Wehrkamp, Gary (Shadow Gallery) (June 2002)

Tracing The Legacy: An Interview With Gary Wehrkamp

Shadow Gallery has by now become one of progressive metal's most representative exponents, with four records released in its career and a sound that is immediately identifiable by most who have followed the scene closely during the last ten years or so. With the monumental concept album Tyranny, this act established itself firmly in the minds of many new believers who were willing to embrace a progressive-minded offering of ambitious proportions, but who nevertheless had to wait another three years until its follow-up, Legacy, was released. Even then, however, Shadow Gallery is a band with an extremely loyal fanbase, an irrefutable integrity, and a unique sound that will doubtlessly guarantee its continued existence for years to come. Now, with the band having released its fourth album, the aforementioned Legacy, not too long ago [this interview was conducted in January 2002], it was definitely a good time to talk with Gary Wehrkamp about life in Shadow Gallery.

Marcelo Silveyra: The reason why Shadow Gallery actually got a record deal with Magna Carta at the beginning was the fact that the band's drummer at the time sent a demo to Mike Varney at Guitar Player. That drummer, however, left the band, and then you joined some time after the first record was released. Did you ever get to meet that drummer? And if you didn't, doesn't it feel strange to be in a band that got a record deal because of a person that you don't even know?

Gary Wehrkamp: [laughs] Yeah, that was just kind of awkward for everybody. For the other guys more so than me, because they were very good friends with John Cooney, who was the original drummer you're talking about. I have met him quite a few times - after the fact, of course - and we'd still have parties and get together, and he'd always be invited. Unfortunately, he had another career as a doctor of some sort, so he was doing just fine financially and was happy with what he was doing. I think, although it's always a bit awkward, he still handled it pretty well and wasn't angry; there were no really hard feelings. And it wasn't really the band's decision not to work with him, it just sort of came out the other way.

MS: At one point I was reading an interview with Brendt [Allman] in which he mentioned that the band had almost broken up during Carved In Stone , with Chris Ingles deciding to go back to school. Considering that you had just joined the band at that time, was it frustrating to know that Shadow Gallery was tearing itself apart at that moment?

GW: Actually, that was quite a bit after I joined the band. I joined - I believe - in April of '93 ... I'm not even sure. I think the era he was talking about was like a year and a half later; it was the following February that Chris decided to go back to school. He had been dealing with some issues himself, so he was just trying to gain perspective on his life. We didn't really talk about it in the press back then, but he left us looking for a possible new keyboard player. So I don't know if it was so much that we were ever on the verge of breaking up, but there was a period when we were wondering who was going to cover Chris' parts, because he's a phenomenal technician and a great musician. We went through a searching period trying to find a replacement ... guys like Jens Johanssen and whomever else we could talk to through Magna Carta. But in the end I just ended up practicing my butt off and trying to learn his parts, so I ended up just recreating a lot of them.

MS: Now that we're relatively on the subject of Carved In Stone , a thing that is particularly interesting is the hidden track at the end, "TG94," because you hadn't told anyone about that track. Carl (Cadden-James) and you knew, but Mike [Baker] and Brendt didn't! That comes across as kind of bizarre when one thinks that records are like artists' babies, so it must be shocking to not know about something that was put on one's own record. What were their reactions to this?

GW: [laughs] Well, first I gotta say, I guess that was pretty cruel on our part, but I definitely give Carl the credit for not telling them. It was something that he had heard just working with a sequencer that's built into my keyboard. On a lot of the later sessions it was just Carl and myself working at the studio together, and there was some searching through sounds and stuff when I think we took a lunch break and I happened to say, "hey, check this out." He heard it and immediately told me to play that again, just got the DAT recorder going, and recorded it, after which he said, "that's really great. You know, we should do something like that." And I think I remember telling him that I wanted to be more orchestrated with Shadow Gallery in the future.

A lot of Carved In Stone was already together. I mean, I had a lot to do with all the recording, but a lot of the initial ideas were already done before I was there, so what I could contribute was already within a certain guideline. And he said, "well, why wait? Let's just put it at the end of this record," and I answered, "that'll be kind of funny..." "Well, yeah, it'll be even funnier if we don't tell the guys." So we had a laugh about it, I didn't know if we were really going to do it, but then it was right at the very end of the recording that we had the knocking and everything. But we never told them, and again, that was maybe a little cruel.

Mike had it the worst - because we sometimes do interviews together and sometimes separately - and Mike had already done a few interviews regarding the record even before it was released. And some of the interviewers had advance copies even before we did, and were asking about that last track, so Mike kept saying, "oh, you mean 'Ghostship?'" And they're like, "no, no, the real orchestrated part." So it probably made him look a little awkward that he didn't know what they were talking about. I think he was little annoyed; I don't think he was thrilled at first that he didn't know.

Brendt's reaction was ... he called me and said, "hey, great track at the end, I love it, it's great," so Brendt was all for it. Chris I actually leaked the news to a week before the release. It was like four in the morning, we were up jamming and drinking, and I said, "Hey, guess what, guess how the album ends..." and I waited for him, so he kind of knew and really had nothing to tell me about it ... but it was fun to do that!

MS: Moving forward to Tyranny, one thing that particularly stands out about that album is the song "New World Order." It's a track that has a very epic and large sound, due in part to elements like the violins and D.C. Cooper's vocals. Shadow Gallery hasn't really done anything like it before or after that, so what would it take for you to do something similar once again?

GW: [laughs] I don't know, we tried to ... we didn't go with any guest artists on Legacy as far as singers go, so we don't have a D.C. Cooper kind of thing. I think what made "New World Order" special was that we looked at it - especially Carl - early on as we were orchestrating as the section that was to be the centerpiece of the album. It was obviously going to be the entire concept of the storyline, and when we got to that part of the album it was going to really be what tied everything together and where everything would come from, so we really put some extra effort in making sure that the song was really everything it could be, which took a lot of writing and rewriting. And sometimes writing is like that. I think the whole beginning, the first two minutes, was a session at my house with just Carl and myself, and what I actually played on the spot was what we kept on the record. But then you get into some of the middle sections, and we just wrote those parts twenty or thirty times, so it was just a lot of ideas put together.

I guess we just had to make sure that it was the right one and done the right way. But yeah, it's a fun piece because it has got a little bit of everything: from the atmosphere, to the heavy, to the dramatic chorus, to D.C. Copper's soaring vocals, to the violins, etc. I think you will see something like that again ... it's just that we usually try to spread it across an album and not have it fall within one song.

MS: In another interview, sometime after Tyranny, Brendt mentioned that he was really tired from the entire process of recording the album. This is interesting in the light of knowing that most bands that record a concept album seem to rest after that and not release another one immediately afterwards, since the entire process seems to be very draining. Was this the case with you?

GW: That was totally the case with us; I couldn't have said it any better. We were all kind of exhausted. Not so much just because it was a large project, but more because we were rebuilding our studio, updating equipment constantly, and dealing with a lot of problems and failures during the whole process of recording it. So while we were working on what was our most ambitious project, we found that we were doing things over and over too many times because of equipment problems. And you can only really go so long before you say to yourself "What's the point? It takes forever and I want to get back to having a life." And in many ways we had given up all the rest of our lives to finish that...

I know that we're not the only band that goes through experiences with problems like that, but it just makes the whole process draining on you, and when you're done, pretty much the last thing you want to say is "ok, let's start another concept album all over again!" And that was probably part of the reason for the break. We were looking at touring, but didn't really even have a lot of contact with each other for a few months except for side projects, which we just kept running into.

There always seems to be one ... as soon as we've finished one record, we're involved in, performing or playing on, or co-writing for somebody else's record. But with that done, we definitely wanted...not a break. It's just that you're not geared up to start again.

MS: Now, moving on to Legacy for a second ... when one listens to the album, there are recurrent themes from your previous efforts, with the most obvious being "Cliffhanger 2." There is also the knocking on "First Light," for instance, and on Tyranny one can also find several recurring moments, passages, or musical things. How does this actually happen? Are you playing when suddenly someone goes "Hey! Look, this is in the right key!" or...

GW: I've always been a big fan of that; it's rock music doing it as kind of an orchestration peeping [? - ed.] tour. When you have a strong theme, it's very progressive rock to take something and twist it, reenter it into a new light, a new passion, a different tempo, a different key. Melodies are melodies, and if they're strong they'll work in the right fashion, so it's fun and exciting to take a pre-existing melody and lay on it in a different way.

Actually, we did that all through Carved In Stone, too, but it was much more subtle back then. If you really listen carefully to the album - a few people have picked this up, but most don't really catch it - some of the "Ghostship" theme from Chris' piano solo has parts that are put throughout in little spots with different instruments. And although it's very subtle, it kind of sets the theme, so when you get to that part of the record maybe you don't know that you've heard it before, but in the subconscious something seems familiar and eerie about it. I think lately we've been trying to be a little more forward with it. Obviously "Cliffhanger 2" was raised directly from the first one, and it was entirely intentional. We thought "we'll start the song off in the same way," and that was just having a little bit of fun with ourselves. We actually didn't redo any of that; that first minute I literally put Carved In Stone in my CD player and just recorded that for a few tracks.

Some critics have said, "oh, it's not very original, it sounds too much like the first one." I always read that and go "you gotta be kidding me, it IS the first one!" It's very intentional and supposed to be funny! We thought it would be fun to end Legacy, minus the orchestrated piece at the very end ... as "First Light" is fading out with the acoustic guitar part, it's introducing themes from songs all throughout the last four records; "Darktown" to "Crystalline Dream" to "New World Order" to various songs on Legacy. We'd just given Legacy its title, and it was just a nice way to end and recap it; the four albums. Not to say that we're done as a band, but at that point we were done with that record and the four records we'd initially set out to do, so it was a way to sum up that era.

MS: A bit more of a superficial question regarding Legacy ... when the band started out, the clothes used on the albums' pictures were fashioned in a baroque kind of way, then on Tyranny entirely normal clothes were used, and on this latest you have adopted a really dark image. Is there actually a reason for this?

GW: Well, I don't think we always set out to come across with a sort of image, but we're always looking to do something a little bit different. One thing I like when seeing a band and its photos is that they're creative with that. If you're creative with your music, your lyrics, and your package, and you do something different each time, why stop at that? So with each record we try to do something a little different with the photos, and the look that we have now just seemed like something we hadn't done before, so it just seemed to work.

MS: Excepting Joe Nevolo, you are the last band member that joined Shadow Gallery. It has been quite a while since then now, but when you first joined, how did it feel to be in a band where you were just new and the other guys already knew each other very well?

GW: I felt comfortable early on with just about everybody, but it was different, of course. They were all buddies and best friends, and they had worked with each other a lot, so I was definitely the new guy. But I fit in well pretty quickly. I just developed a relationship with the guys individually ... when I first met everybody Chris and I were hanging out all the time, and then I became buddies with Brendt a few months later. We were all friends, but you feel that the individual relationships with people are what really counts. Not to say "Here's a band, and I'm a guy ... will I work with the band or will they work with me and feel comfortable?" but when you become friends on your own with the people ... that's when it really feels great to be part of the family.

MS: A short question regarding Ayreon ...you played on The Universal Migrator, and are now going to play on Arjen Anthony Lucassen's space metal project Star One. There seems to be a good relationship between you, so is there a chance that Arjen will at one point work on something for Shadow Gallery?

GW: Yes, we've already discussed that. I was considering having him do a solo for Legacy, which I was recording when I did the Universal Migrator part. It just got a little bit late in the game, and he was busy finishing up that and working on his Ambeon project. It just didn't feel like it was something I wanted to rush with a quick deadline, so I told him "whatever I do next, a solo album, or Shadow Gallery..." and he said he loved it and would be up for it. I'm hoping that he and I can continue our musical relationship like that well into the future, because we both have a good mutual respect for each other, we're both friends with each other, and even talk about the same things musically.

MS: Actually, while we're on the subject of other bands and with you having already mentioned the fact that you always seem to run into side projects, that is something very peculiar about Shadow Gallery. You have worked as musicians and writers with a lot of other people and have been involved with things such as Mullmuzzler, Ayreon, Age Of Impact, tribute albums, etc. Looking at this, does it actually contribute to your chops or to the development of Shadow Gallery in itself?

GW: It probably contributes more to what we can do individually, but hey, anytime anyone of us can further his name individually it of course trickles down to Shadow Gallery. We're not known for turning out albums every year or so, and we haven't toured, so it's really easy for someone to get into Shadow Gallery and have him really be into it, but next thing you know a couple of years go by and they'll get interested in other new releases. So it kind of keeps things fresh, and fresh for us, too, because we've never been interested in being the kind of band that just writes songs for the sake of finishing them and putting them out. We always want to give a hundred and ten percent, and sometimes that takes longer, but that's what has been important to us as a band. So getting to do these side projects is a fun way of keeping it fresh.

MS: Last question. Remember how you had a violin that was too small for your hands at one point? Have you gotten a new one?

GW: [laughs] Yes, I did, I got one last year. And it's normal sized, but I haven't had much time to work with it yet. Every time I see it down at my studio I think, "Oh, I wish I had a few hours to practice," because I'm really interested in playing it. But it's just tough to juggle it, because when I review my own technique on different instruments I'm constantly noticing how sloppy I become if I don't play all the time. Maybe I'll be working on a guitar solo for an album and I'll be working more on guitar and therefore my chops will be getting there, but my technique on piano may start to fail a little bit. So in a way it's kind of tough to keep in shape for everything rather than try to take on something new, but I'm sure that pretty soon, when the time is right, I'll work it out and start playing.

Shadow Gallery (l to r: Brendt Allman, Gary Wehrkamp, Carl Cadden-James, Mike Baker, Chris Ingles, and Joe Nevolo

[Vocalist Mike Baker passed away in October 2008 -ed.]

Discography:
Shadow Gallery (1992)
Carved In Stone (1995)
Tyranny (1998)
Room V (2005)
Prime Cuts (2007)
Digital Ghosts (2009)