BILLY GOULD: We signed to Slash Records and had a big debut show. Half the club were press people, and the record company was saying, “This is our new band, we’re expecting big things.” Chuck was drunk, and he passed out and fell asleep for three songs. Because of that show, the press thought we sucked. It took us two years to crawl out of that hole.
CHUCK MOSLEY: There were a couple shows I was drunk at, but not many, because once I heard myself singing drunk I put an end to that. I tried to stay focused. There wasn’t that much revelry when I was doing the band. But right before I left, I had a girlfriend and I was missing her, so I complained a lot. I was complaining about not getting paid and playing shitty places, and the guys got sick of me. They wanted to fire me before one of the tours, but they couldn’t cancel the tour, so they waited until after we got home. Me and Roddy were the closest in the band at the time, so they got him to call me up and tell me I was fired. I was pissed and kind of shocked. I expected it, but I was still hurt. Part of the reason they fired me was I was more into change and growth, and they wanted to find a sound and stick with it.
JIM MARTIN (ex-Faith No More): [Chuck] was very stubborn and resistant to change or growth. He would resist everything for some reason. We’d argue about almost every little thing, right down to where we were going to stop to get gas.
BILLY GOULD: I quit the band, actually, then everybody else said, “We still want to play with you,” and I said, “I can’t deal with Chuck.” Turns out, nobody wanted to play with Chuck. What started off by me quitting the band actually ended up with us firing Chuck. We went for a year after we fired Chuck before we found Mike Patton. We wrote songs during that year not knowing what they would sound like with vocals. Then we heard the first Mr. Bungle tape [with Mike Patton singing] and we thought we’d give Mike a try. Judging by the insane music, I thought he would be some fat guy with a leather jacket. Turned out he was this little twenty-year-old kid, and we were all eight or nine years older than him. He came to rehearsal and we started playing these songs we’d been working on for the past year. He got on the mic and started singing, and he was just nailing them. The first time he heard them, he came up with great stuff. He’s a real musical guy, extremely talented. And those songs turned into The Real Thing.
MIKE PATTON (Faith No More) [1990 interview]: Some people praise my singing, but I just see my job is to jump up and down onstage and to have long hair and look like a rock and roller. When I first joined the band I had short hair, and I had to go into hibernation for a while before they would let me join.
On 1989’s The Real Thing, Faith No More combined hip-hop rhythms with heavy guitars and Patton’s soaring vocals. Thanks to the straightforward rap-metal anthem “Epic”—which was structurally similarly to “We Care a Lot”—the album took off. The video for “Epic” received regular airplay on MTV, which surprised both the band and its label, and the album quickly went platinum. As influential as Faith No More has been in the evolution of nu metal, bands like Korn, Deftones, and Limp Bizkit might never have heard of Faith No More if Warner Bros. hadn’t let them shoot three videos for the album.
BILLY GOULD: We did videos for “From Out of Nowhere” and “Falling to Pieces,” and they didn’t go anywhere. Then Warner Bros. said, “We’re going to let you do one more video, but this is the end of the record cycle—it didn’t work. What song would you like to do?” They had basically given up. We wanted a video for “Epic,” which we all thought was the best-sounding song on the album. It had nothing to do with what the record company wanted. They thought it would go on Headbangers Ball for a couple of weeks and that would be the end of it. But it blew up, and we were on the road for a year and a half, which really screwed with our heads. We got back and we didn’t have any money. We couldn’t even pay rent. The record company spent a lot of money making videos and doing promotions. We didn’t clear a lot in royalties right away, so we were broke, but everybody thought we were huge. Suddenly, we have to deal with people in the neighborhood giving us shit for being “rock stars.” We realized our popularity was a fluke, so we didn’t really respect it. People wouldn’t even review us before and all of a sudden we were everybody’s darlings. It was very hard to take seriously. So, sometimes, we just got more obnoxious to get a rise out of people.
JIM MARTIN: Being on the road is kind of boring, so we have a good time by being violent. Violent acts don’t come out of anger anyhow. It’s more for entertainment value.
MIKE PATTON: Masturbation is a lot easier to do than relating to someone. It’s like playing a video machine. You can relate to a machine a lot easier than a human being. You can just pound yourself for hours and hours and not think about it.
BILLY GOULD: There was a lot of shitting backstage [and not just in toilets]. Mike [Patton] did that all the time. The thing about shit is that it’s cheap. It’s hard to explain to people, but it’s part of our sense of humor. We’re a lot different from each other, but we have a shared sense of humor conventional people don’t quite understand. But after touring so much for The Real Thing, which was our most conventional record, being conventional stopped being exciting. We had a real need for rediscovering music again, and we did that with Angel Dust. I know there was a lot of discouragement for us to take that approach, but I think that was the only approach as artists that we could possibly make.
Angel Dust was skewed, bizarre, and acerbic, featuring songs with titles like “Jizzlobber” and “Crack Hitler” and ending with a cover of John Barry’s “Midnight Cowboy.” While the album went gold on the back of The Real Thing and the band remained critical darlings, fans who wanted to see Patton rapping and rolling “Epic”-style were sorely disappointed, and Faith No More drifted away from the mainstream. The next great evolutionary step in rap-metal came from a collaboration between Anthrax and rap act Public Enemy. The New York thrash band had already toyed with hip-hop on its 1990 spoof “I’m the Man,” but in 1991 Anthrax got serious, inviting Public Enemy to contribute to a re-recording of their 1988 song “Bring the Noise” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
SCOTT IAN: Public Enemy was my favorite rap band from the first time I heard the demos for [1987’s] Yo! Bum Rush the Show. All I could think of was, “How the fuck can we work with these guys?” It took until 1990, when we were recording Persistence of Time. We were done tracking. I told [drummer] Charlie [Benante], “I wrote this riff based around ‘Bring the Noise.’” I played it for him, and he started playing a beat. Within twenty minutes we had recorded it, and we were like, “Wow, this is so fucking heavy.” I called Chuck and told him we wanted him and Flavor Flav to come in and do vocals. He said, “Ehh, I don’t know. We already did ‘Bring the Noise.’ Why don’t we do something new?” I said, “You just gotta hear this.” He said, “Well, lemme talk to Rick [Rubin].” He did, and told me, “Rick thinks it’s redundant.” But we Fed-Exed Chuck the tape anyway, and two days later he called up and said, “This is fucking slamming. When can we do this?” He and Flav did vocals, and we shot the video on a day off during the Clash of the Titans tour in Chicago. At the shoot, we had so much fun we said, “We should do shows.” Chuck said, “When and where?” So we toured the world for four months.
WES BORLAND (Limp Bizkit): “Bring the Noise” was the main reason I got into Public Enemy, and that’s what got me into hip-hop. I got [their 1990 album] Fear of a Black Planet and went back and listened to all their old records. Then I checked out N.W.A and Ice Cube, which a lot of my friends hated because they were metalheads.
SCOTT IAN: I loved what we did with “Bring the Noise,” and that tour with Public Enemy was so fun. They had never gotten groupies before, and our crew guys would always have chicks on the bus getting naked, and they’d be taking pictures. Flavor Flav was out of his fucking mind for that. He couldn’t get on our bus fast enough to see what was going on. But to me, Rage Against the Machine were the ones who created the whole rap-metal genre. “Bring the Noise” was a collaboration between a metal ban
d and a rap band. It wasn’t one band creating something new. Whereas, when Rage came out, they weren’t like anybody else. They took something organic and they made the Rage Against the Machine sound. We might have opened the door, but they drove the fucking truck through it.
In the fall of 1992, Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut was the album rock and rap fans had been longing for, a seamless combination of aggressive rock influenced by Led Zeppelin and Helmet and political rap that drew from Public Enemy and N.W.A. Rage wasn’t just provocative, it was motivational, as demonstrated by the chorus from “Killing in the Name”: “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” which audiences chanted with the fervor of football fans screaming Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll, Part 2.”
TOM MORELLO (Rage Against the Machine): I moved out to LA with a Harvard guy, Ivy League mentality. I wanted to form a band that combined Sabbath and Run-DMC with some Aerosmith, and we put an ad in The Music Connection for a socialist lead singer. I wanted to play the music I really love and make a statement at the same time. As a band, we have a realization that from top to bottom the system is corrupt and that’s essentially what our songs are about. As Chairman Mao said, “You learn to make revolution through the process of revolting.”
FRED DURST (Limp Bizkit): When Rage Against the Machine came out in 1992, that was fucking huge for me. I came from this break-dance and hip-hop background, so to see this band that put a lot of hip-hop into this heavy rock was really inspiring.
TOM MORELLO: I have a complete love for Led Zeppelin, KISS, and Black Sabbath, as well as funk and hip-hop, and I love to express myself on guitar. Tony Iommi was one of the biggest influences on me as a riff writer. Early on, as a fledgling guitar player, I was trying to learn some Black Sabbath songs, and I asked this guy to show them to me and he almost didn’t want to lower himself. He was like, “It’s so easy, why would you want to learn them?” I said, “Dude, because they rule!” That, to me, is absolutely as much a part of this band as any political agenda. But the fact that we’ve been able to extend the message contained in the music into the realm of political activism has been extremely rewarding. It’s really the barometer by which I measure our success, rather than units moved or tickets sold.
Between Rage Against the Machine’s solid debut and its craftier 1996 follow-up, Evil Empire, numerous rap-metal outfits emerged, but few mixed politics and rock as powerfully, and none stood behind their words so vehemently. As it turned out, many metal fans weren’t ready for such populist polemic, preferring instead to rage against their parents and ex-girlfriends rather than the government. Groups like Korn, Deftones, and Limp Bizkit met their needs, creating hybrids of rap and metal that focused on youthful angst and emphasizing the hedonistic vibe of their favorite hip-hop.
TOM MORELLO: Unfortunately, I’d say I played a large part in the evolution of nu metal. There was a wave of bands that composed the first Lollapalooza nation: Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, etc., that were artistically forward-looking, combining elements of arena rock with artistry and punk. But they all had qualms about playing the same arenas that Poison was playing. It took those Lollapalooza bands four or five years to make a record because they were busy kvetching. I’m quite confident that at the same time, record company executives in boardrooms across the nation were saying, “If only we can find a Rage Against the Machine that would make five videos per record and have songs about chicks and show off.”
REGINALD “FIELDY” ARVIZU (Korn): Everyone in our circle was listening to a lot of West Coast hip-hop, and a lot of that stuff was real minor key and dark anyways, so with the music it was almost like, if you could take that to the next level, you could make it heavy metal.
STEPHEN CARPENTER (Deftones): When I was in high school, I couldn’t get enough heavy metal. There were so many good bands in the eighties—Van Halen, Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Anthrax. I was fifteen when I first played a guitar chord. I used to watch videos, and most of the time everyone’s faking it. I was watching Ratt’s “Round and Round” where they were on a table soloing out. [Warren DeMartini] played a power chord, and I copied his finger positions, and went “Whoa, what the hell!” It was just a matter of playing it up and down the fretboard and learning to stay on time with my right hand. It was just fake-it-out city from then on. I learned to play to Anthrax, S.O.D., Metallica. I didn’t learn another chord besides a power chord until I had been playing for four years.
CHINO MORENO: I didn’t grow up on heavy music at all. I grew up on new wave and bands like the Cure and Depeche Mode, that were really moody and had a lot of sorrow. My heart has always been really into sad music, and I incorporate it naturally into our songs. That’s what sets us apart.
JONATHAN DAVIS (Korn): When I was a kid, I was into death rock, industrial, and Duran Duran. Bauhaus, Christian Death. I was called a fag because I wore eyeliner and had my hair up in the air. I was a nerd. I was picked on, and that shit’s never gonna change. I’m a rock star now, and people still call me a fag. There’s all these things on message boards about how I suck dick and fuck guys, and you know it’s never gonna change. So fuck it. I’m just who I am.
FRED DURST: I’m definitely not a happy person, and I don’t sing happy songs because I fuckin’ don’t like them. I don’t have a positive fuckin’ message. My message is, “If you’ve ever been pissed off and felt like shit, it’s okay, because you’re not the only one.”
JONATHAN DAVIS: My lyrics have always been dark because the things I get off on are all morbid, and my whole life I’ve collected and done dark things. When I was seventeen, I was a senior in high school and I got into this job placement program that hooked me up at the coroner’s office doing autopsies. I was like, “Oh, cool, I’ll be able to see dead bodies and cut them open.” I’ll admit I was white the first day and it freaked me out. But after the second and third time, I was totally into it. I liked trying to figure out how people died, and seeing the anatomy of the body was amazing. Just the fact that you’re cutting a fucking person open and you’re not going to jail, that’s awesome. So after high school I went to mortuary college. I was an apprentice embalmer at a funeral home, and that’s where I was in my first band, Sexart.
By the mid-nineties, bands were no longer flooding the Sunset Strip the way they had in the heyday of hair metal. The most exciting scenes were coalescing away from the city and manifesting suburban angst more than urban hardship. The first city to gain attention for its music community was Bakersfield, California, an area known for its country music scene in the fifties and, forty years later, home to Sexart, Korn, Videodrone, and Adema.
RYAN SHUCK (Sexart, Orgy): The whole Bakersfield scene started with Sexart [which featured Shuck, Davis, and future Adema bassist Dave DeRoo]. Jon [Davis] came down to our studio and then I went down to his house and partied with him. Jon played with us for a few years. One of the first songs I ever wrote [for Sexart] was “Blind,” which ended up being a pretty popular Korn song. But there’s only one chord in that song. It’s all conceptual. It’s all about feeling.
JONATHAN DAVIS: When I was in Sexart, [Korn guitarists Brian] “Head” [Welch] and [James] “Munky” [Shaffer] were in a bar in Bakersfield, California, watching us play, and they thought we sucked, so they were getting ready to leave. Then, suddenly, they heard my voice and flipped out. [Bassist Reginald] “Fieldy” [Arvizu] called me and asked me to try out. Me and Fieldy grew up together. His dad [Reginald Arvizu Sr.] and my dad [Rick Davis] had been in a band. From the first note, when I heard their sound, I was like, “Oh my god, this is insane!” I got my PA and I sang the first song all the way through, and everyone’s mouths dropped open and they were like “This is it! Let’s do it!” Two weeks later, we did a demo tape with [producer] Ross [Robinson] that started getting shopped around. But at first, no one wanted to have anything to do with us. We played clubs in San Diego up the coast of California for about a year before anyone noticed us.
FIELDY: Most bands t
hat get together are just a bunch of musicians. We weren’t a bunch of musicians. We were all friends always having fun together anyway. So we thought, “Why don’t we get in a band so we can all drink in a band together and get crazy?”
JONATHAN DAVIS: When I write, there’s always that sense of sex there. I have a lot of fantasies I like to write about. It’s just the other side of human nature. But at the same time, I’m a vulnerable guy. I’m not trying to go up there and say, “Fuck this, I’m a bad motherfucker.” That’s not me.
JAMES “MUNKY” SHAFFER (Korn): I started using a seven-string guitar to make the music really dark and different-sounding and lower. [A Korn guitar tone has] gotta be heavy, but with clarity. When we record, sometimes we layer three or four different tracks to get the right sound—a clean tone, a really dirty tone underneath, and then something between the two. Then we use lots of sound effects to make it sound even weirder. But I don’t know how to play a standard six-string guitar anymore. It feels like I’m missing a finger when I try.
JONATHAN DAVIS: Alternative music was a depressing time in rock. I’d go to those shows and just fall asleep. I just wanted to wake people the fuck up. I didn’t even know what Black Sabbath was until I joined Korn. The thing that changed my life was when Pantera released Vulgar Display of Power [in 1992]. Then Fieldy turned me on to Sepultura. But we never wanted to do anything that was typically metal. If we ever write something that sounds like Judas Priest or Iron Maiden it’s out the door.
FIELDY: If Jon even tried to sing the word “die” with lots of vibrato, we’d have to kill him. We’re heavier than heavy metal.
Around the same time Korn was honing their chops in Bakersfield, further north, in Sacramento, Deftones were writing in a similar style, combining jagged metal riffs influenced by Helmet, Prong, and Faith No More with hip-hop rhythms and subtle, haunting melodies. But like Korn, Deftones were innovators, not imitators.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 42
