INTERVIEW WITH VIRGIN STEELE!!!

I am truly proud to present, for Ascendant Strains' inaugural interview, a conversation with David Defeis, vocalist extraordinaire and one of the architects behind Virgin Steele's glorious magnum opus, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which I can honestly proclaim one of the greatest metal works I have ever heard. And why not? David is a classically trained pianist, with a Bachelor's degree in composition, and a self-taught vocalist with a three and a half octave range. His father is a Shakespearean actor who runs his own theater company, and I can certainly see how this has helped inspire David's work with Virgin Steele. To truly enjoy this interview, make sure you rush out and purchase both Marriage CD's prior to reading it! Dream Disc has both for only $12 each. (You can contact David at: P.O. Box 2431, North Babylon, NY 11703-0431, U.S.A. Please send a SASE or IRC)

Craig: As you read in my review, I think the new album is tremendous.

David Defeis: Thanks a lot.

I'm a big fan of that kind of traditional, ambitious metal, and this really stood out among most recent releases in the genre.

Beautiful. We intended it to, and we tried hard to make it everything we wanted it to be. As good as people think it, is, I'd still be in there mixing it if I wasn't stopped.

Perfectionist?

Oh yeah, probably to a fault.

What were the musical influences behind these albums?

If you're referring to what other bands we listen to, growing up it was always the big three: Led Zeppelin, Queen, and the whole Deep Purple family, Rainbow, Whitesnake, Coverdale, all those offshoots. Those were the biggest ones, UFO... so many things. And on the other side of the fence are things like David Bowie, Roxy Music, Brian Ferry, Ultravox, a little stranger type of stuff, T. Rex, I was always a huge T. Rex fan. Yeah, Sweet... the whole glam era was a big influence on me, Slade, bands like that.

I've heard people say some parts of Marriage do remind them of Queen.

Yeah, we totally loved Queen, I probably saw them every time they toured here from 1974 on. They were a big influence, and also studying classical music, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, all those people were as well. The romantic and impressionist school really struck a chord with me, I think that's influenced my writing even more than Bach and the earlier baroque music. Though I do love that stuff, the chord structures that I use and the way I write are probably closer to the Chopin / Debussy school.

You can hear that classical influence, and the latest albums are very romantic, both musically and lyrically.

That was a conscious thing, to have the dichotomy of being really savage and barbaric, but also having the whole romantic element too, not afraid to make things sound beautiful.

That's not very popular in the U.S at the moment.

Oh no, no, it's be as ugly as you can be. Ha ha.

How would you compare the last two CD's with your previous work, like Life Among the Ruins, Age of Consent, and the early Virgin Steele, the self-titled and Guardians of the Flame.

What we're doing on the Marriage is carrying on from what we started with the first and second albums. Noble Savage was the real fruition of that style, I think. The first two albums and the EP were essays in the craft, before it was fully sown, and it really came together with Noble Savage. Life Among the Ruins was really kind of a strange, left-field album, kind of more American sounding, and really just what our lives were like at the time. It came at the time when there was a gap of three years or so between Age of Consent and Life Among the Ruins, so there was a lot of jamming around, we had gotten back into an early Zeppelin kind of feel. Things were somewhat a little simpler in some respects. Rather than saying, "Okay, we have to write these epics", there were songs I had written, and that Ed and I had written together, and we just said "Let's do what we have and see what happens." The record was recorded really, really quickly, and has kind of a raw feel. It's just one photograph of what life was like at that point in time, whether or not we come back to that style and do a whole another album...I don't know, maybe isolated songs here and there. It's definitely different. The first album was a combination of those epics and straight ahead rock. It was just done after three weeks of being together. We did it in a week, less than a week for the whole album. Ha ha. For I think under $1000.

That was put out in ‘81, ‘82?

The band formed October of ‘81, and we went into the studio I guess...It was on Halloween we formed, so we went in, the end of November, beginning of December. Came out sometime in March or April of ‘82.

The next question is about the lyrics. What were your lyrical sources for the album? I see some Greek("Prometheus, the Fallen One"), Norse("Twilight of the Gods"), Christian("The Last Supper"), E. A. Poe ("The Raven Song"), even Tolkien("Blood of the Saints")...any other sources?

Oh, god there's so many things that I love. I read pretty voraciously. One of my favorite writers is Ray Bradbury, I really like his stuff, his whole style of writing and the things he says are a big influence. Especially on the Noble Savage album, Ray Bradbury was a big influence. Also, (Aldous) Huxley, Brave New World, books like that, Fahrenheit 451. I like a lot of the French poets like Baudelaire, Rembault, Verlaine, those people. William Blake, I actually didn't know this at the time, but after I had finished doing Marriage of Heaven and Hell Part I, and it came out, we got a new drummer, Frank Gilchrist, for the remainder of the Part II tracks. The first thing he says to me, "Oh yeah, William Blake." I said, "What about William Blake?" He says, "Yeah, he wrote a poem called the Marriage of Heaven and Hell." And I didn't know this. But I got that poem while we were in the midst of doing Part II, and got back into Blake. I had known his earlier things, but I hadn't known that work. So that was just a title I came up with, I don't remember exactly where I came up with it or why I came up with it, but it's just opposites. I love those opposites, Noble Savage, Heaven and Hell, Virgin Steele, so that was pretty interesting. It's nice to have a guy in the band who reads probably as much as I do.

How about any certain grand themes? There seem to be a lot of repetitive images and emotions in the lyrics?

The album works conceptually on several different levels. One is the theme of death and rebirth, the eternal resurrection, like a love that never dies, from beyond the grave. "Emalaith" is the sequel to "I Will Come for You" from Part I. So that's a constant, recurring theme, exalting change, "Transfiguration", and what happens with death and the spirit. Another theme is the flesh and the spirit. People like trying to say, "Well, if you're spiritual, you can't be earthy", and vice versa, but it's not true. What I'm trying to say on the album is that the spirit lives in the house of the flesh. They're connected and it's those connections that make us whole, and it's supposed to be that way. The flesh gives us energy, and the spirit gives us something else. So there's that. Freedom, personal freedom, and with that freedom comes personal responsibility, for your actions, and where you stand in the world. Quite a few things that are happening.

The death and rebirth really comes through, "Out from the wasteland, death into life." All that encompasses, whether it's the Norse Twilight of the Gods, giving birth to a new age; or the flood mythologies in the various cultures; or Christ rising up from the grave...

That's one of the things I think about, that all religions are essentially the same, and it's like language, there are different languages, but a chair is still a chair, whether you call it a chair, or whatever it is in Italian, or French. I think the myths have essentially the same properties, the creation myths are similar, the fiery orb coming from the sky, and these rebirth things. They have their differences of course, but they are all interpretations, I think, of the same phenomenon and man's questions, "How did we come to be?" explaining why the sun goes down, and the moon comes up, so on and so forth.

Is "Emalaith" based on mythology or literature, or is your own creation?

That's a name I made, it's derived from two different sounds, I guess the sound of it is Celtic in origin, and I wanted something that was from that part of the world. And something that sounded otherworldly, sort of vampirish, of another race of beings, or something like that. What Emalaith stands for is that eternal love that everyone's searching for, something, someone, some partner who will be there forever, a love that never dies no matter what happens. That spiritual connection which I think people do have with each other in relationships. There's the exploration of that kind of thing. It's similar in a way to "The Burning of Rome", where there's death, and coming back, and the connection of spirits and common souls. ["When I die, in your arms/One child born/To carry on...I'll meet you again through the eyes of our son"-From "The Burning of Rome", a tremendous epic from Age of Consent.-C]

Is "Blood and Gasoline" based on anything specific?

Nothing specific, it's just things that I was going through. Some of those lyrics were actually written around the time of Life Among the Ruins, and that album's a real personal album, because I was going through a lot of trips during its writing. It's dealing with how people don't really have time for one another because we're moving so fast, there's not enough time to establish relationships. I was feeling this because I was not connecting with people in my life with whom I wanted to connect at the time. So there's a lot of negative energy in there, but channeled in a positive way. It's so fleeting, we're just burning through our lives. Blood and gasoline, they both burn, and it's just so much wasted energy. We're a mobile society, always on the run in cars, we live in cars, we listen to music in cars. Tonight I'll sleep in the motel where you slept this afternoon, and somebody else slept the night before. It's just this burning through time, something that was on my mind.

Getting back to the music, who's going to be on the tour, you, Edward Pursino, and...?

Rob Demartino [bass] from Life Among the Ruins, he's been in the band and out of the band for a while. He was playing with Blackmore's Rainbow for a while, so he really didn't get a chance to play on the two Marriage albums, but he's back. Frank Gilchrist is the drummer, who did the three tracks from Part II, Joey has retired from the music business.

How did you come to put the song "Life Among the Ruins" on the Marriage album? It is better suited than it was for its namesake album.

Ha ha. It wasn't really quite ready during the Life Among the Ruins album, and I always liked the concept. It's happened before. Queen had the song "Sheer Heart Attack" on a different album than the album Sheer Heart Attack, and Led Zeppelin had "Houses of the Holy" on Physical Graffiti, so I didn't invent that idea, but I thought it was nice to continue that tradition. It didn't really fit, as you say, on that other album. I wrote that song at the same time I was writing "Blood and Gasoline", so there's a similar sort of manicness to them.

The European tour is with Angra?

Yeah, they're supporting us.

Anyone else you'll be playing with on these shows, or just Angra?

A band called Superior from Germany. Kamelot was supposed to be the opener, third on the bill, but at the last minute they pulled out, so Superior's doing the German dates. For the other European dates it's a band called Poverty's No Crime. I don't know anything about either of them.

Are you a fan of Angra?

I don't know much about Angra, someone gave me the Holy Land record, and I haven't really thoroughly digested it, I've just kind of scanned through and checked it out briefly. To me it reminded me of Supertramp a lot. Like Breakfast in America and that kind of thing, I thought they were going to be much heavier, but I think their earlier records supposedly are much heavier, because that record's pretty light.

Their previous one is a little more straight forward heavy metal, but still has a lot of the classical influence. Holy Land has so many musical influences, worked into a grand scheme, it seems to fit with your music in a way.

I think they're a good band, what I've heard sounds good, I just haven't really had time to digest the record.

I think Marriage works even better than the new Angra, but I like what they did, it's very ambitious.

It's good, they've got the Brazilian influence and so on...we'll see how it works live. I'm sure I'll like them, I'll get to hear them every night, ha ha.

What are some of the bands you currently listen to now?

Type O Negative, I like them. I'm still listening to Queen and Zeppelin, ha ha, of course. Actually I just picked up this five-track EP, I guess it's a primer thing from this band called Nevermore, I heard their track... we just did this Judas Priest tribute thing ("Screaming for Vengeance"), and they had a track on there along with us, "Love Bites", and I thought, "Well that sounds good, I'd like to hear more of these guys," so I just got that, and that sounds kind of cool.

When were you starting out in music? Was that always in New York?

Yeah, always in New York. I started playing in bands when I was 11 years old, so...when was I 11 years old...Maybe ‘71, ‘72? I'm not sure exactly when that was.

Any other bands we'd recognize before Virgin Steele?

No, there was really nothing of note, just cover bands doing the club circuit and that kind of thing, I started doing the club circuit when I was about 16. The only other thing I've done besides Virgin Steele was a short lived thing, a little project that was strictly live, with me, the bass player from Foghat (Craig McGregor), Jack Starr (Orignal Virgin Steele guitarist), and this drummer, and it was called Smokestack Lightning. That was around ‘92, so probably right before Life Among the Ruins. It was really a blues-based thing, like Foghat, because of the bass player. I'd like to record those songs some day. I've talked with Jack about that and we might do that at some point. It'd be fun.