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interview with Hilary R. Hanes a.k.a. HILARY STENCH
by Jef
L, december 2000
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Hilary play bass on these Chrome albums: Blood on the Moon,, 3rd from
the Sun, The Chronicles, Retro-Transmission, Tidal Forces
How did Damon and Helios come to hire you ?
My brother John and i have differing memories
of how this came about. John suggests that Damon and Helios were looking
for a rhythm section to record with, and MX-80 guitarist Bruce Anderson
recommended they contact John and myself (note: we later played with
Bruce in the Henry Kaiser Band). My recollection is that while Chrome
was preparing to record the album that would become Third From the Sun
at Oliver DiCicco's Mobius studio, Oliver recommended John as the drummer,
having worked with him shortly before on another project. I came in
at the last minute. I'm fairly certain that i didn't even meet D & H
before the first day of recording, and neither John or I recall rehearsing
with the band prior to being in the studio with them. Damon and Helios
would play us what they had written, and we'd make up our parts as we
went along.
Before playing with Chrome, did you play with other bands or on your
own ? If yes, was your brother also involved in these projects ?
My brother John and I played together on and off
since i was 13 and he was 15. I started out as a guitarist, and we played
in a couple of bands in high school in Los Angeles. When i was about
20, after John had moved away, i was playing in a pop band in L.A. called
Village. One day we heard on the radio that they were filming a movie
at a nightclub called the Roxy, and they needed punk bands. We punked
ourselves up, went down there and called ourselves The Whores. The movie
turned out to be Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke, and we're the third
band they show during the rock show segment. We ended up playing around
town at clubs like the Whiskey A Go Go for a while.
In 1977, John moved to San Francisco to join a band called Leila and
the Snakes. Shortly thereafter, their bass player quit, and John suggested
i come up and audition. I borrowed the money for a bass, practiced for
3 days and flew up for the audition, and i've been a bass player ever
since. Leila and the Snakes was a cabaret/rock band, and one of the
most popular club bands in San Francisco at the time, with a sexy young
singer named Pearl Gates. About 10 months later, John, Pearl and I left
the Snakes and started a new band with Peter Bilt that we named Pearl
Harbor and the Explosions. Within 6 months we were the top club band
in S.F. with a single out on 415 records, Drivin', which at the time
was the best selling independently produced single in America (we won
Bammies, a local Bay Area music award, for best club band and best independent
record in 1979) . We landed a record deal with Warner Bros. and released
a record in early 1980. The Explosions toured with the Talking Heads
and opened for many bands including the Clash and the Police. After
an ill-fated national club tour, the band broke up.
After the Explosions disbanded, John and i played locally in a semi-rockabilly
band called the Soul Rebels. I also spent some time with the group Eye
Protection, whose singer Andy Prieboy went on to front Wall of Voodoo.
Around this time (still the early '80s), John recorded an album with
guitarist Jorma Koukonen (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna), and Jorma,
John and i performed as Vital Parts, including a tour of Italy and Germany.
We have also performed and recorded together with guitarist Henry Kaiser,
including the Marrying for Money album (re-released on cd as Remarrying
for Money) and several Henry Kaiser Band cd's (check out our live version
of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" on the Heart's Desire cd).
Were you and your brother fans of Chrome before being asked to join
the group ?
To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of the
band before playing with them (mea culpa).
Were you ever involved with the writing or composition of Chrome's
songs? Can you describe the process by which the songs and music were
written ? What were Damon and Helios' roles in this process ?
Though i don't think we were credited with co-writing
the songs, John and i were integrally involved in the creation of the
music, though the lyrics were solely Damon and Helios' territory. Typically,
D and H would have an idea for one or more sections of a song, play
it for us, and we would come up with our parts, based mainly on how
we reacted musically to their themes. We would then edit what we came
up with, refining the ideas, and often John would suggest ways in which
my initial ideas could work better with the drums. Damon and Helios
were always very open to our ideas. But there was such a purity to the
parts they created, we rarely if ever suggested changes to what they
were doing. There were also times when John and I would be jamming on
one of our ideas during rehearsal or in the studio, and Damon and Helios
would build their parts around that (the song Blood on the Moon is a
good example of that).
What's your favorite Chrome album with you at the bass ?
I'd have to say The Chronicles, only because my
memories of the recording experience itself are really positive. That
record was a challenge both physically and in terms of focus, because
on most songs we would play a section over and over again, then switch
to another section that we'd play over and over, then to another section,
then repeat the whole process several times. John and i did little if
any overdubbing on that record (on all the records, actually), so i
think the energy of the live performance comes through.
Was there
a philosophy behind Chrome's cold and synthetic feel ? What was Chrome
about ?
My time with Chrome was spent making music, and
not discussing the philosophy behind it. My personal approach to music
is much more visceral than intellectual, and frankly Damon and Helios
were not too articulate about their ideas (at least around me). If anything,
the idea of the music being a soundtrack for a science fiction movie
pervaded virtually everything they wrote, and this was appropriate since
their daily lives had a science fiction quality about them.
Did Chrome ever play live in the early eighties, despite Damon's
phobia ?
We performed once in San Francisco at a club called
the On Broadway, and at the Festival of Future Ghosts in Bologna, Italy,
that's all. When we were preparing for the S.F. show, I had no idea
how interested people would be in seeing Chrome live, and was not expecting
much of an audience. As it turned out, the room was packed to capacity
and we had a truly awesome show.
Can you describe Damon's phobias, or other reasons that prevented
him from performing in public ?
I was not even aware of Damon's phobias. We never
became friends, partly due to the fact that i was not using the same
drugs that he was. I would not be surprised if his fears and drug use
were closely related.
What were some of the reasons for the break-up of the band and would
one be right to assume that Chrome's hesitation to perform live was
a major reason for the break-up of the original incarnation of the band
?
You have to understand that, even though we had
great artistic communication as a group, John and I were never really
"members" of Chrome; we were always more like hired hands (for example,
they paid us a little to play on the records, but we never received
any percentage of the royalties). So there was never any sense on our
part of the band "breaking up". It was more that they just didn't
call us to do any more recordings.
After Chrome had disbanded and then rematerialized in Berlin with
a new line-up as well as a new sound, did you, John or Helios feel betrayed
?
When i stopped recording with Damon and Helios,
i did not stay in touch with them at all (i was married and had my first
kid by then, so i had other things on my mind). If i felt betrayed,
it was only because Damon released some material that we had recorded
with him, but he never asked our permission or paid us for the rights
to use our performances. But the truth is, the amount of money that
was made off of those releases was probably negligible, and i'm glad
that the music is out there and people have a chance to hear it if they
want to. Personally, i thought the material Damon released in Europe
was quite inferior to what he created with Helios, and that was sad
to hear. The music Damon and Helios created together had a fire to it
that i thought was lacking from Damon's later work.
After the "break-up", i would run into Helios occasionally
in San Francisco, but we didn't stay in touch, and i didn't follow either
Damon or Helios' careers.
Shortly before Damon's death, there was a rumor that Helios was interested
in reuniting the original band. Is this true ? If so, why did the reunion
never take place ?
I never heard about that, and i never heard from
Helios about it, so either that's not true, or i was very hard to reach
at that point in time.
Was Damon's death necessary for Helios' project to succeed ? Doesn't
that seem like a morbid idea ?
I think Helios' recordings after Chrome were much
better than Damon's (at least the little i heard of them), and Helios
showed us he could produce successful projects on his own well before
Damon's death. Helios might have had some legal problems recording as
Chrome without Damon before his death, i don't know, but his freedom
to use the Chrome name seems to be the only thing that was changed by
Damon's death. The relationship between those two, both personally and
professionally, is shrouded in a kind of mystery that exists in a world
lived beyond the fringes of traditional society, and i was not privy
to that world.
What was your initial reaction when Helios first contacted you about
reviving Chrome ?
My first reaction? "Fuck, yes!"
Reuniting the group ? One can think to profit from the notoriety
and reputation already gained ?
Trust me, the only "profit" anyone is gaining
from Chrome is artistic and/or karmic. For whatever reason, Damon and
Helios were not destined to reunite, and Helios had no reason to try
and usurp the Chrome name since he had his own following that he'd built
through the years after Chrome. I like to think of the Retro Transmission
session as being a tribute to a time and sound and attitude that meant
a great deal to us and to a lot of other people, and that's still a
part of us and our music.
Why did you leave Chrome after two recordings (Retro-Transmission,
Tidal Forces) ?
Actually, there was just the one session with
John and me (Retro Transmission), and everything we did on that recording,
including the writing, we did in one day. My life (and life style) is
worlds apart from Helios', and i can't describe how close to impossible
it is to bring those worlds together, even for a day. It's sad in some
ways, since that potential for great music always exists just beyond
our grasp, but i've made choices in my life that i'm very happy with,
and they just happen to preclude working with Helios.
Will there be other collaborations between you and Helios in the
future ?
Who can say? After Retro Transmission came out,
we tried to schedule some live shows that would accommodate both my
and John's schedules (Helios' life style is much freer time-wise than
ours), but Helios and his partner were not able to work with us, so
they decided to work with less encumbered players. I would love to work
with him more; the music i create with H and John could never exist
with any other people, and the more of that unique experience i can
have in my world, the better.
thanx a lot to Hilary
thanx to Kyla Tchikowski for translation
email interview done by JeF
L
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