Avenged Sevenfold is bringing back the good old days, when metal ruled the world … and they’re taking us with them.
Welcome to Bat Country
It’s two hours before the doors open at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles for Avenged Sevenfold’s sold-out performance, and a dark-haired dancer in tight, low-slung sweatpants and black high heels is hanging upside down on a pole with her legs spread. She holds the pose, suspended, while another dancer steps back and looks her over with curiosity. Then she throws both legs on top of a metal cage, dangles upside down, and shakes her head back and forth. Behind her, stagehands wrestle with a series of backdrops and a technician struggles with a fog machine. Suddenly, a second fog machine spews a dense cloud, covering the stage, and a strobe light flashes intermittently.
Somewhere amid the fog and strobe lights roam the members of Avenged Sevenfold. Bassist Johnny Christ, with his hair freshly dyed flamingo pink, runs through lines on his bass while guitarists Zacky Vengeance and Synyster Gates noodle on their guitars and prowl the grated metal ramps that wind around their drummer, the Rev.
Among the empty seats, Avenged front man M. Shadows stands with his tattooed arms crossed and a black baseball hat cocked low over one eye. The six-foot-five former high school basketball player scans the stage like a gym teacher watching warm-ups. He looks concerned. “We’re the kind of band that wants to do as much as we can to put on a big show,” Shadows explains. “We’re of a generation where kids don’t get to see those big rock shows. We try to pack an arena-size show into a club.”
Shadows and the rest of Avenged operate under the belief that today’s effort is only a warm-up for the day when they will fill arenas. They’ve studied the moves of Mötley Crüe like scholars. They’ve incorporated the pyrotechnics and levitating drum risers into their own sets, and the band regularly throws around stagehand jargon. They’ll also admit to sacrificing cash that could have been spent on booze and strip clubs to make a concert for 6,500 people feel like one for 65,000. “We want the biggest show possible within our budget,” says Shadows. “We played with Iron Maiden and Marilyn Manson in Europe, and they do it right. It was a big deal when those bands came onstage.”
Getting to see Avenged play a giant venue might not be just a fantasy. The group’s latest album, City of Evil, landed on the Bill board Top 40; videos for “Bat Country” and “Beast and the Harlot” are in heavy rotation on Fuse and MTV; and tonight the band will receive gold record plaques, marking more than 500,000 sales of City of Evil.
Back onstage, the entire operation has begun to feel like opening night at a high school play. As Avenged howls through “Burn It Down,” a professional string quartet wanders in, lost in the fog and strobe lights, looking for their seats high above the drums. A tape machine breaks down, causing a moment of panic. The machine contains the band’s encore intro music—a western-themed acoustic guitar medley played by Gates’s father, Brian Haner Sr., a musician who performed with Frank Zappa and Tower of Power. Swapping out the machine causes bickering between the soundman and members of the Avenged stage crew. To break the tension, Gates suggests a song. “We’ll play ‘Bat Country,’” he says. “It’s a fun song to play and probably the best song ever written.”
The band speeds through their hit single, which is an ode to the late gonzo journalist and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson. By the time the five-minute metal epic comes to an end, the stage show has been sorted. The string quartet has settled into place, the fog machine is operational, and the pole-dancers have synchronized their routines. Behind his drum kit, the tall and lanky Rev laughs. “God-fucking-damnit!” he yells. “Are the girls gonna dance or what?”
Backstage, Vengeance and Shadows discuss the early days of Avenged. “We were crammed in a van like sardines, loading our own gear, eating ramen, and sleeping at bus stops,” Vengeance says. “We had no money, but we still had a lot of fun. We’d go out and drink the headliner’s beer and get smashed.”
Back then, Avenged was another band in Southern California’s growing metal-core scene. The band had been at it since 1999, when the four members holed up in Shadows’s parents’ garage—but not before sending out fliers to warn neighbors about the noise. They released a series of albums and yanked Christ out of high school to hit the road, playing gigs for $50 and getting stranded when their van broke down.
“We had a one-dollar-a-day allowance for each band member,” recalls Vengeance. “We did a month-and-a-half-long tour and our goal was to never spend money on a hotel room, which wasn’t hard because we didn’t have the money anyway.”
What the band did have was a following, which has been growing steadily since the release of their 2003 album, Waking the Fallen. That album was fueled by a brutal metalcore sound, lightning solos, and Shadows’s scorching scream. MTV2’s Headbangers Ball picked up on the group’s video for “Un holy Confessions,” and soon record executives began circling. The band had just signed with Warner Bros. when they reached a crisis: Shadows couldn’t scream anymore.
According to doctors, years of screaming had aggravated Shadows’s voice and caused internal bleeding in his throat. The singer and the rest of the band decided it was time to take Avenged in a new direction, but the change caused a backlash from die-hard fans.
“I hate when kids say that I don’t scream anymore because I can’t, when really, we just don’t want to,” says Shadows, visibly irritated.
Shadows began taking lessons with Ron Anderson, a vocal coach known for his work with Axl Rose, Eddie Vedder, and Scott Weiland.
“We saw this as a face-lift for our band,” says Shadows. “No one wants to write the same record twice. No one wants to try and outdo themselves in the same style. We want to outdo ourselves in a completely different way. We wanted to make a record that was off the wall.”
A turning point came with “Bat Country.” The song’s rock ’n’ roll riff, combined with the new whine in Shadows’s vocals, put Avenged closer to Guns N’ Roses than Judas Priest on the metal meter. “When I first heard the riff for ‘Bat Country,’” remembers Vengeance, “I thought it was fucking awesome. It was such a departure for us with only a few notes.”
Avenged headed to Los Angeles to record City of Evil, a swirling 75-minute, 11- song epic album loaded with spitfire guitar solos, apocalyptic references, and a 14-piece orchestra.
“There were a lot of things we would have normally done that we avoided,” Shadows says about City of Evil. “There were heavy parts that we could have made super heavy, but instead we decided to go with more swagger. We brought the vocals down and added tons of attitude.”
Vengeance reminisces about when the band realized they had written an album they couldn’t perform: “We got thrown onstage without being able to play it right away. Sound checks were the rehearsals for these intricate songs that we’d written and never gotten all the way through. Good thing the world has forgotten about those shows.”
With the group’s new sound came a new look, one that is a mix of goth eyeliner, Southern California punk, L.A. hair metal, and hip-hop flashiness. Vengeance rocks a massive gold boom-box medallion on a long chain; altogether the band owns at least six sets of gold teeth. Shadows alone owns three sets, including gold vampire fangs. He estimates he’s spent more than $12,000 on these grills. Gates has a different fetish: He treated himself to a .50-caliber handgun and a $1,000 hunting bow that he brings on tour.
Tonight’s gig is only an hour from Huntington Beach, practically a hometown show, and the band has a full entourage of girlfriends and family members. The family-reunion atmosphere means Avenged won’t be going wild—unlike a recent weekend in Las Vegas that was punctuated with hits of acid and blowjobs.
They spin stories about Shadows, the resident gambler, blowing through $5,000 during drunken online poker sprees; and Christ’s legendary drinking, which earned him the nickname “Cross-Eyed Drunk.” Vengeance vouches for his ability to “function at zero percent brain capacity and still have two beers in his hand.” They also expose the seemingly reserved Shadows as the group instigator.
“He’s good at manipulating you into going out, even when you shouldn’t,” claims Vengeance.
“I just say, ‘Let’s go to the strip club,’” Shadows says with a laugh.
Vengeance counters, “It’s like, fuck, dude, it’s 3 A.M. and I’ve been drunk for 12 hours.”
“I’ll say, ‘Come on. How does a blowjob sound?’” Shadows says convincingly. “You’re telling me you can’t use a blowjob?”
While Avenged mingles in their dressing room just before showtime, representatives from Warner Bros. unwrap gold record plaques and joke about a recent article in which Gates promised to hit a line of coke off their gold record if the band were ever awarded one. Vengeance had said he planned to wait and hit two lines when they go platinum.
But for all of Avenged’s appetite for destruction, the members are also slick businessmen. One label representative moans that they shouldn’t bother being secretive, since the band monitors sales results and has already figured out that the album has gone gold. Shadows, it’s said, can almost always regurgitate the latest sales statistics for City of Evil, the number of visits to the band’s Website, and hits on their MySpace page.
As if to prove this theory, Vengeance returns with his girlfriend to tinker on the big red piano in the room. Seated on the bench, he spies the gold records leaning against the wall and picks one up. “Are these the gold records?” he asks, unfazed. “Cool.”
For a band that plans on filling arenas, a gold record is just a stop along the way.
The award party is a mix of back-slapping locker-room braggadocio and suit-and-tie marketing speak as executives shake hands with the band and describe “having a blast” with the new “partnership.” In a world filled with musicians who cringe when faced with the business side of their industry, Avenged seems unusually comfortable. Gates laughs that the gold record is “bullshit” and a nearby suit is quick to agree, saying gold is “just a midpoint, dude.” Shadows moves through the crowd, shaking hands and chatting. Watching him work the room, it isn’t difficult to picture the tall, short-haired singer as a boardroom shark—sans eye-liner and lip ring, of course.
The show is a success. The crowd screams and leaps to its feet as the smoke begins to billow. Avenged charges the stage and tears into “Second Heartbeat” from Waking the Fallen. Shadows channels his best Axl Rose, wailing into a wireless micro- phone. He holds one arm stiff at his side as he sprints along the ramps surrounding Christ and Vengeance, while Gates holds his guitar up-right and flicks out riffs on the upper frets. They plow through crowd favorites from City of Evil before tackling Pantera’s “Walk.”
But the encore is the night’s biggest spectacle. As the crowd screams for more, a cactus-filled-desert back-drop is unveiled, and the string quartet plays along with the band’s western-themed interlude. Avenged floors it through “Bat Country,” and the dancers bump and grind in skimpy lingerie as thousands of teenage metalheads watch in awe. As the group strangles out the song’s final notes, the dancers leave their cages to writhe at Shadows’s feet. The crowd erupts. For a moment, the 6,500 fans feel like 65,000.
