- Frank Luke with his plane, courtesy of Acepilots.com
Last week, I had a great question from Manny, one of the recording engineers who worked on our latest bunch of tunes. He wanted to know how we wrote the tune “Rampage.”
I’m glad he asked about this one, because it has a great story behind it. He actually was wondering if it was about that early 90s video game!
But here’s the deal: The riffs for “Rampage” came first. They came from a really interesting guitar lesson I had. This lesson was an equal mix of sharpening my chops and my songwriting skills. Anyway, the teacher, who goes by the nickname Ahab, told me to try this trick: Put a movie in the DVD player, hit the MUTE button and play your own soundtrack. A great idea, really.
I’d just bought Conan the Barbarian on DVD, so that’s what I played along to. I then recorded some scratch tracks on my computer and brought the riffs into the rehearsal space for band approval.
Frank Luke's namesake, and some of the planes assigned to it. He deserves it. (Found at glendalerealestate.info)
It didn’t take us long to dream up a subject for the song. I’ve long wanted to write some stuff that stamps us as an Arizona-based band, so it made sense to select an Arizona-based character. I wandered across Frank Luke, a WWI flyer from Arizona and namesake of Luke Air Force Base. We mapped out the story, and Todd worked on weaving the lyrics into the music. The guitar solo was a bit of a laborious process, for some reason, but I’m relatively happy with the way it turned out.
I love playing the entire tune, and the audiences seem to dig it. We’ve opened the last few shows with it, and it gets a great response. I’ll post a clip sometime in the next week or two.
