Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (88 page)

JESSE LEACH (Killswitch Engage, Times of Grace):
Converge was great, but New Jersey’s Rorschach was also there [in 1989] right when hardcore was starting to fuse with metal. And I’d have to say they were probably the biggest influence for any of the bands in the scene. They did it before anyone else, and didn’t get the credit they deserved.

CHARLES MAGGIO (Rorschach):
We were all coming out of a scene of bands like Youth of Today and Bold, who were pissed off by people not being straight-edge. Then I got sick with cancer—Hodgkin’s disease—and it opened up a whole new slew of anger trigger points: cigarette smoking, socialized medicine, mortality, death. Things got darker. I had eight months of chemotherapy. It was two treatments a month, and I scheduled them on Mondays so that I would be recovered to go to the shows on weekends. I came out of it a changed man. I felt invincible, impervious to the petty things that affect mortal people. . . . And we were lucky enough to have generated enough in-band ill will toward each other to break up while we were still doing something seemingly valid. A lot of bands don’t have that kind of luck.

As the late nineties gave way to the new millennium, two distinct scenes emerged that were more musically focused and that often incorporated strong doses of melody. The first developed around a region that extended from Boston to Western Massachusetts, and the other was in the far smaller area of Orange County in Southern California. The former adhered to the sounds, but generally not the straight-edge ethic, of Earth Crisis and Rorschach, while most Cali bands, including Eighteen Visions, Throwdown, and Bleeding Through—at least at first—were clean, sober, and sonically brutal.

MIKE D’ANTONIO (Overcast, Killswitch Engage):
Western Massachusetts is the little scene that could. It’s absolutely bizarre that so many bands made it so far, given that we were all just playing music for the love of it. You’d be playing with these other bands and then the next week you’d find out that a member left one band to go to another band, and members would swap out all the time. It seems like this big thing, but it’s really been a core of about fifty or sixty kids that were all friends that played together that intermingle and are very incestuous.

MATT BACHAND (ex-Exhumed, Shadows Fall):
We were all kids and we didn’t have cars, and Boston was two hours away, so we had to create our own scene with shows at the Green Field Grange and Katina’s and Pearl Street and all these clubs that were around in Western Massachusetts.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ (Aftershock, Killswitch Engage):
I listened to a lot of DC and New York hardcore. But I was also way into early Metallica and Slayer, so for Aftershock, I took all that stuff and squished it together.

SYNYSTER GATES (Avenged Sevenfold):
We liked hardcore, but we
loved
the classics: Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Pantera. We were also into progressive stuff like Mr. Bungle and Dream Theater. That’s where we get our crazy musical transitions.

BRIAN FAIR:
One cool thing about this scene is I don’t think it’s based on anger, like death metal. Even when I was younger and I was into hardcore, I wasn’t angry, I was just into this aggressive release of youthful energy. Some people played football, I went to hardcore shows. I had a nice suburban life. I was getting laid, so I was having a good time. But there was this aggression that I released whether I was skateboarding or listening to hardcore or metal. Even at our shows, we’re trying to have as much fun as possible onstage. It’s not about smash, kill, destroy. It’s more like let’s fuckin’ drink beer and rock out.

BRANDAN SCHIEPPATI (ex-Eighteen Visions, ex-Throwdown, Bleeding Through, I Am War, Sorrows):
I’ve gotten to where I have today because of my anger about things that I have gone through and the damage of everyday life. We play an angry, scary type of music, and that’s exactly how we feel. I use emotional strife as a driving point for everything I do, especially in Bleeding Through.

ALEX VARKATZAS (I Am War, Atreyu):
I’m a really high-stressed, crazy person. I lose my mind sometimes and the anger keeps me going when I’m too tired and depressed. I just rely on being fucking mad. I’d rather be pissed off than be happy with a shit-eating grin on my face.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
Everything was an extension of skateboarding. You look at all the other skateboarders wearing shirts with skulls on them, then you follow that trail to find out who the band is, and it turns out to be the Misfits or Cro-Mags, and you go out and buy their records. A lot of the punk and metal album art really helped me gravitate towards that style of music. When I was a kid, I went to a technical high school and joined the graphics program so I could help my friends with their demo and seven-inch covers, getting them printed for free and making paper stickers for my buddies who needed promo items for their bands. That’s what motivated me to go into the art industry.

RYAN CLARK (Demon Hunter):
My brother [and former guitarist] Don and I have a design company [in Seattle] called Invisible Creatures. I do most of the stuff on Tooth & Nail and Solid State, and Don has done Bullet for My Valentine, Foo Fighters, Chris Cornell. We got asked to design a Cradle of Filth record, but we turned them down because we’re devout Christians and we knew it was gonna get into some pretty weird territory.

Revisionist historians tend to lump the biggest New England metalcore bands together. But the members of Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, and All That Remains grew up in different bands in various areas of Massachusetts. Boston’s Overcast, which often toured Western Massachusetts, and Westfield’s Aftershock were the scene’s pioneers. The former was more chaotic and hardcore-based, with a definable metal edge, and the latter was more firmly rooted in thrash and melodic death metal.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
I went to a high school graduation party for someone I didn’t know and [Overcast vocalist] Brian [Fair] was there as well as drummer Jay Fitzgerald. Brian and I got along and we started to skateboard together. I asked him if he wanted to go to a Leeway show at the Channel in Boston the next day. He was only a sophomore in high school, so his mom called me to make sure I wasn’t some weirdo taking her son away from her. We began hanging out a lot. He was playing bass and singing in a punk rock band called Frenzy. I recorded them and said, “Hey, there’s this other stuff out there that we could try playing if you want to do something when we’re not skateboarding.” That’s how Overcast started in [1990].

PHIL LABONTE (ex–Shadows Fall, All That Remains):
Western Mass. was pretty tame. There are multiple dudes in bands from the area that didn’t lose their virginity until they were far older than twenty. We were not the ragers. We were the nerds practicing our instruments for hours and hours.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
The funny thing is, we didn’t have a musical direction at all when we were writing songs [for Overcast]. We were putting things together almost at random, so it took quite a few years to figure out where we wanted the band to go. We took on that evil Integrity attitude about hating the world and being down on your luck. Then bands started popping, like Starkweather in Philadelphia. They were huge for us. We looked up to the way they jumped from one type of a genre to another in an instant and gave the listener a bit of whiplash. Also, [Brooklyn’s] Candiria was a force to be reckoned with. They were throwing as many different styles of music into their songs as possible, and that’s something that Overcast got a little
too
caught up in—the breakneck swerves and turns that we tried to purposely put into our music so that the listener didn’t know what was coming next.

Even as they combined various American music styles, early Massachusetts metalcore bands were also inspired by emerging Swedish melodic death metal groups, including At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility, all of which combined raw musicality with uplifting harmonies. Once Aftershock’s Adam Dutkiewicz blended these ingredients with soaring melodic choruses, almost every other band in the scene followed suit.

BRIAN FAIR:
As we all got to be better musicians, we all wanted to try to do this tricky, crazy stuff we were hearing from these Swedish bands. The Massachusetts sound really came from that transition from being a traditional hardcore band to playing more in a metal style and straight up improving as musicians. You may have wanted to do some of that shit when you were younger, but the only thing you could play was a simple E chord chug mosh part. I listen to early Overcast shit now and I’m like, “Wow, we were lucky if we could pull off the world’s worst Cro-Mags cover when we started.” Back then, people were just like, “Get the fuck off the stage. Why are you singing and screaming? You guys suck. Your guitar player has long hair.”

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
My brother Toby was the vocalist in Aftershock and everyone [else] went to the same high school and grew up in the same area. We were all friends anyway, so we started playing music together. By late junior year of high school, I discovered melodic death metal, and that had a huge effect on my songwriting. My gateway drugs were Carcass and At the Gates, which got me into the whole melodic style of riffing, and after that I fell in love with that whole European style of melodic death metal.

PHIL LABONTE (All That Remains):
If you want to boil all of Western Mass. down to one dude, you can do it, and his name’s Adam D. Every single successful band that’s come out of Western Massachusetts somehow is connected to Adam. When Adam was sixteen, he was in Aftershock with Jon Donais, who’s now in Shadows Fall. I filled in on guitar for Aftershock for a while. Adam produced two Unearth records, including their biggest one [
The Oncoming Storm
]. He’s done the Acacia Strain and three All That Remains records [and the latest Shadows Fall album]. He’ll deny it all day long, but it all comes back to him.

MATT BACHAND:
I’ve never met a more talented dude in my life. The guy can pick up an instrument he’s never seen before and play it fluently in ten minutes. One time, Aftershock’s drummer couldn’t get to Connecticut for a gig, and Adam said, “Fuck it, I’ll just play drums.” I filled in on guitar for that show. I remember rehearsing in his bedroom in his parents’ house when he was a high school senior. And the kid is just nailing it on the kit. I was thinking, “I didn’t even know you
played
drums.” And he’s got a stand-up bass in the corner. I was like, “Jesus Christ, who
is
this guy?”

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
It’s so funny. People sometimes come up and say, “I used to see you in Aftershock. You guys were so influential.” I’m like, “Influential? Dude, really? You weren’t in our shoes, trust me.” We’d play anywhere in the Northeast, and we were guaranteed to
not
have more than ten people there who would be into it. We played basements that had just one light bulb for illumination. It was one tragedy after another. My brother, [vocalist] Tobias, got hit in the head and had to get stitches. We had tons of van breakdowns, and we got all of our drum gear stolen. It felt like we were cursed from the start.

BRIAN FAIR:
We had to have an “all for one and one for all” vibe because we were literally playing for the guys in the other bands that were also playing the show. Mike [D’Antonio] used to have shows in his living room. We would get four bands together and drag over three or four of our other close friends and get a case of beer. It wasn’t even underground. It was underwater, for chrissakes. But that’s what made it really special. And it’s special that people still give a shit about it. It makes you feel like those long rides in a Ford Escort pulling a trailer out of a kit we built from Home Depot were totally worth it.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
There were lots of times in Overcast when we’d drive for eight hours and play a house show for five kids, or show up to a place and the door would be locked. No one even cared to put up flyers or cancel the show. It was rough, but fun at the same time. It felt like we were paving a new way for ourselves, learning as we went. We didn’t know anything about booking agents or riders; we were lucky if we got water onstage in cups, poured from a tap.

PHIL LABONTE:
I was playing guitar in Perpetual Doom [starting in 1992] and then nu metal happened. Those guys wanted to play nu metal, and I said, “No way. I want to do death metal.” So I quit, and for a year I worked in an auto parts store, but I was also hanging around with Matt [Bachand], who formed Shadows Fall [in 1995, with guitarist Jon Donais after Aftershock broke up]. I went to their second show with a buddy of mine, and I remember telling him, “Dude, that band’s going to be big.” And by “big,” I meant they were going to be signed and sell ten thousand or twenty thousand records someday.

MATT BACHAND:
Our old singer Damien [McPherson] was gravitating more towards nu metal. The way he was putting shit together seemed more Korn/Limp Bizkit to me, which was the most unappealing thing in the world because I was trying to start a
metal
band. I immediately thought of replacing him with Phil [Labonte], who I had been hanging out with. It’s so funny, because originally Phil didn’t
want
to sing. He just wanted to play guitar. He used to do backup vocals with Perpetual Doom a lot, so I said, “Look, man, you can sing. You’ve got a front man’s personality. Give it a shot.”