Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  EERIE VON (ex-Danzig, Samhain): Nobody gave a shit the first time [we released “Mother”], and it was all because of the video, [which depicts Danzig sacrificing a chicken above a scantily clad woman lying on a pedestal]. We gave the video to MTV, which was the dumbest thing we could have done. From that moment on, they were not going to play any video we gave them. They’d give them back to us and tell us what to edit one hundred times, and we’d do the edits. They still wouldn’t play it. If we had started out with a video they would have played, we might still all be together. Because everyone loved the live video [of “Mother”], we sold five hundred thousand copies of it in no time. Everyone was saying we were going to be the next Metallica and it didn’t happen, so people started to quit. We weren’t making a living, so there was no reason to keep going.

  The sullen atmospheres and granite-heavy riffs of doom metal were sonically the stuff of internal bleeding, not carefree celebration. And while many bands kept to themselves and reveled in the darkness, others, such as Type O Negative and Monster Magnet, partied like Mötley Crüe. Type O front man Peter Steele even posed as a Playgirl centerfold in 1985.

  JOSH SILVER (Type O Negative): Peter [Steele] was big and considered himself kind of goofy. He didn’t have girlfriends growing up, which was a little rough for him. A lot of Type O music was written from the perspective of someone who couldn’t get laid or wanted to get laid. We had songs like “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else.” He was able to be very honest about how hurt he was during a lot of these periods. I think that was part of what made us appealing. We told the truth.

  DAVE WYNDORF (Monster Magnet): I never thought I could be Sabbath, but when I saw the Ramones I knew I could be these guys. It was a real triumph of wit over talent. Focus your psychosis. Even if you’ve got a psychological problem, whatever is going on with you that makes the energy run through you, use it to create things.

  KENNY HICKEY (Type O Negative): We were the premier white trash stripper band. Every night we came offstage [on the Mötley Crüe tour] we had all these desperate fat guys working for us, so they would all round [the girls] up, and you’d go to the front and there would be twenty sets of legs. It was ridiculous, the bus shaking, music blasting, people dancing, every night. It was the exact opposite of what you’d picture the band would be like by listening to our music; it was complete debauchery. Pete Steele partook more than anybody. Nobody could drink as much as him, nobody could do as much drugs as him, nobody could eat as much as him, and nobody could fuck as much as that man.

  PHIL CAIVANO (Monster Magnet): One time in New York I fucked this girl on the tour bus. I had my fist in her pussy, and she was slapping me around. When we finished, she pulled out this official police ID and says, “Thank god you were good because if you weren’t, I would have arrested you.”

  KENNY HICKEY: [Peter] saw how many women he was getting after [1993’s] Bloody Kisses and the song “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),” so he decided to design the band towards getting more chicks. October Rust was intentionally sensual just to get the high heels in the door. It was a pimp record. He was with two, three different girls a day. It’s a great record, but his goal in making it was to fucking wrangle them up.

  PETER STEELE (1962–2010) (Type O Negative, Carnivore): Not to be gross, but everybody wants to suck the king’s dick ’cause he’s top of the hill. I mean look, older men with a lot of money and high positions in government or business always wind up with the most attractive women. As the band did better and better we attracted more and more women.

  PHIL CAIVANO: People think AIDS killed sex, but the thing about AIDS is it has forced people to get more creative. You can have a great time without actually sticking it in. Like, there’s lots of girls out there who would love to get it on with another girl and have a guy watch and masturbate.

  Predictably, the deeper that doom metal musicians got into downers and narcotics, the more dangerous their lives became. Other doom pioneers had already been there and done that, and were persevering with their careers without the baggage of addiction. In 2006, Ronnie James Dio rejoined his Sabbath bandmates after an absence of thirteen years and remained with them for several tours and 2009’s The Devil You Know album (under the name Heaven & Hell, due to legal restrictions with the name Black Sabbath).

  RONNIE JAMES DIO: The band started out with several tracks that we wanted to do for an anthology. The label requested a couple of previously unreleased tracks from the past. Well, we didn’t work that way. We always recorded the songs we needed to do for an album and didn’t keep anything back. So I went to Tony’s house in England, where he has a studio. And we started to work and it was really enjoyable. After long spaces of time not working with people, you forget how good they are or how much you enjoyed being around them.

  TONY IOMMI: We did these three songs and had such a good time that we forgot about any of the difficult things that had happened in the past. We were creating something new and that made it all worthwhile. It didn’t even seem like we had been apart. You learn to appreciate a lot when you’re away from each other. It was the same with Ozzy. When we got back together it was great to do the reunion and you forget about all the other things that went on.

  RONNIE JAMES DIO: We should have called the band The Locusts because every twelve years we come back somehow. I’d be a fool if I said I didn’t have any reservations, because you remember things that weren’t particularly pleasing in the past. It makes you think, “Is it going to happen again?” But once I decided to do another full album, I realized that all those little pebbles from the past had to be left on the beach. I don’t think you can bring them along with you on these trips into the water because they’re just going to get so heavy you’re going to drown.

  When it came to the physical and mental dangers of excess and indulgence, generally the famous rockers learned their lessons, or maybe they just settled down. That wasn’t always the case for less established, younger, and unmarried rockers, who still hadn’t been burned badly enough to mend their ways. Inevitably, some pushed the envelope until they suffered a brush with death that made them at least reevaluate their lifestyle. Type O Negative front man Pete Steele battled a monstrous cocaine habit that threatened his health and career, and Dave Wyndorf overdosed on pills in 2006.

  PETER STEELE: I found myself beginning to experiment with drugs about [1997], and that made a profound and unfortunately negative impact on me. I didn’t even start with beer or a joint. I went right to the cocaine up the nose and I had never really done it until the age of thirty-five. I’m so ashamed of myself. I had this “it can’t happen to me” attitude.

  KENNY HICKEY: It’s strange, because before that, Pete was obsessed with working out. He was a gorilla. We had weights on the road. He was all into the health shit, and then one night he came up to me because he was frustrated about something and said, “Give me a line of that.” I was like, “You don’t want this shit,” and I tried to talk him out of it. And he just broke my balls about it. And yeah, I gave him the fucking first line. I kind of kicked myself in the ass for it, but he would have gotten it anyhow. It was everywhere. Then we all went off the deep end—me, Josh and Peter.

  JOHNNY KELLY (Type O Negative): We’d come offstage and the three of them would run like fucking O. J. [Simpson] in Hertz commercials. They would sprint to the back lounge, and all you heard was them bitching at each other, “Hurry up, hurry up,” and you’d hear the card cutting the coke.

  For Steele, the road of excess didn’t lead to poet William Blake’s “palace of wisdom.” It led to the insane asylum and jail.

  PETER STEELE: I was in [Brooklyn’s] Kings County Hospital suffering from drug-induced psychosis, and it was actually my own family that got me put away, which kinda made me wish I was part of the Manson family. I had typical paranoia. I thought there were cameras in the light switches and showerheads.

  JOHNNY KELLY: Peter came home one day and his girlfriend had packed up and split after a couple of y
ears. So he went to rehab in an attempt to get her back. While he’s in rehab, she appears, tells him, “All right, when you come back, everything’s going to be fine, we’ll work it all out.” Peter gets out of rehab, we went to go see him. He’d just gotten home, and we’re sitting on Josh’s stoop, and he’s like, “Yeah, she’s on her way over, going to bring a couple of things back that she took that were mine, we’re going to talk.” She never showed up. Peter found out where she lived and did the Herman Munster in the door, hence his felony conviction for assault. So he’s at his arraignment, and the judge or whatever refers to her as Mrs. Whatever, and he’s like, “What?” It turned out she was married to this other guy already.

  KENNY HICKEY: Pete showed up at this guy’s house at four o’clock in the morning, coked out of his mind. He broke down the door, full fangs and everything, chased this guy through his house, and broke his jaw.

  PETER STEELE: [I was in Rikers Island jail] about thirty days. In the past, I had done a day here or there for stupid stuff like fighting or pissing on the sidewalk. But this was a rude awakening—twenty-three charges against me, one of which was attempted murder. When you’re kicking the shit out of somebody, you really have to make sure not to say, “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you!” because that implies intent. I’m 6-foot-6, I weigh 260 pounds. To be white in jail and to have long black hair and fangs is not an advantage.

  KENNY HICKEY: Peter had a couple DUIs. Then one time he calls me at two in the morning and goes, “Can I tell you a story?” At the time he was living with a girlfriend in Pennsylvania, but he had another girlfriend. He goes, “I was at this other girl’s house, and then I got a call from my girlfriend that she was going to be home in a few minutes. It was pitch black and I was wasted out of my mind. I got in my Jeep and I’m driving down the road, and a bear jumps out in front of my Jeep and I swerved off the road and hit a pole.” So the cops show up and arrest him. His main girlfriend comes to pick him up and she bails him out, picks him up, goes back to her house. He’s getting undressed and she goes “What are you wearing?” He looked down and had his other girlfriend’s panties on because he got dressed in the dark drunk.

  JOSH SILVER: [In 1989 Peter slashed his wrists.] How serious was it? I guess we’ll never know. He certainly had a lot of scars and he was always a self-destructive guy. He did press shots of him cutting his arm with a razor around the Type O logo. He had multiple hospitalizations and suicide attempts. But when a lot of them happened we said, “Oh, this is just bullshit,” because Pete was a very smart guy. If he really wanted to snuff it, he could have.

  DAVE WYNDORF: I couldn’t sleep on tour, so the doctors gave me something that would put down a wild animal. I was doing a lot of transatlantic flying, and on a plane one day I just started gobbling them down. All of my paranoias came at me like a giant, three-headed beast. My biggest mistake was not asking for help. I don’t recall doing it, but I took the whole goddamn bottle—a hundred pills, man, just like they were a shot glass—and the next thing I knew, I woke up in a fucking loony bin. Drugs are supposedly a gateway into creativity. You know what? It’s all a myth. They suck, and they’ll get you in the end. They certainly got me.

  The doom metal community was dealt two major blows in 2010. The first came on April 14, when Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele died at age forty-eight from heart failure. A few days before he died he felt like he was coming down with the flu. He was clean at the time, but doctors speculate that years of heavy drug use took its toll on his declining health.

  KENNY HICKEY: Obviously, Peter wasn’t healthy. An aneurysm can just take you at any time, though. He had an ongoing heart condition for years. He said that he always felt the flutter in his heart, even when he was a kid, so he might have been born with it, for all we know. Four or five men in his family have died from heart disease before fifty, so it could have been hereditary.

  JOSH SILVER: He lived with atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat. Whether that was caused by drugs or something else, I don’t know. It was diagnosed years and years ago. But if you take care of yourself and do the right stuff it’s something you can live with for quite a while. There are plenty of ninety-year-olds running around with it.

  KENNY HICKEY: There was one point when he was in the hospital before a tour. Dude was green from his feet to his head. He had yellow, jaundiced eyes, and eight different surgeons were trying to figure out what was wrong with him, and none of them spoke English. They asked him, “What kind of drugs do you do?” He said, “Cocaine, alcohol, and redheads.” I came back three days later and the doctors asked me, “Excuse me, we need to know: What are redheads?” They thought it was a pill or a drug.

  JOHNNY KELLY: He calls me up and I go, “What are you doing home, you’re supposed to be in the hospital.” He says, “I couldn’t take the food anymore.” I just figured he was like Keith Richards. The guy made a deal with the devil and he’s going to live forever. He was the only guy I know who could do two eight balls and eat sixty dollars’ worth of Chinese food.

  JOSH SILVER: I was sitting at home, and Johnny called me and said “Did anybody call you?” Then he told me Peter was dead—not that he’s sick or he’s dying—that he’s already gone. I was surprised, but to be honest I was shocked that he lived as long as he did. His lifestyle was so unhealthy that I couldn’t believe he was as strong as a horse most of the time.

  Just over a month after Steele died, a more widely publicized tragedy shook the metal community. Ronnie James Dio, who had been diagnosed with stomach cancer about six months earlier, died from the illness. Dio’s last public appearance was at the 2010 Revolver Golden Gods Awards in Los Angeles, where he was awarded Best Vocalist.

  WENDY DIO (wife of Ronnie James Dio): Today my heart is broken. Many, many friends and family were able to say their private good-byes before he peacefully passed away. Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all. We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us. . . . Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever.

  TONY IOMMI: Ronnie loved what he did, making music and performing onstage. He loved his fans so much. He was a kind man and would put himself out to help others. I can honestly say it’s truly been an honor to play at his side for all these years. His music will live on forever. The man with the magic voice is a star amongst stars, a true professional. I’ll miss you so much, my dear friend.

  OZZY OSBOURNE: That was terrible. Going through that sort of thing with my wife [Sharon, who battled and survived colorectal cancer], you don’t know what to do. I remember when Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer, I went into an emotional scramble. It always seemed to be something that happened to someone else, and I didn’t know anyone who survived from any cancer. So I was walking around thinking, “What am I going to do if I lose my wife?” You start to think that way and it’s a very tough situation to go through. When I saw Ronnie, I sent a message of encouragement to him. I was sad, and stunned when he died so quickly. He was a great singer, he had a great voice. A lot of people got a lot of ideas from Dio. Whether you liked him or not, he had his own style, and it was instantly recognizable. When you heard it on the radio, you knew it was him. A lot of people tried to copy him.

  GEEZER BUTLER: All the doctors said if he’d have gone in [for a colonoscopy] a year earlier or two years earlier, they could have treated him. If it had been stage one they could have dealt with it. But by the time Ronnie was diagnosed, he had stage four cancer, which was inoperable. The doctor hinted that it was just a matter of time and there was nothing they could do. It’s really upsetting to think about that, and hopefully it will encourage people who need to have a checkup to get it done.

  4

  YOUTH GONE WILD: METAL GOES MAINSTREAM, 1978–1992

  While the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was taking over the club scene in the UK and Europe, a batch of bands in and around Los Angeles—triggered by a love for KISS, Van Halen, and glam groups like the New York Dolls and the Sweet—were about to
shake Sunset Strip like a 7.0 earthquake. With flashy, androgynous images and brash, solo-saturated songs, the “hair metal” bands were visually compelling and musically engaging. In the beginning, groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt were almost as heavy as Judas Priest and Dio, the band Ronnie James Dio formed after leaving Black Sabbath. But as the scene gained popularity and a major label feeding frenzy began, many musicians tailored their songs for mainstream radio, retaining some of their heaviness but drawing more emphasis to melody and heart-on-sleeve sensitivity—and sexuality.

  With the dissipation of New Wave, MTV latched on to the visually striking glam metal videos—many of which were for syrupy power ballads. Before you could say, “Can I see some ID?” Skid Row, Cinderella, Dokken, Warrant, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, and countless others were storming their way into millions of suburban households around the world. Their videos almost always featured young women in provocative poses, multiple costume changes, and musicians in heavy makeup looking almost as feminine as the girls they stalked. And the stalking didn’t end when the tape stopped rolling. Even before the dawn of the eighties, a handful of outrageous LA bands including Van Halen and Quiet Riot planted the genre’s seedy seeds.

  BLACKIE LAWLESS (W.A.S.P., ex–New York Dolls): I moved to LA from New York in 1975, a lad of nineteen. I was scared to death. [Ex-New York Dolls bassist] Arthur Kane and I moved out; the Dolls were crumbling. We were broke. There was a Ramada Inn that used to be on Sunset Boulevard next to Tower Records. We lived there for a week when we first arrived, and it was like going to another planet.

  EDDIE VAN HALEN (Van Halen): In the LA club days in the early seventies, we did some insane shows. Once, we were onstage playing at Walter Mitty’s Bar and Grill, and all of a sudden two guys are fighting about whose bike is faster. It got rough, and one of them pulls out a knife, and a minute later the other guy is lying there with his intestines hanging out. It doesn’t take too much to figure out which one had the knife—the guy with the Harley, obviously. That was pretty shocking. There was blood gushing everywhere and the guy actually died.