Neal Smith has had a busy year. Not only did he release the second in a series of albums, this one titled Killsmith Two, he performed on Alice Cooper’s new album Welcome 2 My Nightmare and he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the original Alice Cooper Group.

Smith, always recognized for his drumming ability, also plays guitar and he wrote all of the music, sang the vocals and played the drums and guitar on his new album. The result is a bombastic album that proves old rockers don’t fade away…they just get louder. Neal would be the first one to admit that he loves the industrial guitars and the pounding drums on his K$2. His vocals tend to be like strong coffee, they take a little getting used to but once you develop the taste for them you’re hooked!

In the interview that follows, Smith and I discuss the making of the album and dissect several of the songs. We discuss haunted cemeteries, Rammstein and, of course, Alice Cooper.

Does Neal think being in the Rock Hall is a pretty cool thing? You’ll just have to read on to find out.

Neal: It sort of just happened that way; as most of my writing does. It did go in a little bit more of a melodic direction. It still is music that is really pounding and really heavy.

Neal: I am getting ideas for another one. I have a concept album that I have in mind too. Killsmith Two contains all new songs written since 2008. There was one I had written and that was “Legend of Viper Company,” that was in its infancy stage as Sexual Savior was being finished.

I am hoping that as long as I can still hang in there and be creative and inspired to get things down on tape that I can keep making albums. I would like to make two more Killsmith albums. I am really happy with the new one. People are really shocked at the heaviness of this album, as it is heavier than for what I am known for.

One of the songs, “Evil Voodoo Moon” is the inspiration to the new Alice Cooper song, “I’ll Bite Your Face Off.” He heard an early version of that song and it inspired him to make that song so, it is the mother of that song. You can hear the guitar riff is the thing they reworked into a little bit of a different direction. It is a very different song but it was very cool that we had the chance to do that.

Neal: I talk to a lot of guitar players, who are friends of mine, that also write songs, and they tell me there are not many guitar players who would write the way that I write. I play all of the rhythm guitars on the album. It is very fresh and unique and they have fun interpreting what I wrote. I take that as a great compliment. I learned guitar chords from Michael Bruce in the old Alice Cooper Band. I just decided to play the guitars myself on this one and it was a great opportunity.

As far as the drums go, people are always saying my drums sound musical. What the hell does that mean? I try to incorporate my drumming with the changes of the song and it is really second nature to me. I listen to a song and the sounds dictate where the percussion goes. My first job is to be a glorified metronome and find the right tempo. After that, I put the real drums in.

Neal: I wrote the album in four sections, of four songs each, and that was in the middle section. I wasn’t going to use it because it was so different because of the heavy synthesizer on it. I decided to use it because it still fits the Killsmith theme.

Neal: That song is getting some airplay around the Great Lakes. I think that song shows the part of me that has a badass Midwestern attitude. I am comfortable in that character. When you’re writing a song, you can bend and mold it anyway that you want to. On this album, it really took me out of my comfort zone. I wrote the songs, recorded the songs, produced the songs and wrote the lyrics. Usually, I just play drums but in this instance I put it all together. I like it because I still have that badass attitude in there. I like to play a song like “Kiss My Rock n Roll Ass,” which, to me, is my new national anthem.

I think people should be a little bit nice to each other; I think that’s great. After 9/11, there was a camaraderie in New York and everyone was nicer to each other than they had ever been in that city. Occasionally, though, people do rub each other the wrong way. You just need to tell them to fuck off.

Neal: That is a real place in New England. Our bass player, Peter Catucci, who is my partner in this whole thing, actually got lost in the town of Easton, Connecticut and that is where the Union Cemetery is. He got lost and he pulled in the cemetery and turned around. It was in October, around Halloween. When he got to the house where the party was, he told them he got lost and had to turn around in a cemetery. His friend asked him, “Did you see anything unusual in the cemetery?” He told his friend, “As a matter of fact, it was kind of weird but someone was walking across the cemetery. Now that I think about it, I don’t know if I saw the person’s feet.” His teenage son was in the car with him when they turned around. His son said that he saw the same thing. The guy says, “That cemetery is about 400 years old and it’s one of the most haunted places in the United States.

When he tells that story you just get chills up your spine. I looked it up and there was a ton of information, more than enough to write a song. It is a real place and there have been books written about it. The police actually have to patrol it a lot because kids like to go in there. To me, that is a big power song on the album and I’m glad you like it.

Neal: Without the band, Alice wouldn’t have been able to do anything other than pump gas at a gas station; that’s true of any of us. The band was a democracy. Alice never wanted us to call him Alice. I don’t’ know whether it was Dennis, Glen [Buxton] or I, but one of us started calling him Alice and it stuck. We were young and we were in on the ground floor so we could do anything we wanted. We were crazy enough to do it because we had nothing to lose. The camaraderie continued throughout the entire life of the band.

Neal: I’ve heard it is even more than that and it’s okay because it is part of Alice’s heritage and it’s part of my heritage too. With Killsmith, I would never do any of my Alice Cooper songs. The thing is the music is so different. Part of what you do is to create an illusion onstage and anything we would do from the past would not be the same. Dennis, Mike and Alice and I have been lucky to do some shows together over the years. We can do those songs when we do that. Alice Cooper is my band and it will always be my band. I also do other things. I like to keep everything that I do pure. I have evolved in my playing and I have evolved in what I listen to. Rammstein is one of the heaviest bands on the planet and they are one of my favorite bands. They are a huge inspiration for Killsmith. The music I like now is not the same stuff that I liked twenty-five or thirty years ago. I’ve liked all of the music that we’ve done and I like the new stuff that we were lucky enough to play on Alice’s new CD. If Alice decided to do a new recording with the old guys then I would be there in a heartbeat; that is an entity to itself and this is an entity to itself.

Neal: I had talked to people at the Hall of Fame and I was pretty much convinced, back in the late ‘90’s, that if Alice was nominated then the entire band would be nominated. They tend to go back to the original genesis of the act and that’s why I thought we would qualify.

We qualified in the mid 1990’s because our first album was out in 1969. You have to be around for 25 years to qualify. We had to wait sixteen years to be put in. The Rock and Roll Hall Fame, good, bad or indifferent, do know there history. They would not just put Buddy Holly in the Hall; it would be Buddy Holly & the Crickets. I hate that analogy but that is kind of where we were. The Hall knew that if Alice didn’t have that original band that Alice would not have had a career.

The people that I knew that were involved with the Hall, ten or fifteen years ago, convinced me that the entire band would go in if Alice went it.

Neal: Let’s put it this way, I was a little disappointed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because it took them so long to nominate us. It took them so long that Glen was no longer with us. I was actually beyond disappointed and was actually quite a bit pissed off. We could have done this while he was still alive. When it finally happened, it was very bittersweet for me. Glen wasn’t there and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Just for the hell of it, I went to the Hall’s website and I looked at the bands who got inducted on their first try and it was the Beatles, the Stones, Elvis and the Beach Boys—it was all the big time bands. I felt a little bit better about having to wait. It is all really for the fans anyway. They are the ones who made it happen. I know there were people who were out there for years trying to get us inducted.

I can’t believe that we were actually nominated at all. There were fifteen acts, five of which, that would be nominated. If we had got in on the first ballot, that would have been as huge as when Billion Dollar Babies went to # 1 on the charts; I thought that we might eventually get in. I was hopeful that before I left this earth that I would be in the Hall of Fame. It worked out and we got in. Yeah, I have to say that it is a cool thing.

Neal: When I became a drummer, I didn’t learn to play “Satisfaction” or “Wipe Out” or anything like that. For two years, I just had a snare drum and a set of drums sticks and I learned the rudimentary skills of my art. I am sure great drummers like Neal Peart and Carl Palmer did that as well.

When it came to that song, we were having trouble making “Billion Dollar Babies” something a little different and special. I always liked the Rolling Stones song “Get Off of My Cloud.” It was a simple little drum into and I wanted to take that concept and see what Neal Smith could do with that.

Back around Love It to Death, we recorded the song “You Drive Me Nervous,” I was just playing slams all the way through the whole song. I thought maybe I could just do some slams on “Billion Dollar Babies.” We were just going straight into the song in rehearsals and then I came up with the drum part that I played throughout the whole song, which was not a bolero, but it was like a little Spanish-esque kind of thing. We tried it with an intro and Bob Ezrin said, “You can play that part but you will have to play it perfectly throughout the entire song.” I did it and there you have it.

Neal: We did a show in Los Angeles and Shep Gordon, our future manager was there, as was Frank Zappa. We had done an audition for Zappa and he wanted to manage us. We were the house band at the time at the Cheetah Club. We were called The Nazz at the time. I think it may have been the Doors, I can’t really member, but we really did clear the place out; thousands of people left. Shep had never seen anything like that before in his life. It made such an impression on him that he wanted to sign us.

Neal: Bob Ezrin saw us in September of 1970 at Max’s Kansas City in New York City. We auditioned for Nimbus 9, which was Jack Richardson’s company who produced the Guess Who and that’s who we wanted to produce our album, Love It to Death.

When we were in the studio in September of 2010 doing the new Alice Cooper album, it was actually the 40^th anniversary of that date, which is unbelievable. Forty years later we were doing an album together in New York City where we all met each other for the first time.