May 22, 2009 / 2287 reads
Kelly Hansen recently did an interview with Mar Tomás of Rafabasa.com. He was asked about a band project where he and C.C. worked together, called "Needle Park".
Mar: A couple of years ago you started a project with C.C.DeVille that didn't work out. Is that true? Why didn't that project materialize into a band?
Kelly: Uff! (laughs), that's a good question. Let me see how to start. Hollywood Records hired CC to do an album and they offered him a good contract. At the same time, CC put together a great band, with James Kottak on drums, Jimmy Bain started out on bass, but Tommy Fredriksson replaced him, and CC and me. We did several demos and started to work. The thing is since the beginning the company hired CC as "the star" and they continuously told him he was a genius, and that he can do whatever he wanted because he was the star of the project, you know. Then, he hired me and the rest of the band and we started to record the songs and well, one day we were recording with a producer that had been hired by the company and I was doing my vocal warmups and at the same time I was helping the rhythm section on some songs and I told him we were just rehearsing and those were not the final songs, so he told me not to worry, there was no problem at all with that. The thing is, the next day the company's guys where there to listen some songs, when we already told him that those songs where just demos and they weren't my correct vocals and blah, blah, blah. The final thing is that they wanted a new POISON and that's why they told CC he was the boss, the genius and a lot of things... then why do they want a voice like mine? I was really upset because they didn't tell me upfront, in fact they told me the opposite; they told me to do what I know how to do with my voice and everything, when later it was just the opposite, they only wanted to do a clone of POISON. In fact, it was the goal of a particular person that worked at Hollywood Records at that time that has fucked me over twice in my life . . . this was the first.
There came a time when I looked at myself in the mirror and knew that they could fire me at any time and I couldn't stay in the band like that. CC was having a hard time then, he had been using drugs and he was not stable, although, well, that was not the problem... but he didn't see things clearly. A couple of days later I came back to the studio with a couple of the band's guys, but there was no singer, only various idiots trying to record their voices like Poison's, but in the end, there was no way to finish the project and they lost a lot of money, it's sad because there was really good stuff there.
Anyways, I met CC about 6 months ago and we had a great conversation, it was great to see him after all this time, and we cleared up a lot of the things from our past. I know he was having a hard time then and I keep thinking he didn't treated me like I deserved because of that. Anyway, now I understand that all of that happened in the middle of a hard time in his personal life, and I really can't blame him because it was the people at Hollywood Record's thing. They spurned me and fucked me over and fucked up what was a great project that included some really interesting material. So, basically that's what happened.
