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When Stuck Mojo first appeared in the mid - 90s they were something of a phenomenon to some like
myself and a question mark to others. Daring to be different in a non socially acceptable way they
challenged the system musically and broke down barriers. And just when they seemed to be on the verge
of breaking big, they were gone in a flash. Last year to my amazement, the band played a low key gig
(which sold out) in London so I hooked up with guitarist Rich Ward aka The Duke.

-Shan Siva

So where’s Bonz Rich?

rich: man, he’s still asleep.....he had a late night.

Are you kidding - its 4pm!!!

rich: well thats Bonz....if want to speak to him interview YOU can wake him!

Ok. So how come they call you the Duke Rich? Are you related to John Wayne?!

rich: Well it was an honour bestowed on me. If you look at all the great musicians like Elvis, Sting. Bono
they all had nicknames - ha ha, no I’m just joking!! Actually Metal Hammer Germany wrote a review and
said “if Zakk Wylde is the king of metal then certainly Rich Ward is the Duke” and it kinda stuck - and I
didn’t mind cos I was a John Wayne fan anyway ha ha!

Man, I had images of this good ol’ southern boy kinda like Boss Hog livin’ in this big Gone-With-
The-Wind type mansion ha ha!

rich: oh no, actually that’s the Bonz mansion ha ha! I’d be Cooter, the sheriff’s deputy and my house would be a compound with barbed wire. Actually I got married in May so I bought my first proper house with a yard, I figured it was time cos I wanted to build a studio and it didn’t make sense doing it for a rental where they would just kick me out. Funny thing is, my girlfriend and I used to live in this 3 bedroom townhouse and now we’ve moved to this 8 bedroom house but we still only live in two bedrooms cos we don’t know what to do with the other rooms!

Are you still based out’ve Atlanta?

rich: yeah, we’re all still based in Atlanta. I’m within 40 minutes of the city centre....Atlanta’s just one of these cities that goes and goes. You can sit in a traffic jam for 45 minutes and still not reach the city centre from where I live.

I thought Stuck Mojo was a revelation when I first saw you (at Metalfest ‘94) - I mean, the idea of this southern white boy and this african american on stage together jammin out this fusion mix of rap and metal was amazing - did you plan it that way?

rich: actually, no.....but that tension or perceived tension is what makes this band great....the fact that I have so little in common with Bonz and he has with me and that we are so culturally different is what creates the magic between him and me that you’ve described. He was in military, he comes from a military family, he was born on an airforce base in Okinawa so he was exposed to a lot of things and being with Bonz also exposed me to a lotta things.When we first put the band together we were aiming at funk rock along the lines of Faith No More or really aggressive Chilli Peppers stuff and at the time we had this Lenny Kravitzy type vocalist who really couldn’t do the rap thing. I knew Bonz from the rap scene when he was MC Bonz and then he changed his name to Da Brutha Bonz so I invited him over to help our vocalist with the rap stuff. So Bonz starts showing him how to rap and the rest of the band starts gettin goose bumps as we’re listening to him. After the rehearsal we had a meeting and the singer was fired and Bonz was in - but it took me another 2 months to actually be our vocalist cos he didn’t wanna be in a band. Traditionally rappers aren’t in bands - and on top of that we had long hair and wore cowboy boots!

On a more serious note, you must’ve been one of the very few interracial bands around. How easy was it (being from the South) and did you ever get criticised or told that you’d never make it because of that?

rich: Well, it wasn’t easy at all. I even remember playing one show where there was a sign that said ‘no niggers’. And out we come and there’s this black guy onstage and two rednecks with long hair and tattoos and the crowd just didn’t know what to make of us. From ‘89 to ‘94 no matter how good we were we couldn’t get a record deal they just didn’t know what to do with us but when the record came out it kind’ve legitimised us. And yeah, after Mojo there were a lotta bands that came out with black singers. Then we had to work out how to make people buy our records and that was our live show so we would play in front of anyone. We toured with Type O Negative, Testament - and their crowd was tough man, hardcore thrash fans but we’d play on front of ANYONE man! We were determined that anyone could take us on tour and when they did we’d play our asses off.

What does the name ‘Stuck Mojo’ mean?

rich: ‘Stuck Mojo’ came from our original vocalist who one day after rehearsal turned to the band and said “you and the bass player have so much mojo every time I play with you guys I feel like I’m stuck in the middle” and we were like ‘how cool is that name?!’ Its pretty ambiguous cos it sounds funky but also pretty aggressive. So we ran with it for a while cos we weren’t sure cos we were metal but it at least it wasn’t a name like ‘Brutality’ ha ha.

Speaking of apes, is the symbol i.e. the dreaded bulked out ape-like creature an alter ego of one of the band?!

rich: there’s story behind this which is when I used to eat at a place called Studebakers cos I was so poor at the time that I got a shower whenever and stayed with whoever I could. Anyway, there was a dance DJ who was a starving artist and we sorta came together as I was a broke ass musician. Roll on a few years and at the same time we got our record deal he also got a deal with Marvel comics to do 2 comic books so it came out’ve his imagination. If you look at the character you’ll see it has dreads and a goatee which is based on Bonz taking his character onstage and blowing it up into this iron clad comic book character. Century Media was pleased with it and that was the beauty of going with a small independent label (at the time) that we could do something cutting edge and offa the street but as we grew we gradually let it go.

I understand you had a coupla bust ups between you and Bonz.....

rich: (thinks) ...I just didn’t wanna be in a band with Bonz anymore. I guess I never really asked him if he wanted to be in a band with me......I guess the easy way of saying it is for Bonz the gig is never over. After the gig he partys. And I’m a teetotaller and I’m into going to the gym. I guess the difference then was that I did not have the wisdom at the time to accept him for who he was. He was a friend and I loved him and what he did never really affected the band but it was all the little things that he did. And there were all these little tensions in the band be it lack of promotion sometimes from the record company, lack of money from the tours cos they didn’t make what we thought. Many things were going on and Bonz and I were caught in the middle holding the band together and some of these tensions magnified the issues. I had I never looked at it as ‘he’s probably the best front man in the business’ but as ‘he’s always up there on stage as my back up and he always does his job’ but it was me trying to impose my will and way on him and it took me a few years to realise that we all have to be who we all are and that you can’t really force anyone to change the only we really have any control over is over us and our actions.

Are you a controlling person Rich?

rich: I started going thru a period where I became more right wing in my thinking, not in terms of fascism or being a Nazi but more conservative politics i.e. less government less involvement less intrusion lower taxes in other words accountability of the people to the people in other words if you don’t earn a living it shouldn’t be some other guys job to pay higher taxes to give you welfare. So it got to the point where I believed in selfishness with this all-for-one or strengths-of-the-one mindset and of course Bonz was more liberal and socially conscious so he and I were really seeing things differently. And once again, having a few years off I became a kinder gentler person. Some people have their drugs, they do cocaine or heroin but anger and aggressiveness was my drug - benching weights became an obsession and I started getting into this whole Ted Nugent meets He Man thing. Look, in a 24 hour day we take around 2 hours to play a show, then there’s the 22 hours of nothing where I could do drugs, sleep with girls....and I just decided to exercise and so when we’d roll into a town I’d find a gym and start exercising which is what I was doing a coupla hours before doing this interview. And this state of being started to push Bonz away and I started to think I needed my own band. At the same time the whole Jericho thing, which was a side project at the time, started to take the place of Stuck Mojo and as that started to sell big time and I felt like I needed to detox and take time offa this heavy music.

So is Fozzy a joke band, except you guys got a record deal and ended up on Howard Stern right?

rich: We did the ‘Rising’ video with a few of the wrestlers and we’d talk about metal, they’d come and see our shows, we’d go and see wrestling and hang out and jam and developed an amazing kinship. I had a band - it was a fun band - called Fozzy Osbourne and we’d all dress up in 80’s metal outfits and go play Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister and make fools out’ve ourselves like outta Spinal Tap. We never practiced, we just a put a list together and played as fast as we could ha ha. I told Chris about the band and asked him to come sing for us at a show and he thought that’d be killer and we billed it as “Fozzy Osbourne featuring Chris Jericho and the guys from Stuck Mojo”. We played the show and about 700 people showed up ha ha! After the second show we were offered a record deal to do an album of covers and I was like ‘shit, you wanna give me money to do this?!?!’ ha ha so I did it - these 80s metal covers but with heavy Stuck Mojo riffing and I really enjoyed it, so we did another album! Then we thought we should write our own material and besides being a metal guitar player song writing is something I want to develop too personally and thats pretty much where Fozzy is today friend.

Its been a few years since we’ve heard from Stuck Mojo - it all seemed to end rather abruptly, so is this a full on reformation or just a special show?

rich: yeah, it stopped and although it didn’t end we kinda all went our separate ways. There was an extreme side to my personality that I needed to shed over the years which I have now done. I am a metal guitar player, thats what I do onstage and I like to push the boundaries and this is the only band - playing with Bonz - that when I walk offstage I feel that I’ve played with integrity.