Across two bands and two eras, Chad Gray has endured the rise, fall and reinvention of modern metal – and lived to tell the story. As the feral, blood-splattered frontman for Mudvayne and Hellyeah!, the 54-year-old has spent more than three decades establishing himself as one of the most intense and uncompromising performers in heavy music.
Now back at the helm of a reunited Mudvayne, Chad looks back on a life spent screaming in key, blowing out knees and learning the brutal, beautiful realities of the music business. These are the lessons he’s picked up along the way.
BIG LEGENDS DON’T NEED TO HAVE BIG EGOS
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“Vinnie Paul brought so much to the table [in Hellyeah], but he was a bandmember, dude. He wasn’t the big superstar celebrity drummer – who is arguably one of the top fucking five greatest fucking metal drummers out there – acting like, ‘I’m fucking Vinnie Paul. I was in Pantera. I’m bigger than you.’ He didn’t have that attitude at all. He was always just one of the guys, and he made us a band.”
HOPE FOR THE BEST, BUT PLAN FOR THE WORST
“If I were talking to the 2001 version of myself, right around [Mudvayne album] L.D. 50, when that was exploding, the one piece of business advice I would give myself would be to quit and go to college! Ha ha! Get the fuck out of here, quick! Run for the fucking hills! I could never imagine the fucking horseshit we would go through. I mean litigation. We spent $2,000,000 in litigation [with our former management company]. It was insane.”
DON’T EVER LET UP
“Back in 2000, we got a lot of interest and did a showcase with Clown from Slipknot, his drum tech, and their manager who worked for Epic Records. We walk out in full make-up, full everything, and there are literally four people sitting in front of us. We start playing, and halfway through the first song, the mic goes out. I just started screaming my head off without it. I look at the guy running sound, like, ‘Fix this shit!’ and we just kept playing. The guy’s hardwiring shit while trying not to get electrocuted, and we finally get the sound back on. We play five or six songs, and Clown walks straight up to me at the end and goes, ‘You got fucking issues!’ Ha ha! From then on, he was our boy.”
SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS APOLOGISE AND MOVE ON
“Every band has a disaster set. For Mudvayne, especially when we first started touring, we were playing the entire L.D. 50 album because we didn’t have two or three hours of material to pick from. Now, some of those songs have tons of different parts. I remember we were going off the fucking rails in Norfolk, Virginia, at The NorVa. Then Matt [McDonough, drums] fucked something up, and the song just imploded. At one point I was singing one thing, Greg [Tribbett, guitars] was playing a different riff, and Ryan [Martinie, bass] was playing a different riff. It was an absolute disaster – a real head-scratching moment where everyone is playing something completely different. I just looked at the crowd and apologised. I said, ‘I don’t know what the fuck just happened there, but we got through it. So here’s this next one…!’”
GOOD MENTORSHIP FOCUSES ON THE DETAILS
“Mudvayne toured with Metallica on the Summer Sanitarium tour [in 2003]. One day, I’m walking down the hall, and James Hetfield walks out of his dressing room. I walked up and was like, ‘Hey James, what’s up? I’m Chad. I love your fucking vocal style, you have what I call yelling in key.’ And he’s like, ‘Exactly!’ Then he asks me, ‘Man, I use these little things called Vocalzones, have you ever heard of them?’ I said no, so he goes into his room, comes back out, and hands me a box of them. They’re like little liquorice pastilles that stick to the side of your teeth to keep you salivating. It was just so fucking cool. This is James fucking Hetfield, dude. The Alpha. He spearheaded a movement that changed the game in the early 80s, tracing all the way back to Sabbath, then to Metallica, to the nu metal movement, to the kids kicking today. Music is just this constant exchange of inspiration.”
METAL OFFERS THE FREEDOM TO EXPERIMENT
“People in metal have the freedom to experiment in ways that country or pop artists can’t. Your changes will actually be accepted by the fans. Metal wouldn’t sell shampoo! When you get into country and pop and shit, you have to stay in your lane. You have to sing what they think you should sing. In metal, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Some people do shit that’s so different it creates a whole new genre. That’s real freedom.”
BACKING TRACKS ARE KILLING LIVE MUSIC
“New music is really hard for me to deal with, because of the way it’s being done now with the backing tracks and the clicks. Mudvayne never played to a click. Vinnie Paul never played to a click. And I love that, because when you’re live, there’s an actual push and a pull that happens. Say you’re playing a mellow verse and a heavy chorus is coming – by the third or fourth measure of that verse, the tempo naturally starts to speed up right before the chorus hits. It slowly slides into what’s coming. That builds anticipation and excitement for the crowd because they know what’s coming, and then bam! that shit hits. When you’ve got a click, you can’t create momentum because you’ve got a bunch of backing tracks running along with you. I don’t expect a band that has a four-piece orchestral moment in a bridge to carry a viola player on the road, fine. But tripled and quadrupled guitars? Layers of backing vocals? Ain’t nothing wrong with a single vocal, man! If you sound exactly like the record because of the tracks, I mean, let’s keep it fucking real a little bit, what are we doing?”
MUDVAYNE LOVE THE UK
“UK fans always ask why Mudvayne hasn’t hit the UK since reuniting. It’s not personal! It’s just a matter of right time, right place. It costs a tremendous amount of money to go to Europe and the UK – trucking all your gear over there is incredibly expensive. Download Festival came at us with a guarantee, but to make a European tour work, you have to string all the festivals together back-to-back – Download, Wacken, Rock am Ring, Rock im Park… But because those festivals are a couple of weeks apart, you have to get side gigs in between to cover costs. Right now, there’s no venue availability, or the available venues are too small to make the math work. I’ll go over there and play for nothing, but it’s hard to go $100,000 in the hole. So it has nothing to do with our loyalty to Europe and the UK. I love playing Europe. I love playing the UK. I love playing Japan. I love playing Australia. I love playing anywhere you put me on a stage. And UK fans are phenomenal, it just has not been physically possible for us to get over there.”
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
“I am one of the most physical performers in metal, and every night my body tells me I should have quit! I’m killing myself out there. Over 25 or 30 years, I look in the mirror and think, ‘Why the fuck did you choose to wear make-up every day?!’ Ha! I blew my knee out on the last Mudvayne tour. I just threw three braces on it and did what I do. I can’t just stand at a mic stand and sing; that intensity gets my blood boiling. I want that connection to the crowd, and I connect by being physical. That intensity comes directly from the kids in front of me. We give them something, they give it right back, and it builds to this massive crescendo. When we walk offstage, everyone is exhausted. That’s the goal: I want to make you go home and sleep like a fucking baby.”
PLAYING MUSIC IS A PROFOUND ACT OF SERVICE
“When my final gig ends, the facepaint comes off, and the stage lights go down, I hope I’m remembered for being honest. I’ve given my life to people, sharing my stories so they know they aren’t alone. I had this idea a long time ago that I’d be able to exorcise my demons by writing songs about them, but I didn’t realise I’d have to play them every day. When I sing those songs onstage, I go right back to the exact headspace that inspired them. I wear my life on my sleeve. Part of my stage banter every night is telling the crowd: ‘Whatever you got going on in your life – relationships, jobs, money, mortgages – check it at the door. Come in here, open your hand and let go of everything, and embrace what we have because we are a family.’ Because that’s what it all boils down to – we’re all a family and family helps each other.”
Chad Gray plays Aftershock in October
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