Author: smngrx01

Arthur Brown is one of the great originators of rock’n’roll. As leader of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, his 1968 hit Fire inspired generations of shock rockers. But that was only the tip of the iceberg, as Classic Rock found out when we sat down with this great British eccentric in 2004.

Arthur Brown has always had a warm and intense relationship with Fire. That single (now a bone fide classic) reached No. 1 in the UK in August 1968 and No. 2 in the US chart a couple of months later. And although it was Arthur’s only chart appearance, it briefly took him from the shadows of being an underground cult figure into the full glare of rock stardom.

From time to time you’ll catch a grainy monochrome clip of manic-looking Arthur on some retro TV show, prancing about in his flaming helmet, sinister black-and-white face paint and outlandish cape, his voice building from the deep, resonant ‘I am the God of Hellfire!’ introduction to the song’s screaming climax. Even now, all these years on on such a vision makes compelling viewing.

Fire was a cornerstone of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown’s wild theatrical shows. And Arthur was always looking to give the act a spectacular twist. Like the time he made his entrance at London’s Roundhouse, swinging down a rope from the ceiling in full regalia, helmet ablaze. “Anybody down there on acid – and there must have been a few – seeing this figure flying down with flames coming out of his head must have thought God was coming,” he laughs.

Or the time at the Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival when he was lowered on stage by crane while similarly attired and ablaze. Except that a stagehand mistook his opening shrieks for cries of pain and rushed over and poured his pint of beer over Arthur’s head.

But Fire also gave Arthur Brown a brain haemorrhage nearly 30 years later. “It was a hot, sweltering club in Southend and I was singing the high note in Fire,” he recalls. “It was near the end of a thirty-eight-date tour and I was fifty years old. I’d also been trying out loads of different fasts, which had undermined my constitution.”

He survived, thanks to the National Health Service, and went back to recuperate in Texas where he’d been living since the early 80s. “But I was still in a bad way. I was having to learn to walk again. But the heat in Texas was starting to get to me. I basically stayed alive by folding napkins. It was all I could do. And then I wrote some really good songs. That part of me didn’t seem to disappear,” he finishes with a smile.

Texas seems a strange place for Arthur to have ended up. Stranger still when you discover he spent some time running a house-painting business with original Mothers Of Invention drummer Jimmie Carl Black. “I had married this lady from Texas and we had a child and I’d brought him up,” Arthur says by way of explanation. Which doesn’t explain a lot.

But then Arthur’s career was never going to be conventional, from the moment he ignored the questions on his first-year law exam at London University and substituted questions about Marilyn Monroe’s wardrobe instead.

That could have had something to do with being introduced to the Chelsea Set at the start of the 60s: a hip, swinging crowd who were into jazz, French films and dandy clothes. Suddenly Arthur’s musical tastes took on gourmet proportions: “I was guided by voices, really – Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Nina Simone, Joan Baez, James Brown…”

He was not invited to return to London University. When he switched to Reading University he kept his musical options wide open, singing in a jazz band, a folk duo and a mod/R&B band. The theatrical element came when he was offered a residency at a Paris club in 1964.

“Up until then I’d just been standing there singing. I didn’t know anything about stage acts. But playing three sets a night, seven nights a week, just singing the songs was not enough. I started to incorporate poetry, mime and sketches into the act. I’d come on holding a mop, with a bucket on my head, and pretend to be the Statue Of Liberty.”

Returning to England in 1966, Arthur wanted to expand his new-found art-rock talents and looked around for like-minded musicians – while narrowly avoiding becoming a member of the Foundations: “I was going to sing alongside Clem Curtis, and when I walked into the first rehearsal, above a bar in Westbourne Grove, the drummer was bent backwards over the bar and Clem was leaning over him with a spear at his throat.”

In fact the musician Arthur wanted was in the West Kensington house he was living in. “[Future Crazy World keyboard player] Vincent Crane was going out with the landlady’s daughter, and he had a couple of friends who used to come over and write songs. Vincent was a brilliant, classically trained musician with an immaculate taste in music, but he had not really started writing,” Arthur says.

“Together we developed this concept show. We started with costumes, and that led on to makeup, and then we got a proper lightshow. At that time there was virtually nobody else here that was linking lights to music and really going for it.”

But they still needed a drummer. An ad in Melody Maker got a response from drummer Drachen Theaker, who’d got caught in a traffic jam on the way to audition for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and called in on Arthur and Vincent instead.

Now there was some solid rock credibility for Arthur’s art-rock, and they started getting club gigs around London, including the Speakeasy, a fashionable haunt for off-duty stars such as the Rolling Stones. “They [the Stones] were apparently quite bemused by our set,” Arthur recalls. “It was before ‘Their Satanic Majesties…’ and all that stuff.”

Someone else who saw them at the Speakeasy was Joe Boyd, who had just started the underground UFO Club. The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown were just the kind of band he was looking for. Legendary as the club that launched Pink Floyd, UFO was not just about the music. Theatre troupes, mime artists, trippy lightshows and huge inflatable mattresses (this was way before bouncy castles) were all part of the night’s entertainment.

“It wasn’t so much a scene as a forum where you could explode,” remembers Arthur, who did just that. “That’s when the flaming helmet and the act really came together.”

Arthur would emerge through a haze of smoke, the flames from his helmet licking perilously close to the low ceiling tiles as he stalked menacingly around the stage, performing The Fire Suite accompanied by swirling rhythms and gothic, jazzy organ riffs. The lighting mirrored the action, switching to strobes when the going got frenetic. Quite how he avoided serious facial injuries while cavorting around with what effectively amounted to a saucer of burning lighter fuel balanced on his head remains an unexplained miracle.

“My hair was singed many times, my clothes caught fire once, and we were always leaving burn marks on stages. But my face only got burnt on a couple of occasions,” he says.

It was Pete Townshend who got Arthur signed to The Who’s managers Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert and their Track Records. Suddenly there was some commercial muscle behind The Crazy World. Their first single, Devil’s Grip caught the essence of the band’s creepy, compulsive style but didn’t have a catchy enough hook to chart. However, Atlantic Records in the US were keen for an album, and the band began recording The Fire Suite based around the song that was already a highlight of their set.

But Kit Lambert wasn’t happy with a concept album. “He wanted more cover versions like I Put A Spell On You,” Arthur says. “In the end he let us have the first side of the album while he had the second.”

It made for an uneven album, not helped by being recorded in different studios, although the highlights were pretty high. But that was just the start of the album’s woes.

“Kit took the album to America and Atlantic said: ‘It’s great, but the drummer’s out of time’. He came back and got Vincent to write some brass arrangements. The drums were buried; if you listen, it’s the brass that’s carrying it.”

They were on their first American tour – supporting the likes of The Doors, Frank Zappa and The MC5 – when Chris Stamp arrived with acetates of the album. “We found a record player and put it on,” Arthur recalls, “and at the end of the first song Drachen walked across and said: ‘You fucking cunts!’ He picked up the record and hurled it against the wall.”

After that The Crazy World got crazier. “Drachen was already freaked out by the whole American experience, now he was angry. And Vincent was not happy with the way it was going. I was just managing to hold it all together.”

“Then one day Drachen, midway through the gig – whether he’d been watching Keith Moon too much I don’t know – kicks all his drums off the front of the stage. At least Keith Moon did it at the end! Drachen thinks it’s a great stunt until I start shouting at him, and then he walks off. Except that he falls off the front of the stage on to his own kit!

“Back at the hotel he’s really lost it. He’s running around the hotel with his trousers around his ankles, thrusting his wobbler up against the windows. Then Vincent comes in and says: ‘Right, either I go or that fucking wanker does’. I’m trying to calm him down but he’s adamant. I know I will not be able to replace Vincent. So I go to Drachen and say: ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to leave’. And he says: ‘Right, I’m going now’. So now we have no drummer.

“Someone recommends this Canadian guy. He’s a really good groove drummer. The next thing, Vincent starts to get the James Brown vibe. He buys all his albums and plays them constantly. In fact he starts to go over the top. He begins to speak in numbers – ‘You’re the one. Two. Arthur three. Four. Maybe five’. And there was an aggressive undercurrent about it. We thought someone had spiked him. But it turned out he was manic depressive.

“Just as we’re starting one show, he sees a crate of beer that some fool has left at the front of the stage. He walks across while I’m lighting my helmet and starts throwing the cans at the audience. So I go over to him and push my flaming helmet into his face; I push him back round to the keyboards and he sits down. I nod at him and he starts to play. And the show was fantastic. But the next day he was back to speaking in numbers. And after eighteen hours we’re exhausted, because if you weren’t paying him attention he’d break something.

“We got to the hotel, cancelled the gig, then locked him in a cupboard while we went to look for some food. When we got back the cupboard’s smashed open – no sign of Vincent. We eventually found him on the main street, wearing just a cape that he opened from time to time, trying to hitch a lift. And there’s a police car heading toward us. So we grab him and run back to the hotel with him. And just as we get into the room there’s a phone call: ‘When are you arriving for the soundcheck?’ ‘But we cancelled the gig’. ‘No, your keyboard player rang earlier and said it’s on again. And now people are turning up’.”

Vincent was invalided back home. Arthur limped back soon afterward, having somehow managed to complete the tour with stand-in musicians. But if he was looking for sympathy from the management, he was wrong.

“Chris and Kit had always seen me as a solo star. They didn’t think the underground thing was going to last. Kit called me in and said: ‘You can do your underground nights at the weekend. But the rest of the week we want you to play in the lounge. We’re going to make you as big as Engelbert Humperdinck’. And the funny thing was that Engelbert’s people actually came on to me as well. They also wanted me to change my image – shave, haircut, maybe even a nose job. Kit even suggested I could wear a wig for the underground gigs. I just looked at him incredulously and said: ‘No, you’re joking. You just don’t understand me at all. The Crazy World is where I’m at.”

To be fair, Stamp and Lambert had a point. The range and operatic qualities of Arthur’s voice are exceptional, and he could have been moulded into a successful solo artist. But the concept of Arthur Brown as some Bryan Ferry-style crooner is more surreal than any of the characters he has invented over the years.

So it was back to The Crazy World. Or at least it was once Vincent Crane had recovered. And they struck lucky with their next drummer, Carl Palmer, who was fresh out of Chris Farlowe’s band and a potent musical match for Vincent.

“Carl’s arrival changed the whole style of our music because he was much more of a technical drummer,” Arthur says. “Vincent loved that, and they also got on well together which was great because it was just when Fire was a hit.”

The Crazy World were hastily dispatched for another American tour. And this time it was Arthur’s turn to flip. “Before the first American tour I’d never even touched a joint. On the second tour I took acid and that changed everything. I had a completely different realisation of what was going on.”

This new realisation culminated in the infamous Houston Holiday Inn Experience that began when Arthur checked in, wearing white robes and carrying two suitcases. He was shown to his room and, still carrying the suitcases, walked through it on to the patio and straight into the pool. Minutes later he emerged from the pool, dripping, still carrying the cases, returned to reception and asked for another room on a higher floor.

At sunset, drivers on the highway were confronted by the sight of the full Arthur Brown stage show from the balcony of his hotel room – including smoke, strobe lights and psychedelic effects. Complete but for one small detail: Arthur’s clothes. He wasn’t wearing any. He had, however, remembered his helmet.

“There was pandemonium out on the highway,” he remembers. “There were pile-ups, it was completely blocked. There were probably a thousand people watching, and the police were trying to get through on their bikes. Then we got put in jail. Which in the US is not very pleasant.”

Things really started to disintegrate when Arthur contrived to turn down a £650,000 advance for their second album.

“We had a new stage act about a black magician,” Arthur explains. “Our American managers set up a deal with CBS and we’d recorded a song that they thought was bound to be a hit. But we were under contract to Track Records. So we had a meeting in a hotel with Chris and Kit upstairs and the American management downstairs; I was going up and down in the lift between them. But I eventually decided that whatever Chris and Kit’s shortcomings – and I did leave their management later – they had got us up there and it was not morally fair to walk out at that point. I think Vince and Carl thought I’d lost my marbles. We played more gigs, but it wasn’t really going anywhere after that.”

There was also the saga of what could have been: the possibility of forming a band with Jimi Hendrix. “We used to play a New York club called The Scene, and Hendrix used to come down. We got to know each other a little bit and he’d come up and jam with us. He’d play bass, he’d never sing even when I asked him. He hated singing, but he was a fucking great bass player!

“One night I was summoned to his hotel and he told me wanted to put something together with me and Vincent. He had this whole idea of screens, and tapes of Wagner playing in the background. He was in something of a reverie, but he could focus on anything musical.

“At the time, however, I was in a state of nervous exhaustion and could do little more than nod agreement. I know he made a similar suggestion to Keith Emerson later, but I was flattered even to have been asked.”

The flattery is enough to withstand a deflating comparison with Hendrix as a lover, from someone fully qualified to judge. “She told me: ‘Your love-making was okay, but Jimi takes me right to the edge, until it feels like I’m going to fall into an abyss. It goes on like that for a long time. You don’t do that’.” Arthur’s voluntary humiliation in the cause of the Hendrix legend is truly commendable.

But none of it was enough to prevent The Crazy World from imploding soon afterwards, Vincent and Carl heading off to form Atomic Rooster. Arthur, meanwhile, decided to follow his spiritual instincts – something that was to be a regular occurrence over the next decade.

“I’d gone through this whole spiritual growth thing in America, and it transformed everything; not only what I wanted to do with my music, but also how I wanted everything structured. I decided there was no place for leaders, and democracy didn’t work either; there was no room for hierarchies.”

It’s fair to say that an anarchic spirit pervaded Arthur’s next group, Puddletown Express. Their act included the Fire Rite that involved Arthur in a ritual dance with his Crown Of Flames before making a grand disappearance, only to reappear… naked.

The band’s groundbreaking artistic endeavours were not always appreciated; the French Communist Party reckoned that a so-called benefit gig by Puddletown Express cost them a parliamentary seat. And following a spot at the Palermo Pop Festival, Arthur found himself thrown into Sicily’s maximum-security jail.

Not surprisingly, Puddletown Express was short-lived. And while its successor, Kingdom Come (not to be confused with the 80s Led

Zeppelin clone), had a similarly loose structure the music was more focused and innovative. Kingdom Come’s first album, Galactic Zoo Dossier, was released in 1970 and could have been a successful concept album if it had been given the full-on production and direction by a ‘name’ producer. It certainly left a mark on Alice Cooper, who had already been studying Arthur’s make-up carefully.

While Kingdom Come‘s self-titled second album was a rather muddled venture into the theatre of the absurd, 1973’s Journey broke new ground with its use of a primitive drum machine. The fact that Arthur was forced into using it because his drummer had run off with the bassist’s wife should not detract from his pioneering use of technology.

But without proper management and promotion, Kingdom Come were always going to struggle. After touring the Journey album for a year, Arthur removed his body and soul to a school of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) in Gloucestershire; his band went off to join singer Kiki Dee.

Arthur’s career for the rest of the 70s was seldom dull. He pre-empted the world music brigade by nearly a decade with his 1975 album Dance, using African, Eastern, reggae and disco beats on various tracks. He also guested on Alan Parsons’s Tales Of Mystery And Imagination and Klaus Schulze’s Dune’ and Live albums.

Then there was his appearance in the movie Tommy that should have been more than it was: “Pete Townshend originally wanted me to be the doctor or the Pinball Wizard, but the man in charge of it all was Robert Stigwood, who I’d fallen out with back in the Crazy World days. So I ended up sharing Eyesight To The Blind with Eric Clapton. But on the later soundtrack it’s just Clapton.”

Arthur’s free-spirited artistry was incompatible with punk, which is another reason why he spent the 80s and much of the 90s in Texas. He wasn’t entirely inactive musically, however, and released a couple of industrial/electro albums in the US.

The embers of Fire were periodically stoked by cover versions from Marc Almond, Pete Townshend, The Ventures, Prodigy and Die Krupps – Arthur even helped out on the latter. He returned to England in the late 90s after linking up with Big Country’s former manager Ian Grant, who was, just by chance, setting up a record label called Track Records. Grant had even secured the label’s original logo, though not the original label’s now priceless catalogue.

After re-establishing himself on tours with Robert Plant and The Pretty Things and festival shows at Glastonbury and Canterbury Fayre, in 2003 Arthur recorded a new album, Vampire Suite, with Big Country drummer Mark Brzezicki and keyboard player Josh Phillips.

“The idea was to get back to the original format of The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. It’s about a vampire who gets redeemed after attacking someone who turns out to be a saint. It’s a dramatic story, full of hyperventilating falsettos and screaming. And darkness, too.”

Arthur Brown. Still crazy after all these years.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 63

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 50 years. Actually 61 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.

By the time of 2011’s The Hunter, Mastodon had completed their transformation from underground malcontents into psychedelically inclined prog metal voyagers. Metal Hammer travelled to their hometown of Atlanta to get the lowdown on the album and accidentally imbibe some mind-expanding pharmaceuticals.

In the spring of 1837 an engineer from the Western And Atlantic Company chose a spot amongst the forest of Magnolias, Dogwoods and Southern Pines to plant his stake. This was where the proposed giant railway from the American Mid-West to Georgia would terminate. The company, showing a decisive lack of imagination, said the locale would be called Terminus.

A merchant by the mighty name of John Thrasher set about building homes and a general store for the workers who were employed to build Terminus. To be frank they thought the name of their new home sucked balls and as a tribute to their boss dubbed it Thrashersville, the name it kept until becoming Atlanta in 1847. Thrasher, the original pioneer of Atlanta, knew this tiny settle-ment would grow to become a great city at some point in the future. “If you build it”, he reasoned, “they will come.”

In the winter of 1999, cult sludge unit Today Is The Day toured Europe supporting Neurosis and Voivod. On returning, TITD drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher quit the group but were enthused by the intensity of the tour and determined not to lose any of the momentum they had built up. They relocated to Atlanta with the express intention of finding new musicians to jam with. Bill’s wife already worked at the city’s Centre For Disease Control and, being the biggest city in the South East, Atlanta had a reputation as being very musician friendly.

The pair, perhaps drawn magnetically, headed straight to Thrashersville – or to be precise Five Points, the exact place where the engineer had driven the stake into the forest floor, some 163 years earlier. It was a frontier town of a different sort now and a bohemian and roughneck hang-out for tattooed speed freaks, pot-smoking rastas, mohicanned punks and dropouts of every stripe. Within a week Bill was cooking tacos in a dive bar called Elmyr and Brann was working in an alternative shopping arcade called Junkman’s Daughter, where he immediately met the woman he would end up marrying.

Before the end of the week the pair went to their first local gig, High On Fire playing a house party supported by local metalheads Four Hour Fogger. They arrived too late to see the support band but ended up hanging out with them all the same. Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders from the band said to Brann, “Hey, aren’t you that crazy drummer from Today Is The Day?” and they all got talking. Brann was already aware that the burly ginger guy with the Iron Maiden backpatch had a reputation as one of the best – if not the best – metal guitarists in Atlanta. By the end of the night they’d arranged to have their first practice together. If we form a band, they reasoned, people will rock.

In the summer of 2011, sitting in Elmyr, Brann says with little understatement: “Yeah, things came together for Mastodon really very quickly…”

You only need to look around you when you arrive in Atlanta to see pieces of Mastodon’s history written large around you. The city is home to the world’s largest ‘fish tank’, Georgia Aquarium. It houses four examples of the largest fish in the world – leviathans of the deep known as whale sharks that can grow up to 44m long. Just outside Atlanta is a 1,700 foot tall mass of granite that imposes itself onto the skyline, known to the world as Stone Mountain but nicknamed Blood Mountain by the band.

The city itself is elemental. In 2008, the largest of 45 tornados formed in one devastating day, cut a six-mile scar across the city, sucking windows and furniture out of the multi-storey Omni Coliseum – former home of local roller hockey team, the Atlanta Fire Ants. Like any major city built in the American sunbelt, it has had its fair share of devastating fires over the years but is also subject to harsh ice storms in winter as well.

But more than anything, Atlanta is a city built in the middle of trees. If you take a plane journey to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport you could be forgiven for thinking your jet was touching down on the Forest Moon Of Endor. And it is from these trees that the band drew some of their inspiration for their new album, The Hunter.

Mastodon have, in the past, had their albums associated with the four traditional elements. Remission symbolised fire; Leviathan water; Blood Mountain earth and Crack The Skye air. Initially when you ask them that now that they’re out of this stage, what the fifth element is, they all contradict each other and kind of fudge the question. Brent, guitarist, vocalist and manic dynamo at the core of the group says: “Get out of your element. Get out of your box. Find yourself a new element.”

Serenely dude-like bassist and centre- stage vocalist Troy Sanders denies that there even is one. “I guess the overall theme of the album is the fact that there isn’t one.”

Ice cool riff-master Bill adds: “People expect us to have a theme; they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, you ran out of elements, there’s only four elements.’ But this is not true because we could have started on the periodic table of elements if we had wanted, but we just chose not to.”

Intensely focused drummer and singer, Brann, who is perhaps the closest the group have to a de facto leader and is certainly the member who makes the most aesthetic choices regarding the group, tells a different story.

“I guess wood is the theme,” he says then jokes, “If wood can be described as an element that is – I’m sure in China wood is an element. Wood and trees were what I had at the back of my head after Crack The Skye, so I went out and bought a couple of books on tree legends and the secret lives of trees and that’s what I was mulling over. What people believe about trees is pretty strange. I mean obviously trees are alive but some people believe they have a consciousness.”

Despite initially disagreeing, after three days spent chipping away at him, Brent, a former carpenter, concedes this much: “Has wood played a big part in my life? Jesus yes! Of course! I’m a wood sculptor, I’m a carpenter, I carve tikis in my spare time. I’m obsessed with the forest. I’m obsessed with wood. The forest and nature has made a really big impression on what I write and what I gather. I think it’s beautiful and I want to share the way I feel about it.”

Sitting in Elmyr – the bar where Brent spends so much of his time that he ended up filming a hilarious TV commercial for them – the band talk us through The Hunter. The first single proper is Curl Of The Burl, a twanging, filthy Southern boogie stomp that references prime ZZ Top and is a good example of this arboreal obsession.

“A burl is like a cancer in wood, a knot that forms during a period of stress and this growth causes whorls to occur round a compression in the ‘design’ of the wood,” says Brann. “If you cut a tree open when you’re making furniture, you might get a giant burl which means there will be a higher concentration of curls. Furniture makers pay top dollar for interesting burls. So I had this idea about a group of people out in the Pacific North West who are addicted to methamphetamine who go out into the woods with a chainsaw to find the perfect burl to bring back into the town to try and sell to a furniture maker.”

So far, so Mastodon… but none of this explains the opening lines to the track: ‘I killed a man because he kicked my goat.’ Brent laughs darkly and says cryptically: “You fuck with my goat you’re going to get what’s coming to you. And you really shouldn’t be on my property anyway.”

The theme is symbolised by the amazing cover art of a three-jawed minotaur by wood carver and sculptor AJ Fosik. But if anyone is hoping for a grand narrative like on previous albums, they will be sorely disappointed. This is the first traditional album Mastodon have done so it’s free from concept.

“I came up with this crazy long plot but when it came down to it Brent was like, ‘I don’t want to do that again!’” says Brann. “From that freedom came a flurry of ideas. I ended up being more inspired to write than I had been before so it ended up being a good thing to be honest.”

For the first time since Leviathan in 2004, Mastodon have rocked out some proper, face-melting, bowel-prolapsing, hardcore-influenced, sludge- blasted, horns-up, heavy fucking metal this time out. There is the punkish, raw-throated Blasteroid that has the memorable line, ‘Now I wanna drink some fucking blood’. There is the fretboard-splintering Motörhead-meets-Slayer thrasher Spectrelight and the galloping speed metal of All The Heavy Lifting.

Bill, one of the more traditionally metal-obsessed members of the group, says: “I’m always about the face-melting riffs! I guess the heavier, faster ones are usually mine but Brent came up with all the songs for Crack The Skye. That was a special album and about us stepping back for a minute and slowing down. So all of the stuff I’d been writing got put into the riff bag for later; to get married with stuff by the other guys for this album.”

He pauses, then adds: “I love all the stuff that we do slow or fast but I’m a big fan of the Ramones and Slayer. I’ve always wanted to take that style of The Ramones to a live show and be just like, ‘One, two, three, four…’ I love Slayer albums where it’s the same and just boom, boom, boom in your face. I do enjoy playing songs like The Czar and The Last Baron, because it’s a challenge to play a 15-minute song from start to finish without fucking up.”

Perhaps the weirdest (and certainly one of the best) songs on the new album is Creature Lives. Booming Moog synthesizers (played by Brent as a tribute to cult outsider musician R Stevie Moore) herald a cosmic sounding ode to a hapless creature who gets pushed into a swamp by a howling mob. It is by turns hilarious, melancholy, psychedelic and rousing as if back in the day prog keyboard maestro Keith Emerson, who used to play by sticking daggers into his organ, had joined acid-fried Oklahoma City weird beards The Flaming Lips.

“It’s currently my favourite song on the album,” agrees Troy. “The first thing we said when we were creating Creature Lives was, ‘Wow, this has got a Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd kind of vibe’ and we hope that when we play it live it will have the same effect – everyone with their arms in the air, singing along. I’m always pulling for the underdog and that song is about a hideous monster from the swamps, looking for acceptance and questioning who he is but realising he’s just fine the way he is… Me and Brann wrote it for Brent who loves The Creature From The Black Lagoon.”

Being freed from writing a concept album has obviously been a creative shot in the arm – on this matter the band are in total agreement. But Brent puts it the most succinctly when he says: “Of course it’s different from the first four albums. Who wants to wake up every fucking morning like it’s Groundhog Day?”

He is, of course, right. If there’s one thing you really can’t accuse Mastodon of, it’s treading water.

When trying to come up with a suitably heavy name back in 2000, Brent was looking at the Bantha skull – Boba Fett’s insignia from The Empire Strikes Back – tattooed on Star Wars freak Bill’s arm and, said, ‘What is that thing? That elephant thing, is it called a Mastodon?’ Immediately they knew they had the right name.

Things didn’t look as promising for the group during their first practice the same year, however. Brent, who is by his own admission an alcoholic and who was a habitual heroin addict back then as well and turned up too wasted to play. The other three had to wait for him to come back down to Earth and dry out before anything could happen.

Brann is candid about his first impressions. “I didn’t like it. I was not excited. It wasn’t good. I wanted to do something fast and wild and he was like, ‘I wanna do stuff like this – BRRRRRRMMMM! [mimes hitting one doomy note] He was just playing one note over and over again. I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know what that is.’ I mean, I liked him, he was funny and cool but at that instant, I just didn’t think he could play guitar at all. I was like ‘What the fuck is everyone talking about?’ This guy is supposed to be the best guitar player in Atlanta. But he came by the next day and picked up an acoustic guitar and started riffing this crazy shit.

“Then I was like, ‘Awesome! Let’s go straight to the rehearsal room now and start playing!’ People started saying to me that he had a lot of baggage and that I didn’t want to be in a band with him. But I didn’t care. You’re not going to be in a crazy band or a metal band that doesn’t have people with baggage. I have my own baggage, man. It’s part of the dynamo that powers a good group. As long as none of it gets out of control… as long as no one dies from it.”

After putting out the Slickleg 7” on Reptilian, the band signed to Relapse in 2001 and issued the raw and furious Lifesblood EP (All these essential tracks were later compiled on The Call Of The Mastodon, in 2006.) Their first album proper Remission in 2002 contains the brutal fan favourites March Of The Fire Ants and Crusher/Destroyer but it was Leviathan in 2004 that really smashed down the doors for the band. From the opening riff of Blood And Thunder and Brent’s blood curdling scream: ‘I think that someone’s trying to kill me…’ to the sublime aqueous instrumental Joseph Merrick, it was a copper-bottomed classic and arguably remains the best metal album of the 00s.

Brann devised the loose concept for Leviathan while reading Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick on tour. “Brann was reading the book and said, ‘Wow, there are so many parallels we can relate to in our struggle every day to make it. This man is sacrificing everything at home to get in a boat and go out to sea chasing after his obsession, the white whale. And we’re leaving behind everything that makes us happy to jump in our white van to chase our obsession, our holy grail,’” says Bill. “And we thought, ‘Ah, we’re onto something here…’”

After the success of Leviathan the band signed to Warners imprint Reprise and turned their newfound method to creating their major label breakthrough Blood Mountain, which showcased a growing musical sophistication and a step away from more traditional metal into the realms of prog. Again, they took the mundane idea of the boredom of being on the road and turned it into a fantastical quest to scale a dangerous, monster-inhabited peak.

This transformation was partially successful but the process was completed on the masterful Crack The Skye album in 2009, their most successful to date. All traces of hardcore and sludge metal had disappeared and this was partially down to Brent’s health. The singer had spent three days in a coma after getting beaten up by SOAD’s Shavo Odadjian and rapper William Burke backstage at an MTV event. His crime? Drunkenly swinging a wet shirt round his head.

The near-death experience led to a necessary slowing of pace and a heightened sense of introspection. While the story was the most complex yet – it ostensibly concerns a quadriplegic who learns astral travel but then becomes reborn as Rasputin; involving the occult, Tsarist Russia and Professor Stephen Hawking’s Unified Theory of Space Time – it had an even deeper level. Skye Dailor was Brann’s sister who committed suicide at the age of 14 after being viciously and violently bullied at school – something that was understandably a pivotal and catastrophic occurrence in the young man’s life. The fantastical tale can be seen as a metaphor for attempting to escape the abysmal pain of losing a loved one – as well as a reflection on how close to the void Brent himself had sailed.

If previous Mastodon albums have been about death, then so is The Hunter. Mastodon are concerned with death. They don’t deal what happens to our physical bodies after we have passed on like Carcass originally did or indulge in the Grand Guignol operatic horror like Cannibal Corpse or shout back defiantly in the face of oblivion like Slayer. Instead, they treat death as the constant companion. Something that one day – hopefully no time soon – will happen to them and to all their friends; as it will happen to you and everyone you know. But while Mastodon sing about death, in truth they are celebrating life. An approach to death that is slightly more uncommon amongst most metal bands perhaps.

“It’s something that affects all of us,” says Brann. “We wanted to address it and we did, especially with Crack The Skye, when that came out and I went more public with my personal situation. [There were several coded references to Skye’s death on their debut album Remission as well.] Death happens to everyone and if it hasn’t happened yet it’s going to happen. So what better way to deal with it?

“I’m lucky enough to have a platform to honour the people who inspired a lot of the music that we write. I think it’s a good thing for our families in general. It lets them know that we care. For example, The Hunter is very important to Brent and his family. It is named after his brother who died at the end of last year. It was important for it to be a beautiful song. We had to try and turn that terrible situation into a beautiful song. We’ve had countless kids come up to us, saying, ‘Yeah I lost this person and this music helped me.’ And why wouldn’t it, because it helped us in exactly the same situation. I think that artists owe it to themselves and their fans to put as much of themselves into their art as possible. To help themselves and to help other people through their experiences.”

When we arrive at Brent Hind’s house, it’s already dark. There is a beat- up old Ford truck in the drive with a postcard of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. There is a large deer’s skull with antlers over the garage door. We learn later that his brother – Brad Hinds, the hunter who inspired the album title – bagged it.

The noise from locusts is deafening, like the throb of bass in a techno club. When we knock, his girlfriend peers cautiously at us from behind the curtains before letting us in. “It’s kind of a rough neighbourhood,” she explains.

Once inside, the house is exactly how you’d want it to be: a baroque, gothic grotto of Creature From The Black Lagoon memorabilia, Shriner fez hats, skulls, candles, stuffed animals, charts of medical oddities, piles of obscure albums and books and giant, leering, wood-carved tikis. Above the door is a framed photograph of Brad Hinds, cradling a deer he’s just shot.

While we’re waiting for Brent to turn up, we meet his pets, one of whom is an epileptic cat. Apparently Brent, ever the curious soul, took some of the cat’s medicine a few weeks ago and passed out cold. When Brent and Tom Cheshire, his best friend and co-conspirator in West End Motel arrive, there is a whirlwind of activity. They start cracking beers and talking at a million miles an hour, curiously.

When I finally get to speak to Brent he is halfway to getting drunk and long since disembarked. We go out onto his dimly lit porch to do the interview and he asks if I’m alright. I foolishly say I have a headache and need an aspirin. He says, “Oh we got something better than that…”

I swallow the pill he hands me and he tells me it is a ridiculously strong painkiller that spins me off into some semi-psychedelic, landscape where nearly all words have become unpronounceable. The hour-long conversation that follows is by turns unpleasant, ball-busting, jocular, threatening, whip-crack smart, hilarious and acid-fried nonsensical. But enlightening all the same.

Even out of his gourd, Brent’s obviously closer to being some kind of genius than he is a tattooed hill billy freak – an image he has partially projected himself. Frustratingly I also get the impression he’s the sort of person who’ll do stuff badly so he doesn’t get asked to do it again. Like interviews for example. You can tell at all times he’d sooner be playing guitar – especially when he informs you.

About 30 minutes in as I’m sinking beneath opiated waves of analgesia and he’s whizzing in high orbit round the planet obstreperousness, he’s arguing black is white to a man who has been beaten insensible with a chemical cosh. At one point I make the mistake of telling him I don’t play guitar and he convinces me that I’m lying: “Trust me, you do play guitar”.

All I can do is whimper that he is right and pray he doesn’t demand a demonstration. We talk briefly about his brother and he says: “He died of a heart attack while hunting on December 4, 2010 and I guess that’s pretty much all there is to it. He had killed this deer and he had dragged it up to the truck. I guess he overexerted himself. And they found him dead in that truck.”

I ask him other questions which he answers briefly in a detached, almost bored manner but I notice something weird, both of his cheeks are moist. Now I’m not saying he’s crying – and God knows if I was in his position I would be crying unabashedly – there are plenty of reasons why a man’s eyes might water like fuck on a humid night like this when the potions are flowing. But the situation jerks me back to reality. I’m round this guy’s house on a Saturday night when all of his mates are next door partying, out of my mind on painkillers asking him about his dead brother, while he’s also out of his mind. It just won’t do.

As soon as the tape is turned off the mood lightens and he hugs me, offering to BBQ me food. But it’s 2am and time to leave. The band’s PR wants us to get up early the next day so we can all visit Atlanta’s internationally famous World Of Coke, celebrating the popular fizzy drink. Ironically, I can tell Brent and his buddies can’t wait to spend an entirely less wholesome rest of the evening once we’ve left.

When I catch up with him a few days later, he’s the same guy, it’s just that the obstreperous, ball-breaking nature has gone. If it was the combative Dr Jekyll we were with then; now it’s the urbane Mr Hinds. He’s a sweetheart and funny as fuck to boot. He laughs when we ask if he identifies with The Creature From The Black Lagoon who he has tattooed about his body. “Well, yeah of course I identify with him because I live in a swamp, I breathe through gills and I’m bright green. What sort of question is this?!”

He tells a very instructive story about another film film. “When I was eight years old The Exorcist came on TV for the first time and oh my God it was the most terrifying place that cinema has ever taken me. I was watching it with my grandmother and she told me, ‘That girl has been possessed by the devil.’ She took a drag on her cigarette, looked me in the eye and with smoke coming out of her mouth and nose said: ‘This could really happen to you…’ He pauses dramatically, “While I was eight, dude.”

He tells us more about his brother: “Really the time was right to name the album after my brother now. It would have been the wrong time two years down the line. No matter how painful it was in December, now it’s more of a celebration. No one in the world knew my brother. Now everyone in the world is going to know that I had a brother who died hunting. What’s wrong with that?”

There is of course nothing wrong with it. It’s as beautiful a sentiment and as fitting a tribute as it is brilliant an album.

On our last night in Atlanta, Troy and Brann are back home with their families. Bill has to buy his wife a birthday present and drops us off at Elmyr so we can eat awesome Mexican food and hang out and party with Brent and Tom. At about midnight, I make my excuses and leave a bunch of them raging with controls set for the heart of a beautifully hazy night. At 11.30am the next day Hammer photographer Mick Hutson crawls into the hotel lobby with eyes vibrating like tennis balls in a washing machine. He looks at me with a pitiful look and says:

“About an hour ago when I was leaving them, I said I had a headache and needed an aspirin. They said, ‘Oh we’ve got something better than that…’”

Southern hospitality, Mastodon style.

Originally published in Metal Hammer 223, September 2011

A wizard, a true star – as well as being title of Todd Rundgren’s classic album from 1973, it’s also a fitting description of the multi-talented musician/producer who has been a potent force in popular music since emerging with psychedelic garage rockers The Nazz in 1968. Since then he’s carved out a unique space for himself as both a musician in his own right and a producer for the likes of Meat Loaf, Cheap Trick and XTC, crossing paths with many huge names in the world of rock’n’roll along the way. In 2009, Classic Rock sat down with Rundgren to hear stories of spiky exchanges with John Lennon, experiences with a drunk Ringo Starr, the weird, formative years of Sparks and the insanity of the New York Dolls.

I met John Lennon in a place called the Rainbow in Los Angeles during his carousing days with Harry Nilsson. He was sitting in a booth and someone introduced me to him. I said hi but had no conversation; I wasn’t loaded enough. That was the only face-to-face experience I had with him. But there was this infamous exchange we had through a British music paper [Melody Maker]. Someone interviewed me when I was in England, and I’m not exactly sure how John’s name came up but the context was to do with his credibility as a revolutionary. John’s antics were fairly well-publicised at the time. He was going out every night and getting drunk, and there was one particular incident where he got into an altercation with a waitress and apparently was wearing a Kotex [tampon] on his head and acting somewhat boorish.

My opinion at the time was that if you’re going to encourage people to change the world you have to have a certain amount of personal credibility, and if you start going backwards and abusing women when ostensibly you are supposed to be a feminist, it’s time to either be just what you are or drop the revolutionary shtick and clean up your act. So this started a whole faux conflict between us. His take on it – as his take was on just about everything in those days because he and Yoko were involved in this primal scream therapy which had gotten into his music – was that he attributed my commentary down to some issues I might be having with my father. Anything that happened at that time John attributed down to some infantile issues.

Apparently after he was assassinated the police found of copy of one of my albums in the hotel Mark Chapman was staying at. I never had any contact with him and I don’t believe that there’s any evidence that the little spat me and John had any effect on Mark Chapman at all. I’m not even sure he knew about it.

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Ringo Starr

Ringo was the most approachable of all of The Beatles. I have met each of the band in turn. If you grew up on A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and watched The Beatles’ antics, to actually meet them in person was often a let-down. For instance, Paul McCartney was an unusually dour person and John was totally drunk and inanimate. George I met very briefly when I was producing a Badfinger album.

You expected cleverness and a happy-go-lucky demeanour because of the image they projected up until the point they broke up. The only one who seemed to have recovered from any of the effects of that was Ringo. He did the music for fun. He didn’t feel that there was some burden to it, he just liked to play. Any opportunity to sing was fine but I never saw him having any pretence that he was building some giant musical legacy.

My experience with him spans quite a few years. The first time we worked together was for a Jerry Lewis telethon in the late 70s in Las Vegas. Ringo was still something of a drinker at the time. I didn’t really notice; he seemed to be in pleasant spirits. Jerry brought in this fiddle player named Doug Kershaw and made us play behind him, and he started playing Jambalaya and wouldn’t stop. I got up on one of the drum risers and started directing and we just started playing the song faster and faster until the fiddle player couldn’t keep up any more. That’s the way we made him stop.

Years and years later when Ringo started doing his All Starr shows, he asked me to join him. By that time he was all cleaned up and very well-organised. Ironically he was heading up a group of musicians of whom half were in Alcoholics Anonymous and the other half were completely smashed. I managed to straddle a middle ground; I could drink casually and enjoy it and not get into any shenanigans. But at the time, there was Ringo who was in AA, and Zak, his son, who was the other drummer and definitely not in AA. So there was a whole dynamic going on there.

My nemesis was Burton Cummings [The Guess Who]. He was a bad drinker. When he got drunk he would start getting ugly with people, and then the next day he would apologise to everyone and then in 12 hours he was back in the same state again. He was a good example of what not to do. Joe Walsh was also pretty toxic at the time. The thing is that Ringo does not discriminate, he doesn’t tell musicians they have to be on the programme. It just so happens that on every tour I’ve been on there’s always somebody who doesn’t know where to draw the line.

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Sparks

At the time I worked with them they were this weird band from LA who were called Halfnelson. While they must have had some commercial influences on their first album, it was one of the strangest projects I’ve been involved in.

Essentially the core of the band was two pairs of brothers – the Maels and Mankeys – and another guy [Harvey Feinstein on drums]. There seemed to be a lack of focus in the group when I was working with them. They wanted to produce this strange music. The Mael brothers had this highly developed image thing going but it seemed the rest of the band was more committed to playing. The stuff they had been writing up until then was way out of the mainstream, and they wanted to become a little more commercial. It was obvious that Ron [Mael, keyboard player] was doing this kind of Chaplinesque thing; he was like a silent movie, and he never said anything.

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Grand Funk Railroad

The Grand Funk Railroad album [1973’s We’re An American Band, produced by Rundgren] was one of the easiest things I ever did. It simply required my normal sensibility, particularly because the band was operating with such low expectations. They’d had some great success but they were not well-regarded critically. They had a huge live following but were excessively jammy, and if you compared them to real jam bands like Cream they really didn’t hold up. To compound things their manager insisted on producing their records, and he was terrible at it. So by the time I worked with them their expectations for the record were so low I couldn’t fail.

I got involved through photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who was part of the new management team and a good friend of mine. She got the idea of putting us together. And by then the band had spent so much time under the thumb of Terry Knight that they were a little unsophisticated about a lot of things outside their world and they went along with it. By the time I got to them they had already been encouraged to produce stuff that was more in the mainstream.

We’re An American Band surprised a lot of people, and the title track has been covered by countless bands since, most famously Bon Jovi. I haven’t heard their version yet, but that’s because I really don’t pay that much attention to Bon Jovi.

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In a sense what they did was anti-musical, and at the time I recognised that this was the necessary cyclic thing in music. When rock music gets too flaky or fancy there’s always a movement to break it down. I always thought the reason that certain music critics liked bands like the New York Dolls is because they are doing something that is comprehensible to them.

The New York Dolls weren’t presented to me, they were just part of the milieu I was involved in at the time. I was still living in New York in an apartment that was walking distance from Max’s Kansas City which is where everything was happening; there was no CBGB yet. There were a lot of bands that were performing what was referred to as ‘the New York Scene’; it was not called punk rock yet. I knew I was going to be leaving New York to move upstate to Woodstock and entering a new phase, so I wanted to do one of these bands as a farewell to my New York lifestyle. The band that was creating the most excitement and actually got signed first was the New York Dolls.

I was such a fixture on the scene and was having wild success with my production work, it was a logical step for me to work with them. I went to see the band play a couple of times and met up with them, and knew that were certain members with whom the musical responsibility lay and then there were guys who were living the dream. Looking back on it, and having had the recent experience of working with them, that part of it hasn’t changed. It was always Sylvain [Sylvain, guitarist] and David [Johansen, singer] who were shouldering most of the burden, so I mostly kept a focus on them and tried to manage the other guys, keep them from consuming too much during the course of the sessions.

For the most part I went through David. I used him as a translator to get to the rest of the band. The challenge of making the record [1973’s New York Dolls] was that the control room was a freaking circus; everyone wanted to know what was going on with The New York Dolls – the critics’ favourite band. I was pretty sober throughout the entire thing, my only working drug was pot. While these guys would smoke pot they would also do everything else. The sessions involved politics, psychology and crowd control. And at a certain point I had to surrender to the process and accept that the surrounding insanity was going to be a part of the character of the record.

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 139, November 2009

Pete Makowski joined Sounds music weekly aged 15 as a messenger boy, and was soon reviewing albums. When no-one at the paper wanted to review Deep Purple‘s Made In Japan in December 1972, Makowski did the honours. The following week the phone rang in the Sounds office. It was Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. “Thanks for the review,” said Blackmore. “How would you like to come on tour with us in Europe?” He also wrote for Street Life, New Music News, Kerrang!, Soundcheck, Metal Hammer and This Is Rock, and was a press officer for Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Motörhead, the New York Dolls and more. Sounds Editor Geoff Barton introduced Makowski to photographer Ross Halfin with the words, “You’ll be bad for each other,” creating a partnership that spanned three decades. Halfin and Makowski worked on dozens of articles for Classic Rock in the 00-10s, bringing back stories that crackled with humour and insight. Pete died in November 2021.