The Seven Deadly Sins (24 page)

Me? My gluttony is entertainment. TV, movies, comic books, books in general—I devour these like water to a parched body. But my true passion is music. I have been wading through music my whole life, even before I realized I had a knack for it myself. I have had the blessing of being exposed to music as long as I can remember. And it continues to this day: I am a voracious fanatic with a reservoir of knowledge, not only for the music itself but for the histories behind the many genres I enjoy. I want to know everything there is about the composers and the rock stars that have created my personal soundtracks. The great
thing is that I learn new things every day, from the little bits of ear candy in the mixes to the inspirations behind the lyrics to the vibes behind the scenes when certain songs were recorded. I find my way through the dark with a little help from my “friends,” most of whom are people I have never met. But they helped me grow up and gave me a reason to vent all my troubles into melodies and prose. I am a glutton for junk food music: Give me a cigarette and a microphone and I will sing along all night long.

By the by, I have discovered that there are many phases involved in the development of a true music connoisseur. The first phase is your early recollections of music, most likely picked up around the house as a toddler. I can remember hearing everything around my grandmother's house, from the Statler Brothers to Black Sabbath, the latter courtesy of my Uncle Alan. My mother was a fan of Motown and disco, so I had the Jackson 5 and the Village People running around in my head as well. Throw in a little bit of Beach Boys and Beatles and you can see that I grew up with major chord progressions and big harmony choruses on a Big Wheel ride to my destiny. Kids naturally grasp onto major keys because of how happy those tones feel and sound; children want to play and smile, so they want stuff like Christmas carols and Happy Birthday. The itsy-bitsy spider ran up the inner ear and into your subconscious: Do not fight it, that shit kicks ass.

The second phase of musical taste is from siblings and such, something I call the Babysitter Syntax. Especially if you have older brothers and/or sisters, you become aware of current music almost subliminally. Because I had no older siblings, my second phase came from my cousins and my babysitter, Anna. I heard everything from the Sex Pistols to Def Leppard, and I
suddenly realized I was a rock fan through and through. It was visceral and dangerous and I loved it so much that I could not wait to find more. Between the two of them, I learned about Mötley Crüe and Ratt, the Damned and Adam Ant and, of all things, Journey. I was eight years old when MTV first hit the airwaves, opening the floodgates for a pop music meltdown: Michael Jackson, Joan Jett, Pat Benatar—the list is ridiculous and it was all I had for a very long time. I performed in front of my first “audience” when I was ten, singing along to Journey's “Separate Ways” for my aunts and uncles in a Spartan living room in Indianola, Iowa. What the hell did I know? I was ten!

The third phase is what I consider the most crucial: discovering
your
music. You see, until that point we are all exposed to other people's music, which is all well and good, but it stops speaking to you after a while. You need something that feels like your own. You have your own generation to stand with and that includes your own set of problems. It also means you need your own music. That is when metal swept into my life.
Master of Puppets
was and still is the greatest album ever created. It was a turning point for me. I absorbed any and all metal music I could get my fucking hands on: Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeth, Testament, even skate thrash like D.R.I. and Suicidal Tendencies. I finally had a style that was
my
style. My listening started to expand at an alarming rate.

If you are a casual listener, you usually do not make it past phase two. You saunter along with the rest of the herd, clinging to the latest mesh of pop pathology and reminiscing about times when people were not so angry or loud when they made music. If you are anything like me, you stumble onto the next few stages in your development. The fourth phase is a sort of maturation of the younger aggressive stage. I started expanding past metal
after a while, going back to my punk roots and discovering this movement coming out of Seattle and Minneapolis and a handful of other places. From the Cure to Nirvana, alternative music—called “college radio” when I was listening to it—was speeding its way into the international psyche to destroy the bloated carcass that was Mainstream Rock and Pop Princess Crap. Alice In Chains and Soul Asylum steered me toward a future that was more Dylan than Dio, and I rolled around in it like a dog in a yard full of delicious bones. You could take the darkness and shape it to your will. You could basically do whatever you wanted. All bets were off.

And that brought me to my final phase: the creation and realization of my own music. I had been writing and playing my own stuff long before that, but up until that point, I had only been mimicking what I had been listening to. I was a response and call with an acoustic guitar and an attitude. It was all I knew. But when I heard “Would” by Alice In Chains, I knew there was so much more I could do and that I wanted to do. It was an expansion of the hunger in my soul that needed to sing and be. I had been looking my whole life for something to unlock the inner muse. I had finally found it. And I have never looked back. This glutton has scoured the entire musical landscape, taking twists and turns wherever the road gets crazy, from P Funk and Public Enemy to the Rolling Stones and Roxy Music. Mike Patton made me want to explore any and all vocal styles. David Lee Roth and Steven Tyler made me want to party and smile. Henry Rollins made me want to write and scream. Bob Dylan made me want to be a genius. Johnny Cash made me want to sit on a corner and smoke while singing sad songs. But James Hetfield made me want to be myself. I am a gluttonous child with the music of time in his veins. I always want more. I always want to make
more. I have no boundaries and no limits—I will push the lines and blur the borders. I have not heard the ultimate song yet, but then again maybe that is because I have not written it yet. I am enough of a fan to know that you can never put limits on your abilities just as you can never put limits on what you like. I have always said your heart knows better than your head does when it comes to the music you are drawn to. If you can get out of the way of your own prejudices, you can experience a universe of music. I stopped holding myself back a long time ago, and the payoff has been rich indeed.

Gluttony has bursts of brighter sides, but the darker sides can be vicious. An abused wife who refuses to run from her torturous husband becomes a glutton for fear because her capacity for denial makes her a target. It is twisted conditioning; I am not saying it is right. I am saying it happens all too often. The other reality is she fights back and either flees or kills the man. That woman can then become a glutton for life and happiness, spending the rest of her days feeling sunlight instead of raining fists and brutality. The epilogue becomes the karma that should befall the abusive man. There are no sins bad enough for him.

I have a hard time with this whole sin thing because it is the act that carries the stigma, not the aftermath. I mean what good is a bottomless hunger if you cannot try to fill it? Ask this: Are you a glutton if you have no idea what you are hungry for? Can you suffer if you do not know why? We are force-fed this moral bullshit from the moment we take our first breaths. People judge people, and we don't need a reason, just a scapegoat. Humans have been manufacturing targets out of each other since our molecules formed. It only makes sense that we would break it down to hunger as well. What do we care? We live our own hells every day. We feel our own pain. Is it the distraction that
gives a little respite? Are we truly so indignant that we sift through people's emotional trashcans to find something, anything, that will give us the superior edge? Nobody wants to feel alone in the world; they especially do not want to feel alone in their misery.

Drug addicts and alcoholics are gluttons for not only the chemicals they take but for the effects that are forthcoming. It can gloss over a different hunger entirely. Repression and delusions can only make a person long for the thrill of contentment. Getting high or drunk is meant to be a celebration, the old rituals of becoming one with “god.” Visions and lightning are a heavy effect. If these things make you feel like god, why would you not want that feeling all the time? But stamina, adaptation, and tolerance can build up fairly quickly. Suddenly you are drinking more and taking more and looking for all the right “reasons.” Dependency can destroy the greatest of us; so many talents have come and gone. But it is not the gluttony that ultimately kills them but the depression, and I mean that in the literal and metaphorical sense. Depression is a dark lonely place. A depression is also a hole. The parable is obvious.

I had an alcohol problem for a while. I was drinking two or three bottles of Jack Daniels a day. I just wanted to stay numb and drunk and oblivious to what I was doing so I could do something other than what I was supposed to do. I never stopped to realize that maybe I was doing it to mask something, something I did not want to face. Fortunately, it had never really affected me adversely when I was doing things like
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
, but as time went on, my darkness slowly took control. Fast forward to
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
: I was lined up to play “Bother” with a string quintet I had never met before in front of an audience of 35 million people. Yes, I was
nervous. Yes, I was unprepared. Yes, I guzzled my way through a bottle of whiskey just so I could do it. So my gluttony for alcohol, misery, and challenges all coalesced into a frothing experience that I have very little recollection of. I regret it, and I spend very little time on regrets. But this one sticks with me. I was in front of a national audience, really basically by myself, playing guitar and singing. I should have relished this moment. Instead, all I have to show for it is the cardboard
Tonight Show
nameplate from my dressing room with my name on it. I do not remember meeting Jay Leno, which I allegedly did. I have no clue if I was good or not. I have seen the footage and I still have no idea. All I remember is purchasing the Skid Row T-shirt that I wore for the performance. Everything after that is a blur. That should have been my first clue that my gluttony had gotten out of hand.

I was miserable, a broken poker player who had tried to buy his way out of too many bluffs. I was a ball of hate with whiskey in my fists. I did things I am not proud of during that time of my life, and that shame reinforces my resolve to be the very best person I can be. It took three years of being sober and another two years of being on my own to find that hunger, that black spot in the desert that the sun can never seem to get to no matter where it places itself in the sky. I have put my hungers in their proper places, and now I move a few days at a time through the remnants of a life that was almost wasted. So when I stepped onto that
Tonight Show
stage with Slipknot a year or so later, I was not petrified. I was not nervous. I was invigorated. I was there, strong and coherent, ready to show the world just how fucking good I really was. I did not give a shit if I fucked up or not—I was not going to be fucked up. So I would be myself and destroy, and that I did. I know now that my misery fueled my
gluttony to speed out of control. So I do not blame the drinking. I blame myself.

But that was not the first time. I have had an addictive personality since I was young. I have noticed that the term addictive personality is a euphemism for glutton, just like custodial guardian is a euphemism for parent. I am enchanted and consumed by things very quickly. I am like a mad scientist running with a dangerous hypothesis. Maybe this is because I grew up limited by what was in my brain and little else. I always had the feeling I was not like the other kids. But I also knew I could not relate to them very easily. So I overcompensated by making myself the goofball, the class clown. A front man/showman is nothing more than the class clown on a bigger stage. So I am a glutton for attention as well. I want all the eyes on me for as long as I can hold their fixations.

Self-esteem is a key factor to gluttony. When you feel incomplete, you crave something to fill the void. Psychologists describe it as compulsive eating. That in itself can lead to the other end of gluttony, anorexia, which is a glutton's way of “fixing the problem” that gorging oneself creates. Two opposite ends of a spectrum and the result is the same: a cycle is born. Stimulus and emotional abandon will converge and yet leave you empty. So now I obsess and acquire: I buy houses, guitars, collectibles, toys and gifts for my children, and anything else that covers up the remnants of that kid who woke up in a dumpster, feeling like so much trash for the compactor. I chain smoke and binge drink and overthink and self-diagnose till my eyes boil and my chest hurts. I buy shitty T-shirts to match my shitty jeans and my shitty shoes, all so people do not notice my shitty jackets or my shitty haircut. I am a reaction in a world of practiced moves. I
wish I knew who created this monster. Then again, I guess I do know who created it. I just wish the answer were not me.

So, essentially, my mind searches for distraction. There it is: I am a glutton for inspiration. I try to weed it out wherever I can, and I have become adept at it. My brain races like a freight train on rocket fuel and I forget more good ideas than I write down. I become fixated and one-minded until all I can see is the final outcome. Then all I can do is wait for the fruits to be revealed. I will get songs stuck in my head that I have not even written or recorded yet. I do not mean melodies or lyrics—I mean full-blown compositions. I can think of nothing else. I can focus on nothing else. It is the source of my greatest songs. It is also why it basically took me two weeks to write this book. When the spirit takes me, I have no control, and the spirit is all around me. The disparaging echo rattles around in my tenement and gives me a decent dose of black lung, all the while teaching me there is a sea just waiting to be established in the valleys of my heart.