The Return Of Helios Creed
By: Jacob Pierce
SantaCruz.com
October 29, 2013
Helios Creed offers
to serve me a hot cup of instant coffee at 4pm as I sit on the edge of
the guitarist’s bed in his smoky studio apartment on Beach Hill. But
Creed, who just rolled out of bed and hasn’t opened up his eyes all the
way yet, won’t drink any. He prefers to wake up by dragging on
cigarettes and gave up on coffee years ago, having guzzled a dozen cups
a day through the 1970s and ’80s. “It burned out my pancreas. I drank
too much,” he says. “That’s who I am. I overdo everything.”
Creed, lead guitarist
for the legendary San Francisco underground rock band Chrome—a huge
influence on bands like the Butthole Surfers, Prong and MGMT—doesn’t
know how to take things at half-speed. He gave up alcohol years ago too
after abusing it (although he says he still smokes cigarettes and
marijuana and uses psychedelic drugs on occasion.) It’s that same
obsessive, addictive nature that gives the musician, who is about to
release an album and is working on another, the meticulous attention to
detail he displays on each ridiculously complex song.
Creed plays me
“Prophecy,” a song for an upcoming, yet-untitled Chrome album the band
might also title Prophecy,after the song. The song starts quietly, and
climbs steadily in pitch and volume as a man chatters in the
background. Suddenly, Creed’s baritone voice comes in—his lyrics mostly
indecipherable, in trademark Chrome style. In certain sections,
instrumentation roars in reverse from Creed playing the tapes of the
band backwards for the mix, and the song transitions easily from one
blaring section to the next.
Chrome’s musical
style has been called “industrial music” or, perhaps more accurately,
“acid-punk.” The singer got inspiration for his sound from a Black
Sabbath concert he attended on mescaline and a couple hits of Orange
Sunshine LSD when he was 17 years old.
Creed stresses that
he didn’t invite me here just so he could offer me coffee and talk
about songs. A fascinated stargazer—there’s a reason his Chrome and
solo albums have names like 3rd from the Sun and Busting Through the
Van Allen Belt—he wants to know why NASA hasn’t been more forthcoming
about its findings with the SOHO telescope, which launched in 1995 to
study the sun. Government officials, Creed insists, know frightening
things about the universe. They won’t tell us out of fear we might
“freak out.”
“It’s good that I’m
telling you this because any interview that I do from now on, I’m going
to do this—reveal the bullshit that’s going on as much as I can,” Creed
says.
Creed first joined
the band Chrome in 1976 after an invitation from drummer Damon Edge.
Creed and Edge became inseparable collaborators in San Francisco,
working on albums like Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves,
but the band fizzled into hiatus when Edge left for Paris in 1983 and
changed forever when the drummer died in 1995.
The new Chrome album,
Half Machine from the Sun, is a release of never-heard material
leftover from the 1970s and ’80s that Creed and current bassist Jay
Tausig mixed. It will be available at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz
and on Amazon.com. Creed and Clark (who lives in Los Angeles) hope to
release the next Chrome album in February.
On Half Machine from
the Sun, old Chrome fans can expect Creed’s metal technique fused with
his psychedelic vision, and Edge’s jazzy syncopated drumming style. But
they should not expect Creed to break down his complex songs into
boring music theory or anything clinical like that, or even discuss
what’s happening in each song.
“We like to keep it
as a feel,” Creed says. “Damon and I talked about it. He goes, ‘You
know what it is? Rock & roll is this animal thing—the best rock
isn’t thought about.’ People lose the fact that rock and roll is an
animal.”
Every time Creed adds
a new band member, he makes it clear they’re not going to sit down and
talk about the “direction” of the band.
“We’re just going to
do it,” he says. “If it sounds great, we’ll keep it. If it sucks, it’s
out the window. That’s it. That’s the school of Chrome learning. It’s
not sitting around and analyzing what you’re doing ’til it has no life
left in it.”
Images appearing in this article:
