Jon Crosby: Vastly appealing.

It might be hard to find levity in a group that writes songs called "Dirty Hole" and "I'm Dying," but Jon Crosby, the precocious mastermind behind VAST, wants people to know he doesn't always wear a frown. "People always come up to me and can't believe that I'm funny onstage and that I joke around," he says. "I think because I take music seriously and interviews seriously that they think I'm more pretentious than I am. I want people to know that I'm not that serious about myself, but I am very serious about the music. To me the record is more important than me ... I treated [it] as the last record I would ever make."
Crosby recorded the majority of his VAST debut, Visual Audio Sensory Theater, a la Trent Reznor and Dave Grohl -- that is, solo. "I don't think it's that big a deal that I played everything by myself on the record," explains Crosby, who spent months auditioning musicians for his live shows. "Now that I have a band, it's more challenging to work with other people."

To fully realize his vision on the album, he added samples from the Bulgarian Female Choir and the Benedictine Monks of the Abby of Saint-Mauer and enlisted the help of drummers Fred Maher and James Lo (Chavez) and an eighteen-piece orchestra. The result is a hybrid of metal, goth, electronica, classical and world music that somehow works in a cohesive and original style. With superb production by Maher (who has worked with Lou Reed and Matthew Sweet) and mixer Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Slayer), the album has garnered its fair share of critical attention. Lars Ulrich of Metallica, for one, has hailed it as one of his favorite new albums.

But Crosby's foray into the music business is nothing new. At the tender age of twenty-one, the Humboldt, Calif., native has more war stories in the industry than most of his senior contemporaries. At thirteen, Crosby attended a weeklong guitar workshop where he was discovered by the head of Shrapnel Records, who subsequently recorded a demo with him and sent it off to Guitar Player magazine. Taken with his talent, the editors featured Crosby as a young guitarist to watch, and quickly the teenage prodigy was receiving letters from people all over the world who wanted to know more about him. "At a young age I saw that it was very possible for me to make a living as a musician," Crosby says. "It was a very positive thing."

Despite this early acclaim and recognition, Crosby never really gelled with the high school institution, and ultimately chose home study and his music over the social infrastructure of Ninth through Twelfth grades. "For some reason people who think and are more introspective have a difficult time socializing and fitting in," he accedes. Indeed, there is a lot of soul searching in Crosby's lyrics. The song "I'm Dying" -- in which Crosby screams, "Not a day goes by when I don't realize I'm dying" -- deals with personal notions of religious faith and the realization of one's own mortality. Other songs deal with shame, sin and temptation.
"I think a musician not singing about God or spirituality is like a married couple not having sex," says Crosby. "Every band and musician that I've been into has sung about it so I don't know what makes me any different."

DAVID DERBY
(April 6, 1999)