Today we interviewed Rachael Rine – drummer of Paradise Kitty. We discussed her experience touring as the opener for Steven Adler of Guns N’ Roses, the cycles the music industry has gone through, her biggest struggles in the industry, and more.
Shannon Wilk – When did you start playing drums?
Rachael Rine- “I started a little later than most, I was about 19/20 when I started.”
Shannon – What did you do to learn quickly in order to catch up with everyone else?
Rachael – “Well when I first started, it was really frustrating because I just wanted to play and you don’t even know where to begin. I had my first drum kit on layaway, and everyday I would go to the music store with whatever money I had made that day and even if it was $2, I would still go and give them that much more towards buying the kit. When I go it home, I didn’t even know how to set it up, I had never played. So when I first started, it was frustrating because I just didn’t even know what to do. At the time I was living in Santa Fe and a friend of mine referred me to a drum teacher who I then started working with on a weekly basis. That really excelled my playing. It gave me direction and as a beginner, it’s really important to have somebody who helps you stop bad techniques that can hurt you and things like that. So that really helped a lot.”
Shannon – What made you want to play drums in the first place?
Rachael -”It’s kind of a funny story. I had always loved the drums and when I would go to concerts, my favorite part would be feeling the kick drum in my chest. Then I kind of joked around about playing and at that time, there weren’t female role models to look up to, there were a few female drummers but not many. It wasn’t as acceptable for a girl to play rock n’ roll and especially drums. I kind of joked about it but I never really took it seriously. Then one night I had a dream where I was on stage playing in front of an arena and I woke up the next day and said, I have to do this, I can’t joke about this or say no to this anymore. Then within two weeks, I went and picked out my drum kit and started putting money down on it.”
Shannon -When you started in music, was being in an all female band something you wanted to do?
Rachael – “Actually, no. When I first started, I didn’t wanna play with girls, I wanted to play with guys because back then it wasn’t as acceptable or as common for women to play and it felt like, at the time, to me any all female band felt like a gimmick. I just wanted to play with musicians, I didn’t care if they were girls or guys or this or that. I’ve kind of just ended up in all girl bands, and now I appreciate it and I love it. There wasn’t as many girls to pick from either. There was one female bass player in town and that was who you had to play with. There wasn’t choices, it was just that you had to choose the one girl. I don’t like the whole “you’re good for a girl” thing, I just think you’re either good or your not.”
Shannon – Tell me about your first band.
Rachael – “It was probably four or five months after I got my first kit, so I was really a beginner beginner. Santa Fe has a small music scene of amazing musicians and a couple people kept asking me if I wanted to be in their bands and I didn’t feel ready because I was still a very basic beginner. I woke up and said, I can’t say no anymore, the next offer I get, whatever it is, I have to take it and I’m gonna figure it out. So it was a little bar band and we played every Saturday night in downtown Santa Fe at one of the bars. When you play places like that, you don’t plan a 45 minute or an hour set, you are the entertainment all night long, so you have to have 3-4 hours of material. Some people repeat their first set as a last set, so we just learned a bunch of covers and it was a 7 piece band with a horn player and a keyboard player and we got out there and played every Saturday night.”
Shannon – What was it like touring with and opening for Steven Adler?
Rachael -”That was my old band Cockpit. All the guys playing with him then were all really good friends of mine and so it was just like being out on the road with a bunch of my friends. Steven is such a sweetheart, he really just a sweet, gentle human and it was just really lovely to play with them. The promoter would rent him a drum kit that would match his specs and every night he would point at my drum kit and say, I wanna play that kit. Then I would say, Yes, please let him play it. So he ended up playing my drum kit every night because he liked the way I set it up. It’s funny because that was a long time ago and I ran into him about a year ago at an award ceremony and I reminded him that we had toured together a long time ago and he said, I remember you, you had the blue drum kit and it was set up like this. He remembered me by my drum kit and how it was set up and so that was cute and endearing.”
Shannon – Tell me about the early days of Paradise Kitty.
Rachael – “A friend called me and asked if I wanted to do an all girls Guns N’ Roses tribute and I said I was interested but I had a couple caveats. The first one was that everyone in the band had to really play and sound good, I didn’t want it to be a gimmick or something that’s like, oh we’re so cute but the songs don’t sound right. With Guns N’ Roses, every member in the band has such a specific style and if that style isn’t mimicked and if you don’t capture the feel, I wont do it because I know the Guns N’ Roses guys and it would’ve just been embarrassing to me. That and also, I didn’t wanna have a cheesy name and wear wigs or anything campy like that at all. People know who I am as a drummer and I just wanted to get out there as myself and not trying to be Steven Adler or Matt Sorum. So those were my rules around it. The same person introduced Jenna and I and we really hit it off. The first lineup went through a lot of changes because Jenna and I really wanted to find the right people. Jenna and I are both really serious about what we do and when we take on a project, we take on wholeheartedly and we work really hard and you can’t do that when you have band members who only wanna play once a month or only wanna play close to their house or can’t do a fly-date like there’s people who just wanna play music as weekend warriors and there’s people who are in it to win it. I think it’s important to play music with people who have the same goals as you and if not, you’re working in different directions or not working at all. I took us a while to find people who were moving our direction and we just ended up deciding that it just worked best to hire different people for each tour and each project we do depending on who’s available and who’s easy to tour with and who gets along with everyone. A lot of being a good musician is how you interact with your bandmates and how you handle yourself while traveling.”
Shannon – Does it ever get chaotic being in a band with all girls?
Rachael -”I’ve been in a number of them and it can be but I don’t like that. I like situations where we’re family members and we can work together. My all girl band that I put together in L.A. that I was with for 10 years, I’m still dear friends with most of them and I saw one of them the other night and she’s playing a few shows with Paradise Kitty. We’re all still dear best friends and we all still send each other’s parents Christmas cards and things like that. To me it’s important to play with people who you like being around and being with because it really sucks when you play with girls who are catty or competitive because I’m not that kind of person and I don’t like being around that kind of person. I like to be around women who support each other and love each other and work together. So whatever project I’m working on, I try to curate that kind of feeling and to really grow and flourish in whatever your doing.”
Shannon – Who is one drummer who has inspired you time and again, that you would like to talk to, that you haven’t yet?
Rachael – “That’s a tough one because I’ve met most of them. Bonham would be pretty rad, Keith Moon would be pretty rad. The person who inspired me most in my life as a drummer and as a person would probably be Randy Castillo. I was fortunate enough that we became friends and he inspired me more when we became friends. He grew up near me in New Mexico and when you grow up in a small town, most people don’t really leave. You feel limited by your environment. I remember being in 5th grade and they were talking to us about starting to look at colleges and I instantly thought I had to go somewhere close to home. Then I thought, Wait a minute, that guy from Albuquerque, New Mexico plays with Ozzy Osbourne around the world. If somebody who lives close to me could do that, then why would I have to go to college close by. So he started to inspire me long before I started playing drums. I started to look at what was available to me outside of my small little town and years later when I moved to L.A., we got to be really good friends and he continued to inspire me constantly. When I first moved there he would check on me every few weeks. He would say, Are you eating well, are you taking care of yourself, are you practicing regularly? He just looked after me and that meant a lot. He was just such a kind person and he inspired me to be the best version of myself I could be and work hard.”
Shannon – Outside of music, what are your hobbies?
Rachael – “Well I love art. My day jobs are all in music. Right now I’m working on some projects through my day job supporting women in entertainment and it’s really invigorating for me and I’ve become really passionate about it. It’s exciting to watch how powerful women can be when we work together instead of working against each other. It’s this weird thing that women are kind of taught to be competitive with each other and it’s so disruptive and it doesn’t do any greater good in the world. But when you watch a group of women work together. When women work together they are so strong and powerful and they can manifest so much and I feel really blessed and honored to work through Monster Energy to work on our women in entertainment program because I’m working with different initiatives that really support women working together.”
Shannon – What were you initial thoughts on being asked to drum for Femme Fatale?
Rachael – “When Lorraine first called me I was living in London and I wasn’t scheduled to come home until a few months after I ended up coming home. So I was like I can’t do it, I’m in London. So she called a few times and I kept declining because I was too far away. Then one day it was raining in London and I was stuck in the cold, wet rain with soaked shoes and a soaked coat and I thought, someone is offering to pay me to go play the Monsters of Rock Cruise in the Caribbean and be treated like a rockstar and I’m staying here in the freezing cold for a few more months, Hell No! I’m going home. So I called her back and asked if she was still looking for a drummer and she said yes, thank god. To me it was cool because I remembered her band from when I was a kid and we’re both from New Mexico so that was an interesting hometown thing, so it was cool, I love Lorraine.”
Shannon – What is one thing you think the rock industry needs to improve on these days?
Rachael -”I think it’s really finding a unity and working together. When a scene has that unity, it’s so powerful and so beautiful and so powerful and I haven’t felt that in the rock scene for a long time. And that’s how a scene is created is by the unity. Everyone starts going to a club one night to see some cool bands and then it turns into a scene and I haven’t felt that in a while. Everyone watches each other on social media, there’s not that human to human, person to person interaction that’s really important to making the magic.”
Shannon – Do you think rock n’ roll will ever get as big as it was in the 70’s and 80’s again?
Rachael – “Music is cyclical so it moves in cycles and I can say this from meetings I’ve been having with music executives and they’re saying the cycle’s getting ready to shift again. I’m starting to see labels putting time back into rock bands. I think for the longest time everyone was waiting for rock to do something new but it’s all been done so there’s not gonna be some new sound that comes out like David Bowie when he started or some new sound like Judas Priest when they started or some new sound like Black Sabbath when they started, nobody had ever seen or heard of something like that before. But now all the extremes have been done and they’ve been expanded upon into sub-genres of every extreme and I think it’s kind of moving back to a place where people come back to the middle where it’s just solid rock n’ roll. You can talk to all the metal shredders and they’ll say, Oh AC/DC that’s easy, that’s stupid. Well it’s really not easy and it’s not stupid. If you think you can play the notes, then yes you can play the notes, but to make it feel right is not easy. You ask any amazing, top drummer out there to play like Phil Rudd and all of them are like, I’ll do my best man, but I don’t know if I can do that, because Phil Rudd has such an amazing Rock feel in AC/DC that it’s really hard for anyone to touch it. I remember a big artist that wasted an entire day in the studio tearing apart Phil Rudd drum parts trying to quantize and see exactly what it was that he did that made it feel so damn good and they couldn’t figure it out. I think rock is gonna have a resurgence but I don’t think there’s gonna be some new variable that no one’s ever thought of before because all the variables have been tested. I think it’s gonna come back on people playing with an amazing feel and really emoting through their music.”
Shannon – What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome in the music industry so far?
Rachael – “I hate to say it, but honestly female discrimination because I’ve also worked in this industry on the business side for almost as long as I’ve been a drummer. So I’ve had a series of situations where people said to me, You know you aren’t allowed to be pretty, smart, and talented, you could be one of the three, maybe two of the three, but you can’t be all of the three. It’s been really challenging. It’s also a mindset that women have about each other and I think that’s all changing right now and I feel really blessed to be alive at this time to watch how women are being allowed to own their power. But in all reality, it is challenging. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than most of the girls I play with, so I’ve seen how bad things were when they were still picking out their first guitar. It’s not something I like to really talk about of call out because that emphasizes it and supports it so I kind of ignore it and try to work in a different direction. But in the end there are really challenges with being a woman.”
Shannon – What can we expect from you in the future?
Rachael -”Paradise Kitty is gonna keep growing and doing different things and that’s awesome. But there’s also another project I’m working on right now that will hopefully see the light of day sometime soon here. So I’m really excited for that and I can’t say much about it but just keep your eyes and ears open and hopefully that will hit your ears sometime soon.”