Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (95 page)

Avenged Sevenfold doesn’t have a slogan, but if it did it would be: “work hard, play hard.” Guitarists Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates hone their chops for hours at a time, and M. Shadows spent a mint on vocal training with one of the best coaches in the business. They continue to play concerts sober and are reliable about making promotional appointments. But when their work is done for the day, Avenged Sevenfold like to let loose. They drink heavily; they’ve experimented with pills, acid, and coke; they gamble; they visit strip clubs; and they have gotten involved in messy brawls. At times, especially around the
City of Evil
era, it looked like their appetite for destruction just might take them out.

M. SHADOWS:
The last time we got into a bar fight we were just sitting there drinking and some asshole goes, “If I don’t get a drink in the next five minutes, I’m gonna punch the next person that walks in the door.” So he doesn’t get his drink and my friend walks in, so the guy shoves my friend. The Rev walks up with a beer bottle and just,
boom!
across the guy’s face. All I remember is kneeing someone in the face over and over and not stopping.

JOHNNY CHRIST (Avenged Sevenfold):
I got arrested for a DUI in 1994. I had just bought my Crown Victoria and I went out. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. I just had a bottle of Jack sitting next to me and I was drinking, watching TV, and a friend came over. I had just got back from a tour. So I showed him the car and I was drinking some more. I ended up blacking out. And for whatever reason, I wanted to go for a spin. Next thing I know, I wake up and I’ve driven my car underneath a parked Dodge pickup truck. I found out later I had put the pedal all the way down and at the last second I fishtailed and went right underneath the truck. So I’m trying to back out and this guy runs out in his underwear and starts screaming. I tried settling it, but there was already a cop there. I went to jail and had a pretty hefty fine.

SYNYSTER GATES:
People are saying we’re the next Mötley Crüe. They say our way of life is over-the-top and crazy, but to us
their
way of life is pretty crazy—to not be human and indulge in things when you want to do them. People are animals. We like to explore and we’re daring, and to stifle that is unnatural.

ROXANA SHIRAZI (groupie, writer):
[One time], Synyster put down his beer and unzipped his heavy metal pants, full of chains, studs, and assorted accessories. He unleashed his hot pee like a fountain all over my breasts. I held my head back to expose my neck. [Back on the band’s bus] the Rev tried to fuck me. M. Shadows watched. When Synyster showed up, though, the Rev’s dick died. He kept trying to fuck, but his dick was spaghetti limp. He tried to shove it in again and again. Because of all the chemical substances he’d consumed, he began foaming at the mouth. All of a sudden, his face went pale and twisted in deranged psychosis, and he slammed me onto the ground. I hit my head, then stood back up in a daze. I was angry, but mostly because I hadn’t gotten proper sex.

SYNYSTER GATES:
When we went to Atlantic City on the
City of Evil
tour there were a couple of girls we met at our meet-and-greet. We were supposed to play strip poker, and while we were there, we got a little crazy. We filled up a bucket with urine and dumped it all over one of the girls and she was freaking out. She was soaked head to toe in the band’s urine. So Johnny said, “Don’t worry, baby. It’s just alcohol.” So she picks up a bottle of Patrón [tequila] and says, “I can’t believe you wasted this bottle of Patrón on me.” We’re just busting out because she’s covered with piss.

THE REV:
We had a day off in New Mexico [in 2006] and there was nothing to do, so me and [guitarist] Zacky [Vengeance] were drinking. It was just me and him in the bathroom at this tequila bar. We got drunk to the point where it felt like we were on crazy drugs because it was, like, 100 degrees outside and we were out of our minds. So Zack thought it was fuckin’ hilarious to start pissing on the floor. I was like, “Yea-eah!” I fuckin’ dropped to my knees and started fuckin’ lickin’ it up.

M. SHADOWS:
Everyone thinks I’m the craziest one in the band because my temper has an on/off switch, so when I drink certain alcohols I get out of my mind worse than anyone else on drugs. I’m going around trying to kill everybody or I’m just going nuts. I’ve whipped cards in the faces of casino dealers when I’ve lost, I’ve grabbed knives and tried to stab people and had to be talked down. That’s how I get my bad rep—just from my temper.

THE REV:
I’m not a drug addict, but I’m a total sex addict. I’m also probably an alcoholic. I mean, shit, when you’re sitting around the tour bus every night driving to the next town, what the fuck else is there to do but drink and take drugs? But I’m not into ruining my life. I never had to go to the hospital or anything. The closest I got was being on a lot of cocaine and then snorting Oxycontin pills. That was really dumb, and I don’t remember anything after that.

ZACKY VENGEANCE:
I once saw Jimmy walking down the street holding his arm up and fucking wheezing. Like, “I gotta put my arm up, it’s hurting my heart. It hurts really bad.” Like the dude’s about to have a heart attack. Then he walked back to the room and I see these lines of coke cut on a mirror that are literally the size of four pencils stuck together. Each line was seriously like a gram and a half. I looked at him and started laughing. I’m all, “That’s enough to last a fucking month.”

THE REV:
We have this term
cross-eyed drunk
for Johnny. He gets so drunk that any other one of us or any normal human being would pass out and get sick. But his body will never make him pass out, so he never has to stop. He’s not conscious at all and he’s doing the most unspeakable things. He’ll be buck naked, puking on himself. He was trying to get drunk enough to do stand-up comedy and improvise. He pukes and we’re like, “You didn’t drink enough.” So he goes, “I know, I know. I can still see.” He downs three more full glasses of tequila and does more stand-up comedy. It’s the most disturbing thing. We filmed it, and watching the video is like watching
Faces of Death
. There’s one point where he lay down, he got pulled out of his bunk, and it looked like a dead body being dragged across the floor. Then he covered himself in suntan lotion and started trying to tell jokes again.

For Jimmy “the Rev” Sullivan, the good times came to an end on December 28, 2009. Avenged Sevenfold were well into the writing process for their 2010 album,
Nightmare
, when the drummer died unexpectedly at his home in Huntington Beach, California. Toxicology reports determined that his death was caused by acute polydrug intoxication due to combined effects of the prescription drugs oxycodone, oxymorphone, diazepam/nordiazepam, and alcohol. The coroner’s report also indicated that Sullivan suffered from an enlarged heart, which may have contributed to his premature death.

LARRY JACOBSON (manager):
To all of us who loved Jimmy, the only thing relevant about December 28 is that this is the night we lost, too soon, a son, brother, friend, and one of the most talented artists in the world. Every day, his parents and sisters, and his brothers in Avenged Sevenfold smile at the many memories they have of Jimmy, and his fans around the world revel in the musical legacy he left them.

M. SHADOWS:
I came home [from playing golf when my wife called me with the news] and there were probably fifty people [there], just crying. [We were] camping at each other’s houses. We’d order in food and sleep and watch videos. We didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything or talk to anybody.

SYNYSTER GATES:
A week or two after the Rev passed, some fans gave us this huge book of thousands of stories of the band and [personal] notes and pictures. It was the first therapeutic thing that happened and it was just unreal.

JOHNNY CHRIST:
After Jimmy passed, we didn’t think we were going to continue. We couldn’t imagine Avenged Sevenfold without the Rev. But [the fans] sent letters and videos and there was this tremendous outpouring over the Internet, and they asked us if we could continue. After a while we realized that this thing that we created with Jimmy is a little bit bigger than we are at this point.

ZACKY VENGEANCE:
Nightmare
is the darkest, the coldest, most numb album I’ve ever heard, because we went there during the hardest time, basically with tears in our eyes, and recorded the songs our friend had helped write. Having to listen to the demos he played on, we put up a shield. We turned the rest of the world off, marched in there, and went to work. Looking back, I don’t even know how we did it.

13

NEW AMERICAN GOSPEL: MILLENNIAL METAL, 1992–PRESENT

T
he nineties and aughts have been a strange time for those who found grunge and alternative rock too lightweight, nu metal too trendy or stereotypically macho, and death metal too brutal. Yet the era yielded some of the most creative and iconoclastic bands formed by artists who wanted to play a combination of sounds they liked and weren’t hearing from existing bands. While Tool, System of a Down, and Mastodon didn’t set out to be rock stars, they each imbued underground sounds with commercial elements that took the mainstream by surprise. Others, such as Lamb of God, Machine Head, Slipknot, and Hatebreed also wrote bracing, original material, yet these bands featured striking and charismatic musicians that couldn’t have stayed out of the headlines if they wanted to, often because their offstage lives were as chaotic as their onstage performances. Then there were rockers like Disturbed and Godsmack, who drew influence from classic metal and wrote heavy, melodic songs that were easily digestible and that turned them into willing celebrities, at least until they craved anonymity and family lives.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN (Tool, Puscifer, A Perfect Circle):
I moved to LA in December of 1989 and immediately noticed that people playing music clearly were taking cues from A&R guys or marketing people. It seemed all upside-down. They had clever gimmicks, and the music was suffering. I’m kind of an opinionated guy, so I kept expressing myself, and a bunch of people said, “Well, if you think you can do better,
you
form a band.”

ADAM JONES (Tool):
I met Maynard through an old friend he was dating. I was working in Hollywood on special effects for movies, and my hobby was playing guitar. Maynard played me a tape of a joke band that he was in back on the East Coast, and I went, “Maynard, you can sing! You sing good.” I kept bugging him to start a band on the side with me. Danny [Carey] lived downstairs from Maynard, and was playing in Green Jellÿ. He originally didn’t want to play with us. Then we had a practice session and the guy that was supposed to drum for us didn’t show up. Danny felt sorry for us and agreed to play. He said, “Well, I’ll sit in on the sessions, but that’s it.” Afterwards, he went, “Wow, we should jam again.”

DANNY CAREY (Tool):
We weren’t trying to
be
anything. We were just trying to stay open and experiment and find out what our personality was as a band. I was really into prog-rock at that time and Adam was more into rock and roll like Black Sabbath. Maynard was into Joni Mitchell and singer/songwriters. [Bassist] Paul D’Amour was more the grunge guy. We really did just throw everything into the pot and let it develop.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
It wasn’t hard for Tool to get signed. We were four pissed-off, relatively talented musicians, and we got a record deal after about seven shows. Nirvana helped open the door because after they hit, most music guys around town were chasing their tails trying to find the next big thing. Here we come along and we don’t sound like most of the other stuff going on, so for them, they don’t really get it, but they knew that it was different and that Nirvana was selling lots of records, so they knew they had to grab whatever it was, just in case.

ADAM JONES:
The most important thing for us at that point was to have creative control. When we got signed [to Zoo Records], we went, “Okay, if we take less money can we have control of the music?” and the label went, “Yeah. No problem.” We said, “If we take even less money can we have final say over the videos?” And so on. So we got artistic control, but there was a lot of banging heads with the record company anyway because they wanted to do things in the traditional way. They’d go, “If you’re not gonna be in your video, we’re not gonna pay for it.” Typical slimy shit. We really wanted to take the importance of who
we
were and stress what we were doing instead—just the music and the art. We signed a three-album deal and the first thing we wanted to do was an EP. They went, “Yeah, do an EP. That’d be great!” We kind of got burned from it because it wasn’t a full-length so it didn’t count as a record on our contract, which is why they were so agreeable when we suggested it in the first place.

DANNY CAREY:
We were broke, and we knew that even if the record company was willing to pay for studio time we were going to have to pay it all back. So we recorded
Opiate
in four days because we knew if we were there longer it was gonna get expensive. But we also had a live recording and we were happy with the way it sounded. So we thought, “We’ve got all these great live tracks, let’s just mix them and add them to the record.” That’s how “Cold and Ugly” and “Jerk-Off” got on there.