Interview With A Vampire
Dimitri Coats from Burning Brides vs BBtBB
Interviewed by Diego Silva, Transcribed by Jess Buck, Photos by Gillian Zulauf
The Toronto
International Film Festival featured many musical guests, one of them
being Burning Brides. Frontman, Dimitri Coats, is featured in a vampire
comedy flick, Suck, which premiered at TIFF this year. The film is
directed and stars Canada native Rob Stefaniuk, who for the second
time, wrote, directed and starred in a film. Suck is a rock and roll
vampire spoof with a casting crew of stars that could easily be
mistaken for a new super-band. Some of the superstars include: Henry
Rollins, Moby, Iggy Pop, Alex Lifeson, and Alice Cooper.
Dimitri Coats plays a
vampire who transforms a female bass player into a vicious, sexually
charged maniac who drives the audience wild. The rest of the band falls
into the vampire bandwagon and launch into the spotlight. Things take a
turn for the worst as their fame grows, and the plot thickens. During a
special event at Yonge & Dundas Square featuring a performance by
Burning Brides, I sat with Dimitri to discuss the film and his music
career.
BBtBB: (Setup) “Let’s
begin with the film theme that we are following today. TIFF is in
session, and Burning Brides is here to represent the movie ‘Suck’. Tell
us about your experience playing a vampire in the film.”
Dimitri Coats: “It was a lot of fun, it was like getting paid to go out on Halloween or something.
It makes it easy when you have that much makeup on. Like, I mean I had
my teeth molded on professionally for like, real fangs and I had special contacts in… it was like a five million dollar movie. So I had a chair with my name on it and I had a big showdown scene with Malcolm McDowell. It was the real deal for me, having never really been in a film before. And I’m in another movie here at the Festival called Passenger Side as well.”
BBtBB: “That’s a Canadian movie right?”
Dimitri: “Yeah, yeah. Two Canadian films.”
BBtBB: “You went to school for acting, correct?”
Dimitri: “Yeah, well like a long time ago. Yeah, I studied acting in New York. And I dropped out of school to do this band.”
BBtBB: “Is that how it led to you being in this movie then? Because of your acting background?”
Dimitri: “Yeah,
well Rob was a fan of the band and he envisioned me as the character
even before he knew I had an acting background. So maybe I still exude
a little bit of an actor, I don’t know. But once he found out about it
he wrote the role bigger for me. I don’t have an acting agent, I wasn’t trying to do any of this, it just sort of happened. ”
BBtBB: “Cool, so you’re not hoping that in case you left the band you could fall back on acting?”
Dimitri: “Well, I mean, I think it would be great if something happened from these two films. You know, that’s kinda why I’m doing it, to bring more attention to the band and just to support my family. These days you have to do anything you can to survive. You have to not only be an artist but a bit of a businessman as well.”
BBtBB: “You are married to Melanie, bass player of Burning Brides, and you recently had a baby together, Veronica, correct? How was that experience?”
Dimitri: “Yeah! That’s the most psychedelic thing that I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
BBtBB: “Like acid?”
Dimitri: (Laughs) “It’s very similar.”
BBtBB: “Cool, so how do you think touring will go with a child? You guys have played three shows since she was born right?”
Dimitri: “Ah,
touring is going to have to change. We can do little runs here and
there but nothing like 2 months straight or whatever. Unless someone
is gonna pay us to go in serious style and be in a tour bus and have a
nanny and all that kinda thing. Which could happen, I don’t know, but
it’s gonna be an interesting thing to figure out as time goes on. We
get really cool offers to go on the road all the time, some of them we
can do, some of them we can’t. But we’re gonna continue to make music
and put out albums, ‘cause it’s just what we do. We didn’t get into
this to be famous or anything. We did it for the love of being in a
band together and experiencing that and it’s gone far beyond our
wildest dreams, all of us.”
BBtBB: “So you met Melanie when she was in school for dance in New York, right? ”
Dimitri: “Yeah, we were both at the Julliard School. I was there for acting, she was there for modern dance. I had already quit after two years
and she was about to graduate and I sort of convinced her to play
bass. And we were really into bands like Sonic Youth and the Pixies
and Nirvana…you know, three piece kinda thing…female bass players…and I
just started writing songs and just went from there.”
BBtBB: “Did she have a musical background too or did you have to teach her a lot of the bass playing?”
Dimitri: “You
know, she really didn’t. But because she was a dancer and was used to
performing and responding to music physically, she became a very unique
rock performer. All the big bass player magazines have featured her
now and it’s incredible because this is our first band. So, I guess we
hit it right the first time.”
BBtBB: “Did you guys hook up first as a couple or as band mates, growing into the relationship?”
Dimitri: “I
was already starting to write songs and I had already made the decision
that I wanted to pursue that. She was a little burnt out on dancing,
she had been doing it since she was a little girl. And I think it sounded exciting to her, it’s different. And we fell in love… I think music was a big part of it. Getting stoned listening to records together, imagining being in a band, all that kinda stuff, you know?”
BBtBB: “The other featured cast members in SUCK are amazing rock stars! Tell us about your experience working with such talent.”
Dimitri: “Well, it was amazing…I actually became friends with Malcolm McDowell and kept in touch with him afterwards, played a little bit of golf
with him. Alice Cooper, I got to sit down with him and talk about
obscure records and he was really impressed with the way I performed in
the video. Because two of our songs from the new Brides album, Anhedonia, are in the film and I sing both of them as a vampire so he was watching some of the footage and he was like ‘Wow!’ Although we sort of perform in jeans and t-shirts,
I think he might have thought that that’s how we always perform. And
he was a little disappointed I think when he realized that I don’t walk
on stage with fangs and a cape. And then Henry Rollins was really
cool, he helped me get through immigration. I had never met him before
but he knew who I was, ‘cause I’m really good friends with the first
singer of Black Flag, Keith Morris…So Keith had sorta told him all about me and gave him a couple of records so he knew exactly who I was.”
BBtBB: “That’s a quite the honour, to have Henry Rollins know you and help out!”
Dimitri: “Yeah he said ‘Let this guy through, I know who he is’ and he’s like ‘Hey Dmitri!’ And it’s like ‘How does Henry Rollins know who I am?’ It’s amazing.”
BBtBB: “You played guitar on Chris Cornell’s album, Carry On. How did that come about?”
Dimitri: “We toured with Audioslave and he just really liked our band
and um, asked me to play on Leno first with the James Bond song that he
wrote for the movie. Then he asked if I wanted to play on a few songs
on his record and I did that. And then he asked me to be in his band
but we had our third record coming out at the time and I wanted to concentrate on my own stuff, you know? There’s nothing like it, even if it’s…you know we’re not a big band but it’s still really the most important thing to us. We’ve been doing it for ten years, we have the respect of so many bands and
all that. But when we’re in town here we still play the clubs. We’ve
played everything from thirty thousand people to thirty people.
We’ve slept on people’s floors, and you name it throughout our career,
we’ve seen it all. We started DIY, got a big record deal. Then the
record industry kinda went under and we had to brush off the ashes and
just figure out how to do things more on our own. And it’s really paid off.”
BBtBB: “You’re producing your own albums, doing the last two albums yourself, correct?”
Dimitri: “Yeah, yeah, we do everything ourselves. The funny thing is I didn’t do anything differently than I would have if we were on a
major label. I live in LA and because the industry is kinda in the
shitter you can get really good deals. And I just know a lot of
people, I know a lot of engineers and people that can mix records and master records and… you know. I mean, the guy that did our artwork for the last two records did Nirvana Nevermind and Beck Odelay. He just did it for me as a favour ‘cause he likes the band, we’re friends.
Yeah so…it’s kinda people helping each other out sometimes, you know,
there’s a community and it’s a smaller world than you think it is.”