One on One with Nelson's Matthew Nelson

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after talking with Matthew Nelson of Nelson, it was the realization that he truly loves what he does – playing music, touring and winning over new fans. Nelson fans can also be excited that a new album is on the horizon after nearly a decade and that besides catching Nelson rocking out on tour, the brothers have produced and are also touring the show, “Ricky Nelson Remembered”, a tribute to their late and great father.

Unfairly pegged early on as fluffy teen idols, thanks to a marketing strategy from Geffen that has never agreed with the artists that comprise Nelson, the band has had to overcome the false perception created and worked even harder than most to be taken seriously as musicians and accomplished songwriters since their debut in 1990 After the Rain. However, hard work, high energy and a new creative freedom after leaving Geffen has broken the constraints of label misdirection in which Nelson has become widely accepted for their music rather than an image that does not encompass the band whatsoever.

Nelson, appearing in Chicago May 28th at Tailgater’s is also embarking on a national tour that will have them playing in England and Shanghais, China for the first time in the career.         

Buzz – So how’s everything going?

Matthew – Good. I’m taking a little breather for a couple days and then we’re off to Alaska for a week and then coming out to see you guys.

Buzz - What’s going on in Alaska?

Matthew – From time to time  - we call them our working vacations – we’ll do three or four Royal Caribbean cruises and we’ll play a couple night s on the ship for a couple different groups of passengers. It works our really well. We get to take some family and friends along with us. It’s not a bad gig AT ALL. It’s one of those cushy gigs that we do real well on and it’s a lot of fun.

Buzz – I’m sure Alaska is very scenic as well.

Matthew – I’ve got to tell you, Alaska is very cool. If you haven’t been there, you have to see the glaciers, especially since they’re not going to be there for very long, unfortunately.

Buzz – I saw that Nelson had recently signed with Frontiers Records in 2009. Have you guys began working on the new album?

Matthew – The album is actually finished. It’s all done. We’ve mixed and we’re just getting ready to master now. We’re really excited about it and we’re really just talking about different ways to market it. We believe in it more than just throwing it out on Frontiers and just hoping they sell their obligatory five or ten thousand copies and move on. We’ll see what happens. Right now Frontiers has it worldwide but were kind of getting sniffed out by majors and that’s kind of neat because it’s been so long for us. That’s exciting because it means people are digging the music.

Buzz – How does that work with your own label, Stone Canyon?

Matthew – Basically what it is for us is the license. We make the product on Stone Canyon and then license it to somebody else. After our stance at Geffen, we’re not going to allow anyone to own the master after we’re done working with them. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Buzz – Are you still going with the working title Lightning Strikes Twice for the new album?

Matthew – I think it will actually be changed to The Blonde Leading the Blonde. 

Buzz – From what I understand, your fallout with Geffen was initiated by the heaviness of Imaginator. The album was too heavy for their liking and they wouldn’t promote it for you.

Matthew – It was actually more complicated than that. Imaginator was the album we felt like we were forced to make artistically and from our position it was really frustrating to watch the way we were being marketed the way that we were. We had no say at that point. It was almost like having a tiger by the tail. Looking back on it, I kind of understand why they did it. For instance, we never did an interview for a teen magazine in our lives, but that’s how we were marketed.

Buzz – That would be difficult to swallow – not having any input on the way you are presented.

Matthew – Well, we basically wanted to be a different choice for all the black leather wearing hard rock bands because there were so many of them. I think there are two different schools of rock and roll bands you can come from – it’s either blues-based, which I love, or folk-based – like pop stuff. Frankly, Nelson was a hard pop band more so than a heavy metal band. We always wanted to be a heavy metal Hollies. That’s what we were going for. We came from California, that was our sound with our dad and all – that was kind of engrained in us – and we did our own take on it and it wasn’t Guns and Roses by a long shot.

Buzz – You stayed true to your roots.

Matthew – Right, and what happened is that we broke primarily on pop radio. When we first came out pop radio jumped all over it and as soon as it became a pop success, they vanished. So basically, we were men without a country. We were too heavy for pop radio. We were up against Paula Abdul, Maxi Priest and MC Hammer and of course the heavier crowds didn’t dig us either. It was interesting though. When the ball started rolling, I mean, the first video we put out, we couldn’t sell any tickets to our shows. I think everyone just kind of thought it was a bubblegum concoction in a studio. And then we put out a second video that had us playing in a live setting and we ended up selling out an entire run of 40 dates in five minutes.

Buzz – And we’re talking about Nelson’s first album After the Rain…    

Matthew – Exactly. We toured that album for thirteen months and we did everything from our own solo stuff to opening for really heavy bands like Lynch Mob and Cinderella. And what happened was the paradigm shifted musically and grunge happened on our label, on DGC, with Nirvana. So we came home off the road after doing what we did, in the middle of that horrible economy – we were having a recession, and I remember meeting up with the then new president of DGC, who saw me in the parking lot, and literally said, “What? You’re still here?”

Buzz – That had to be a bit shocking.

Matthew – Well, that’s what we were faced with and we made Imaginator, which kind of paralleled our lives as far as the media was concerned, especially television. And I had some collaboration with Henry Rollins, who I was always a big fan of, and it was really a great, intense record. It was really dark. I sang one of the songs the night I broke up with my then girlfriend, which was Axl Rose’ ex-wife Erin Everly, ironically Don Everly’s daughter of the Everly Brothers. It was like an exorcism of sorts, but it was still a very strong record. It just wasn’t After the Rain. Then what happened is we were in a meeting with the Geffen heads and three songs into it, they stood up and walked out of the room. Our manager followed them and came back and told us they did not want to release the record. And this is at a point in time when two things were happening – One, our A&R guy, John Kalodner, who was brilliant and he was on this roll of getting bands like Aeorsmith to redo their records. If you can believe it, they actually recorded Pump three times – mixed it – everything – sent it back to the studio. Really what happened is they didn’t know what to do with us. Their agenda had changed. The music industry had changed.

Buzz – And you were handcuffed?

Matthew – Yes. We sold too many records for them to let us out of our contract, but they didn’t want to put any more money into promoting us. So basically, they sent us back into the studio with ZERO budget. For us, we just wanted to make records and keep doing what we were doing. It took a five-year span for us to put out our next record and by that point everyone was asking us why are we still putting out records. Our fan base had gone away and onto other things and it was really a painful and excruciating process.

Buzz – Imaginator was later released on Stone Canyon. How did that happen? 

Matthew – The first thing I did after we left Geffen was ask for Imaginator back. And they didn’t care about it and obliged. I then finished it and put it out because artistically I needed to get the album out.

Buzz – At least they gave it to you without a fight.

Matthew – Yeah. They just didn’t give a shit about it. They didn’t care. It was great for me and it is one of our rarest albums. It’s hard to find. Very few people have it and it’s out of print right now. We’re going to probably do something with an online presence so people could download the album at least.

Buzz – Tell me more about your relationship with Frontiers Records.

Matthew – We did a deal with Frontiers for a new album and two companion pieces for the After the Rain album – one of them is a live album that I’ve been sitting on and the other one is a companion of demos that wound up becoming the After the Rain album that includes songs that didn’t make the cut that I actually thought were better than stuff that made it. And it doesn’t sound like something thrown together. It sounds like a real record. Other than that we’re off doing new stuff.

Buzz – What does the new stuff sound like?

Matthew – Well, let’s put it this way. The band that has maintained their stamp, signature sound while moving on with the times has been Bon Jovi. This does the same thing. You’ll hear it and know it’s Nelson, but it sounds like they’ve been making records for twenty years and they just didn’t go to sleep twenty years ago. I really like every song on the record, for what it is. Obviously it’s a heavy rock or confidence, or arena rock kind of thing, but with the signature Nelson vocal sound, which I think is really our thing. It’s very guitar heavy as well. My brother Gunnar does all the guitar work on the album except for maybe one guest spot with Steve Lukather from Toto.

Buzz – You’ve probably developed a lot of friendships with other artists throughout the years.

Matthew – That’s what’s kind of neat. The longer we stay in the business, the more we work with heroes we grew up with. I mean, Gunnar and I laugh because at this point in our career we’ve played with everybody from Air Supply to ZZ Top. It’s crazy. We’ve done it all. We’ve made country records. I do a ton of studio work both playing bass and backing vocals. A couple years ago I did a record for Fuel. Gunnar was just asked to play with Cat Stevens playing guitar and singing back up vocals on his album and tour. I actually turned down a job as music director for Avril Lavigne. It’s all different stuff and it sounds schizophrenic, but it’s all music.

Buzz – It doesn’t sound like you have very much free time.

Matthew – You know, I was just discussing that with Gunnar. We also do a tribute show for our dad, “Ricky Nelson Remembered” that’s blowing up. Our dad was our best friend. He was a great guy and we really got along well. I loved his songs and when he died we didn’t want to play any of his music and now it’s kind of an anniversary. I can’t believe it’s been twenty-five years since he passed away.

Buzz – He was certainly one of the great ones.

Matthew – Thank you. And we were supposed to be on the airplane with him and we lost our second family because his whole band went down with him. So we wanted to put something together that would be kind of cool – and we’ve integrated video with the show because he was so televised throughout his career – an we go through all the visual timelines along with all the musical timelines. Sometimes we have guys like Skunk Baxter from the Doobie Brothers playing with us on steel and James Burton, his old guitar player, would be playing with us. The songs are such a slam-dunk and you can watch the audience – even kids who have no idea who he was – transform through the show. They’re so whittled that you can say, well there’s just so little out there that’s going to have a forty-year run. For us it’s awesome. We play the show because we love to, not because we have to.

Buzz – How long has it been since you began the tribute show?

Matthew – In this format, it’s been a little less than a year. We’ve been honing it down. This has really been my baby because I love editing and putting together storyboards. I think it was because when I was ten years old I went to see Beatlemania – yes, I’m a Beatles freak, too – and I got to find some video where Paul McCartney is talking about our dad. If you are a music fan you are going to love the show. It’s not a Beatlemania kind of thing; I just love the through line where they go through the chronology of where they came from and where they wound up. It’s the same thing with our dad’s show. With Nelson it’s a little different because we can be fairly schizophrenic and not necessarily go through a timeline. We’re always arguing about which song we have to do. Of course, we have the obligatory hits and you want your band to be happy. I mean, I always hated it when I would go to see an artist and they would try to make a statement by not playing their hits. But I can also see where they might be coming from. You can very quickly go from being an artist to becoming an act. It’s really important to challenge yourself to make sure you don’t wind up just being an act and slugging it out and playing those little, tiny clubs for bar money to the aging fans that are like, “Play After the Rain!”

Buzz – You’ve got to stay sharp and maintain the creative edge.

Matthew – Exactly. You also want to make sure that you have fun, too. We love those songs and we’re not ashamed of them and we have a great time playing them. I guess that’s what it is. Gunnar and I went out a couple years ago and we opened for Styx and Frampton and that was not our crowd. Those were guys that we grew up listening to but frankly their audience was fifteen years older than the people who bought our records. For most of the shows we weren’t even on the ticket. People would get to the show and be like, “Oh, those guys?” But we have a lot of energy when we play and sing and it was really fun winning over an audience in a half an hour that wasn’t ours. It’s difficult, but it’s something we’ve always had to do.

Buzz – How so?

Matthew – Well, Gunnar and I kind of have a little thing where it’s starting to come around for us, but for most of our career we’ve always had that attitude from the media and some people just didn’t want to get into what we were doing  - didn’t believe it – where we’re kind of guilty until proven innocent. I don’t know where it comes from but it’s real. It’s nothing that I’m going to complain about because my dad had that. I always used to say about him – and I felt guilty for years about it – when he dies people are going to call him a legend. And this was when people weren’t really showing up for his shows. I kind of understand it now a little bit more because frankly I don’t care who you are or what band you are in, for the most part, we do this because we genuinely love it. And the ones who have done this and are still standing after all these years really have to love it because there are a lot easier ways to make a living.

Buzz – “Ricky Nelson Remembered”, is that something you are touring completely separate from Nelson?

Matthew – Yeah, we do it completely separately. The Nelson rock show is a completely different show and we don’t play any Nelson songs with “Ricky Nelson Remembered”. That’s all our dad, all the time. We do one original song that we wrote for him called “Just Once More”, which is appropriate.

Buzz – That is a lot of touring.

Matthew – It’s not so bad. We play about five to seven shows a month and they’re usually bigger shows. It’s great. The days of running around town in a mini-van are done, except that I still go our there and play for free. If somebody calls and says they could use somebody to jump on stage and play with them – play bass or sing – I mean, I’m the first guy to volunteer. I love it and it kind of puts out an energy that it’s beyond making a living – it’s a brotherhood. And music, after all these years, is as close to magic as we have. And, I’ll just say it straight up, times are hard, man. If I didn’t have music in my life  - just to listen to or play – I don’t really know if I’d want to be around.

Buzz – Earlier you had said that you and Gunnar were supposed to be on the plane along with your father when the accident occurred. What deterred you from getting on the flight?

Matthew – Well, we were living with our dad at the time – we had just turned eighteen – and our parents just had a horrible, acrimonious divorce and for a lot of reasons we couldn’t live with him until we were eighteen. So we turned eighteen in September and we moved in with our dad and his accident happened on New Year’s Eve. So we really got along and it was almost a miracle to spend that much complicated time with each other. Up until that point we were kind of used as pawns in their divorce. He was just a really great, laid back guy and we had talked about getting out and hitting the road with him because we were over eighteen then and it was our time to make up for lost time.

Buzz – Right.

Matthew – Anyway, we had this great plan for New Year’s Eve to go out where he was going to do a week of dates and then wind up in Dallas on New Year’s Eve. And for whatever reason – our bags were packed and we were ready to go – he came upstairs and said he had been thinking about it and it we wanted to come he thought we should fly commercial and meet him in Dallas. And I remember that statement, “Fly commercial and meet me in Dallas.” And I was like, “Pop, I don’t understand I really want to be on the plane. You love the plane and it’s a really cool plane and the whole point was to be together. You’ve got three other shows, do you not want us to hang around the band?” And he said, “No. I just want you to fly commercial and meet me there.” I swear that he had a foresight.

Buzz – Certainly – a premonition.

Matthew – He really did and that had never happened before and I remember Gunnar was so disappointed so we said, Listen, there’s no point in flying to Dallas for that one show, we’ll meet you back home when you come back.” And he said, “ I just want you to know that I’m going to take a little breather when I get home and help you guys with your music and what you’re doing and I really want to get into acting a little bit and slow down.” He was playing over three hundred shows a year. So he was really burning it. He was only forty-five when this happened. He deserved a break. And so the accident happened and there was so much conjecture with caused the plane crash. The NCSS report came out about six months after the media had said he was free-basing on his plane, which didn’t happen. They proved that Janitrol heater, which is few by aviation fuel, was leaking out of a washer and filled up the belly of the plane over a course of about three months. Something happened and the fuel caught on fire and that’s why when landed it and they brought the nose down, flames came up in the cockpit. It was just horrible. The plane actually landed but our dad and the band was gone because of smoke inhalation. Then Gunnar and I had to not only endure the media crap – but I also found out about him dying on the radio. We learned a lot about protecting ourselves from the media. Frankly, Gunnar and I could never talk about what happened on the airplane because we had to wait for the report to come out but also there was a settlement because of the idiot who put in the wrong part on the aircraft. There were so many plaintiffs it took up a high school gymnasium and this guy gets up on the stand and he cracked within thirty seconds saying, “I know I killed him. I put in the wrong part…” And of course the lawyers start saying, “Settle! Settle! We’re going to settle.” And there was this gag order and so we had to just sit there and watch this crap unfold and not be able to say anything about it. It’s going to be what it’s going to be. There’s going to be a feature film on the whole thing. We all have our time and I really wish we had more time with our pop.

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