Touring behind new album Too Mean to Die, Accept will perform Tuesday, Oct. 4 with Narcotic Wasteland opening. SanAntonio SATX SanAntonioTX ThingsToDoInSanAntonio SanAntonioMusic TexasMusic HeavyMetal LiveMusic accepttheband
Accept's current lineup features three guitarists, including Wolf Hoffmann, the band's only original member.
None whatsoever. I mean, we just had a bit of fun with it and thought, “It's a bit extreme; let's go crazy.” And basically, it was — I wouldn't say a joke — but it was definitely in the spirit of,"Hey, we don't care. Let's have a bit of fun with it, and let's just see where it goes.
You want it to sound totally familiar and I want it to sound like a song I could have written back in the '80s, but at the same time, I want it to sound fresh and exciting and up to date. So, yeah, it's definitely a fine line, but it's fun. That's part of the fun of making an album. You want to challenge yourself. At the same time, you want to sound like you.
It was different for every member, but for me, I was done with the music business in the late ’90s, because Accept had a few years where we made some albums that didn't go so well. And we were a little bit lost, stylistically, in the ’90s — like a lot of other bands from the ’80s era. We were struggling to fit in with all the grunge times and new age bands. Anyhow, we made some albums that didn't go so well, and the band finally said,"OK, we're done.
So we did, and he walked in. We didn't think much of it. We thought we're going to have an hour of fun and that was it. Then it turns out he had actually covered some of the songs way early, a couple of the tunes, so he was definitely familiar with Accept. We jammed on “Flash Rockin' Man” and a couple of other songs that I can't remember, probably “Fast as a Shark” too.
I often thought about that actually: why is that that American bands sound a little different, or a lot different, actually? I mean, speaking for us, I can tell you that we came from a part of Germany that was heavily industrialized, and it wasn't a very pretty part of Germany. There was nothing much to do, so for us, it was very much like maybe for Black Sabbath coming out of Birmingham or Judas Priest coming out of whatever steel town they came from, and we used it as an escape almost.