Lisa Kekaula of The BellRays Says Punk Goes Way Deeper Than Green Day

For nigh on 25 years now garage-soul dynamos The BellRays have been taking their high-octane rock'n'roll to the people as if they were on some kind of evangelical mission, led by the firebrand fury of frontwoman Lisa Kekaula. Formed in Riverside, CA back in 1990, The BellRays have long fused disparate strains of music such as rock, punk, soul, R&B and even jazz into their own inimitable brew, never really garnering mass mainstream attention but nonetheless winning hordes of devoted converts along the way.

The BellRays' sound has evolved slightly over the journey but their trademark passion and conviction remains undiminished and while they haven't released a new album since 2010's Black Lightning (which had belated local release corresponding with their last Australian visit in 2013), their live show is renowned as being a dynamite experience. Hence the excitement in rock circles at their impending Rockpocalypse tour, which will find the four-piece return in all of their pomp and (super loud) glory.

"Since we were there last time, as The BellRays we've mainly just been on the road — most of 2014 was spent on the road," Kekaula explains. "Apart from all of the touring we've been doing we've been working on the next BellRays record. It's great and we've got it all ready, we just need time to get back and work on it.

"Whether we'll have any new songs in our sets during the Australian tour remains to be seen, because we've just been spending so much time on the road we haven't had much time to practice the new songs, even though they're all done. There were two that we were trying to get done for these shows — maybe they'll be there, maybe they won't. I was actually trying to work them out before this big batch of touring, but if we can get down to Australia early enough we'll see."

Punk rock aficionados will still have heard Kekaula's distinctive pipes in recent times, when she belted out unreleased Stooges tune I Gotta Right, as part of James Willamson's Re-Licked project (whereby different vocalists tackled the songs which would have been the follow-up to The Stooges' Raw Power (1973) if the band hadn't split before they had a chance to hit the studio).

"I loved every minute of it, it was a dream come true — the kind of dream that you don't even dare to dream!" she laughs. "It was awesome. I was a Stooges fan since forever, and Raw Power was always my favourite — I've always been a really big Raw Power fan — so even when The Stooges first [reunited] and weren't doing any of those songs it was still worth it to see them, but when they started doing the songs with James Williamson there I was just blown away. And then when I heard that he wanted somebody to song that song — and it could be me — I was elated.

"James is an awesome dude and to have somebody like that in the rock world who's just so easy going and so easy to talk to about music and is so transparent, it's just awesome."

The BellRays' music touches upon so many templates, inadvertently reflecting Kekaula's own diverse musical upbringing.

"At first I wasn't into rock at all, I had to learn about most of that stuff at age 19 or 20," she tells. "I grew up really entrenched in soul and R&B, but radio was different when I was growing up too — it was more AM radio, so you were exposed to all music and it was just looked at as music. They weren't really calling it names like 'rock' — it was before they were trying section everything off — it was just popular music. It was just what people were playing, and there was so much crossover that I never really caught onto that whole thing, where everybody says, 'Well this is rock because this is a white guy playing the same licks as black guys are playing, and we call that R&B'. Because that's what bullshit is to me."

And while Kekaula was passionate about the music she loved it wasn't always obvious that it would end up being her livelihood.

"You just kind of realise that you like it and you might be good at it, but as far as being a kid and realising, 'Oh, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life' — not so much," she reflects. "You don't even really realise that some people don't do it well, you just realise that it's like play, it's what you do. You don't see yourself not doing it, but you don't say, 'I'm committing my life to my art!' It's not like that. It's not 'at age eight I made this breathtaking decision to become a musician'."

But with The BellRays going for 25 years now, as well as her other projects Bob & Lisa and Lisa & The Lips (both alongside guitarist husband Bob Vennum, also a founding BellRay) does she feel like a lifer now?

"Are you asking whether we reckon that this is what we do and what we're gonna do?" she chuckles. "Yeah, yeah — it's a foregone conclusion at this juncture in my life, I was just saying that early on it was just not quite so clear."

Do they approach the band differently these days than they did early on in the piece?

"I think so," the singer reflects. "I think that unless you're able to somehow preserve every element of yourself at a specific age, which I think would kinda make you very stilted, you have to [have a different approach]. Just experience and mileage from being on the road and also technology forces you to look at things in a different way, just through what you've been exposed to — all of those things come together to make you approach things differently. There's still certain things that I like to see more and to hear more than anything else — I love the way that a bass played with a pick sounds doing the kind of music we do, that's some of the stuff that gives it that edge — but I'm still open to other ways to drive it. You're flexible, I think I've become a bit more flexible."

Does the writing side of things get easier with experience?

"No, it does not get easier!" Kekaula rails before breaking into giggles. "Maybe for some people, but not for me. I was reading something with Jessica Lange the actress about how creative people just have these ups and downs; she talked about how she goes through these periods of depression where it's not like you're depressed, it's just the ebb and flow — you go through these highs and lows — and I can totally identify with that. There are just times where it's like, 'Oh, this is great! I can do all of this stuff, blah blah blah', and then you get these dry spells or even times when your instrument is just not working the way that you can make it work. You can go through these spells for a couple of weeks or it could be a couple of years — you don't know what it is and it's really frustrating, but you just always keep the faith that it's going to turn around."

But on the flipside, when it all flows easily from a creative point of view that must be a great feeling?

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, it is! Or you're like, 'Oh thank you, let me just write this down before my mind shuts off again'. You take what you get."

Despite the band putting out some great albums and standalone singles over the years, Kekaula feels that The Bellrays are one of those bands better experienced onstage than on record.

"By far, by far," she admits. "I think we've gotten better at putting our records out, but I think we've always poured more into our live show. And I think that's probably another reason why a lot of people who would want to know about us don't know about us, because we never really concentrated that much on the recordings. But now I think we're almost phobic about how we want to get them done, and that might be adding to why it's getting done the way we wanted."

They have been striving to capture that live essence in the studio since the get-go, it just hasn't been so easy.

"Yeah man, since the very beginning it's always been one of those things that we wanted to capture, but I think we've always been so fiercely independent in trying to capture it that we've been in our own way," Kekaula muses. "Just saying, 'Oh no, we can do it like this', and 'We can do it like that', but it never really captures it, so I think we've kind of said, 'Ah, forget it, I'm not going to really try and do that anymore'. So we just do the live shows and do the recordings and let the chips fall where they may, because they always do."

The BellRays' live shows seem so intense and in the moment from in front of stage — is it a fun experience for Kekaula or more like going into a zone?

"It depends," she continues. "I like going in there with a clear mind, and the more you can go in there with a clear mind the more I think you're able to just channel the energy of everything that's going on onstage into that moment and into that crowd, because the crowd there has a lot to do with it so the more you can be involved in that exchange to me that's the better show that I'm going to be able to put out. At least from my perspective.

"And I know it's all perspective, because sometimes there have been shows that I honestly thought was the worst show ever and people have come up to me afterwards crying, saying that it was the best thing that they've ever seen and it changed their life. So I'm not going to sit up here and debate; 'Oh, you don't know what you're talking about!' It's in the eye of the beholder, and whatever comes across may be exactly what someone else needs at that moment, and just because I don't think that it's the perfect moment for me doesn't mean that it's not giving in some way."

Luckily for us Kekaula reckons that The BellRays have had a good rapport with Aussie crowds during their trips here over the years.

"I've always loved playing to the Australian crowds, it's a unique thing to be able to go outside of the United States — and this is not a slam on you guys at all — but feel like I'm surrounded by Americans when I go to play, I love that," she giggles. "I just dig that element of, 'Yes, we want to rock! Yeah!' and be able to hear people every now and again yell out, 'Fuck yeah!, because you can't hear that everywhere. You only hear it in places where people say stuff like that: 'Fuck yeah!'"

The BellRays are mid-European tour as Kekaula speaks to The Music — do the Europeans get into it properly as well?

"They do get into it, but every country is different: the French are a bit reserved, the Spanish are very into it and are going to show you physically that they're into it," she reveals. 'The Germans are the ones where you're never sure if they're really going to be out there for you or just... be German. But they're usually all supportive in the long run.'

Somehow it seems that after 25 years The BellRays are still on an upward curve and being discovered by new crowds and audiences.

"Yeah, we're defying physics," Kekaula laughs. "And I love that word 'up', because to me our career seems like the longest constant line. Like a table, like we just stay right there. But it's all good, we're gonna rock and we're gonna do what we do no matter what, but it's really nice to hear people say that and talk about it, and know that we've been doing it for as long as we've been doing it but we're still... and I hate that term that people use, but we're still 'relevant'. I fucking hate that cock, but it's almost one of those things were everybody has to use that term. Like artists have to prove that they're relevant by doing something weird or cutting their hair, or all of this other shit where you can't just be good at what you do to be looked at and noticed and listened to. I'm sure you hear about that all the time, about how someone's got to 'reinvent themselves' or whatever — their music still sounds like shit but they've got a new hairstyle or whatever. I'm not really in the industry, I'm just on the periphery, outside rockin' it."

But having integrity and not compromising gets a band noticed too.

"So I hear, so I hear," Kekaula guffaws.

Finally, what of The BellRays' perfect long-term mantra "blues is the teacher, punk is the preacher" — what does that mean to the band?

"It's actually a take off of something that James Blood Ulmer wrote: 'jazz is the teacher, funk is the preacher'," Kekaula explains. "We took that and flipped it, but I really love that that's a part of our history because of what the show became; we almost lived up to that little moniker by accident. I feel like it's the tag that draws everybody in, but most people don't even know what it means — they don't even get the connection, a bunch of them think that punk means Green Day and that's it. They don't get that there's all of this rich, blues-drenched, sexual thing way before that, that Green Day is very divorced from — once it hit that point it became different, a different kind of thing. And it's not like we're some kind of purists or anything, but ours is more in that Stooges or MC5 realm, or that kind of thing where you have that really deep R&B feel to it and you don't lose anything — basically everything that rock'n'roll became but just with less of an edge."