“I consider myself unbelievably lucky,” British-born singer Michael Des Barres told me a few weeks ago when calling from his home in California. With a new album and a gloriously positive attitude about life, Des Barres takes all the good, the bad, the ugly and the extraordinarily fun with a wink and a smile.
He started out as an actor, appearing in the 1967 Sidney Poitier film To Sir With Love, but the pull of music was too intense and he left one spotlight for another, forming the band Silverhead in the early 1970’s. In 1975, he changed directions and put together Detective with Yes keyboard player Tony Kaye. The band was signed to the Zeppelin label Swan Song where they released two albums and opened for KISS.
Des Barres would eventually return to acting, turning up on TV shows such as MacGyver, Roseanne, Nash Bridges and Bones as well as on the big screen opposite Clint Eastwood, Steven Seagal and Steve Martin, while still making time for his music. His 2012 album, Carnaby Street, was a breath of fresh air while it walked down the path of his multi-faceted life, telling tales of the revelry he always enjoyed having. But with the release of The Key To The Universe on April 7th, Des Barres returns to the call of the wild rock & roll he so loves to play in. The guitars are more out front than they have been in quite some time and his song choices are more about emotions and actions than frivolities of the libido.
For the former husband of famous groupie and author Miss Pamela, Des Barres’ goal is to live life to the fullest, with the excesses that once flowered his adventurous road now long gone. He is content, happy and excited about all his current projects, musically and personally. He enjoys sharing his stories with those who ask about his part in the great musical scene of London in the sixties and seventies, and when I tell him it would be fun to go back in time to go to school with him and his classmate, Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell, he laughs and says, “Yeah, sure Baby, but you’d have to be a boy though cause I went to boys school.”
It is just that lovely disposition, his laughter, his honesty and his genuine love for everything, that makes any conversation with him entertaining. Whether you know him from his many shady characters on film or his music or from his hosting a show on SiriusXM as part of Little Steven’s Underground Garage, Des Barres is not one to slide past you without making an impression, one way or another.
Your new record is really a rocking record. The guitars are more at the forefront than on your last album, Carnaby Street, which was really good but on this one, you’re really bringing it.
Yeah, it’s happening and people are really digging it. And I’m glad you liked it cause I’m very, very proud of it. It’s so interesting because thinking about all of the stuff that I’ve done over the many years, I’m sure decades before you were even born, the thing is there is a certain thread to what I’ve played. I’ve been talking about this album a lot lately and I realized I’ve really played the same music for forty years. I haven’t really changed much. It’s the same feel, you know. Some are better than others, some have a great feel, but this thing, for me, is the key of MY universe (laughs). That record, I love hearing it, I love listening to it. I think it’s very authentic. I think it’s got a truth to it. And I think people when they hear it, apparently that is what the response has been too.
Why did you go to Rome to record it?
Well, you know, you need to be inspired to make art. What happened was, I did an album a while back with Bob Rose, who produced The Key To The Universe, and he loves to work in Italy. So he called me up and said, “I’d like to make a rock & roll record with you because there are few people that can sing like that anymore and I really would like to cast the band and make a real rocking record from scratch in Rome.” And Rome is one of my favorite cities so we go to Rome and Nigel Harrison, from Silverhead and Blondie, was on bass, brilliant, I love him, we’ve been friends since we were teenagers, which is back in the 12th Century (laughs) and the drummer was Clive Deamer from Radiohead and he works with Robert Plant and Jeff Beck. And the guitar player was Dani Robinson, an incredible guitar player. And that’s all it was. It was guitar, bass and drums in this massive studio in Rome where the great composer Ennio Morricone did all of the scores for those wonderful, sweeping Italian romantic movies. So we knew we’d get a big fat sound in that big room, just guitar-bass-drums and me on top, you know. It just worked.
You mentioned Nigel Harrison. You’ve known him for a long time and been working with him for a long time. Where is the chemistry between the two of you guys?
History. It’s knowing someone very well. You know, we’ve had an amazing life. I mean, we were teenagers, stoned out of our heads wandering around London with a bunch of lunatics playing rock & roll music. And when you’ve been through what we’ve been through, decadent, sexualized, liberating, drug-riddled adventures that we’ve been through, and you come through it – that’s very important that you come through it – then it’s almost like going through war with somebody. He is someone that will forever be my comrade in rock & roll arms because we’ve been through battles like you wouldn’t believe. Then he went to Blondie and I went to the Zeppelin thing and the Power Station and Miss Pamela and all this shit and TV and killing people on television, all of this stuff, but we’ve always remained friends. And I love him so I trust him.
So the whole thing about being in a rock & roll band is you’ve got to trust those guys cause you’re jumping out of a plane with those guys and if you don’t have a mutual parachute, you’re going to crash. And I trust him. The other two I didn’t know but immediately me and Clive and Dani bonded real good, and Nigel had played with those two before. So it’s a matter of trust and the decades that we’ve known each other, since we were kids.
You have several songs that have very powerful messages within them. First, what can you tell us about “Burning In Water?”
It’s a beautiful song. You know, I still believe in love. I’m really a romantic person and that song is so fucking romantic. “Burning in water, drowning in flames,” he LOVES her. Jeff Silbar wrote it and I think he wrote it for Tom Jones and I got my hands on it and it’s just a very touching song and it’s angry and it’s all things that a relationship is. It’s romantic, it’s dramatic, it’s combative. People who love hard, play hard and die hard, to paraphrase Bruce Willis. It’s a tough thing being in love and that’s what the song is about.
“I Can’t Get You Off My Mind” is about obsessive love. Have you ever been so obsessed by something almost to the point of insanity?
Oh, I’ve spent my entire life obsessively insane (laughs). I’m obsessively insane about House Of Cards right now. I can’t really think of any other way of being other than completely intoxicated with life. But obsessive love is a horrible place to be. It’s the worst. You find yourself at 3:00 am driving past their house like some dreadful stalker. It’s the strangest thing. I wrote about it years ago. I wrote that song called “Obsession” that Animotion did and I’ve been obsessed with the notion of obsession for a long time. So when I got that song from Linda Perry, it was just so perfect for the album and it was the first song we recorded, which set sort of the template for the rest of the record.
Obsession can eat you alive if you’re not careful
Oh it will eat you dead, it will kill you and eat you. It’s the worst, it’s awful. But because of that, it’s dramatic and if it’s dramatic then it’s worthy of a piece of art. And if you can capture that in a song, then that’s a good thing. Because I think when people hear it they can let go of it a little bit. If they’re all alone in that feeling and can feel that other people have gone through this, then they don’t feel so frightened and terrified by it. And I think that’s what art does, it frees you, it liberates you to understand the human condition and not be scared of it.
What was the surprise song on this record?
The surprise song is “Yesterday’s Casanova” because it was so daring. I mean, if you listen to it there are so many different time signatures in there and it’s a very complex song. Even though it’s a rock & roll song, it’s about this lothario, this womanizer who is making a fool of himself. It’s a heavy song and I think the one we really concentrated on a lot because we knew that it was different, you know. But nothing on that album was not considered for the album. We had many, many songs. The ten that are on that record were very carefully created for that record, to flow, you know. But “Yesterday’s Casanova” certainly demanded a hundred percent concentration.
In your songwriting, why do you prefer to be more realistic than sugary happy-go-lucky?
I believe in telling the truth and I don’t want to make up characters through which to sing. I want to talk about my life and if I can talk about what shit I’ve been through and going through, I think it’s important. So happy-go-lucky, you know, I AM happy and very fulfilled and I feel artistically fulfilled. But I want to explore all kinds of colors in the rainbow and that is why that record has a vulnerability to it. You know, I’m in rock & roll which is about sex, about turning people on, it’s about seducing people. But that’s just one way of looking at it. The guy doing that is also a real person, you know. He goes through heartbreak and obsession. There is a lot more to my life than just having fun.
What do you think this album says about you as an artist today?
I’ve reached a place where I’ve gotten rid of a lot of bad habits and gone back to the innocence and joy of those first few moments when I realized I had a feel for rock & roll.
You grew up in England. Were you always kind of the show-offy kid?
Yeah, yeah, I was always an exhibitionist. I grew up not knowing my parents and I was in boarding schools so in order to survive that kind of upbringing with no parents’ guidance and being in these fancy schools, the protection that I created was humor. And you’ll hear this from a lot of artists, they fend off potential aggression with humor. I was just a born gregarious guy, you know. I wanted to have an amusing life. I didn’t want to be chained down . I had no sense of family and it’s a long story, my life, and it’s difficult to encapsulate. But yeah, I was a show off.
You got to be in the music scene in London when that great blues movement via John Mayall et al was happening. What do you think you absorbed the most from experiencing that music firsthand?
Well, firsthand would be Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins and the really old guys. John Mayall was a white Englishman who loved that music too. So the real birth of my interest in the blues was from the blues, from the Delta, from Chicago, Muddy Waters and I fell in love with that. I don’t know why but then again I don’t know why Keith did or Mick did or Brian Jones did or John Mayall did. It was something after the Second World War, the young kids in England, I think, were looking for something and a lot of artists found the blues, which is very interesting and strange. The oppressed African-American would touch a nerve in the working class of London. The English guys, and not just in London but England, seemed to need something. We were somehow attracted to the blues and tried to recreate it. And the irony is that we brought it back to the States in the sixties. So I was very influenced by Lightnin’ Hopkins and Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, all those great bluesmen, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson. There are certain people that you clearly know, Leslie, that just turn you on and you don’t know why. And you spend the rest of your life trying to find out.
When you first started singing, were you trying to sound like them? I know Paul Rodgers once told me that is how he started.
No, I didn’t. Paul, who I love and was on the same label, Swan Song, is an amazing singer. He, from the very beginning, had his own style I think. But the references of Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, James Brown, all those guys made a difference to us, not so much that we tried to emulate them but the feel was so intoxicating. It’s when you sing like a drummer. All the singers that I admire, Tina Turner and Sam Cooke and Otis, they had a real percussive way of singing, with a lot of balls and energy and it just comes out that way.
When Detective signed with Swan Song, did you think that was it, that was your golden ticket and you were going to be a big success?
I’ve never thought about golden tickets. I’ve thought about gold lame trousers (laughs). My life has been a golden ticket, Leslie. My life is a golden ticket because I’m talking to you right now and I mean it. I had no expectations and when people say success, gold and platinum and all that stuff, I’ve had the most outrageous accomplishments and challenges and my life has been very rich and full and I don’t really think about golden tickets. I stand in line for Disneyland.
What was the craziest thing you’ve ever done onstage?
The craziest thing that has ever happened to me onstage is a delightful story. In 1972, Silverhead played the Whisky A Go Go. When we arrived at the infamous Hyatt Hotel, outside was a hearse. In the hearse was a live tiger. The driver of the hearse was working on a TV show called Daktari about a game preserve in Africa. And I see the tiger and I say to the driver in my drunken stupor after getting off a plane, “Can I rent your tiger, please?” He said, “Sure.” He comes out surrounded by girls and drug dealers and he goes off into a room to have intimate exchanges with friendly rock & roll fans and I have the fucking tiger. That night we play the Whisky A Go Go for the first time. I bring the tiger onstage. I’m wearing tiger skin trousers. The tiger is so tranquilized it can hardly move. It was on more drugs than I was, if that was possible, and Leslie, be prepared now, it took a dump in the middle of the first song. I grabbed a bouquet of flowers from the eager young girl in the front and stuck it in the you-know-what. So that would be the craziest thing that ever happened to me onstage.
When are you going to write all these stories down and put them in a book?
Oh, I’m not down with writing a book. I mean, there is a documentary coming out about me that is really fun but maybe one day. I don’t want to write a book that is a trajectory. I would like to write a more impressionistic book. Of course, I write like crazy cause I have a big social media following and I write every day for that and I have my radio show which I talk at length about these things and that’s satisfying enough right now. I have copious notes and journals and one day when things settle down I’ll write.
I saw you had posted some things when Andy Fraser passed away not long ago. When I talked to him several months ago, he didn’t seem bitter or angry and he certainly could be.
Yes, yes, a beautiful man, an activist and I respected Andy and knew Andy and I’ve got tears in my eyes just thinking about it, because he was one of the great musicians and human beings. You know, if there’s anything I would leave you with, it would be just that. If we don’t love each other, we are doomed to a dark, dark existence. We must start holding each other and be compassionate with each other and understand each other and know full well the key to the universe is without question knowing that we are all that same.
This is how I feel about music and about art and about relationships: you’re either going to tell the truth and you’re going to have compassion and forgiveness and acceptance of that person or you’re not. If you’re not, I pray for you. Not to Jesus, not to God. I just send out to the universe that you will be okay and you will see that the light shines still and the light shines from you. Without you, there’s no universe. You are the universe. You are the key to the universe. We all are. It’s unification.
