Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (103 page)

STEVE “FUZZ” KMAK (ex-Disturbed):
The best line that a girl on the bus can ever say is, “I’ve never done this before.” That’s the best.

DAVID DRAIMAN:
Especially because they always seem to know the rules of the bus. They know where everything is, they know you can’t poop in the toilet [or the septic system has to be drained].

ZAKK WYLDE:
Black Label Society’s soundman, Dave, had some fuckin’ chick in the back lounge of the bus. The rest of us are sitting up in the front packed in there. It was like fuckin’
Animal House
on fucking crack cocaine and steroids. The majority of guys were all single, so it was like a
Caligula
fuckfest. There was this one chick that all the guys were fucking. She was riding two guys, trying to fit both of their fat-ass cocks in her fuckin’ mouth and getting pounded by one of the other guys. I grabbed our driver, Mike, and went, “Dude you gotta see this shit!” Then there was the girl in the back that Dave was banging. She only knew him as Soundman Dave. So she’s yelling, “Fuck me, Soundman Dave!” because she didn’t know his last name. And the next thing you know [bassist] John “JD” DeServio is sitting there and he’s, like, five-foot-three. So she goes, “Soundman Dave, I’m done with you. Lemme fuck the little guy.” I’m going, “What the fuck?” The next day at sound check JD’s playing “Riders on the Storm,” Dave’s out front. And in a voice like Jim Morrison, JD goes, “Fuck me, Soundman Dave / Your throbbing cock I crave.” For the next fuckin’ month and a half everyone called him, “Fuck Me Soundman Dave.” We’d be in a bar, and when I’d introduce him to someone I’d go, “This is Fuck Me Soundman Dave. It’s fuckin’ crazy his parents named him that.”

SULLY ERNA:
There were times where there were forty or fifty people jammed on the bus. My bus used to be nicknamed the Combat Zone [after Boston’s Red Light District]. There’s a vision you have when you’re not signed yet about what it’s like to be a rock star. When you jump into it and you start to live it, you’re like, “Cool, this is what I wanted to do.” Then all of a sudden it consumes you and turns into this awful fuckin’ creature and it takes over your life.

MICK THOMSON:
No one knows who they are until they’re in a different situation. People think, “Oh, I’m really grounded. I’m faithful. I would never cheat on my girlfriend or my wife.” Oh, really? Ever had extremely hot pussy dangling in front of your face every fucking night willing to give it up? No. What you’re saying is you don’t go to a bar and chase tail. But when you’re faced with that shit right in front of you and it’s there every single fucking day, those are usually the people that are first to cave.

SULLY ERNA:
You go out and play the show. You hit the bottle. You’re drunk. The chicks are back there. The party’s back there. You’re the center of the whole thing. The next thing you know, you wake up in the morning and you got some stranger in your fucking bed that you don’t give a fuck about, and you can’t wait for her to get the fuck out of there. Then there’s a new chick, so you go, “Oh, she’s fucking hot.” And you’re banging her. There’s no satisfaction in it, and it becomes an addiction. You see the next girl and you go, “Whoa, look at her! I haven’t fucked
her
yet.” So you fuck her and then you’re like, “Eaagh! I don’t really like you. And I’m starting to not really like myself.” You start to feel like Bill Murray in
Groundhog Day
. In the end I came clean with my old lady and told her about every fucking girl I ever cheated on her with.

DAVID DRAIMAN:
Now I’m very happy and monogamous. But since I’ve been on the road, I’ve had a handful of meaningful relationships, all of which left me fairly badly wounded. I had an ex-fiancée leave me. I lost my unborn child four or five years ago while my ex was in the middle of her second trimester. That’s what “My Child” [on the
Asylum
CD] is about. I wanted a family so badly, I didn’t see that she and I were not meant to be together. But she had an epiphany when we were in Amsterdam and literally, within twenty-four hours of coming home from Europe, she was gone.

SULLY ERNA:
To be able to tell your girl that you’ve been cheating on her for three fucking years on the road and all the suspicions she had about you were true, that’s heavy. I don’t know any fuckin’ dude that’s done it. Well, I know James Hetfield did it. When he told me I went, “Wow, that’s pretty awesome, but I would never fucking tell.” But eventually I decided I had to. Before I told her, I went to the desert for two weeks and worked with these Native American medicine men—these people I’ve known that do some amazing rituals and ceremonies. It was magical in a sense, and it allowed me to open the door and realize what my problem was, and it was just that I wasn’t being honest and I wasn’t living an honest life.

MICK THOMSON:
Our old manager and everyone around him were invading our fucking shit going, “Hey, dude, try some of this. Hey dude, there’s a chick over here who wants to fuckin’ blow you.” I’m like, “You just smiled and said goodbye to his girlfriend and now you’re trying to get him to fuck somebody
else?
” That’s who these people are. They’d try that shit with me and I’d go, “You know what, dude. You don’t need to worry about my dick. My dick will go wherever my dick wants to go. But you don’t need to fuckin’ come over and try to urge me to go into some room and tag some fuckin’ chick.” I almost found it gay. Like, “What, are you gonna sit there and beat off thinking about how I’m just destroying some pussy in there? What the fuck is wrong with you?” To me, if my pants are off, that’s my private life and you don’t need to be involved with it in any way, shape, or form.

COREY TAYLOR:
When we went in to do
Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses
, we were in the studio three months and I hadn’t laid down a stitch of vocals. I was gonna quit the band and I was actually on the phone buying a plane ticket home. I was wasted at the time and it took Clown to fuckin’ talk me down. Clown has always been kind of my father figure in a weird way, even though we’re only four years apart. There were a few guys I was close to at that time, but for the most part I pushed everybody away. I was just going through a constant cycle of abuse and it culminated with me at the Hyatt on Sunset almost jumping out of an eight-story window. If my buddy Tommy and my ex-wife hadn’t been there, I’d be dead. The next morning I had my little moment of fucking clarity. I quit drinking for three years until my wife and I split up.

JAMEY JASTA:
The low point for Hatebreed came when we were doing a festival with Kid Rock, Static-X, and Staind in Wisconsin. We made an agreement not to drink. One night we decided to break the whisky out, and that ended up with me, [bassist Chris] Beattie, and ex-guitarist Sean [Martin] all fighting each other individually, cage-match style, outside the bus in front of all the other bands, agents, and managers. It was terrible. We broke the windshield out of the bus, which cost us over $15,000. We missed shows. I woke up in a bathtub filled with blood. And my elbow was cracked open from Sean body-slamming me onto these rocks. It was full-blown—the hardest you can punch, the hardest you can smash someone’s face into the ground. Everybody witnessed this and it was just a disgusting display of drunken idiocy. But it made us all better friends. Fortunately, I cleaned up my act and got sober. But I’ll always have an addictive personality. I have mental illness, depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction in my family for generations going back. So with an addictive personality, anything can be a problem—food, booze, pills, women. All that stuff comes out in the music.

ZAKK WYLDE:
Once, some of the guys in the back were getting blowjobs from some chick. There was this whole running joke that went this chick’s gotta blow the whole crew, the Doom Crew, before she gets to the band. So she’s blowing some dudes in the back. Next thing you know I hear,
ba-boo-oom!
I go up to the fuckin’ front and the windshield of the bus is shattered. Someone threw a brick at it and took off running. I saw him and chased this motherfucker down, beat the living fuck out of him, and then walked back to the bus. One of my guys goes, “Man, did you talk to him?” And I said, “No, I beat the living fuck out of the motherfucker.” And he goes, “Aw, dude. It wasn’t his fault. His girlfriend was the one who came on the bus.” I go, “Are you kidding me? Well, he shouldn’t have thrown a brick. He should have gotten her out and dealt with her or just left her there.” The poor fuckin’ bastard pays for the two tickets, probably brought her out to dinner. And what does he get? Does he get a blowjob? No. Does he get laid? No. He gets his ass handed to him and his fucking girlfriend sucks off the Doom Crew. God bless heavy metal.

RANDY BLYTHE:
I’m not a big fighter, but I’m definitely accident prone. The last day of the Unholy Alliance tour in 2006 with Slayer I bought a really sharp machete. Some kids asked me for an autograph and the machete came off the belt of my sheath and landed right on my toe. Blood started fountaining everywhere. I asked the fans to get me some Super Glue. If a cut’s not too deep, you can glue the wound right back together, but it was way too late for that. I had to get stitches right away. More recently, we were playing in Osaka, [Japan], and I was visiting with my tattoo artist. I had forty-five minutes before I had to be onstage. He said, “My buddy has a clothing store. He wants to flow you some cool gear.” I went and got some hats and a cool jacket and he asked me to put the jacket on so he could take a picture of me wearing it for the store. So I whipped it on and a tag was hanging out. I busted out my knife to remove the tag. I cut the tag off, closed the knife and I wasn’t paying attention so I closed it on my thumb and split it wide open. I should have had stitches, but I had to be onstage early. I went back to the club bleeding like a stuck pig. Everyone looks at me and shakes their head like, “Oh, there goes Randy again.”

When Lamb of God arrived in Prague on June 27, 2012, to play a show at Rock Café with Skeletonwitch and All Shall Perish, to everyone’s shock Blythe was cornered by police at the airport, arrested, and charged with manslaughter, stemming from an incident in 2010 in which nineteen-year-old Daniel N. died. After the fan rushed the stage, Blythe allegedly pushed him back into the crowd, where he fell and hit his head. Two weeks later, N. died from injuries sustained from the fall. Even after posting US$200,000 bail, Blythe was held at Pankrác Prison through August 2, 2012.

RANDY BLYTHE [in a press statement]:
If it is deemed necessary for me to do so, I
will
return to Prague to stand trial. While I maintain my innocence one hundred percent, and will do so steadfastly, I will
not
hide in the United States, safe from extradition and possible prosecution. The family of a fan of my band [still] suffers through the indescribably tragic loss of their child. They have to deal with constantly varying media reports about the circumstances surrounding his death. I am charged with maliciously causing severe bodily harm to this young man, resulting in his death. While I consider the charge leveled against me ludicrous and without qualification, my opinion makes no difference in this matter. The charge exists, and for the family of this young man, questions remain. The worst possible pain remains.

For many years, Mastodon front man, guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds tempted fate. On September 9, 2007, insane partying and juvenile antics almost ended his career. Hinds was swinging around a wet shirt when he accidentally hit someone with it. The guy blindsided him and Hinds’s head smashed against the cement, causing severe internal bleeding. Ironically, the trauma fueled his creativity for the band’s 2009 psychedelic prog-metal epic
Crack the Skye
.

BRENT HINDS:
I got run over pretty hard by this dude, and if I would have seen it coming it never would have happened. He sucker punched me out of nowhere and he’s a coward for doing it. If he would have said, “Hey, I’m about to punch you,” it would have been a different story. It’s like, “Dude, grow some balls and fuckin’ face me. It was an accident that I hit you. I was fuckin’ wasted drunk.” Me and [Queens of the Stone Age front man] Josh Homme had just played with the Foo Fighters on MTV. We were hanging out with Lemmy. I was just having too much fun. That’s why he punched me. [System of a Down guitarist] Daron [Malakian, who was there], said I hit the back of my head [on the ground] so hard it sounded like someone had hit a homerun. I went into convulsions and seized out and had blood coming out my ears and mouth and nose and brain hemorrhaging and a brain aneurysm. I was holding the fuckin’ Grim Reaper’s hand. It’s a miracle I made it through.

TROY SANDERS:
Bill [Kelliher], Brann [Dailor], and I were in my room real late and we got a phone call and found out Brent was beaten on and had head injuries, and next thing you know our party vibe got turned into us sitting in this deluxe hotel room crying together because we were scared that brain injury means possible death, possible coma, possible motor skills lost for life. It was incredibly scary. That element of the unknown terrified us, and that was the first step of us for the next twelve or eighteen months becoming more solid as a family. It takes those kinds of moments for you to step back and reassess your life personally, and your career and your bandmates and the brotherhood you’ve been sharing for the past nine years.