Danko Jones 'We Sweat Blood' album

Danko Jones is a band, a hard-rock trio fronted by a guy named Danko Jones. “I’m kind of a bigmouth – I hog the mic,” Jones says, “but everything we do is split three ways.”

Danko Jones is a Canadian band, from Toronto, not a Swedish band, though they do have a deal with Bad Taste Records – based in Lund, Sweden – which has released several of their ecstatically reviewed recordings in Europe (the band is signed to Razor & Tie in the U.S.)

Those two points having been established, the most important thing to remember about Danko Jones is what kind of band it is: “a live band,” according to drummer Damon Richardson.

This goes a long way toward explaining the title of Danko Jones’ latest album, We Sweat Blood, which Razor & Tie will release in April of 2005. “We were at the tail end of a four-month tour,” Danko recalls. “It was December and we were in Sweden. It was really, really cold. We’d been playing just about every night since the beginning of September. I’d pretty much lost my voice, but there was no question that we were gonna go out and play hard no matter what it took. I remember saying to someone, ‘Man, we are sweating blood on this tour.’ We are a hardworking band – our work ethic precedes us. Naming the album ‘We Sweat Blood’ was putting our money where our mouth is.”

Danko Jones has been on the road for nearly four years – first as a support act (for the Hives, among others), then as headliners and lately as a major festival draw – and they wouldn’t have it any other way. Dedication to live performance is the bedrock of their creative raison d’etre. Says bassist JC (John Calabrese), “We just want to write stuff that will really work for a live show.” (To see that stuff really work, check out live footage of the band playing “I Love Living In The City” in front of a stadium crowd.)

Jones recalls a seminal moment: “When I was six, I joined the KISS Army. I had begged my mom to get KISS Alive for me. On the back of the album was an address for the fan club. I sent this letter and I got a package from KISS with all this free stuff. They were superheroes to me, and, as an only child, I pretended they were my brothers. I’ve only seen them once. I got to the show late because I was working that night. Right when I walked in, they started playing ‘Deuce,’ which is the first song on KISS Alive. I almost cried.”

That kind of thrill is a deeply visceral experience, and Jones tends to wear his guts on his sweat-drenched sleeve. He is significantly more articulate than your average rock star, but when he describes the inspiration behind “Forget My Name,” which opens We Sweat Blood, language fails him and he resorts to something more akin to a growl. “When I see a girl walking down the street who I think is really hot, there are no words; there’s just a feeling, and that feeling is … [insert sound of guy getting sucker-punched by lust.] It’s not loud; it doesn’t knock you down; it’s just … [that one sound again]. It makes your heart beat a little faster. I want to put that feeling to music.”

He succeeds in this mission with not only “Forget My Name,” but bravura three-minute workouts like “Dance,” “I Want You,” “Sound Of Love,” “Hot Damn Woman,” “Love Travel” and the mind-blowing, righteously hooky “Lovercall,” in which he seems to be channeling Thin Lizzie’s Phil Lynott, Jimi Hendrix and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. (At first listen, you might want to include “Strut,” another standout off We Sweat Blood, in this list, but that one’s actually – surprisingly, profoundly – about chick power: “Get out and get ready/ To tell the world that you’ve arrived … No one will know if you’re too shy/ Nothing gets done sitting on a fence/ The hottest thing you got is confidence/ Strut, strut, turn the streets into your catwalk.”)

Jones concedes that meeting girls was somewhere in the back of his mind when he became a musician, but when asked why, during his teen years, he picked up an electric guitar, he says: “I wanted to be Eddie Van Halen.” “My parents bought me a Squire Fender for Christmas when I was 14,” he continues. “I took lessons for two months, learned how to play major chords – G, C and E – and then I quit. That was enough for me to figure out how to play Misfits and Ramones songs.”

“I was a metalhead when I was really young,” he says, thinking back on his influences. “I got into Iron Maiden and Metallica. But then it was all about punk rock, The Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Fugazi, and later, bands like Dinosaur Jr.”

He was a DJ at his college radio station (at Toronto’s York University), which prefigured his current, weekly show, “The Magical World Of Rock,” broadcast in Sweden and accessible elsewhere at www.themagicalworldofrock.com. (Jones recently wrapped a European spoken-word tour, also called “The Magical World Of Rock,” during which he told tales of Danko Jones’ life as a traveling rock band. He calls the outing – one stop found him sharing a venue with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye and “High Fidelity” author Nick Hornby – “an excuse to stay on the road.”)

And he worked a series of day jobs that would allow him to make music his first priority, including a stint as a porn shop clerk. “It was pretty crazy,” he relates. “When I got the job, all my friends were, like, ‘You got your dream job!’ The first day, this incredibly beautiful woman walked in, and I thought, wow, this is gonna be fun. Of course that was the last I saw of any normal person in there. That place turned me off to sex. But I got over it.”

He started Danko Jones in 1996 with JC, whom he’d known from the local music scene and because the bassist also had a show on the college radio station. “When we first met, we just talked about records,” JC recollects. “And that’s still all we do.” Why did he want to start a band with Danko? “He’s a really genuine person who just gets excited about music,” JC says, “and he’s a totally charismatic person who is amazing to watch onstage.”

JC picked up the bass after his brother started playing guitar. He counts Joy Division and The Clash as early favorites but says he was probably most inspired to play bass by the Italian punk band Negazione. (He spent his school years in Italy; his parents are Italian.) “There was always music in the house when I was growing up,” he says. “When we came home from school, we’d find my mom playing guitar, and my brother and I played piano when we were younger.”

In 1998 Danko Jones released a self-titled EP. It was a loud ‘n’ fast, stripped-down take on soul music with a soupcon of sleaze. The following year saw the debut of another EP, the tighter, more proficiently produced but no less funky My Love Is Bold. It was with 2002’s full-length Born A Lion (Bad Taste), however, that Danko Jones began to come into its own, revealing a more straight-ahead, blues-hued rock sound. Reviewers took note of their rampaging riffage and began mentioning them in the same breath with AC/DC and Black Sabbath-influenced alternative rock bands like Soundgarden.

That record reflected the arrival of Damon Richardson, who’d joined Danko Jones in 2000. “Damon is a great drummer,” attests JC. “And he hits the drums really, really hard.” Says Jones: “Damon was in a well-known Canadian band called Change Of Heart. He started playing with them when he was still in high school. He was known around town as this power-kid drummer. We needed someone to fill in on a tour, and Damon wasn’t playing with Change Of Heart at that point, so we just asked him. We had such a great time on the tour that we didn’t want him to leave. We were, like, oh my God, we need this person in our band.”

Says fellow Toronto native Richardson, the son of a high school music teacher and piano teacher: “It felt totally natural playing with these guys. I was getting back to a kind of music I really liked and enjoyed playing but hadn’t been able to for a while. It was an exciting coincidence that I happened to be available when they needed me.”

Jones is very proud to be playing with musicians of Calabrese and Richardson’s caliber. “I’m the guy who makes the mistakes,” he says. “They’re the guys who don’t.” Their relationship extends to a series of creative checks and balances. “We write all the songs together,” Jones notes (though he handles lyrics on his own). “Damon and JC are really good at arranging them. And sometimes I might be too into something, and I can count on them to tell me, ‘This really sucks. I know you really like it a lot; you’re married to it, but you have to get a divorce because it’s garbage.’ They’re not brutal; they’re just honest. That’s why it works.” (It’s also telling that Jones’ proceeds for his spoken word tour will be split three ways.)

This rapport was key to the making of We Sweat Blood, which was written and recorded in two months with a major tour serving as deadline. “We had to go in there and lay it down and whatever we did then was what we had to live with,” Jones informs. “But that turned out great because we love the rawness. And you can hear a certain desperation, too, because the whole thing was very fuckin’ stressful. We finished the vocals and literally the next day, we went on tour. In the middle of the tour, we took a week off to mix in Stockholm. The producer and the mixer didn’t even see the city; they just went from the hotel to the studio. They were working around the clock. I can feel this sense of tension in the record, which I like. That’s what rock should sound like.”

The producer, Matteo DeMatteo, had mixed Born A Lion. “He’s got great ears, and we trust him,” says Jones. Adds Richardson: “He’s really positive. He doesn’t tell you what to do, but he has really good ideas when you need them.” DeMatteo, a drummer and acolyte of John Bonham, kept the proceedings focused despite moments of personal discombobulation at working in the room where Led Zeppelin recorded In Through The Out Door, at the legendary Polar Studios, aka the “ABBA studio” (shuttered in May 2004 after 26 years in business).

Commenting on the album’s sound, Jones illuminates: “When we were making the record, I was listening to a lot of heavy music. And being in Europe, you’re around it all the time – it just kind of rubs off on you. I think I was feeling my metal roots, but I wouldn’t call this a metal album; it’s a very, very hard rock album.”

Released in Europe in October 2003 on Bad Taste, We Sweat Blood was hard enough for Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson to play it on his BBC 6 radio show. In fact, several cuts from the disc, among them “Living In The City,” “Dance” and “I Want You,” received regular airplay in the U.K. and throughout Europe and Australia.

Critics adopted the album as a personal cause. An NME scribe declared: “They sound mighty, like Status Quo raised on Minor Threat. And they make NME want to kidnap indie dullards and carve the name ‘Danko Jones’ in their milky white flesh. ‘Strut’ sounds like Van Halen if they weren’t poncy latex ponces, while ‘Forget My Name’ is the finest slice of macho sexual paranoia since the scene in ‘Conan The Barbarian’ where Arnie fails to seduce the foxy goblin.” The List called We Sweat Blood “a full-on bombastic assault of high times and pure, 100%-proof rock ‘n’ roll,” and Canada’s Chartattack allowed: “You can bet that Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix and Angus Young would all approve of this kind of kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll explosion.”

Now Danko Jones is bound and determined to rock America. “We did some shows in the Midwest and the Northeast with Blonde Redhead, but that’s about it,” says Jones. “With Razor & Tie behind us, we can really tour the U.S. It’s a lot of fun to play for audiences who have no idea who we are or what we sound like. It feels like your first gig; you are out to impress.” JC confirms: “We’re doing a lot more touring in 2005. We’re going to South Africa and back to Europe and then all over the U.S.”

“I’ve been completely out of my mind since we got off the last tour,” Jones confesses. “I need to get back onstage and rock out. I need to get up there and scream. I’m a quick-tempered person, so when I’m onstage, I get it all out, and at the end of the night I can be a nice guy again. It feels so good. What you’re watching when you see Danko Jones is three guys who are really fuckin’ happy to be onstage.”

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Danko Jones - We Sweat Blood