MICK MORRIS: I had never been on the Internet before I moved to California. In ’99, I lived with James and his mother, and he had AOL Instant Messenger. I had no idea what that was. He was like, “Dude, you have to make a screen name and start talking to chicks.” It was a whole new world to me. Since I was new blood in Orange County, these girls swarmed me. Then I discovered makeoutclub.com in 2001. Then Friendster came out, then MySpace, which was the be-all, end-all of sleaze for the entire world, but especially for bands.
JAMES HART: The biggest mistake I ever made was introducing Mick to the Internet.
MICK MORRIS: The first time we went to Europe, we brought out this Dutch dude and he was very shy. He was good-looking, but scared to meet girls. One night, it was us and Throwdown on our first European tour, and we got our roadie out in a van with two girls. I guess they gave him a hand job. Then the next day, the girls are on the message board saying Eighteen Visions raped them! We still had a month left in Europe, and promoters threatened to cancel our shows because we’re rapists. We were hearing this shit back home from friends and family and girlfriends. We were like, “That’s not true at all. We weren’t even involved with any of this.” We soon discovered there are a lot of girls going out of their way to sabotage band dudes.
JAMES HART: That tour was such a mess. Our driver split on us, saying he got robbed in Rome, and the backpack that had all the money in it and passports was stolen. But I can tell you right now, rape is not something that’s fun to be accused of. That’s why I always try to stay away from the Internet. We’ve had crew members in the past say some stupid things online, and people find out what band they work for and it comes back to us. Then people say, “Oh, you guys hire racists and KKK members.” You end up having to fire good people and good friends because of the way it affects your band on tour and the way people perceive you as individuals.
MICK MORRIS: No matter what we did, girls seemed to cling to us. A handful of times I’d come on the bus sweaty as hell, completely drenched, and have naked girls in my bunk waiting for me. Once we evolved from the metal scene to the radio rock scene, it was a whole different world in every aspect, but especially with women. But you have to take the good with the bad. Sometimes girls would get mad and throw shit at you because you were with them the first time they came to your town and when you came back you didn’t want to be with them. Some of these chicks, especially in Europe, would claim that they were pregnant. I would always call bullshit about that. They never had proof.
Throwdown featured many of the same members as Eighteen Visions, so it’s no surprise that they experienced similar instability. Not only were the personalities volatile, some of the members did double- and triple-duty in other groups.
DAVE PETERS: In November 1999, when Brandan left Throwdown, he recommended me to replace him on guitar. I was stoked to be in a band again playing shows. The songs were tongue-in-cheek at first and poked fun of the tough-guy hardcore subgenre. The lyrics for “Box Your Face In” were “Box your face in fuckface / I’ll put you in your place.” The first time you play it you’re like, “This is really funny and people are singing along and it’s a big joke.” Then it gets to a point when you can write real lyrics and real music and you’re still playing “Box Your Face In.” People want you to play it and they want to hear “Get Sick,” where all you say is “Get sick motherfucker.” It became kind of tiresome.
BRANDAN SCHIEPPATI: I played in Throwdown from 1998 until 2000. At one point, I was in Bleeding Through, Throwdown, and Eighteen Visions all at the same time. But Bleeding Through was really my thing. I had filled in a show for Throwdown singing because Keith [Barney’s] voice was ripped up. So he played guitar and I sang, and Scott [Danough] came up to me afterwards and said, “Listen, I need you to sing in a band and I’m gonna play guitar and I have these guys that will play with us.” That’s how I met [original Bleeding Through guitarist] Chad [Tafolla] and drummer Troy [Born]. We tried a bunch of different bass players and guitar players. We even had Dave Peters come in, but he only lasted for one practice. Finally we got some people that stuck: [bassist] Ryan [Wombacher], [guitarist] Brian [Leppke] and [drummer] Derek [Youngsma]. And while I was writing and recording with Bleeding Through and Eighteen Visions, we actually played a couple shows where all three bands played and I played during each set, which was tiring but fun. For the first two Bleeding Through tours, Throwdown brought us out and then Eighteen Visions took us out, so I got to play double sets each night. That’s how incestuous it was.
MICK MORRIS: Everybody was all over the place because Ken and Keith were both in Throwdown. Ken was playing drums in Throwdown and Brandan asked me to play bass in Bleeding Through. That was in 2002. So I was in Bleeding Through for a summer [and played on the 2002 Bleeding Through album Portrait of the Goddess]. Ken and Keith were out with Throwdown and we were swinging back and forth between both bands. James would fly out and we would do an 18V set, then a Bleeding Through set. Then Eighteen Visions’ [2002 album] Vanity came out, which Brandan was a part of and tracked on and wrote half of. At the end of the next Bleeding Through tour there was an 18V tour coming up. Me and Brandan sat down and said, “Dude, we’ve got to figure this out.” I said, “I moved out here to be in 18V. I love Bleeding Through. I love everybody in the band, but my priority is 18V.” And he’s like, “Well, I’m one of the original members of 18V, but Bleeding Through is my thing now.”
DAVE PETERS: Keith decided he wasn’t going to sing for Throwdown anymore. He sang straight through his throat and blew it out. He only wanted to play guitar. I said, “Okay, but then who’s singing and who’s not playing guitar? We already have two guitar players.” He said, “Well, you’ve been in the band the least amount of time, so we’re gonna find another singer and you’re not in the band anymore.” I went, “Well hold on. I can still play guitar just fine. You’re the one who can’t sing anymore. Why are you still in the band and I’m not?” I was really insulted, but in an attempt to make lemonade out of lemons I said, “Let me try and sing.” I ended up trying it and I was kind of shaky at first, but in retrospect it’s the best thing that could have happened because when it comes to performing there’s nothing I like more than singing and interacting with a crowd. Being thrown overboard without a dinghy forced me into the position that suited me best.
By 2000, with the release of its second album, the scabrous Of One Blood, and the addition of charismatic vocalist Brian Fair, Massachusetts band Shadows Fall started making inroads with the U.S. metalcore community. Killswitch Engage followed soon after.
MATT BACHAND: One of the first times Shadows Fall ever left New England was in 2000 when we played the Milwaukee Metal Fest, where we made friends with some people at Century Media. We handed them our disc and they liked it and signed us. Our first few tours were with bands we didn’t fit in with. We went out with Dismember, Kataklysm, and Krisiun, which were all death metal bands, but it kind of worked out. We were the lightest bands on the bill, and we were getting $50 a night and sleeping on whoever’s floor we could find. Maybe we’d eat a slice of pizza once a week. And coming up with the money to fill the tank to get to the next show was rough. But it was fun as hell.
BRIAN FAIR: We realized we could do these tours opening for death metal bands because these crowds across the country and world started responding to our music. We went, “Holy shit, we might be able to quit our day jobs someday.” But even after we had done four full records, I was still working as a gourmet ice cream chef for a few days a week in Cambridge, [Massachusetts], [bassist] Paul [Romanko] was working in a grocery store, Matt was working in a shoe store, [guitarist] Jon [Donais] was at a Hot Topic in the mall, and [drummer] Jason [Bittner] was working in the IT field.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Nine months after we started Killswitch we still didn’t have a singer. We had tried out thirty or forty guys and nothing was working. Then Adam [Dutkiewicz’s] brother, [Toby], who was the vocalist in Aftershock, suggested we try Jesse Leach. Toby had put out a recor
d of Jesse’s old band, Current, who were from Rhode Island. And it was pretty much, “If this guy Jesse doesn’t work, we should probably just say forget it, because this is lame. We’re playing the same songs over and over with no singer. Why should we write more if we don’t have something to let us move forward?” So I was told that this new singer guy was going to come to my house and we were going to drive to a practice space in Westfield. I was living in Worcester at the time, and he shows up at my door. I didn’t quite know who Jesse was until he came over and then I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen you moshing at shows. Let’s do this, this should be really fun.” And he worked out perfectly—for a while.
JESSE LEACH (Killswitch Engage, Times of Grace): One day Adam called me out of the blue and said, “Hey I’m jamming with Mike D. from Overcast and we’ve been looking for a vocalist for a long time for this side project. Do you want to audition?” I went over there and after the first song, Killswitch was born.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Overcast and Aftershock had gone in such crazy directions, we were throwing a million genres into one song, and these songs started to be, like, twelve minutes long. For people with ADD, it wasn’t making sense anymore. You’d play a show and no one would get it unless they’d seen you thirty times. So we took a step back and looked at what else was going on. We saw what was going on with Hatebreed, who had been together for quite a while. They had this simplistic style and they sold a million records on Victory [Records]. So we took our whole book of writing songs and threw it out the window and started from scratch and stripped everything down, and added these guitar harmonies inspired by Swedish melodic death metal.
JAMEY JASTA (Jasta 14, Hatebreed, Kingdom of Sorrow; ex-host, MTV’s Headbangers Ball): With the Massachusetts bands following right behind us, we knew they were going to have a lot of success, too. With Hatebreed, we always had everything going against us. We’re not the greatest players; I can only hold a couple of different notes. But what we lacked in talent, we more than made up for with sheer animalistic drive and ambition. Whereas with the Massachusetts bands, these guys were seriously talented. When Killswitch first started bubbling up on Alive or Just Breathing, those riffs, the drums, Jesse’s vocals—we all knew it was going to be very big.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Killswitch got signed pretty easily. I was doing graphic design for Ferret [Records], and I just happened to say, “Hey, I have a new band,” and [label founder Carl Severson] said, “Send it to me.” So I sent him the demo and he really liked it and wanted to put it out. Suddenly we had a self-titled album.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: Even with Killswitch, in the beginning we were in our van, making really terrible guarantees. We’d come home from tours with no money, stay on people’s floors, eat pizza every day, rent vans that would break down every hundred miles. Once, we drove five hundred miles to play a show in Tallahassee, Florida, and when we got to the club no one was there, so we called to find out what was up. They came down and said, “Oh, we didn’t tell you? The whole place is flooded with feces.” The sewer had backed up in the club, so they canceled the show without telling us.
MATT BACHAND: We had so many weird shows. We played with Hatebreed and Diecast in Brockton, [Massachusetts], and a box of merch got stolen, which was like a box of gold bars to a band like us at that time. We weren’t even getting paid for the show. It was a three-hour drive. And then we find out the promoter left with all of the money. He just took off. We had $50 coming to us. So at 3 a.m. the Hatebreed crew went to his house and the rest of the story I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I’m pretty sure they got their money, though.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Carl Severson was working at Roadrunner as the new media manager, which is a fancy word for website guy. Any time he’d have a release on his record label, he’d hand it out to all the A&R guys at Roadrunner, as if to say, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing, maybe you should think about going in a different direction.” At the time, Roadrunner was pretty nu metal. He handed our record to A&R man Mike Gitter, who called me up at my parents’ house. I couldn’t believe that this guy from Roadrunner was calling me. It was never anything we aspired to, and when I brought it up to the guys, everyone laughed at me, literally. They were like, “That’s stupid. Why would they want to have anything to do with us?”
MIKE GITTER (Razor & Tie; ex-A&R, Roadrunner): When Carl gave me that first [self-titled] Killswitch record [in 2000], it blew my mind. I went and saw the band at a tiny art gallery in Western Mass. called the Flywheel. There were, maybe, fifty people there. Unearth was the opener. Adam D. was still on drums. I loved the passion behind it all—Jesse’s emotional vocals and spiritual lyrics with riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on a Carcass or In Flames record.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Mike Gitter actually lied to Roadrunner and told them that we sold a lot more records than we did when they signed us, otherwise I’m not even sure we would have gotten the deal. I think we were at about two thousand records for [2000’s Killswitch Engage], and he probably told them ten thousand. He made me swear never to tell Roadrunner how many records we initially sold so he didn’t look bad. It was basically a big dupe.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: Working on our second Killswitch Engage album, [2002’s] Alive or Just Breathing, was incredibly difficult. I would drive two hours to Jesse’s place in Providence with a mobile digital recording rig, and we’d work on his vocals in his living room. There were nights where he’d literally sing for five minutes and then say his throat hurt and he couldn’t do it. Then I’d drive two hours back home. It was a bad situation for everyone. He didn’t know how to prevent throat fatigue and it ended up cornering and overwhelming him.
JESSE LEACH: I had all these misconceptions about my voice. I didn’t know how to sing properly. I had no technique. So I would get up there and bleed my soul through a microphone and force my voice out and my vocal chords would smash together.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: There was literally this gradual self-implosion that started with Jesse around the time when we signed to Roadrunner. Not to point fingers, but when we worked on the first Roadrunner record [Alive or Just Breathing], Jesse was getting a lot of outside pressure from the label, most notably our A&R guy Mike Gitter, who would make phone calls saying, “You should try to sound like this” or “Maybe you should use this for inspiration.” A lot of people are able to deal with that kind of stress, but Jesse internalized all of it. He took everything to heart, and I think that was the beginning of the destruction of Jesse being a front man in the band. His concentration was scattered all over the place and his confidence was crushed.
MIKE GITTER: Was there pressure on Jesse to deliver the best vocals he could? Absolutely. Was this one of the contributing factors to Jesse leaving the band? Sure. That wasn’t the only factor. Jesse had just gotten married and felt a responsibility to his wife. He also felt the pressure of everything that was going on around Killswitch at the time. It wasn’t an easy time for the guy. I don’t think that with Jesse, Killswitch would have become as big as they did. They would have done well, but not become the commercial band that they became with Howard Jones.
JESSE LEACH: Our first official tour was with Soilwork, and those guys had a ritual of doing beer bongs. When Adam and [guitarist] Joel [Stroetzel] got seasoned by them, it was ridiculous. They would get so drunk, and I would get irritated. If I was in a better place, I’m sure I would have laughed a lot harder at some of the hilarity. Adam is still one of the funniest guys I know, and the banter between him and Joel when they were drunk in the van was hilarious. They were like the two old guys from the Muppets who could take any situation and pick it apart and make it funny.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: I played drums straight through the release of the first Roadrunner record, [2002’s] Alive or Just Breathing, which was at least a year and a half. As soon as the record was released, that’s when we decided to be a five-piece instead of a four-piece, just for a bigger sound. That, and I was tired of setting up the drum kit. So we got our friend Tom [Gomes] in to play [drum
s] and I moved to guitar.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Playing with Adam has always been hilarious. Even in the beginning, he’d wear a Viking helmet onstage behind his drum set and blow horns and play kazoos and do everything he could to make people look at him. It’s so funny because he started out as a really timid guy and he just blew up into this dude ready to get nuts.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: We’ve always liked getting our drink on, just bro-ing down and being goofy. Jesse didn’t really vibe with that. I’ve always found that a bunch of drinks before a show tames the jitters. Joel says that if he doesn’t have drinks before he goes on, he can’t remember how to play the songs. There’s definitely been nights where I’ve been less than tight, but I think for the most part I’m pretty good at remembering stuff, somehow. I don’t know how I do it. Muscle memory, I guess.
JESSE LEACH: When we toured, I did my best to stay completely sober. No beers, no nothing, because I had read that alcohol is bad for your voice and it dries you out. Back then, a lot of the clubs allowed smoking. So I’d be in these smoky rooms and I would be freaking out, which is part of the reason I would hide out all the time. Basically, while they were all having fun, I kept to myself in the van. I thought not talking between shows was good. I was way wet behind the ears.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: It got to a point [in 2002] where Jesse was miserable. He felt like he couldn’t talk, he missed his wife, his throat was always a gamble. We canceled two or three shows because of his throat problems. By the end of the first tour, we had played all these gigs in these terrible venues with nobody showing up, and finally we were in Seattle, about to play our last show. There was a great turnout, the club was amazing. We were so amped up. Great vibes, great city. Then all of a sudden Jesse goes, “You know what, I can’t do this. I’m leaving.” He packed his stuff and hopped the plane home to go be with his family.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 58
