BLACK TIDE

For these Floridian metal upstarts, drinking may be off-limits, but there’s still plenty of monkey business to be had

By Richard Bienstock
Photo by Justin Borucki

It was a mild summer evening in July 2007 when Gabriel Garcia sat down to dinner with his family for a celebratory meal, and also to say goodbye. The next morning the singer and guitarist would be leaving his hometown of Miami to head out on the road as part of Ozzfest 2007. His band, Black Tide, which had recently finished recording their debut full-length album, Light From Above, for Interscope, were initially scheduled to appear at just one date of the festival, in West Palm Beach, Florida, about an hour north of Miami. But early buzz about their music—part New Wave of British Heavy Metal riff-rock, part power-metal bombast, part ’80s hair-band flash—resulted in Black Tide’s being invited to sign on for a full tour of duty on the second stage. All in all, things were looking up. And then they went down, real fast.

“I had just started eating,” Garcia recalls, “when the call came in that we had been kicked off the tour. This was about eight hours before we were heading out. The RV was packed, all our gear was loaded, we were ready to go. And then…nothing.”

As the story goes, Jägermeister, which sponsors the second stage of Ozzfest, alerted festival heads that under no circumstances could Black Tide be associated with, much less complicit in, promoting their brand, a liquor celebrated throughout the rock world partly for its mouthwash-like licorice flavor but mostly for its ability to get you seriously fucked up, and quick. It was a tough break for the band members, but shit like that’ll happen when your singer, guitarist, and main songwriter is all of 14 years old.

“Jäger was concerned that by having us play on their stage they’d be promoting underage drinking,” says Black Tide guitarist Alex Nuñez, himself a relatively senior 18 years old (the band is rounded out by bassist Zachary Sandler and drummer Steven Spence, both 19). “So we were super-sad. But then there was all this noise about it on the Internet, and the story got blown up all over the place.” As if in response to some cyberspace chant of “Let them play!” like a 21st-century twist on the Bad News Bears, Black Tide were soon reinstated on Ozzfest. Only now, in order to circumvent any legal issues, the band found themselves performing not on the second stage but on the Jäger-less main stage, opening for, among others, Lamb of God and Ozzy Osbourne himself. A propitious turn of events, but hey, shit like that will happen when your singer is 14 years old, too.

In a variation on the well-worn “chicks in rock” adage (“They can play pretty well…for girls”) Black Tide have since their inception four years ago been tagged as a metal band that are pretty good…for kids. The truth is that they’re actually pretty good, period. The songs on Light From Above are fueled by aggressively raw, streamlined thrash-metal riffs and tempered with catchy, hard-rock choruses. And while the band’s overall youth might instill the album with a certain naivety, it also fills it with the unbridled enthusiasm and energy of an act in the earliest stages of its career. (Perhaps as a nod to this sentiment, the CD includes a blistering cover of “Hit the Lights,” the first song Metallica wrote and recorded.) As for the musicianship, Garcia and Nuñez in particular prove to be adept musicians, trading off rapid-fire guitar licks and searing, blindingly fast solos with surefooted precision. Garcia, who counts Axl Rose and Dave Mustaine among his vocal influences, wields a similarly sneering, biting voice whose versatility belies his youth—even if, at times, his lyrics don’t: When asked about the meaning behind leadoff track and first single “Shockwave,” the singer, seemingly uninterested, responds, “I don’t know, dude. It’s just like, a fucking shockwave.”

Garcia, who recently turned 15 (a milestone that was celebrated, with much 21-and-over-style debauchery, with tourmates Avenged Sevenfold), was just 9 years old when a cousin first introduced him to heavy metal, and the guitar. “Before that it was all pop-punk, Blink-182 type of music,” he says. “But my cousin, who is a few years older than me, got me into Megadeth, Pantera, Iron Maiden, all the old-school stuff. Guns N’ Roses was the first band that made me feel like this was what I wanted to do.” As for why he was attracted to music whose heyday came and went before he was even born, Garcia says, “I just liked the guitar playing better. And the vocals were more melodic, more real.”

Garcia soon began practicing guitar obsessively, teaching himself to play by reading lessons and tablatures online and eventually jamming with his brother, a drummer who is three years his senior. In time, his brother invited Alex Nuñez, a skater friend who also played guitar, to these sessions. In addition to a love for the same type of music, Nuñez, a Dominican American, shared a similar Hispanic background with the Garcias, whose family emigrated from Nicaragua (current drummer Steven Spence is Dominican as well).

“Gabe was only 10 or 11 at the time,” Nuñez says. “He was really good, though. He was already writing his own stuff. He still writes most of our music.”

The trio eventually worked up enough material for a set, and with Zachary Sandler, a schoolmate of Nuñez’s, on bass, the band began performing under the name Radio. At the time, Garcia was still in elementary school. “None of my classmates knew what I did,” he says. “They couldn’t have come to the shows, anyway.” Two years of steady gigging—mostly weekends, no school nights—in Miami and the surrounding areas (during which, Nuñez says, “We’d get to the shows by piling the band, all the equipment, and all our girlfriends into Gabe’s dad’s minivan”) led to a small local following, and it was after a performance at the Florida Music Festival in 2005 that the band, now with Spence on drums, landed a tentative deal with Atlantic Records. That relationship eventually soured—“We wasted about a year and a half with them,” Nuñez says—but soon after, at a show in Miami, the band were spotted by a representative from EMI, who put in a good word about them to a friend at Interscope.

“I didn’t even know what Interscope was,” Nuñez says. “But we met with them and they were like, ‘We want you to come out to California in a week.’”

It was in the winter of 2007 that the newly christened Black Tide (“We knew when we got signed that we were going to change the name,” Nuñez says. “We had all grown up a bit”) headed to Groovemaster Studios in Chicago to record with producer Johnny K (Disturbed, Finger Eleven). Though the finished product, Light From Above, is just seeing release now, the band has come a long way in the past year. After Ozzfest came the opening slot on Avenged Sevenfold’s fall tour, and looming just on the horizon are further gigs in the U.S. and eventually Europe. Which means that, at least for now, school is firmly on hold. “I had to drop out my junior year because we signed our deal,” Nuñez says, as if this is a dilemma faced by every high schooler. “But my parents aren’t worried, because they know I’m pretty responsible. I’ve already signed up for classes to get my GED.”

Garcia, for his part, is enrolled in an online-schooling program. “I still have homework and tests and all that,” he says. “I have to do it every day.” He pauses. “Well, I’m supposed to. I just don’t have the time while we’re on tour.” Not surprisingly, it is Garcia, the youngest of this very young band, who requires the most supervision on the road. Nuñez insists there are no overprotective “stage parents” surrounding Black Tide—“Everyone’s folks are super-supportive,” he says, “but they know that when we gotta go, we gotta go.” Nevertheless, Garcia’s father, the onetime minivan driver, is a constant companion to the band on tour and handles much of their daily planning. Occasionally, he still even drives the RV.

That said, boys will be boys, and the members of Black Tide are always up for a little fun. On Ozzfest, they became friendly with Lamb of God, which resulted in their taking part in some, at least for them, illegal behavior. They may not have been allowed to play on the second stage, but, says Nuñez. “We still managed to drink a little Jäger.” He laughs. “Though we actually got busted a couple of times. Every once in a while someone would rat us out to our tour manager, and we’d be like, ‘What the fuck?’” As for that other classic road indulgence, Nuñez offers something of a veiled confirmation. “We’ve definitely been meeting a lot of people, especially on the Avenged Sevenfold tour. I wouldn’t call them groupies…but I’m doing all right so far!”

But while they’re getting some love from the ladies, as well as other bands, it remains to be seen whether or not Black Tide will be accepted by the metal population in general. Will the band be judged on their music or merely perceived as a novelty act? They’re hoping for the former, but clearly ready for the latter. “People talk shit about us all the time because of our age,” Nuñez says. “Like that’s the only reason we’ve gotten anywhere.” Though it’s undeniable that this fact has opened plenty of doors for the band, musically, Black Tide can stand with metal acts twice—hell, in Ozzy’s case, three times—their age. “So what people say doesn’t really bother us,” Garcia says. “We just do what we do, and hope they’ll pay attention to the music.”

Of course, sometimes doing nothing but paying attention to Black Tide’s music only serves to drive home how very young they are. On the Avenged Sevenfold tour, for example, Garcia took to singing many of the songs from Light From Above in a lower vocal register. The reason? “My voice had changed in the time since we recorded the album,” he says with an uneasy laugh. “A lot of the songs I’m not able to sing the same way anymore.”

They grow up so fast these days…