Nita Strauss interview for the Metal Hall of Fame
By Ray Van Horn, Jr.
You know her name. Already a legend of hard rock and metal as Alice Cooper’s right hand axe for more than a decade. Formerly slinging guitar for The Iron Maidens, perhaps the most significantmetal cover band in history. A member of Los Angeles Kiss, As Blood Runs Black, Femme Fatale, Consume the Fire and the video game supergroup, Critical Hit. She’sglobetrotted with none other than Jermaine Jacksonand toured behind Demi Lovato. She droppeda chart-topping solo album in 2018, Controlled Chaos. In 2022, she scored a number one single on theBillboardMainstream Rock chart, “Dead Inside.” She’s evencalleda “shred” fitnessand martial artsguru, having been featured in Muscle & Fitnessand Bodybuilding.com.
Nita Strauss is a self-taught rock warrior who worked her way through the trenches, landingin the Alice Cooper band in 2014. She’s endorsed by Ibanezandbecamethe first female guitarist to be branded her own model, the JIVA 10. In 2019, Strauss was bestowed an “Inspire Award” at the 7thannual She Rocks Awards, presented to her by guitar legends Nick Bowcott and Steve Vai.
The Nita Strauss I interviewed in 2017 had merely dreamed of meeting her hero, Vai, already making a name for herself in Uncle Alice’scamp. She was on her way up at this time when I drew Nita for assignment. The piece was sadly shelved after the periodical I’d freelanced this piece for folded. It’s a shame, because Nita and I had spoken for more than an hour and as you’ll read, she dropped pure gold for my readers. It remains one of the proudest interviews I did in my career,
I was given liberty by Nita and her publicist to hold onto this remarkable footage featuring an ascending megastar for whereverI deemed fit. Is there a better way, then, to resurrect it than to present it for The Metal Hall of Fame?
RAY VAN HORN, JR.: One of the funniest things I ever heard in my life was from a woman I was in convo with a few years ago when I told her Iron Maiden was the greatest metal band ever. She’s not into metal at all, but I wanted to laugh when she said, “Oh, typical guy music.” I told her about the Iron Maidens and she had nothing to say afterwards. Why do you feel a perception outside of metal like this exists?
NITA STRAUSS: Typical guy music? I like that! You know, I see it daily in music, I really do, and I don’t have an answer for you. I wish I did. I’m pretty much as woman as it gets. I like to dress nice and get my hair done, but I also love heavy metal! I don’t find it weird. The cool thing is, being a part of this surge of musicians coming up right now, it’s so cool to see it be a lot less weird. When I started playing guitar, I was the only girl guitarist I knew. I was just getting into Metallica and Megadeth, people featured in guitar magazines and Revolver. It didn’t seem weird to me until people startedtelling me it was weird. Now it’s not really weird. When I go into Guitar Center now, people don’t ask if I’m shopping for my boyfriend (now husband) anymore!”
RVH: That being said, beingin the Iron Maidens, did you at first get a lot of flackfrom guys for being an all-female tribute act? Maiden’s one of the sacred bands of metal, of course, somy friend from the previous question had a point,to a degree.
NS: The thing that was easy for me was that the Iron Maidens had been around long before I was a part of the band. I was a young guitar player growing up in L.A., playing shows when I was 13 and the Iron Maidens’ posters were all over the place. That’s the really great thing about guerilla marketing, fliering, that kind of thing. I would see all these posters around and I’d look them and think ‘Wow, that’s so cool!’ and not having any peers who was doing what I was doing. That was so cool, these hot chicks playing Iron Maiden songs, never dreaming I would someday be a part of this band! By the time I got involved, I believe that was their 10-year anniversary, actually, and they were really established.
I did go to the shows to see if it was all hype and I will tell you from an audience’s perspective, that band delivers! Everyone in that band is so talented. You have to be to play Maiden’s stuff! You’d better have the chops or you’ll get torn apart. It doesn’t matter if you’re Courtney Cox (Iron Maidens) and wear a beautiful, sparkly bra or you’re a 300-pound dude, you’d better play the songs right! Iron Maiden fans are the toughest fans, way tougher than Alice Cooper fans! They’re the most brutal and it’s in a good way. It’s high pressure to do the songs justice, which is something you should have anyway. You should be playing the songs well, since their fans are picky and they’re rough.
RVH: In your opinion, have the IronMaidens been viewed as a novelty and if so, is that just part of the band’s shtick?
NS: To be perfectly honest with you, I think we are a novelty in the same way the Tia Pepa band started writing and recording their own music. Yeah, they have a life outside the band. I don’t want to call it a hobby because it’s too hard to be a hobby, but I think they would say the same. It’s cool to be novelty; it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Judas Priestess is fantastic! They’re so good! John Petrucci’s wife, Rena, used to play for them! We played with them a number of times and once on this bill—you gotta get ready for this: the Iron Maidens, Judas Priestess and support was Hammer of the Broads! I’ve heard some creative all-female band names, and that’s my favorite one, Hammer of the Broads. There are some really great, all-female tribute bands out there! You have AC/D-She; Zepirella is amazing.
The harsh reality is, if you take a regular guy with long hair and put him onstage, no one’s going to look at that guy and go, ‘How’d that guy get in this band?’ ‘I bet that guy can’t play!’ ‘What’d that have to do to get in the band?’ No matter how a girl looks, whatever she wears…I used to onstage in a baggy t-shirt and essentially pajama shorts and Adidas sneakers and people still said the same thing! It really doesn’t matter whether I wear clothes that are more revealing or clothes that show absolutely nothing of what I look like. People are going to say the same thing. It’s just the actuality.
RVH:Obviously you come from a lineage of music royalty. Tell me what pressure, if any, you’ve felt as a descendent of Johann Strauss II? I understand you didn’t take any formal training for guitar, but genetics have a way, right?
NS: They usually don’t know that! I don’t know if genetics do, or not, to be honest. Guitar wasn’t easy at all for me in the beginning. I hear it a lot, people saying I must’ve come from great musicians on both sides of my family, and I did grow up playing a bunch of instruments including the family guitars. When I picked up guitar, I was actually on the Junior Olympics gymnastics team. My mom’s a dance teacher, so I thought I was either going to be like her or a gymnast. That’s sort of where my life path was going. I got a guitar for my birthday and I wasn’t really any good. It was hard and I played a couple chords and I didn’t really get it! It wasn’t quick for me. I wasn’t one of those guitar players who picked it up and fell in love with the instrument. I had to see Crossroads basically and say, ‘Okay,that’s what you can do with this instrument!’ Then I was able to figure out what it was going to do for me.
Literally, from that day forward, I never went back to gymnastics class. I didn’t even say goodbye to my coach, who had been my coach for a long time! From that moment forward, my whole life did a complete 180 and then it was about getting better. I started my first national tour age 15 and that was me trying to evolve as a young guitar player. Being on the Vans Warped Tour, I had the chance to say, I’ll play faster, I’ll get better. If they’re not going to look at me, I’ll make them look at me! It paid off and that’s how you learn to fight for what you believe in and to become who you are. It served me really well in the long run.
Life lessons, mid-teen as a musician: I think the most important thing that I learned was stubbornness and tenacity. If people won’t give you respect, take respect! People might come to a show wondering if you’re any good. I learned it to be my job to make sure they left knowing. They’re not going to walk in, see a 16-year-old and say, ‘I’ll bet she’s great!’ No one expected anything of me. The vast majority of people I met never expected me to be any good. I learned very quickly to have thick skin as far as all of it was concerned and just be the best I could be.
RVH:Youplayed with Jermaine Jackson! I mean, come on,what a way to expand your repertoireand travel globally to audiences not many rock guitaristshave been to. What was that experience like with Jermaine and being caughtwithin therelativeepicenter of the Jackson family drama?
NS: That was crazy! I still can’t believe it happened. When they called me out to do an audition for Jermaine, he said, ‘Can you play funk?’ I was now 21, 22 at the time, and I’m from San Juan Capistrano, California, which is as not-funky as you can be! I was like, ‘Yeah!’ I think of opportunity as a window and sometimes the window kind of revolves and it goes around, but every once in a while, it opens and you have to be ready to jump through it and say yes to this opportunity. It’s the same way with Alice Cooper; I wasn’t playing rock yet, but I said ‘Yes, whatever you guys need me to do, I’ll make it happen!’ That’s how it was with Jermaine, it was the same kind of situation. I didn’t know what funky guitar playing was, but I made damn sure if that’s what it took, I would go on YouTube or find a guitar teacher who would show me what to do to get there, and I did.
Luckily for me, the other guitar player in the band was Mike Scott, who’s really one of the funkiest guitar players there is. It was just so much fun with John “Sugarfoot” Moffett, a lot of Michael’s band was in Jermaine’s band. So to be in the same room with those kinds of musicians was such an amazing experience.
Going to Africa with them was culture shock and something people really don’t think about, me being in a Jackson band. We weren’t in South Africa; we were in Gambia, Senegal. We were in it! It was really an eye-opening experience because I had never really been through anything like that before. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go walk around,’ and they were like, ‘Nope! No, you won’t!’ But we were really well taken care of and it was just an awesome experience.
RVH: Obviously, the gig with Alice is a huge deal. The man is so nice and I’m grateful to himgivingfor my buddy a shout on-tape during an interview I did with him, since my friend’s a mega-fan. Put me there in the moment when you got the gig with Alice.
NS: Every time I get the question about what it’s like playing with Alice Cooper, I never give the same answer twice, because it’s so vast and broad reaching. Your story is one of the most powerful lessons I’ve taken away from playing with Alice. He’d been a superstar long before I was born and he has never taken that for granted.
A lot of times we’ll be out eating as a band and everywhere we go, someone will stop him and no matter what he’s doing, even if he has food on a fork up to his mouth, someone will say ‘I have to tell about the first time I heard “Billion Dollar Babies!’ and he’ll put his fork down and he’ll say, ‘Tell me about it.’ That is so cool! He doesn’t quietly even say, ‘Hey, man, thanks, would it be cool if I talk to you later? I’m kinda eating with my wife, here.’ He’ll stop whatever he’s doing and take time for everybody, and it’s so inspiring. Of course, everyone’s grateful to have their fans, but I’m definitely guilty sometimes if I’m on the phone and saying ‘Can I take a picture with you in a few minutes?’ Alice will stop his conversation. He’ll do anything for his fans. It’s amazing. He’s does meet and greets after our shows and sometimes it’ll take two or three hours, because he doesn’t cut people off.
We share a bus, we’re real family. We ride together, we eat together, we live together. We arrive at the same time, we get off the bus together. That’s what it is, hard-working, slightly dysfunctional, fun!
With my Guitar Clinic appearances, I tell them, you cannot cut off the line, I will take the time and sit here, sign and take the pictures until the last person’s done. Sometimes three to four hundred people show up and that can take some time, but it’s so important. I want every single person to leave feeling like they got something out of the whole experience. It’s actually just as much of a treat for me, because I’m a guitar player’s guitar player. I like talking to other guitar players about guitar! I love hearing about how people started, why they do and what brought them into the clinic that day.
RVH: Taking over for Orianthi in Alice’s band, I guess you could say she broke the barrier for female performers (ones not choking Alice onstage,ha!) appearing in his lineup. How would you evaluate fan reception between her and yourself? Would you say most have embraced a female guitarist in his band or have you seen jughead naysayers out there?
NS: They’ve been really accepting. For a legend like Alice Cooper, like Maiden, there’s these diehard fans and you have to show them you’re gonna give the songs the respect they deserve. I took that very seriously and I took it really to heart when I was playing the material. I went back and listened to the original songs and played all the iconic solos for “Billion Dollar Babies” exactly like the record. “Feed My Frankenstein,” I do the solo exactly as Steve Vai and Joe Satriani intended it.
I think stuff like that means a lot to fans. I think it’s really meaningful for fans to see that. I’m not going to improv with the boss, since he’s standing right next to me. I think once they saw that and saw how much I loved playing with Alice and loved playing these songs, it was fine. It was a transition period between guitar players, but I think once people saw I wasn’t going to just come and step all over the music, trying to modernize anything. I mean, yeah, there’s room for improvisation and room for each guitar player doing his or her own thing, but we still stay within the Alice Cooper theme, a dark, creepy rock and roll, grungy kind of thing. It’s all fine now, that’s for sure.
RVH: Beingin a big production like Alice’s, I can imagine there’s a certain point every show you just can’t wait for. What would that be?
NS: I have to say that it’s the song “Poison.” When I was a teenager, I would literally play guitar for anybody who would have me. I didn’t care if it was rock, death metal. I didn’t care if it was originals, somebody else’s originals, covers. I just wanted to get out there any play guitar and better my craft. That sort of machine gun approach, playing live shows, tiny live shows, I was in this 80s cover band playing Bon Jovi and Quiet Riot songs, and we’d play Alice’s “Poison.”
I remember the first time I was onstage with Alice, doing a warmup show for the Motley Crue tour. That intro sample came in, and I looked to my right, and I saw Alice Cooper. I had this flashback to these grungy little shows this cover band used to play on Saturday nights, when we hoped and prayed that 30 people would show up so we could get paid and afford a beer after the show. All those long tours and being so hungry and tired. Before, with my old band on our first tour, we had this old cell phone and we’d use it to call our parents and tell them we were okay, because we were all 15 and 16 years old. We were so tired, so hungry and so poor we couldn’t even afford bottles of water, so we would drink the free energy drinks that we got from shows, we were so thirsty! All of that led to this moment, me playing that same song with the man himself. I wouldn’t have traded that whole experience for anything. A lot of it wasn’t fun. It was a really hard journey. I was talked down to and I was treated really badly sometimes. It all taught me what I wanted to be in the end. I think about that all the time when we play “Poison,” and we hit that intro note. It really makes me so grateful.
When it comes to the guillotine part, I don’t know how we do that! I’m fifteen feet away and I have a perfect view from upside and above and I should be able see it. What I see is he’s putting himself out, face-first, the blade comes down, his head comes off and he’s dead! It’s crazy, I get concerned he’s really died every night! I don’t know how he does it. I really don’t! At the clinic, I’ll hear people say, ‘I know how he does it!’ Well, don’t tell me!
RVH: Overall, would you say metal and hard rock still haveits share of misogyny? How would you define a misogynist?
NS: I think so, yeah. It’s not so much metal and hard rock’s fault; I think that’s just the way society is right now. I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of it and I think we’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another. You have a female in a traditionally male role, maybe you a have a doubt in your mind. Do you want a female heart surgeon? Do you want a female auto mechanic? It’s a really unenlightened world to be in and I think of lot of that stems from the females in the rock and metal industry who are banking on things other than their musical abilities. Who’s respecting anybody for that? Why should there be any respect if you’re not doing anything? You can’t just be respected because you’re a girl doing something. You have to be good at it! I’ll say it at clinics, ‘Do me a favor and just be good. Don’t just be this girl guitar player; be a good guitar player. Be a great musician.’
You don’t have to just be a chick. Be a great musician. If people wonder why they’re not getting respect for what they’re doing, maybe they should do it better! I’ve spent so long being as good as I can be at the guitar and I can be a lot better. I’m looking towards being better every single day, and I practice every single day. Having that drive is what’s going to get you respect, not just some chick doing something on YouTube.
There was this heated debate on Facebook about whether people would care about me if I weighed 300 pounds, so apparently this is still a thing! It’s just so weird. It’s astonishing to me, because I’m such a music fan. I’m such a fan of guitar players and I try not to fanboy—or fangirl—when I talk about Steve Vai or Jason Becker and what got me into playing. I think to myself, if I had the opportunity to say hi to Steve Vai, what would I say? Would I say nobody would care about you if you weighed 300 pounds? That’s so mean! The internet, you’re absolutely right, everyone just says whatever they want.
I will tell you; I’ve had the unique experience of encountering trolls in real life. They do exist outside the internet. Those trolls are in-person and they’re just about the same person as they are on the internet! I have a little more respect for them for coming at you live as a person, because that at least says you’re not a keyboard warrior; you’ll come up and talk smack in real person! You have to at least give them respect for that when they come out from under the bridge.
One time we were doing a headline show, a theater show in the middle of the Motley Crue tour, and we’d been onstage for two hours or so and just playing our hearts out. We were just so happy to have our own fans there, and we’d played the show of our lives!Alice introduced us as the band during “School’s Out,” our last song, and he goes, “The Hurricane, Nita Strauss!” In the second row, this guy stands up on his chair and put both thumbs down over his head and started screaming “Booooooooooooooo!!! Boo, boooooooooooooooo!” I couldn’t stop laughing! I mean, I just did all that, I just played my heart out! I get a lot of my emotions out onstage. I’ve been known to burst into tears during guitar solos—that’s the girl side of me coming out. Any kind of rage or anger that comes out of me, I take it out on the instrument. To play the show of your life and have someone just get right in your face like that is so surprising! It’s so surreal. I wonder sometimes if that guy remembers that moment and how much he scarred me! You can’t please everybody. It would be nice if everybody liked everything, but it is what it is.
RVH: So far, I’ve heardpoint and counterpoint for female artists in this scene using sexuality as part of their presentation. You use sexuality in a classy manner, but do you feel it’s something a female artist needs to employ in this scene in order to gain a competitive edge or is it a natural expression?
NS: Here’s the thing: I used to be one of those “Don’t call me a female guitar player” guitar players. If you look me up pictures of me in this band I played in called As Blood Runs Black, you’ll see me in baggy camouflage shorts and big old extra-large guy’s pajama shirt—and that was really isn’t who I am–because I didn’t want to the do the “chick” thing. I had been in all-female bands and gained all the respect I needed to get, I decided to go the complete opposite, and now nobody knows what I look like! Guess what? It still happens. It still all goes down the exact same way.
So I think as far as using sexuality to get where you want to be, I think it doesn’t do you any good if you’re not good at what you do. It doesn’t get you anywhere, and I realized very quickly while I was wearing camouflage pants and a long shirt, or if I’m wearing what I am now, which is just tighter pants and a tighter shirt, people are still going to make the same comments. What’s important is look how you want to look; just back it all up by good at what you do.
You find ways to survive in this business. Now I feel secure enough and confident enough to be able to say I’ll look how I want and play how I want to play. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to hide behind a big t-shirt and camouflage pants. I can just be who I want and be happy with that. You have to be happy with who you are and it’s something that takes a long time with an artist. I don’t know even if I’m all the way there.
There’s a reason I can’t read the comments on articles because they’re hurtful to have people judge you for being who you are and for just being yourself. It’s hard as an artist. Really, we’re sensitive, and that’s not just a girl thing. I think the guys can be more sensitive than the girls.
Just about every day, though, I get a message at social media or Facebook comments that says, “I brought my 8-year-old daughter to see the show and now she asked me for a guitar for her birthday.” That is the most amazing feeling that I can think of! When I was learning guitar, I didn’t have any female heroes and maybe someone won’t have that same experience I did, maybe they’ll want someone to look up to. If I can just be that role model, just one person…if we have one more Jennifer Batten in the war and one less Kardashian, we’re in good shape! The future feels better! If we can do that once in a show, five nights a week for the next couple years, I think we’re gonna be okay!
RVH: Beingthe house guitarist for Los Angeles Kiss, having your work playing inside commercials and videogames and movie trailers, you’re a multimedia conqueror! Back in the day, there weren’t quite as manyopportunities for women to expand their reach as well as you have. On the flipside, this is also a market with twice the competition for both males and females, and twice the consumer population. How hard would you say it is today to gain any kind of competitive edge,much less run in the circles you have?
NS: I think it’s harder to gain a competitive edge, but not for the reasons you might think. Because of YouTube and SoundCloud, it’s so easy to get an audience that people forget that it takes more work! It’s not enough to just sit on YouTube and send that music off and then go out and tour. You have to put the actual work in. You have to go out, push and promote yourself, pass out fliers, get merch, get a van or rent a trailer and go out there and stomp it out. That’s what’s going to create a great band and a great buzz and great musicianship.
People think ‘Oh, I’ll just sit in my bedroom and play a few covers on YouTube and that’s going to get me a record deal!’ It’s not enough; you must go out there and stomp it out. I think people are now starting to realize that, but technology has made it seem so easy that I think awhile, anyway, people were forgetting that. It’s crazy what the internet has done!
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