Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (42 page)

KURT BRECHT:
Even after things caught on and people started coming to shows and buying our records, we still didn’t make any money. I lived in the van as long as I could, then I had to move into a tree in Golden Gate Park around the time we did
Crossover
[in 1987]. One night after we played a huge show in LA with Slayer, we drove back to San Francisco and they dropped me off in front of my tree. The reason I was in the tree was because no one could see me up there, so they couldn’t fuck with me. Most of the bums slept on the ground, which is really dangerous. Anyone can come up and attack you. I would hear somebody if they were climbing up the tree.

MIKE CLARK:
I noticed things were taking off big-time when we were headlining, and even more when we were on the radio. Because getting radio play back then was pretty much impossible, and then they started playing “Waking the Dead” statewide. That’s when I noticed, “Okay, there’s other bands like us, now,” which is the best compliment you can ask for, basically.

By 1992, crossover had hit critical mass. Suicidal Tendencies’
Controlled by Hatred/Feel Like Shit . . . Déjà Vu
went gold, as did 1994’s
Lights, Camera, Revolution
. And Biohazard’s second album,
Urban Discipline
, eventually sold more than one million copies worldwide. The Brooklyn band was a bit of an anomaly, mixing syncopated beats, crushing metal riffs, and flailing solos with barked hip-hop-influenced vocals. But the band came from the streets and embraced the ideals and lyrical themes of hardcore, which gave them cred. Moreover, Biohazard didn’t just surface out of a sea of flames and broken bottles to claim the crossover throne. The band formed in 1987 and shared stages with Cro-Mags, Carnivore, and Agnostic Front long before breaking into the mainstream.

EVAN SEINFELD (ex-Biohazard, Attika 7):
When I was seventeen, I roadied for Carnivore, which was probably the single biggest influence on Biohazard because Carnivore played thrash metal, but they were somehow fused with the hardcore scene because they had the best skank parts, slow parts, and dance parts. One day I went down with Carnivore to the rehearsal studio to see Agnostic Front. They all had shaved heads, tattoos, and were more punk than Carnivore, but they were starting to play a metal style. I was totally sucked in. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have all of these styles in one band.”

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
I was playing in hardcore bands in Manhattan and I was just about to try out for a band called Breakdown when a buddy of mine said, “Oh, I know a metal dude who is looking for a guitar player. He works at Crazy Eddie’s [electronics store] down the street.” Back then, I was doing security at Flip, a famous punk rock/metal clothing store. So I met Evan and we bullshitted for a bit. I played some guitar for him and we decided to form a band. We got together with a drummer who wanted to bring in guitarist Bobby [Hambel]. But Bobby had gotten drunk and had gotten in a fight with a cabbie, then a bunch of other cabbies stopped and jumped him. So we had to wait for Bobby to heal before he could join us.

EVAN SEINFELD:
I was a street kid from Brooklyn, but I got what Biohazard wanted to do because after I went away to college to SUNY Oneonta, my friend Ian gave me the Cro-Mags demo and it totally made sense. That, and Agnostic Front’s [1984 album]
Victim of Pain
blew me away. I knew I wanted to do something that had that vibe, but mixed with Carnivore and early Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden. The rap thing wasn’t contrived at all. Me and Billy were kind of shy about our vocals, so we started this rhythmic delivery because it sounded hard and you didn’t have to worry about sounding too happy if you were singing. We were definitely not happy guys. We wanted our music to portray our anger, our dismay, our dissatisfaction with the world. When I heard metal, I really wanted to say fuck the world—not just fuck the world, but blow it the fuck up! Biohazard was perfect for that.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
We didn’t exactly fit in anywhere. When we played with bands like Exodus and Slayer, we got the vibe that we weren’t
metal
enough. Then, we would play with hardcore bands and we were
too
metal. We were outcasts. So we just did our own thing and created our own style, which eventually became popular.

JOHN JOSEPH:
A lot of people hated on Biohazard when they started blowing up. But I always thought, “God bless the dudes” ’cause they were a good band. And they were good guys. You can’t hate on people just ’cause they have success.

EVAN SEINFELD:
As productive and successful as we were, I was so fucked up on drugs. I was really into coke. I used to smoke crack before it was known that crack was a bad thing to do—like it hadn’t hit the news yet. The vibe was, “Hey, there’s this new thing! It’s like freebase, but it’s five dollars.” And I was like, “Wow, that’s great, I got $20. Let’s go.”

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
All of us were into drugs and alcohol. Evan used to deal coke, and he was doing a lot of it himself. We were young and amped up, and the violence was crazy. We once played Riverside, California, and there were these Latino white power dudes there. I was going, “Why are they
sieg heiling
? They’re Mexican.” So we went off on them and it erupted into a big brawl. New York shows were crazy too, because we were pretty solid in Brooklyn, but we played a lot in Manhattan. So a lot of DMS [gang] guys would come out. There was another crew in Brooklyn called BYB. It seemed like whenever we played, that was the meeting point for all the different gangs in the hardcore scene to have beef. A lot of kids used to hold razorblades in their knuckles and then when they were dancing they would just start slashing people. I’d see all these kids leave the pit with slices down their back.

EVAN SEINFELD:
In England, a fight broke out with the bouncers and I punched this guy in the head and broke my fucking hand, like a boxer’s break. Now I’m trying to fight with one hand. I can’t even raise my other hand. We ended back in the dressing room. They emptied the club, pulled down the gates, and locked us in, and we were terrified. I thought they were going to kill us. There’s twenty of these football hooligan bouncers and eight of us. All of a sudden there’s a knock at the door and we hear this Irish brogue, and the guy says, “We’d like you to send out one representative.” Our tour manager was a Scottish guy named Rush Duncan and he says, “I’m your manager. I’ll go out.” So he opens the door and we’re waiting for an ambush. We got a refrigerator blocking the door and we’re holding these chair legs. It’s like
The Warriors
, and the head guy, the guy I broke my hand on, his head has got a big fucking giant lump, and he says, “Well, we talked it over. We think you are stand-up guys and we want to buy you some drinks.” We ended up having the coolest night ever.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
We’d score heroin at night after work and party, drink beer, and cause trouble. And then the next morning you’d snort crystal meth and go to work all day. You’d do that three or four days in a row. And then you’d take three days off and call in sick because you couldn’t do it anymore. I lost a lot of friends and saw people wither away. I had a friend Hal, a skinhead from the Lower East Side. He had this big heroin problem and he hung himself. It shocked me because, I was like, “You don’t hang yourself. You’re a junkie. You die. You OD. That’s how you go out when you’re a junkie.” That’s when I realized, “You know what? Living like this is way more dangerous than I ever imagined.” At first you’re like, “I’m only snorting” or “I’m only smoking.” Then it’s, “I’m only skin-popping, I’m not mainlining.” But you end up getting to a place where you think it’s the bottom, and there’s always one step lower. When Hal hung himself, I said, “You know what? Making music is getting me more excited than doing dope.” And we started straightening ourselves up.

EVAN SEINFELD:
For a long time, everything was still all about sex, drugs, and violence. We were in Phoenix, Arizona, on tour with Sick of It All and Sheer Terror, and a brawl broke out between these kids and these skinhead guys, and some guy whips out a hammer in the pit and cracks some kid in the head. We all went out to the Winnebago and the kid comes knocking on our door, and he’s got a dent in his head that looks like it goes back into the middle of his brain. It had to be six inches deep. He’s like, “I don’t feel so good.” I’m thinking, “You don’t feel so good because you’re probably going to die any second.” Over what? Over a rock concert. The night turned into a full-on ballroom riot. Every guy in every band was standing back to back in the club fighting these dudes. One guy from our crew had two cue balls in a woven sock and he started cracking people in the head. One of my friends had two glass beer pitchers he used as weapons, and I had a broken pool cue. It seemed like it made sense back then. We were like warriors of the wasteland. But I look back and I try to think of what we were fighting for. We had a positive message in our music and we were trying to fight ignorance. But we were all acting like thugs. So we thought, “Well, maybe we can find some positivity and use our music as a positive release to all this negative energy and let other people use it to vent their frustration, and we ended up taking this thing that started really negative and turning it around.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
Our judgment was clouded because of our lifestyles. Evan was still doing tons of coke, but then he had a heart attack [on May 31, 1988]. He thought he was gonna die. They rushed him to the hospital. After that he went through rehab and straightened out. Evan was the first to clean up his shit and I followed suit, and what kept us straight for a long time was trying to help [guitarist] Bobby [Hambel]. Well, how do you help your buddy with a drinking problem while you’re sitting there holding a beer? The first time we toured with Pantera we were straight, and they thought we were the most boring band ever. But Evan wasn’t going to just straighten out and be this normal guy. As soon as he was clean and sober he jumped deep into the other vices of life and got heavily into sex.

Today, Seinfeld is as notorious for his life as a porn star as he is for being a metal icon. In 2004, after doing some professional acting work, including the HBO series
Oz
, Seinfeld married pornographic actress Tera Patrick and became her manager. The couple performed in fifteen movies together, Seinfeld under the name Spyder Jonez; he has been involved in more than thirty-five in total. In September 2009 the couple divorced. Seinfeld launched his own website, RockstarPornstar.com, in March 2010, and after nearly a three-year break, Biohazard reunited with now-sober guitarist Bobby Hambel to tour and work on the follow-up to 2005’s
Means to an End
. In June 2011, Biohazard announced that Seinfeld had left the band amicably. He has since become the vocalist for Attika 7, which also features celebrity motorcycle builder Rusty Coones.

EVAN SEINFELD:
I was always obsessed with pussy and girls. The very first video I saw was “The Beatles at Shea Stadium.” Girls were screaming and pulling their hair, and I thought, “Fuck, I want somebody to scream for me like that.” When I got my first bass guitar, all of a sudden all these new girls that I didn’t know before were suddenly interested in me. Playing in a metal band and going on the road is almost like being an urban land-pirate swashbuckling your way across the earth, raping and pillaging. To me a good concert was like this: there’d be a fight, I’d get laid, and the show went well.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
One time I ended up in the hotel room with two girls. We’re hanging out and the girl to my left says to the girl on my right, “I can’t believe we were in this same hotel last week.” One of them goes, “I was with Phil,” and the other says, “I was with Dime.” I’m like, “Aw fuck, two friends of mine.” The funny thing about that is we just did a tour with Unearth and the same thing happened to them regarding us. One girl they were with said, “I was with Evan.” And the other goes, “I was with Billy.”

EVAN SEINFELD:
If I was in it for the money, I would’ve been in a commercial band. I’m a smart guy. I could’ve been a lawyer. For me it was about having a good time and living that rock-and-roll outlaw lifestyle. I ride choppers and Harleys, I drive hot rods, I’m tattooed. I like brutal heavy metal and fast times with easy women. And I love girls who know what they want and aren’t uptight.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
Evan had “the book.” Really, it was Biohazard’s book, but he likes to take credit for it. The way it started was we’d get a girl to consensually show us her tits and we’d take a picture of her. At first, there were ten Polaroids on the table. And then somebody decided to put them into a photo album. The album gets bigger and bigger, and it progresses from, “Oh, shit, this girl showed her ass” to, “Oh, shit, this girl showed her landing strip for her Brazilian wax.” Eventually, it turned into a full-on porno book. There were volumes and volumes of these things.

EVAN SEINFELD:
I heard that Gene Simmons had a photo album of naked girls and I thought that was the coolest fucking thing ever. I thought, “This guy is documenting his role as a super-pimp.” So my friend Drew Stone says, “You should take it a step further and take pictures of chicks sucking your dick.” I said, “That’s really funny, but how are we going to get them developed?” He goes, “We won’t, we’ll get a Polaroid.” So we got the camera and one day I said to Drew, “When I get her back in the bus just come in with the Polaroid and I’ll ask if she minds taking a picture.” A lot of girls were into it, posing with my cock, and it became really funny. Then Billy and I hosted MTV’s
Headbangers Ball
and we had to interview all the bands who we were on this festival tour with, including KISS and Ozzy Osbourne. After the interview, Gene says to me, “So, I heard you have a book.” I was floored. I said, “I
have
a book, Gene. Actually, you inspired my book because I heard about
your
book.” So Gene, who’s in KISS makeup, in his full demon outfit, reaches into his shirt, under his wing, and pulls out a photo album. I’m looking at this book, and there’s hundreds of pictures of naked girls. He goes, “This is just one volume from the last tour, but there’s hundreds of volumes.” I was impressed. Then he says, “So, can I see
your
book?” I felt it was like a meeting of the minds, and I sent one of the guys from my crew to get it. So he brings it back and Gene opens the book. It has facial cum shots and girls with my dick stretching their mouth. Gene’s face was somewhere between shock, disbelief, envy, and disgust all at the same time. I’m thinking to myself, “I’m on to something here” because if you can get that kind of reaction from Gene Simmons, then porn is the new punk rock. And that’s when I decided to enter the porn business.