When I first heard of Melodic Hard Rock band Raddar I couldn't believe my eyes.
The band released their debut album after having recorded the basics for the songs fourty years ago. "Transmission" was originally recorded in 1978 in a time when Hard Rock was doing the very first steps.
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| Raddar performing live. Band Photo by Brian Hubbard |
The chance to discover them was like having a time machine. It brought me back to the roots of heavy music. Why did it took that long to release it? How did it all come together? And what are the guys behind the diverse longplayer with 17 blistering tracks doing these days?
More than enough exciting reasons to talk to Razar King (Bass, Guitar, Vocals) and Randee Lee (Vocals, Guitar, Organ) of the band about their Compact Disc in 2020. They kindly gave an in-depth behind the scenes look on transfering the old material, completing it and finally finding a proper way to release it physically as well as digitally.
Before continue reading make sure to open
the official Raddar website in a new tab. You can listen to one full track there. It fits well in the background while reading what the guys had to say about the exciting travel back in time.
Heavy Metal Underdogs: Was there something that made you start playing music - maybe a special life event etc. ?
Randee:I actually started recording at around 6, archiving TV shows on my mother's mini Sony reel to reel tape recorder. So the recording side was there from an early age...I had a 3rd grade teacher who realized I had a gift of writing what would later become lyrics and fast forward to the teen age years when I realized all the records I was buying were for the guitar parts. That led to my desire to play guitar and of course after hearing Mountain's Mississippi Queen it was a lock! When I met RAZAR, a fellow musician endowed with the same guitar fervor as myself, a match made in Heaven was established. The rest is history!
Razar:Hearing Foxy Lady and Crosstown Traffic by Hendrix on local radio is what initially started the fire in me. Several of my friends were taking guitar instruction classes in school, so I thought I would have the same teacher show me how to play bass guitar. Everyone was learning guitar and there were no bass players. He was teaching Beatles, Monkees, Beach Boys and that sort of music, so I opted to learn about the bass from him and then go home and put on records to learn how to play the kind of music I loved. I must have played through Humble Pie's Rockin' The Fillmore and Grand Funk's On Time and Red Album a hundred times! I remember the specific event that got me on guitar-my father was listening to me play the bass and made the comment "It's hard to tell what song you are playing" and I thought to myself that it would be easier to play tunes people knew if I was on guitar instead of bass. Next thing I knew I had a '59 Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall Super Lead half stack and was hammering out the chords! I used Yesterday And Today (Y&T) and early UFO to teach myself the basics of rock guitar. Michael Schenker and Tony Iommi became my heroes and much of my lead playing still sounds like them to this day!
HMU: Do you had to fight with technical problems while recording the songs? I think studios and producers weren't familar with that style back in the 70s in the United States.
Randee: Being the archivist I was from an early age we were fortunate that I kept all of the original recordings from all those years ago. I think the problem we really faced looking back was that there was no one really steering the bus in the recording sessions. We went in and recorded all those tunes in one take live, just as we played them but never really really finishing any of them. Strangely, the technical problems were not uncovered until after digitizing the catalog and finally taking a good hard listen to what we had. I think originally we were recording on 8 tracks which seems maybe archaic to today's standards but we might as well have been working at NASA in our minds...lol. We ultimately had to deal with all the drums being on 2 tracks and bass tracks not being recorded well at all. Fast forward to today we had the opportunity in my recording studio to flesh out, fix and complete the songs as they should have been.
Razar:Studio engineers back in the late 70's referred to our sound as "rugged" and "heavy duty" since they had never heard anything like us. I don't think people quite knew what to do with us since we weren't the watered down RNR sound that was popular in Texas during those days. Randee and I were able to get the tones heard on Transmission by playing our Marshall and Sound City amps wide open on 10 and running them through attenuators to bring the volume down. That way we had "our sound" no matter where we were recording. We weren't so fortunate with the original bass tracks. When we digitized the analog tapes a few years ago and gave the songs a listen for the first time in decades the bass guitar tracks were thin sounding and distorted. We knew we couldn't use them, so I had to record new bass guitar tracks on all 17 songs. I tried to be true to the original spirit of the songs wherever I could.
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| Razar King and Randee Lee always pushed forward to make "Transmission" become a reality. Photo Credit: Jeannie King |
HMU: How did Gary Priest (the drummer on the "Transmission" sessions) join the band?
Randee: I will yield to my most honorable colleague RAZAR for this one as I personally don't recall our initial meeting but I do remember rehearsing and discovering that we had commonalities in musical tastes in certain bands of the day. Very prolific drummer for those times. His chops were amazing and I'm sure they still are. There wasn't anything that we threw at him that he couldn't handle.
Razar: OK, I'm reaching way back in my memories for this one. Best I can recall, my wife was friends with a guy named Monty, and he had a brother named Phil. Phil was friends with Gary Priest, the original drummer, and word made it's way to Gary that Randee and I were in need of a drummer. Gary was the best drummer I had ever seen. He was a student of a world famous school for jazz drummers when we found him. Through much technical wizardry in mixing and mastering Randee was able to keep Gary's original drums.
HMU: Did you have to re-record parts of the old material or was everything in good condition at the time you transfered the tracks to the digital format?
Randee: I briefly touched on that in a previous question but I will elaborate a bit further. The short answer is no, not all was well when we finally dove into the material. Miraculously, the tapes themselves had survived really well. We did have to go through the whole tape baking process and we did have a great engineer (Jeff Mount) that was an awesome archivist at a studio that still had machines that could play these very old tapes. He took great care in saving the recordings and digitizing them so we could bring them back to my studio. From there we embarked on a rather long and arduous journey of taking stock of where we were at with them and where they needed to go recording and song wise to get to where we are today. In the long run some lyrics were rewritten or scrapped all together in favor of new story lines. Some guitars were updated as some songs did change along the way. As I had mentioned before, new bass tracks were added due to the original tracks being recorded very poorly and not salvageable plus, some songs changed due to rewrites. I ended up replacing the original vocals due in part to us not being able to get the original vocalist on board, and with the new updates we wanted to have a consistent vocal presentation on the record. A tremendous amount of work went into the restoration of the original recordings to get the final product where it is now.
Razar: It was fun doubling guitar parts that I hadn't played in 40 years! As stated before, all the bass tracks were re-recorded. But, the guitar tracks transferred to digital quite nicely. Since there were some new arrangements due mainly to re-writing lyrics it was necessary to hammer out power chords here and there, and Randee and I added new solos where necessary. But, we were able to keep the songs very true to their original state and most solos are coming out of the original Marshall and Sound City stacks.
HMU: Why didn't you already release the album back in the 70's/80's?
Randee: I think RAZAR and I asked ourselves this same question numerous times during the making of this record. Unfortunately we don't have an answer except that we just never seemed to finish any of the recordings as we would now or maybe we thought they were finished as they were recorded how we played. Once again no real producer at the helm at the time and we had a very limited budget that we were working with. No backers...lol. We just did not have access to the record business that we would have needed at the time until 40 years later when a label did come knocking after finding a long lost demo.on another band's tape. We opted to self release.
Razar: I've wondered ever since these songs were written if we could have been a part of the rise of hard rock/metal (Rods, Riot, KISS, Motley Crue) in the USA. Looking back I think if we had management with vision that could have placed us in the flow of NWOBHM coming from Europe we could have been the band opening for Priest in the states (like Kick Axe and Great White) or playing at Donnington (like Pantera in their early days). IF we had released an album in '79 or especially in '80-'82 I know it certainly would have increased our chances! Unlike self releases of today, one still had to go through "the machine" and catch a record company's attention back then. We were heavy rock and might have been ahead of our time musically for the year 1979.
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| Raddar finally released their material after 40 year, Photo Credit: Jeannie King |
HMU: Did you also listen to psychodelic music at the time of the recordings?
Randee: I don't think that would have been my playlist during these days...maybe a bit earlier as I listened to a lot of music, very broad based in terms of genres...rock, folk, psych, prog, hard rock, metal, lots of guitar music and even early Christian rock music such as Petra. I was very into songs and bands that featured crunching guitars and organ with great vocals.
Razar: I listened to Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane with Papa John Creach, Iron Butterfly, Nektar.
HMU: What happened after you finished recording the "Transmission" album?
Randee: Took a break...lol! No really we just kind of took a step back and did a victory dance as we realized that we finally had the finished product in our hands. A completed project with finished songs, new art work by Nello DelOmo from italy and the physical tangible product. A great feeling.
Razar:I've heard artists say they can't listen to their finished product after being in the studio hashing out the nuts and bolts of getting the songs recorded. Not the case with me! I love these songs, not because we wrote and recorded them, but because they are really good songs that are easy to listen to AND THEY ROCK. I've listened to Transmission almost daily since we finished it, and my interest is renewed each time someone local or abroad tells me how much they enjoy it. These aren't 17 cookie cutter songs-they are different. We followed no known patterns when we wrote or recorded these songs. They truly came from our love of what we wanted to hear. After the disc was finished I immediately began contacting people and radio stations worldwide who promote this kind of music. The next release will be a bit heavier and I'll do it all over again unless we get picked up by a distribution company.
HMU: Do you still create music these days?
Randee: Very much so. I am writing all the time. I have several solo projects that are scheduled for release plus RAZAR and I already have most of a new RADDAR record in the can and ready to go with a couple more on the drawing board. Since I have a studio I have produced a few records for other artists and logged several tunes on Texas radio with one in use by the Dallas Cowboys football team. It has been in my blood for a long time. Between RAZAR and myself we have veritable cornucopia of plectrum fueled musical escapades in storage waiting to be unleashed.
Razar: Well said! I have 360 songs sitting on my desktop waiting for their turn, and that doesn't include the songs Randee and I are working on together for Raddar. I have several recording side projects. A doom metal band, a traditional power/heavy metal band, and even a country/hard rock project. No grass growing under these feet. I've always been a metal head and never tire of cranking the amps, and I have 20 of them I can crank!
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| Maybe more material of the band will show up in the future. Photo Credit: Jeannie King |
HMU: Where can the people purchase your music?
Randee: At this time it is only available on our website at
www.raddartheband.com. We are actively seeking outside distribution for the States and overseas. We would love to hear from everyone!!
Razar: Having distribution outside the states would reduce the cost of our cd's, posters, and t-shirts to other countries, so we hope to arrive at that end shortly.
Randee and Razar: Thanks for your interest in our music and for giving us the opportunity to chat with you!!!
Make sure to
follow Raddar on Facebook to keep track of the next steps of the band.
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