Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  RAYMOND HERRERA: We still had a contract with Roadrunner as a band and individuals for three albums, and if we didn’t write any music for them then we were in limbo [as musicians] for who knows how many years. Me and Christian were already doing another project, and we couldn’t do anything until the Roadrunner issue was resolved. Our lawyer told me to go back to Burt and say, “Look, dude, can we write two or three songs?” Because if we did that and got Roadrunner a demo, the ball would be in their court and we could say, “Okay, do you want the next record? Give us our advance.” So Burt said, “Okay, if you get rid of Dino I’ll think about it.” I sat down with Dino and told him what happened. Dino never quit. We got rid of him. Then we did the songs and got them to Roadrunner, but it still took us eleven months to get off the label. Most people think Roadrunner dropped us, [but] we were trying to get off the label, and it took a long time and cost us a lot of money.

  DINO CAZARES: Burt agreed to go back to the band for a little while until he realized Raymond was taking control and was having an affair with Christian’s wife Christy [Prisque], who was also managing the band. That’s when things started to go sour. Burt said, “Look, we need to get a real manager, not some woman both of you guys are banging.” I can understand why Burt had a problem with that, but they didn’t want to change things. Also, they didn’t want me back in the band. They made that clear.

  RAYMOND HERRERA: I told Burt many times, “Why do you want to fire her? I don’t fire people for no reason. We’ve gotten sued for firing people for no reason.” As far as me going out with Christy, yeah, I went out with Christy after Christian had already found another girlfriend. I was spending a lot of time with Christy because we do a lot of business together, and we became intimate. Now the funny thing about that is Burt had no problem with it after Christian knew and everything was cool. Everything’s been cool. If there was really an issue, don’t you think me and Christian would be the ones not talking? Me and Christian are the best of friends. What does that have to do with Burt? Furthermore, Burt has gone out with every female manager that we’ve ever had and I never said anything about it. I never cared.

  BURTON C. BELL: In October of 2008, I extended an olive branch to Raymond, stating that I would like to bring Dino back into the band. Raymond said he would never work with Dino or me ever again.

  RAYMOND HERRERA: I didn’t want to work with Dino because I know how Dino and Burt are. Burt coming back and saying, “I want to work again with the guy I hated most out of everybody in the world and even quit over” was just ridiculous. If Dino’s bummed out or hurt because I said I don’t want to work with him, it’s nothing personal. It’s just that I’ve been there when they fight about the stupidest shit. I don’t have time for that anymore.

  BURTON C. BELL: Dino and I were good friends for a long time. [And when we weren’t] I was talking to mutual friends and asking about him, hoping he was well and relaying messages. Then, at a Ministry show in LA, there he was. I just said, “Hey, how you doing?” It felt really good. We started keeping in touch over the phone and through e-mails. I felt comfortable with the idea of, “Hey, how’d you like to do this again?” Of course he was down. And since then, we’ve done two albums together that sound the way Fear Factory is supposed to sound without all the bullshit.

  During Fear Factory’s absence, an East German band swept across the scene like a brush fire, adding a new level of theatrics to industrial metal. Rammstein’s six albums are packed with militaristic guitar riffs, operatic vocals, melodic keyboards, and lyrics about control, submission, and sex—both heterosexual and homosexual. But the totality of their vision can only be experienced in a live setting. Their shows are rife with pyrotechnics that make KISS concerts look like candlelight vigils. Effects include towers of fire, flame-throwing muzzles, exploding babies, and a giant mechanical penis vehicle that launches foam twenty rows into the crowd. In part, the band’s hunger for thrills stems from an upbringing starved of pop culture.

  RICHARD KRUSPE (Rammstein): When we formed in 1993, the music scene in East Germany was divided. One part was the professional, educated type of musician, and the other was the so-called amateur, and the amateur was not allowed to play onstage without having another job to get money from. We had to play in front of a jury to get a document that allowed us to have concerts for a certain amount of money. Even then, no one wanted to let us play. So we just played wherever we could.

  CHRISTOPH “DOOM” SCHNEIDER (Rammstein): We never tried to be anything in particular, but we have our influences. Ministry had a considerable impact on us, especially the fact that their music is very hard and monotonous. But pop music has also had an influence, so we make hard, monotonous music that’s catchy. There’s a lot of different emotions and sexual expressions and things that [most] metal doesn’t have. For example, we hate the guitar solos of the metal music.

  RICHARD KRUSPE: The low frequencies of Till [Lindemann’s] voice forces us to arrange our music differently. We’ve tried to develop that with a German type of groove, plus, the vocals are in German—and there’s the theatrics. The visual aspect of the band comes from our own insecurity. From the beginning, Till was very unsure of his own abilities. He was afraid of singing in front of people and he didn’t know what to do onstage, so he decided to set himself on fire.

  CHRISTOPH “DOOM” SCHNEIDER: He started to bring along fire equipment and play with dildos. It grew from there, with flamethrowers and different props. Now, what we perform onstage isn’t just musical, it’s visual as well. An audience can’t be bored during a concert.

  RICHARD KRUSPE: Everything that we do is controlled by fire police and gets approved by special permissions. In the early days, we weren’t so careful. A burning backdrop fell on the drummer’s back in about 1995 in Berlin, and his drum set burned. That was the moment we said, “Okay, this can’t happen again. We are not professional pyro workers so we need to hire people who are.” Even now, there are always small things, like a piece of the floor catching fire and you have to put it out quickly. When I heard what happened to Great White [at its 2003 concert at the Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, when one hundred people died after the band’s pyrotechnics set the venue ablaze], obviously it hit home. It was very sad and [we were] grateful that nothing really terrible happened to us in the early days when we were young and irresponsible.

  CHRISTOPH “DOOM” SCHNEIDER: In the beginning and even now, some people don’t understand that there’s no political approach at all to what we do. But because we’re German, we often get confused with having some sort of extremist tendencies. We’re making hard music, we’ve got short hair, and we’re German, so people immediately associate us with fascism and the right wing. That frustrates us.

  ALEC EMPIRE (Atari Teenage Riot, EC8R): I think they’re not a fascist band at all, but I think in Germany there’s a lot of misunderstanding and that’s why they sell records, and I think that’s dangerous. You just can’t [use footage from Leni Riefenstahl films] in your video [for “Stripped,”] and say it’s just a joke, because my grandfather died in a concentration camp and for me, that’s not a joke at all.

  TILL LINDEMANN: I am fed up with allegations of being a right-wing band. My daughter—my dearest in my life—came to me to ask, “Tell me, do you play in a Nazi band?” At this point I knew we had overstepped a border.

  Today, more than twenty years after Ministry started a metallic revolution, the industrial movement has petered out, but the music is still going strong. Rammstein continues to set sold-out venues ablaze, Marilyn Manson still pushes pressure points and reaps the rewards, Fear Factory released its second album since Cazares’s return to the band, and Ministry has returned from a five-year hiatus (during which Jourgensen almost died from a ruptured ulcer). In addition, non-industrial bands, including Korn and Asking Alexandria, are adding more industrial samples to their songs and inviting dubstep DJs, including Skrillex, Excision, Borgore, and Big Chocolate, to remix their music.

 
; BEN BRUCE (Asking Alexandria): Even Slipknot and Korn have a lot of low, grimy industrial sounds. We’ve taken influence from that, and at first we worked with our producer [Joey Sturgis] to program the beats. But then we went, “Well, none of us are DJs, and that [dubstep] stuff mixes well with metal,” so we got a bunch of guys to remix a lot of our songs for [2011’s] Stepped Up and Scratched. It just adds another cool element to the songs.

  BRANDON GEIST: The crossover between dubstep and metal is pretty big right now. Korn’s the most obvious example of that, but lots of younger bands like I Wrestled a Bear Once and Periphery have done these collaborations with dubstep artists as well. It might seem weird because dubstep is really dance music, but a lot of these guys really know metal. Even Cameron Argon, from the death metal band Disfiguring the Goddess, is better known as the electronic dance music producer Big Chocolate.

  Industrial metal also still thrives in the underground, as evidenced by groups like Blut Aus Nord, Aborym, and the Shining, which have added samples and electronic beats to death metal, black metal, and jazz.

  JORGEN MUNKEBY (The Shining): I thought it would be interesting to combine free-jazz with black metal, but both kinds of music are kind of dirty and messy, so I decided to add the catchiness and the polished aggressiveness of American industrial pop. I didn’t know how to do that, so I read through all these album liner notes and found this guy, Sean Beavan, who was the engineer, mixer, and producer for all the Manson and Nine Inch Nails albums. I sent him our demos and he was really into what we were doing. He mixed Blackjazz and made it sound better than I could have imagined.

  MALFEITOR FABBAN (Aborym): Nine Inch Nails are still an important band for me and Aborym even though they have nothing to do with black metal. I love those kinds of electronic sounds, and we have been able to apply them to the music we make to sound ominous and scary, but also different than other bands. We’re free to do anything because we have no commercial aspirations. Aborym is a band that doesn’t play to make money. We only play for artistic satisfaction.

  9

  ALL FOR THE NOOKIE: NU METAL, 1989–2002

  As sonically different as metal and rap were when Ice-T put out the singles “Body Rock” and “Killers” in 1983, the two genres were fated to merge. Both were loud and percussive, tended to attract confrontational musicians who thrived on creating controversy, and were dismissed as “noise” by those who didn’t appreciate them—especially parents. Even before the Beastie Boys broke the hip-hop–race barrier in 1986 with Licensed to Ill, some metal fans were already vibing to the distorted guitar samples of Run-DMC’s 1984 hit “Rock Box.” It was only a matter of time before groups like Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Deftones would emerge, guided by collaborations between Aerosmith and Run-DMC (“Walk This Way”) and Anthrax and Public Enemy (“Bring the Noise”), as well as the creative hybrids of Faith No More and Rage Against the Machine.

  ICE-T (Body Count): White kids have always been intrigued by black culture. It’s something they’re taught by their families is very taboo. They think, “Oh, black kids are going to rob you.” Most of the white kids from Christian fundamentalist homes get pushed this Christian doctrine so hard, so that the first bit of them rebelling is going, “I like Dio, I like Slayer.” That pisses mom off. Then a double rebellion is them saying, “Yo, I don’t even like Slayer, I like Ice Cube and Ice-T.”

  REVEREND RUN (Run-DMC): When we made “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith [in 1986], people was wondering, “Why?” “Why?” isn’t a good question when it comes to bands collaborating. Music is music, and I think they can cross each other at many paths, and I think musicians tend to think the same, so they get along well. Working with Aerosmith was exciting, and it was even more exciting when so many other people liked it. We had no idea it would break down so many barriers.

  ICE CUBE: I used to always watch what the Beastie Boys was doing, which was kind of like, to me, the birth of something new. They started as straight rap, but as they went along they mixed different styles in their music and that led directly to the kinds of things that lots of rock bands would mix into their music to create this metal and hip-hop blend.

  The Beastie Boys were the first rap outfit to appeal to metal fans on a large scale—probably because they shared similar roots. The New York trio started as a hardcore group, but thanks to their behind-the-scenes virtuoso, Def Jam cofounder Rick Rubin, they soon morphed into a rowdy rap group that colored its songs with brash Led Zeppelin and AC/DC samples. To boost the Beasties’ metal cred, Rubin hired Slayer guitarist Kerry King to play a solo on the groundbreaking Licensed to Ill track “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” named after the Motörhead live album No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith.

  KERRY KING: That was such a whim thing to do. We were in the studio at the same time. They were on Def Jam and they needed a lead and I went, “Okay!” I got to be in their video, which was cool because we didn’t have any videos at the time. I think I got, like, two hundred bucks or something. I had no idea who they were or if they would be popular.

  CHINO MORENO (Deftones): The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill was when I realized, “Damn. I can rap now.” So I started rapping right away. Before that, I’d go to the high school football games and I used to rap in a big circle, and there would be beat boxes, but nobody would really take me seriously because I wasn’t black.

  The Beastie Boys opened the floodgates for the marriage of rock and rap, yet they weren’t the first to blend hip-hop and metal. Outside of the spotlight, Faith No More had been cultivating a volatile mixture of metal, alt-rock, rap, and hardcore for several years, and in 1985, a year before Licensed to Ill came out, the band dropped the underground radio hit “We Care a Lot.” The same year, Megaforce founder Jonny Z got together with members of the Rods to write “Metal Rap,” a hastily constructed song about the history of metal that featured rapping by Z and a choir of children on the off-key gang vocal chant, “metal music.”

  CARL CANEDY (ex-Manowar, Thrasher, Rods): Jonny always had his finger on the pulse of the emerging metal scene, so he wanted to do a tribute to the bands he was working with. That song got a little bit of attention, but it didn’t break open any doors—like Faith No More, who merged rock and rap successfully. It didn’t seem like it was two interescting right angles. It was more like a T in the road. Everything had a hook and made sense, which made it powerful.

  JONATHAN DAVIS (Korn): It all started off with Faith No More. I can’t give them enough credit. They had groove and they were heavy and weird. They were a huge influence to all of us.

  BRIAN SLAGEL (founder, Metal Blade Records): Faith No More brought down a lot of the barriers. Before them, you couldn’t like Queensrÿche and Slayer at the same time. Suddenly, all these different styles are being integrated in the music, and fans are getting into it.

  BILLY GOULD (Faith No More): I moved from LA to San Francisco in ’81. There was an ad in a record store; somebody was putting a band together. I met these guys and we found drummer Mike Bordin through a mutual friend. We played for a year as Faith No Man, and then the keyboard player, Wade [Worthington], left, and Roddy [Bottum] came in. We went through five singers, including Courtney [Love, in 1983]. We originally thought Courtney was cool because she wasn’t afraid to get in front of a microphone and assault people, and that made the shows interesting. But she was really high-maintenance. People would call us up because she would go to their houses and burn up their phone bills and not pay them. We got kicked out of a rehearsal space because of her being fucked up and leaving doors unlocked when we were sharing the room with another band. After six months of this, it seemed better for her to go. Also, her singing wasn’t very good. But during all this time with different singers we were discovering how to play in rhythmic patterns and make grooves heavy. We didn’t even know what kind of singing should go over it. But I was friends with Chuck Mosley, so we tried him out and he stayed in the band [for five years].

  CHUCK MOSLEY (ex–Faith No More): People always credit Red Hot Chili
Peppers for being the first to mix rap and metal, but they weren’t doing metal, they were playing funk. We were more mixing metal and hardcore with rap. Mike and [guitarist] Jim [Martin] grew up with Cliff Burton from Metallica, so they brought in more of a metal sound. A lot of early Faith No More was all rhythm, with Billy and Mike pounding out beats. I had no idea what to do over that. I wasn’t a natural singer, and I was a fan of rap anyway, so whatever I couldn’t find a melody for, I would just pound out vocal rhythms to the beat. And I was a lousy rapper, so it turned into my own version of freestyle.

  BILLY GOULD: Chuck is a funny, sharp guy with a lot of charisma, but he couldn’t sing, so there’d be a lot of tension within the band. When something mattered, we’d always wonder if we’d be able to pull it off. And he didn’t seem to care. We lived in San Francisco and he lived in LA, so we’d have a show and he’d come up from LA. We’d go onstage and start playing and we wouldn’t even know if he was in the city yet. Whenever he arrived, he’d walk in the front door, jump up, and join us onstage.

  CHUCK MOSLEY: They were real serious about the band, and I didn’t take it as seriously as they did because I knew I wasn’t really a singer. I was more into partying and being crazy and fucking with people. I’d dress in drag, put on skirts and dresses and not have anything on underneath. Then I’d go onstage and find the most macho, headbanging, punk rockin’ dudes in the crowd and I’d teabag them. I wanted to shock people. Someone in England said I was gay and I said, “I’m not an AIDS receptacle,” which was really stupid and juvenile. I’m not a homophobe. I was just trying to be offensive, and this group of people got really offended. [Keyboardist] Roddy [Bottum] got yelled at and attacked. He’s gay and he gets attacked for my anti-gay remarks. I thought that was hilarious. We thrived on that kind of tension and humor.