COHEED AND CAMBRIA

How Coheed and Cambria kept their cool despite severe substance abuse problems and seismic lineup shifts and emerged with the triumphant ‘No World for Tomorrow.’

By Jon Wiederhorn
Photos by Rayon Richards

The walls are covered with Black Sabbath posters, an image of Iron Maiden’s Eddie, and more than a dozen mounted fantasy jigsaw puzzles: There are wizards shooting fireballs at scaly red dragons, sword-bearing warriors preparing for battle, and demonic creatures squaring off against one another. It’s pretty much what you’d expect sci-fi prog-rock band Coheed and Cambria’s practice space to look like. After all, frontman Claudio Sanchez has always immersed himself in make-believe and has spent the last six years writing concept records about interplanetary social unrest, sinister clones, and a government-produced virus that turns men into doomsday devices. He has even created a series of graphic novels to accompany his albums, going so far as to hawk his wares at sci-fi conventions.

But as it turns out, this Middletown, New York, shrine to fantasy wonderlands isn’t Coheed’s at all—they’re just borrowing it from some sci-fi-obsessed friends.
“Isn’t this crazy?” asks Sanchez with a laugh, pointing to a triptych of sorcerers conjuring flames from a giant cauldron. “I love that the pictures are all big puzzles. I bet it took a really long time to put them together.”

As much as he may admire the decor, Sanchez wants to make sure we understand this lair isn’t his. Yes, he’s into science fiction and likes to incorporate intergalactic themes into his songs but he has always intended his music to function simultaneously on two levels: while the initiated are aware that the lyrics are telling convoluted and crazy stories of vicious cyborgs and corrupt armies, the casual listener can enjoy the tunes as just good old-fashioned emo-rock.

“I’ve always said that my music isn’t just for comic-book fans,” Sanchez says, gesturing wildly with his hands as he speaks. “The story lines are there for the people who want that, but you can totally not be into science fiction and still like this band.”

A short while later, Sanchez, guitarist Travis Stever, and bassist Michael Todd are standing in the rehearsal room in a semicircle with new drummer Chris Pennie (ex–Dillinger Escape Plan), cramming for a tour of South America, and Pennie is introducing the guys to some new keyboard, string, and background-vocal samples programmed into his laptop. In addition, Coheed are practicing several songs from their new album, No World for Tomorrow (Columbia), that they didn’t include in their Warped tour sets.

As great as they sound, the musicians seem to be having a bit of trouble adjusting to the new samples. Even after performing “The Hound (of Blood and Rank),” “Radio Bye Bye,” and the title track five or six times each, they’re not entirely comfortable with the material. And since their plane leaves for Colombia in just a couple of days, there’s not a lot of time to get it right. But if the band members are feeling any pressure, it’s hard to tell. Throughout the day, Stever and Pennie exchange goofy faces as they play, and between takes, Todd breaks into the Sugarhill Gang’s seminal rap song “Rapper’s Delight” while Sanchez twirls a cheap cigar between his fingers and jokes about looking like Fidel Castro.

Maybe the lack of tension has something to do with how secure and stable the band compared to a year ago. Since last summer, Coheed has survived drug-related tour cancellations and the departure of two founding members (one permanently), and skated close to the point of breaking up. Today, the guys are glad just to be together. And having survived an existential crisis, heroin addiction, and a suicide attempt, Michael Todd is happy just to be alive.

“It feels like we’ve been through this crazy strength test,” Stever says after practice. “It’s like, emotionally and mentally, how much shit can you go through and still work through it? I’d like to think we passed.”

Actually, they aced the test. Not only did Coheed adapt to their circumstances, they wrote and recorded some of the best material of their career. Epic yet immediate, No World for Tomorrow is full of teeth-clenching riffs, symphonic arrangements, and pop hooks that, more successfully than ever, blend the members’ love of metal, prog rock, psychedelia, and commercial pop.

Conceptually, No World concludes the saga of the “Amory Wars.” The main character finally accepts that he is “the Crowing” and that he is destined to bring about the end of the world. At the same time, he remains determined not to be ruled by a prophecy. Through the lyrics, Sanchez addresses the internal conflict between what the character wants and what he knows will transpire. At the end, while the Crowing contemplates events from the past, the planets of the lunar body called the Keywork begin crashing into each other, and the curtain falls, ending the story. Outside of the sci-fi realm, however, No World is Sanchez’s most intimate and personal work.

“I really let the events of 2006 dictate what these characters had to go through,” he explains. “And if you can read into it, it’s all there.”

“These songs are really personal to Claudio, but for the first time they’re personal to me as well, because I can really hear his words,” Todd rejoins. “On some of them, I feel like he’s talking directly to me.”

The drama that fueled No World for Tomorrow began in late 2004 when Todd was prescribed Vicodin to combat severe pain in his knees. “I was like, ‘Wow, my knees feel better and everything else feels better, too,’” he says.

No stranger to drinking and smoking weed, Todd started popping more and more pills and sharing them with the band’s former drummer Joshua Eppard. By the time Coheed and Cambria took off for their co-headlining tour with Avenged Sevenfold in April 2006, Todd was taking 10 to 12 Vicodin every two hours and suffering stomach bleeding as a result. “That’s when I discovered OxyContin,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, I only have to take one of these and it won’t make my stomach bleed and you get high and you don’t get sick. So, why not?’ I had no idea they were basically heroin in pill form.”

As Todd and Eppard’s drug use escalated, pills took priority over the band. In June 2006, five hours before a car arrived to take Coheed and Cambria to the airport for a European festival tour, Sanchez and Stever received alarming news. “Josh called us to say he couldn’t get down the stairs and that he wasn’t coming,” Sanchez says.

“It was pretty abrupt, because whatever was going on with them was never an out-of-control thing before,” Stever says. “They were looking drained but they had already done a couple of tours like that and it was nothing huge. We never thought they’d throw in the towel.”

Scrambling to save the tour, Sanchez and Stever asked Eppard’s drum tech, Michael “MP” Petrak (ex-Samiam), to fill in, and when Todd met them at the airport, they told him the news, but he was too far gone to understand. “Healthwise, he didn’t look so good,” Sanchez says, understatement intended. “I don’t think he even knew Josh wasn’t in the airport van with him.”

Coheed and Cambria played England’s Download Festival with Petrak on June 9 as planned and, given the situation, the show was a success. Then, they headed to Barcelona, where they bombed. Sanchez lost his voice, and Todd was not only suffering from drug withdrawal but found he had contracted a case of the debilitating (but fortunately curable) hepatitis A, most likely from eating a tainted shish kebab. The next day, while Coheed headed back to England for the Metal Hammer Awards—which Eppard somehow conjured up the strength to attend—Todd flew home.

“I could hardly get through the security line without throwing up,” he recalls. “I don’t think the guys thought I was coming back to the band at all after that.”

With no bassist and a drummer who looked like he might fall over mid-set, Coheed canceled the rest of the tour and went back to New York, where Sanchez and Stever debated their future. After a month of complete inactivity, Sanchez was invited to submit tracks for the Ghost Rider and Transformers soundtracks. His songs were rejected, but they eventually became the No World for Tomorrow tunes “The Running Free” and “IV—The Road and the Damned.” More important, the sessions convinced him that he wanted to keep making music; he just wasn’t sure it would be with Coheed. Initial efforts to resurrect the band were a bust. Calls and emails to Eppard and Todd went unreturned, and both failed to appear at Stever’s wedding.

“The name of the record is No World for Tomorrow because there was a moment when we felt like the band might be over,” Sanchez says, nervously flicking his fingertips across the bridge of his nose. “But then Travis and I talked about it and we decided it wouldn’t be fair because we’d been playing since we were kids, and this is what we love to do. And at the same time, it wouldn’t be fair to the fans, especially the ones who have invested so much time in the conceptual side of the band. Now we’re not gonna give them the end? So we said, Let’s move forward. Let’s get through this.”

The two recruited their friend Matthew Williams to replace Todd, and Petrak played drums on a brief but successful stint with AFI and Dillinger Escape Plan. Then the band returned to New York to start working on the new record.

Around the same time Coheed chose life, Todd seemed determined to die. Suffering seemingly insurmountable feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness, he began using drugs harder than ever. Unable to afford OxyContin, he started snorting heroin, and before long he was shooting up. “I started to realize what I was a very actively using addict, so I kind of embraced that,” says Todd, the track marks still visible on his arms. “I became a walking cliché. And I attacked it the way I do everything else with my grandiose personality. I said, ‘Well, if I’m going to be a drug addict, I’m going to be a better drug addict than everybody else.’”

After months of heavy dope use, Todd decided to commit suicide. “I fit as much shit as I could in a needle,” he says. “Nothing sounded better to me than going to sleep and just not waking up. When that didn’t work, I tried to kill myself by cutting my wrists.” He points to a jagged scar across the back of one arm. “I was so railed out at that point I didn’t even do that right. The next day I was hospitalized and, after having my arms sewn back together, I had a moment of clarity, embarrassment, fear, and humility. I had never wanted help before, because help meant rehab and that was scary, which is such a twisted way to think.”

Like many former addicts, Todd is eager to tell his horror story, both as a warning to others and as a way to relive the past as a form of therapy for himself. “When confronted with the choice of going to rehab and getting well or going to sleep and not waking up, the later seemed like a much better option, which is so fucked up,” he continues. “It’s a biochemical miracle that I didn’t die. The amount of shit that I put into myself the last time was enough to kill a horse.”

While Todd was going through drug and psychiatric rehab, Sanchez and Stever were working on new material with Pennie, who had befriended Coheed on the Dillinger dates. Pennie decided to try out for Coheed because he wasn’t getting along with Dillinger guitarist Ben Weinman and was unhappy with that band’s inconsistent work schedule. The turning point came during the Coheed tour when Weinman temporarily quit. “He just walked out,” recalls Pennie, sitting on the couch in the practice space and tapping on a bottle of water. “He had been freaking out about things and not really getting along with people in the band. It was the culmination of two or three years of tension and it made me ask, What am I doing here? I’m supposed to be happy. I love this music and I love the band, but I hate this situation.”

Dillinger weren’t planning to tour for another 18 months and were only getting together twice a month to write, so in late 2006, Pennie accepted the offer to play with Coheed. “They have an amazing vibe, and I felt at home instantly,” he says. “We’d get together three times a week and play for five or six hours, and for me, that was what had been lacking so much.”

After breaking for the Christmas holidays, Sanchez and Stever started working on new songs in a makeshift studio in the frontman’s new house on the outskirts of Middletown. In addition to fleshing out material Sanchez had already started tinkering with on piano or acoustic guitar, the two collaborated on some tunes from the bottom up. It was the first time they had written that way since high school.

“Claud would have a vocal idea or something, and I’d come up with a guitar part,” Stever says. “And then we’d email the song to Chris and he’d do something on drums and send it back to us. It was a really fun and creative way to work.”

A couple of months into the process, Coheed’s manager received an unexpected call from Todd, who wanted to meet up with his former bandmates and apologize for his past behavior. Sanchez admits he was nervous about seeing Todd again, but as soon as the two started talking, his tension was allayed.

“It was like seeing the old Mike, completely different from what we had been used to for the past couple of years,” Sanchez says. “We were proud of him and happy to see him. We showed him some of the new material and watched a movie together. And he said he would love to play again one day. So after he left, Travis and I agreed, ‘Well, let’s just try it out and see how it works.’”

Sanchez had originally planned to produce No World for Tomorrow himself, but the band’s management convinced him to hire a big name instead. After considering their choices, Coheed went with Nick Raskulinecz, who has recently worked with Shadows Fall, Stone Sour, and Rush and who has also produced two Foo Fighters records. The move paid off almost immediately, though in an unexpected way. Just as Coheed were getting ready to head to Los Angeles to enter the studio, Pennie found out that, as a member of Dillinger Escape Plan, he was still under contract with Relapse Records, and that the label wouldn’t allow him to record with another group. Thinking quickly, Raskulinecz contacted Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, and within days Hawkins was in the studio with Coheed.

“That sucked, but I know there was pressure from the other side of Dillinger to not let me do it,” Pennie says carefully, weighing his response. “I wrote the new Dillinger record with the guys and I had planned to play on it, but when they wouldn’t let me play on the Coheed record, I just left the band.”

“Taylor played great on the record, but it should be stressed that Chris owns the songs,” Todd says. “Most of the serious parts and drum hooks are directly from Chris’ demos.”
Coheed and Cambria spent six weeks in the studio recording No World with Raskulinecz and found the time surprisingly enjoyable. Having recorded their other three albums in sleepy Woodstock, New York, with producers Michael Birnbaum and Chris Bittner (with whom they sometimes argued), the musicians were happy to be in Los Angeles working with someone who was clearly a fan.

“Even when we were in preproduction running through the songs with Taylor, Nick was there every minute and was so involved and enthusiastic,” Stever says. “It was like having a cheerleader on the side. Also, he had a lot of really cool input soundwise.”

When they finished recording, the band flew back home to rehearse with Pennie for the Warped tour. The dates were the first to feature the new drummer, and also marked the live return of Todd. Despite the 30-minute set limitation and the grueling summer weather, the band had a blast. “Man, two months went by like that,” Pennie says, snapping his fingers for emphasis.

“Now we’re just looking forward to being able to play our full set and a lot more off the new album,” Sanchez adds.

After practicing “The Crowing” one final time, the musicians put down their instruments and take a late lunch break. Seated on a faux-leather couch clutching Subway sandwiches and bottled water, the members are downright giddy, and not from a lack of food. Having triumphed over the greatest adversity of their career, they feel reborn and ready to conquer the world. No World for Tomorrow might be the final chapter of the “Amory Wars” saga, but for each of the band members, it signals a fresh start.

For Todd, it’s the first chapter of a life of sobriety; for Pennie, it’s an opportunity to prove himself in an established band and make a comfortable living playing music; Stever sees it as the continuation of something he feared was over and a chance to enter a new writing partnership with Sanchez; and for the leader of the pack, it’s the reinvigoration of Coheed musically, personally, and spiritually.

“It really does feel like the beginning,” Sanchez says with a wide grin. “Even conceptually, there are so many options. We can go back and revisit Coheed and Cambria or do some kind of a prequel story, or we can move from this mythology into another one, or tell stories that parallel this and see how some of the characters’ lives are affected by the events of the ‘Amory Wars.’ The possibilities are endless.”