Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  While Korn and Limp Bizkit were excited to embrace a music scene of like-minded bands, Deftones didn’t want to be associated with a musical movement. When Korn organized its own “Family Values” tour in 1998, Deftones turned down an offer to play; the maiden voyage of Family Values featured Korn, Limp Bizkit, Orgy, Incubus, Ice Cube, and Rammstein.

  FIELDY: If someone tried to tell us for a year straight we sounded like the Deftones, I’d be pissed off, too. They never sounded like Korn. Not even their early stuff. It’s not the same shit. It’s just the same vibe.

  CHINO MORENO: When angst-ridden, heavy music goes out of style, I don’t think we’re gonna go out with it. There are a lot more elements to our music that separates us from that scene. As far as the other bands, I respect them and I dig them, but the minute we get pigeonholed in a scene, basically everything we’ve worked for years for is out the window. Suddenly you’re reliant on all these other bands, when you should just rely on yourself and what you’re doing.

  Nu metal bands dismissed the profeminist and anti–rock star stances of Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana. Instead, they indulged in the Babylonian excesses that had motivated the Sunset Strip hair bands. Getting laid became almost as important as getting paid. At the same time, a new synergy developed between the adult entertainment world and the music industry that made debauchery more acceptable to the mainstream.

  MIGUEL “MEEGS” RASCÓN (Coal Chamber): There is definitely a connection between the porn and metal worlds. This kind of music is all about unleashing. It’s a creative purge. It’s all about rhythm, and sex is all about pulsing rhythms. The people in the porn industry and the music industry have the same kind of values. The two groups are debaucherous. It’s hard for a rock guy to date a normal nine-to-five banker. They look at us like we’re fucking out of control, while someone in the sex industry, they look at us as normal because that’s the way they live. So it’s not a big secret that porn girls date rocker guys or strippers or any type of sex industry people.

  BOBBY HEWITT (Orgy): My wife [Shane] used to be in the adult industry, so she understands what happens out on the road. And with her being so fine with all that, it makes it easy to not want to fuck around. But when we’re together, me and my wife get together with her girlfriends, and we always have a great time.

  JONATHAN DAVIS: We’re rock stars. We go out on the road for years at a time. We’re never home. We have tons of beautiful women trying to fuck us all the time. There’s a lot of things going on and you just have to find that special lady that can deal with that. I was really lucky to find my wife, Deven Davis, and we have two kids together. She was a porno actress and she used to do girl-girl movies, which I have no problem with. She didn’t take dicks for a living like the other girls. But then she stopped to become a spokesmodel and go out on the road and do signings and interviews with the starlets while they’re on set. So it keeps her involved in the business, but it takes that aspect of the sex out. I’d describe our relationship as a liberal, free thing and I love it.

  LYNN STRAIT (1968–1998) (Snot): We’re not gonna mention any of my porn career [laughs]. We went through a lot of strippers. We practiced two doors down from a strip club, so between practice we’d go over there. We’d have a soda on our break and get a lap dance and go back. Then all the strippers would hang out at practice. Then everyone in the band was dating one for a while at one time or another.

  DEZ FAFARA: Lynn Strait’s girlfriend Karen was a porn star, and he did a scene with her in [Matt Zane’s] Backstage Sluts 2: No Ass, No Pass. We were all, at that point, getting interviewed by porn magazines and porn videos, and it was cool to be a part of that because, as a single dude, there was just endless pussy. Lynn was the guy backstage in the shower, with everyone looking at him getting his dick sucked by two chicks and then going out and getting tattooed. We both got our hands tattooed the same day by Paul Booth. I got a big huge black-and-white pumpkin, and he got a big skull. In between sessions he’s getting up, going in the bathroom, getting his dick sucked by two bitches. It was total rock and roll, bro. That guy was on fuckin’ fire.

  WAYNE STATIC (Static-X): My wife Tera Wray was a porn star [with Matt Zane’s Zane Entertainment], so when we’re on tour it’s a party with a million people. After we got married [in 2008] she retired from the business. The first thing she said to me when we met onstage at Ozzfest in front of twenty thousand people was, “I masturbate to your music every day.” I was like, “Wow, I love you. Let’s get married.” Now she lays around and masturbates when I’m writing.

  DEZ FAFARA: One day you’d read in Hustler magazine that some Hustler chick loved you, loved your band. The next day she’d be at your show with six women and everybody’d be having sex up on the bus with handles of Jack Daniel’s and cocaine and meth.

  FRED DURST: It you’re a heterosexual guy, you’re a horn dog whether you’re with one person or not. Whether you sleep with your girlfriend once a month or five times a day, you love tits and pussy and pornography. I believe in God. But I love titties. I love seeing girls in panties more than I like seeing them naked. That’s what makes a lot of guys be so good to their girlfriends, ’cause they’re so guilty in their minds all the time.

  JONATHAN DAVIS [1999 interview]: I’m the kinkiest motherfucker you’ll ever meet. I do freaky, weird shit and people enjoy it. I’ve had a girl for a birthday present. I’ve made girls piss in cat boxes, I’ve taken a drill gun and put a rubber on the end of a screwdriver handle and drilled out a bitch’s pussy. You name it, dog, I’ve done it. Just try watching an all-deaf orgy in the back of my bus. That was in Florida. They had a threesome in the back of my bus. They were all eating each other’s pussies and it was the damndest thing watching a deaf girl get off because the sound is like no other.

  DEZ FAFARA: It wasn’t uncommon to walk up to our bus, open the door, and see any of us naked having sex in the front or back lounge. It wasn’t uncommon for four, five, six girls to be riding the bus on a nightly basis and for us to be getting down with all of them at the same time. Me and Meegs had orgies. It was not uncommon to usher in and usher out women and to share women. As a matter of fact, that was more common because it was like, “Dude, we’re bro-ing down on this right now.”

  MEEGS RASCÓN: It was like Caligula on the bus. Everyone’s running around naked, and if you weren’t involved you were just sitting there and it wasn’t a big deal. We had two bass players who were girls, Rayna [Foss] and Nadja [Peulen], and they never partook. They knew we were all doing crazy things in the next room or the next bunk. They’d hear noises and they’d hear porno on the DVD player, but they just laughed and shook their heads.

  RAYNA FOSS: I was recording the original version of “Unspoiled,” and everything raunchy that happened in one room came through my bass speakers, and I’m the only one who has it!

  JAY BAUMGARDNER (producer): Let’s just say there were bits of that track that needed to get edited out. It’s like the Watergate tapes, actually—the missing five minutes somewhere! It involves spanking, I think.

  FIELDY: With some of the shit I was doing, I think it was pretty safe to say the girls I was with the night before were never gonna call me again. Either I kicked them out of my house or I was actually at a club with another girl right in front of them. I even kicked some of them off the bus while we were rolling. We’d just stop the bus—“Get the fuck out.” But the thing is, you really couldn’t get as freaky as you could back in the day. I wasn’t gonna go down on some chick, and I wore a condom all the time. And I didn’t kiss girls because you didn’t know how many other dicks they’d been sucking.

  FRED DURST [1999 interview]: We brought strippers out on one tour, dressed them up as nurses, and had them strip down and eat each other out on the last song. Not naked, but I know there are a lot of fifteen-year-old kids out there who’ve never seen any shit like that, so why not see it at my show? Every guy out there probably wishes he had a fine girl he could tie up and blow a load all over them and they
would love it—some crazy kinky girl. But I make sure, when I do the chicks, they’re all over me and they’re into it.

  JONATHAN DAVIS [2002 interview]: One time, I was in the shower and these three girls came up to me with a bag full of dildos and whips. They went at it in the shower. I got tied up and got the shit beaten out of me with Judas Priest belts and about fifty people watched. They beat me up pretty badly. That was pretty cool. Then some other people took beer bottles and used them in both of these girls’ orifices. It’s not like I look for it. Usually, I walk into my dressing room and, hello, there it is. I’ve seen girls bend over and guys hock loogies on their assholes and whoever gets the asshole gets to fuck her. I’ve never regretted anything I’ve done. It’s been all fun. No one was hurt. It’s sex, man. You gotta explore and do things that are different, and these girls want to do that with you. Short of beating on someone—that’s wrong—but if they like to be beat in a sexual way, I’m all for it.

  ICE-T: In the rock-and-roll world, it’s not unusual for a girl who wants to meet someone like Marilyn Manson to be told, “Okay, but you gotta suck the bus driver’s dick and the light man’s dick,” and they’ll do it. It’s amazing. But after you see that, it fucks your head up because people will do low shit, and there’s no limit. For the average dude, sex is so hard to get in the normal world. Then you go into a power game like a rock concert and you see the same chicks that would make a normal guy take them on twenty-five dates before they gave it up, and they’ll lick your bus driver’s ass in a second. It really gets to your brain.

  EDSEL DOPE (Dope): One of my old drummers has some good video footage of him with some chick that is sucking his cock and then pukes all over it, and then goes back to sucking it again. But he liked that. Another time, I puked while this girl was giving me head and then she puked. And then she kept giving me head. It was a mess.

  ICE-T: I’d see guys that would loan their girls to the group for autographs. But the weirdest thing I ever saw was on the Lollapalooza tour, where there was some chick in a trailer giving blowjobs. I was on the bus, and everybody was like, “You gotta see this,” so my curiosity took over. I went to the place and there were like fifty cats in a line, and this had been going on for hours. This chick must have done five hundred head jobs. When I went in there it was dark, and someone introduced me as Ice-T, and the girl said, “Oh, you’re back.” So apparently guys had been telling her that they were Ice-T.

  MEEGS RASCÓN: Even when we did our record, there were girls everywhere. They were running around the recording studio and between takes, us and other bands were going in and out of these rooms that weren’t being used for music and doing drugs and getting laid. Before I would track, we would go into the restrooms and get blowjobs and then we’d go back out and record.

  MORGAN LANDER (Kittie): We’d always see stuff like guys bringing back strippers and banging them, and we encourage that for our crew members ’cause we’re living vicariously through them. I think honestly we’re more apt to be objectifying women just because they’re asking for it. There are male groupies, I guess, if you can classify them as that. I’ve seen some interesting stuff in my day, but most of the time they come off as gross. No one wants to have some dude breathing in their ear or saying disgusting things. “No, I don’t want to fuck you on the bus, that’s weird, just go away.”

  More often than not, alcohol and drug abuse accompanied the debauchery. Cocaine, methamphetamine, and hallucinogens were main ingredients for the raging party. And as in past eras, the musicians had little awareness of or concern for the damage they were causing themselves and their bands.

  DEZ FAFARA: It says it best on Coal Chamber’s first record on the license plate of the ice cream truck: “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” That’s what we lived. We did every kind of drug: coke, sniffing ketamine. Our rider had four bottles of whisky a day, and after that was gone we would go out to the bar drinking. Meegs and them did so much meth. I don’t even know how they’re alive. I saw balls of meth get mailed to them that would have lasted meth heads a year, and they would do it in three days.

  MEEGS RASCÓN: We kind of re-created the eighties but in the nineties. The music was darker, heavier, and angrier, but the amounts of drugs, alcohol, and girls was out of control. I was doing a lot of what we called drug salads. It was every type of drug at once—coke, speed, weed, Special K, GHB, ecstasy. There were times I would do way too much blow and I would sit in my hotel almost praying because my heart felt like it was coming out of my chest. I always sweated it out, but there were some instances where I felt like I should have been dead.

  DEZ FAFARA: I would take handfuls of Somas, mixed with Xanax, mixed with red wine and whisky. And then at two in the morning I’d decide to eat an eighth of mushrooms. I once did two weeks straight on the road on mushrooms every day.

  FIELDY [1997 interview]: Munky likes to pee on us when he’s drunk. We were too busy laughing to kick his ass. He didn’t know what he was doing. He thought he was taking a piss in the bathroom. I’ve only tried to piss on someone one time, when I was in New York drinking Jäger. These Korn fans came up to me, and I was taking a piss. They’re all, “Yo, G,” and I said, “Get the fuck out of here,” and I tried to piss on them. They ran. We don’t drink Jäger anymore. It turned us into dickheads—especially Jonathan. We’d go on the bus and we’d look down, “Here comes Jon,” and we’d all get in our bunks and act like we were asleep.

  JONATHAN DAVIS [1997 interview]: It’s true. When I walked into the bus everything stopped. I think it was because I’d get fucked up and bite people. I bit everyone in the band. I would party and get drunk and do cocaine or crank. Then I’d get all horny and wanna be tied up and fuck some chick, but I’ve got a wife. So I’m fighting inside, and I drink more. And for what? The whole thing is fucked-up anyway. I always wake up in the morning feeling bad from doing drugs, so why do I keep doing it?

  MUNKY: I think you wind up drinking so much because you’re covering up some sort of pain. And then when you stop drinking, you start feeling that pain and you don’t know what to do. And that’s when you start freaking.

  JONATHAN DAVIS: I definitely freaked, but I kept drinking because they tried to kick me out of the band if I didn’t.

  BRIAN “HEAD” WELCH (ex-Korn): No we didn’t. Fieldy did.

  JONATHAN DAVIS [1997 interview]: He said, “If you don’t drink beer, it’s not gonna work out.” But then I got to the point where I had to stop. I was like an alcoholic bulimic. I’d drink mass quantities of alcohol, go puke in the toilet, and then keep drinking. And one day I just looked at myself and I saw I was gonna die. My baby was about three at the time, and I came home drunk one night and he saw me and gave me this fucking look that I’ll never forget. I felt like the biggest piece of shit. I was like, “I’m not gonna do this to my son. I gotta be there for him.” So I sobered up. The thing is, I stopped drinking because I thought it would make me feel better, but it didn’t, and that’s when it really started to scare me.

  HEAD: Jon would be happy for a few days, and we thought, “Oh, cool, he’s doing better,” but then he’d be in his room all fucking depressed. It was like this rollercoaster, and it depressed all of us.

  JONATHAN DAVIS: Dude, I’d wake up and I’d literally want to kill myself. I wanted to jump out the window.

  MUNKY: It was so sad. I felt so helpless sometimes ’cause I wanted to help him and I couldn’t. I’d sit next to him in bed and he’d shake and I’d go, “Dude, are you all right?” But nothing I could say or do would make him come out of it. I’d tell him I love him and hold him and hug him. I’d say, “Jon, man, all this great stuff is happening to us.” But it just didn’t matter.

  STEPHEN CARPENTER: Between the time we were eighteen and twenty-five, me and the guys in the band drank everything we could get our hands on, and I realize now I did that because it was the path of least resistance. But to go that way made me not ever concentrate on anything because otherwise I was focused on everything all at onc
e and it was way too much to handle. I was stressing out. But when I was twenty-five, I weaned off the alcohol and went to weed, and that really made me feel good and allowed me to focus on everything, and I gained respect and appreciation for the fact that I am everything that is.

  DEZ FAFARA: We got in lots of fights. Once we were sitting in the front of the bus at three in the morning. I was yelling at Meegs, telling him he was a fucking junkie, and he threw a whole gallon handle of whisky at me. I ducked, it hit the front windshield of the bus, broke out the glass, and the driver stood up, took the keys out of the ignition, said, “I quit,” and walked away.

  MEEGS RASCÓN: When fights would erupt, I would be right there in the middle. We just knew how to push each other’s buttons. So I’d push Dez’s buttons and he’d push mine and before you know it, we were throwing punches.

  JONATHAN DAVIS: It was fuckin’ bad, dude. I was going insane, literally. The only time I felt good was the hour that we were onstage. Other than that, I was in fucking hell. We did the first Family Values [in 1998] and we had just done Follow the Leader, which blew up so big with “Freak on a Leash” and “Got the Life.” That freaked everyone in the band out. We went through a crazy adjusting period. No one was getting along because of all this sudden fame. We used to be able to go out in the crowd and talk to people, and suddenly I needed a bodyguard to go anywhere. Then I got a cocktail of Prozac and Dexedrine and it changed my entire life [for the better]. I still party like a motherfucker with all my friends; I just don’t partake. If you see me at a party, I’m sitting there chopping lines and giving people drinks and rolling joints—whatever my homies want. But for me, it’s just something I can’t do anymore. I don’t even drink caffeine.