Interview with Lee Ving of Fear

L.A. punk legend talks about some of his musical exploits, past and present.

As the frontman for Fear, Lee Ving has been an icon of L.A. punk rock, and he later did substantial work in Hollywood movies and television shows. Years ago, CITIZINE was a able to publish interviews with former members of Fear, Spit Stix and Derf Scratch, but getting an interview with Fear’s lead singer and primary songwriter was always an elusive task.

Just recently, we finally made contact with the band’s ringleader, and just in time for Fear's 2009 national tour. From his current base in L.A., Lee was glad to talk about his pre-Fear musical career, the rise of Fear, and some upcoming releases on the horizon from Mr. Ving’s extensive back-catalog.

Check out the CITIZINE Radio podcast of the Interview with Fear's Lee Ving
http://citizinemag.podbean.com/

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All right, this is CITIZINE magazine here and we got Lee Ving, the lead singer of Fear, on the line. How you doing today, Lee?

I’m doing great. How you doing, man?

So it’s summer ’09. What’s going on with Fear now?

We’re fixin’ on playing a national tour. We’ve done two Warped Tour dates already in Ventura, California, and in Pomona, California, and upon our return from our national tour, which will take us across the country, down through Florida, and certainly not to exclude the great state of Texas in three locations – Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. And then we’ll be back to do a Mountain View, California (near San Francisco) Warped Tour date, and then the grand finale Warped Tour date in Los Angeles, California, at the Home Depot Center in Carson.

Nice. So this is all gonna be in July and August this year, right?

That’s right.

Are there gonna be other bands that are accompanying you on this tour?

Yeah, there will be. I think D.I. and Total Chaos.

Nice! So we’ve been interviewing a lot of people in the L.A. punk scene in CITIZINE over the years. We’ve always wanted to interview you, and it’s great we got in contact with you.

Yeah!

You know, I want to talk to you about the band, and just music in general. Like, what was your music career like before you were in Fear? What were you doing before then?

I was a singer and a harmonica player in a blues band in Philadelphia [Sweet Stavin Chain], and then, after that, I was a singer and harmonica player in a jazz-rock fusion band in New York City called Daybreak. We had such stellar musicians in that band as Donald Grolnick, and Joe Bonner, the keyboard player, and Bruce Ditmas was the drummer from Gil Evans Band. Eugene Busnar was the bass player. Howard Johnson played with us, the tuba player and baritone sax player. Let’s see, Dave Hubbard played with us, the tenor saxophone player, a Blue Note recording artist.

Nice …

Bruce Johnson, the guitar player, played with us. These were all regular members of the band, and so it was a great project with great musicians. It never quite got to the recording phase, although I do have some recordings of that band that I’ll be releasing.

And what’s the name of that band?

Daybreak.

So how many people were there in the band at any one time?

There would be a rhythm section, a keyboard player, and horns, so there were five to seven musicians in the band at most times. We were sort of a rival band of another band across town, Michael Brecker’s band, God rest his soul – he had a band called Dreams, and Don Grolnick went from our band to his band at one point, and so it was a circle of friends that were populating these two bands. Michael’s band had his older brother, Randy, in it, and some other players – Barry Mann played guitar.

So that was in the mid-‘70s then?

Yeah, you would say so.

And so then, it sounds like – so did you grow up on the East Coast?

Yeah, I grew up in Philadelphia.

So how’d you make it to L.A. then?

Well, the band – Sweet Saving Chain was the blues band I was playing in in Philadelphia, and we played with -- on the last tour when Blind Faith came through town … No, this was prior to Blind Faith -- the last tour that Cream played in Philadelphia at the Spectrum, we opened for them. Terry Reed was on the bill, I think, too. So subsequent to that, the band sort of disbanded, and Eugene Busnar and I moved to New York to start this other band. Then we were in New York for three-four years doing this, and then I moved to Los Angeles.

Like what year’d you move to Los Angeles then?

Uh, that was a couple of weeks ago….

Yeah? So you were in L.A. for a while even before you started Fear.

Yeah, I didn’t start Fear until 1978 …and we’ve been at it ever since.

So when you started the band, what was your goal with Fear? How were you gonna set the band apart from the other bands?

By the ability to play. By the ability of each of the people in the band to play their instruments. I noticed that that was not in evidence at the time, and so I decided that if we – if our band was able to play very well, that would make us vastly different than everyone else who was doing it. The thing that drew me to playing in a band that was called this moniker, this punk rock word – the thing that drew me to it was the audience. When I saw the audience’s reaction to some of the bands that were playing, I knew that this active, involved reaction by the audience – it was the audience I wanted to perform for. And I knew that I could put a band together that would have more frenetic rhythms, that I personally was able to incite better than the people who I saw walking around and using the microphone. I knew that we’d get a leg up on the competition.

When you started the band, did you see a future for the band putting out records, touring …?

I did, and I thought that this music as a scene would have a chance to be accepted, and to play to a growing, bigger audience. But it appeared that there was some resistance on the part of the record companies to getting involved with it. You know, there were stories about what Sid Vicious might have done at some record parties here in Hollywood as they were going from A&M to Warner Brothers, or vice versa, whatever that was, that sort of put a damper on the acceptability of the music in general to the record companies. So at one point, the word went out, you know, “Hands off this punk rock stuff. We don’t need to bother with that.” So that there was a resistance to signing – you know, like, coming in and doing a mass signing of bands the way that it had happened in scenes prior to, like San Francisco and other places where the record companies would go in and sign every band that had anything to do with the scene, and put a record out on ‘em. I thought something similar like that was gonna happen in L.A. with these punk bands, but it didn’t. So through our own tenacity and fortitude, we’ve stayed at it and continued to release records under our own steam over the years. And fortunately, the audience has remained and grown, and now that the record companies have shown themselves to be useless, now that there’s an internet, maybe the thing’s come full circle after all.

Yeah, don’t you think in a way that musicians are empowered by the technology now. You don’t need the whole system of the record company to manufacture and distribute everything now it seems like.

That’s definitely true. I feel that way. You know, why give the lion’s share of the profits of the record that you’ve conceived, and you wind up paying for anyway – why give that to some third person who really has no connection or loyalty to you at all in any way? So yeah, who needs the record companies? Our first album has been re-released by Rhino Records, and they pay me .001 cents per song for the writer’s money, when statutory rate is internationally now at 10 or 11 cents per song, per album. It’s an insult. So why would you deal with companies that would deal with you in that way when you don’t need them? You can get to the market – you can release through iTunes, and through all these other internet stores, and bring your music to the world without the assistance and the rape of business companies… the “statutory rape,” you know?

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about The Record, because the band started in ’78, and you guys were playing live, built up a reputation, and the album didn’t come out till ’82, and that was on Slash Records. How’d that all happen?

Yeah, it came out in … You could be right that it came out in ’82. I tend to think of it as ’81, but you’re probably right. And it was on Slash, and Slash got absorbed by Warner Brothers, which in turn got absorbed by Rhino now.

And so you are just – there’re some old contracts and everything’s …

Yeah, you know, a horrific, old contract. You know, a standard music business contract that gives a really bad deal to the artist that -- we even had a lawyer recommend that we sign the deal, and that it was as good as could be had at the time, which was all bullshit, you know. You only sign deals that are… Had we taken that record and released it ourselves, we would have made a good amount of money off of it, instead of giving it to Slash Records which really never paid us for any of those sales. As they got absorbed by Warner Brothers, all the independent distributors that had been pre-shipped our product said they weren’t gonna pay for it because they weren’t able to get more product, so they were just going to keep it, because they could sue them. So Slash Records turned around and said, “Well, sorry guys, we’re not gonna pay ya.” There was no recourse for us in the contract that we signed. So all those things make it a good idea not to deal with third parties, with record companies at all. Especially since now there are no stores to go buy CDs in, and the downloads are the wave of the future. You can get into a download store, download situation, without a record company, especially if you have a market, or you have people who know about you. If you don’t need a record company to tell the world about you, then who needs ‘em?

Can you just talk about the rise of the band when you were playing live when you were in California? What happened …?

Sure, we were doing shows, and we played better than the other bands, and people noticed it right away. We played in San Francisco, and we were supposed to open for one of the bands who was doing pretty well at the time. They didn’t show up -- we showed up. We were there, and played the headline slot, and played really well. We were confrontational with the audience -- they seemed to respond to that. So we became an instant headliner in San Francisco, and we came back to L.A., and played shows around L.A. at the Starwood one month, The Whisky the next month, Club 88, all the places around town, Blackies, you know, all the different joints there were to play, and we just stayed at that. We’d go back and forth from San Fran to L.A.

We went out and did national tours -- we played through Chicago and Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, through Florida, back through Texas. We played at Raul’s in Texas, in Austin, and that club hasn’t been in existence for quite a while. We had a great show there, as we always did in Texas. We have a really strong following in Texas. In fact, we’re on our way back there right now.

Anyway, so by doing that, by playing shows and releasing records, the first record on our own steam. Afterward, we ran into Danny Hutton at one point, who had been the singer in Three Dog Night. He took us on for approximately a year, he being our manager, and we would do full page ads in the L.A. Weekly, in Slash Magazine, and the L.A. Times, and we became a very strong item. We played for all the record companies, and they knew that we played better than the acts they were signing, but because it was called “punk rock,” they sort of took a dim view of the idea of signing us.

And then we were having a reformation at one point. We were playing a sold out show at the Palladium in Hollywood, and Interscope shows up, and they wanna sign us. And they’re talking to this … person who was telling them that he was our manager. And so they believed him, and they started talking to him, they made a deal to him, and the guy tells Interscope that, “No, I wasn’t interested” because it was not enough money. But I never heard about this thing. So that was about as close as we ever got to a major label deal, and this person fucked it all up for us, but that’s ancient history.

Okay, so you put that first record out on Slash, and then after that …

The next record I put out myself. We did that at Cherokee Studios. That was More Beer. Then the next record after More Beer was Live for The Record. That I also put out myself. That had been on Enigma, the same label that we had been on from Restless Records, but that master [recording] came back to me. Also when More Beer was done for them, that master came back to me. And then we did Have Another Beer With Fear. We recorded that in a great studio in San Antonio. Then, subsequent to that, after a road tour, we recorded another record called American Beer. Those are doing well, you know, they’re available for download on iTunes, and Amazon.com and all that, and I have some out of print CDs of all four of our titles that I’m gonna be putting up for sale at our website pretty soon, as soon as we get back from this tour. Plus, some side projects. The Range War stuff, the country band that I had, that wants to be released, and we’re gonna release that very soon.

Cool, yeah, I’d like to hear that. I haven’t heard the Range War album. How’d that happen?

At one point, I just stopped doing Fear, and I called a bunch of friends of mine from Ft. Worth who happened to be in L.A. at the time, and we put together this great country band. We had fiddle and steel, and we were doing Bob Wills songs, playing all the fiddle, the different parts to it that that he would’ve had, and a bunch of stuff that I wrote, and that band kicked major ass. That was a great group, and it sort of retired itself before we released a record. We were talking to some record labels about it, but I didn’t want to give it away, and so it’s gonna be released on my record label now, Fear Record Company, and so we’ll be releasing that soon. I’m still in touch with those people, and we may do more performances … it’s possible.

So just to sum up the early years of Fear, what’s your side of the whole Saturday Night Live episode [Halloween, 1981], how it happened and how it turned out … What did you witness that happened there?

It was a thing that occurred because of John Belushi. He had just quit the cast, and somehow there was some interest among some of the people – Michael O’Donoghue and John and maybe … probably, that’s all. And so John’s friend, Tino Insana, a lifelong childhood friend of John’s, had some contact with us, and when it came time for them to pick a “punk band,” in quotes, to be a guest artist on Saturday Night Live, there may have been something of a revenge factor for John, too. Having left the cast in maybe less than happy circumstances … you know, it was under his own steam. They would’ve given anything to keep him. I think that he just, at that point, wanted out. And so, they wanted to get some “punk band” to be a guest artist, and I think they were asking Tino, and Tino said, “No, no, don’t get whoever that is. Get Fear!” So Michael O’Donoghue calls me up on the telephone and says, “Hi, is Lee Ving there?” I say, “Yeah, that’s me.” He said, “This is Michael O’Donoghue from Saturday Night Live. We wondered what you were doing Halloween this year?” And I said, “Hold on, Michael. Let me check my calendar.” [laughs] I said, “Just kidding. What do you have in mind?” He said, “Well, we’d like you to play the show.”

So we fly into New York, we check into the Four Seasons Hotel. There’s people with dinner jackets, and black tie tuxedos, and there’s women in evening gowns getting ready to go out to the theatre. A lady’s playing a classical harp in the lobby, and I go up, and I bang on the bell at the check-in desk, and this guy turns down and looks at me, and we got us and all our women. Us in motorcycle jackets and greased back hair, and the women in miniskirts and torn up stockings, and this guy in this very fashionable hotel turns down and looks at me and says, “Can I help you?” And I said, “Yeah, we’re Fear -- we got reservations!” He looked at me, and he says, “So you’re just gonna be here for tonight?” I said, “No, pal. We’re gonna be here all week!” [laughs] And he got real nervous, and he went -- he hid in the back for a while. And that was just our introduction to New York.

We rehearsed for the show, and brought some people from D.C. John had invited some people from Washington, D.C. to come up, and see the show, and be audience so it would look like a real punk rock deal, not like, you know, the Doobie Brothers performing with people chit-chatting at a table while they play. So they brought up what was supposed to be three to five to eight people to be audience. Well, so they started in D.C., and they stopped in Baltimore, they stop in Philly, and then they stop in Trenton, and by the time they get to New York, there’s about 180 of ‘em. And, you know, it’s like a punk rock mob that they’re gonna bring in as audience.

So we played our first two songs, and that went off just fine. We play our second set of songs, and we got through the first song okay. As this audience we brought in is jumping around, one of them picked up a pumpkin, and hit Dick Ebersol in the chest with it. Mr. and Mrs. Middle America are grabbing their hearts, looking like this is a life-threatening situation. And I start off “Let’s Have a War” as the fourth song, and I don’t get more than three-quarters of the way through the first verse, when one of the people in the audience grabs the microphone, and screams out this expletive about New York. You know, “Fuck New York!” And the twenty second delay situation didn’t work since there was such pandemonium in the crowd.

And so it went off over, you know, throughout the country. It was broadcast on NBC, and so Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC at the time, at home watching Saturday Night Live in bed with his wife, as he had always done, picks up the hotline, calls the studio and says, “Cut to stock footage! Get them off!” And it had nothing to do with us. It was nothing that we did. It was some group that had come with this clan of riff-raff that they brought in to be audience.

So they said they’d never broadcast it again. But in point of fact, it was the most unique musical offering of an evening in Saturday Night Live’s history. Donald Pleasance was host of the show. He couldn’t say “Fear.” He said [in an English accent], “Ladies and gentlemen, they look really scary, but they’re actually quite nice people. Let’s have a warm round of applause for Fee-ya!” He couldn’t say, “Fear.”

[laughs]

So it went that way. And Eddie Murphy at that point was in the cast, and he, at that time, would make a habit of getting somewhere behind the musical act, and pantomiming, you know, hamming something that they would be doing, you know, to poke fun at the musical act, to try to sarcastically do something that would be humorous about what the musical act was doing. Well, Eddie’s back there trying to get attention, and the camera never went to him, ‘cause there was such pandemonium going on in the front. And he’s back there trying to ham it up, and make some sort of sarcastic remark about the musical group, us, but the camera never went to him, so I thought that that was really funny. [laughs] That was great… He was really uptight anyway. He would never say anything to us. We would say, “Hello,” and he would just look the other way. I figured it all came out in a wash.

Next day, I get a phone call. It was the Sunday after at the Four Seasons Hotel. I pick up the phone and he says, “Hello, is Lee Ving there?” I said, “Yeah, that’s me.” He said, “This is so-and-so from the New York Post. We heard that your group caused $20,000 worth of damage to NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center last night during your performance.” I said, “Hold it, hold it! No way, pal. That’s a bald-faced lie!” I said, “We caused $500,000 worth of damage, a cool half a million dollars worth of damage, ‘cause we’re professionals, and I counted the damage myself.”

Nice …

And so we signed off …

So you tried to be controversial, tried to get the audience to react --

No, I saw that there was an audience – speaking initially about this music – I saw that there was an audience that wanted to react. So we weren’t “trying” to do anything. I would say what was on my mind, and the audience seemed to want to react. If we would play rhythm and things, that would drive them nuts and make them crazy. And I think in the process – see, when we started, they were doing these poser things like the pogo and this kind of crap. As we started to get going, and playing gigs around the beaches here in Southern California, we started something called the “slam dance,” and it was more like a soccer match or a rugby match where it had gone to chaos and pandemonium. People were throwing elbows and stuff, like they do in the UFC now, and we started that by playing extremely fast, and doing one song after another, and by making the rhythms be perfect to make people get very physically involved.

And then how’d you get into the Hollywood thing, and then how’d you end up in Austin later?

A producer and a director came to see Fear play at the Whisky, and they had a part in their film for someone who was doing something reasonably akin to what I do with Fear – being the front person, the rabble rouser, the guy that stirs them up. And so I took this part in this film called Get Crazy with Malcolm McDowell, and Lou Reed was in it, and the Turtles were in it. And it was sort of a send-up of a New Year’s Eve party at a music venue that was closing down.

And so that movie came out and went directly to the video rental bin. But as a result of that, I went and I got an agent at William Morris, a fellow named John Burnham, and he sent me to read for this movie called Flashdance. And he said, “You’re probably not gonna get the part because the director, Adrian Lyne, wants his friend Keith Richards to play the part. But go read for it anyway. It’ll be good practice.” So I went and read for the part, and possibly as a result of them realizing it might be difficult to get Keith to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to be on time for work for six weeks in a row, or whatever other considerations they had, I got the part.

And so I knew something about it, being an East Coast guy myself, and the movie went on to do really well. All concerned were very happy. All the producers were extremely happy, and the film did great, and as a result, I was invited to come and interview for other parts, and lots of other parts came along -- Streets of Fire, Clue, Black Moon Rising with Tommy Lee Jones, lots of movies. And bunches of T.V. shows too – Who’s the Boss?, Three’s a Crowd, two episodes of Fame, in both of which I sang -- “The Impossible Dream” in one, and some other construct in another episode.

So it had all gone on quite well and I had a motorcycle accident after that in 1986, and as a result of that, I became somewhat disenchanted with living in Los Angeles for that time, and I moved to Austin, Texas, where I already had friends, and I was serenely happy. I wound up moving back to Los Angeles in 2000, and I’ve done more work in the years I’ve been back here from Austin, than I did at all when I was in Texas. I was so relaxed and happy to be in Austin. At my house, I could shoot guns off the porch, we could make noise all night. You couldn’t see another house from mine. It was in the beautiful Hill Country, and I would just get up in the morning and walk out into the cedar groves, and it was a very, very good life. It was a really nice, meditative place to live, a very ethereal existence, and you couldn’t get me outta there with a crowbar.

So I didn’t come back to L.A. to do auditions. Pretty much most of the work that I was doing, including a lot of the Fear work, was sitting … we weren’t doing anything. I wasn’t doing anything. Even the Range War stuff became less and less active. So then when I came back, I started everything back up, and I’ve done a whole bunch of work since then, and fortunately, folks wanted to see the Fear band as we came back to play, and they still do. We haven’t stopped and we’ve been at it steadily.

Yeah, cool. Yeah, personally I saw you at the Key Club like two or three times.

Yeah, the Key Club [in West Hollywood] has been a great place for us. We play there regularly. We’ll be playing at Emo’s in Austin and that’ll be cool. We’re playng the Meridian in Houston … I’ll tell you what the dates are for the Texas tour …

I saw the Austin one is August 15^th, and so that’s at Emo’s which is the place to be.

I think August 14^th is San Antonio, and August 16^th will be Meridian in Houston.

And people can check out your stuff – here, it’s FearLeeVing.com, is that the web site now?

Yes.

And just talk about … What’s the crowd like now? Do you see a lot of young people? Do you see a lot of teenagers?

The crowd looks identical. We had older folks, some of the local intellectuals who got a kick out of the scene in the old days, and very young people in the old days. And now, what with people bringing their kids, the scene looks identical. The audience looks identical, virtually the same as it has always fortunately looked.

Nice. Well, thanks for the time and thanks for doing this interview for CITIZINE magazine.

July 15, 2009.

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