More than two decades after its last album and over 10 years since its last live performance, industrial rock band Gravity Kills came back to life in 2023, playing a successful, sold-out show in its old St. Louis stomping grounds and releasing its self-titled debut album (1996) on vinyl for the first time. And that’s not all. The band members—singer Jeff Scheel, guitarist Matt Dudenhoeffer, drummer Kurt Kerns and keyboardist Doug Firley—have been in regular contact since then, discussing the prospect of creating the first new Gravity Kills music since the 2002 album “Superstarved.” It appears that more live shows are on the horizon, as well. Live Metal’s Greg Maki recently caught up with Scheel for a lengthy talk on the current state of Gravity Kills, touching on the recent show, the vinyl release (including plans for the band’s sophomore album, “Perversion,” released in 1998) and the early stages of long-awaited new music from the band. Watch the interview or read highlights (edited for length and clarity) below.
(Cover photo by Dustin Winter)
LIVE METAL: I was very excited to see that last year some things started happening for the band for the first time in a while. You played a show in November—your first show in over 10 years. How did that come together? How did it go?
We had talked about doing a show before the pandemic. We talked about doing something maybe around the 25-year anniversary of the band. And of course, the world kind of came to an end for a while for a lot of people—and still is for some people. Then Kurt and I started talking about we’ve got older kids. I still have one that’s 12, but I’ve got an 18-year-old that’s a senior in high school. Kurt has one that’s out of college, one that’s in college, and one that is just starting high school. All of us have kids now. So nobody’s kids had ever seen a show. Kurt’s two oldest came to a 2005 soundcheck that we did at the same venue, at The Pageant in St. Louis.
So that was really the motivation. None of us are young anymore, so we thought it’s now or never. If we’re going to even talk about doing anything beyond that, we sort of kicked that can up the road for a long time. So we decided to put the show together, and we worked on that show for four months, because we live in a little different time now. (laughs) Greg, when we were out, obviously, playing shows in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, technology was so different. So to do a show the way we wanted to do a show within the context of being able to use technologies that exist now and lighting that exists now, we employed a team. We had a creative director that we did the show with. We had an insanely good team as far as lighting and sound and video and all of that. Kurt really spearheaded that.
Doug had to completely rebuild his entire world. That keyboard stand is as much a part of the band live as me or any of the other guys, so he had a team of guys working to put together a new keyboard controller that would fit, that could be built in an old Oberheim Matrix 12 chassis. And if you’ve ever seen the show or seen video of the show, Doug abuses that. So all of the circuit boards and all of the things that go into an electronic keyboard, they have to take all that out and then shock mount everything in a way that if he’s slamming the keyboard, it’ll keep working. So he was working on that, plus old keyboard modules that he had—like batteries went out, and they don’t make them anymore. So he bought two new keyboard modules, had to recreate base sounds for the entire show. So he’s working on that.
Matt had the same issue. He had guitar processors that weren’t made anymore, didn’t exist anymore. So he goes out and buys a Fractal and brings in a couple guys, and they worked that out. In the meantime, Kurt, who never plays drums anymore—Kurt’s a multi-instrumentalist, guitarist, bass player. So he had to start playing drums again. (laughs) And I hadn’t sang a 90-minute set in years and years and years. So I had to start getting my voice in shape.
So we did that for four months. We rehearsed the show for about a week and a half before we did it. The show went off. It was a really, really cool experience. There were people there from multiple countries, all over North America, people that I had watched grow up coming to our shows. So that was a really special night, and having my kids with me the whole day, getting to experience that with them and my wife and, of course, the guys. We had done shows in the past between breaking up and this show last November, but literally, I hadn’t even seen Doug since I went to his wedding in 2015. We bounce texts and talk on the phone, but I hadn’t seen him in person. I hadn’t seen Matt since a surprise birthday party that he was being honored at, and that was 2018. We have a text thread between the four of us, and we bounce texts. Now, it’s more often because we have other things going on.
Within most bands, there are very specific dynamics between the band members, as far as who does what and the relationships with each other. Did you find yourselves falling back into the old roles you all had in the original run?
Yeah, and the personalities haven’t changed really. I think the difference is back then, Greg—I can speak only for myself—I was not the easiest person to be in a band with. I don’t know that I was a tyrant or anything like that. I worked so hard—all the guys did. So any dissension or personality conflicts that happened—and not just from my end, from everybody’s end at times—those things get blown up. They get blown out of proportion, and you hear about that shit with bands all the time.
All the guys are insanely intelligent. Kurt’s an architect. Matt’s the CEO of a $300 million company, and he’s a mechanical engineer. Doug is one of the brightest human beings that I’ve ever met and know. Doug looked at details so hard that some nights before we would go onstage, we would go on five or 10 minutes late because Doug was dealing with something that only Doug would deal with. Maybe it was a wardrobe thing. Maybe it was a technical thing. There was all kinds of different things. We were getting ready to do our VIP meet-and-greet, and it’s two minutes to 3 o’clock and we’re on a schedule—this is in November. In the old days, everybody would’ve been pissed off at each other. But Doug was late because he was dealing with something that needed to be dealt with as far as our merchandise went. Doug had a lot of stuff to do that day, and that was part of it. Doug showed up literally at 3 o’clock when the VIP meet-and-greet was supposed to start. Instead of us being pissed, I just walked up to him and gave him a hug and told him, “Hey, man, I’m happy you’re here.”
So the difference is now we understand that everybody had strong personalities in the band, and I didn’t always understand everybody, but I now appreciate what everybody did to make all of that happen. At every rehearsal, I was thanking guys. Kurt called me one night after rehearsal, and he was talking to his wife, and he was like, “Jeff might be dying. There might be something wrong with Jeff, because he’s being really, really nice.” (laughs) I was like, “No, dude, I’m not dying.” I was really grateful to everybody for all the work that they had put in, and as we get older, I think that’s what you start to appreciate—the people that help make you who you were, instead of back then, we kind of fought each other’s personalities at times. Now, you embrace them and understand that Doug being the way he is was part of the reason I could be who I was, and that happened with everybody in the band.
Kurt’s more of our Rick Rubin guy. He’s like the vibe guy, and we can really talk about, especially lyrically, what it all meant and write lyrics within the context of keeping things compact. Matt was the guy where you could take him the most mundane guitar part, and then we would sit down, the three of us, and work parts out at times working on records, and Matt was the guy that would take a simple guitar part or just a simple progression and make it something else. His perspective was always super unique to the rest of the guys in the band. And Matt’s the nicest guy in the world, as well. And he was the most solid guy in the band, too. The other three of us were kind of wild cards. You could always count on Matt to be the most solid guy every night. He was the glue for us live.
When you were rehearsing and then performing these songs that you wrote 25 to 30 years ago, did you find that lyrically they still held a lot of meaning for you, or are they more time capsules of back then?
A little of both. There were certain songs that maybe meant more to me, not lyrically but just the vibe of the song. The highlight of me for the night, for every rehearsal, was “Never,” which was sort of the most punk rock song, which is really the root of especially Kurt and Matt, sort of where they came from musically. Plus, at that point in the set, as a singer you’re like, “How does my voice feel tonight? How am I gonna get through this?” And by the time I got to that point in the set, I could just let it fly. I didn’t have to worry about it. I was like, “Man, I’ve got this.” Usually, by the third song, you kind of know, you kind of feel your tone, how strong your voice is or how weak it is, and then you adjust accordingly. Then you get to a certain part of the set and you go, “Oh, I’ve got this,” and you just let it fly.
I think it was a time capsule, but part of the human condition is to be in a constant state of struggle and trying to evolve and trying to sort things out. And really, a lot of the lyrics that I wrote or that the guys contributed really spoke. Some stuff’s super personal. Especially the third record, “Superstarved,” a lot of stuff’s super personal for me. But the songs really become something else, too, and that’s really what the show became. We realized that it wasn’t about us necessarily doing the show for our kids. When we were being contacted by people who were flying in from all over the place for the show, you realize that once you put that music out there, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. That’s what you hope for as an artist, that you can transfer ownership to somebody else.
Sometimes, after you sing a song a thousand times, it turns into something else, or it turns into maybe you remember singing it in the context of a certain show, and there’s all those things that start creating these emotional layers on top of things. But yeah, it was both, and I really dug revisiting all of that with the guys as a more mature human being.
The other big thing for the band last year was that the first album was released on vinyl for the first time. Are you happy with how that turned out?
Yeah. Really, we owe that to a guy named John Perrone, who was one of our radio guys at TVT. We had tried to get The Orchard’s attention for a few years. At one time, there were a lot of TVT employees who were still at The Orchard, and as those people peeled off, we didn’t have any allies there, and it took us a couple years to get somebody’s attention. John had emailed me and said, “Hey, you need to reach out to so-and-so, and here’s their email.” So you know that TVT went bankrupt in 2007, filed for bankruptcy, and all that stuff got moved around. Well, our masters—who knows? Luckily, Doug had—all the final mixes we did with John Fryer at Batter Studios in New York before we went to master, he had those archived. But (laughs) they were archived in a Sonic Solutions system—Sonic Solutions isn’t made anymore—on a computer that we bought in 1998 that was running Mac OS 8.6. He still had some of the hardware, but it was basically trapped.
So anyway, it took him two years. He and people that work for him at Shock City, they were reaching out to people. They had people building all sorts of stuff to get these final mixes exported into a couple decades later. We didn’t want the mastered for CD mixes. If that’s what we were left with, we would’ve said, “No, we’re not releasing vinyl.” Those mixes were made for CDs in the ‘90s where we fucked up. Everything was overcompressed. You just wanted it loud and in your face, and those mixes had very little dynamic to them. After “Forward,” “Guilty” is the first track on the record, and (laughs) the needle would’ve jumped off the vinyl—literally. So Doug did all of that.
Kurt reached out to the guy who did our artwork. Between Kurt and a guy named Greg, who was at TVT and worked on the artwork—they still had scannable versions of all that artwork. So Kurt took that over. Basically, I was sort of project managing, making sure people were communicating.
Now, The Orchard is going to be getting an email soon. We have already remastered “Perversion” for vinyl. We just have to get The Orchard, since they are the one that own those masters even though they don’t have them. (laughs) They couldn’t find them if they wanted to—not the unmastered versions anyway. And Kurt’s already working on the artwork. We’re going to ask them to do it. They don’t have to. We also have the ability—we haven’t mastered it yet—to put “Manipulated” back out, as well.
We have the unmastered mixes to “Superstarved,” but getting anybody’s attention at BMG, that’s a whole other mess. That record wasn’t on streaming services for years, and I kept reaching out to anyone I could find at BMG. Finally, a guy at the BMG office in the U.K. saw a tweet, DM’d me, and then they figured it out. But for us to get any vinyl done, I think it would be a stretch. It’s possible, but I’m not gonna count on it.
The first album is still available through the band’s merch store, right?
Yeah, we have very limited supply. We have a couple left maybe of each color. We bought up maybe 5 percent of what was pressed. People are like, “Oh yeah, it’s a money grab for the band, reissue this stuff.” It’s like, “No.” We’re short to recoup on our deal with TVT/The Orchard/Sony—I don’t know, we’re short $800,000 or so. We’re in partnership with Concord on the publishing on that record, so we’ll see 50 percent of the 90 cents per record. Put it this way, Greg: The only way a band makes any money off a re-release like that—typically, if they were signed to a major or on a bigger label—is if you’re buying it directly from the band.
We didn’t do it with the intent of making money on it. That’s why I was even pushing Amazon links to people. I was like, “Get it however you can get it.” It’s about our legacy. It wasn’t about a money grab. Probably with “Perversion,” if The Orchard will actually do it, we’ll probably order more than we ordered the last time, because it’s gonna fund some other things, which is the next chapter of the band.
Well, let’s talk about that. I don’t know how much you want to say, but what is in the works?
Everybody’s kind of working independently at this point, just coming up with ideas. We did three records that are very different. We have been as electronic as you can be being a rock band, and we’ve been as organic as you can be being a rock band. And genre-wise, we’ve touched into very hard places, and we’ve been in very punk places, and we’ve been in very dancy places. So we’ve spent a lot of time talking more about what we don’t think the band is in the context of 2024.
Whatever we do, Greg, we don’t want it to sound like Gravity Kills 1998 or ‘96 or 2002, for that matter. But we have a foot in all that. I don’t necessarily want to make a record or do songs that people go, “That doesn’t sound like Gravity Kills.” But everybody’s got a little different idea what the band is, and I think whatever we do, it’s gonna sit within those boundaries. But those boundaries for us are so broad, and that’s what’s exciting. We can do a song that sounds like an Exploited track. With me singing on top of it, it sounds like Gravity Kills. Or we could go, maybe, not quite into Bad Omens or anything like that, but we could lean into those places a little bit and it would still sound like Gravity Kills. So that’s what’s cool.
The four of us, we spend so much time talking about it because we all have our own separate ideas of where the band sits, and it’s just gonna take getting a couple of tracks done to realize, “Hey, we can go this direction, we can go this direction, we can go that direction” and it all fits.
Are there plans for more shows coming up?
Yeah, there are. We wanted to make sure that we were able to do a show that people wouldn’t be disappointed with. Now we’re past that hurdle. We declined an offer for a Chicago show in September. We kind of want to sort out some other things. We’ve got an offer that’s sitting open for a Denver show right now. People would think, “Denver?” Denver is actually our number 2 streaming city in the United States—Chicago being number 1.
Some people would think, “Oh, you’ve got momentum off that one show. You should keep playing.” I think we want to waterfall this thing, and if we get some songs together, we’re just gonna release songs as we finish them. We’re not gonna wait to release a record. If we finish enough songs, we’ll release a record. I think that will help us over the next couple years, and really, that’s all we want to do it for. I think five years from now, I don’t know how interested everybody’s gonna be in doing it. And physically, too, I’m really lucky, Greg. Probably because I didn’t sing that much for the last 20 years, my voice hasn’t aged. There’s some guys that happens to.
Most singers that happens to.
Yeah, if they’re singing all the time. I think me not singing much over the last 20 years or so, I think it kind of preserved it in a mason jar somewhere. I’m not a smoker. I don’t really drink. It’s not that I’m against any of that stuff. Hey, go have fun, be responsible with it and all that stuff.
Was that always the case for you?
Yeah, on the road especially. I can’t say never. If I had three nights off coming, especially if there were record label people out, it’s like let’s go. I didn’t do any diuretics on the road, caffeine or any of those things. Stylistically, I’m not screaming in the context of the way guys scream maybe now, but I’m singing with pitch very intensely at times, and to do that night in, night out back then, even as a younger man, you really have to take care of yourself.
I did early on have an incident in San Diego where I lost my voice. Going into the last song, I had nothing left. It was a nightmare, and I remember us going on the bus and crawling into my bunk wanting to die. At that point, I just knew there can’t be any of that stuff. This was in March of ‘96. We had gone in to play in Salt Lake City. We were playing with Korn, and the Deftones were on that show, too. The Deftones were before us. Sister Machine Gun was on that show, too, because we were touring together at the time. At that point, we had been on the road on that run about two months, and I had dropped about 12 pounds. It wasn’t because I was doing a bunch of drugs or any of that bullshit. I was acclimating to life on the road. We’re on MTV at this point. People don’t know who the band is yet really. Sometimes, trying to find food—if you’re on tour, maybe you’re getting a meal buyout, or maybe you’re going to a place that’s catered and it’s horrible. They’re feeding you some pasta and some chicken breasts that taste like they’re a week old. So I just dropped a bunch of weight. After that show—it was a horrible show for me—my manager Gloria took me into a dressing room by ourselves and basically said, “You gotta fucking figure this out. You’ve gotta take care of yourself because you’ve got a lot of people counting on you.”
And you weren’t just standing there onstage. You guys really brought it. It was a high-energy show.
Yeah, right, so that was part of it, too. At that point, we were playing 45 minutes a night. But it was a real wake-up call for me, Greg. At times, if I was off and we were getting together, we had some amazing, crazy-ass stuff that went down—like a lot of rock bands or like a lot of people that aren’t in rock bands. Some great party stories. If I was on tour, I was pretty straight arrow when it came to anything. And that just sort of carried over.
Again, it’s not that I’m opposed to drinking, and I hate to harp on my age, but I just don’t feel good. It doesn’t make me feel good enough the next day to want to feel like that the night before. So I just don’t do that shit anymore, and I haven’t for a long time.
Anyway, to your question—yes, there’s shows. We’ll get to that stuff. We want to do all of the above. Maybe we’re being too ambitious, but everybody’s got the time to do it. I book music for a living, I do a lot of corporate stuff, smaller city festivals—that kind of thing. Greg, I book a lot of country and red dirt—Texas country—too. But I can make time. My daughter’s older now. She starts college in the fall, and now she just comes and goes like a typical high school senior. I’ll text her, “Are you gonna be home for dinner tonight?” “No.” “OK.” And I’m here by myself. My wife and my stepson are in St. Louis, and I’m in Oklahoma City. That will change, obviously, at some point because my daughter will be able to handle life on her own. But I’ve got the time.
I told Kurt at the least I’m cutting demo vocals with the guys in St. Louis. That’s where we can tweak melodies, and somebody can say, “Hey, I like this lyric, but we can do better,” or “What does this mean?” It’s hard to be objective all the time when you’re working by yourself. And I’m up in St. Louis quite often anyway, being my wife’s there.
In the early years of the band, right after the band formed, things started happening very quickly. Do you feel like at the time you were able to appreciate what was happening and the success you had?
There were moments, yes. But a lot of it, no. Because you went from nobody giving a shit to everyone giving a shit. I’m not talking us being ubiquitous like the Foo Fighters or something. That’s not what I mean—or Metallica. In our bubble, with record label people, people at our shows, radio, MTV, the press—whether they liked us or not. I’m not going to name names, but there was a guy at a major publication that said I was the biggest asshole he’d ever met and wouldn’t do a feature. They ended up doing a feature on our second record because maybe at that point they felt we were worthy of it or whatever. When you go from nobody caring to—if we had a day off in New York City, your first interview might start at 9 o’clock in the morning and you might not be done until 1 or 2 in the morning just doing interviews all day, just being carted around. I used to hate it. But it’s a lot of fun for me now to get to talk to people about this stuff. Who wouldn’t want to sit around and fucking talk about yourself all day? And that’s what we used to complain about.
Not to go all Ted Lasso on you, but I would have panic attacks. I could get onstage and play festivals where there might be 30,000 people there and have no issues. Get me in a meet-and-greet that wasn’t organized and I would legitimately have panic attacks. We got to the point where our lighting director would come to these meet-and-greets. If it was after a show, as soon as he could peel off, he would come in, and we had a signal. If I felt one coming on, he would come in and say, “Jeff’s gotta go”—just make something up and pull me out of the room.
So yeah I enjoyed it at times, and at times you hated it. Your friends didn’t understand all the time. You come home, and your friends would go, “Hey, let’s go out,” and you’re like, “No, I wanna go to Blockbuster and get a couple movies. I just wanna sit on my couch and not talk to people.” In St. Louis in particular, too, especially at the height of the band, it was weird at times. I’d go to the mall, and I’d find packs of kids following me around the mall. Or go to the grocery store—and this actually happened—there was a writer from the weekly newspaper, not the daily but the weekly, that did a blurb on what they saw me buying at the grocery store, and it was just odd. At that time, you felt like you were performing all the time, even if you were out just hanging out or going to a restaurant or whatever it was.
But looking back, it was amazing to be able to touch that many people personally, and people recognize you as an artist. All that stuff, in retrospect, maybe ties into the first thing we were talking about, doing the show. It’s kind of come full circle, and you appreciate it for what it was when you can get outside of it and how cool it was.
I wish that I could have slowed it down a bit, because Greg, within the first year we did “Guilty”—you probably know all about that story; we’re not gonna rehash all that. But within a year of the band forming and doing “Guilty”—we didn’t really form; we did “Guilty,” and then we were like, “Hey, shit, I guess we’re a band.” In the first year, we write a song, we end up doing more songs, we finished the first record, still hadn’t signed a record deal, TVT had already paid for the record, we’re on two major motion picture soundtracks already by that point—“Mortal Kombat,” then we’re on “Seven”—and we went from 0 to like 6,000. We got put in a rocket and took off. So I don’t know that we really had time.
Yeah, so it’s really cool now that you have this opportunity—even though it’s not going to get to the highs that it did back then—but you have this opportunity to really appreciate the band and what you’ve done, what you might do now, and that’s an opportunity that a lot of bands don’t get after they split.
Yeah, Greg, it’s interesting. We don’t have huge social media numbers, but man, the people who are engaged are fucking engaged. And that’s the cool thing. We know that not a lot of people are gonna pay attention to any of this stuff. But for those that are paying attention—aside from doing it for ourselves, when you make any art, at some point, the ownership of what you’re doing crosses a boundary into interpretation. And we have a lot of people that are ready to interpret, that want to. It’s not hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s cool with us. We can release some things physically that people will want. We can do some shows in some markets that people will want to come see. And that’s really cool for us. We’re kind of interested in that legacy, too. That’s why we’re being very methodical.
Again, we’re not thinking we have to write songs in a specific style or whatever. Whatever it is, we wanna at least be proud of what we’re giving people to listen to, not just throw some shit out. There’s gonna be people out there going, “I was expecting this, and we got this. This sucks.” We fully expect those things, too. But there might be some people that are really surprised, or they’re happy that we didn’t write “Guilty 2.” We really rejected that by the second record anyway. It was probably to our detriment commercially that we experimented with so many places and didn’t stay in our wheelhouse necessarily. I don’t even know what that is anymore.
LINKS:
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