Daniel Shulman

Interview by Edmond Barker

Dan Shulman’s journeyman career as a session musician has taken him from rap to alternative rock and beyond—he cut his teeth playing bass on classic Run-D.M.C. records before becoming a long-time contributor to Garbage in the nineties. I sat down to talk with him about the newest adventure for his project Halloween Jack.

(L to R): Halloween Jack: Gilby Clark, Daniel Shulman, Steve Stevens, and Stephen Perkins.

Edmund Barker: I’m a big Garbage fan…they have a new record?

Dan Shulman: It’s gonna be coming out this year…the stuff that I heard and played on sounded really good. Definitely been a fan of their more recent records, and this one sounds good too.

EB: Onto Halloween Jack. So you’ve put out a tribute to the late Sylvain Sylvain of New York Dolls, recently passed away. Now I’ve spoken to other musicians like Will Crewdson who really took inspiration from the bands of that milieu, like T Rex and Slade, for some British examples. What do you think it is about that early glam rock age in the seventies that makes it so enduring?

DS: Certainly, for me personally, it was coming of age as a kid in the seventies, and I was a shy kid—so seeing these bands like Slade, like the Dolls, like Kiss, Bowie, and Alice Cooper expressing themselves in such an outrageous way… it was just insanely exciting for me, as a young musician. I was thinking, that’s what I wanna do, I can communicate like that. There seemed to be a danger and a freedom in it I was super attracted to.

EB: Especially the stage performance element?

DS: All of those things combined. I remember I heard Perry Farrell [of Jane’s Addiction] say one time that he likes bands that are just basically for the ears, that’s fine, but that when he does something, he wants to do it for the eyes and the ears, and I’ve always felt that way too. That if I do a rock and roll show, I want it to be entertaining in as many ways as possible.

EB: So, it’s the fun of inhabiting a character and escaping yourself.

DS: Without a doubt. Well, I think that’s true to some extent no matter what, whether you’re a glam rock musician or not, there is something artificial, inherently, about getting on this platform with lights and jumping up and down. So it just depends on how far you wanna take it. I’m sort of drawn to the darker elements, like Alice Cooper and Gene Simmons from Kiss, who sort of took the dark side of Black Sabbath and made it a little more glamorous. And the New York Dolls, as sort of bright and shiny and feminine as they were, felt dangerous to me too, and still feel dangerous to me when I listen to them.

EB: And they were sort of associated with proto-punk, right?

DS: Absolutely. I do think there’s a direct line from The Stooges to them to The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. They were a phenomenally exciting band, and I actually got to see them play when they reformed in 2005! They played at a Spin Magazine party at South by Southwest, and there were all these new bands on the bill. And to me, personally, they were way more exciting; because a lot of the new bands were just sort of dressing like they were working at the gas station, staring at their feet…and the Dolls were just glamorous, and exciting, and shiny and loud. Bummed I didn’t get to see them back in the day, but I was a bit too young to handle the Dolls back then!

EB: So in Halloween Jack, you’re paired up with Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction and Gilby Clark from Guns N’ Roses…did you ever see yourself putting together a super group, or did it just come about more organically?

DS: It was more organic; I wanted to play with musicians I liked. I’ve known those guys for a while, there was a band that started in the eighties I was in called Double D Nose, and Gilby was our sound guy before he got the GNR gig, so I’ve known him for a long time. And Steve Perkins ended up playing percussion for that band, so I’ve known him for a long time. All of us, including Eric Dover from my group, all used to play at this glam club called Club Makeup in Hollywood, which was the first Saturday of the month at El Rey Theater. It was all seventies glam stuff, with a house band and people who would sit in…there was sort of a Priscilla, Queen of the Desert over-the-top vibe, and it was super fun. I was home and not touring and I thought, if I was, what would I wanna do? I’d want to play all my favorite glam stuff from the seventies, so Perkins was the first person I called, and he was totally in. I suggested Gilby, and he was on board with that, so he was in, and then he brought in Eric Dover to sing. When we did this tribute video to the Dolls, the video “Trash” more recently, unfortunately, Eric Dover was missing in action. The fortunate side was that Gilby reached out to Steve Stevens, who was actually named by Sylvain Sylvain back in the eighties—I used to love seeing him play with Billy Idol. He came in and recorded guitar and did the video, which was super exciting. Thank God Eric Dover is still alive, he’s resurfaced, and we’re gonna do, on Valentine’s Day, a video of The Stooges’ Search and Destroy.

EB: Looking forward to it. Well, once again, I’m a big fan of your work with Garbage—so much so I’ve been trying to write a horror novel called “Only Happy When It Rains”, because that’s such a brilliant title!

DS: Love it! Well, when you get it done, send it my way, and I’ll share it with the rest of the guys.

EB: Thanks!

EB: Also on the topic of your band—I was reading there was someone you wanted in your group you couldn’t have because he was stuck in Japan at the time?

DS: That was Eric. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what happened, but the story I heard is that he was on tour with his band Sex Fist, and that they were on the bullet train and he fell asleep…everyone else got off but he didn’t. So he ended up in some remote village busking for the rice farmers and hooking up with some girl there. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what I heard, and all I know is we couldn’t get in touch with him.

EB: Sounds like a pretty exciting story if true! Accidentally becoming a hermit.

DS: Exactly. Well, you never know what to expect from Eric. He is a phenomenal singer and guitar player, and he definitely brings the rock and roll spirit. So if you hang out with him, unexpected things are gonna happen!

EB: On that note of touring stories—and going back to your history with Garbage—you’ve been touring with them on and off going back to their early days, so it sounds like you’ve seen some pretty incredible global venues like Fuji Rock Festival and Glastonbury and Australian festivals. Going off that, what was your favorite large spot in another part of the world to play?

Garbage

DS: Hmm, that’s a good question. The Mount Fuji Fest would not be my number one choice, only because we played during the day and it was like 10,000 degrees. Although it was a lot of people, like almost 100,000 people, so that was fun. And there were a lot of cool people on the bill like Beck and Elvis Costello, and it was cool seeing them. I think my favorite was…there’s two, maybe. One was, we headlined the Reading Festival in the UK. That was massive, because I’d been hearing about the Reading Festival forever, and we had played it previously, as one of the earlier acts in the day, so to be able to headline that was pretty mind-boggling, so that was incredibly fun. And then, we played a festival called Roskilde, which I wanna say was in Denmark. And I enjoyed that, in part, because that was a huge audience— like 90,000 or something. I enjoyed it because it was just such a weird bill! The Deftones opened up, then Bob Dylan played—before us somehow, I don’t know Bob Dylan plays BEFORE us instead of after, but it was Bob Dylan—and I’ve seen him a few times, sometimes he’s great and sometimes he’s not. That night he was absolutely on fire, he was so good and the bad was so good. It was amazing to get to watch that. Then we played and that was a lot of fun, and then after us was this band called DAD, which stands for Disneyland After Dark. They had maybe a minor hit in the States, but I had basically never heard of them. In Denmark, they were absolutely massive, and the crowd went completely ballistic for them. And they had kind of like a Spinal Tap-y, heavy metal vibe. The drum riser was like fifty feet tall with this giant big bass drum, and they had a huge thirty-foot skull behind them.

EB: Tongue-in-cheek?

DS: I don’t think it was tongue-in-cheek for them, it was just totally over-the-top, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don’t know if I was enjoying the music so much as the whole spectacle of it, it was incredible, and the audience loved them. So that was a weird bill, I definitely enjoyed playing that.

EB: Yeah, it is odd how you’ve got the old metal bands and throwbacks that are so much bigger in Scandinavia and Japan, than America.

DS: Without a doubt. Speaking of Australia, that was fun—there’s some stuff like Big Day Out in Australia, where it’s a festival but it’s a multi-city festival. So that’s always fun to play, because the cities are so far apart in Australia you can’t play back-to-back nights, which means you get more time off to just sorta hang out and have fun. I always did enjoy that.

EB: What’s it like, touring across Australia? You bus through the outback?

DS: That’s the thing about Australia, you can’t do it on a bus, you have to fly. So that’s why they space the shows out, you do a show in a city and hang out for a while and you fly to the next one and hang out a bit there.

(L to R): Halloween Jack: Daniel Shulman, Eric Dover, Stephen Perkins, and Gilby Clark.

EB: So then it’s more leisurely with more time for sightseeing.

DS: Definitely more time for sightseeing, and there is something that takes it out of you flying all the time…but there’s something that takes it out of you trying to sleep on a bus in the middle of the night every night too. So, it was different, but it was a nice break going to Australia and having time between shows.

EB: Both buses and planes are hard to sleep on in their own ways.

DS: Yeah, I usually didn’t even pretend I was gonna sleep on the planes. I would pretend I was gonna sleep on the bus, but both Butch Vig, drummer for Garbage, and I had pretty bad insomnia, so everyone else would be asleep, and we would be in the lounge watching Clint Eastwood movies and staying up all night.

EB: On the opposite end of the spectrum, what’s one of the more odd and unpleasant stories you have from touring the world, like losing all your luggage or committing some kind of faux pas?

DS: Well, I’d say the worst thing that happened was when we were playing in New York City, touring with The Smashing Pumpkins. Ever since I’d seen Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, I’d dreamed of playing Madison Square Garden. We were in New York City, we were supposed to play Madison Square Garden that night, and I was hanging at a friend’s house. Suddenly they come running in from the other room and go, “I just heard on the radio that one of the Pumpkins died.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I call my tour manager, and he goes, “Yeah, the keyboardist they hired to go on tour with them overdosed last night.” Him and the drummer Jimmy overdosed—thank God Jimmy survived, but unfortunately the keyboardist did not. And he said, “I dunno what’s gonna happen.” So he called me back a few hours later and said yeah, rest of the tour’s canceled, we’re all going home. And that was just incredibly shocking and disturbing, it was a huge bummer. They did end up picking up the tour later, and we did end up touring with them again later, although we didn’t play the Garden that time. And then we were going to play the Garden with Alanis Morrissette, and then she decided, because it’s really expensive to play the Garden, to play Meadowlands instead. And then finally we did get to play the Garden with U2, which was really fun. But I’d say the worst thing that happened was the keyboardist from the Pumpkins overdosing and dying. That was really shocking and a huge bummer. They ended up kicking Jimmy, the drummer, out of the band when we toured with them again—Matt Walker was playing drums, and he ended up subbing in Garbage, I played with him in Garbage for a while when Butch got sick and had to stay home. It was good to get to know him, but I was bummed for Jimmy that he had that terrible experience and wasn’t able to continue playing with the band at that time.

Daniel Shulman performing with Halloween Jack.

EB: That’s tragic. Another touring question I have is—well, first, I interviewed John Robb of The Membranes and he told me he once stayed overnight at an inn where the two owners dropped acid and got into a swordfight…

DS: *laughs*

EB: …and he had to just slink out in the morning. I was wondering, in your extensive touring with various bands, did you ever end up staying at a place where you just thought “this isn’t good, I gotta get outta here?”

DS: I would say the most colorful stories were probably before I started playing with Garbage, when I played with more indie bands. That band that I told you about that Gilby Clark used to do sound for and Steven Perkins played percussion, Double D Nose, we did a tour across America with no money. So, we would play a show, and then announce from the stage, “Can we crash at anyone’s house tonight?” If we couldn’t, we would scrape together everything we got paid for the show to get the worst motel possible, and all cram into one room without them noticing somehow. But almost every time someone would say, “Yes, you can stay at my place.” One time we played this show—I wanna say it was in Cincinnati, but I don’t really remember—and there were only two people in the audience, these two girls. And after the show, we went to them and asked if we could stay at their place, and they said, “Absolutely not, but there’s this bar around the corner, go there and ask for Joetta, and she will definitely let you stay at her place.” So, went to this bar, asked for Joetta, and sure enough she was there, and sure enough she said yes. She played in a band, I don’t remember what it was called, but they all lived in their rehearsal space, which was just a few blocks from there. So, we went to her rehearsal place, and it was basically like an all-night party, and it was incredibly dirty and gross. I think we’re lucky that we got out of there un-diseased! I remember that one of our singers tried to pick up this girl, and she was like, “Yeah, let’s go in the other room.” So she walked him to the front door—he was not quite in his right mind after partying, and didn’t realize it

(L to R): Halloween Jack: Daniel Shulman, Stephen Perkins, and Eric Dover.

was the front door—so he just walked out and then she locked him out! So he had to spend the night out on the street, and some other people tried to hook up with guys in the band; some did hook up, some didn’t want to hook up. It was definitely a pretty insane night. We ended up leaving with this small piece of artwork, which I’m not gonna say what it was, because it was phenomenally offensive and X-rated. But one of our singers insisted on having it in the van, and for the rest of the tour, the drummer always tried to hide it and get rid of it, but whatever show we were at, the singer would always find it and get it back on the van somehow.

EB: Let’s just leave it to the reader’s imagination, leave it a mystery!

DS: It’s better in your imagination, trust me.

EB: What a great note to end on. Well, Dan, been wonderful talking to you, hope our paths cross again.

DS: Thanks!