MEET THE MANAGER
The man behind the scenes of Avenged’s rise to fame, Larry Jacobson has seen his boys grow from hellraising upstarts into one of metal’s biggest bands
WHAT DID YOU DO BEFORE MANAGING AVENGED?
“I had run Giant Records for 10 years. We sold it to AOL Time Warner in 2001, I went to Capitol and I was the number-two executive there. And then I left to start my own company and I stumbled across this band that was living with their parents at the time…”
HOW DID YOU FIRST HEAR OF THEM?
“Not long after I left Capitol, I called up our money managers to say, ‘Look, I’ve just started my own business,’ and the guy that I usually dealt with was out that day, so his partner picked up the phone. He said, ‘My brother owns an independent label [Hopeless Records]. Would you mind meeting up with him and giving him some tips?’ A few weeks later I met him and he handed me a stack of CDs. Later that night, I started throwing them on in my study, and this one-minute26-second song came on the stereo. I flipped out and thought, ‘This could be the biggest band in the world.’
That song was To End The Rapture.”
WHAT WAS GOING THROUGH YOUR HEAD AS YOU WERE LISTENING?
“I loved Matt’s voice. I loved the screaming. To me, nobody had screamed that way. I loved all the harmonies. I loved all the punk rock influences that you didn’t really hear other people doing. They were also writing all of these long, meandering songs. I loved that the songs had different parts to them that all worked. This is why I love managing this band and getting new music from them: seven minutes
into a song, they’ll still surprise you.”
HOW DID YOU FIRST MEET AVENGED IN PERSON?
“I drove down to Orange County. They weren’t playing, but there was a show at Chain Reaction. M. Shadows was there – I think he was 20 years old. I introduced myself and he didn’t want to know me at all, but I persuaded him to let me take him and the band out to dinner, so we
went to the Rainbow in Hollywood – the classic hard rock Mecca. We sit down, the band turns to me and says, ‘We don’t want a manager. We don’t want some guy telling us what to do!’ By the end of the night I was managing them.”
AVENGED USED TO GET INTO A LOT OF TROUBLE. HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO NAVIGATE THAT?
“Some of it was brought upon them by the media, and some of it was the band’s doing. I’d tell them, ‘You know, that’s not gonna help you move the ball down the field.’ I believed then and now that they’re one of the most important bands in history, and that stuff was all just gonna get in the way of that and could cheapen them. First of all, it’d cheapen them because it’s not the real story: the real story is their artistry, not the shenanigans. Second of all, it’d cheapen them because they’re not the first band to do that! With Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses, rock bands being crazy is familiar. So for them to have the reputation of being the next Mötley Crüe instead of being a truly great rock band in their own right, how does that help? But there’s also a positive to it: as a person who loves hard rock, part of what it thrives on is danger and mystique. That’s something that you don’t really see today. But we’re still paying for destroyed hotel rooms to this day. Thank you, Johnny Christ!”
WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE AVENGED GO NEXT?
“I want them on the cusp of new music delivery. The world has changed: we’ve become a streaming society when it comes to how we consume music and we’ve become a televisionon-demand culture when it comes to how we watch TV. I think that TV has surpassed movies in terms of freedom as an artform and, creatively, I would like to see this band experiment and take chances in that direction as well.”
“WE’RE STILL PAYING FOR DESTROYED HOTEL ROOMS TO THIS DAY” BUT LARRY ISN’T BLAMING ANYONE IN PARTICULAR <COUGH> JOHNNY <COUGH>