Dug Pinnick - Strum Sum Up (2008)

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Dug Pinnick - Strum Sum Up (2008)

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Enter Pinnick’s latest solo effort, Strum Sum Up, a raucous batch of jam-heavy tunes, among the freest he’s ever recorded.

Enter Pinnick’s latest solo effort, Strum Sum Up, a raucous batch of jam-heavy tunes, among the freest he’s ever recorded.

“Everything that was done for this record was right, for once in my life,” says Pinnick. “It is like this portal has opened for me. Everything lined up and it resulted in something I am really proud of. “Strum Sum Up” is the realest thing I’ve ever done.”

Helping Pinnick achieve a sense of musical balance is a stellar cast of players: guitarist Walter “Wally” Farkas of Galactic Cowboys fame (Yes, that Walter Bela Farkas immortalized in the King’s X song bearing his name), Army of Anyone’s drummer Ray Luzier, Billy Idol’s six-string guitar wizard Steve Stevens, friend and Hollywood star Hal Sparks, Alain Johannes (Eleven, Queens of the Stone Age), Kellii Scott (Failure, Veruca Salt), Miles Loretta (Zero1), Natasha Shneider (Queens of the Stone Age), and David Henning (Big Wreck).

Half of Strum Sum Up is composed of two-part rock “suites”, containing extended jam sections following the song proper. Befitting Pinnick’s newfound looseness, he and his band let ‘er rip on many of these tracks. “We would play the song and immediately jam right after it on the first time around [in the studio],” says Pinnick. “The jams you hear are all the first take. We would do the song and then we’d jam, and the jam became the second part of the songs. Some of the jams are my favorite stuff on the record, and really showcase some of our best playing.”

King’s X fans are used to the tall man causing low-register-tone eruptions with his bass guitar. On Strum Sum Up (as he had done for his Poundhound records and his 2005 Magna Carta solo release Emotional Animal), Pinnick plays six-string guitar joined by Farkas, Stevens, and Henning, all of whom create an overdriven, psychedelic sonic freak-out – the splendiferous sound of Pinnick’s new self expression.

“The truth of the matter is that I have been playing guitar as long as I’ve been playing bass,” says Pinnick, who currently plucks away at his trusty Fender Strat Elite. “I’d write songs and I never practice scales or chords or anything. I’ve always been like that.”

We shouldn’t give you the wrong impression, however. Pinnick hasn’t completely buried the past. Elements of Pinnick’s pulpit days are still present (ie. “Perfect World”, “Hostile World”), but even in those few moments of self-righteous indignation, Pinnick’s general acceptance of the world around him – and himself – slips through.

“I have been writing music for 30 years and I figure you either have to give up or get better,” says Pinnick. “I always tell people, if you play one note when you are 20 years old, and spend the next three decades playing that one note, that one note will be the greatest note anybody’s ever heard. Look at B.B. King. He’s got a handful of licks, but every time he plays ‘em you just go ‘Oh, my god.’

“It’s all about KISS [keep it simple stupid],” Pinnick continues. “I don’t have to put every note and every time change I can in every song I write. I clutter it up so much and the song gets lost. … It is like you have this great piece of meat and you dump ketchup, BBQ and steak sauce all over it.”

Strum Sum Up, recorded by Michael Parnin (Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine) at Blacksound Studio in Los Angeles, sports such gems as “Damn It”, “Angel”, “Coming Over” (featuring a funk diatribe that courageously rhymes “junk of your trunk” with “crunk”), “Cross It”, and the explosive, inimitable “Dynomite.”

“ ‘Dynomite’ is basically telling about the way my life was going at the time and the way I felt about it,” Pinnick. “When I started singing the chorus, ‘So, hit me with your dynamite’. I was recording and I had to stop my computer. I thought about that line. … Whenever I come up with a line that makes no sense, it might take me five to ten years to figure out what I was truly trying to say. Maybe it was something that was going on deep down inside me, but I just didn’t know how to verbalize it, and it comes out in my lyrics. Musically, I just love it. When the chorus kicks in, the music just slams. I can’t wait to go out and do that song.”

Pinnick can’t hide his exuberance for playing his music – and “All I Want” – recalling his early years when he was first exposed to the music of Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. “When I go out on tour with this band I am going to play guitar with Wally, and another guitar player,” says Pinnick, who’ll hit the road in support of Strum Sum Up in the fall of ’07, prior to the scheduled release of King’s X’s upcoming studio record. “We are going to have three guitars and do the Lynyrd Skynyrd thing.”

Despite experiencing a new sense of openness and purpose, Pinnick still keeps a few things to himself: he refuses to reveal the origin of his solo record’s mysterious title. C’mon, dUg, are you sure you won’t tell us what inspired Strum Sum Up? “Yeah. I think I’ll keep that one to myself,” Pinnick says. “It’s an inside joke. Maybe someday I’ll tell the world what it means, but until then, people will just have to apply their own meaning to what it expresses to them. It’s fun for now to let it be what it is.”

Let it be, dUg. Let it be.

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