Kyle Sanders
It’s a fragile time for Texan metallers Hellyeah, who return with a new album and a new drummer, having lost Vinnie Paul Abbott last year. We meet bassist Kyle Sanders
Hellyeah’s bassist discusses life after the premature death of his band’s founder member, Vinnie Paul Abbott
Welcome Home, the sixth studio album from Hellyeah, is the last recording made by Pantera founder member and drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, who succumbed to heart failure in June 2018 at the age of only 54. As Pantera fans will recall, his younger brother ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott also died young, having been murdered on stage by a deranged gunman in 2004: that’s a whole lot of tragedy for one family.
Regrouping after their loss, Hellyeah have recruited sometime Stone Sour drummer Roy Mayorga and are resuming their live schedule – but it’s a strange time for the band, understandably enough. Bassist Kyle Sanders, whose brother Troy plays bass in Mastodon and is a regular in these pages, brings us up to speed with what’s going on.
It’s a sad time for your band, as well as an exciting one, presumably.
Extremely, yeah. Emotions are peaking on both ends, because there’s a lot of pride in everything that we pulled off and that we’ve done, but it’s also extremely hard and painful to get back on the horse and see the record through.
The great thing is that Vinnie got to put down all the drum tracks for the record before he passed away.
Oh, I couldn’t imagine doing this if he had just partially finished the record or anything like that. The way things worked out, we had the skeleton of all the music bed laid down, all the basic guitars, bass, and drums, but Chad [Gray, Hellyeah singer] still had a lot of work to do. He was behind on the lyrics and we were way ahead on the music, so everyone gave high fives to each other, made arrangements to take a break from the studio, and said, ‘We’ll get back in a couple of months when Chad catches up’.
What was it like for you as a bass player to be in a rhythm section with Vinnie Paul?
I’m lucky, man. My whole career, I’ve played with some of the most amazing drummers you could hope to work with. I’ve gotten really comfortable with playing in solid rhythm sections. I was always a fan of Pantera, so in the very beginning I was kind of star-struck, but he was such a normal guy that it wasn’t intimidating. We were all doing it for the same reason: we loved music and we loved playing together. It wasn’t until I stepped outside the box, when I went home from a tour or the studio, that I realised people were freaking out and saying, ‘God, you’re playing with Vinnie Paul!’
As bass players, we understand drummers, because it’s our role to lock in with how they feel, so we have to study what they do.
Exactly. And that understanding is important because drummers are a different breed all the way around. They think differently. Most of the guys in bands will agree that a drummer is a different kind of entity – they’re kind of an enigma.
You’re an Orange amp user and a Warwick bass player, correct?
Yeah, for sure. I started playing my first Warwick in 2002, and I’ve been hooked on them ever since. I only play Warwicks now. When you find what you like, then you kind of stick with it. The Corvette was my first one, and since then I’ve got a Thumb bass too, which is cool on certain songs, and it’s all Streamer Stage IIs on every other one. As you say, they go into Orange amps and cabinets. I’m lucky enough to live in Atlanta, where Orange is outside of the UK. It’s their home base and warehouse, so I can go down there whenever I need something fixed or I need to replace something. They’re awesome people and it’s amazing gear, so it’s a combination of my fingers, Warwick and Orange. That’s my sound.
Are you strictly a four-string guy, or have you ever dabbled with more?
I’m mostly a four-stringer. When I was in my previous band, Bloodsimple, I had a couple of five-strings because we tuned down to drop C, but I realised that the Warwicks could easily hold their own when tuning down with a four-string, so I could get away with it. I only play a five on one song now, where’s there’s a low B part. I play a Warwick five-string Stage II on that song, just for the low B, but other than that, everything I do uses four-strings.
How did you get started as a bass player? It was me and John Connolly, who is the guitar player in Sevendust now. We used to live down the street from each other. We were always air-guitaring and drumming in our bedrooms. Then he started playing drums, and I picked up a guitar, but I immediately started playing with my fingers with my picking hand. I thought, ‘You know what? I think I’m a bass player’, so I traded it for a bass after seeing the Cliff Burton VHS tape, Cliff ’Em All. Something about that really struck a chord with me: I was like, ‘That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and that is what I want to do for the rest of my life’. Between Cliff, Steve Harris and Geezer Butler, it expanded from there.
What were your early basses?
I play left-handed, and it seems to be easier now to find lefty stuff, but back then, I could not find one. I even hit pawnshops – and got nothing – so I had to find a right-handed bass that had a double even cutaway. I finally found a Lotus, which was almost like the Gene Simmons Punisher bass, in dark emerald green. It was a righty, so that was my first bass. The E string and volume and bass and and tone were up top, which was an awkward thing, but I found a music store who said, ‘We can custom-order a left-handed bass’. It was a ridiculous amount of money, but I got a Guild Pilot, which was my first real lefty. I’ve still got that one. I love that bass. After that, whenever I found a lefty, I would buy it, so I have a ’78 Precision and a ’76 Rickenbacker 4001, which was just like Geddy Lee’s, in black and white.
Have your Warwicks got special specifications?
The last one I got does. It was built to my specs. It’s a Streamer Stage II, but I only have the volume knob exposed. Everything else is internal because I don’t change my settings within the songs. Live, I play so hard and beat it up so much that I end up moving knobs around. Also, I always have right-handed guitar techs, so when they try and turn the volume down to tune the bass or whatever, they turn the bass down or the treble, and they’re always screwing my settings up. I got rid of all the exposed electronics except the single volume, and everything else is internal. It’s pretty much exactly what I like.
Tell us about Welcome Home. Can we expect some cool bass performances? Man, we did some awesome bass, working with [sought-after rock and metal sound engineer] Kevin Churko. We never had anybody dial in the tone so quickly. There’s a lot of bass and drum parts where the guitars drop out, which is always a highlight for a bass player: it’s just me and Vinnie ploughing through it. Everything was finished with the exception of one more song, which we wrote a few months after Vinnie passed and we finally got back together. It’s all acoustic, so I played an acoustic bass on that.
“I PICKED UP A GUITAR, BUT I IMMEDIATELY STARTED PLAYING WITH MY FINGERS. I THOUGHT, ‘YOU KNOW WHAT? I THINK I’M A BASS PLAYER’”
Are you going to be touring?
We are touring. It’s kind of a yin-yang thing. I’m dying to get back on tour, but at the same time, stepping onto that bus the first time, or being in the dressing room without Vinnie, is going to be so emotionally extreme. He was the heart of the band, so after he died we went back and forth for a long time, asking ourselves ‘What do we want to do?’ It would have been easy to say, ‘I can’t do this without Vinnie’, but this was his life. It’s all he cared about, and he would be so disappointed if we quit. It wouldn’t be right for us not to do anything, so we’re taking baby steps. There’s all kinds of talks about doing the full cycle and getting over to the UK and Europe and Japan and Australia, but we’re easing into it, instead of booking ourselves for the next year and a half.
I was wondering who you might get in to replace Vinnie, and Roy Mayorga is obviously an amazing candidate.
Yeah, he’s a stellar drummer. The main thing is that Vinnie respected him and vice versa. They both influenced each other. That was the bottom line. We had to have somebody who was close with Vinnie, who Vinnie put his stamp of approval on, and who we know that he would be proud to have fill in for him. We had to make sure it was right with everybody, not just the fans and not just us, but everything as a whole. So Roy is the man.