Queensrÿche’s fans owe Scott Rockenfield’s parents one hell of a whopping debt—and an even bigger thank-you.
The drummer was gifted with a pair of folks who went amazingly beyond the call of duty in the name of their son’s career. From the earliest days of Queensrÿche, the band worked in the basement of the Rockenfields’ home, nicknamed “the Dungeon.” The quintet toiled away there for the first 15 years of its career, writing, practicing and recording. When it started to tour, “we were still rehearsing in the basement,” Rockenfield says. “We actually made and recorded demos, or even tracked partial records all the way up until 1995 when ‘Promised Land’ was being finished. We actually did some of the final mixing and recording at my folks’ house.”
Rockenfield’s parents backed his music habit from the age of 12, and they put their money where their mouth—and ears—were. “We didn’t have in-ear monitoring back in those days where you could just plug direct into a computer,” he explains. “We had Marshall stacks and everything in the basement in full-on volume, and we used to literally shake pictures off the wall upstairs and in the living where my folks were sitting tryin’ to watch TV.” He laughs. “But they dealt with it, and I God bless them to death.”
Their generosity didn’t stop there. “Half the band even lived there at some point in their life when they were homeless back in our youth or didn’t have places to stay after we were touring for so many years,” Rockenfield remembers. “They’d literally shack up in the basement, and my folks were cool with that.”
Aside from the Rockenfield’s father now using it as a weight room, the Dungeon remains intact. “We came in and carved it out different than what it was by sound-proofing it and putting walls in and windows, kind of like a miniature recording studio, so to speak, and there’s this doorway that enters through the hallway downstairs,” he explains. “It’s just a simple door that we put in, but it’s been stickered with everything possible through the decades of us being there. It’s basically the history of backstage passes and interviews and any type of thing that we could paper and sticker on this door. It’s become kind of a shrine, and the door, we should probably lacquer it and put it like at the EMP [Experience Music Project] museum in Seattle or something.”
During the formative years in the Dungeon, some of the lyrical subject matter Queensrÿche tackled was about artificial intelligence, explored on such songs as “NM 156.” The group was wary of computers becoming more dominant long before the information age, but that didn’t make it immune to modern advances, for some songs on Operation: Mindcrime owe a tip of the hat to a drum machine with a mind of its own.
Rockenfield used the machine to record many of his Mindcrime demos. For “Spreading The Disease,” his original intro didn’t contain the rapid-fire snare drum riff at the end of every bar. He programmed his beats into the machine, then ran the time-correction function. “When I did the time correction, I hadn’t played it exactly to the click track, and so it fixed it and put that little thing in there, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’ so I ended up learning the drum machine part and using that as my main part when I actually tracked the record,” he says.
“And there was a couple other things on ‘Breaking The Silence’ that also did the same thing. I don’t remember exactly, but I just remember because I had to change my original real part to emulate the drum machine, because it was just better. And I’m totally proud to admit that, that the drum machine was teaching me something that I hadn’t learned yet.”
The most crucial drum beats Rockenfield supplies for Mindcrime are for “Anarchy-X,” which launches the album with a military-style march that acts as an theatrical introduction, revealing the different moods that will come into play. Although this song wasn’t influenced by computer, its genesis is a small surprise: It began as the title track to 1986’s Rage For Order but didn’t make the final cut. Rockenfield retailored it to fit Mindcrime, yet a lot of the pattern was written during the Rage sessions.
“I suppose the reason why I did what I did with that piece was just kind of the way that [former guitarist] Chris [DeGarmo] brought it to me,” he remembers. “It had that type of feel, and it was just one of those things where we were looking for a musical introduction to the record, and it just seemed fit that the Mindcrime thing had such a kind of, almost military, revolution vibe to the whole thing . . . It just seemed to fall into place. It was one of those chemistry things.”
When Queensrÿche does Mindcrimelive, “I always have fun playing that, just ’cause it’s kind of a focus point for that piece, I think,” Rockenfield says. “And the crowd always loves it. They’ve almost figured it all out, so they can follow along and swing their arms and bang ’em to the accents when I do [them]. A little bit of museo-ness to that piece, but the audience sure seems to get it.”
Blistering: When someone says to you that Mindcrime is 20 years old, what do you think?
Scott Rockenfield: God, I didn’t even know that! [laughs boisterously] You know, it definitely does put things into perspective, by all means. And it doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, to be honest. That record has still got such a, for me, kind of a lot of freshness to it. Even the touring that we did in the last three or four years, bringin’ the whole thing back . . . Mindcrime I, it’s still pretty fresh to me, and it’s sort of just one of those records I suppose lives down in the Queensrÿche infamy with our fans as being one of the probably most defining moments of the band.
But, you know—20 years, wow. Time flies. I have a 17-year-old kid! He was born just a couple years after that record came out. [laughs] Go figure. Listen, it’s all good. Twenty years. I hope in 20 years we can look at the 40th anniversary.
Blistering: When you think back on that record, what memories first come to you?
Rockenfield: Probably just the actually making of the record, ’cause I was at kind of a turning point in how I was doing things with the band in my drum playing and just kind of defining and honing my talents. And working with Peter Collins and [James] “Jimbo” Barton were our producer/engineer team, and working with them for the first time and knowing that Peter had a history of working with bands like Rush, and so the things that he brought to the table, which, Neil [Peart] was always a big drummer influence of mine from Rush. Those type of things really helped define me even more, and I learned a lot back then.
I started out a young kid. Listen, our first record, I was 17 when we made the [self-titled] EP [in 1983], and I didn’t have a lot of experience. And Mindcrime was only 10 years later than that, so I was in my late, mid- to late 20s, and I had always been thrust into the music business, I suppose, straight out of high school, goin’ on the road. So needless to say, I was always lookin’ for experience to learn from. And Mindcrime was one of those things.
It was just kind of the perfect record for us, I think, at the time. The things we were going through with management changes and money issues because of bad management, and we got rid of them, and that’s when we signed on with Peter [Mensch] and Cliff [Bernstein] from Q Prime, and all those things. It totally changed our lives makin’ that record—musically, creatively and in a business aspect.
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