Rammstein vocalist Till Lindemann plays with fire. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Ministry vocalist Al Jourgensen, industrial metal deity. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Marilyn Manson: Antichrist Superstar. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Marilyn Manson lends bandmate Twiggy Ramirez a hand. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman dares others to follow the leaders. Photograph by Greg Cristman.
Rammstein’s stroke of genius. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Early Rob Zombie: the devil’s reject. Photograph by Bill O’Leary.
Longtime Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 finds a new home with Rob Zombie. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Onstage blood bath with Skinny Puppy’s Nivek Ogre. Photograph by Greg Cristman.
Nu-metal icon Korn gears up at the Anaheim NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
When he’s not fighting capitalist pigs, Tom Morello likes to Rage on his guitar. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst tries to recall what he “did it all for.” Oh yeah, he remembers, “the nookie.” Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
After the 2001 anthrax terrorist attacks, Anthrax, the band, refuses to back down. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Deftones singer Chino Moreno “dreads” being called nu-metal. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Korn’s Jonathan Davis gets intimate with his H. R. Giger mic stand. Photograph by Kevin Hodapp.
George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher joins the ranks of the mighty Cannibal Corpse. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Late death metal pioneer and Death front man Chuck Schuldiner. Photograph by Jeff Kitts.
Obituary: one of Florida death metal’s first and finest. Photograph by Bill O’Leary.
After leaving Cannibal Corpse, Chris Barnes butchered new victims in Six Feet Under. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Eychategod vocalist Mike Williams boozes it up onstage. Photograph by Jon Wiederhorn.
Swedish black metal band Marduk vocalist Daniel “Mortus” Rostén sings psalms of blasphemy and destruction. Photograph by Greg Cristman.
UK black metal band Cradle of Filth front man, Dani Davey guts it out. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Morbid Angel returns from the dead. Photograph by Alex Solca, courtesy of Nuclear Blast.
Godfathers of goregrind Carcass refuse to smile for the camera. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Adam “Nergal” Darski, front man of Poland’s Behemoth, picks out the faithful among the crowd. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Dimmu Borgir guitarist Tom “Galder” Rune Andersen falls victim to the black metal zombie invasion. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Current Mayhem vocalist Attila Csihar sings to his good-luck charm and former best friend. Photograph by Jon Wiederhorn.
Gorgoroth’s Gaahl: evil is as evil does. Photograph by Kristell Gathoye.
Dimmu Borgir worships at the temple of . . . Dimmu Borgir. Photograph courtesy of Nuclear Blast.
Norwegian progressive black metal band Enslaved reveals the rock. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Black metal pioneers Immortal stand guard against the Christian infidels. Photograph by Peter Beste, courtesy of Nuclear Blast.
Watain’s fork-tongued vocalist and bassist Erik Danielsen. Photograph by Ester Segarra, courtesy of Nuclear Blast.
Eighteen Visions: The first name in straight-edge metalcore. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
All That Remains: armed and ready for battle (and dessert). Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Avenged Sevenfold guitarists Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates let fly. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Bleeding Through flexes its Orange County metalcore muscle. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Boston-based metalcore pioneers Overcast. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Killswitch Engage guitarist Joel Stroetzel and ex-vocalist Howard Jones try to restrain guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz from trashing another art gallery. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Early Throwdown: metalcore with the emphasis on “core.” Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Unearth rockin’ the house. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson returns to the fold with a new lineup featuring lead guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Mastodon: new masters of prog-metal (left to right) Brent Hinds, Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher, Brann Dailor. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian checks whether his deodorant is still working while John Dolmayan keeps the beat. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan never has a bad hair day. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Metallica joins Motörhead legend Lemmy Kilmister at L.A.’s Whisky for a special set dressed as The Lemmys, in honor of their idol’s fiftieth birthday. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Disturbed front man David Draiman gets down with the sickness. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Early Slipknot shot of vocalist Corey Taylor flipping the crowd the bird. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Hatebreed: warriors of the wasteland. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe promotes Aboriginal Living Skills School while rocking the crowd back to the Stone Age. Photograph by Kristell Gathoye.
Rock royalty lineup: Metal lover Dave Grohl, System of a Down vocalist Serj Tankian, Henry Rollins, Tony Iommi, and Bill Ward. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Atreyu breaks “The Curse,” becomes metalcore darlings. Photograph by Jeremy Saffer.
Meeting of the minds: Alice In Chains bassist Mike Inez and guitarist Jerry Cantrell pose with metal legends Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Mastodon’s Brent Hinds rocks the New York crowd at Terminal 5. Photograph by Jon Wiederhorn.
Modern metal offers something for everybody: (left to right) Trivium’s Matt Heafy, Machine Head’s Robb Flynn, Slipknot’s Joey Jordison, Fear Factory’s Dino Cazares. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Late Slipknot cofounder, songwriter, and bassist Paul Gray. Photograph by Kevin Hodapp.
Machine Head front man Robb Flynn clenching the fist of dissent. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Avenged Sevenfold’s late drummer, Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan. Photograph by Stephanie Cabral.
Faith No More backstage at RIP magazine party with Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica’s James Hetfield. Photograph by Nick Charles.
8
HIGH-TECH HATE: INDUSTRIAL, 1980–1997
The descriptors of some subgenres of metal, such as “death” and “black metal,” are nebulous at best. But the word industrial conjures up vivid imagery of the music and lyrics it designates: the filth of coal mines, the unrelenting whirr of a sawmill, and, especially, the buzz and grind of automotive factories. Before industrial metal morphed into industrial dance music, its sound was indeed rooted in the sounds of the factory. The term stems from the name of the pioneering band Throbbing Gristle’s label: Industrial Records. Emerging from Kingston upon Hull, England, in 1976, Throbbing Gristle strove to emulate the clatter and clamor of industrial machinery by combining performance art with primitive electronic beats and analog samples. Like-minded artists—Sheffield, England’s Cabaret Voltaire, Sydney, Australia’s SPK, and others—took a similar path to sonic annihilation. Then in 1980, West Germany’s Einstürzende Neubauten emerged with a more percussive style of music that took a fairly literal approach to the term industrial, combining actual machinery—including jackhammers, barrels, and chainsaws—with harsh Teutonic vocals. The next wave of industrial bands, including Skinny Puppy (started in Vancouver, Canada, in 1982) and KMFDM (launched in West Germany as a performance art project in 1984), incorporated Neubauten’s dissonant assault with a variety of keyboard melodies and dance beats. (KMFDM was originally called
Kein Mehrheit für die Mitleid, which translates as “No pity for the majority”; the acronym was not short for Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode, as was widely believed.) As industrial became more structured and technology advanced, bands added distorted electric guitars and caustic samples, making the sound more conventionally metallic.
TRENT REZNOR (Nine Inch Nails): I don’t mind the term [industrial] applied to us, but I think the reason people cringe is what it connotes—Throbbing Gristle, Test Department—bands Nine Inch Nails have very little in common with. What is industrial, then? I’d basically define it as dance music that’s a bit harder, a bit tougher, definitely with a drum machine and maybe some distorted vocals.
ADAM GROSSMAN (Skrew): When I think of early industrial bands, I picture that guy Dieter from “Sprockets” on Saturday Night Live. There was this whole kind of intellectual philosophical based thing that was underground and elitist.
BILL LEEB (Front Line Assembly): To me, industrial music is six guys onstage with shaved heads, pounding viciously on metal drums. They have sheep’s heads and blood and power drills. There’s a film of an autopsy playing in the background, and there are no effects, no tapes, or samples, or anything.
SASCHA KONIETZKO (KMFDM): We did an early KMFDM show in Paris and we had a fire-eater onstage, and we would blow up TV sets and bang on sheet metal and air conditioner ducts. We had twenty people onstage, and everybody wore funky outfits. There was fake blood and we were shooting animal intestines around the stage. We’ve changed a lot since then.
BRANDON GEIST (editor in chief, Revolver magazine): At one point, mixing dance music with metal was about as taboo as you could get. It was one thing for metal and punk to start cross-pollinating, because those seem like natural bedfellows. But it took real balls for a metal band to start collaborating with an electronic dance music producer or start making dancey metal.
The most successful artists to create hybrids of metal and industrial are Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. But the first band to incorporate tangible elements of industrial and metal in their music was London’s Killing Joke. The band formed in 1979 and blended rigid, repetitive riffs, regimental drumming, and aching vocals with strident keyboards and sound effects.
JAZ COLEMAN (Killing Joke): When we started Killing Joke, we looked to all the outcast philosophers, guys like Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Aleister Crowley, for inspiration. At the time, we were all very cynical about punk. We would listen to dance music and seventies disco music and heavy, dark reggae. Of course, we liked a lot of high-energy music like AC/DC, and it was there that our tradition started.
TONY FLETCHER (journalist): [Killing Joke] was stark, dark, minimal, confrontational, loud, and not a little violent. And that was just their reputation as interviewees. But there was something truly fascinating about Killing Joke’s apocalyptic vision, and their arrival on the London scene upon the dawn of the eighties was impossible to ignore.
JAZ COLEMAN: One time in 1981, we had two thousand people at a concert and they were all fighting. It was like the music was a soundtrack to the violence. That’s when I questioned whether I was part of the problem or the solution.
TOMMY VICTOR (Prong, Ministry): To me, [Killing Joke’s 1980] song “Change” [from their second album, What’s This For . . . !] started the whole danceable metal thing, which, eventually, we really used for [our biggest single,] “Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck.”
JAZ COLEMAN: One of the funny things about Killing Joke was we were intense and things could get violent, but we weren’t one of these self-destructive bands. We’d have gallons of tea and the occasional reefer, but we never drank. Our first gig in America was in 1981 at the Rock Lounge [in New York City]. [Ronald] Reagan had just gotten into office. We were backstage, and this junkie guy came up to [drummer] Big Paul [Ferguson] and said, “Hey man, can I use your belt?” This guy was gonna jack up. Paul took off his belt and started whacking him with it. The guy yelped like a dog and ran out of the dressing room, and the promoter came in and said, “You don’t know what you’ve done. That was Johnny Thunders [late guitarist for the New York Dolls].”
The first industrial band to be openly accepted by metal audiences was Chicago’s Ministry. Ironically, the group began as a dance band, and their first record, 1983’s With Sympathy, was lightweight synth pop with syrupy vocals. It would be another three years before Ministry evolved into the most carcinogenic industrial band with the guitarless but unnerving Twitch. The keyboard-only mandate didn’t last long, and by 1988’s The Land of Rape and Honey Ministry had added caustic metal riff samples to the electronic mix, creating the template for groups like early Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, and Static-X.
AL JOURGENSEN (Ministry, Revolting Cocks): I started playing guitar in the seventies, and I did it to get laid, but I wasn’t that great of a guitar player. I was into MC5, Nugent—anything loud. Then somebody taught me a little bit of synth and I figured, “Well, I can actually play this better than I can play guitar.” Then I got into Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire and realized I wasn’t as good as them on synth and I wasn’t as good as the metal bands on guitar—but I could do both. So it was a case of [being a] jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I roped the two together out of necessity.
JAZ COLEMAN: I remember Al [Jourgensen] coming to our Boston Channel gig in 1980 dressed like he was in Duran Duran. Of course, he ended up later marrying my ex-girlfriend. There’s nothing like flattery, is there? He married her and they both became junkies. Happily ever after [laughs]. I love Al. He is the cuddliest, nicest person you could meet. It’s just that people die around him.
AL JOURGENSEN: Really? C’mon. I was never involved in anyone’s death. [Killing Joke bassist] Raven died after he played with us, but he was working with Treponem Pal in Geneva, Switzerland. And I was devastated.
ROB ZOMBIE (ex-White Zombie): When I was in White Zombie, people were always saying to me, “Oh, man you gotta see Ministry. They’re the most insane thing.” I was like, “Wait, weren’t they that disco band?” I didn’t get how they could suddenly be really heavy.
AL JOURGENSEN: I started as a metal and industrial dude before anyone knew what the fuck industrial was. I didn’t even know what it was. Then I signed to Arista, and they made me become Milli Vanilli, like a pop artist. So I sued them, got off their label, and hooked up with Wax Trax!, and I started doing my own music. A lot of the stuff that Arista rejected [for With Sympathy] wound up on Twitch and [1988’s] The Land of Rape and Honey. I was doing that in 1980, but they said, “No, we don’t want that,” even though that’s what I was playing live in clubs. Arista said, “You need to get a nice little haircut and wear suits and be British.” So it wasn’t a real big switch for me to go heavy. The unnatural progression was doing that Arista album.
PAUL BARKER (ex-Ministry): In the early eighties a lot of people were just making straight electronic music. We brought out guitars because we weren’t interested in being enslaved by our machines. We grew up loving rock, and Al was a really good guitarist. So we’re like, “What are we doing? Why are we trying to make just noise records?”
AL JOURGENSEN: What I did notice about the difference between our electronic and metal stuff is the kind of chicks I would attract. When I was doing the synth stuff I got fat chicks with runny makeup. When I was doing metal I had skinny chicks with puffed up hair. When I put both together I kind of got a midway chick with runny makeup and puffy hair.
KEVIN OGILVIE (“NIVEK OGRE”) (Skinny Puppy): At first there was a kind of a competition between us and Ministry. We were following each other around. Al was cutting himself for real [with a razor blade], and I was faking it. Then I started cutting myself for real, and Al started faking it. We asked Al to produce our [1989] album Rabies, and that’s the first time our two worlds merged and we had a lot of these metal guitar sounds. Then when I was touring with Ministry, our crowds converged. Touring with Ministry was definitely like boot camp. In Salt Lake City, Al beaned somebody with a bottle by
accident. Afterwards, I came back to the hotel in a cab with a bag of weed in my pocket to the tune of six police cars with their high beams on, and everybody was out of the bus with their hands up. But it all ended up fine. There were apologies made and a T-shirt given and all was fine.
AL JOURGENSEN: Chaos followed me everywhere. When I was in Tennessee during Lollapalooza ’93, I bought this gigantic pyrotechnic from some toothless guy behind a truck stop. [Butthole Surfers front man] Gibby [Haynes] was with us and lighting off m80s in the back of the bus. I decided to one-up him. I lit the firework thing, which was like a bazooka that’s larger than a man’s arm. It was a professional pyrotechnic that you’re supposed to light on boats, away from people, and it’s supposed to make a pirate ship in the sky. So the fuse is lit and everyone was freaking out, but I was just joking and I went, “All right, enough’s enough.” I tried to put it out and I didn’t realize it was an underwater fuse. The only way you can put that out is to cut it, and we didn’t have scissors. So we passed it around back and forth to each other, freaking out. Then the thing went off. There were all these pellets that shot out down the length of the bus, and everything it touched started a different color fire. Just the recoil of this thing going off sent me flying back four feet through the air into the back lounge. People are diving out of the way of the sparks and the bus driver pulls over and says, “Get off my bus. I’m calling the police.” He called the cops. We had put the fire out by this point, but there’s still so much colored smoke coming out of the bus it looked like Apocalypse Now. The cops pull up and they looked at the bus driver, and he’s going, “Throw them in jail. They blew up my bus.” This Texas state trooper was chewing tobacco. He spits, looks at the bus driver and goes, “Well, what do you expect? This ain’t Mozart, it’s rock and roll. Now get these boys back on the bus and get off my highway.”
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 37
