ex-Type O Negative drummer on hypothetical Peter Steele tribute concert: ‘I’d want a female vocalist’

In a new interview with the Loaded Radio podcast, former Type O Negative drummer Johnny Kelly was asked if there had ever been any talk of staging a concert in honor of the band’s late frontman Peter Steele.

Coffee talk. There was never any serious consideration, like, should we do something? Is there even a point of doing it? Or also, is it just a blatant cash grab? So all these things go through your head.

People celebrate [Peter] all the time. They do it daily. I see it online all the time and the impact that he had.

Maybe somewhere down the road there may be something that’s… I don’t know. But I know that for me, it would have to include Kenny [Hickey, guitar] and Josh [Silver, keyboards] as well. Anything that we do, it would have to be the three of us. And there’s no way you’re getting Josh to do anything like that.

I don’t know. I’d want a girl to do it. I’d want a female vocalist — like Ann Wilson [Heart] or something like that. But even so, that’s the first thing. When you think about doing some kind of tribute show, you’re just gonna get all these people… Yes, Peter was very highly regarded by our peers and stuff like that, and you’ll just get a bunch of dudes up there just trying to sound like Peter. And you can’t do that. And it’s, like, all right, so what’s the most remote thing from Peter? You’d have to do something completely abstract. And I would say get a female vocalist. I think Peter would get a kick out of… He would get off on seeing a girl sing his songs, seeing a female sing them. And it would really stress the point of doing something as a tribute instead of trying to recreate something.”

Former Type O Negative drummer Johnny Kelly

Peter, for the most part, he was a clown. He was always joking around — sarcastic, very self-deprecating humor. Just the opposite of what the music portrayed. When we were working on music and stuff, the end result, he was very serious about what he wanted, how he wanted something to sound. Other times, he was a clown.

I always said that he wanted to be a normal person, but because he was Peter, that was just not in the cards for him; it was completely impossible,” he continued. “I bet he would love to just be able to hang out, go to the bar, have a few drinks. And we would try to do that, and the minute he would come out to the bar, everybody gravitated towards him. He couldn’t go to the store by his house without something happening to him.

Johnny Kelly about the late Peter Steele to Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station

Asked if that was because of Peter’s size, Johnny said:

I think so. He just had this very striking look. He didn’t look normal. And he had fangs. [Laughs] He was six and a half feet tall, [had] long black hair and fangs. You’re not gonna get the normal response when you’re going grocery shopping.