Randee lee & Razar King - Sanctus Interview
Lee: I am a native Fort Worthian, born and raised. Normal childhood but raised by my Grandmother. My mother in the early days would always have music playing and be dancing aroundthe house. So yes, I would say that music was a part of our household. Early on I took music lessons at the Hammond Organ studios (dating myself lol) and I always seemed to have a fascination with music on the radio. which is where I learned to sing. For me and my buds at the time, we always journeyed out to see the touring acts of the day whenever they came to town… Mahogany Rush, Skynyrd, Talas, Sabbath, Purple, Gino Vanelli, Rush, Foghat, Wishbone Ash, Schenker, Priest and on and on… Plus we had some local bands that we followed, mostly a band called Lightning. Not really a sports person but yet I played golf and bowling, both of which I wanted to do professionally. I guess it was in high school that the music started calling me… Me and a friend would start every morning with either Grand Funk, Jethro Tull, Bread or Elton John on the record player before leaving for school. James Gang’s Walk Away was one of the mainstays on the jukebox at the local Pizza Hut so when they came to town I had to be there. James Gang and Bang my first and possibly loudest concert I ever attended…
Both bands had singles out that I was digging at the time. Also at this time I was also drawn to the drums, thinking that was what I would like to take up… A course change would soon be in order and bowling would soon be displaced as well. Back In my day we had a prolific club scene. I was not a drinker but would venture out to see all kinds of acts back then… But I would say the biggest influences were Lightning and Nitzinger. During this time my Dad bought me a cheap-o $25 acoustic from a pawn shop and from there I never looked back, progressing to electric and finally getting my first real Les Paul for graduation. After graduation and a brief stint in college I came back to town and started working at the local music store where I would eventually meet up with some buds from high school and church and start rocking. The guitar and bands proved to be too alluring and bowling and golf soon fell by the wayside. We rocked mightily as a garage outfit but my desires were for more. One thing led to another and through a series of introductions I met Razar King, a fellow guitarist with whom I still write and record with to this day. We met and found out that we shared mutual affections for some of the same British hard rock bands like Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Trapeze. A musical marriage was born. I always had lofty visions for my musical endeavors and now I had met someone who had the same.
King: Weatherford, Texas I grew up in a small town of 550 people named Aledo. I was the only hard rock kid in town! The year before Hendrix died. I had listened to and liked "loud" bands on the radio like Bubble Puppy and Blue Cheer, and any song that used feedback or distortion on guitars. Those were the days when AM radio would play Foxy Lady followed by a Donovan song. There was no format like today's AM and FM radio. But, it was Purple Haze, All Along The Watchtower and Foxy Lady that immediately caught my attention. I knew then I had to have a guitar! Boring. Seriously, I came from a very conservative family. Perry Como, Chet Atkins and Ray Charles records were always playing around the house. My parents were big on singing, especially at church gatherings. I still use the harmony structures I learned during those days on my songs. Yes, two siblings and they DO NOT rock. Swimming, hiking, shooting (everyone in Texas had guns in those days), driving "into town" to eat at great burger and pizza places. Yes, the mountains. Even though it was a 15 hour trip to get there, my family often vacationed in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They still fascinate me today and I visit them as often as possible. Oh yeah, and girls...
Traffic with Free opening at the Fort Worth Convention Center. Must have been 1973 or 1974. I was too young to drive so my dad took me and dropped me off at the venue. Interesting side note-my dad said the bass player from Free got locked out of the venue and stood at the main door trying to convince the ticket taker to let him in saying "I'm with the band!" I "got the bug" when a local band played at a fairgrounds in my town. I was only a kid, but I watched them set up their gear, listened to their soundcheck, watched their show later and was mesmerized. The only song I can remember was James Taylor's Steamroller and they really rocked it out. It was when I met Randee Lee somewhere around 1975 that I realized I had found the component necessary to start a serious band. Tarrant County Convention Center-Grand Funk, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Bad Company, Alice Cooper, Uriah Heep, BOA - Texas Hall University Of Texas Arlington-UFO, Trapeze, Piper, Paris, BOC - Memorial Coliseum Dallas-Queen, Aerosmith, Mott The Hoople, Rush - Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium-KISS, Judas Priest, UFO and Nektar. Black Oak Arkansas, Grand Funk Railroad, Judas Priest (1977 show opening for Bachman Turner Overdrive and Bad Company-they blew me away!!! I paid no attention to the headliners!)
Lee: The seeds of Sanctus were now born and our musical assault was planned from there. The aforementioned garage band was the catalyst for meeting almost all of the original members of Sanctus. Everyone that was brought in were very prolific on their instruments. Great players. Now I had been writing original compositions since I started on acoustic and now the perfect vehicle was born to house and cultivate those new formed ideas. Everyone was equally gifted to add to those ideas and Sanctus turned out to be a well spring of musical thought stemming from our individual and collective influences. We did some covers but we were definitely an original band. We were young and strong and so the total amassed weight of all the Marshall and Sound City heads, Marshall cabs and Leslie cabs plus the bass gear and the drummers double octaplus kit was staggering (as seen in the photo from the website). We had the look and the sound…lol. We were a band of brothers… We rehearsed in a converted garage that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was a true bandin’ those days. All for one and one for all. It was all about the music. We would write and rehearse continuously. Several times a week. So when it came time to record, in those days we tracked all together in one room at the studio laying the songs down in one take, no-punch ins and no overdubs. Recorded as we played them.
King: I met Randee at a youth gathering in Fort Worth. The only reason I spoke to him was the length of his hair. I thought to myself "any guy with hair that long must play rock guitar." So, I asked him. He said he did and we immediately began telling each other who our favorite bands and guitarists were. When we both admitted Iommi and Schenker were major influences, that did it. He knew a bass player and I knew a lead singer and my girlfriend knew a drummer. I played with a relative who drummed and his neighbor who played bass. We did anything from James Gang to John Denver. I was in a jazz band during college, and played in a bluegrass ensemble as well. I loved all the new band guys. THEY WERE FUNNY. Each one of us brought something to the project. The bass player had deep jazz fusion roots, the drummer had a great progressive rock style, the singer could hit notes in the stratosphere, Randee was an all around great guitarist, and I brought "the heavy" to our songs. The bass player, Randee, and I did most if not all the writing. We would show up with a riff, or lyrics and then jam it out.
The ones I remember were James Gang-Must Be Love, Kansas-Sparks Of The Tempest, Judas Priest-Delivering' The Gods, Thin Lizzy-Waiting For An Alibi. Loud! We took 3 stacks of Marshalls, 2 Hammond Leslies, 4 Acoustic bass cabinets and a Ludwig Octa Plus drum set with a custom lighted riser to our shows. We got strange looks from the other bands who walked in with a guitar in one hand and an amp in the other. Fun. We all had a great sense of humor. That helps when you're not making money, only spending it. The two I remember most were The Roxy (where I saw Ratt, Frank Marino, Accept) and an outdoor gig at TCU university. Cramped and claustrophobic! I think my ears still ring from those days of the drums being only a few feet away. By the mid seventies my interests turned to the riff rock coming out of Europe from Scorpions, UFO, Sabbath, Trapeze, Budgie, and the like. When I came up with the Coming Your Way riff I had all those bands in mind. The main thing is we wanted Sanctus to sound different from all the other Texas boogie rock bands. All the songs on Raddar's Transmission were written around this same time.
Lee: Marshall and Sound City heads cranked all the way up with the cabs separated from the band. Not wanting to be a club band we went for the original path hoping to get lucky with some interest from a label… That would come 40 years late. Comin’ Your Way which you discovered on YouTube got out due to a label that found us and was looking for us. A Houston based label discovered a demo recording from a studio we worked at that was engineered by the same guy who owned the garage studio we rehearsed at. This recording featured a new vocalist that came in after we parted ways with our original singer. The only demo by the way that I did not have in my possession. I had managed to hold on to all the recordings we had ever made for 40 years, but this one had slipped away from me as never knew what became of it. It is very interesting how that came about being on the tail end of another band’s recordings. It seems as though the label really liked it and pulled it off the demo to be released on a Texas sampler and began searching for us. It took them around 3 years but one day I got a cryptic message from my old band mate Razar King that we needed to talk. By this time the band had long been over and Razar and I had gone our separate ways. The bass player was the first to go back then and he was friends with the engineer so there went the rehearsal space.
King: The biggest contribution I made to writing was to play in minor keys! All American rock was major key and usually based around a three chord blues structure. I avoided that all together. Plus, I liked soloing over minor chord progressions better than over major chord progressions. First the singer went, then the bass player. The drummer held on until he saw the direction the "new songs" were taking which was more of an 80's hard rock feel, then he left, leaving only Randee and me. I had a young family and several kids and that priority pulled me away. Randee found a new group of musicians with a tour bus and gigs and he toured the nation for years. Randee kept the master 2" tapes in his home for around 40 years. He contacted me asking if I wanted to "finish" the songs so we took them to a studio that baked the oxide on the tape and then digitized the songs for us. It worked! We were blown away hearing these songs again after so many decades. They still breathed fire! So we went about the task of bringing all 17 tunes up to today's standards.
Lee: Razar and I and the drummer relocated to another warehouse facility and hooked up with a sound company in an effort to keep going under the moniker Quest. We soldiered on dropping most of our old catalogue in preference to more updated covers and newer originals. We held on for quite a while with that name with the drummer exiting next and replacing him with a series of drummers to follow. A keyboard player was soon to come in and a new vocalist with which we managed to rock numerous clubs and venues locally. Eventually another regrouping with some guys that had relocated from Wichita, Kansas lasted a short while until eventually Razar decided to move on. That was the final incarnation that began as the Sanctus gathering. That band twith only me from Sanctus toured through out Texas and I went on to play in numerous rock, blues, country and tribute bands that took me across the U.S. and Europe. Razar went on to front numerous projects as well and writing a whole other catalogue of music outside of Sanctus. A number of years later saw a 10 year reunion of the Sanctus crew once again assembling to play write and record even more music under the moniker Decade.
Lee: It would be short lived and so now fast forward to the ominous text from Razar, we agreed to meet and he proceeded to inform me about that label from Houston that had found our music and wanted to connect with us to see about releasing it. The interesting fact is this came about from another email from Europe, Sweden I think… I could be wronghere, but an acquaintance of Razar’s from the heavy music scene over there had seen something that the label was looking for this band with this song. So now we contact them and they present us with a contract to put out what would have been the original record. We read through the contract and decided that we would never see any money from it, might lose control of it and that we never wanted the original recordings released in their current state in the first place so, we turned it down. Thus began the arduous task of baking the tapes, transferring to digital and then in my studio resurrecting the old recordings in a more suitable sonic state. Transmission the 40th Anniversary release is born. Now to bring all of this to a close… Razar and I decided to take on the task of resurrecting the old Sanctus recordings. It would prove a long and involved process that would see us re-tracking poorly recorded audio bass tracks from 40 years back and rewriting most of the lyrics to fit who and where we are now. I took over the vocal duties as the former vocalist had become non responsive to our inquiries and so we moved on and then mixed and mastered in my studio Mix Mechanix.
Lee: We had some very positive reviews from online music mags all over the world and sold some copies of Transmission, the 40th anniversary of Sanctus… The name change occurred because several other bands after us over the years had used the name… There was no internet when we started so we couldn’t secure it… Rather than fight with it we decided to rebrand with a new name and logo and just move on. We have released one other cd after Transmission…Signal with one more due out very soon called Beacon. Razar and I have continued on after finally getting the early recordings to the light of day. We still have the same love of the same music as we did in the beginning. We each have our own solo projects and do our own things, but the Raddar brand is definitely us. I think if you are a lover of British and American melodic hard rock then you will enjoy what we did and what we are still doing. It hasn’t changed, it is us still making the music we like and want to hear. Great stories, rockin’ riffs and good hooks. As Johnnie Winter once said... We are still alive and well!
King: Rock never dies!!! Music is timeless. The current trend for bands to return to the 70's rock sound amazes me. That was a great time to make music and I am still influenced by sounds and songs I heard back then. Bands like Tucky Buzzard, Bang and Moxy made great music that I still like today. Besides Raddar I have 2 projects in the works. One is a heavy/power metal project called Razarking, and I hope my first release "Born In Texas' ' will be out this year. The other is a doom/power metal project called Portal and I plan to release "Subterranean" this year as well. Grinding, downtuned goodness! You can keep up with news of both on my website www.therazarking.wixsite.com/razarking, or by clicking on my picture on the Raddar site, or by emailing me at therazarking@gmail.com. I BELIEVE IN FANZINES AND ROCK MUSIC BLOGS. IT TAKES ALL OF US TO GET THE MUSIC OUT THERE.
