MASTODON

With Blood Mountain, they've take conceptual metal to dizzying new heights. Revolver joined them on the road to get the details.

By Dan Epstein
Photos by Jimmy Hubbard

It’s Saturday night in Dallas, and the Unholy Alliance tour is in town. Inside the lobby of the posh Nokia Theater, the fans are pumped up and ready to rock. One black-T-shirted believer, who’s clearly had a few beers too many, tries to rouse his compatriots to join him in a “Slayer” chant, but he’s already too wobbly to get it going. “Slaaayer!” he wails. “Slaaaay-yer!” Then, almost as an aside to himself, he adds, “And they brought some friends!”

Backstage at the Nokia, those friends are getting ready for their set.

“This is what we call ‘performance sauce,’” says Mastodon bassist and lead vocalist Troy Sanders, grinning as he pours himself a sipping cup of Jack Daniels. “It’s a necessity. When we’re in the studio, we have ‘recording juice,’ which is ice-cold beer. But when we’re on the road, it’s performance sauce.” Mastodon guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds munches on some tortilla chips and marvels at the sumptuous dressing-room spread, which tonight even includes a hefty stack of delicious Cajun shrimp. (As a joke, the band put “shrimp cocktail” on their rider at the beginning of the tour; they didn’t actually expect the request to be honored.) “It’s so easy to get fat on a tour like this,” Hinds says with a laugh. “You’ve got catering two times a day, and then they bring all these snacks to your dressing room. To come back from a tour having gained weight—that’s a new one for us!”

These are fat days indeed for Mastodon, at least compared to the ultra-lean existence of years past. The last time Sanders, Hinds, guitarist Bill Kelliher, and drummer Brann Daillor played Dallas with Slayer—in late 2004 on the Jägermeister Tour—a representative from Warner Bros. Records came out to see them, with a view to possibly signing Mastodon to a deal. For a band on a small independent label (Relapse) that had—as Kelliher puts it—spent the previous five years “playing stadium rock in tiny clubs and people’s basements,” and had grown used to logging hundreds of thousands of miles in a cramped Ford van known as “the Fart Box,” the idea of signing a major-label contract was hard to even comprehend. “At first it turned our heads, like, ‘A major label is interested in us maybe? That’s bizarre!’” Sanders recalls. “We were flattered and intrigued that we had this attention, but we also wanted to make sure that everything was gonna be cool.”

Now, the Atlanta-based band is about to release Blood Mountain, its first record for Warner Bros. Any time a group with a strong underground following rises to the big leagues, the question of “Are they selling out?” inevitably becomes a hot topic of conversation among both their supporters and detractors. And Mastodon are no exception, even though it would probably be easier for the strapping, bearded Sanders to pass as a woman than for their Neurosis-damaged brand of prog-thrash to pass for anything remotely “commercial.”

“With Warner Bros., we told them from day one, ‘Don’t sign us and then try to tell us how to write our next record,’” Kelliher explains. “We were like, ‘We’re not going to be a radio band, and we’re not going to be easy to work with.’ With Relapse, we would just write our record and give it to them. We’d be like, ‘Here’s our fucking record,’ and they’d be like, ‘Cool!’ We’d gotten this far on Relapse doing everything our way. The second that any kid gets a hint that Mastodon is corporate, or thinks that someone else is controlling us, then it’s over. It can’t happen. Mastodon has to stay Bill, Brent, Brann, and Troy writing all the music, making the decisions about the artwork and videos—all that stuff.”

In a rare showing of record-company wisdom, Warners pledged not to meddle with Mastodon’s artistic vision. As a result, the band was free to make what Kelliher quite rightly calls “the best Mastodon record yet.” Even by the impressive standards they’d set for themselves with 2002’s Remission and 2004’s Leviathan—which topped numerous year-end “best of” lists, including Revolver’s—Blood Mountain is a massive leap forward for Mastodon, a brilliant record so challenging, so complex, so heavy, and so uniquely strange it’s hard to believe that the Warner Bros. top brass didn’t shit their collective pants the first time they heard it.

Produced by Matt Bayles (who also helmed Remission and Leviathan), Blood Mountain features plenty of earth-moving riff-o-rama (most notably on “Circle of Cysquatch,” “The Wolf Is Loose,” “Hand of Stone,” and “Crystal Skull,” the last of which features a vocal turn from Scott Kelly of Neurosis), but there are also some staggering cinematic excursions into Pink Floyd–tinged space rock (“Sleeping Giant,” “This Mortal Soil,” “Pendulous Skin”), a dizzying prog-rock rave-up (“Capillarian Beast”), and one song (“Bladecatcher”) so frantic and fucked up that it practically defies further description. “Colony of Birchmen”—which features creepy multitracked vocals from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age—is catchy as hell in its own demented way, but it’s not like we’ll be hearing Kelly Clarkson covering it on her next album. In short, it’s hard to disagree with Kelliher when he calls Blood Mountain “the next honest step in the Mastodon evolution.”

Just as Leviathan was inspired by Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, there’s a unifying concept to Blood Mountain, as well; and once again, it was Daillor who brought that concept to the table. Daillor’s phenomenal drumming is one of the elements that’s always set Mastodon apart from the rest of the contemporary thrash/grind pack, but he’s also contributed a hefty amount of lyrics and riffs (he writes the latter by singing them into an ever-present Dictaphone, then teaches them to his bandmates) to the Mastodon cause, and he’s typically the one who comes up with the album concepts. “It would be hard for us to just have a collection of songs that don’t have anything to do with each other,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to rally around it as a band. I think [basing a record upon a particular concept] is kind of a cool way to approach it, and it seems to motivate us. Once we get a topic to focus on, we can all go, ‘Okay, now we can finally write a record!’”

The idea for Blood Mountain came to Daillor in 2005, when the band was playing Ozzfest. “I was reading that Howard Bloom book, The Lucifer Principle,” he explains. “It was talking a lot about how we act instinctually with our ‘reptile brain’—it’s like the fight-fuck-and-kill brain that’s inside of everybody, and it’s left over from when we first grew legs and walked out of the pond…

“So the original story that was in my head was, okay, this guy is climbing towards the top of Blood Mountain, and he’s looking for this Crystal Skull. He needs to safely get the Crystal Skull all the way to the top of Blood Mountain. And when he gets there, he inserts the Crystal Skull inside of his own head, and it eliminates the ‘reptile brain,’ and we all move forward into the next phase of human evolution. Of course, when I first told the other guys about it, they were like, ‘Uhhh, yeah. So, anyways…’” Daillor says with a laugh.

“But with this band, it can’t just be my idea—everybody has to own it,” he continues. “So I figured out a good way for everybody to be able to own it would be to say, ‘Okay, you’re on this mountain, and a lot of things can happen to you when you’re on this mountain—you get lost, you’re starving, you have to kill your own food, you chew on a root and start hallucinating, blah, blah, blah.’ That way, everybody can create their own creatures or whatever and just come up with some really whacked-out, psychedelic crazy shit.”

Like Leviathan, which implicitly drew parallels between life on a 19th-century whaling ship and life in a struggling rock band, Blood Mountain—despite all of the fearsome, fantastical creatures that populate it—is ultimately about Mastodon itself, as well as the world the band inhabits.

“Blood Mountain could be a metaphor for anything,” adds Sanders. “But, ultimately, it’s just a parallel of our own adventures and our own characters. To us, Blood Mountain is an enormous obstacle. You either conquer it, or it stands in your way. It kind of ties in nicely with this journey we’re embarking on.”

While Mastodon has come incredibly far in the past seven years, there’s nothing like opening for Lamb of God and Slayer to make you feel like you’ve still got a long way to go. Each night on the Unholy Alliance tour, the Mastodon guys attack the stage with all the gusto of pirates raiding a Spanish galleon. At some shows, like in Dallas and the next night at Houston’s Reliant Arena, the crowd responds in kind—the band leaves the stage in Houston to lusty chants of “MAS-TO-DON! MAS-TO-DON!” But on other nights, it’s obvious that the audience is reserving its energy for the top two bands on the bill.

“At least we haven’t been ‘Slayered’ yet,” shrugs Daillor. “Bands touring with Slayer in the late Eighties and early Nineties, they’d get ‘Slay-er, Slay-er’ shouted at them all through the set. We’ve done about four for five months of touring with Slayer during the past two years, and that’s never happened. So I think we must be doing all right.”

This is also only the second time that the band has toured the U.S. in an actual tour bus, although Sanders says that the band had originally intended to bring the Fart Box out instead, in order to save some money. “But it turned out that there were long overnight drives between at least half the dates on the tour, and that’s just unhealthy and dangerous to do yourself,” he says. “I absolutely love the bus, but between your driver, bus rental, and the fuel, all your profits are sunk right into it. We’ve decided that we’re going to take the van out when we do our headlining tour in September with Converge, though. The fumes will be rolling!”

When that happens, says Hinds, he’ll be ready. “I stopped eating red meat because of my farts,” he reveals. “They were really bad—they used to make people throw up and wreck their cars and shit like that. But I discovered that when I didn’t eat red meat, my farts weren’t near as stinky.”

A red-bearded free spirit with a crazed twinkle in his blue eyes, Hinds will happily talk your ear off for hours about tiki carving (after finishing Blood Mountain, he spent three weeks in Hawaii studying with master tiki carvers), Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top (his favorite guitarist), and tattoos (he’s covered with ’em, and got a new one on the side of his head while he was in Hawaii). Just don’t ask him about Mastodon. “I’m just sick of talking about it,” he says with a hearty chuckle.

This isn’t to say that Hinds isn’t as committed to Mastodon as the rest of the band; it’s just that he has little patience for the more mundane aspects of band life—or, for that matter, certain rules of social conduct. Howard Jones of Killswitch Engage recalls one Ozzfest show last year where he watched in amazement as a naked, acid-crazed Hinds led security guards on an early-morning chase through the bands’ bus area. “All of a sudden, Brent turns and yells, ‘Wait a minute, stop!’” says Jones. “And then he just craps right there, in front of everybody. Needless to say, they removed him from the premises. He’s a great guy, but he’s out of his mind!”

This impetuous streak has caused some tension between Hinds and his bandmates over the years, but by now they say they’ve all learned how to handle each other’s personal quirks. “It’s taken a long time,” says Daillor, “but we know everybody’s boundaries, everybody knows how to talk to each other, and we know how to work in certain touchy situations.”

When the Unholy Alliance tour hits Atlanta, Hinds manages to stay on his best behavior—a good thing, since everyone’s extended families have shown up to cheer on the band at their hometown show. Hinds’ grandmother, a spry and jovial eighty-something woman known to all as Mama B, has even made the three-hour drive from Birmingham, Alabama, to rock out with the boys. Taking her place before their set on Hinds’ side of the stage, Mama B waves to the crowd, which responds with a mighty cheer.

Like all of Mastodon’s sets on this tour, today’s show is a nine-song, 50-minute blast of molten energy. The band tears through older favorites like “Iron Tusk,” “Mother Puncher,” and “Behemoth” to a frenzied response from the hometown crowd, but new songs “Circle of Cysquatch” and “Crystal Skull” go over really well, too. After a ripping version of “Aqua Dementia,” Hinds pauses to change guitars—and to give Mama B a big hug. The crowd goes nuts.

Several hours later, after the closing notes of “Blood and Thunder” have long since died away and the band has said their goodbyes to their friends and loved ones, an exhausted Kelliher sits in the back lounge of Mastodon’s bus with a bottle of performance sauce, and quietly reflects on the show. “I was a little bit nervous today because we had 100 friends and family on the guest list,” he admits. “It was like, ‘We better play good tonight,’ but I think we rocked it.”

With only a few minutes left until the bus pulls away for the next gig—in faraway Albany, New York—Kelliher takes another pull on the bottle of Jack and delivers a parting shot. “The kids that are our loyal fans, some of them have been like, ‘Oh, you’ve signed to Warner Bros.,’ like we’re selling out, but I’m still wearing the same fucking shoes and pants I’ve worn for years,” he laughs.

“Right now, I just want this record to come out, so that kids can hear it and go, ‘This is the new Mastodon!’ They need to know that this isn’t the ‘watered-down Warner Bros. Mastodon.’ This is fucking pure Mastodon. This is the next fuckin’ level.”