Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Five Finger Death Punch

More than a year after the release of their debut album, The Way of the Fist, Five Finger Death Punch remains one of metal’s hottest new acts. With two hit singles (“The Bleeding” and “Never Enough”) under their belts, a newly released video for their disc’s punishing title track and coming off of a summer spent pulverizing the Jägermeister stage of the inaugural Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival, they now are headlining a U.S. tour that will keep them on the road into December. Then begins phase two of the 5FDP quest for world domination, as the band is preparing to take its music across the globe. At one of the last stops of the Mayhem tour, the band’s founder, guitarist Zoltan Bathory, and Live-Metal.net’s Greg Maki pulled up a couple chairs in the back of a trailer and discussed all things Five Finger Death Punch.

Zoltan Bathory: Where are we right now? I don’t know what time we are in.

Live-Metal.net: We’re in Virginia.

Virginia. All right.

[laughter]

I don’t know. Usually, it’s like I just don’t know. They point out, like, “Food is that way. Bathroom is that way. Stage is over there. You get your guitars under the orange tent. 5:50.” And that’s pretty much it.

It all looks the same.

Yeah, every day it’s the same thing.

Spending the whole summer in parking lots.

Pretty much. And these pavilions, they all look the same. So it’s like every day is a fucking Groundhog Day.

I guess the tour’s almost over now, right?

Yeah, we have three more shows. Kind of on a sad note because we had a lot of fun. It’s just weird because it’s like a big traveling circus. You see these same guys every day for three months or whatever. In fact, with Disturbed, we are out with Disturbed since May. So it’s gonna be really weird that I’m not gonna see those guys in the morning. Every morning we see them and we hang out every night. Disturbed’s stage is the Jäger stage, the unofficial Jäger stage because you cannot stand on deck without pounding Jägers. Between every song they come on the side, “Have a shot!” So you better be eating before you go over there because you’re gonna get fucking wasted. That’s what’s gonna happen.

But it’s gonna be weird. That’s one thing. The other thing is every morning I train with the guys from DragonForce. Herman Li’s a Gracie, a Jiu-Jitsu guy. So we train every morning, like Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, just grappling, fighting, whatnot. We have the mats—see the mats over there, the blue mats right there next to you? Those are Judo mats. I have two big ones, he has two big ones. So we cover the Jäger tent. It’s the Jäger dojo. So they can call me Master Jäger now.

[laughter]

What do you do all day out here?

Interesting things. Every day we have signings. Basically how the day starts, we get up, locate the food, bathrooms. Everybody talks about the crazy shit that happened last night because every night some fucking crazy shit happens. It’s pretty insane. It is the mayhem tour, I’ll tell you that. Put 100 crazy motherfuckers in a parking lot and you know what happens. [laughs] Sometimes I try out new gear, like new stuff always arrives, companies giving us stuff to try out, new pieces of gear and whatnot. I fuck with those. Then we have meet-and-greets with radio stations. We’re actually sponsored by JT Paintball. Wherever we go, we try to con the local radio stations into playing paintball against the band. So it’s a team of assassins here. I always look forward to some crazy shit. As I said, we do Jiu-Jitsu, Judo training every morning almost in the Jäger tent with the DragonForce guys. Adam from Machine Head goes up almost every morning, jumps out of an airplane, parachute. So I may go with him. There are maybe three days left. I waited for the last day, so if I die at least we fucking finished this tour. So maybe the last day I go with him and jump out of a fucking airplane.

Any bands that have really impressed you that you weren’t quite familiar with before?

Let’s say Airbourne. They’re really fun. They’re really cool dudes. We really like those guys. Obviously, Machine Head, they’ve been around forever. It’s a fucking legend anyway. It’s kind of cool hanging out with them every day, playing on the same stage. So that’s cool. I mean, Disturbed was always a band that I liked. It’s one of my favorite bands, so that was cool to tour with them. And now, being on a festival and becoming really tight with those guys, it’s pretty awesome. Same thing, DragonForce. It’s déjà vu because our very first show was with DragonForce. Those guys gave us a slot on their show in L.A. and that was our very first show. So it’s kind of interesting how everything comes in full circle. Korn opened the door for us, letting us tour with them and then we did the arena tour. And then Disturbed gave us an open door for accessing all these people. All these bands were really good to us and kind of helped us get to another level, besides they’re awesome guys, besides that we personally became really good friends. Even if we wouldn’t have, it’s something that we’ll never forget. They gave us the tours. It’s a lot of people connected to the band. We have a very similar crowd.

How have the Death Punch pits been on this tour?

[laughs] Oh my god. It’s almost I like should pull over one of the crew guys here instead of I’m telling you. It would pretty funny if I asked somebody that works here, like, “Hey, tell me about the pits. What happens?” Oh my god. If you remember Family Values, this is the same shit five times that. Sometimes I really wonder about these kids. Like, “Dude, you don’t necessarily have to punch the living shit out of the other guy. I mean, come on.”

The pits are pretty fucking crazy. I mean, holy shit. It’s getting to the point where we really have to be like, “All right, guys, go for it, but if somebody falls, pick him up.” It’s not pretty sometimes. It’s interesting because obviously our crowd, since Family Values was our first tour, since then it’s quadrupled. Now in front of the stage we have 5,000 to 10,000 people a day. It’s pretty fucking crazy playing for this many people. Our line at the Jäger tent—we sign every day—is like a fucking mile long. We’ve sold a lot of records. That’s why we’re doing a headlining tour after this. The number of fans got to the point where now we can play these big shows on our own and it will sell out. It took a year. We didn’t go outside of the U.S.A., other than Canada. This is gonna be our sixth U.S. tour, basically. So by the sixth time, you accumulate enough fans that you can do a proper headlining tour—light show, the whole nine yards.

Did you get to pick the bands you’re taking out with you?

Well, you know, how it works pretty much is you get a list of possibilities. Your booking agency puts out the word, like, “OK, we’re going out on a headlining tour.” And other bands will want to hop on, like bid for the spot. They express interest, like, “OK, we would be interested in going with them,” and then negotiate terms and whatnot. But yeah, you have a long list of bands who wants to go on the tour and basically from that list we picked. So basically, it’s gonna be In This Moment, main support. We know those guys. They’re from Hollywood. It’s a funny story, but those guys, Chris [Howorth] the guitarist was playing with Matt [Snell], my bass guitarist, for a long time in the same band. Basically, there was a band called Deadsett that fell apart and we got Matt, the bass guitarist from there, and the rest of the guys went and became In This Moment. They got Maria, the singer, and then that’s pretty much it. Another band is gonna be Another Black Day, which we played with those guys a couple times. Pretty good band. And Bury Your Dead. They’ve been around for a while. That’s like a respect of the underground, hardcore band. So it’s gonna be a really good bill. It’s gonna be good times.

You mentioned this is gonna be the sixth U.S. tour. Is there a European tour in the works yet?

The record is not out in Europe still. It was strategically set this way. It’s very expensive to tour overseas, especially today. The recording industry is struggling. The whole downloading shit is killing bands. People don’t understand. Well, it’s cool that you downloaded it. It’s awesome. But obviously you downloaded something because you like the band. I respect the guys who download something, check it out, if they like it they buy the record. I personally buy records. I have a fucking insane amount of records. I buy them. Usually, I check out something on MySpace. You have a couple songs there, you check it out. You can to Amazon, you can check out the sound clips there. If I think something is good, I just buy it. But people don’t understand how it works. You download, the band is not making money, they can’t tour, eventually fall apart. Tours fucking cost an arm and a leg. It’s crazy how expensive everything is and how slim it became. We are in a very awesome position for some reason. Our fans are fucking crazy, hardcore. They send us pictures of them showing the records. Among each other, the Knuckleheads, if you don’t own the record, you’re not cool. It’s like an honor thing, like you have to own the record, otherwise you’re not a real fan, you don’t support the band.

A lot of them have probably gotten it twice now, with the re-release.

Yeah. Well, obviously, you can download those extra songs. If you already own the first one, just download the rest. But it’s an honor thing for them. They have to have the record.

So anyway, the real question was a Europe thing. So it was kind of set up this way that we were touring the U.S. and the record was out here, and when we go out to Europe—There’s some buzz already building. I lived in Europe for a long time, so we know how it works. We know everything, like what’s coming out. We just know. So there’s already a buzz building. We’re gonna drop the record in the fall and then we tour. It made no sense for us to go to Europe and tour, but then we don’t have a record out. It has to go hand in hand. At the same time, it didn’t make much sense either to drop the record and then not tour Europe. So this is how we did it. We put it out here, toured, then toured and toured. Then we’re gonna put it out in Europe, then go there and tour, put it out in Japan, then go there and tour. So it has to go hand in hand. The whole thing has to be a package.

How long do you think this touring cycle is gonna end up lasting?

To tell you the truth, we’re gonna start a headlining tour in September. That means we’re getting off the road around December. We’re probably gonna take the break for December as we usually do. It was all U.S. Now, there’s Europe, South America. I mean, you gotta go to the Brazilian beaches—are you kidding me? So South America, Japan, Australia—plenty of places to go and it all takes time. So I’m assuming that we’re gonna be probably touring through next summer. And who knows. If there’s a big summer festival next year, maybe another Mayhem, maybe we hop on that. So probably gonna be on the road Metallica-style, like two years. And then we do another record, maybe next fall, like August-ish. I mean, we’re writing. We have a bunch of new stuff. So by the time next summer hits, we’re gonna have enough stuff to record.

When you had that break earlier in the year, you did a couple songs for the re-release.

We did, like, seven.

Oh, really? You did a couple cover songs, too.

Yeah, we did a couple of covers. We did “Out of Nowhere” from Faith No More and we did “Bad Company.” They came out really good, so we’ll see what we do with them.

I saw a show back in the spring where you played “Bad Company.” I think it was the first time you played it.

Yeah, when we headline we play it. Yeah. So we did those two. We’ll see what we do with them. Both of them came out really good. And then we wrote like seven songs altogether in like a month and recorded most of them, at least to some degree. If you have a European release or a Japanese release and there needs to be a bonus on it or whatnot, then we would drop another song on it. So that’s the whole idea. Or if there are soundtracks or whatnot that need material, they want something new. So we just recorded all that stuff, it’s there. Either goes as bonuses or soundtracks, or it’s gonna go on the next record. We work really efficient and really fast. And we have a lot to say, so there’s no worries. We have four or five records worth of this already. So that’s not a problem. It’s more like touring takes precedence right now and it would be not fair—let’s say the European fans, we can’t just drop another record and they would never see this tour, The Way of the Fist record and the tour. It wouldn’t be fair. So we have to tour on this record and then we do a second one. So everybody gets a chance to see both tours because, obviously, next tour that comes around, we’re gonna play different songs—I mean, after the next record.

How long has it been since you’ve been back over to Europe?

Me, personally, like 10 years or so.

Are you looking forward to getting back over there?

Yeah, it’s home turf, kind of. I lived for 20 years in Europe, so for me that’s like homeland. And for me especially, the metal scene in Europe was always huge. In fact, East Europe especially, that’s all we had. It was kind of like a survival thing, man. That was the middle finger for the government, fucking communist bastards. It was not OK with the system, the whole idea of heavy metal and the Western influence. They did not like that, so that was kind of like our middle finger to them, like, “Suck this, I have two of them.” And still, there is a very strong metal community. It’s sort of like a brotherhood. It’s a lifestyle over there. So it’s gonna be awesome to go back there and experience and show these guys.

So what led you to come over here?

Oh, I had a band that got a deal, a previous band that I got signed with and we all came over here with our band. The band kind of hit the wall after a while, but we stayed here and started new ones. This is what we do.

You’ve talked about the pits and fans and I’ve seen online pictures of their tattoos. What’s the most extreme thing you’ve seen a fan do for you guys?

There are many, many tattoos, which is kind of interesting that this early on we have such a dedicated fanbase, such a hardcore fanbase. Not a single day passes that we sign and there’s not at least four or five guys or girls with the tattoos, 5FDP on their knuckles, the brass knuckle tattoos, the skull tattoos. Every single day, at least four or five. I don’t even know what town—Atlanta, maybe—there were like 15, 20 kids in one line, in one signing line that had Five Finger Death Punch tattoos. That’s kind of like, wow. So it’s really interesting. There was a guy who made—you know the T-shirt we have with the skulls, which looks like a Guns N’ Roses thing?

Yeah.

There’s actually a funny story about that. Originally, we were gonna call the tour the “All Guns, No Roses” tour. So that’s why we made the T-shirt. It was kind of a joke. It looks a little bit like the Guns N’ Roses thing. But we decided not to piss off that many people, so we didn’t do it. Well, who knows. We may do it after all. I’m really thinking about calling this next tour “All Guns, No Roses,” but we’ll see. One of the guys made the whole cross out of metal, like machined it out really detailed. It’s huge. It weighs like 150 pounds. So it’s made out of metal that we can attach to our drum riser and whatnot. So we got that from a fan. It’s pretty amazing how dedicated all these guys are. We play, they know every fucking word to every single song. That’s a pretty cool feeling to stand up there and as far as I can see—it’s not even the first three rows. As far as I can see, people singing the lyrics. And I have good eyes. I see far. I have 20/10 vision.

One question we like to ask a lot of people in interviews: When do you think Chinese Democracy will actually be released?

Chinese democracy will never happen. Oh, you’re talking about the Guns N’ Roses record. Ah!

[laughter]

I think that applies there, too, doesn’t it?

China is a communist country, man. Actually, I love Chinese history. I’m really into Asian philosophy and I’m amazed by the country, regardless of right now they’re a communist system. But the country itself is like holy shit, man. Their culture, it’s just unbelievable.

Back to Guns N’ Roses. I’m not even sure there’s a point at this point. I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been a Guns N’ Roses fan, to begin with. I was one of those guys who was into the shred and Yngwie Malmsteen and thrash metal and all that shit. So then kind of Guns N’ Roses, even though I was still pretty young when Guns N’ Roses kind of ruled the world, I wasn’t really into it. That’s not my music. So for me—I don’t care who thinks what—but for me it was kind of a disappointment. I listen to Appetite for Destruction now and it’s a fucking goddamn good record. But at the time, for me, being like Pantera, Metallica, Anthrax and all the European—Destruction, Kreator—you know what I mean? All that shit I was listening to and all the guitar gods—from Marty Friedman to Yngwie Malmsteen and Vinnie Moore—I was all into that shit. And for me, Guns N’ Roses was like yeah, it has an interesting vibe, but this is not my gig.

If look at American music, it’s very blue rhythm-based, especially Guns N’ Roses. It’s blues-based music. Generally, even metal in America is blues-based. It’s because of the culture. That’s the music you hear in the background. If you look at European music, it’s classical-based. Here, most of the things are built out of rhythm. It’s all the feel, the rhythm and the grooves. You go to Europe and it’s all the harmonies. You can put together a 32-piece orchestra and everybody plays something a little bit different, and it works. So everything’s based on those harmonies. So if you take those bands, everything from Iron Maiden to Children of Bodom, the harmonies between the guitars or keyboards or bass guitars—whatever the fuck you have, trumpets, I don’t care—but the harmonies. And I grew up in that.

So for me, something that is really blues-based is not happening. Something that’s very groove-oriented, like Pantera, with huge fucking grooves in it, that works. If it’s too bluesy, I don’t like it. Even if you look at Five Finger Death Punch, I think musically it’s actually between the two because I have that background, the harmony thing. I always think about that when I write music. It’s always like, OK, one guitar does this, here’s a chorus, I have to have a harmony in the back. And then over the guitars, vocals—it all has to build. It can’t be like, OK, the bass guitar plays the same as the rhythm guitar. That doesn’t work for me. I need to hear the harmonies. So I build on that and I take the American grooves, these big, fat power grooves. And that’s the secret, I would say, of Five Finger Death Punch, this mix of Euro and American music. That’s what gives a different sound.

You mentioned Pantera. How much fun was it last year to tour with Vinnie Paul?

He was cooking Five Finger Death Chili on his bus. That was an awesome moment. There are a certain rules of a HellYeah bus. If you go on a HellYeah bus, you will be served drinks, straight-up drinks. They don’t mix drinks with other shit. You get it on the rocks. It’s drink it or wear it. Either you take it and drink it or they pour it on you. So it’s pretty interesting. You go on the HellYeah bus, you will not come off the bus sober. It was pretty fun, man. It’s Vinnie fucking Paul. I mean, goddamn, dude. You go on his bus and he’s cooking. “I’m making Five Finger Death Chili over here.” We have it on video. That was awesome. Or like I’m headbanging and I’m always look from the corners of my eyes and see him standing there, like fucking Vinnie Paul is standing on deck. I look at the other side, there were the Korn guys. This tour, the Disturbed guys come over every day. They do that. They play, if you’re not on stage, it’s almost like what happened? We’re always there supporting, drinking their Jäger. We play, one of those guys is always here. It’s a good thing when you play with bands and actually like their music. I listen to that shit anyway, you know? So it’s kind of cool that they like what we do, we like what they do. There’s a mutual respect. But that what was happening on that tour, too. Vinnie Paul was like, “Goddamn, you guys are kicking ass.” It’s like, “Dude, you’re Vinnie Paul, what the fuck?” It was awesome.

You got a lot of that stuff and the pits on video. Are you ever gonna do a DVD?

We’re really, really, really, really thinking about that because we have so much footage. It’s crazy footage. It’s interesting. From Family Values to this day, almost every show, the footage that we have is always something fucking crazy. So the hardest thing is gonna be what to put in it. I guess what we would have to shoot is just segue stuff because we have hundreds of hours. We’ve played like 350 shows or some ridiculous number and most of them are recorded. We have so much live footage that I don’t even know what we would put in the DVD ‘cause it’s just hard to pick. That we have and then there are crazy moments, obviously, that happen on tour. We have recorded a bunch of those. But we would probably have to record more of just us living life, the crazy shit we do—the paintball stuff, the Judo training, the beer bottle throwing. I don’t really drink, though. The other guys make up for it, though. I don’t really drink, but the rest of the band drinks for me. They make up for my non-alcoholism or whatever. Ivan has a fucking MySpace page called Ivan’s Liver.

[laughs]

And it’s reporting from the tour. “I got beaten up last night. I saw a bottle of Jäger coming through and then some whiskey. I’m feeling pretty bad today.” Daily reports from Ivan’s liver. Fucking hilarious. The tour diary is from Ivan’s liver. That’s Ivan’s liver writing our tour diary, like what happens on the road, dissected by percentage, like, “Today 25 percent of vodka, 30 percent of Crown Royal.” That’s pretty much what they drink, Crown Royal, Jäger and Vodka. That’s the holy triangle. That’s their trinity. Vodka, Crown Royal and fucking Jägermeister. And the Death Punch, what they drink called the Death Punch, is a mix of these three. There’s no way that you can survive it.

Do you have hopes for the new Metallica album?

Oh, man, I can’t wait. Some people told me that they heard six, seven songs off it and it’s crushing. So it’s gonna be interesting to see what happens. It would be a cool tour to get on. Obviously, it’s Metallica. Every-fucking-body and their mothers wants to get on that bill. Unlikely that it will happen, but that would be awesome. But obviously, we’ll go and see Metallica. So far, I’ve seen almost every tour, except for the first Kill ‘Em All. I was still living in Europe and was fairly young, so we didn’t see that. And Ride the Lightning tour, didn’t see. It’s gonna be awesome. Metallica. The posters are everywhere. Good times.

[yawns]

What should we add? The band is doing really good. We’re selling a lot of records. We’re really proud of that. The crowd is ridiculous. Now we’re getting nice equipment from companies, signature this, signature that. So there’s gonna be a lot of that coming, probably next year, probably January at NAMM, I would assume. Things are coming out, probably signature guitars, effects. Those things are in the works. That’s a good thing. Our gear situation, elevated. I have really nice amps. I can drop the names of, like, I play Diamond amps. Fucking brutal pieces. I have Dunlop strings. Dunlop actually has to make us special strings because I use these ship cables. You can tow a ship with it. My strings are extremely heavy strings. It’s ridiculous. I play baritone tuning, so it’s B to B tuning and my strings are 62, 213, which is really, really heavy. So Dunlop has to assemble string sets for me. Guitars are still BC Rich and we’re loving them. It’s good. It’s a good position we are in right now. Enjoying the ride, really, that’s what we’re doing. Sitting in a trailer, throwing pebbles at the cops over there. No, just kidding. We like the po-po.

Actually, it’s weird. I’m one of those guys, I like cops. It has nothing to do with anything, I’m just saying. To tell you the truth, at the end of the day, man, when shit hits the fan—when shit really hits the fan—these motherfuckers show up. They don’t know if they will go home or not and they show up. When you make that 911 call, dude, when somebody’s emptying shotgun shells at my house or whatever, or somebody’s robbing the fucking bank or whatever, these guys show up. In a communist country, you can’t really give shit to the cops ‘cause they’re just going to kick your ass. Back in Europe, where I grew up, you can’t fuck with the cops. They’re gonna just beat your ass and nobody gonna go to court, like, “Oh my god, it was injustice.” They just kick your ass and if you’re fucking loud about it, they’re gonna kick your ass again. So it’s different. Here, many people give shit to cops. They’re just like, “Fuck the cops, fuck this, fuck that.” But at the end of the day, dude, again, when shit hits the fan, these motherfuckers show up, dude. They pull your ass out of the ditch or the riverflow or whatever the fuck if you were stupid enough to drive into the flood or whatever. These guys, firefighters—I have a lot of respect for people in uniform. Soldiers. Not because of the fucking Iraqi war. It’s popular to support soldiers. I don’t necessarily support war or the whole idea of why the war happened or whatnot—not my business anyway. But men in uniform, they go for it. They go over there and when people are shooting at you, it’s pretty fucking interesting. It’s serious. Firefighters, cops, soldiers—they risk their lives.

What else you wanna know? Let’s talking about catering. The food is pretty fucking good!

[laughter]