A Conversation with John Wetton – HuffPost 3.3.14

Mike Ragogna: Hi John, how are you doing?

John Wetton: Very well, thank you very much.

MR: Your new album, Gravitas. Why “Gravitas”?

JW: It was originally going to be Valkyrie. That was the working title for this album. It was the first title I had in my head that would go anywhere near this album. When we first had to deal with the next chapter of this band, we were in San Francisco when we started looking for a new guitar player. The last thing I wanted it to look like was Steve Howe Leaves Band, Asia’s Over. I wanted to make it seem as seamless as possible. So what we had to offer on whatever that date was when we played San Francisco was the fact that we had Sweden Rock–which we wanted forever and had wanted to get because the band wasn’t tough enough–it was too soft for the selectors of the festival. We had a day for it, which I think was June 7th, we had an offer for a new album from our record company and all we needed, really to complete this was a new guitar player. We started looking around for a new guitar player as soon as we could, and the two guys we approached were my favorite guitar player Steve Lukather and the other was Carl [Palmer]’s favorite guitar player, Paul Gilbert. Both of them said, “Very flattered, but sorry, we can’t.” Both of them had too much commitment to their own careers at the moment. So when Paul Gilbert said this, we said to him, “We’re going to get this same answer from anyone that we approach who we really like, so can you suggest someone?” He said, “Yeah, I can suggest two people…” One of them was American and one was a British guy, but it had nothing to do with their nationality, because Sam [Coulson] lives in Canada now…Alberta. But Sam was a blank page. He was virtually unknown outside of the guitar players’ union and he came with no baggage at all. There were no preconceptions about what he would be like. He’s from virtually the same part of the country that Carl and I come from, so there’s more of a chance of him fitting in. When we met him, he was a natural. For me, what I liked about it was that he wanted to be part of this band. The ammunition I had in San Francisco at that point was, “We have a new guitar player, we’ll be recording a new album and the band will be on tour in June playing the Sweden Rock festival that we’ve always wanted to play. Those three facts were enough to make it look like we were going to hit the ground running, which in fact we did.

I even gave them the title of the album, I said, “The new album is going to be calledValkyrie.” At that time, “Valkyrie” was just four chords and a title, but I knew that was going to fly–that’s a terrible pun, really, but I knew “Valkyrie” was going to fly. So we set about recording it, Geoff [Downes] and I started on the usual process of taking a sack full of ideas and sorting through them until we found stuff that was compatible and working on synthesizing it. Eventually, we came out with a bag full of pretty good, strong ideas for this new album. The name was always Valkyrie until one meeting where somebody in the band thought that it was too feminine. That’s odd, because in myth the Valkyrie has more power than a male, but there you go. What I always say is that I’ll come up with the titles until someone comes up with something better. If you’re going to knock it down, come up with something better. It so happened that I had another title, Gravitas. “How does anybody feel about that?” and immediately the fists went into the air, high fives and whoops and they said, “That’s the title” and I said, “okay, fine.” So to me, then Valkyrie was not relegated at all, it was still going to be the flagship of this album because it’s such a concise distillation of what this band’s all about. The track “Valkyrie” is five minutes of pure Asia. I think it’s still the one that’s going to get the attention. It’s still the one that’s going to be the video, first track, single. “Gravitas,” although it’s very hard-hitting, is too strung out to be the promo track. Valkyrie will be the promo track of this album.

MR: John, there seems to be a theme behind this album. Can you go into that?

JW: Well two of the main tracks, “Gravitas” and “The Closer I Get To You” are both about disintegration of relationships. It’s something that’s fairly universal these days, most people have either been through it themselves or they are very close to someone who’s been through it, so it kind of strikes a chord in most people. Now, in “The Closer I Get To You” the situation is almost redeemable. He doesn’t know whether it’s going to completely fizzle out or whether he can get it back on track again, but in “Gravitas,” it’s completely gone and it’s dealing with the aftermath and the guy is saying, “Please, let’s do this with some respect, let’s not just tear each other’s throats out, because I don’t want it to end like this.” The underlying theme of the whole album is redemption, really, and treating other with a little bit of respect. It’s the non-violent solution. It’s trying to find another way where people retain their dignity. The meaning that I take out of Gravitas is dignity. We didn’t want to make a straightforward rock ‘n’ roll album. Most of this band are in their sixties–we’ve got one exception who’s twenty-six, but most of us are getting to that respectable age now. We can’t come up with punk anthems, we never have done. What we do is we reflect the internal conflict that people get. Look at “The Heat Of The Moment.” It’s an apology. “Only Time Will Tell” is about a relationship falling apart because of infidelity. My complete change-around as far as lyric-writing came in 1971 when I had three records that I listened to all summer. One was Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the other one was What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye and the last one was Surf’s Up by The Beach Boys. The one that hit me the hardest, really, was Blue by Joni Mitchell because she wrote every song in the first person. It’s all like she’s reading straight out from her journal. For me, who had been brought up on art rock where you’re observing other people from a distance, it catapulted me into the world of, “Why don’t you write it from your own experience? To this day, if I hear someone bleating on about fame, I want to hear about their fame, not someone else’s. If it’s coming from the horse’s mouth, great. If it’s coming from the horse’s ass it’s no good at all.

MR: [laughs] When you guys are creating the music, there’s a point where you’re all very accepting of the material that you bring into the process, like a surrender to it, right?

JW: Geoff and I have an unspoken agreement that anything goes when we bring it into the writing studio, whether that be at his house or my house, or we could do it on the road in a hotel room. But we have this unwritten agreement that anything goes. We will never laugh at each other’s suggestions. They can be as completely un-PC as you could possibly imagine and then some but we won’t poo-poo each other’s ideas. Maybe we’ll trim it later and bring it within the bands of public health, but anything goes. Nothing’s out the window, which is kind of different from the way we approach the music, because the music is actually quite structured and it’s structured to very strict rules, really. We’re both sticklers for keeping notes within the chords and things like that. Things have to be in tune, things have to be in the right place chordally. We’re quite strict about that, but as far as the content of the song anything goes. So we kind of write about anything we want basically, but normally it falls into the bounds of either anti-war songs or songs about interpersonal relationships and feelings. I got criticized on our first Asia record for being “anti-female,” that I portrayed women as duplicitous. I was tarred with that brush, but I think that’s unfair, because I’m just giving you my point of view, my experience with my relationships. Maybe I’m not very good with relationships. On the next album I tried to regress that down a little bit with “Don’t Cry,” but you’ve got to be really careful with that, because if you constantly try to regress that balance you end up inevitably going too far the other way and you get accused of being patronizing.

But one of the standouts from the second Asia record was “My Own Time,” which was a real kind of “f**k you” anthem. “I really don’t care, I’ll do this anyway and I’ll do it in my own time.” Actually, most of the guys that I speak to love that song. They probably would, wouldn’t they? It’s a real stick one finger up and say, “I’m going to do this anyway” song. I don’t like to confuse myself like that, so I just write from the heart mostly. They almost always, these days, end up being about personal relationships. It’s nice that they can be seen on a few different levels. I did one called “Holy War” which actually was on Omega and I thought, “Oh, Jesus Christ we’ve got to be careful about this one, going on about the crusades and stuff” but actually it came out and in places it’s more like a personal war, and a song of hope, which is great. But back to Gravitas, the underlying theme always is optimism for me. There’s a little bit of a slight humorous twist in “Nyctophobia,” which is the fear of the dark, but again it’s all from personal experience. I wouldn’t dream of writing a song about something that I haven’t experienced. When I came out of alcoholism–actually, I’ve still got alcoholism, I just don’t act out on it anymore–but when I came out of that very black period, any phobia that was around, I had it. And fear of the dark was a big one for me. It’s not like I’m inexperienced in that. And I am incredibly grateful for the other guys in the band because when I came out of that period of alcoholism–and they were incredibly supportive, by the way–when I came out of that I was like the Japanese guy who’d been on an island in the Pacific for twenty five years and didn’t realize that the second world war was over. I didn’t know anything about anything that was current, at all. I kind of had a computer but I didn’t know how to use it, I had a credit card but I didn’t know what the pin was for it, I had a mobile phone but I didn’t know how to text or anything. They had to kind of lead me through gently into the twenty first century. I am eternally grateful to all of them for doing that. We got thrown straight into being on the road again in 2006 and suddenly we’re all sitting in a car driving up to Buffalo and it’s like the old days but I really was unaware of what happened in the last ten or fifteen years. It was quite amazing.

MR: John, Asia started at a very high point, didn’t it.

JW: Yeah, we got let out of the elevator at the penthouse instead of the ground floor. We didn’t have the opportunity to develop organically as most bands do, where we’d spend two years bumming around and two years looking for a record deal and five years making our first album. That didn’t happen with Asia. I’d been writing a lot of the material that was on the first Asia record for about five years, but we weren’t a band, we were just a studio outfit that recorded a load of songs. When we went out on the road we only had forty minutes of material. We had exactly the amount of material that was on the album, I think thirty-eight minutes. So we never had a chance to do it organically. The following year the band was split up, but we all felt there was unfinished business and we wanted to do it again properly. So in 2006 that’s exactly what we did. Lo and behold what you have before you now is a real, live organic rock ‘n’ roll band. It’s a classic rock band. We make records, we get on tour, we have regular band meetings, we know what we’re doing, we plan our budgets, we do everything properly, just like a real band should.

MR: I also have to ask you, you said “classic rock,” but Asia also falls under the category of progressive rock, which I think allows you the freedom you talked about before to do anything you want with your music.

JW: Yes. We have a foot in three trenches, really. We’re classic, we’re prog, and we verge on pop at times. We certainly can have singles that will appeal to people outside the prog fraternity, which they probably don’t even like. It’s clearly elitist, this prog thing. The bands that we came from, certainly all of them were prog. They died in the war of prog. But Asia, when it came out, reached far beyond the prog circles. To this day our audience is so varied, we get real kids at concerts, we get people our age and everyone in between. It’s great, I love it. And we still have a fairly broad spectrum as far as gender. Usually, we don’t have a room full of beards and sweaters, it’s usually a good mix of women and men. Very, very healthy audience. It’s great.

MR: Don’t you think the cross-generational thing speaks for the music as well as the fact that your music keeps popping up in movies and TV? South Park has one of the most classic Asia shoutouts with “Heat Of The Moment.”

JW: It certainly is classic, isn’t it? Cartman even says, “I’m going to use the words of a classic song.” It’s great! If Cartman thinks it’s okay, then it’s cool with me.

MR: And also Forty Year-Old Virgin gave you gusy some luv.

JW: Brilliant. And it’s exactly the right time, as well. Apparently, that had to beat out something else to get that spot. “Heat Of The Moment” was up against two or three different songs when they take them out to cinemas and try it out and “Heat Of The Moment” won it because it was the most appropriate. It’s an abject apology, he knows he’s blown it and he’s trying to get back to the girl. The line in the song is, “I never meant to be so bad to you,” so it’s kind of perfect. And that big guitar intro helps.

MR: And like you were saying about the songwriting and your inspirations earlier, when you’re writing these songs, you’re focusing on the message overall as well as the confessional part.

JW: I think the music has to strike a chord somewhere. I’ve seen enough really out there heavy metal acts where all you’re getting is the throb tribal thing and I can’t see anything that comes from the heart. My favorite male artist of all time is Don Henley because it’s like he’s reading poetry that comes straight from himself and it’s so gorgeous. It has to twang the heartstrings or else it’s really not worth it. There has to be something more musical going on.

MR: Do you feel that that’s why Asia has had such longevity? Because it’s striking a chord on a personal level more than other acts?

JW: Yes. A guy that I spoke to recently said, “I think when Asia started it was all music and now it’s kind of more people listening to what you’re saying,” and I said, “no, Asia wouldn’t have been successful in the first place if people weren’t listening to what was being said in ‘Heat Of The Moment’ and ‘Only Time Will Tell.'” It’s always been like that. Nothing’s changed. As far as the ethos of the songwriting is concerned, nothing’s changed. We’re still the same guys who wrote “Heat Of The Moment” and “Only Time Will Tell,” we’re still the same guys who wrote “Rock ‘N’ Roll Dream,” nothing’s changed there, it’s all the same people, and the ethos has remained the same. There has to be something personal that happens in the song.

MR: Hey, John, what is your advice for new artists?

JW: Sticking on. Looking at my personal life, most of it is fairly tragic. If anybody wants to follow in my footsteps try and avoid the pitfalls that I’ve made. Don’t become an alcoholic, don’t get divorced. Stick to your guns. Whatever your beliefs are when you start out, stick to them. Don’t get carried around by the wind, just try and believe in yourself, even when nobody else does. That way you only have yourself to blame when it goes wrong. Don’t take other people’s advice is my advice.

MR: Nice. And who are the Joe DiMaggio fans in the band?

JW: [laughs] Nobody, really. I heard that expression, and I can’t remember where, but someone said, “It’s as soft as Joe DiMaggio’s glove” and it went “Bang!” It just immediately registered and I said, “I’ve got to use that.” But I’ve no idea how soft Joe DiMaggio’s glove is, but it’s a lovely thought, isn’t it? This beautiful buckskin soft glove. Yeah, it’s lovely. We’re all sports fans in Asia, some more than others, but no one in particular. It was something that I’d heard and it was completely out of context, just someone saying “Oh, that’s as soft as Joe DiMaggio’s glove.

MR: Well, having that song on the album is now going to make you guys unofficial Yankees fans, you know that, right?

JW: Absolutely, yes.

MR: What does the future look like for Asia?

JW: It’s never looked brighter than it does today. This very moment when I look at what Asia has on its plate it’s never looked better. We have a solid foundation, we are good personal friends as well as colleagues, and we have an exciting new guitar player in the band. If you’d heard the band at the last ten concerts we’ve played, I’ve never heard the band sounding better. I even tweeted that, “If you think Asia is over, come to one of these jamming club gigs we’re doing and it will change your mind because the band’s never sounded better.” It’s all sort of brilliant. The band is good on stage, we’ve made a great record and we have tours coming up. It’s never never been in better shape, really.

MR: Beautiful. Is there anything that’s caught your eye in the papers lately?

JW: I saw one of our athletes win a gold medal in Sochi so I’m very pleased about that. She won it as we were talking, in the skeleton luge. This country is under six feet of water as we speak. It’s all doom and gloom. There is no end to this biblical flood at the moment. All they’re telling us is to keep doing what we’re doing because there’s no end to it. I’m sure it will turn around one day, but all that weather that you get in the united states we get six weeks later.

MR: Love the expression, “I wouldn’t wish our weather on anyone.”

JW: Well, we’ll be getting it, because that’s the way the world turns.

MR: John, you’re awesome as always. I really appreciate the interview. All the best and let’s do this again.

JW: You too.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne