PrimaDonna Reeds' upcoming VENTS mag INTERVIEW

Here is a preview of The PimaDonna Reeds soon to be published interview with Vents Magazine.

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Hi guys, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?

Excellent. We just completed a series of shows in New York City and played Local Legends Festival in Monroe, New Jersey on a beautiful day. I actually walked on grass. Nice! It’s been a very high energy couple of months. Now we are off until our next show on July 29th at Desmond's 433 Park Avenue South New York City 10016. We go on at 10:30, folks!

 Can you talk to us more about your latest single "Red Stilettos"?

Red Stilettos is about a rock and roll chick who is a tattered hot mess running around the Lower East Side of NYC in red stilettos after she had another fight with her man. 

She ran away from him in anger but now she regrets it and is running around looking for him.

When she sees him off in the distance she runs up to him, spins him around and gives him a big kiss. She kicks off her RED STILETTOS because she is done running now that she has found her baby. 

(Obviously, those Red Stilettos are pretty comfortable to do all that running. Maybe she kicks off her red stilettos at the end because her feet hurt.)

Did any event in particular inspire you to write this song?

Well, JC Ryder, the band’s guitarist and I are married. We are always enacting this scene.  We have a very volatile relationship. But that's just our brand of love. Plus, the make-up sex is great.

Any plans to release a video for the single?

Yes.  We are in talks with a well known producer to fast-track a video for Red Stilettos. As soon as we sign the contract, I can announce his name. Red Stilettos will be included in the new Danny Garcia movie called ‘Sad Vacation’ to be released in October this year, so we want to coincide the release of our video to take place at about the same time.  ‘Looking For Johnny’ (2104) by Danny Garcia, a rock ducumentary about guitar hero Johnny Thunders was very well received. We are hosting a casting call at our next show to find the right 'Crazy Bitch" to be heading for the “Big Big Bango”.  The video will transition from a club to a rooftop party where various interpersonal scenarios play out. As much fun as it will be to watch, it will be more fun to make. I have my pal from my old job on Wall Street – yeah, I had to cave in and get a real job - to be a biker dude. He looks more like a biker dude than a Wall Streeter. Plus, since our music is going to be in Sad Vacation, which is about Sid Vicious & Nancy Spungon, we will have a Sid & Nancy type of couple bitching at each other as the original Sid & Nancy used to do. We are coming up with other side-plots.

Why naming the record after this track in particular?

 It's very characteristic of the Lower East Side, NYC sound that everyone in the band loves. It's edgy, raw and high energy. We open our shows with this song and it's an immediate call to attention, and it always does the trick.  I would like to do more songs with the feel of ‘Red Stilettos’. Lastly, I love red stilettos and now I have an excuse to buy many pairs.

How was the recording and writing process?

I usually come up with the initial lyrics and JC adds more. I think in poetry so I'm always coming up with segments that could be turned into a song. I immediately text them to myself – I have a big collection. Some are pretty crazy. Lately, JC has been coming up with ideas on his own for songs. The creative juices are flowing in camp PDR.   Then we put the words into verse, bridge chorus format.

JC writes the music because, well, I can’t. He studied music at Brandeis University and understands chord structures, progressions and other fine nuances that make music work. I tell him what I like and describe how I want it to 'feel'. We bat it back and forth for a while until it gels.

We then try it out in rehearsal - put it in the right key and make sure that the words sing well. We don't want to deal with any tongue-twisters on stage.

Then we add harmonies for Regina Martin, our background vocalist and John Sheppard our bassist / background vocalist to layer on the sound.  Finally, we decide what parts I should sing and what parts JC should sing. We have extremely different voices. Since he is a musician, he is spot on key and sings it straight.  I take liberties with interpretation.

The recording process was completely absorbing. Hours go by and it seems like 5 minutes. We recorded Red Stilettos at Cherry Bomb studios out on Staten Island in a pretty isolated area so there were no distraction. We just barricaded ourselves in there for 10 or 12-hour sessions. The sessions were loosely scripted. We tried different things. Some of it made it onto the CD and other stuff did not.

Does NYC play a role in your music?

Definitely. JC is a third-generation born and bred NYC boy. He grew up on Second Avenue & 11th Street. He always talks about 2nd Avenue politics, which is the law of the street. You had to be tough to grow up in that part of town. It was not at all trendy back then as it is now.  I moved to NYC from New Jersey right after school and dove right into the Lower East Side music scene. I lived on the corner of Rivington and Pitt when people were afraid to even walk around there. I caught the tail end of Max's and became a promoter at CBGB's. I practically lived in that club. I have a degree in biology-chemistry and was offered a job at Slone Kettering in the lab, but turned it down for a job at a club so I could work from 5PM - 9AM instead of 9AM - 5PM. So I was out in the scene almost every night. There was a lot more live music going on in my musically formative years. (Rents are so out of control now that there are no neighborhoods left where struggling artists can afford to live. Plus, high rents are turning the clubs into profitable high-end restaurants and stores. The new rich real estate owners are fine with that because they don't want the noise.)

There was a live-fast mentality in the scene back then.  And bands featured really loud guitars. It was very glamorous, dangerous and creative. That has stayed with me.

I met our guitarist 'Luigi Babe Scorcia' at Max's when I went to see his band, Luigi & The Wiseguys play. I was a big fan of his band. Then he got picked up to tour the world as bassist for Johnny Thunders after Johnny left The New York Dolls. Lu and I stayed friends over the years. When JC & I put the band together, he liked what we were doing so he came on board. Our drummer George Morales is a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, so we all have the NYC 'get tough' gene.

I understand one of you is a flamenco artist - can we expect some of that in this record?

Absolutely. As I mentioned, JC grew up in the East Village. However, he was oblivious to music scene going on around him. Even though he grew up blocks away from Max's Kansas City, he never went there. He was a trained classical guitarist from an early age as seen to by his culturally astute mom and I guess he did not have a rebellious period (until he met me). He thought Max's was a steak house because the sign said Steak, Lobster & Chick Peas.  Haha!

JC and I first met at a place called Bond Street which used to be a very cool rock club before it was turned into a high end sushi restaurant. Over drinks he mentioned that he wanted to learn Flamenco guitar. To impress him, I did some investigation and found a very well known Flamenco instructor for him: Dennis Koster.  In 2015 Dennis finally bought a cell phone and still does not have a computer, so he was really hard to track down. Dennis and Jonathan hit it off fabulously. To this day he goes to Dennis's place every Monday at 6 PM for his Flamenco lesson. They are good friends.

In 2012 JC won an award for his Flamenco performance at the New York City Classical Guitar Society. He is very methodical when he decides to learn something.

After we got married, I transformed JC into a rock and roll dude. It was so funny watching him discover all the music he missed while growing up. His favorite 'discovery' was the band Toto, and in particular the amazing guitar work of Steve Lukather. JC is now going back through all of the old catalogs to listen to what he missed with new rock & roll ears. 

I convinced JC to pepper some of our songs such as ‘Say You Love Me’ with Flamenco solos. He resisted combining the two genres at first because Flamenco is sacred to him so I had to push him to mix it into our rock & roll songs, but it turned out really well. We have a few more songs in the works that display his Flamenco expertise.

What fantasies get to inspire the lyrics on this record?

I would not say that they are fantasies. They are about our emotional life; JC and mine. I wrote a song called ‘Damaged’ after we had a fight and I was feeling pretty low. We have not recorded that one yet. It's for the next CD.  JC wrote ‘Lazy Woman Blues’ about me. “But when the loving starts, baby, I know it’s gonna be fine”. Cell Phone Funk is about the cell phone zombies of NYC walking forward about to smash into each other because they are staring at their phone.

One song that is not about us is ‘Come To Me’ which I was inspired to write when a friend of mine broke up with his boyfriend who was still in the closet. "I knew this day would come, closet lovers never last..." The catch line, Come To Me is about being beckoned to indulge in self-medication to avoid feeling pain. "Come to me, baby baby baby come to me / our love was always meant to be" is the seductive lure of substance abuse. That part is a fantasy. My friend did not abuse drugs.

Any plans to hit the road?

Not right now. JC is a trial attorney as his day job, so it's a little hard just to pick up and go (though we did carve out 10 days to go to China on vacation in September). We do venture out of Manhattan to clubs in Brooklyn. I guess you could say that the road is a very short road for us at this point.

What else is happening next in The PrimaDonna Reeds' world?

We are looking at a new place to call our recording home, Atlantic Sound Studios in Brooklyn. Cherry Bomb Studios is in storage boxes while they are looking for a new home.

The BIG story, though, is having our song in Danny Garcia's new movie, ‘Sad Vacation’. Danny’s last ROCK movie (he also has done a few westerns) ‘Looking For Johnny’ had it's premier in 2014 at The Second Avenue Theater, just south of where JC grew up.  The ENTIRE Lower East Side, NYC music scene was there. The whole audience knew one another. It was packed. Plus, we all knew the people who were IN the movie and each time a new person appeared on the screen the whole audience cheered. The whole audience cheered halfway through the movie until people started appearing for the second time.  Danny Garcia's rock movies really bring the rock and roll community together. I had never been to The Second Avenue Theater before - it's sort of dark & convoluted -  and saw Jesse Malin heading up the stairs in front of me.  I figured he knew which door led to the theater. Unfortunately, he was just going to the men’s room and I almost followed him in. When Sad Vacation premieres there, I will know better.