(Contributor’s Note: In preparation for this interview, I checked out a video that Chris Catero did in New York at the Sirius/XM studios. I thought to myself, “Self, this will be cake. The dude is as chill as a hairless man in Antarctica.” So, five days before the interview, I was leaving a rig and had a voice mail pop through on my cell after getting back some service. It was Catero. Seems a line got crossed, a mistake was made, or something to the like, and he thought the interview was that day. Imagine my surprise upon listening to the message about an hour and a half after he left it. I called him back as soon as I could (my cell service dropped the call after only a couple minutes, and it was quite embarrassing). So, we got to speak, about my line of work, a little about the state of New Mexico, his familiarity with the area I live in, and a bit about where he is from. After we finished THAT conversation, I thought to myself, “Self, this is going to be BADASS!” I got home a few hours later and friended him on FB right away. I have been a fan of Razer’s for a couple years now, and my excitement built over the next several days. The day of the ‘view I thought to myself, “Self, chill…the…fuck…out.” He called about two minutes after 4 my time, and it was on. Chris Catero is just as genuine and deep in his beliefs of the music industry as any true-blood musician is. Well, and he is just one helluva human being. Our conversation is as follows. Enjoy and rock on)
**********
OverkillWFO-First, I just want to say thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to interview with me for The Monk’s House.
Chris Catero-Oh absolutely. Not a problem.
**********
OKWFO-I didn’t think it would be after talking to you the other day.
Chris-(laughs)
**********
OKWFO-For those that might not know, please tell our readers and fans about you. When did you start playing bass originally, and what is a little of your personal history in the music business?
Chris-Okay, I started playing bass a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away because that’s what it feels like (laughs from both sides). So, I’ve been playing bass for a number of years. I really got my first start, funny enough, being in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I went to school at New Mexico State University. In high school, I played in a kind of a high school cover band or whatnot. When I got to college, we put together a pretty popular cover band I played in during my years down there at NMSU. Ya know, just kinda making the extra money and the rent while you’re going to school type of thing. But, at the very end of my time at NMSU, I met some guys, and we ended up forming an original band, more of your speed metal-type band called Wardog. With Wardog, the guitar player/singer and I split vocals. What ended up happening was we were all kind of connected. He had been in a former band that had been signed to Capitol, and he had actually played with Marty Friedman growing up as kids in their first band. So, after we did our first Wardog record, which was really just more of an extended EP we did on our own, Metal Blade Records got wind of it, picked it up, and we signed a deal with Metal Blade. With Metal Blade, I was with that band for a few years, and that band finally broke up. I got to be friends with Marty Friedman through that whole process with Wardog, and I started playing with Marty on and off in his band. Along the same time I had formed Razer with myself and two of the other guys (Eric and Paul) who had been in Wardog with me. We just wanted to kinda go into a little bit of a different direction. Simultaneously, I was doing the Marty Friedman thing, we were working on the Razer thing, at that point I was the singer of the band, which I really didn’t wanna be (chuckles). I would much rather just be a bass player. But, at the time, it was just one of those things I had been a singer, or part singer, in a band before. It was kind of an easy thing to do. As soon as we started writing stuff, I knew I did not hear my voice singing the songs. It was just in a different vein than what we were doing in Wardog. I heard a bigger, more soulful-type voice going on with that. I have a very kind of heavy metal kind of voice I guess is the best way to put it.
**********
OKWFO-There’s nothing wrong with that (laughs)
Chris-No, no , no, there wasn’t anything wrong with that, but what I was hearing, we were writing all this music, and I was hearing like…I was hearing in my head what I wasn’t hearing in reality. A heavier-tinged band, but with a singer that was more in line with Steven Tyler meets Motown almost, which sounds like a really odd combination. But, that soulfulness is what I was kind of looking for. Someone who could really belt, and I just never really heard many guys who could do that in heavy music. And, I thought, to me, I was like, wow, this would be a very cool and interesting combination that nobody had thought of at this point. Luckily, right as we were getting ready to ditch the band because we just had not found anybody (chuckles), we expanded our search beyond the Phoenix area, where we live, and I found Chris Powers, our singer, on an online ad going to L.A. moving from New York. When I heard his voice, I thought, “This could be the guy.” We sent him out some music we had been working on that didn’t have any lyrics or melodies purposely for the idea of thinking we would check some other guys’ ideas out. The first thing he sent back was what turned in to be ‘Never Understand’ on our record. The minute I heard, it was like a verse and a chorus, I was like, “That’s the dude.” We just kind of went from there, and got him into joining the band, and that is for real where Razer started in my mind.
**********
OKWFO-You brought up where you and 2 of the other guys came from, what about Chris Powers? Was he in a band before?
Chris-Funny enough with Chris, Chris is really a guitar player. He’s from Albany, New York, and he’d had a band up there called Shift. He actually went to school as a guitar player, and he’d only decided to sing in his band Shift two or three years prior to when I found him online. He is just a raw, natural talent. He’s one of those guys that can just sing. There’s no trying with him, per se. One of those guys that when he opens his mouth up, he could sing. He’s that guy, if you’re a singer, you just completely hate because he is a natural. He opens his mouth and good things come out. At the same time though, he is a really good musician, and he’s a helluva guitar player funny enough. He can really lay down some pretty wicked leads or whatnot.
**********
OKWFO-Really. Does he do that on any of the new album?
Chris-Actually, he does. He plays a little guitar here and there. He did an outro solo on the title track of “Dark Devotion”, and our cover of ‘Every 1’s a Winner’ that’s him playing most of the main guitar riff lines.
**********
OKWFO-Oh, son of a bitch. That’s cool. That’s the kind of guy you want , a guy who can sing and be a musician all around. That’s awesome.
Chris-It’s funny, because we have two guitar players, we haven’t incorporated him playing guitar live, per se. He hasn’t necessarily wanted to go there all the way with doing that, but it’s great having a guy who comes from not being a singer, but being a guitar player. When your writing, there’s a whole helluva lot less ego you gotta deal with because he’s not really a “lead singer” by his nature. He’s really a musician. That’s cool because he can understand the whole and can really grasp what’s going on with the music. The more bullets you got in the gun, the better off you are when you’re shooting.
**********
OKWFO-Well, it depends on who’s shooting (laughs)
Chris-(laughs) That’s true (laughs)
**********
OKWFO-You brought up Marty Friedman, and not to take anything away from anybody, but what is it like being friends with arguably one of the better guitarists in history? I mean, it’s Marty Friedman.
Chris-(laughs) Yeah, I know. The funny thing about it is that I still remember the first day I met Marty. Tom, the guitar player in Wardog, had said we’re gonna re-record some of this old stuff. Their first band was called Deuce, and he wanted to record some of this stuff just for shits and giggles just to have fresh copies of some old stuff they had done, and said Marty’s coming in to do it. This was during… probably around ‘Youthanasia’ or maybe even before that I guess, somewhere around in there anyway-that time frame when that was going on. I still remember the first time meeting him. He walked through the door, and prior to all this, he was one of my favorite guitar players in Heavy Metal just because I gravitated toward his style, and he sounded like nobody else but Marty Friedman. I remember him walking in and saying to myself, “Holy shit, that’s really him.” We got to jamming, and from that day forward, we actually just kind of became friends. Marty’s the one who actually, when we moved from New Mexico, kind of talked us into moving to Phoenix as he moved there a couple months prior to us. It was funny because eventually he just kind of became my little curly-haired guitar player friend. I started playing with him in his touring band after he asked me, “Hey, do you want to go out and do dates with us?”, and I was like, “Yeah. Sure.” It’s fun, a way for me to stretch and get my chops up and that kind of stuff. And, then it was like I forgot how great he is…at that point he was just my friend. We’d start playing, and I’d be on stage with him, and I’d be like, “Holy shit! Did you just play that?” And then, it takes me back, I remember…oh yeah, he is a guitar God, isn’t he? (laughs)
**********
OKWFO-Is he involved in Razer in any way, shape, or form?
Chris-He hasn’t been involved with us in any other capacity other than him and I co-wrote our current single, ‘Do You Want It’. It was kind of a unique thing to doing that, too, because it was probably the world’s wackiest co-write due to the fact that, traditionally, when you think of when guys getting together and co-writing they get in the room together and bounce off each other, “Oh yeah, this is great” or whatever. It wasn’t anything like that. I was up at his house kinda helping him engineer some stuff that he was doing on a record and played me this song he had a kind of semi-finished rough form, which is basically the riff in “Do You Want It”. I heard it, and listened to the song, and I kind of look at him and say, “Dude, this is a vocal song.” Not that any of his other stuff isn’t great, because it is, but instrumental albums tend to gravitate toward the guitar thing as the primary instrument obviously. With this song, I just heard lyrics. Literally, I heard, “Do you want it” come out when I was listening to it. So again I told him, “This should be a vocal song.” He said, “Dude, go for it.” I was like, “Okay.” A couple months goes by. He finishes the record. I get the record. He gives me a copy of the record, and I mentioned back to him, “I think I want to try to do something.” He goes, “Yeah, go for it, man.” So, I take it, and I go away. Now, I kinda chop it up, and I rearrange it, and I do things that went more toward a vocal thing, and I wrote all these vocals and everything to it. We as Razer at the time, this was before Powers was in the band, demoed it, thought it was killer, but it just kind of didn’t go anywhere past the demos. Then, fast forward up to very late last year, management was saying we should consider doing an expanded edition of the record. We had just gotten a bigger management company on-board and had some new business ventures happening. They’re like, “We should consider an expanded form with some new tunes on it.” I said, “Yeah, I like that idea. That would be cool.” A lot of people really hadn’t got to hear “Dark Devotion” when it was released earlier that year. When thinking about new songs I brought up, “Ya know, there’s this song I wrote with Marty Friedman.” I went back to the drawing board again on it, editing it further, tightening the arrangement up a little more than what it was before, and we did a demo on it. Management flipped out and said, “You gotta do this.” I called Marty and said, “Hey man, we are going to do ‘Do You Want It’ on a record, do you want to play on it?” He’s like, “Yeah, sure. Let me figure it out.” He’s living in Tokyo, Japan so we kinda went back and forth on e-mails, and once we had finished up the rough form of it before it was mixed, I sent him over some stuff, he did some solos at home, sent it back to me, re-amped it at our studio, and there we were, Marty Friedman was playing on our tune. Long story short, it was a pretty wacky kind of write, but it’s a very cool thing at the end of the day because I thought he played a killer solo on it.
**********
OKWFO-Damn, that’s awesome. I love cool fucking stories like that.
Chris-Well, the funny thing about it is, Marty has played little guest appearances on a lot of records, but this is actually going to be the first time when this single goes to radio here in July, the first time he’s been on big, active rock radio since he was in Megadeth. I think that’s a pretty cool thing, ya know.
**********
OKWFO-Yes it is. That’s hard to believe with all he does, and can do, in the music industry this will be the first since then.
Chris-When he left Megadeth, he decided he wanted to move to Japan and formed an entirely new career there that’s not even really based music. Music is secondary part of what he does because he’s really a t.v. star there. He’s really big in a lot of different t.v. stuff, he’s had two or three different shows, he’s actually had a #1 bestselling book there. He’s like just more of a “star” there. We went there a couple years ago to do a live DVD, and we were walking out in the street and little old ladies were coming up to him and everybody’s talking in Japanese. You totally expect a little thrasher dude coming up with long hair and like, “Oh, Marty Friedman!” and throwing him the horns, but it wasn’t like that at all. I was like, “What was that about?” He said, “Oh, she saw me on a cooking show.” I’m like, “What the hell were you doing on a cooking show?” He’s like, “It’s just a thing I had for hosting.” And, I’m like, “Alrighty then.” That just kind of gives you the idea of how far it’s kind of gone.
**********
OKWFO-That’s crazy. Well hey, not to sound like a cheesy fan, but I think Razer could have a book someday, and I think they just might.
Chris-Well, ya know what, we’ve been writing the chapters here for a little while. We’ll see if it all comes out. (laughs)
**********
OKWFO-Hell yeah. You touched on ‘Dark Devotion’ some already. Let’s talk about that. What are some of the differences between this re-release and the original?
Chris-What we ended up doing is, with the original, we added four new songs to this, plus with the original, while it sounded great, I wasn’t really happy with the mastering on it. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be. And, our producer, when we talked about doing this expanded edition, once we had recorded these new songs, turned me onto Scott Hall at Masterdisk, who’s a very big mastering engineer. Scott did ‘Do You Want It’ for us when it first came out to iTunes as a single. I was like, “Wow man, this is exactly how I wish the rest of the record had sounded.” So, we just said, well, for the expanded edition, let’s actually have Scott go back and re-master the whole thing, which he did a great job with. It’s really bombastic-sounding as you probably got to hear, very heavy-sounding. Between that and the new songs, this record will actually get to hit the light of day to a lot of people, whereas before, it only hit a small niche of people, and I thought it was a really good record. I wanted people to hear the record, we all did, so that was part of the reason of saying, “Well, let’s do it in an expanded form.”
**********
OKWFO-Cool. When is it going to be out?
Chris-It’s going to be out July 19th. You’ll find it at all the online retailers and all that kind of stuff.
**********
OKWFO-Good. I’m planning on getting it and doing a review on it, too, just so you know. Looking forward to the extra songs also.
Chris- Cool. Cool. Awesome.
**********
OKWFO-I told you on the phone the other day that I’ve been a fan of you guys for the past couple years. I first heard ‘Superpaun’, which was of course the first song I heard from you guys and played on Octane, and instantly just loved it, love the sound. With all the different genres of metal nowadays, how would you classify Razer within that mix and why?
Chris-Well…and that’s a good question. I had a feeling you were going to ask me this (laughs), only because, I kind of don’t know where we sit, and I want to explain this to you. If you look at us on the surface at a very brief glance, you can say, “Well, that’s kind of a…” like you said, an Octane-radio rock band. But, as you start listening to us, you go, “Well, there are a lot more layers to what they do than your standard radio rock band.” There’s a lot more guitar stuff going on, the singing’s a little more complex, there are more harmonies, it’s more musical. Not to take away anything from anybody else, but we have like really old school influences, like ‘70s and ‘80s influences, and that was part of the grand scheme of the make-up of Razer. We wanted to have this band that is obviously modern-sounding, but at the same time, having the writing sensibilities of the great bands of yesteryear. For me personally in today’s music, there’s very few bands that I go, “Wow. That band’s great.” And, there’s a lot of bands that I go, “Well, it’s okay.” I think that in the business, the music business is so wacky right now that as far as the labels that release music go at this point, they don’t know what to do. I don’t think they have anybody within the context of their label organization that really has an ear for what’s actually happening, so they keep rehashing really vanilla stuff to the masses that keeps dwindling. They wanna blame downloading and things like that and that has a little something to do with it, but I also think it’s a lot of not having a product that a lot of people want. At least with us, I wanted for the band to be able to not just have a great song here and there that’s catchy but a great record like bands used to do, that somebody could get into it and keep listening to it and not get tired of it-songs all the way through that you like and whatnot, just like the bands I loved growing up. Really, it’s just kind of just, along with an answer to your question, I don’t know where we sit because we can kind of play with any of the radio rock bands and fall in with that. At the same time, we are doing a gig coming up in El Paso with Tesla. Some people might say that’s a weird combination, but it really is not at all for us. The fans of Tesla actually like what we do, too, because it does have that musical complexity that music from that era had. So, we fall somewhere in between, and I don’t really know what you classify us.
**********
OKWFO-I mean, for me, I don’t like that there are so many different classifications of metal. To me, it’s just fuckin’ metal. That’s what I grew up with-Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, ya know the Big Four, and beyond. Then all of a sudden, all this other stuff started happening, there’s all these different genres, I was like, “Shit.” When I first heard you guys, I thought this is just a good Heavy Metal band. In my eyes, you guys are just Heavy Metal. I don’t wanna put anymore classifications in front of that because to me, it sounds really good. It’s a newer-style Heavy Metal, but that’s exactly what it is.
Chris-Well, that’s what we were really trying to do, and I’m glad it has come across like that to you. That’s all we really wanted to do. I would love to say we could reinvent the wheel, but I don’t think anybody has reinvented the wheel in music in a very long time. At least I wanted to say, well look, we’re not just a band that’s wearing our influences right out there on our sleeves and copying things. We’re a band that’s taking our influences, like bands of old who’d take their influences and spit’em back out in their own way, and that’s pretty much what we’ve wanted to do, and I think we have been successful doing those things.
**********
OKWFO-Hell yeah, man. I like that. A couple other things here. Obviously, you guys are based out of Phoenix. I lived in Phoenix back in the ‘90s. 98KUPD was, and is, THEE metal/rock station, and I read they helped you guys out. In what sense have they help?
Chris-Well, I’m friends with a lot of the people at KUPD. They played ‘Superpaun’ and got us on some of their radio station-sponsored shows. Ya know, KUPD is a really difficult station to get on in any capacity because they are one of the top 5 rock radio stations in the country, which makes them a tastemaker…every major label is trying to get their latest and greatest played on there. And, the fact that they’ve shown us some love just purely because they liked us was something that was really helpful for us. At least as far as some people saying, “Well, KUPD’s played them. That’s gotta be something cool going on with this band.” And, giving us a little more of some notoriety. Not necessarily outside of the fan base of the Phoenix area, but more with the business because the business people understand the power that KUPD carries as far as what it does, and that’s definitely put us on the radar of some people who we weren’t on prior.
**********
OKWFO-That’s a helluva compliment for ya. Where can we all expect to see you guys in the coming months, touring-wise?
Chris-What’s going on right now is with all the media and stuff that’s coming out, I think that our people are already formulating touring plans. We’re going to be doing kind of spotty days between now and probably the middle of August. Our booking agent is already looking at stuff for very late Summer through the Fall. As soon as we get more stuff, more information coming down, I’ll definitely…it will definitely be getting posted up, but we should be out and about touring probably by September I would think.
**********
OKWFO-I guess it’s time. I’ll step back, and let you have the floor. If there’s anything I missed you want mentioned, to bring up, anything you want people to go check out or whatever, it’s all yours, man.
Chris-Okay. Well, I would just say, if you get a chance to check out the whole record, definitely do. It’s not just one or two songs you hear on the radio that are good on it. You’ll get to hear a really cool, kick ass full record that you won’t mind listening to. Another thing I’d say to check out, too, for all you guys out there who are video game fans and stuff like that, should also check out and know that our singer, Chris Powers, also has done some of that kind of work, too. Like if you’ve played Guitar Hero 3 with the battling the devil, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. That’s actually our singer doing that. It’s a little fact that some people normally go, “Oh wait, I’ve played that.” I say, “Well, then you’ve heard our singer.” (laughs)
**********
OKWFO-Where else can people go? You guys have your own website and Facebook and all that. Where else would the best place to go to really check out your guys’ music?
Chris-I would say go to, probably for the music itself, you could go to our website (razerband.com) or our ReverbNation page. I like ReverbNation for actually listening to music, and that’s just reverbnation.com/razer.
**********
OKWFO-I’ll definitely be adding some links into this once I get it all ready to go.
Chris-Cool. Put up a Razer Facebook link. Obviously, the more people to go and Like us and all that kind of stuff, all the better.
**********
OKWFO-Oh, I will. Damn right. That’s it, man. Thanks again for talking with me. I knew after speaking with you the other day, I had nothing to worry about (laughs)
Chris-(laughs) Not at all and no problem. Take care.
**********
(It’s obvious Chris Catero is an honorable friend to most and a badass musician to all. Please follow the links provided and bang your head to the tune below) Razer Website / Razer ReverbNation / Razer FB Fanpage
Razer-Superpaun
