Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (72 page)

JONATHAN DAVIS [1997 interview]:
It’s true. When I walked into the bus everything stopped. I think it was because I’d get fucked up and bite people. I bit everyone in the band. I would party and get drunk and do cocaine or crank. Then I’d get all horny and wanna be tied up and fuck some chick, but I’ve got a wife. So I’m fighting inside, and I drink more. And for what? The whole thing is fucked-up anyway. I always wake up in the morning feeling bad from doing drugs, so why do I keep doing it?

MUNKY:
I think you wind up drinking so much because you’re covering up some sort of pain. And then when you stop drinking, you start feeling that pain and you don’t know what to do. And that’s when you start freaking.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
I definitely freaked, but I kept drinking because they tried to kick me out of the band if I didn’t.

BRIAN “HEAD” WELCH (ex-Korn):
No we didn’t. Fieldy did.

JONATHAN DAVIS [1997 interview]:
He said, “If you don’t drink beer, it’s not gonna work out.” But then I got to the point where I had to stop. I was like an alcoholic bulimic. I’d drink mass quantities of alcohol, go puke in the toilet, and then keep drinking. And one day I just looked at myself and I saw I was gonna die. My baby was about three at the time, and I came home drunk one night and he saw me and gave me this fucking look that I’ll never forget. I felt like the biggest piece of shit. I was like, “I’m not gonna do this to my son. I gotta be there for him.” So I sobered up. The thing is, I stopped drinking because I thought it would make me feel better, but it didn’t, and that’s when it really started to scare me.

HEAD:
Jon would be happy for a few days, and we thought, “Oh, cool, he’s doing better,” but then he’d be in his room all fucking depressed. It was like this rollercoaster, and it depressed all of us.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
Dude, I’d wake up and I’d literally want to kill myself. I wanted to jump out the window.

MUNKY:
It was so sad. I felt so helpless sometimes ’cause I wanted to help him and I couldn’t. I’d sit next to him in bed and he’d shake and I’d go, “Dude, are you all right?” But nothing I could say or do would make him come out of it. I’d tell him I love him and hold him and hug him. I’d say, “Jon, man, all this great stuff is happening to us.” But it just didn’t matter.

STEPHEN CARPENTER:
Between the time we were eighteen and twenty-five, me and the guys in the band drank everything we could get our hands on, and I realize now I did that because it was the path of least resistance. But to go that way made me not ever concentrate on anything because otherwise I was focused on everything all at once and it was way too much to handle. I was stressing out. But when I was twenty-five, I weaned off the alcohol and went to weed, and that really made me feel good and allowed me to focus on everything, and I gained respect and appreciation for the fact that I am everything that is.

DEZ FAFARA:
We got in lots of fights. Once we were sitting in the front of the bus at three in the morning. I was yelling at Meegs, telling him he was a fucking junkie, and he threw a whole gallon handle of whisky at me. I ducked, it hit the front windshield of the bus, broke out the glass, and the driver stood up, took the keys out of the ignition, said, “I quit,” and walked away.

MEEGS RASCÓN:
When fights would erupt, I would be right there in the middle. We just knew how to push each other’s buttons. So I’d push Dez’s buttons and he’d push mine and before you know it, we were throwing punches.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
It was fuckin’ bad, dude. I was going insane, literally. The only time I felt good was the hour that we were onstage. Other than that, I was in fucking hell. We did the first Family Values [in 1998] and we had just done
Follow the Leader
, which blew up so big with “Freak on a Leash” and “Got the Life.” That freaked everyone in the band out. We went through a crazy adjusting period. No one was getting along because of all this sudden fame. We used to be able to go out in the crowd and talk to people, and suddenly I needed a bodyguard to go anywhere. Then I got a cocktail of Prozac and Dexedrine and it changed my entire life [for the better]. I still party like a motherfucker with all my friends; I just don’t partake. If you see me at a party, I’m sitting there chopping lines and giving people drinks and rolling joints—whatever my homies want. But for me, it’s just something I can’t do anymore. I don’t even drink caffeine.

WES BORLAND:
At first, I drank beer and hung out, and we did mushrooms on the road and X. One night I tried a couple of heavier drugs, but then I realized, “Whoa, that’s bad. That’s so bad. ’Cause if I keep doing this, it’s so easy to take this and fill up the loneliness hole so fast.” I was like, “Boy, I could just fill up with this every night, and then I’ll find something like coke or heroin that will fill it up even quicker,” and if you do that the hole just gets bigger and it takes more of it to fill. There’s another way to fill that hole more permanently, and that’s by reading books on the road or going sightseeing—being a little tourist for a day. You’ve been given a chance to learn and go to all these different places and take advantage of that instead of nursing a hangover.

Capitalizing on the nu metal fever, Ozzfest assembled a cutting-edge lineup in 1998 that included Limp Bizkit, Sevendust, Coal Chamber, System of a Down, Incubus, Ultraspank, Snot, and Sepultura front man Max Cavalera’s new band, Soulfly. But the year ended in tragedy when Snot front man Lynn Strait was killed on December 11, when his Ford Tempo collided with a truck on an off-ramp on California’s 101 Freeway near Santa Barbara. In tribute, many of Strait’s friends and peers—including Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, Jonathan Davis, Sevendust’s Lajon Witherspoon, Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath, System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and Incubus’s Brandon Boyd—contributed vocals to an album of unfinished Snot songs and released it as
Strait Up
in November 2000.

It didn’t take long for the nu metal community to rebound from Strait’s death. For much of 1999, rock radio blared Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Deftones, and in June nu metal went supernova when Limp Bizkit put out its second album,
Significant Other
, which featured the sex anthem “Nookie.” The disc debuted at number one on
Billboard
, selling 834,000 copies its first week. In 2001, the album was certified seven times platinum; it has sold over fourteen million units to date worldwide.

FRED DURST:
Everything on
Significant Other
blows me away. We nailed it. Every song is its own entity. I can’t think of a song that I’m not excited about. I think maybe I wanted to redo one chorus that I didn’t get to do, but I was happy about everything else. We just went in and did it, real natural.

WES BORLAND:
It was a hard record to make mentally and emotionally. We were constantly going, “Is this right? Is this the best we can do?” We were constantly second-guessing ourselves. We had a lot to live up to, and we were thinking about what our fans wanted and how to make that without compromising what
we
wanted.

FRED DURST:
I really dug into myself and pulled a lot of stuff out. There are songs about sex and breaking stuff, but a lot of my lyrics come from betrayal and the way I’ve been treated by certain ex-girlfriends, because those scars don’t go away. When I was in relationships, I was so naïve. I’d think everything was okay because we cared about each other. I’d spent all this time to prove I liked her, so I think everything’s okay [and I stop pampering her]. And suddenly she feels rejected, and she thinks I don’t like her or respect her, and she’ll start fucking my friends. That’s the worst thing. Your close friends have the best connections to the lonely girlfriend, so they act all sympathetic just to get her in bed. It became really hard to trust anybody.

When
Significant Other
blew up, Durst started to believe his own hype. He became a regular on MTV’s
TRL
and an A&R man at Interscope, signing Staind, Cold, and Puddle of Mudd. He wrote songs with pop princess Britney Spears and boasted about the two allegedly having a sexual relationship. He dated celebrities Carmen Electra and, reportedly, Halle Berry, who shot a romantic scene with him for the video of Limp Bizkit’s cover of The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” a song from the appropriately titled 2003 album
Results May Vary
. Such Hollywood antics undercut his metal cred, and when Durst bad-mouthed Slipknot and even Korn in the press, boasting about how the student had eclipsed the sensei, there was a major backlash. In an online chat, Jonathan Davis said, “It’s time for me to put that little bitch in his place. Never bite the hand that feeds.” Ironically, Durst expressed similar sentiments—albeit more graphically—in a message he left on the answering machine of Stephen Richards, the singer for Taproot. Durst felt betrayed after the band, whom he’d offered a deal at Interscope, signed with Velvet Hammer/Atlantic for their debut album,
Gift
, in 2000.

FRED DURST (phone machine message):
Hey man, you fucked up. You don’t ever bite the hand that feeds in this business, bro, and your fuckin’ manager so-called guy is a fuckin’ idiot . . . a loser motherfucker goin’ nowhere. You have just chosen that path. Took you under my wing, brought you to my house, fuckin’ talked about your ass on radio, on press, and you embarrassed . . . me and the Interscope family. Your association with Limp Bizkit does not exist. Your manager slings that name around, he’s gonna be blackballed and probably be erased . . . and you will, too. He’s a fuckin’ idiot. You’re gonna fuckin’ learn from this time right here. I hope you let your band know that you just fucked yourself. You need to be associated with somebody in this business. You need somethin’ to get you out there, put you out there, and believe in. Now you got enemies and you’re fuckin’ yourself already. Tell your friend that. Don’t fuckin’ show up at my show, ’cause, if you do, you’re gonna get fucked. All right? You and your fuckin’ punk ass, man. You call your fuckin’ manager, David Manifestease-whatever, ask him what he’s done and doin’. You’re a fuckin’ dumb motherfucker. You’re learnin’ right now exactly how to ruin your career before it gets started. All of the luck, brother. Fuck you.

MIKE DeWOLF (Taproot):
The deal Durst offered wasn’t too good, and in the long run we were glad we found out what we would’ve been dealing with. That’s putting it mildly.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
There was one time when Fred was a really cool guy. Then fame hit and went to his head. I miss the old Fred.

WES BORLAND:
Fred really wanted to embrace celebrity and stardom and become that character, just as I was hoping to become the character of the weird Mike Patton-y guy. We’ve always polarized people. There’s not a lot of dismissive gray area when it comes to Limp Bizkit. A lot of people that were polarized to the hatred side were in complete disbelief that anyone would actually like us. That’s one of the reasons I left the band. A lot of the people I had looked up to my entire music career were bashing something I was a part of.

TOM MORELLO:
For me, Woodstock ’99 [which included Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Kid Rock] was the low point of nu metal—the rapes in the pit, the trashing of the sites. It just seemed like it distilled the worst element of metal—the misogynist jock buggery—and the message wasn’t announced as “this is a horrible thing.” It was more like, “This is our new Woodstock generation—[a] bunch of idiots.”

JONATHAN DAVIS:
We rocked that place that first night. Everybody had fun. The second night, Limp Bizkit fucked it up for everybody.

WES BORLAND:
The conditions at Woodstock were really shitty and overpriced. The organizers were running out of cash and water. People were getting crazy, anyway, but the shit didn’t hit the fan until the day
after
we played. When we played it was a crazy show but all we could see were endless people going onto the horizon. If there were fires, I didn’t see them when we were onstage. People were surfing on pieces of wood and Fred went out and started surfing on a piece of plywood, but I don’t feel like he encouraged anyone to riot. It felt like our normal set. We weren’t even at the venue when the rioting cranked up.

MATT PINFIELD:
I think Fred burned a lot of bridges with friends, with other bands that he was actually associated with and helped out. It was personal. There are obviously people who didn’t like him. They thought it was a dumbing-down of rock. In the industry, there were people who had it out for Fred, and therefore had it out for nu metal.

Some bands were happy to be considered part of the explosively popular nu metal movement. Others were dragged kicking and screaming to the carnival. The four most visible were Los Angeles’s Linkin Park, whose 2000 debut,
Hybrid Theory
, was a commercial feast of rapping, melodic screaming, and industrial metal rhythms; Des Moines, Iowa’s Slipknot, whose 1999 self-titled debut featured rapping and syncopated beats within a sea of experimental guitar riffs, samples, scratching, and percussive clatter; Chicago’s Disturbed, who started out combining rap and vocal melodies with abrasive guitar riffs; and Lawrence, Massachusetts’s Godsmack, whose 1998 self-titled debut featured plenty of staccato drop-D riffing and vocals that sounded like a blend between front man Sully Erna’s favorite singers—Layne Staley (Alice in Chains) and James Hetfield (Metallica).