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Recently, acclaimed Broken Teeth/Dangerous Toys (and former Watchtower) frontman Jason McMaster was kind enough to speak with us regarding, among many other things, the forthcoming release of the group’s latest masterpiece Electric…
Todd: How was Dangerous Toys formed?
Jason McMaster: “…I was in this Technical Progressive Thrash band called Watchtower for about eight years, right outta High School, so there’s a whole other decade of Rock within my museum of Jason. …I kinda cut my teeth as a singer doin’ that. I had some friends that had a Glam Roc thing goin’ on in the mid to late ‘80’s in Austin called Onyx. They had a female singer that called herself Onyx. …They were done with her and needed someone to fill in for some gigs they already had booked. It was a completely unserious thing for me to go in and learn a bunch of cover tunes and do some shows for fun with a Glam band. So I went in and had a really good time with it…all tongue-in-cheek. It was kinda like Halloween for me because it wasn’t exactly what I was weaned on, but it was a lot of fun. Six months later, wouldn’t ya know it, the songs that I had written with them were actually pretty fuckin’ good and caught the attention of some of the labels that were lookin’ for the next big thing…the coattails of Guns ‘n’ Roses, L.A. Guns and Faster Pussycat. That’s how that just kinda exploded. A Year after I started messin’ around with those guys in Austin, I was on MTV and in arenas touring Europe. …The rest is kinda history. That first Toys record gets a shitload of things like Sirius and XM Satellite Radio. I get a royalty check every quarter…some lunch money, which is how I look at it. …Yeah, I’ve got a couple of Gold albums, which are kinda like bowling trophies. It doesn’t matter. My house is old, my care is old…I’m old. I still doin’ the same shit. I’ve been doin’ the same Rock ‘n’ Roll goin’ on twenty seven years.”
Todd: In retrospect, what was your state of mind when you wrote the lyrics for the first album?
Jason: “I’m just a Heavy Metal dude. …Everybody likes a good story, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be true. …I think it’s a sub-human caveman state of mind when you learn how to put words together and have some sort of scheme going on in a lyrical sense or even just a groove… I think the state of mind was ‘…wow, I’m not the greatest lyricist, but this shit is fun and I’m gonna use it…’. …I’d try to use clichés as little as possible and or let the clichés run the gamut. I remember some of the titles like “Take Me Drunk I’m Home”…I got that off of a T-Shirt I saw in a Rock shop or record store somewhere. I used to go read the little buttons and pins that would have stupid stuff on them sometimes. I used to have this button collection and one of them said ‘…I Eat Nuns…’ Whatever that meant, it was a shocker and I wore it a lot. I remember I had another one that said ‘Guess How Many Doughnuts Can Fit On My Dick?’. It was stupid, but again that’s that sub-human Beavis and Butt-head mentality…”
Todd: In hindsight, who was the most responsible for the blatantly commercial sound on Hellacious Acres?
Jason: “…I’m going to write of what you’re trying to say as awful production with a big name producer, Roy Thomas Baker, who had done records with The Cars, Queen and Journey…stuff like that. The label had pulled us off a big Spring 1990 tour opening for The Cult. We were selling lots of records with that first record and they basically pulled us off the road and said ‘…go home and write…we don’t wanna miss this window of opportunity…’ It was just one man’s opinion that we should stop what were doing even though we were making them money, making ourselves money and doing a great job of not really doing anything except rockin’ the house. They pulled us off the road and made us go home and write. We didn’t wanna go home and write, but ya know we were outvoted, so we went home and wrote. About half of Hellacious Acres is worthy of being called Dangerous Toys and the other half is just kinda blasé. They have a kinda ‘…these songs will work…’ kinda vibe. …I kinda felt that we were pushed into a corner that we didn’t wanna be in and weren’t ready to be in for no good reason and what came out of that was Hellacious Acres. …We weren’t sitting next to them when they were mixing and producing that record. The budget insisted that we go back home and get ready for a tour while they finished mixing that record. …We didn’t have a whole lot of say about the sound of that record and they weren’t willing to take the chance of spending another half a million dollars on us going back in and fixing up what we felt had been lost in the tone, sound and vibe of Hellacious Acres. On top of all of that, with you calling it a more commercial record…it may have just been sold that way because of the problems we had with it as a band and still have with it.”
Todd: As a group, that must have been tremendously difficult to overcome…
Jason: “…The third studio record Pissed, which came out in ‘94, should have been released as our second record. It’s arguable that Pissed was our best studio record. …We kept doin’ what we were doin’ and Pissed came out on an independent. We followed it up in ‘95 with The Rtist 4merely Known As Dangerous Toys in which we had lost a couple of original members. I ended up playing bass…and therefore I was writing a lot more of the riffs, so it ended up as a Hodge podge of what was Dangerous Toys, hence the name of the record. We were fine with that, are still fine with that and we actually had a lot of fun on that record, but the fans didn’t care how much fun we were havin’ because they weren’t havin’ it. …I wasn’t singing about my dick or fuckin’ in the backseat anymore. It was all these headstrong lyrics and serious moments and they weren’t gonna have it. They still wanted to fuck, suck and drink beer all night long. That’s fine, but it wasn’t where we were as people just because of maybe the push and pull of the business and people who we thought were our bros and we’re gonna be with us forever. Nothing lasts forever and The Rtist 4merely Known As Dangerous Toys is sorta the answer to that even though we still played the old material. We still played stuff from all of the previous records when we were on tour. Those were the songs that everybody ultimately wanted to hear, hence the departure… We did a live record in ‘99 called Vitamins & Crash Helmets Tour - Live that was a retrospective at that time of the ten years that we had been on the road. It was a great, great live record, I thought. The first ten songs were from a show…at the Orpheum Theater in Boston while on tour with L.A. Guns. …There’s highlights and low points to boot on that live record, but I love it because it’s all over the place and kinda tells a story. …It was legitimately fair to all four studio records….”
Todd: In hindsight, do you feel the group made the right decision by recording a cover of (the Bad Company classic) “Feel Like Makin’ Love”?
Jason: “I probably would have done something different, but I gotta tell ya, our fans fuckin’ love that for some reason. …I don’t think it does justice to who we are as a band, but that’s how I feel about most of Hellacious Acres. I feel like we were painted into a corner… We were actually just messing around with that song in the studio and Roy suggested that we cover it. We weren’t so excited about all the other material, so we were like ‘...okay, why not? Maybe we’ll get played on some Classic Rock radio with that someday…’ I think it does get a lot of downloads on the internet. I see that on my royalty statements.”
Todd: Have you ever considered disbanding Dangerous Toys in lieu of a more lucrative venture?
Jason: “Never. It’s still happening and it’s great. We play a couple of shows a year. We’ve got a twenty one song twentieth anniversary DVD comin’ out this year on Corporate Punishment Records. …As far as touring and surviving as a Rock band on the road as Dangerous Toys…it can’t be done. No one wants to pay us what we’re worth and what we feel like we should be paid. That, and I hate to say it, but the day jobs that some of us have pay more than Rock ‘n’ Roll ever did. Gold Records and everything, the jobs that we have now as individuals now pay more… You can’t argue with that when you have a mortgage and a family. Going out on the road and coming back with no bank…a dead wallet is not something all of us can do. I’m the one who was always hard-headed and always about the Rock ‘n’ Roll. I don’t care about money and I’ll live out of a fuckin’ bag and I don’t give a shit. That tends to be the war machine that is Broken Teeth. That’s where I am now. We are a war machine and we don’t give a shit about anything except kicking your ass onstage.”
Todd: How did you become involved with Shadows Fall recording a cover of “Teas’n Pleas’n”?
Jason: “Those guys are big Dangerous Toys fans, ya know? Those guys grew up on just as much Metallica and Anthrax as they did Motley Crue, Skid row and Dangerous Toys and the like. The class of ‘89, ya know? I had heard from some friends of mine who were already into some of the earliest Shadows Fall records that had seen them play in clubs when they had come through Texas, which would have been ten or twelve years ago when those guys first hit the road as a band. …My friends would go see them play and they’d wear Dangerous Toys T-Shirts onstage and shit. …So I got E-Mail address for a couple of the guys and started E-Mailing them. We were stoked to catch up and exchange phone numbers just like little girls do now on MySpace. …They were totally down to earth and now I try and see them and hang with them every time they come through here. …They sent me the master tape of their cover of “Teas’n Pleas’n”. I think the whole thing was drop D, so it was a whole step down and heavier. I adapted my voice to that and it came out fuckin’ great, ya know? I mailed the tapes back and I expected (Shadows Fall vocalist) Brian Fair to out his own vocals over it, but there was nothin’ there. They said they loved it exactly the way they heard it back so they left it alone. I take that as a compliment and I think it turned out great and it’s opened the door to a lot of my stuff to their fans…”
Todd: What can you tell us about the new Broken Teeth record?
Jason: “…I just got out of the studio today. I finished the last two songs. …It’s not even mixed yet. We’ve still got to cut some back-up vocals, put in a couple of solos, mix it and come up with some artwork. All of that stuff is pretty much falling into place as we speak. …The working title is Electric…that’s the title track off of the record. It rocks…it’s smokin’. It’s half old material and half new material. We’ve got a new guitar player whose actually been in the band for a year and a half now… We had to make some changes…because we were ready to hit the road for longer than five or ten days at a time. The guitar player we had was (ex-Dirty Looks axe man) Paul Lidel, who was a founding member and was actually in Dangerous Toys. …He moved to Austin in 1994 specifically to play in Dangerous Toys. A few years later, we were asked to start this project called Broken Teeth, we did and eight years into it, he had to walk away from it because he couldn’t be gone (out on tour) for more than ten or fifteen days. We got a guy whose more of a warrior and can stay out for thirty or forty days at a time, if he needs to, so we can do a US tour…”
Select Jason McMaster Discography
The Ultimate Dangerous Toys - Sleaze Metal Kings From Texas (2004) **
Blood On The Radio (2004) **
Guilty Pleasure (2002) **
Vitamins & Crash Helmets Tour - Live (1999) *
Broken Teeth (1999) **
The Rtist 4merely Known As Dangerous Toys (1995) *
Pissed (1994) *
Hellacious Acres (1991) *
Dangerous Toys (1989) *
* as a member of Dangerous Toys
** as a member of Broken Teeth