via The Pitch KC

Musician Nuno Bettencourt of long-running hard rock band Extreme can best be described as a guitarist’s guitarist. In addition to his work with his main band over the last four decades, he’s worked with Paul McCartney, Rhianna, and Perry Ferrell. Throw in the fact that Extreme frontman Gary Cherone did some time with Van Halen in the late ’80s, along with the various side projects of bassist Pat Badger and drummer Kevin Figueiredo, and the band can be seen as something of the inverse of a supergroup.

All four members of Extreme have done their time with musical luminaries the world over, and yet, the band has been a regularly touring and performing entity for the past decade, to say nothing of their long history prior to their 2015 reunion. The band’s currently on the road with Living Colour, with the tour hitting the VooDoo Lounge on Sunday, Sept. 1. We spoke with Nuno Betterncourt to discuss his wide-ranging career and the joys of being in Extreme.

The Pitch: Last year, Extreme released their first album in 15 years, Six. I imagine there’s been a lot going on in between those two albums. What keeps the band going after so many years?

Nuno Bettencourt: It’s that brotherly love-hate that we have for each other. No, we’ve obviously been doing shows and doing performances and stuff through those years together. The 15 year gap is kind of not real. Only because it sounds like, “Okay, well, we did an album 15 years ago,” then, like you said, “What? Did we just not do anything and then wait 15 years and, all of a sudden, magically an album appears?”

It wasn’t the case. We were writing through the years off and on. Geography plays a big part. When you’re a younger band in the early days, everybody’s from the same neighborhood, everybody’s always hanging and doing that. And then, you get a bit older and you have families, you move, people are in different places, and it’s not as susceptible to the geography of it to write and create.

But, that excuse aside, I think we wrote a lot actually. Probably wrote about 50 to 60 songs in that time. I think we could have easily put out maybe three or four albums in that space of 15 years, but I said a long time ago to Gary–we are predominant writers of the band–“I never want to release anything that doesn’t mean something to us,” in the sense of, “Just ’cause we wrote a song doesn’t mean you put it out.”

I know most people don’t do that because I think most artists think everything they do is great, and the newer stuff is always the best stuff, and I also think it’s detrimental to your finances to not release music. You always get an advance, people want to book you more, and all that stuff. The money never affected us that way, thankfully, which is not good for our bank accounts, but I told Gary, that music is really important to us.

I always felt that when you’d walk into a record store back in the day, our heroes that you listen to—Queen, Zeppelin, Van Halen, and all stuff—I felt like whenever we got a record deal, and we finally did what we did, I felt like it was a privilege to be even included in those bins. You could go to the E and there we are. There’s Extreme along with The Who over there and all the bands we love. I always felt like something that you earned and it’s something that was hallowed ground to me.

I think putting out music that’s going to be here long after we’re gone, it’s kind of your legacy and your history and your contribution to rock and roll. To me, that always had to be something important to us and something that we couldn’t wait to contribute and share with people, not just because it’s a payday, not just because we can.

It became a lot more tempting, obviously, you know, with the birth of social media and all that. It’s easy to just put shit out. You’re like, “I’ll put something out today. Let me just hit the spacebar, and now we posted it. There it is. We have a song out.” As much as that tempted us, it never made sense to us. It was always like, “Listen, if you’re gonna do an album, and you got some fan base out there and you possibly have new fans, you want to do it with respect. You want to release it in the proper way and the way that there’s a tradition there to us.”

When artists do an album, I think it has to be fully self-centered and selfish. It can’t be for somebody else. It can’t be for the fans. It can’t be for the label. It has to be something that you put your head on the pillow at night and you’re like, “I can’t wait to share that with my brother or with my family,” and I think that was the real reason we hit a crop of songs in 2018, and it was like, “Oh shit, I think I’m feeling something. This is something special to us.”

I know it’s a long-winded answer, but that’s really the truth.

That’s a great answer because I’ve always felt like Extreme is the inverse of a super group, rather than it is a bunch of people from other bands coming together to form a band. You all have gone out and done so much other stuff and then come back to Extreme time and time again. Gary’s got his time with Van Halen, there’s your and Kevin’s work with Perry Farrell, or your work with Rihanna, but you all seem to gravitate back to this band to focus your music.

I refer to Extreme as the mothership. I think we all know there would be no me performing with Paul McCartney at the Grammys, or there would be no me playing Nobel Peace Prize concert with Steven Tyler or Kings of Chaos, or all the things that you mentioned that Gary and everybody else is doing, if it wasn’t for Extreme.

Extreme is the inception of our careers. It’s not even just the inception of our music in Extreme. It’s who we are. It’s who our DNA and our identity is. You always know that when you come home to that mothership, there’s something a lot more powerful.

I mean, what could be more powerful than actually hanging with Paul McCartney for three days? I don’t know, probably nothing. Even when you’re with Paul McCartney, for instance, and you get those secret three-day rehearsals of talking to him and just jamming with him, but when a Paul McCartney will bring up your music, like a “More Than Words,” or certain songs on the album, it’s not just performing with him and Rihanna at the Grammys, it’s actually, “See what you’ve done? You’ve reached somebody that is unreachable.”

You have to believe he’s real, that it is Paul McCartney the whole time you’re with him, but that he actually mentioned a song title or a couple of them, that’s the importance of what goes back to the album stuff that we were talking about. That is your legacy and your identity.

There’s none higher than The Beatles for me. There’s The Beatles and then the pop kind of rock world. And then there was Zeppelin for me. When you get to actually have a Jimmy Page come to a show in London or talk to you backstage, or you get the honor of playing with Paul, you realize something that you’ve done that you have to respect, which is our mothership, which is Extreme.

That’s what got you to the point where you can actually walk into a room where somebody shows up to your show, and you’re like, “What the fuck are they doing here? How is this even plausible? How is this possible that you’re playing in London, and Jimmy Page just walks in the dressing room, and he says, ‘I’m here to see you perform’?” You’re like, “Wait, what? Excuse me? Is that even possible?”

Trust me, I’m not bragging about it. It’s more just the surreal things that happen to you when you put everything in your heart and soul into something, you do it for the right reasons, and you create music. So we just wanted to keep that going and I think that’s why we come back to the mothership, because we know that we’re grateful. Without Extreme, there would be nothing else. I wouldn’t even have been able to walk in the door. Perry Farrell would be, like, “Who?”

I’m a huge soundtrack nerd. Whenever I get a chance to talk to artists such as yourself, who’ve had their songs in so many different films and television shows and things like that, I’m always curious as to what it’s like for you to have a song that was written about like a very specific thing used to be paired with visuals that might be something totally different.

I think that’s the beauty of directors, producers, film, and television. I’ve always been a big film and television fan. That’s one of those other little surreal moments, as well—to see a movie or be in a theater and have a scene in a Stephen King film, where there’s a chase or something and they turn the radio on and “It (’s a Monster)” is on the radio and it’s one of his horror things, even if it’s just for 10 seconds, 20 seconds.

It really gives you this feeling of all these things that you saw when you were growing up, when you go into a movie theater, when you’d see a horror film or you’d see anything—Ferris Bueller, whatever it may be—and you hear a song and you’re like, “Man, we’re in a film!”

It’s kind of out of our hands and sometimes you’re like, “Wow, that’s interesting,” sometimes you’re like, “That nailed it,” and then there are other times, you approve these things for certain shows that are big, like Handmaid’s Tale.

They’re like, “Hey, would you allow ‘More Than Words’ to be in Handmaid’s Tale? It’s a karaoke moment.” They have to tell you what it is and you approve it. That’s because we were always been very protective of the songs. We don’t put them out anywhere. Then, you see that and you go, “Oh, that was cool. It was in the background. That made sense. Super dope, super cool.”

And then you get one for The Boys, this show that I really don’t watch right now, and I’m reading it, and I just read it, and I go, “Wait, wait, let me go back. What did that just say? That it’s playing in the background while he wants to have a threesome with an octopus and a girl?” and I’m like, “Hell yeah. That’s it. ‘More Than Words’ belongs in that scene.” There’s things like that that you’re like, “What the fuck? Why? Where?” but it’s so interesting.

Look, we’re blessed that people still want to put stuff in current movies. It’s one thing to have it back when we were doing well, in the sense of doing well and the sense of being in our moment in the early ’90s, but now, people are still putting these songs in certain moments, it’s really special. It’s really cool.

You’re on tour with Living Colour and I have to imagine that you, specifically, and Vernon Reid have a lot to talk about. You’re both in that echelon of guitarists’ guitarists.

Yes and no. There’s something really interesting about what you just said. I found, I think, through the years, when you’re in a room, and you get blessed enough to be in a room, say, with Edward Van Halen, I don’t ever remember talking about guitar. Jimmy Page comes to the show, you’re not sitting there talking about, “Hey, what gauge strings you do use?” or whatever.

You’re literally just having this human conversation about, “How are you? How you doing? How’s it feeling? How’s the tour going so far? Hey, you killed it last night,” but it’s not like it’s new there. Maybe certain people want it. Maybe that’s what they want for me. I’ve never done that and I’ve never been approached that way about guitar playing. I think you do it so much and you’re very aware of each other’s work, so you almost want to just hang as humans in all of this and have this contact of just a friendship.

I get together with a bunch of guitar players every once in a while, Tom Morello and different people. We go to the Rainbow and we have these metal nights. We invite all these other musicians and stuff and all we do is talk about like, “What’s your Mount Rushmore?” of this or that or whatever it is and we never talk about ourselves.

It’s really just a conversation sometimes about music and rock and roll and things like that. As musical as Vernon is, we never sat down and talked about notes, guitars, solos, and things like that. It’s really interesting. It’s more just checking in, man. “How are you? How you been?”