B004FEF6RO EBOK

by Wylde, Zakk

  “Awww man, I think we just lost two Metallica fans,” said Lars.

  I was sitting there trying to figure out what the fuck Lars was thinking, but he’d grabbed those cups and didn’t realize they weren’t cold beers? As I was sitting there pondering the situation, someone opened a window and yelled out to these poor sons of bitches, “Hey, chill out, we got another case of that shit if you guys want some more!”

  As the van sped away, I could hear them screaming after us. I don’t blame them for being upset, but still, how they didn’t realize the cups were warm is beyond me. We weren’t in the Sahara fucking desert or anything like that. If someone handed me a cup that was heated up to body temperature, I would hope that I would question it before I simply choked it down. Funny thing about drinking—sometimes it can cloud your better judgment. Thank God the Immortal Beloved drank those eight Long Island iced teas right before I proposed to her.

  Moscow Peace Festival via New Jersey Shore

  BY SNAKE SABO

  MY FIRST REAL JOB WAS AT A PLACE CALLED THE GARDEN STATE Music Center in New Jersey. It took me an hour and a half and two bus rides to get to work each day, but I didn’t mind because I just couldn’t handle the thought of any kind of regular job. I’m thankful I was able to talk my way into that job, because it really turned out to be quite fortuitous for me later on in life.

  Zakk used to come into the music store all the time. He was this eighteen-year-old kid who was really just kind of shy and unassuming. Once, he asked me if it was cool if he took down one of the guitars and tried it out. Of course I said that it was fine, and to my surprise he took down a classical guitar and started playing this unbelievable shit. It was fucking nuts! I’ve never heard an eighteen-year-old kid play like that. I was only a few years older than him, but he was so far ahead of me at that point. He was just killin’ it. The guy always had that star presence about him, that “it” thing if you will. Everybody in town who was involved in music knew that he was the guy.

  At the time he was playing in bar bands in front of a dozen drunks, and I had just started to put together Skid Row. We were both on the same path with the same dream, so we got to know each other pretty well. We soon realized that we had the same sense of humor and would say the same stupid remarks to each other, so we became friends pretty quickly. Of course, none of us had any money, so I’d throw him packs of strings and picks and do whatever else I could to help him out.

  One day this music photographer, Mark Weiss, called Zakk and told him that Ozzy was trying out new guitar players and that he had been able to get Zakk an audition. Zakk was really, really nervous about it, but me and Scott Hill (the other guitarist for Skid Row) were positive that he was going to get the gig. I distinctly remember telling him, “Zakk, you’re getting this gig, man, this is yours.” And sure enough, we got word almost immediately that Zakk had landed it. It was nuts; our buddy Zakk was the new guitarist for Ozzy!

  Right around the time Zakk joined the Ozzy Osbourne band, Skid Row was signed to a major record label, and so all of us were out there touring and playing arenas. We were on tour with Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, and Zakk was out with Ozzy. It was so awesome when we’d run into each other on the road and get to hang out, but we really didn’t get to do it right, until Moscow.

  In 1989, our manager at the time, Doc McGhee, had put together this massive festival with some of the biggest rock acts of the time: Ozzy, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Scorpions, Cinderella, and Skid Row. It was called the Moscow Music Peace Festival and was happening at Lenin Stadium, where the 1980 Olympics had been held.

  The plane route went from Los Angeles to Newark, where I connected with Zakk, and then on to England, and then I think Moscow. We may have had a stop in Germany, but by the time we got to Europe, we were fucking crushed from all the drinking and partying. Now this was supposed to be a dry flight and performance because it was being sponsored by the Make a Difference Foundation. We ended up dubbing it the Make a Different Drink Foundation because we got plastered the whole flight!

  Zakk and I hadn’t gotten to spend much time together up until that point so we were probably the two most annoying people on board. Neither of us slept the entire way. We would wait for people to fall asleep, and when they did, we’d drink whatever booze they had happened to sneak onboard. I think we were pretty well hated after that flight; because we were so isolated over there, it wasn’t easy to restock what Zakk and I had drunk.

  When we landed, we were shuffled off to Moscow’s version of the Hard Rock, where a big welcome party was being held for all of the bands. So we decided to go there for a bit and just go berserk. After a while, Zakk and I decided to head back to the hotel, which was called the Hotel Ukraine, in the middle of Moscow, right near Red Square. This hotel was really, really old and creepy—bats in the belfry and everything.

  We had been up well over thirty hours by then, but we were just so excited to be hanging out that we couldn’t sleep. So we went exploring from floor to floor, looking for something to do or someone to annoy. Finally we got up to the top floor, where we found this door ajar. The light was on inside, so we decided to go in and found ourselves in this big old room full of telephone-type operators who were monitoring the phone calls of every guest in the building. Even though it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War, obviously Communism was still in full effect.

  It was funny because I didn’t even know that the phones in our rooms could dial out! I mean our rooms were pretty broken down and overrun with cockroaches. There were so many roaches, in fact, that we were rounding up any aerosol spray cans we could find and lighting these nasty critters on fire. That was really crazy because we really were being overtaken by these suckers.

  After that we went and hung out in KNAC disc jockey Tawn Mastrey’s room. She was there covering the event for KNAC, God rest her soul, and we annoyed her until about five thirty in the morning before saying enough was enough and finally going to sleep. But for all the partying, Zakk was right up there with Ozzy the next day, just fucking killing it. There’s this great, classic photo of all the bands coming out at the end of the show to jam out on Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll,” and I’m up there on Zakk’s shoulders. That’s pretty much how that all ended, both of us wasted onstage, me up on Zakk’s shoulders, jamming out killer tunes and lovin’ life.

  A Few Words About Alcohol

  THERE IS NOTHING SEXIER ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH THAN THE CLINKING sound of fresh beer bottles, ice cold and smooth as a mountain goat. It’s the sounds of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and those clanging bottles of hops and barley that warm the heart and soul. Ever quantify your drinking to figure out exactly how much it costs you? Me neither. But you can bet your ass that my wife and my manager did, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, I’ll break it down for you to give you a better understanding of the effort I put into my drinking habit. Let’s just say that if drinking was graded, I’d be the one setting the curve.

  If you saw the alcohol and destruction bills I paid at the end of each tour, you’d agree that the name Berzerker fit those damn bills. One year we were out on Ozzfest only four weeks before I got a call from the Warden. She said that in just that one month we had already spent thirty thousand dollars on alcohol alone. Now, mind you, this was among ten guys on our tour buses, but only eight of us were real fuckin’ boozers. Barbaranne told us that the party was over and she’d had “enough of that.” So what did we do? The next month out, we just continued drinking and kept the Black Label pub open around the clock. At the end of the second month we had raised the alcohol bill to fifty-four thousand dollars. Let’s just say good times were had by all, except for the Warden.

  It isn’t tough to rack up the bills, especially when you decide to cover the bill for a shit-ton of hell-bent boozehounds, like the kind of Berzerkers and Berzerkerettes who roll with Black Label. With album titles including Sonic Brew, Alcohol Fueled Brewtality, and Hangover Music, I can’t say that the music discourages the behavior though. The booze b
ill was especially high when we decided to film for the DVD Boozed, Broozed and Broken-Boned at a classic watering hole in Detroit, Michigan, called Harpos. We shot the whole thing during a show with the Detroit chapter, so they could be in the video as well. And clearly, the Detroit chapter is one of the most heavily intoxicated of our clan. So it was fitting to have them there with us, enjoying every alcohol anthem of mayhem we played that night.

  Things actually went fine as far as the shoot was concerned, and we ended up with a ton of badass footage. Everyone was working away, so I wasn’t really paying attention to all that was going on, until we were wrapping up and I was ready to grab myself a case of cold ones for the road. I asked the bartender to set me up, but to my surprise my request was denied. There wasn’t any alcohol left! That’s right, the entire bar had been drained dry. There wasn’t a fuckin’ beer left in the place. The bartender himself couldn’t even believe it, and he told me that it was the first time in the history of the place that it had run out of booze.

  So if you ever find yourself getting into a drinking contest with the Detroit chapter of Black Label Society, I highly recommend that you pack yourself an extra liver, one or two spare pancreases, and a couple of semitrucks loaded with extra adult beverages. Chances are that you’ll need all of that just to stay in the game! Good luck.

  Well, that whole experience ended up costing me. I don’t, or don’t want to, remember how much that bar tab was! But let me assure you, in my good old inebriated heyday, it didn’t take an entire chapter of boozers to run up a ridiculous tab. Now, one of the only other true vices I have besides a stiff drink is a prime cut of steak, and so the concept of the steakhouse is, in my mind, the single greatest culinary achievement in modern history. Unfortunately I can’t eat much of anything before a show, and so I usually find myself out searching for a meal right after we clear out of the venue, and the steakhouse is the ultimate destination as far as I’m concerned.

  During one particular food quest, myself, Mark Ferguson, Sean Peyton (my tech at the time), and our tour manager wound up at one of those higher-end steakhouses where, besides prime cuts of meat, they serve all sorts of liquor. I spied a bottle of Louis XIII that they were serving for a hundred and sixty bucks a shot in these fancy snifters. I had to order a shot for the guys to try.

  We were eating, drinking beers, and enjoying sipping this cognac and it went down real smooth-like. The three of us sharing the shot didn’t satisfy us at all, so I ordered up three of more of them, one for each of us. The more we ate, the more we kept drinking. It wasn’t long before I wound up getting us all another round of the good stuff. Soon a couple of my friends, who always seem to show up when I’m buying drinks, arrived at the place, and another round got delivered. And of course the restaurant didn’t stop us; I’m sure they figured that if us idiots wanted to power down Louis XIII like it was Jim Beam, that was our own deal. To show their appreciation for all of the money I was throwin’ at them, the bar gave us the crystal bottle we’d been draining.

  I was having a great time eating a delicious meal of steak, spinach and cream, and garlic mashed potatoes, and putting back these cognac shots. Everything was going splendidly, until I took that one last shot. There it was, that warm rush. That feeling I knew all too well. Everything was about to come up. I tried to fight it, but I wasn’t kidding myself; I always lose that battle. And then it happened. The Floodgates of Doom opened and unleashed their fury.

  I started puking right there on the bar. One of the guys reacted quickly and handed me one of the snifters. I filled that, and he immediately handed me another. There I was, hurling into glass after glass and setting them on the bar as I went. When I was finished there must have been eight or more glasses full of incredibly expensive vomit all lined up in a row, full of what looked like Irish stew … like gravy. I mean, you could see it all, the spinach, the beef!

  Then Sean, being a fuckin’ wiseass, leaned over and said, “Oh, Zakk, I see it was you that had some of my asparagus. I was wondering who else was eating it, I knew I didn’t eat it all myself.”

  Needless to say, the cognac was all that and more. But the fact that I puked up over two thousand dollars’ worth of alcohol wasn’t very cool. In fact, it was really pretty nasty. Sometimes it’s just cheaper to stay home and drink. Well, less expensive maybe, but not necessarily safer.

  Back at the compound we always had a good time drinking, barbecuing, and taking full advantage of the rights that come with owning a mountain, kind of like how my manager takes advantage of my God-given talent for his own personal gain. Only in my case, I bought the mountain, so I should get to play on it with my friends. And what better toy to have for the rocky terrain than my black Ford F-350 Super Duty, or as it’s come to be known, the Deathcore Warmachine.

  Take the Mountain!

  BACK IN 2005, MY BLACK LABEL BROTHER, COLLABORATIVE DOUCHE OF this book, and runner-up homecoming queen at his high school prom, Father Eric, was in town recording with his band. I invited him up to the compound to hang out, watch a game, and have a few cocktails. It’s not that I actually liked Father Eric. In fact I still don’t—nobody does. But since we were all out of booze I thought I’d invite him up, so long as he made a pit stop at the liquor store and brought a few cases with him. Was it worth it? It never is.

  It was totally dark by the time he reached the dirt road that leads up to the compound. And the road branches off all over the fucking place, so if you don’t frequent the compound, you can easily get lost. Also, if you’re Eric Hendrikx, you could get lost in a brown paper bag. Fortunately, there’s only one of him that we all have to deal with. When he showed up, we grabbed the beer, jumped in my truck, and took off to test it against the mountain. I wasn’t driving. Another buddy of mine was, who also happened to be a stunt driver.

  Within a few minutes we reached our target—the steepest fucking hill in the area, covered with desert brush and small trees. That’s when we plowed the truck up the fucking mountain to see if we could make it to the top.

  Note from Eric Hendrikx: What actually happened here was something I’ll never forget. After jumping the truck off these massive tyrannosaurus dirt jumps that repositioned all of my internal organs, we stopped at the base of a steep-ass cliff and got out to take a piss. I was standing next to Zakk finishing my piss when he turned to me and asked, “Father Eric, do you know what time it is?”

  “No, what time is it, buddy?” I was sucked into his antics.

  There before me was something I had never seen before. Even with my bottomless and twisted sense of humor, I had never conceived this lewd act as a possibility. Zakk had stretched his dick around his wrist and was flaunting it like a Rolex watch. I’m not sure if I was frozen in a dead gaze like an armadillo on the highway or if time just completely stopped, but I couldn’t remove his baby-arm wristwatch from my view.

  “It’s time to take the fucking mountain,” he said, and then, with that sinister laugh of his, holstered his skin saber and jumped back into the cab of the truck.

  If Zakk was a superhero, whipping out his cock-watch would replace the need for a freeze ray to stun his enemies. He could just use his super cock watch to stop time and defeat his nemesis:

  “Excuse me, evildoer, do you know what time it is?” Super Zakk would say. His fierce nemesis would look down and take one glance at the fleshy bracelet and become completely perplexed. This confusion would be followed by a quick and deadly strike from Super Zakk’s Black Label Five Deadly Venoms kung fu.

  Game over.

  Within seconds, the truck boosted its way up the incline, ripping out bushes and small trees, for a few hundred feet before it began losing speed and then sliding backward. The truck went fuckin’ sideways on us and began tipping over. I’m not sure how we managed to keep right-side up—probably because we had a fucking stunt driver behind the wheel—but we still slid down the hill and had to adjust our approach to get more speed.

  Again the truck bashed into the side of the mountain
, pounding over boulders, shit flying all over the cab, beer foaming all over us; we were all cracking the fuck up! Well, at least I was cracking up. After about a dozen attempts and realizing that we weren’t gonna make it up without completely annihilating my ride, we headed back to the compound.

  We finished off most of the beer and then took turns riding my son Jesse John Michael’s motorcycle around the property. It had to be two in the morning and we were ripping around on this thing right next to the edge of the mountain. It’s a miracle one of us didn’t go for a death roll off Dead Man’s Curve just at the edge of the property. After that ended we continued drinking, storytelling, and listening to music.

  Thank God I wasn’t there when the Warden found Father Eric. But he later told me that she was fuckin’ furious after finding the empty beer bottles and boxes. I can picture it now, Eric hungover as hell with eyes crusted with dirt from last night’s motocross event, looking up at the Warden, who had fire and smoke coming out of her fuckin’ ears!

  A little later the Warden discovered what we did to my new truck. It wasn’t long before the three of us were standing in front of the Deathcore Warmachine, looking over the deep scratches from the trees we ran over the night prior. The thing looked like a mating post for a fuckin’ grizzly bear! So to calm Barbaranne I told her, “This will all come out with some wax; we can buff it out.”

  Barb looked at me in disbelief and then at Father Eric, and asked him if we could really get the scratches out.

  “Oh, definitely,” he told her, siding with me on this one. “That will come right out with a little buffing.”

  The two morals of this story are: Vehicles and alcohol never mix well (even when the driver is sober), and Eric Hendrikx is always a problem.