The rock music community isn’t as big as you might think. Veteran players, songwriters and artists often know one another or at least know of one another and sometimes even get to work together on exciting new musical endeavours. So, it’s little surprise to see a plethora of new bands and projects featuring rock heavyweights popping up from time to time, allowing these pals to work together.
Black Swan sees veteran vocalist/songwriter Robin McAuley [McAuley Schenker Group] join forces with Winger and Whitesnake axe master Reb Beach, alongside bassist/production maestro Jeff Pilson (Foreigner, Dio, Dokken) and current Ace Frehley drummer Matt Starr to form a new musical enterprise that is already garnering significant popular and critical praise for their powerhouse debut album, Shake The World, released on Valentine’s Day through Frontiers Music s.r.l.
“I never expected the kind of response we’re getting. It’s really come at us and the comments are so positive. What I am hearing, and Jeff and I were just talking about this, was that people didn’t expect it to be as heavy as it is. They didn’t expect it expect to sound, for a classic rock record, very fresh and very sort of in the moment. And they are all saying that they think the material is great and never heard any of us sound better,” said McAuley, a native of Ireland who has lived in the U.S. for many years.
“I mean Reb is absolutely on fire, because everybody is familiar with his Winger and Whitesnake work, but Jeff and I felt something was different about Reb. And it’s just nasty, he is tearing it up. Jeff and I have a very long history, as indeed do Reb and Jeff back to when Jeff was in Dokken. I have known Jeff since way back in the McAuley Schenker days because he played on the last MSG studio album and then he did a large part of our unplugged tour. He was also best man at my wedding, and I have been married for 27 years.
“Jeff didn’t want to play bass on this album, but Reb and I had other ideas. He just wanted to take a back seat and produce, and we had some great bass players lined up. But since the recording took place at his studio, he would lay down the bass tracks during preproduction and then I would add melody and vocals and Reb would do his parts. One day Reb just said, ‘he’s just going to call one of these bass players in and is going to show him what he’s already played anyways.’ So, we told Jeff he was playing bass. And then Matt Starr comes in over top and knocks it out of the park. After all is said and done, we ended up with this kick ass record that we’re all very, very happy with.”
From the first moment that they all got together in Pilson’s studio, McAuley knew something special was going to come from his agglomeration of talent.
“There was no conversation about ‘let’s do a song like this, let’s do a song like that.’ It was more like, ‘let’s see what we’ve got,’ and we just started churning out this amazing stuff. And Reb was on fire. We’d never worked together before, but he knew what I sounded like, but it’s not like working alongside Kip Winger for all those years where he knows what to expect – this was a completely new arrangement for him, but I think it turned out to be pretty damn good,” he said.
“It just clicked. We all know where we have come from. We are in a pretty special place in our lives and in our careers; we all know what we’re all capable of and I think we were just expecting a lot of that from each of us, without actually having to ask for it. Reb would be playing, and I would be like, yeah, I know what he’s able to do and it’s going to be great. Egos are very difficult to work with. I don’t want to be in the same room as an egomaniac; there’s no need for it. I think what’s important is that level of unspoken respect, that’s all it is. And we know each other, and we get along with each other. At times I was surprised we got anything done because we spent so much time talking about stuff that we did, way back and just telling jokes about this, that and the other until one of us says, ‘oh shit, I guess we’d better get some work done.’”
The first piece of music that came together from the sessions between Pilson, McAuley and Beach was the incendiary track, Big Disaster, which is also one of the album’s singles.
“Reb had just come in from Pittsburgh and we were running down the music, we weren’t even recording, we were just running down the backing tracks for Big Disaster. We didn’t have lead breaks and all that sort of stuff at the time. And I said, ‘this is what I got.’ So, I started singing the verses and I started singing the choruses and Reb was looking at me and went, ‘hmm.’ And I just knew what he did next was going to be fucking great,” said McAuley.
Immortal Souls is another song that exemplifies the amazing chemistry that coalesced around the members of Black Swan during the writing process.
“I remember at one point coming back to Jeff’s after they sent me another piece of music and I came into the studio and it was just Jeff and myself and I said, ‘listen dude, I am a big vampire buff. I love vampire movies. Right at the top of this song you guys sent Reb’s got this overtone that sounds like a wolf to me.’ Jeff thought I just had too much coffee, but I insisted that it sounded like a wolf howling and that song became Immortal Souls. I structured the entire lyric and melody around the idea of vampires, and it turned out to be an amazing song,” McAuley explained
Johnny Came Marching is only tangentially related to the American Civil War folk song When Johnny Came Marching Home, but has a deeply personal resonance for McCauley, who says it is as much a commentary on the brutality of war as an homage to those who serve on the front lines.
“One of my sons, Casey, was at the Borderline Grill in California when there was that massacre where they shot 12 college kids, friends of his. I was in Poland at the time and it freaked me out. I was playing with Schenker and I got the news and found out he was about 10 minutes from being there that same night. He is going to college and has a part time job, and he got called in unexpectedly for his job about 10 minutes prior to him showing up at the Borderline to meet some friends,” he said of the incident that took place in Thousand Oaks, California on Nov. 7, 2018, where a 28-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran, who had done a tour of duty in Afghanistan, sprayed the popular country bar with bullets, killing 12, including a police officer, before he took his own life.
“I ran with the idea of how the whole system really does not properly acclimate and counsel the soldiers who have been discharged. He was a veteran, but when you think of veterans, you’re thinking of an older guy maybe. But many of them are kids, out of college, into training, not sufficient enough training, and they are sent to the front lines with a gun in their hand and they often come back damaged and have very little support. The idea simply was that we have a lot of service people who come back into society not ready for it – things are not like they were when they left. That’s basically all that was. There was this terrible massacre by somebody who wasn’t in his right mind, himself a young person. The young people are just thrown into combat with so much expected of them to defend and keep our freedom, which we absolutely need, and we all say, ‘thank you to the troops,’ but I don’t think we have any idea what we’re saying when we make that statement.
“The whole episode touched me because my son could very easily have been there and unfortunately there were a lot of young men and women who were just out for a good fun evening of line dancing, totally innocent to the fact that somebody with an unsettled mind was going to come in and take their lives.”
As a native of Ireland, growing up during a time of great political and religious unrest between the Catholic Republic of Ireland and Protestant Northern Ireland, McAuley has an intimate understanding of that it’s like to be a solider in a heated, stressful and possibly violent environment.
“I was actually in the Irish National Guard through a lot of the troubles in the 1970s. I remember when we used to have to take a lot of the refugees in after they lost house and home and they would come into the south [from Northern Ireland] and we would put them into army barracks. You weren’t allowed to talk to them, and they would be screaming all kinds of abuse because they didn’t want to be there; they wanted to be home, but they didn’t have a home anymore. It was awful times. And I remember being in an armoured personnel carrier at around three or four in the morning and going right up to the border facing off from the British Army. There would be an exchange of papers between the officers, and there were always these guns pointing at you, and your guns were pointed at them. It’s 3 a.m. and it’s pouring down rain and you’re miserable and it’s the last place you want to be, but there you are,” he said, his voice going softer, with far more gravity to it than previously in the conversation.
“My father was a soldier. My uncles were soldiers, and then you put them up in a place like Northern Ireland and it changes you. I am just happy to be on the other side of the fence now and tell the tale. But Johnny Came Marching really came more from thinking about my own son, and what he was actually 10 minutes away from me possibly never seeing him again – it just hit home.”
Over his more than four decade long career, a good portion of it spent touring the globe alongside German guitar legend Michael Schenker, and various other projects, McAuley has gained the sort of wisdom and skills of observation and understanding of a good story from seeing the world.
“I always say I don’t want to get up on a soapbox, because that’s not the kind of people I am. I don’t want to express any political overtures that I think I might have, because I don’t know anything about politics. But that said, when you do travel, and when you meet so many different people of all ethnicities and races, it’s a great learning experience. It’s great to hear the history and stories of individual people because it’s tangible; you get to touch and feel and eat their cultures and see their lives and you get to hear their stories. It has to have some bearing on your life, whether you think about it on a daily basis or not. There is always that subliminal thing going on in the back of your mind. It sticks with you and it inevitably comes out in some shape or form, and on this record, I guess we were all, dare I say it, somewhat reflective as we were writing. Something would come up and you’d go, ‘okay, let’s just go down that road and see what happens,’” McAuley explained.
“We have so much opportunity to make change, a positive change. We’re in a sort of pickle right now, and it has been like that for a while. And we can either just let it go and carry on doing more of what we’re doing, which is not very pretty as far as the earth is concerned, or we try to make things a little better for God’s sake. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s not too much to ask. And as musicians we’re also here to tell stories, whether they have a big message or not. I love the story aspect of songwriting. I think a song is just that – it’s a story. It’s like a book that has a beginning, a middle and an end. I am not interested in writing about partying or spending my nights out on the Sunset Strip, I have no time for that shit. That doesn’t mean anything to me.
“The song and the story has to touch on something that is personal to me, and that’s what I can do as an artist. I don’t want anybody to take it for any more or any less than it is, it’s me being reflective. It was the same with Jeff. When the song Divided/United [the album’s last track] was written, I had been to see Bohemian Rhapsody. At around midnight not long after Jeff sends me a piece of a track and said, ‘I have just been to see Bohemian Rhapsody, I came home and sat down at the piano and this is what came out.’ And I couldn’t believe it. Talk about being on the same page. And I hit the studio early the next day and as it turned out we changed only a few little things and had quickly finished the first part of the song. But we needed an end section. So, Jeff sat with Reb and said, ‘okay I am thinking Queen here. I am thinking these Brian May guitars.’ Reb stands up and starts to play all these riffs and Jeff knew he was nailing it and started recording. And Reb didn’t know he was being recorded and said, ‘maybe I should do something like that?’ and Jeff goes, ‘yep, got it already.’ That’s how spontaneous it was. Somebody had an idea, somebody heard something from that, and voila, we were off the races. It was fantastic, amazing, just great, great spontaneous stuff.”
McAuley is adamant the Black Swan be treated as a band and not a project, saying that he has had as much fun putting together Shake The World, and is singing as good as he ever has. If it were up to him, Black Swan would be hitting the road sooner rather than later.
“We all are so busy, but we are talking about. I would love to take Black Swan live. I think it’s a great band and should be seen live. I have had promoters over in Europe and promoters I have worked with over here emailing me saying they want to work with this band, so the interest is there. If the positive feedback and comments continue to be good, it will be kind of indicative of what sort of thing we will do next. Whatever happens, I hope we can get the band out there,” he said.
For more information visit www.robinmcauley.com, or https://www.facebook.com/BlackSwanRockNRoll.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
