Jason Newsted: We did all of Ozzfest in 2003, and after that we took a little time off and started piecing together ideas and trading discs back and forth. We got about 25 songs together from Piggy's seeds and started developing them. I had a couple other gigs going on and some other things taking place through 2004. Then Piggy started getting sick at the end of 2004 and finally got help with it at the beginning of 2005, but it was too late. It really came down to being neglectful of himself. If he would have paid attention to it earlier he probably would still be with us. It's speculation, but he didn't have it cared for like he should have at the time. It took him under in the middle of 2005, and just before he passed he told Michel (Langevin, Voivod's drummer) he had a bunch of stuff stashed on his computer. In the afternoon of the 24th of August he called Michel and told him he needed to come right now and bring his computer. He told him with his last bit of lucidity where everything was. He then went to sleep and that was it.
We've got pieces of the stuff, the things that we had built together were all rough tracks that Piggy had recorded, some at the Chophouse and some on the half stack sitting on the toilet in his little bathroom. The majority of the guitar you're hearing is his scratch stuff. That's how good he was. That's his scratch tracks you're hearing on the album. It's also my scratch bass tracks that you're hearing on the album. He was on the porch at the Chophouse, and we were sitting out in the sunshine in California and I just recorded my bass parts sitting in a rocking chair, just hanging out. That's what you've got. The stringed instruments on the Voivod album were scratch tracks.
Then Michel went in and glued it all together. He was in the studio by himself with Piggy's amplifier playing the ghost guitar parts as he sat there and glued everything. He's from another planet. Anybody that knows him knows he's not from around here. He knows things that no other musician does, especially any other drummer that I've ever been with, and I've played with a lot of cats. He is absolutely mystical in the way he is able to pull it off. He memorizes the part. There's no click track, no cue tracks. He just plays it. And then Snake went in and did his vocal track in the studio. So the album is half scratch tracks and half real tracks.
How much more of Piggy's material do you have left?
We have enough for at least one more. We haven't had a whole bunch of time to siphon through all of Piggy's acoustic tracks for some interludes and later some Piggy only music. To me as a Voivod fan and as his friend this isa crazy metaphor. He always played electric guitar. He's always been an electronics whiz. He played electric for 31 years. He never had an acoustic guitar. He didn't have an acoustic on the bus, he didn't have an acoustic in his bedroom. Once they told him that there was no hope he unplugged and his girlfriend got him an acoustic guitar. For the last three months of his life he just played acoustic. I'm getting goose bumps thinking about that. The life force was gone, so he pulled the electricity out. He unplugged himself. So all the extra 35 tracks that were stashed in his computer were those acoustic pieces. You can hear his pain. There will be these fumbling chords, then something beautiful. It just rips you up. He still, until the very end, kept striving to make his music. We know him well, and know what he would have wanted. And he actually did say those words. His main concern was letting the record company down. They had given his band another chance. They were putting money behind it. They did what they said they were going to do. What a concept! And he saw that. He felt he let the band down and the record company down. That's his mentality. So we knew we had to make sure everybody heard what he had to share, his last stuff. You can tell that it's quite a distance away from the majority of the music that's made today with cheating with computers and things like that. There are no edits. We just played it. That's something to be commended.
