This conversation with Brian Kirsch (a.k.a. Sterling) has been a very interesting one to say the least. Not only did we talk about his band Veil of Ashes, but we talked about life, faith, and the journey that he has been on recently. One of the things I enjoy so much with this zine is not just being able to talk to my favorite artists, but to also talk about their lives and where they are now. Following someone through their music is a very personal thing in a sense, sometimes it means something different to everyone, but these are the ideas that we listen to and the ones that I have grown up with.
Veil of Ashes was in the ‘alternative’ Christian scene early on. They released a couple of demos on Realty Records, the first was Prayers For The World, and the second was Negro (pronounced nay-gro, means ‘black’ in Spanish, referring to a color). Their first CD was Pain and that was released on Graceland Records, followed by The Young And Reckless The Regression of Veil of Ashes on Michael Knott’s Blonde Vinyl label, and as their final offering there was Mr. Sunshine released on Eden Records. Veil of Ashes had a big following in the Bay Area and played some shows with some big named acts, but as fate would have it, their career was ended too soon.
We interviewed lead singer Sean Doty in our previous issue, and here I wanted to do something a little different, interview Brian who was the bassist and one of the primary songwriters. Brian and I have spoken on a couple of occasions and it has been fun to talk about the ‘glory days’ of the scene where stuff was new and fresh, but it has been just as interesting to hear him talk about his personal life and what he has been going through personally. I think it is safe to say that Brian has endured a large amount of loss and hurt, and the difficult trials have led to him questioning his faith and direction. When Brian and I talk the conversation seems easy and I enjoy listening. What I decided to do was take this interview and break it down into three parts. This will be the first installment, and I hope that you, the reader, will find the story interesting as well.
If you never heard Veil of Ashes you can check out their Facebook page and click on the music tab where they have MP3’s from all their major releases up and available for your listening pleasure. Stop by their page, drop them a line and say hello… for now, enjoy this first part interview with Brian Kirsch!
How was the songwriting process in Veil?
Well, Sean wrote all the lyrics of course. Me and Sean were pretty much like Lennon & McCartney for the most part, we would work on stuff and then once we got into practice I would write everything on my bass and Sean would write on guitar. Whatever I would write I would pretty much have everything worked out like the chord progressions, where the verse was, where the chorus was and where the bridge was. When I was in high school, I took two years of college level music theory, so that helped a great deal.
You and Sean were founding members of the band, correct?
Yeah, me and Sean were the only two original members for the entire seven years the band was together.
How did you and Sean get hooked up?
Well, you interviewed Battz in the Belfry right? That’s Nelson Demarco’s band, and Nelson is a mutual friend of ours. Nelson played keyboards in this band at this church that I was going to at the time. It was one of those mega churches, and I was kind of the weird guy at church because I was going through the college careers group and I wasn’t in college, but I was in that age group. I was into a lot of music that most people weren’t into at the time like The Alarm, The Damned, U2 and stuff like that. So Nelson thought I needed to meet these guys and he introduced me to Sean. We hung out a little bit and tried to give it a go. Originally it was just Sean and Phil, and they were doing this kind of keyboard based band because Sean is more of a keyboard or piano trained artist. Me joining the band really changed the direction of the band musically. You ever heard Depeche Mode’s first album, the one they call the ‘happy album’? They were kind of doing something in that direction and I came in and pretty much darkened it up musically.
I know Pain was the first major release and prior to that what was there?
Prayers for the World and Negro. Prayers for the World was the first one we did, it was a little 4 song e.p., after that we did Negro. The way we did stuff at that time was that we kind of divided stuff up, me and Sean pretty much ran the business of the band. Sean took care of getting the shows and dealing with all that type stuff until we got our road manager, and I was pretty much the visual representation of the band with the flyers, album cover and stuff like that.
I was very heavily into 4AD artists at the time like Wolfgang Press, Cocteau Twins and Throwing Muses and they were on a label out of England called Creation Records. My art direction was visually geared in the same direction as those artists.
One thing I do want to say about Veil’s Pain album though. There is a website that is kind of dedicated to Ed McTaggert… Ed McTaggert had nothing to do with the art direction of the Pain album. It was all my idea, I sent them all the mock ups for that album. A friend of ours, Debbie Smith, she did all the artwork for the Negro tape and for our first t-shirt which was the cubistic rendering of the crucifixion, and she did all the mock ups for the Pain album. All that stuff, basically everything that was visually representative of Veil of Ashes was by my art direction. Ed McTaggert’s a nice guy but I really want people to know the truth because when we got the first CD back I was like, “Oh man…okay.”
Why did you guys split up?
Like Sean alluded to, pretty much everybody was getting married and having kids. Sean had gotten married, Mike Jackson who was the drummer at the time was getting married, Rich Medina who was the keyboardist was leaning in that direction and we were all pretty split up all over the bay area as well. We faithfully practiced 3 or 4 times a week, but at this point people were having kids and it was getting harder to get together.
There was a fair amount of disillusionment as well. It’s hard to do stuff when people thought we were basically evil ya know? I look back on it and I think a lot of it was due to our lyrical content, but nothing that I could see was really that controversial. Basically we were just writing about the subjects in Christendom that nobody really wanted to talk about.
As far as radio play, you guys got good radio play as well, but when “Queen for a Day” came out that kind of derailed it?
Yeah, that killed it. That was the nail in the coffin. I don’t know, I think our biggest mistake sometimes was not delineating who we really were. I’m very proud of the albums and what we did musically, but I don’t think we should have ever signed to a Christian label. It’s very, very frustrating… when we put out Prayers for the World and Negro there was a magazine called Option magazine, and it pretty much covered all genres of music and was more indie oriented. They used to have ads in the back of the magazine where you would send them $25 and they would send you their database of 500 college radio stations throughout the US and Canada. That really helped us get a hold of some of our biggest pushes. I sent everything we had out to some of these radio stations and we were actually getting charted at #1 on a few college stations out in the Midwest. So when we got signed I told those guys at Frontline, this is what we’ve been doing, this is how we’ve been marketing ourselves and this is what you should do, but of course they didn’t listen to a word we had to say.
Well, you guys were a great band and you put out some great music don’t you think?
Musically there were some great moments. “Corpse” was great, “The Hunger” is probably one of the best things I ever wrote, but it just wasn’t really dark enough for me. My biggest complaint with CCM music at that time was all these bands had this attitude of, “Oh you like that band, well we’ll be the Christian version of them for you.” I mean, what a bunch of crap. I always loved Daniel Amos, The 77’s, Undercover, Lifesavers, Breakfast With Amy… those guys were in bands and they were great musicians, they weren’t trying to copy anybody or any sound in the regular market.
What were some of the more memorable shows that you played?
Playing with The Call back to back. We did a series of concerts for California Concerts and got to the point where we pretty much got first choice of all the big alternative acts that were coming through the Bay Area, and we played the first night with The Call in San Francisco, the second night was in Oakland at The Omni. The show with The Psychedelic Furs was a great show, we pre-sold 500 tickets for that show. You really find out how petty people are though because Richard Butler didn’t want to have a local band opening for them, so at the sound check it was like two groups camped out at two separate tables with Butler just staring us down.
What did you do after Veil, didn’t you play in some other bands?
After Veil I stayed in the Bay Area for about a year then came back home to Vegas around 1994. The music scene was off the hook around here from about 1994 until 2000, everyone thought it was going to be the next Seattle. By this time I was out of the CCM community and I was stage managing a band called “Acoustic Asylum” and I was playing in a goth band called “Rain”. All the Goths around here got tired of being ignored so we all formed a co-op of artists, musicians and poets in order to play shows and productions and that worked really well. After that I was playing in a band called “They”, we just did a two piece thing with a Roland 808 and a bass guitar. It was like a ‘rock-tronica’ act, just bass guitar and electronics. We got signed to the Orange Pill record label but that didn’t last long, apparently I was too wild and too hard to handle. (laughter) The last thing I did musically was about 10 years ago with Dave Keuning the guitar player from The Killers. We were doing this 3 piece thing with this French-Italian chick who was completely nuts, but that didn’t last very long and it was the last thing that I did musically.
Are Veil talking at all about possibly getting back in the studio and playing again?
Well, there’s always the talk. We got back together back in March of this year and did some work in Masaki’s studio, but I can’t talk about that right now, that’s all still under wraps. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that people thought disappeared over time… I’ve got the last 3 demos we recorded when we were looking for a deal after Mr. Sunshine and I’ve been talking to Sean about that. I’ve got a recording of Veil at Cornerstone 1988 mostly on tape, it’s a bit grainy, it’s like a bootleg. I also have some remixes of different songs that we did off the Mr. Sunshine album. I would really love to get the three demo songs out to people ya know, it’s like when we broke up as a band we had really just hit a stride in our writing. Really and honestly I am a bit surprised that there is an appetite for Veil of Ashes, I mean people hated us… we weren’t a band that people were mediocre about, they either loved us or hated us.
What are you in to musically these days? I know you don’t play anymore but do you still listen to music?
I do, but not as voraciously as I did when I was younger. Bauhaus put out a new album a couple of years ago that was really good… um, Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees put out her first real solo album a couple of years ago also and I really liked that. Who else? The Damned put out a new album and they’re still recording and touring. I love The Verve too and got to see them play awhile back, there was much weeping involved… they are just amazing. For the most part though I find new music these days to be pretty boring, everybody sounds like everybody else. It seems like we’re back in the attitude of the mid 70’s as far as corporate music crap, and that was what was really cool about Veil back in the day… it was the whole DIY attitude. There were the independent labels like Frontier Records and Homestead that were putting out great acts like Minutemen and Mission of Burma, Husker Du and stuff like that. It seems like everything got swallowed up into the major labels. I’ve got some friends that are in a band called Devilcar and they’re freaking amazing, they’re kind of like Elvis Costello meets The Jam meets Cheap Trick. I’ll send you a CD if you want to check them out, but they are secular.
That’s no problem, I love hearing new music and I listen to just as much secular as I do Christian music.
By the way, I haven’t stepped inside a church since 1992.
Really? Is that due to anything that you saw in the industry, or how did that happen?
Well, it’s a lot of stuff really. I’m in a weird place right now, and I’m what I would consider an agnostic at this point. I just have too many questions right now about a lot of things right now. Sean and I were talking about this while we were recording and I have questions about basic issues like eternal security and eternal salvation and things like that. I basically have two ideas, and one is that Jesus said “Because you’re neither hot nor cold I will spew you out of My mouth”, and I’ve always had this mentality of I’m either going to serve Him or I’m not, I’m not going to do anything wishy washy. It’s an either or situation as far as I’m concerned and it’s always been that way for me. The other thing is that God is very set in who He is and I’m not worried about my salvation. You know, if He’s going to take care of us He’s going to take care of us and He doesn’t retract His gifts.
Well, people change and life is a journey that we’re all on…
Yeah, I’ve just been going through allot of crap the last couple of years. In October it will be two years that I lost my job. I’m a compounding technician at a compounding pharmacy, I make peoples intravenous medication whether it’s antibiotics, pain therapy or chemo therapy. I actually want to go back to school and get my doctorate and become a full blown pharmacist.
So did you lose your job due to the downturn in the economy?
No, one of the pharmacists that I worked with was my girlfriend, and she killed herself. She more or less ate a bullet and then I spent the next month or so just drinking myself into the gutter. During that time I smoked some pot and when I came back to work they drug tested me and fired me when the test came back positive… I thought, “Man, really?”, but they are a big corporate company and there’s not much flexibility in companies like that.
Man that’s rough, I’m sorry to hear about that.
Yeah, well at least now I can talk about it…
It’s kind of adding insult to injury to lose the job on top of everything else.
Well the worst part was that it happened right as the economy was taking a dive and I’ve been turning out applications to hospitals and some health care facilities but the frustrating thing is that you can’t just walk in somewhere and talk to someone because everything is online now. So you hope someone got your application and looked at it, but it’s like burning a virtual piece of paper and throwing it up in the air. What can you do….?
That my friends ends part one of the dialogue. We will have at least two more parts to finish this interview up. I think it continues to get better and better, we’ll talk more with Brian in the next issue but in the meantime check out the Veil of Ashes face book page, listen to some classic music and join us when we return.
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