Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  PAUL GRAY: We decided to go in the studio and do a CD right away, which was crazy because we had only done a couple shows. It took forever to make, it was expensive, and we paid for it ourselves—a couple hundred bucks an hour. Andy and I were doing concrete to pay for it. We borrowed a lot of money from Shawn’s wife, who actually had a job. The producer, Sean McMahon, was super Christian, and he was in turmoil because he thought we were Satanic. We were in the studio day and night. We’d sleep there and watch porn and videos of people killing themselves or getting killed. The producer walked in while we were watching this stuff, and he stood there for a couple minutes and then had a mental breakdown and locked himself in the bathroom for a few hours. We were getting charged for him to sit in there and cry. He ended up getting [guitarist] Donnie [Steele] to quit because he convinced him that what we were doing was evil. Donnie was supposed to play all the leads and he started not showing up. That record took so long to make that by the time we were finally done, it didn’t really represent us.

  JOEY JORDISON: Everything was a work in progress. We experimented a lot because we weren’t really sure where we wanted to go. The cover of that album—Mate.Feed.Kill.Repeat—is me naked in this cage contraption that Shawn welded together. It’s 20 degrees out and I’m in the middle of a fucking cornfield freezing to death. In the picture you can see my foot looks like a goddamn devil hoof. That wasn’t intended, but we saw it and went, “Fuck, we’re onto something.” It was all about misery, and that’s what we love—the misery, the hurt, and the pain. We’re gonna kill ourselves more than any other band. Slipknot is absolutely the most painful thing you could ever endure.

  MICK THOMSON (Slipknot): They had already recorded Mate.Feed.Kill.Repeat when Paul asked me to play with them. It was weird because Joey and I had this personal beef going from before Slipknot. It was a stupid, childish thing. He once gave me a look I didn’t appreciate, and I don’t think he appreciated the look I gave back to him. So we were both like, “Yeah, fuck that guy.” It’s funny. Talking about it to him years later, it was like, “Wow, we were stupid because we were wrong.”

  PAUL GRAY: We got a wake-up call when we were in a battle of the bands hosted by the local radio station. We went up against Stone Sour and we won. Show-wise, we blew them away, but Corey’s voice was killer. We read back what the judges wrote and they raved about our performance and music. The only negative thing they would say was about our vocalist. He could do death metal, but he would try to sing, too, and it just sounded horrible. We knew something had to change.

  ANDY COLSEFNI: Right before Corey came in there were no feelings of negativity in my mind at all. We were constantly in the studio re-recording things or putting something else down for Roadrunner, trying to seal that deal. I was walking on clouds. I thought we were actually going to make it work. It wasn’t until after I came back from a long weekend vacation with my family that I found out that without ever talking to me, they had Corey come in and record over a bunch of my vocal tracks.

  SHAWN CRAHAN: I bought a bar because we got banned from playing everywhere else. We used to saw on things and make sparks, and we’d go into the crowd and put a noose over fans’ heads and drag them around with it. No one wanted that in their place. Andy helped get that world going. But we knew we had to replace him with Corey. If we were smart and mature, we would have said, “Andy, play the drums.” But he wanted to be the lead singer so he quit, and I don’t think he made a mistake. I absolutely know he’s not supposed to be in this band. It’s no offense to him, but this is Slipknot. He was throwing fits and not growing, not evolving, and we were on the fuckin’ bulldozer and there was a maniac driving it. We were frightened, all of us. Scared to death. But it felt good.

  JOEY JORDISON: Me, Mick, and Shawn came into the porn shop Corey worked at one night and circled the DVDs and looked at them a little bit. Corey was almost ready to piss his fuckin’ pants. He thought we were there to beat him up since he was in Stone Sour. We went up to him and said, “All right man, straight up: You wanna join Slipknot?”

  COREY TAYLOR: I know there’s a big legend about how they threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t join the band. It’s completely untrue. They were so nervous it was fucking adorable. Clown was constantly moving around, couldn’t stand still. He went, “Hey, you know . . . I’m just gonna be straight up with you. . . . We want you to join the band. . . .” Joey was mumbling something and Mick was going, “Look, man, I just wanna do whatever we gotta do to make it.” I was like, “Holy shit!” I was still doing Stone Sour and I was very devoted to that band. So I said, “Well, gimme a little time to think about it,” but in the back of my head I knew.

  PAUL GRAY: At first, the plan was to keep Andy, too, and have him just play the percussion and scream the heavier stuff. We actually did one show like that and it was good. But Andy wanted to be the singer so he announced at his second show with Corey that he was quitting the band. We didn’t even know that was coming, but we were relieved because he was so unhappy we brought Corey in. It took us from being a really big local band to a place where we knew we could get a record deal. It was definitely Corey’s vocals that changed it.

  JIM ROOT: I was pissed at Corey when he joined Slipknot. Shit was going really well for Stone Sour so I couldn’t understand why he’d leave.

  It wasn’t just Taylor’s vocals—which can grate like a tire spinning on gravel or flow like a troubadour singing tales of heartbreak—that brought Slipknot sudden attention. It was their ugly aesthetic, which included macabre costumes, conceptual approaches to albums and shows, multimedia presentations, and the type of performance art antics usually reserved for experimental industrial bands.

  COREY TAYLOR: We had this bootleg videotape that we had named “Sex, Death and Mayhem.” It had all this crazy animation, snuff shit, and real death. We decided to splice together an hour of footage from that for a Halloween show, and the footage culminated with the Bud Dwyer suicide. [Dwyer was the former treasurer of Pennsylvania who, in 1987, after being accused of accepting a bribe, held a press conference in which he removed a .357 Magnum from a manila envelope, inserted the loaded revolver in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.] We looped it, so at the end of “Scissors,” there’s Bud Dwyer popping himself over and over. I watched people’s faces staring in absolute horror because not only did we loop it, we slowed it down [laughs]. We were fucked-up at the time—so angry and so hungry and willing to do anything to make a statement. We lost half of our fans at that show. I had a friend who still, to this day, will not talk to me. She looked at me straight in the face and said, “This is disgusting, this is not gonna go anywhere. You are not the person I thought you were.”

  SHAWN CRAHAN: I came up with the name “maggots” for our fans, and it’s simple. I had a dead bird that was given to me. I watched the maggots come and I studied them. We used to inhale the fumes from this bird before we played and just—death, man. When you inhale it into your lungs there’s just this sickness that overtakes you and makes you throw up, and we’d walk onstage with that. I’d watch this thing and I’d see the maggots grow and they’d die in the liquid ’cause it was in a jar and they’d drown and didn’t get to be flies. I was watching the fans one day and they were all pushed together. Once in a while one of them would get on top. I was like, “Wow. Maggots burrow themselves straight up and down like that and they eat, and when they’re done they fall on top and they literally roll to the back.” I was like, “Maggots. You feed off of us. Then hopefully you get your life going. One day you will get the wings of flies and fly away.”

  At first glance, System of a Down was as unlikely to become famous in LA as Slipknot was in the Midwest. Yet for a period of time they were the darlings of the Los Angeles scene. The band, which re-formed in 2010 after a six-year hiatus, was composed completely of Armenian musicians who eschewed traditional metal in favor of something more bizarre. Their influences were all over the place—Dead Kennedys, Black Sabbath, Slayer, Mr. Bungle, Frank Zappa, Parliamen
t/Funkadelic, Middle Eastern and Armenian music—and they shifted rythmic gears multiple times between songs. Yet their chemistry was so strong, their melodies so clever, and their lyrics so compelling—a combination of politics, angst, and nonsense—that they demanded attention.

  DARON MALAKIAN (System of a Down): We started playing out at the late end of the whole grunge thing—end of ’95—and we didn’t really know what was going on in the metal scene in LA, to be honest. We had never been those guys who go out on Sunset Strip. So when we went to LA to play shows it was a weird shock to the scene; the other bands were like, “Who the hell are these dudes?” We were four Armenian guys, and in the early days a lot of Armenian kids came out and supported us. But we never really felt like a part of any scene.

  SERJ TANKIAN (System of a Down): I wouldn’t say we were grounded in the Armenian community. We’re proud of our heritage and it’s definitely an influence that we don’t want to deny. But it’s not specifically something we’ve tried to incorporate in our music and say, “Hey look, we’re Armenian.”

  DARON MALAKIAN: The two or three years that we were selling out clubs and had a huge buzz in LA, nobody wanted to sign us because we were Armenian. We were told, “Yeah, you know you guys have a big buzz. There’s a big Armenian community in LA. But who’s gonna get you in Texas? Who’s gonna get you in Germany? Who’s gonna get you in these places where they don’t even know what an Armenian is?” We never considered the Armenian thing to be such a big deal; it just was.

  SERJ TANKIAN: When we write new songs, we try not to sound like System of a Down, let alone anyone else. That keeps us not only a step ahead, but a step ahead of ourselves. The reason we do a lot of different things in the same song is because you don’t wake up in the morning and think about one thing during your whole day. You think about love for a second, you think about hate, you get angry at your boss. With System of a Down, we want to bring all of that kind of life emotion into the music.

  DARON MALAKIAN: After years of having every record company shut their doors on us, we finally got a manager who knew someone who knew [American Recordings president] Rick Rubin, and Rick ended up coming to see us at the Viper Room, and he loved it.

  SERJ TANKIAN: We had a couple lineup shifts before we got signed. We had a bassist [Dave Hakopyan] who was a great player, but he didn’t really fit in with our vision, so we got Shavo [Odadjian], who had been hanging out with us for a long time and was a guitarist in our previous band, Soil. Plus he and Daron vibed better. They both grew up on KISS and they played really well together. [Hakopyan later joined the Armenian metal band Apex Theory.]

  DARON MALAKIAN: We were on the verge of getting signed and had been talking to [drummer John Dolmayan], whose own band was falling apart. We shared studios with him and we noticed there were personal issues that [our drummer] Andy [Ontronik Khachaturian] was having that were getting in the way of the band. He was a great player, but he was unstable. We told John, “Look, if something happens, we might need your help.” Next thing we know, Andy gets into a fight and punches a wall, shattering every bone from his fingers all the way up to his elbow. I was hanging out with Shavo that day, and he goes, “Hey man, Andy just broke his arm,” and right away I said, “Call John.” I didn’t even stutter. Then we went in and did the record.

  When its self-titled debut came out in 1998, System of a Down hit the road with more traditional metal bands and eventually won over Slayer’s fans and other tough crowds. The album eventually went platinum, and the band’s second record, 2001’s Toxicity, which featured the radio hit “Aerials,” has gone triple platinum. Morally, if not musically, System of a Down had a similar vibe to Tool. Neither band partied especially hard, the members valued their privacy, and their primary goal was to make music, not trouble. Tool was even more popular than System. To date, all its releases have gone platinum or double platinum, except for 1996’s Ænima, which is triple platinum. In 2012, Tool was working on its fifth release. Despite its financial success, the band has experienced various growing pains and personality conflicts.

  MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: Near the recording of Undertow, you’re really starting to figure each other out and see the nuances and hang-ups and emotional and mental obstacles. I think we went from zero to jaded in under thirty seconds. The honeymoon was definitely over and we started to see what was happening out there with bands coming and going. Toward the end of the tour we were watching amazing bands like Fishbone struggling to make it. We used to think Fishbone was gonna be around forever.

  ADAM JONES: We got asked to do all these strange things. Once this girl asked us to play an anti-vivisection show at the [Hollywood] Palladium, and she was talking about how killing animals is wrong—but she was wearing leather Doc [Martens]! We said, “Okay, we’ll do it,” but we went the other way with it because we feel that life feeding on life is very natural.

  MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: We came out with acoustic guitars and started playing “Maynard’s Dick” for this sold out crowd that wasn’t even there to see us. The chorus goes, “Slide a mile six inches at a time on Maynard’s dick.” So we’re already trying to be offensive. Then right in the middle of the song, we started picking up all these $5 acoustic guitars we got from Tijuana that we had stacked by the side of the stage and we began smashing them. We pulled out chainsaws and tore the hell out of these things.

  ADAM JONES: That performance was the birth of “Disgustipated,” which is the industrial track at the end of Undertow. We also bought two pianos for $100 a pop through The Recycler and [while recording] at Grand Master Studios, we shot them up with shotguns, bashed the shit out of them, and then we [played them and] had a guy come in and help us with sampling, which was really a new thing at the time.

  MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: I had a shotgun with blanks in it and I’m shooting it off inside the Palladium, flames leaping up out of the barrel towards the curtain. There were all these horrified people there to save the bunnies, and here we are screaming, “Life feeds on life!”

  ADAM JONES: After we finished, the girl with the leather Docs went, “Oh, that was so great!” She totally missed the point [laughs].

  DANNY CAREY: After we put out Undertow we went on tour with the Rollins Band and we could tell we were winning over hundreds of fans every night. Then we were lucky enough to have a connection that got us on Lollapalooza. So suddenly, MTV had to pay attention to us. They played our [surreal stop-action] video [for “Sober”] one time and they got bombarded with requests. We watched our record go from nowhere to number 50 on the charts, and it stayed there for two years. Suddenly we go from playing for 100 people in a club to performing for 20,000 people a night on Lollapalooza.

  MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: A lot of my songs are very personal, so one of the biggest obstacles for me was overcoming the emotional and physical drain of being on the road trying to perform those songs every night in front of huge crowds.

  ADAM JONES: “Prison Sex” was the second single and the record company was getting all geared up for that. Contractually, they were supposed to talk to us about any sort of publicity stunt they pulled on our behalf. But without telling us, they made little kid T-shirts with our Tool wrench logo on there, which is actually a phallic symbol; it looks like a penis with testicles. So, the label was going to send the shirts to all the radio stations to promote “Prison Sex” because Nirvana sent T-shirts for one of their songs. Maynard goes, “Do you know what that song’s about?” They went, “Uhhh, no.” He said, “It’s about getting fucked in the ass and being a little kid and then that child abuse cycling [to the next generation].” They went, “Oh my god” and the shirts never went out.

  MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN: The tragic part of that is they didn’t get the joke they had accidentally made. They were just that stupid. We had to go, “This is funny. I don’t think you know it’s funny, but it’s funny and, no, we can’t send these to people.”

  Tool’s traumas may have been mostly silly and superficial; Machine Head was dealing with real problem
s caused by dysfunction and overindulgence.

  ROBB FLYNN: By the time I was writing for the [1997] album [The More Things Change . . .] I was too fucked-up to care as much as I should have. I was drinking a lot and getting into a self-destructive phase. I put on a bunch of weight and got very insecure about it. I started making myself throw up after every meal and became a full-blown bulimic. Now, when I listen to the lyrics, it takes me right back there. That was the beginning of this manic partying. There were times we’d have sixty people on our bus blinded out of their heads. The VOD guys introduced us to Special K and we fucking loved that. It was elephant tranquilizers. Adam [Duce] and I did that and we were fucking crushed.

  DAVE McCLAIN (ex–Sacred Reich, Machine Head): Ozzy canceled his set at Ozzfest in Columbus, Ohio, right before he came out. Sharon was telling Phil [Anselmo] “You’ve gotta go out and tell the crowd Ozzy’s not gonna be here.” Phil said, “I’m not gonna go out there unless Robb’s with me.” Then they started getting people to sing. So, all the singers who knew Ozzy’s songs sang with his backing band.

  ROBB FLYNN: Phil and I do “I Don’t Know” and Manson and I do “Crazy Train.” Then they just wanted me to stay up there. But by the fifth or sixth song, everyone was like, “What the fuck’s going on?” So you start to see from the back of the amphitheater all these little fires pop up. The grass is frying and part of the fence goes up. It’s like, “Holy shit there’s gonna be a riot!” So Anselmo, who’s got the most undesirable job in the world at that point, comes out and says, “All right, Ozzy’s not gonna be fucking. . . .” Boo-oo-oo-oo! Next thing we know, the police helicopters are there.