Hear Lightning Bolt’s First Recording in Six Years ‘The Metal East’

There’s a whole false take of this record, correct?
Chippendale: Between 2009 and 2015, there are, I think, three recording sessions with our old guy of versions of a record…. I don’t know if anyone will ever hear them, but there’s definitely like a similar album… in a different kind of fidelity in a closet somewhere.

I don’t know if I would have ever used the word “fidelity” around you guys.
Chippendale: [Laughs] I know. We tried to make this one “hi-fi,” but then some people are like, “Oh, you recorded different? Oh, OK, yeah, maybe I hear it.”

Well, you are sort of becoming more of a traditional band in a lot of ways. You’re playing on stages now.
Chippendale: Yeah. It’s still a complicated thing for us…. When we play on the floor, it’s, like, this amazing experience because it’s the same experience we had back in 1998 or something. It’s 22-year-old kids gathered around us having the time of their lives and we’re, like, super-psyched…. The audience in that circle of floor people is kind of the same audience as it’s ever been. But then there’s all these other people that are just a few rows back that are either older or smaller — it didn’t even cross my mind in the beginning. As audiences got bigger, you just start realizing that there’s always people that just can’t get involved in the experience.
Gibson: I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with the stage, personally. I really enjoy playing on the floor. If you play a show with 500 people, there’s going to be a lot of people disappointed in the back. From my perspective, when we play on the floor, I just see the first four rows of people, having a great time, hearing everything, seeing everything, and to me, the show seemed like it went really well. But there’s vastly more people on the outer ring that didn’t get to see anything and didn’t hear anything.

Was there a moment where it was like, “OK, this is not working out?” Like a waterfall of people landing on your gear?
Chippendale: Those shows, I was actually like, “This is working better than ever.” I remember this one show, I think it was [2002] in L.A. at the really, really fancy Knitting Factory in L.A. Which was so funny because we walk in there and they’re like, “We have a $15 million PA.” And we’re like, “That’s cool, man — we’ll play over there in the corner” and not go through it.

And that show was packed; don’t know how many people. By the end I had a kickdrum, a snare drum, and maybe a cymbal. Here was a kid wrapped around the snare drum stand, holding it in place, and there were a heap of bodies over the bass drum that kind of had it in place. I had been pushed up so that my back had been smushed up against the speakers, so there was, like, no more places for me to go. And the show had to end because at some point, Brian holds up his bass and someone had ripped the cord out of his bass and with the cable came like a whole bunch of the innards of his bass. And they were just hanging. And we were like, “We’re done, thanks!” But it never crossed my mind, even then, that, “This isn’t working.”