TRIVIUM
Metallica sing their praises, Dimebag’s family has virtually adopted them, and they’re already huge stars in the U.K. Now, with The Crusade, they are about to make a devastating strike at America as well.
By Jon Wiederhorn
Photo by Crackerfarm
The members of Trivium are milling around the new New York offices of Roadrunner Records, when they’re summoned by Monte Connor, senior vice president of A&R. Mind you, this isn’t just some dude who signed the band to the label; he also brought the world Slipknot, Sepultura, and Type O Negative, among others, so the guys waste no time finding out what he wants.
Facing the band from behind his desk, Connor holds up a CD containing a proposed British radio edit of “Anthem,” one of the more commercial cuts from Trivium’s new melodic thrash fest, The Crusade
. He explains that the label’s U.K. office wants the Orlando, Florida, band to shorten the track for the Brits. Then he pops the disc in the stereo and cues to the edit, which cleanly excises one of Heafy’s solos. “No fuckin’ way!” Heafy shouts, jumping up from a couch as if he just noticed he was sitting in a pool of Mick Thompson’s vomit. “We’re a guitar band! I’m not gonna sacrifice my integrity for a bunch of limeys.”
This tea-bag-bashing outburst is surprising for two reasons: 1) England was the first territory to embrace Trivium, who are almost gold there, and 2) though he’s only 20, Heafy is usually careful not to offend anyone or burn bridges.
But the young rocker has an excuse for his outburst; he was tired and irritable even before entering Connor’s office. He and his bandmates—guitarist Corey Beaulieu, 23, bassist Paolo Gregoletto, 21, and drummer Travis Smith, 24—were up all last night in Selma, Texas, on the Sounds of the Underground tour. By the time they flew to NYC, they’d been awake for almost two days. Fortunately, Trivium still possess youthful resilience. And they know a little something about damage control, to boot. Shortly after writing off an entire nation of radio listeners as “limeys,” Heafy purposefully praises the Brits.
“Seriously, dude, England has been great to us,” he begins. “On the first tour we did there, they treated us like rock stars. This guy had me sign his stomach, then came back later with my signature tattooed there. The next time I saw him, he had a replica of the tattoo [that I have] on my right arm and my exact ear gauges. And then he tells me he’s getting a tattoo of my face on his chest.”
Along with the obsessive devotion of their fans, Trivium have earned the respect of some of metal’s most formidable musical institutions. Metallica invited them to open on six European dates this summer—a dream come true for a band that started its career covering “Master of Puppets” in shit bars. And during the stint, the Bay Area bashers took the Florida quartet under their wing, plugging them in interviews and inviting them to sing backup on a cover of the Misfits’ “Die, Die, My Darling” at three shows.
“We were just hoping to meet them,” Heafy marvels. “But they hung out with us and took us to dinner, which was crazy. Religious people model their lives after a certain deity as a way to live. I modeled mine after Metallica, and them giving us their approval was amazing.”
“It would be like the skies opening up and God saying, ‘Hey, nice going, man,’” adds Beaulieu earnestly.
Metallica aren’t the only thrash kings to promote Trivium. In the early days, Machine Head helped them rise through the ranks, and more recently former Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul and Rita Abbott, Dimebag Darrell’s widow, have taken a major interest. When Rita found out Trivium were playing “Walk” and “Domination” in tribute to Dime, she lent the band guitars Darrell used on Pantera’s Reinventing the Steel tour. Last New Year’s, she even invited the band to Dallas for a big bash. That night, Beaulieu stepped onstage with Paul’s cover band, Gasoline, to play “Cowboys From Hell.”
“I was totally loaded by the time I got up there,” Beaulieu recalls, then smiles. “After the set, Vinnie and I got into this in-depth conversation, and the next thing you know, I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m really sorry, but I have to throw up.’ So, I just tilt my head and puke, and Vinnie’s just dying laughing at me. Then we got in a limo and headed off to the next bar.”
Anyone wondering why the thrash legends are passing the metal torch to Trivium probably hasn’t heard The Crusade. Ever more than 2005’s Ascendancy, the new disc is an unabashed return to Eighties speed metal. Throughout The Crusade, Heafy and Beaulieu exchange solos like coked-up Iron Maiden protégées, and Gregoletto even contributes a few fleet-fingered passages.
“On Ascendancy, the solos were really short, and there were only one or two per song,” Beaulieu explains. “We wanted to make the solos these big, epic sections of the songs because no one’s doing that anymore.”
“The goal was to do something really brutal but also memorable,” says Heafy. “If you look at bands like Megadeth and Testament, they were really aggressive, but there was always something catchy. The riffs weren’t just heavy—they were also things you could hum.”
Heafy knew that his screamy singing style would also have to be overhauled, and he hired two of metal’s finest vocal coaches, Ron Anderson (who has worked with everyone from Axl Rose to Chris Cornell) and Melissa Cross (who trained Slipknot’s Corey Taylor and Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, among others) to help him effect the transformation.
“I used to scream because I was so bad at singing,” Heafy reveals. “I felt like I needed to do it because I couldn’t fuck it up. But I found out I already had the fundamentals for singing. It was just a matter of learning different placements for air in my head and where to resonate.”
Crusade’s technical shredding, precision riffery, and complex structures suggest Trivium spent ages assembling and recording the disc. They didn’t. Because they’ve been on the road nonstop since 2004, they had to compose much of the disc on tour. “When we started, we were all crammed into this airport shuttle bus with PVC pipes and wood to make up the bunks,” recalls Heafy. “We had to sit down with a guitar and no amps and just write.”
The pressure didn’t ease when it was time to record. In March 2006, Trivium went into their Orlando rehearsal room for a week to finalize the song arrangements and memorize their parts. Then they headed to Sanford, Florida, to record with Jason Suecof over a strict five-week period. “We knew we had to do it in the scheduled time because if we would have kept going, we would have had to start cutting European festival dates, and we definitely didn’t want to do that.” Gregoletto says.
Of course, five weeks is an eternity compared to the two days Smith had to lay down all of his drum parts. “I was supposed to have four days,” he gripes. “We lost days going back and forth from Orlando twice to find a kit that sounded right. At that point, I really started to panic, but then I just got on with what needed to be done.”
With his half- and full-sleeve tattoos, black ear gauges, and a Municipal Waste T-shirt, Heafy looks pretty fuckin’ metal, but he wasn’t always that way. When he joined Trivium, he was a dorky 14-year-old who had never heard of Pantera or Megadeth and played saxophone in his middle school band. Heafy met Smith in 1998, after Trivium’s original singer saw Heafy perform Metallica’s “Four Leaf Clover” at his school talent show, and asked him if he wanted to come to Smith’s house to audition for a guitarist-spot in the then-two-week old band.
“At first, I was kind of unsure because of how young he was,” Smith admits. We’re at a billiards hall now, and he’s just slaughtered Revolver in a game of pool. “He came to my house, and you could tell he was scared as fuck. I guess I intimidated him, but I meant to. It was kind of a test. But once we played, I knew right away this was gonna be the dude.”
Heafy auditioned with Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and, shortly after, the group played the tune at a battle of the bands at Smith’s high school—and took first place. Right before the performance, however, it looked like the show might not happen. “Matt was really late because he had a concert with his middle school band for all the parents,” says Smith with a smirk. “So he shows up right as we’re supposed to play, and he was a nervous wreck. But it went over really well.”
About a month later, Smith fired the original singer, who wanted the band to sound like Tool, and designated Heafy both singer and guitarist. “I didn’t even know he could sing,” says Smith. “But I saw how hard he worked on guitar, and I figured, If he’s that dedicated at guitar and he does the same thing for his voice, we’re there.”
At the time, there was one major dissenter in Trivium: Heafy. “I was shit scared to sing because I wasn’t even through with puberty yet, and my voice was horrible,” he recalls. “But I was even more scared to say no because Travis was insistent, and he was a lot bigger than me back then.”
With Heafy screeching, Trivium started playing thrash covers at tiny bars. Then they wrote some originals, recorded their first demo with Suecof, and sent the disc to a bunch of labels. In early 2000, after going through a couple of bassists, they heard back from Germany’s Lifeforce Records, which wanted to sign them but needed a record right away. So Heafy threw together some more songs, and the band made their hit-and-miss debut, Ember to Inferno, as a trio with bassist Brent Young and Suecof producing. Realizing they needed a second guitarist to generate enough power live, they placed an ad on their website. Beaulieu was the first to respond.
“Corey used to come to our shows, and I always thought he was a goofball, so I wouldn’t talk to him,” says Smith. “Then he shows up at Matt’s to audition, and I’m like, ‘No fucking way. Not this dude.’ But Matt convinced me to let him play, and he totally ripped it up.”
Around that time, Monte Connor, senior vice president of A&R at Roadrunner, heard Ember’s “If I Could Collapse the Masses” on a magazine sampler, but while he liked the song, he wasn’t quite convinced. Then he got Trivium’s next demo, and all doubts disappeared—Trivium found themselves with a Roadrunner contract. Everyone was stoked except for Young, who quit because he didn’t want to be in a full-time band. Suecof had been working on a side project with Gregoletto and recommended him. Thus, Trivium’s lineup was secured.
“It worked out perfectly,” says Gregoletto. “I stayed with them a week, learned a bunch of stuff, then headed right out with Machine Head. It was like a trial by fire.”
After the tour, Trivium returned to the studio to record Ascendancy. Soon after its release, the bandmates began to garner critical raves and started partying heavily to celebrate their incipient success. Then, after nearly killing himself one night goofing around, Heafy decided to sober up.
“A good friend of Corey’s invited us to stay at his house, and I got all screwed up and did a back flip off the kid’s couch into a glass table,” Heafy says. “It was kind of a wakeup call. Now, I run in the morning, exercise in the afternoon, and eat healthy. And I think the shows are much better because of that.”
When they realized Heafy was serious about his health, the rest of the band vowed to play all of their shows sober, and Trivium were back in business. U.K. stardom followed, including a slot at the sold-out Download festival in front of 80,000 people. But as Trivium get ready to head back to Europe in December to open for Iron Maiden, Heafy’s got one big problem. Now that he’s becoming a celebrity, he’s getting recognized everywhere he goes.
“Even in airports, we can’t walk around,” he complains, before heading back to his hotel for the evening. “When we go to Europe now, we have to have security. And it really sucks.”
Call it a minor hiccup in the Trivium master plan. After all, when your goal is to follow in the footsteps of Metallica, sooner or later, you’re gonna lose your anonymity.
“We’ve had the same ambition since the day we began,” Heavy says. “And that’s to be the biggest band we can be—hopefully, the biggest in the world.”
He stops for a moment to consider the implications. “If that means getting recognized everywhere I go, I guess I can live with that.”
