Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  ROB HALFORD: I finally got clean and sober in 1986 [after my boyfriend’s suicide]. For me, it was life or death. It was a simple choice, really. I was getting to that place of complete self-destruction, where if I kept going I would do something really stupid, either intentionally or unintentionally. The great people that we’ve lost in rock and roll, either deliberate suicide like Kurt Cobain, or choking on vomit like Hendrix or Bon Scott, that’s the way some of us are destined to end up. I turned to spirituality to get me out of that dark place, and that side of me is what gets me through the day and I’m always in touch with it.

  Some who couldn’t clean up their acts met with tragedy. In 1984, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, known at the time for alcohol and substance abuse, was speeding to a New Year’s Eve party in his hometown of Sheffield, England, when he missed a sharp turn, lost control of his Corvette Stingray, and rolled his car, sustaining an injury that severed his arm below his shoulder. Seven years after Allen’s accident, Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clarke died from an overdose of codeine, valium, morphine, and alcohol; his blood alcohol level was twice that which killed Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. The GN’R camp lost several friends. In 1987, former Jetboy bassist Todd Crew OD’ed and died in his friend Slash’s hotel room. Then, in 1997, Guns N’ Roses collaborator West Arkeen (co-writer of “Patience,” “Yesterdays,” “It’s So Easy,” and others), was found dead in his LA home from a drug overdose. And in 2002, Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby died of a heroin overdose, after having contracted AIDS.

  WARREN DeMARTINI: Robbin definitely reached a point where he was really, really mixed up with drugs, and it was extremely difficult, because no one knew what he was going through. One quote I never forgot is he said, “Quitting heroin is like quitting breathing.” I had no idea to what extent he was struggling, because it was such a secretive thing to begin with.

  ROBBIN CROSBY (1999 VH1 Behind the Music): What has drug addiction done for me? It’s cost me my career, my fortune, basically my sex life when I found out I was HIV positive. I had spoken to somebody . . . [whose] opinion mattered to me, and he said, “Do you wanna be remembered as the guy . . . [from] one of the premier groups of the eighties? Or do you wanna be remembered as the guy who has a disease and who is dying out in Hollywood somewhere?” I feel like if I can help just one person to avoid what got me into this maelstrom of hell, then it’s worth it for me.

  STEPHEN PEARCY: It hit me really, really hard when Robbin told me he had AIDS, and then when he died from the heroin overdose. It shook us up. It made me want to really pull it together and try to get things moving with Ratt again—otherwise I would still be a solo artist.

  WARREN DeMARTINI: Missing Robbin doesn’t get any easier as time passes. It’s not something I can hope to get over as much as it’s something I try to get used to daily. There’s no closure. When we play the old songs like “Scene of the Crime,” although it’s a happy thing, I think back to when we would play that song and the band was just breaking—seeing Robbin in the spotlight playing the intro.

  STEPHEN PEARCY: You look at any successful band and there’s always a terrible thing that’s gonna happen or has happened to wake you up. It happened to us with Robbin’s death. It shows you’re successful, but also it shows you how vulnerable and how short life can actually be and, how quick it can end.

  Quiet Riot front man Kevin DuBrow’s life didn’t end as early as Crosby’s, but the cocaine overdose that killed him at age fifty-two was clearly preventable. While DuBrow left and rejoined the band over the years, and battled his bandmates for the rights to the group’s name, he seemed to be in good spirits and was officially in the band at the time of his death. His last recording with Quiet Riot was its eleventh album, Rehab.

  CARLOS CAVAZO: I loved Kevin a lot. He was like my brother. When he got around Frankie, that’s when he got bad. Those guys were bad medicine. They really wound each other up and would cause problems. But when I was one-on-one with Kevin we got along great. He was like my big brother. I miss him dearly.

  FRANKIE BANALI: When [Kevin and I] were at each other’s throats, we were as vicious as we were friendly. The test of a true lifelong friendship is we always managed to sort out our problems, shake hands, hug, and then continue. I can tell you without any reservations, the last five years of Kevin’s life was the happiest I had ever seen him. The last three years in particular, he was so up and so positive, feeling great and looking great, there were bright things on the horizon for us for 2008. Then on November 25, it all ended.

  STEPHEN PEARCY: There’s two entities of sober: the dabbler—someone who was the extremist and [then only] dabbles; and the person who really makes a conscious effort to be sober. I can speak on something like that for Kevin. When you’re into something as heavily as he was, then you just stop and then you start to do it again, your body’s not used to it. When you get clean, you can’t just jump in and do it like you used to.

  LONN FRIEND: He was never without a smile on his face or a bounce in his step. It didn’t matter what rug he plopped on his head or what folks might be saying about the guy he was in the spandex-clad past. Kevin didn’t give a fuck anymore. He was content playing his own rock, venturing out to see his musical peers shred it loud and hard, and totally enjoyed the second half of his life.

  By comparison, Warrant singer Jani Lane struggled with his and Warrant’s declining popularity in the last years of his life, sometimes showing up wasted onstage. He left Warrant for the last time in 2008, and toured in place of ailing Great White front man Jack Russell for a few months before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in August 2011 at a Comfort Inn in Woodland Hills, California.

  JANI LANE: The only thing that made me a bit of an odd duck was that it was a known fact that I wanted nothing to do with drugs and I didn’t want them around me. If anybody was caught with them in their possession or doing them, they were immediately fired. Code words were used around me, which for one tour, I found out. Everybody kept going, “Have you seen Fred? I saw Fred. When’d you see Fred?” I’m asking the whole tour, “Yo, what’s goin’ on?” At the show before the last one, this tour guy goes, “You do know what Fred stands for, right?” I said, “No.” He was like, “Blow.” I didn’t tolerate any of that stuff. But drink ’til you puke, pass out, get up, and do it again!

  As Guns N’ Roses wrote in “November Rain,” a song from the ambitious 1991 double-CD set Use Your Illusion I and II, “Nothing lasts forever.” By the early nineties, hair metal was on its way out. MTV abruptly canceled its weekly metal show, Headbangers Ball, and once-ubiquitous songs like Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Skid Row’s “I Remember You,” Warrant’s “Heaven,” and GN’R’s “Don’t Cry” disappeared from the airwaves, replaced by the more stripped-down and angst-riddled fare of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains.

  JAY JAY FRENCH (Twisted Sister): Over time, I found the eighties metal thing to be as pretentious and phony as “Championship Wrestling.” Hair bands fell apart because kids were dying for something real, and they got so sick of the pretentiousness and the “let’s party on dudes” vacuous music garbage that was coming out of the eighties. [So] when Nirvana and Pearl Jam hit, it was a dose of real emotion. The songs are better, the message is more real.

  CHRIS CORNELL (Temple of the Dog, Soundgarden, Audioslave): [The “grunge” scene] was the right mood at the right time. We were getting bludgeoned with one kooky-haired commercial metal band after another, and they would present themselves as people you could never be: they had loads of expensive cars; hung out with scantily clad supermodels with bolt-on breasts; wore leather suits and huge gold watches.

  GEORGE LYNCH: We were like sheep—very short-sighted—a product of our environment. We’d all go to the same clothing designer, Ray Brown, wear the same makeup. We’d go to others and go, “How do they get their hair up that high? I’ve got to get mine higher.” Everyone just chased each other’s tail until it exploded on itself. Grunge exposed it for the sil
liness that it was. [The attitude of grunge was] “I don’t care if I can play a fucking guitar solo or if my guitar is even in tune.”

  PHIL LEWIS: Everybody was throwing their crap in the back of a Camaro and driving west. It glutted up the city. There was a “rock zone,” “Rock & Roll” Denny’s and “Rock & Roll” Ralph’s [on Sunset Boulevard]. It diluted it. There were bands getting signed that shouldn’t have gotten signed. It was a fad, like Pretty Boy Floyd.

  LITA FORD: I really wanted to get away from all the evils of the music industry, so my then-husband and I packed up and moved to a little island in the Caribbean. Everything was changing so fast and metal was getting ruled out all over the place. It just didn’t fit anymore. What really pissed me off was that “eighties metal” got labeled as a dirty word. All these grunge guys were speaking out against everything we did. It was like, “Hey man, you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for us.” I felt like we led the path for these people, so why would they label us as something bad?

  RUDOLF SCHENKER: When I first heard grunge music . . . I think Mother Love Bone was the first grunge band inspired by Led Zeppelin, but they also had this more kind of fucked-up kind of feeling, very dark. Nirvana, I liked them very much. I called my manager, Peter Mensch, and said, “Peter, what do you think about this Nirvana thing?” He said, “You know, it’s a one-day thing.” I said, “I tell you one thing, Peter, I like the stuff. I hate the lead guitar, but I love the composing and also the attitude.”

  HARRY CODY (Shotgun Messiah): I heard Nevermind and thought it was just brilliant. But great albums come and go without scenes dying because of it. I didn’t feel a sense of impending doom. I don’t think grunge killed the scene as much as MTV turning on a dime and making fun of everything up til that time they had helped create.

  SEBASTIAN BACH: Yes, [the Seattle scene’s dominance] definitely sucked and it was a bummer. But between 1989 and 1991 Skid Row sold twenty million records. We were all wealthy as fuck, so it really didn’t suck that bad. It sucked, but I bought a five-acre estate and I could walk around in the woods and ride on a boat. So my attitude was, “Fuck it, who cares?” It gave us a chance to buy some shit and have some fun.

  5

  CAUGHT IN A MOSH: THRASH METAL, 1981–1991

  At the same time as the hair metal scene developed, a handful of young, defiant bands were creating a new, more aggressive counterculture that would quickly go mainstream. Metallica is most often credited for pioneering the thrash movement, and there’s no underestimating its contribution. However, if it weren’t for the thundering tempos of Motörhead, thrash bands wouldn’t have had a bar—or a Jack and Coke—to rise above. By combining the speed and ruggedness of Motörhead, the attitude of the Sex Pistols, and the precision and complexity of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, groups like Metallica, Slayer, Exodus, and Anthrax birthed a scene diametrically opposed to everything that made commercial metal popular. By 1984, Metallica had moved to San Francisco and become huge; ex-Metallicat Dave Mustaine had formed Megadeth and started making his mark in LA; Anthrax was carving its niche in New York; and, before long, San Francisco’s Legacy (soon to be Testament) and New Jersey’s Overkill joined the fray. For almost a decade, these bands composed the fastest, heaviest music on many of the nation’s major labels, at the time a significant accomplishment. Along with the speed, groove, and aggression came plenty of stage diving—and a new audience activity borrowed from hardcore known as moshing: members of the crowd rotating like clothes in a washing machine, colliding with, and sometimes inflicting damage on, anyone who dared enter the mosh pit.

  RAT SKATES (ex-Overkill; filmmaker): Thrash was a spinoff of the music coming from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and it was an example of what American kids do. We take everything to an extreme. That’s always been the mindset of heavy metal as it’s grown. We took what we were hearing and made it faster, heavier, and more intense.

  KERRY KING (Slayer): Before we came out, what was popular? Glam. Men looking like women. I knew that’s what I didn’t want to be. We definitely missed out on a lot of good-looking groupies that way, but I’ve still got my credibility, and where are all those other guys?

  GARY HOLT (Exodus): I think the thrash bands and the hair metal bands needed each other. We were mutual enemies, and it gave us ammunition. They were the pretty boys in the makeup and we were the guys in the denim vests with Motörhead patches on the back. But by the same token, we always went to the hair band shows because we knew that’s where the girls were. So we appreciated them at the same time as we hated them. If I wanted to get laid I went to a Faster Pussycat show, not a Saxon gig.

  DAVE MUSTAINE: The hair bands turned metal into a farce or a joke. You had the video [for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”] where Tawny Kitaen is trying to swallow a Jaguar with her vagina. That kind of stuff cheapened everything. You’ve got guys like us who live heavy metal. It’s what we eat and breathe. Then there were bands like Warrant and Poison, and when people thought of metal, they thought of them, which did a terrible disservice to the music. But at the same time, there was a loyal following of thrash fans who hated that shit, and it made them want to be even heavier and less commercial.

  DAVE ELLEFSON (Megadeth, ex-F5): During that whole era, there was so much confusion because guys were dressing up like chicks and chicks wanted to be with rockers. You didn’t even have to be any good, you just had to be in a band and you were getting laid. So what happened? Well, every guy I know instantly got into a band—and most of them sucked.

  CHUCK BILLY (Testament, Dublin Death Patrol): In the eighties, San Francisco was known for its glam bands, too. So when metal was rising in the Bay Area, the whole theme for us was “kill posers,” and, to us, the posers were the guys who were into glam. I think our crazy, young madness and all our threats eventually drove all the glam out of San Francisco, and that’s why San Francisco rose as more of a thrash metal center. The glam bands went to LA and we had the Bay Area metal scene pretty much to ourselves.

  SCOTT IAN (Anthrax, S.O.D.): Motörhead were so important to the development of thrash metal because they were so fucking fast and heavy. When Anthrax started out, we were listening to Motörhead nonstop. We’d be writing a song and going, “No we should play that one faster. That’s how fast Motörhead plays. We have to be faster than them.”

  LEMMY KILMISTER: As far as the tempos go, well, we were all doing speed when we started, but then again, I was doing it in Hawkwind. I’ve just always been in a hurry for everything. I’m a very impatient man.

  DIMEBAG DARRELL ABBOTT (1966–2004) (Damageplan, Pantera): Motörhead—man! Songs like “Ace of Spades” and “Love You Like a Reptile” just tear your head off. The uniqueness of that band changed the way a lot of people looked at their sound. Lemmy’s bass—cramming it through a Marshall cabinet on twelve—was real unique. His voice was very raw, and so was their whole way of jamming. The music didn’t have to be all pretty and polished. It’s like they set up, jammed it one time, and said, “Okay mix it, we’re done. We’re going to drink. See you later.”

  Metallica quickly became the most influential thrash band and one of the most inspirational metal bands, period. But they weren’t the first to play thrash metal. A year before Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich met guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield in Los Angeles, San Francisco quartet Exodus was playing an early form of thrash with a lineup that featured future Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, drummer Tom Hunting, and a revolving door of players, before the band’s future architect, guitarist Gary Holt, entered the fray.

  GARY HOLT (Exodus): I met Kirk Hammett when Exodus played in my high school band room, and we became friends. He taught me a couple chords, and six months later I was in the band. The Kirk-era of Exodus was definitely thrash, but it had a more Iron Maiden-ish bent to it. Tom [Hunting] used to play drums and sing because we couldn’t find a singer at first. Then we met Paul Baloff at an outdoor party we were playing. He came down because Lääz Rockit played with us and he wen
t to school with those guys. Paul couldn’t sing at all, but he was more metal than anybody I’d ever met. We believed in him, so he became our vocalist, and he became a guy many people still consider the voice of the band, even though he only sang on one studio record.

  RAT SKATES: In the heavy metal underground, even before Metallica, Exodus was definitely huge. We had recordings of all their live shows, which they didn’t know people were making. The tapes got copied and passed around. We all knew what they were like live way before we saw ’em.

  GARY HOLT: The live shows were a big thing for us from the start. But a lot of the real excitement always happened offstage. One time, Kirk, Tom, and our former manager got frustrated with their lack of quality equipment and robbed the band in the rehearsal storage shed next to them. I wasn’t even in Exodus when this happened, but sometime between the actual theft happening and me hooking up with them, I let them rehearse in my parents’ garage. The guitar player I replaced—my high school buddy Tim Agnello (ex-Blind Illusion)—ratted the band out because he was one of the founding members and he was so mad at them for firing him. They got caught, and I got called in for questioning. The police considered me an innocent patsy until I got caught hiding the remaining stolen gear, which cemented my guilt. So I spent one night in juvenile hall. That’s the only time I’ve actually spent in jail.

  At first, thrash was deemed way too heavy for radio or MTV airplay, so bands played out as much as they could and sent demo cassettes to musicians, fans, and industry insiders in the hopes that their music would be embraced by fanzine editors, mom-and-pop record stores, and ambitious start-up labels. This was the early-to-mid-eighties era of tape trading, the primitive method of peer-to-peer music sharing that existed almost twenty years before the dawn of Napster and BitTorrents.