Interview by Rachel Jablonski
Godhead is back. With a new release titled The Shadow Line on the newly formed label Cement Shoes Records, I caught up with Ullrich “Method” Hepperlin on the Congress of Corruption tour prior to the band’s performance in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sitting in the back of a very nice tour bus with an ugly brown exterior, the talkative bassist and I had a long chat about Godhead past, present, and future.
Rachel: Congratulations, today marks a day in history for us. After tonight, despite my long standing concert going career, Godhead will be the band I have seen the greatest number of times; tonight will mark my 8th time seeing you guys.
Ullrich: Really? That’s amazing.
Rachel:It’s HUGE. Huge day for me. [laugh]
Ullrich: And you’ve seen most of those shows in Baltimore?
Rachel: No, I’m from Nebraska actually. You’ve played in Nebraska a lot.
Ullrich: Yeah, I love Nebraska. I don’t know why. It’s not the major consensus, but… I think it’s the people. It’s appreciation for music; it’s appreciation for touring bands that come through. Through a state that seems like, who the fuck would ever listen to us in Nebraska? And we get nothing but love out here.
Rachel: Cool.
Ullrich: Of course we’re in Iowa right now, right? Not in Nebraska.
Rachel: Yeah. [laugh] But, even though I live in Iowa now, my heart’s in Nebraska too. It’s my home state!
Ullrich: You know what? Just interchange Nebraska with Iowa.
Rachel: [laugh]
Ullrich: We haven’t played in Iowa that much, but I’m sure it’s the same thing really. I mean now that they have Slipknot of course, they have home pride; it’s a little different.
Rachel: Godhead has toured extensively over the years, what does this tour mean to you after about a three-year break between albums?
Ullrich: Almost three year break, yeah. It’s good to get back out definitely. We took our time with this record because first we built our own studio and then all the while tried to find a decent record company that could really do something for us. The last label didn’t know what they were doing; they ran out of money real fast. So, it took about three years to get all the stones in place to get out on the road and do it right. Get a package together and find enough financial backers to make this a purely promotional tour and not worry about losing money. We just want to get out there and play and get in front of the kids and let them know we’re back. So I’m much happier with this. And we’re in traveling comfort that’s also good. We haven’t done this in a long time, since Manson.
Rachel: Touring on a bus you mean?
Ullrich: Yeah, because I mean, I can’t say numbers, but we’re all losing money on this tour. But it’s better to lose money and get the word out and start the spark and travel in comfort and not get burned out on it than to try to do it frugally and then after two months everybody hates each other and says I’m not going out on the road again my back hurts, my legs hurt, my head hurts, and my fingers hurt and I have a cold and a pneumonia and all that and fuck all of you. [laugh]
Rachel: Well you have had some bad luck with financial backing. What do you expect from your new label, Cement Shoes Records, as far as opportunities they can provide for success?
Ullrich: Everything. I mean within moderation of course. After eleven years in the business we know what to expect realistically. But really what it comes down to is that it is not that hard to find money, it’s just hard to find people that can take that money and spend it right. There’s a million ways to spend a million dollars and none of them are the right ways. It depends on so many different factors. It’s a timing thing, it’s political, an artistic climate thing, sometimes it’s even a weather thing. Say that you spend a bunch of money on an outdoor festival tour and everything gets rained out – you’re screwed. And stuff like that. Or if you put all of this money into something and it keeps getting delayed, delayed, delayed all of the sudden you’re doing a winter tour. So we’re positively surprised how well this company is handling everything. I mean everything from radio to getting the video off the ground before the album release, getting the album mixed and mastered by really high caliber people, and even to like getting a whole DVD together for the packaging of the new CD. That has a lot of added value which hopefully is going to cut down on the downloading a little bit. There is also a fully featured 12 page booklet with all the lyrics and some really cool pictures of the band and stuff included in the CD packaging. All and all I think it’s a really good product in addition to the music. So they did that right and actually got all that done before the album release. And internationally, actually we’re pushing the international release forward because international companies that are distributing us are saying that they’re getting a very high volume of imports. They’re channeling imports through and they’re getting the numbers but they aren’t making any money off of that because they aren’t manufacturing any of it. So they’re saying why are we waiting three months for this release, why aren’t we doing it now? So it’s unprecedented that pretty much the entire international machinery has asked to push the release forward by three months. Which is very flattering and a very good sign. There’s a lot of concert offers like Moscow to Tokyo to Germany and it seems like pretty much any country other than the U.S. is really responding to our video. Even Canada. I think the video has climbed to number seven on the Canadian charts right now.
Rachel: Well the video [“Trapped in Your Lies”] is politically aimed…
Ullrich: Well it’s politically aimed without forcing any ideology on anybody. We show people from all sorts of political life. We are just implying that if you start with one little lie that’s going to escalate and eventually you get trapped in your own lies and we get trapped in your lies. The video implies that all the lies on the planet right now are colliding and could possibly lead to something like WWIII. Hell, we see it everyday in the news ya know. But if you just listen to the music itself the meaning could totally just be on a personal level between you and your friends, you and your parents, you and your girlfriend or whatever. It’s a very universal message.
Rachel: Well you guys hit it off overseas when you were first starting out anyway, didn’t you?
Ullrich: The first album was a self-titled album called Godhead which was released by a German label called Marlboro Music which was owned by Phillip Morris in attempt to market cigarettes to young people that listen to music.
Rachel: Wow!
Ullrich: Yeah. But they had a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure and they were looking for hot, young American acts to fuel their machinery. We were just looking for a record contract. So we got signed to them and they did really good work. I wasn’t in the band at the time, but I was living in Germany. We obviously had the aspiration to move the whole thing over to America as well and release it there. But obviously the laws with cigarette companies being involved in youth oriented marketing or product lines were much stricter in America. Nobody would allow Marlboro Music to put out a record in America no matter how much money was involved. So they looked for a company to partner with and there again all the major labels said no thank you, we don’t want to be involved with it otherwise we’ll get sued. So we found an independent label out of New York and Marlboro Music gave them a whole big money injection and tried to make it happen, but at that point the band changed. That’s where I joined and we started writing more songs that were keyboard oriented the goth/rock kind of thing. We decided we wanted to record more songs. By the time we were done with all of that the old record was so outdated that we took half the songs off the old record and half of the new songs and put them on a record called Nothingness. Power Tool Stigmata was the next record. At that point the laws in Germany and Europe had pretty much ended the Marlboro Music career. Then Power Tool Stigmata came along and that’s kind of what got us major label attention. We got signed to Priority Records through Marilyn Manson. Then Maria Carey had her nervous breakdown and Priority Records lost about 33 million dollars overnight and had to drop all of their extracurricular activities which were a lot of rock labels. We got rolled into Capitol Records at that point. We were one of 600 bands that became part of Capitol Records overnight. A week after that Capitol Records cut over 50% of their staff. So we were looking at 18 months before anyone would even call us back to say hey what you want to do with this record. So we opted out of that contract.
Rachel: Wow that is some complicated stuff!
Ullrich: Yeah, it’s a roller coaster. Not a lot of people know the full history of it. They see a band that has so many records out and has lost some record deals and just went from one label to another, many of which are now bankrupt. They think well that band can’t be selling that many records; they can’t keep a record label. But companies are out of business left and right. There are a lot of factors that play into it which we have no control over. All we can do is play music and hope that we get tour after tour so that we can play in front of as many people as we can.
Rachel: Well good luck with this one! Seems like you’re off to a great start. Godhead supporter Andy Dick gives commentary on the documentary portion of the bonus DVD that comes with the new CD. How did that come about?
Ullrich: Well, the real working relationship started when he and I were hired to do the original soundtrack for Andy Dick’s quasi autobiography called Danny Roane which is this quirky, kind mockumentary, kind of like the Spinal Tap version of a comedian’s life from beginnings to network TV stardom to like alcohol addiction, kind of like a behind the comedy kind of thing. But it’s not really autobiographical because its way crazier than even Andy Dick’s life has been. It was hilarious fun. I got to work with a lot of great comedians. All of the comedians actually sing the songs that we did. We did everything from like metal to New York Dolls style punk to total Andrew Lloyd Webber’s style musicals to some lounge, spoken word singing type stuff, I mean everything from every run of music. I really had a lot of fun with that.
Rachel: Where can we find the movie at?
Ullrich: Well it was just picked up I think by Lions Gate and they did a couple test runs on theater audiences. Now they’re gonna push it out as a sleeper DVD hit. Ben Stiller already signed up for the promotional tour so he’s going to do press for it. He’s in the movie as well. Ben Stiller’s in the movie, Andy Dick, Chris Farley’s brother, Mo Collins from Mad TV, Jack Black is in it. It’s total high school play type production, but it is so funny. James, our vocalist, is in it too. He plays the musical supervisor. It’s kind of like a movie within a movie with a documentary documenting the making of the movie within the movie and the whole thing is a movie. [laugh] It has a lot of layers.
Rachel: Well Jason has been doing some voiceovers out in Cali and he’s done some for Nickelodeon even? What kind of characters has he represented?
Ullrich: Well he’s still starting out so a lot of it is “Second Ninja from the Left.”
Rachel: [laugh]
Ullrich: But its work and he’s done some commercials. I mean voiceovers are really just like anything from talking over a TV promo or a theatrical trailer to ADR for animation where you actually lip synch to a character. Most of the stuff for Nickelodeon has been ADR. Through his work he and I had the idea to build a studio in Hollywood not only to make music but also to get in the voiceover business. I built the studio and we use it for our own music and we’re also booked around the year for other work. We built a home base and it’s been a dream come true for both of us.
Rachel: Well you’ve been busy in three years. There’s a new drummer in the band. How does he fit into Godhead?
Ullrich: Best thing that every happened to us. He’ll tell you the same thing, the stars have aligned. We lost a drummer and were looking for a new one under such time pressure. We really didn’t have much time to find the right drummer, which has always been the case for us. We’re always in the same predicament; we have like a week to find a drummer. If you really want to find the right drummer a week is not enough. The drummer you really want is either playing with another band or is on the road at the time or is in the studio with another band or has just lost a job and needs a lot of money up front or whatever. So short notice it just never ever works out like you would want it to. And this was SUCH short notice. This was two days before we were supposed to shoot the video, the same day we were having a photo shoot for the album. The next day we were supposed to leave on a three day tour with Static-X to try out audiences, try out the new songs live. Then the week after that we were supposed to sign the contracts. Our drummer quit two days before all this for personal reasons with a text message. But Glenn, our new drummer, came in, picked up a CD, and the next day he sat down and we played the three songs that he was supposed to learn. We sounded better that day than we ever have, period. With any drummer, with any amount of rehearsals, or any previous chemistry. That day we sounded better than ever before and that was after no practice. It’s like a human body, like one element suddenly works better and everything falls into place like with better drums, the bass has more of a groove to it, the guitars sound heavier and the whole songs are taken to a different level. All of the sudden the vocals rise to a better background and the whole thing just exponentially becomes that much better. You’ll hear it tonight, you’ve seen us eight times, and tonight you will see the same songs you know and love and have seen with probably five other drummers. Those same songs tonight, we have not changed anything but drummers, will sound like they are going to rip your head off. It’s just amazing.