Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (18 page)

JOSH SILVER:
[In 1989 Peter slashed his wrists.] How serious was it? I guess we’ll never know. He certainly had a lot of scars and he was always a self-destructive guy. He did press shots of him cutting his arm with a razor around the Type O logo. He had multiple hospitalizations and suicide attempts. But when a lot of them happened we said, “Oh, this is just bullshit,” because Pete was a very smart guy. If he really wanted to snuff it, he could have.

DAVE WYNDORF:
I couldn’t sleep on tour, so the doctors gave me something that would put down a wild animal. I was doing a lot of transatlantic flying, and on a plane one day I just started gobbling them down. All of my paranoias came at me like a giant, three-headed beast. My biggest mistake was not asking for help. I don’t recall doing it, but I took the whole goddamn bottle—a hundred pills, man, just like they were a shot glass—and the next thing I knew, I woke up in a fucking loony bin. Drugs are supposedly a gateway into creativity. You know what? It’s all a myth. They suck, and they’ll get you in the end. They certainly got me.

The doom metal community was dealt two major blows in 2010. The first came on April 14, when Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele died at age forty-eight from heart failure. A few days before he died he felt like he was coming down with the flu. He was clean at the time, but doctors speculate that years of heavy drug use took its toll on his declining health.

KENNY HICKEY:
Obviously, Peter wasn’t healthy. An aneurysm can just take you at any time, though. He had an ongoing heart condition for years. He said that he always felt the flutter in his heart, even when he was a kid, so he might have been born with it, for all we know. Four or five men in his family have died from heart disease before fifty, so it could have been hereditary.

JOSH SILVER:
He lived with atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat. Whether that was caused by drugs or something else, I don’t know. It was diagnosed years and years ago. But if you take care of yourself and do the right stuff it’s something you can live with for quite a while. There are plenty of ninety-year-olds running around with it.

KENNY HICKEY:
There was one point when he was in the hospital before a tour. Dude was green from his feet to his head. He had yellow, jaundiced eyes, and eight different surgeons were trying to figure out what was wrong with him, and none of them spoke English. They asked him, “What kind of drugs do you do?” He said, “Cocaine, alcohol, and redheads.” I came back three days later and the doctors asked me, “Excuse me, we need to know: What are redheads?” They thought it was a pill or a drug.

JOHNNY KELLY:
He calls me up and I go, “What are you doing home, you’re supposed to be in the hospital.” He says, “I couldn’t take the food anymore.” I just figured he was like Keith Richards. The guy made a deal with the devil and he’s going to live forever. He was the only guy I know who could do two eight balls and eat sixty dollars’ worth of Chinese food.

JOSH SILVER:
I was sitting at home, and Johnny called me and said “Did anybody call you?” Then he told me Peter was dead—not that he’s sick or he’s dying—that he’s already gone. I was surprised, but to be honest I was shocked that he lived as long as he did. His lifestyle was so unhealthy that I couldn’t believe he was as strong as a horse most of the time.

Just over a month after Steele died, a more widely publicized tragedy shook the metal community. Ronnie James Dio, who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer about six months earlier, died from the illness. Dio’s last public appearance was at the 2010
Revolver
Golden Gods Awards in Los Angeles, where he was awarded Best Vocalist.

WENDY DIO (wife of Ronnie James Dio):
Today my heart is broken. Many, many friends and family were able to say their private good-byes before he peacefully passed away. Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all. We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us. . . . Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever.

TONY IOMMI:
Ronnie loved what he did, making music and performing onstage. He loved his fans so much. He was a kind man and would put himself out to help others. I can honestly say it’s truly been an honor to play at his side for all these years. His music will live on forever. The man with the magic voice is a star amongst stars, a true professional. I’ll miss you so much, my dear friend.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
That was terrible. Going through that sort of thing with my wife [Sharon, who battled and survived colorectal cancer], you don’t know what to do. I remember when Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer, I went into an emotional scramble. It always seemed to be something that happened to someone else, and I didn’t know anyone who survived from any cancer. So I was walking around thinking, “What am I going to do if I lose my wife?” You start to think that way and it’s a very tough situation to go through. When I saw Ronnie, I sent a message of encouragement to him. I was sad, and stunned when he died so quickly. He was a great singer, he had a great voice. A lot of people got a lot of ideas from Dio. Whether you liked him or not, he had his own style, and it was instantly recognizable. When you heard it on the radio, you knew it was him. A lot of people tried to copy him.

GEEZER BUTLER:
All the doctors said if he’d have gone in [for a colonoscopy] a year earlier or two years earlier, they could have treated him. If it had been stage one they could have dealt with it. But by the time Ronnie was diagnosed, he had stage four cancer, which was inoperable. The doctor hinted that it was just a matter of time and there was nothing they could do. It’s really upsetting to think about that, and hopefully it will encourage people who need to have a checkup to get it done.

4

YOUTH GONE WILD: METAL GOES MAINSTREAM, 1978–1992

W
hile the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was taking over the club scene in the UK and Europe, a batch of bands in and around Los Angeles—triggered by a love for KISS, Van Halen, and glam groups like the New York Dolls and the Sweet—were about to shake Sunset Strip like a 7.0 earthquake. With flashy, androgynous images and brash, solo-saturated songs, the “hair metal” bands were visually compelling and musically engaging. In the beginning, groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt were almost as heavy as Judas Priest and Dio, the band Ronnie James Dio formed after leaving Black Sabbath. But as the scene gained popularity and a major label feeding frenzy began, many musicians tailored their songs for mainstream radio, retaining some of their heaviness but drawing more emphasis to melody and heart-on-sleeve sensitivity—and sexuality.

With the dissipation of New Wave, MTV latched on to the visually striking glam metal videos—many of which were for syrupy power ballads. Before you could say, “Can I see some ID?” Skid Row, Cinderella, Dokken, Warrant, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, and countless others were storming their way into millions of suburban households around the world. Their videos almost always featured young women in provocative poses, multiple costume changes, and musicians in heavy makeup looking almost as feminine as the girls they stalked. And the stalking didn’t end when the tape stopped rolling. Even before the dawn of the eighties, a handful of outrageous LA bands including Van Halen and Quiet Riot planted the genre’s seedy seeds.

BLACKIE LAWLESS (W.A.S.P., ex–New York Dolls):
I moved to LA from New York in 1975, a lad of nineteen. I was scared to death. [Ex-New York Dolls bassist] Arthur Kane and I moved out; the Dolls were crumbling. We were broke. There was a Ramada Inn that used to be on Sunset Boulevard next to Tower Records. We lived there for a week when we first arrived, and it was like going to another planet.

EDDIE VAN HALEN (Van Halen):
In the LA club days in the early seventies, we did some insane shows. Once, we were onstage playing at Walter Mitty’s Bar and Grill, and all of a sudden two guys are fighting about whose bike is faster. It got rough, and one of them pulls out a knife, and a minute later the other guy is lying there with his intestines hanging out. It doesn’t take too much to figure out which one had the knife—the guy with the Harley, obviously. That was pretty shocking. There was blood gushing everywhere and the guy actually died.

STEPHEN PEARCY (Ratt):
I moved to San Diego in 1971. Around ’75 we were playing a place called Straight Ahead Sound. Everybody went there, so you automatically played in front of six hundred to one thousand people. You would have Jake E. Lee’s band Teaser, [my band] Mickey Ratt [which evolved into Ratt], and Robbin Crosby’s band Metropolis. We’d all be competing.

KELLE RHOADS (composer, brother of Randy Rhoads):
Randy and I started out in a band called Violet Fox, with me on drums. But that didn’t last too long because I always wanted to bash his head in. We didn’t get along as teenage boys. Later in his short life I came to really appreciate him, and we formed a really tight bond. The period right up until he joined Quiet Riot was magical for him. If Charles Dickens was around and wrote a story about boys in the seventies going into glam and metal band, I think he would have chosen my brother as a model because it was a real period of discovery for him and he was really good.

KEVIN DuBROW (1955–2007) (Quiet Riot):
I was eighteen; Randy Rhoads was seventeen. He walked in and he had hair down to the middle of his back and a really long thumbnail. I didn’t hear him play, the first time I met him. Then the second time, I went to his mom’s house and I went there just as a joke, because I was playing with Stan Lee, the guitarist of the Dickies. Stan is the one who said, “You should go hear him play; it’s going to be funny.” You know, we did it as a joke. The joke was on me, because he was amazing. I heard him play and Randy says, “Okay, let’s hear you sing,” and I was like, “No, not going to do it,” and eventually, obviously, I did. But he was brilliant, he was gifted, he was hilarious and a wonderful person.

BLACKIE LAWLESS:
The very first show I played in LA was with [Arthur] Killer Kane. The first time we played the Starwood [Night Club], there was a band called New Order—this was half the Stooges and half the MC5. They were headlining, we were playing in the middle, and the other band was, at that point, unknown: Quiet Riot with Randy Rhoads on guitar. Looking back, that was one of those special nights. But that was ’75 and disco would start rearing its ugly head, and it was very hard for those bands to get jobs after that.

KEVIN DuBROW:
Van Halen got signed a couple of years before Quiet Riot [did, in 1977], and we thought maybe we were going to be the next ones, but we weren’t. We were the only hard rock band, pretty much, in town at that time. Mötley Crüe had just gotten started, so they were still in the clubs. We had been out there as Quiet Riot for a number of years. But a lot of bands then sounded like the Knack.

BLACKIE LAWLESS:
Van Halen was the very first band I saw in LA. They were the house band at Gazzarri’s. They were playing “Running with the Devil” then. I remember hearing that song for the first time and thinking, “That’s an okay song.”

STEPHEN PEARCY:
I used to watch them play in front of twenty people, and they would play like they were at [the LA arena] the Forum. I haul ass home to San Diego. I get tight with guitarist Robbin [Crosby] and we’re playing gigs. I tell Robbin, “There’s this band called Van Halen,” and he comes up to meet Eddie. I’m like, “Look, January 1, 1980, I’m moving to LA.” And I did.

EDDIE VAN HALEN:
Back in ’74, we were playing a club and the public bathroom was our dressing room. I’m changing my clothes in the toilet stall and the guy next to me goes, “Hey, Eddie. Great show. Want some dynamite blow?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So he hands me this paper, and I took my guitar pick and went to town. I didn’t taste it first to see what it was. Ten minutes later, I barely made it 50 feet. Alex saw me collapse from across the ballroom and ran to me. I had overdosed on PCP. Thank God [bassist] Mike [Anthony] had a station wagon, because my body was so stiff they couldn’t put me in the car. I actually died on the table in the hospital, and when I woke up the doctor said, “Your heart stopped. If it was thirty seconds later, we couldn’t have brought you back.” I didn’t see any light, but I had a vision that I was onstage at the Forum before we ever played there, and when we
did
play there it was exactly as I imagined. The doctor even said to me—because I woke up with my ankles and wrists strapped down because I guess I was violent—he goes, “It’s funny, your fingers wouldn’t stop moving.” That’s the only time I ever did any drugs that heavy, and it was by accident.

FRANKIE BANALI (Quiet Riot):
I came to LA in 1978 or ’79, and I decided to stay and do or die. I took the drum heads off and put all my clothes inside the drums. I took the drums to Fort Lauderdale Airport, my mom dropped me off, and that’s when you could pay twenty bucks to get all the stuff on as luggage. I got to LAX, I got my drums, I’m standing on the white zone with my drums, $300 cash. That was my plan. I had no idea how I was going to get to Hollywood. As luck would have it, an SIR [Studio Instrumental Rentals] van comes driving by, and it stops, and this guy goes, “Frankie?” I say, “Joey?” It was a tech I had met in Chicago. He was now at SIR, picking up for some big famous band. He goes, “Get in!” We put my drums in the van and he graciously let me stay at his apartment.