Chasing their metal muse has left the members of Chimaira broke, sick, crazy… and more determined than ever to achieve greatness or die trying.
“Xanax, Lexapro—I’ll endorse them all fucking day,” says Chimaira’s Mark Hunter. The vocalist is having dinner, along with Matt DeVries (guitar) and Chris Spicuzza (keyboards/samples), in a crowded NYC restaurant around the corner from the club where his group will headline in a few hours. His bandmates both order drinks, but Hunter abstains; he has given up alcohol because of all the medication he’s on. “It’s the only reason I can sit here and have a normal conversation with you right now,” Hunter says. “A few months ago, before I started taking the drugs, I’d get seriously freaked out just going into a restaurant or hanging out in a large group of people.
Hunter believes his social-anxiety disorder is due, in large part, to being in the band. The condition began a few years ago with simple stage fright. “I started throwing up before I’d go on, and I couldn’t figure out why. I just got nervous. And then the way I felt before getting onstage started happening when I just wanted to go out somewhere.” The singer shakes his head. “I think touring got to me because I’m constantly surrounded by people—and it makes me sick.”
The frontman of a metal band, who must goad throngs of headbangers into an animalistic frenzy on a nightly basis, is not supposed to be a social cripple who can barely face a crowd. But then Chimaira (rounded out by guitarist Rob Arnold, bassist Jim LaMarca, and drummer Kevin Talley) are not a lot of the things that conventional wisdom would dictate. If hedonistic groups like Motörhead and Mötley Crüe set the standard for a metal band’s offstage conduct, then Chimaira should be on their bus snorting coke off of groupies’ breasts; instead, they’re watching Seinfeld and going to bed by 11 P.M. If the expectations of most naive, unsigned metal bands (including Chimaira themselves at one time) held true, then the group, having signed to Roadrunner Records, should be rolling in cash; instead, band members are constantly on the road trying to build a fanbase and making less doing so than when they delivered pizza for a living. And if rock critics and elitist metalheads are to be believed, then Chimaira are a mediocre nu-metal band—one with a DJ, no less; instead, with their self-titled third album, they’ve created an ambitious and mature true metal record so aggressively noncommercial (there’s not one song on it that’s less than five minutes long) that it has provoked fights with their label. It’s a grueling set of circumstances, and several Chimaira members have dropped out because of them. Hunter, meanwhile, is popping pills just to hang on.
Formed in 1998, Chimaira could have been a nu-metal band. The Cleveland-based sextet was influenced by the likes of Korn and Deftones in the beginning, Hunter admits, and echoes of such trendsetting nu-metal groups can be heard on Chimaira’s 2001 debut, Pass Out of Existence, alongside elements of more extreme metallists like Meshuggah and Slayer. It’s an album that some of the band members seem to wish would pass out of existence itself.
“For me, that record was almost a collection of demos that we were forced to record,” says Spicuzza. “At that point in our career, we spent most of our time wondering if we were gonna get signed, rather than writing and practicing. Then we got signed to Roadrunner, and they were like, ‘OK, go record!’ and we never got a chance to write new songs.”
Unfortunately, a band gets only one shot at making a first impression, and Existence’s cobbled-together sound and Adidas-rock histrionics made it all too easy to pigeonhole Chimaira as just another Korn wannabe. Not only did Existence fall short creatively, it also didn’t move nearly as many units as Roadrunner had hoped, and so Chimaira were under the gun when making their 2003 follow-up and what would prove to be their watershed album, Impossibility of Reason. Rejecting the overly polished production of their debut, the band returned home to record with their friend Ben Schigel in his garage studio (where Chimaira also recorded their latest). They went back to their roots musically as well, writing a barrage of Pantera-esque mosh-metal anthems, but it would be the two most atypical new tracks that had the biggest impact on the band’s current direction: “Stays the Same” (a rock ballad that didn’t make the album) and “Implements of Destruction,” the 13-and-a-half-minute instrumental that closes Impossibility.
“Roadrunner asked us to do a radio song, so we wrote ‘Stays the Same,’” says Hunter, “and when they heard it, they loved it. But we were like, ‘Listen, how can you have an album that’s all brutally heavy and then suddenly this song just comes out of nowhere, that you can obviously tell isn’t who we are?’ It was a big grace of Monte [Conner, Roadrunner senior VP of A&R] that he eventually let us make the right choice on our own,” Hunter says.
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