MATT BACHAND (ex-Exhumed, Shadows Fall): We were all kids and we didn’t have cars, and Boston was two hours away, so we had to create our own scene with shows at the Green Field Grange and Katina’s and Pearl Street and all these clubs that were around in Western Massachusetts.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ (Aftershock, Killswitch Engage): I listened to a lot of DC and New York hardcore. But I was also way into early Metallica and Slayer, so for Aftershock, I took all that stuff and squished it together.
SYNYSTER GATES (Avenged Sevenfold): We liked hardcore, but we loved the classics: Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Pantera. We were also into progressive stuff like Mr. Bungle and Dream Theater. That’s where we get our crazy musical transitions.
BRIAN FAIR: One cool thing about this scene is I don’t think it’s based on anger, like death metal. Even when I was younger and I was into hardcore, I wasn’t angry, I was just into this aggressive release of youthful energy. Some people played football, I went to hardcore shows. I had a nice suburban life. I was getting laid, so I was having a good time. But there was this aggression that I released whether I was skateboarding or listening to hardcore or metal. Even at our shows, we’re trying to have as much fun as possible onstage. It’s not about smash, kill, destroy. It’s more like let’s fuckin’ drink beer and rock out.
BRANDAN SCHIEPPATI (ex-Eighteen Visions, ex-Throwdown, Bleeding Through, I Am War, Sorrows): I’ve gotten to where I have today because of my anger about things that I have gone through and the damage of everyday life. We play an angry, scary type of music, and that’s exactly how we feel. I use emotional strife as a driving point for everything I do, especially in Bleeding Through.
ALEX VARKATZAS (I Am War, Atreyu): I’m a really high-stressed, crazy person. I lose my mind sometimes and the anger keeps me going when I’m too tired and depressed. I just rely on being fucking mad. I’d rather be pissed off than be happy with a shit-eating grin on my face.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: Everything was an extension of skateboarding. You look at all the other skateboarders wearing shirts with skulls on them, then you follow that trail to find out who the band is, and it turns out to be the Misfits or Cro-Mags, and you go out and buy their records. A lot of the punk and metal album art really helped me gravitate towards that style of music. When I was a kid, I went to a technical high school and joined the graphics program so I could help my friends with their demo and seven-inch covers, getting them printed for free and making paper stickers for my buddies who needed promo items for their bands. That’s what motivated me to go into the art industry.
RYAN CLARK (Demon Hunter): My brother [and former guitarist] Don and I have a design company [in Seattle] called Invisible Creatures. I do most of the stuff on Tooth & Nail and Solid State, and Don has done Bullet for My Valentine, Foo Fighters, Chris Cornell. We got asked to design a Cradle of Filth record, but we turned them down because we’re devout Christians and we knew it was gonna get into some pretty weird territory.
Revisionist historians tend to lump the biggest New England metalcore bands together. But the members of Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, and All That Remains grew up in different bands in various areas of Massachusetts. Boston’s Overcast, which often toured Western Massachusetts, and Westfield’s Aftershock were the scene’s pioneers. The former was more chaotic and hardcore-based, with a definable metal edge, and the latter was more firmly rooted in thrash and melodic death metal.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: I went to a high school graduation party for someone I didn’t know and [Overcast vocalist] Brian [Fair] was there as well as drummer Jay Fitzgerald. Brian and I got along and we started to skateboard together. I asked him if he wanted to go to a Leeway show at the Channel in Boston the next day. He was only a sophomore in high school, so his mom called me to make sure I wasn’t some weirdo taking her son away from her. We began hanging out a lot. He was playing bass and singing in a punk rock band called Frenzy. I recorded them and said, “Hey, there’s this other stuff out there that we could try playing if you want to do something when we’re not skateboarding.” That’s how Overcast started in [1990].
PHIL LABONTE (ex–Shadows Fall, All That Remains): Western Mass. was pretty tame. There are multiple dudes in bands from the area that didn’t lose their virginity until they were far older than twenty. We were not the ragers. We were the nerds practicing our instruments for hours and hours.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: The funny thing is, we didn’t have a musical direction at all when we were writing songs [for Overcast]. We were putting things together almost at random, so it took quite a few years to figure out where we wanted the band to go. We took on that evil Integrity attitude about hating the world and being down on your luck. Then bands started popping, like Starkweather in Philadelphia. They were huge for us. We looked up to the way they jumped from one type of a genre to another in an instant and gave the listener a bit of whiplash. Also, [Brooklyn’s] Candiria was a force to be reckoned with. They were throwing as many different styles of music into their songs as possible, and that’s something that Overcast got a little too caught up in—the breakneck swerves and turns that we tried to purposely put into our music so that the listener didn’t know what was coming next.
Even as they combined various American music styles, early Massachusetts metalcore bands were also inspired by emerging Swedish melodic death metal groups, including At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility, all of which combined raw musicality with uplifting harmonies. Once Aftershock’s Adam Dutkiewicz blended these ingredients with soaring melodic choruses, almost every other band in the scene followed suit.
BRIAN FAIR: As we all got to be better musicians, we all wanted to try to do this tricky, crazy stuff we were hearing from these Swedish bands. The Massachusetts sound really came from that transition from being a traditional hardcore band to playing more in a metal style and straight up improving as musicians. You may have wanted to do some of that shit when you were younger, but the only thing you could play was a simple E chord chug mosh part. I listen to early Overcast shit now and I’m like, “Wow, we were lucky if we could pull off the world’s worst Cro-Mags cover when we started.” Back then, people were just like, “Get the fuck off the stage. Why are you singing and screaming? You guys suck. Your guitar player has long hair.”
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: My brother Toby was the vocalist in Aftershock and everyone [else] went to the same high school and grew up in the same area. We were all friends anyway, so we started playing music together. By late junior year of high school, I discovered melodic death metal, and that had a huge effect on my songwriting. My gateway drugs were Carcass and At the Gates, which got me into the whole melodic style of riffing, and after that I fell in love with that whole European style of melodic death metal.
PHIL LABONTE (All That Remains): If you want to boil all of Western Mass. down to one dude, you can do it, and his name’s Adam D. Every single successful band that’s come out of Western Massachusetts somehow is connected to Adam. When Adam was sixteen, he was in Aftershock with Jon Donais, who’s now in Shadows Fall. I filled in on guitar for Aftershock for a while. Adam produced two Unearth records, including their biggest one [The Oncoming Storm]. He’s done the Acacia Strain and three All That Remains records [and the latest Shadows Fall album]. He’ll deny it all day long, but it all comes back to him.
MATT BACHAND: I’ve never met a more talented dude in my life. The guy can pick up an instrument he’s never seen before and play it fluently in ten minutes. One time, Aftershock’s drummer couldn’t get to Connecticut for a gig, and Adam said, “Fuck it, I’ll just play drums.” I filled in on guitar for that show. I remember rehearsing in his bedroom in his parents’ house when he was a high school senior. And the kid is just nailing it on the kit. I was thinking, “I didn’t even know you played drums.” And he’s got a stand-up bass in the corner. I was like, “Jesus Christ, who is this guy?”
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: It’s so funny. People sometimes come up and say, “I used to see you in Aftershock. Yo
u guys were so influential.” I’m like, “Influential? Dude, really? You weren’t in our shoes, trust me.” We’d play anywhere in the Northeast, and we were guaranteed to not have more than ten people there who would be into it. We played basements that had just one light bulb for illumination. It was one tragedy after another. My brother, [vocalist] Tobias, got hit in the head and had to get stitches. We had tons of van breakdowns, and we got all of our drum gear stolen. It felt like we were cursed from the start.
BRIAN FAIR: We had to have an “all for one and one for all” vibe because we were literally playing for the guys in the other bands that were also playing the show. Mike [D’Antonio] used to have shows in his living room. We would get four bands together and drag over three or four of our other close friends and get a case of beer. It wasn’t even underground. It was underwater, for chrissakes. But that’s what made it really special. And it’s special that people still give a shit about it. It makes you feel like those long rides in a Ford Escort pulling a trailer out of a kit we built from Home Depot were totally worth it.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: There were lots of times in Overcast when we’d drive for eight hours and play a house show for five kids, or show up to a place and the door would be locked. No one even cared to put up flyers or cancel the show. It was rough, but fun at the same time. It felt like we were paving a new way for ourselves, learning as we went. We didn’t know anything about booking agents or riders; we were lucky if we got water onstage in cups, poured from a tap.
PHIL LABONTE: I was playing guitar in Perpetual Doom [starting in 1992] and then nu metal happened. Those guys wanted to play nu metal, and I said, “No way. I want to do death metal.” So I quit, and for a year I worked in an auto parts store, but I was also hanging around with Matt [Bachand], who formed Shadows Fall [in 1995, with guitarist Jon Donais after Aftershock broke up]. I went to their second show with a buddy of mine, and I remember telling him, “Dude, that band’s going to be big.” And by “big,” I meant they were going to be signed and sell ten thousand or twenty thousand records someday.
MATT BACHAND: Our old singer Damien [McPherson] was gravitating more towards nu metal. The way he was putting shit together seemed more Korn/Limp Bizkit to me, which was the most unappealing thing in the world because I was trying to start a metal band. I immediately thought of replacing him with Phil [Labonte], who I had been hanging out with. It’s so funny, because originally Phil didn’t want to sing. He just wanted to play guitar. He used to do backup vocals with Perpetual Doom a lot, so I said, “Look, man, you can sing. You’ve got a front man’s personality. Give it a shot.”
PHIL LABONTE: When Damien quit in 1996 they asked me to join and I said, “Well hell yeah.” It’s funny ’cause later, they were like, “Yo, can you do stuff like Brian from Overcast?” I should have seen the writing on the wall.
Early metalcore tours were sparsely attended, but musicians seeking action and misadventure (rather than fame and fortune) usually came home with great stories—some humorous, others horrific.
MATT BACHAND: Shadows Fall did a mini-tour with Overcast when Phil [Labonte] was still singing for us. We got strip-searched in Canada. They ripped the van apart and threw shit everywhere. Then they found a pebble or something and claimed it was a pot seed. It could have been anything. They were just looking for an excuse to fuck with us because they knew we were coming into the country to play shows, and whoever booked the tour gave us paperwork that said we were going there to record an album. So we see this guy come around the corner with a rubber glove on. Phil was the first one to go in. He went into the room and came out with a miserable look on his face, but he couldn’t tell us what happened. He had to sit on the other side while we went in one by one. When it was my turn I was expecting the worst. They said, “Well, we can’t touch you.” But they made me drop my drawers, bend over and they looked up my asshole with a flashlight. And we still didn’t get into the country because one of the band members had a rap sheet longer than he was tall, filled with stupid childhood breaking-and-entering and arson charges that we didn’t know about. We got fined $500 and we had to turn around and go home.
BRIAN FAIR: One time, Overcast was out with Jasta 14 and we were going to Ithaca to play with Madball. I met up with some friends who went to college there. We were raging, getting so loaded-drunk. Our drummer Jay [Fitzgerald] went out with the two guitar players for Jasta 14 and they were on a rampage, going into frat houses and stealing CDs, smashing shit and causing trouble. They wanted a case of beer but didn’t have any money, and nobody was twenty-one. So they decided to try and steal beer from this convenience store. Jay ran in, grabbed a case, tripped on his way out, and smashed it right into the doorway. He realized he fucked up and took off running. They finally made it back to the apartment where we were staying, and I went, “Dude, people are looking for you. You gotta stay here and find a place to hide. Do not leave.” We all passed out, but Jay woke up later and decided he needed cigarettes. So he walked back to the same fucking store while the cops were watching the footage of him smashing the case of beer. He put a pack of Marlboros down on the counter, and they look at him like, “Are you fucking kidding me, dude?” They arrested him on the spot. The next day, we didn’t know where he was, so we started looking in ditches. We finally called the police station and they called us back a couple hours later and said, “Oh, you’re looking for the drunk kid. Yeah, we got him.” We didn’t have any bail money because we were broke. So we called his mom back in Massachusetts and she said, “Just fuckin’ leave him there. I’ll be there Monday.” This was Friday. So she just let him stew and we went home and missed the shows.
KARL BEUCHNER: We were coming down out of the mountains in Yakima, Washington, and our van rolled four times. Everybody smashed out of the windows and was lying in the snow except for me and the driver. I went into the back of the van and was lifting up all of our gear—we had it all packed in there with us, which was an insane way to travel. I thought everyone was crushed under it, so it was a miracle to see everyone alive outside. Our fill-in guitarist had one of his ears partially detached. Our drummer Dennis [Merrick] got hurt the worst. He had collapsed lungs and a broken collarbone and broken ribs and a concussion. I didn’t know what was going to happen to him. Incredibly, he was playing drums again six months later.
DEREK YOUNGSMA (Bleeding Through): It was about 7 a.m. and we had just left Salt Lake City on our way to Denver. The ground was covered in snow and I was driving. [Vocalist] Brandan [Schieppati] was sitting shotgun and most of our other band members were in the back of the van lying down. I was coming down a hill and noticed there was an accident in the center of the highway about a quarter mile ahead. I could see the highway patrol cars and some people standing around. As I drove closer, I crossed a bridge and the trailer started to slide and just pulled the van right along with it. We spun 360 degrees and slid into the center of the road, and just as the van began to tip, we hit the truck that crashed in front of us. When we hit, the van came to a stop but the trailer broke off and flipped, throwing gear and merch everywhere. The cops were all running and diving out of the way and thankfully no one was hit. The van and trailer we borrowed were completely totaled and we were stranded in Salt Lake for a few days, but we all walked away and most of our gear survived, though we did have to cancel the rest of the tour. The cops were actually very cool considering what they had been through. The reason we got so much notoriety out of the crash was because the dashboard camera in one of the police cars caught the whole thing. We ended up all over the news: Inside Edition, Wildest Police Videos. And most of the news shows were cool enough to include some of our music and live footage in their stories.
For most veteran Massachusetts metalcore bands, wild rides couldn’t make up for the continued lack of commercial acclaim. Overcast was first to break up, in 1998, followed by Aftershock a year later (though they continued to put out previously unreleased material posthumously on Devil’s Head Records). The fragmentation of the pioneerin
g bands was ultimately beneficial for the growth of metalcore. Members of Aftershock and Overcast launched Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, and, eventually, All That Remains—all three of which would grow exponentially in popularity, selling out clubs and performing at stadium festivals, including Ozzfest and the Rockstar Energy Mayhem Fest.
ADAM DUTKIEWICZ: We got an offer to play Japan, and that’s actually how we ended Aftershock. We were playing these clubs there with five to six hundred capacity. They were sold out, and we were like, “This is freaking crazy. We had to fly halfway across the world to play shows in front of a bunch of people who are into us.” At that point, going back to playing shows for fifty people again didn’t make sense.
MIKE D’ANTONIO: We had just done our first major U.S. tour as Overcast; it took about seven years to get to that point and we struggled the whole time. We had put out Fight Ambition to Kill [in 1997], and it was doing okay. So we started talking about writing another record, and our drummer Jay [Fitzgerald] said, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore. It’s costing more for us to get to a show than we’re getting paid.” That was a big blow to me because Overcast was my baby. I had a stronghold on that band—a stranglehold, probably. It meant everything to me.
BRIAN FAIR: We did our last tour together [in 1998] with Section 8, Shai Hulud, and Disembodied. Pretty much every band on that tour broke up except Shai Hulud, and they lost every member except Matt Fox; we called it the Tour to End All Bands. Mike D had been keeping track of the money we were making for every show, and there were definitely a few zeros, but what’s even funnier is there’s actually a $7 and an $8, and then there’s a $32. And on one, we made $102. And that was the big tour. We were getting to California with three other bands who all had records out. We all thought, “This is gonna be huge!” Yeah, right. “Here’s $32.”
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 56