Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (92 page)

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
Mike Gitter actually lied to Roadrunner and told them that we sold a lot more records than we did when they signed us, otherwise I’m not even sure we would have gotten the deal. I think we were at about two thousand records for [2000’s
Killswitch Engage
], and he probably told them ten thousand. He made me swear never to tell Roadrunner how many records we initially sold so he didn’t look bad. It was basically a big dupe.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
Working on our second Killswitch Engage album, [2002’s]
Alive or Just Breathing
, was incredibly difficult. I would drive two hours to Jesse’s place in Providence with a mobile digital recording rig, and we’d work on his vocals in his living room. There were nights where he’d literally sing for five minutes and then say his throat hurt and he couldn’t do it. Then I’d drive two hours back home. It was a bad situation for everyone. He didn’t know how to prevent throat fatigue and it ended up cornering and overwhelming him.

JESSE LEACH:
I had all these misconceptions about my voice. I didn’t know how to sing properly. I had no technique. So I would get up there and bleed my soul through a microphone and force my voice out and my vocal chords would smash together.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
There was literally this gradual self-implosion that started with Jesse around the time when we signed to Roadrunner. Not to point fingers, but when we worked on the first Roadrunner record [
Alive or Just Breathing
], Jesse was getting a lot of outside pressure from the label, most notably our A&R guy Mike Gitter, who would make phone calls saying, “You should try to sound like this” or “Maybe you should use this for inspiration.” A lot of people are able to deal with that kind of stress, but Jesse internalized all of it. He took everything to heart, and I think that was the beginning of the destruction of Jesse being a front man in the band. His concentration was scattered all over the place and his confidence was crushed.

MIKE GITTER:
Was there pressure on Jesse to deliver the best vocals he could? Absolutely. Was this one of the contributing factors to Jesse leaving the band? Sure. That wasn’t the only factor. Jesse had just gotten married and felt a responsibility to his wife. He also felt the pressure of everything that was going on around Killswitch at the time. It wasn’t an easy time for the guy. I don’t think that with Jesse, Killswitch would have become as big as they did. They would have done well, but not become the commercial band that they became with Howard Jones.

JESSE LEACH:
Our first official tour was with Soilwork, and those guys had a ritual of doing beer bongs. When Adam and [guitarist] Joel [Stroetzel] got seasoned by them, it was ridiculous. They would get so drunk, and I would get irritated. If I was in a better place, I’m sure I would have laughed a lot harder at some of the hilarity. Adam is still one of the funniest guys I know, and the banter between him and Joel when they were drunk in the van was hilarious. They were like the two old guys from the Muppets who could take any situation and pick it apart and make it funny.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
I played drums straight through the release of the first Roadrunner record, [2002’s]
Alive or Just Breathing
, which was at least a year and a half. As soon as the record was released, that’s when we decided to be a five-piece instead of a four-piece, just for a bigger sound. That, and I was tired of setting up the drum kit. So we got our friend Tom [Gomes] in to play [drums] and I moved to guitar.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
Playing with Adam has always been hilarious. Even in the beginning, he’d wear a Viking helmet onstage behind his drum set and blow horns and play kazoos and do everything he could to make people look at him. It’s so funny because he started out as a really timid guy and he just blew up into this dude ready to get nuts.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
We’ve always liked getting our drink on, just bro-ing down and being goofy. Jesse didn’t really vibe with that. I’ve always found that a bunch of drinks before a show tames the jitters. Joel says that if he doesn’t have drinks before he goes on, he can’t remember how to play the songs. There’s definitely been nights where I’ve been less than tight, but I think for the most part I’m pretty good at remembering stuff, somehow. I don’t know how I do it. Muscle memory, I guess.

JESSE LEACH:
When we toured, I did my best to stay completely sober. No beers, no nothing, because I had read that alcohol is bad for your voice and it dries you out. Back then, a lot of the clubs allowed smoking. So I’d be in these smoky rooms and I would be freaking out, which is part of the reason I would hide out all the time. Basically, while they were all having fun, I kept to myself in the van. I thought not talking between shows was good. I was way wet behind the ears.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
It got to a point [in 2002] where Jesse was miserable. He felt like he couldn’t talk, he missed his wife, his throat was always a gamble. We canceled two or three shows because of his throat problems. By the end of the first tour, we had played all these gigs in these terrible venues with nobody showing up, and finally we were in Seattle, about to play our last show. There was a great turnout, the club was amazing. We were so amped up. Great vibes, great city. Then all of a sudden Jesse goes, “You know what, I can’t do this. I’m leaving.” He packed his stuff and hopped the plane home to go be with his family.

JESSE LEACH:
Everything came crashing down on me, so I literally disappeared on the second-to-last day of the tour. I had my brother pick me up in Seattle, where he lives, and I got a flight straight home. I didn’t even say goodbye to those guys. I went into hiding for a month. Then I had to pay my bills, so I ended up working three jobs and I became a total workaholic.

MIKE D’ANTONIO:
I received an e-mail from him about two days after he left saying he didn’t want to do it anymore. We had just started driving back home, and our van broke down in the middle of South Dakota. The wheelbase fell off and we were just sitting there at our lowest point. We had just put out our record on Roadrunner, and all of a sudden we find out we don’t have a singer.

BRIAN FAIR:
Back in ’91 or ’92, Overcast played with Howard Jones’s old band, Driven. Howard was actually the first person I suggested to Mike D. when he told me Jesse was leaving the band. At first they thought, “Well, he’s already got a solid band going on with Blood Has Been Shed,” and they didn’t want to steal him away. Then
he
actually ended up getting in touch with
them
.

PHIL LABONTE:
After Jesse [Leach] left [in 2002], I tried out for Killswitch a couple of times. Once, they had me ride down with them to New York City’s SIR Studios. I had a leg up, and I thought, “Ah, I got this.” I did the tryout. Mike Gitter from Roadrunner was there and he said, “It was great. You nailed it.” But the day before we did that, I heard that Howard [Jones] had called them up and I thought, “Uh-oh.” Because I had heard Howard sing, and he’s really talented. After that, I had another tryout, and a week later I called Adam and he said, “Yeah, we’re gonna go with Howard.” I was like, “Fuck!” But man, I wasn’t mad. Because one thing people may not know about Adam is he’s funny and he’s a jokester, but he’s the most straight-shooting and legit dude that I know. There are no pulled punches and he doesn’t mince words when he has to be straight. You have to respect that.

ADAM DUTKIEWICZ:
We auditioned a bunch of people, and several were pretty good, including Phil. But Howard just had that
thing
, he had the magic. He can sing his nuts off and he’s really great at melody and great at projecting.

MIKE GITTER:
When Howard came in, a lot of things about the band and its sound broadened. He’s
bigger
. His voice is bigger.
Physically
, he’s bigger. He is the kind of front man that can stand in front of a crowd of fifteen thousand people and be utterly commanding. He’s also spontaneous and is the straight man to Adam D’s tomfoolery.

HOWARD JONES (ex–Killswitch Engage):
Adam is hysterical. He’s funny, period, but when he’s drinking it’s even better. I don’t drink. My beverage of choice is protein and soy milk. Adam drinks enough for everybody.

In February 2010, after releasing their self-titled fifth album, Killswitch Engage announced that Jones was taking time off from the band to sort out personal issues. Labonte filled in for a tour. Then, in 2012, Jones announced that he was battling type 2 diabetes and was leaving the band. Moreover, he stated that his heart was no longer in the music. Having worked again with Dutkiewicz in the side project Times of Grace, original Killswitch singer Jesse Leach was invited to rejoin the band. Killswitch Engage wasn’t the only Massachusetts metalcore pioneer to struggle with lineup changes; Unearth also had its share of personnel shake-ups.

BUZ McGRATH (Unearth):
In 2002, we had to replace [bassist] Chris “Rover” Rybicki with [bassist] John [“Slo”] Maggard, who used to be in a Western Mass. band called Flatlined. Chris just wasn’t ready to commit to how far we wanted to take the band.

TREVOR PHIPPS:
We remained friends with Chris, [who died in 2009 when his scooter was hit by a drunk driver]. He had a really funny, dark sense of humor. And he was a bit perverted. We were shopping the band to get to a bigger label and we were on tour and this label guy put us up for the night. He has a guest house/gym that had a couple couches. I was sleeping the next morning, and this guy’s wife and her friend were working out in the next room and I woke to see Rover filming this label guy’s wife with a video camera. We had to tell him to stop and delete the footage because it could have gotten us in trouble. That wasn’t all he filmed. We had good friends of ours who were girls, and out of the blue Chris would show us videos of him having sex with them. We wouldn’t have thought the girls would do that with him, but sure enough, he could convince them. He used to walk up to a girl in a bar or at a show and say something really dirty that he wanted to do to her. He told us, “If you do that to a hundred girls, you might get slapped ninety-eight times, but there’ll be one or two girls who will be psyched for it.” He’d have sex with these girls in club bathrooms or stairwells. The rest of us were just in awe.

BUZ McGRATH:
After we got rid of Rover our original drummer, Mike Rudberg, quit. We had about half of [2004’s]
The Oncoming Storm
written when that happened. [Drummer] Mike Justian came in around then and learned what we had written and made it his own and wrote the rest. That was a big record for us and it really brought us into our own as more of a thrash band and less of a metalcore group.

TREVOR PHIPPS (Unearth):
Mike Rudberg was a very reserved, shy, quiet guy. He wouldn’t do anything crazy, ever. But we were playing this sold-out show at Emo’s in 2003 with Evergreen Terrace, at South by Southwest, and for some weird reason Mike stripped down naked and played the entire set nude. After the show he was psyched for about five minutes. Then he took a long walk and came back and told us he was leaving the band because he didn’t want to tour.

For groups that weren’t already insiders, the Orange County metalcore scene was hard to break into. Ironically, the two acts that had the hardest time being accepted by the metalcore elite, Atreyu and Avenged Sevenfold, would later become the most successful bands in the scene. Atreyu, who named themselves after a character from the children’s movie
The Neverending Story
, formed in 1998 and fought relentlessly to win over metalcore fans with vocals that were alternately acerbic and syrupy, and guitars that combined elements of thrash, post-hardcore, and eighties metal.

DAN JACOBS (Atreyu):
I was a big fan of Warrant and Queen back when I was ten or eleven years old. I went off in a punk direction for a while; then when I was fifteen, my friend played me Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and I was like, “Oh, my God, this is awesome.” From there, I discovered Ozzy, Twisted Sister, Bon Jovi, and the more I looked into it, the more I discovered how over-the-top eighties metal was, how big the live shows were, and how every musician ripped. I manage to get a little bit of that flavor in the music of Atreyu.

ALEX VARKATZAS:
Dan and I met in eighth grade. [Drummer] Brandon [Saller] had just started seventh grade, but I knew his older brother Ryan, who introduced me to Brandon, and it just clicked. Our first band practice was me, Dan, and Brandon. We were in a little punk band in high school and we practiced in Brandon’s apartment and covered Black Flag’s version of “Louie, Louie.”

BRANDON SALLER (Atreyu):
When we started Atreyu, I was kind of scared because Alex and Dan were both older than me, and Alex was this gnarly punk dude who knew so much more about music than I did. I was like, “Shit, what if we play and they think I suck?” But it worked out. I had been playing drums for two years at that point. I was not good by any means. I could work my way around some Green Day songs; it wasn’t anything special, but it was good enough.