For years, Billy Sheehan wondered if a project he’d worked on would ever see the light of day.
An accomplished bassist who’s played in Mr. Big, The Winery Dogs, Talas and in David Lee Roth’s band, Sheehan held out hope and shared the heavy, modern rock songs with friends when he could.
“I’d always have those songs on my phone, and I’d be out with a couple people drinking and talking about music, and I’d say, hey, check this out, let me play you this song. It’s a band called The Fell I did with Mike Krompass and Toby Rand. And everybody’s like, ‘Wow, when is it coming out? When are you guys playing live?’” Sheehan said with a laugh. “I’d go, you know, man, I hope it happens. So thankfully, as luck would have it, we’re going to do it finally. And in Pittsburgh, no less.”
The Fell — comprised of Sheehan as well as guitarist Mike Krompass (who’s worked with Smash Mouth and Nelly Furtado), singer Toby Rand (Australia reality show “Rock Star: Supernova”) and drummer Nick Chiarore — released their “Killswitch” EP last year. The band will be playing their first shows later this month, including a date on March 26 at Crafthouse in Whitehall.
While the band’s officially released only five songs so far, the 90-minute show should include 18 songs with a few others as possibilities.
“We’ve been writing ferociously in the meantime,” Sheehan said. “We are really pleased with what we’re coming up with, so tons of new stuff, it’s gonna be cool.”
In a recent phone call, Sheehan spoke with TribLive about the band’s origins, playing live, Mr. Big guitarist Paul Gilbert and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
Before we get into The Fell, do you have any favorite Pittsburgh memories?
Millions. (laughs) There’s a club we play there called Stage One (in Monroeville). It gets confused because there was a Stage One in Buffalo also, but they weren’t related. We played Stage One in Pittsburgh a lot. There’s a couple other clubs I can’t remember off the top of my head, but what’s the big FM radio station? WDVE, some folks that were dear friends of ours in the old days. The place would be packed out and had just a million great gigs there. Always a blast, lots of friends. Every time I go through town, I have to make sure to come out after the show and say hi to everybody. Great to see everyone after all these years. It’s pretty cool.
With the Fell, how many shows has this group played? The internet wasn’t giving me a lot of help.
None. Well, we did a couple of shows because our singer Toby had a contractual thing and unfortunately we couldn’t do live shows with him for a while. Warning to my musician friends: be really careful when you sign anything that has anything to do with television because they wrap you up in a quarter-inch plate steel and make it so you can’t do anything. But fortunately the whole situation has been resolved, and so Toby is now free. We did a couple shows with some different personnel, just maybe two or three shows about 10 years ago. So that didn’t count. So now we actually have the original band, the original idea that we had together to do this band: myself, Mike and Toby, and a new drummer we have named Nick, and we are now ready to go. All the songs we have, I’m just going over them listening and making sure I remember lyrics and stuff like that. I’m really pleased with it, with the bunch of songs we’re going to perform live, it’s going to be really cool.
The “Killswitch” EP came out in October, so is there a full album slated for later this year? Is that the plan?
Absolutely. The record biz, as you know, everything about the music business is different now. You have to do a lot of things on your own. And the good part about that is you have control over everything, not somebody else telling you what they want, or what songs should be the single, or if they don’t like the lyrics in this chorus or whatever. You’re on your own, thank goodness, so you can do things as you wish. The only problem is it takes a little longer, because you got to do it all yourself. But everything’s in the pipeline, it’s all coming out.
This tour will be, like you said, this will be the first shows with this group of guys, the original band members, so how much rehearsing is there before you head out on the road?
For me, quite a bit. I go over the songs a lot until they’re in my DNA, and then I like to get together with the drummer first before we start to rehearse with the whole band. It’s all about the bass and drums, so I make sure every move he does, I’m shadowing him and he knows exactly what I’m doing. Then we’ll get together with full band, do all vocals, guitar and bass, so two or three days should do it. I do my homework. I’m a good bass player. I come in, I know the song. It’s cool. For me too, because when I’m on stage I don’t want to think or have sheets of paper or notes or I see sometimes singers singing and they’re holding an iPad, reading the lyrics. No no no, that should be illegal. You gotta learn the song, gotta learn the lyrics, so we’re pretty ready. Two or three days should do it for us
Would you rather be out playing live or working in the studio?
Live always. I live to play live and I play live to live, so I’m excited to be playing live again. I’ve been off for almost a year, which is an eternity for me and very unusual. Very few times I’ve gone this long without performing live. I’ve done a bunch of little things, NAMM show and jam things and what have you, stuff like that. An actual gig though, it’s a big difference for me because it’s what it’s all about and I prefer it. When I get to the gig during the day, I start warming up. I always tell people, they ask me, can I do this or can I come by? You can do anything you want, as long as it’s not before the show, because I concentrate on what I got to do. But after the show, anything’s legal. So I’m just excited to play live. And with this band too, our guitarist Mike is just a great guy to play with. He’s got some really great tones and sounds, and he’s a great producer in the studio. He’s produced a whole bunch of other artists, a real knowledgeable guy that works out great. Toby’s voice is just killing me. It’s so great. In studio, you don’t have to fix any pitches. He can actually sing on key, which is just great. It’s an oddity these days sadly. Our drummer Nick is just a powerhouse so I’m excited to get on deck with this.
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Mike sort of spearheaded the group originally, so how’d you get hooked up with him?
He contacted me on Facebook. I never knew him. I knew of his band and their hit single and stuff, but I didn’t know much more about him. He contacted me one day and said, hey, you want to come down and put some bass on some songs I have? I lived in L.A. at the time. He had a studio there. I said, sure, I’ll come on down. I played on a lot of records, on a lot of tracks generally during the pandemic. Me and my engineer did over 600 tracks for people around the world. It’s just insane. So he called me to come down and do that. I went down and he didn’t give me the songs up front, so I learned them as I was sitting there. So we’d go over a verse and a chorus. OK, hit record, let me lay these down. OK, let me do the next part.
As I’m listening, I was like, geez, these songs are great. Who’s that singer? He goes, that’s Toby Rand. I thought, oh, man. He’s an Australian guy. Wow, incredible. We ended up doing about three songs. At the end of the day, we had a great time. We had a lot of laughs. He said, if you want, I can pay for bass on these songs, or if you’d rather, maybe see about putting this together and performing and doing this as a band. I said, I’ll take door No. 2 for sure. I just love the way the songs fell together. Most bands are put together because you know each other and you’re friends or this guy’s a good drummer or this guy’s a great guitar player, where this band was actually built on great songs. The songs, I just absolutely love and I would love to perform these songs live. And they’re right up my alley stylistically, what I like. And a band was born.
So it didn’t take you very long to realize that there was something special there?
Absolutely, just really on the first couple songs. A lot of times when you record in the studio, you don’t have everything on at the same time. So I hear the guitar and drum parts. I didn’t hear any vocals, just to figure out what I’m going to lay down for bass on that particular section. Then you would click and pop the vocal in it. Oh my god, it makes total sense now. When you listen to music without some of the components, it doesn’t always add up in your mind. When you finally put them all together, and I heard the way these songs were arranged and the way Toby would grab these really cool melodies that I would have never thought of myself, and just be able to pop them in, it was right away it struck me.
Your Mr. Big bandmate Paul Gilbert grew up in Greensburg. How did you work together in Mr. Big and what made that dynamic special?
Paul’s the greatest. What a wonderful guy, and one of the best guitar players there ever was, and is. He used to come out and see me play at the aforementioned club, Stage One, at a stage that’s only about six inches high. So we would stand on it, and Paul was really tall, and he’d stand in front of me in the audience, and we’d be almost face to face, because Paul’s a real tall guy. So I was like, remember that tall kid in Pittsburgh? So at one point his band opened up for Talas, and there was no dressing room in the club, but there’s a DJ booth, so bands just kind of set up in there, right next to the stage. They covered up the windows, so they had a little privacy to warm up before the show. And here was a band played. Who was that guitar player? I looked at him, and there he was. That’s the tall kid, Paul, amazing. So we became friends.
I did my very first bass clinic in Pittsburgh, and Paul was at my first bass clinic. So we spoke a bit, and we talked about music and whatever, and I stayed in touch with him to some degree. And then when I went out to L.A., he had already gone there to start at Musician’s Institute as a student. So it was a guitar contest at Gazzari’s, a famous club on Sunset Strip, and it was me, I think the bass player from Whitesnake, and somebody else were the judges. And so Paul was on the line, and I told all the other judges, hey guys, wait till you hear this kid. And sure enough, Paul came up and blew the whole place away, and he won, I don’t know, a guitar and an amp or something like that. So I stayed in touch with him. He started his band Racer X. They did really good locally, but they could never get signed, and eventually they gave up, and Paul was bandless, and I said, hey, I was going to start a band, and I got a drummer, and we’ll find a singer, and what do you think? And he said yes.
So we got together for our first time together, musically, in rehearsals, and we both knew about a thousand songs each. So we had so much fun with Pat Torpey, our Mr. Big drummer, and then I managed to get in touch with the singer Eric (Martin), and he came down, and Mr. Big was born, and toured and worked with him for many, many, many years. And Pittsburgh should be very, very proud of this gentleman. He’s not only a wonderful guy, a great player, a great songwriter, sings his ass off. But his guitar playing is just spectacular, and it covers a huge spectrum of styles, and all of them done incredibly well. So I had a great, great experience playing with Paul.