Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  MATT PINFIELD (TV host, 120 Minutes; DJ): We’re partying under Roseland, doing blow and drinking. It was before a trip to rehab for me. I see Twiggy and Marilyn, and they’re sitting there, and Marilyn just looked at me and goes, “Pinfield, you scare us.”

  ALICE COOPER: When I first saw Marilyn Manson I went, “Well, I can understand this: a new Alice Cooper for a new generation.” It was sort of like, “Hmm, girl’s name, makeup, tall, slender, theatrical”—except that he found different pressure points and anger points within the audience. “I’m gonna be a devil worshipper. I’m gonna tear the Bible up. I’m gonna do all this Nazi stuff.” This was going to irritate every parent and every church in America. I totally got it [though] I was surprised that he went with a girl’s name, only because that just made it totally Alice Cooper. When I saw his show, I realized it was different. But at the same time, I could not buy into his theology at all. The guy was in the Church of Satan. When I announced that I was Christian, he suddenly disowned me saying, “I hate Alice Cooper because he’s Christian.”

  MARILYN MANSON: I’m completely unlike a lot of other performers in the past who have been forgiven or come to terms with the real world because they tell everyone their performance is just a show. So people say, “Oh, it’s okay then. We don’t care. He’s not really a bad person.” It’s not just a show for me. It’s my life. I live my art. I’m not just playing a character onstage. Anyone who thinks I’m just trying to be this weird or shocking guy is missing the point. I’ve never tried to be merely shocking because it’s too simple. I could do a lot more shocking things [than I do]. I’ve just always asserted myself as a villain because the villain in any walk of life is the person who refuses to follow blindly and always wants to question things.

  ALICE COOPER: Manson and I had about twenty-five rounds of dueling against each other in the press. But we finally did meet in Transylvania at a festival around 2008. He walked by the dressing room and knocked on the door and opened it as I was getting ready, and he said, “Can I come in?” I said, “You know what? It’s about time we met.” We got along very well. But I still held to the point that my belief in Christianity was something where his show did offend me in a lot of places. Tearing up the Bible and throwing it in the audience—that was very offensive to me. But he came up onstage and did “Eighteen” with us and then I did “Sweet Dreams” with him. I understood that for this generation there needed to be a new villain, and he was that villain.

  MARILYN MANSON: I was born to be a rock star, so I’m just trying to be the best one that I can. We’re in an era where rock music is gradually becoming extinct, and I think it’s important for me to ensure that it survives and that it survives with a personality and an attitude, and not mediocrity. The only rock music that exists right now isn’t doing what the people that created the music form intended for it to do. Now I feel I can balance perfectly because I can be as sober as I want, or I can out-drink Frank Sinatra or Jim Morrison, and I could do more drugs than Andy Gibb, and I could still get up and look better than all four Spice Girls.

  JEFF HANNEMAN: When we toured with Manson [in 2007] I went onto his bus one time and he says, “Hey, Jeff.” I go, “Hey, what’s up?” He says, “Hey, come kick me in the balls.” I told him, “I’m not gonna fuckin’ kick you in the balls.” I was like, “This is too weird. I gotta go.”

  TRENT REZNOR [2009 interview]: Manson is a malicious guy and will step on anybody’s face to succeed and cross any line of decency. Seeing him now, drugs and alcohol rule his life and he’s become a dopey clown. During the Spiral tour we propped [Manson’s band] up to get our audience turned on to them, and at that time a lot of the people in my circle were pretty far down the road as alcoholics. Not Manson. His drive for success and self-preservation was so high he pretended to be fucked up a lot when he wasn’t. Things got shitty between us, and I’m not blameless. The majority of it, though, was coming from a [resentful] guy who finally got out from under the master’s umbrella and was able to stab him in the back.

  MARILYN MANSON: A doped-up clown sounds kinda fun. It sounds like something you’d send to a kid’s party and be really upset you’ve hired the wrong person. Which is kinda me. Lipstick, drunk sometimes. . . . Since I’ve known Trent he’s always let his jealousy and bitterness for other people get in the way. I’m not talking about me—I sat back and watched him be jealous of Kurt Cobain and [Smashing Pumpkins’] Billy Corgan and a lot of other musicians. I stopped thinking about him a while back, but I know that every day I have a song played where the money will go to him, forever. As long as I have a record deal it will be attached to him financially. In the words of his own song, you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you—you should take that hand and punch yourself in the face.

  Around the same time that Trent Reznor was falling out with Marilyn Manson, White Zombie was heading for the grave. The band, which started as a tight-knit group, had become a business entity, and the bond that once united them was splintering.

  ROB ZOMBIE: The last seven years of the band were pretty shitty. No one got along, no one ever wanted to do the same thing. It was like when you have a group of friends, and everyone outgrows each other. But when you’ve got all this money involved and these expectations about what you’re supposed to do, it forces all those people to stay together and you drive each other fucking crazy.

  SEAN YSEULT: It’s weird that he would say that because we were together eleven years, and most of that time was really good. But when we were in the middle of a tour with Testament in 1992, [drummer] Ivan de Prume and Rob got in a big fight onstage. Ivan made a slipup and Rob got mad and spit on him. Ivan was like, “I quit!” Rob said, “Okay, quit!” I thought we could work things out, but at that point it was irreconcilable. That was sad because we were like a gang or a family of misfits. By that time the band and business had really taken over our relationship, so Rob and I decided to call it quits as a couple. That was when we started working on Astro Creep 2000, [which came out in 1995].

  ROB ZOMBIE: When we recorded the last record, I don’t think the four of us were in the studio at any point. I would ride on a separate bus at all times. Separate dressing rooms. It was just four people who didn’t work at all. That was beyond stressful. Everything about it should have been great. We had finally made it, we sold millions of records, we were playing in big, sold-out arenas. On the outside, it looked so fucking great, but on the inside it sucked.

  SEAN YSEULT: I dated Al [Jourgensen] for a while in 1995, and I don’t think that helped my relationship with Rob any [laughs]. Al and I packed a couple of years into a whirlwind couple of months. He almost drove us off a cliff at Johnny Depp’s house. It was late one night and Al was backing up. I told him he should back up a little slower ’cause we were getting ready to go off a cliff, and he proceeded to back up really quickly. It was just like in a Looney Tunes cartoon. The car was teetering back and forth and we had to delicately leap out of the Taurus back onto safe ground and spend the night there until we could get a tow truck.

  ROB ZOMBIE: Now [as a solo performer with a new band], I’m finally in a place where I’m with a group of friends doing this weird thing and we’re all on the same page. I never had that before. This feels like what that was always supposed to be.

  SEAN YSEULT: The end for White Zombie came because Rob wanted the band to go a little more techno. He hired [programmer] Charlie Clouser from Nine Inch Nails to write techno tracks, and [guitarist] Jay [Yuenger] and I had to create riffs over them on a couple of songs. Rob can be really controlling. Whoever’s on his team, it’s them against the world. Once Jay and I didn’t want to go along with him creatively, he kind of considered us against him.

  Most industrial bands that formed in the eighties had played electronic music and alternative rock prior to integrating their music with metal. One of the first extreme metal bands to tinker with samples and electronics was Fear Factory.

  DINO CAZARES (Fear Factory, Divine Heresy): I first heard [vocalist]
Burton [C. Bell] singing in the shower. In the late eighties, we both lived in this eight-bedroom house in Hollywood that this guy rented out to starving musicians. Burt’s in there singing some U2 songs and I thought, “Hey, it sounds pretty good.” Later, we met and started talking and I found out he was into some heavy, heavy industrial shit. I was into grindcore, death metal, and speed metal, so he turned me on to stuff I didn’t know and we decided to start a band together.

  BURTON C. BELL (Fear Factory): The reason I moved into that house was because I was in this industrial noise band called Hateface and my other bandmates lived there. When we broke up, Dino said, “Hey man, I know this great drummer. We’re gonna meet and jam. Come with me.” That’s when we went and met Raymond [Herrera].

  DINO CAZARES: I said to Raymond, “Yo, I’m trying to put a band together. Let me know if you’re interested.” He said, “Well, I know a band looking for a guitar player. Why don’t you go jam with them?” So I went and joined this grindcore band called Excruciating Terror. But I was like, “Eh, I need something a little more experimental.” One day I was at rehearsal and the drummer didn’t show up. Raymond happened to be there to watch us rehearse, and he got behind the kit and I was like, “Oh, man, this guy can play double-bass pretty good. Maybe I can see something going on there.” So I quit Excruciating Terror after two shows. And Raymond goes, “Well, our guitar player quit. Wanna join my band?” His band was horrible. They were called Extreme Death. But I saw the potential in Raymond. So I asked him to join forces with me. I said, “We already got a singer,” because Burton was on board. So we formed the band Ulceration, and later, three of those songs came out on Fear Factory records.

  BURTON C. BELL: Dino was friends with [producer] Ross Robinson, and Ross wanted to get into producing. He had an investor and he was engineering at Fort Apache, which was [W.A.S.P. front man] Blackie Lawless’s place. Ross heard our demos and said, “Hey, I love your sound. I want to start my own label. I want to produce.” We went, “Okay.” So we went into Ross’s studio and recorded sixteen songs in a week and a half, and it sounded killer. Then he handed us this contract [which would have given him ownership of everything]. We showed it to our lawyer, and he was like, “Don’t sign that!” We didn’t, so basically, Ross owned the masters, but we still owned the songs, we just couldn’t use the versions Ross produced. So we sent the DAT of those recordings to Roadrunner, and that’s what got us signed. Later, Ross played our demo for Korn to show them he knew how to produce bands. He played them “Scapegoat,” and then all of a sudden you hear a song called “Blind” coming from Korn. I think Ross was a real helpful inspiration to them by showing them that sound.

  ROSS ROBINSON (producer): I kind of got jacked and I thought, “Oh gosh, maybe I should have a band sign a piece of paper before I record them.” The next band I worked with was Korn. At least [Korn] signed something, and they could’ve jacked me too, but they stuck by me, where the Fear Factory guys just jacked me. I mean, I love those guys now; we were all just kids, doing the best we could.

  DINO CAZARES: On the first album we didn’t have a bass player, but we got [Andrew Shives] after the record was done, so we put him on the album cover and used him for touring. But he and Raymond didn’t get along, so after the record came out we needed to find another bass player. A week or two later, Christian [Olde Wolbers] came in. Our rehearsal room was in South Central LA, a heavy gang area. Sometimes we’d open the door and hear “pop, pop, pop.” And we knew someone was getting shot at. So we’d close the door and wait til it was over. During the Rodney King riots the owner of the place put “black-owned business” on the door so the building wouldn’t be burned down. The day we auditioned Christian, we had a few bass players waiting outside, including him. He was like, “Man, where the fuck am I? I’m gonna get jumped. I’m gonna get killed!” We liked him—not because he could play that well, but because he was different. He wasn’t from the LA scene.

  BURTON C. BELL: The first record, Soul of a New Machine, was definitely an introduction to Fear Factory. I have been told a few times that the whole metalcore vocal style [death metal vocals leading into a clean, melodic chorus] is all my fault. When we started out, it definitely took people aback.

  DINO CAZARES: When Soul of a New Machine came out, some people were like, “Whoa, this is new.” Other people went, “He’s singing melodically? That shouldn’t be on a fuckin’ death metal record!” I’ve heard a lot of people say Burt ripped off [Killswitch Engage singer] Howard Jones’s style. I’m like, “Uh, well, that was Burt’s thing. He was doing that before Howard.”

  BURTON C. BELL: It wasn’t until we did the remix of Soul of a New Machine [called] Fear is the Mindkiller [1993] that we met (ex-Front Line Assembly programmer) Rhys Fulber, and we went, “Wow. This is a great sound. We could really move this forward.” We were always fans of Ministry and KMFDM, and we thought we should integrate some of those more industrial elements into our sound. That’s where our second album, Demanufacture, came in. We brought Rhys in to co-produce and do the soundscapes for it, and it was that union that really helped create the sound that we’re known for.

  Fear Factory’s albums abounded with experimentation, innovation, and mathematical precision that required endless hours of intense studio time. However, perfection came at a price. The members argued frequently and grew further apart with each release. On the road, tempers flared, and the musicians antagonized one another out of boredom.

  RAYMOND HERRERA: Dino would get under Burt’s skin pretty frequently. They would argue about the color of the sky. That created a lot of tension. Then we had some misfortunes that didn’t help. In 1994, we had all our gear stolen in Philadelphia. We show up at the hotel. We had a long night. We wake up. Our truck is gone. All our shit was gone. We had to cancel the tour and go home. Also, the rest of us liked to party and Dino didn’t get high at all. His only real vice was having sex with whoever he could find.

  DINO CAZARES: I didn’t do drugs and I hardly drank. I was definitely a sex addict. I never had a girlfriend for that reason. I was into full-on orgies. Once, I had four chicks at one time. I was picking girls from the audience and pointing them out to my personal assistant, who had a red bandana. He’d go through the crowd and when he found her he’d wave the bandana. I’d give him the thumbs up, and he would talk to her. Nine times out of ten, the girl I wanted would come back. I had some girls waiting on one side of the stage and other girls on the other. During the five-minute wait before the encore, I’d go backstage and get a quick blowjob and then come back on and start the next song. On average, I’d have sex with two girls a night.

  RAYMOND HERRERA: The rest of us had girlfriends or were married, so we didn’t get into that. But there was plenty of it around. Seeing the same girl with three different guys from three different bands in one night just comes with the territory.

  DINO CAZARES: In 1994 we were out with Sepultura and we had this tour manager whose communication skills were horrible. He talked to everyone like they were pieces of shit. I knew I had to get him back some time and I knew he was a really big stoner. One day this kid came to the show and said, “Hey Dino, can you let me in? I got some weed for you.” I walked him in the back door and took the weed. All of a sudden I had an idea. I picked up a girl and took her to the bathroom. She gave me a blowjob and right when I came, I pulled out of her mouth and shot my load on this weed. The girl thought I was fuckin’ weird. She bolted, but I didn’t care. I put the weed back in the foil, let it sit for a few days and ferment. I told everybody on the whole tour, “Look, I’m gonna give this nugget that I shot a load on to our tour manager when he’s behind the soundboard.” That’s exactly what I did. Everybody was watching. He opened it up and put it in his pipe and took a hit, and everybody’s like, “Oh, my fucking god!” He blew it out and went, “That’s some really good weed.” Everybody just blew up laughing.

  Fear Factory’s commercial peak came with 1998’s Obsolete, a bruising, well-crafted industrial metal al
bum laced with enticing melodies. Ironically, the springboard that launched them into mainstream success was a collaboration with Gary Numan on a cover of his 1979 hit single, “Cars,” which was left off the first pressing of the album. The record went gold. Fear Factory’s management and label, hoping history would repeat itself, encouraged the band to work with nu-metal producers and add hip-hop elements to their sound for their 2001 album, Digimortal, which featured a collaboration with Cypress Hill’s B-Real on the song “Linchpin.” For Bell and Cazares, it was the beginning of the end. During the tour, a rift developed between them, and the band broke up. They later regrouped without Cazares, while the guitarist played with underground death metal groups Brujeria, Asesino, and Divine Heresy. But without Cazares’s catchy, ripping guitar riffs, the band fizzled. In 2009, Cazares and Bell mended fences and re-formed without Herrera and Olde Wolbers, and Fear Factory returned heavier than ever.

  RAYMOND HERRERA: [Before the first breakup] I was in the back of the bus playing video games. We were getting ready to leave to the next city. Our tour manager had to delay our departure. Dino crawled up his ass. Burt went to defend him. All of a sudden it went from Dino arguing with the tour manager to Burt arguing with Dino. Then some personal stuff came up and before you know it, they’re throwing punches. Burt’s really reserved and quiet and private; he’s just not the kind of guy who gets into fights. So when Burt went to punch Dino, I knew this was a different situation than we had ever experienced. We had another four months to tour. And man, it was uncomfortable. These guys wouldn’t eat at the same table, sit in the same room, or look at each other. Then in Tokyo Burt said to me he would finish Japan and Australia, but after that he was out.

  DINO CAZARES: After Burt quit the band, we all broke up. Then a little while later, Raymond said, “Hey, I have a plan. Let’s put the band back together.” At first, Burton went, “I don’t want nothing to do with it.” But then he finally agreed. But the plan from Raymond was Burton could come back and they’d get rid of me and put Christian on guitar.