Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (96 page)

ADAM JONES:
We felt like no one would take us seriously unless we pushed the more heavy metal ideas, and that explains
Opiate
. We got typecast as a metal band right off the bat. It’s kind of funny because the least aggressive song, “Opiate,” was the most popular one.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
After
Opiate
came out, we found ourselves in some place like Akron, Ohio, playing some club that looks like it holds five hundred people, but there are only five people there and those are the guys that are playing after us. But it didn’t matter because we were still getting to know each other. Being on a stage like that, hearing what things sound like in different venues, getting used to traveling—I think that was a very important step in our growth.

DANNY CAREY:
We got thrown into the whole grunge thing, which was weird. Everyone was into that stuff so heavily, so just because we had sort of a heavy sound and we didn’t look like a spandex-wearing hair band, they instantly assumed we were one of those Seattle-type bands.

Tool delivered their music with artistic flair and drama that equaled their aggression. Other bands, however, focused more intently on sheer rage born of challenging upbringings, chemical imbalances, or just plain contempt for society and/or themselves. Robb Flynn, the force behind Machine Head, had an abusive childhood, but he was able to turn his negativity and depression into inflammatory songs rooted in thrash and incorporating aspects of nu metal. Flynn actually cut his teeth in the Bay Area’s late thrash band Vio-Lence (as did current Machine Head lead guitarist Phil Demmel). At the time, Flynn and bassist Adam Duce were young, hostile, and trying to survive in an industry that had grown antagonistic toward thrash.

ROBB FLYNN (ex–Vio-Lence, Machine Head):
Vio-Lence was a second-wave Bay Area thrash band that I was with [from 1986 to 1992], and it was reaching its end. The shows were down to about a hundred people. I told them I’d stay, but I wanted to start another band called Machine Head. The end of my time with the band came a year before they broke up. We went to a Deftones show and left roaring drunk with a crazy friend who loved to fight. The three of us would drink a fifth of vodka and then either get laid or fight somebody for no particular reason. This night we were getting gas and beer at the AM/PM, and this big white dude walks up and starts shit with my friend. We’re watching them fight, then these two black girls from the neighborhood walk up to see what’s going on. Seeing two white guys fight was pretty entertaining to them. All of a sudden, three carloads of black dudes roll up and they’re like, “What are you doing fucking with our black girls?” They were fucked up and wanted to start shit. They surrounded us, the girls scatter. The dude who’s fighting our friend bails. I could see there was no talking. I had a handful of these gnarly rings and I swung and felt this guy’s nose break under my fist and he dropped. It was on. We’re fighting five dudes. They’re kicking and beating on me, and in the end, three of these guys got stabbed [by my crazy friend] and we bailed.

ADAM DUCE (Machine Head):
I came out of the mini-mart with a six-pack and I see Robb and the other guy we were hanging with squaring off with six guys. I put my beer down on the curb and I thought, “Oh, fuck. We are about to die,” ’cause there’s about fourteen of them. They kicked Robb to the ground and surrounded him. I came over and I’m swinging on whoever, not looking. I’m hitting people in the ear as hard as I can from behind. Next thing I know, I’m picking myself up off the ground ’cause I got knocked out. I wake up and start hitting people again ’cause they didn’t surround me. And I got knocked out again. I wake up and look up, and these [black dudes] are screaming and running. I was like, “What the fuck happened and now how do we get out of here?”

ROBB FLYNN:
We had a show coming up and I started getting death threats at the club. People were calling in and saying, “We’re gonna throw grenades onstage.” This was the real deal, so I told the band, “This is too fucked-up. I’m not gonna play the show.” They took that to mean I was quitting. For the next month, Adam and I lived every second terrified. These gang guys had gotten our number and were calling and threatening our lives. Eventually it all passed over because they ended up finding somebody else to fight. Over the next six months almost every single person in that gang was killed through their own internal shit.

ADAM DUCE:
Me and [ex–Machine Head guitarist] Logan [Mader] used to score weed and hang out with [Vio-Lence guitarist] Phil [Demmel] all the time. Then in 1990 we all moved into the same apartment building. We’d sit around playing acoustic guitars and get wasted. So when Robb approached us to say, “Hey, I want to do this other thing,” we had already started doing something.

ROBB FLYNN:
Before Machine Head, I was doing a lot of drugs and I sold speed at shows. Slayer shows were always the big score ’cause I could send my trolls off and make $700 in one night. I used to do a lot of speed, but after I left Vio-Lence, I completely stopped. I just wanted to sell drugs to make money because I needed to live. I was basically just drinking at that point.

ADAM DUCE:
I was at rock bottom. I’d panhandle $20 so I could buy a $20 bag of speed and cut it in half and sell both of them for $40. I’d do it again and again. To live in the Bay Area was a real struggle. I did it for several years, and then I rented a warehouse to grow weed, and that was a huge job.

ROBB FLYNN:
The first Machine Head record,
Burn My Eyes
, was fueled mostly by alcohol, rage, and hunger.

ADAM DUCE:
I was a pissed-off nineteen-year-old kid starving to death, deciding whether I should go down to the store and buy a sandwich or buy a pack of cigarettes, and choosing the cigarettes because cigarettes are going to last all day and I won’t be hungry. There wasn’t a chance in hell the four guys that did
Burn My Eyes
could burn that hot for that long.

ROBB FLYNN:
At first, no one liked us. One reviewer wrote, “
Burn My Eyes
: pretty good if you’ve never heard Prong.” I was like, “Dude, fuck you!” We opened for Napalm Death and Obituary and at 85 percent of those dates the crowds hated us so much dudes were trying to fight us onstage. They were shouting, “Go back to Oakland, pussies” and spitting on us. At the end of the Denver show we had to take cymbal stands off the drum riser and use them like shields to defend ourselves. I thought Chicago was gonna be sick because Vio-Lence did pretty well there. We played there, and when we stopped “Davidian” there were just two people sarcastically clapping. I said, “You suck, fuck you Chicago.”

While alternative and grunge incapacitated thrash and nu metal, it didn’t have the same effect on hardcore, largely because many of the popular bands of the day—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine—all claimed to be rooted more in punk than metal. Ironically, one of the most popular hardcore bands, Hatebreed, was influenced as much by Slayer as Minor Threat. The front man for the band, Jamey Jasta, started in the music industry in Connecticut in his early teens, playing in the well-respected band Jasta 14 and booking local hardcore and metal shows. Like Flynn, Jasta came from a dysfunctional family and sought music as an escape.

JAMEY JASTA:
I was thirteen when I was in my first band, Dreadnaught. We had to change the name when I was fourteen because there were other Dreadnaughts, so we went with Jasta 14 and started to play out and do trade shows. I loved every part of it, whether it was handing out flyers a week before the shows or making the demos and photocopying at the Food Bag down the road from my house, cutting them with scissors or buying the tapes for demos at the dollar store. We could draw two or three hundred kids in some places, and we sold a lot of demos. We were kind of like a mix between mosh metal and bands like Burn or Quicksand. The other guys were older than me, but I grabbed the mic because I was determined to be the singer. I don’t think they necessarily wanted me to do the vocals, but I didn’t know how to play an instrument so they went with it. We practiced in the middle of the night in a band room in downtown New Haven above an old woman’s clothing store. It was not what a normal fourteen-year-old should have been doing. I missed a lot of school to play shows out of state, and I made it to the end of the ninth grade before I dropped out. I lived at home on and off and I lived with the drummer of High on Fire, Des [Kensel]. My crackhead Uncle Paulie, God rest his soul, used to take us to gigs. He didn’t have car insurance, but he had a license, so he convinced Ryder to rent us a truck. One tour, it was us and Dive in the back of a Ryder truck, which you’re not supposed to have people in the back of. We’re drinking Mad Dog, we’re smoking weed. Matt [Kelly] from Dive, who is now the drummer of Dropkick Murphys, was in the back with us, and we were telling stories about the hookers that my uncle used to fuck—that he’d bring to my house. Talk about debauchery. We didn’t believe in karma. Shoplifting was the norm, being a scumbag, being an asshole. Eventually it caught up with me.

BRIAN FAIR:
Jamey was the hardest-working man in hardcore. He saw the possibility of making a career out of this long before anyone else I knew did. But he knew that meant multitasking and having a million irons in the fire. He booked shows, he had a ’zine, he started a small record label, he had Jasta 14. We were all like, “Who is this little chubby kid that’s running the Connecticut hardcore scene?” It’s weird because he was totally responsible with the business, but totally crazy. We had some great times with Jasta 14, but you never knew if they were gonna make it to the show or end up in jail that night.

JAMEY JASTA:
I worked hard booking and promoting shows and getting the band noticed, but I also did a lot of fucked-up shit. We’d steal equipment from band rooms and get in fights all the time, when I was still in New Haven. Because you’re in Yale, you feel this intense divide with the upper class. You’re on the street, you have no money, and you’re high or drunk. We thought it was a good idea to do fucked-up shit to Yale students. One time at three in the morning, my friend was wearing this Judge shirt and somebody had made a comment about his shirt and it started this whole melee between these football player Yale students and us. The Judge shirt was white and it ended up being almost completely red with [other people’s] blood by the end of the fight. One night we were all camped out at a friend’s apartment, and a buddy of mine went downstairs to answer the door and got shot in the leg. He came up bleeding and we called 911, but you don’t want to tell them exactly what happened because there was some illegal activity going on. I kind of learned my lesson when I was arrested in New Britain in ’92. I got into a fight in a diner with a guy who ended up being an off-duty cop, and I spent Thursday through Sunday in jail. When you’re fifteen and you think you’re tough and you’re drunk and this grown man hands your ass to you and then you end up spending four days in jail and no one will bail you out, it’s kind of humbling. You realize you’re not such a badass. At the time, New Britain jail was bad. They were calling me Kurt Cobain and I’d hear people crying in other cells. After that, I just said “I’ll never go back to jail.” And I never did.

In 1994, Jasta was fired from Jasta 14 for missing a band meeting and started Hatebreed with some friends in Bridgeport: guitarist Matt McIntosh, bassist Chris Beattie, and ex-drummer Dave Russo.

JAMEY JASTA:
We made a joke demo tape with studio time Jasta 14 had already paid for. We worked that to get a lot of shows. Kids started coming to the shows and taking part in this positive, energetic experience. Even though the music was always loud and aggressive and we were sometimes violent as fuck, the message has always been positive.

CHRIS BEATTIE (Hatebreed):
[Our band has] always been about having a good time. I like to see kids up front. I don’t want to see them standing in the back because they’re afraid to come see us.

JAMEY JASTA:
In Jasta 14 everyone was so talented and had so many great ideas, but when you’re trying to make a simple recipe it just doesn’t work. It would be like having Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, and Bobby Flay trying to make one little simple dish; you have too many cooks in the kitchen. With Hatebreed, I felt like, “Let’s make this meat and potatoes. Let’s try and be like the AC/DC of metallic hardcore and write songs that any kid can pick up and learn.” By the end of ’95, we had a real three-song demo. But Chris and [guitarist] Matt McIntosh had day jobs and I didn’t. I was trying to be fully about the band, promoting it, booking shows. Matt eventually quit. He needed to get a stable day job and didn’t think this crazy hardcore band from Connecticut was ever gonna amount to anything. But he did record on our first EP,
Under the Knife
. We sold it as a 7-inch through the Victory distribution system, and it was just a phenomenon. We sold 50,000 copies and it got the label’s attention. We did a deal with them in early ’97.

In 1992, vocalist Randy Blythe was Lamb of God to the core, and he hadn’t even joined the band yet. Rugged, daring, unpredictable, and a little bit unstable, Blythe grew up as a hardcore kid and didn’t even embrace metal until he joined Lamb of God (then called Burn the Priest) in 1994. But at heart, he was all metal. Whether a sign or mere coincidence, both the swaggering Blythe and Mastodon’s maverick, loose-cannon guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds rode freight trains like hobos before they hooked up with their main bands.