Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (74 page)

CHINO MORENO:
We could have gotten all depressed and said, “Fuck this, everything is pointless.” Instead, we made new music. It was our appreciation for life and a celebration of the fact that we still have each other that kept us going. We just took that zest for being alive and poured it into the record.

STEPHEN CARPENTER:
The alternative to us having a good time and doing music was being bummed out, and that’s tough. It’s still there now at this very moment. It’s like, I’m divided. One half of me is having a great time in life, the other half can’t have that great a time because my friend can’t have a great time.

While Deftones was reinventing itself with producer Nick Raskulinecz and ex-Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega, Korn was taking a step back in time. In the wake of nu metal’s apparent demise, the band released two albums that were funkier and more experimental: 2005’s
See You on the Other Side
and 2007’s
Untitled
. Both were well received by their devout fan base. Nonetheless, for 2010’s
Korn III: Remember Who You Are
, Korn recruited their original producer, Ross Robinson, and strived to recapture the tortured sound that had started the nu metal revolution.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
It was just like old times. Ross would sit and talk to me about the most personal shit and bad memories and use any kind of ammunition he had to get me into that headspace where I feel like I want to run away and get the fuck out of there. But it gets the message across for what I’m singing about and the vibe, and you definitely can feel the emotion. I basically went fucking crazy. It was very painful to do the vocals and it totally damaged my psyche. But what isn’t painful? In life we got a lot of great things and a lot of bad things. But I chose my art and my art is to sing about pain.

STEPHEN CARPENTER:
I’ve been in the same headspace with our music for the past ten years. I don’t ever question whether we’re in or out. I feel like our first three records have proven our consistency. I think the self-titled record is just as great as the first three, I think [2006’s]
Saturday Night Wrist
is just as great as the first four. [2010’s]
Diamond Eyes
is our sixth record, and when I reflect on all the records, they are all good to me. I don’t ever feel like I have to prove myself to someone anymore.

JONATHAN DAVIS:
It’s pretty fuckin’ crazy that we’re still around. I feel truly blessed. Even though the music business is dying, we’re still going strong. . . . People counted us out a long time ago and we keep coming back. We’re tighter than ever. I love Fieldy and Munky. They’re still my brothers.

FIELDY:
We’re getting along better than we ever have and that has a lot to do with me. I was a lot of the problem when I was drinking and doing drugs. Since I’ve become Christian I’m a lot easier to get along with. It’s been about eight years for me since I’ve changed my life. When I first made my change I was pretty quiet. Because everything that happened with Head, I kinda just was taking everything in and chilling out.

In 2011 Korn released the dubstep-saturated
The Path of Totality
, and in 2012 Deftones recorded their second album without Chi Cheng,
Koi No Yokan
. Both were critically and commercially successful. Yet both bands have effectively transcended the genre that spawned them. As a movement, as a subculture, nu metal no longer exists. Even though sounds from the scene continue to thrive in the more hectic music of modern death metal groups like Suicide Silence, Carnifex, and Job for a Cowboy, many musicians and critics look back at nu metal as an embarrassing moment in metal’s history—an era colored more by style than substance, and one that encouraged misogyny, violence, and mindless rebellion.

JACOBY SHADDIX:
It was cool to be a part of the nu metal scene at first, but after a while it became watered down because it was oversaturated by so many bands. So we said, “Okay, now we want to have our own identity.” Us, Incubus, Deftones, Korn, we all broke out of all being tagged as the same thing, and now we’re still doing our own thing.

SULLY ERNA:
Korn’s first couple records were fuckin’ great. They were so different and so unique and their live show was phenomenal. Them and Limp Bizkit hit a moment where they really influenced this certain generation. But it kind of went by fast because the generation they hit were in their late teens and early twenties. They were wearing crooked hats and baggy pants down to their knees. And then those kids grew up and started having families of their own. So suddenly they’re thirty and they have this wife and kids and it wasn’t so cool to wear pants down to your knees anymore and crooked hats. I don’t really think it was their music that got bad, I think it was their fan base that grew up and grew away from it.

COURTNEY LOVE (Hole) [2010 stage banter]:
I have to say, as much as I like Fred [Durst], he brought about the worst years in rock history. That just be a fact, okay? That just be a fact. “I did it for the nookie!” I did not do it for the nookie, I did it for the rock. . . . I see [a] guy with [a] backwards baseball cap. “Dude, you! You scare me! You make me feel like you’re going to rape me or something, and all my children. You did it for the nookie, dude in the red baseball hat? I’m so sorry you’re here for the nookie. I could beat your ass.”

10

HAMMER SMASHED FACE: DEATH METAL, 1983–1993

T
ampa, Florida, isn’t generally thought of as the kind of city that breeds great art. In 1990, its artistic community was at least 10 percent less active than that of most major American cities, according to National Science Foundation statistics, and it ranked just .08 percent above the national average for employed musicians. The city has a large conservative community of retirees, and, aside from the abundance of strip clubs along North Dale Mabry Highway, there’s little indication of anything terribly sordid going on. Yet from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, Tampa was unquestionably the death metal capital of the world. Groups including Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse played blazing, savage, and lyrically graphic music that abounded with frantic double bass and blast beat drumming, down-tuned bee-swarm guitars, and low, guttural, and largely unintelligible vocals that made Slayer sound like Bad Company.

JIM WELCH:
Everybody always wants to push extremes to the greatest degree, and that’s what drove death metal. Thrash was fast and heavy, but death metal was faster, more extreme, and more out there.

BRANDON GEIST:
The vocals became so inhuman, and that was a big step. It’s like, “I’m no longer going to sing as a person. I’m going to sound like a demon.” Thrash bands were pissed and that’s why they shouted. Death metal bands were possessed. It was a whole other level of evil.

JOSE MANGIN:
Death metal is about mixing insanely fast blast beats with slower grooves. With the good bands, there’s musicianship and technicality there along with these vicious vocals.

For almost two decades, the origin of the term
death metal
has been fodder for late-night drunken arguments among fans. Some credit hyper-thrash band Possessed, which put out a demo called “Death Metal” in 1984. Others swear on an inverted cross that Mantas front man Chuck Schuldiner (later of the band Death) called his music “death metal” to separate it from thrash even before recording the 1984 demo “Death by Metal,” and thus deserves the credit. Regardless, everyone agrees the scene was motivated by misanthropic rage and violence, and that it spread like a pathogen across the globe.

JEFF BECERRA (Possessed):
The first singer for Possessed, [Barry Fisk], committed suicide by shooting himself in the head as his ex-girlfriend opened her front door, so [drummer] Mike Sus and [guitarist] Mike Torrao came to my high school and asked me to join [on bass]. I had just gotten out of a band called Blizzard and wanted to play Motörhead-type music. This was a perfect opportunity. We couldn’t find a singer, so the guys asked me to sing. Later I went back to my old band and got [guitarist] Larry LaLonde (Primus), and with a little help from the devil we became Possessed.

RICK ROZZ (ex-Death, ex-Massacre):
The death metal scene totally started in San Francisco with Possessed because there was nothing going on [in Florida] yet. The first time Death played a show at Ruby’s Pub with Nasty Savage in ’84, there were at least two hundred people there, but there was nobody in front of the stage. They were clueless, and I
know
Possessed were already playing in front of people in California. The thing is, there was never a thrash scene in Florida. Savatage wasn’t thrash. Nasty Savage wasn’t thrash. Exodus and Slayer were ruling in California, so crowds there were already used to the growly vocals, and this was just the next step for them.

JEFF BECERRA:
I came up with [the term
death metal
] during an English class in high school. I figured
speed metal
and
black metal
were already taken, so I said “death metal” because the word wasn’t associated with Venom or anybody else. We wanted to piss people off and send everybody home. And that can’t be, like, “flower metal.”

PAUL MASVIDAL (ex-Death, Cynic):
Chuck [Schuldiner] heard [Possessed vocalist] Jeff Becerra and said, “Whoa, that’s where I want to go.” Chuck definitely was labeled as the godfather of death metal, and in some ways he was. He kept going and making records and developed the whole sound.

ALBERT MUDRIAN (author,
Choosing Death
; editor in chief,
Decibel
):
Some people say Possessed’s [1985 album]
Seven Churches
is the first death metal album, and it
may
be, but I feel like it’s the first proto-death metal album. I feel like it’s the last non–death metal because it’s about as close as you can be without being all the way in. And the fact that they have a song called “Death Metal” on the record sold it to a lot of people. But to me, there’s a clearer delineation when these bands that are recognized as death metal starts. If you listen to Obituary’s first album [1989’s
Slowly We Rot
] back to back with
Seven Churches
, you can tell the difference.

JOHN TARDY (Obituary):
My family moved from Miami to Tampa when we were young, and the first people we came in contact with in our neighborhood were the guys in [speed metal band] Nasty Savage and [power metal group] Savatage. So, those were the bands that got us interested in playing music. And me, my brother, [drummer] Donald, and [guitarist] Trevor [Peres] all lived in the same neighborhood, so we started jamming when we saw Nasty Savage playing out. We didn’t sound anything like them, but they were real motivational. We started Xecutioner [the predecessor to Obituary] in 1984 just to have fun in our garage. We had no idea what we were doing, but it didn’t take long to develop the sound we wanted.

JAMES MURPHY (ex-Death, Disincarnate):
Nasty Savage and Savatage got all the Florida bands going because they were making records, playing clubs, and going to Europe, and they showed us, “Hey—you too can start a band and get signed.”

JOHN TARDY:
We were getting off the school bus and going in my parents’ garage and jamming until my mom said, “Come in and eat.” Xecutioner tried to do a gig with Nasty Savage at Rubies in Tampa. We showed up and went to load in and they went, “You guys can’t play here. You’re not old enough.” So we turned around and left.

JAMES MURPHY:
As great as Nasty Savage and Savatage were, they were far from death metal. Chuck deserves the credit for that. He was an avid record collector and was into obscure European bands like Demon Eyes, Sortilège, and H-Bomb, as well as early [German thrash bands like] Sodom, Kreator, and Destruction. Nobody else was listening to that at the time. And that really helped shape his sound. In 1983 when he did the first Mantas demo, [“Death by Metal,”] he was doing something unique, and it hit a nerve with people who were looking for something heavier than thrash.

KAM LEE (ex-Death, Massacre, Bone Gnawer):
It was 1983 and we were all in high school. I knew Rick [Rozz] because we had art class together. I was a little punk kid and I was always drawing skeletons and spooky stuff ’cause I was a Misfits fan. So, Rick would come over to look at what I was drawing and we started talking about music. One day he came into class with a copy of Iron Maiden’s
Killers
album and he threw it down on my desk and said, “Do you think you could draw that?” I was like, “Yeah, man, that’s easy.” So I drew Eddie and gave it to him. He goes, “Hey man, I know we’re not into the same music, but I’d like to give you some stuff to listen to.” I was a punk drummer. I really wasn’t into metal. But he got me listening to Motörhead and that pulled me in. One day he goes, “I met this guy Chuck at a party and we were saying we can’t find drummers who can play this stuff. Would you like to come in and try it?” He had seen my other band, Invaders from Hell, which was very Misfits-influenced, so he knew I could play fast.