Any way you slice it, things are going very well for Mudvayne. Not only has the bands debut album, L.D. 50, dug in on the Billboard Top 200 but the single "Dig" has the makings of a minor hit, thanks to steady radio play and a devoted core of MTViewers. It's not quite the same as being Number One with a bullet but it's not a bad start.
So why is Chad "Kud" Gray so obsessed with putting that bullet through his head?
Every night, before Mudvayne takes the stage, the singer sits himself in front of a makeup mirror and carefuly paints a realistic-looking .38 caliber bullet-hole on his temple. And when he's done, he can't help but stare at it -for minutes at a time- in mute admiration. "I love it," he says. "I love the horror of it. I genuinely like seeing myself with a bullet hole in my head. And a lot of times I wish it was real. It gives me a chance to see what I'm gonna look like when I'm dead."
While it may be too soon to say if Gray is merely playing aroung or setting himself up as the next Kurt Cobain, it's clear that Mudvayne itself is no joke. Unlike other makeup heavy rockers, no one in the quartet plays a specific, Kiss-style character; and while there is a "back story" to the band's complex mythology, no one in Mudvayne will spell out what, exactly, that story is. Instead the band revels in mystery, deception, and misdirection. And the smokescreen is entirely intentional, designed to create an absorbing, addictive puzzle not unlike the one created for the online campaign for Steven Spielberg's A.I., with fans piecing together clues derived from snippits of an evolving story line.
"There's a meticulously crafted mythology," says Matt "Spag" McDonough, Mudvayne's drummer and conceptual mastermind. "We are very careful about controlling what people see and know about who we actually are, and what we represent. For us to give to much away dilutes the ability for each fan to get their own handle on what we're about. We wanna give the audience an opportunity to build a relationship to the product, based on their experience of what they think we are."
So who are the members of Mudvayne, and what is the band about? McDonough says people draw their initial impressions of this Peoria, Illinois quartet from their makeup. And who can't help it - even if the face paint serves only to prove that Mudvayne is a book best not judged by its cover
McDonough, who speaks most, wears the simplest makeup, a facial pattern of alternating black and white strips. Bassist Ryan "Ryknow" Martinie, the band's resident jazz expert, belies his nice-guy demeanor with devil horn hair patches and charcoal face paint. And while guitarist Greg "Gurrg" Tribett is Mudvayne's brightest (red base, with black splotches) and highest-haired (giant spikes) he's also the band's most notably introverted member.
Still, it's the blue-haired, silver painted Gray whose get-up inevitably garnered the most attention. It was the goatees that did it - twin, french braided monsters that dangled a full four feet from the singer's jaw. It was a great gimmick onstage, but the freakish facial hair was killing him off hours. "There's been more than a few times I've woken up with them wrapped around my neck, strangling me," he says. So even though they were among Mudvayne's most identifiable visuals, Gray gave them the boot - actually, the scissors - this past spring."They were a real pain in the ass," he concludes. "End of story." But the mystery that is Mudvayne goes much deeper than a few layers of greasepaint. Sift through the band's lyrics- which, judging from the content of online messege boards, is something Mudvayne fans do with an impressive attention to detail - and all sorts of clues begin to mount up. Among the more obvious allusions: The sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey; clown-faced serial killer Ed Gein (L.D. 50's "Nothing to Gein"); and the Hebrew mystical text the Kabbalah. Then there's the list of links at mudvayne.com, which includes such sites at the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (an occult group dating back over 100 years), Terrence McKenna Land (devoted to McKenna's concept of pharmacological shamanism), and the Krishnamurti Foundation of America (that's Krishna as in "Hare Krishna"). Not to mention album art and a video concept based on the periodic table of elements, something which has no doubt earned the group the admiration science teachers everywhere.
Heavy stuff, to be sure, but it's hard to say just how much weight to give it. Mudvayne may be careful to subtly change the onstage makeup periodically, but its members tend to dismiss the whole exercise as meaningless. ("It's nothing more than part of the show," Martinie says.) The band is not opposed to commercialism or its recent run of success at radio, but there's not one song on L.D. 50 that relies on the standard verse-chorus-verse structure; indeed, the group promises that its next record will be even more challenging.
Mudvayne cites Led Zeppelin as a primary influence, but there's no Page/Plant style dynamic between Tribett and Gray; the group prefers instead that fans appreciate each member equally. Even so, McDonough handles virtually all the band's interviews, and says he prefers the other refrain from talking so the mythology remains consistently presented. It seems reasonable; yet if he wants to be the public face of Mudvayne, why does McDonough inevitably ask that security guards escort him through concert venues, so he won't have to meet the fans and answer their questions? It seems strange that Mudvayne's most public face doubles as the band's elusive man-behind-the-curtain. While Gray seems obsessed, lyrically, with death and the afterlife (e.g. "Death Blooms" and "Lethal Dosage"), he maintains that he leaves most songs open-ended enough to allow for a "happy" ending. And then there's Martinie and McDonough's description of Mudvayne as "jazz-like," a label that seems odd given the band's bent for composing rhythm tracks using numerology-decidedly non-improvisational approach.
"The makeup and mythology are Trojan horses," says McDonough, explaining why the clues don't always add up. "You wheel the thing in, and since people have a high expectation of what it is, when it's not that, it blows up in their face. They're left wondering what just happened. It's like, 'Okay, now I need to go through this again. Something special just happened. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but they're not the progressive rock band from Peoria I expected.'
"The beauty of Mudvayne is that eventually people have to start from square one and abandon whatever they think we're going to be about."
This much is certain: Mudvayne may be part of the Slipknot-fueled makeup-core explosion, but the band is hardly an overnight success. McDonough, Tribett, and Gray founded the band four years ago, after nearly a decade of bouncing individually between rock and metal outfits in Peoria. Mudvayne's first incarnation was heavy, but unfocused. "Like most bands, we needed to spend some time writing, rehearsing, and hanging out with girls," Gray says. Granted, the idea to make records like movies- with a score(music), story(lyrics), and visuals(makeup)- came early on, but the execution was pretty low-concept at first. "We'd paint our bodies or put X's on our heads," says Tribett, who now buys his spike-inducing hair goo in bulk. "It didn't mean much, other than that we enjoyed creating some kind art on ourselves."
All agree that things didn't get completely serious until the band fired its original bassist and plucked Martinie out of Broken Altar, the Midwest underground's leading Dream Theater-style progressive metal band. "At the audition, I asked them one question: 'Do you believe in what you're doing?' Because it they didn't, I didn't have any place in this," Martinie says. "They all stopped, looked at each other, and nodded. I'm not sure they'd even verbalized it to each other yet, but the look on their faces was all I needed."
After the extensive grass-roots touring and a self-released album, Kill, I Oughta, they found another believer in Slipknot percussionist Shawn "6" Crahan. He helped them land their deal with Epic and wound up as L.D. 50'S executive producer. The ensuing Slipknot/Mudvayne association would turn out to be both a blessing and a curse. True, it gave Mudvayne access to pre-existing fanbase that enjoyed both impossibly heavy music and incredibly heavy makeup. But at the same time, Mudvayne's connection to the kings of costume rock risked letting the band's look overshadow its music. Was anybody going to notice the adventurous time signatures and attention to lyrical detail while staring slack-jawed at this festival of face paint and goatee extensions?
"If people wanna say we're a Slipknot clone, fine," McDonough says, shrugging. "Slipknot and the makeup gave people an excellent first point of contact. Besides we knew that it takes a while for people to build a relationship with abstract things. From Zeppelin to Tool, it took time for people to digest the mythology. I don't regret any of the things we've done or any of the associations we've built."
Musically, Mudvayne's creative process is as complicated as its back story. McDonough says some songs have taken as much as eight months to flesh out, because they're written from the concept back, whereas most bands start with the riff and build toward a concept. "If you write forward, you disconnect yourself from the potential of how something can be interpreted," McDonough says. "But if you already have an idea of a bigger scheme in a universal language, rather than tying yourself to a hook or chorus, you've taken into consideration the potential for where it can go."
But don't assume the concept is all about words; as Gray explains, he doesn't write the lyrics until the band's convinced the music is completely finished. "If it's incomplete, whatever I'm drawing from emotionally could be incomplete," says Gray. "But our arrangements are so wacky. They have a sort of flow, but there's no form- every arrangement is different, every arrangement offers a different theme. I look at these guys like, 'What the fuck's that about?' They make it a real challenge for me to make shit flow."
L.D. 50 may be firmly established on the charts, but the members of Mudvayne are less concerned with that album's ongoing success than with what they're going to do for an encore. "If there's anything that's frightening, it's that now the ball is cathing up with us- or potentially rolling in from of us," McDonough says. "We simply can't spend eight months on songs anymore. And for the first time, I don't know how things are going to turn out. How do you escape for six months, write an album, and still hold the attention of the audience? It's encouraging that some bands have done it. Tool spent four years writing Aenima and were able to come back with people waiting for it. Hopefully your initiative carries through, and an audience waits."
For his part, Gray worries that the success of "Dig" will lead the record company to pressure them for more of the same. Although he likes the idea of commercial success, he hates to imagine someone asking Mudvayne to write "Dig Deeper" or some equally obvious sequel.
"I would like to see us not budge for anybody," he says. "People may not want to hear this, but I think if we're really doing what we wanna do, it's gonna be as uncommerical as uncommerical gets. The day I write something just for radio is the day this band is fucked. And I won't budge. I don't give a shit how long it takes to make the record. If it ain't right, it ain't coming out. I will not take a step backward."
For all his passion, Gray is getting a little ahead of himself. At this stage of the game, winning over more fans with L.D. 50 remains the objective, and despite all the talk of conceptual planning, the band will build its audience the old-fashioned way, through roadwork. Mudvayne will start the summer with Ozzfest, then follow through with a headlining tour. "Our focus has never been as much on sales as it is the live show," Martinie says. "Because the more people see us, the more they care. I used to get put off visiting the chat rooms and seeing kids discussing what color my hair is, or debating whether I should have shaved off the horns. But now they're talking about the authors or concepts that are referenced on the album and beginning to understand what we stand for."
Even so, like the A.I. online puzzle, it's possible that many of those chat-room kids will still be left wondering what, exactly, Mudvayne stands for. Is it enough just to like the sound, or are those people only getting half of the Mudvayne experience? And what if there's no true concept after all- what if the promise of a loftier motive is merely an elaborate ruse to draw kids in? Mudvayne ain't saying- though McDonough allows that the mere fact fans are having such conversations enough for him.
"That kids have questions is part of the intentional ambiguity and the power of what we are," he says. "The only constant is a constant dedication to progression, movement, and change. This is a roller-coaster ride, and you can't be attached to the potential outcome. You can take it into consideration, but the bigger you build a fire, the more darkness you illuminate. The bigger something gets the more poeple attempt to explain it and the higher the potential for it to be misconceived.
"That's why it's important for us to make another album," he says. "A lot of what we're doing now will be better explained and understood in retrospect, when people can understand the lineage.
"Until then, the rush is that we've built something bigger than ourselves. We've constructed a universe that people want to be a part of- even if they don't know what it is. They want to live there but they can't find it. The beauty is that we're the pied pipers onstage, and you're left wondering if you got there."