The Great Crusades interview
The Great Crusades
Teutons Of Fun
Picture the scene: Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip just as the burgeoning, glittery hard rock scene is shining a national spotlight on bands intent on making a case for Aqua Net stock to surge. Fresh faced 17-year-old Brian Leach, with the approval of his high-school teacher father, leaves the hearty Midwest to pursue his dreams in Tinseltown and lands a trial gig playing keyboards for none other than Mötley Crüe.
During his short stint circling the periphery of the rockers, Leach found himself at the digs of bassist Nikki Sixx (“absolutely the brains of the outfit,” Leach recalls) one early afternoon to loudly hammer out some Theatre Of Pain material.
Mid-jam, a visibly irritated, half-awake girl sporting just a T-shirt and panties storms from the bedroom screaming “Nikki, shut the fuck up!” Rattled, Leach suggests they cut the session short, but Sixx replies to the girl in kind, “Why don’t you go do something useful? Why don’t you go make us fucking breakfast or something?” The girl returns 10 minutes later and the bickering resumes.
At the second behest of Sixx to whip up said breakfast, the girl goes to the kitchen, takes out a frying pan, and smashes a dozen eggs, shells and all, into the pan, which she then chucks at Sixx and Leach. “Nikki’s got egg on him and I’ve got egg on my keyboard and there’s just egg everywhere,” Leach says. With that, Sixx abandons the argument and accompanies Leach to Hardee’s where he proceeds to hit up the young part-time keyboardist and minimally paid Tower Records employee for cash to pay for the meal.
Only much later did Leach realize Sixx’s panty-clad, egg-torpedoing girlfriend was former Runaway Lita Ford — pre-scary Ozzy duet. “It was fucking weird. She didn’t look anything like Lita Ford. No, she looked like some girl who just woke up and was really pissed,” Leach, 42, remembers with an impish giggle.
Stories of this nature roll off the tongues of Leach and his bandmate in local outfit The Great Crusades, frontman Brian Krumm, 36, as they sit side-by-side in a booth at The Continental, a dimly lit bar in Humboldt Park where the band holds practice every Tuesday night. As the fellas compete to talk over the nonstop Beatles mix blaring from the bar’s loudspeakers, tall tales of their former Champaign-based bands (Suede Chain for Krumm, Last Gentlemen for Leach) opening for the likes of Oasis and Sheryl Crow and stealing their liquor spill out with ease as each cigarette is extinguished and another round of Goose Island ale makes its way to the table.
But the anecdotes that excite them the most stem from the last decade on the road with The Great Crusades, especially the Germany chronicles, where the band enjoys a pocket of stardom.
Autograph seekers, screaming teenage girls, and gigs shared with the Scorpions — all common occurrences for the boys in Deutschland. Let’s forget for a second that particular sector of the population also rates David Hasselhoff on par with Bono; international acclaim and a blissful relationship with a German label, Glitterhouse Records, is a real accomplishment for a group whose seeds were sown at the members’ own sixth-grade graduation party. Krumm, bassist Brian Hunt, and drummer Christian Moder go way back to grammar school, with Leach coming into the picture a few decades later.
October saw the release of the band’s sixth studio album, Keep Them Entertained, which earned the distinction of “Rock Album Of The Year” by German music mag Musikexpress. And the record does indeed rock; it swings too, just like the crisp, dapper suits the boys uniformly wear to each gig (and keep relatively fresh in the olfactory department on the road by sticking dryer sheets into all the pockets).
Krumm’s grizzled (think Tom Waits after an especially long night of drinking) vocals and Modor’s charging drums sadistically propel “Sex Sells (So I’ll See You In Hell),” while a sweet harmonica hook stabilizes “Paradise (At The Petite Four),” a suspenseful account of teenage consummation. Krumm, in a slightly unnerving Nick Cave kind of way, gets tender on “Forgiven For An Hour Or Two” and cites the dinging church bells behind his house as the inspiration for the melody.
And those Germans just eat it up. By the band’s third tour of Europe, which included television appearances and solid record sales, The Great Crusades turned away from Chicago and focused their energy on gaining momentum overseas, especially since coming home hit them with a bitter reality check.
“It was really kind of the peak at that point and then we got back and we had a show at Quenchers — and I love Quenchers, I work there — but we got back and . . . it was just kind of one of those shows where it was like — and there’s my friend and there’s my other friend and here we are,” Leach says. “It was kind of a letdown, ’cause it’s really exciting on tour. You’re kind of cocooned and people really take care of you and then you get back here and it’s kinda like — now what?”
Now the goal is to reestablish a connection with Chicago audiences by playing more around town and mixing it up at the gigs by going acoustic certain nights (coined the “cabaret shows” by Moder) or like they did for two nights in December, film the shows for future DVD releases — something that turns the show into an event, according to Leach.
“I’m always looking for a way to have the same kind of success we’ve had overseas and I think Chicago’s a great city for us, even though it sometimes confounds me how many people don’t seem that interested in seeing live bands plays,” Krumm says as candlelight from the table dances across his rectangular black-rimmed glasses. “One of my hopes for The Great Crusades in the future is that we could get like a regular night at one place . . . like this is the house band for Thursday nights . . . a long standing residency. I think that would be a good way to reconnect with a fanbase or just reconnect with music lovers that like to see a good band play, ’cause I think we’re a great live band.”
Jumping right in, Leach notices the absence of the over-35-year-old set at gigs. “There are people over 35 who go see bands, but it doesn’t seem like a thing that they do as much as they do in Europe, because when you play a town in Germany, and it’s a small town for instance, everybody goes, all the way from 16-year-old kids to grandparents even,” he says.
Speaking of fans spanning the generation gap, the newest and youngest Great Crusades fan entered the world in July, not long before the group embarked on yet another European jaunt. It tugged at proud papa Krumm’s heartstrings to leave newborn Hazel and admits he spent a couple of days on tour moping like a “basket case.” Leach concurs, explaining that on about the fifth day of the tour, Krumm was “Mr. Inconsolable.” “He wouldn’t let me talk to him,” Leach jokes.
Then an epiphany occurred on stage in which Krumm turned a new leaf. “I was playing a song and I looked up and it sounds really cheesy, but the lights were a certain way . . . [I] looked around at the other guys in the band and [thought], ‘How can I be depressed? How can I be sad when I get the opportunity to do something like this?'” Krumm says.
And if the little Krumm wants to ever see what all the fuss was about, she can always pop in her dad’s self-released DVD capturing two nights in the winter of ’07. Better that than Mötley Crüe’s Lewd, Crüed & Tattooed DVD.
— Janine Schaults
