Specials
Machine Head: Robb Flynn talks about hardcore
posted by: David on 5 January 2010
With their 1994 debut album ‘Burn My Eyes’, Machine Head came crushing into the metal scene like a ten ton hammer. For that record alone they deserve all the respect they can get. No matter how you feel about the releases that came after their debut, you’ll still find some interesting answers in this interview with Robb Flynn, as we talked about the history of Machine Head, Dynamo Open Air, Anvil and his love for hardcore and punk rock.
It’s been over 17 years since you started Machine Head. How do you look back at the rollercoaster ride that it’s been until now?
Exhilarating. It’s been amazing, man. The fact that we’ve created this extreme form of music and managed to flourish for this long is incredible. We don’t have airplay or MTV play, it’s been through underground channels for the most parts. And we’ve managed to outlast many other bands for some strange reason. If you think about the bands that were around when we started out, 99% of our peers are gone. It’s amazing that we’ve been able to make music for this long.
It sounds like you didn’t expect that to happen, to last that long...
There wasn’t really a long term plan. It’s cool that we lasted this long. At this point I’m not qualified to do anything else (laughs). I’ve been doing this since I was 17 years old and I don’t know any other way of life. I’ve been doing it for over half my life now and I love it. It’s a life less ordinary.
Are you going to write a book one day about your experiences, like so many other musicians have?
Maybe down the line. I think there’s a lot more story to be told. It’s definitely too soon to write a book. We’re not done at all.
In Europe your success came straight away with ‘Burn My Eyes’, but in the USA you would gradually become more successful later on. Is there still a difference between playing in Europe and in the USA?
The size of the venues is a little bit different. We’re playing bigger venues in Europe, but we’re getting close in America now as well. It’s like neck on neck now. It took a while for America to get it, but they finally are, so that’s cool.
Why didn’t they get it right away?
I don’t know. When ‘Burn My Eyes’ came out in America metal was about as uncool as it could get. There were so many bands from the late eighties and early nineties that called themselves metal. Poison and Skid Row called them selves metal, while they were actually making pop rock. I think it got so diluted what metal really was. To some degree it went up its own ass. Everybody was trying to copy Metallica’s black album. So when we played this brutal form of metal it was sort of an uphill battle. But we continued to do our thing and had this undying belief that what we were doing was good, no matter what other bands were doing. I think that resilience has paid off. In America’s eyes it’s appreciated now that we were waving the flag of metal when it wasn’t cool to do so.
When ‘Burn My Eyes’ came out I was 15 or 16 and there was a whole bunch of bands on Roadrunner Records that opened up my eyes to a new breed of metal, like Machine Head, Biohazard, Life Of Agony, Fear Factory and Pro-Pain. Were all of those bands only ‘big’ in Europe and not in America?
They were definitely all more popular in Europe than in the US. They were popular at an underground level here. Biohazard had that hit with Onyx and they were on Beavis & Butt-Head, so that was by far the biggest band of those you mentioned. But still they sold ‘only’ 200,000 records. And they were big. They headlined Dynamo Open Air in 1995 in front of 110,000 people. We actually played before them to that same huge crowd. That sure as hell wasn’t happening in America back then. Dynamo was such an awesome festival. It’s really a shame that it’s not around anymore. We were lucky enough to do it twice. I remember the first time we played it very well. I looked at the crowd of 110,000 people and I couldn’t see the end of it. It just turned into a blur at the skyline. Incredible.
Now I know why you learned to say ‘Proost’ on stage. In how many languages can you say ‘Cheers’ now?
I can pretty much say it in every language in Europe now. There’s a lot of languages though.
When did you start to notice you were influencing other bands?
Around ‘Burn My Eyes’ I heard a lot of bands trying to do what we do. You know, the drop-tuning and the hard vocals/clean vocals thing. I heard it pretty early on in riffs or lyrics. It’s cool, as long as people give us credit for it. We wear our influences proudly on our sleeve. To hear bands mention us as an influence is awesome, like Killswitch Engage or Trivium. I even read that Metallica’s ‘Death Magnetic’ was influenced by our album ‘The Blackening’. That was kind of mind-bending. My jaw literally hit the floor when I read that and I spit coffee all over my laptop.
Do you feel some sort of pressure when you work on a new album, since there’s a certain quality level that people expect of you?
I think every band feels that. ‘Through The Ashes Of Empires’ was a huge album for us. People were asking how we were going to top that, and than ‘The Blackening’ came out. It’s just that you have to go into a different creative place every time you write an album. That’s what we’ll do now that we’re going to write the follow-up to ‘The Blackening’. I don’t want to go and write 14 minute songs now. I want to find a different way to approach it. I read an interview with Missy Elliot where she said that song-writing is learning to say the same thing in a different way. That’s what we’re going to do.
Are you reinventing your sound every time?
There’s a little bit of that. You challenge yourself as a musician every time. Especially after touring three years after ‘The Blackening’. We pushed ourselves to the limits of our playing abilities. So now we can do even better. Whether it’s by playing it simpler or finding a way to strip things down or make it more complex, I don’t know where it’s going to go. That’s the exciting thing about it. There’s a part of me that wants to do an interview and say how planned out our song-writing is. But it’s not like that. ‘The Blackening’ was not this great vision that I had. When we’re jamming in the studio it’s so Beavis & Butt-Head. Someone plays a riff and the rest says “That’s kind of cool” or “That’s weird”. It’s like that. It’s a lot less glamorous than one would think. But I’m looking forward to writing our next album.
The sound you had in the early days of Machine Head was different than the thrash metal that Vio-Lence played. How important was your love for hardcore when you started out?
It’s as much an influence as the metal. When I was getting into thrash in my teenage years, it was an incredible time in the Bay Area where all these different kinds of new music were coming out. There was thrash metal, hardcore and that aggro LA hip-hop, like NWA and Public Enemy. It all radiated the same kind of anger, rage and “fuck the world, fuck the police, fuck you” attitude. For me, all of that was so influential. It wasn’t just about being a metal head, you either liked a band or you didn’t. My first show I ever saw was a metal show and my second show was a hardcore show: D.R.I. when they drew nothing but San Francisco skinheads. That’s probably the biggest influence for my vocal style. It’s definitely there in the music to some degree, but it really shows in my vocal style. It’s more modelled after hardcore. Metal was more about being precise, while hardcore was about trying to get as much pissed off energy in your vocals as possible. Poison Idea especially influenced me. Some of their songs were just about screaming your head off for two minutes. It’s a rant instead of a song. That was amazing to me. I never heard anything like that. Goose bumps. It wasn’t about hitting the right note or even necessarily being on time, it was just about emotion. When we covered ‘Fucking Hostile’ by Pantera for a Metal Hammer tribute, it took me a while to get the vocals right, because I wasn’t used to this metal style. I had sang along with the song of course, but it was harder than I realised to sing in that style. The phrasing of all the words was different. It really dawned to me at that point that I probably have a more hardcore vocal style.
Is ‘Burn My Eyes’ the Machine Head record that has the most hardcore feeling?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I hear it on ‘The Blackening’ too, but it’s just different. To me, the middle part and the lead break in ‘Beautiful Mourning’ is just straight up Discharge. The riff and the simple mindset. The end of ‘A Nation On Fire’ is totally hardcore too. Very influenced by Poison Idea. Every album has a different vibe. We covered Discharge on ‘The More Things Change’ and we covered Bad Brains on ‘The Burning Red’. We even did a Cro-Mags cover, so the hardcore is definitely there.
How come a lot of the early Bay Area bands are influenced by British punk bands?
We had this very influential college radio station called KUFF. On Saturday nights they would play metal and thrash and punk and hardcore. The DJ was a big personality. He was funny and crazy. The Metallica dudes would come to the studio hammered drunk and they would talk crazy shit about Slayer. It was funny and entertaining, but that guy was also responsible for turning a lot of people I know onto bands like Battalion Of Saints, Discharge, Broken Bones and GBH. He played a lot of British punk. We hadn’t been exposed to any of that stuff before. I think the thing that a lot of metal heads in the Bay Area gravitated towards was that it had this kind of metal overtone to it. There were hardcore and punk bands that had a kind of rock ‘n’ roll thing going and other ones had the evil notes of metal. I was always drawn towards that sound. The British bands definitely had that. Discharge especially had these dissonant notes and I liked that. I think bands like Slayer took that and combined it with metal and took it into a different direction. I still have a lot of those bands on my iPod. When you listen to those records now, it’s really amazing how many of them stood the test of time. It’s so vital and alive. The energy gives you goose bumps. Metal was about perfection at that time, everything had to be perfect. When you listen to Poison Idea you can hear that the drums don’t sound very good and the guitar tone isn’t great and the vocals are all over the place, but when you put it all together it’s fucking perfect! It’s not metal perfect, but still it fits perfectly. That’s why we refuse to record to a click track. That punk rock element, the human element, is important to us. You know how you start off a song and at the end it’s 10 BPM faster? That’s great! Every band now records to a fucking click track and I hate it. It’s like a drum machine, even though there’s a real dude playing it. I love it when a song ends 10 BPM faster than it started. We want to keep that unperfectness about it when we record. I always keep my feedback in and you can always hear me breathing when I record my vocals. I always make a point to keep that in, because all my favourite punk rock and hardcore records have it. They didn’t clean it up. It’s real.
You did a lot of cool covers over the years. Can you comment on these cover songs that you did?
Cro-Mags - Hard times
‘The Age Of Quarrel’ is one of my favourite records of all time. I just remember how terrifying that band was. I never saw that line-up live, but we heard all these crazy stories and we had all these bootlegs. I remember staring at that picture of Harley on the back of ‘The Age Of Quarrel’ and thinking “Jesus fucking Christ!”. They were just terrifying and of course we thought they were great. ‘Hard times’ was just a short blast of energy. When we first started playing shows, the thrash and metal scene in the Bay Area was completely gone. So most of the shows we were playing, we weren’t playing with metal bands. We were playing with punk bands and hardcore bands and death metal bands. Neurosis, Rancid, Downset and Napalm Death were the bands we played with. Because we were playing punk and hardcore shows we wanted to show those kids that we loved hardcore and were influenced by it as well, even though we were a metal band. That’s why we started playing that song. It was fast, short and fun. We only had like five or six songs anyway, so we needed another song to play. It was a great way to fill up two minutes of our set.
Poison Idea - Alan's on fire
Again that was showing our love for this kind of music. Yes, we’re a metal band, but we also love this stuff. There’s a different side to us as well. It’s just a fucking awesome song. When we wrote ‘Burn My Eyes’ we were freaking out on that record, which had been out for a few years by then. It was such an influence on us. It was an epic hardcore record and we love everything epic (laughs). It had that piano intro, ‘Plastic Bomb’ and it was such a cool vibe. This song had an intense energy. Every once in a while I hear it on my iPod and those fucking guitars still sound savage.
Bad Brains - House of suffering
It seems like most people were influenced by the ‘Rock For Light’ era Bad Brains, while we were definitely more influenced by the ‘I Against I’ era. That record in particular blew me away. It was punk rock, metal and obviously reggae, but it also had almost like a new wave vibe to it. I always associate that record with ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure. I don’t know if it’s because I got into those records at the same time. Songs like ‘Sacred Love’ and ‘I Against I’... You always hear the crazy stories about how the lyrics were recorded over the telephone while HR was in jail. I saw them live on the ‘Soulcraft’ record for the first time, but ‘I Against I’ had the most impact on our band. ‘House of suffering’ was a fast, pissed off song with cool, weird lyrics and melodies. It’s always fun to do a cover song that takes you out of your element. We loved it man.
Is that also why you did ‘Colors’ by Ice-T?
That song was a metal song to us. It had that cool bass line and the evil notes. That song was scary when it came out. It was evil. That was a fun song to do man. It had like six tracks of bass. It was very different. Most metal bands suffer from metalness (laughs). They always want to prove how metal they are. It can be like overkill to me. We’re proud to be metal, but it doesn’t mean that other music sucks. Most other music sucks, but not all of it. Hardcore can be rad, hip-hop can be rad. Sure, there are crappy bands out there, but that goes for every genre. We wanted to show that there’s another side to this band that helped shaped who we are. We’re not just in the metal box.
But you also did a bunch of metal covers (Iron Maiden - Hallowed be thy name & Metallica – Battery)
Those were done for tribute albums and we were asked to do them. I don’t know if we would have done them if we weren’t asked. They were cool tributes and it was an honour to be asked though. When we did ‘Through The Ashes Of Empires’ we thought about doing some cover songs, but they weren’t metal songs. We were going to do ‘Witch hunt’ by Rush! There’s something cool about not doing the obvious. Too bad we never finished the Venom cover ‘Black metal’ that we recorded during ‘The Burning Red’ sessions...
Nirvana - Negative creep
This one was recorded during ‘The More Things Change’. We love Nirvana, we make no bones about it. We’re total Nirvana groupies. Last New year’s eve I went to Dave Grohl’s New year’s eve party. He has this bash every year in LA. Me and my wife met him at a Metallica show and he invited us. We were like “Oh my god!”. We were hanging out with him for the first time and we hit it off right away, so he invited us to come. We said: “That’s very nice of you, but why would you invite us? You don’t even know us!” And he said: “Because I live in LA and I don’t have any friends!” (laughs). It was really funny. The tricky thing was that every New year’s day we have a party of our own, last year was the tenth annual Flynn New year’s day party. So we weren’t sure if we could make it to Dave’s party, since it’s obviously a big production to fly to LA and have our own party as well. But we said “Fuck it, let’s just do it!”. We flew over last minute, went down there, had this amazing time at Dave’s party, got annihilated, went to sleep at 5 in the morning, got 2 hours of sleep, woke up at 7 am, flew back and then put on our New year’s day party. When I went down there I brought a copy of ‘Negative creep’. And I’m sure it’s not really the same for Dave, since he didn’t actually play on that song, but he thought it was really cool that we covered Nirvana.
Well, Dave Grohl is really into projects with other musicians, so maybe you’ll be in a band with him one day...
I don’t know, probably not. I’ll hold my breath. He’s like the coolest dude. I have a groupie crush on Dave Grohl.
Will there ever be a cover album by Machine Head like Slayer, Hatebreed and Sepultura did?
We’ve talked about it. I don’t know. If we did, I’d again want to do some trippy songs too. It would be cool to throw all the songs we’ve done on there, but there have to be some new ones as well. I’ve always wanted to cover ‘Stripped’ by Depeche Mode. It’s pretty much only keyboards. It’s very epic, it has a lot of evil notes. The lyrics are just “Let me see you stripped down to the bone”. It’s got very fucked up lyrics and it’s a very depressed song, but I would like to make a guitar based version of that. If we would make a cover album it wouldn’t be just metal songs.
Like the ‘Message In A Bottle’ cover you did by The Police?
Yeah, or the Rush song I just mentioned. Something different. Our drummer Dave would probably want a Kiss song. I fucking hate Kiss. Me and Adam and Phil and Dave are firmly divided. Adam and I can’t stand Kiss, while Phil and Dave fucking love Kiss. They even have Kiss tattoos. If it’s up to me, we won’t do a Kiss song.
My last question is about ‘The Story Of Anvil’. What did you think of the documentary? Would you bring them on tour?
No (laughs). They fucking opened for AC/DC here at Madison Square Garden. AC/DC saw the movie and wanted them on the bill. In America they got a lot of press and their shows are all sold out. That wouldn’t have been the case two years ago. I think it’s amazing for them that they finally got there huge moment. They’re obviously great dudes. I’ve never been a huge Anvil fan. I kind of missed them when I was a kid. I was already into other things. None of my friends listened to them. But I totally loved the movie. Especially being in a band, you’ll recognize a lot of things. They’ve been around for a long time and they survived a lot of internal shit and music business shit. There’s so much to relate to. That they managed to keep their drive and integrity and keep on doing what they’re doing is truly admirable. I support them, but I don’t think they would benefit from opening for Machine Head. Hey, they already got asked by AC/DC, so they don’t need our help!
Interview by David.
Pictures provided by Google Images.
Views: 2206
Related bandprofile: Machine Head
Comments
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| Pim |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (10:24) |
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| Prima interview David! |
| Nico |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (10:46) |
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| Leuk interview! |
| stengels |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (11:21) |
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Erg leuk verhaal! Zo te zien had Robb er ook wel zin in  |
| Mr Van79 |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (11:24) |
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Cool interview
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| MiguelPosi |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (11:24) |
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| Uitstekend leesvoer... |
| rogier77 |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (11:51) |
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| Nice! |
| sander@dynamo |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (12:27) |
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| Mooi stukje proza! ruige band, hoe was die Rob? hij staat bekend als een nukkig persoon... |
| David |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (12:58) |
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| Ik had ook zulke verhalen gehoord, maar het was echt een relaxte gast. Heb bijna een uur met hem aan de telefoon gehangen en ik had echt het idee dat hij interviews niet als een noodzakelijk kwaad ziet, maar als een leuk onderdeel van het spelen in een band. |
| cc |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (13:05) |
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| Ik heb niks met deze band maar het is een leuk intervieuw. |
| Goof |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (13:24) |
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| Was hij zich er wel van bewust dat Stripped al door Rammstein gecovered is? |
| Theo DI |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (14:33) |
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| prima interview, Rob had er echt zin in zo te lezen! |
Geert
Blindsight |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (16:33) |
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@Sander: Flynn was idd wat nukkig in interviews ten tijde van de eerste twee platen. Kwam waarschijnlijk vooral omdat Machine Head zo goed als doodgezwegen werd door de Amerikaanse media in het begin.
Erg coole gast, hij heeft er zelfs voor gezorgd dat Blind Sight ze mocht supporten in Luxemburg in 2006.
Leuk interview David. |
| xBILLYx |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (20:31) |
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Nice!
ik trek de ouwe Machine Head btw heel goed! |
| Paco |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (22:56) |
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| Direct weer even Burn My Eyes aangeslingerd. Goed leesvoer David! |
| Floris |
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Posted on 05.01.2010 (23:03) |
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cool interview 
ff Imperium maar weer eens gedraaid... |
| born to expire |
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Posted on 06.01.2010 (02:02) |
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| Prachtig leesvoer. Hulde. |
| unstable |
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Posted on 06.01.2010 (12:00) |
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| Leuk interview. Heb de beste man zelf ook tweemaal ontmoet en het was een ontzettend aardige vent die voor iedereen alle tijd nam. Denk dat het drugsgebruik in het verre verleden hem tot een nogal onverschillig persoon maakte. |
| brasso |
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Posted on 06.01.2010 (12:38) |
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| top interview. Burn my Eyes... |
| Widmar |
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Posted on 06.01.2010 (17:29) |
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| Goed interview, nog steeds machine head fan! |
realhatehardco
re!73 |
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Posted on 08.01.2010 (17:23) |
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| nog steeds machine head fan! |
| Onnovdw |
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Posted on 10.01.2010 (07:30) |
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| Erg leuk interview! |
| Lou |
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Posted on 16.01.2010 (18:03) |
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| cool interview |
| b.k. |
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Posted on 28.01.2010 (15:32) |
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| zeker een goed interview |
| Crypt666 |
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Posted on 23.02.2010 (04:53) |
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Interessant!
Maar Rob moet niet zo lullen, alles na burning red was gewoon kut met dt. |
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