Machine Head, Kerrang! July 4, 2007
MORNING, 1998, somewhere near San Francisco. Robb Flynn has just woken up. The night before was spent taking ketamine, a horse tranquiliser that, among other things, can produce dark and nightmarish hallucinations.
He looks in the mirror, breathes out slowly and closes his eyes. Carved across his chest is the word ‘METAL’, scratchy, bloody and violent. He looks down and sees the knife with which he gouged the letters in his flesh, blood drying on its blade. This isn’t the first time he’s cut himself. It’s not even the first sign there’s something wrong.
Much of the frontman’s previous year has been spent taking a cocktail of drugs, of abusing alcohol and substances with increasing regularity. It’s just one of a number of self-destructive tendencies that have driven the singer to the edge of suicide. There’s also the bulimia and subsequent vomiting sessions in disgusting, shit-hole club toilets, an affliction he’s struggling to keep secret from his wife.
Therapy is helping, to an extent. A year-and-a-half re-opening wounds that Flynn isn’t sure he wants to revisit, further cocaine and alcohol required to block out the pain of memories that refuse to subside.
And now, here in 2007, these are the things Robb Flynn is thinking about. Sat in a Camden pub on a weekday afternoon, he’s pouring his heart out. Drugs, depression, fighting, suicide and memories of the abuse he suffered as a child all come tumbling out; a man looking back on a life spent standing over the abyss.
He’ll speak fluently at times, haltingly at others – some memories off limits, too painful, not for public consumption. Sometimes he’ll look you in the eyes and thank you for asking him about this, at other times he’ll shut himself off. “I’m done talking about it,” he says. “I’m done.” Firmly, politely and with sadness in his eyes.
Then he delves into his past again, dredging the depths of his heart.
“I’ve got issues, man,” he says, an intense, steely glare branded on his face. His voice a whisper. “I’ve got issues you can’t imagine. There’s always been an explosion of anger around me. At some point in my life, I stopped taking all that rage out on the world and turned it on myself. There have been times when I’ve ripped myself apart. Ripped myself apart.”
IN 1985 Robb Flynn was just another 17-year-old metaller thrilled by the new Bay Area scene in San Francisco, where he lived. School, where Flynn had been a straight A student before discovering beer, metal and weed, was behind him. He’d graduated, just, and only after a stern talking to by Principal Logan, but cared little about furthering his education. He lived with his adopted parents – he’s never tried to find his real parents and says he never will – in Fremont, a quiet middle-class suburb, but despite efforts to keep him on the straight and narrow, he was always attracted to, “the skater kids and the smoker kids”. And they were kids who led him straight into the dingy clubs and bars of the Bay Area’s burgeoning metal scene.
“It was amazing then,” says Flynn. “Bands like Poison Idea, The Dead Kennedys, Metallica, Exodus, Possessed and Death Angel were all playing. I don’t think any of us realised what an incredible musical thing was happening. My first couple of shows meant so much to me. I had finally found somewhere that I fitted, a place where I could connect to everyone there.”
And it was as exciting being in the crowd as being onstage; aggression, anarchy and thrills all around.
“Oh man, it was violent then, incredibly violent,” says Flynn. “I’d come out of shows with my nose and ribs broken. I remember seeing someone in a circle pit with a cow’s leg bone. He was just smashing people round the head with it. Elsewhere there’d be people breaking glass and rolling in it. It was fucking crazy, man. There was no security, no insurance and no barriers – anything went.
“Me and my friends would get a bunch of crank – speed – and the cheapest beer we could find, $3 for a 12-pack. Then we’d go to Berkeley and get wired and drunk before seeing a show. Afterwards, we’d drive home blaring the bands we’d just seen from the stereo. Then, because I was still so wired, I’d sit up playing guitar ‘til dawn, trying to work out the riffs I’d just heard the bands playing.”
It was a lifestyle that couldn’t last, his parents finally losing patience with the amped-up son they found in their house every morning.
“They kicked me out because I was too crazy. Their attitude was, ‘You’re 17-years-old and you think you’ve got everything all figured out. Fine, go figure it out.’ I totally resented that back then. But now, looking back, it was probably a good thing. Now that I’m not a skateboarding, fighting, speed-freak, 17-year-old asshole, I can see that being kicked out helped me learn some responsibilities.”
He’d crash on friends’ floors, sofas, “or hook up with girls just so I’d have somewhere to sleep at night”. To make ends meet, he’d work odd jobs but could never settle to anything permanently. “They were great times but they weren’t always fun,” says Flynn now. “Not having any money and not having any food sucked. Once I couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes, and the pair I had stunk. Man, it was a satanic stench. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t take my shoes off.”
Something had to be done. So Flynn looked at the area in which he lived, the broken down ghettos, the filth covered streets of Oakland and realised something very quickly: the only people making any money were those selling drugs. It wasn’t a career move he had to think twice about.
“There were a lot of crack dealers. You’d look at them making a living and realise, ‘I could do that’. I thought, ‘I do speed, I may as well sell it too’. It turned out that I had quite a knack for it. I made pretty good money.”
SO IT was that, as the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, Robb Flynn was the crank-smoking, speed-dealing, guitarist with Bay Area thrash metallers Vio-lence, a band also featuring current Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel.
“They were probably the craziest days of my life,” says Flynn. “I was fighting every weekend. We would go out drinking just so that we could have a fight. I wouldn’t say I regret those days. 95 percent of the people we were fighting were drunk and looking for trouble too.
“It was about then that I stopped smoking speed – smoking, by the way, is the connoisseur’s way to do crank, it’s a little more gourmet. But I looked at where I was heading and thought, ‘I’m not going down this route’. I still don’t know if that was shrewd business or dumb luck.”
Meanwhile, all around him, the metal scene was dying. Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ had changed the face of thrash, while alt-rockers Jane’s Addiction, Primus, Faith No More and the nascent grunge scene were softening metal’s riffs into something more mainstream.
So this, with typical perversity, was the moment Flynn chose to leave Vio-lence to launch his own metal band, Machine Head, alongside bassist Adam Duce, drummer Chris Kontos and guitarist Logan Mader.
“The scene was dead then,” says Flynn. “We had to play in tiny, shit-hole punk clubs alongside bands like Rancid just to get a gig. The punks sort of accepted us. They’d see a bunch of long-haired dudes, realise we’d fight people just for looking at us the wrong way, and thought, ‘We’ll just leave them alone’. The funny thing was, we were these tough dudes who would secretly listen to The Cure. I could sing all the lyrics to ‘Careless Whisper’ by George Michael…”
WORD SPREAD of Machine Head’s fearsome live shows – so fearsome, in fact, that the band were banned from three San Francisco clubs after gigs went too far – until their reputation earned them a visit from Roadrunner Records’ A&R department. A deal was swiftly inked and an ecstatic Flynn was eager to hit the town to celebrate.
“It was October 9, 1993, and my friend and I went out and got absolutely fucking trashed. We’d just signed a deal, man. It was amazing!
“I had been dabbling with heroin at that point but, luckily, I just didn’t enjoy it that much. I’d shoot it, throw up for two hours, and think, ‘This sucks’. That night, though, drunk at two in the morning, we were like, ‘Let’s go score!’ We went to the dealer’s house and, because I was scared of needles and afraid of messing up, he shot me up. I overdosed on the spot. They told me afterwards that I turned blue, so they dragged me in the bathroom, got me breathing again and just left me there. I woke up in that bathroom six hours later thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ The dealer, who was half nodded-out, said, ‘Oh my God! You’re alive.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God I’m alive? What the fuck are you talking about? You just dumped in the bathroom after I OD’d? Fuck you guys!’
“I called my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, and she went crazy. I felt so stupid. So stupid. I was incredibly ashamed of myself. I was so embarrassed that I cried. What the fuck was I doing? Why am I so self-destructive?”
THE ALBUM that came out of such despair and anger was Machine Head’s 1994 debut ‘Burn My Eyes’. On its release Kerrang! gave it 5Ks saying, “This is the shit… ‘Burn My Eyes’ is a monster”. Elsewhere, too, it was credited as a masterpiece, an album that single-handedly reinvigorated and reinvented the ‘90s metal scene.
Even now it’s held up as a work of genius by a new generation of musicians who have used it as inspiration. Bands like Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall and Trivium, in particular, have been quick to acknowledge its importance in their careers. Bullet For My Valentine’s Matt Tuck is another, saying: “I was about 15 when I first heard Machine Head. It was the first time I'd ever heard that real, ultra-heavy, metal production with the double kick drums and the raging, heavy guitar sound. It was just relentlessly heavy. It got me hooked on that type of music immediately.”
But, back in 1994, Flynn wasn’t so sure of his success. Returning home from supposedly world conquering tours to his same old rundown home amid Oakland’s overflowing ghettos was a brutal reality check. Still living next door to the crack, smack and speed dealers of his past, it was hard to reconcile his surroundings with the praise being heaped on his music, his achievements hard to believe in those mean streets. So, with shotgun blasts in the distance and junkies outside his door, those old self-destructive urges would return to gnaw, gnaw, gnaw away.
“I had so much anger then,” he says. “I was so angry at the world, at everything I saw. Part of me was pleased we were getting somewhere at last; part of me didn’t think we deserved it. I’m never completely satisfied with anything. Perhaps I’m a perfectionist. Maybe that’s what drives me.”
It meant second album, 1997’s ‘The More Things Change’, had a difficult birth. Drummer Chris Kontos had left to be replaced by current drummer Dave McClain while Flynn collapsed under the pressure of writing a follow-up as successful as their debut.
“Everyone was stressing out and arguing,” he says. “There were plenty of times I was totally depressed, thinking, ‘This is never going to happen’. It was a fucking nightmare, I can’t even begin to tell you just how much of a nightmare.”
The album was mixed, remixed, then remixed again. Flynn was convinced, at times, that he should split the band up and give up on music. There were times he thought he’d lost his mind, something that would send him on violent rampages in which he’d, “cry, scream, break chairs and tables, punch holes in walls. For a long time it just didn’t seem as if anything was going to get better.”
To make matters worse, while they had been holed up in the studio, bands like Korn and Fear Factory had stolen in and taken their metal crown, leaving nu-metal around the corner and waiting to pounce. It meant that, while the response to ‘The More Things Change’ was positive, it was nowhere near as orgasmic as the reception that greeted ‘Burn My Eyes’. The tours that followed were successful but became an ever growing battle. So Machine Head realised that, on their third album, they needed to come out fighting, they needed to mark their territory, they needed to stand firm.
And then Robb Flynn began to fall apart.
“I’M HAPPY I’m not in the same place as I was in 1998,” says Flynn, his face set in steely determination. “That was when I was taking a lot of things out on myself.”
It was then that Flynn woke with ‘Metal’ carved across his chest, when he’d take coke, and ketamine, swilling them down with booze. It was then that he felt his life was spiralling out of control, prompting the onset of the bulimia.
“It was a way of trying to force control onto everything around me. If I could control my body, then I would be okay, I thought. That’s what the bulimia was about, I think. I was in a bad way.
“There’s this glamour about being the fucked up singer in a rock band. Maybe I was playing up to that. But there’s nothing glamorous about puking into a toilet because you thought you were fat. There’s nothing glamorous about that puke splashing back into your eyes. There’s nothing glamorous about having your wife walk into the bathroom and watch you as puke runs down your face. There’s nothing glamorous about that at all. It’s pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.”
So he went into therapy, talking his problems through with shrinks who dredged up his deepest, most repressed memories, reawakening thoughts he had buried through fear. And it was from those sessions that the song ‘Five’ emerged. Hauntingly, it deals with the abuse Flynn suffered as a child. ‘You molest and destroy just a five-year-old boy, and you make me suffer, motherfucker. Ripped my heart out. I was only five. Five,’ run the chilling lyrics. It’s not something Flynn likes to talk about.
“I will never play that song onstage. Ever.” Deadly serious as he talks now, a fixed stare and clenched jaw. “That was a song ripped straight from the heart. I try to never think about what happened but it creeps in though, it creeps in. When I’m alone in my bunk, lots of things I don’t want to think about come into my head. I try to block them out but they keep on coming...” he breaks off, eyes welling up. “…I don’t want to talk about it. I’m done.”
THIRD ALBUM, ‘The Burning Red’ – the record wrought from Flynn’s 1998 turmoil – was not well received. Too many thought Machine Head had embraced nu-metal, selling out to corporate rap-rock.
“There’s a minute and a half of rapping on that album,” says Flynn angrily. “The other 53 minutes of the record are like a giant scar being ripped open while I projectile vomit through it. If all that people got out of that album was rap-metal, then they didn’t fucking listen to it.”
Still, its poor reception started a chain of events that would see Machine Head fall so far from grace that they lost their record deal, a good proportion of their fan base and much of their credibility.
Fourth album, 2001’s ‘Supercharger’, was the band’s lowest selling record, managing just 250,000 sales. Not bad for a new band, not good for the so-called saviours of metal. So, in 2002, they found themselves with no record deal. Guitarist Logan Mader had walked out on them before ‘The Burning Red’, his replacement, Ahrue Luster, left as the band’s record deal disappeared.
So Robb Flynn did what he knew best. He went to the practice studio and worked on new songs, doing odd jobs as a sound engineer to pay the bills. Reuniting with Vio-lence guitarist Phil Demmel, Machine Head worked on a new demo that they sent out to every record company in America.
“Every single one of them – all 35 – turned it down,” he says. “The first couple of rejections were difficult. Towards the end, it was almost comical: ‘Oh, someone else has passed on us. Okay, well fuck them!’”
But then Roadrunner’s European arm re-signed them, allowing them to start work on ‘Through The Ashes Of Empires’. It was an album that, on release, met with uniformly ecstatic reviews. And from that day, from that album, has come a spectacular renaissance, one that has led to Machine Head being hailed as godfathers of today’s metal scene, with Robb Flynn a James Hetfield figure for a new generation of metallers.
“It’s crazy that people think that,” says Flynn. “It’s nice but crazy. We’re fans of bands like Trivium and Killswitch Engage, so when they say things like, ‘Oh, by the way, I followed you around for a week when you were on tour once,’ it’s quite amazing.”
Most recent album, this year’s ‘The Blackening’, will almost certainly be the best metal album of 2007, while Machine Head’s live shows have become a celebration of a band in the form of their lives. Meanwhile, closer to home, the birth of Flynn’s second son – only the second blood relative he’s ever known – earlier this year has made him a decidedly proud man.
So perhaps it’s resurrection that has marked Robb Flynn’s life more than anything else, more than the drugs, the violence, the horrors and the self-destruction. Each time he has threatened to disappear into a black hole of despair, the music would return to him, would save his life. Each time it all got too much, he has staggered back from the brink to claim victory, to survive.
“Putting it like that makes the troughs seem like a bad thing,” he says. “I don’t think the troughs were bad at all. You need the valleys to appreciate the peaks. You’ll learn more from your failures than you ever will from your triumphs.”
He leans in.
“I wouldn’t change a thing.”
© Tom Bryant 2010
He looks in the mirror, breathes out slowly and closes his eyes. Carved across his chest is the word ‘METAL’, scratchy, bloody and violent. He looks down and sees the knife with which he gouged the letters in his flesh, blood drying on its blade. This isn’t the first time he’s cut himself. It’s not even the first sign there’s something wrong.
Much of the frontman’s previous year has been spent taking a cocktail of drugs, of abusing alcohol and substances with increasing regularity. It’s just one of a number of self-destructive tendencies that have driven the singer to the edge of suicide. There’s also the bulimia and subsequent vomiting sessions in disgusting, shit-hole club toilets, an affliction he’s struggling to keep secret from his wife.
Therapy is helping, to an extent. A year-and-a-half re-opening wounds that Flynn isn’t sure he wants to revisit, further cocaine and alcohol required to block out the pain of memories that refuse to subside.
And now, here in 2007, these are the things Robb Flynn is thinking about. Sat in a Camden pub on a weekday afternoon, he’s pouring his heart out. Drugs, depression, fighting, suicide and memories of the abuse he suffered as a child all come tumbling out; a man looking back on a life spent standing over the abyss.
He’ll speak fluently at times, haltingly at others – some memories off limits, too painful, not for public consumption. Sometimes he’ll look you in the eyes and thank you for asking him about this, at other times he’ll shut himself off. “I’m done talking about it,” he says. “I’m done.” Firmly, politely and with sadness in his eyes.
Then he delves into his past again, dredging the depths of his heart.
“I’ve got issues, man,” he says, an intense, steely glare branded on his face. His voice a whisper. “I’ve got issues you can’t imagine. There’s always been an explosion of anger around me. At some point in my life, I stopped taking all that rage out on the world and turned it on myself. There have been times when I’ve ripped myself apart. Ripped myself apart.”
IN 1985 Robb Flynn was just another 17-year-old metaller thrilled by the new Bay Area scene in San Francisco, where he lived. School, where Flynn had been a straight A student before discovering beer, metal and weed, was behind him. He’d graduated, just, and only after a stern talking to by Principal Logan, but cared little about furthering his education. He lived with his adopted parents – he’s never tried to find his real parents and says he never will – in Fremont, a quiet middle-class suburb, but despite efforts to keep him on the straight and narrow, he was always attracted to, “the skater kids and the smoker kids”. And they were kids who led him straight into the dingy clubs and bars of the Bay Area’s burgeoning metal scene.
“It was amazing then,” says Flynn. “Bands like Poison Idea, The Dead Kennedys, Metallica, Exodus, Possessed and Death Angel were all playing. I don’t think any of us realised what an incredible musical thing was happening. My first couple of shows meant so much to me. I had finally found somewhere that I fitted, a place where I could connect to everyone there.”
And it was as exciting being in the crowd as being onstage; aggression, anarchy and thrills all around.
“Oh man, it was violent then, incredibly violent,” says Flynn. “I’d come out of shows with my nose and ribs broken. I remember seeing someone in a circle pit with a cow’s leg bone. He was just smashing people round the head with it. Elsewhere there’d be people breaking glass and rolling in it. It was fucking crazy, man. There was no security, no insurance and no barriers – anything went.
“Me and my friends would get a bunch of crank – speed – and the cheapest beer we could find, $3 for a 12-pack. Then we’d go to Berkeley and get wired and drunk before seeing a show. Afterwards, we’d drive home blaring the bands we’d just seen from the stereo. Then, because I was still so wired, I’d sit up playing guitar ‘til dawn, trying to work out the riffs I’d just heard the bands playing.”
It was a lifestyle that couldn’t last, his parents finally losing patience with the amped-up son they found in their house every morning.
“They kicked me out because I was too crazy. Their attitude was, ‘You’re 17-years-old and you think you’ve got everything all figured out. Fine, go figure it out.’ I totally resented that back then. But now, looking back, it was probably a good thing. Now that I’m not a skateboarding, fighting, speed-freak, 17-year-old asshole, I can see that being kicked out helped me learn some responsibilities.”
He’d crash on friends’ floors, sofas, “or hook up with girls just so I’d have somewhere to sleep at night”. To make ends meet, he’d work odd jobs but could never settle to anything permanently. “They were great times but they weren’t always fun,” says Flynn now. “Not having any money and not having any food sucked. Once I couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes, and the pair I had stunk. Man, it was a satanic stench. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t take my shoes off.”
Something had to be done. So Flynn looked at the area in which he lived, the broken down ghettos, the filth covered streets of Oakland and realised something very quickly: the only people making any money were those selling drugs. It wasn’t a career move he had to think twice about.
“There were a lot of crack dealers. You’d look at them making a living and realise, ‘I could do that’. I thought, ‘I do speed, I may as well sell it too’. It turned out that I had quite a knack for it. I made pretty good money.”
SO IT was that, as the ‘80s turned into the ‘90s, Robb Flynn was the crank-smoking, speed-dealing, guitarist with Bay Area thrash metallers Vio-lence, a band also featuring current Machine Head guitarist Phil Demmel.
“They were probably the craziest days of my life,” says Flynn. “I was fighting every weekend. We would go out drinking just so that we could have a fight. I wouldn’t say I regret those days. 95 percent of the people we were fighting were drunk and looking for trouble too.
“It was about then that I stopped smoking speed – smoking, by the way, is the connoisseur’s way to do crank, it’s a little more gourmet. But I looked at where I was heading and thought, ‘I’m not going down this route’. I still don’t know if that was shrewd business or dumb luck.”
Meanwhile, all around him, the metal scene was dying. Metallica’s ‘Black Album’ had changed the face of thrash, while alt-rockers Jane’s Addiction, Primus, Faith No More and the nascent grunge scene were softening metal’s riffs into something more mainstream.
So this, with typical perversity, was the moment Flynn chose to leave Vio-lence to launch his own metal band, Machine Head, alongside bassist Adam Duce, drummer Chris Kontos and guitarist Logan Mader.
“The scene was dead then,” says Flynn. “We had to play in tiny, shit-hole punk clubs alongside bands like Rancid just to get a gig. The punks sort of accepted us. They’d see a bunch of long-haired dudes, realise we’d fight people just for looking at us the wrong way, and thought, ‘We’ll just leave them alone’. The funny thing was, we were these tough dudes who would secretly listen to The Cure. I could sing all the lyrics to ‘Careless Whisper’ by George Michael…”
WORD SPREAD of Machine Head’s fearsome live shows – so fearsome, in fact, that the band were banned from three San Francisco clubs after gigs went too far – until their reputation earned them a visit from Roadrunner Records’ A&R department. A deal was swiftly inked and an ecstatic Flynn was eager to hit the town to celebrate.
“It was October 9, 1993, and my friend and I went out and got absolutely fucking trashed. We’d just signed a deal, man. It was amazing!
“I had been dabbling with heroin at that point but, luckily, I just didn’t enjoy it that much. I’d shoot it, throw up for two hours, and think, ‘This sucks’. That night, though, drunk at two in the morning, we were like, ‘Let’s go score!’ We went to the dealer’s house and, because I was scared of needles and afraid of messing up, he shot me up. I overdosed on the spot. They told me afterwards that I turned blue, so they dragged me in the bathroom, got me breathing again and just left me there. I woke up in that bathroom six hours later thinking, ‘What the fuck?’ The dealer, who was half nodded-out, said, ‘Oh my God! You’re alive.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God I’m alive? What the fuck are you talking about? You just dumped in the bathroom after I OD’d? Fuck you guys!’
“I called my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, and she went crazy. I felt so stupid. So stupid. I was incredibly ashamed of myself. I was so embarrassed that I cried. What the fuck was I doing? Why am I so self-destructive?”
THE ALBUM that came out of such despair and anger was Machine Head’s 1994 debut ‘Burn My Eyes’. On its release Kerrang! gave it 5Ks saying, “This is the shit… ‘Burn My Eyes’ is a monster”. Elsewhere, too, it was credited as a masterpiece, an album that single-handedly reinvigorated and reinvented the ‘90s metal scene.
Even now it’s held up as a work of genius by a new generation of musicians who have used it as inspiration. Bands like Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall and Trivium, in particular, have been quick to acknowledge its importance in their careers. Bullet For My Valentine’s Matt Tuck is another, saying: “I was about 15 when I first heard Machine Head. It was the first time I'd ever heard that real, ultra-heavy, metal production with the double kick drums and the raging, heavy guitar sound. It was just relentlessly heavy. It got me hooked on that type of music immediately.”
But, back in 1994, Flynn wasn’t so sure of his success. Returning home from supposedly world conquering tours to his same old rundown home amid Oakland’s overflowing ghettos was a brutal reality check. Still living next door to the crack, smack and speed dealers of his past, it was hard to reconcile his surroundings with the praise being heaped on his music, his achievements hard to believe in those mean streets. So, with shotgun blasts in the distance and junkies outside his door, those old self-destructive urges would return to gnaw, gnaw, gnaw away.
“I had so much anger then,” he says. “I was so angry at the world, at everything I saw. Part of me was pleased we were getting somewhere at last; part of me didn’t think we deserved it. I’m never completely satisfied with anything. Perhaps I’m a perfectionist. Maybe that’s what drives me.”
It meant second album, 1997’s ‘The More Things Change’, had a difficult birth. Drummer Chris Kontos had left to be replaced by current drummer Dave McClain while Flynn collapsed under the pressure of writing a follow-up as successful as their debut.
“Everyone was stressing out and arguing,” he says. “There were plenty of times I was totally depressed, thinking, ‘This is never going to happen’. It was a fucking nightmare, I can’t even begin to tell you just how much of a nightmare.”
The album was mixed, remixed, then remixed again. Flynn was convinced, at times, that he should split the band up and give up on music. There were times he thought he’d lost his mind, something that would send him on violent rampages in which he’d, “cry, scream, break chairs and tables, punch holes in walls. For a long time it just didn’t seem as if anything was going to get better.”
To make matters worse, while they had been holed up in the studio, bands like Korn and Fear Factory had stolen in and taken their metal crown, leaving nu-metal around the corner and waiting to pounce. It meant that, while the response to ‘The More Things Change’ was positive, it was nowhere near as orgasmic as the reception that greeted ‘Burn My Eyes’. The tours that followed were successful but became an ever growing battle. So Machine Head realised that, on their third album, they needed to come out fighting, they needed to mark their territory, they needed to stand firm.
And then Robb Flynn began to fall apart.
“I’M HAPPY I’m not in the same place as I was in 1998,” says Flynn, his face set in steely determination. “That was when I was taking a lot of things out on myself.”
It was then that Flynn woke with ‘Metal’ carved across his chest, when he’d take coke, and ketamine, swilling them down with booze. It was then that he felt his life was spiralling out of control, prompting the onset of the bulimia.
“It was a way of trying to force control onto everything around me. If I could control my body, then I would be okay, I thought. That’s what the bulimia was about, I think. I was in a bad way.
“There’s this glamour about being the fucked up singer in a rock band. Maybe I was playing up to that. But there’s nothing glamorous about puking into a toilet because you thought you were fat. There’s nothing glamorous about that puke splashing back into your eyes. There’s nothing glamorous about having your wife walk into the bathroom and watch you as puke runs down your face. There’s nothing glamorous about that at all. It’s pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.”
So he went into therapy, talking his problems through with shrinks who dredged up his deepest, most repressed memories, reawakening thoughts he had buried through fear. And it was from those sessions that the song ‘Five’ emerged. Hauntingly, it deals with the abuse Flynn suffered as a child. ‘You molest and destroy just a five-year-old boy, and you make me suffer, motherfucker. Ripped my heart out. I was only five. Five,’ run the chilling lyrics. It’s not something Flynn likes to talk about.
“I will never play that song onstage. Ever.” Deadly serious as he talks now, a fixed stare and clenched jaw. “That was a song ripped straight from the heart. I try to never think about what happened but it creeps in though, it creeps in. When I’m alone in my bunk, lots of things I don’t want to think about come into my head. I try to block them out but they keep on coming...” he breaks off, eyes welling up. “…I don’t want to talk about it. I’m done.”
THIRD ALBUM, ‘The Burning Red’ – the record wrought from Flynn’s 1998 turmoil – was not well received. Too many thought Machine Head had embraced nu-metal, selling out to corporate rap-rock.
“There’s a minute and a half of rapping on that album,” says Flynn angrily. “The other 53 minutes of the record are like a giant scar being ripped open while I projectile vomit through it. If all that people got out of that album was rap-metal, then they didn’t fucking listen to it.”
Still, its poor reception started a chain of events that would see Machine Head fall so far from grace that they lost their record deal, a good proportion of their fan base and much of their credibility.
Fourth album, 2001’s ‘Supercharger’, was the band’s lowest selling record, managing just 250,000 sales. Not bad for a new band, not good for the so-called saviours of metal. So, in 2002, they found themselves with no record deal. Guitarist Logan Mader had walked out on them before ‘The Burning Red’, his replacement, Ahrue Luster, left as the band’s record deal disappeared.
So Robb Flynn did what he knew best. He went to the practice studio and worked on new songs, doing odd jobs as a sound engineer to pay the bills. Reuniting with Vio-lence guitarist Phil Demmel, Machine Head worked on a new demo that they sent out to every record company in America.
“Every single one of them – all 35 – turned it down,” he says. “The first couple of rejections were difficult. Towards the end, it was almost comical: ‘Oh, someone else has passed on us. Okay, well fuck them!’”
But then Roadrunner’s European arm re-signed them, allowing them to start work on ‘Through The Ashes Of Empires’. It was an album that, on release, met with uniformly ecstatic reviews. And from that day, from that album, has come a spectacular renaissance, one that has led to Machine Head being hailed as godfathers of today’s metal scene, with Robb Flynn a James Hetfield figure for a new generation of metallers.
“It’s crazy that people think that,” says Flynn. “It’s nice but crazy. We’re fans of bands like Trivium and Killswitch Engage, so when they say things like, ‘Oh, by the way, I followed you around for a week when you were on tour once,’ it’s quite amazing.”
Most recent album, this year’s ‘The Blackening’, will almost certainly be the best metal album of 2007, while Machine Head’s live shows have become a celebration of a band in the form of their lives. Meanwhile, closer to home, the birth of Flynn’s second son – only the second blood relative he’s ever known – earlier this year has made him a decidedly proud man.
So perhaps it’s resurrection that has marked Robb Flynn’s life more than anything else, more than the drugs, the violence, the horrors and the self-destruction. Each time he has threatened to disappear into a black hole of despair, the music would return to him, would save his life. Each time it all got too much, he has staggered back from the brink to claim victory, to survive.
“Putting it like that makes the troughs seem like a bad thing,” he says. “I don’t think the troughs were bad at all. You need the valleys to appreciate the peaks. You’ll learn more from your failures than you ever will from your triumphs.”
He leans in.
“I wouldn’t change a thing.”
© Tom Bryant 2010