----------------------------- After the Plea of "Guilty"... Omnibus talks with Kurt Kerns ----------------------------- by Robin Brooks Omnibus (a publication?), date unknown If you know when and where this article was published, please contact me. GRAVITY KILLS' KURT KERNS on where they are and what got them here.... RB: To what do you attribute the speed with which people have picked up on Gravity Kills and particularly your live show? KK: I don't know, it's really weird. We started touring in February, and we've had some good shows. We ended up touring with the Nixons for a while. We've been doing our own shows in June and July, and in the last couple of weeks especially, have noticed all of a sudden that we're selling out every show and they're selling out quick. It just seems like recently its starting to happen really fast and it's getting real crazy. In fact, the last two nights both the barricades collapsed. We like that! It's all good. What's cool, too, is that our biggest increase in sales was the week after MTV dropped our video. Luckily it's going word-of-mouth. RB: People certainly do seem to be catching on quickly. KK: It's the kind of thing where...I dont know whether you've read anything about us or not, but everybody says "You guys are so normal!" We're not doom and gloom by any means...or trying to be...people want to label us as an industrial thing and ask "Why aren't you like this or that?" We're not trying to be anything. I think our record has a lot of different emotions on it. There is anger, but there's also fear, apprehension, guilt, a lot of things on the record. RB: What are you seeing in the people who come out to see a Gravity Kills show? KK: It's a huge cross-section. Anything from 14 and 15-year old kids to 30-plus people. Its really cool. In Austin there's a mother and a daughter that come to see us play everytime we go there. That's gotta be really strange! I can't imagine as a kid going to a show with one of my parents and being totally into it. RB: What really spurred you on to producing "Guilty," the song that introduced many more people to your work? KK: Matt (Dudenhoeffer, guitarist), Doug (Firley, keyboardist) and myself have played together in bands since we were 12 years old, and we're 27 now. Jeff (Scheel, vocalist) moved to Dallas to go to college, staying down there through his college years and playing in bands all that time. Doug, Matt and I all ended up in St. Louis together, and started writing music again. I conceptually came up with Guilty and called Doug, who owned a studio at the time that did audio, video, and post-production stuff. We moved into Doug's studio and started recording "Guilty" for the fun of it. In reality, all of us had decided that we were never going to be professional musicians or be able to follow this dream...that we were all going to work. I'm an architect by training, and was just a couple months away from my licensing when all this really happened. So we were just writing music for fun, because when it's in your blood it doesn't go away. It's a great emotional outlet. We were recording "Guilty," and all the singers we'd ever worked with before couldn't do it or were too busy or didn't want to do it, and having worked so hard on this thing we though it was too bad...we had to get ahold of somebody. The guys said we should've just called you cousin. Matt had the best-paying job of anybody (he was an engineer) and he said, I'll pay for the plane ticket if you fly him up. We called Jeff and asked if he would fly out and cut a vocal for us...(laughs)...He kind of freaked out a little bit and decided he'd do it. Thank God he did! ("Guilty" was submitted for a compilation CD sponsored by St. Louis radio station KPNT "The Point," and quickly won a huge response.) RB: You also scored big in the area of movie soundtracks, with a demo version of "Goodbye" on the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, and "Guilty" included in the soundtrack for Seven. KK: It's a really weird thing with the soundtracks. I think we're batting a thousand so far with the soundtracks we've picked. We're getting ready to do Escape from L.A. -- we've just been really lucky. You don't know (how successful it's going to be) when you make those decisions. It's like "Do you wanna be on Mortal Kombat?" and you don't know if it's cool...a lot of times the company won't release a pre-screening of the film for bands to watch so youre taking a big gamble. With the movie Seven, all we saw was the trailer for it. But I really respect Morgan Freeman as an actor and David Finch as a director... Brad Pitt I was kinda nervous about, cuz he's such a pretty boy kind of thing. But I figured he's from Missouri as well, I can give him a chance...so we went ahead and did it, and this turns out to be one of my favorite movies. We went to the premiere and I was blown away -- I couldn't believe how good the movie was! I'm so proud to be a part of it now. RB: It's great that you can work with another medium like film and combine it with rock 'n roll. It sounds like you're a fan of film. KK: Totally. Actually, Doug and Jeff are both film majors. Me? I've now accepted the fact that I went through five years of architecture school to learn how to write music. RB: How does it feel to be throwing in with the likes of the Sex Pistols on your first tour? KK: That's definitely cool, especially for Matt and me, because in high school we were pretty much punk rockers. This is perfect that the Sex Pistols are getting back together...because (Never Mind The) Bullocks was so influential, what they did has shaped music so much...and most people don't give them enough credit, I don't believe. By doing this record they're going to heighten awareness of what they've done for music...and teach a whole new generation of people what they really did. I think they deserve it, totally. RB: The term "industrial" is often applied to Gravity Kills, but three-fourths of you came from guitar-based bands. How do those two things come together? KK: What we're trying to be...it's more about guitar, bass, and drums than it is about keyboards. Although Doug uses keyboards live to cover the bass parts, because that's the instrument he's trained on. It is about technology, and about computers. The process by which we write is a very non-linear method. We work with Sonic Solutions, a Macintosh-based system, where you can build a chorus, and then just copy and paste a chorus. Matt and I take songs to Doug and Doug records them and edits them, and does a lot of the initial percussion and sequencing. Then Jeff comes in as kind of the last layer, staying out of it, kind of, until it's about 85% complete. Then he'll just start adding vocals to it. The guitar is such an imperfect instrument, you can do a million things with it...you just set yourself up for all kinds of bizarre little accidents, because it is imperfect. It's not like a keyboard where you push a key and you're gonna get the same sound every time. [All copyrights are property of the owner. This article is reposted on this site because the original owner does not have it on the web. All typos are original to the version posted (i.e. not caused by me). This copy is stored at "Perverted" - Gravity Kills fan site http://grantb.net/perverted/index.html -> "Articles" ]