Article scanné et retranscrit par karina4449 du board.
Quelqu'un pour la traduc??
Getting a record deal is difficult. Getting a record deal based on an unmarked demo with no biography or promotional picture and the offer of a showcase two hours drive away from most record label offices is nigh on impossible. This is what a three piece brooding rock band from Los Angeles found out when they anonymous packages to label reps and invited them to watch the group play in Santa Barbara.
A grand total of four representatives from the recording industry made the journey that night. The band did what they always did; set their gear up and played their 13-minute songs that braced the worlds of electronic, psychedelic and alternative rock. Surprisingly, as they packed down they were told by a couple of the aforementioned industry types that a recording contract would be in the post tomorrow and that they would call on Monday to cement the deal. An amazing result given the questionable strategy employed by the band. Monday came. No one called. The postbox was empty. That band, 30 Seconds to Mars, carried on regardless.
“We were so naïve then - we had no idea how ridiculous it was to showcase for record labels so far away from LA”, recalls front man Jared Leto with a smile. “When we wanted to get a record deal we didn’t go out and make press packages or get a big fancy manager and try to manipulate a deal, we just played shows and invited people to them. It was simple logic.”
That night was more than 10 years ag, and despite the unorthodox tactics 30 Seconds to Mars are still going and still growing. As they gear up for their massive headlining slot at Give it a Nam, Rock Sound takes a journey back to the beginning to find out how and why the band has made it this far.
It started for the brothers Leto in the mid-90s, they had been writing music together for some time but they had never really taken it seriously. They loved what they were doing, they wanted it to be more than just a thing they did in their spare time together, so they decided to try and make something happen.
“When we first started, really started to obsessively play, we would try to find shithole studios that were cheap that we could go in and use,” admits Shannon. “Just doing that felt like a big jump from the bedroom. We would play in garages, shitty studios or anywhere else where there was a PA we could rent.”
Many of these rehearsal room sessions were booked in an attempt to enlist other musicians to convert their idea into a band. Their chosen method of finding potential collaborators was unbelievably uncomplicated. “We would take a piece of paper, write something on it and post it up in music stores and coffee shops,” explains Jared with a grimace. “The only thing we got from that was a bunch of fucking weirdos.” The brothers laugh about it now, but the experience was not so comical at the time. “We knew what we did not want and we certainly found a lot of them,” Shannon continues. “In hindsight we should have filmed the people that came through the door, it would have made great footage for a DVD.”
Were they really that bad? “Yeah,” Jared states emphatically. “We had everyone from Slash’s clone to Slash’s nemesis, we had Yngwie Malmsteen guitar gods from the guitar school to full on punk rockers. The big challenge was finding someone that you liked and were interested in and could get along with who was also capable of walking the fine line between the sounds we were interested in. We found we either got metalheads who just wanted to shred or else we got people who were only interested in one genre. We got a few hair band wash-ups too. It was bad.”
For a time the brothers felt like they were never going to find anybody they clicked with. A string of bass players were found and fallen out with as the band continued to play live and work toward their record deal. Undeterred, they started touring.
And they toured with anyone. Absolutely anyone. “At one time we opened up for Fishbone,” Jared remembers with a mixture of shame and pride. “We opened for a Mexican grindcore band once, we opened up for metal bands, art rock bands or folk bands. We opened for whoever, wherever and whenever or we would headline ourselves; we played with all these different bands and no one noticed.”
Wanting to make the difficult impossible, 30 Seconds to Mars - rounded out by guitarist Tomo Milosevic - toured in complete anonymity during this time. “For many years we toured pretty silently. We did not have a band name, we just toured and played shows,” admits Jared. “We were not really interested in building a following, it was just an experiment to us. Then we realised there was a completion to the process of music, you make it and then give it away and then people can have their own private experience of it and then you come together in a public space and share something together. We wanted that so we started to create an identity.”
The band never actively hid Jared from the audience by sitting him backstage or in the van ‘til it was time to go on stage, but they were smart about where they played. Most of their touring was done outside of Los Angeles in places where no one ever expected to see an actor fronting a rock band. Thus many of the early shoes took place in roadside biker bars, old churches, community centres, libraries and dive bars in Nowheresville, Anywheretown. Anywhere unexpected.
“It was challenging having me in the band,” admits Jared. “We knew it would be a challenge and we were very aware that it would take more work than maybe if I had not been in the group.”
But, undaunted by the challenge, the band put the work in. Long-time Rock sound squeeze Jonah Matranga remembers a night shared with the band when he was fronting seminal alt-rockers Far. “We were playing some tiny little place with no stage in central California,” Matranga begins. “Paul from Immortal (Records) had called to say that a band they were thinking about signing was on the bill that night, he told me the singer was an actor, which is never a good sign.” His worst fears were realised when teenage girls were circling the band at load-in asking of ‘he’ was there yet, and a terse introduction to Jared added to his apprehension. But something changed once the two got talking.
“Jared’s demeanour immediately changed when he realised I wasn’t there to struck him,” Matranga continues. “We chatted for a bit about his strange circumstance, how he was burnt on acting and was a lot more excited about the idea of being in the band, I probably smiled and said ‘Careful what you wish for’ or something, and we went back to loading gear. He truly did seem happy to be there, doing the completely unromantic stuff that goes with being in a band, that is somehow the most romantic stuff of all. I gained more and more respect for him as the band stayed together. Never really listened to them, but just that he kept going was to be commended, there were so many easier paths he could have taken.”
Initially the band members would convoy to shows like that in their cars, they would take turns to lead the pack and read the map, pulling in at gas stations to refill and swap positions. It was not just shows in and around California either; they would undertake full tours of America this way. All part of the adventure, finding romance in the most unromantic parts of touring life. A major breakthrough came when the band could afford to graduate to a motor home they could all travel in together. Spirits were high, but so were the sides of the relatively small touring vehicle and thus the elation was short lived. “We actually had to get rid of that RV,” Jared admits. “The wind nearly blew it over when we were driving across Arizona. The van was too tall and the wind was blowing so hard we couldn’t drive anymore. It actually got blown over a few times before that too.” It got blown over? “Yeah.” With you all in it? “No,” continues Shannon. “But it was like sailing being in the van when the wind was up though, you had to lean into it to keep the wheels on the ground sometimes.”
It is hard to picture such a scene as Rock Sound sits with the brothers in the upper back lounge of their immaculate tour liner. Inside a runner handles a few last minute errands, a stylist from an earlier photoshoot waits to cut Jared’s hair, while a tour manager and a large technical crew take care of front of house before the band play another sold out show to a crowd of thousands. But it happened, just as the brothers signed their record contract without proper legal representation, choosing to read and handle contract negotiations themselves. A lot of things happened, but the band always survived.
The band survived a lot, not least the delay of their debut record. “We were supposed to put out our debut in 2001 but then September 11 happened and everything changed,” recalls Jared sombrely. “It was a huge tragedy and everyone was watching, waiting and trying to work out what they felt was appropriate. Our album title “Welcome To The Universe” was changed, the original artwork was changed because of it, because it was an image of military was, a beautiful image of something incredibly violent. It was just something that would not work in a post 9/11 landscape. It put the album back ten months.”
The album eventually came out and 13-minute epics had condensed into six-minute Bjork and Radiohead-inspired space rock experiments that bore just enough in common with the popular nu metal bands of the time to allow the band to tour and grow more. For most of this period 30STM did not talk to the press, instead building a fan base based on the constantly improving live shows. “We took the approach of a band like Tool and let the music speak for itself,” admits Jared. “We knew how difficult it was going to be to change perceptions so we didn’t bother ourselves with it for a while. We knew that we had something that excited us and something that excited friends and family, so we just waited for it to work on people we did not know.”
So they carried on touring and carried on distilling their influences into a sound that had the size and scope and impact they wanted. They released a second record, to the surprise of many who thought the band was just a vanity project the actor needed before he went back to his main career, his ‘proper’ job. The band then took on the press, first in America then eventually overseas.
They toured more to larger crowds and sold over a million records. They made it. More than a decade after disheartening open auditions, convoying round America to shows and that disastrous showcase, 30 Seconds to Mars stand on merit as a successful rock band. Why? “Sacrifice,” states Jared bluntly. “It is so important and the reason we are here today.”
It was nearly impossible for a band like 30 Seconds to Mars to make it, but they have. Love them or hate them, it is nearly impossible to deny them their success.
Side article - In it for the money?
Rock Sound knows what you are thinking. Jared Leto, super famous actor bankrolls all the band’s mega videos. We know you think this because we thought this too. Until Leto put us right. “When this band was making demos and unsigned we put all our money into it, but once we signed a record deal we never put any money into the band,” he recalls. “We really thought that if it was real we really would not have to do that. I never made a lot of money as an actor, so I did not have lots of money to throw around. Maybe if I was rich then it would have been easier, but there has only been one time I have put money into the band personally, and that was so that we could go on tour for Lollapalooza 2003 because the label would not give us tour support as we were in between albums. I felt like it was the right thing to do, so I paid for that out of my savings.”
Not rich? Possible, for much of his working life Leto has worked for ‘Scale’, a level of pay set by the Screen Actors Guild for all performers of the union which guarantees them a minimum fee for their part and other basic contractual issues such as meal breaks, overtime fees and accommodation costs. Obviously this is more than you or I earn but, importantly, it is much less than many think he earns every time he appears in front of a camera.
“People see you in a film and imagine that you are rich,” he notes. “Throughout that whole period of the first album we did not have much money at all. I was not working often as an actor and when I was it was usually a small part in a film. To get the money together for the video for ‘A Beautiful Lie’ we actually used a settlement from a lawsuit, a corporation used 30 Seconds to Mars content inappropriately and we took the blood money and used it to shoot a film for the environmental effort we were interested in.” The epic video, filmed on location in the Arctic Circle in a town called Ilulissat, took 18 months to plan and was not just a challenge financially.
“Two days before we went there someone fell into an iceberg and died,” remembers brother Shannon. “The icebergs are always changing and moving and during one shot we see Tomo jump, and he heard the shotgun sound which means the ice is about to split underneath him. It was scary because it was all under the radar, it was a completely sketch video. We were not covered by insurance for most of it and no one was unionised. The director of photography was the only legit dude on the crew.”
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marsi beaucoup pour le scan..Je me serais bien proposée pour la traduction : après tout, j'ai fait de la traduction en anglais pendant 3 ans mais là, j'avoue que c'est long & j'a peur de ne pas avoir le temps d'ici une semaine 
: sur la photo de la couverture, on dirait que Jared a mis une perruque mais de travers! Ok je m'en vais! 
