Machine Head: Inside The Machine

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Chapter 1

Before 1992

No book has ever been pretentious enough to include both the names Philip Larkin and Machine Head in its opening sentences before now, so let’s establish that precedent, shall we? ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do,’ advised the late poet Larkin in one of his more noted couplets, relevant in this case because Machine Head’s remarkable career has hit some low psychological points over the last couple of decades. In those bleak times, both singer Robert ‘Robb’ Flynn and bassist Adam Duce have talked about the mental scars they carry from their early lives. From tragedy comes creativity, thankfully, and some of Machine Head’s finest music has been inspired by those black times. Of course, many other factors have made this remarkable band what they are, namely a love of the music for its own sake and a practically spiritual connection with the fanbase that makes other groups look aloof in comparison. But without that dark side, Machine Head’s lyrics, musical aggression and perhaps even career trajectory might have been rather different.

There’s a geographical factor in the rise of Machine Head, too. In the eighties, the decade in which Machine Head’s roots lie, one of the most fertile places to be if you were a musician in an American heavy metal band was the eastern end of the Bay Area. Home to various creative communities for many years, the towns of Oakland, Hayward, Berkeley and others have been hot spots for musical, literary and other artistic endeavours since the fifties. In the timeframe that concerns us here, the renowned Bay Area thrash metal scene coalesced in the early eighties, when Robb Flynn was in his mid-teens.

He was born in Oakland on July 19, 1968 to unknown parents, although he revealed in later years that his birth name was Lawrence Matthew Cardine. Adopted and raised in Fremont, a relatively peaceful suburb in Alameda County, Flynn has revealed little about his pre-teen life, despite being asked about it in hundreds, perhaps thousands of interviews. We do know that he was a good student, especially in his early years at American High School in Fremont – and that an obsession with heavy metal struck him at an early age, specifically at the hands of the genre’s founders, Black Sabbath.

Figuring out Sabbath’s complex history was a reverse process for this budding headbanger. When I got into Black Sabbath, both [sometime Sabbath singers] Ronnie James Dio and Ozzy Osbourne were already recording solo albums, he explained. "The first Sabbath album I ever got was Heaven And Hell [1980]. My friend Lori had a copy of it, and until that point I had never really heard Black Sabbath. I didn’t even know there had been an Ozzy period. Later, I dug back, and the first Ozzy-era record I heard was We Sold Our Souls For Rock ‘N’ Roll, the compilation record. I heard ‘Paranoid’ and I thought the lyrics were just awesome. Then I heard ‘Iron Man’ and I was just … terrified! So I got totally into that era, too. But really, I love both [Ozzy and Dio] eras.’

By 1982, thrash metal was beginning to make its presence felt in the Bay Area, although no-one had given it that name yet. Hardcore punk co-existed with metal, although not always peacefully thanks to the clashes between the followers of the different movements: the length of a concert-goer’s hair could literally determine whether he went home with or without his teeth after the show. If it wasn’t for those bands, recalled Flynn, "there wouldn’t be a Machine Head. When I was a kid, Exodus was my favourite band of all time. [Their 1985 album] Bonded By Blood was my life. I once punched some kid in the face for saying that [Exodus guitarist] Gary Holt sucked."

It was only when Los Angeles thrashers Slayer emerged that the two cults of punk and metal were united. While Slayer, who appear in this book at several pivotal points, weren’t the first Californian thrash metal band – that honour goes to Metallica, and just behind them, Exodus – they shed their influences faster than any of the other thrash metal groups, refining a relentlessly malevolent sound over a matter of months. Flynn and his metal buddies saw Slayer doing this and ideas began to form in their teenage minds, with particular relevance to kids who – like Flynn – had taken up the guitar.

The appeal of the new thrash metal scene for such kids was immediate and obvious. Even the average teenager craves an annihilation of the senses from time to time as part of the maturing experience, and troubled teens doubly so. The rebellion, the volume, the tribal belonging, the adrenaline, the sense of adventure … all these were present in thrash metal by its very nature.

It was amazing then, Flynn told Kerrang! writer Tom Bryant two decades later. 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. If Flynn was looking for catharsis, thrash provided it in abundance. Oh man, it was violent then, incredibly violent, he continued. 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.

I was fortunate to be 14 years old and growing up in the golden age of thrash, Flynn recalled later. In LA the musicians acted like rock stars. In the Bay Area, people were accessible. When I first saw Metallica, James Hetfield was hanging around outside the auditorium. You could get his autograph and talk to him. To a young kid, that made a huge impression. The Bay Area sound always had more evil notes than other styles of metal.

Two of Flynn’s earliest friends were a drummer, Jim Pittman, and a guitarist, Jeff Stewart. The latter remembers: I met Robb in junior high, at American High School: I was a couple of years older than him. I was in a band called Deep Freeze – we were playing kinda AC/DC, Judas Priest stuff. Robb and his friend Jim Pittman would come and watch us play.

When Flynn and Pittman formed their first band, a duo called Inquisitor, they practised staples from the Bay Area repertoire at Stewart’s studio. As Flynn told Tom Trakas of Midwest Metal magazine, "Me and [Jim] were jamming, and we’d just discovered the joys of drinking a six-pack and listening to Metallica. So we started off just trying to emulate Metallica, just covering Kill ‘Em All stuff: we liked Sabbath and all that. We’d play at a friend’s party or something, playing Slayer or Metallica stuff and a bunch of older, biker kind of guys would be like ‘Play Zeppelin’ … And, of course, we’d be like ‘Those guys suck’!"

Jeff Stewart continues: In around 1984, I got in a thrash metal band called Annihilation, which was a little heavier than Deep Freeze. Annihilation had a rehearsal spot called Fast And Furious Studios, and that was the place to be. Robb was in Inquisitor, and he’d come to our studio and watch us play. We’d jam and I’d show him how to play arpeggios and hold his pick like Eddie Van Halen. We used to hang out quite a bit: we were pretty close. I used to go over to his house in Fremont all the time. It was a great, suburban area: very well kept. Definitely not the hood.

Stewart adds: "Robb’s guitar chops were great, even then. He was a hell of a guitar player and he had a phenomenal ear. I was blown away by how quickly he learned. I introduced him to Uli Jon Roth’s solo album, Earthquake, and he learned the solo from the title track and played me the licks. I’d say, ‘Damn, dude!’ He’d learn [Dokken guitarist] George Lynch’s solos too. He was very quiet, but he had a vision. I always told him to follow his heart."

Soon the community of metal bands began to spread, Stewart remembers: "Inquisitor would do ‘Motorbreath’ by Metallica and other covers. I’d go and watch them in the garage and tell them they were doing good. It was good, we all felt like we were going somewhere. In fact, Annihilation was the band for a while, but we lost a lot of members and it never really worked out for us, even though [Bay Area DJ and inventor of the name ‘Metallica’] Ron Quintana used to interview us a lot for his show on KUSF."

Another of Flynn’s early allies was a kid called Craig Locicero, who also played guitar but – at two years Flynn’s junior – was still some way behind him as a musician. As Locicero remembers, I first met Robb in 1984 when I was a freshman in high school, a couple of months after I started playing guitar. At the high school I went to in Fremont, I was literally the only kid walking around wearing Venom shirts and carrying Mercyful Fate records: there was nobody else at that school who knew anything about metal. But there was a Chinese kid named Clement in my class, and he walked up to me one day and said, ‘Dude, I know another guy who likes that same crap that you like. It’s my friend Robb: you should come with me after school and we’ll go meet him, he lives right by me.’ So I went over to his house and met him, and we started talking about music. He had all these records wrapped in plastic: he was very organised.

He continues, Me and Robb – who spelled his name with one B at the time – hit it off right away. He was a super-fan of metal: I was a step below him, because I was still learning and he was a couple of years older than me, but we had that in common. I really wanted to play with the guy – but that took some work before I earned my way into doing that. Robb’s drummer, Jim Pittman, thought I was too evil to play with because of my Venom T-shirts. Robb sure ripped on guitar: he was already a good lead player at this early stage. John Tegio played bass and Leroy Munoz played guitar before me, and they advertised for a singer in the paper.

After initial jamming sessions, a singer called Russ Anderson was recruited to the new band. As Locicero recalls, Robb called me, all excited, saying, ‘We’ve found this singer, you should come down and watch!’ So I went down to Leroy’s garage where they rehearsed and heard Russ sing. Wow, he was great! I made the decision right away that there was no way that I was going to walk out of that garage without being a member of the band. The other guys went to get some cigarettes and beer while Russ and I stayed behind. While they were away I picked up a guitar and played ‘Balls To The Wall’ by Accept. Russ said, ‘Dude, you’re way better than Leroy’ – and within a few days they were playing in my garage. Things move fast when you’re young. The band didn’t have a name: we had a load of stupid ideas like War Witch. Eventually we became Forbidden Evil, which was Jim Pittman’s idea.

Forbidden Evil’s early shows were that Bay Area staple event of the Eighties – backyard ‘keggers’, where a party would revolve around a keg of beer. Thrash metal was just beginning to move into Fremont at this point, because we had brought it in, says Locicero. "When we chose the setlist for the parties we played in back yards, our set would be obscure to anyone who didn’t know about thrash. We were playing ‘A Lesson In Violence’ by Exodus before the Bonded By Blood album even came out, because we had the demos. We did ‘Violence And Force’ by Exciter and ‘Am I Evil?’ by Diamond Head. Metallica had put out Ride The Lightning so we did ‘Creeping Death’. When we played these songs, people lost their minds. They didn’t know what they were hearing. We slipped in a couple of originals too: ‘Legions Of Death’ and ‘Egypt Has Fallen’ were the first ones, I think. Those were Robb’s songs."

It hadn’t taken long for Flynn to make his mark as a songwriter, remembers Locicero. At first, Robb was definitely in charge. I was trying to improve my guitar playing and I’d play the odd solo here and there. At the first few shows we did, although they were parties rather than shows, we did his songs. The first thing we wrote together was ‘Forbidden Evil’, which was a conglomeration of both our riffs that he’d found a way to put together. One thing that Robb did better than anybody else was take an arrangement and put his riffs into it – the intro, the verse, the pre-chorus, the chorus and so on. He had that down. Later I started writing too, and the songs that appear on the albums we recorded, we wrote together.

Songwriting and arranging were definitely among the teenage Flynn’s skills, recalls his sometime guitarist. I have fond memories of writing music with Robb, says Locicero. I learned a lot from him: he was something of a mentor to me, musically. He was a really nice kid. Everyone liked him and he joked around a lot. He wasn’t a ladies’ man at the time, although he was trying. I remember one of the later Ruthie’s Inn shows, he’d got a leather jacket and he wore it on stage and found a persona. He met a girl before the show and she really liked him, and they were an item after that. That was when Robb found himself and became a man. He was still shy, though: a lot of people don’t know that about him. It changed his life. And more power to him.

Along with the long nights of metallic debauchery there came drugs, specifically speed – a cheap, nasty way to guarantee being able to stay up all night. Flynn has long been open about his use of this filthy-but-fun stimulant back in those early days: the drug was so commonly used in the Bay Area thrash scene that an early name for the music, speed metal, was often used before the more conventional ‘thrash’ label began to be applied in around 1984.

Me and my friends would get a bunch of crank – speed – and the cheapest beer we could find, three dollars for a 12-pack, remembered Flynn. 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 until dawn, trying to work out the riffs I’d just heard the bands playing.

Although Flynn’s performance at American High School in Fremont is said to have been exemplary until his mid-teens, he only scraped through graduation – and his behaviour continued to deteriorate to the point where, in 1985, his adopted parents asked him to leave their home. They kicked me out because I was too crazy, Flynn told Tom Bryant. 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.

Poverty was no fun for this teenage hellraiser: Flynn was tough enough to brave a certain degree of squalor (this was thrash metal’s garage-level heyday, remember) but the crunch point came when he began to emit a certain odour. Not having any money and not having any food sucked, he sighed. Once I couldn’t afford a new pair of shoes, and the pair I had stank. Man, it was a satanic stench. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t take my shoes off.

Nonetheless, the partying continued. Locicero recalls, Back then our weights would fluctuate depending on what drugs we were doing at the time! That’s what Bay Area metal was about. Speed kept us going. That’s why they called it speed metal: we were literally playing as fast as we could. In fact, the drug soon became a form of employment as well as of entertainment. While switching between sleeping at friends’ houses, Flynn began dealing speed to keep afloat. There were a lot of crack dealers, he observed. 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.

This may sound pretty desperate, but Flynn later looked back on this period as one of the best times of his life. They were great times, he told Rock Sound. [Drugs were] not a self-destructive thing; we were just partying a lot and I was doing a lot of speed. We were 17-year-old kids going to thrash shows and everyone did speed there: it gave you the balls to go crazy and go stagedive. All our idols and all the bands were doing it, and it got to a point where it became bad for me, but it didn’t ruin my life … I just look back on those times as crazy.

Somebody was probably getting low while we were high, he reflected, aware of the potential downside. I know we fought a lot when we were taking speed, but it was always someone at a show who was on speed wanting to fight us back, so it wasn’t like we were hurting people who didn’t want to get hurt already. The one thing about speed that I used to think was a bad thing, but have now come to realise was a good thing, was that I was never a person that could stay up for days and days on speed. I had friends who would stay up for a week on speed and not sleep.

Fortunately for Flynn’s career, he had no such stamina. He added, I could never last more than two days on speed. I would start at 9pm one night, party all night, and then by 6pm the following day my body was shutting down and narcolepsy would set in, and I would fall asleep mid-sentence for three hours, then wake up and perfectly continue the sentence I was in the middle of before I passed out. I think to a large degree that was beneficial for me, as I couldn’t get that much into it.

In any case, music was now calling and Flynn couldn’t spend too much time out of his mind: Forbidden Evil demanded the maximum from his evolving guitar skills. As any metal guitarist will tell you, playing thrash riffs accurately requires a picking hand of almost inhuman precision or the music will sound muddy: the only way to achieve this level of picking accuracy is to spend hundreds of hours practising, rather than being wall-eyed with amphetamines. Jeff Stewart recalls how quickly Flynn’s guitar skills improved: I was taking lessons in classical and jazz, and I would jam with everyone around town and show Robb things. He would learn stuff by ear, because his ear was phenomenal, and he kept practising, and I’d show him how to double-pick and what scales to practise, and picking techniques. He got up to where I was at. Me, Craig and Robb always had some healthy competition.

With the musicians fully dedicated to the band, Forbidden Evil began to make some progress. After not too long we started getting out there and playing better gigs, says Locicero. "Our first was with Metal Church, the day before they supported Metallica. They weren’t very popular at the time, but I thought they were good. It was at Ruthie’s Inn on January 30, 1985: that gig was recorded for a live album called At The Eastern Front."

One early witness to the new band’s onstage antics was budding photographer, manager, bassist and all-round ‘Bay Area banger’ Harald Oimoen, who was later immortalised in the song ‘The Ballad Of Harald O’ by the Metallica side project Spastik Children. Oimoen, who compiled his pictures and memories of the early Bay Area thrash scene alongside those of fellow metalhead Brian Lew in a 2011 book, Murder In The Front Row, recalls: Forbidden Evil were basically just drunk teenagers at that point. I never thought they would go very far, which is amazing because they’re more popular than ever now. Craig Locicero is one of the most dedicated musicians I’ve ever met: to this day, music is his life. From the moment he joined Forbidden Evil, you could tell that it was going to be his career. He’s the heart of the band.

At the same time, a second thrash metal band called Vio-Lence was making their presence felt in the Bay Area. Oimoen remembers the emergence of Vio-Lence, saying: The first Vio-Lence show was at Ruthie’s Inn. They had a different singer, Jerry Birr, and they didn’t look like contenders: they were almost like a parody of thrash. Then Sean Killian came in and made it a bit more serious: they started singing about social issues and got a bit more hardcore. I hung out with them all the time. I was in a band called Terminal Shock at the time, which was the band that the bassist Deen Dell was in before he joined Vio-Lence.

Guitarist Phil Demmel was the glue that held Vio-Lence together. His history was similar to Flynn’s in that he had paid his dues in covers bands before his first shot at success. As Demmel explained in a 2001 interview with Midwest Metal, I was with a group of friends I had grown up with, you know, and bounced back and forth with them in a band called Betrayal. That band was a little more instrumental, like Savatage or Accept, but it broke up and I was looking for something to do. So I joined Death Penalty, which was pretty established at the time: it was Jerry Birr, Troy Fua, Eddie Billy and Perry Strickland – and they were looking for a guitar player. I joined them, we played a party and before the next party we did, Perry changed the name to Vio-Lence. We were Vio-Lence for about three months, then we lost Eddie and brought in Deen Dell. It’s funny, a lot of people think I formed the band and got everyone together, which isn’t the case, but I just slowly took over. The songs we were playing at the time were a culmination of stuff which friends of the band had written, stuff from past members and all that.

Demmel was one of the most committed ‘bangers’ in the band, as he later recalled: "I’ll give you a Spinal Tap moment. I’ve got a scar on my shin; you can barely see it now. We were playing Pittsburgh. I was jumping off the monitors, so I ran across the stage and leapt off the wedge and it gave in. I fell backwards and ploughed the whole drum set. The songs stopped and the next day, we wore peg pants back in the day, so the peg pants were all tight, and you could see this huge lump that came across [his entire shin]. It hurt but I’ll never forget it."

The guitarist also recalled his first encounter with Robb Flynn, saying: "We shared a studio with a band called Annihilation. It was their place, so we set up in front of them and we paid them a little rent. Forbidden Evil