Just about every rock band in the world will tell you its latests collection of songs is its best yet. Oftentimes, public opinion proves to think otherwise. All of which leads us to Cleveland’s Quest.
They too will tell you that their Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence album is the best stuff they’ve ever recorded. But you know what? They’re not lying.
For starters, various factors during the band’s first 10 years resulted in only a handful of singles and EPs. The band went through two previous singers on those releases, Scott Wagner and Jude. Each time, something was incomplete. Not anymore. New singer Allen McKenzie is The Man. Quest couldn’t have found a better complement to its progressive rock package.
Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence clicks on all cylinders. So much so that the band laid down 11 songs in its own home studio affectionately dubbed “The Woodworks” (more on that later), thus making Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence the first full-length album in Quest’s decade-long career.
“Yeah, we’ve been around awhile,” says guitarist Bill Kaminski, in between a few laughs as we sat down recently to find out about Quest’s latest quest.
“Our first vocalist [Jude] was with us five and a half years and then he left. We auditioned something like 60 people and got our second singer [Scott Wagner], but unfortunately that situation was like being in a bad relationship, going out with a girl you know you shouldn’t have gone out with; it should never have happened, yet it kind of goes on for way too long. That was sort of the situation with our second singer. He was a nice person, nice guy, but he wasn’t there otherwise.
“So after that, we didn’t know what we were going to do (laughs). We thought we were going to be playing all instrumentals. After Al sought our ad seeking a singer, he called, and I couldn’t believe it because I had met him like 11 years ago. We had a singer and he always liked our band, our first ep and stuff. He always wanted to be in the group, but we had a singer (laughs). I was floored when he called, He came over and that was pretty much it. After he joined, we decided we had to get our stuff together and put out a CD. So really, it was because of him joining that we went ahead with recording.”
McKenzie hooked up with Quest in March of 1993. By the following July, work had begun on Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence.
"The creative process started right from day one,” McKenzie said. “It wasn’t like I had to break myself in with these guys, because I already knew what they were about. I knew that we’d blend together. My singing style, their playing style, I knew it would work.
“I remember seeing a review for Heartstrings and I was thinking to myself they’re right up my alley, along the lines of the bands I grew up with and loved. Bill shows up at a Rush tribute show I was doing at Akron University in about 1986 with a copy of Heartstrings and just gives me a freebie. I take it home and listen to it, and thought ‘these guys are great.’ From then on, I liked the guys and always thought, ‘man, if I could only be their singer. I want to be their singer.’ But they had a singer.”
Kaminski relates an interesting situation that came up shortly thereafter.
“When Jude left the band, I went to the Akron Agora because Foxx was playing, and I was going to ask Al if he wanted to join the band. So I go there, and they were a pretty big established band, the place was packed and the response was great. I just stood there went go, ‘this guy’s never going to give up all this to join our group’ Why would he? So after he did end up ultimately joining, we talked about this and he said, ‘oh, I would have quit that night (laughs).”
“And I would have,” interjected McKenzie. “I would have just left Foxx in a second to join these guys.”
“Sometimes it takes a little longer to get things right,” Kaminski said. “Steve, our other guitar player, he put it best when he said when Al joined the band we got our engine for our Ferrari. We had the body and all the rest, we just needed the engine. And Al was the one.”
With all the parts in place, and an exciting fresh new beginning, Quest decided the time was finally right for a full-length release that would showcase all the various facets that make up the band. McKenzie possesses a clean, ranging higher-pitched voice that at times resembles Geddy Lee’s from Rush. It is an exciting mix to Quest’s eclectic musical natures. Different parts of Quest’s music would appease fans of such artists as Rik Emmet, Triumph, Rush, Dream Theater, Yes, and early Genesis.
Short, four or five song EPs in the past didn’t fully capture the complete Quest. Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence does. Kaminski has always accentuated positive, inspirational topics in his lyric writing, and continues to do so in impressive new songs like “Warm” and “Is This All There Is”. McKenzie, while no doom and gloom merchant, has however brought in a few darker and more mysterious subjects to his songwriting. “In The Name Of God”, for example, revisits the David Koresh episode in Waco, Texas.
“Al can sing pretty much the whole gamut, so now we’re open to pretty much whatever anyone comes up with composition-wise,” Kaminski said. “We’ve always been about trying to do whatever we wrote and doing what came naturally, but with Al’s voice we’re able to accomplish that… effectively (laughs).”
McKenzie is not soley a singer. He can play guitar, bass, and keyboards, which helps immensely in addressing his songwriting ideas.
“You have to write material you believe in,” McKenzie says. “If we didn’t sell a single copy of Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence, it’s still my proudest thing I’ve ever done. I can listen to this album and say, ‘Wow, look what we’ve done.’ I can look myself in the mirror every day, which I couldn’t do in the last band because I didn’t believe in what I was doing.”
“We do try to be a positive band,” Kaminski said. “We want people to listen to the records and for the most part get some sort of good feeling. I always remember reading the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team used that one Triumph tune “Magic Power” as their inspirational theme song on their way to a World Series title. In fact, I read that in THE PATROL (laughs), and I think that’s great. There have been times people have come up to me and said, “I realy liked the lyrics from this song. It made me think about things.’ It’s really a great compliment to a lyricist that you affected somebody in a positive way.”
In past years, Quest has opened for such notable national artists as Rik Emmett, RTZ, and Fate’s Warning, but by far the band’s biggest highlight was opening up for Yes last summer at Blossom’s side stage.
“That was awesome! Awesome,” Kaminski said. “There was a ton of people there, for one, and the response was just incredible. I think if we would have had a product out at the time, we would have sold a lot of copies. And some of the guys from the Yes crew came down and checked us out. It was definitely a highlight of our career.”
Opposite Sides Of The Picket Fence is an impressive sounding collection of songs, especially production-wise. Quest took its time getting particular details exactly the way they wanted them.
“We bought our own gear and made our studio called The Woodworks, which is a takeoff on the Metalworks (owned by Triumph’s Gil oore and Mike Levine) in Toronto, because we recorded there in 1987,” Kaminski said. “We always said if we get our own studio – well, we can’t afford metal (laughs) – so we’ll call it the Woodworks.
“We maybe spent $5000 on the gear, and then we spent from July 1993 to October 1994 recording it. So we spent 15 months recording, mixing, and the whole deal.”
“It was our first undertaking, doing it ourselves,” added McKenzie. “In the band I was in before, and these guys (Quest) before, we always worked with outside producers, outside engineers. I like the result (of the new album) because we knew how we wanted to sound. I think it showed up on this record.”
“We spent a lot of time adding things like acoustic guitars, sound effects, and a lot of things,” Kaminski said. “Like if someone listened with headphones, they would hear a lot of things going on, similar to the way a lot of the great albums in the 70’s were done.
“We did it all on our own, and of course we had to do it around our schedule of having to do other stuff outside of music. If we would have went to a studio to record 11 songs, I don’t even know how much it would have cost. It would have been way out of our reach.”
Said McKenzie, “To go into all the details the way we wanted to put everything into (this album), to go into a recording studio and you’re on a budget, you have to rush everything. With our own studio, we took our time and got the sounds we wanted.”