Courtesy James Stuart III
Santa Fe metal fans will no doubt recognize bassist and guitarist James Donald Stuart III, a local mainstay who has played with everyone from Savage Wizdom and Sex Headaches to Night Soil. What they might not know is that Stuart’s metal journey kicked off in church camp, continued through years spent at Warehouse 21 metal shows and, as of now, more projects than even seem possible for a single musician. Just goes to show that if you play bass well in Santa Fe, bands will eventually come a-knocking. And though the lion’s share of Stuart’s work finds him writing and collaborating with some of Santa Fe’s most notable rockers, this week he dons his tribute hat for a performance in Sabbath, a Black Sabbath tribute act sure to pay respect to the roots of metal itself (7 pm Friday, June 3. $10. Tumbleroot Brewery & Distillery, 2791 Agua Fría St., (505) 395-5135). You’ll also find the band Guided paying homage to none other than that guitar god himself, Jimi Hendrix. This all sounded pretty cool to us, and pretty shreddy, so we found Stuart and tricked him into answering these questions three.
Of all the metal tributes to which you could possibly pay tribute, why Black Sabbath?
Well, I mean, Black Sabbath is, you know, the godfathers of metal. [Guitarist] Tony Iommi is the godfather of the metal riff, and he’s viewed that way by a lot of people. Plus, it just sounded like a good idea. This all started because there was that 50th anniversary celebration for the Candyman [music store], and they were theming it with bands from the Woodstock fest. I’d made this joke to [manager] Francesca Jozette about having some metal bands, just as a joke, and she asked if I’d be down with doing a Black Sabbath tribute band. They were kind of in the same timeline as a lot of those Woodstock bands, and she thought it would be cool. So I got with metal musician Chris Riggins, who is also a huge metalhead, and he wanted to do guitar and said he’d take a crack at vocals. We got our friend Jesse Otero to play drums and friend Tom Valencia for the other guitar, and that was it. Everything we do is from the first four albums, and we haven’t branched out past that because the last four albums kind of sucked.
What’s up with your project Night Soil? Y’all shredding any new material our way anytime soon?
We’re trying to write right now, and I think we’ve got some tentative shows in July. And we’ll hopefully have refined a few of our newer songs that we’ve been working on, but we’re really hoping to hit it hard by the end of the year. [When it comes to writing] it really depends. Chris [Riggins] and Mark [Pennington] do a lot of the riff writing and the structure, and I’m kind of the glue that helps put it all together. It takes a little time to get it going. We’ll jam a riff, and if we like it we’ll go back over the basic structure with drummer Dominic Martinez, and then we just take it a beat at a time, really. We’ll try to rough out a skeleton of what we think is a whole song. I don’t read or write music, but Chris is definitely schooled and definitely very learned. He has a background in sound and engineering, and he helps with a lot of the relations between songs, so if there’s a note off, he’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, what if we tried this?’ We have our Night Soil demo, which you can find on our Bandcamp page. We did five songs that we recorded and mixed entirely ourselves, and we did it all in our jam space—which is really Mark Pennington’s shed. Chris Riggins recorded it, so it’s very much self-released.
Why do you think Santa Fe has always had this intense love of all things metal?
Man, I have wondered that for as long as I’ve gone to shows. There’s just something about this town, I think—it’s a very old town, very historic, and there’s a lot of really violent and bloody history, a lot of dark and alluring things about this place that just kind of have this vibe. A lot of people have referred to it as high desert metal, high desert rock—I think it’s just something about the atmosphere. It brings out a certain angst and beauty, and it’s a really strange phenomenon to me. From my teenage years to now, there have always been these metal bands.
And all of us who play music are just stealing little bits and pieces from other musicians and trying to make it something more like what we like, more unique. I listen to metal, but I listen to a lot of basic garbage pop music, and just hearing what they can do with very little while they make these songs people are very interested in, seeing what other bands can do like Yes, with great technical playing and hooks and pop…everything that pop music has, but with life in it—I just want to take things that sound good and have this feel that’s approachable.
