Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (46 page)

BRIAN FAIR (Shadows Fall, Overcast):
Zakk is an amazing character; his personality is over the top and he’s a total cartoon, yet he can play a guitar like nobody’s business. The combination makes him a heavy metal superhero.

ZAKK WYLDE:
The first show we did was at Wormwood Scrubs Prison in England. All lifer inmates are in this fuckin’ place. I had long blond hair, I weighed 144 pounds, and I go, “Dude, I’m about the closest thing to Farrah Fawcett that these motherfuckers are gonna see for the rest of their fuckin’ lives.” I was like, “If I don’t pass this audition, what the fuck are they gonna do, leave me in this fuckin’ hellhole?” So we ended up playing there so no one would be able to see me audition, and if things didn’t pan out they’d get another guitar player. It was fuckin’ hysterical. My first gig with Ozzy and I’m in a fuckin’ prison.

SCOTT IAN:
We were in Tallahassee, Florida, opening for Ozzy on Zakk’s first tour with the band. I was walking across the arena parking lot towards this backstage door. The door opens and some dude in bell-bottom jeans and work boots with long blond hair walks out. And he goes, “Hey, Scott,” so I said, “Hey, man,” and I kept walking because I was late for the Anthrax sound check. A couple hours later, Ozzy’s band is onstage and there’s that same dude with the bell-bottoms and the work boots up onstage shredding. And I was like, “Oh, that guy was Zakk Wylde.” I had no idea. So, I see him backstage after that and immediately he goes, “What’s up? I say hi to you, you won’t even talk to me.” I said, “I didn’t even know. I had no idea. I don’t know you. I didn’t know what you looked like.” I was all apologetic, and he started laughing and said, “I’m just kidding. I’m just fucking around.” But then the rest of the tour he busted my balls incessantly. At sound checks he’d be onstage at the microphone and he’d see me and go, “There’s that cunt Scott Ian. Too big to say hi to the little guitar player.” And this went on until about, oh, three years ago.

VINNIE PAUL:
Outside of him being an amazing guitar player, he truly is a comedian, man. He likes to cut up and laugh and have a really good time. He has the same spirit and energy my brother Dime had. I just love hanging out with the guy.

Joining Ozzy’s band was Wylde’s big break for sure, but the original madman of metal couldn’t have chosen a more skilled or compatible wingman. Wylde could outdrink most anybody except his boss, and he was crazy enough to stand by Oz no matter what tumbled his way.

ZAKK WYLDE:
Me, Father [Randy] Castillo, Phil Soussan, and John Sinclair and Oz were coming up with riffs for “Miracle Man” and “Demon Alcohol” [for 1989’s
No Rest for the Wicked
]. But every day at 10 or 11 a.m., like clockwork, Oz would go straight to the Wheatsheaf pub and have about five vodkas and OJs and a couple cognacs and a couple pints to start the day off. Then he’d have a little something to eat. Then we’d jam for a little bit before we went back to the pub for dinner. Same shit. Rifling down cocktails like it’s nobody’s fuckin’ business. Oz had a beige jumpsuit on and people would go, “Oh, man, it’s fuckin’ Ozzy Osbourne.” Oz was trashed out of his mind. He’s got his round glasses on. They’re crooked as fuck. He’s got piss running down his whole leg from the jumpsuit into his shoes. And we’d be like, “There he is, our fearless leader.” Whenever this shit would go down, Mom wasn’t too happy. She’d see him in this condition, and Oz would be like, “Uh-ohh.”

OZZY OSBOURNE:
The word
one
doesn’t exist to me. I should start at twenty-five drinks, you know. I never went out for
a
drink—ever. What I really meant was I was going out to get shit-faced and you won’t see me for the rest of the week.

SHARON OSBOURNE:
Ozzy started to get violent, and I could deal with it to a point. He would hit me, and I’d hit him three times. I can stand up for myself. It was very violent. Our fights are legendary to people in this business. We’d hurt each other a lot. We had a great fight once at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York. We beat the shit out of each other. That’s how we were. If Ozzy would throw something at me, then I would destroy the fucking room. I was used to that because I was brought up with a lot of violence. So it didn’t faze me.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
I’d become what they call a blackout drinker. I didn’t know what I was doing, and it was fucking horrendous. Waking up and thinking “what the fuck have I done now?” You wake up covered in blood, and you don’t know where the blood’s come from.

SHARON OSBOURNE:
The worst it got was when he tried to kill me [
laughs
]. I had him arrested, and the court put him in a treatment center for three months. That must have been ’89. He was on an unbelievable roll of drug-taking, drinking, making drug concoctions that were hidden all over the house. He would take it with the booze, and he was on an outrageous roll for a week. On the seventh day, he tried to kill me. He seriously tried to strangle me. I got to the panic button for the alarm, and the alarm system went off, and the cops came within a few minutes.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
There was a period where I kept thinking, “Hey, it’s cool to be crazy and drunk and on drugs. Ozzy does it, look how popular he is.” It wasn’t really a great approach for me to take because it gave me a reputation for being a loose cannon for a long time. I thought, “Shit, the guy pisses on the Alamo, he bites the head off a bat, he’s out of his mind, and people love that. He’s always in and out of insane asylums professing to be mad. Then I realized that the world isn’t fucking insane. Just some people are.

Ozzy and Pantera were peaking at the same time that Ozzy’s peer and Pantera’s hero—Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford—was growing weary of singing with the metal titans. He would record one more album with the band, 1990’s
Painkiller
, before quitting the group for more than a decade to pursue other metallic avenues with Fight, 2wo (with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor), and Halford (which featured future Damageplan vocalist Pat Lachman). His exit from Judas Priest was hardly civil and his last stage appearance with Priest in the nineties could have been his last show ever.

K.K. DOWNING:
Rob got his head knocked off in Toronto. When he came onstage on his motorcycle, metal stairs rose up and Rob would drive underneath the stairs. On this particular occasion, the intro tape started but everyone but Rob was late to the stage, so the guy who started to lift the stairs up in all the smoke brought the stairs back down because we weren’t ready to start the show. Rob was already riding the bike toward the stairs and they were halfway down, so he literally drove into them and was knocked unconscious. We’d started “Hell Bent for Leather,” and, of course, there were no vocals. We didn’t know where Rob was. He was actually on the stage and so was the bike, but it was underneath all the dry ice and smoke. We played the whole song with no vocals, but he came around and managed to do the show. Afterwards, he went to the hospital and that was the last time I saw him for a long time because after that—it wasn’t because of that incident—but that was when he actually quit the band.

VINNIE PAUL:
After
Cowboys from Hell
came out, Pantera did a European tour with Judas Priest. Apparently, Rob was a huge fan. We heard later that was around the point when he was thinking of leaving Priest and was going to put together Fight. I think he kind of modeled Fight after Pantera, his favorite, heaviest band at the time.

ROB HALFORD:
There was supposed to be a time where I could be in Judas Priest
and
do stuff outside of the band, and go back and forth. That’s when confusion started, because I had to send what is commonly known as a “leaving member document,” which would have effectively removed me from Judas Priest on paper in the world of lawyers, but let me stay in the band. That’s when Priest went, “Well, hang on. What does this mean? You’re gonna leave?” One thing led to another, and it got very bitter. There was a lot of screaming and yelling, which I don’t like. So I just started sending faxes as opposed to trying to communicate via the phone or in person. The big Grand Canyon of disruption started to happen, and suddenly that was it, I was out of Priest. Initially, I was apprehensive because I wondered, “Is this suicidal?”

IAN HILL:
We had no argument whatsoever with him going to do a solo album, but he said he wanted three years, which is a long time for a band like Judas Priest to stay dormant. We were going to take a year off anyway. For the previous twenty years we’d done an album and tour every year, but three years was just a bit too long. As it turned out, we were out for quite a bit longer than that.

ROB HALFORD:
In the world of metal, there’s this fierce, loyal, devoted, almost conservative approach from the fans that will not accept you doing anything more or less than what they love you for. It’s that Sylvester Stallone syndrome. We only want him to be Rocky. We won’t give him the chance to be anybody else. So Fight might not have been as successful as it could have been because people only wanted to hear me in Judas Priest. But for my personal sanity, I had to explore these other areas before I could return to the mighty Priest.

From 1990’s
Cowboys from Hell
tour until its 2000 swan song
Reinventing the Steel
, Pantera was unstoppable. Not only did the band proudly support metal after others abandoned or corrupted the musical form, they engaged in so many antics and practical jokes that they were able to release three VHS videos of shenanigans filmed by Dimebag and his best friend, Bobby Tongs. The material was rereleased in 1999 as the
Vulgar Videos From Hell
DVD. According to Dime’s girlfriend, Rita Haney, the Pantera videos inspired pro skateboarder Bam Margera and his demented friends Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and Ryan Dunn to launch their cringe-inducing reality show,
Jackass
, which debuted on MTV in 2002. Despite Pantera’s constant revelry, the nineties were almost as unkind to thrash metal as to hair metal. To be considered relevant in an age of grunge and alternative rock, many bands were forced to rethink their sonic approach. Of the Big Four, only Slayer stayed the course. Even when they changed drummers, as they did several times through the nineties, their core sound and controversial subject matter remained consistent. But the members discovered that there are sometimes consequences to writing songs about death, the devil, and devastation.

TOM ARAYA:
Because we speak our minds and don’t try to say things nicely, we get blamed for all the stupid shit that other people do. In late 1995, some guy killed a girl and blamed it on us. Apparently, he had a black metal band and he fashioned it after us. They wanted to sacrifice a virgin, but they messed up because they fucked her and
then
they killed her. It’s like, obviously everyone knows who did it; what more do you need, and why blame it on someone else when it’s clearly your fault?

San Luis Obispo Tribune
, April 14, 2010: On the evening of July 22, 1995, 15-year-old Elyse Pahler left her home to hang out with three teenage boys, who had promised her drugs. Later that evening, the three, aged 14, 15 and 16, held her down, stabbed her and later had sex with her dead body. . . . One of the boys, Royce Casey [later] led authorities to her badly decomposed body. The three boys pleaded no contest and were sentenced to 26 years to life in prison. . . . The case garnered national attention after Pahler’s parents filed a lawsuit against the band Slayer, [whose music they claimed] incited the murder. In 2001 . . . a judge said lyrics written by the heavy metal band may have been offensive, but they did not incite three teens to murder. “Slayer lyrics are repulsive and profane,” [Judge Jeffrey] Burke wrote in his 14-page decision. “But they do not direct or instruct listeners to commit the acts that resulted in the vicious torture-murder of Elyse Pahler. . . .”

BRIAN COGAN (professor, author):
The connection between certain kinds of metal and violence is nebulous in terms of influence. Did thrash lead to more aggression? Sure. But to try to say that violence is connected to music is a stretch at best. The Swedish and Norwegian black metal scenes
did
have their share of grotesque violence and murder, but that was mostly some fairly twisted individuals using racist and dubious neo-pagan ideology in order to justify their actions. For most other metal heads, a pentagram necklace or a “metal up your ass” poster was as likely to be the source of any kind of violence as a Bee Gees poster. However, if the fan is an asshole to begin with, all bets are off.

KERRY KING:
It’s funny how quick somebody points a finger at a band rather than the fucking bingeing of drugs that was going on at the same time. Things like that and Columbine have happened before and they’re gonna happen again. It’s the result of not taking responsibility for what you do, then trying to pass the blame. When you leave your kids to be brought up by MTV and Jerry Springer, you’re asking for trouble. Parents today are fucking idiots. And maybe some crazy fucker says he was set off by movies or music, but if you’re raised with no values and no sense of right and wrong, anything can set you off. Don’t blame the fucking entertainment industry.