Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (17 page)

PHIL ANSELMO:
There would be no Down if it wasn’t for Trouble [who Pantera took on tour in 1992]. Yeah, they play slow, but as far as their influence goes, it’s vast and comes from a lot of different sources other than Black Sabbath. Eric Wagner had a miserable quality to his voice. He sounded in pain. It was a depressing sound going along with these droning, beautifully constructed riffs and great drumming.

DAVE GROHL:
What was doubly amazing about Trouble was not only were they heavier than most bands, but they were singing about God. How’s that possible? It was cool and off-center and something you’d never expect. Listen to those first two records, [1984’s
Psalm 9
and 1985’s
The Skull
], and they’ll blow your fucking mind. But it’s weird. God and metal haven’t really had the best relationship with each other.

RICK WARTELL (Trouble):
Eventually, a couple of the guys became practicing Christians, but we were
never
a Christian band—by no means. There were some good messages there, and Eric started reading the Bible and using cool quotes from it. But it didn’t dawn on any of us that this would become a kinda stamp on us. When we got the “white metal” tag, that really didn’t sit well with us. I mean, we did a lot of cocaine and weed—everybody but [guitarist] Bruce [Franklin]. We were rock guys, man. We went out and got drunk and met girls and did things rock guys do. It’s how we lived.

JOSH HOMME (Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures, ex-Kyuss):
I’m not into Trouble and I thought Vitus was cheesy. I hate both those bands. I was into Black Flag, Minutemen, and the Descendents. That’s what was more vital and important. Vitus was just some cheesy guys in pants that were too tight.

While Danzig frontman Glenn Danzig was reclusive and moody in person, his band had an accessible sound that downplayed the punk roots of his earlier groups, Misfits and Samhain. On their first four groundbreaking albums, Danzig combined Elvis-meets-Bauhaus vocals with sustained, sensual guitar chords and pulsing, pounding rhythms, paving the way for the mainstream success of Type O Negative and other so-called gothic doom metal bands.

GLENN DANZIG (Danzig, ex-Samhain, ex-Misfits):
Danzig stayed together long enough for people to catch up with it. The previous bands I was in always either broke up or, you know, Samhain turned into Danzig. “Mother,” [which first appeared on the band’s self-titled 1988 debut], was a live track on [the 1993 EP
Thrall: Demonsweatlive
] and [that’s when] it started getting some airplay. Radio guys were calling up Mark [DiDia] over at American Recordings and saying, “You should re-release ‘Mother.’”

EERIE VON (ex-Danzig, Samhain):
Nobody gave a shit the first time [we released “Mother”], and it was all because of the video, [which depicts Danzig sacrificing a chicken above a scantily clad woman lying on a pedestal]. We gave the video to MTV, which was the dumbest thing we could have done. From that moment on, they were not going to play any video we gave them. They’d give them back to us and tell us what to edit one hundred times, and we’d do the edits. They still wouldn’t play it. If we had started out with a video they would have played, we might still all be together. Because everyone loved the live video [of “Mother”], we sold five hundred thousand copies of it in no time. Everyone was saying we were going to be the next Metallica and it didn’t happen, so people started to quit. We weren’t making a living, so there was no reason to keep going.

The sullen atmospheres and granite-heavy riffs of doom metal were sonically the stuff of internal bleeding, not carefree celebration. And while many bands kept to themselves and reveled in the darkness, others, such as Type O Negative and Monster Magnet, partied like Mötley Crüe. Type O front man Peter Steele even posed as a
Playgirl
centerfold in 1985.

JOSH SILVER (Type O Negative):
Peter [Steele] was big and considered himself kind of goofy. He didn’t have girlfriends growing up, which was a little rough for him. A lot of Type O music was written from the perspective of someone who couldn’t get laid or wanted to get laid. We had songs like “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else.” He was able to be very honest about how hurt he was during a lot of these periods. I think that was part of what made us appealing. We told the truth.

DAVE WYNDORF (Monster Magnet):
I never thought I could be Sabbath, but when I saw the Ramones I knew I could be
these
guys. It was a real triumph of wit over talent. Focus your psychosis. Even if you’ve got a psychological problem, whatever is going on with you that makes the energy run through you, use it to create things.

KENNY HICKEY (Type O Negative):
We were the premier white trash stripper band. Every night we came offstage [on the Mötley Crüe tour] we had all these desperate fat guys working for us, so they would all round [the girls] up, and you’d go to the front and there would be twenty sets of legs. It was ridiculous, the bus shaking, music blasting, people dancing, every night. It was the exact opposite of what you’d picture the band would be like by listening to our music; it was complete debauchery. Pete Steele partook more than anybody. Nobody could drink as much as him, nobody could do as much drugs as him, nobody could eat as much as him, and nobody could fuck as much as that man.

PHIL CAIVANO (Monster Magnet):
One time in New York I fucked this girl on the tour bus. I had my fist in her pussy, and she was slapping me around. When we finished, she pulled out this official police ID and says, “Thank god you were good because if you weren’t, I would have arrested you.”

KENNY HICKEY:
[Peter] saw how many women he was getting after [1993’s]
Bloody Kisses
and the song “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),” so he decided to design the band towards getting more chicks.
October Rust
was intentionally sensual just to get the high heels in the door. It was a pimp record. He was with two, three different girls a day. It’s a great record, but his goal in making it was to fucking wrangle them up.

PETER STEELE (1962–2010) (Type O Negative, Carnivore):
Not to be gross, but everybody wants to suck the king’s dick ’cause he’s top of the hill. I mean look, older men with a lot of money and high positions in government or business always wind up with the most attractive women. As the band did better and better we attracted more and more women.

PHIL CAIVANO:
People think AIDS killed sex, but the thing about AIDS is it has forced people to get more creative. You can have a great time without actually sticking it in. Like, there’s lots of girls out there who would love to get it on with another girl and have a guy watch and masturbate.

Predictably, the deeper that doom metal musicians got into downers and narcotics, the more dangerous their lives became. Other doom pioneers had already been there and done that, and were persevering with their careers without the baggage of addiction. In 2006, Ronnie James Dio rejoined his Sabbath bandmates after an absence of thirteen years and remained with them for several tours and 2009’s
The Devil You Know
album (under the name Heaven & Hell, due to legal restrictions with the name Black Sabbath).

RONNIE JAMES DIO:
The band started out with several tracks that we wanted to do for an anthology. The label requested a couple of previously unreleased tracks from the past. Well, we didn’t work that way. We always recorded the songs we needed to do for an album and didn’t keep anything back. So I went to Tony’s house in England, where he has a studio. And we started to work and it was really enjoyable. After long spaces of time not working with people, you forget how good they are or how much you enjoyed being around them.

TONY IOMMI:
We did these three songs and had such a good time that we forgot about any of the difficult things that had happened in the past. We were creating something new and that made it all worthwhile. It didn’t even seem like we had been apart. You learn to appreciate a lot when you’re away from each other. It was the same with Ozzy. When we got back together it was great to do the reunion and you forget about all the other things that went on.

RONNIE JAMES DIO:
We should have called the band The Locusts because every twelve years we come back somehow. I’d be a fool if I said I didn’t have any reservations, because you remember things that weren’t particularly pleasing in the past. It makes you think, “Is it going to happen again?” But once I decided to do another full album, I realized that all those little pebbles from the past had to be left on the beach. I don’t think you can bring them along with you on these trips into the water because they’re just going to get so heavy you’re going to drown.

When it came to the physical and mental dangers of excess and indulgence, generally the famous rockers learned their lessons, or maybe they just settled down. That wasn’t always the case for less established, younger, and unmarried rockers, who still hadn’t been burned badly enough to mend their ways. Inevitably, some pushed the envelope until they suffered a brush with death that made them at least reevaluate their lifestyle. Type O Negative front man Pete Steele battled a monstrous cocaine habit that threatened his health and career, and Dave Wyndorf overdosed on pills in 2006.

PETER STEELE:
I found myself beginning to experiment with drugs about [1997], and that made a profound and unfortunately negative impact on me. I didn’t even start with beer or a joint. I went right to the cocaine up the nose and I had never really done it until the age of thirty-five. I’m so ashamed of myself. I had this “it can’t happen to me” attitude.

KENNY HICKEY:
It’s strange, because before that, Pete was obsessed with working out. He was a gorilla. We had weights on the road. He was all into the health shit, and then one night he came up to me because he was frustrated about something and said, “Give me a line of that.” I was like, “You don’t want this shit,” and I tried to talk him out of it. And he just broke my balls about it. And yeah, I gave him the fucking first line. I kind of kicked myself in the ass for it, but he would have gotten it anyhow. It was everywhere. Then we all went off the deep end—me, Josh and Peter.

JOHNNY KELLY (Type O Negative):
We’d come offstage and the three of them would run like fucking O. J. [Simpson] in Hertz commercials. They would sprint to the back lounge, and all you heard was them bitching at each other, “Hurry up, hurry up,” and you’d hear the card cutting the coke.

For Steele, the road of excess didn’t lead to poet William Blake’s “palace of wisdom.” It led to the insane asylum and jail.

PETER STEELE:
I was in [Brooklyn’s] Kings County Hospital suffering from drug-induced psychosis, and it was actually my own family that got me put away, which kinda made me wish I was part of the Manson family. I had typical paranoia. I thought there were cameras in the light switches and showerheads.

JOHNNY KELLY:
Peter came home one day and his girlfriend had packed up and split after a couple of years. So he went to rehab in an attempt to get her back. While he’s in rehab, she appears, tells him, “All right, when you come back, everything’s going to be fine, we’ll work it all out.” Peter gets out of rehab, we went to go see him. He’d just gotten home, and we’re sitting on Josh’s stoop, and he’s like, “Yeah, she’s on her way over, going to bring a couple of things back that she took that were mine, we’re going to talk.” She never showed up. Peter found out where she lived and did the Herman Munster in the door, hence his felony conviction for assault. So he’s at his arraignment, and the judge or whatever refers to her as Mrs. Whatever, and he’s like, “What?” It turned out she was married to this other guy already.

KENNY HICKEY:
Pete showed up at this guy’s house at four o’clock in the morning, coked out of his mind. He broke down the door, full fangs and everything, chased this guy through his house, and broke his jaw.

PETER STEELE:
[I was in Rikers Island jail] about thirty days. In the past, I had done a day here or there for stupid stuff like fighting or pissing on the sidewalk. But this was a rude awakening—twenty-three charges against me, one of which was attempted murder. When you’re kicking the shit out of somebody, you really have to make sure not to say, “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!” because that implies intent. I’m 6-foot-6, I weigh 260 pounds. To be white in jail and to have long black hair and fangs is not an advantage.

KENNY HICKEY:
Peter had a couple DUIs. Then one time he calls me at two in the morning and goes, “Can I tell you a story?” At the time he was living with a girlfriend in Pennsylvania, but he had another girlfriend. He goes, “I was at this other girl’s house, and then I got a call from my girlfriend that she was going to be home in a few minutes. It was pitch black and I was wasted out of my mind. I got in my Jeep and I’m driving down the road, and a bear jumps out in front of my Jeep and I swerved off the road and hit a pole.” So the cops show up and arrest him. His main girlfriend comes to pick him up and she bails him out, picks him up, goes back to her house. He’s getting undressed and she goes “What are you wearing?” He looked down and had his other girlfriend’s panties on because he got dressed in the dark drunk.