Today we’d like to introduce you to Chaz Leon.
Chaz, before we jump into specific questions about your music, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Well, basically I grew up as a huge fan of music, rock music in particular. I remember watching the music video for Guns ‘N Roses November Rain as a young kid and thinking it was the most amazing thing I had EVER seen! My young mind was blown and my journey into music underway! If somehow, somewhere, people were making music like that, I knew I had to be a part of it! I saw the way music inspired people and most importantly, I could express emotions through music that I could not through any other means of communication.
I started playing guitar around 12 or 13. Got way into music in high school and became obsessed with being in a band. Like many a young guitar fan, I was inspired mainly by 80s rock guitar heroes: Slash, Dave Mustaine, Marty Friedman, Kirk Hammett, Alex Skonick, Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Steve Vai, etc. Yet, interestingly enough this was during the mid-late 90s, after many of those artists had passed the peak of their popularity. I have since become a huge fan of 90s rock and alternative music, but at the time, my world was heavy metal guitar! I could not fathom how that sort of virtuoso heavy metal guitar playing had ever gone out of style, but that’s just because I was so into it that I had blinders on! Also, it was probably because I JUST missed it’s heyday in the 80s and early 90’s. 🙂
I started a thrash metal band called Absolution in Los Angeles in the mid 2000’s and after about four years of slogging it out in the clubs, unable to keep a stable line-up, we called it quits. We recorded our own album, appeared in several magazines and webzines and played a number of high profile shows opening for established metal acts such as Overkill, Metal Church, Nevermore, and M.O.D. as well as sharing the stage with future metal stars Exmortus and Warbringer, yet we could never find the stability to break through. Nevertheless, it was a great experience and a whole lot of fun rocking the Southern California scene and writing and recording music.
Flash forward many years later, having moved to San Diego, graduating law school and being a little more settled in my life, I was desperately missing the itch to get out on stage and rock! While moving to San Diego, I noticed that the city had a thriving live music and tribute band scene! Being from Los Angeles, I had seen a number of legendary tribute bands over the years and figured this would be the perfect way for me to return to the scene as a more seasoned veteran. However, the metal fire still burned brightly within me! Several years ago, I formed a Metallica tribute called Anesthesia and got my introduction to the San Diego live music scene. We were welcomed warmly and found to our pleasant surprise a group of wonderfully talented, amazing performers who were helping San Diego become one of the fastest growing live music cities in the U.S.. We did some incredible gigs and had some great times! However, about a year and a half ago I came across an add on craigslist looking for members for a Megadeth tribute! Many years ago, while struggling on the Sunset strip, I said to myself if I ever REALLY wanted to do a tribute to one band it would be Megadeth. Why Megadeth? Well, as a young guitar player learning how to play, Megadeth were just AWESOME!! I couldn’t ask for more! At their best, to me that was everything heavy metal should be! The power, the precision, the attitude, the skill, it was all there and then some! When Megadeth were on, to me, as a young musician, they just blew everyone away! I’d never heard anything like that, and always wanted to pay tribute, and here was my opportunity! Joining together with fellow musicians Paul Courtois, Ryan Romero, and Mark Bock, Woke Up Dead – A Tribute to Megadeth was born.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Music is a CRAZY path 🙂 Everyone who is involved has to have had major bumps in the road. Where to begin??? Well, since I could spend the entire night on this section, let me just say it’s enormously challenging getting good enough at your instrument, finding like minded people, finding people with the right ability, making sure you have the right ability, finding like minded people with the right ability who can work together, getting everyone together to rehearse to become a good act, establishing your act, developing your act, marketing your act, putting on a good performance, and just plain getting LUCKY! There are many other musicians far more successful and talented than I that can probably better answer this question but I will try to focus on how we approach being a good tribute band:
- First and foremost is the music. Megadeth is a band that plays a very complex, intricate style of heavy metal and the fans of this music know every single note, riff, guitar lick, drum fill, lyric, etc. We do our best to nail it note-for-note, but as Megadeth has had some of the finest heavy metal musicians to ever set foot on a stage, this can be a daunting task. It takes quite a bit of practice on your own and then together as a group to get it right. Luckily, I play with an AWESOME band who are very supportive of each other and take the time to work through challenging parts. We get along great and have fantastic communication between all band members!! Not to mention they are a great group of guys to hang with!
- The look. This is a tough one, but important! Some tributes go all-in for the look, some don’t bother at all, and some end up somewhere in the middle. I think the better tribute acts I have seen are the true tributes! They do their best to pay attention to the look, feel, vibe, and every detail of the artist they are celebrating. Keep in mind, none of us wrote these songs, we are simply trying to pay homage to the artists we love and giving the crowd an experience as similar as possible to the original. When I first started doing tribute bands, just for fun, I didn’t pay as much attention to this aspect. Yet as I started to see some of the better tribute acts, interact with the crowd, and listen to our fans, I realized that this was an integral component of a good tribute band. The fans who come to see us are just like us, fans of Megadeth! In general, they love it when you get all the little details right (such as the right guitar, the right tone, a particular drum head, a particular outfit or a bullet belt, etc.). It’s all for fun anyways, so the best thing you can do, in my opinion, is to just get into the role! Now, sometimes this can be problematic! Dave Mustaine, the lead singer of Megadeth (whose part I humbly attempt to perform) is known for his iconic strawberry blonde hair. Being of Mexican descent with dark hair in my genes, there’s not much I can do about that! (I would look ridiculous with dyed red hair). However, I have done my best to match his style and outfits from what many fans believe was the band’s peak era of the late 1980s and early 1990s! Thankfully for me this is pretty easy! Bullet belts, tight jeans, various ripped shirts or no shirt, and boots or high-top sneakers! The rest of the band has their similar styles. We also take the time to set up our stage with props and scrims whenever possible to give as professional a live show as we can! Paying tribute to a classic thrash band makes our “look” a little easier to achieve. You’d probably get some interesting answers interviewing a Prince tribute or Motley Crue tribute!
- The live performance – this is what it all comes down too. Again, none of us wrote these songs. Our fans come to see us because they want see their favorite songs and they want to see them performed with passion by people who love them as much as they do! We earn our keep with the live performance! Again, I’ve seen many a tribute band, and there’s everything from the obvious group of hobbyists, to the dedicated professional musicians that really take the time to give the audience a quality show! We strive to be the latter! We want to leave it all on the stage! The blood, sweat, and tears of a full on live performance going a thousand miles an hour nonstop! We figure, if you’re going to come see a tribute act, we want you to walk away thinking that that was an awesome performance and that the band did their all to pay homage to the legendary musicians they are tributing! Again, this is challenging! Everything has to come together! The music, the look, the attitude, everything! And when you play challenging music like Megadeth for 90 minutes or even up to 3 hours (some gigs), you got to be in shape to go full steam the whole time! Thankfully, we have some AMAZING fans who show us more love and energy than any tribute band could ever ask for! When we see them rocking out the whole time, how could we not do the same?
- Have FUN!! This is rock and roll! It’s all a show! It’s all fantasy and it’s all to blow your blues away (Diamond Head \m/)! These are challenging times during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and we need to be safe, but now more than ever we need to remember to rock out and have fun! Spirits are sinking low nowadays, but just remember, live music will return and we will be ready to go as soon as we are given the green light!
We’d love to hear more about your music.
Woke Up Dead is a band of four musicians that give it their all to attempt to pay homage to one of the finest heavy metal bands in existence. We specialize in all eras of Megadeth, performing the songs as close to note-for-note as possible and giving the audience a sonic nuclear assault of heavy metal! We also strive to get the look, the sound, the attitude, and everything about the live show as close as possible to the real thing! This change depending on the venue where we perform, but given a full stage, we are as professional as possible! What sets us apart is our energy! The four of us are a bunch of madmen on stage and will not stop moving for the entire length of the show! We are there to ROCK you!
Our proudest moment has to have been performing with original Megadeth bassist, David Ellefson at a book signing he did at Warwick’s in La Jolla in August of 2019! As a tribute act, this is basically your dream! To have an original member of the band you are tributing sit-in and perform with you and Mr. Ellefson made that happen for us! It came about when the book store reached out to us and asked us if we would help promote the event, as we are the only known Megadeth tribute in Southern California. Of course, we agreed and they asked us if we were somehow able to perform at the event during the signing! This was actually quite the challenge as we were confined to a small area of sidewalk in downtown La Jolla and had to provide all of our equipment which included electronic drums, amps, mics, a mixer, a PA and everything for the performance. We had never done this before, but considering Mr. Ellefson was going to present, we had to make it happen! Then, a week before the event, we get a call from Mr. Ellefson’s business partner, co-author and band member, the wonderful Thom Hazaert asking us about our setlist and asking if he and David Ellefson could sit in with us for a few tunes! After pinching myself, I calmly agreed and proceeded to call my band members with the excitement that can only be matched by a small child opening presents at Christmas time! The day came, and we had a crowd of about several hundred gather in the streets of downtown La Jolla and we proceeded to rock out! We meet and hung out with David Ellefson and Thom, received praise from them about our musicianship in covering their songs, and had a great time! No matter what happens going forward, it’s going to be tough to beat that! Megadeth did a cruise last year and I hear they brought out a Megadeth tribute band to be a part of that! If they do another cruise in the future, we will throw our names in the hat for that and see what happens. 🙂
Although, I have spent most of the time talking about Woke Up Dead, I am also involved in a number of other music projects. I am still backing up Anesthesia whenever they need a singer/guitarist to fill in and I have a GREAT tribute project coming out of Los Angeles that I will be pleased to announce very soon! I am extremely happy to be involved in music again and right now am focusing on tribute bands! However, I have a ton of original music written and one day play to record and release it! One thing at a time!
What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I had too much energy. I was interested in a lot of things! Sports and academics. Basketball and Martial Arts were my favorite sports and History my favorite school subject. Personality wise, I was always very loud and outgoing. I liked to talk to people and my enemy was always boredom! However, I did have a number of difficult situations regarding my family that kind of rocked me at an early age. This led to inevitable struggles with depression and anxiety and me feeling insecure about a lot of things! When high school rolled around, I struggled to fit in. I had a personality that allowed me to be friends with a lot of people, but internally I was a mess! I tried to stay into sports and my school work but things were happening in my personal life that made it difficult to focus. I also did some things that I probably shouldn’t have been doing at that age and let’s leave it at that! I don’t want to downplay some of the things I went through, but I always try to be a positive person so I want to focus on that! Music was my outlet! Heavy music! I was feeling a lot of strong negative emotions at the time and I needed a way to deal with that! So many kids going through similar situations turn to self-destructive or destructive outlets! So, did I to a degree, but the one thing that kept me positive throughout this period was music! And if you will permit me to get a little serious here, I always felt that heavy metal music and dark music is really misunderstood.
To this day, I am certain a number of people will judge me negatively for playing in a heavy metal band. That image just has a certain stereotype that is difficult to shake! Our county and our culture have been rocked recently by a need to reexamine our biases and prejudices in order to become better as people. Now I am not saying that being a heavy metal fan or playing heavy metal music has anywhere near the same level of prejudice against it that other groups of people experience, but let’s be honest, there’s still a very negative stereotype that exists for this type of music and people who enjoy it! The music is intense! The lyrics and content can be explicit! But I think what’s important is that we have an outlet to explore those thoughts and feelings in a creative, constructive manner as opposed to repressing them or channeling them in a different direction! I can tell you with one-hundred percent honesty, that being able to express myself with such an extreme form of music has been incredibly therapeutic for me and has allowed me to deal with really intense feelings that I’m not sure I could have dealt with in any other manner! I’m not saying that everyone has to like heavy metal, but I wish more people would take the time to realize that we enjoy this music and perform this music as a way to deal with intense emotions that we ALL go through and that this actually a very positive and supportive community! We’re not bad people! We’re people just like everyone else who live and love like everyone else and have dreams like everyone else and just happen to really enjoy an intense form of music! I’m the type of person who, if you met me off stage, or at work, might never guess would be into this kind of music. I still feel that I need to “hide it” from some people, who will judge me negatively, look down me, or not take me seriously because I enjoy it so much. If I could somehow make some people think twice about that, I guess I would consider that progress.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wokeupdeadtributeband.com/
- Email: wokeupdeadtributeband@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wokeupdeadtribute/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wokeupdeadtributeband/
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgMsbViTnS_jI1vwGot1OuA?reload=9
Image Credit:
Daria Davis
Michael Lucero
Tonya Hyke
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