RAGGED, RAUCUS KINGS OF ROCK,
Mike Elliott likes playing crash-and-burn-style guitar.
“I have a dark, mid-range sound,” notes the lead singer/guitarist/harmonica player of mighty garage ’n’ grit blues trinity Elliott and The Audio Kings.
“I don’t play with any pedals,” he states. “All that (fuzz) sound is just the way the guitar sounds through the amplifier and then the way I play it,” he explains.
“When I put that all together, I like things to sound ragged, like it is about to come apart,” he says.
Elliott began using vintage musical equipment years before it was popular. “I call mine ‘garbage’ because these guitars have no business being around!” he exclaims, referring to the Harmony guitars that he owns. “They are super well constructed and the wood has gotten old and junkie, but they create that mid-range sound. Then I put that through an equally junkie amplifier from the same era,” adds Elliott.
Elliott’s creative partners in crime include Audio Kings drummer/background vocalist Jonny Sauder and Scott Fitzpatrick on doghouse bass. “I owe a lot to Scottie and Jonny,” says Elliott.
“Long Live The King” is another aurally visceral Audio Kings guitar -and harp injected jump-and-jive roller-coaster ride from high octane opener “Zim Zam Zoom” to raucous finale “Tin Sandwich.”
Elliott says song arrangements are pretty well worked out before he brings them to the “fellas.”
“I write a lot of songs and we try them out,” says Elliott. “Then we tweak them a little bit — some of the physical construction of the song — but I have already written the song and then we play it a few times,” he notes. “If we like it, I keep it. If I feel like I don’t like the song very much or we are not really dialing into that song, I just take it out of the set list. Some of the songs make it to the set list, some of them get reworked for the set list and some die. I recycle the lyrics somewhere down the road,” says Elliott.
“Love Live the King” was recorded at Sauder’s home, Sheep Ship Studios.
Thanks to his fellow Kings, Elliott got the sound he wanted to achieve.
“I owe those fellas a lot with respect to setting up professional high-grade equipment and for having the patience to let this happen. We got great results,” he notes.
“When the red light is on, everybody has to have a good take or you have to throw the song away. But the good thing is, when you record something live like that and the energy is high, it comes straight across onto the record and you can feel it.
“Jon and Scotty make it easy for me to do stuff like this. It is kind of cool to find people who think what you are doing is not crazy,” notes Elliott with a laugh. “I owe a lot to those fellas for the sound, thank goodness. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would be doing!”