Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (97 page)

RANDY BLYTHE (Lamb of God):
I hopped trains for two or three summers to California and back [to Virginia] just to see America. My grandfather had done it and my mom would always tell me stories about it. I had a romantic view of what it must have been like to ride the rails in the Depression era. I wanted to see if you could still do it. I discovered that you can if you know what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t recommend it, ’cause if you try, you’ll more than likely get killed. I had a rail partner, Tyler, and the first night of the second summer we rode out, we carried this girl along with us. She wanted to ride freight and we were like, “Well, all right.” We had done it the previous summer, so we kind of knew what we were doing. We told her to pack light. So Tyler jumps up on the train and I jump on the train and it’s moving out. And this girl is getting on the train. All of a sudden she’s dragging her feet, holding the ladder, trying to get up, and she’s slipping. We were like, “Aw, shit, we gotta pull this chick up!” We grabbed her and she was a little girl so it shouldn’t have been too hard. We start pulling her up and she was heavy as fuck. All three of us almost got yanked overboard. We would have been chewed to pieces by the rails. But we got up there. We’re panting, and I said, “Gimme your backpack.” I opened it, and she had books, makeup, toiletries, and all this fucking girl shit—a nice dress. So we’re just throwing stuff off the train left and right and she’s freaking out, going, “But I need that. I’m a
girl
.” We were like, “You’re not a girl out here. You’re a liability.” I knew a girl in Minneapolis who lost her foot because she was drunk and she tried to hop out and didn’t make it and the train chopped off her foot. You don’t fuck around with freight trains drunk. You’ll lose.

BRENT HINDS (Mastodon, Fiend Without a Face, Four Hour Fogger):
When I turned seventeen I decided to try the hobo life for a while—hopping freight trains and drinking whisky. That didn’t last; I got arrested and went to jail in New Orleans. I had walked out of a bar and I was tripping pretty hard on acid. I had taken my shirt off. At this point, my torso wasn’t fully tattooed, but I had a huge bat on my chest and some tattoos on my forearms. I was staggering down the street dragging my jacket behind me. I was obviously drunk. So I walked over to this horse. I started bridling the horse and walking away with him. This cop comes up to me and says, “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said, “Oh, I’m taking this horse with me.” He said, “No, you’re not. What the hell are you on?” I went, “I’m on the sidewalk, motherfucker, what are you on?” I went to jail for a couple months for that one. I called my mom. She went, “God, I haven’t heard from you in two years. I want you to come home.” I went, “Okay, cool, ’cause I’m in jail and I need you to come get me out.” Then I went down to Birmingham, Alabama, and saw my buddy Gary Lindsey’s band Knuckle. And that’s how I met [their bassist] Troy Sanders [now in Mastodon].

TROY SANDERS (ex–Four Hour Fogger, Mastodon):
Brent is like a smart homeless guy or a mad scientist, but he’s mostly mad. He’s 75 percent mad, 25 percent scientist. But he’s a great musician and a great guy if you stay on his good side.

BILL KELLIHER (ex-Lethargy, ex–Today Is the Day, Mastodon):
Sometimes Brent is the nicest guy on earth, other times he’s . . . a little volatile. You just gotta be careful of what you say around him. It’s like playing with fire. I’ve seen him pour beer on people’s heads just for fun. But he’s Brent. He just gets away with stuff like that. He lives for the moment and doesn’t really think about the future.

JOHN CAMPBELL (Lamb of God):
We all met at Virginia Commonwealth University [in 1990]. Randy went there, too. Chris [Adler] learned how to play drums. [Guitarist] Mark [Morton] was in [indie rock band] Hgual. Then [in 1994] we got together and started Burn the Priest as an instrumental band. There was no heat at the house. We would freeze our asses off, get really drunk on Black Label beer, and hang around the kerosene heaters trying to write metal songs. But we practiced five days a week out of necessity. The bands in Richmond can flat outplay you and if you don’t rehearse they will blow you off the stage. They inspired us to raise the bar musically and taught us the work ethic we needed to succeed.

MARK MORTON (Lamb of God):
These really off-time, rhythmically powerful instrumental bands—like Breadwinner, the Alternatives, Brainflower, Ladyfinger—that’s who we saw at parties and clubs and that stuff was a big influence on us. We were a heavy metal version of that. Randy wasn’t in the band yet, but I knew him from around Richmond. Friends of mine were in a band called hose.got.cable. Every once in a while, Randy would hop onstage and do a song with them. He had this crazy death metal growl. But then I left Burn the Priest to go to graduate school, and during that time, they got Randy and [guitarist] Abe [Spear] to join.

RANDY BLYTHE:
[When I first saw Burn the Priest in 1995] they were loud as fuck and awesome. And the cops came. They were playing in this garage behind this house and the cops were shining their lights in, so they just ducked down and kept playing. I was like, “That is fucking punk rock!” I looked at my girlfriend and I said, “This is the band I’m going to sing for.” She’s like, “Whatever, Randy.” A week later I’m in the band.

MARK MORTON:
When I came back after grad school, they were this grindcore/thrash band with some of the riffs I had written. But I was certainly happy to come back to it, and that’s when things started taking off. It’s not like we went from the Richmond college scene to doing big shows. In the mid-nineties, when we were in that basement in Richmond pooling our money for a case of cheap beer, we weren’t thinking about being nominated for Grammys and touring the world. We were just thinking about having enough money for that beer. I was a roofer for six or seven years before the band broke. There was a time when I thought, “If I can go roofing full time I can make really good money.” I had bought a little house for myself and was living a cool bachelor’s life. We were just playing weekend shows. We’d show up at the practice space, load up the van, everybody would throw a twenty or two down and that would be our gas money. Then we’d go and try to make it back. If we did good, we came back with a couple extra bucks and that was all it ever was. As it got more serious, the business stuff started creeping in and it became harder to balance making the right decisions for the band versus keeping my life going. I never wanted to gamble everything I had built for myself on the band, which at the time seemed really far-fetched. It was tricky walking that fine line for a while. ’Cause on my own, doing construction, I was fine. In the band full-time, I was broke. There were definitely times I was selling CDs so my power wouldn’t get cut off and saving scrap copper from jobs in a bucket so every couple weeks I could turn that in and get a hundred bucks for it to put towards the bills.

E. J. JOHANTGEN (president, Prosthetic Records):
We were just starting out as a label and I heard about Burn the Priest from a friend and I thought there was nothing else like them at the time. I thought they sounded a little bit like Brutal Truth, but there was something unique and different. I heard no one would sign them because they were called Burn the Priest and they refused to change their name. So I called them up and said, “I don’t want you to change your name.” After three days of negotiation we signed them. Then right before that they decided to change their name because they thought the name Burn the Priest would hold them back.

From the moment he joined, Blythe was both Lamb of God’s greatest asset and the hurricane force that threatened to rip it to pieces. Misanthropic, belligerent, and accident-prone, he provoked controversy and drama wherever he went. But he was always amazing onstage, captivating crowds with the fury of Phil Anselmo and the attitude of Jello Biafra.

RANDY BLYTHE:
The first time we toured with Gwar, I got pass-out drunk. We were staying at this house, and I got up in the middle of the night to take a leak and walked out a second-story door off the roof and woke up on the ground with a broken arm. When I was onstage performing and getting really worked up, the blood would just rush to my arm and the part I broke at the wrist hurt like a motherfucker.

MARK MORTON:
Randy is one of my best friends in the world. When we’ve gotten drunk and gotten in fights and I’ve punched him in the face, he was still one of my best friends. I hang out with him as a friend socially and I would tomorrow if the band broke up. He’s my compadre and my partner in crime. But because we
are
that close, we fight like brothers.

RANDY BLYTHE:
The worst fight Mark and I ever got into was in Glasgow and it was documented on our
Killadelphia
DVD. I was drunk as shit and we were fuckin’ sick of each other after being on the road for so long and we just went at it. I picked him up and threw him on the ground and I think I cracked his shoulder. I woke up with a sideways nose so I went into the bathroom and popped that back into place, and my pinky was broken and my eye was swollen shut. The next morning after that was not a good morning.

MARK MORTON:
I think it scared everyone else worse than it scared us. Fifteen minutes after the fight, I walked off and got my head back together and came back and everyone was in the back lounge like there was this big crisis. Me and Randy were in the front lounge and he handed me a beer and I popped it and we kept on going and laughed about the whole thing. It certainly wasn’t the first time we’ve come to blows. It’s just that someone happened to have a camera there to document it.

In Des Moines, Iowa, in the heart of what some consider America’s Midwestern wasteland, one of the most artistic, chaotic, eclectic, and popular contemporary metal bands evolved like a creature from a prehistoric swamp. All nine members of Slipknot were too bored, furious, determined, and subversive not to change the cultural landscape of their hometown, and later the entire metal scene. Aside from becoming one of the strangest and most disturbing bands to break into the mainstream, the members of Slipknot have been involved with other popular and artistically praised groups, including Stone Sour (vocalist Corey Taylor and guitarist Jim Root), the Murderdolls (drummer Joey Jordison), Dirty Little Rabbits (percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan), and DJ Starscream (turntablist Sid Wilson).

PAUL GRAY (1972–2010) (Slipknot):
Before Slipknot, I was in a band called Body Pit with Andy [Colsefni] on vocals, and Mick [Thomson] and Donnie Steele on guitars. I had played with Joey in a band called Anal Blast. The basic idea of Slipknot started in ’92 and we didn’t have a name. We just knew we wanted to do something with extra percussion. [Percussionist] Shawn [Crahan] started jamming, but then I moved to California with an old girlfriend, which didn’t work out. So Shawn was like, “You wanna come back and do this?” I told the chick I was leaving, got on a plane, and went back to Iowa.

SHAWN CRAHAN (Slipknot):
Paul and I used to get together in his mom’s basement and we’d write songs and drink beer, with me on drums. Then I reached out to Andy, and he had a death-growl that slays to this day. It was Paul, Andy, and I. But the truth is, I always knew they were going to call Joey [Jordison] to play drums. It was part of the plan. I was molding this sickness. I was like the sun on the water boiling the shit. We had all these other people who came in and out. We even called Jim [Root]. He was supposed to be the original guitarist because spiritually we were trying to get all these people aligned. But he said no. Jim’s place wasn’t until later.

JOEY JORDISON (Slipknot, Murderdolls):
The first time I met Shawn was when he was in his old band, Heads on the Wall. My band, Modifidious, played on a bill with them and [guitarist Jim Root’s old band] Atomic Opera. I watched Shawn play, and the dude was kicking over his hi-hat stand, pissed as shit. I was like, “I wanna be in a band with that guy.” After Modifidious broke up, I was talking to Paul [Gray] about doing something, and he said, “Come see what me and Shawn are working on.” I went over and they played me four songs. The first was “Slipknot” [later rewritten as “Sick”]. From that second on, I knew they would be the biggest fucking band ever. I said to myself, “I’m gonna either join this band or I’m gonna destroy it.”

JIM ROOT (Slipknot, Stone Sour):
In 1985, Atomic Opera fell apart so I started jamming with some other friends, including [bassist] Shawn Economaki. He said, “Why don’t you come over and hear what Corey and I have been doing with Stone Sour?” I’d heard some of their stuff on local radio before and I wasn’t into it. They sounded almost like Tesla. So I put it off, but then one day after I was practicing with Economaki I stuck around to watch a Stone Sour rehearsal, and they sounded completely different than when I had last seen them three years ago. So I called them up and said, “Hey, I’d like to be a part of this.”

PAUL GRAY:
We had a show booked and we didn’t have a name. But we had the song “Slipknot,” which rolled off the tongue pretty easy. So we used it. One day we were in rehearsal and Clown had this clown mask. He put it on and would not take it off. At first, it pissed us off. You couldn’t even see if he was serious. We went, “Dude, please take that fuckin’ thing off,” and he sat there and laughed. After a while we went, “Man, that is actually creepy. Maybe we should
all
get masks.” It was cool because after the shows we could go back in the club in our normal clothes and talk to people in the crowd to find out if they liked us or hated us, and no one knew the dudes they were talking to were in the band.