After the show I got their names and contact information and after a few failed attempts (all around) we finally got together on July 18 of 2005. I was instructed to meet them at Acapulco (excellent product placement that) on Sunset at 7-ish. We’d have a few drinks and do the interview in the bar. What they didn’t tell me was that it was a Karaoke bar and the caterwauling that ensued shortly after our arrival did not make for a clean tape. So we fortified ourselves with some hooch and a plate of Mexican munchies (generously supplied by my host Lenny J) and then sidled out the back to a quieter location. Settling down to business, I led off the interview with the following question.

Pauly, winking at me!

Queen D, she of the melodic Swiss accent

We kept passing the mic back and forth. It’s a very long fucking story. These kids insisted on having an interview out of the house so I had to bring this portable rig shit instead of setting up my fancy dandy little thing at the house. And I guess they don’t like my cooking. Pauly demurred. “How incredibly rock ‘n roll is it though, to have an interview in a parking lot behind Acapulco restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood?” Well. I guess they were right. Okay, let’s do fucking rock ‘n roll! I love drunk musicians. Don’t you? Moving on by moving back, I asked for a history of the band. Olly and Pauly are relatively new members and the band’s name is new as well. Queen D allowed as how she’d like to fill us in on that.

Lenny J (left) attempts to shake off a
margarita haze. That's Olly on the right.

There’s a pause as Pauly eyes first D, then Olly. “Drums,” he mentions casually. D laughs out loud and says, “Okay! Too many margaritas!” Lenny laughs and takes the mic away. “Ronny (Mikkelsen) was our bass player from the beginning of Elegantly Wasted and he wanted to pursue a radio career. He’s an engineer, and rather than playing he was getting into the engineering. He’s producing a radio show for Tom Morello (guitar, Audioslave) and Serg Tankian (vox, System of a Down) called Axis of Justice. So he wanted that and said, ‘Okay. I gotta focus on my radio career. This is what I wanna do.’ And actually we met Olly earlier in 2001.”

Olly pensively considers young girlfriends, old grandmothers and when the hell it was that Pauly started playing bass.

Pauly’s been laughing all through this story and adds, “You are that guy! Where the hell did you go?” So now I have to ask Olly, “Where did you go? And why?” Olly’s sweet, young face betrays several emotions when I ask him this. He takes the mic slowly and considers his answer very carefully. Seeming to have reached a decision, he smiles and says, “Girl problems.” Laughing, Pauly says, “I thought it was grandmother problems.” Olly chuckles and then settles down to tell a story. “No. That was the official story. I had a girl in Sweden that I was dating for four years, and she broke up with me.

Lenny J, live at The Gig on Melrose

Lenny smiles and gestures to me for the mic—I hand it to him and he relates, “Yeah. He’s really into metal and he’s a fabulous drummer.” I wanted to know José’s full name for the record. “José Clark. He’s a great drummer, but very on the heavy side so he went to play with the guitar player Ramon Ortiz from the band Puya. He has a side project, a band called Ankla. José wanted to stay in our band but he couldn’t commit to two bands. Much as he wanted to, we wanted to tour and he’s wanting to tour with them, so, yeah. He had to commit to them. And we found Pauly actually, through an ad. Olly found Pauly through an ad.”

Pauly doing what he does best

Olly takes the mic and tells me how this went down. “Yeah, the bass player in my roommate’s band met Pauly in the elevator when Paul was moving in. And he was like, ‘Dude, you got long hair, you playing drums?’ kind of thing. I don’t know what really they said to each other but, my roommate’s bass player knew that we were looking for a drummer and they hooked up and got to be friends in the elevator. Kevin, the bass player, told me about Paul and, yeah. We met at Hollywood Boulevard and had a sausage somewhere.” Pauly laughs at this and reminds him, “Scooby’s, dude!” Olly laughs, “Scooby’s, yeah! Met at Scooby’s and fell in love. Wait! No! Take that out! No!”

I disagree. “No. Wait a minute. See? This is how rumors start. We had quite a discussion inside on the gay member of the band.” They’re all laughing now and Pauly says, “That’s Olly! He said so, right there! Had a sausage and fell in love at Scooby’s.” So I probe, “You had a sausage together?” Lenny joins the melee, “Well Olly, remember before we approved Pauly, we had to go drink with him? Because we had to figure out if he was a cool person to hang out with before we actually even auditioned him—on drums?”  Pauly adds, “And on top of it, they made me go to the doctor!” Olly (who, incidentally, is not gay) remembers, “Before we even did the rock ‘n roll stuff, we went walkin’ in the park.” Lenny laughs, “Yeah. We had to give him a little exercise because he had a little beer gut. So, that got rid of that quick. But that’s pretty rock ‘n roll too. So we had to check out the stuff that, you know—you do as a band, outside of playing music. Go drinking, hang out and all that stuff, and that worked out so...”

“All right, so we’ll dispense with your sausage. How long had you been in town before you met this lot. Moving into the building? Were you moving from Cleveland, Ohio? Did you just move into town and join the band? This I want to hear.” Pauly wipes the tears from his eyes and takes a breath. “Okay. Well, it’s a little longer than that. When I first moved in I just started whoring myself out, you know. I’m a drummer for hire, put out an ad, just like everyone else does. And I met Kevin in the elevator and I was tellin’ him and he was tellin’ me his guitar player’s roommate was lookin’ for a drummer. So I gave him my ad, what I was all about, met Olly, did the whole sausage thing that Olly likes to talk about. At Scooby’s of Hollywood. And it was—the whole courtship probably took a few months. You know, getting’ to know each other, hangin’ out, I went and played with them for a little bit. They saw what I could do, then saw how much I could drink—saw if I could actually walk through the whole damned park.”

D bristles and says, “We’re all US here!” To which I reply, “But where were your born love?” She laughs and takes the mic. “I was born in Switzerland, but I’ve been here for 10 years now.” Might as well get the low down on the rest so I asked, “And where are you lot from please? One at a time, Olly?”

Olly, sans black Hamer Thunderbird

Queen D, "We're all US here!"

While I sat there wondering what Rod was doing for hair these days, Pauly lost complete control and, pointing to Lenny, he yelled, “It’s the evolution of Rod Stewart, right there!” Lenny yells back, “No It’s the evolution of The Mod’s haircut! Anyway! I was born in Gothenburg, Sweden which is the second largest city in Sweden and it’s probably produced the most number of rock bands coming out of Sweden, internationally, or outside of Sweden anyway. And actually, a lot of them are pretty much death metal. There’s a lot of death metal bands from my home town. Stockholm is the biggest city and Stockholm has a lot of alternative and pop music and stuff like that. Abba’s from Stockholm. And Gothenburg has the rock scene. Division of Laura Lee is pretty much like a Gothenburg band because they’re from outside of there. There’s bands like In Flames, The Haunted—but yeah, there’s a lot of bands from Gothenburg. It’s a big music city and it’s always been. It had the big glam rock scene and it had the metal scene and we’re kinda part of both. I was more part of the rock scene. So that’s my home town.” Olly interjects here, “We’ve got a funny story about that though. Like when Lenny grew up, he was in a band called The Boulevard.” Lenny agrees, “Yeah. It’s a very funny story.” Olly went on, “And when I grew up I was in a band called Blitzkrieg Boulevard but we never met each other until we met here in Hollywood. And Lenny was saying, when he was a kid, his bass player was playing this black Thunderbird, a Hamer one which is kinda really rare for where we’re from. And I was like, “I have a black Hamer Thunderbird. I bought it from this guy called Thomas in Gothenburg.”

 Preparing to wrap this night up, I ask, “Okay kiddies, Greetings From A Strange Place. Where do I find the album?” Lenny answers, “Well okay. When we did Rock N’ Roll Soul, we had an EP called Amped which is pretty much out of print. We made up 500 of them, sold a bunch of them and the other ones we gave out for promotion purposes. The album—we made up a thousand of them and you can get it at CD Baby or you can get it at Tower Records which is affiliated with CD Baby, and you can also get it from the Elegantly Wasted website. If you go to My Space—everybody’s on My Space—there’s a link to our website so you can get it from there. And you can come to our shows and buy it too! We’re going on tour in Europe so hopefully we’ll sell most of our albums when we do that in September. But we’re also looking for a distribution deal or a record deal for the album so we can release it worldwide.” Okay, time to talk tour. Where in Europe were they going? “We’re going to Switzerland in September. We’re starting there and we’re going to Germany and right now we’re booking gigs in France and in Italy, so we’ll be there as well. And next time around we’ll probably try to extend it to go to Sweden and England and maybe Holland and Belgium. We really wanna focus on Germany and northern Italy because they have really good rock markets and we actually have a lot of My Space friends already in Germany, Italy and Spain just from being on the internet.”

Now this raises a very real consideration. I direct my query to Lenny, “Forgive me darling, but you are not a kid anymore, and you’ve been around awhile. You know the business. Tell me, how is something like the internet and My Space for a band that’s trying to make it. Is it detrimental? Is it marvelous for you? Is it getting you worldwide attention so that when you do tour you know you’ve got a fan base already and they’re out there waiting for you? How is the internet affecting the music business?”

Lenny J and his famous haircut

Lenny tries to hand the mic to Olly but is refused. “You don’t wanna talk about the internet? Olly actually set up our My Space page. I think the internet is really good. You can do a lot of promotion on the internet, and I think for bands that are from one region of the world, to get to another country—the internet is extremely valuable. You can do promotion to someone in Australia while you’re living in Hollywood. Anywhere. My Space actually is incredibly important and it’s only been around for what? A year? A year and a half? And last year when Olly put up the page, there were about 4 million people on My Space. Today, I just looked there and there’re 21, 989,000 now. So, figure you can go to anybody’s friends on your friends list, add them to your band and you get a hit on your website. My Space is just incredible. We got a gig in Germany through a guy there whom we’ve never even talked to. He just e-mailed us and said, ‘I like your band. I like your CD. Hit me up for a show.’ He and his girlfriend have a bar and they booked us.”

Okay. “You’re booking your gigs through My Space—in Germany for crying out loud. Why do you need the labels?” Lenny looks at the others, but they all defer to him so once again he takes the mic. “I think the only thing you need the label for is being one big bank. You know? The good thing about record labels—even though they’re kind of losing out because a lot of bands are doing their own thing and not needing a label—is that, being in Hollywood, the labels are still really powerful and they have a lot of money. And if they wanna make you big, they can make you big in five minutes. If they wanna put money behind you, they can put you all over MTV, all over the world, touring with really established bands, and you can’t do that by yourself. There’s no way to do that by yourself. There’s always gonna be the major record labels around because they’re the only ones that have all that money to do that. All the connections, all the booking agents, all the publicists, all the TV networks, they can make a star out of you in five minutes if they want to. There’s no way to make yourself a superstar overnight. Major labels can still do that. They have the resources to help you out and help you make it big. I think that’s the reason we’re still in Hollywood—because, this is the music Mecca of the world.

Rockin' The Gig

Wrapping it up for real now, “I have one very, very important question here that must be addressed this night. Olly, we all know here in Hollywood that the Swedes are taking over the world.” This is greeted by hoots and hollers from the four assembled. “Now I’m serious. I really do want a full explanation of this. Olly, you said someone you know explained the theory to you. Now we really have to close down this absurd attempt to get an interview which has gone on for what—two and a half months now?” More laughter and I suggest, “Now, Olly, stop laughing and explain your country’s plot.” With trembling hands, Olly takes the mic to answer for the insidious plan. “Okay. I’ll do my best. My neighbor Nate, who is an American, has this big conspiracy thing in his head. The Swedes have been planning on taking over the world since years and years. The thing that we were neutral in the second world war, that’s where he thought we started thinking about all this stuff. Since in his neighborhood there are many Swedes and I bring a lot of Swedes to our apartment and people will be sitting there and he asks them where they’re from and right now they’re living in San Francisco or New York. You know, there are Swedes pretty much everywhere so, Nate’s biggest proof of this is that Tsunami in Asia at Christmas. There was something like five Americans missing but there were something over 2,000 Swedes that were missing. So, he says, ‘do the math.’ I don’t know, I actually missed out on the whole plan but, he might be right.”

Queen D, Olly, Lenny J and Pauly are most definitely
Elegantly Wasted

With that, we ended the evening. I dragged my poor old bones up from the concrete I’d been lounging on for the past hour and brought the band around front to get away from the racket of the Karaoke inside the bar at the Acapulco Restaurant, there on Sunset Boulevard near La Brea in beautiful downtown Hollywood. When asked why in hell these serious rockers were hanging in a joint like this, the answer was instantaneous and unanimous, “Two dollar margaritas!” Since this interview, Olly’s gone back to Sweden again, no doubt to hatch an evil plot. Elegantly Wasted will tour Europe in September of 2005 and hopefully Olly will join them there and come back home to Hollywood with them later on.

Rock on.