Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (99 page)

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
Near the recording of
Undertow
, you’re really starting to figure each other out and see the nuances and hang-ups and emotional and mental obstacles. I think we went from zero to jaded in under thirty seconds. The honeymoon was definitely over and we started to see what was happening out there with bands coming and going. Toward the end of the tour we were watching amazing bands like Fishbone struggling to make it. We used to think Fishbone was gonna be around forever.

ADAM JONES:
We got asked to do all these strange things. Once this girl asked us to play an anti-vivisection show at the [Hollywood] Palladium, and she was talking about how killing animals is wrong—but she was wearing leather Doc [Martens]! We said, “Okay, we’ll do it,” but we went the other way with it because we feel that life feeding on life is very natural.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
We came out with acoustic guitars and started playing “Maynard’s Dick” for this sold out crowd that wasn’t even there to see us. The chorus goes, “Slide a mile six inches at a time on Maynard’s dick.” So we’re already trying to be offensive. Then right in the middle of the song, we started picking up all these $5 acoustic guitars we got from Tijuana that we had stacked by the side of the stage and we began smashing them. We pulled out chainsaws and tore the hell out of these things.

ADAM JONES:
That performance was the birth of “Disgustipated,” which is the industrial track at the end of
Undertow
. We also bought two pianos for $100 a pop through
The Recycler
and [while recording] at Grand Master Studios, we shot them up with shotguns, bashed the shit out of them, and then we [played them and] had a guy come in and help us with sampling, which was really a new thing at the time.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
I had a shotgun with blanks in it and I’m shooting it off inside the Palladium, flames leaping up out of the barrel towards the curtain. There were all these horrified people there to save the bunnies, and here we are screaming, “Life feeds on life!”

ADAM JONES:
After we finished, the girl with the leather Docs went, “Oh, that was
so
great!” She totally missed the point [
laughs
].

DANNY CAREY:
After we put out
Undertow
we went on tour with the Rollins Band and we could tell we were winning over hundreds of fans every night. Then we were lucky enough to have a connection that got us on Lollapalooza. So suddenly, MTV had to pay attention to us. They played our [surreal stop-action] video [for “Sober”] one time and they got bombarded with requests. We watched our record go from nowhere to number 50 on the charts, and it stayed there for two years. Suddenly we go from playing for 100 people in a club to performing for 20,000 people a night on Lollapalooza.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
A lot of my songs are very personal, so one of the biggest obstacles for me was overcoming the emotional and physical drain of being on the road trying to perform those songs every night in front of huge crowds.

ADAM JONES:
“Prison Sex” was the second single and the record company was getting all geared up for that. Contractually, they were supposed to talk to us about any sort of publicity stunt they pulled on our behalf. But without telling us, they made little kid T-shirts with our Tool wrench logo on there, which is actually a phallic symbol; it looks like a penis with testicles. So, the label was going to send the shirts to all the radio stations to promote “Prison Sex” because Nirvana sent T-shirts for one of their songs. Maynard goes, “Do you know what that song’s about?” They went, “Uhhh, no.” He said, “It’s about getting fucked in the ass and being a little kid and then that child abuse cycling [to the next generation].” They went, “Oh my god” and the shirts never went out.

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN:
The tragic part of that is they didn’t get the joke they had accidentally made. They were just
that
stupid. We had to go, “
This
is funny. I don’t think you
know
it’s funny, but it’s
funny
and,
no
, we can’t send these to people.”

Tool’s traumas may have been mostly silly and superficial; Machine Head was dealing with real problems caused by dysfunction and overindulgence.

ROBB FLYNN:
By the time I was writing for the [1997] album [
The More Things Change . . .
] I was too fucked-up to care as much as I should have. I was drinking a lot and getting into a self-destructive phase. I put on a bunch of weight and got very insecure about it. I started making myself throw up after every meal and became a full-blown bulimic. Now, when I listen to the lyrics, it takes me right back there. That was the beginning of this manic partying. There were times we’d have sixty people on our bus blinded out of their heads. The VOD guys introduced us to Special K and we fucking loved that. It was elephant tranquilizers. Adam [Duce] and I did that and we were fucking crushed.

DAVE McCLAIN (ex–Sacred Reich, Machine Head):
Ozzy canceled his set at Ozzfest in Columbus, Ohio, right before he came out. Sharon was telling Phil [Anselmo] “You’ve gotta go out and tell the crowd Ozzy’s not gonna be here.” Phil said, “I’m not gonna go out there unless Robb’s with me.” Then they started getting people to sing. So, all the singers who knew Ozzy’s songs sang with his backing band.

ROBB FLYNN:
Phil and I do “I Don’t Know” and Manson and I do “Crazy Train.” Then they just wanted me to stay up there. But by the fifth or sixth song, everyone was like, “What the fuck’s going on?” So you start to see from the back of the amphitheater all these little fires pop up. The grass is frying and part of the fence goes up. It’s like, “Holy shit there’s gonna be a riot!” So Anselmo, who’s got the most undesirable job in the world at that point, comes out and says, “All right, Ozzy’s not gonna be fucking. . . .” Boo-oo-oo-oo! Next thing we know, the police helicopters are there.

DAVE McCLAIN:
If Robb didn’t perform, the crowd definitely would have rioted. He really saved the day. So we’re getting ready to go, and I go outside to take a piss. Robb’s lying there looking like he’s half dead. His fucking shirt’s off and the word “METAL” is carved into his chest. There’s a knife out and he’s bleeding. We were like, “Dude, what’s up? We’re here for you. We’re fucking proud of you, you got up there and saved the day.”

ROBB FLYNN:
Here’s what happened. I called my dad, thrilled about this thing I had done. He literally said, “Oh, cool. I gotta go to bed right now.” And he hung up. I was drunk, but I was trying to keep it together, and that was my way of dealing with the lack of support of my father.

After some bands have a few albums under their belts, they calm down and curtail their self-destructive ways. Not Machine Head. It wasn’t until the members started having families that they cut back on the decadence and debauchery.

ADAM DUCE:
There are giant blocks of time—like years—that I just don’t remember. During our first year and a half of touring for [1994’s]
Burn my Eyes
, I was so drunk that when we toured the same places for
The More Things Change
, I didn’t remember any of the venues.

ROBB FLYNN:
Adam and I were drinking too much at that point, but [guitarist] Logan [Mader] had gone into raging drug mode. He was doing booze, weed, Valium, Percocets [a prescription narcotic that combines Tylenol with oxycodone], Ecstasy, and coke. By the end of that tour cycle, we’d go onstage and he’d be playing the wrong riffs and we’d be arguing with him onstage. In our last conversation, he was convinced the government had placed robot cats on the fence outside his window, and they had fiber-optic eyes that broadcast his every move back to the CIA.

LOGAN MADER (ex–Machine Head, ex-Soulfly; Dirty Icon Productions):
Clearly, we were all out of control drinking and taking drugs all the time. I don’t think I was any worse than any of the other guys, but it became clear that I couldn’t keep doing that, so I left the band. And yes, I probably said something about robot cats with camera eyes, but I must have been joking. I wasn’t crazy.

ADAM DUCE:
I did meth for a couple years, but I couldn’t handle the fucking painful comedown. I eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to never come down again is to not go up. So I just quit and went back to mostly drinking.

ROBB FLYNN:
[1999’s]
Burning Red
was the most drugs I had ever done during a record session or a tour. I was gacked out of my brain on coke, and boozed out every night. The night before I ended all coke use, eight people had an eight ball each, and we went through seven and a half of them in a thirty-six hour period. It was like
Boogie Nights
.

DAVE McCLAIN:
At two o’clock in the afternoon, they were sitting around the pool buck-ass naked and then Robb’s gacked out of his mind, and he has to get on the phone with our label to ask for tour support.

ROBB FLYNN:
I can’t even focus on the numbers and I was on the phone exploding in a rage to get another $50,000. And I fuckin’
got
it.

Though they shared the same thrash influences, Hatebreed’s music wasn’t as complex as Machine Head’s, which is probably a good thing since, for a number of years, Jasta and his bandmates started drinking 40s at 11 a.m. and kept going until they passed out. Hatebreed wasn’t the tightest band on the planet. But no matter how hammered they were in writing sessions, onstage, or after a gig, the band delivered surging, savage riffs and gut-roaring vocals with the fortitude and ferocity of frontline soldiers storming enemy lines. In many ways, Hatebreed
was
battling to survive. Even when their albums sold, even when they landed high-profile tours, their demons threatened to outrun them, and poor business decisions kept the group on the verge of collapse. Since they knew they weren’t going to get rich, they settled for getting shit-faced, touring the globe, and coming home with outrageous stories and a few war wounds.

JAMEY JASTA:
Victory Records signed us and put out
Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire
in 2007. We were on fire. We sold a hundred thousand records and we thought that was insane, but it didn’t stop. We went on to sell two hundred thousand copies—and didn’t see a penny.

FRANKIE PALMERI (Emmure):
Satisfaction Is the Death of Desire
is the greatest hardcore album ever. So many bands use that as the blueprint of what they’re going to sound like, even today.

JAMEY JASTA:
There’s a reason we toured that album for four years. We were broke. We were worse than broke. I was young when I signed both a bad record deal and a terrible publishing deal. There was a point where we had a merch bill that was over $30,000. We had so many vehicles breaking down and practice rooms we didn’t pay, and we used merch money for gas. There was a lot of borrowing from one empty pot to fill another. I used to start drinking at noon, then go to the club and sell dime bags of weed out front before the show. Then at the wrong times, I’d fight someone and we’d get banned from a club. We got a reputation for being this out-of-control band. When we did Warped Tour ’98 we were thrown off multiple times. I have memories of [ex-guitarist] Lou “Boulder” Richards riding around naked on a bike. We were sharing a bus with Carey Hart and these [other] big-time motocross riders, and those guys were big drinkers, too. [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman wound up kicking us off the bus with the motocross guys. But he said, “Look, get to Jacksonville, Florida, and you can stay on the tour.” He never expected us to make it there. So we took Greyhound, split the gear up in other people’s vans, and when we showed up he was like, “How the hell did you get here?”

LOU “BOULDER” RICHARDS (1970–2006) (ex-Hatebreed):
People assume we are tough guys or something. Put it this way: we are only tough when we absolutely have to be, and you don’t want to see that side of us. Musically we bury any band out there. There isn’t any band as heavy as us, not to dis any other bands. I think we are definitely the heaviest and most brutal.

JAMEY JASTA:
We had some great times with Lou. But he was battling depression and drugs. It just got to the point where there was always some new major issue with him. He was just one of those guys who always had—not bad luck—but if it wasn’t one thing it was another. He had a very hard upbringing; we all did. We just chose to do different things about it. . . . We were ready to shoot the “I Will Be Heard” video [for 2002’s
Perseverance
]. This was the biggest moment in the band’s career, and Lou told us, “I can’t do this. I’m quitting the band.” We were like, “Dude, you’ve gotta be in the video.” But Lou said, “No, this is my last show and I’m quitting.” Then he started telling people that we kicked him out. We have him on film telling people it’s his last show. So when we had Frank [Novinec] join the band, we don’t know what Lou was thinking. We knew that he had a drug problem. But the guy’s dead. He can’t speak for himself. With him, I just try to remember the fun times. Because there were so many good times, and before the drugs and depression got really bad there was a great guy there.