Sal Canzonieri talks Electric Frankenstein, Art and Chinese Martial Arts

Sal Canzonieri of Electric Frankenstein talks about influences and the music scene, Rat Fink & Monster Art, the pioneering days of the internet & MP3 and what it meant to run one of the first 45 websites overall, how the music industry tried to suppress the new rock’n’roll scene, and why he is a well-known name in the world of martial arts.

Interview by Glen Clarke

So my first question, how did you get into playing guitar? Can you remember a defining moment where you thought, „That’s what I want to do!”

I heard Alice Cooper, and then I was like, „I want to do this!“ I was already an artist, you know, drawing, painting… and I was interested in martial arts as well. I started everything when I was around 15. So I listened to that Killer album and that song, “You Drive Me Nervous“. That’s when I thought, „I’m gonna learn how to play guitar!“ I said „I’m going to be in a band like this, I’m going on tour. I’m going to do everything like this,“ so that was the moment.

Can you remember the first guitar you bought and paid for with your own hard-earned money and do you still have it?

My first guitar was given to me by my cousin’s girlfriend. She said that Jimi Hendrix had picked it up and played it a bit at a party in NYC. It was like the Johnny Ramone guitar, a White Mosrite, but it was only a Univox copy. Then I sold it to get a Gibson guitar, because I was in the guitar store and the guy said, try this, and it was like driving a Cadillac. So, you know, better players have better tools.

Do you still have that guitar?

Yeah, I still have all my old Gibsons, like 10 different ones! I have most of the different kinds of Gibson guitars, just missing a Flying V and a Les Paul Junior. I also have a bunch of vintage guitars of other brands. Close to 20 guitars.

Jesus man, that’s a lot!

I decided to buy them because people were saying you should buy BC Rich during the 80s, and I thought these vintage guitars (Gibsons) at the time were really cheap, so I should buy’ em now before it’s too late. I was getting them for under 500 dollars each. Now they’re fucking expensive, man. Ha, I do have a black BC Rich Warlock though, like Slayer!

Your brother Dan plays bass. Was that a conscious decision you guys made that you would be the guitar player and Dan would be the bassist?

It was a conscious decision, I was in bands already for a while then. I wanted to play in a band with my brother. We got along well, and we liked the same music, we went to shows in NYC together and saw a lot of great bands from when he was a kid. By the time he reached the age of 17/18, he said he wanted to play. I said ok, play bass so that we can be in a band together.

I give him a stack of records and I said, this is what I listened to when I was your age, so check this stuff out. Stuff like Misfits, Black Flag, and the first Christian Death album. He later wound up temporarily playing with Rozz (the singer) in the Shadow Project and Christian Death shows.

What’s the age difference between you guys?

12 years. I’d been in a couple of bands already, and he was happy being a bass player. He picked it up fast and was great at it.

Electric Frankenstein started around 1990. How was it playing in a pure rock’n’roll band at a time where grunge was kind of the big thing?

Well, grunge was already old for us because we’d seen all those bands live when they were brand new. I saw Nirvana, I saw Soundgarden, and I saw Mudhoney. Mudhoney were really fantastic live and so they were partly an influence on what we wanted to do. We said, “We don’t want to be a shitty gutter punk band, we want to take punk to the next step.” We wanted to merge punk rock with hard rock and turn it around into rock punk. We liked the 70s hard rock, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Mott the Hoople, and all those bands. And then we liked the 70s punk rock like the New York Dolls, Dead Boys, and Radio Birdman. So, we said “hey, let’s bring it together; what are the good things about the Dead Boys and what are the good things about AC/DC?”

So that’s what we did. We turned punk rock into rock punk. We made sure there was lead guitar and intros and outros and well crafted songs instead of crappy boring stuff. We wanted to make music that was fun for us and dangerous sounding too, like The Stooges.

We also grew up with hardcore and heavy metal, the original hardcore was a big deal in our life. I saw every show in NJ and NY that all the original hardcore bands played.

Are you talking about bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains?

Yeah, we went to see everyone that was great back then, went to see every one of those bands. And that was part of our sound because we thought let’s not just have two things, lets also add in some hardcore and heavy metal. We loved the southern California sound like Agent Orange, Adolescents, Black Flag, and we were into Slayer and Motörhead too.

When you guys started playing, the kids weren’t wearing Mötley Crüe shirts anymore; they were wearing Nirvana or Soundgarden shirts at that time. Were the grunge kids into what you did?

At that time, it wasn’t the kids that were into those bands, it was older people. The kids were into that Green Day, Rancid sound and all that stuff. Yet it was all so boring, that kind of punk was boring, plus no women went to those shows, it was all sweaty guys.

So we did something else with punk, and the people who understood what we were doing were like our age. And soon after we started lots of girls looking like Joan Jett started coming out to the shows and it made everything so much better in the bars and clubs. Lots of girls up front and dancing to the rock punk. It was fun and cool again.

That leads onto my next question. You guys are associated with the term “Action Rock”. Do you think you are one of the first bands to have coined that phrase?

No, I don’t think so. When we started, we started calling what we do High Energy Rock and other people were calling it Punk Rock & Roll, but there were other bands before us, like The Dwarves, SuperKools, Lazy Cowgirls that were doing what was called Punk Rock & Roll, so we were calling it High Energy Rock or even High Energy Punk Rock & Roll, but that was too long to say for people in Europe. So, people who liked The Hellacopters or Turbonegro in those days, they were calling it Death Punk. Not that cool sounding of a name. So then they started calling it Action Rock in Europe and it stuck among the newer generation of rockers. So in the end, in Europe it was called Action Rock while in America it was called High Energy Rock.

ON HAVING ONE OF THE FIRST 45 WEBSITES, THE PIONEERING DAYS OF THE INTERNET AND MP3

Is it true that you are one of the first bands to have had your own website? How did that come about?

Well, I used to work at Bell Labs in the 80s and 90s, you know where they invented the cellphone, the transistor, that kind of thing. One of my friends was learning to code, and he made a one page thing and I put it online. That was the first website for any band really. I had access to the original internet.

It was so weird. Back then there were only like 45 websites in existence, then by the end of the year there were 450 sites and I had looked at every one of them. Most of them were just scientific stuff, and then there were 4500 and then 45000 and then 45000000- it happened so fast. I remember being interviewed on the radio and telling people about Google, and they were like “What the fuck is a Google?”.

Did it help you guys as a band, or was that just kind of a nerdy thing that you guys were into?

It helped us because we got well-known really fast all over the world. Every country, even places like Vietnam, had our records and people with access to the internet looked us up. Then there was digital music, we had MP3s before any other band.

How was that at the beginning of the MP3 revolution?

MP3.com came around and I started up a punk rock’n’roll channel on it. Then all those bands were all surprised so many existed and no one had known about each other at all. Soon, everybody was helping and promoting each other worldwide. That’s why I started my Fistful of Rock & Roll compilations to make it into a physical thing that people can use to learn about a worldwide ‘new rock revolution’. Then mp3.com got bought by some assholes who just shut everything down right after they bought it, which was not fair. Because what was going on was the Action Rock-bands were charting higher than the major label commercial bands, which meant that, in reality, people wanted good music, not popular music. The corporations didn’t want us taking over the music scene, and they tried to stop it (laughs). But obviously it didn’t work, it just got bigger and bigger, with more and more great bands.

How did you come up with the idea for a Fistful of Rock & Roll?

I wanted to do a documentation of all the new bands, show people that there is a return of rock’n’roll music, we were calling it “The New Rock Revolution”. Then magazines started writing about it, and the big newsstand magazines like NME freaked out. The head editor said to the reviewers “Under no circumstances are you allowed to use the words New Rock Revolution!”- the reviewers showed me the emails. And now those magazines don’t even exist anymore, NME is nothing now. But all the New Rock bands are all over the world, from South America to South Africa, from America to Australia, from Europe to Canada and the UK. Everywhere!

They were telling their writers that they couldn’t write about a „New Rock Revolution“?

The editors were sending out letters saying like “Punk rock caught us unawares, we’re not going to do that again”. Stupid people, they were getting paid off by the record companies and wanted to maintain control over who gets written about (laughs). The internet put an end to that. Everyone has access to information now.

Basically, you wanted to help young and new bands to get known?

It was / is a bigger thing. I wanted to do a documentation of past, present, and future bands, so that meant new bands, well-known bands, and middle known bands. It was more to be a document, even bands that broke up are on the comps because I wanted to document anybody and everybody, basically any bands that are any good. There are even bands that never got to play live on there, so I got a lot of exclusive tracks. I even have stuff from Michael Monroe from Hanoi Rocks. I have some of his side projects on the new ones. I have songs with Glen Matlock of Sex Pistols fame, and other cool songs.

There’s like a million volumes. Do you have a personal favorite?

I can’t. It’s impossible. I think that always the next one is my favorite. I just finished mastering volumes four, five and six. And I’m like, “Wow, these are so good,” but no, wait a minute – all the others are good too!

The first series had like 13 volumes, making 15 CDs. And from the new series there’s 3 volumes out. But I already have 22 volumes all done and ready to come out.

CRISIS & ART

So why did you decide to do it again, the last one was 2007?

What happened back then in 2007/2008 was the whole economic world recession, where a lot of bands stopped playing and there was hardly anybody still playing. We were still playing and the Dwarves were still playing, but even the New Bomb Turks stopped playing so there was hardly anybody doing anything.

Why was that, in your opinion?

Well, the people weren’t going to the shows and everything was in transition. Young people in bands weren’t working, and neither were the people in the audience. So many famous clubs closed down during those years. Places like CBGBs, Coney Island High, The Continental in NYC and more all around the USA. There was this economic rut that made people broke. It started changing as the economy got better and then it all started happening again, with a younger generation of rockers getting involved who had listened to their parents’ rock records and to Electric Frankenstein and the Fistful of Rock comps when they were 15 years old. Now they were between 21 and 35, so they started their own bands, which is exactly what I wanted to happen.

We were the second generation, so now there was this next, third , like that Dead Boys song “Third Generation Nation“. So, I said I’m going to do it again and it’s actually easier to do because everything’s digital. It used to take me a year to put one volume together because everybody had to mail everything and then I had to convert it. The bands from all kinds of countries sent me cassettes and all kinds of mediums, but now they email me the song and I have it. So, I have 22 volumes of the second series already finished and they are coming out one by one. We got slowed down by the COVID-19 situation and from some stupid things that happened.

So next question: how are you and the band dealing with this fuckup that is 2020?

I wrote a whole new Electric Frankenstein album and my brother has new songs too, but we can’t get together for now. Everything is on hold at the moment. Nobody can go to rehearsal studios because everything’s closed. You can’t meet in person, nothing, so all the shows were canceled. There were some big festivals we were supposed to do in the United States that were all cancelled, so I’ve been working on the Fistful of Rock comps instead. The third one just came out in March, I put them on Bandcamp first.

RAT FINK & MONSTER ART

You guys are known for having incredibly good cover art. How did that come about?

Firstly, me and my brother are artists, we grew up on comic books. Secondly, we grew up on The Misfits because they were from New Jersey and I was friends with them since they started. They had that iconography idea, so I kinda moved it over. They were black and white, and I made mine colour, know what I mean? Also, we were friends with White Zombie and shared the same type of artists because the artists were fans of the music.

Who was the main artist for you guys?

Dirty Donny and Johnny Ace are the main ones, they both did a lot of stuff for us. Those are the two main people and then there’s everybody else, there are like 350 artists I worked with. Anyone that is well-known and great, such as Art Chantry, Merinuk, Alan Forbes, Coop, Kozik, and many more.

And do you have a particular favorite?

All of them are good, but I like Karl Kaufman, he’s Australian and I like Coop, of course. Some people have said to me, “You’ve completely ruined it for anybody who wants to use a Frankenstein monster in their art, everybody thinks about you first”. We are associated with the image of the Frankenstein monster- the Rock & Roll version, not the movie version.

You guys did it first, so what the hell.

Now we’re in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame because of that. I found out that you can not only get into the Hall of Fame because of your music, but also for other reasons. So, we are the first rock band to have an art book of all our record covers and posters. The first book was published by Dark Horse Books/Comics and we were put into the Hall of Fame archives for our artwork. So we’re famous now! (laughs)

Do you have a particular favorite piece of cover art?

One that the Famous Monsters magazine artist from the 1950s, Basil Gogos, did before he died a couple years ago. That one is a big deal, because he only did three bands, White Zombie, The Misfits and us. Usually he does portraits, our cover is the only painting he ever did of something in action, it’s a Frankenstein playing guitar, he never did that for anybody.

We’ve even had John Pound do stuff for us, the guy who done those Wacky Packs. In the 1960s and 70s, every kid would go buy for 25 cents a pack of Wacky Pack cards that had gum inside, and what they did was like Mad Magazine, where they would take a product and make it really funny.

So we have him, then Frank Kozik and Coop, we have Art Chantry, Spine, Karl Kaufman, and Alan Forbes, and like 300 artists from all over the world.
I mean, everybody famous has already done a poster for us. The only one who has never done anything for us is Pushead. He doesn’t care about rock bands, so he doesn’t want to do it. He just likes Death Metal and Hardcore stuff.

Sticking to the artwork, no future pun intended, how did it feel to be asked to represent a stamp, I mean a fucking stamp?

You know it’s not like we’re on the stamp, we were chosen to represent the stamp, ha ha and to play live, we almost got to play Madison Square Garden for that, almost.

How did all that that came about ?

They (The Frankenstein Society) contacted us and said, “We’ve got The Dracula Society, The Frankenstein Society and Boris Karloff estate, and we all got together and are doing the commemorative stamps with the US Postal Service. And since we know about your band, do you want to represent the stamp, like be the living example of commemorating the Frankenstein Monster?” And I’m like „ Of course! Yeah, sure“

And then we also got in a documentary about the legacy of Frankenstein by the History Channel, and they mentioned Electric Frankenstein and showed all our record covers.

How do you feel about that because you want people to think of the music too and not just the artwork?

Oh, that’s OK with me (laughs). It feels good because you want to leave a legacy. You know, sometimes people say to me „I have all these posters from your band and finally listened to one of your records and it’s really cool, I want ’em all,“ and then they go and buy a hundred dollars worth of records.

Have you had the experience where someone said „The artworks cool, but your music sucks“ ?

No, no one ever did that (laughs). But there are people who hate our music, people who hate rock’n’roll. We had this one crazy girl who used to write us long letters saying how much she wished we were dead and she hated us because we were trying to bring back rock’n’roll and she wanted it to end. Long, rambling, schizophrenic letters.

Oh, man. You got to publish these.

I don’t know if I kept them or not, crazy person! That was back when we first started, and back then people wrote letters. There were good things too. My favorite one was our first letter we got from Japan which said „I am feeling both cool and raw listening to your music,“ We loved that statement, that was great to see.

How did it feel for you guys to have your song „It’s All Moving Faster“ get covered by The Sweet? That must have been an awesome feeling, man!

We were giggling about it, and we were like, „Well, that proves that we’re a good band !“ (laughs). They asked us first, and I was like „Yeah, of course you can cover us, why not?“ and so they covered Lou Reed and us !!!

Are you happy with how Electric Frankenstein are seen now or would you still be thinking „Well, I wish we had maybe made it another two steps up that ladder” ?

I do wish we got to be bigger, on the level of say Social Distortion. I had major label people telling me that if the music business wasn’t controlled we would be as big as AC/DC. I had a number of meetings with major labels and the bigger indie labels during the early years. But all the contracts were such a rip-off. So, well it’s been going on 30 years, and it’s coming back around. We’re getting an enormous amount of requests to play Europe again now next year, and then we have big labels interested in us to put out a new album.

MARTIAL ARTS

To quote Monty Python, „And now for something completely different“ -would you like to tell us about your martial arts background?

I’m pretty well known in the martial arts world for Chinese martial arts. About the same time I started playing guitar, I started learning Chinese martial arts because I was influenced by Bruce Lee when I was a teenager. So I started learning Chinese Kung Fu and got really good at it. I’ve also been doing research for thirty years, I wrote a lot of articles that were all published in the newsstand Kung Fu magazines, then I collected all my research and Amazon published my books. I also had a website and taught classes for many years, judged some tournaments, and there’s lots of people all over the world who know me for all of that.

What exactly is it that you do?

I learned a lot of Shaolin boxing and am also known for Qigong. Pronounced Chi Gong. Also Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Bagua. It’s all different styles of Chinese martial arts. But you know Chinese martial arts is like two halves, the one half is for self-defense, the other half is for enhancing health, which is called Qigong. That means energy work.

If you could explain that to someone who has never seen a martial arts movie or has had anything to do with martial arts whatsoever, how would you explain that?

Qigong is a bit like Tai Chi. The movements, you’re either standing and it’s like standing meditation, or you’re moving in a certain way that it stimulates the acupuncture points. That’s what makes it a state of health, you can feel it come out of your hands. You can feel like a magnetic force and the heat comes out of your hands when you do it. And that’s all healing energy. I also do healing on other people, I’ve been flown all over the world to help people with that. The self-defense part is like moving like a bullfighter to evade an incoming attack and then trap the attacker to take them down. Hard to explain, It is nothing like the more known Karate (Japanese) or Taekwondo (Korean).

When are we going to hear some new Electric Frankenstein music? You just said that during Corona time you wrote a whole new album ?

We recorded new songs for some singles right before March. Those came out and then I have a couple other singles coming out. We have a new album called Razor Blade Touch. It is going to be the third and final album of our trilogy of songs that never made it onto an LP. It’s going to be on Deadbeat records.
Then we’re gonna be recording a brand new album. Me and my brother, we’re going to do the demos real soon, as soon as we can get together. Hopefully next year we’ll have a brand new album. The cover art and poster is going to be by Ed Repka, the guy that does the Megadeth record covers. 

When you look back on those old songs, do you listen to them and think, „Uh, why didn’t we put it on a record that’s a great song“ ?

They were bonus tracks on CDs, they were never on LP. They were CD only songs or they were b-sides of singles, so this is going to be a good album. We have a lot of record collectors who like our stuff, and we always do things to make them happy. Cool colored vinyl as always.

The record cover is really cool and the songs are great. There’s even a song from when we first started and had a female drummer. She was in an all-female metal band called Hari Kari.

What are the chances of seeing you guys in Europe? Are there any plans despite everything that’s going on at the moment?

Yeah, there’s a booking agent that has already put together a whole tour of all the places that are begging us to come back, we’re hoping Spring of 2021

Yeah. Let’s hope that that shit happens, man. One last question. Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre“?

Chainsaw Massacre is scarier when you first see it because it’s happening to real people.

Thanks Sal, it’s been great talking to you, have a great evening !!

Thanks, man. OK, have a great day. Take care.

Interview by Glen Clarke