Everybody, support Wikimetal, and listen because that’s what this is about. Everybody coming together as a community and supporting all this great music.”
Eddie Trunk: Hello.
Wikimetal (Nando Machado): Hello, Eddie?
ET: Yes.
W (NM): Hello, Eddie, this is Nando and Daniel from Brazil, from Wikimetal, how are you?
ET: Hi, guys, how are you?
W (Daniel Dystyler): Very good, Eddie. This is Daniel, how are you?
ET: I’m good, thank you.
W (DD): Good. Eddie, similar to what’s been happening to us here in Brazil, for the past, let’s say, thirty years, we are really honored to have you on our show, because you grew up in love with heavy metal and really devoted a big part of your life to this type of music, so first, in the name of all the Brazilian headbangers, I’d like to thank you very much for everything you’ve done for metal, and welcome to the Wikimetal show.
ET: Well, I appreciate that, thank you, and I’m glad to be on with you guys, an I’m glad for all the fan support in Brazil, it’s really nice to know and hear from all the people there. One day I hope to come and visit, I’ve never been there, but I would love to, I know the TV show is very popular as well, so that’s great to hear. As you said, I’ve been doing this for many, many decades and it’s good to finally be able to connect at least through the TV show, I guess some people can access the radio shows in Brazil, so it’s great to be on and I appreciate you having me.
W (NM): So, starting at the beginning of your career, Eddie, I assume a bunch of things have changed from when you were a kid, that used to write a column called “Sharps & Flats” in Madison, New Jersey. But what are the things that are still the same even after 30 years have passed by?
ET: Well, you’re right, a lot of things have changed. What you just mentioned I started doing as a very young kid, when I was in high school, that was when the first thing I ever did in music was writing in the school newspaper, because I was writing about the bands that I wanted other people to know about, that I felt weren’t getting exposed. And that’s the same exact thing that is driving me today, and that has driven me for the last 30 years, because it’s still the same concept. I’m still out there trying to expose and create awareness for all these band and this music that I don’t thinks get the credit and the respect that they deserve, so that’s the one thing that I definitely think is the same. The same for me is the cause, it’s fighting for these bands and to get them exposure. But obviously a lot has changed, the way that we do that has changed. The media, you know, back when I was young if you had a CD or something, you were considered a credible artist, because you had a CD. Now, with computers, everybody can make CDs and download, so it’s kind of harder to determine what’s good and what’s not. And obviously there are so many other ways to reach people, whether through the internet, you know, through Twitter, through podcasting… And I think that’s good and bad. I think that’s good because it’s more outlets and opportunities, but it’s bad because so many people can do it now, it kind of deludes it a little bit, and you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, meaning you don’t really know… It’s kind of harder to navigate what has some impact and reach and what is really, you know, just being heard by one or two people. So it’s a whole different world out there from when I started, but I’m happy that I’m still part of it, and I think a big reason for that is I’ve always stayed true to what I believed in. And that’s still the case now.
W (DD): Great, Eddie. And how did music, and then heavy metal, enter in your life?
ET: Well, the first heavy rock band I was ever into was Kiss. As a little kid, I was thirteen years old and my first concert was Kiss, in New York City at Madison Square Garden. And that was really a big thing that changed my life: seeing Kiss and getting my first real heavy rock album, which was “Kiss Destroyer” at the time. So that’s what really started it all for me and for a really long time I was completely consumed with nothing bit Kiss, for a couple years. And then I realized I should try to, you know, explore some of the other bands out there, you know, when I was a little kid I felt that you can only like one band, I wanted to be loyal to the one band, I felt like if I liked any other bands it would be disrespectful to the one band I truly loved at the time, which was Kiss. And that’s how you think when you’re a little kid, but obviously as I grew older, I realized “well, maybe there’s some other music out there I should check out”, so I did, and then from there I got into Black Sabbath, and Aerosmith and UFO and AC/DC, a lot of other stuff of the time, and began to kind of explore and learn about all this music. And even as far back as then, and much like today, I’m still into many of those same bands. And I’ve always liked heavy metal music, and I’ve always liked hard rock music. I think they’re two very different things, but they’re somewhat connected, and I’ve always liked both. I was never someone who was afraid to say that I like Slayer and that I also liked whatever was the hard rock of the time, whether it was…
W (DD): Motley Crew.
ET: Bon Jovi or White Lion, who I worked with for a little bit, or those sort of bands too. I liked both worlds, I never had any problem saying that, even back then or now. I like mixing them all up.
W (NM): And have you ever tried to play an instrument or put up a band?
ET: When I was very young I took drum lessons for a very short time, but I got very frustrated, I didn’t have the discipline, I didn’t have the patience, I wanted to pick up the drumsticks and immediately be able to play like what I heard on my records, and when I couldn’t do that after a month or so, I quickly put it down. So outside of playing in my school band very young, I can’t play anything. It’s one of my great regrets, I wish I could, I had so many great honors, just recently Michael Schenker gave me one of his guitars. I’d love to be able to play these things, but I’m not able to play any instrument at all. And that’s kind of why I took the course I did, because when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to be a musician myself, because I didn’t have the skill or the discipline, I said “well, what’s the next best thing?”, and the next best thing was “well, maybe I can work with these musicians to help expose them”. But one day, I still always say, one day I’d still like to sit down and take some lessons, but my schedule is just too demanding right now to put the time into it.
Steve Harris, from Iron Maiden is a big UFO fan and he wrote, that every time he hears ‘Love To Love’ he gets goose bumps, his hair stands up on his arm.”
W (DD): I see. Eddie, we have a classic question on our show that we ask every single person that we interview, which is, imagine you’re listening to the radio on a rock station, or driving your car listening to your iPod in shuffle mode and all of a sudden a song starts that makes you lose your mind and you start headbanging immediately, doesn’t matter where you are you can’t refrain yourself. What song is that so we can listen to that song on our show right now?
ET: Cool, cool question. What song would do that for me? Ah, you know, one of my all time favorites thrash albums ever is Overkill’s “Taking Over”. And there’s a song on that album called “Powersurge”, that’s one of my favorites, so that would probably be the one that would do it for me.
W (NM): Eddie, talking about “That Metal Show” which by the way, season 6 has just started here in Brazil on VH1. It’s very easy to spot the great chemistry that exists between Don, Jim and yourself. How did you guys first meet and how did the idea of the show come up?
ET: Well, I’ve worked for VH1 for ten years now, here in the US. I was a host for them starting back in 2002, on the channel that the show airs here in America, which is called VH1 Classic. And I had always been a host for them, and I had interviewed a lot of different sort of artists, and was a VJ and an interviewer, and all the years I did that, I had always said to them “I would love to be able to do my own show someday”, meaning speak in my own voice, have guests that I want to have on, and do it without any sort of restriction as to what I can and can’t say. And it never really materialized, and I kept pushing and pushing for it. And then finally, around 2008, I believe it was, they had Lemmy come in for a meeting, to discuss an idea of doing some sort of heavy metal show. And it went through a lot of changes and evolutions, we tried different things, there were different ideas, there were different people attached to it… And finally they said “ok, we want to try this, but we want you to have another person out there with you, or two. We want a couple other guys with you, because we don’t want the show to be so serious.” Now, it was very important to me that the show be respectful, because we truly love all these artists, but VH1 didn’t want the show to be a very very serious interview show, they wanted it to be a little bit more loose than that. So Don and Jim were friends of mine, and they were big fans of my radio show, I’d done a metal radio show for thirty years in the New York, New Jersey area, and I still do two radio shows a week here in the US, and my whole background is in radio. Don and Jim’s background is as stand up comedians, they’re comedians, but they are also really really into rock and metal music, so they would often come and they’d listen to my show, they were fans of the radio show, they’d often come and sit in on the radio show with me, whenever they were free. And we just had a lot of fun on the radio. And when VH1 said “we need a couple other guys”, I said “well, I’ve got just the guys, because they would be perfect in terms of mixing it up a little bit, and they also, most importantly, truly love and know the music as well.” So when I brought them there, I introduced them to the network, we shot a pilot, you know, a test episode, everybody immediately saw the chemistry. But it’s funny, because people just don’t realize that story, they think that somebody just assembled this team. Somebody did assemble it, I did, because they were friends of mine that I brought into it, and we’d done radio in the past together, and what many people don’t know, as I said earlier, is that I worked for VH1 for about six years before doing “That Metal Show”. So there were some things in place already, and “That Metal Show” is the product of me finally getting the opportunity to do a show the way I always wanted to.
The guy I would most like to interview right now, who just is not doing interviews is Eddie Van Halen.”
W (DD): Wikimetal, as of now, is the number one heavy metal and hard rock podcast in Brazil, and we also have many plans for the near future in order to start doing things, and obviously, we really admire everything that you’ve done in the US and with “That Metal Show” and the other projects that you have. And one thing that we really admire on “That Metal Show” is the mixing of different worlds: you guys host on the show, very-well known heroes such as Lars, Lemmy and Mustaine, and, mix them with much more obscure artists that probably wouldn’t have the opportunity of appearing on TV. What’s the importance of this for the metal scene?
ET: Well, it’s very important, you know, again, the show here is produced, here in America, for a channel called VH1 Classic, which is a different channel than VH1, and caters mostly to classic artists and bands. Now, I know you said you’re about to see the sixth season in Brazil, here in America, we’re just about to wrap up the tenth season, so you are a little bit behind in terms of the shows that you’re seeing. And as you’ll notice, as the shows progress, things change, we have different features in the show that go way… Early on in the show Don and Jim, and sometimes myself, we were going out, we were doing these little bits out in clubs, try to be funny bits – those are all gone now, now we’re spending more time with the artists. Early on the show, it was a half hour, now it’s an hour. We’re finally starting to have some musicians perform in the show, in the new episodes – I don’t think you guys have seen those yet in Brazil, but they’re coming. So, we’ve changed and also we’ve evolved a little bit with the guests that we have, some guests are starting to repeat, we’re having guys back, because, you know, time has passed, and we have new stories to tell, new things that have happened. And there still some guests that we’re trying to get that we haven’t gotten yet, because of the schedule, or the time constrains, or they simply don’t want to do the show. You know, there’s a lot of musicians out there that don’t like to do a TV show, especially a TV show with people like us, who really really know their music and their careers. They like to do TV shows where nobody is going to kind of press them on some things, to make them just promote their latest project and leave. We don’t do that, obviously, we talk about the good and the bad and we pry ourselves on doing that. So that’s really a big key and a big part of the show, and although our guests are mostly classic, we have had some new artists on, we had Marylin Manson on, we had Corey Taylor from Slipknot on, so we’re starting to do that, and we’re also starting to have some mainstream rock people on – people you won’t immediately think of when you hear heavy metal, but who were certainly an influence, people like Paul Rogers and things like that. So we have to evolve, we have to grow, and that’s really what’s the key to the success of the show – it’s going forward, it’s to always be sure that we are trying to be a rock and metal show that appeals to a good amount of the fans. I do understand, and I do hear from fans, you know, wanting to see things like death metal on the show, or progressive metal bands, or power metal bands, or European bands. It’s just that we can’t have them right now, we do a handful of shows a year, a couple times a year we tape them, and the TV network is always striving for the most recognizable people they can get. And I understand there are a lot of other styles of metal and a lot of other artists out there, but the TV network has to approve every guest and we have a certain sort of audience that we go for, that the show works for. So that’s kind of where we look for our artists.
W (NM): If I asked you to choose a song again, Eddie, we know you’re a huge UFO fan. Can you choose a UFA song that we can play on our show right now?
ET: Sure, my all time favorite song is a UFO song, which is… I love the live version from “Strangers in the Night” called “Love to Love”, and I love this song so much because it’s about seven minutes of just perfection and it’s melodic, it’s heavy at times, it’s got brilliant singing and guitar playing, I read a lot of notes in the reissue of “Strangers in the Night” from UFO. Steve Harris, from Iron Maiden is a big UFO fan and he wrote, in the notes, that every time he hears “Love to Love” he gets goose bumps, his hair stands up on his arms, and when he wrote that, I immediately understood what he was talking about, because I still get that feeling more than 30 years after it was recorded, so “Love to Love” is my all time favorite.
W (DD): Excellent, Eddie. I get goose bumps when I hear the final part of “For Those About To Rock”, anyway… From all the metal heroes you’ve already interviewed in your life, which one was the one that you felt like a child on Christmas morning? The one you were thinking “I can’t believe I’m talking to his guy”?
ET: Actually, that just happened, and we’re just talking about UFO so that’s interesting that you bring that up, because, here in America, the brand new show that’s airing right now is an episode that we did with Michael Schenker. And, you know, I book a lot o the guests for “That Metal Show”, and the job I have behind the scenes is making sure that we get these guests, because I know them from having worked with them for so long. So that’s a big part of my job, and one of the challenges is to try to get artists on the show that don’t live in America. Because we have a very short window that we tape the shows, and it makes it hard when the artists don’t live in the US to try to get them to our studio. So just recently we had Michael Schenker on, and I’ve only interviewed Michael a couple times, but he is so much better now than he’s been in the last five years, because he’s sober, he’s healthy, he’s happy. And we have him on in the current season that people are seeing here in America, twice playing guitar and also sitting down as a guest. And in one of the episodes he gave me one of his “Flying Vs”, and that was really a pinch myself moment, it was very emotional for me, because I’m such a fan of UFO and Michael’s, I couldn’t believe that… It took me back to being a little kid with UFO posters on my walls, it took me back to all those memories, and, you know, here I am now, in my mid-forties, on television, doing my TV show and one of my heroes is here giving me his guitar, and singing, and talking to me, and thanking me for supporting his music. So it was very surreal. A lot of these guys have become friends over the years. I’ve interviewed them so many times, and some, we talk off the air. But a guy like Michael, who lives in the UK and who doesn’t get here all that much and whom I’ve only met a few times in my life, I was really very powerful for me.
W (NM): So, Eddie, is there anybody that you’ve never interviewed that you wish you had?
ET: You know, over all the years, I’ve really checked off a lot of them, to be honest. We’ve interviewed Axl Rose twice, I had him on my radio show, interviewed him on TV late last year. There’s a number of them that I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with and interview. I would say that the guy I would most like to interview right now, who just is not doing interviews is Eddie Van Halen. So I would love to interview him, we would love to have him on “That Metal Show”, but so far he’s really done only one interview for this entire new album and tour. But I did interview Eddie once very briefly about ten years ago. The one guy I have never interviewed that is still alive would probably be Jimmy Page.
W (NM): Well, we really hope you do, so we can watch it.
ET: So do I. That’s one of the things that I have to explain to people, that all of the guests that have not been on the show that most people want to see, so do we.
W (NM): Yeah, we understand that completely.
When I was a little kid I felt that you can only like one band. I felt like if I liked any other bands it would be disrespectful to the one band I truly loved at the time, which was Kiss.”
Wikimetal (Daniel Dystyler): Eddie, I’m not sure if all the Brazilian headbangers had the opportunity of listening directly from you, what do you think about the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame? Would you mind explaining why it’s so unfair, and so many great bands suffer injustice, and why they are not on?
Eddie Trunk: I wish I could give you an answer to that. I have made that a big part of my… I don’t know the word for it, but it’s been a big campaign of mine, I’ve exposed it in America in radio and TV as much as possible, people ask me why I speak so much about it, and I do it for only one reason: because it means to be exposed. I don’t think people realize how completely disrespectful it’s been to hard rock fans. I try to get to the bottom of it, but the only thing I can really tell you is that it’s not something that’s voted on by fans. The fans have no vote or voice in it at all. It is 100% owned by secret groups of old record company people and writers and musicians, who, I think, are the same sort of people that made fun of me growing up as a kid for liking these bands. They don’t take the music seriously, they don’t take the bands seriously. And I think that it’s completely wrong and disrespectful, so the reason I talk about it so much is because it’s important for people to realize who has been ignored by them. Alice Cooper only went into the Hall of Fame last year. He was eligible for 15 years and they ignored him. And he said, when he went in, that all of his friends said to him they couldn’t believe he wasn’t in already, they just assumed he was. So that’s the exact reason I’m so vocal about it, because people need to know the truth of what’s going on there. But until they bring in new people into the voting committee, unfortunately, it will never change… To think that there’s something called the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame, that Kiss, Deep Purple and Rush, to name a few, have been ignored for over a decade is pretty hard to understand. So I just keep doing it to get them upset, so they want it to change one day.
W (Nando Machado): You’re absolutely right, we support your campaign. Anyway, changing the subject, Eddie, we’ve interviewed some rock legends, some of our rock N’ roll heroes on our show, for the past year and a half, let’s say. And we always ask, when people are familiar with this person, about Ronnie James Dio. We asked Ian Gillan, we asked Sam Dunn, we asked Geoff Tate… Could you share any nice memories you had with Ronnie, because we all think he’s so representative, and he was such a special person. Do you have any memories you can share with our listeners?
ET: So, so, so many… Ronnie was a dear friend of mine, I was honored to have hosted his memorial service when he passed away in Los Angeles. Wendy asked me if I would do that and I did, and I was honored to… We just recently had a dinner in his name, that I hosted as well, and I was given an award at, for Ronnie’s charity, which was another great honor. Ronnie and I were very close, Wendy said he didn’t like doing interviews, but he loved doing them with me, and we did so many on TV and radio over the years he was alive. For me, it doesn’t even feel like he’s gone, because… I just kind of feel like he’s on a very long tour, and I think about him and miss him all the time, I was lucky enough to have him on “That Metal Show” a couple of times. And the one thing I can tell people about Ronnie James Dio is that he was a brilliant, brilliant musician, as everybody knows, and one of the greatest singers ever. But, personally, if you were lucky enough to know him, he was an even better person. He was just the nicest man, cared so much about his fans, so genuine… People would be surprised, because I would be with him somewhere and I would introduce them to Ronnie and then I would see Ronnie again a few months later, or a year later, and Ronnie would remember their names, and he would look right at them and say hello, and always had just a tremendous courtesy and never put himself above anyone. And he influenced me greatly in that area. As my career grew and more people became aware of me and who I was, and the things that I was doing through radio and TV, and I became more popular, obviously, nowhere near as popular as Ronnie James Dio, but as my career grew and more people wanted to approach me, interview me, take pictures, have me sign things – so many have come up to me and said “you’re really good at how you handle that, how you’re always so nice to people who are fans of yours.” And I tell them all the time, I learned that from the man who was the best – and that was Ronnie James Dio. That was always the thing that, outside of his music, was just incredible to me – is what a kind and wonderful man he was. And taught me a lot about that, and we had some fantastic times, one of the most memorable times was in 2006, when he rejoined with Sabbath. I went to England, and when he was going over there to record those first three new songs for the “Greatest Hits” package, we stayed at the same hotel together, we stayed up late at night having some drinks and laughing and telling stories and having dinner. And those are some memories that I will never ever ever forget, I’m so grateful that I had. But the best thing I can tell people is: as great as he was as a musician, he was an even nicer person.
W (DD): Excellent Eddie, thanks so much for sharing that. Could you choose the one song that you would like to have written? The one that you would feel most proud of having created, so we could listen to it on our show right now?
ET: Well, you already played “Love to Love”… So I couldn’t to that one again. I would say, as far as a metal song is concerned, maybe some like “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, by Iron Maiden, which is just such an epic, classic song. I think that song just paints an amazing picture… I love songs that are somewhat epic, and have different sides to them, and tell a little bit of a story, so, maybe something like “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.
It’s been great to be on Wikimetal, and talking metal with everybody. Whether it’s my show or Wikimetal, anybody that is out there doing this for the right reasons, to help these bands and expose this music: It’s what it’s all about.”
W (DD): Can you tell our listeners about your current projects besides That Metal Show, your radio shows, the book, and how the fans can try to get in touch with you?
ET: Yeah, I do two radio shows a week here in America. One is on satellite radio, which I don’t if it can be accessed outside of America, and the other show is on regular radio here in America, that’s on about 20 radio stations, and that also screens on the internet. But again, I know that… I get e-mails from people that are frustrated, because sometimes this content can’t be accessed on computers outside of the US. And I have nothing to do with that, I wish that was not the case, but I don’t control that, that has to do with laws of the internet and whatever country you’re in. But if you can access those radio shows, they’re, and I do them twice a week: on Mondays and Fridays. My website is eddietrunk.com, and I try to update that when I can, there’s an area on it called “The Trunk Report”, which is a little blog that I post from time to time, when I have the free time to do it. I wrote my first book a year ago, which is called “Eddie Trunk’s Essential Hard Rock and Heavy Metal”, and it did tremendously well here in America and in other parts of the world as well. You know, you asked me about somebody like Dio, there’s a very big part of the book about Ronnie, and it’s dedicated to him, I write in there about my experiences with Ronnie and also hosting his memorial service. So there’s a lot of personal stories and some really cool photos in the book as well, and the book has everything in it from, you know, Bon Jovi to Slayer, and that’s always been what I’ve been about, I’ve loved both of those worlds. All, and everything in between, so the book is out there, and I’m going to start the sequel on that, probably later this year, that will come out next year – part two – that will have more bands in it, and also do full chapters on the band at the back of the book – there’s about 25 bands at the end of book that I just mention briefly that I didn’t have space for. So the next book will be full chapters on those bands. And that will be coming out sometime next year, I’m just going to start working on it in the next month, or so. And the best way for people to contact me and to keep up with what’s going on would be, go to eddietrunk.com, there’s a link there you can e-mail, as well. And also Twitter. I got very active with Twitter – I’m not a good guy with computers and things like that, but Twitter has just become so easy for me, because I can do it from my phone, it’s very instant, and I can send photos out and updates, right to the second that something happens. So my name on Twitter is just @eddietrunk, and the best thing I tell anybody to do is that they follow and check that, I’m updating that many times, sometimes on the day, depending on what’s going on.
W (NM): Eddie, talking about Brazilian heavy metal, do you know any Brazilian heavy metal bands? We’re in touch with the main Brazilian heavy metal bands, we would be very happy to send you a package of the best heavy metal bands in Brazil, but what do you know about heavy metal in Brazil?
ET: Not very much, obviously I know the history with Sepultura and, you know, that band, coming from there, probably making the biggest impact here in America, but I honestly don’t know much about the scene there in Brazil. A lot of times when I do interviews with people in other parts of the world, they ask me about listening to and getting music from band from their part of the world. And I tell everybody the same thing: I’m happy to take this stuff, but it’s very hard for me, because I’m trying so hard to promote and get the word out and help the bands here in America survive, and I say that not because I have some bias just about America, but, there are so many bands here, and the shows that I do are all produced for America – this is where they’re produced and really what they’re made for, and then, obviously, they will go out at some point to other countries. I don’t have anything to do with where and if the shows air in other countries, so when I hear about the show being on in Brazil, or Venezuela, or any of these other places, I’m very happy about it, but I never know until I start hearing from fans that it’s airing there, because it’s just something that the network does. So it’s hard for me, because I have so much work to do here, on the shows that I work on and the bands that I deal with here in the US, that it’s very hard for me to find the time to listen, and even harder for me to find opportunities for those bands, because these shows are produced for America, and as I said before, the network wants the most well-known bands that they can ever get. So it’s difficult, but I’m aware of some of the stuff that people tell me about, and I know that the scene is great. I’ve heard for so long that the Brazilian fans are phenomenal metal fans, and that’s why I said, when we started talking, I hope to one day visit, because I’d love to see that for myself.
W (DD): We always ask our guest, which usually is a musician, to give some advice to a young kid that’s thinking of putting up a band or something like that. But in your case, we’d like to do something slightly different: could you kindly give us some advice since we’re also trying to wave the flag of metal as much as we can with Wikimetal?
ET: Well, I think that the best advice I can give anybody is: stay true to what you believe in. Don’t try to change… It’s always ok to take some constructive criticism, as they call it, if somebody can help and has some ideas, and, you know, be open to listening to other people and their thoughts. But, I believe that it’s important to stick to your guns and do what you believe in. When I first started in radio, as a kid, right out of high school, I was told: you don’t have the right voice for radio, you can’t do radio, the music you want to play and talk about, nobody cares about. And I never changed, I never stopped to give up, it only made me try harder. So I think that just doing what you truly believe in and love, if it’s a good quality and it’s coming from the heart, I think eventually people will respond to it, if there’s enough people that truly care about it. And I’ve stayed consistent, you know, through the 90s, when a lot of this music was not popular and being made fun of… I never changed, I did what I did and stayed true to it. As I said before, I like metal and I like hard rock. And I found, as a kid, so many times people would pretend that they didn’t like a kind of music, because they thought it would not make them look cool if they admitted it, and then behind closed doors they say how much they love these bands. And I always hated that, I think that there’s nothing wrong with liking a variety of music and you shouldn’t be ashamed to say it, it doesn’t make you any less metal if you like some hard rock bands as well. So I’ve always just preached that, from the beginning, that at the end of the day, it’s all about your opinion and sometimes people will agree, sometimes they won’t, but I think that it’s important to stay true to what you believe in and what you love, and have an open ear, and allow everybody to also have their opinions, I think that that’s important too. Many times I’ll play bands that I like that other people don’t, and I’ll play bands that I don’t like so much, but I know my audience wants to hear. I’m a big fan of Marilyn Manson. Most of my audience, to be honest with you, does not like Marilyn Manson, so my radio audience doesn’t like when he’s on, but I do, I vote for the fans, so I’ll respect their opinions and vice versa. So it’s important to have a good communication with your audience, and as honest and real as you can be. I never had a fake voice, I never had a fake name, I never tried to be something that I wasn’t, and I always steered away from being the clichés of this music. You know, people think you have to look and act and talk a certain way, and I always didn’t care about that. I think that you can express yourself however you want, but you should be just how you feel. People say to me, sometimes, when they see me for the first time: “Oh, you don’t look so much like a heavy metal guy, you don’t have those sort of qualities, your hair’s not long, you don’t have any tattoos”… That’s fine, that’s just not how I feel to project myself – that would be dishonest for me, because I never felt like that. For people that do, that’s fine, but the point is that you should be able to… There’s heavy metal fans of all sorts out there, and I think one of the things that takes this music down and marginalizes it, is people thinking they’ve got all figured out – it’s only a small amount of people that look and act a certain way that like heavy metal. And that’s not the truth, and that’s why I have always encouraged people to just be yourself and have fun, and just be loyal to what you love.
W (NM): Great Eddie. Every single show of ours, we pick a question to ask our fans, and whoever gets it right gets a small prize, sometimes a CD, a DVD, a book, or something like that. Can you choose the question that our listeners are supposed to get right?
ET: Let’s see… How about this, this is kind of medium tough: what was the name of the independent record label that put out Motley Crew’s first album “Too Fast For Love”?
W (NM): That’s a great one, thank you Eddie.
W (DD): Eddie, let me thank you so much for your time, your patience, you’ve been a great presence on our show, we are really honored to have you, because of everything that you’ve done for metal all these years, and you are really role model for us. We’re really happy to have you here, you were great. I’ll ask you to leave a final message to all the Wikimetal fans that are listening.
ET: Sure, absolutely. It’s been great to be on Wikimetal, and talking metal with everybody, and I appreciate everybody listening, I thank you guys for having me. And everybody, support Wikimetal and listen, because that’s what it’s about, everybody kind of coming together as a community and supporting all this great music, and getting the word and the music out there, the information out there… Whether it’s my show, whether it’s “That Metal show”, my radio shows, or Wikimetal, anybody that is out there doing this for the right reasons, to help these bands and expose this music: it’s what it’s all about. So thank you for having me, and I wish you guys all the luck with Wikimetal.
W (NM): Thank you so much, Eddie, once again, and please count on us in every single thing that you do, every single project you have, you can count on our support. And we ask our listeners to watch, every Tuesday night at 10pm on VH1, the best TV show in the world, which is called “That Metal Show”. Thank you so much, Eddie Trunk!
ET: Guys, thank you for having me, and if you have a link to this, send it to me, I’ll be happy to post it so people here in America can listen as well. Again, thanks for having me and if I ever get to Brazil, I will certainly look you up, I hope to come there one day.
W (DD): Excellent, thank so much, Eddie. Bye bye!
ET: Ok, bye bye!