“On the night of November 6th, 1979 Black Sabbath was at their most drug addled and explosive standing,” it reads. “They were on tour supporting their newly released Never Say Die album and had a night off in Los Angeles. After knocking back a few drinks at the infamous Rainbow Bar, they decided to check out the local rock scene at the Whiskey A-Go-Go. Arriving late, they caught the tail end of a set by The Circle Jerks. Feeling intimidated yet inspired, they rented a rehearsal space and spent the rest of the night jamming. For an unknown reason they exclusively played Thin Lizzy material and Keith Moon was sitting in. These events never took place. But if they did, the results may have sounded similar to Los Angeles’s The Shrine.” Which is to say that VeniceBeach trio The Shrine, who formed in 2008, play the kind of psychedelic, beer-drenched, riff-blasting rock’n’roll that could have existed 35 or 40 years ago, but is instead happening right now.
Josh Landau (guitar/vocals), Courtland Murphy (bass) and Jeff Murray (drums) are here to remind us that it’s fun to break stuff, it’s fun to crank the amps up to “antisocial” and it’s fun to give yourself over to the power of the riff. They’ll be in Australia for much of May including a high profile slot at this Sunday’s CherryRock015.
The CherryRock Festival almost seems custom-built for The Shrine. “Yeah – it’s going to be so rad,” Landau says. “We’ve toured a lot with Red Fang. We’ve done two European tours and an American tour with them so we’re always stoked to see those guys. We’re good buddies. We came down once to Australia in 2013 or 2014 and we played about eight shows. And we drove everywhere and we went out of our fucking minds doing overnight drive after overnight drive. But we had an awesome time. We played a last-minute gig in FitzroyPark in Melbourne, at the skate park, and we set up all our stuff on the edge of the bowl and played. The cops walked up and they said, ‘As long as this finishes in a couple of minutes this is cool.’ That never would have happened in America. In America they’d be telling you they’re going to impound the gear and all that shit.”
The band is playing in Melbourne multiple times over the course of the tour, and after each gig they’ll head off somewhere else to play some shows before coming back. “We’re zig-zagging all over,” Landau says. “We rented a private jet and we have a wolf painted on the front of it so we’re just going where we want all the time.”
Was it always a goal for The Shrine to have that kind of direct, honest vintage sound, or was it more a matter of economics? “It’s only as intentional as the music we like is, the records we listen to and the shit that inspires us, really,” says Landau. “Things are a lot more unnecessarily complicated these days in terms of the way records sound. I mean sure, there were plenty of bad records being made throughout time, but we always try to capture the band as we play live. We want it to sound like Robin Trower sitting on Lemmy’s face.
“We met Lemmy once at a strip club in Hollywood and he was so awesome and friendly,” Landau boasts. “He talked to us for a while. I talked to him about the MC5 for a minute. I told him I saw Wayne Kramer play an acoustic show and that it was awesome, and Lemmy said ‘Of course it was’.”
Although Landau appreciates fine guitar gear, he relishes the challenge of unexpected borrowed gear on the road, from whoever can lend it to them. “Well, if we’re flying out we just borrow whatever is there, whatever we can borrow from people,” he says. “We’re so grateful to people letting us use their gear, coughing up their shit – you know how that can be. But we’re going in kind of blind, we don’t know what gear we’ll be using at any of the [Australian] shows until we show up, apart from our guitars and pedals. I have a JEN wah-wah. It belonged to my dad. It’s his old wah-wah and he doesn’t use it and I’m too stubborn to give it up. I keep getting new pots for it year after year because it sounds too awesome.”
Landau started playing guitar at 14-years old after somebody gave him a Black Flag CD and a Misfits CD. “I didn’t listen to anything except punk and hardcore all through high school,” he says. “Eventually I started listening to what those bands were listening to. I found out Black Flag were listening to Hendrix and Mahavishnu Orchestra and King Crimson, so I checked that stuff out, and KISS, and I got way deep into Bob Dylan, Radio Birdman – probably my favourite Australian band – then Slayer and Metallica. We try and just funnel all that down the toilet and have the shit that comes out the other end be our sound.”
BY PETER HODGSON
