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So, without further ado, I would like
to introduce you to Sully Erna.
Somebody told us this is
where the fucking party is tonight.
Is this where the party is?
Most people spend their entire lives just trying
to figure out who they want to be.
Somehow, for me, at a really young age, I just knew
what I was gonna do with my life.
There's a lot of people, I guess they go
through their whole life of wondering what they're gonna be
when they grow up kind of thing.
I just knew I wanted to be a musician
and when I picked up the live bootleg record one day
and I seen that picture of Joe Perry holding up a B.C. Rich,
that picture actually changed my opinion of wanting
to be going from musician to wanting be a rock star.
Sully Erna, he's just like a nonstop guy, you know,
a hundred percent energy, that guy.
Sarcastic, tough-in-your-face attitude.
Short punk, he would pick the fight with the biggest kid.
Sully is driven. That's what he always was and still is.
He's got the tenacity
that you fucking just would not understand.
What he goes for, he goes for.
Sully was always the guy that wanted to conquer the world.
When we think about Sully, it's not just
as the lead singer of Godsmack,
but it's really just a force of nature.
One, two, three, four, ready? Go!
Growing up, he was always there for me,
but when he could be.
He was always on the road.
He was always touring, doing press, doing shows, whatever.
His job is obviously abnormal.
It is weird, like we don't see each other a lot
so we don't get to have that like family time
that like a normal family would, especially
when dad's gone all the time.
Eleventh floor.
My dad doesn't talk
about his childhood a lot, like the harder stuff.
I think that he's very closed off about that
because it was a harder time in his life.
But basically all I know about his childhood is
that like it was rough for him growing up
and he came from like a really tough part of Massachusetts.
These two others were in the hospital
with non-life threatening injuries...
Police also responded
to Melrose Street around noontime for shots fired.
Officers swarmed the area in heavy gear
after they saw the gunman targeted police.
Central High School says increase security after 51...
My name is Sully Erna.
I'm the founder and lead singer of the band, Godsmack.
We were born as a band way before you guys were born,
but for me, I was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts
and I spent the first 18 years of my life there
and it was a very challenging city for me growing up.
But I was raised with a musical family
and my dad's still a trumpet player.
And so then I found out through my dad that my great uncle
who was my grandmother's brother, was a famous composer
in Sicily, Italy, which is where my family is from.
His name was Emanuele Carta.
He had composed and written all this Italian music
that today has become very well known in Sicily.
When he passed away, he left the house to his sister,
which was my grandmother
and then she went on to get married and raised my dad
and his sister, my Aunt Rina.
I was born in 1944 in Sicily
in a small town called Melilli.
Unfortunately, when I was 14 years old,
my mother passed away.
A few years later, my father brought me to the United States
where we found work in a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Oh, it was a beautiful city.
You'd never had to worry, your parents never had to worry.
You could go out, you can enjoy life, play in the yard.
Very different than today.
There was a lot of areas
that you just avoided, especially where we lived.
Even as adults, we didn't hang around that area.
So this is my house
that I grew up in, 87 Basswood Street, Lawrence.
And it's so surreal being here right now
because really this is the heart and soul
of kind of the core of my life and what I remember the most.
And you gotta come check this out.
Oh my God, I'm freaking out.
I haven't been here since I was 17 years old.
So this was it. This was my old home.
This was my mom's room.
Her bed used to be set up this way against the wall.
This was my little bedroom.
It looks so much smaller than I remember.
I used to have my little drum set there.
My mom's gonna freak out when she sees this film.
This is insane that I'm standing in this house right now.
What an amazing experience to be able
to come back here after what, 35 years.
If there was a clown in the family.
When Sully was little, as long as he had a spoon
or a stick or something to bang on, that baby was happy.
Fortunately he always had it in his blood just like I did.
The earliest memories that I can remember,
it was always somehow connected to music.
From watching my dad's band all those years, sitting
in the basement
from the time I was three and a half years old
and when they were done rehearsing, I used to always go
to the drummer first and ask him if I could play
on the drums and he'd sit me on the stool.
I couldn't even reach the bass drum pedal. I was so small.
I can barely reach it now actually.
Sometimes it would make me crazy hearing
that steady banging and banging
but I just had that feeling that he had something in him
that maybe would develop later on.
I had gone to Constantino's where his dad went all the time.
One day the owner of the studio came up to me
and says, "You know, there's a mother here
with a really young little fellow
and she'd like him to sign up for drum lessons."
And they said, "How old is he?"
I said, "Three and a half."
"Can you teach somebody that young?'
And I said, "Well, I have never done this before this young.
This would be a new experience, but I'm game."
So we went to two or three lessons
and the fourth time we went back, he told me, he says,
"Mrs. Erna," he says, "Don't stop him."
He says, "He has gotten a natural rhythm
for these drums that I can't explain."
He says, "But please, don't stop him."
So we bought him a little drum set for Christmas.
It was a cute little set, but it was paper.
And he put his foot to it
because he said, "This is not a real set.
This is a toy set."
One year later, at the age of five, on my fifth Christmas,
there was my blue sparkling beauty real drum set.
For the first time, I had some real drums in the house.
The smallest drum set they had was still
three times bigger than him.
He just had such a natural talent. He was born with it.
And no matter where he went,
his jeans, his high tops, his drumsticks in his back pocket,
so he was always beating on something.
But again, I wasn't a rock star back then.
I wasn't successful, I wasn't a celebrity, I had no money.
We were raised so poor that we didn't even have milk.
Our milk was powdered.
So we had a packet of powder that you mix with water
and that's kind of what milk was for us.
My mom, you know, raised us trying to hold down a couple
of jobs to raise me and my sister.
I know that my mom
and my dad didn't have a great relationship.
There was a lot of tension in the house,
from what I remember.
My ex-wife, I have to make sure, it's not
because I'm trying to be nice on this interview or not
but my ex-wife is a wonderful person.
I still respect her enormously.
Unfortunately, she probably doesn't feel the same way.
At least I think I hurt her a lot when I left.
I think both of us got married too young.
And my reason, I wanted to get outta the house
and he was my out.
I don't remember having a lot of memories with my dad
in that house 'cause I was really young.
And the memories that I have, they're not the best memories
for a young kid to remember
so maybe I shut a lot of that out.
But what I do remember is they would fight all the time.
Anything could trigger him off.
I could make something for dinner that he didn't like
and he would take it and throw it in the wall.
All different things like that.
He was physically, emotionally abusive.
He had a very short temper.
And from what I understand, his dad was the same way.
He was taught to teach through hitting.
And so he was a bit too aggressive
for a young kid to handle.
I used to pick fights, you know,
and I didn't care if the guy was 6'2,
as long as I threw the first punch even
if you beat the hell outta me.
The main point is, Sully, I didn't want you to be like me
because you'd end up in jail if you kept going like that.
So I said, you know, this is why, you know,
I told him, "That's why I used to do what I used to do.
If I smacked you, it is
because I didn't want you to be like that."
But then as life goes on, you start to become more wise.
And I do remember this one specific fight where I was told
to go to my room and I could hear them screaming
at each other in the kitchen.
And when I opened the door, I remember my dad had my mom
by the back of her hair
and he had her face like hitting on the stove.
And I remember him looking back
and just telling me to shut my door.
And I just remember hearing the argument and the screaming
and it just didn't sound good to me and I was really upset.
So he always carried a gun, which made me very nervous
'cause I knew he had a short fuse.
I know one day we had a fight and he picked up Maria
and she was about eight months old and he had a gun
and he took her out of the house with a gun
and said, if I call the police, he would shoot her
and he would shoot me.
Sully doesn't remember a lot that went on
when things were really bad, Maria does.
There were times
when we were little, I didn't think we were gonna make it.
You know, we grew up in a pretty rough environment
and we didn't have a lot of encouragement
from some of the family members, you know.
The fights got worse and worse
and to the point where she didn't want it around us anymore.
And she asked him to go and he left.
No matter what my mom went
through with him, she always sheltered me
and my sister from it as best she could.
She never cried in front of us.
She never told us to hate our dad.
I have one thing to say, you don't have to love him,
but you do have to respect him 'cause he's your father.
When he walked out of the house, he walked out with nothing.
Not a bill, not a house payment, not child support, nothing.
It was just us struggling just to make ends meet.
And it was just so hard. I felt so guilty.
Although I have no regrets about where I grew up.
Lawrence is one of those places that you have
to get tough real quick to survive this place.
It really is one
of the toughest inner cities you can find in America.
I had every challenge in the world.
I had next door neighbors that were rapists.
I had people that I thought were amazing school teachers
that got arrested for dealing drugs.
I watched people get beat almost to death just
for wearing the wrong colors
'cause you weren't in their gang.
Thankfully, I had music in my life.
I loved it so much. I wanted to go home and practice.
And so when some of the group of kids were going out
to do the really dark stuff, I was home practicing.
I was definitely going down the rock and roll path.
I started picking up some
of the first records in rock and roll.
I was kind of molding myself
to become that style of a musician.
And that kind of rock and roll has always been rebellious.
And so I think it was just me trying
to embody myself with that personality.
Once I found my love
for drums, I just wanted to play all the time.
His drums were his life, you know,
practiced and practiced.
And so I would literally skip school and go to my bedroom
and strap on headphones for hours and hours and hours
until my hands were cracked and bleeding.
And I just remember thinking, this is what I'm gonna do.
I don't know how I knew this,
but at a very young age, I just knew what I wanted
to do with my life.
I wanted to be a drummer and that was it.
And when my dad would come over to visit,
I remember he got frustrated and he would just discourage me
in a way by saying that music should be a hobby
and that I needed to get a good education and a job.
And I remember thinking, that's fucking crazy to me.
Everything else is gonna be a hobby
and music is what I'm gonna do for a living
In my memory, you know, just felt like he would show up
and they would immediately be beating each other like
in a fist fight and just kind of yelling
and just like slamming doors.
And I just didn't understand why my dad was, it seems like
to me was always picking on him, you know.
I always loved him, but I was a little bit afraid
with the way he was growing up.
But I was still myself as far as not being a great father,
if you want, if you will, you know,
as far as the way I thought it was the right way to teach.
That was the beginning of the end for our relationship.
It just spiraled outta control after that.
And the more he told me no, the more I just told him,
this is what I'm gonna do.
And I really think it's the reason
why I became a lot more rebellious.
And I remember it didn't help my attitude.
It made me angrier.
And as years and years developed, I got really good
at being bad and it becomes an addiction in itself
and I got looped into that world.
And I found myself getting involved
in drugs at too young of an age.
And I found myself fighting at too young of an age
'cause I was a small guy
and I always had to defend myself.
First day of freshman year, there he is,
and there's this bully and he's giving him shit.
He's picking on him.
I say, "Hey, pick on somebody your own size."
So we've been friends ever since.
Freddy introduced me to Jimmy Mustapha.
He brought Sully along.
I remember him saying he plays the drums or something
and I'm like, "Oh, you play the drums?"
And I remember Sully doing something
with his hands on like the trunk of a car.
And I'm like, "Oh wow, he's good, you know."
Jimmy Mustapha, Freddy Cristaldi,
those three lived together.
And when it came to music,
Sully brought it to the forefront.
Whenever we're all over at his house,
that's all he did, played drums all day.
Sometimes I'd be there,
and I wouldn't be able to talk to him
until the song was over.
"All right, take a break, kid. Let me talk to you."
Because he would just be playing along.
We hung out every day, it seems like, just
for years and years, you know, 1984 or whatever,
We're all heavily into music.
We were like metalheads.
We wanted long hair and leather jackets
and parties and chicks
and we wanted to live that lifestyle.
We all loved that lifestyle.
And Sully brought that into our lives really.
Every day was just about finding someone
to buy us beer at the local liquor store
and scraping up 10 bucks to get a bag of weed
and going to house parties.
Here's to you, here's to me,
best of friends will always be,
if we should disagree, fuck you, here's to me.
You just had to kind of walk
around the city and find each other
and this was the meeting spot.
Whenever they just said, 'Meet us at the stoop,"
this was the stoop.
But we all hung in this little platform
and buy weed and meet up with people and talk and chat.
Like everybody that I knew
in Lawrence, this is where everyone hung out.
To be honest, we all bonded
because we all had tougher home lives.
During my teenage years, the streets were a better place,
I thought, at the time than home.
My father was a fucking monster.
He was fucking insanely strong.
And then one night he came in drunk, didn't even know
who I was and he tried to kill me
'cause I asked my mother to pull my pants
over my cowboy boots for me.
She bent down and he snapped,
and I went in my room and just shut the door.
And he came barging through the door
and my mother pushed him and said, "Get outta here,"
so I left, but Lawrence was tough.
And when your family goes down like
that too, it's even tougher, you know?
So you rely on your friends and I did.
It certainly was part of the path
that I walked in my life that maybe hardened my shell
and prepared me for some of the more serious things
that came at me later in life.
It was a rough town. You don't forget any of that.
It lives with you for the rest of your life
But the man you become is the man you choose to be
and the part of Lawrence that stays in you
and anybody from Lawrence, if you've noticed,
which you probably have, we're all a bunch of wise asses.
You had to be aggressive or have an attitude back
in order to get along with other people and stuff.
Even Sully, when I remember,
when he was a kid, you know, short punk,
he would pick the fight with the biggest kid, you know.
He wouldn't pick a fight with somebody his size.
He'd always pick a fight
with somebody bigger than him, you know, to prove himself.
You know, and that's that Lawrence attitude.
You don't back down from a fight.
Me, Jimmy and Freddy one night decided
to go to this house party that we heard about.
And when we pulled up, I remember Freddy saying he needed
to show us something.
I opened the trunk and the only two I showed this to.
And there was a sawed off shotgun in the trunk.
You know, I was like, yes, let's take this thing
out right now and I wanna see it.
We took it out and I picked it up
and Freddy's like, "Don't fucking pull it out
in the middle of the street," and put it back in the trunk.
And nevermind, he shut the trunk.
Forget it was even there kind of thing.
So we went upstairs to this house party,
and I just remember looking around and there was no girls.
It was just a bunch of dudes.
There's probably three, four girls
in the whole entire party.
It was like 30 guys. - Sausage fest.
Sausage fest.
And we were like, well, this kind of sucks,
but we're here now and we got beer
and so let's just go and fucking have a beer.
Yeah, we were jamming up to some tunes,
but these guys wanted to take off after about an hour.
Then we just weren't feeling it so we decided to leave.
And on the way out, I had realized
that I had forgot my jacket.
And those guys said they were going downstairs
and they would meet me at the car.
And I grabbed my jacket,
and on the way out, I was walking through the kitchen
and I had my head down or something,
and I had a beer in my hand
and this dude had a beer in his hand,
and we smashed into each other
and spilled beer on each other.
And next thing I know, we hit the ground
and we were fighting.
The thing I remember after that was getting kicked
in the face and kicked in the side of the head
and kicked in the ribs.
And I started thinking while I was fighting this kid
that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time
because these were all his friends
and my friends were no longer in the house.
Somehow I squirmed out of that mess
and I came down the stairs and my shirt was ripped
and my face was all red.
He comes down, but you can tell something was wrong.
He was huffing and puffing
And just as I'm telling them
what's going on, we could see them coming out of the house.
But then I remember seeing the kid that I fought
and he was coming towards me,
and he had a knife in his hand,
and I felt like I was the only one that's seen it.
And everyone's arguing
and trying to figure out what the fuck.
And I just remember looking at this kid with a knife,
and I'm like, this motherfucker's gonna stab me.
You know, "What's up? Gimme the keys."
I'm like, "What?"
"Gimme your fucking keys," so I throw him the keys.
I remember popping the trunk and grabbing the shotgun.
I pulled the shotgun up to this kid's face,
and I just remember feeling nothing at that point.
And I started to turn my head, I hear
And as he got close to me, I pulled the trigger,
Sully pulled the trigger.
And till this day, it's one
of the toughest things for me to talk about.
But thankfully my friend was smart enough when he decided
to put this gun in his trunk, there was no bullets in it.
So all I heard was click.
And now I went, oh, shit, this kid's gonna kill me now.
He came down with a knife, I let go of the gun
and I grabbed his wrist.
And I just remember thinking
to myself, do not let go of this kid's wrist.
Somehow I weaseled out of this mess
and we got in the car and we screwed out of there.
And I remember as we were leaving, I felt something kind
of cool on my ribs and I looked down
and he nicked me enough
that, you know, he was able to break the skin
and put a small puncture in my side.
But thank God, you know, he never got
that knife fully inside of me because it was a big knife
and for sure, I would've been dead.
And I think about that story every single day
because it was such a pivotal point in my life
that had that shotgun had a bullet in it, a lot
of things would've been different for me in my life.
Sully pulled the trigger not knowing
that it wasn't gonna go off.
He would've killed this kid.
He would've shot him, blew his head off.
Sully was 18 at the time, it would've been 18
to life for him, and I would've went down
with him over a spilled beer.
There would've been a lot of things missing,
and I would've pretty much spent my life in prison.
I'm sure of it. So someone was watching over me that day.
I know my mom really struggled in the early days
when we lived in Lawrence.
There was just no money coming in
and she was working as much as she could.
And she struggled a lot more than I even realized
at the time.
Yet somehow she always found a way to make it work.
I don't know how she did it.
Year after year, I was in so much trouble
and my friends were in so much trouble
and yet my house was always the house to go to.
Whenever someone was really getting their kicked at home
or needed to get away, it was my house they ended up at.
Sully, came home one night
and he says, "Mom, can I talk with you?"
And I said, "Sure."
He says, "I have a friend, Rick Jarvis,
it's the winter and he's sleeping in his car."
And I said, "Oh my God."
I say, "Go get him and bring him here."
Connie.
Listen man, if there was ever an angel, it's his ma.
That's just the truth, man.
She saved my life. He saved my life.
It's a fact, you know.
I was sleeping in my car outside his house every night.
And then eventually she just said, "Tell him to come in,"
and that's how his mother was.
You know, she was a sweetheart.
You know, it's funny.
My mom is really a very honest, simple person
and yet she's harboring all these punks
and criminals that I called my friends.
I knew where they were, what they were doing.
I didn't have to worry.
And my mom used to say, "Oh, how do you stand all these boys
at your house all the time?"
And I tell her, "I know they're with me
and they're not in any trouble."
I had met this girl, Michelle.
It was one of my first really intense loves
and she and I fell in love pretty quickly.
Michelle was a looker.
It's easy to see why Sully liked her
and teenagers, hormones are going crazy,
what do you think?
So there was this one day when I was walking to the store
that was down the block from my house,
and this car screeched and pulled up in front of me
and these four guys jumped out
and they were basically asking me if I knew Michelle.
And they put me up against the wall
and they started threatening me, basically saying
that if they see me with her again, they're gonna come back
and fucking kill me.
You know, later on when I had confronted Michelle,
she had told me that her boyfriend
that had confronted me earlier was actually
in a gang called the Tenney Street Gang
that lived up the street.
And I'm like, "Oh gee, you couldn't have thought
to tell me that before we started dating
that your boyfriend was in a gang?"
So we were taking a little stoner snap in my bedroom,
and I woke up to all these screeches and screaming
and yelling, and someone was arguing outside.
I had looked out this window here in my dining room,
and I had seen all these cars
that had stopped in front of the house.
And my friend Rick happened to be standing in the yard
and I remember him confronting a guy right here.
These two dudes walk up
and they're like, Hey man, you know Sully?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, I fucking know him, yeah."
"Well, he screwing with my girlfriend."
And I said, "Well, that's your problem, man."
I said, "If you got an issue
with Sully, you take care of it in the street."
And he opens up the gate
and he says, "Nah, we're gonna take care of it now."
And I says, "You ain't going in the house,'
and I hit the motherfucker
and I went on top of the other guy.
So the next thing you know, these cars are pulling up.
And then they all started jumping on him.
And there was this big, crazy brawl going on
in front of my house.
They were throwing bottles and coming over the fence
and putting the arms through the windows.
So I immediately ran back in my bedroom
and I grabbed a baseball bat
and I came screaming out of my bedroom
and my mother grabbed onto my fucking head
and pulled me backwards through the door.
And she was like, "Don't you go out there."
And I'm thinking, what the fuck?
Rick's getting jumped by like 25 kids right now.
I have to help.
There was some kid that had hopped over on the fence
and in our yard at the time, it was one
of those old push lawnmowers.
And the kid had it up over his head
and he was gonna smash it on the back of Rick's head.
And Connie's grabbed onto Sully apparently,
and I hear him, "Look out for the lawnmower,"
and this fucking lawnmower comes flying
over my fucking head.
It scared me to death.
My brother-in-law came down. He had a shotgun
Once these guys seen the shotgun, a bunch
of those kids scattered as well.
It was just this excessive amount
of blood all over the front yard.
I mean, it was psychotic. It was chaos.
I mean, the house was destroyed
When the cops got there, my uncle was talking to them
and I had went inside.
And I remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table
and she was hysterically crying to the point
where she couldn't catch her breath.
It was just too intense for her.
As the weeks went by, it just got worse.
It got to the point that it was either get out of there
or end up in the nuthouse.
After that whole nightmare happened,
she had a nervous breakdown.
She was a mess and she moved us away
and that was the last time I ever lived in Lawrence.
I was just done with Lawrence.
I was so tired of getting in trouble.
I was so tired of the fights and the violence and the crime
and everything else that was really consuming me
and taking away from this gift that I'd been born with
that I really wanted to pursue even more
so that when the opportunity arose to go
to Fayetteville, it wasn't even really a decision.
I was ready.
I didn't have anything back in Lawrence
so when he decided to go, I decided to go with him.
Once my mom decided
that she was moving me, she took the whole crew,
basically everyone who was living in my house in Lawrence.
I had no family.
My family was Sully and Connie and going
to North Carolina was probably the best damn thing
that ever happened to me.
When Sully told me he was moving down
to North Carolina, I was heartbroken.
I was losing my fucking best friend.
We're talking rural Fayetteville.
Birds are chirping in trees.
The neighbors are like, "Hi. Nice to meet you.
What school did you go to?"
And I'm like, "What?"
The school of hard fucking knocks, you asshole.
I remember when I first got to Fayetteville, I went
to the mall to go look for some kids my age
that would lead me to the music community.
You know, I still had my long hair
and I still looked like a musician.
I had my tattoos and that whole thing going on.
I remember walking through the mall
and I started hearing someone heckling me from behind.
I just ignored at first.
And I could hear sounds of like, "Oh, it's Eddie Van Halen,"
or, "Oh, it's Ace Frehley," and blah, blah blah.
And being raised in Lawrence, I was taught
to stand up for myself and never back down.
And so I hauled off and punched the kid right
in the face and I walked away.
And as I was walking out
of the doors, these two sheriffs were coming in
and within seconds I heard, "Hey,"
and I turned around and it was the sheriff calling me over
and I went to jail.
And that was my first experience.
Within two days of me being in North Carolina, I had
to call my mom from the local jail.
She was like, "Where are you?"
I said, 'Well, I'm in jail."
She's like, Are you fucking kidding me?
We just got to this place. What did you do?"
Once again, you can take the boy outta the city,
but you can't take the city outta the boy.
It was near Fort Bragg, so it's all military.
Me and Sully had long hair
so we'd walk into a bar and it's all skinheads.
So we'd hang out with the band members,
you know, "Hey, what's up guys?"
'Cause they didn't have long hair, you know?
And so it didn't last long for me.
I was there maybe a few weeks and I had to get out of there.
You know, it was very lame compared
to the exciting city life, you know.
It was the first time I had really seen, you know,
a new life surfacing for me.
And of course my first mission was to just find musicians.
So I found some kids that kind of drifted
into the mall, hanging around the arcade
that had long hair and looked like musicians.
And so I approached some of them and one of the kids
that I approached, his name was Jon Robbins,
and he was a drummer too.
Music back then was kind of what you had.
That's all we did, was play music, think about music, try
and be better at music.
And back in the eighties, when you got in a band, everybody
in the band knew the term, "make it."
What that meant back then was that you got a record deal
and the way to get a record deal,
at least from our understanding, you would go
and get in a band, try and get really good,
and then you would go out on the road and you would suffer.
And then at some point, somebody would see you
in a big club and say, "Yeah, we're gonna sign that band."
We're gonna make it.
Fewer than one half
of 1% ever get contracts with record companies.
What happens to the other 99.5%
while they're waiting for the big break?
Well, they play wherever they can get anyone
to listen to them.
And they practice in basements and garages across America.
When we first moved to North Carolina,
and Sully had joined with this band called Meliah Kraze.
The longhaired freaky fuckers? Yeah.
It was a hair band.
We called ourselves Meliah Kraze,
and we looked fucking ridiculous.
You know, we were dead smack in the middle
of the eighties and all that at that point.
That music, you know, it was big at that time.
It was the biggest music in the world, probably.
They reminded me of Motley Crue and Rat,
which was something Sully and I, we listened to it back
in Lawrence, but kind of grew past it.
I was like, "Jesus Christ, man, there's no way
Sully's gonna go with these guys," but he did.
So I mean, it is what it is
and that's really where it started.
Even though we looked like fucking a bad version
of Twisted Sister, Meliah Kraze was actually the first band
that I got on the road with,
and getting a little bit of money for it.
It wasn't much.
I mean, we were playing for, you know, beer or 50 bucks.
We lived off of ramen noodles, oodles
and noodles, all that stuff,
that was like breakfast, lunch, and dinner
but it was only once a day.
But we were on the road, and that's all I cared about.
And he started playing around North Carolina,
Of course, you know, mommy would pack up the cars
and drive the equipment.
And I spent my life delivering drums to the world.
I was, you know, starting to really live
that lifestyle as a musician
and the partying, the drinking.
It was also,
when I first started really getting a lot deeper into coke.
I had met this girl named Arlene
and I remember that we were in our apartment one weekend
and we went through a bag of coke that was probably like
that big and it was cigarettes and coke and beer and coke
and this went on for three days.
Finally, we realized that we were doing too much coke
and when you have that much cocaine
in your system, it's just brutal coming off of it.
And it was the night that changed my life
because I guess I had in the middle
of the night started choking on my uvula,
which is the little thing
that dangles in the back of your throat.
It had swollen up to the size of like a plum
and I had swallowed it.
And I don't remember this part,
but Arlene thankfully was there next to me
and she heard me choking and woke me up.
And I remember literally having to pull it out of my throat
because it got lodged back there
and I was that close to death.
And if Arlene wasn't there
to wake me up, I would've died in my sleep.
And it scared me so bad, I quit doing coke
and any kind of hard drug forever.
And I was 21 years old,
and I had never touched a drug again.
Right around the time Meliah Kraze was breaking up, one day
when we were doing a club and the sound man,
who was named Todd Jackson, he'd seen me play that night
and he approached me.
I was in a band called Lexx Luthor,
and we needed a drummer at the time.
So we brought Sully in for an audition
and it was amazing to play with a drummer
with that much precision, as fast as he could play
and still be precise.
See, I remember the bass player,
Robert and I, we walked out back.
We're standing there taking a piss together,
and Robert looks at me
and he goes, "Man, Sully's good."
So he was in the band after that.
It was for me, a step above where I wanted to be
and I felt like it was much more at my level.
And that really became my obsession
at that point was now I'm starting
to think this is about writing our own music
and trying to get a record label interested
so we could do this for a living, for real.
We wanted to get signed. We wanted a record deal.
And we wanted to write original tunes.
We knew what we were gonna have to do to get there.
We were gonna have to give up a lot to do it.
Sully was more than willing
to give up whatever it took to get to that point.
Todd started telling me
about this kid named Shannon Larkin,
that was supposedly this really great drummer in the area
that played with a band called Wrathchild.
So one day we went to this club called The Attic,
and Wrathchild came on stage.
And I remember watching this kid come out
from behind the drums and my fucking jaw hit the floor.
I had never seen a drummer, so animated
and such a great live performer
and his showmanship was by far the best I've ever seen.
It was like he was making love to the drum set.
And at one point I started thinking, I'm gonna go home
and literally take my drums
and throw 'em right through the fucking wood chipper.
Like, I don't even want to play drums anymore.
This is ridiculous, what this kid was doing
behind the drum set.
From that point on, it changed the whole way
I looked at drums,
I saw Sully, and he kicked ass on the drums.
We pretty much formed a fast friendship
that continued all the way up till now.
Yeah, I think you have to really get into it
to be like a heavy metal band.
And that, that's what I like to see
when I walk into the club
'cause you can feel the energy flowing off the stage.
It's like, ugh.
Shannon showed me showmanship,
and to me, that was elevated to another level.
So now I needed to incorporate everything
that I knew about drumming and be visually great.
And I ripped him off. I fucking stole all his shit.
I started swinging fucking hands.
But I don't feel so bad now
because I've learned throughout the years
that almost every drummer
in rock has ripped off Shannon Larkin.
At one point we found a new singer,
and his name was Dennis Bauer.
I had drove with him and his wife to rehearsal.
And on the way back from rehearsal that night, I had started
to get this weird sensation in my chest,
and my left arm started to go numb and I felt this pain
and my hand started tingling.
And the more I thought about it, the more nervous I got.
And he could see something was going on.
And he asked me if I was okay
and I said, "You know, I don't think so."
Dennis had called me
and he said, "Man," he said, "Something's up with Sully.
You know, he is just not doing real great."
Next thing you know, I'm sitting
in an emergency room, wired up to all these electrodes
and machines and wondering what's going on
and looking at these white lights
and thinking, you know, am I gonna die?
And at one point I started thinking, man, am I gonna be one
of these unfortunate kids that
at the age of 21 has a heart attack?
And they started to run some EKGs on me
and trying to find out what the problem was.
But every test they ran, there was no signs of anything.
They're like, "Your heart's strong,
your blood pressure's good, and we don't know."
And so I remember going home
that night and I was really confused
because something weird had happened to me,
and there was no proof of it.
They're telling me it's anxiety,
and I didn't know what the fuck anxiety was.
That really started a series of events in my life
that changed my life to this day.
There was times where these anxiety attacks would hit me
when I'd be in the middle of a club hanging out
with my friends, or I'd be here or there in public.
And I remember it started to bother me
so much that I stopped going out
and I started alienating myself from my friends.
He would stay downstairs off to his self more.
He was just more secluded.
He didn't wanna be around a lot of people.
I do remember Sully being extremely edgy
to get outta North Carolina.
He wanted a way to get out.
I couldn't stay in North Carolina.
It was just a place that was becoming very dark to me.
I wasn't really playing music anymore at that time.
I couldn't find any good memories there anymore.
You know, I always try to get in touch with him.
And one of the things over here
that it was hard for me is when he didn't answer, you know.
So obviously, you know, I miss him when he's away, okay.
I wish I could have him more,
but he also needed his freedom.
And to me, he was never gone
because he was always on my mind.
It was hard.
It was very hard for me
to accept the fact that he's gone away
because I always wanted him over here, you know.
Sully stayed down here for I think three years
and decided he was gonna go back to Lawrence.
I wasn't happy about it,
but he had grown up a little bit more.
And I think seeing maybe the way life was
down here, he wouldn't go back to Lawrence
and get back into that rough area that we lived through.
And so I talked to Jon Robbins one day
and I'm like, "Hey man, what do you think about coming
to check out Boston?
You know, I thought it'd be cool
to have a friend from down there."
Boston sounded exciting to me.
It was a big city and a new scene
and maybe we could make it there.
There was a scene happening in Boston.
You know, Boston's been known over the years
to have birthed a lot of great bands.
And the scene comes and goes.
And this was one of those times
where it was just starting to light up again.
There was a lot of cool bands playing in the clubs
and it was a good time for music.
♪ I'm shipping up to Boston, whoa ♪
♪ I'm shipping off to find my wooden leg ♪
So the cheapest way, and the only way for me
and Sully to get to Boston, Massachusetts
from Fayetteville, North Carolina, is on a train.
Yeah, I'd never been on a train before for one.
We start out happy, smiling, it's a great idea.
It's a big adventure, it's gonna be great.
And it was an 18 and a half hour ride of hell.
This is not fun.
This was not a good idea as far as the travel goes.
And it was hot and it was smelly
and it just felt like it took forever to get back to Boston.
But finally we arrived and I was so happy
to see the skyline and get off that train.
When we got to Boston, we had to have a place to stay.
So we stayed with Sully's sister, Maria,
I had a little duplex, so he came and lived with me.
I was a manager of a big retail chain here
and I got him a job and his friend a job
and he would get me in a little trouble at work.
Sully's looking for bands.
He's trying to find people to play with.
I couldn't find anybody to play with.
I didn't quite fit in all the way out there.
Jon, he didn't stay too long
and he ended up splitting,
so it was just kind of me and my sister.
But the thing that came back
to haunt me pretty quickly was the anxiety attacks.
Sully would have these panic attacks, anxiety attacks,
whatever you wanna call 'em.
He would just get so worked up.
I took him to the hospital
because he thought he was having a heart attack
and he would freak out like
he'd been thinking he was gonna die.
And as time went on, the attacks got more violent.
They got scarier.
Once again, I found myself in and out
of emergency rooms over and over again.
I found myself being carried into an emergency room
at one point by my sister over her shoulder
because I couldn't even stand up.
I couldn't walk. I just was completely out of it.
And the doctor actually said,
"You know, this stuff can kill you one day
if you continue this."
I never forgot those words.
And at that point is when I started
to put together a plan to battle the anxiety,
because I needed something to distract my thoughts.
My mind was becoming my worst enemy.
And so I forced myself to be in public situations.
I forced myself to get involved in music again.
I also, you know, had reconnected
with some of my older friends.
When he came back around, it was like a renewed energy
and we picked up right where we left off
because we were always tight like brothers.
Yeah, I knew I'd see him again someday.
Even if he was gone
for 10 years, once he came back, we could pick right up
where we left off.
♪ Put a little tiny man in your butt ♪
♪ Put a tin can in your butt
♪ Say it, put everything in your butt ♪
♪ Everybody's singing now
♪ In your butt
♪ Put the boogie in your butt
I slowly got further and further apart
from the anxiety attacks.
Little by little, it was just getting me back
to feeling like me again.
And finally I was finding a path again
through, you know, some really good friends and my music.
He ended up into a band called The Fighting Cocks,
which was really difficult to try to book
when you had to put that on a marquees somewhere.
They were really dirty Boston Street guys.
I felt like I was getting closer to my comfort zone again.
And I've always loved Boston. I loved the streets of Boston.
I loved it because it's where Aerosmith came from.
And so I was psyched to kind of get into the streets
of Boston and be in a basement right
in downtown Boston, playing with a rock and roll band.
And I joined the band.
I was back on the map as a drummer in Boston
and making a name for myself.
And I thought that was really important
because there was a scene happening in Boston.
It was the early nineties and it was a good time for music.
And I had met Paul Geary and he was just coming
into the height of his career.
He was the drummer for a band called Extreme.
Sully, he'd come to my house
and you know, when I was off tour
and we hit it off right away, became friends.
And I was just starstruck by Paul
because man, they were big time as far as I was concerned.
I had never been around a celebrity that big at that time.
I was just so mesmerized by these guys.
They were so polished and so good.
After I was with the Fighting Cocks
for a while, I had actually gotten a call
from the management company of a band called Meliah Rage,
who were signed with Epic Records.
They were really heavy metal, like a Metallica.
And it was an opportunity for me to possibly get
into a band that was signed with a record label.
Michael Munro, the lead singer,
Meliah Rage, Master Vader.
When he joined Meliah Rage, it was different.
It was an established band.
They already had a record or two out.
Not that they were phenomenal and big,
but they were established.
And once again, we went out
and hit the club circuit.
We were playing everywhere that we could get a gig.
They had a following already.
You know, there was real people coming to see these shows.
I was really happy to be in that band.
That really pushed me further and further
into getting away from normalcy as I knew it
and getting back into my fantasy land, which was music
'cause that was always my go-to.
Anytime something knocked me down,
it seemed like music became this vehicle to heal me
and distract me and make me feel better
'cause when I'm on stage, I don't think about shit.
It doesn't matter what just happened.
When I'm on stage, I go somewhere else
and my music consumes me and I lose myself in the music
and everything goes away just for
that small amount of time I'm on stage.
Yeah, Meliah Rage, that was a good time.
It was a life of a miniature rock and roller.
We decided to go to a strip club
and on stage was this amazing looking girl named Lisa.
And I was just like
About that time he met this girl, Lisa,
who was a stripper.
He got in deep fast.
Always together.
It was like instantly they weren't apart at all.
She was quite the package.
She was every bit as crazy as she was pretty,
that's for sure.
Just don't date strippers.
Went very quickly, very fast
and I was crazy about this girl.
I'll pass.
Right around that same time,
I actually found myself looking for work again
and I was struggling for money, you know.
I didn't wanna live with my sister anymore.
It was just too much the responsibility for her carrying me.
So I had moved out and I just kind of used my van
to house myself with a blanket until Fro took me in.
So he came back from tour, had no job,
had no place to live.
That's when I said, "Dude, move in with me. I live alone.
You can stay at my house as long as you want.
It doesn't matter. I don't have to worry about rent.
Fucking, I got it covered."
He had this cool place set up
above this restaurant called the Cafe' 97 in Haverhill.
The restaurant would close like around one o'clock
so he could actually play his drums as loud
as he wanted and wouldn't bother anybody
'cause there was no houses around nothing.
We were hanging out there so much
on the weekends, partying every weekend
that it was just the to-go place.
Like no one even had to know or call each other
and say, what are we doing after work on a Friday?
Everybody would just know to go Fro's house.
Waiting for the sink bomb tournaments to start.
We have contestant one, Jimmy Mustapha from Turkey.
So it was a really fun hang place.
And I think that was the first time I started noodling
around on a piano too.
It was also the place that I helped write some
of the Meliah Rage songs that we were working on.
But I had learned soon after I joined them
that they weren't signed with Epic Records after all.
They used to be signed with Epic Records
and they were looking for a deal again.
And I'm like, fuck, I thought I got there, man.
I thought I snuck my way into a signed band
and I was gonna be more like Shannon
and playing the circuit again
and it wasn't that.
I stuck it out with them for as long as I could,
but I just didn't see it was gonna go anywhere.
But I didn't want to quit either,
because I really loved these guys and they were great.
He always thought I didn't support him.
And I remembered, you know, he called me up
and I had to send him, I believe
at that time, I had sent him something over there
because he didn't have no place to go
and he didn't really have a job.
So I said, "Sully, being a musician, I'm not doing this
as a living, I'm doing this more
for fun than anything else."
'Cause the music business, there's very few people
that make it to the big time.
There's very few people.
So I said, "Sully, you know,"
I said, "It's okay to get a job just
in case it doesn't work out."
Well, he thought, you're not supporting me.
That's not what I meant.
I tried to explain that to him,
but in his mind, it was, I wasn't supporting him
because I didn't say, you know, "Yeah, great, keep going."
He called me once and he said, "If I don't make it
in another year, I'm giving it up and I'm gonna get a job."
And I said, "You know what? Just have patience.
It's going to happen."
And I always told him right along, it's going to happen.
There was a band in Boston called Strip Mind
that had just signed a deal with Warner Reprise Records.
I believe at the time
that Sully was playing with Meliah Rage
and through a local manager, he found out
that we were auditioning.
And so he shows up and I meet him
and it seems like just like a crazy townie guy,
but he's a metalhead too.
So I'm like, this is good because I can relate with that.
That's me, you know.
I'm like, "Oh, let me help you with your drums."
And we go out and he has this total shitbox van
and opens the back door, jumps in
and starts fucking kicking his fucking drums
out the back like kick drum and it goes rolling.
And I remember the guitar player just going like,
"What the fuck?"
Because I don't think he had ever seen
anyone treat a musical instrument like that.
But I was like, "Whatever, they're fucking drums.
They're meant to be beat on. Load 'em up, let's go."
These guys played some seriously technical punk metal.
He was like, "You guys have a deal with Warner Brothers?
Like, I can't fuck this up, man.
This is what I've always wanted.
This is my chance. I'm not gonna fucking blow This, dude."
He took it so insanely seriously.
Sully showing up was the best thing
that ever happened in that band
'cause if he hadn't shown up,
I don't think we would've went on.
I don't think a record would've gotten made.
We are here with Strip Mind.
Guys, why don't you go through and introduce yourself?
Hey, I'm Tim. I play bass.
I'm Bill. I play guitar.
Sully, drums.
Stu, I sing and play guitar.
This is so Metallica, man.
And I was in fucking seventh heaven at that point.
I mean, I was finally signed with a band and touring.
And I just thought at the time,
it doesn't get any better than this.
Here we are, Pyramid Studios.
Gonna take a walk in here. The old tape machine.
It really gave me an opportunity
to showcase my ability to play the drums.
Finally, you know, finally he's making it.
Finally, he's gonna be world famous drummer.
People are gonna know about Sully.
He was living his dream and I was so happy for him.
I was psyched. I was thinking, you know, here it is.
You know, this is what we've been waiting
for, a record deal.
You know, go on tour, see the world, all that stuff
but it was such a small record deal
that their first tour was a van tour.
This band didn't give a fuck about anything really.
We were into drinking whiskey and smoking a lot of weed.
We were living more of a punk rock lifestyle.
Nobody really gave a fuck.
And along the way, Lisa had met my friend Dave,
and somehow started sneaking
around behind my back and seeing Dave.
Things started changing and she wasn't around as much.
I started to hear rumors.
The more I asked around, the more I started to hear things
that I just didn't want to hear.
Things like, you know,
Lisa was performing sexual acts for drugs.
These were things that were just really disturbing to hear.
Things that no guy wants to hear.
I had called my friend Dave and he somehow admitted to me
that he had been dating Lisa and I'm thinking, what?
I was kind of fuck you mode at this point.
I was getting really numb
to kind of relationships in general,
but I also had this new band, Strip Mind
and we were releasing a record and we got on the road
and we started to tour at a national level.
We are hanging out in Detroit with Strip Mind.
Who is the main songwriter in this band?
That would be Stu. - All right.
So now you have songs like "Pentapussy"
and "I Wanna Fuck Your Girlfriend."
So let's talk about your songs a little bit.
Well, the way a lot of the lyrics are written is
that, I mean, I either am inspired to write
by pain or by happiness
and there isn't usually too much happiness going around
so it's a lot of the pain and the anger
that comes out and that kind of motivates me
to put the pen down on the paper and get going.
"I Wanna Fuck Your Girlfriend" is basically
about getting pissed off about your ex-girlfriend going out
with a friend of yours and it's really kind
of a heartfelt statement about love lost.
Me and Stu didn't get along so good.
Stu came from a much better upbringing than we did.
His parents had money. We were street kids.
Where the fuck is Stu?
- He's in the other room. - Well, what the fuck?
- You wanna play it or not? - I've been waiting.
I don't even really play it. Let's go.
So there was just a lot of tension, man,
and we were living it for the first time.
You know, all of us were kind of experiencing
that being signed to a major label
and the responsibilities that go along with that.
We were right at the beginning of hearing about Pearl Jam
and Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden
and although we loved a lot
of those bands, we didn't sound like that.
And we were at the tail end of the era
of the traditional metal going away.
You can only be ignorant to this kind of business for
so long before it just spits you back out.
And unfortunately in this band, there was no business sense.
We spent all of our advance on making the record,
which we come to find out you're not supposed to do that.
You're supposed to like save some to live on.
And we didn't do that. We didn't know any better.
So we just like spent it.
The band got to the one day where Stu was able
to convince the other guys that I was the problem
and they decided to fire me.
And I just remember thinking, everything I went
through my whole life and all these bands
and all these struggles
and all this bullshit to chase this dream
that I fantasized about since I was three years old.
And I finally got there
and in a blink of an eye, it was taken away from me.
I was broken to the point
where I just decided I didn't want to do music anymore.
He was really down in the dumps
and he told me, he says, "Mommy, I'm going to quit music."
I felt that my only shot had came and gone.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe that was my one opportunity
to do something with music and it came
and it went like that.
I didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
It was disappointing me over and over again.
And at 25 years old, it just didn't seem like the right kind
of life for me anymore.
And I told him, I said, "Sully, don't get discouraged yet.
It's gonna happen. I know it's gonna happen.
You just gotta give it some time.
It's gonna be there, you're gonna make it."
At that point, I put the drums away
and I put my dream of being a musician, a rock star
in a shoebox and put it up on the shelf.
And so I decided that I was gonna quit music for good.
I think Sully gave up on music
'cause I think he got sick of chasing the dream
and not getting anything from it.
He got real discouraged at that point.
He worked so hard.
I mean, he always thought from the time he was young
that he was gonna be a rock star
but when those things don't work out, you know,
it's like someone kept stepping on him
and stepping on his dream, you know, and just crushing it
and he just gave in.
I didn't look back at that point.
I just wanted a new life. I wanted a different life.
I wanted to feel like somebody again,
because the only person I knew I was
at that time was someone that was sleeping
on my sister's couch and borrowing $5 from people
to buy a pack of cigarettes.
And then I finally started looking through the newspapers
and I found a job doing collections for an attorney.
You know, I chopped my hair off at that point too.
So he came over to my house
and he walked in and he had no hair.
♪ Say goodbye
♪ Never say goodbye
And I always dreamed to have long hair
'cause I had that stupid fucking fro.
So when he came in
and he cut all his hair off, I got
so fucking pissed off, I threw him outta my house.
Merry Christmas, dear Fro.
Oh, for me. God, what is this?
I think it's something you could use
from time to time.
God, a five o'clock shadow razor.
Sure.
Make your trimming needs a little easier.
What made you buy me razor, man?
I don't know.
We have pulse.
And then he met a girl.
She was a different type of girl, you know,
'cause she didn't grow up in the streets
of Lawrence like most of the girls
and he fell crazy in love with her and deservedly so.
She was a sweetheart.
Her name was Erin.
She was everything you could ask
for in a girlfriend, really.
And I found myself starting
to live a different kind of life.
It was a life away from music with a nine to five job
and a really pretty girlfriend.
I remember for the first time in my life, I felt
as safe as I had felt when I lived with my mom.
A year or two
into our relationship, I just started missing music.
It had been with me my whole entire life.
I didn't know how to be anything else.
And I also think that the more I fell in love with her
and the more I seen how unneedy she was
and how she just was proud of me for, you know,
whatever, the more reason I wanted
to show her how talented I was.
That's when I got the itch to start playing again
With Sully, I don't care
what he did, he would never be happy without his music.
Up until that point, I was just the drummer in a band
and I didn't have any say for the most part.
I just decided, you know what? I'm gonna write my own music.
I'm gonna try this a different way
and I'm gonna try this my way
and I don't want to listen to anyone else's direction.
Sully called me and he said he wanted to get
into a band and jam just for fun.
And he was like, "I'm in," immediately,
there was like no hesitation.
I go, "Well, you may wanna hold on a second here
because, you know, I'm gonna sing for the band."
I looked down at the phone, like little smirk on my face.
I heard the phone drop
and hit like every step going down the basement.
I got a message on my answering machine saying
that he had this possible gig for me and I was gonna laugh
and that's all the message said.
When I called back and he said
that he's putting this band together
and he was wanting to sing, I didn't think
that he could sing 'cause he played the drums.
So we started jamming
and then next thing I know we're in the studio.
It was quite the experience, man.
Again, I was, you know, freshly inexperienced
and new at singing.
And I was in the studio now about to record a demo
and it wasn't good.
I was terrible. I didn't know how to sing.
Like I was a screamer, but I had no pitch.
Hey!
I started singing and I remember watching
Robbie walk right outta the fucking studio.
I'm like, "Hold on a second, I will get this.
You gotta gimme a minute."
He is sounding like a wild goat in heat
and I went, "Oh my God, you're awful."
It was the first time I was on a stage as a singer-
They've come here from all over the world.
In a real band and not playing the drums at all.
How's everyone here, tonight?
Oh, thank you.
It sounds like everyone's doing well.
And I gotta tell you, the thing I struggle
with the most was figuring out
what the fuck to do with my hands.
Because being a drummer, your whole life is
if it's not going well, you can just kind
of hide and get through the set.
But now I found myself in front of the band
and I was the guy that had to entertain
and I didn't know what the fuck I was gonna do.
You sound like shit actually.
- Swear to god? - I swear to god, man.
Fucking ice kept breaking up.
Tommy was fine. His fucking drums kept blaring out.
Robbie's bass was fine.
The guitar kept breaking up and his voice kept breaking up.
You'll see.
No, I'm just saying...
And I kept practicing and working with it
and between performance and singing, actually trying
to learn how to get in pitch.
You know, it slowly came together.
You know, I had a lot
of experience like yelling my whole life, screaming
at people, I just had to get it in key, you know,
and figure that part out.
♪ Why are you laughing as if you're my friend, yeah. ♪
Erin would come out to the shows
and she was starting to see
that I had something a little bit more
to me than just being, you know, a guy
in a collection agency.
Those were some really special times when I think back,
because it was where it was starting.
It was getting that initial feedback
of what songs were working and what songs weren't working
and we eventually started to find a sound
within people pointing out the heavier stuff.
♪ Get up, get up, get up, get up ♪
♪ Gotta get up
♪ Gotta get out
It was me and Robbie
and this kid Lee, our first guitar player
and Tommy Stewart.
We played a club called Axis.
And right next door, Korn was playing a bigger venue,
I think it was The Avalon.
And anybody from The Avalon had a ticket they could get
into the show and access for free.
So as soon as we got on, the club let out
and the whole place filled up,
and I knew then that we had something.
Nobody knew the songs, nobody knew us.
I'm like, I'm just looking
around and going, wow, we've got something here.
About two weeks into it, Lee got that dreaded knock
on the door that every man fears.
And when he opened it, he found a woman on the other side
that he used to date that said, "Hi, this is your child."
And you know, honorably he left the band to go be a dad.
So Robbie said, "You know, I know this guitar player
in the area.
His name's Tony Rombola, and he is really good.
You should come check him out."
Robbie Merrill brought Sully
to a Crushed Tomato show to check me out.
I didn't know it.
I met Sully there, you know, shook his hand
and they handed me a tape
and said, "You know, learn this stuff
and we'll see if we like you."
I went and auditioned
at the train station where they rehearsed.
It was only like, I think four songs, three or four songs
so I learned them and I played them and it was all good.
And that's when they kind of told me
and said, "All right, man, let's do this thing,"
and that was it, I guess I was in.
I was just psyched to be playing with such good musicians
in first really original band too, you know?
So I was just excited about what was coming, you know.
♪ You gotta go away
And right around the time
that we started to get some momentum, I ran
into Lisa, my crazy ex stripper girlfriend.
And when I seen her again, all these old emotions came
up really quickly.
For some reason I had forgot about the bullshit
that we had went through,
and I just kind of was drawn to her again.
But I also knew
that I had this really great person in my life.
And although those thoughts went
through my head, I really didn't regard it that much
and I kind of drifted back into Lisa.
I am in a relationship that's pretty deep at this point
with a great girl that I'm living with,
and I'm just falling for this girl
that was just so bad for me.
And so I get a call one day from Erin
who asked me to come meet her for lunch at her job.
And when I showed up, she walked outside
and she smacked me right across the face and started crying
and told me we were done.
And I immediately knew she knew something.
She had heard a voicemail that Lisa had left
on my answering machine, and she just turned around
and walked back into work.
And in that split second, I knew I had fucked up so bad.
I know it affected him
because he knows he made a huge mistake, massive mistake.
He potentially lost the love of his life.
I tried and tried and tried to work things out with her.
She wouldn't take my calls, she wouldn't come see me.
I showed up at her house one night
and through the balcony I could see her sitting
in the living room through these glass doors.
And I climbed up onto the balcony and I opened up the slider
and she kind of looked over at me and just looked back down
and she had been crying and crying.
And I came in and I immediately got emotional
and I just said, "You know, listen, I just need
to talk to you."
And she didn't say anything, she just looked me in the eyes
and she just said, "Will you dance with me?"
And I was like, "What?"
And she went on to explain,
she goes, you know, "The one thing that you never asked me
to do the whole time we were seeing
each other was dance with me."
I didn't even know what to say.
And she just came up to me and put her arms around me
and she just wanted to dance one time with me.
And I also remember thinking, I was really afraid
for my life because I thought she was gonna stab me
in the back.
I danced with her to some slow song,
then she opened up the door, she let me out and said goodbye
and that was the last time I ever seen her.
You know, sometimes you have
to go through heartbreak in your life
and then something happens and your life turns around.
I'm all busted up over a relationship that just ended
and the band is solidified now,
but my head's all fucked up, my heart's all fucked up
and I was in a lot of fucking pain.
And I just didn't have the energy to go
to rehearsal a lot of the times.
♪ Let's take a blast to the moon ♪
I just started jotting down my feelings
and my thoughts like a journal.
♪ How I'm craving you
And all these journal entries started
to become songs for me.
And I noticed immediately that it was really easy
for me to express myself on a piece
of paper much easier than it was for me to talk about it.
And so I wrote, and I wrote and I wrote,
and all of it came from this real pain
that I was experiencing.
Through the pain I was experiencing,
something really beautiful was happening
and it was the birth of Godsmack.
I just got a call from Sully one day.
You know, "Hey, I got a new band, it's called Godsmack."
"And we have a bunch of material and we wanna record it.
How can we do this?
You know, we don't have a whole lot of money."
And we ended up borrowing $2,600 off
of a friend of ours at the time.
And so for 2,600 bucks, he took us in on a weekend
and we basically tracked as much as we could.
Track after track, just doing it, trying
to save money to do it fast.
You know, that's the only reason we were doing it fast.
We did everything live.
Tony and I were on headphones but our ears were
in different separate rooms being recorded at the same time
and we wiped out all 11 tracks in two days.
I was getting over my fears of being a front man
and I started to look towards the Steven Tylers
and the James Hetfields and the Layne Staleys
and the people that I admired as a singer.
And I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that
and then I went back and sang all the vocals.
And that was it.
That was the record we put out
and it was called "All Wound Up."
We put some awful artwork on it.
It was a picture of Sully's TV
in his living room with a girl in a chair
with cassette tape wrapping around her.
It was the most fucking
ridiculous album cover ever.
I remember the first time I heard Godsmack for real,
on a real produced CD and I was hoping
that it was gonna be the one where you get to make it.
By shopping around these CDs and getting them
to certain radio stations, we drew the attention
of this one guy named Rocko who worked
for a local Boston station called WAAF.
It's Rocko on WAAF.
Rocko just used to go digging through the promotions bin
and we always had a bin of local bands
that would send music in for airplay.
And Rocko thought the artwork was really cool
and so he put it on the air.
And once he started playing it,
the listeners really started calling about it.
What's going on Monday? I'm Rocco.
First we were played on the Nightly News
and it was at 11 o'clock at night
because I used to work construction,
so I had to get up at 5:00 in the morning.
But I'd always want stay up to listen to the Nightly News
'cause he'd play "Keep Away" on there.
"All Wound Up," this is Godsmack on WAAF.
I was over at a bar
and someone was like, "Man, have you heard
about this Godsmack group?"
He says, "Man, yeah, listen to this shit."
So he put it on.
The first song I heard was "Keep Away.'
I was like, "Who is this fucking asshole, man?
This is some good shit."
He says, "Yeah man, this guy, his name's Sully."
Sully Erna.
I said, "I couldn't agree with that fucking guy."
I'm in my shop one morning working
and I've got it on this college station
and I hear this song come on
and I start listening to the lyrics of it.
♪ Sickness spilling through your eyes ♪
And I said, that's Sully. That's fucking Sully singing.
♪ Craving everything that you thought was alive ♪
And the band started to grow at this stage
and all of a sudden we had this huge momentum going.
So I went to this local store
in New England called Newbury Comics,
which is a chain of about 17 stores.
And there was a lady named Beth Duby,
and I asked her if she would take the CD
and she said, "Sure."
You know, she ended up taking like five of 'em.
And I was like, "Oh, that kind of sucks.
You know, we have a whole case, you can take more."
And she's like, "Nope, we'll start with five
and if we sell these five, you bring us five more."
And then five a month started to turn into about 10 a month,
and 10 in a month started turning into a hundred a month.
And the more they played it
on the radio, the more people would buy the CD
and the more people would buy the CD,
the more they would show up at the live shows
and on and on it went.
A lot of people were showing up
and they were selling out, selling out, selling out.
And then they play it more
and play it more and play it more
and then it just snowballed into something huge.
Godsmack! Godsmack! Godsmack!
They started selling so many copies that
when they published the album sales numbers of everything
that they were selling week to week, Godsmack was outselling
as a local unsigned band, huge national artists.
He had done a lot of work, Sully and the guys.
They were working the club circuit heavily.
They had recorded what was a great record.
And as I would come out and see them play live in clubs
there, I began to recognize not only the strength
of what he was doing, but also the cause and effect
with the audiences.
And it was very small, but it was meaningful.
Me and Tony were at rehearsal one day
and I came up with this drumbeat.
So how about going
so it has a little bit of thud to the ending of it.
And Tony started playing this riff over this drumbeat
and it turned out to be the song, "Whatever."
We wanted to add it to the CD,
but we didn't wanna record a whole new CD and everything.
So we just recorded that one song
and just taped it onto the CD.
As a bonus CD because when that song hit the radio,
that's when it really blew up for us.
♪ Better fucking go away
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
♪ Now go away
"Whatever" sold thousands of copies.
Like bam it went from we sold, you know, 5,000
to right where we're doing 2000 a week.
And in the meantime, you know,
WAAF was just playing the hell out of it
so you could feel something happening.
We were playing a lot of places
and we were really starting to build a name for ourselves
and it sparked the interest of the record labels.
♪ Let's go
I think I was probably checking
on sales of one of our records
and I remember speaking to someone
at Newbury Comics calling around, "Hey, how's this record?"
"Hey, it's doing great. It's number two this week."
"And well, who's number one?"
"Yeah, Godsmack."
I said, "Well, who's Godsmack?"
Said, "Yeah, he got this record called 'Whatever.'"
I said, "Well, can I get a copy?"
And it was a CD and then it had a rubber band
and then it had this white additional CD, blank CD,
just like that.
So I'm sitting in my little basement room
and the phone rings and I pick it up.
"Oh, yeah, what? Hello, what?"
I said, "Hey, I'm from Republic Records. How you doing?"
He is like, "Yeah, what about it, you know?"
"Quit fucking around, you asshole,"
and I hung up the phone,
I really thought it was a friend of mine fucking with me.
I actually hung up on the president of the record label.
And so the phone rings again
and I was like, "Seriously, I'm not in the fucking mood
for this today."
That was clearly Sully.
And he's like, "No, don't hang, don't hang up."
He's like, "No, this is Avery Lipman from Republic Records,"
and he started to go on and talk a lot
of different kind of terminology, record label terminology.
And at that point I go, oh my God,
like, okay, we don't even have a manager
and they're talking contracts
and I don't know anything about that part of it.
So I called up Paul Geary
and he was into management at the time.
I had him look at the band a couple times previous to that,
but you know, we just weren't ready yet.
Finally I called him
and I said, "Okay, listen, you're managing the fuckingband.
That's like what's gonna happen
because I get record labels calling my bedroom
and I don't know anything about contracts."
This, I'll never forget. I remember this intensely.
I was sitting in my driveway talking to Sully
and I said, "Well, we actually have our first offer,
but I think it's shit.
You know, I don't think that's what we want to do."
I remember him saying, "Are you sure? Are you sure?
We're passing on a major label deal here."
And I felt at the time,
look, I've been doing this long enough to know
that I don't know what kind of deal we're gonna get,
but we're gonna get a deal.
And so they ask us to set up a show
and we're like, no problem.
Can fucking play anywhere in New England.
We're gonna pack it in, We're gonna look awesome.
We're gonna get a record deal.
And we show up, we do our sound check, band sounds great,
everyone's in a good place.
We hit the stage. Not a fucking person.
There may have been 14 people in the club.
I remember thinking like it wasn't full.
We worried about that 'cause here we were getting ready
to, you know, showcase and there wasn't a full room.
I was probably optimistic thinking
there was at least half of a room.
We're dead, we're dead.
That never bothered us, you know,
as far as like, you know, the small turnout and shows
because we knew it was a process
and we knew it was just a matter of time
and we just had to be patient.
And so we just said,
okay, we gotta pull our head together here.
They just wanna see this band play.
And for whatever it's worth, man, we got up
on stage and we played
to 15 people, just like we would play to 5,000 people.
♪ Let's go
And at that point, Republic came back with a real offer.
There's a rule of thumb in our business
that, you know, just when you feel like all is lost
and your company's going down and you just, you know,
for whatever reason you can't make the rent,
you can't pay the bills,
you can't do this, you can't do that,
in our business, you've gotta hang on
with everything you've got
because the next day the Beatles can walk through the door
and in our case, it was Godsmack.
Please welcome Godsmack.
Godsmack.
He wanted it. If you want it, you gotta go for it.
He's touched so many lives
and helped make their lives better.
I mean, how can I not be proud?
He had this one thing
that he always wanted his whole entire life.
I have no other words, but just simply amazing.
We're lucky we didn't end up dead or in jail
and music, it was just a savior for us.
Nothing was handed to him.
He worked hard for what he has accomplished.
Always knew he'd make it and then he did.
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
♪ Go away
♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪
♪ Go away
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
♪ Go away
♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪
♪ Go away
♪ Yeah
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
♪ Now go away
♪ I'm doing the best that I ever did ♪
♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪
Show me your hands, come on.
Yeah, yeah!
♪ I'm doing the best I ever did, go away ♪
♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪
Godsmack! Godsmack! Godsmack!
Sometimes getting to where you want
to get to, it's not as easy as it sounds.
And you're gonna face challenges
and life is gonna knock you down on your knees a lot.
But the people who can stand tall again
and get up, no matter how many times life knocks you down,
when you can reach down and find your inner strength
and inspire others
and keep working at it, those are the ones
that are gonna make it.
Those are the ones that'll never live with regret.
It's all just a part of the paths we choose.
I don't remember a lot about my childhood, especially not
with him because he was on tour a lot,
but I've noticed a lot that
as I've gotten older, he just wants
to spend more time with me.
My dad and I will talk for hours about like anything.
Seeing the fans connect with him so much
and you know, sing along to his songs
on stage, it's really cool for me
but it's almost like surreal, like all
of these people love your dad
because you know, I don't look at him like Sully.
I look at him like, dad.
Son, you're right.
So they're still fixing the camera?
Yeah, I think so.
So this is my mom, my dear mom, my one and only mother.
Thank you, dear. That's it, yeah.
I think I only have one.
I hope so.
We got over all our hangups,
how I used to be versus what I am now
and now we get along great.
Yeah, I think so.
I think so too.
You're still a little bit of a pain in my ass, but-
Well not like you're not a pain in my ass too especially
when you don't answer your phone and no, I'm just...
I'm busy though, you know?
Yeah, I know I'm busy too.
We're back at the stoop. This was like our hiding spot.
- This was our spot, right? - This is the hang, yeah.
I feel so comfortable here.
Do you?
I still feel like I gotta kind
of watch my back a little bit.
And you guys don't ever fucking call me.
Very proud of my friend.
He has made an impact in the music world
and he is my friend. - Right, well, you know,
here we go.
Enough.
I'm a little bit over pampered here right now.
- Never thought I'd hear that - It's been a great ride.
Let's keep it going.
♪ I've told you this once before, you can't control me ♪
♪ If you try to take me down, you're gonna break ♪
♪ I feel your every nothing that you're doing for me ♪
♪ I'm thinking you ought to make your own way ♪
♪ I stand alone, inside
♪ I stand alone
♪ You're always hiding behind your so-called goddess ♪
♪ So, what, you don't think that we can see your face ♪
♪ Resurrected back before the final falling ♪
♪ I'll never rest until I can make my own way ♪
♪ I'm not afraid of fading
♪ I stand alone
♪ Feeling your sting down inside me, I'm not dying for it ♪
♪ I stand alone
♪ Everything that I believe is fading ♪
♪ I stand alone, inside
♪ I stand alone
♪ And now, it's my time
♪ It's my time to dream
♪ Dream of the skies
♪ Make me believe that this place isn't plagued ♪
♪ By the poison in me
♪ Help me decide if my fire will burn out ♪
♪ Before you can breathe ♪
♪ Breathe into me
♪ I stand alone, inside
♪ I stand alone ♪
♪ Feeling your sting down inside me, I'm not dying for it ♪
♪ I stand alone
♪ Everything that I believe is fading ♪
♪ I stand alone, inside ♪
♪ I stand alone, inside
♪ I stand alone, inside ♪