Greg Foxx is a keyboardist who has worked with many famous musicians such as Billy Idol, Toto, Yes, and ACDC. His performances can be heard around the world. You might have heard Greg's performance at the Academy of Country Music Awards with Miley Cyrus for her song, The Climb. One of Greg's most recent projects is called the Renaissance Rock Orchestra.
The Renaissance Rock Orchestra is directed by Greg and includes other rock legends that have performed with fans like Queen, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. This performance unites the sounds of metal and symphonic music. I'm Ellie Sadler and I'm being joined by Greg Foxx. His music with RO as well as Louis Prima Jr.
and The Witnesses and the Moby Dicks can be heard on our station. Be sure to listen to Renaissance Rock Orchestra's three new Christmas singles that will be played during the holiday season this year and the year's forthcoming. Welcome, Greg. Hi, Ellie.
How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good.
It's great to see you. Hello to everybody in my hometown. So I have a show called Broken Record, which is a music variety show. On my show, I talk about concerts and my love for live music.
So I have three quick questions for you. First, what was your first concert? My very first concert. Yes.
My very first. It's been so long. But of course, you think that you remember your very first concert. And I recall my very first concert as being Chicago, the band Chicago.
Oh, fun. Do you know Chicago? Yeah. My dad listens to the music sometimes when we're driving in the car.
Chicago was a great, great band back in the day. They were a big deal. They were a horn band. Kind of like a blood, sweat, and tears thing back in the day.
But of course, they had so many hits over the course of the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. But back in the 70s, when they went to that show, they were still a very organic band. You know, they ended up with Pete Satera, Peter Satera, becoming kind of a bit of corporate production hits. You know, you have an outside songwriter, the rest of the song, you bring it in, you record it.
It's beautiful. And they're beautiful songs. And he had so many hits that way. But in the early days, it was like this band of like 12 guys with trumpets and saxes and trombones.
And they were all their own songs. So it was very personal to them. And I don't know. It was kind of like hippie music, I guess I would say.
But a really interesting thing I remember about the concert, it's so different how times have changed. Back then, we didn't have LED walls and lasers and shooting the fire. So the big, huge thing to show, other than how great the band was, was they had this gigantic blow-up thing behind the stage that was like 30 feet tall. And it took a long, long time for it to blow up whenever it was pumping up.
And so it was kind of silly because it was pulled up. But it was their band named Chicago, 40 feet tall, this big, gigantic blow-up balloon in Chicago that was like 60 feet wide, 40 feet tall. That's what live concert special effects were like back then. Oh my gosh.
That would be so cool. And what was your most recent concert? Well, what was the last concert that I saw? Let's see.
Let me think about this. But I think my last one was actually Chris Cornell. Oh, wow. Yes, and my light guy, Sam Raphael, who lives up there in Bremerton.
My sound guy, his brother, Alex Raphael, lives in Bremerton too. And he owns Max RPM Motorsports over there in Bremerton. But Sam, he was running lights for Chris Cornell, and that was very, very cool. Yeah, it was.
That's so cool. Do you have a favorite concert you've been to? Oh my. Well, that is very, very hard for me because I've been to so many over the course of my life.
You know, back when I was a kid, the only fun thing to do was to go to concerts. And of course, you could go to a concert for five bucks. Yeah. You could go see Led Zeppelin for five bucks.
A lot cheaper. Crazy, right? So, you know, it was pretty cool, of course. In some ways, the concert that I did for Miley Cyrus at the Academy of Country Music Awards was my favorite because I had never performed in front of 36 million people before I played the song The Climb Forer at the MGM Grand Garden Arena here in Las Vegas.
In some ways, that was a very special concert. But I'm going to say my favorite concert, I never saw Close to the Edge by Yes. And everybody watching, if you've never heard that or studied that album, please do. It's an iconic progressive rock song album.
That side one is a 30-minute song called Close to the Edge. And most people that like prog rock or progressive rock think that it will never be duplicated. There will never be another progressive rock record as good as that. I did not see that concert live, but I saw Yes a number of times.
And I'm going to say that my favorite concert was the album Relator. Relator. Some beautiful, beautiful songs on there. When I hear this music, it's just heart-wrenching to me.
But you know what? It has that rock power and groove that I like to. And they get crazy. They get way outside the box in.
And I love that. That's kind of my wheelhouse. Yeah. Going back to Renaissance Rock Orchestra, what was the inspiration behind that?
What made you want to create a group that would play these songs? My first inspiration to do it was when I went out to see Trans-Sagorean Orchestra. Are you familiar with Trans-Sagorean Orchestra? Yeah.
Of course, they tour around the country every year for Christmas. And so they kind of built this genre, this Christmas genre that is, once again, I would say classical metal. They're considered to be a metal act. But of course, the production is so huge with fire and shooting fire and lasers and all the LED walls.
It's just remarkable. And the music I love, too. Mikey Bones took me out. He knew the guys that were in Trans-Sagorean Orchestra and he introduced me to them.
And so over the course of several years, I saw the show three times every Christmas. And every time I'd see the show, I would think to myself, man, this is amazing. I love this music. And I could do that.
I know I could do that. I know I could write music like that. So that was my inspiration. And of course, I was also hoping that since they created this genre that didn't exist before, they had opened up this new world.
And they're so successful at it that they go out and they play for about 60 days every year and they make $90 million. So I was hoping that investors were going to go, wow, there's only one TSO in the world. And this guy, Greg Fox, has built this new little TSO band. Although there is a difference.
I'm not trying to be TSO. I've never wanted to do the Christmas show thing. So even though we've recorded three records in, my second record has 27 rock stars on it and nine famous drummers from bands like ACDC and Slash and Whitesnake and Foreigner and Hearts. It goes on and on and on.
But I never wanted to be a Christmas show. So this fourth record that I recorded this year called Christmas Rocks is our first Christmas rock. And it's the first time we're really getting the wheels on the bus and taking it out on tour. But it was originally Trans-Sydarian Orchestra that inspired me to start writing it.
And it was amazing how the music came to me. It seemed kind of divine. It was the right time where God had said, you know, it's time for this to happen, for this to happen for you. When I was out on my sailboat, that experience changed me a lot as a person and as an artist.
It made me a lot stronger. It made me miss my music block because I couldn't have a candle on the sailboat. But when I got off the sailboat, I immediately moved to Venice Beach, California. I started taking my career a lot more seriously.
Prior to that, you know, when I was up in Seattle, I was kind of hanging on the coattails of famous fans, like playing with the guys in hards, you know, doing some things with the guys in Queens right here and there. The difference between TSO and Renaissance Rock Orchestra is, of course, the Christmas versus the classical metal, which is what I do in write. You know, I've gotten to the point that I like to call it melodic rock because people get scared any time you say metal. They get scared when you say metal.
And some people don't understand the symphonic thing. They don't think they're going to like it. So I've started calling it just melodic rock. It has progressive rock influences, classical metal influences, progressive metal influences.
But yeah, please go listen to it on Spotify and on Apple Music and check it out. So my new motto for Renaissance Rock Orchestra is take, when people ask me what is Renaissance Rock Orchestra, I say take Trans-Siberian Orchestra, take out the Christmas and add rock stars. Yeah. So that's kind of what my theme of what we are.
Awesome. All right. Thank you so, so, so much for doing this interview with me. Well, thank you too, Ellie.
It was really a pleasure to meet you. Yeah. Once again, I'm Ellie Sadler here with Greg Fox. Greg Fox is a part of the Renaissance Rock Orchestra that has multiple performances coming up.
Thank you so much again for joining me. Thank you so much, Ellie. Bye. Bye.
This has been Ellie Sadler with 88.9 The Bridge.