Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (101 page)

JOEY JORDISON:
I was staying there mixing the record after Ross had left. I always had a heater by me because it was always really cold. One night I knocked over one of the pillows I was sleeping on and it fell onto the heater. Next thing I know, I’m smelling something so I jumped up. I almost burned Indigo Ranch studio completely down. The whole thing was filled with smoke and flames. Rich Kaplan, the guy who owns the place, came in and we had to use fire extinguishers all over the place and open all the windows. It took about a week to get the smell out.

SID WILSON (Slipknot; DJ Starscream):
We did a warm-up show at First Avenue [in Iowa City] before Ozzfest ’99, and I was head-butting my beer keg right before “Eeyore.” I was wearing my first gas mask, which had three holes in it and there were metal rings where the eye lenses used to be. I did two good hits into it with my head and you could hear the keg echo even though there were no mics on it. The lights went out. My knees buckled and I hit the floor. When the lights went back on I couldn’t get up. Blood was gushing like crazy all down my face and pouring out of the mask. I hobbled over to our security guy at the side of the stage and when he saw all the blood, he turned white. He took me to the dressing room. I took the mask off and looked at the wound, which was wide open. I could see my skull. He sat me down and pressed my head with a towel, and every time he took the towel off it would gush blood again. He said, “You need to sit down and chill out until they’re done playing.” I said, “No, there’s a song coming up. I’ve got parts.” I put the towel on my head and strapped the mask over my towel really tight to try to stop the bleeding. I go back out onstage and I get there on my knees and do my part at the beginning of “Prosthetics.” I go over to Clown and he’s looking at me funny. He doesn’t know I’ve split my head open. He’s giving me this look that says, “You look like a fucking idiot with that towel.” He thought I did it to look cool. So he punches me in the head right in the gaping wound. The world turns white and I’m seeing stars. I pushed him away and waved my hand. I thought, “Fuck, man. I gotta get somewhere safe. I crawled over to Corey because he had never beat on me during a show. He grabs me by the head and bangs my head onto the floor to the beat of the music. I went to the hospital after the show feeling drained and nauseous and I got sixteen stitches to close the gash.

COREY TAYLOR:
There were a lot of times during Ozzfest when it was so hot and I was raging so hard that I threw up in my mask and the slit was too small to spit it out so I’d choke on it. And I broke my mouth so many fucking times just coming up too hard on the mic. I went from puking and having to swallow that to having to swallow blood.

As impulsive and explosive as they were onstage, backstage and offstage Slipknot were just as crazy. And their handlers made sure they had enough booze, drugs, and girls to satisfy their every desire.

PAUL GRAY:
The craziest groupie I ever met was this girl who wound up on our bus. We went into the back lounge and started messing around. Everybody else was in their bunks sleeping. So, we’re going at it and then all of a sudden she tells me to hit her and I said, “What? No.” So she fuckin’ punches me in the face. Then she says it again. “Hit me.” And I’m like, “No, I ain’t gonna hit you.” And she kept fucking punching me. Finally, after getting hit in the fucking face ten times, I said, “Seriously, I will fucking hit you if you do it again.” So she hit me again and I fucking slapped her. That’s totally what she wanted. It turned into this full-on Wrestlemania with us fighting and getting it on. It was the weirdest thing. When it was all done it was, like, four in the morning, and I’m trying to get her off the bus. I’m thinking everyone’s still asleep, and when we step out of the back everyone’s sitting there in the front lounge clapping. It was definitely a walk of shame for me.

CHRIS FEHN:
We had a no-drugs policy for years, and then when we went to Amsterdam we said, “Okay, you can do a little something if you want.” That opened the door for a little here, a little there. Then it was, “Okay, everything’s fine. Do whatever you want.”

JIM ROOT:
I got wasted constantly. Suddenly, you’re like twenty-seven, and you’re in this lifestyle where you can show up to work fucked-up. Nobody’s gonna tell you any different because everybody’s working for you and it’s handed to you and sometimes people expect it. I went for it against my better judgment. The first four or five years of us touring I was in a bad spot and really depraved and doing some fucked-up shit and hurting people and being a horrible person. It started out as a fun partying thing and then it turned into a medication thing. You have to do it to deal with this lifestyle because you’re constantly away from your family and your friends, if you even have any left after being away from them for so long.

PAUL GRAY:
One night we were in Cincinnati and Chris, who’s not a big drinker, had been drinking with [Deftones bassist] Chi [Cheng] all night, and he’s fucking wasted. In the middle of the night he gets out of his bus bunk to take a piss and he thinks his bunk is actually the bathroom. He sticks his dick in between the mattress and the railing of the bunk, lifted his mattress like it was the toilet seat and just started pissing and it all starts dripping down on Sid, who’s below him. Sid starts screaming, “What the fuck. What the fuck!
What the fuck
?” He smelled it and tasted it, and he’s like, “It’s fuckin’
piss
!”

CHRIS FEHN:
We had been drinking full glasses of rum all night so I had no idea what was happening. I woke up with Sid yelling, “You pissed in my bunk.” I said, “I did not. Shut the fuck up.” But I totally did. Before I die, I have to let Sid piss on me.

Along with Lamb of God and High on Fire, Mastodon was tagged by the press as one of the three great hopes for an emerging New American Metal movement—a nod to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Although it was a more ludicrous tag than “metalcore” and a more manufactured scene than grunge, it broadly defined a new generation of bands with eccentric members and the potential to be rock stars. Mastodon, while not the most successful, has become the most inventive of the bunch. With time, their sound has progressed from pulverizing, rhythmically complex noise metal to heavy, psychedelic prog, and in every (largely conceptual) album they’ve expressed the need to escape through a sonic odyssey driven by stunning musicianship and cinematic performances.

BRENT HINDS:
My buddies Gary Lindsey and Troy Sanders brought me to Atlanta when I was nineteen. Their band Knuckle was playing at the Nick in Birmingham, Alabama. I came up to them after the show and went, “Man, you guys are awesome—except for your guitar player. He fuckin’ sucks. You need a good guitar player, like me.” They’re like, “He’s just filling in until we can find someone good.” I went, “Well, look no further. I’m right here.” A week later I knocked on the warehouse door, and I’ve been in Atlanta ever since.

TROY SANDERS (Mastodon, Four Hour Fogger):
Four Hour Fogger [started in 1995 and] lasted until December 1999. In January 2000, Brent and I were at a High on Fire show at the Parasite House, and it seemed like a fresh time to pursue anything new and exciting. At that High on Fire show we met [guitarist] Bill [Kelliher] and [drummer] Brann [Dailor], and they were looking for a second guitar player and a bass player. Brent said, “Well, I’m your second guitar player. There’s Troy. He’s my bass player.”

BILL KELLIHER (ex–Today Is the Day, Mastodon, ex-Lethargy):
[Drummer] Brann [Dailor] was a scenester. He hung out in the square in [Rochester, New York] and was always wearing Elvis sunglasses with his hair all bouffanted up and a wifebeater so you could see his tattoos. I thought he was kind of this showoff with platform shoes. But then I started playing with him in [technical death metal band] Lethargy, and we became friends. Then in 1997 Brann got a call saying [Nashville noisecore band] Today Is the Day is looking for a drummer. I had just seen Today Is the Day play and Troy and Brent’s band Four Hour Fogger had opened for them. So Brann got the gig. Six months later their bass player wasn’t working out so Brann called me and said, “Come out to Texas and try out. I know you’ll get the gig.” So I went out there and I got the job.

STEVE AUSTIN:
I started Today Is the Day in 1992. We’ve had a lot of great players over the years, like Bill and Brann and [drummer] Derek Roddy [ex-Nile, ex-Hate Eternal]. A lot of people are finding out about us through these other bands, and that’s great because they’re going, “Wow, this seems like a seminal thing. I wonder what this shit’s about?” My music is disturbing yet lulling at the same time, and that’s because it’s pretty much what my life is like.

BRANN DAILOR (ex-Lethargy, ex–Today Is the Day, Mastodon):
Our first Mastodon rehearsal was a disaster. Brent was extremely inebriated. He could barely play guitar. He just started hitting open droning notes. And before we went into the practice space he almost got into a fight with the cook at [Atlanta restaurant] Elmyr. A lot of people said, “Don’t be in a band with him. He’s got a lot of baggage.” I thought, “Well, we’ll see what happens.” But there were red flags all over the place. So then he came over the next day with an acoustic guitar and ripped out all this crazy shit. I think he kind of knew the night before didn’t go so well. But he definitely proved himself to be an amazing guitar player. Bill and I had three or four songs, and he had five or six songs he had already recorded with Four Hour Fogger. So we started working on those. They hadn’t done any vocals over them. We changed some of the stuff around and before you know it we had all of the elements for
Call of the Mastodon
, what became known as “The Nine-Song Demo.”

BRENT HINDS:
Bill and Brann moved into town and were asking people, “Is there anyone around here who’s crazy and a really good guitar player?” Someone went, “Yeah, this guy Brent Hinds. But don’t mess with him because he’s crazy, for real. He’s on, like, every drug in the world and he’ll just take your life in a spiral down to hell.” They found me at a Four Hour Fogger show. I had an Iron Maiden shirt and jacket on and Brann loves Iron Maiden. We got along really good and I wasn’t drunk or fucked-up ’cause I had just played a show. They said, “Hey, man, meet us at Elmyr tomorrow at about six and we’ll have a drink and go down to the practice pad and jam. So I get to Elmyr the next day and lo and behold, the Patrón Silver girls are there and they’re handing out Patrón Silver for free, and I was like, “Yes, I think I will.” I had about seven shots and then I went, “Okay, let’s go jam.” I sparked up a big joint on the way down there. By the time I got to the practice pad I could hardly walk. I went, “Yeah, I’m into
this
kind of stuff.” I played this one droning chord over and over. I was way ahead of Sunn O))). I was doing that kind of stuff ten years ago. I was using a didgeridoo with Tibetan monk singing and playing heavy chords over it. And I was sincere when I was telling Bill and Brann that’s the kind of music I wanted to do. It wasn’t ’cause I was drunk or fucked-up. But they just weren’t into that. So I said, “Okay, whatever. What do you guys have?” And they played me some stuff they did in Lethargy and I went, “I ain’t playing that shit. That’s just crazy.” So that was it. They went their way and I went mine. The next day Brann calls and goes, “Hey man, why don’t you come over to my house sober. Everyone I talked to says you’re a really good guitar player and I just want to see you play.” I said “Sure. Sorry about last night, man. I was totally wasted.” So, I played all this classical guitar for him and they decided to give it another shot. So Mastodon is kind of a toned down version of Lethargy with me as a heavy influence.

BRANN DAILOR:
In Today Is the Day, we were on Relapse Records and they heard our demo, so they were excited about seeing us live. We played the Robot House in West Philadelphia in one of the worst neighborhoods. The show was in the basement. You’d got down the stairs and the audience had to be on one side of the stairway and watch the band through the banister. [Relapse president] Matt Jacobson and [the retail and marketing guy] Pellet were staring at us, which was pretty weird. But they signed us and put out our EP
Lifesblood
in 2001. We released our first full-length,
Remission
, the next year.

Many musicians have side projects. Tool’s Maynard James Keenan has taken the practice to a new extreme that at times has left him gasping for air and unsure of his identity. He has been involved with A Perfect Circle, which recorded three platinum albums, and formed the performance art band Puscifer. Outside of music, he owns the Arizona wine companies Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars, and starred in the 2010 documentary
Blood into Wine
. Maynard’s inability to focus on just one artistic endeavor both jeopardized and saved Tool.
Lateralus
was created in an environment of discord and distrust. Keenan couldn’t stand being with his bandmates while they composed, and ultimately bailed to work with his former guitar tech Billy Howardel on A Perfect Circle. Ultimately, Tool benefited from the front man’s departure, as it enabled them to compose in an unorthodox manner without pressure from Keenan about each song’s vocal demands.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
We found we definitely have different ways of processing information and being creative, and I was frustrated. I like to capture the emotion and have fun. At that point, the other guys in Tool were really taking their time. I understand that the method they have to go through involves taking every avenue possible and going down them to see if they get anywhere and then coming back and starting over at another avenue. It’s a very tedious and long process that doesn’t really lend itself to telling a story. I need some of the foundation there before I can start telling a story because if the foundation keeps changing, the story’s gonna keep changing. So I had to step back, but if I was going to go through an entire two- or three-year process of trying to write this stuff while they were working that way I was going to go out of my mind. So that’s when I took a break and I worked with my roommate Billy Howardel on A Perfect Circle. I had no idea it was gonna blow up as big as it did, but I went along willingly, and that caused a lot of tension with the Tool camp. “Where were you? You’re off with your
mistress
.” We’ve navigated that, but it was always a sore spot. So getting into
Lateralus
was a little bit of a chore. But I believe that friction and juxtaposition makes for good art.