Dear 14-year-old Robb,
music will be a way for you to make sense of your life, good and bad. Your life will take a path, and you’re going to learn whatever you need to learn, and do whatever you need to, and then take those lessons and apply them.
Your parents don’t want you to play music. Well, in one sense they’ll be supportive.
Your father will rent you a guitar for three months for $45, and promise to match anything you save if you keep on playing.
You’ll keep on playing, save up $200 and get a $400 Ibanez. In that sense it’s cool, but he still won’t get what you’re doing. By the time alcohol and drugs and girls come into it, him and your mom will be divorcing and you’ll be totally out of hand, fucking girls in your bedroom until 1am.
But you practise a lot. metallica are a huge reason you start playing, and you’ll see them opening for raven in front of 250 people. as a teenager from the Bay area, you’ll never believe it, but you’ll support them one day.
In your early 20s, you’ll still love playing music and want to make it. But when your band
Vio-lence is ending, you’ll start selling drugs to make money – and you’ll be good at it. You won’t get high on your own supply. even though you’re addicted to it, the logic will come over you that if you’re gonna sell it, you shouldn’t do it. You won’t be in a street gang, but you’ll be out of your mind on the streets. cops will bust everybody, but you’ll miss them by five minutes.
You’ll go to Slayer shows and make $2,000 selling speed – it’ll be like the jackpot at Slayer shows. listen: in a few years you’ll be supporting them, and it’ll be the first time you’ve ever left america.
this will be your life; parts of it will be fun, and parts of it will be terrifying. Some bikers will offer to front you a shit-ton of speed because they’ll think you’re some rising star, and it’ll scare the fuck out of you. You’re just trying to make money between being in a band, and it’ll make you wanna be in a band more. Dudes will want you dead. For a good six months you will not be safe anywhere you go. every step you walk out the door, you will have a gun and a knife. It will be a twitchy way to live. and then machine head will happen.
at the beginning of machine head, you will be pretty negative. In the band, you will have a saying: ‘this is the worst!’ You’ll have these neighbours who are college kids, always complaining about you playing loud music. You’ll think, ‘these fucking neighbours are the worst!’ then they will move out and a middle eastern guy will move in who is about to get deported. In a rash decision he will marry this lady who is the fucking scum of the earth, and she’ll move in with her teenage kids who are in a gang. then they’ll get divorced and she’ll file something so he can’t come in the house, and this family will still be living there. they’ll threaten your wife, steal your mail, have screaming matches and they’re not even paying rent.
they will finally get evicted. You’ll never utter the words ‘this is the worst’ again, because the world will show you just how bad it can be. It is a big lesson.
In machine head’s early days, some dude in the Bay area will say: ‘I can see you guys lasting five years.’ he won’t be saying it as a compliment, but in your head five years will sound like a long time. It won’t be easy, but it doesn’t need to be. We’re conditioned to believe that life is supposed to be easy, when we should be conditioned to know that life is gonna be hard with easy points. and that’s oK.
You’ll put a lot of your life into your first record, Burn My Eyes, and it will be this crazy, insane time. You will sign to roadrunner, who have Sepultura, Biohazard – all the best bands. Fuck yeah! there is so much happening that you won’t stand back and take stock of it until literally years later. You will hold your own against a Slayer crowd at its most vicious. I mean, you can open for