Randy Blythe
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Coming up next on Passion Struck. Fear is a real MF-er, a top shelf grade A son of a bitch that will let you ruin your whole week if you let it run the show. That's a sentence in the book. And in this world of so much information coming at us all the time, it's hard to filter out what we should be worried about and what we shouldn't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And just started externalizing that anger. And that's why the punk rock scene so appealed to me because most of the lyrics were political or societal based around social issues at the time. And I can transfer that anger in a righteous way to what I view as valid or just causes, things you should be mad about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Yes. And I think it was a combination of things because I came a little bit later to drinking than you did. I drank and did drugs pretty heroically for 22 years, right? I mean, Olympic level drinking, especially for a skinny dude like myself, I could... put away a case of beer a day, no problem, along with shots and whatever else I managed to shovel down my gullet because I was a garbage can.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Right about my senior year in high school, a couple of things happened. I got my first real serious girlfriend. And she was an extremely pretty girl. And everybody was all of a sudden very confused. They're like, how did you get that? How did you pull that off? And I'm like, she's an artist. We're talking about the cure. She and I listened to the cure together. So. I got my first real girlfriend.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I'm going to this art school. I'm becoming more and more involved in this sort of underground music culture. And I'm finding my people. But at the same time, during that same time, I started doing some drinking on the weekends with some friends of mine who we used to party in their garage. And that really made things better. Finally, I felt okay.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
You mentioned talking to girls or feeling comfortable in social situations. That did all that for me. It removed this self-consciousness or this feeling like these people are looking at me and judging me to where I don't care. So what if they are? I'm having a good time. And at first, alcohol provided that sort of relief. It lifted that horrible feeling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
blanket, that wet blanket of what I felt was societal judgment on me to where I did not care. And it was wonderful for a little while. And that's a very common thing you hear. I know a lot of sober people. I've been sober for 14 years now. I know a lot of sober people and almost all of them will say male or female, whatever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
All of a sudden I was a, I could talk to members of the opposite sex or if they were gay to the same sex, I could hang out and go in public. And I felt a part of, I felt as if something had changed. And that was very much the case for me. It just made life easier. It was an answer to this unnamed issue. I had this unnamed problem because it wasn't,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
At 17 years old, I was not sitting there analyzing myself through a Freudian eye. Well, you're excluded. You have societal anger. You're self-judgmental, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was just like, something is wrong. Something is wrong here. And then all of a sudden, these few things happened and things started to feel right. And alcohol was definitely a big part of that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I realized that more and more. The more I stay sober, the longer I stay sober, I look back at my earliest drinking and I realize it was fairly abnormal even for like people go to college and they drink some or they drink a little bit in high school. Mine was a bit more intense. And I'm realizing that and seeing the signs now only with the benefit of hindsight.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I've seen them. I don't think we have them in Virginia.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
A recreational beverage distribution manager.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I bet it did. I was a... recreational pharmaceutical salesman myself for a little bit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Through miscreants and criminals, they brought you to this world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
In the beginning, we were booking our own tours. We weren't traveling around on a tour bus or anything. We were in a series of constantly breaking down condo line vans. I mean, we've literally changed the transmission in a van in a Walmart parking lot before. Crazy stuff. And we were playing mostly like VFW halls or people's basements, punk rock squats, things like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And hoping for maybe enough gas money to get down the road. and maybe a plate of spaghetti to eat for dinner and someone's floor to sleep on. That's what we'd say. Hey, on stage, can anyone give us a place to stay tonight? Because there was no money for a hotel or anything. At that time, it was very exciting because you're doing this, you're doing this not, certainly not for any reason,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
hope of monetary compensation whatsoever it's for the love of playing music it's for this thing you want to express yourself that's how this was a manner i had found by loosely call it singing by singing in this band it was a manner of me expressing myself and surprise after a while for the first time in my life people i didn't even know started to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
enjoy the manner in which I was expressing myself artistically. So it was very gratifying, but it was also a very big adventure in those early days. Because like I said, we were not exactly making any money. It was just like, we're going to go out and wow, I get to go to Chicago and see what Chicago is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
That was about the furthest we made it before we eventually wound up going in tour buses eventually. And we wound up going to California and so forth. So it was very exciting, but it's also a great place to really develop and hone a taste for alcohol and other substances. Because you're not beholden to getting up in the office. And if you are drunk on stage, that was expected. That's the norm.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So you could get away with things that people at a normal job simply could not get away with. Right? I mean... Alcohol is my one true love. I managed to never get strung out on drugs. I do not know how because I get a ton of them. But I used to stand on stage and be like, who's got the drugs? Who's got the pills? And like magic, people would... come up and hand me drugs.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And that's not something you can do in a normal job. If you were going to go into your job at a law firm, you can't just stand up on desk and be like, all right, I want some cocaine. And who's got it? You'd be fired immediately. HR would come in with a security guard and carry you out. So live existing in that sort of environment was a great place to develop my alcoholism.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And it was a lot of fun at first until it wasn't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I mean, the part I'm talking about, as you mentioned, I really look at the history of where I'm going and so forth. And I... really love on going on tour i love going to go see where uh writers lived when they were back in their early days of their career for instance ernest hemingway a huge fan very obsessed with his
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
sort of lost generation period when he lived in Paris with Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein and all that stuff. So I'll go to Paris and I will walk the left bank and I will go have a coffee in the Dome or the Select, all the cafes where he wrote. And I'll go see where he lived and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Or I've been in Santiago in Chile and I will go to Las Chascona, which is Pablo Neruda's house in outside Santiago, one of his residences, and go through there and just look at the environment in which he created, in which he wrote. Or one of my favorite more modern authors, this guy Pat Conroy, who's a masterful storyteller from Beaufort, South Carolina.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I will go down there and walk through Beaufort, South Carolina and look up where he lived when he was a young school teacher there and was working on his first books, his beginning of his life as an author.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I will just look at these places and examine them and see the environment, or at least an echo of the environment that they existed in this place that brought forth this creativity from them. And I'll look and I'll examine it. And I get this feeling like, oh, I understand why. they would write about this why this place was so critical to them expressing themselves
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And it's just like a personal belief of mine that I think that sort of creative energy may linger. Maybe it's wistful thinking. I don't know. But I'd love to go and see these places and immerse myself in these places. And in my town in Richmond, Virginia, Edgar Allan Poe got his start there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I've been to where he had his first job at a newspaper and been to where his house was when he grew up and just sat around and thought about – wow, this place produced this person. And I'm thinking very much about the environment that they were in. And I look at what is there now. And then I think about my own environment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I think, what is it about wherever I am right now that makes me want to create? And I think that that sort of energy maybe one day will linger from me. Hopefully some young kid will be
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
cruising through the alleyways in richmond virginia and they'll be like who won that dude randy from lamb of god he used to walk through this alleyway because i did all of them any alleyway you walk through in the fan that's me and maybe this is where he came up with this idea for this song it's just something i really enjoy going to go see where artists work i don't know if that answered your question
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Yeah. And you're talking about the Beatles, not the biggest Beatles fan, but I've been to made of ale studios who to do like the, what became the inheritance of the peel sessions. John peel is a producer there who used to, have his own radio show, very influential in spreading new music in England.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
But we were in there and his producer, the guy who inherited the peel show was showing, he's like, see this two inch tape. This is just sitting in the corner, dusty. And he was like, the Beatles did a record on that tape machine. And I'm just like, wow. It's so cool. I just love seeing the little pieces of history and inserting myself in that history in a way. That's also important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
It's not just consuming these places, but I think it feeds my energy because like I said, I never thought we would ever make any money doing this music. My wildest, wildest dream was to play a club called CBGB in New York. Because that was the birthplace of punk rock. It's where the Ramones and Blondie and those guys got their start back in the early mid-70s, even before the Sex Pistols.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I thought maybe one day we'll get to play CBGB. And in 1997, I believe it was, it's 97 or 98, we got to play CBGB for the first time. And I walked on stage and I... It's it was just a dump, man. But so many great bands played there and it was such a great place to play. And I walked on stage and I felt as if I was walking into history.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I inserted myself into the noble history of that smelly, smelly club. And I did. We got to play it several times and no one can ever take that from me. It's something very dear to my heart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Sure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Okay, so I remember precisely when it happened because, like I said at first, alcohol really enhanced my ability to be social, to not feel like such a freak, and to feel more comfortable in my own skin. And so, naturally, I pursued that. I pursued that to great lengths, to Herculean lengths. And then
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
It stopped working and it stopped working a lot sooner than I thought, but because by then I was addicted to it. I was an alcoholic, so I drank and drank and drank and it would shut up my head a little bit. The voices in my head, because the head is the killer. You can't sit up here too long. My head is a bad neighborhood that I should not go up in without adult supervision.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I just tried to shut it up by drinking, stuffing down these feelings and this horrible feeling. miserable existence that i was living and one night we we were on tour with metallica and we were in australia and we were mains we we did about a year over the course of two years of as main support for metallica which is the biggest metal band in history and one of the biggest
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
bands on the face of the planet period when we were in australia which is an absolutely amazing place i don't know if you've ever been but it's just so cool and i had money in my bank probably 20 times to live there for a period of time so yes i know australia extremely well Yeah, it's great. It's great. So I had money in my bank account. I was still married at the time. I had my band.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
We had fans. We're on tour in Australia opening up for this band that most metal bands could only ever dream of meeting, much less being main support for. And I went out on the night of October 17th, 2010. And I went out with some friends. And I went drinking. Started at an Irish pub in Brisbane. And ended up alone in my hotel room drinking beer. And I drank and drank and drank and drank.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And it stopped working. I was left with nothing but myself. And I was miserable. I'd already... Been through a lot of consequences. I've been to jail for being stupid and drunk. I've been suicidal. I tried to kill myself. I wound up in a mental ward while drunk. I've woken up in the hospital with broken bones on tour because I got drunk and walked off a roof at a house party.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I almost killed myself. I did that drunk. I got divorced once. I got drunk. I did drugs. broke before because I drank everything up. I just drank through all that, right? I just drank through it because I could drink at people. I could drink at my problems. Like this is the fault of everybody else but me. And then on this one night, I drank and drank and drank and drank and it stopped working.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I woke up on a hotel balcony on October 18th, 2010 in Brisbane, Australia. And I walked out on the balcony and it was sunny day and Brisbane Botanical Gardens were down the street to the left and they're beautiful and they have awesome plants and weird animals. And then across the street was one of my favorite bookstores I'd ever been to. And I love books. I'm a huge nerd.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And then down the street were all these great restaurants. And I looked at all this stuff and I had this feeling that I did not want to exist anymore. I didn't feel like I wanted to kill myself. I just felt I just wanted to cease being, period. I felt utterly empty. And I'm on tour with Metallica. You should not feel that way. You should feel like this is a huge part of my career.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I felt completely empty. And I finally came to the realization, maybe what other people have been telling me, maybe there's a bit of truth to it. Maybe I ought to try and quit drinking and things will get better. So I looked on this table, on this balcony, and I saw all the beer bottles from the night before. And because I'm OCD about things, I had arranged them extremely neatly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
All the labels were facing the same way. And they were in a very neat row on this little table. And I looked at these beer bottles and I realized they were a metaphor for my life because I had become nothing more but an empty container to pour alcohol into. And while everything on the outside of my life, like I had a job, had a wife, had money, everything looked orderly like those beer bottles.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
But all it would take would just be a little push and everything's broken. Everything falls and shatters. So. It was not a big dramatic thing like you. It wasn't like I woke up under a bridge in a trench coat, you know, clutching a bottle of rock gut wine with no money in my pocket. I just woke up on a hotel balcony and wanted to cease to exist. And I'm like, I have to try something different.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I haven't had a drink or any drugs since that day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
The entire continent is nailed down by pubs. There's one on every corner.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Yeah, sure. If you're a guy, Jean, you're over there doing business, but that's interesting that the relationship of alcohol and the Japanese culture.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
corporate culture because you'll be in tokyo or osaka on a weeknight and you'll see these businessmen in these suits just completely trashed unable to walk and it is my understanding that within that what they call the salary man culture if the boss says we're going out drinking then you are expected to go out to drink
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
with the boss and they get it in they get it in and i think they have a different view of the state of intoxication as well because i've heard that from several different places if you're drunk and the boss makes you come out and and drink with you and you say or do something rude or embarrassing It's not talked about the next day. Oh, he was drunk. That's okay.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So it's like a pressure valve, I think. There's tightly constrained social roles. There's many beautiful things about Japanese culture. I don't know if you've been there as well, but it's one of my favorite places on earth. Yeah. they have a saying, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. I don't think I'd make it too long as a native Japanese guy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Wow. That's beautiful country as well, man. We've been there two or three times now. Crazy shows there for us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Well, that's the thing. It's trying to numb the chaos. It was, I keep on talking about the voices in my head. I'm not schizophrenic. It's not literally like I had someone saying this or that or the other. And just speaking of the constant state of emotional agitation within me and upset at the fact that the world is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
continued to behave in a manner that i did not see as acceptable so i would drink a drink to numb that and but it was also numbing and dumbing me and i got away with that for a long time also because i believed in the cultural myth of the alcoholic slash
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
addict writer slash musician slash artist artist that's a great cultural myth and some of my favorite writers were these masculine dudes like Hemingway and uh Hunter S Thompson and Bukowski like every other angst riddled 20 year old male or whatever I love these writers and I still do so I did all the things that these great writers did like I drank and they but
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Did a respectable amount of womanizing and even got some fistfights from time to time. I did all the stuff that those great writers were doing, except for the writing part. Right? I'm practicing to become an artist. So I bought into that cultural mythos of the damaged artist, the alcoholic artist.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And it's certainly, that's a fear, I think, amongst musicians, writers, artists of all sorts that become alcoholics or drug addicts, that when they stop doing whatever their preferred poison is, their creative abilities will abandon them. I have found it's complete nonsense. In fact, I did not become a published author until I became sober.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I talked a lot about writing a book one day when I was drinking, but it wasn't until I stripped away that poison I was putting in my brain that I was able to exert myself creatively long enough to complete a book. And it's, as you well know, it's not an easy task writing a book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I think for me, I didn't have much choice but to jump into the chaos as a sober person because I realized on that day, I realized when I woke up on that day in Australia that I'm going to die if I keep doing this. It's going to kill me because I did not drink just a little bit. I drank a lot and I had tried to quit drinking while at home a few times and it didn't work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I would not drink but still take drugs of some sort to to level out until i could go back on tour and get drunk again so i'm on tour in australia with metallica and i have this moment and i'm like i have to stop and i have to stop now it cannot wait anymore i cannot push this to the side anymore and i
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
my first day sober i woke up and at this sort of realization that i had to at least try and there were some sober guys on the tour from metallica's crew including james hetfield the guitar player so i went i didn't drink until i got to the show that evening and i'm like please help me please i don't know what i'm doing i'm losing my mind and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
there were actually three of us got sober on that tour, three or four of us from me and some of Metallica's crew. So there was these group of dudes who were sober and I'm like, please help me, please help me. I know you guys quit drinking, please. And they're like, just breathe, dude. And, and talk to me and calm me down and told me I could do it and gave me some advice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And so I walked on stage that night with a banging hangover, um, on stage in front of 14,000 people. And I had, luckily I had long hair still then because it was in my face because I was weeping uncontrollably on stage in front of 14,000 screaming Australians. And I was just like, my life. And then luckily I'm not Pavarotti. I scream for a living. So...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
It's screaming out these lyrics in front of 14,000 people, just crying for the whole 45 minutes I was on stage with my hair and my face and nobody noticed. I got through it, but that was my first day sober. That was my first day sober. I think it had to happen that way for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I think I had to inject myself into, I had to raw dog reality right from the start on tour because I think in order for me to understand that I could do this, I have to get sober. I have to maintain that sobriety no matter what my surroundings are. And if I can get sober on tour, surrounded by free alcohol and free drugs, uh, Anybody can do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I know guys who've gotten sober living in a crack house before too. There's different levels of difficulty, but if anyone is having a problem, you think you can't get sober because this situation isn't right or this condition isn't right. It's nonsense. If you have a problem and you know this and you want to change, you can't wait, but only so long because it might kill you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
You're eventually going to have to try it. And For me, it was on tour. And so I didn't really have a choice about how, not if I want to continue being a musician. And I got sober when I'm 39 years old. It's not, it was a little bit late for me to go back to school and become a lawyer or something. My career choices are limited at this point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I'm just grateful I was able to do it and I did it with some help.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
100% fear. Can I cuss on this? I like, I'm trying not to be vulgar. I mean, you can. I won't let's just say I believe there's a sentence in the book right since I am here to talk about my book in a way there's a sentence in the book and it's about fear and it talks about how fear is there's a whole thing about different fears that I have faced so there is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Fear is a real MF-er, a top shelf grade A son of a bitch that will let you ruin your whole week if you let it run the show. That's a sentence in the book. And I think in this world of so much information coming at us all the time, it's hard to filter out information. What we should be worried about and what we shouldn't, I think, in one way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I think that's apparent in the rising level of anxiety in young people as well. But it's affecting people our age, definitely. I feel it myself. There's so much information and there's this 24-7 news cycle. And much of it is horrible. And much of it is bad. And there's just conflict and natural disasters and chaos.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
political instability and warfare and and it's just like this constant bad and it it causes this automatic sort of reaction in in our um our nervous system the limbic system starts working up and you start internalizing these things and feeling them and after a while it becomes you know this constant grinding state of low-level anxiety i think and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I think once something has passed, a danger or whatever, something that you should be afraid of, let's say a crocodile attacks you or something. Once that danger is passed, the adrenaline dumps down and you move forward. I think now. the fear has been ratcheted up. And in fact, Lamb of God has a song called Engage the Fear Machine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And it's about this constant media doom and gloom, like constant negativity. And it is true that there are bad things happening in the world at all times. There is no doubt about it. And right now I'm experiencing quite a bit of anxiety and fear for friends of mine in Los Angeles, because we're recording this while Los Angeles is on fire. And I spent the last few days
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Every day I remember someone else who lives out there. I'm like, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Is your house there? And it has been this overwhelming feeling of anxiety. And that is really happening. And these are not abstract people to me. These are people I care very deeply about, friends of mine that have had long-term relationships.
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All that being said, I'm over here on the East Coast. I'm not in the middle of a wildfire in California right now, right? So this feeling of fear and anxiety has been ratcheted up within me. And if I do not dial it back and I do not take stock of the reality of my situation, which is I'm sitting here in my study with all my books on the internet doing this lovely podcast with you.
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If I don't stop that anxiety, it's just going to ruin everything. And I think society in general is riddled with anxiety, perhaps not entirely because of, but I think...
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Thank you so much. I'm first and foremost, a music fan, and I've gotten to know almost all the bands I listened to growing up and in my twenties. And it's just so cool for me to hear those stories as well. So I'm glad to talk to you, man.
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this constant to negativity is accelerating this sort of anxiety hangover we all wake up with every day i think and it's for me it's a process of trying to stay present and trying to stay cognizant of what the reality of my situation is and looking at that realizing that in this moment i'm okay and then
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If there's anything I can do to alleviate the suffering of other people, then I can take action, right? If I'm calm and looking at myself and looking at my situation with clear eyes, then I can actually take action. think and plan and do something to actually make the situation better rather than just sit here clutching my pearls and wringing my hands. Like, this is so terrible.
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This is so terrible. And I'm guilty of that. I am, but I'm trying so hard to fight against that. And I mean, right before this conversation, we're talking about the wildfires in LA and I, for the last five, six days, I've constantly checking on my friends and remembering someone else, as I said, and I've felt like this overwhelming anxiety and I've wanted to make things better.
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And I was talking to my girlfriend right before this and we've donated some money trying to figure out what I can do. But I realized, oh yeah, I'm going on this book tour. And it's hard for me to promote, to feel like I'm promoting a book tour and I'm promoting my new book when all these horrible things are happening. Then I realized she had this great idea.
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She's like, donate the proceeds from your Los Angeles show to one of the charities that is helping people right there. And then I talked to my manager and he's like, yeah, you could do the three California shows because I'm going to do three California shows. And then I contacted my friends at this podcast, The Dollop, and I asked them about it. What charity?
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So I'm like, what do you think about Habitat for Humanity for Los Angeles? So now I've got these three shows in California that I'm going to donate any money I make to Habitat LA. And I can only do that because I'm thinking and remaining calm and looking for a solution, not completely consumed by fear and anxiety. But it's a process, dude. It's a fight every day. It's a fight.
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Well, it started out that area, Malibu, the Palisades is extremely wealthy. The homes that were on the beachfront were destroyed. These belong to wealthy people, but there are also normal people that live out there too. And there are working class people who were displaced. It's not just movie stars and so forth. And I think that's something that is a bit of a misconception.
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I have friends who live all around there. And luckily, none of my friends have lost their house, but they've had to evacuate. I have a friend who's on tour right now as a comedian. And His house is under fire watch. It's like, okay, I hope my home is still there when I get back. And this is a working class comedian. He's not a bazillionaire or a rich guy. It's heartbreaking.
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And no, I'm sorry to hear about your house. I am from a coastal area myself. I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia and Cape Fear, North Carolina. And hurricanes come. They definitely come. I've done some. Once again, it's a matter of looking at what you can do. A few years ago, Down in Brunswick County, North Carolina, in Cape Fear, a hurricane came and ripped through and destroyed a lot of things.
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And so I stopped and asked myself, okay, how can I help? And I have a buddy who is a member of a disaster relief team. He's a New York City firefighter for years. And in his spare time, he goes in and does disaster relief. And his team came down to North Carolina. to do some relief. And since I have a lot of connections in the area, I went on social media and found out
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through locals where things were most needed and set up a distribution center. Because the Red Cross is a great organization, but there's a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape. It's very slow moving. And my buddy, he's a former Marine, New York firefighter. He has no time for all that. It's time to get supplies to people. So I went and used my connections in the area to set up the stuff.
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And then the next thing you know, we're in a flooded out trailer park delivering emergency relief. Boom, like that. And it's because I was able to think and use my mind. And I hate to keep coming back to alcohol. When I'm numbing myself from the chaos and the bad things in the world or whatever by just pouring alcohol and doing drugs because I don't like the way it is, I am combat ineffective.
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I cannot do anything. And it's not always fun trying to figure out a solution to these issues or at least a way to... help or try to make the world a better place. But for me, I have to have a clear head. I have to be able to face things, the good, the bad, and the ugly without that sort of substance filter over. Otherwise I can't do anything.
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I no longer feel, I think within the last 10 years, I had the urge to drink once and it hit me out of the blue at a traffic light. All of a sudden I was like, I want a beer. It was crazy. It just came out of nowhere. So I immediately called some friends of mine who are sober and I told on myself. I was like, I just thought about drinking and it passed. And it's like, of course you did.
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You're an alcoholic, right? You haven't had a drink in 14 years, but... It is my belief that once I drank myself into the state of alcoholism, I cannot safely drink again. Therefore, every now and then, naturally, an alcoholic would think about drinking. For me, except for this one time, I think in the last 10 years, I seriously had a slight urge to do it, and it passed. It's not...
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I'm fighting against this desire to drink, right? That sort of compulsion has been lifted from me. And it's just my normal state now is sobriety. And I don't think about it that much unless I'm discussing it in a context like this with someone else who has quit drinking or who wants to quit drinking. So for me, once I removed this alcohol, though, I did have to face myself.
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And there's a saying amongst the sort of sobriety community that what do you get when you sober up a horse thief? A sober horse thief. You still have to look at yourself. And not that I've ever stole a horse. I'm not that cool. I'd like to think I'm like a Comanche Raider or something. But the fact of the matter is that I'm still looking at myself when I'm sober.
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When I remove this alcohol, it's not like everything's immediately better. And I'm looking at myself and I'm forced to deal with my shortcomings. And I found myself... Particularly in the beginning, it's not as bad now trying to replace the alcohol with other things, which I justified as being not as harmful. For instance, for me, it's buying books.
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And I have gotten much better about this, but I used to have a very bad book problem to the point where I was going to the bookstore every day for a while and buying books because I'm looking. A lot of times about self-help books, right? I have a massive collection of which I've read 20 pages of each one. And I'm like, ah!
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this isn't going to fix me because I'm looking to some sort of external thing to fix this, this problem within me. And for me, it was buying books. It's embarrassing after a while because you show up at the bookstore and they're like, Oh, Hey, how are you doing? Randy's back.
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It's like when you drink, you hear alcoholics say this is like, they're trying to cover up the fact that they drink so much by shifting their alcohol purchasing location to different convenience stores. Like on Tuesday, I go to this one and get a 12 pack.
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And then on Wednesday, I go over here to this other one to get a 12 pack because you don't want the clerk at the convenience store to think you're an alcoholic. For me, it's like the bookstore. They're like, oh, this guy has a book problem.
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I'm a bookaholic, yeah. It's a problem to this day, I will admit, but I've gotten better about it. I've slowed down about it. I just love books. I love them. I can't help it. Well, I have to send you mine then. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah. I will definitely take that. No problem.
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For me, this sort of, and some people, like you mentioned earlier, like sex, gambling, all these things, these are external, these are attempts to use external measures to control ourselves, I think, to exert control, to make us feel better. And in the end, the only thing I have absolutely any control over is, is myself. And I don't even have control over my thought processes.
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I can't control some of the thoughts that pop into my mind. But I can, with practice, control how much energy I feed those thoughts. I can, if I am intentional about this, control my attitude towards things that are happening beyond my control. Outside of my control. It is completely outside of my control that there is a wildfire in Los Angeles right now.
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And it's even outside of my control that it upsets me and that I'm worried about my friends who live there. But what is in my control is me looking at the way I am reacting to that and rationally examining that and thinking, okay, it is useless for you to sit in this pit of anxiety. You need to think about what you can do because I have no control over it.
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See, I've never seen them. But I waited for their new record to come out. I heard the first two singles. I had it pre-ordered. And then I waited until the night it came out. came out and I got in my truck and I drove down this back road and listened to the whole record in its entirety. And it was just a magic moment.
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anything else in the world other than myself thank god because if i was control of everything it would just be a disaster right everything would be horrible i would make a horrible world dictator or whatever i but i can only control myself and my attitudes i think and and it's a constant work in progress it's constantly me reminding myself of that waking up every day and thinking Okay.
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Today it could be really screwed up. What matters is how you respond to that rather than simply react.
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Man, for one thing, it starts with how I start my day. I wake up, right? What I do every morning is I wake up and I make my coffee and I pour myself a cup and one for my girl and then I go into my study. And I do not look at my phone for the first hour I'm awake. I refuse to look at it. Absolutely. And it doesn't stay in the same room with me either.
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It stays in a different room when I wake up and I don't have to look at it, use it as an alarm or anything. I do not touch it for at least an hour after I wake up. So I wake up and I read some meaningful literature, whether it be philosophy or an inspirational memoir or something. I'm not just waking up and reading nonsense.
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Normally I like to read a bit of stoic philosophy, whether it be Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or Seneca. And then I journal a little bit and I start off the day intentionally, no matter what is going on in my life by reading. placing myself firmly in reality and not looking at all this chaos that's coming at me through this screen, through this digital world.
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Because if I do that, if I wake up and immediately check the news or check social media, then I have started off my first few moments of consciousness at the mercy of the dictates of others. I have not decided what I'm going to think about, what I'm going to work on today, how I would at the very least like to attempt to approach the issues that are going to face me this day.
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I did definitely become deeply involved in the punk rock scene, but at the same time, listening to The Cure. The Smiths came later. My best friend from middle school loved them and When we graduated high school, he actually gave me the Smith's greatest hits compilation. The orange one, I think, louder than bombs is a joke because I was like, the Smith sucks. But now I like them.
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I just start off looking at stuff. I'm a passive sponge. I'm immediately inputting all this other stuff and let's face it. a lot of it is negative, whether it be social media or the news. It's just a lot of negativity. That is no way to start off the day. I will be an ineffective human being because I'm starting off the day consumed by anxiety.
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Then what I'm trying to do throughout the day is remind myself that I'm just one person. I'm just one human being. And I can only use the tools I have at my disposal to try and make myself calm, to improve my life, and hopefully in doing that, make the world a better place. For me, my tools, I'm an artist, right? This is the one question I would...
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i hope people will take away while they're reading this book they will look at this book and ask themselves what am i that's a very broad question what am i the meaning of life the universe and everything but what is my function what am i most effective at doing at what are the my tools at my disposal i can use to improve my life and make the world a better place and for me
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At 53 years old, it's a little late to become a doctor or a scientist or any of that stuff. I'm a writer, a musician, and a photographer. I'm an artist. As bizarre as it is to me to this day, I'm a professional artist. So I'm looking... at what I do that day and trying to create art that matters and that can be of service to others. Because it just, it feels better to me. It just does.
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It's primarily a mode of expressing myself, admittedly. That's why I was drawn to this life. Even when it was not profitable, no guarantee of monetary compensation or whatever, but I felt as if expressing myself through any of these three things, it's what I'm supposed to be doing.
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And now that I am lucky enough through a combination of luck and perseverance and hard work, I'm lucky enough to make my living this way. Like I said, I'm not a doctor. I'm not curing cancer or whatever. But I can use these tools at my disposal to try and improve things. And I find fulfillment and purpose in that. And sometimes I still question myself or I beat up on myself.
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I'm like, you're not really doing anything. You're just a stupid heavy metal singer. That's all you're doing with your life. And it feels meaningless. But then... every now and then I will meet a fan who will tell me your music saved me, man. I was going to kill myself, but this song you wrote kept me going. And I'm like, yes, I did it. I made a difference.
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And I remember how music made me feel when it, when I, as we talked at the beginning of this conversation, how I felt so different and outside and alone. And then I first heard this music, this punk rock music, this X feels, I'm like, These people understand. Finally, someone understands.
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And when I get told this by these fans, and I've been told so many times how our music or a book I wrote or even my photography has truly helped people get through difficult times, it is by far the most rewarding part of what I do. It's nice to make a living, it is true. But having someone tell you that you made a real impact in your life
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in their life it's supremely gratifying to me and it provides me what i feel like a sense of purpose and i think we're talking about how people feel lost and as if they don't matter not everybody is supposed to be an artist. Not everybody's supposed to be in a heavy metal band, but everybody has something that they can do to help others.
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And I have found that trying, at least trying to structure my life around beyond paying the basic bills, around allowing enough room for me to be of service to other people in other ways has provided me with fulfillment and a sense of purpose that chasing money or success or notoriety has never provided, ever. And I think anyone can be of service to others. They just have to look around.
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They have to look and look around their own neighborhood and see, what can I do to make this place better? Who can I help? Even if just by walking over and talking to someone. Like old people, man. Old people are lonely. If you are able to go and go to an old person's home and volunteer and talk to old people...
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who are spending the last of their lives alone you may a learn something from these people there's a lot of wisdom and b you will be being of service and that costs nothing it costs nothing to you to to engage with this other human being on a person-to-person level and and i think
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for all the supposed connectivity that the internet and social media provides, it's really in many ways causing us to separate from ourselves more and more. When my grandmother, I interviewed my grandmother right before, not right before, eight years before she died. She lived to be a hundred and a half years old and I was right by her side when she died. But I interviewed her, maybe she was 94.
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I can't remember when I interviewed her. And I asked her this question. I said, grandma, What do you think is the biggest difference between now and when you grew up? She grew up in the depression, so there's massive differences. But she didn't talk about computers or technology or self-driving cars or whatever. She said, I think people aren't as close as they used to be.
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I think they don't come and visit as much as they used to. Nobody knows their neighbors.
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and i think our society is feeling that and i think that lack of real person-to-person human contact is manifesting itself in these feelings of anxiety and not belonging and feeling alone and not knowing our purpose because we don't know the people around us we don't know our community um and therefore we don't have anyone to bounce these feelings off of so we're just stuck with ourselves
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I know a couple of people that know Robert Smith, but I don't think I have that much pull otherwise, otherwise I'd ask him for you.
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That opens up the book. It's a chapter called The Duke.
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which is a lamb of god song i wrote about this young man wayne ford and i've talked about this before wayne was a young man i'd met outside a show in phoenix arizona and he had been diagnosed with leukemia recently and was starting his chemo treatments and radiation and all this stuff and i had a talk with him and his wife outside the show and wished him the best of luck and i thought
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man good luck i hope this guy makes it and pulled away and didn't think much more of it and then five years go by and one of his friends wound up emailing me through my publicist and was like Wayne, I don't know if you remember meeting him, but he's not going to make it, dude. He's fought this thing for five years and he's done.
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So he's decided to spend out the last of his days at home, not undergoing any more chemo or trips to the hospital and enjoy his life. with his family the way he wants to, the way he's going to live the way he wants to, because he had spent the last five years in and out of hospitals, unable to eat what he wanted to eat, just a miserable existence. But he was fighting for his life.
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This guy wrote me this letter to let me know that Wayne was dying. And he said, can you get the guys in lamb of god together to say hello to him and i said unfortunately that is not possible because they were in california recording an album and i was in richmond virginia working on lyrics we weren't all together and they were in different studios i said look I'll call him though.
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I would love to talk to him for whatever that's worth. So I wound up setting up this video call where I was going to chat with this terminal young man, Wayne Fort, he's 33 years old. And before the chat, I became overwhelmed. We were talking about fear. I became overwhelmed with fear and anxiety that I'm not a grief counselor. I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know anything.
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how to handle this sort of situation. And then I started worrying, well, what if I make it worse? What if I say something wrong or stupid? And this sends him, it shortens his life even more. What if I offend him? And it was, I had this realization as I'm thinking about all this, I'm not thinking about this young man. I'm thinking about myself. I'm thinking about myself.
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fear of looking ineffective or of doing the wrong thing. It's entirely fear-based. And I came to, I asked my dad who wasn't minister and had a lot of experience with grief counseling. I asked another friend of mine, actually he was a rabbi who had experience with grief counseling.
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I'm like, they both confirmed what I already knew is it's not my job to talk to this guy and make him feel better and be the front man clown and tell tour stories or whatever. It's just my job to be And so when I wound up talking to him, I approached it. We said hello. And it was normal conversation. Like, Hey dude, how are you doing?
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I approached it from this sort of way where I was thinking, well, there's this elephant in the room and this young man is going to die, but I don't need to beat him over the head over it, but I can open up space for that if he wants to talk about this with me. So I asked him how he was feeling. Which is a different than, it's very different than just like, what's up, dude?
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It's like when you're talking to a dying person, you're like, how are you feeling? And I figured if he wanted to move into that, explain to me what was going on with him, then I would listen. And he did. And we had these conversations. frank conversations. And I would, I'd ask him how he was dealing with things and so forth.
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So this went, we kept in touch back and forth for a while, mostly via text message. And at one point I asked him, I said, do you want to come and see me? I'll video
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chat you into the studio when i'm recording vocals which no one's allowed in the studio when i record vocals not even my own bandmates i just thought it would be neat for this young man to obviously he's an exception to be able to see me doing what i do and because we were his favorite band and he said yeah sure and so then i had the idea i asked him i said
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is there anything you want to say to the world or what you want to be remembered by? I could record you saying it or work it into lyrics and then you'll become part of our music on this record and you'll be immortalized on this record. He's like, that's really cool. He said, let me think about it. he never got back to me on it and he died shortly thereafter.
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He was such a, he handled his own mortality with such calm and grace, like just this outwardly like calm demeanor. And I'm sure he was afraid at times it's natural, but he did not, He had a very stoic demeanor, man. And it was so inspirational because having been around people who are dying before, an older person, they're coming to the end of their life.
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They generally come to a place of acceptance. And like my grandmother, she was 100. But when she went, she was ready, man. She's 100 years old. It's time to go. She'd had a good life. When this young man checked out, he was 33, and the way he handled this was so, for lack of a better term, inspirational.
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Because I would like to think that I'm going to face my own imminent end whenever it comes with that sort of level of calm and grace, but I don't know. However, I do know that it's possible because I witnessed it. It just, it also put my own, of course, these brings your own mortality into focus and it made me think about my own. I'm not a spring chicken. I'm 54.
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It's all right, though, because all we have is this moment right now. That's it. That's the only thing that exists. I'm seeing here that you lost your sister. I'm very sorry to hear that. I'm glad you were able to have a good conversation with her. What a blessing. And I really cherish my conversations with Wayne and try to take something from it because we're all going to go one day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I refuse to ignore that fact. I think trying to hide from that only heightens anxiety. I'm trying to come to a place of acceptance and make the most of the time that I have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I really enjoy talking to you, man. And as far as if anyone wants to learn, if anyone wants to learn more about me or my book, the new one is called Just Beyond the Light and it will be out February 18th via Grand Central Publishing slash Hachette. You can order it wherever you order your books from. I'm going on a spoken word tour to support the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I'll be telling a bunch of stories from my life to illustrate the themes from the book. It should be pretty funny, a good time. You can go to randyblythe.net, R-A-N-D-Y-B-L-Y-T-H-E. And I have an Instagram and a sub stack, Randonesia. So look me up. Thank you so much.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
100% and I do to this day sometimes. I still feel like a space alien at times. Like yourself, I was a very nerdy child. I had a very deep love of books. I was not a sports guy. I come from a really small town where, you know, if you were... anything like you played football and I just sucked at that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I wasn't interested in football and just suppose the normal regular high school teenage things. And I found myself gravitating more towards definitely books and stranger things and I felt like an outsider and was treated as such at times. It's like, you're a nerd because your social groups, when you're young, kids are trying to find their place. And I really couldn't find a place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I just knew it was weird. And I, that's where i when i was really young i tried to fit in for a little while but it just didn't work i just couldn't i was like a square peg going trying to go into a round hole and i didn't understand i didn't understand why someone would be mean to me because I enjoyed reading books or they're like, you're a nerd. I'm like, but that means I'm smart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Isn't that the goal to not be an idiot? This did definitely lead to a feeling of sort of separation from my peers. When I discovered punk rock music, that's when I first started feeling, oh, someone else understands me. Because by the time I had given up trying to fit in, I started to become mad because I was like, I just can't fit in and people are judging me. So I was like angry.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I was angry about this. And I didn't really feel comfortable in my own skin. And then I started here. I first heard the Sex Pistols, Nevermind the Bollocks, a tape in the seventh grade. This other guy I knew who was a skateboarder gave me. And I was like, these people understand. I heard the music. They're angry and they understand.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And I started delving into that subculture some and eventually going to shows and meeting people. And most of the people in that subculture were exactly like me. They did not fit in. So... as much as I would like to think of myself as I'm okay, I'm this stoic outsider sort of human beings are social animals. And the quote, no man is an Island is absolutely true. We need social groups.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
We crave social contact. And so I found that within the music scene, this underground music scene. And it was the first time I really felt I belonged until I My 11th and 12th grade year, I also wound up going to a high school for the arts half of the school day. And it was a bunch of other weirdos who didn't fit in. So I found my group. But for a long time, I felt very much an outsider.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And some of that may have been heightened by the very nature of being a teenager and going through hormonal changes and everybody feels crazy. But I think I definitely was an outsider and maybe just that teenage confusion that everyone goes through added to that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Depressing, highly depressing, which manifested itself for a long time in an outward expressions of anger. I was very angry that I could not fit in. And also at the same time, angry outside, but also very self-critical at the same time, pointing fingers at myself. Like I said, I didn't really feel comfortable in my own skin. And it's like, what's wrong with you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Why are you... Something must be wrong with you. Why can't you fit in? To my view, everybody else was...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
okay which of course is also probably colored through the lens of a teenage eye where everybody looks at other people but it was depressing and i think as i get older i talk to my parents about this because i dealt with some depression and unsuccessfully few methods that i'm sure we'll get into in a bit i tried to deal with depression and i'm older i talked to my parents a few years ago i'm like
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Do you think I had some depression as a child? If I was, I suffered from that and they're like, yeah, I definitely think you were a very sensitive child. And I certainly felt that way. And I internalized that outsider feeling and it was, it was not good. It was not good. Angry and depressed. That's how it made me feel. How about that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
Did you ever feel like that at all? As if I was putting on a mask? Like I said, I think we all wear masks to a certain degree. I think that's how we function in social groups. We have to, there's an unspoken social contract where you can't say every single thing that comes through your mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I don't know about you, because some crazy things come from my mind that I just shouldn't speak out loud from time to time. But for the most part, I gave up on the mask pretty much young, where I just didn't understand why people would care. I don't come from money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So I never, when I grew up, I would wear hand-me-down clothes and those were not the most in-style clothes or whatever when I was younger. And people, they would make fun of me or they'd make fun of the neighborhood I lived in. And because it was not a wealthy neighborhood. And I, for a while, just did not understand why this was. I'm like, it's not my fault that I don't have the new clothes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
And who cares? It's about being a good person. And that really affected me emotionally. I tried to fit in. As I said, it didn't work. I was just like, screw this. I am not changing myself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
so i as i said as a sensitive very good natured child that sort of nature that the good natured sensitivity began transformed into a sort of external hard shell of anger i think and i don't know if it's so much a mask i was putting on is it was just a reaction to my inability to understand the way My peer group functioned at such a young age.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
I basically became a walking middle finger for a long time. I don't think it's so much a mask. It was more like a protective shell. And that's not sustainable either, though, after a while, because you grow up and who wants to hang around the constantly angry guy? That's not cool. You don't get a lot of, oh, he's always mad. Let's invite him to the party. That doesn't work either.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Randy Blythe on How to Make Peace With the Wars Inside Your Head | 574
So now I didn't really – past a certain – right around sixth grade, I just gave up. I was like, these people don't like me. I can't get a girlfriend like everyone else. They make fun of my clothes. They think I'm weird because I read books, which I thought was asinine even then. I even had teachers make fun of the way I read. And I was like, just screw these people then.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Katherine Morgan Schafler on Control, Perfectionism, and Letting Go | EP 572
Fear is a real MF-er, a top shelf grade A son of a bitch that will let you ruin your whole week if you let it run the show. That's a sentence in the book. And in this world of so much information coming at us all the time, it's hard to filter out what we should be worried about and what we shouldn't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Why Mattering at Work Is the New Metric Leaders Must Track | EP 573
Fear is a real MF-er. A top shelf grade A son of a bitch that will let you ruin your whole week if you let it run the show. That's a sentence in the book. And in this world of so much information coming at us all the time, it's hard to filter out what we should be worried about and what we shouldn't.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's a matter of purity of expression. And I sing about things that matter to me and things generally that upset me a lot of the times because I make a decent living. I'm not a multi-bazillionaire. I don't have a Rolls Royce and all that other crap.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I drive a 2006 used Toyota 4Runner that I've had since I bought it used in like 2018.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because why? Not a car guy. It's got 258,000 miles on it, I think. I surf, boards fit on top, and I'm going to have to buy a new car soon because it's getting more.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, mine is real, dude. The heat didn't work some this winter, but it's not important to me. Mine is dented. It's got scrapes. I don't care.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I have a rental car out here and they gave me this Audi like with this spaceship screen and I'm just parking in the garage, the below ground chair and all that's beeping and all this other stuff and I'm like, ah, don't scratch this thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You're a prisoner to your possessions after a while.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I know what it is. I've lost two.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Shout out to my buddy, Patty, the surfer. He got me on it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sure. I am going to buy a new car because this car is starting to repeatedly need to go to the garage. And I just want something reliable. So I'm going to buy a brand new car for the first time ever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
A Toyota RAV4 hybrid. There you go. It carries surfboards. But I'm going to be a nervous little ninny about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's a big festival in the United Kingdom.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, we were headlining Bloodstock in England two or three years ago, I guess. It's a big music festival. And we were the main act because we do very well in the community there. And there's 40,000 people there, I guess. When you walk on stage, you have a laminate most of the time.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, exactly. It's a tour laminate, and I did not have mine because I'm a sweaty mess. When I go on stage, I'm afraid I'll lose it, or if I leave it, someone will take it. People see tour laminates, they're like, ooh. So normally I give it to my guitar tech or I just leave it locked in the dressing room. On this night, I was like, I probably won't need it. We're the headliners.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So I walked up without my laminate and you have to show your laminate to get on the stage. We're getting ready to play. And this young lady doing her job looked at me and said, excuse me, I need to see your laminate. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm an idiot. I don't have it. And someone's like, no, no, no, he's the singer. And she's like, oh, Oh, I'm so sorry. And I'm like, no, don't be sorry.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You're doing your job.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I like you. And it's my fault that I didn't have my laminate. I didn't want to be inconvenienced. So, like, why should I be mad at this woman for doing her job? That's patently insane. She's there to keep me safe.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Which was so surprising to me. I'm like, this is not like some sort of triumph of altruism. This is a decent human being, man.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, maybe. I guess I look like a mean person, but my girlfriend says I have a mean demeanor.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
When I'm walking around, I guess she looked at me and I'm like, I don't know if that's okay.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, I'm a really nice guy. But when that came out, you know, I've talked to a lot of security people and they're like, dude, there are band guys that...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I just work here. So for me, I always like to poke fun at myself and say, don't you know who I think I am?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We played a few, like a year later in Bristol, England, and someone told me, yo, I think her name was Sarah. They're like, she's working tonight. And I'm like, oh my God, the same lady. I got to see her and give her a big hug. And then we did this whole like skit where I acted like I was security and she was trying to come backstage. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I need to see your ID.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And my band is, you jerk, don't you know who she is?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, it's the same guy. We played a festival in Milwaukee a couple of years ago. Milwaukee Metal Fest, a friend of mine puts on. And I got a kink in my neck. from swinging them around and it wouldn't leave for like two weeks. And I was like, okay, that's it. It was constantly hurting my neck. I surf too. And they get really heavy when you surf.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, it sucked. And also I'd have to tie them up. They come undone sometimes. You surf?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So when you paddle and then pop up, you put your hands at your rib cage to pop up. And sometimes my hair would get underneath it and then I'd just eat crap.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, don't scare me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But you can't do it. Your bladder would eventually explode and poison you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Um, yes. But if it's an extreme emergency, before you go on stage, every person is going to the bathroom as much as possible to get it out.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But, dude, there have been some close calls with not just peeing. Oh, God. Because when you go on tour, you have to be pretty much dead to not get on stage. All of us have gotten on stage after suffering food poisoning. Yeah. where it's like, ah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I remember we played in London one time, and my guitar player, Mark, had gotten food poisoning, had been up all night long puking and coming out the other way. And he just stood in one place. I couldn't really do my job because I was so worried he was going to fall over. He was gray, and I was just trying to... Stay near him so he could hold him up.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But we've definitely had trash cans backstage before because if it's going to go, it's going to go.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The last time we canceled because of illness was because of me. I had sushi with a friend of mine in L.A., and then we went to Vegas. for the next show at House of Blues. And I woke up and I walked off the bus. I was feeling great. And then all of a sudden I wasn't feeling great. And then all of a sudden it all started coming out everywhere. And eventually it would not stop.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So we got a doctor to come to House of Blues and give me a shot to stop the vomiting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then I got in my bunk and I just, I couldn't barely move. And I remember my tour manager opening the bunk and he's, do we need to cancel? And I'm like, yes, I can't move. You could wheel me out and lay me on the stage. I could just lay there and vomit and shit myself. It wouldn't be much of a shit. It's performance art, people. Exactly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We came back, I can't remember how many months later, and made that show up. But if people couldn't make it up, obviously they're going to get a refund.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's also when you cancel a show, fans get so mad.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm just astounded by constantly. I realize that we're heading into legacy territory, and it's super rare. A lot of the great bands that I listened to when I was younger lasted five, six years.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, absolutely. And I understand that. That's why we don't cancel unless something is severely wrong. But for us, it's not good either. Because when you cancel a show, we still have to pay our crew. We've already paid the bus.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We paid for everything. And that's built into the budget. So you don't make money on a tour until a lot of times the last third of the tour. I see. Because everything else is catching up with the initial output.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh yeah. So we reserve that in our bank account to start a tour. But if you cancel shows, you lose money. And I love playing music and I love playing for the fans, but it's also my job. I'm not out here to lose money. So when people cancel shows, I don't think fans understand this. Sometimes they're like, he just didn't want to come here or something. Yeah, diva. No, dude.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
This is how we make money.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, exactly. A lot of my guys have kids, and the band dudes are the last people to get paid. Sure, of course. Always the last.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Dude, I have learned the hard way. I don't really do sushi. I don't eat spicy Indian food anymore. At all or just before shows? Okay, yeah. My tolerance for spice has gone down.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, mine has sadly gone down. I can't do it the way I used to.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, I don't do raw oysters on tour. I won't do mussels. One wrong muscle to quote Anthony Bourdain. And you're shitting like a mink. Whatever that means.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We're very self-critical, and there are mistakes that happen during shows, but our band is so tight. We're one of the tightest bands out there. So for us, a mistake that will really bother one of us is something completely unnoticeable to the average listener. So it's got to be a huge train wreck. And I think one time in the last 10 years, we had a total train wreck on a song.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But they're eternal in your mind and in your sort of emotional connection to this music because it's so important to you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I'm like, you just laugh. You laugh at yourself.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
That's hilarious. We're humans and we don't play to a click. We are a live rock band. And as such, mistakes happen, but not often. No Milli Vanilli moment where you're going to... No, we don't run tracks except for like during the intro, there's an intro or whatever. There's no vocal tracks, no guitar tracks, none of that crap.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I haven't seen the live show, but I assume... Yes, we started doing that a few years ago.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It was... I love it. It's cool, right? It's very cool, but it was very scary at first. And the first time we did it was in 2021, I believe. It was the first tour we did coming out of COVID. And we started it in Austin, Texas. There's a venue at a racetrack, a Formula One racetrack out there. And it was in July or August in Austin. And we had a pre-production day where we ran the whole set.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh, yeah, yeah. And I'm on stage and it is, I think it was like 110 degrees outside.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm like, why did we do this? But it's awesome. It's amazing to have a pyro guy, bro. It's like having your own personal wizard. It just presses a button and I am the mother of dragons.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because everyone has their different sort of... It's just extreme metal, just descendant of thrash or whatever. Just extreme metal.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I mean, when you think about it, you're sitting around with people. If there's a fire in someone's backyard, a fire pit, people gravitate towards that. That's right. They sit there and they look at it. It's primal. It is. It's in our DNA.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Better now than we ever did before.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And it's rare. That's another thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I think we started as such a sort of cantankerous group of gentlemen, combative. And over the years, we've learned, I mean, not 100%, but we've learned more and more to shelve the ego. This is my way. I want this. and really think about the greater good. So we have a saying in Lamb of God, which is, better is better.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
If you want to call it that. Yeah, sure. 22 year knock down, drag out Olympic level brawl with booze and drugs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, it's the center of my existence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I started drinking when I was about 18. And the longer I stay sober, the more I realize how different my drinking was from the beginning. Whereas everybody drinks when they're young, at least in our age group. Sure. My friends would drink and most of them, even on the weekend, maybe get a hangover or whatever and then go on about their life. But with me, when I drank, strange things happened.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I wound up in weird places with weird people doing weird things at times. And... That was even before my band. So once I joined a band... You can get away with a lot of stuff when you're in a band that you can't at a regular job.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, exactly. And when we finally signed to a major, I'd been in the band... nine years at the time, I guess, when our first major label record came out. And we didn't get millions of dollars a piece or anything, but we had to make a decision when our first major label record came out. Like, okay, are we going to devote ourselves full time to this?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Or are we going to continue to weekend warrior this and work when we can and tour when we can? It was a very scary time in my life. I've been working since I was 12.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, burn the boats. Time to do this. And the odds of success, particularly given the nature of our band, are not good. Right. They're not. We're never going to deliver a radio hit.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
When I quit the day job and the band became full-time, I no longer had any sort of restraint, except for when I was on stage or in the studio. There's nothing telling me not to drink every day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I had some money in my pocket for the first time in my life, and my alcoholism just progressed. And I think it was already there. Like, in retrospect, I'm looking at it, it got worse and worse, though. And particularly in our culture, I think it's changing now. I think the paradigm is changing. I think kids are smarter now.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't think they think it's cool to be a drunken train wreck anymore. but we did from the heavy metal world. And our band is from that. And even in the more punk rock scene I come from, there's a long history of junkies and so forth.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. He was 21 years old.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. So that sort of mythos, I bought into that. Of course I drink. I'm in a heavy metal band.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
That's a hard pill to swallow if you've written something that you think is genius and everybody else is, I don't know, dude. But an old saying from writing, often attributed to Tennessee Williams, you must be willing to murder your darlings.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And being a train wreck kind of was expected. So it got worse and worse, though. My band was doing better and better, and I was getting worse and worse until finally in 2010, we were in Australia on tour with Metallica. And I woke up one day, and I looked out on my hotel room balcony, and it was a beautiful day in Australia, Brisbane. And I was like, I don't want to live anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It wasn't like I was suicidal. I just wanted to be erased from existence.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, done. And then I was like, maybe you stop drinking and doing drugs. Your life might get better. And it did. Yeah. So how did you stop? You just... I stopped and I talked to some of the dudes who were out on that tour who I knew were sober. James Hetfield and some of his guitar techs and stuff. Because they had talked to me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We were on tour in Metallica for about a year over the course of two years back then. And every now and then they'd be like, dude, you might want to dial it back a little bit. Because it partied across America, Europe, then on into New Zealand, Australia. And I knew those dudes were sober. So I went there. I'm like, please. Help. They're like, just breathe, dude.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I spent my first month sober in Australia on tour.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
My metabolism is so fast. I processed it out. I was sweaty and couldn't sleep very well a couple of nights. Sure. But there's only two substances that can kill you from withdrawals, and that's alcohol and benzodiazepines, Xanax and that shit. And withdrawals from alcohol can kill you, seizures and all that stuff. Luckily, it just didn't happen for me. I guess it just processed it. I got lucky.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But I had a friend who drank himself to death at age 23 years old, died on his bed cursing his parents. They were coming to see him, and he couldn't barely even speak anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They took the alcohol away from him. He went to the hospital, and his internal organs melted. That's just horrific. He was built like me. Like a tall, skinny dude. You never know. It's an individual thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I get a gut when I eat, but it's not like a fat gut. It's just distended six-pack. And then two hours later, it's gone. Man. It makes my girlfriend really mad. Yeah. She's like, you eat whatever you want and I gain the weight.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, I think you mentioned that. I listened to the, was it the James Patterson episode? He was talking about that. Yeah, I love that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The precise quote, the word that's missing, is if you are unwilling...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
To examine. If you sit there and you're like, if I think, okay, Jordan Harbinger really doesn't like me, we're going to do this podcast and he's going to ask me some gotcha questions and then try and submit this to the music press and make me look like a total jerk.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, I know. I can tell. You're very Machiavellian. So if I have these beliefs for some reason, if I am unwilling to say, why do you think that, dude? Like, why? No matter how cherished that belief is, if I'm unwilling to do that, then I'm scared to look at myself and look at my method of processing the world. And I think this is something that a lot of people experience.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
There's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on I believe this. We live in such a divisive society. Not to get into any sort of political party or whatever, but people are so binary now almost.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
At least online. In person, things tend to go a little bit smoother. But online, there's this group think. You're A or B. And the group is comforting. Human beings have a herd instinct. Of course, this is the way to think. Everybody else thinks.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Exactly. And it's reinforcing your biases, your already existing biases. But if you aren't really willing to sit there and look at why you think the way you think and ask yourself, do I believe this because I believe this or because it's been yelled at me by a bunch of other people? then you're just scared. You're scared to look at yourself.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I think as an artist, at least for me and a lot of my friends, that's one of the great things about being an artist because it involves a lot of self-reflection, creating honest art and questioning myself and my beliefs. And some of my beliefs are the very same as they were when I was 16. And I hold them up to scrutiny. And it's uncomfortable. But some things, I have to let go of.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You get hungry enough, you'll eat your dog. Of course.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Right, 100%. And that's the whole thing is it's uncomfortable to question your beliefs. And with the meat thing, I eat meat myself. That being said, the factory farming system is atrocious.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It is horrifying. For me in my life— I've been trying to buy, it's much more expensive, especially these days, ethically sourced meat, cage-free eggs, all that stuff. It is expensive, but it's the little thing I do. But when I'm on tour, I'm not doing that. So it's hypocritical. I think we can only do the best that we can do.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm just coming off this almost month-long spoken word tour for my book, and I was telling stories, not in the book, but that relay the main theme of the book, which for me is perspective. And I practiced very hard before I left, and there were certain things. It's not a stand-up comedy show, but it's close at times.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I am constantly turning off lights. I am constantly recycling. I'm constantly doing all these things. That you just hope are actually working. Please. And I'm going to buy a hybrid car next because I know that will reduce gas usage.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And it's just, oh, God, there's so much. And I think that if you're a socially or environmentally conscious person at all, You can't concentrate on everything. You'd lose your mind. Because you begin to feel helpless and without agency. And I think that feeling of helplessness and lack of agency causes some people to just say, Screw it. Yeah. I'm going to just do whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And that's not the answer. So for me, just try, man. I'm trying just to do what I can. And I know I'm not perfect, but don't give up hope on doing the right thing just because it's difficult.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I mean that I'm a great catastrophizer. That means that I start with something relatively minute, maybe that has gone wrong, or more likely that I have screwed up, and my mind immediately kicks off like an English soccer riot and draws an entirely logical sequence of events that ends in the worst possible outcome.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Everything, my friend. I'm from the 1970s, a child of the Cold War. And the worst logical outcome is global thermonuclear warfare.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So I forget to stop by the grocery store to get yogurt for my girlfriend, like I promised. And the next thing you know. Putin's invading Ukraine. The sky is on fire and everything's dead but cockroaches and Keith Richards, right, bro? So this happens all the time. I need some adult guidance and should not go wandering around up in my head without some adult guidance.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. 2010, we were in Australia on tour with Metallica. And I woke up one day and I looked out on my hotel room balcony and I was like, I don't want to live anymore. It wasn't like I was suicidal. I just wanted to be erased from existence. James Hetfield and some of his guitar techs, who I knew were sober, they had talked to me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So that's why I do things like... read philosophy and talk to people who have more experience. I used, when I was younger, try to figure everything out myself. Why am I so upset with the world? Why are people jerks? Why can't they put the grocery cart back in the car corral? It's 10 feet away. And I'd get so mad that I'd have to change my perspective.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And the best way I found to do that would be drink. And then you're just possessed by impotent anger. It's okay to be anger about some things. But if you're not doing anything with that or it's not inspiring any sort of action whatsoever, then you're just sitting there mad. And nobody likes the mad guy. He doesn't get invited to parties. Were you an angry kid? After a certain point, yes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Did something start that? Yeah, absolutely. I don't come from money. I didn't grow up in a dirt shack with no electricity or anything. My dad and mom,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
lower middle class and upper lower class lower middle somewhere there somewhere in there and when they split up when I was in like the end of third grade my father and my brothers and I moved to Virginia from North Carolina my mom stayed in North Carolina to go to college Shout out, Mom. I love you. Good for her.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Stories, yeah. I'm a pretty good storyteller. And there were parts that I was like, this is so funny. This is going to kill so hard. And it did not land one single time. I'm friends with some professional stand-up comedians. I'm like, dudes, what is going on? They're like, sometimes stuff just doesn't land.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
She had three kids.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No. So she went to college, and my parents are great friends to this day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The separation was not what, like, really made me angry.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because they handled it. They never weaponized my brothers and I against them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They're beautiful. Both of them are beautiful people. I love them both very much. Learned a lot from both of them. But when we moved from North Carolina to Virginia, I went into a new school. I did not fit in. I did not have the right clothes. I did not live in the right neighborhood. I was not interested in the right things. Like sports? Yes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I want to read books.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I want to go skateboarding, and this is in the 80s.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
When skateboarding was not cool.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
no oh man in Michigan it was like the coolest thing not in the broader sense that it is now sure like you were a weirdo punk rocker most of the time if you were a skateboarder yeah wow and I lived in a little tiny redneck town maybe that's why so it's like you're a fag remember when people could just freely say that how horrible yes to the point that was in the culture so much that I don't know how old I was I managed to eradicate that from my vocabulary
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because it's something I used to say. Of course. Because I was raised around it and didn't mean like... It wasn't a slur.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh, I should just not say that anymore. I didn't know any gay people until I got older. You did, but they didn't tell you. Now I have some very dear friends, and it's, like, embarrassing to me. It is embarrassing. I'm like, oh, my God. I was like, even though these people called me that word, I'm still throwing it around. What a jerk. So it's a process.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh, my God. Dude, I say that so many times. I'm like, thank God there were no cell phones when I was a teenager.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Not really, though. Yeah. I think that's a problem with children today, though, too. We're joking about it. Thank God we don't have this. But they do have it. They do have it. There is a frothing mob of iPhone wielding documenters waiting just to catch your every screw up. And like, that's got to be pressure.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But I was writing that part about how the future is unknowable, no matter how advanced our technology gets. People are not good with uncertainty these days. We all have these cell phones, which I call the pocket Jesus. You look to it for all your answers, but some things you just don't know. Uncertainty, you just have to deal with it. So I was writing about how if someone were to say,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm not going to sneeze two years from now or whatever. It doesn't matter how much you study sneezing. Every allergen you remove from your environment, you could be the boy in the bubble. You might be ready to sneeze.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Look it up. What's John Travolta?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, he had autoimmune disease, which basically meant he had no immune system.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And when he left, he had one of those ball things that like hamsters roll around in.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I've read about people with that to this day. But yeah, the whole point of that is I was talking about how the unknown is unacceptable. And if you say, I'm not going to sneeze, that's a ridiculous statement. By the way, don't try and hold back sneeze because you can rip your larynx. I also have read... And I'm very careful when I'm driving if I have to sneeze. Very careful.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. Or perhaps stuff that I find funny, other people find horrifying.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So that you actually see what's going on. Because most of the time when you sneeze, you're just like, and driving is not the time to blink. So I'm just like, and I very purposely keep my eyes open.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm not a savage.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then you touch your steering wheel again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
My voice gets deeper. I think everybody's naturally does.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You know, consistency, and you go out on tour, and a guy with a voice like that, he wants to deliver. People want to hear that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You know, like, perfect. They want to hear it perfect. And if he can't hit that, you know, I understand. If it ever gets to the point where I'm like, I'm going to be okay, it's time to hang it up.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The more I sing, the better I get over the years. But certain falsetta stuff, I'm a bass baritone, so it's a little difficult for me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, I try not to do that around children.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then you're chasing laughs. I found myself after the first show, it's you're chasing these laughs, this validation coming from people. Yes, I'm funny. Yes, what I'm saying has an impact and speak the truth and hope it lands.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You know, amazingly enough, the last time I had it tested, it was okay. When I get done recording or I come off tour, I lay down at night. And it goes away after a couple of days. Every now and then it'll just come beep, really high-pitched. But I do not have it like, per se, William Shatner has it. William Shatner got it on the set of the original Star Trek.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Remember when they'd be on the bridge on Star Trek and things would be on fire or whatever? The pyrotechnics exploded unexpectedly close to his ear while they were filming one day. And so Shatner has tinnitus so bad almost that he was considering suicide.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It was driving him crazy. So I think he's done some work with foundations to research that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Mine has not been that bad whatsoever. Generally what I'll do if it's at the end of a tour and I have a little bit, I'll make sure there's a fan running, some sort of white noise until it fades.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't like recording Lamb of God.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because it is physically painful.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
When I record, I need everything in the can's ear bleedingly loud to help emulate the sort of vibe I have with my band. Because we're not a quiet band.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
My ears go... Oh, that kind of physically painful. Yes. I have a headache. My throat hurts after you've done it. I wake up every day. My voice is naturally pretty deep when I'm recording. It would be great for like sexy voiceover. And I will hear a fragment of a lyric that I recorded the day before. When I lay down to sleep, I'm hearing the beep.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But then I'm also hearing my own voice screaming a part of a lyric again and And again and again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's not good. It's a physical process for me. It really is. I don't enjoy it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Right. I always have a hard time getting my voice to do what it does live until one day my producer was like, let's try a trick. And he put a filter on what I heard. in my ears and not what was going to tape, but the filter that I was hearing my voice, he made it sound like a crappy club PA because that's the world I come from. And then all of a sudden my voice went bling.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. Also because most of the time when you're recording an album, our last album were recorded here in LA at Henson Studios and a lot of it was live.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, it's a legendary studio. Charlie Chaplin owned. Yeah, that's right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So we did it with a great live room and I wasn't in the room with my guys while they were playing, but I was in a booth and I could see them. And there's an energy that happens between us live. It's just so much different. Now, if I'm singing to a tape, my dudes aren't there. I don't feel this visceral connection to them in the music as it's being made that I do on stage.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I really feel it, and it makes it, I don't know, it makes it just so much better. I hate singing to tape.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The lights can definitely blind you, but I'm very well aware of the audience. I'm hyper aware of how the music is going over with the audience. It's my job to make sure, to facilitate the audience's good time. Sure. As a front man. Not to be egotistical, but it's your job to make sure that these people are enjoying the music.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Never really any radio play. We were rather extreme for that. I worked a straight job for the first eight or nine years of the band.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It involves encouragement at times. So I'm very much aware of the audience's status.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I was a restaurant cook and also a roofer.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
My guitar player, Mark, and I both roofed together for a while. That's not an easy job.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No. Not really the case. That's what my first book, Dark Days, is about. And it's a 500-page book. But basically in 2010, Lamb of God played a concert in Prague. Their security was non-existent. Kids were on stage off and on the whole time. And very dangerous. Small club. Our equipment was ready to fall on people. We played that show. We're like, thank God that's over. We came back
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. It's a bunch of pirates. The restaurant business allows you flexibility to go out on the road. Most of my bosses, I'm like, look, I'm going to go on tour for a little bit. And they're like, I'd give them, you know, a few weeks notice or a month or two notice. And they're like, okay. And then when you come back, hey, you got any shifts? You pick them up.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Two years later, we flew from Norway to Prague, landed in Prague airport, got off the plane, and they diverted myself and my band into another room. And in the room, there were five or six dudes in, like, mask balaclavas with machine guns and stuff. Three big, huge, like, Slavic men.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, they look like Dolph from the Rocky movie. Yeah, sure that these plainclothes detectives and in this woman This woman who was the head detective handed me a piece of paper Saying that I was being charged with the equivalent of manslaughter because a young man they said I purposely Pushed a young man off the stage attacked him. He fell hit his head went into a coma died a month later and
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And we had no idea anyone had been hurt.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No clue. And the American government had been contacted about this by the Czech government two years previously. And the American government said, this is nonsense. We're not going to cooperate. But the American government never let me know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I would have gone back there to handle this. It's not a parking ticket.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So I'm in total shock. what are you talking about? This makes no sense. I thought it was a mistake. And then I went to a prison in Prague for 37 days.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so they granted me bail, which was almost half a million dollars. We borrowed that from the record label. And then unlike America, where when you pay bail, you're free to go there. We paid bail. The prosecuting attorney did not like it. So he objected. So they doubled the bail. So we're pushing towards half a million dollars.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Luckily, some rather wealthy friends of ours were like, we'll loan you guys the other half, which they did.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then I got bailed out and I went back to America and immediately went on tour in order to pay for all the lawyers. And then six months later, went back to trial in the Czech Republic and I was found not guilty.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because the family of this young man who died They never attacked me in the press. The Czech press attacked me, particularly this one tabloid newspaper painted me as this marauding American Viking come to murder people or whatever. They said printed all sorts of nonsense. He said I'd kicked a woman to death in the head. All sorts of just made just made up nonsense.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then just paying me as a really bad guy to the point where my attorneys had to threaten to sue the paper. My Czech attorneys did. But the family of this young man who tragically died, they deserved answers. All they knew is that their son went to go see my band. He was injured somehow, and he died a month later.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's horrible. And I, in my first marriage, I lost the only child we had. She died shortly after birth due to a heart defect. And I have empathy for those parents. I know what it's like. Probably even worse for them, because he had lived.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
18 or 19. And my daughter only lived less than a day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Well, you're a parent. So the only thing these parents knew was that their son had gone to see my band. And then this sort of rumors of me attacking him and all this other stuff. Yeah. felt honor bound to try and give them the answers that I could to the best of my ability not to hide in America like a coward. Sure. Because their son is dead. That's horrifying.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And B, although I know I was sober that night, I know because I've been writing about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
in a journal also memory is a tricky thing and memory it's not like people think we have this hard drive that all you gotta do is press a button and everything is replayable that's not how memory works it's like recreating a puzzle almost every time you remember something i learned a lot about the science of memory during this so i needed to make sure that if i was in fact culpable here.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
If I had done something that I did not remember or had falsely construed in my mind, if that came out in a trial, then I need to be held responsible for my actions because I ran away from my problems for so long in alcohol. But I was a sober man then.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
If I am not willing to take responsibility or at least look at the possibility to examine myself and what may come out, evidence I'm unaware of, then I am not being responsible.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
There's this massive, I wouldn't even call it a deceleration process. It's just an impact. You're on tour and you have this schedule and everyone's happy to see you. And we were working straight jobs while touring in tour buses, which people see a tour bus and they think it's this magical vehicle that indicates you're just rolling in cash.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
accountable in my life and if I can convince myself that I am not accountable in this one area just because it's scary because it's scary then it's only a hop skip and a jump for me to convince myself that I'm not accountable in all sorts of areas and from there it's very easy for me to be like you've been sober a long time maybe you can just take a drink and it'll be alright I see and then if I hadn't gone back I'd be dead now one way or the other
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes, because I would have either drank myself to death, I know it, or I would have killed myself because I couldn't look at myself in the mirror.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The prison I went to was called Penkratz Prison. It's in Prague. At the time, I believe it was 127 or 137 years old.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Well, it was. For the first half of it, they put you in one tier to see if you're depressed and suicidal, supposedly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I talked to this one guy who spoke English. He's like, look, the doctor is going to come for psychological development. When they ask you what you think, do not tell them you do not like it here because they will keep you in the basement longer. He told me that when they ask him, what do you think of the presence of art? He said, what the f***? Pardon my French.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
What do you think I think about this? It sucks. And they're like, you're depressed. Maybe you ought to stay down here in isolation a little bit longer. So it was very heavy. I love the history. Just these walls, the stories they could tell. The stories that prison can tell are from 1939, I think, to 1945. And the Nazis had it. Oh, geez.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They were putting Czech dissidents, black marketers, some Jews, I think. These political... undesirables there and they were executing them by firing squad. Then that got too expensive. So they started hanging them and then that took too long. So they installed a guillotine. And so in about a year and a half, they executed over 2000 people. I think it was by the guillotine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
The guillotine was down the hall from me. It was still in there? Yeah, I didn't get to see it, but they keep it there because at the end of the war, the Nazis took it and threw it in the Vltava River in order to hide the evidence of their atrocities. But the Czech divers went and got it and brought it back. Good for them. And the head executioner of that prison...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
maybe it was even in the 2000s, he applied for his retirement benefits from the German army in Germany.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Because he's, yes, I served in this and this. And they're like, what did you do? He's like, I was the executioner at Pankratz prison. He wrote the Czech government. I need proof so I can get my government benefits.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
From killing thousands of you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So being in that prison was like being in a Misfits song. I don't know if you know that band. Of course, yeah. Jeez. It's crazy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
but you come off you're signing autographs you're playing in front of people who love your music and they're excited to see you and then it's okay I'm back to washing dishes boom exactly what is this stuck to my never mind don't answer that I don't want to know what I'm cleaning off with my bare hands right now but as you said it was a gradual process and it
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, yeah. My guitar player, Mark, said that one time. I was just like, this is like prison. I just looked at him. I'm just like, no, dude.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, bro, let's think about this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sure, and then you go straight into the history of the Eastern Bloc. The communists came from Russia and from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the time. And Prague is a beautiful city. It's beautiful. But that's only since what they call the Velvet Revolution, 1989. Their first president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, I believe that's how you say his name, was a big rock and roll fan.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. And the Velvet Underground, one of his favorite bands, a very important political writer. People do well to read his stuff right now. But he was the first president and he had done time in that prison I was in. Oh, wow. He was the first president of the Czech Republic. You go to Prague now, it's beautiful and colorful.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But I talked to people, including a lot of my lawyers and people my age who remembered Prague. Growing up under a communist rule in Czechoslovakia and just gray. The buildings were gray. You go to the grocery store lines. All they have is potatoes. Just grim.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Grim. And I recommend anyone to go to Prague. Beautiful city. Great food. But it wasn't that way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I will go and play Prague if the conditions are right, meaning that A, it would be for charity, and B, that the family of the young man who passed gives me the blessing. But they have suffered enough, and if I went back to play the Czech Republic, it would be a huge news story.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
My face, my existence, and my band's existence have caused them immense pain. I don't wish to do anything further to hurt them.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, it's much more specific. And that is the two bookends of the story of my book. It starts with the story of a fan I befriended during the last couple of months of his life who was dying of leukemia. And I wrote a song in his honor called The Duke. And around the release of that, we released it as a single.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I'm fully prepared for it all to go away one day. You never know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We did a fundraising thing where we raised almost $15,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. But we also raised awareness for the Be The Match, which is now called the National Bone Marrow Registry. But if you go to BeTheMatch.org, it'll still carry you to it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So we wrote this song and we put it out and there's an awareness campaign to register for this, particularly not that if you're white, you don't need to do it, but particularly for ethnic minorities, because blood marrow bone types are highly specific, as you're saying. And I think black or African-American people are the most underrepresented people. group on the bone marrow registry.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
If you're white, I think you have a 70% chance of matching with a bone marrow donor. If you're black, I think it's 20%.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes. So they need more from black people, Hispanic people, Native people, Asian people here in America. So... We did this awareness campaign because it's free. All you got to do is spit in a tube. And I have a friend from another band who beat leukemia because he had a donor. And then Lamb of God's old merch girl died of leukemia. She was diagnosed and a week later she was dead.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, it was awful. So, pretty passionate about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't know.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, and then she was dead, I think, seven to ten days later. Evie Carano, I miss her. But, so that's the beginning chapter. And it's pushing towards awareness and... And the chapter is about mortality, basically, because this young man who died, I befriended, faced his own mortality with such grace and a very stoic demeanor. And I learned a lot from this inspirational guy named Wayne Ford.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Six years after or so, that song came out. We're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody's touring. Nobody's doing anything. And I'm walking one afternoon over a bridge in Richmond, Virginia, and I'm like, what's going on with my life? This is crazy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I check my email and I get an email forwarded to me from our old publicist from a dude who's like, hey, man, because of your song, I signed up for Be The Match. And I matched with a patient. It's the late 60s person. And I'm going to donate. And I immediately emailed this young man. His name is Todd Seaman from Arkansas. We're great friends to this day.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And eventually when the time came for him to donate his bone marrow, I went up to D.C. where he did it and documented it, a photographer as well, and hung out. And it was two days before Christmas and it was just wonderful. It was like the best Christmas ever. gift ever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You know, I felt like this song and my friendship with this guy who had died and a fan where we're doing something. He donated and because of HIPAA laws, you can't know what happened to your donor. Oh, that would drive me nuts. So after a year, you can write a letter. After a year, the recipient will make the decision whether or not they want to contact you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Me and my buddy Todd, who donated through the whole year, were like, I hope this person, because we were told he survived after a couple months, but we didn't know how long, whatever. So we were talking about it and we'd joke too. We're like, what if he's like the grand wizard of the KKK or something? Like it's just a total jerk. What if we did the wrong thing? We'd joke about it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But after a year goes by, shortly after a year, my buddy Todd hits me. He's like, dude, I heard from him. He's 69. He lives in Denver, Colorado. He's a photographer. Not in a clan. He's a photographer. He's an old rock and roll musician. He's awesome. And so he went and surprised this man whose name is Michael in Denver on his 70th birthday.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And a few months later... I came to Denver on tour and I met this man who lives to this day and spent the afternoon walking around Denver taking photos with him because of this song.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They don't have to do that anymore. No, they use what is called an apheresis machine. It's very interesting. You sit there and you have to take this medicine a week before. And what it does is it basically makes your bones leaky. They leak white platelets.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, it doesn't hurt. There's white platelets that come from your bones. And then they put it into this machine, which is like a centrifuge. They draw the blood from you. It spins it around. And then the healthy bone marrow cells and plasma is separated by the centrifuge. And then they put the blood back into you from the machine. So you're just sitting there hooked up to an IV.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You're basically fancy giving blood, playing on your iPhone for two hours. Yeah, and it used to be the drill, the painful thing. And in rare cases, it still is. And my buddy, though, who did it, he's like, they drill me. I don't care. Because once you know, dude, if I do this, this person might have a chance.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You meet this guy, Michael, and talk to him, who's alive because of this stuff. It's like, he gets more time with his grandkids. You can't put a price on that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I got to do that, bud. Yeah. You now have Jewish blood in you. In a sense, he would be Jewish now. That's right. Because your DNA, he takes on, in a sense, he is you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So, like, people who do this, theoretically, one of them could commit a murder. and DNA found on the scene of the crime, it would match precisely.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't want to get caught for murder. But they match. The person who receives this will inherit any allergies you have.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Neither do I. Alcohol, I break out in handcuffs. But he, at 70 years old, had the immune system of a 35-year-old man because his DNA changes. Sometimes it replaces. Sometimes it's an additional set. But it would be really neat if you could turn the Grand Wizard into one of the chosen people. Yeah, boom. Shalom, buddy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Dude, you might want to dial it back a little bit. And then I was like, maybe you stop drinking and doing drugs, James. your life might get better.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You can't eat shrimp anymore, bro.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yes. In the punk rock scene, at least in the scene as I came up, I'm not talking about just pop punk stuff you might hear on the radio singing about boys and girls. There is a strong anti-materialistic, anti-authoritarian, anti, I don't know, pursuit of riches vibe.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
That can be, if you take it the wrong way, but it's more this sort of consciousness. Sure. Being like some sort of rich, famous person. Why would you aspire to that? And the thing with the punk rock scene is when you come up in that and the bands you love, most of which, amazingly enough, I'm friends with now, the bands that I listened to in high school, all of them, I know them all, basically.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No. I've seen that. I know people in our world who got pretty famous... At 21 years old. And some of them are still trying to recover from that. You're not equipped to deal with that stuff at all at that age. And our quote unquote fame has been very gradual, steady, incline up. we're grateful for that. Every new thing that happens for us, we're like, wow, this is cool.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They're alive, yeah. So... When you come up in that scene, there's a very anti-rock star mentality. You are a regular person. So when you come to see, like the first show I ever saw was ZZ Top, right? I saw ZZ Top when I was 12, I think, at the Hampton Coliseum in Virginia. And there are these gods on stage and they have lasers and all that's cool and stuff.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But after their show's gone, poof, they're gone. They're disappeared. They're these magical creatures, these exalted creative types. rather otherworldly. In the punk rock scene, you go see the bands that you like, and then you want a T-shirt, and you go to the merch table, and the bass player's selling the T-shirt to you. Right, right, sure, yeah. The drummer's loading the equipment.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So there's this sort of purposeful erasing of the barrier between audience and performer and that's the world I come from and as my band got bigger and bigger and bigger and I'm not in a punk rock band I'm in a metal band with
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
punk rock roots in parts so i'm not in a strictly punk rock band as the band gets bigger and it goes away from the sort of punk rock touring environment and stuff and you actually start making and living and stuff and being able to support family there's this strange guilt thing It's a strange thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
In some ways, I think it's good because people could be a bit more conscious about, I think, the things that they view as valuable or things to aspire to. Being a super rich dude does not interest me.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It does not interest me. I'm not allergic to making money. Don't get me wrong. But having money for the sake of having money to sit around and buy designer things is zero interest.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No. And that is not something that I aspire to. And I think with the youth, once again, and social media and influencers and all that stuff, you got to have this. You got to have this. No, you don't. That doesn't say anything about your worth as a person. And you don't need to have money to have worth as a person or the latest Jordans or the fanciest car or any of that crap. You don't need that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You're a good person no matter what you own. So in a sense, I think punk rock guilt is good in that it makes you keep it real and not forget where you come from. But in the other sense, it can be counterproductive because punk rock guilt, the reason why I write about it is because I have a reforestation project in Ecuador.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I bought this property at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when things had gone just sideways in my life personally and for everyone. It was a nightmare. And my job had disappeared because I am a glorified traveling black cotton salesman. That's how musicians make their money, t-shirts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
That's right. Black cotton. I'm a black t-shirt salesman. The taxes say musician in reality. I'm slinging merch. So I bought this cattle land.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Cattle land. Oh, cattle land. Pardon my southern accent, man.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Catalan, boy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But I bought this because I have Ecuadorian friends who are doing a lot of the same things. And I was like, I'll just make my money back once I go back on tour. But that didn't happen. So I didn't go back on tour because COVID. And we live in Richmond, Virginia, where expenses are not what they are, although it's gotten much more expensive in, say, Los Angeles or New York or wherever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Cost of living is comparatively doable. But even not making any money, I need to make this money back somehow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
and this company cameo who quote celebrity greetings which i don't think of myself as a celebrity at all they had been bothering me for years you need to do this you need to do this and other friends of mine had done it one of my buddies did it to pay his back taxes i finally i'm like okay i need to make my money back i don't have any other way to making money right now
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I don't know when my job is going to come back. I better start singing some happy birthday.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
One reason why I didn't do it is because punk rock guilt for so long. Who do you think you are? Do you think you're Elvis? The dudes in Black Flag never sang happy birthday for $20. They also used it for charitable purposes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I raised money for respirators in India at the beginning of COVID-19 because our guy who books us in India and another girl I know, they're like, they're burning bodies on the sidewalk outside.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Post-apocalyptic and sent me videos. I got video of people on fire.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
On the sidewalk because it's wild.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sadly, yes, they did. This is cartel activity in Ecuador, which was formerly known as Isla de Paz. I believe that's how you say in Spanish, Island of Peace, in between Colombia and Peru, I think. Two big cocaine-producing nations. Ecuador was not part of that. And over the last few years, it's gotten worse. Since I've been there, the cartels have moved in.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Also, the Colombian crime syndicates who are producing the cocaine. Because it's a shipping lane. They aren't really producing cocaine there, but it's become a really valuable shipping lane. And also the Armenian Mafia. Very strange. That's a weird connection. Very strange. Armenian mafia, Colombian crime groups, and the Mexican cartels are there. And it is now a contested shipping lane.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So there's violence. It's gotten a little bit better recently. They had a young president come in who did some no-nonsense like...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
el salvador yeah i'm just gonna arrest everybody yeah yes that kind of stuff which is bothersome for human rights but the other thing is that my friends there dude like bodies hanging from bridges scary and the cartels did come into the national tv station during broadcast and with guns to heads and they tell the politicians to leave us alone or else
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, no, no, no. It's very real. And the last time I was there, one of my homies was driving me and my girl to a village where I have some property, a surfing spot, and... We were getting on the outskirts of the village and I saw a motorcycle accident on the side of the road and people were gathering around. I'm like, honey, don't look. This is going to be bad. Motorcycle accidents are not pretty.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't come from money. I started working my first job when I was 12. Who hires a 12-year-old? A bookstore. I got paid like $2 an hour and I found out what the 18 and over people were making and the owner was like, what are you going to do? Yeah. And I was like, oh, screw you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We get up closer and I look and this man was laying on top of his motorcycle. That's not how motorcycle accidents happen.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We get a little bit closer. Back of his head is blown off. So they know me there. I asked some questions of people and they're like, he was handled. He was a bad person. And the locals.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, that's right. He got handled and that's how it is there. But it wasn't like that, man. It's gotten better now, but the cocaine trade has made it bad, man. Friends of mine, not good things happened. Not good things happened so people can sit up snorting crap and talking insincere shit all night long.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I've done enough Peruvian marching powder to keep this whole block of Los Angeles awake for a year. So I'm not an angel. But I've seen the human cost of this up close. And people need to think about that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Dude, I have friends who are dead because of it. I'm in the music business and in that scene and people still party and... Look, man, stick to your MDMA or whatever. You can't trust anything now. You can't trust anything. Because I loved pills. So did my guitar player, Mark. He's six years clean and sober now. Wrote a book about it. I'm not talking out of school, but he got real bad on opiates.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Luckily, I quit before this happened, but now there's counterfeit prescription pills.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They have their own pill presses and it's fentanyl.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You know, when people go to get cocaine and stuff, and I was asking, why is there...
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
fentanyl in the cocaine why that makes no sense cocaine makes you go up yeah and someone's like oh to make it more addictive and i'm like i don't think that really makes an accident just sloppy sloppy mixing and sometimes machines they use that to process fentanyl they're not going to clean their pill press in a way that sterilizes yeah they're just gonna throw the cocaine in after the fentanyl and oh well the first batch is a little gross whoopsie but whatever yeah
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sure. When I was in the Czech Republic waiting trial, I love history, and I learned a lot about the history of the Czech Republic during World War II and further into it. It was Czechoslovakia then, then through the communist era. Did they let you read in there and stuff? Like, what did you do in prison? I finally got some English books. I wrote a lot before no English books.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Then I'd be a snitch, you know, and I love working at the bookstores. I wound up just mostly doing lawn work after that, making better cash than sitting in the bookstore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then my lawyer finally brought me some English books. But no, I did not do much. I worked out and read and wrote. But anyway, World War II, the Nazis obviously invaded and took over. And the... Only, I think, high-ranking Nazi official to be assassinated happened in Prague. And his name was Reinhard Heydrich. I think that was his name. He was known as the Butcher of Prague.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And there was a group of Czech and Slovakian dudes who had gone to England. They had already been out fighting by the time the Nazis took over. So they were in England when the Nazis took over. They trained up in Scotland as guerrillas and paratroopers, special forces. They parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Czech, went into Prague,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And then two of them made an assassination tip on Reinhard Heydrich as he was driving his car, the Butcher of Prague. And one of them's machine gun jammed. The other one threw a grenade. And it went off beneath Heydrich's car. And they thought they hadn't gotten him, but they did because the upholstery had horse hair in it. The shrapnel pushed horse hair into Heydrich's blood and poisoned him.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
He got sepsis.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
and he died he didn't die right away no he died so this group of paratroopers go into hiding and eventually they wind up hiding in this basement of a church in the crypt where they buried people and they get ratted out i can't remember i think one of them turned and ratted them out And so for full 24 hours, something like seven dudes held off 1,400 Nazi stormtroopers or 900.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
They had to flood them out. Eventually, the Nazis came to the church. They held them off the guns, eventually retreated to the crypt. They were trying to flood them out. They were throwing grenades down there and stuff. Finally, at the end, they ran out of bullets. They tried to dig out through a tunnel into the sewers. They couldn't do that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And finally, they only had a few bullets left, so they shot themselves. This was known as Operation Anthropoid. There's a movie called Anthropoid you can watch. And you can go into the basement of that church and you can see where they were trying to dig out. And you can see the bullet holes inside of it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I was really surprised. I was 12 or 13, and I started running the cash register.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But these were hard men.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. But they went and touched the great butcher of Prague. They're like, ha, we're here. And they gave the Czech people hope. Even though the Nazis did bad reprisals, they wiped a whole village out of existence, killed several thousand people. But I wrote a song called Anthropoid, and it's written from the perspective of those dudes in the basement of the church waiting to die.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So that's real work, right?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I was doing it yesterday. I saw a bank. I was like, oh, that looks good.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Or something that happens in my life. I'd never know. I think that is one of the main building blocks of being an artist is just being a noticer, just noticing something that everybody else might pass by and shining light on it. That's what art is.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I mean, when I'm sitting down to write, particularly at the beginning of the process of every day before I develop any sort of flow and get into it, I'm sitting there like, oh my God, I have to find something worth saying. I have to express this in a sentence that will not make me sound like an idiot or cliche. When I'm working on a book, yes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And lately, more and more, I've been on this book tour averaging five hours of sleep on this tour because a lot of that sucks. That's a lot of flying and then speaking two and a half hours every night. I could not do that. So there hasn't been the room to write. But as soon as I get done with this. I've been feeling the need to do it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But I think people have a misconception about writing that people sit down and write. They're immediately spilling out these beautiful sentences.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And it's everything is just perfect. Hemingway just sat down. This is great.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
100%. Pressfield, genius. His book, War of Art, great book. Don't know him, but shout out to you, Steven Pressfield. And I mentioned him at the book. But for me, it's really about trying to punch above my weight intellectually. And stylistically, I'm trying to write above and beyond my capabilities. I really am. And I think good writers do that.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Not everybody sits around and speaks profound thoughts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Tripping off the tongue effortlessly.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Not everybody does that. And I think also, I think that's rather indicative of everybody's need to share everything all the time. Blah, blah, blah, blah now. Like with dial it back, maybe you'll say some smarter shit if you think about it a little bit first. So like, that's what writing is for me. It's a process.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
If I have a thought about your watch and it reminds me of the way a wave breaks and I want to write a poetic paragraph about it, I just don't sit down and like Harbinger's watch curled to the left, like the way I like to surf. And it doesn't come out perfectly. I have to write and think and look for a path to make it beautiful.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We want to make music. We didn't start making music for other people. And I say this again.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Again and again, we make music for the five dudes in Lamb of God. And it's wonderful that we have fans. And it's wonderful that they have provided us with this living, which is beyond my wildest dreams. And it's wonderful that our music helps people and it brings them joy. It's, oh, that is great. But that's not the reason why we make music.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We make music because we are musicians and there is a need to express yourself through that chosen medium. That's why I write. I hear songs all the time, just like I see pictures or think about possibilities for stories. It goes back to seeing things through the eyes of an artist. I can still remember things from prison that I want to put rhythmically into songs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Sure. I am the same guy. I think being in such an aggressive band, and there's this idea about people in bands as aggressive as mine, whether it be metal, hardcore, or punk, that are quote-unquote angry bands. Those of us in those bands and people in the community that go see these bands, to the outside eye, it may look violent and chaotic and crazy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. I can still hear when they would do inspections, they'd bring a stick and they'd come in and you had your metal locker and they would go boom and it would go clink, clink, clink, clink with the stick across the spines on the frame of your bed. So it was always boom, clink, clink, boom, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And really echoey, a lot of natural reverb in this prison. I can still hear that. And I want to put that rhythmically into a song.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
hate your show and i'm like i don't take it personally but it's still in there somewhere sure it's in there so when you put yourself into something whether artistic or any project and someone just pooh-poohs it for no reason because people are dicks yeah particularly online on the internet it's removed this impulsive thought filter that's what i call because in real life the impulsive thought filter is there because you might get punched in the mouth if you say some dumb shit
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I've seen that in some conversations on the internet before where someone actually bothered to write back, hey, that hurt my feelings. Why are you doing this? And a person would respond, I'm just having a bad day. I'm sorry.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But don't take that out on me. So that impulsive thought filter is not there. That being said, when you put something out, like you put yourself in this, I put out a song or something. If someone doesn't like it and they're just poo-pooing it out of nowhere, there's a little sting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
There's a little sting. But the way I look at it is... I come from a band where we were playing on the floor of squats and basements and in bars and stuff. If you've never had a beer bottle thrown at your head while someone yells, you suck, that puts things in perspective, okay? That's a little bit more real life than, I don't like your show on Instagram or whatever.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And also, I can't remember who said this. I've read it a few times recently. Why would you pay attention to someone commenting something if they're a person you wouldn't take advice from.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I think about the people I would take advice from that I value as friends, advisors, mentors. None of those people would ever go on the internet and talk shit.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And so the trolls and the thoughtless people, I think they're really ultimately only damaging themselves because they're unable to deal with conflict in the real world.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh, I've been a few riots over the years.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We were in Thailand, and we were in Bangkok, and there was the red shirts protest, I believe, that was going on.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Thailand is a monarchy, and the king and queen of Thailand are very revered. The new king is a weird dude. Look, this was the old king.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
You don't talk smack on the king or the queen. Like, I have friends who, expatriates who live in Thailand. I met them in Bangkok. And when they referred to something weird the king was doing, they called him Elvis. Where if they were like, we don't like that Elvis did this, they don't want anybody to know that they were talking about the king.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But again and again, you will hear from people who go to a metal show with a friend for the first time. They're like, everyone was so nice. And I think as far as the person on stage and the person in front of you, they're the same person. But the onstage person, I'm allowed to release a lot of energy, a lot of aggressive energy in a controlled environment. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
It's real serious there.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So... There was some political strife going on to where these people had come into Bangkok, into the financial district, I guess, and had taken it over, and they were drawing buckets of human blood, like people were donating blood, and they were throwing it on, I think it was the prime minister's house or something, just buckets of blood.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
In protest. And they were there for like a month. Man. And we landed in the middle of all this. And I'm like, what?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, exactly. Dear friends of ours. And... They were still peaceful. It was peaceful. Then we went on stage that night. And two minutes before we went on stage, the government had enough of these protesters who had taken over all of downtown Bangkok. And they were like, okay, martial law is in effect. And you got to go home or you're going to go to jail. And nobody left our show.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We played the show, whatever. And so then I, to my friends, I'm like, I want to go downtown and see what's happening. They're like, are you sure? Can't get enough of foreign prison. This is before I went to the other one. I'm like, yeah, I want to go down there, man. I want to see what's going down.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I went down there and all these people were gearing up and they had homemade armor and like all this crazy stuff. And I got pictures with several of these people. They gave me a red headband for their cause or whatever. They're like, I have it somewhere at home. And then it started kicking off. As I was leaving, it wasn't too bad the first night.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But as we were flying out the next day, all of a sudden, like 37 people were dead. Oh, geez. Including an American, I think Japanese journalist. The cops just.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
So it popped off real hard.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I don't go running down the street screaming in people's faces.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah. Then I'd just be a tweaker. They do that downtown. Yeah, they do that. So for me, it's an aspect of my person. I don't sing about dragons and dragons. Fantasy stuff. I sing about real things, mostly things that concern me and upset me. Sociopolitical issues, environmental issues, and things like that. And that's stuff that really gets my gears grinding.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
On stage, I can release that in that manner. It's a release valve. And the people that come to the shows... that engage in this very physical act of viewing this music, whether it be banging their heads, moshing, or just jumping up and down, it's a release valve for them too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
There are jerks every now and then, but there are jerks in this building somewhere right now. You're talking to one. Yeah. Our community tends to self-regulate itself. That just unrestrained aggression to try and purposely hurt someone, it gets dealt with.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
David Draymond.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
He's got metal in his face and all that stuff.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
I know those dudes. They are a very big band. They did a cover of The Sound of Silence. And Draymond has a beautiful voice. He's a great singer. They're at the point where my mom, who's met lots of my scary friends, and is always like, they're so nice. Southern woman. But she's like, Randy, do you know this band Disturbed? I'm like, yes, mom, I do.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And she's like, I just love their cover of Sound of Silence. And I'm like, I'll tell David Singer.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
But those guys, he's patient with you. Those guys come from a DIY background. They're from Chicago. And they used to have these parties where they would throw these parties in warehouses to promote their music.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Yeah, exactly. It's not like the record label gods were swooping down upon them and making them huge. They were promoting themselves for a long time. And that's the world we come from, too.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
Oh, that's the whole hip-hop scene.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
We call it LSD, lead singer's disease. For me, I think no offense to the city of Los Angeles, but I don't live in Los Angeles. I don't live in New York City. I don't live in an epicenter of the music industry in Richmond, where I'm from. A lot of people, except for the younger people, they're like, oh, that's Randy. He used to be a line cook at Third Street Diner. That dude made me pancakes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
No, they were great. I'm very egotistical about my pancakes. We as a band are pretty cognizant of the dangers of that and act very purposely to not be jerks and to stay right-sized. It's got to be tough, though, because. Dude, when you start believing. Yeah. People are like, you're awesome. You're God. I've had tons of people and I know it's an expression. They say, you're a God.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1150: Randy Blythe | Making Peace with the Wars Inside His Head
And I'm like, you need a better deity. I suck. I'm fallible. Even just saying that is reinforcing that in the back of my head. And once you start believing your own hype that you're this awesome thing, I find that's when your talent tends to abandon you.