Mushroomhead

Yeah. We pretty much had the whole summer off aside from finishing up the record. Then we were chilling out and not doing much. We’re just getting ready to get on the road and crank up all the new material, get the new show together and basically just do all the little things that we have to do.

Yeah, that’s where we’re at right now.

Being home is cool but after you’re home for a while, you’re ready to leave because you get sick of it. You come back and you have to deal with everyone else’s drama and everyone else’s problems. Basically the only reason to come home is for family basically, but once you’re here for a while sitting around, you don’t know what to do with yourself. We don’t have day jobs so we get bored. We’re sitting around waiting to go on tour because at least you get to do something every day.

Yeah, I have friends. Not as many as I used to because when you’re a little older, friends start disappearing and start dwindling down. They get married or move away, but I’ve got a small handful of friends that I actually can trust and rely on. Everyone else is only your friend to get something out of you. There’s a lot of that around here.

Yeah, last Wednesday at Peabody’s. We debuted new material that we’re going to do on the new tour just to get our feet wet with it and try to find out what’s wrong or if anything needed to be changed around or switched. That went over very well. A lot of the kids knew the songs already and were singing along and that was very cool.

Well it was the day after the album had come out but I know a lot of people had downloaded it though. I’m really not a huge fan of the whole pirating downloaded stuff because it screws over the artist at the end of the day. When people aren’t buying your record, you can’t survive. The whole album somehow got leaked over a month ago and that was a big blow to us. The whole album was available for download at all these pirated sites for a month which hurts your sales quite dramatically. If you’re Metallica or a band that’s selling millions of records, that’s one thing. But when you’re an underground band that only sells a hundred thousand copies, you need those extra sales to survive.

It’s good. It’s been two years now since he’s been in the band but this is the first album with him. He’s excited because now he’s going out doing his own stuff, not playing other people’s stuff. Before he was singing all of J. Mann’s lyrics and now it’s music he was a part of so it’s probably going to be a little more personal and fun for him. He’s been finding his niche in the band and things have been going fine. Nothing’s really stopped since he’s been in.

Yeah, because he could do more than just do the yelling. He could actually sing and harmonize and have a lot of different vocal styles so we play with that a lot and work with him on that more. We asked what this kid could actually do and I said “make him scream” and he actually came out with some pretty good stuff. Every time there’s a part where Jeffrey Nothing’s singing, he’s always backing him up with the harmonies. That’s something the band never had before so it’s pretty cool.

Yeah, we’ll still be playing older Mushroomhead stuff. There’re certain songs that we have to play because fans are not going to stop liking the songs. Eventually the more albums you put out the harder it is to play the old stuff but there’s always going to be a good chunk of songs from the old material.

I heard about that. I guess some radio station does these cage matches or something where when a new single comes out for a band, they play it against another single that just came out and fans call in and vote for which one they like better. I guess in a lot of markets, our single was released the same time as Evanescence and in some spots we were beating out Evanescence, which is cool.

I didn’t know either. It’s funny because a month ago, I thought the same thing. The thought crossed my mind “What ever happened to Evanescence? They just completely disappeared.” Now a month later I hear we’re beating them out on the radio. I’m like “they’re still a band? I though they broke up.” I had no idea but that’s cool. They’ve sold a lot of records. They had their moment there for a while. They were pretty big.

I’m hoping. That’s what we’re trying to do with the new record because without hits on the radio, it’s pretty hard to stay alive because the underground isn’t what it used to be. People just don’t buy CDs like they used to so you really have to push forward and try to get your music out there. But I really hope we get some good commercial exposure because it does nothing but help.

I think it’s a matter of the program directors getting behind the music and actually liking and believing in it. I’ve heard total crap on the radio. There’s nothing pleasant about radio, nothing catchy, nothing anything. But they play it so much because the program director likes it and then the general managers wind up liking it because it’s shoved down their throat everyday. If you play something for people over and over and over again, eventually they’re probably going to start liking it because the radio’s telling them to. But we never seem to get that push which I don’t really understand. We’re not forced in anyone’s faces and that’s what needs to be done. We’re the band everyone knows about but they never hear or see from us.

That was all us actually. We wanted to do it because we figured “well, with all this pirating and downloading, how do you make the incentive for people to buy the CD?” You make special packaging or you make bonus tracks, so Skinny and I came up with the idea of doing the seven different covers so you could actually collect every single band member. That helps a lot because you have those crazy fans that want the collectibles and every time they buy them, it gives you an extra scan. Then we did the limited edition 3D one too at Best Buy so it was actually eight different covers. That was all our idea and they actually weren’t into it at first. But then when they saw it printed, that’s when they were like “Okay, well now we see why you wanted to do it.” We pretty much call our own shots and do our own artwork and all our designing from merchandise to videos to whatever.

Well I don’t really know any other bands on that label right now. It’s like us and Ministry. I know they made it in the 80’s with Metallica and everything but I didn’t even know Megaforce was still a label until they approached us. I know they’ve got a lot of big backing and hopefully they’ll be getting our material out there. I hope it works because it didn’t work on Universal.

We heard of him because on the cover of Revolver Magazine, it said “The documentary that Slipknot doesn’t want you to see.” I wondered what the hell that was. The article talked about how they couldn’t get this documentary about the music scene out and how Slipknot ripped off all their fans and screwed over all these people and at the end of it, it says “The director also hints on the fact that Slipknot ripped off Mushroomhead” and I’m like “what the hell?” This guy is putting out documentaries about us and we didn’t know about it. So I went on the internet and I wound up tracking the guy down and made contact with him. He flew out here to show us his documentary and he said he wanted to do a music video for us. We’ve always shot our own videos and we wanted someone else to see what they could come up with.

We shot it here in Cleveland. There’s an old building out there, it’s like an old Bible press, and Jeffrey Nothing’s friend actually owns the building. This whole building looks like a Hollywood movie set but everything was falling apart and it’s just completely crumbling within itself. It was the perfect location to do a dark creepy video but we ended up doing a pretty straight up video. It’s the band jamming in all these different settings with creepy camera angles. There was some really cool imagery going on but there’s no other premise or any crazy hijinx in the video or anything like that.

He’s been the producer since day one. The band produces itself, but at the end of the day he’s the guy that pitches if the idea is good or bad or moves things around or works on vocal lines or arranging the songs and everything. It was really good this time around. A lot of people in the band had a lot to say in a lot of the things. I had more input on this record than I did the last one which is exciting for me. But he’s good. He knows the band and knows what he’s doing.

We don’t think it, we know it. In Cleveland, ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you Slipknot ripped off Mushroomhead because it’s undeniable.

The label, Roadrunner Records, knows Mushroomhead. Roadrunner was talking to Mushroomhead about signing a deal. Mushroomhead decided not to go with the deal. Roadrunner had pictures, videos, CDs; everything from old Mushroomhead look which is pretty much the Slipknot look. We had nine members, we had the orange jumpsuit with the barcodes on them, our drummer had a gas mask, our bass player wore a pig mask. The one guy wore a bondage mask, the other guy wore a clown mask. So two years later after Mushroomhead turns down Roadrunner, they obviously went out and found some band and dress them up. They knew that the timing was right for a theatrical masked band to come out and make it huge. That’s pretty much where that goes from there. We’ve never met those guys; we’ve never talked to them. We just took the higher road when we first came out. We didn’t want to come out bashing them or saying things because they were so popular and we broke the mainstream after they did. We didn’t want people to start hating us but people were calling us a rip-off band and all this shit. But we were doing this three years prior, how are we ripping them off? We had our own thing. We have the material to prove it. They don’t have anything. Chad’s documentary talks about all these bands from Iowa that were affiliated with Slipknot when they were underground and how all these bands helped them out but as soon as they got big, they didn’t help anybody out. So I guess a lot of people in Iowa were pretty salty. From what I hear, Iowa doesn’t even like Slipknot because they claim to be from Des Moines but they all live in California and Florida. I think one guy in that band lives in Des Moines, Iowa. We played our first show in Iowa which I thought was going to be bad. I thought kids were going to be throwing stuff at us but the show was sold out. I was talking to fans afterward and I was like “I thought we were going to get hated on and there would be protestors.” They were like “Why? We love you guys.” I was like “well because of Slipknot” and they were like “Fuck Slipknot. They claim to be from this town but we’ve never even heard of them until they got signed to Roadrunner Records.” But whatever, there are so many stories. A lot of the controversy between us and them was Mushroomhead fans versus Slipknot fans spreading rumors all over the message boards and things like that.

The other side of what I do is a lot of Photoshopping and setting up photo shoots for the band and handling merchandise ordering and designing merch. I put the packaging for the CD together for this one. Aside from handling all of the business aspects, at the end of the day I do the programming and the samples and all the effects for the album. I’m not the song writer of the band therefore I do the things that other people don’t have the time to worry about.

I wouldn’t say so much. The song writers in the band are Gravy and Shmotz but sometimes what I’ll add to the songs might change the feel of it or change around how it might be looked at, which happened on a couple of songs on the record.

Every deal we’ve signed, we always have a say in what everything winds up looking like. If they want to do a magazine ad, we want to see it beforehand because we don’t like to be misrepresented like we have been. We’ve built this whole idea of a band and its image and we always want to make sure it’s put across the right way. We don’t want someone making a wrong decision and make a design that won’t represent the band properly. Though it comes with the territory that you have to let things go and you have to give up certain things that you want to control because people are going to be doing it for you. You have to play ball in that sense because it’s just that big.

Originally when the look was what it was prior, everyone just came up with their own character. It was no rules, anything goes. Go to the local costume shop, grab a mask, get a jumpsuit from the thrift store. It was just like a costume party. Everyone always wore different things all the time. As it evolved and everything, everyone became their own character but then when Slipknot came out, we changed and went to the black masks with the military outfits. But we still got hell for changing. With the new album, we wanted to head back more to characters and have more individuality again because we’ve been the same thing for four years. So we worked with our mask maker, Dave Grayhouse, and everyone gave him ideas and pointers on what they wanted their mask to look like. Then everyone did their own thing and everyone put together their own outfits. The look is still evolving so it’s going to change from day to day but we’re definitely going for more characterization. We almost look like horror movie characters or something like that.

[laughs] I don’t know if I’d be incriminating myself. It’s weird because our fan base is mainly guys even though there are a lot of girls but the problem is that at the end of the day I care more about getting off-stage and actually talking to fans rather than looking for some slut. Also when you see us, we’re in the masks. Therefore I get off stage and I’m just a guy at the show. So we don’t really see the whole rock star groupie scene. A couple other guys in the band are married and actually are committed to their relationship and things like that, but I’m not. I’m single and 26 and ready to go. If see some hot Goth chick, I’m all over it.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck