Jason McMaster
(Dangerous Toys, Ignitor, Watch Tower)
When Dangerous Toys unleashed their self-titled debut in 1989, the future of the Austin, Texas-born group app-eared impossibly bright. Led by the oft-charismatic Watch Tower frontman Jason McMaster, they were initially fueled by the singles “Teas’n, Pleas’n”, “Scared” and “Sport’n A Woody”. The release of the Roy Thomas Baker-Produced Hellacious Acres in 1991 (a cover of the Bad Company classic “Feel Like Makin’ Love” remains a highlight) only further entrenched them in the public consciousness. Boldly forging ahead with additional projects à la Broken Teeth, Gahdzilla Motor Company and Ignitor, to name only a few, only further solidifies his already iron-clad reputation. Recently, McMaster, always a man of many words and interesting stories, was kind enough to speak with us regarding the recording of the group’s latest high-octane offerings Horns And Hammers (2024).
Todd: How would you describe the recording process for Horns And Hammers? Was everyone ‘all in’ one room?
Jason: “Absolutely. Not to say that there’s only one way to write a song or write a record or record a record or create a piece of art at all. …But as far as traditional Heavy Metal or even just old-school Thrash Metal or Punk Rock or even just Rock ‘N’ Roll, you have to remember it’s a couple of guys or a whole band in a room together, sweating it out, building something from nothing. Something that has that emotional spark. And that can now be done by one guy. Everybody’s at home writing a riff, partial lyric or melody and then e-mailing it to everybody else. No one even has to even see each other’s face. And that works great sometimes, but to answer the question, the way that we do it is those guys are in a room together hashing out riffs old school style. They get excited and maybe not so excited about parts and put them together to create this bed for vocals and solos to go on top of. …I do my thing right here where you see me sit (gestures to an expansive home studio), and then I e-mail t-hem to (Agony Column guitarist) Stuart (Laurence) and he flies my vocals into the sessions. Stuart records all the drums but does very little editing or sound replacement. He uses some plug-ins for Mastering. When it’s all DIY, sometimes it can be hard to get the right drum sounds. I don’t mind saying we sometimes struggle with that, but I think the record came out great. The songs came out great. The approach was exactly the same as it’s always been. It’s an old school band jamming in a sweaty room having fun, playing riffs together. It’s all so great.”
Todd: How did you initially become involved with Ignitor? As much as I’ve always enjoyed your voice, I was disappointed when vocalist Erica Tandy left the group. She’s an immense talent who seems to have disappeared.
Jason: “The band was around two or three years before I entered the picture. I’ve known all the guys in the band decades. It’s supposed to be a term of endearment, I think, but calling us a ‘Super Group’ makes me vomit in my mouth whenever I say it. Stuart created this band called Agony Column back in the ’80s. He eventually added Billy ‘Chainsaw’ Dansfiell. Billy was not the original bass player, but he took over a few years into Agony Column, so there’s Stuart and Billy from Agony Column in Ignitor. (Drummer) Pat Doyle is globally known. He was in a Hardcore Punk Rock band from Killeen, Texas, which is just north of Austin where we all reside. And they were all kids because this would been in the early ’80s. He’s this weird underground Punk Rock legend who pic-ked up double kick Heavy Metal drumming along the way, which is wild. …And (the rhythm guitarist) Robert (Williams) has been in the band for ten years already, which is crazy. …To answer your question, Ignitor formed in 2003. The first record Take To The Sky came out in 2004 and featured Beverly Barrington on second guitar and Brendon Bigelow was the bassist at the time. The original singer was my friend Erica Tandy. …Erica is this amazing vocalist and musician. I befriended her during her time in Ignitor and we remained friends. They got some accolades for Take To The Sky and they then came home and made a second record Road Of Bones that the band literally never did anything with it. They were playing songs from Road Of Bones leading up to the release of the record, but it was like almost as soon as Road Of Bones came out, Erica found her exit. She has her own reasons as to why. Anyone who’s not feeling it anymore should probably step down, ya know? And that goes with any form of art. If it’s not in your heart anymore, you just need to let it all go. It’s always for the best.”
Todd: At what point did it become clear you were going to becomes the group’s new lead vocalist? How do you find the time for all of the different projects you’re involved with? To be honest, it sounds absolutely exhausting.
Jason: “Ignitor was auditioning singers locally. This would have been in 2005 or 2006. I have a Judas Priest tribute band called Sad Wings. It’s me and a bunch of friends. Stuart roughly plays the part of (former Judas Priest guitarist) K.K. Downing, right? We were at Sad Wings rehearsal at Stuart’s home studio and I’m like ‘Hey, man, how’s the Ignitor vocal auditions going?’ He chuckled a little bit and told me about what was happening with that. Erica left some giant shoes to fill and ultimately, it ended with me saying ‘It’s too bad because you guys have a lot of fans and this is a big bummer for them. I hate to see a good band around here locally not be able to play a gig or work or record or move forward.’ I said ‘You have material’ and Stuart’s like ‘I have a whole new record. I’ve got a whole new already recorded’ and that ended up being The Spider Queen (2009). I offered my services and I don’t remember it saying that it would be temporary. I said to Stuart ‘Hey, buddy, if you want me to just do the record, it’ll be fun for me. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot’ because other than singing Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, I’d never been in what you would call a Power Metal band, right? I was like ‘It sounds fun. I need another band like I need another hole in my head, but I hate to see you guys falter at all.’ I ended up doing the record and I’ve been standing in those shoes ever since, trying to write songs with those guys. …The line-up changed over time. It’s a different band now. If you expect it to sound like what it did 20 years ago, you’re not going to get that, so.”
Todd: All things considered, your voice has held up unnervingly well. Are there warm-ups and warm-downs that you use to maintain or preserve everything? Looking at your schedule, there’s a great deal of work to be done.
Jason: “Zero. But I did learn how to relax. I have fun and just chill, but I also really pay attention to what my voice is doing at that moment, and that day and that second. I make sure I can hear myself really well because the Kung Fu of the whole thing, and it shouldn’t really be a secret, is if you can hear yourself really well, you’re not going to push as hard. If you can’t hear yourself, you’re going to probably push harder because your brain is going ‘Oh, I don’t hear it, so I better sing louder’. Well, that ends up being yelling and screaming and singing, even in Heavy Metal, is not screaming and yelling. You may want to sound like Satan’s razor blade-throated voice-over and that might be your style of singing, but you’re still not screaming and yelling. You could sound like Satan warmed-over without screaming and yelling if you’re doing it correctly. If you can relax, you don’t have to sing very loud. And there’s a lot of Heavy Metal singers out there that sound like they’re screaming. They’re not screaming. They’re creating that tone with lower power. You don’t have to yell. Yes, you have to project and you have to learn how to project. …But ultimately, you just don’t yell. Take it real easy and make sure you can hear yourself. Now, on that note, I am losing my hearing because I’m old and I’ve been in a Heavy Metal band since I was fourteen and I’m sixty now, so it’s kind of like ‘Okay, well, what do I do? Do I turn the monitors up louder and go even more deaf? No. Do I scream louder? No, via what I just said, right? I finally got some in-ear monitors. I was basically afraid to use technology at all, but I had to do something. I have bandmates in different bands that have been trying to sell me on in-ear monitors for a long, long time. And I was ‘Fuck that, man’ and I just turned it up. Well, once I realized that that kind of goes against what I’ve been preaching, I needed to take my own advice and relax. …Once I got used in-ear monitors, it was like having earplugs with my own volume knob.”
Todd: I’d imagine the development of modern in–ear monitors has had a rather significant impact on your voice.
Jason: “I can turn up the room in my head with a volume knob, basically. It’s more tech than that, but that is the idea. You can create this low volume and still be comfortable in the room, even though the amps and everything else might be louder. If there’s no amps, then you’re going to have to turn it up. …So there’s this modern way to control what’s going into your ears as you’re performing, in my case, as I’m singing, so I don’t have to blow my head off with volume just to be able to tell what the hell I or the band is doing. And that’s kind of helped me as well. A lot of people say ‘Man, you’re still singing the high notes’ and I know what they mean. There’s a lot of Hard Rock and Metal singers out there that don’t sing in the stratosphere any longer. It may not even be their fault. Or maybe they just smoked their voice out. And then there’s (Judas Priest fontman) Rob Halford, who is seventy-three years old and sounds amazing. …When you listen to these literal grandfathers making Extreme Metal or Heavy Metal music, the singer sounds amazing because they’re paying attention. Singers that maybe can’t sound the way they did when they were so young could be just because of their age, so that plays a part, too.”
Todd: Historically, I’ve been told luck can have a ‘not-necessarily small’ impact. Have you found this to be true?
Jason: “And I’ve been lucky that I learned even though I’ve never had any training. …It’s always been like ‘Oh, I better not do that again’, right? You don’t step in the cat shit every day. You memorize where that cat shit is so you don’t step in it the next day. You have to learn from your mistakes and don’t be like ‘Oh, man, I hurt my voice because I couldn’t hear myself. I don’t really do warm-ups. I might do some light warm-ups sometimes, but usually, when I’m warming up, it’s because I’m afraid I’ve lost part of my range. And I usually muster something up. …I am usually able to get my voice warm enough to be able to do the gig and not hurt myself all that much.”
Todd: That seems to be sound advice for anyone who occupationally utilizes their voice on a semi-regular basis.
Jason: “Even if you’re a radio Disk Jockey or a Podcaster. …The same portion of your range is going to get worn out, so it’s the same thing. You got to pace yourself. I think it’s important that while we’re talking about this, I’m wearing over-the-ear headphones and I’m really close to my microphone. This is what I’m used to because I’m a singer. I’m used to having the mic right here. I can hear myself really well and there’s no loudspeakers, there’s no PA or any playback speakers. It’s all going right in here and I’m controlling it with a Mixer. Ultimately, it’s an in-ear monitor, which is what I’m used to. It’s nice. …I don’t have to be loud to get my voice in the microphone.”
Todd: For lack of a more eloquent manner of approaching the subject, what’s the current status of Watch Tower?I understand there has been a reunion, but from this perspective, it’s rather unclear who’s currently their vocalist.
Jason: “The band got back together, and there’s a resurgence right now because the fortieth anniversary of the first record is here. …Unbeknownst to a promoter in Houston named Christian Larson who runs the festival Hell’s Heroes, called us a couple of years ago and said ‘What would it take for you guys to get back together and play the first album in its entirety at Hell’s Heroes?’ That got the ball rolling and then we played (the) Keep It True, (Festival) and all these other shows started falling in our lap. …I’m not trying to jinx it at all. I feel it’s starting to slow down a little bit. Maybe it’ll re-surge again. To answer your question, am I back with Watch Tower? The answer is ‘yes’, but in a way, the band has had (vocalist) Alan Tecchio and myself in and out because they made a new record with him a couple of years ago (Concepts Of Math: Book One, 2016). And then just to use it as an example, Christian from Hell’s Heroes is talking to me about doing the Energetic Disassembly album, which is the album with me on it, so that’s not going to have Alan because we want as close to the original band as we can for the Energetic Disassembly record. And Alan knows that and Alan understands that. …Alan was never out of the band, and I was never out of the band until I was. …And Watch Tower wasn’t working until we were.”
Todd: From your perspective, do you feel as if the group has unfinished business? Am I correct in understandin-g German label High Roller Records is releasing a re-Mixed and re-Mastered edition of Energetic Disassembly?
Jason: “Is it unfinished business? Is it a real band still? It’s more like we’re doing some reunion shows to celebrate music that fans won’t let die. Ultimately, that’s what it is. And the idea that there are enough of us out there that they think that it’s a great idea to re-issue the first record. …We have, in our possession, the two-inch master reels. We have baked the tapes and digitized the songs before re-Mixing it and re-Mastering it. We found some bonus stuff on there that’s going to be on the record as well. It’s going to be the original version with no re-Mix or anything and then there’s going to be the re-Mixed version because the purists aren’t going to want the re-M-ix. They’re going to want the original because they have a bootleg copy or they’ve never had the original. High Roller is going to pull out all the stops on the record with both the re-Mix and the original version. And the fact that there are markets or contingents, or as I said, fans that still won’t let it die and people are real excited about it… There’s bonus tracks on a record I recorded when I was nineteen and I didn’t even know they were on there.”
Todd: In 2024, you ‘filled-in’ as vocalist for Accept (Mark Tornillo and Udo Dirkschneider) and Armored Saint (ex-Anthrax frontman John Bush). How does one prepare themselves for such a gig, particularly on short notice?
Jason: “There was no time to learn any of their catalog. They’re like ‘Can you be on a plane tomorrow?’, but you haven’t even been given a set list. There’s no rehearsal, so there’s no learning. There’s no anything. You hit ‘print’ on the computer a thousand times, you make a cheat sheet, you get on the plane and you just go do it. That was all the preparation. The soundcheck before the show, the first show that day? That’s not even rehearsal. That’s just us dialing it in, trying to get ready for something that seems impossible. As far as the vocal styles, John Bush is really hard to recreate if you’re trying to sound like John Bush. There some things in his sort of stylings that I can do alright, in my opinion, because they’re comfortable for me to do. And there’s things that he does that are completely uncomfortable for me because I’m not John Bush. And I could say the same thing about Mark Tornillo or Udo Dirkschneider. …I’ve been trying to sound like Udo Dirkschneider my whole life and I’ve also come up with voices for Rob Halford and (Aerosmith frontman) Steven Tyler and (AC/DC leaders) Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. There’s a full bucket of singers or vocalists who are still singing Blues-based Rock melodies, right? For my whole singing career, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that, so I think that that’s why those guys trusted me to come up and sit in with them for a week. Was it that they hear my catalog and they hear what I’ve done and they say ‘Oh, I get it. He’s pretty close’, ya know? …It’s like ‘Let’s get this guy to hang out with us for a week and get through this so we don’t have to cancel the tour’ and that’s exactly what I was. I was a band-aid, so to speak. But both camps treated me so well and they’re so nice. I’m so happy to call them friends. But the prep was pure hell. You need to stay up all night and listen to the songs. And while I’m on the plane, I can listen to the songs, but I can’t sing because I’m on a plane. I’m not going to belt it out and rehearse on the plane. But what I can do is listen to the material and try to memorize as much of the lyrics as I possibly can. But again, we’re still talking less that twenty-four hours after you get the call, you’re on a plane and then you’re on stage performing. …And then five days later, you are back on a plane home going ‘Wow, that was all crazy’, ya know?”
Todd: At this point, what is the status of Broken Teeth and Dangerous Toys? How do you find the time for it all?
Jason: “Broken Teeth is still playing a few shows. We have a ton of songs that do need to be fleshed out. There’s seven or eight songs that are almost ready to record. And I could say the same for Dangerous Toys. As far as a new Dangerous Toys record, if we’re going to do a full album, we still need a couple more songs in reality. But over the past few years, we’ve been playing two new songs live. It’s (Dangerous Toys guitarist) Scott Dalhover… it’s his thing to record and mix the new Dangerous Toys record. And that’s great, but he’s taken a long time, so I would take it up with him. Broken Teeth is just slow. Everybody is working and life gets in the way. I’ve been able to stay busy. People think I’m this super busy singer and artist. And yeah, I’m busy, but it’s not crazy busy. It just looks busy because I have my hand in a lot of different things and I do a lot of things. But I’m not so busy t-hat I have a different gig every day or I’m going on tour all the time. It’s very spotted, actually. …I do have some footprints out there, but it just looks like I’m busy. I’m not as busy as I could be. I guess I am comfortably busy.”
Select Discography
Horns And Hammers (2024)
Live…Before The Plague (2021)
The Golden Age Of Black Magick (2020)
Haunted By Rock & Roll (2017)
2016 Special Edition EP (EP) (2016)
Mix Tape ’85 (2013)
Year Of The Metal Tiger (2012)
The Spider Queen (2009)
Vitamins And Crash Helmets Tour – Greatest Hits Live (1999)
The R*tist 4*merly Known As Dangerous Toys (1995)
Pissed (1994)
Hellacious Acres (1991)
Dangerous Toys (1989)
Energetic Disassembly (1985)