Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (89 page)

PHIL LABONTE:
When Damien quit in 1996 they asked me to join and I said, “Well hell yeah.” It’s funny ’cause later, they were like, “Yo, can you do stuff like Brian from Overcast?” I should have seen the writing on the wall.

Early metalcore tours were sparsely attended, but musicians seeking action and misadventure (rather than fame and fortune) usually came home with great stories—some humorous, others horrific.

MATT BACHAND:
Shadows Fall did a mini-tour with Overcast when Phil [Labonte] was still singing for us. We got strip-searched in Canada. They ripped the van apart and threw shit everywhere. Then they found a pebble or something and claimed it was a pot seed. It could have been anything. They were just looking for an excuse to fuck with us because they knew we were coming into the country to play shows, and whoever booked the tour gave us paperwork that said we were going there to record an album. So we see this guy come around the corner with a rubber glove on. Phil was the first one to go in. He went into the room and came out with a miserable look on his face, but he couldn’t tell us what happened. He had to sit on the other side while we went in one by one. When it was my turn I was expecting the worst. They said, “Well, we can’t touch you.” But they made me drop my drawers, bend over and they looked up my asshole with a flashlight. And we still didn’t get into the country because one of the band members had a rap sheet longer than he was tall, filled with stupid childhood breaking-and-entering and arson charges that we didn’t know about. We got fined $500 and we had to turn around and go home.

BRIAN FAIR:
One time, Overcast was out with Jasta 14 and we were going to Ithaca to play with Madball. I met up with some friends who went to college there. We were raging, getting so loaded-drunk. Our drummer Jay [Fitzgerald] went out with the two guitar players for Jasta 14 and they were on a rampage, going into frat houses and stealing CDs, smashing shit and causing trouble. They wanted a case of beer but didn’t have any money, and nobody was twenty-one. So they decided to try and steal beer from this convenience store. Jay ran in, grabbed a case, tripped on his way out, and smashed it right into the doorway. He realized he fucked up and took off running. They finally made it back to the apartment where we were staying, and I went, “Dude, people are looking for you. You gotta stay here and find a place to hide. Do not leave.” We all passed out, but Jay woke up later and decided he needed cigarettes. So he walked back to the same fucking store while the cops were watching the footage of him smashing the case of beer. He put a pack of Marlboros down on the counter, and they look at him like, “Are you fucking kidding me, dude?” They arrested him on the spot. The next day, we didn’t know where he was, so we started looking in ditches. We finally called the police station and they called us back a couple hours later and said, “Oh, you’re looking for the drunk kid. Yeah, we got him.” We didn’t have any bail money because we were broke. So we called his mom back in Massachusetts and she said, “Just fuckin’ leave him there. I’ll be there Monday.” This was Friday. So she just let him stew and we went home and missed the shows.

KARL BEUCHNER:
We were coming down out of the mountains in Yakima, Washington, and our van rolled four times. Everybody smashed out of the windows and was lying in the snow except for me and the driver. I went into the back of the van and was lifting up all of our gear—we had it all packed in there with us, which was an insane way to travel. I thought everyone was crushed under it, so it was a miracle to see everyone alive outside. Our fill-in guitarist had one of his ears partially detached. Our drummer Dennis [Merrick] got hurt the worst. He had collapsed lungs and a broken collarbone and broken ribs and a concussion. I didn’t know what was going to happen to him. Incredibly, he was playing drums again six months later.

DEREK YOUNGSMA (Bleeding Through):
It was about 7 a.m. and we had just left Salt Lake City on our way to Denver. The ground was covered in snow and I was driving. [Vocalist] Brandan [Schieppati] was sitting shotgun and most of our other band members were in the back of the van lying down. I was coming down a hill and noticed there was an accident in the center of the highway about a quarter mile ahead. I could see the highway patrol cars and some people standing around. As I drove closer, I crossed a bridge and the trailer started to slide and just pulled the van right along with it. We spun 360 degrees and slid into the center of the road, and just as the van began to tip, we hit the truck that crashed in front of us. When we hit, the van came to a stop but the trailer broke off and flipped, throwing gear and merch everywhere. The cops were all running and diving out of the way and thankfully no one was hit. The van and trailer we borrowed were completely totaled and we were stranded in Salt Lake for a few days, but we all walked away and most of our gear survived, though we did have to cancel the rest of the tour. The cops were actually very cool considering what they had been through. The reason we got so much notoriety out of the crash was because the dashboard camera in one of the police cars caught the whole thing. We ended up all over the news:
Inside Edition, Wildest Police Videos
. And most of the news shows were cool enough to include some of our music and live footage in their stories.

For most veteran Massachusetts metalcore bands, wild rides couldn’t make up for the continued lack of commercial acclaim. Overcast was first to break up, in 1998, followed by Aftershock a year later (though they continued to put out previously unreleased material posthumously on Devil’s Head Records). The fragmentation of the pioneering bands was ultimately beneficial for the growth of metalcore. Members of Aftershock and Overcast launched Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, and, eventually, All That Remains—all three of which would grow exponentially in popularity, selling out clubs and performing at stadium festivals, including Ozzfest and the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Fest.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
We got an offer to play Japan, and that’s actually how we ended Aftershock. We were playing these clubs there with five to six hundred capacity. They were sold out, and we were like, “This is freaking crazy. We had to fly halfway across the world to play shows in front of a bunch of people who are into us.” At that point, going back to playing shows for fifty people again didn’t make sense.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
We had just done our first major U.S. tour as Overcast; it took about seven years to get to that point and we struggled the whole time. We had put out
Fight Ambition to Kill
[in 1997], and it was doing okay. So we started talking about writing another record, and our drummer Jay [Fitzgerald] said, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore. It’s costing more for us to get to a show than we’re getting paid.” That was a big blow to me because Overcast was my baby. I had a stronghold on that band—a stranglehold, probably. It meant everything to me.

BRIAN FAIR:
We did our last tour together [in 1998] with Section 8, Shai Hulud, and Disembodied. Pretty much every band on that tour broke up except Shai Hulud, and they lost every member except Matt Fox; we called it the Tour to End All Bands. Mike D had been keeping track of the money we were making for every show, and there were definitely a few zeros, but what’s even funnier is there’s actually a $7 and an $8, and then there’s a $32. And on one, we made $102. And that was the
big
tour. We were getting to California with three other bands who all had records out. We all thought, “This is gonna be huge!” Yeah, right. “Here’s $32.”

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
One of our last shows was at the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square [in Boston]. We get there and the floor is covered in kitty litter, which was really weird. When we started playing the pit got going and a big cloud of kitty litter dust arose. You couldn’t see the audience at all.

BRIAN FAIR:
All the bouncers were wearing surgical masks, which should have been a sign we should pack up and leave. We found out later that the night before, a sewage pipe had blown up, and, in classic Rat style, they didn’t clean it. They dumped all this kitty litter on the floor to absorb it all. My throat was torn apart with each breath.

MATT BACHAND:
I started my own label, Lifeless Records, just to put out our first [Shadows Fall] album, [1997’s]
Somber Eyes to the Sky
, and make it look professional. That record featured Phil [Labonte] on vocals and, at the time, Phil’s thing was death metal. He didn’t want to do any clean singing. Most of the clean singing on that album is me. His main focus was the growl and the aggressiveness. That’s the main reason we started looking for another singer.

PHIL LABONTE:
I got kicked out of Shadows Fall [in 1999] because Brian from Overcast became available. I actually drove [Shadows Fall bassist] Paul [Romanko], [guitarist] Matt [Bachand] and [guitarist] Jon [Donais] to Overcast’s last show at the Espresso Bar in Worcester, Massachusetts. I was like, “I’ll be designated driver.” I didn’t know they’d spend all night talking to Brian about how they were going to kick me out of Shadows Fall.

BRIAN FAIR:
Phil was into more brutal death metal and they were getting more melodic, so it was really a common parting of the ways. Matt, being the ambitious one, asked me to join the band literally as I was coming offstage from the last-ever Overcast set in Connecticut. I was like, “Dude, gimme a minute. I’m burying one of my best friends now.”

MATT BACHAND:
The crazy thing is we kicked out Phil because he didn’t want to sing, and now if you listen to what he’s doing in All That Remains, it’s exactly what
we
wanted him to do.

PHIL LABONTE:
I had already started writing stuff for All That Remains. I had written “Follow,” “Shading,” and “Ace,” which are off our first record. I wrote the music because I had planned on playing guitar again and not just singing. Everything worked out in the end.

Since Unearth’s breakthrough album was 2004’s
The Oncoming Storm
, many casual metalcore fans consider them latecomers to the scene. In actuality, the band was there almost from the start.

TREVOR PHIPPS (Unearth):
In 1998, I ruptured my appendix and had to have it removed. I was trapped in my house for a week and I couldn’t really move. [Unearth guitarist] Ken [Susi] came over every day to try to convince me to leave my old band, Second Division, and join their project. Finally, I agreed to go to their practice space to hear their songs. I thought they were pretty fuckin’ killer, so I agreed to join.

KEN SUSI (Unearth):
Unearth is one of the first bands to play metalcore as it’s known today, and that started a huge trend. We’re very big fans of classic thrash, and we wanted that to be a major part of our music because no one was doing that at the time. And we’ve never tried to sell hits. A lot of metalcore bands go straight from a mosh riff to a bright, shiny chorus to make their music more commercial, and I just think if people keep watering down metal with clean vocals, it’s going to be nu metal all over again. So we went all-out in the other direction.

As the Massachusetts metalcore scene was heating up, on the other side of the country, in insular Orange County, California, another batch of musicians—some of whom were influenced by Shadows Fall and Converge—were forming new groups. Like the Massachusetts bands, they often featured a revolving door of players from other bands. The most popular were Avenged Sevenfold and Atreyu, but the first to strike were straight-edge adherents Eighteen Visions, which was formed in 1996 by front man James Hart and guitarists Ken Floyd and Dave Peters. In the beginning, Eighteen Visions was primarily influenced by Thousand Oaks’ straight-edge metalcore band Strife, one of the early staples of Victory Records, and San Diego’s Unbroken. In contrast to many of the outfits they spawned, the first California metalcore bands were unapologetic teetotalers.

DAVE PETERS (ex–Eighteen Visions, Throwdown):
I started out as a metal kid. The only shows I had seen before I got into hardcore were when I was a teenager and I got $60 of allowance from my mom to go see Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, and Motörhead. Then I went to see Unbroken and I was standing two feet from the band. I was like, “Wow, I can get this close? I thought you had to sit an acre away to see a concert, like at Metallica.”

MICK MORRIS (Eighteen Visions, xCLEARx):
I grew up in Salt Lake City, and I was really into Slayer and Pantera, but once I discovered the early Victory [Records] bands, it all made sense to me because it had that heavy vibe that was metal but it was a whole new scene. One of the first shows I saw in 1995 was Integrity, Earth Crisis, and Bloodlet, which was a life changer. I could relate to the crowd, I could relate to the straight-edge lyrics, and I could relate to the intensity of the music. I started xCLEARx, and our two biggest influences were Overcast and Converge. We were on a label called Life Sentence that had some popular bands in the metalcore scene in the late nineties, including Eighteen Visions, which I later joined.

BRANDAN SCHIEPPATI:
We’re all straight-edge. We’re not militant about it. If people want to drink or whatever, cool. But it’s really maintained my focus on what I want to do. If I was doing something where I didn’t have control over myself, I don’t know if I could accomplish anything.