After a 7-year friendship with Chris Wyse, guitarist Jason Achilles Mezilis didn’t necessarily have a reason to think that he and his buddy would end up collaborating – particularly given that Wyse already had a fairly steady gig as the bassist for The Cult. But behind the scenes, Wyse had been crafting a set of songs that pushed the boundaries of the traditional rock format. When it came time to head into the studio and make those ideas a reality, Mezilis stepped up to the plate to lay down several of the guitar tracks. That little "favor" morphed into an ongoing gig in the new band Owl, a project that Mezilis is hoping to take on tour in the not-too-distant future.
For the past few years
Mezilis (who is also a freelance producer and engineer) has been the guitarist for the Hollywood act
Your Horrible Smile, delivering a style he proclaims as "
dirt guitar."
Owl has led
Mezilis down a very different path, a fact that becomes quite obvious when you listen to the band’s debut record. It’s not shocking to hear straight-up punk in one moment and a highly experimental
Pink-Floyd style in the next. The bass line often comes front and center throughout the course of the record, but after all, this project was most certainly
Wyse’s baby. When
Mezilis talked with Ultimate-Guitar writer
Amy Kelly, he detailed his experience working with
Wyse, a musician he described as "
the best bass player I’ve ever met."
UG: I understand that you and Chris had a 7-year friendship before starting Owl. How did you initially meet up?
Jason: I moved to L.A. a little over eight years ago. I really didn’t know a soul. One friend who I had met, she was friends with Chris. I think definitely within the first six months of living here, I would literally go around to clubs sort of wide-eyed and scared. If I saw somebody very interesting, I would just go up to them and say, “Hi. I’m new here.” I made some friends. People just took pity on me! It was weird.
I remember I was standing at the Opium Den and she was like, “This is Chris.” I remember talking to him, and I had never met anybody in a famous band or anything like that before in my life ever. He was in The Cult two different times. I’m not really sure if he was doing it then or if he had just been doing it. He was like, “What do you do?” I’m like, “Oh, I play guitar. What do you do?” “Oh, I play for The Cult.” I just looked at him and was like, “What? No way!” There was something about him that was very down-to-earth. He’s got a great smile and a very warm personality. We hit it off.
We became friends and started going on hikes together every week. I would say our friendship was more of like a big brother-little brother kind of relationship. When I met him, he was already in a position that I was looking up to him immediately. He was very comfortable in the role of older brother.
Had you been jamming for a lengthy amount of time before you broached the subject of starting a band?
You know what? It actually didn’t really come together like that at all. We never jammed together. I had always been a fan of his projects. I’m not blowing smoke up anybody’s ass, but Chris is the best bass player I’ve ever met in my life. I would just watch him play and be like, “Shit!” But we never played together, and I never thought we were going to play together. We never played together until he basically called on me and two other friends to do this record. He called me and a few other friends in, myself and another guitar player Eric Bradley. He’s actually featured very heavily on the record, almost as much as me. We actually pretty much shared the duties. I wanted to make sure to mention him because he wasn’t able to be involved in the project. He and I were friends with Chris, and Chris said, “Hey, I’m going to do this album if you guys want to do this with me.” We were both like, “Yeah, sure. We’ll help you out.”
I read a quote in which you recalled one of the first jam sessions that you had with the other members of Owl. You had described it as “electric.”
Yeah. That was during rehearsals. We rehearsed this record and then recorded it. Chris had demos for us. We were able to learn the songs, and then we would go in for the first time playing them on like Monday. Then we were supposed to record them on Friday. We would go in there and start playing and it was like, “Holy shit!” Dan, seriously when he hits the snare drum, it sounds like a gun goes off. He’s like Godzilla. So we did like a week of rehearsals to basically learn the record, and then we’d track it and perform it live.
Chris wrote the core foundation of most of the songs on the record, but did he give you a lot of creative leeway in the studio?
He had it pretty well worked-out in his head. Anything he didn’t have worked out would be very supervised. He produced the whole thing, so he really knew what he wanted. We knew our jobs. I knew my job was to go in and help play what was in his brain.
I’d like to talk about what we’re hearing in a few of the songs because there are some amazing textures and layers. What instruments were involved in the first track “Brainwaves”?
The only guitar on that track is that sort of high-pitched scream thing in the background, and that was overdubbed. “Brainwaves” itself is the end of the last song. I don’t remember what order we tracked the record. When we did “Waves,” at the end of the song, Chris went off. We tracked everything live and could go back and do whatever. Chris and Dan would work out to some degree what they were going to do there. But yeah, they just went off on it. Most of all the distortion and the effects are bass.
As I was listening to the record, I was wondering if each offbeat or unusual sound heard was the bass rather than synth, if only because Chris has such an experimental style. Did you also have an effects-driven setup?
When I tracked this record, I didn’t use any effects. Live, I have to use some things. Eric had some effects like delay. The only pedal I used on this entire record is a wah pedal.
"We try and have that big, meaty sound."
We were pretty much 50/50. I can points to moments when I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.” Like the intro of “Waves,” I played that wah sound in there. We try and have that big, meaty sound, and I’ll just start playing things.
For your other project Your Horrible Smile, you incorporate a lot of slide work into your songs. How much did you use the slide on the Owl record?
The slide is definitely something I brought. When someone asks what I brought to the table, it wasn’t as much of a writing thing because the songs were already written. So the slide thing, I tried to get it in there as much as I could. Both of the ballads “Ghost in the Starlight” and “Sky Rocket, you hear this very David Gilmour type of sound. That was actually something I brought to it. That song, it’s got a pedal that is holding on basically a tension. The entire verse is in a tension key. That’s why the chorus works so good because basically you’ve had the entire song unresolved up the point. I felt that I needed to reinforce the verse section. So that’s why I created that sort of happy sound for the structure of that part. It’s like one of those little Jeff Beck tricks. You use the slide and then turn the volume down at the same time. You get like a swelling of ocean waves falling over you.
You mentioned David Gilmour and Jeff Beck. Were those some of your earliest influences?
Gilmour is obviously an influence to me. I just saw Jeff Beck recently. Oh, my God. There’s like him, Brian Setzer, and a few other guys that actually get better over time. Most great guitar players will peak and don’t really get better over their career. I feel like a lot of the best players – I don’t want to mention names or anything to make them feel bad – but there are people out there that have a time when they have performed at 100 percent. Guys like Beck, you hear his early stuff and then you hear the stuff now. I’m watching him and I don’t even know what the fuck he’s doing! He was someone I discovered later. Beck is a guitar player’s guitar player. You learn to love him the more you play. The guy is amazing.
For me, the number one guy for me was Eddie Van Halen. It was his sound, his look, the fucking smile he always had on his face. He was so happy playing. I think the other guitar player that I liked when I was younger was Steve Clark from Def Leppard, with his sound and everything he did. He wasn’t super flashy.
Owl’s songs go outside of the typical rock structure in many cases. Did you ever think that you would be in more of forward-thinking band like this one?
I feel most comfortable on the record with the songs that are different. I don’t know what it is, if it’s something about my upbringing or listening to old Greek dance music. Regular song structure or regular rock formats are more verse, verse, chorus. That gets boring. I definitely feel most comfortable with songs like “Waves” and “Preacher Man.”
I know that you had some pretty serious training as a musician over the years. I would assume that you probably have a solid understanding for musical theory, which some guitarists out there might find intimidating.
I never thought of myself as intimidating! Yeah, I started with classical piano. I studied that for about 11 years, and then I got a degree in music at UC Berkeley. That was basically my background. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was in my late teens.
Was it an easy transition for you to go from the classical piano to the electric guitar?
It wasn’t like a natural thing for me. I think back to when I was like 16 and remember how bad I wanted it. There was such a freedom about it, being able to move around and not sit onstage playing a piano. The hardest part for me was that I’m not actually left-handed, and I had to learn play left-handed because I have a bad wrist. My wrist is weird. You know how you turn your hands flat in front of you? My left hand won’t do that because of the way the bones are. I was just born that way. I had to learn to play backwards.
That’s incredible.
It’s interesting now that I look back at it because my strong hand is my fretting hand. Because of that, I’ve always had a weak picking style. I’ve never been able to speed pick like in Metallica or Van Halen or anything. What I’m really good at is something that John Lennon once said. “I may not be the flashiest player, but I’ll grab that guitar and shake the shit out of it.” I like when there’s a good tone that feels very meaty. I think that’s where I tend to appreciate Jeff Beck. He has that sound where everything he does sounds like it has a lot of weight to it. Clearly the guy has got chops and has chops for days. So physically, it kind of defined my style for me.
In those first days when you were attempting to play, did you have to select a specific guitar that made the process easier? I noticed you’re playing Gibsons now, which have a pretty thick neck size. Was that an issue?
This is the first band that I’ve ever played Gibsons in. My guitar all these years was a Japanese Strat that I got way back. All of the Your Horrible Smile stuff was done with that. Every song that you heard from that band was one guitar and one pickup and one amp. If you ask, “Did you work to get your tone?” I’m like, “Yeah, I worked really hard and got one tone!” For me, I’ll have one guitar, one pickup, no effects, one amp. Inside that, you can find every way possible to blow that up by playing different points on the neck, doing different things with the wiggle stick or the volume to make it sound like different instruments or noises or weird things. For me, I need that definition, that very clear boundary.
There are a lot of players who thrive on having a massive pedalboard. Can you appreciate what those guitarists are attempting to do in their music?
Eric is a guy like that. He creates a soundscape, and I actually really respect him. Number one, he’s incredibly good at it. It’s easy to get a billion tones, but the hard thing is to make that tone good. Work as hard as you can to make every transition fluid. There are little tricks you can do. You can have a delay pedal after switching distortion. So when you switch it, it carries the song over a bit. It warms over the tones so it sounds fluid. I was kind of like that a little bit when I was first playing, but I just sort of got away from it. I definitely respect those who do it well.
Did you and Eric trade off techniques in the studio?
We’ve been in bands together before this. So we already had that whole rapport down, and it made this project really awesome. We were checking each other constantly, but it was never competitive. It was never like, “Oh, I want to do that part.” It was more like, “Yeah, sweet! Do that!” The first song we tracked on this record was “More On Drugs.” We’re doing two-guitar duty, but we’re both the same part. It’s like me on the left and him on the right or something. We tracked it at Matt Sorum’s house, so the studio wasn’t huge. It was good-sounding, but it wasn’t massive. So the drums were in one room, and then all the amps were like in the closet. We were all in the control room playing along, kind of like when you’re a kid and play to the radio. That’s how it felt like! It was really different. I had never done anything like that before.
So I’m on one side of the control board, Eric is on the other side, and Chris is in the middle behind us playing bass and singing scratch vocals so we know where we’re at. There’s a part in that song that is real punk and real heavy. Dan is in the other room, and we’re hearing the entire mix coming out of the stereo speakers. So because of that, it’s a little hard to hear yourself. So we start playing that song, and I can’t hear myself. We did soundcheck, so I knew I was loud enough. I’m like, “Shit. What’s going on?” This particular guitar, the knobs on it are reverse wired. So the volume’s “on” is in the opposite direction.
So we’re doing the song and I’m like, “Shit, am I on?” I can’t hear, but it sounded really good. So I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’ll keep going.” We get through the first chorus. I’m like, “I guess I’ll just keep playing.” Then there’s this chaotic sound, and I think Eric was doing that while I was doing the rhythm. So we get there, and sure enough, I’m in there. We were just so tight that it sounded like one guitar for the entire song. We work pretty hard and these guys are the best players I’ve ever played with, every one of them. I didn’t say anything to the guys, obviously! I was just like, “Holy shit!”
"I feel most comfortable on the record with the songs that are different."
We actually have talked about it. I’ve been trying to keep everybody focused on pushing what we’ve got. That’s more like the producer side of me. That’s my day job. I’m a producer. You definitely always want to keep creating, and I’m the same way. I was trying to keep focused on this project as much as I can. Chris has a lot of ideas, and he asked me to come over and work with him on stuff. We were jamming on some funny shit the other day. I think right now the next project is possibly an acoustic recording.
Would you focus primarily on an acoustic recording versus an unplugged tour?
I don’t think we’ll do an acoustic tour. We might do some dates here in L.A. One, I think it brings a cool, different feel and brings out the songwriting focus. It’s good for people to see that. Even if it’s not presented that way on the album, it still helps people understand where a lot of this stuff is coming from. Even though we’re imparting a lot of musicality – and I don’t want to say trickery – but there’s a lot of flash on the record, especially from the bass. There’s a fucking bass solo track! What I’ve always loved about Chris’ music and his demos is that they’re good songs. I think we might do an acoustic EP. We just recorded “Alive,” and it turned out great. The session sounded really good. It was fun, too. You’re kind of reinventing what’s already there, so we don’t have as many concerns about structure as much. So it’s imparting a new feel.
How difficult is it to transfer the studio recording over to the live setting? It sounds like there were some pretty intricately layered songs. Do you have to subtract quite a bit in the process?
A little bit! Yeah. The only reason it’s a pain in the ass for me is I’ve got two guys I’m covering for. I remember once reading Jimmy Page talking about this is in an interview, and he would layer a lot of stuff. I don’t remember what his answer was, but it was sort of finding what’s most important and going for that. It’s interesting because the live situation carries a lot of weight and power. When you hit a note live, it carries even after you’re done hitting it. There’s so much more there. There are these deep overtones. So the basic doubling of rhythm tracks, we’re playing live as a three piece. Honestly, people actually come up to us and tell us that it’s more powerful. Obviously, that’s the biggest compliment you can get. To create a great record and an even better live show, I think that’s the best.
Do you have a big touring schedule in store?
We’re trying to figure out the touring options right now. Chris is really trying to put together something special more than just a band going out and trying to pair with some other bands. He wants something really creative that brings focus to it, beyond being just a regular band going on tour. I don’t know how that’s going to develop. I know that he has to go on tour with The Cult this year, and we’ll obviously have to work around that schedule. I would love absolutely nothing more to be out for months and months and months.
Interview by Amy Kelly
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