Mudvayne: Behind The Makeup

from www.mtv.com
2001

Ever since the freewheeling '70s, makeup has been a part of rock and roll. Whether it was the painted-on masks that made Kiss seem larger than life or the mascara and rouge that blew up in the faces of bands like Mötley Crüe and Poison, artists have turned to cosmetics to turn heads. So why should Mudvayne be any different? The four Central Illinois musicians came together in 1996 hell-bent on making powerful music. The resulting sound was something like a cross between Pantera and Korn, and with a playing style that fierce, it's only natural the band's appearance should try to keep pace. When they released L.D. 50 last year, metal fans took notice, and the group earned spots on such high-profile tours as the Tattoo the Earth ink-and-music roadshow and this summer's Ozzfest outing. Joe D'Angelo got hold of Mudvayne drummer Spag — the one whose head makes him look like an overzealous Foot Locker employee — during a recent stop in Las Vegas and got the story behind the face paint, the band's popular video for "Dig" and the group's secret formula for "math metal".

MTV: Obviously everyone is intrigued by the band's makeup. How did that come about?
sPaG: We had always wanted to bring a visual aspect to the band and something that could help us interact with our audience. We have a great love for cinema and visuals in general, so we'd love to have a video onstage or a holograph and a tight light show and props, even costumes. But early on, the makeup was a very easy, thought-provoking, attention-grabbing and inexpensive way to bring a visual aspect to the band. We started wearing makeup three years ago when, not that it's not a cool thing to do now, but back then it was off the hook. People were just flippin' out, and for us it was very energizing. It's real exciting — it gave us a great rush going onstage painted up like a bunch of freaks. It was almost like a going-into-battle sort of feel, like in the movie "Braveheart".

MTV: How did you decide how each person was going to look?
sPaG: I think it's important to not draw anything too literal about the makeup. When we started, I think all of our makeup was similar. Through time we've all kind of kind of found our own feel. You know, I've stuck with the stark black/white contrast, kind of a yin-yang thing, which says a lot about me on a personal level. I think we've all just kind of followed our unconscious motivations. But none of the makeup was ever anything that was supposed to refer to an identity, and I think for us the makeup is more of an identity-losing element. It brings us all together onstage. It allows us to disassociate from our normal sphere of awareness and step outside of ourselves and just be this madman, warrior, magician, crazy man onstage, whatever, and a part of the unit too.

MTV: Do you sometimes think that you'll shoot yourself in the foot with the makeup — like, "Look, we did this for attention, and now this is all the attention we're getting"?
sPaG: I think in a certain way it was a bit naive of us in the beginning. I don't think we ever expected to get as much attention for the makeup. I think for us it was more fun and, I don't want to say lighthearted, and I don't want to trivialize it, but it was exciting for us. I don't think we saw the impact that it would have on a marketing level. And it is a little freakish for us, but I don't regret it. I think the payoff from it as far as just drawing attention to the band has been worth it. And I think as we go along and people see us change and moving into different looks, people are gonna realize we're not that superficial — there's actually something going on and we are evolving.

MTV: Fans can expect a makeover, so to speak? The makeup will be evolving?
sPaG: It already has. How you see us on the album is not how we look onstage right now. It's been changing for months. We started doing different stuff with our look last fall.

MTV: So it's kind of little by little?
sPaG: It depends. We've done drastic things onstage. I mean, we've been onstage a couple of times now and not worn the makeup. We've been onstage in medical scrubs, covered in fake blood.

MTV: Does that freak people out?
sPaG: Oh yeah, big time.

MTV: Are you surprised by how well your album, L.D. 50, has done?
sPaG: It's definitely a bit of a, I don't want to say shock, but it's more than we expected. We knew that when we were writing the album that it would be commercially viable. We knew there was a scene for it, but I didn't expect this much this quickly. On a personal level, I think we're all handling it pretty well, and to be honest, we're fairly insulated being on the road. I mean, we're just playing shows, and when you're walking into sh--ty clubs and whatnot, it's kinda hard to visualize the success that you're having.

MTV: Looking back, can you pinpoint a time that you felt like you had really made it?
sPaG: It was real exciting for us, of course, to get signed, but we felt like even about six months before we got signed, when we were really working on the album, we kind of felt at that time that we had hit on something. As far as on a literal level, with what's going on with the band, going through Australia was really exciting last month. Getting on the top 40 there was a really important sign to us that there was a commercial viability to what we were doing and that people really were paying attention.

MTV: Your album was produced by GGGarth [Melvins, L7] ...
sPaG: Yep, Ga Ga Ga Garth. His name is Garth, but the whole joke with that is that he stutters, so it's Ga Ga Ga Garth. He's got a great sense of humor about it though, so it's cool. It was produced by him and then co-produced by us.

MTV: Executive-produced by Shawn Crahan of Slipknot. What exactly is executive-produced?
sPaG: Basically that's like a stamp of approval, like in the sense he's saying, "Yes I endorse this product. I think this is good, and I think that you should buy it." You know, pretty much Shawn's involvement with us was on an inspirational level and on a sounding-board level. When we were putting things together he was like, "Yeah, this is cool. I like this. You guys are going in a good direction, work that way".

MTV: This was your debut album, but it's not really your first recording, is it? You had something else.?
sPaG: We had an independent EP,Kill, I Oughtta, that we did on a local level, just to get something out for our fans. Originally it was recorded as a demo, just for shopping the band, but we were doing so well locally and there was such a demand for us to put something out that we ended up putting that out. We never saw it as being our first release, but it worked out well. Anybody that listens to Kill, I Oughtta, will recognize it as being us. It's not like we changed our style, but L.D. 50 is on many levels much more refined. It shows a greater amount of versatility in the band's writing — more dynamic control. Lyrically, I think it's a lot more mature. At the time when we worked on Kill, I Oughtta, we were a lot more focused on kind of expressing the juvenile adolescent angst that most kids have. Not that we were kids at the time, but it was our first chance to really vent a lot of anxiety and angst about growing up, and those were a lot of the issues that we focused on, whereas with L.D. 50 we pushed into deeper waters dealing with the human experience in general. And I think we really wanted to open up ourselves and get away from just being seen as another angry band — ya know, the "My parents didn't let me go to the mall today, so I'm pissed off" kind of thing.

MTV: Is there any kind of fundamental theme to L.D. 50?
sPaG: Yeah, I think it's important, because a lot of people want to see it as a concept album, and that's kind of a misunderstanding. It's conceptual, and there's conceptual continuity and theme, but we're not a band that has a specific verbal message that can be expressed. I try to stay away from literally defining anything. I like to give our fans the opportunity to build their own relationship to the work. I think that's really important. I think that's important in all good work. There are themes on the album that the title itself expresses.

MTV: Care to explain?
sPaG: As a general idea, we wanted to have an overall theme with the album of pushing people, opening doors, inviting opportunities to open a person's awareness, and I think a lot of the vehicles that a person can come in contact with that afford that opportunity tend to be things that are outside of what we normally see. The possibility grows when you don't have control over a situation. And that was a major theme for the album. Essentially, cultivating opportunities to change your life and transform yourself through random events, through accidents, through dangerous risk-taking situations.

MTV: L.D. 50, or Lethal Dose 50, is somewhat of a scientific term, and your album artwork features chemical models and writing that looks like it belongs on a periodic table of the elements. Do you guys have some sort of fascination with science?
sPaG: I don't have any background, like a degree in chemistry or physics or anything like that, but I've always had an interest in pharmaceutical pursuits. I've always had an interest in psychedelic drug use and things like that — the background of it as far as indigenous tribal usages across the planet, where these compounds come from and the implications of actually using them. So a lot of that came into call with the band also. It affected the album artwork and whatnot.

MTV: It looks like it also carried over into your video for "Dig".
sPaG: Well, going into making a performance video, first off it was important to us to have an association with our album artwork, which is very stark, very clear — an almost medical starkness or a research lab kind of thing. So we shot all the performance pieces against stark white backgrounds, and one of the cool things about it was our look. Our image is so attention grabbing that with those sorts of backgrounds it very strongly contrasts the makeup and the colors and whatnot. So it drew a lot more attention to the performance.

MTV: And does the science motif carry over into how you make the music as well? Your music's been called "math metal." Is that an accurate title?
sPaG: Yeah, I kinda accidentally started that myself. Back in the day, when we were first getting exposed, people would ask us what kind of music we make, and it was kind of a joke but it was also kind of serious. I like to look at our band in some ways as the thinking man's metal band. We also have a great love of numbers and number sequences, and we use number patterns consistently through a lot of our songs. Music is generally written, especially rock music, in phrases, so you can combine phrases in any number of patterns — like, you might play one specific riff four times, whereas we might play it five times then come back to it later in the song and play it three times, that sort of thing.

MTV: What's the significance of that?
sPaG: The significance, well, depending upon the number patterns that you use, you create a number theme for a song that creates a certain character or personality for that song. I like to look at it like building robots. I look at all of our songs as robots, as physical entities with their own numerical sequences, that sort of thing. Or in another way, I like to see each song as a geometric, sort of three-dimensional pattern built upon these numbers. I can visualize it in that way sometimes. Like if we work with, say, threes and fours, then sevens become relevant and then 21 becomes relevant too. And so you're building up a consistency in that song. This also goes into the time signatures that we use, and that's a big part of it too.

MTV: Can you give us an example from the album?
sPaG: "Nothing to Gein" has number nine patterns all through the song — fives, fours and nines — and I specifically pushed toward that because the number nine for me is something that I associate with the moon, and those sorts of themes were very important for that song. It's being about Ed Gein, kind of a night creature, dancing under the moon, wearing people's skin as clothes and robbing graves, that sort of thing.

MTV: So the math metal thing definitely fits...
sPaG: I don't see it as being a genre-defining term. I think it was just something fun for us to kind of call ourselves. I think there are some things about the band that are positive and powerful — taking the sort of complex intellectual approach to our music, but being able to make it also accessible, and that's one of the hard things 'cause when you go off on one of these tangents you can fall off into obscurities so quickly. But I think regardless of how intellectual, or whatever you want to call what we're doing is, I still see 12-year-old fans that love what we do, and I don't see us as ostracizing the fanbase. You don't have to necessarily intellectually understand what we're doing, and I think that's important, to be able to have that content there for the people that want to make the effort but also for people that just want to get off and listen to good fun music.

MTV: People who just want to jump in the pit.
sPaG: Exactly.

*If you want to hear audio clips from this interview click here.