Heavy Metal Musicians

"These kids were killing people and burning churches, but then they were also doing photo shoots in cemeteries, trying to look scary. Euronymous was playing a part and playing the game, and then people took to it and thought he was for real."

"It's not often that an artist’s solo career outshines the output of their primary band, but as controversial as it might be to say, that’s what Emperor co-founder Ihsahn has done in the eyes of many prog fans. To be fair, he's released twice as many full-length records as Emperor, and listeners looking for a purer black metal ride will probably prefer what they’ve done. Yet, those who’re interested in a significantly more progressive/avant-garde and wide-ranging palette will find Ihsahn to be among the greatest modern prog metal acts period. Rather than become uninspired and predictable, Ihsahn has becomes more of a visionary as the years pass."

"I don’t think they had a political agenda. I know that some of them are very extreme in their political agenda today, but they were young boys. I think they stopped thinking as individuals and started thinking more as a group, to impress each other, and to shock. They were in this bubble where, finally, you get immune: you take one step further, and then another, and before you know it, it’s not a big deal to kill a man."

"It isn’t every day that you get to see a corpse, so you have to make the most out of it."

"Finger on the trigger Back against the wall [...] So, you thought you could escape without a fight That we would lose the scent of your despair"

"I spent many Saturday nights in grade school and high school watching MTV's Headbanger's Ball. I was very fortunate that my parents had one of those old, massive, ugly giant satellite dishes that took up half our front yard and also made a great bird's nest and lightning rod. Because we had MTV and also Canada's Much Music channel since the early 1980s, I was able to discover many of my favorite bands through these TV channels, including Death. I remember the first time I saw the video for "Lack of Comprehension" and I was completely blown away. This song was the perfect mix of brutality and melody. Sean Reinert's drumming also blew my mind. As a drummer, I was fascinated by his playing and I immediately wanted to learn more about Death. I also couldn't believe that this song had brutal, guttural vocals, but was also very melodic and catchy — to me it sounded like the perfect mix of a band like Iron Maiden, and a band like Possessed. I immediately tried to learn the drum parts for this song and I have to humbly say that it took me about three years to do so. Almost every day from the time I purchased the Human album in 1992 until I joined Death in 1997, I practiced drums to the Human album because I loved the music and drumming so much. Fortunately, when I auditioned for Death in July of 1997 I knew the Human album like the back of my hand and the first song Chuck Schuldiner and I played together was "Lack of Comprehension." Chuck was very impressed that I knew the whole Human album and many other Death songs and this led to me joining my favorite band in the world and making friends with the most talented musician I've ever met and one of my heroes, Chuck Schuldiner. I miss Chuck so much and think of him every day and pretty much still listen to Death every day. When fans ask what drumming performance of mine that I'm most proud of, I always say The Sound of Perseverance album by Death. It is the highest honor as a metal fan and a dear friend of Chuck's Schuldiner's to say that I got to be in Death, my favorite band in the world."

"Wielding some of the tightest rhythm playing along with some the most otherworldly lead playing that has ever graced heavy music, Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential heavy metal guitarists. [...] Dimebag brought a new level to heavy songwriting and shreddy guitar playing throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s. Infusing his love for blues, KISS, Van Halen and Slayer [his music] helped to pioneer the drop-tuned groovey guitar style that the vast majority of modern metal scene has sworn by."

"Our purpose is to spread fear and evil."

"I have heard Slayer's first and a few from bands such as Sodom, Destruction, Wimphammer / Celtic Compost, and I think they all suck. I don't even listen to black metal, death metal, satanic metal, or thrash metal at all. It's mostly crap."

"Rhoads brought a new level of virtuosity to metal guitar. [...] Carefully trained by his music teacher mom, Rhoads had a flair for modal improvisation, tapped arpeggios and meticulously doubled leads, and set the stage for the Eighties shred boom."

"Given his ability to kick your teeth in and leave you smiling, it’s easy to lump LaRocque in with other ‘80s shredders. But his drenched-in-melodicism licks were outliers, and hinged on tone above all else. LaRocque could shred with the best, but he came from a different place, eschewing theory and relying purely on instinct."

"Most heavy metal is not very melodic in nature. It’s often minor in tone so you can use a lot of minor thirds in your lead breaks. That automatically sounds classical. Leslie West was one of my favorites because he used classical ideas with feeling. He was melodic but mean."

"There was this chemistry between me and Adrian that went beyond the music."

"As the darkness creeps over the Northern mountains of Norway and the silence reach the woods I awake and rise"

"Rhoads infused the explosive, fleet-fingered, yet largely blues-based guitar style of Eddie Van Halen with classical music–inspired melodies and runs and an advanced knowledge of music theory. His playing on Blizzard of Ozz classics like Crazy Train, Mr. Crowley and I Don’t Know raised the bar for guitar shredders in the Eighties and beyond."

"Few guitarist in contemporary music have made such a monumental impact over such short a period of time like Randy Rhodes has. [...] With albums Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, Randy Rhodes’s legacy has become one of the most respected and influential of any guitarist in the metal genre."

"Murray is known for his smooth play, especially when it comes to transition and chord progressions. [...] Though he may not play with the fury of his bandmates, Murray is one of the best melodic guitar players in the metal genre."

"[Murray and Adrian Smith] are the OG’s of the twin axe attack (and thus to blame for inadvertently causing melodic death metal)."

"No one deserves to die the way that Dimebag died. It all occurred on that fateful night in Columbus, Ohio at the Alrosa Villa club on December 8, 2004. Darrell was onstage playing with his band at the time, Damageplan, when a murderous, psychopathic ex Marine jumped on stage and the gunfire erupted. The motive for the rampage was resentment over the breakup of the great, Pantera. Darrel was shot close range and killed, but there were other victims that night, including 23-year-old fan Nathan Bray, Damageplan crew member Jeff “Mayhem” Thompson, 40, and club employee Erin A. Halk, 29. Dimebag’s brother, and Damageplan drummer Vinnie Paul was also shot and injured in the horrific events. The terrifying ordeal ended when SWAT team officers stormed the club, and killed the shooter after a standoff. This brutal, and very graphic scene can be seen on VH1’s series Behind The Music. Of course, the shooter’s death failed to bring any solace to Dimebag’s family friends and legions of fans. Many mourn his loss to this day, including so many other of his peers and colleagues in heavy metal and hard rock. This was such a senseless death, and December 8, 2004 was truly one of the darkest days in metal’s history."

"The kids in Europe were disappointed about [Bob Rusay's departure], 'cause [they were like], 'What happened to Bob?! He was the brutal-ist!' So I kind of had my work cut out for me, you know?"

"[Lyrical possibilities within death metal are] endless, you know. The limits are just.. [nonexistent]. There's all [kinds of] new ways to talk about maming and killing and torturing."

"I first got into extreme metal through trading tapes and reading fanzines. When I was fourteen, I went with one of my neighbours, Shamaatae, to sit in on a rehearsal with his new band. That band was Grotesque and seeing them rehearse was incredibly cool. The intensity and speed of the music being played at maximum volume impressed me like very little had up until that point. My favourite song quickly became 'Blood Runs From The Altar', from their second demo The Black Gate Is Closed. I was already a huge J.R.R. Tolkien fan, so this was just perfection to me."

"We do various things to prepare to go into battle, and it involves some meditation and other practices that we feel like expressing from time to time. We've always been a very spiritual band, and we remain that way."

"It wasn’t about having or being part of a scene. [...] We believed in ourselves and our craft. We pulled ' out of thin air. That’s the result of us living on an island all by ourselves. We came up with something for ourselves that we wanted to do. It was about writing good songs, not about playing fast. Yeah, we like playing fast, and we happened to have a drummer who is capable of very high-speed coordination, so why not take advantage of it?"

"Some people have missed the point, sexualizing the violence or being gross for the sake of it [..] Whatever we were doing with , there was definitely some thought behind it. [...] But it’s easy to be shocking, isn’t it? It’s easy to say horrible things. I’d like to say we did it with a sense of humor."

"That playing [on Heartwork] had that magic rarely heard anymore."

"I understand when people say, "Oh he doesn't sound like he did on that album or song." Well yeah, that's how it's always been on every album. I've had a different vocal sound and that is purposeful. I wouldn't want it any other way. I don’t like to blanket a specific sound over everything. To me it sounds stupid if it sounds like you had no imagination and you had no understanding of what music is and basically just a robot, just going through the motions. That's never been what I do. I've always kind of wanted to reach out and find more out about music than myself through what I do, what I explore through this strange form of art."

"I just think that it gets really, really boring doing the same vocal approach, like as some vocalists do. Fans appreciate it, I think, but its really boring [to me] as an artist to just sit there and tread water, do the same thing, and not really feel the music in a new fresh way each time. I don't fear that. [...] I want to explore something new."

"It just felt right to enunciate and pronounce the lyrics more clearly [on The Bleeding] because I felt the music was more clearly pronounced. [...] I think that at that point in time I wanted to prove to myself that I could still sing really heavy [...] but people could understand my lyrics more, because the lyrics [and storylines] are very important to me [...] it’s an artwork to me [...] and I want my art to be heard."

"I'm not a death metal singer that sings one style or one tone throughout an entire album or sings the same way on every album. I really take it song by song and I try to adjust my vocal approach to the nuances of the music and how it feels to me and what I want to accommodate to kind of offset those things that I hear in the music to make it more closer to what I feel its related to vocal tone wise. [...] The guttural thing started for me when I heard certain things in the riff. You know, the [syncopation]. [...] So I wanted to really bring my vocals into that. You know, so [they were] like melted together with [the music]."

"I think I was only 22 when I burned the inverted cross into my forehead. The spirit moved me, man! To this day, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking, but I knew that I had been christened Catholic as a child, and I felt that the best way to take care of that would be my symbolic way of taking that Catholic mark off of my skin. I’ve always been that kid in the picture who’s got that twisted look and the smile on his face, and when I got to an age where I could start being me, I just started being me. Now that my two sons are both grown and off in the world, I find myself back to being that guy again, the guy that branded the cross on his forehead."

""Hacksaw Decapitation," ' (1999) as quoted by Jon Wiederhorn of"

"The way I look at is “who cares?” [laughter]. Who gives a fuck anymore? Does anybody even read the lyrics anymore? It’s like they’ll release the first SoundScan numbers and it’ll be like 2900 copies sold the first week, but there are like 50,000 downloads. Does anybody even read the packaging anymore? I was going to put in the album this time, “If anybody’s reading this, thanks for not ripping me off!"

"Even though we record to Pro Tools with a click track, I think we’ve learned how to use it in a way where everything still sounds organic. I feel like we managed to capture an old school death metal vibe. It doesn’t sound like one of those modern metal productions where everything is overly precise."

"When I was eight years old and forced against my will to participate in the Christmas play at the church my mother was a Sunday school teacher at, I was singing at the front of the church thinking, ‘How did I get myself into this shit?’"

"The part is all on the C# string [E tuned down a minor 3rd], so it’s really easy to keep it going. Things get a little trickier when you start skipping strings. I didn’t think it was necessary for the part to make it harder than it needed to be, so I kept it all on the C# string so I could pedal along nicely. I kept it at a tempo where I can comfortably play 16th-notes, which is 172 beats per minute. It’s still fast, but once I start getting past 180 BPM, it gets tough."

"[Religion is] beaten into me, so I can’t sing about anything else. If I try to sing about other things, I draw a complete blank. I let the universe speak through me, and if I have to force it, it just won’t come."

"This kind of music helps people get through negative things. I mean, you're taking something negative and turning it into something positive by making it into music -- instead of actually going out and doing something violent. There's plenty of ways to turn things around, and that is what death metal did for me. [...] It got me through alot of negative things in my life -- it was always there for me."

"His wife’s head breaks his jaw Bruised flesh becoming raw"

"Awake, I’m being disembowelled Rotation pulling out the guts Tortured by this tool Intestines on the spool"

"Unless you’re an experimental metal band by nature, people don’t really want that experimentation, I don’t think. They want us to try and out-do what we’ve done – I don’t think people want us to stand still and put out the same album again and again but I think what they want is something stylistically consistent and hopefully even a little better than the last album. When bands go too far away from their style it’s generally not well received in the metal community. Consistency is a big part of our genre."

"My heart is broken, but I know he loved me unconditionally and will always be with me [...] It is the same with all of us, he will be with you everyone, everyday and his love will surround us now and forever."

"People who don’t know this music think it’s just a bunch of noise and it’s really easy to play. That’s totally untrue. You may not like it, but death metal is really complex. You have to have a really fine-tuned ear to appreciate it and a lot of the guys in these bands are incredible musicians."

"I was always referred to as ‘the evil little bastard’ in my family. I just fell into it, and it’s the persona I’ve had ever since I was a little kid, through school and through everything else. I don’t even really know why, but do I get off on raising eyebrows and ruffling feathers? Fuck yeah, I do! Fifty-six years old and I still love getting a reaction out of folks. Most kids rebel, and I wanted to fight the powers."

"Ralphie was a character. He was a crazy person. He always liked to party. He maybe partied too hard. That's a [price] you sometimes have to pay when you party too hard in life. I was very sad last year that he wasn't in a band anymore; he wasn't in an active band anymore because he was such a great player. His background was always more the '70s stuff like and . He loved all of those '70s players, but he brought this stuff into death metal. He was one of the first really skilled lead players in death metal back in the day. He was always funny, also, and had a very black humor. Every time we played in Florida, he came to the shows and brought his great humor and great entertainment to the shows. It was very sad for me to see; I think the fact the tragic ending had to do with everything involved in his music business. When you kind of don't play in a band anymore and you're used to it and you stay home all the time, and you see all your friends touring and you don't, and you're such a passionate musician as him. That was really something that killed him also in a mental way. I was talking to him often and he was always hopeful for a new project. It never really happened. It's very sad because Ralphie was one of a kind. He was one of the guys you met, you meet him once, you'll never forget him."

"We kept giving [him] chances because we’re nice guys. Well, not so much me. I was the one totally against him coming back and forth like that. It was more like [drummer] Steve [Asheim] and [guitarist] Jack [Owen], who are friends with the guy, wanted to keep giving him chances. I’m not the type of guy to give chances. I just kind of went along with it reluctantly. Finally, there was an issue in Europe on one of the tours and I chucked his ass off the bus and called it a day. [...] Man, without going into great detail, let’s just say the guy’s a trainwreck and leave it at that."

"With Cannibal Corpse, it’s always a ‘song first’ kind of thing for me. Some of the side projects I’ve done have allowed me to stretch out a little bit more [in terms of style], but Cannibal is really about being a big, heavy rhythm machine, and stepping out too much might detract from that."

"The shed we rented smelled like rat shit and it was hotter than f–k. We had an air conditioner that didn’t do shit and we’d be totally soaked by the time we were done practicing. But we were determined."

"I'm not going to tell people that what they believe is wrong at all. I'll drink and I'll party more than ten fucking black metal bands put together. I'm definitely not a choir-boy. I have my own thoughts on religion, but at the end of the day, I just want to play my guitar and play metal and have a good time. The rest of that shit is none of anybody's business. What I'll never do though — I'll work at McDonald's before I pretend to be someone I'm not just so that people accept me. I guess that attitude is what's caused a lot of the problems in my life. But there are two kinds of people in this world. One kind — and Glen is one of them — aren't afraid to be themselves. There's another kind that, for some reason, that offends them, and that pisses me off. I will be myself, and I don't really give a fuck what anyone says. I know who my friends are, and that's all I need. The funny thing is that these metal kids are constantly ripping on me on Blabbermouth, and I'm really close friends with a lot of the bands whose T-shirts they're wearing. I'm not going to pretend to be some dark and angry and evil person so that people think I'm metal. I have all of that in me, but the most important thing is that I play my guitar, and you either like it or you don't. I really don't care one way or another."

"The thing is, I hardly know anyone that I share a view about religion on. Every person's different, and Glen absolutely fucking hates Christianity. Who am I to tell him what to think and what to do? I'm just as fucked up as anybody else. The thing with the death threats starting was because of this: when we were supposed to play in Chile, the fucking douchebags that worked for the promoter plastered the poster — the one that had a picture of Jesus with a bullet-hole in his head — all over the city when they had specifically been told not to do that. They put it on churches and everywhere else and so the mayor got pissed off and he had the show cancelled. Then in the hotel, some girl came up to me and asked me for an interview. I asked her who it was for and she told met that it was for some webzine, which later turned out to be a major newspaper. She asked me how I felt about that, and what I said was that I was pissed off that those idiots did that and got our show cancelled. Not that they made the flyer look like that. And in the article, they twisted it around and misquoted me. She also asked me what I thought about some fan who had murdered a priest in Chile last year. Now, I'm not a very patient person, and I have a really low tolerance for stupidity. I was like: 'What the fuck kind of question is that?' Of course I don't condone some asshole murdering a priest. Then suddenly a bunch of people started sending me all sorts of messages on MySpace, threatening to kill me, and a lot of those people are probably pretty serious. Personally I'm not afraid and I'm not intimidated, and all those people can fuck off. I'll tell you this though, a couple of months ago we were playing with Vital and [Dave] Suzuki came running up to me on stage and grabbed me, just to kind of fuck with me. I didn't see who it was at first, and when it happened, I thought it was some guy who was coming up to stab me. So that was funny, but it freaked me out. Then when the cops pepper-sprayed me in Texas, the first thing I saw was someone holding something to my face and I thought I was about to get shot. That freaked me out a little bit. But, you know, I'm not worried about those people. If somebody wants to shoot me, they can shoot me."