By John Pecorelli
Alternative Press magazine cover story
“Chino fuckin' Moreno, the king of metal!” screams a giddy Australian kid, all sweat and spikes, as a bouncer drags him past the band dressing room. Moreno, all sweat and spiky hair, is sprawled out on the floor pouring bottled spring water over his body, doesn't notice. He's exhausted, hot, missing a shoe, and nursing a bum knee—all from the night's gig. A few moments later the dressing room window crashes in, and bouncers scramble to jock the vandal. “It's okay, it's okay, he didn't mean to!” Moreno yells at the bouncers. Just an overzealous fan—like the one who threatened to kill himself a few days earlier at a local record store unless he got tickets to this gig.
Welcome to the Deftones' first Australian tour.
Despite the occasional mishap, however, Moreno reckons things are pretty good for the Deftones. In the living room of his 14th-floor Kings Cross hotel suite, Moreno takes a swig of Victoria Bitter and remembers the not-too-distant past.
“It's weird—I'm sitting in a hotel overlooking Sydney right now when nine years ago him and me were sitting in high school in class talking about music and listening to Slayer tapes,” says Moreno. “He'd have one headphone and I would have the other headphone in, you know what I'm saying? I think it's so cool—the fact that we used to skateboard around all day talking about Suicidal Tendencies and now we're here. And we have no boundaries on our music, we can make whatever we want.”
“And we really haven't changed much,” says the wiry, hyperactive Cunningham. “We're the same motherfuckers.”
If things are good, that's only as it should be—this is a great band. But there are other great bands in the world to whom fate has not been so kind, if fate has anything to do with making your own way in the world. Fact is, the Deftones have been playing their own hand most of the way here. Sprouting from metal roots in Sacramento, California, the then-quartet (before the addition of turntablist Frank Delgado) wasn't about to ape the current musical climate. Not if their recorded output is any indication, anyway: It's full of slow, chunky death-metal riffs, to be sure, but tempering that are passages of moody, impressionistic ambient noise and Moreno's distinct vocals, which draw as much from the vertical-haired Morrisey and Robert Smith as they do anyone in the hard-rock singer scene. This duality was a fresh interpretation of an existing archetype, and commercially acceptable or not, this dynamic has characterized the band's music and collective personality ever since.
“We try to not be predictable. If there's gonna be any predictability there, we try and make it a little bit tasteful,” says guitarist Stephen Carpenter, whose imposing physical stature and generally stoic expression disguise a pretty warm personality. “It's all been done, you know. But are you just gonna take something, redo it, then put your name on it? Are you gonna try to make something interesting with what's already been done? Everyone has their own drive and their own end result of they want, but as a whole for us, we want something that satisfies us, not just musically but emotionally, and can fulfill our lives. This is what we love to do and we put our hearts into it.”
Moreno attributes his end of the dynamic to something else. The man who penned “Bored” on the debut album and who claimed to be “dying of boredom” on the follow-up says his motivation is simple: boredom.
“I have a short attention span,” he laughs. “I'm really fickle. I always need to be satisfied. I constantly have to have something inspiring going on, and if I'm not inspired, then I'm bored as hell. I have to be doing something creative, or listening to somebody be creative, or watching somebody be creative or doing something. If not I just have to be completely drunk.
“If our music was one-dimensional, it'd be boring,” he continues. “I think that's why we keep the tension. I keep my own. I'm a really moody person with a gang of personalities—not like a schizo, but I have different moods that I swing in and out of all the time in a day.And it goes through the music that way.
He motions to his bandmates. “Their music's really dynamic, and I can feel myself escalate from feeling really warm and feeding off everything, and there's points where you spurt a little out here, a little out there. Then there's times where you let it all out, then take it back in...”
That night at the Iron Duke Hotel—a rock club in the Sydney enclave of Newtown that looks more like New York 's Lower East Side than anything in Olde England—Moreno backs up his talk. Though his pre-gig ritual involves the ingestion of solvent-blue Gatorade mixed with vodka, Moreno's sharp as a cat's claw on stage. One minute he's folded up inside himself, fully detached, and the next, say, the explosive chorus of “My Own Summer (Shove It),” he's all fire, and usually finds himself surfing the crowd or diving headlong into it, his shoes and knees be damned. It's all about ebb and flow, the conservation and release of energy, the lull and lash. And Morenos back-up is no less dynamic: The records only hint at the kind of power these boys blow out live, when they're not trancing out a crowd with hypnotic textures. It's nearly Zen—and this is a “new metal” band?
“It gets old being tossed in there all the time,” says Delgado of the genre tag. “It's bound to happen though. People put you somewhere, they gotta relate you to something. Bands like Korn blew it wide open so people are gonna relate us there, even if they haven't heard us yet.”
“It's not that we look down on that scene or anything like that,” says Moreno. “And we all try to lump shit in with something—it's really comfortable for people to categorize everything, especially music. But I feel more comfortable thinking that what we've got is totally our own.”
Bassist Chi Cheng notes the universality of lumping, but prefers the European version to the American style. The Deftones recently played a gig there opening for Bob Dylan—the only lumping involved in that festival's planning was that the bands be good.
“They categorize things the way Americans should,” Cheng says. “Right now Americans are concentrating so much on ‘new metal' and ‘jungle' and ‘trance' or whatever, and in Europe it's either ‘good' or ‘bad.' I can't think of too much stuff in the world that really gets my goad, but I think America almost demands mediocrity at this point. Maybe it's just that our lives are so difficult right now that we don't want anything passionate, anything to stir us up any more than necessary, I don't know,” he continues. “It just bums me out to see Georgia O'Keefe paintings in hotel rooms, and to read mediocre writers, and to listen to the radio, where every song has got to have a little catchy hook, like a husk of a song, like there's no soul inside of it. I mean, before MTV, you had to judge albums by albums. You'd listen to ‘em. And we've got like 8 million Diehard and Lethal Weapon movies, which are fine once in a while, but it seems like nobody's putting out anything deep.
“I think the best things in life just take in and change your life instantly,” Cheng summarizes. “Like the first Tom Robbins book I ever read, just changed my life. The first time I listened to The Harder They Come soundtrack, something changed the way I pictured music. Or certain movements in music or painting, or even normal things—like the first time I put my feet in the Mediterranean, that changed my perspective.”
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Lump the Deftones with “new metal” or anything else “new” (in the trendy sense) if you must, but consider that their career has been one of slow, methodical stages. There was the informal jam Moreno set up between his fellow skateboarder pal Cunningham and guitarist Carpenter 10-odd years ago, playing death-metal covers and just having fun. Then there was the inclusion of Cheng and the next big step—a local Sacramento gig a few years later. All the while the band was working on its own unique sound, cementing a local following while opening for “big” bands (that is, any band from out of town touring clubs). Word spread, as did bookings throughout California. A few years later, an industry rep caught their live set at L.A.'s Coconut Teaszer and rushed the band's demo to Madonna manager Freddie DeMann, who eventually signed them.
Moreno, fresh from the bottle shop with a Stolichnaya Lemon Russki, explains. “We just persisted. We weren't trying to hype up and push ourselves in peoples' faces so much as play live shows and let word of mouth do it. It's always been a real slow progression for our band, and it still is. If you step back for a minute and look at everything, I think that is what a good career has to consist of; being able to grow with your audience, never getting head-over-heels in anything, never getting over-hyped.”
While the band hasn't gone out of its way to not have a megahit single—though their listener-challenging sound would seem to preclude one in Mall America anyway—hype is clearly something the Deftones have consciously avoided. Aside from the inherent distastefulness of it, there's no quicker way to alienate the underground audience the Deftones hold dear than to associate with corporate grandstanding and overtly commercial “check me out” histrionics. Not to mention the dreaded catchall every band worth its populist salt fears: sell-out. For the Deftones, it's so far, so good.
“Yeah,” says Moreno, “but if we ever have a hit single or a video I'm sure a handful of kids will say that, which is totally understandable. I was just like that as a kid, you know? When you're in school and you're trying to find your identity and see something that's special to you written on some jock's backpack, then yeah, it's totally understandable. But hopefully the music will prevail. If the shit's good, and they're still at home in their bedroom listening to it because they can't deny that they like it, then fuck it. It all goes back to not being over-hyped. If you just let your music speak for itself, it's gonna stand stronger.”
“Lately I've been personally frustrated,” Cheng confesses. “I'm not trying to sell out, but we've been doing this going on 10 years. I have doubts sometimes. At this point it'd be jarring to switch professions, but I'm creeping up on 30. I need to start putting money away for the future. It's a drag that I even need to start thinking about it. I'm pushing it out of my mind—we should just keep doing what we've been doing. No matter what, we're never gonna compromise, but I don't know...”
“The thing is,” says Moreno to Cheng, “you're a smart person. The last thing I want—god forbid—is that something happens and we don't become a band in the next year or something. But if so, fuck, man, I'll find something else to do that's gonna be creative. It'll all happen, and if it doesn't happen, then it was meant not to happen. We're all those kind of people.”
“Yeah,” agrees Cheng, “I've got a lot of dreams that I still want to fulfill before my life is over, and some of them are not music-oriented at all, and it just gets to me sometimes. It's a weird balance where you have to make sure you're doing the right thing and not worry about the other consequences.”
Among Cheng's goals: Going back to school and getting a teaching certificate. Not to “mold” kids into some socially acceptable cog, he says, but merely to hang around them and learn, which Cheng sees as a “very humbling” experience that he's picked up from time with his own child. Cheng is a also a practicing Buddhist who'd someday like to join a monastery, but that one's on indefinite hold as it's not exactly compatible with touring—or with his wife's wishes at the moment. Meanwhile, Moreno's also got a family back home—and his humbling experience has more to do with his wife.
“It's weird,” he says, “we've been married like four years and I still bug out about what she thinks of me. I think that's what keeps our relationship cool—we both still try to impress each other in roundabout ways. It makes me realize how much I really care for this person. I really do care what she thinks of me, man. Like sometimes at home I wake up in the morning and I'll go in bathroom and look in the mirror and go, [horrified tone] ‘Fuck!' and do my hair real quick. I don't wanna walk out there looking all tore up.”
Love? Families? Teaching certificates? Monasteries?! Not exactly rock star behavior, all of this. Carpenter likes it that way, and he considers it yet another example of Deftones independence from the norm.
“I always tell people, we're only rock and roll because that's what our music sounds like,” he says. “But we're not. We're not here to follow anyone's rules, we're not out here to do what's been done. It's more about our relationships with each other. The music just happens to be what we love to do. And the music business just happens to be what we want to make a living at it. I'm not in this business by any means to do what anyone tells me to do. In fact, if someone tells me something to do, I can't wait to not do it their way. I'd rather do what I want, make my own mistakes, and deal with them then do what someone else told me—and be fucked up anyway.”
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That's the yin, now for some yang. The Deftones' 1995 debut album, Adrenaline, was a real punisher. Ten tracks that stood well apart from anything in the skate-punk/metal scene from which the band supposedly belonged, producer Terry Date eschewed the fancy soundboard work in favor of a raw, almost live feel. Moreno establishes his turf on the first track, the stinging “Bored”: Whispering through the loud parts, howling through the relative calm, he lets fly lyrical abstraction like “Pissed and combined before me on I, and we come clean it gets worse it's more” before settling into the maddening lament, “I get bored!” Then there's “7 Words,” half-rage, half-revenge, this is the most aggressive middle-finger anthem in the band's repertoire. Adrenaline encompasses a variety of moods, but one distinct impression it leaves is the notion that these cats are pissed.
“I was 17 when I wrote ‘7 Words,'” says Moreno, “and at that age for some reason I was going through this part of my life—probably about six months—when I was getting in fights all the time. I was just this angry person who always thought the world was against me. And anytime anyone would say anything negative toward me or the band, like right away—violence. I'm not like that anymore. I think when I really learned my lesson was this time we played a show in Bakersfield, California, and somebody in the crowd was talking shit or whatever. He ran up on the stage like he was gonna do something and I punched him in the jaw and thought that was that. So after the show the guy came back with a gang of his friends—but they didn't get me, they got Abe, and they really fucked him up; they broke his jaw, his collarbone, all kinds of shit, right? My whole thought process changed right then. I don't know, you can't be mad at somebody for being ignorant. Once I learned that, I mellowed out a lot. But going back to the ‘7 Words'—I can still do the song, once the music kicks in, you find that place and you can go back and get in touch a little bit. But I don't really feel that way much anymore.”
The difference in tone is evident in the band's latest record, last year's Around the Fur. It's plenty coarse and plenty aggressive, but the emotional range is greater in every song. Delgado's impressionistic washes of ambient noise and Carpenter's blurred guitar textures weave between chainsaw guitar riffs and cracking snare, while Cheng's unique bass work provides rhythmic and tonal counterpoints to the guitar. Fur is an ambitious, perhaps even a transitional record for the band.
“I think it's a taste of what we're trying to create,” says Moreno, popping another Victoria Bitter. “I can't wait to do our next record, man. There's so many ideas that I have; a lot more Frank, a lot more sounds—not sound effects but sounds—that you wouldn't expect to hear with something that's heavy. Because regardless, it's going to be heavy. I can say it's not all day long, but Stephen, who does the majority of the songwriting, is gonna make that shit heavy regardless.”
“He comes up with a lot of cool soft stuff too though,” Cheng interrupts. “When we started recording Fur, I was tripping because there wasn't much heavy stuff he'd written for it. So I wrote ‘Rickets' with Abe because I was just thinking, ‘Shit, Stephen hasn't come up with one heavy thing yet. So maybe I'll write the heavy stuff!'”
“Well, I think we're all starting to realize that we could take this shit in any direction and it'd be heavy, whether it's soft and slow and melodic,” says Delgado. “Even our slow song, ‘Mascara,' that's a heavy fucking song.”
“Maybe we have a different definition of heavy,” says Cheng. “Like anything Theolonius Monk does is heavier than Pantera to me. He was nuts, so out there. And bebop was at its peak, man—so if he's considered out there, then he's way out there, because everybody else was experimental back then.”
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Moreno's got some things to heavy about, but he ain't. Raised in a tough neighborhood in Sacramento, where he hung up his red jump suit for good at the age of 10 due to warnings that the “blue rags” would nail him, it wasn't until attending junior high in a different neighborhood that he found out other kids usually played in parks, not around streetlights. He's as well-spoken and intelligent as any college grad you'll meet, and maybe it shouldn't be all that surprising to learn Moreno dropped out of high school, given the quality of public schools and the limitless abilities of a strong-willed kid to teach himself, but it still is.
That aside, Moreno exhibits a strong aversion to whining and complaining—and a healthy suspicion of faux artiness. In fact, he winces when the band is described as “cerebral,” and though he harbors a deep admiration of Robert Smith, Nick Cave, and Morrisey, he refers to angst-ridden frontmen as afflicted with “lead singer's disease.” Moreno's only real trouble, he says, is that he starts to “bug out a little bit” if he goes a couple days without the sauce. In fact, one thing the entire band agrees on, the whole point of the Deftones was meant to be fun. Even if their definitions of fun differ somewhat.
“Me personally, I have a good time by being depressed,” he says. “Not like so utterly depressed that I want to commit suicide or anything like that. But I like sad things. If I get happy, I get excited by listening to sad music—not like sad events like, say, the bombing in Ireland today, which did not make me happy. But a certain amount of melancholy, this sadness, like the gloomy weather that we've been having, those kinds of things excite me. That's my fun, that's what I'm into. When we all get together, that's our main goal. If we're not having fun—and it doesn't have to be like a goofy loud time—but if we're not excited, then something's up.”
The band's slightly askew sense of fun is often in evidence, whether it's Moreno asking a self-professed riot grrl in the elevator to do his laundry, Carpenter hurling a TV out an upper-story window, Zep-style, in Fort Worth, or the band's constant and generally ruthless verbal banter back and forth. Case in point, Moreno on Cheng's early bass playing: “The fucker's rhythm was way off —he was on some other shit, man. Some Asian rhythm on the other side of the earth!”
But Carpenter sobers right up when asked if the Deftones are, in fact, some kind of sinister party band.
“I've said it before: We want make music that's tasteful, that's timeless,” he says. “No matter who you are, if you like music and you're open to it and your ears are open to everything else, I truly believe you'll love our music. It's not about any issue, it's about just making good music, and there's nothing but feeling in it, all kinds of feeling: sadness, humor, love, pain, hate, confusion, it's all there. We joke around and do all kinds of cheeseball shit too, but that's just another little piece of who we are as people, not of who we want to be as a band.”
Maybe the secret to the Deftones' success lies beyond the fact that they're an absolutely phenomenal live act and a gutsy recording band with a true personal vision that's not intimidated by industry muscle. Maybe it goes beyond the fact that they've got a sharp sense of balance in their approach to music, business, and life in general. Maybe it even goes beyond the fact that they can rip each other up verbally while spending nearly every waking hour together—without going nuts. Maybe the reason for it is that all those things are inextricably linked. These boys are like brothers.
“Our shit's just so tightly knit—our band and our friendships,” says Moreno. “We grew up together and we make music together. Not even that we all think the same, because we don't. But we all feed off each other immensely. That's the only reason I can think of that explains why we are where we are. I couldn't say that anybody has done us any favors—besides Matador for signing us. But if they wouldn't have signed us, we would still have persisted and made our own records. Maybe we wouldn't be in Australia right now, maybe we'd be in our hometown playing tonight, but I'd still be excited doing music. Everything we've learned about this business, we've learned together.”
Carpenter agrees.
“As far as the music business goes, we can do anything we want,” he says emphatically. “And the bottom line is we're gonna do what we want, not what someone tells us. Some people in the industry might not like it, might not agree with it, accept it or anything else, but you know what? That's only because they're too afraid to do it themselves. I can say with confidence in myself and us as a band that we're gonna make fairly good decisions most of the time. We're gonna make some wrong ones too. So be it—that's life. I ain't gonna trip on it.”
AP asked the Deftones to sum up their CDs.
Adrenaline
Delgado: [Producer] Terry [Date] did a good job of capturing the band's live sound. Definitely a good way to do a first album. And he's a person who knows how to get it out of everyone.
Moreno: I'd always get mad at him for his suggestions—and he'd always prove me wrong in the long run. He's inspirational, but he never lets you know that you're doing anything good. It kinda punks you in a way, in a roundabout way it makes you work harder because he never really lets you know that he's satisfied.
Delgado: I think we opened him up a little bit. That Smiths song...
Moreno: Yeah, we covered a Smiths song and he was like, ‘I don't care if you guys do it, but I'm not putting my name on this pussy shit.' [laughs] So we produced it ourselves. Then the next record, we ended up doing a Duran Duran song, and that was probably just as pussy if not more pussy than the Smiths cover—and he was cool with it.
Around the Fur
Moreno: We wrote that record in two months, and recorded it in two months, man. So it's like think about four months of your life and you made a record. It's beautiful that we were able to do that. And I think Fur' s starting to take us a new direction. Still heavy, but the right way to be heavy.
Cunningham: Heavy doesn't have to be full-on to be heavy.
Carpenter: The real difference between the two records is that our first record is all songs from being kids. And the new one is something we wrote, recorded, and mixed in four months. We're the same people, but we've grown up. We've matured in our own lives.
AP took the opportunity to check up on some of the tones some of the Deftones are listening to at the moment.
Moreno: A random sampling of singer Moreno's personal CD case revealed, among other things, albums by PJ Harvey, the Smiths, System of a Down, Bjork, and (inexplicably) Rush.
Cunningham: Cunningham listed the following wax as heavily influential: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Prince's Purple Rain. Hendrix's Axis Bold as Love. The Police's Outlandos d'Amour. And anything by the Surf Nazis.
Delgado: Right now in my CD player is New Wet Kojak [a side project of members from Girls Against Boys]. Pretty much any Pharaoh Sanders. When I'm at home playing for me, I spin a lot of jazz. And Miles Davis—I still can't even believe Bitches Brew. Oh yeah, for rock, Quicksand.
Collectively: Bad Brains.