Interviews - Five Finger Death Punch

With a hit single (“The Bleeding”) tearing up the airwaves, successful runs on the 2007 Family Values Tour, an arena tour with Korn, their own headlining shows, the opening slot on Disturbed’s spring tour and a spot on the first-ever Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival this summer, Five Finger Death Punch is one of the hottest bands in metal. Their phenomenal debut album, The Way of the Fist, will be unleashed in an expanded edition, featuring the new single “Never Enough,” on May 13. When the band came to the Chameleon Club in Lancaster, Pa., on April 22 for a headlining show, with support from Nonpoint, guitarist Darrell Roberts sat down with Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki.

Live-Metal.net: You just got back out on the road again after some time off, right?

Darrell Roberts: Yeah, we did. We’ve been out for about four days now.

Absolutely, man. We actually had about two and a half months off after being out for like six, seven months straight. The first couple shows, you know, they were a little rusty, but we got a great response and the guys in Drowning Pool and Nonpoint, they played with us, and they came afterwards and were like, “Damn, man! We have to play after you guys?” Apparently, it wasn’t too bad. Apparently, we threw down pretty hard. But it’ll definitely get better after a few more shows.

Yeah. We were supposed to go on that All That Remains tour. After touring that long, Ivan [Moody], it was a little rough, his voice was a little rough and he had his throat looked at by a doctor. He’s fine, didn’t need any kind of surgery or anything, thank God, but he just advised him to definitely take some time off and rest up. So we just wanted to stay productive. The label wanted us to stay productive and they always want additional material. Movie soundtracks come up and they always want exclusive stuff. We’ve got a lot of guys, a lot of fighters, UFC fighters that want to use our music for their entrances into the ring and dirtbike videos, stuff like that. So they just wanted us to go in and do some stuff. Luckily for us, we’re on the same management as Korn. We were lucky enough to use Jonathan Davis’s studio because they were over in Europe touring. So we went down there and we tracked about three new original ideas and did a couple cover songs. One of those songs ended up being “Never Enough,” which they really liked, so they decided to release it as the second single. We were kind of bouncing the idea around about how to release it because a lot of people had just bought the record and it wouldn’t be on the record. So they did some research and found this PUSH technology so kids that already have the CD can actually put it in their computers and download the song for free.

Yeah, I got it. I really appreciated being able to get it for free like that.

Yeah. We are gonna re-release the record in the middle of May. It will come out and it’s still considered the Way of the Fist CD, but it will have some additional tracks on it that I don’t think will be available for PUSH, but “Never Enough” is. I think the acoustic version of “The Bleeding” is on that, too. And it’ll be iTunes, so if people already have the CD, they might have to go buy one of the tracks on iTunes for 99 cents or something. But definitely “Never Enough” is available now.

There’s gonna be three songs: “Never Enough,” another original song—

It’s one that we just did, that we just recorded recently, so it’s a brand new one.

I believe they’re going with “Stranger Than Fiction.” And then the acoustic version of “The Bleeding” will be on it, as well. So it should be cool. We’re excited about it.

Yeah, we did a version of “From Out of Nowhere,” Faith No More song, and we did a version of “Bad Company,” the song “Bad Company” by Bad Company on the album Bad Company. We actually were goofing around today, doing it for soundcheck. We’re headlining tonight’s show, so we have to play a little longer set. So we were thinking maybe we’ll pull out that Bad Company song. We’ve never played it as a band before. We messed around with it a little bit at soundcheck. It sounded pretty cool, so I got a feeling it might show its face tonight.

So how did it work out [tonight]? You just opened for Nonpoint and now they’re opening for you.

What happened was we were coming out to Jersey to do a radio show, the radio show at Starland Ballroom. And then there was a few days before the Disturbed tour started. It’s expensive to be on tour, so we didn’t want to just sit in a hotel room with a bus sitting in the parking lot for a week. So our agent, luckily for us, found these shows with Drowning Pool and Nonpoint. But those shows were basically already booked and they were selling tickets for it and it was a done deal, and they just kinda added us. They were cool enough to add us on to the shows sort of at the last minute. So we were like, “Sure, we’ll play in front of those guys. Let us do what we do, sell some merch and it’s all cool.” We like those bands, too. So that’s kinda how that happened and this show here was one of our shows. Nonpoint was kind of in the same deal. They were like, “Well, we’re out in this same area already. Can we get on this show with you?” So it just kind of worked out that way.

Coming up after these shows you’re doing right now you’re going out with Disturbed.

Yeah, we start with Disturbed, I believe, Sunday. So I guess it’s about five days from today. We do that for about a month, about five weeks. Then we have about two weeks, maybe three weeks off in June. We do a few one-off shows at the end of June, some festival stuff. Then we start on the Rockstar Mayhem tour with Slipknot, Mastodon, DragonForce, Disturbed. We start that, I think, July 7 in Seattle and that’ll run about six, seven weeks.

Oh, man. [laughs] Actually, yeah. It can be really brutal, but I like it. I like it out there sweating. For us, at this point, we’ll be on the Jägermeister stage. So it is brutal and it’s hot, it takes it out of you, but you only have to play for about 30 minutes. You basically just get to go out there and play your five or six strongest songs and just throw down as hard as you can and get out of there. Now, if we were Slipknot or Korn or something and we had to play for an hour and a half, two hours, it would definitely be brutal and to keep up the energy level that we perform at would be extremely tough. Hopefully we’ll have to deal with that problem in the near future.

The Family Values show I went to last year, it had to be 100 degrees out there. I can’t imagine what it was like for you guys on stage.

We had one of the worst buses ever, too. The generator was constantly going out on it. It happens to a lot of bands, but it’s happened to us when we were in the hottest cities, like Atlanta and Tampa, Florida. We literally actually went and rented a little Kia van and we would just sit parked in our van with the air conditioner cranked up behind the stage until it was time to play, run out, do our set and then jump back into the air-conditioned van. But it eventually got straightened out and it was all good.

At some of these festivals, you’re playing with a lot of different types of bands, not all metal bands. Are you looking forward to playing for maybe a different audience at some of these?

Yeah, we’re doing some of those big radio station shows with bands like Three Doors Down and Kid Rock. I can’t wait, man. I’m a fan of music in general. To me, there’s two kinds of music: good and bad. If you do it well, I like it. It could be rock, metal, blues—I love blues—country. I like everything if it’s done well. Most of those bands that we’re playing with, they’re established, successful bands and so they’re probably good at what they do. I haven’t seen a lot of them, so yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

You obviously have wide interests in music. What inspired you to first pick up a guitar?

The first person that inspired me to actually want to play a guitar was my grandfather. He was a guitar player. For as long as I can remember, as an infant, him sitting at the kitchen table, like this old Gibson or this old Kay guitar that I have now, he would sit there and just make up these country songs, blues and country songs, and I would be fascinated with it. All the other kids would be outside playing football or riding their bikes, and I would just be sitting on the kitchen floor watching him play guitar. It was a trip. And then when I got a little bit older, he gave me a guitar. He went to the flea market and bought me some $5 piece of shit guitar and gave it to me. I kind of was into it. I would practice a little bit here and there. But then when I heard, I think it was probably the riff of “Crazy Train,” when I heard that first slide, when I heard that riff, then I was out of my mind obsessed. Then I was like locked in a room, 12 hours a day. My mom had to cry and beg for me to go to school because I would sleep two, three hours a day and just sit, learning Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen riffs, Sabbath and stuff like that. When I got a little bit older, then I started really discovering the blues guys and people like Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Schenker, people like that. So I was really getting into that, too. But I would say probably Randy Rhoads and my grandfather were the two most important people that made me want to—They’re responsible for ruining my life.

Probably about 14. I played in some band called Starstruck. It was like this whole family. The drummer and the keyboard player and the bass player were all brothers and cousins, and we had this girl singer. We would play at fairs and shit like that. I was like the little rocker, the punk rocker kid. When I joined them, their dad was managing them and they were doing all the stuff that he liked. They were doing Beatles songs and Elton John, stuff like that. I came in, kicked and screamed, and I got ‘em to play a couple Ratt songs, Whitesnake, stuff like that. I got ‘em to rock it out a little bit. It was cool. That was my first real actual band that I played in front of people for and stuff like that. Then I played in a bunch of cover bands and I moved to L.A. and did my own thing on the Strip for a couple years. Then I joined W.A.S.P.

I’d just been in a few bands in L.A. , playing around the Strip and I had some deals that eventually got dropped and didn’t really amount to much. But I knew the bass player from W.A.S.P., Mike Duda. When Chris Holmes left W.A.S.P. for the second or third time, Mike just got a hold of me. I was doing an Alcoholica show—I used to play in a Metallica tribute band and I used to do the Hetfield parts. Mike and the tour manager for W.A.S.P. came to one of those shows and approached me with the idea of playing with W.A.S.P. So I was like, “Hell yeah, I’ll check that out.” Went down and got that gig and really was kinda thinking, “Yeah, I’ll do this for a year or two and maybe hopefully do a couple records with ‘em and build my profile a little bit more and learn.” I knew I’d learn a lot from being around Blackie Lawless. It stretched into almost six years and then I finally was like, “OK, I gotta do my own thing.” As soon as I left the band and got in the studio and started doing my own songs and was kind of putting my own band together, Jeremy Spencer, the drummer for Five Finger Death Punch, he got a hold of me and was like, “Hey, man, I got this new project. I think you’d like it. We need a second guitar player.” He gave me the CD and I was actually kinda hoping that I didn’t like it because I was like, “I wanna do my own thing this time,” you know? And goddammit, man, as soon as I put that CD in and listened to it, I was like, “Shit! I gotta join this band, man. They’re amazing.” Especially when I heard the song “The Bleeding,” I just knew that was one of those special songs; if got on the radio, it would have a huge impact on people, and it did. So here I am a couple years later and that snowball is starting to take shape.

Backing up a little bit, how was Blackie Lawless like to work with and tour with?

I thought Blackie was cool. I thought he was a really cool guy. Extremely intelligent. I learned so many aspects of this music business from every direction you could think of, from performing, playing, playing in tune and singing in tune and writing a song, how important dynamics were in songs—all that stuff. I learned a tremendous amount from him. I thought I was pretty schooled and I thought I pretty much knew a lot about it until I got around that guy, and then I was like, “Wow.” He could be intense, there’s no doubt. He could be really intense. He’s really set in his ways and he wants things done a certain way, but I think that’s good. I think that’s why he’s still around, why he has longevity. This business is full of sharks, man, people if you give ‘em an inch, they’ll take a mile. And the word spreads. As soon as you’re a nice guy, this guy tells this guy and everybody keeps thinking they can get away with more when it comes to your band. But if you’re that asshole that everybody says Blackie is or whatever—whoever it may be—because he won’t tolerate it, then you get that reputation. But I didn’t see that at all.

Several times, yeah. They still do pretty good in America. They have that hardcore, that Motorhead, Danzig diehard fanbase. The numbers aren’t obviously what they used to be in America, but in Europe he’s as big as he’s ever been. If you play anywhere like Greece, Eastern or Western Europe, Scandinavia, Sweden, Finland —we would sell out seven, eight shows in a row in places like that. A lot of times even before the tour started, that stuff would sell out immediately. Then we played Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia and Bulgaria and Turkey and those kind of places and it was insane, man. We would play multiple nights in places, sold out, a thousand kids outside trying to get into these shows. It was crazy, man. And he’s still doing it. He’s still doing it to this day and I’m sure he’ll do it until he physically can’t.

By the time you joined Five Finger Death Punch, most of the music had been written at that point, hadn’t it?

Yeah. The Way of the Fist record was pretty much done when I came along. There was a couple tracks on the record that didn’t really flow with the rest of the record and especially [guitarist] Zoltan [Bathory], who was kind of the architect of the band, there was a couple tracks that he didn’t really feel that strong about. A lot of the comments we get on our MySpace and stuff, it’s like, “There’s not one song that I skip when I listen to this record. I love every song on it.” That’s rare. And that was kind of the way Zoltan was in the beginning. He was like, “Man, I’m super stoked about every song on this record except for maybe this one or this one.” So when I came in, I said, “Well, I got some riffs.” He had a little Pro Tools rig in his house. I said, “Let’s go over and start throwing some ideas down and maybe there’s time to actually get another song or two tracked and get it on the record.” So we ended up doing a couple and “White Knuckles” ended up coming out of that little session.

Yeah, yeah. It turned out to be one of the strongest live songs because the middle section, the breakdown and everything, is so powerful. So I had a lot of input when it came to that song, but most of the other stuff was pretty much done when I came along. Second record will be different.

Oh yeah, definitely. It was really cool. We’re kind of scattered around a little bit. Zo’s in Vegas. Ivan’s in Denver. I’m in L.A. We all got little Pro Tools rigs and stuff, and we would just get rough ideas together and then we would all come together in L.A. or Vegas or whatever. We would just get a studio and go in and start throwing ideas down.

OK, I went on the forums on the street team site and asked if anyone had any questions for you.

Well, man, it’s weird because when you’re out on tour, you do have a lot of time sometimes to do nothing because you play for 35, 40 minutes and then there’s 23 hours left to sit around. We’ll watch movies. We’ve got tons of DVDs on the bus and sometimes I’ll kick back and watch movies. We’re lucky this tour, we’ve got a great bus. It’s got a really nice Wi-Fi Internet connection, so I’ll sit in my bunk on my computer. I’ll read MySpace or browse the Internet. We bring a little weight set with us. Sometimes we’ll set it up in the trailer and go out there and work out a little bit. Go to the mall. Just kind of normal stuff. We went and played paintball the other day, we had a paintball game. We’ll go bowling. Stuff like that.

[laughs] The driver sleeps when we get to the venue. When we pull into the venue, the driver takes a cab to the hotel, he sleeps all day and then he drives all night. We sleep at night. It’s not difficult or hard to sleep on the bus when you’ve drank like a fifth of Crown Royal and about eight or nine beers. You sleep like a baby. If I don’t feel like drinking and I go straight in there and try to go to sleep, it’s a nightmare. And that depends on your driver. If you got a smooth driver, it’s much easier to sleep than if you got a driver that seems to hit every pothole. And again it depends on what part of the country you’re in. When you’re in New York and Chicago and Michigan, where the streets have potholes everywhere, you can’t sleep. No. But if you’re on the West Coast, like Arizona, Nevada, where it’s nice and smooth, yeah, you sleep like a baby. It’s actually hard when you get home to sleep ‘cause you’re used to hearing the generator running.

Probably Jeremy. Yeah, Jeremy, he’s a typical drummer. He’s like ADD, hyper. To get a serious answer out of that kid for anything is like pulling teeth. So yeah, I have to go with Jeremy. And Ivan’s probably the biggest recipient of pranks ‘cause he’s deathly scared of snakes and we always stick rubber snakes in his bunk, stuff like that.

Me and Zo are both pretty laid back. We’re not real loud, social people. Ivan is definitely without a doubt the loudest. [laughs] Especially if you get a couple drinks in him, man, his mouth is like a bullhorn. It’s amazing how loud that guy can be.

If you haven’t played a song in a while and you decide to play it again, does it take some time to relearn it?

No, not really. You would think it would sometimes, but man, it’s like riding a bike or something once you’ve done it for a while. Everyone in this band is seasoned. We’ve all been in lots of different bands and been doing this stuff for a while, so it’s pretty easy. We usually just take a soundcheck and we’ll run through it and brush it up once or twice. Then it’s usually fine. And, again, it’s just rock n’ roll, so if you hit a wrong note or something, who cares. It’s part of the beauty of it.

Favorite song to play? Man … I don’t really have one. “White Knuckles” is a blast because of the breakdown. That’s always an extreme high point of the set, watching the audience when we go into that breakdown. That’s really fun. But then playing “The Bleeding” and watching everybody sing along to every word, that’s definitely right up there. But then again I love playing “The Way of the Fist,” too. I can’t—“Way of the Fist,” “Bleeding” and “White Knuckles” are probably my favorites.

There’s tons of ‘em. I always wanted to either tour or do an album with Ozzy or Dio ‘cause I’m a huge Sabbath fan and to get to go out and play those Randy Rhoads songs or stuff off the Heaven and Hell album with the guy that sang on it. That has always been a dream of mine, to play with either one of those guys. But, you know, truthfully I’m real happy with what I’m doing right now. I don’t really kind of even think about that stuff much anymore. I’m just kind of focused on what I’m doing.

No, man, just I want to thank—the unbelievable support we’ve gotten from everybody. The Knuckleheads are the coolest diehard fans in the world. I don’t even like to call ‘em fans ‘cause that’s like fanatic or some cheeseball thing. Just thank every person that gets enjoyment out of our music or is interested in what we’re doing ‘cause that’s the greatest thing, the greatest part of it. And the Knuckleheads have just been over-the-top cool. I just want to thank all of them. Look for us on tour this summer. We’ll be out all year.