The Talented Mr. Freese

Josh Freese is a musician's musician. You've undoubtedly heard his work as a professional drummer, though you may not know it.

Freese is an original member of The Vandals, and like the other members, has what he refers to as a "day job" as a professional studio drummer, and must take time away from his first love to pursue other, more lucrative projects.

"[The Vandals] is kind of like a hobby for me. I've been in that band for, like, 10 years, and will continue to stay in that band. But we've got enough good drummer friends that, if I have to go on tour for a month or two with someone else, they understand and they just get a buddy of ours to fill in for a gig or two," says Freese. "The Vandals are my home and my family, something I've done since I was 16, and something I'll probably do until I'm 60. I'll do it forever because it's kind of a loose situation. All of us know that we're never going to sell a million records, or even a half million. We're fine with selling, like, the same 50,000 records with every album and playing for the same 500 or a thousand kids a night all over the world and having a good time doing it. We've been able to maintain The Vandals as one huge inside joke — whether it's on-stage banter between songs, or the songs themselves, or the names of the songs, it's all just for fun."

And because it is all just for fun, and Freese is a professional player, his work is heard in many other places. Other "day job" gigs include work for Paul Westerberg, Guns 'n' Roses, Devo and Meredith Brooks, to name just a few.

"When I say day job, I mean things that are much more serious, things that make me a living," he explains. "Working with Devo and working with Paul Westerberg was like working with two of my biggest heroes ever. But I do sessions for a lot of other people. I played on Chris Cornell's latest record, and I've made records with people like Juliana Hatfield and Tracy Bonham.

"I did that first Meredith Brooks record with that horrible 'Bitch' song," he says with a barely noticeable sigh. "Yeah, I was on that. Some of those things I don't take seriously. Playing with Paul Westerberg, Devo, Chris Cornell, and I'm on the new Nash Kato [Urge Overkill] record — those are the things that I hold dear and really love doing. Then there's Meredith Brooks and those kinds of people, which I could really give a shit about. It just beats working at Tower Records."

"I wanted to add in, while we're talking, too — just because I have no other way to promote it other than these interviews — is that I actually have my own record coming out on July 11^th on Kung Fu Records, The Vandals' label, under my own name, Josh Freese. The name of the album is The Notorious One Man Orgy. It's a record of songs that I've written, that I play all the instruments on. I got help from some guitar player friends of mine, like Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam and Lyle Workman, who used to play with Frank Black. It's just fun and quirky. Some of it's kinda punk rock and other stuff sounds kind of like a cross between, um, The Pixies and Butthole Surfers and Ween."

All other projects aside, Josh Freese's current day job has him playing in A Perfect Circle, a supergroup of sorts, featuring well-known studio players — Freese, bassist Paz Lenchantin, and guitarists Troy Van Leewen and Billy Howerdel — and one new-school rock god, Maynard James Keenan, who is taking a break from his own day job, otherwise known as Tool. A Perfect Circle is currently on tour supporting their eponymous debut album, and when we caught up to Freese, he was standing outside the bathrooms of the Starplex theater in Dallas, Texas, explaining how he got hooked up with A Perfect Circle.

While Freese was on the road with Devo for Lollapalooza in 1997, he met Maynard, who was also on the traveling festival, with Tool. The two became friends, and when the tour was over, went their separate ways. A couple of years later, Josh met Billy Howerdel, who was doing some engineering on the Guns 'n' Roses record Josh was recording for.

"Billy and I became friends and one day he said, 'Hey, ya' know, my roommate's Maynard from Tool, and he says he knows you.' We started hanging out and working on a bunch of music that Billy had written, and now here we are."

Howerdel was a guitar tech on Tool's Aenema, which is when Maynard first heard the A Perfect Circle material and began working on lyrics. The band is all Howerdel's baby, says Freese, and after Maynard was brought in to do vocals, the rest of the group was added. It was, in the beginning, a standard deal for Freese: come in, learn the music and pound the skins.

"Billy had all of these songs already done, and Maynard just had to write lyrics and vocal melodies to them. It wasn't like we all sat down and recorded an album. Billy just said, 'dude I got a bunch of great demos that I want you to hear and I want to rerecord them.' We just kind of took it from there. He said, 'Here's my stuff, let's make a record.' Everyone said okay, and we formed this band. I love being involved in writing music so much, and I enjoy and am interested — just as much, if not more — in writing music as I am in playing drums. Hopefully, on the next record I'll be able to help out on some writing because it's important to me. But the thing about this is that Billy has all these songs and they're great. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But it's not like Freese minds not being a part of the writing process. The music that Howerdel crafted is powerful stuff. It ebbs and flows through sections of brute force and interludes of soft string accompaniment and touching passages of gentle and subtle nuance.

"I love it," he says of the music, making no bones about it. "It's a bit more dynamic and progressive than a lot of the things I've done over the last five years, you know? It's definitely not straight-up pop music, or power pop. It's not rap/metal — Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Korn or any of that shit. I really enjoy it. Some of it is ferocious and aggressive, and other songs are beautiful and nice and a little more emotional than most pop music."

Freese says that the music was intricate and complex from the beginning, but he also says that when the band got together to play and record, some of the dynamic was brought out even further. It's also some heavy shit, not necessarily always hard and driving, and not all too serious or emotionally frail, but deep, layered and meaningful, both musically and lyrically. There's depth not just in the music, but behind it as well.

"We all gel and play well together, and did right from the beginning when we started — it just felt natural and good," says Freese. "We share a lot of the same musical tastes, and we're all looking forward and pushing forward in the same direction, all wanting to do the same things at the same time. It just works, you know?"

Freese's casual mentions of more albums from A Perfect Circle aren't just suppositions of a possible future. The eponymous debut is the first in a line of three records that the band has signed onto Virgin Records to record, so the opportunity is there for the music to grow and expand with the players. And though it is mainly Howerdel's project, as he previously mentioned, Freese hopes to get a bit more involved in the writing process.

"It will mainly stay as it started off, as Billy's baby and his brainchild, but hopefully, we're going to make it more like a band, where everyone has a bit more influence," he says. "This isn't just one shot. We are definitely a band more than just a side project."

The group's name suggests the relative permanence of their collective existence. A Perfect Circle is a phrase in Maynard's lyrics, but beyond the obvious, its connotations run much deeper.

"Billy and Maynard were looking around for people to help out with this project and join this band, and they realized that some of the best people, and the people they wanted involved, also happened to be some of their closest friends," explains Freese. "I mean, we're all great friends. They just kind of looked around and thought, 'Look at this circle of friends — we'll get Paz on bass, we have to get Josh on drums and Troy will play guitar.' It kind of completes the circle of things they were working on. Of course, maybe in another month of living on bus we're all going to want to kill each other — A Broken Circle."

Freese, of course, is joking, and the crumbing of the group is the last thing on their minds. As it is now, A Perfect Circle is getting huge press and radio coverage nationwide, and that's mainly due to the fact that music really is something new, different and interesting. It's new rock without cliché.

"We're seeing it already," says Josh about their public feedback, pointing out that our conversation is happening the day of the album's release. "The fact that the record's been banged on the radio all over the country, and our video's being played and we've got this great tour going on, we're really fortunate, definitely, and we all acknowledge that. Everything's going well."

And though it's the music that will ultimately make the band what it is in the public eyes and ears, having a frontman with such a following as Maynard's certainly isn't hurting. Freese says even though it's easy to think that, with the way the group is often advertised — "A Perfect Circle, featuring Maynard of Tool" — it's a Maynard side project, having the enigmatic, charismatic frontman hasn't made that much of a difference in the band's growing success, and hasn't translated in an inordinate amount of Tool comparisons.

"His voice is so distinct that, of course, we're going to get comparisons, but I've actually been surprised how little we've been compared to Tool," says Freese about his bandmate's notoriety and unique vocal abilities. "I was expecting it to happen a lot more than it has, which has been nice."

For now, A perfect Circle will push forward, completing this tour and taking a short break so the band's members can get back to previous obligations.

"Maynard's going to go back into his Tool corner later this summer to make another record, so we're touring as much as we can right now. The plan is, after this summer's over and after Maynard's done recording, we'll probably go back out on the road doing a headlining tour in clubs of theaters or whatever level we're at at that point. Who knows," says Freese with a casual certainty. "But we're definitely going to be doing a lot more work."

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