Mass metal

The suburban sounds of Godsmack, Staind, and Reveille

by Carly Carioli

Sully Erna, the singer for Godsmack, is on a cell phone, fading in and out as he and his mates hurtle toward the next stop on the fast track to fame, fortune, rock stardom, Big Things. "We're approaching Myrtle Beach," he announces. "Oh yeah -- party!"

Erna has earned the right to celebrate. Faster than you can say That Thing You Do, his Methuen/Lawrence-bred band have ascended from fringe dwellers on the suburban Massachusetts hard-rock circuit to crossover smash with one foot in the Buzz Bin and the other kicking down the door to Late Night with Conan O'Brien (where they'll appear this Friday, April 30). The enabler for their unprecedented success, the single "Whatever," is a concise summary of post-metal convention: White Zombie backbeat, crunchy/doomy riff in drop-D (the favored tuning of heavy hitters since Helmet), a hint of industrial mechanics, and Sully's gruff approximation of Layne Staley's baroque bray. The song tore through Billboard's Modern Rock radio charts, where it's currently lodged in the Top 20, then broke ranks and stormed even higher on the Mainstream Rock charts, where it's been hovering in and around the Top 10. Thanks to its success, Godsmack's album -- originally self-released by the band as All Wound Up, then picked up last August by Republic/Universal and retitled Godsmack -- has bounded up the Billboard Top 200 charts to #46 with a bullet. A little over a week ago, the album went Gold. This summer Godsmack will share the main stage at Ozzfest, alongside such long-standing hallowed heroes as Black Sabbath, Rob Zombie, and Slayer.

Meanwhile, the band have been riding the crest of "Whatever" during their second national headlining tour. "It's actually growing at a nice pace," says Erna. "We're not peaking, like shooting straight up in the air and getting into arenas. But a few months back we were doing four-to-five-hundred seaters and it wasn't even close to being sold out. And all of a sudden shows are selling out everywhere."

The Godsmack story is the kind of rock-and-roll fairy tale that doesn't come true all too often. That said, there are two more Cinderellas in the local wings. Springfield's Staind just released their Elektra debut, Dysfunction; it will probably take an act of God to keep them from denting the charts. Currently on tour with Kid Rock, they'll be on the road all summer opening for Limp Bizkit. This summer, Elektra will also release the debut album by Reveille, a group of teenagers from Harvard (the town, not the university) who are already doing Rage Against the Machine-style rap-metal fusion duets with Cypress Hill's B Real. Although they've trod different paths to get within arm's length of the brass ring, Godsmack, Staind, and Reveille have this in common: they've all appealed almost exclusively thus far to suburban audiences, cultivating an extensive rural fan base that's negated the necessity of winning over the perennially jaded and cynical audiences (me included) in Boston.

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In the late '80s and early '90s, Sully Erna beat the skins in a bloozy bar-band outfit called the Fighting Cocks, then joined as the drummer for the Boston thrash-metal band Strip Mind, who'd been signed to Sire/Reprise. At the time, rumor had it that Erna's suburban-metalhead mindset rubbed his bandmates the wrong way. He didn't like them, either. "I learned some good lessons," he says, "but I don't have a lot of good memories from that band. There was a lot of drugs, drinkin', a lot of fights, a lot of animosity." (Former Strip Mind bassist Tim Catz, now doing double duty in Roadsaw and Honeyglazed, refutes Sully's characterization of those days but holds no grudges: "He was right there drinking as much as the rest of us. But there weren't any drugs. All I can really say is, he's in a better setting now. He was always the drummer who wanted to be the front guy.")

In 1995, when Erna formed Godsmack -- yes, they're aware of the Alice in Chains song, and no, they're not apologizing -- and switched to vocals, he called drummer Tommy Stewart, who'd played in a Southern hair-metal band called Lillian Axe, and cover-band guitarist Tony Rombola. The album Godsmack recorded with well-regarded local producer Andrew "Mudrock" Murdoch at Boston's New Alliance Studios in 1997 was, by normal major-label standards, demo-quality; the best two tracks, "Keep Away" and "Bad Religion," bore overt resemblances to post-Black Album Metallica. WAAF's overnight DJ picked up the disc cold, listened to it in his car, and was impressed enough to ask the station's program director, Dave Douglas, whether he could play it. Soon "Keep Away" was hitting the airwaves every night, and eventually it saw daylight.

Six months of steady airplay later, not much had changed. Depending on who's telling the story, the WAAF staff heard Godsmack play "Whatever" at a live gig and requested a recording, or the band had recorded the track for a compilation. In any case, Godsmack went back to New Alliance for a weekend, and when they emerged, they took "Whatever" straight to WAAF. "And when I heard that," says Douglas, "I thought it was heads above whatever else was on the album. So we created our own edit and put it in regular rotation starting right then."

By the time "Whatever" hit the air, in early 1998, the band were already selling about 50 copies of their CD a week at Newbury Comics. But after "Whatever" made it into rotation, sales soared closer to 500 a week and the band had to start shrink-wrapping CD singles of the song to the full-length.

"WAAF totally made Godsmack what they are," says independent promoter John Peters of MassConcerts, who puts on shows by metal and hardcore acts in Central and Western Massachusetts. "They were playing Godsmack 25 or 30 times a week, and the band were selling thousands of records. But it was just this huge regional phenomena, and no else had even heard of the band."

True enough. Although sales of All Wound Up were skyrocketing, Godsmack were still virtually unknown in Boston. "It was a lot harder to get a buzz going in Boston than it was in the suburbs," says Erna. "We had focused on Boston, but when we started hitting the suburbs, we found that we were doing better on the outskirts than in the actual city. There are a lot of cool markets -- Springfield, Worcester, Manchester, New Hampshire, Providence -- where shows don't come to people that often. So we'd just make as much noise as we could. And then it all started to snowball: the next thing you know we're selling 1000 records a week, and we had sold almost 20,000 before we got signed."

Boston was proving a tough sell. A rumor -- completely untrue -- even circulated in the city that Godsmack were buying up their own albums to inflate sales figures. In the suburbs, the band were filling 500-seat clubs, then 1000-seat ballrooms; still, they couldn't seem to get arrested inside the city limits. "I don't know why it was," says Sully. "I think it has to do with a band presenting itself a certain way. I guess at times we would make it look like we were bigger than we really were, or we had something more going on than we really did -- we would rent these big light shows and stuff. And so what if we didn't make any money? But we'd put on a fuckin' awesome show.

"We also maintained a certain distance from the audience. We would spend a little time with them after the show, but we never gave them too much -- you always want to keep some kind of mystique with the band, and we always felt it was the right thing to do."

Godsmack were already showing up on Billboard's regional charts by the time they signed with Republic/Universal, in the late summer of 1998. They also signed on with an agent whose clients include Tool and Korn. Six weeks later, an album recorded in a Fenway basement -- remastered and retitled, with "Whatever" added on, but essentially the same disc -- hit the national shelves.

Even then, the best Godsmack could do for a Boston gig was Mama Kin, at that time still partly owned by Erna's boyhood hero, Aerosmith's Joe Perry. But they had no trouble headlining a sold-out show at the 7000-seat Tsongas Arena in Lowell. In terms of a live draw in their home state, they were on a par with Korn and Marilyn Manson.

What's surprising about Godsmack's rise isn't necessarily that the audience for heavy metal and hard rock is suddenly suburban -- that's been a given for 20 years. But certainly over the past 15 years, the conventional wisdom for people who want to play metal, or anything else that doesn't involve learning other people's songs, has been to gravitate to the city.

"In the old days," says Peters, "the only time anyone would be able to see an act like Godsmack is if they opened an arena concert for Aerosmith or something. But now there's a good network of all-ages rooms outside Boston, so a lot of these acts have been able to build up followings. Kids can actually go to the Palladium or St. John's Gym or the Espresso Bar and see shows that are safe and well-run. Which is important because the metal scene feeds on itself: Slayer comes through and Fear Factory opens, and the opening band plays in front of 1500 people and the kids like them, and when the band comes back they're bigger."

"When I lived in Western Massachusetts," recalls Graham Wilson, who co-owned the Boston indie label CherryDisc and co-manages Staind, "I listened to hard-rock radio, because that's all there was for a teenage white boy. In Boston, everything's more diffuse: you've got the urban influence, the world influence -- and even the college stations who are playing heavy rock tend toward the most extreme stuff. It puts pressure on bands to be more creative; they have to live up to that notion of artistic credibility. So if you're a loud rock band from Cambridge, you're gonna have to bust out an electric violin with flames on it. In the suburbs you get a steady dose of solid, heavy rock. And out there, the heavy-rock thing is more a part of suburban white-boy culture."

Peters adds, "I think of Korn's Follow the Leader as being this year's Nevermind. I mean, that and Creed's My Own Prisoner are like two super-influential rock records for suburban kids. I don't think any critic's gonna say how great Korn is, but the fact is that kids love them."

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You don't need to tell Graham Wilson about the exodus of metal from the cities to the 'burbs over the past 10 years. By the time Roadrunner acquired CherryDisc, the bigger, metal-oriented indie wasn't even all that interested in the Boston imprint's heavy hitters -- Tree, 6L6, Quintaine Americana. Roadrunner just wanted CherryDisc's indie-pop bands.

So when Wilson began managing Staind, in November of 1996, he harbored no illusions that the Springfield band would ever take Boston's club scene by storm. Wilson also had a hunch they wouldn't need to: that same month, the record-release party in Springfield for Tormented, Staind's self-released debut album, drew 900 kids. "I was never under the impression that I was going to break Staind in Boston," Wilson says. "Just knowing the politics of the scene, that was never my plan. It would've been easier for me to break them [in Boston] 10 years ago with Bunratty and the Channel and the Rat. But I knew the scene wasn't ready to support a band like Staind."

Initially Staind looked and sounded pre-packaged: a little Tool, a little Deftones, a little Pantera, a lot of gratuitous body language. In the suburbs it played like MTV come to life; it made them anathema in Boston. "We definitely haven't broken into Boston," says Staind guitarist Mike Mushok, the band's happy-go-lucky spokesman. "There's no question about it."

There is also the matter of the band's inauspicious beginning. "How did we get 900 kids to come out and buy a lot of CDs?" asks Mushok. "Well, we went about it in a strange way that a lot of people to this day give us a hard time for. The first thing the band did when we got together was, we immediately wrote three tunes. And we thought, man, we're in Springfield, and it's gonna be real difficult to get people to see us. So because we're from Springfield, home of the tribute band, we learned cover songs. And we went out and we played other people's tunes. We also always played our own tunes, from the first gig. But we learned other people's tunes, and we developed a pretty broad fan base doing that."

"I hate telling people that these guys were a cover band," says Wilson, "because they're so talented, and it's only because of where they grew up that they ever had to do it. [Frontman] Aaron [Lewis] was born to sing, and it wasn't his fault that he had to grow up in Long Meadow, where they don't support live music. People hold these prejudices, like it makes them less of a band: 'You used to play covers so you can't be a real band.' That's like saying you grew up in the projects, so that's your fault -- you deserve to live in the projects all your life."

For all that hand wringing, it hasn't make much difference. At worst, Staind have found themselves unpopular among the denizens of the neighboring hipster preserve. "Because of what we did, we were frowned upon greatly by the people in Northampton," says Mushok. "It's like, 'Man, if you could just open up and see why we did it.' "

"Anybody from Western Massachusetts that's somewhat alternative or trendy or lesbian or gay or from the art community moves up to Northampton," says Wilson. "And the people that are stuck in Springfield or Northern Connecticut, even though they might be artistic, there's very few outlets for creativity. And that's the difference between Springfield and Boston. In Boston you've gotta fight and scrap just to get your fans to pay attention to you -- just to get on the right shows and all that crap. In Springfield, if you're willing to deal with the cultural void that exists there, people will respond and react to that."

But in the end, that didn't make the biggest difference either. On October 29, 1997 -- Mushok can still quote the date off the top of his head -- Staind got a gig opening for Limp Bizkit. Bizkit's frontman, Fred Durst, tried to get the band kicked off the show when he saw the album art for Tormented, which pictured a bloody dagger piercing a Bible. ("Fred's really a pretty spiritual guy," says Mushok.) But after Staind's set, Durst changed his mind and declared them one of the best bands he'd seen, setting in motion a string of phone calls, demo-tape exchanges, and Bizkit opening slots that eventually resulted in Durst's personally signing the band to his label, Flip/Elektra.

Durst didn't stop there. He brought Staind to his high-powered management company, the Firm; he produced Dysfunction along with Deftones producer Terry Date; he directed and made a cameo in the video for "Just Go," which is now on MTV's 120 Minutes; he offered Staind singer Aaron Lewis a guest spot on Limp Bizkit's upcoming sure-to-be blockbuster album; and he's taking the band on the road for Limp's summer tour. Mushok says Durst had a lot to do with the very sound of Dysfunction, encouraging the band to give Lewis more space to show off his pipes -- which sound a bit like Tool's Maynard Keenan and a lot like Layne Staley. "And with those words of wisdom, we kinda changed what we were doing and how we did things," says Mushok. "Fred really pointed us in the direction we're in right now. He helped us a lot in shaping some of the tunes."

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Reveille formed just over a year ago in the hamlet of Harvard, Massachusetts, where there's one general store, a lot of apple trees, and no place to play rock and roll. Everyone except the bass player was still in high school, and the only gigs they'd played were the ones in the drummer's driveway, "for some of the kids in the neighborhood and stuff," details vocalist Drew Simollardes, now 18. In a sheepish voice that's almost a whisper -- a stark contrast to the angry growl feeling out the rhythms of hip-hop over double-barreled guitar on Reveille's forthcoming Elektra debut -- Simollardes recounts what little there is to tell of the band's story. The five of them scraped together pocket money, recorded a demo, and got themselves an agent, who shopped the tape and engineered a deal with Elektra. Before that they'd never played a real show; they've been gigging seriously only since they got back from recording with Korn producer Steve Thompson (who brought along Cypress Hill's B Real, whose part on Korn's "All in the Family" had ended up on the cutting-room floor) this past February. A track from their self-released four-song EP is currently in rotation on WAAF. (Reveille will be part of the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival at the Worcester Palladium this weekend, and along with Staind they'll be opening for Monster Magnet at the Palladium on May 9.)

Asked whether it feels weird to be signed to a major label without ever having toured, Simollardes stutters, "Uh . . . I don't know. I don't even know what touring's like."

The sum total of Reveille's experience is little more than a few club dates and some bigger shows opening for their friends in Godsmack. "Well, the Godsmack shows are for like the biker crowd and stuff," Simollardes says. "Our fan base in general seems to be more the skater crowd -- kids, anywhere from say, 16 to 20. But we go over really well with Godsmack's crowd. There's no competition between the bands whatsoever, because the music's so different, but it's similar enough so the fan base is still the same, so it's like two totally different shows, and the crowd really gets into it. It's really cool."

What about Boston? "Boston's kind of hard to play, because they don't get 'AAF out there."

Has airplay made a difference in attendance at their shows? "Well, we didn't have anybody coming to shows before that," Simollardes admits.

"The reality is that bands like Godsmack and Reveille and so on are becoming much more popular than most of the bands in Boston's elite society, if you will," says WAAF's Douglas. "And you don't have to be a brain surgeon, as a program director, to understand that we ought to be playing this music. If other stations choose not to, that's their business. But maybe we're just going back to what the American colonies were all founded on -- you've got the people who are saying, 'We want something,' and then you've got this hierarchy that says, 'No, this is what you should want.' And maybe this is a bit of a revolt. Kind of a quiet revolt."

Still on the cell phone, #46 with a bullet, Sully Erna's more than happy to be trailblazing Douglas's, uh, quiet riot. The success of Godsmack, Staind, and Reveille, should it all pan out, "is gonna put Boston back on the map," he says. "It's a great city, y'know? I hated to see it going through a depression when nothing was happening. And I can't say that we're responsible for all of this, but if we did have anything to do with it, then it makes us feel even prouder. I love my home, I love New England, and whatever it takes to keep that fucker on the map, I'll go the extra mile."