When you’ve lived the rock & roll life for as long as The Dead Daisies lead singer John Corabi has, you know exactly what you’re looking for in a band.
“Honestly at this point, I’m just too fucking old and ornery to have to deal with babysitting anybody, or people’s egos or any of that shit,” John says. “I dealt with that in the older bands I was in and I don’t want to do it now.”
John took over the vocal duties for The Dead Daisies from Jon Stevens (ex-Noiseworks) in 2015 and hasn’t looked back. Although fronting big-hair and equally big-ego bands like Motley Crue in the ‘90s shot him to stardom, his tenure also taught him some hard lessons he still takes with him today. “Motley shot me out of a cannon and I kind of became a household name. I did that for six years and then it went away, and I think the one thing I took from it is you just got to be yourself.
“There were a lot of aspects of Motley where I just didn’t feel like I fit in, and in hindsight now I can go back and see the differences in my personality when they brought things back; I can see why from a business point of view.
“The one thing I learned is you just gotta do what you gotta do. There was a brief period after Motley where I said to myself, ‘I need to reinvent myself’, and after a while when I wasn’t getting anywhere I said, ‘just go back to the basics, man'.”
The Dead Daisies released their third studio album (the second featuring John as lead singer) ‘Make Some Noise’ in August. The latest single off the record is ‘A Song & A Prayer’, which has received an incredible response in terms of airplay, being picked up in the United States by the NFL and NASCAR. “It’s actually charted in a bunch of countries around the world as well and we’re getting a great response from it,” John says.
“The title track has been getting a lot of airplay and a lot of use with the American football teams, and NASCAR has also been using it. So the response from the record has been pretty cool. Then live, it’s been really cool. The audience seem to be grabbing a hold of it so we’re very excited about it all.”
Rocking the high seas on the KISS Kruise VI in early November before their European tour in December, The Dead Daisies have also recently returned from South Korea where they played for US troops. “We’d never been to the country and we had never played any sort of show for the troops, so it was pretty cool,” John says.
“All the guys over there were very excited that we came, but it was an honour for us; regardless of whether you support a war or not, the troops are the ones going over there for their country, so we figured we’d go over and play for them, and it was a blast and a great time.”
‘Make Some Noise’ is out now.
