Access All Areas
“Both my mom’s parents were alcoholics and her dad used to beat them,” says Steve Holt, 36 Crazyfists philosophical guitarist as he rummages in a pocket for his cigarettes as he addresses the heritage of his own heavy drinking. “My dad’s dad was alcoholic too, and my uncle drank himself to death a year ago.” He pauses as he pulls one from the packet with his teeth. “At my mom’s house no less.”
You thought you knew 36 Crazyfists. You thought you knew them because they signed your CD, gave you a cigarette and chatted to you and your mates until the bus took them on to the next city in the middle of the night.
“I’d already been doing acid,” admits the band’s lofty bassist, Mick Whitney, in his low and rumbling voice, “But I got into smoking coke, doing speed, [injecting] coke and I was just starting to really like heroin.”
You thought you knew them because singer Brock Lindow remembers you from the mosh pit two years ago; because group’s lengthy drummer Thomas Noonan smiled through his faux doom-mongering pessimism; because Mick never tired of you taking his picture with your Nokia 6230i; because Holt indulged your guitar questions as you chewed his drunken ear off at the bar.
“I did crystal meth by accident once,” explains Brock, “I thought it was only coke, but that shit kept me up for three whole days.”
And while it is still true that the band are as nice a collection of drinking, smoking musicians and joke-crackers as you are likely to meet, their pasts aren’t all rosy flower-lined yellow brick roads out of middle class suburbia to the stages and shop shelves of the world.
“I can be a dick to people,” cedes Thomas frankly. “Not to people I like, or people we’re on tour with, but I’ve been that guy who’s a real dick to people.”
This is not a normal Access All Areas. Sure, Metal Hammer hung out on the bus, saw the gig and got drunk with the band afterwards, but this time we got to access not only the tangible but the metaphysical: the past, possible futures, and inside these four very different men’s minds.
You may think 36 Crazyfists are just another American metalcore band signed to Roadrunner Records. And while this is true there is so much more to this band than its music. Most bands get asked the same set of questions time after time, and they reel out the same anecdotes again and again. Rarely do a band let their guard down, and reveal who they really are.
After spending two days with 36 Crazyfists in their native Portland Oregon for an interview in Metal Hammer 154, we were ready to dig a little deeper with Alaska’s only global rock band. So Metal Hammer spent two days in Birmingham and London with the boys on their pre-album release European mini- tour in the venues and on their bus soaking up the four Crazyfists’ super-friendly yet ever-complicated personalities.
“I had a brother who died when I was seven,” says Holt as he looks into the top of his half-drunk pint of Guinness, standing as we are by the ladies toilet and merch stand in the Birmingham Barfly watching it fill with people. “He died doing some work in our backyard when he was 15.”
After this he couldn’t stay the night at people’s houses, suffering acute anxiety attacks if he tried. And as he admits, this is probably the reason why he can’t smoke weed: “My heart races and just freak out.”
Even so, Holt found himself taking acid in eleventh grade. The trip lasted for what felt like days, but what he’d thought was the drugs was in fact anxiety and panic.
“You know when someone says ‘so-and-so died’ and your heart just drops. It’s like that but it doesn’t go away,” he says before looking around the Birmingham Barfly’s girder-lined inside and inhaling a noseful of the cold smokeless gaffer-tape air.
“It happens on planes too: I get real claustrophobic. We were supposed to fly out and record [second album] ‘Snow Capped Romance’; I got on the plane and just as we were about to take off I thought, ‘I have to get out of here’. I just went to the door and had them let me off. I tried to fly again and I couldn’t do it, so I conned [my girlfriend] Sarah into driving from Portland to Florida to record the album. It took us three days straight.”
That’s over 2,000 miles.
“It’s a major thing in my life,” Holt drops his cigarette on the floor and stubs it out with a worn-in worn-out skate trainer. “I’ve had to deal with that for a long time. Thankfully I haven’t had it for a while - which is good.”
Do you think the fact that you drink heavily is related to all this?
“Absolutely,” he says before throwing a knowing look our way and swigging back a neckful of beer. He swallows, pauses, smiles and looks up. “I don’t mean this is in ‘I can out drink everyone’ way,” he continues. “But when I look around as I’m drinking, I think ‘fuck, I’m drinking twice as fast as everyone else’.”
Heavy drinking is as par for the course in heavy metal as studded belts and tattoos, but Holt’s appetite and capacity for alcohol is often remarked upon.
“My drinking isn’t a problem,” he says slowly and carefully. “But I have noticed recently that I enjoy a beer at midday. I’ll have two or three and think, ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about’.”
Holt tracks his hard-drinking past back to three alcoholic grand-parents and an uncle who drank himself to death a year ago, aged only 42.
“The fact that alcoholism is widely hereditary is something I do think about,” he says tapping another cigarette into his mouth. “I’m not sure how the genes will interpret themselves with me, but I know it’s prominent in the family and I know it’s weird to like beer so much at noon.”
“This is our last song, Birmingham,” bellows all six foot and four inches of Crazyfists frontman Brock Lindow to the amassed Barfly crowd who roar back in approval, “But we’ll all be at the bar for a beer afterwards if you want to come and say ‘hi’, get things signed or just hang and have beer.” Then the tone of his voice turns to a roar, “But right now, I want to see you jump the fuck up, then jump the fuck down!”
Then all at once, mohawked guitarist Steve Holt, surly drummer Thomas Noonan and the towering form of bassist Mick Whitney tear simultaneously into audience favourite, ‘Slit Wrist Theory’, and the crowd go berserk: cheering, dancing and whipping up the human whirlpool moshpit. Brock points at someone in the crowd and grins before diving into the crowd, after which he holds the mic into the heaving throng of black t-shirts for a few lucky fans to scream the chorus.
True to Brock’s word, once the band have left the stage, swigged down a beer and towelled off their sweaty bodies, every member of the Alaskan four-piece can be found near the bar or merch stand, pen in hand and a fan conversation on the go.
“People know they can get closer to us than most bands,” he says smiling wide. “Before and after the show we’re usually hanging around the bar or outside…”
“And,” Mick jumps in grinning just as widely, “One guy’s got a Mohawk, and two of us are over 6’2” and weigh 250lb in shorts - so we’re not hard to find.”
A little more advanced in years than his fellow band-mates, Mick Whitney has a past that reads like Mötley Crüe’s infamous autobiography ‘The Dirt’. Luckily, while Mick’s own story may share locale and chemicals in common, his life-story’s latter years have panned out quite differently to the Crüe’s continued descent into drugs, debt and divorce.
“The plan was that my friends - guitarist Mark and singer Tony – and I would move to LA and start a band,” explains Mick with his hair in a Samurai pony tail. “All the magazines said it was the place to be, so in 86 we moved to an apartment on Sycamore Avenue just off Hollywood Boulevard.”
Living just beneath Mick were Gabby and Abby two strippers to whom Mick sold pot. The strippers had famous friends and would often party with Slash and Steve Adler of the then local band, Guns n’ Roses.
“We were right in the thick of the scene; I was only 19, and I immediately started partying way too hard.”
“I’d already been doing acid,” he says seriously looking out of the window of the 16 berth tour bus as we head south through the night, “But I got into smoking coke, doing speed, [injecting] coke and I was just starting to really like heroin. I could see why people enjoyed it, but I was too young and dumb and too stoned to do anything.”
“It all came to a head when I met my oldest boy’s mother and got her pregnant,” he says more quietly as he thinks back. “She called my folks and told them I was slamming dope. My old man was like, ‘you need to come home’. In ‘88 he brought me home to Alaska and took me moose hunting hundreds of miles from anywhere. My dad just offered me the chance to pull myself together… and I took it.”
“September 1997 was the last time I did anything,” he says, coming back from the dark place that his past comes from. “Apart from smoke pot of course,” he laughs.
Do you ever think you’d like a line after a few beers?
“I get too fucked up,” he says becoming serious again, “I don’t need to be that guy again. My drugs of choice are pot, beer and wine.”
As we talk, Noonan hauls his tall meatless frame up the bus stairs wearing his incongruously fluffy slippers; Brock talks to his enchantingly sweet fiancée, Carrie; and Holt chats to his own better half, Sarah.
“I want a life that I can live, enjoy and be in control of,” he turns his bottle of beer between two pan-like palms. “Shit takes a toll on you. And no matter what you think, it will take a toll on you.”
36 Crazyfists have been hammering away at this game for 13 years. And while they’ve succeeded where so many other bands have failed - label deal, tours, albums, a global fanbase - they have also seen many of their peers and newer bands rise past them to become festival headliners, platinum-sellers and cover-stars while 36 remain simply stalwart metallers turning out good albums and great live shows - the promise of the big time never quite becoming a reality.
Steve Holt sits on the concrete steps outside their second Barfly venue in as many days – this time London’s - with yet another beer in his hand. He looks up at the cloud-naked sky and squints as he ponders the question, ‘after 13 years of 36 Crazyfists are you getting to a point where you’re thinking it’s now or never?’
“I think it is that time,” he says after a pause, “But only in the sense that the priority level of the band will fall down a couple of notches. As we get older there’s more of an urge to have normal lives. We all have long-term girlfriends. Brock is getting married and I know he’s keen to set up home.”
In time off from the band Brock not only works in commercial fisheries, he also has a slot announcing hockey games on a local Alaskan radio station.
Could that mean the end of 36 Crazyfists?
“I know I want to keep this band going. I can’t see Thomas doing anything else, and I know Mick will keep doing it.
Holt recently blacked Thomas’ eye by throwing a CD case in a recent dispute. Following this, Thomas broke Holt’s finger which is now permanently crooked. Today they are friends again.
“I think whatever Brock does will dictate what the rest of us do,” he admits and half shrugs. “I think he might take it all a bit lightly. I don’t think he realises what a big part of his life it is. If something like that did happen, I think Brock would get bored and be like, ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’” Holt gestures faux-despair with two open hands before tapping cigarette ash onto the pavement. “He might think he needs to leave the band to have a family, but just look at Mick: he has two kids and lives with his wife and her son from another marriage. And he has no intention of quitting.”
“What happens next may have something to do with the success of this record. But I know there will be another 36 Crazyfists album after this one, I know it.”
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