Stuck Mojo
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Rich Ward has never taken the easy road. As the guitarist and founder of Atlanta based rap-metal hybrids Stuck Mojo, Ward and his band of Southern-based misfits brash metal riffs and often politicized lyrical content quickly made them Century Media Records’ best selling artist during their tenure with the label.
With the release of the group's fourth studio album, Declaration of a Headhunter the band was submersed in inner turmoil and disbanded shortly thereafter. Ward would go on to concentrate on Fozzy, his side-project with WWE wrestler Chris Jericho, while frontman Bonz dabbled with a series of Atlanta based independent groups.
In 2005, the group reunited and toured Europe, before recording their fifth and latest studio album Southern Born Killers. With the album completely finished, the band began shopping for labels, but during the process the turmoil between Ward and Bonz finally came to a head and the frontman was replaced by longtime Stuck Mojo friend Lord Nelson. The group, now stronger than ever, has signed with Napalm Records for the release of Southern Born Killers and new a beginning.
Ward is no stranger to controversy as his no holds barred attitude and unabashed honesty always give journalists the most interesting interviews. Blistering.com recently sat down with Rich for over 60 minutes to talk about Stuck Mojo's new album, the departure of longtime frontman Bonz and his political leanings.
Blistering.com: Southern Born Killers has been recorded for quite some time, does it feel like a relief to have it finally see the light of day?
Rich: Napalm has allocated a certain amount of tour support for this record. Our goal is to go out and do support slots for the next year or so we can kind of rebuild the machine and a fanbase, which is what we did in the early ‘90s. We don’t want to go out and headline because that would be preaching to the converted. I think it’s important for us to go out and find new potential fans through other bands’ fan bases. It’s tough because we could go out and make a lot of money headlining, but that doesn’t advance the band’s career. We felt going out and doing the whole Stuck Mojo memorial tour, two or three times over is just stupid. Back in the day we probably spent well over $100,000 opening for Machine Head, Type O Negative and Pantera which were all great tours, but now we really have to pick and choose our tours to get the most value for our dollar.
Most of the Mojo fans discovered us in the late ‘90s, which puts most of our old fans at around late ‘20s through mid ‘30s and now they’ve grown up with careers and families, which means they don’t have the disposable income they did back then, so we have to go out and find the younger fans who still love to go out spending their money following good rock bands around. There are a lot of new bands out there that influenced by us and we would be honored to have the chance to open up for them and smoke the doors off them every night! (laughs)
Blistering.com: After the album was recorded you parted ways with Stuck Mojo frontman Bonz and replaced him with Lord Nelson. What lead to the split between you and Bonz?
Rich: I held the band together many many years after we really shouldn’t have gone any further. I remember even back in ’95 Bonz and our original drummer got in a fist fight and at that time there was talk of us removing Bonz at that point, but I had that fear that you couldn’t replace the singer. So we decided to get rid of the drummer instead of getting rid of the singer, the one that started the problem!
The beauty and the curse of Bonz was that if you put a mic in his hand, he’s great. The problem is that all that chaos that he unleashes, he can’t just bottle it for the stage, he just carries it with him wherever he goes. It really prohibits good creativity and relationships within the band. We can’t write together, we don’t want to travel together and we can’t wait to find one of the opening bands that will let Bonz ride with them to the next few shows. It’s not that Bonz is a bad guy, it’s just that he’s on 11 at all times. Then you add substance and alcohol to that and it’s more than anyone in the band can handle.
I know I’ve told this story before, but we were on tour with Sevendust back in ’98 and it was a very pivotal moment for the band. Cory and I took a long walk when we hit San Diego and said, “Nobody is getting along and here is such a huge divide; the band is done.” There was a level of camaraderie and family that was just missing and we felt the band was done. We were talking about putting together a new band with one of the guys from DoubleDrive. We had taken a long break and then got back together in 2005 and he was on his best behaviour for our first tour of Europe. Sure there were issues, but they were very small, but once we started doing more tours we were just right back to where we were at before. We approached Bonz and said, “We love you man and we don’t want you to not be the singer of this band, but we don’t want you to be the singer unless you are willing to go into some kind of rehab facility and get clean.” He said he didn’t need to go to rehab and we told him that it wasn’t a negotiation, but a take it or leave situation and he chose not to take it.
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