Cavalera Max - My Bloody Roots: From Sepultura to Soulfly and beyond: The Autobiography

My Bloody Roots

From Sepultura To Soulfly And Beyond

The Autobiography

Max Cavalera with Joel McIver

Foreword by Dave Grohl

A Jawbone book

First edition 2014

Published in the UK and the USA by

Jawbone Press

2a Union Court,

2022 Union Road,

London SW4 6JP,

England

www.jawbonepress.com

ISBN 978-1-908279-64-4

Edited by Tom Seabrook

Jacket design by Mark Case

Volume copyright 2014 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright Max Cavalera with Joel McIver. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.

Contents

This book is dedicated to God/Deus.
Obrigado por sempre estar comigo e escutar as
minhas preces e por iluminar a minha carreira!

Foreword
by Dave Grohl

The Foo Fighters studio is a great place. When we built it, the first thing we did was install massive, freestanding speakers in the control room. They look like monoliths: theyre unbelievably loud and clear, and theyre the best speakers in the world. I couldnt wait to plug them in and listen to Sepulturas Roots album on them, because theyre the size of the Glastonbury PA. So I put in a CD of Roots and I turned it up to 10and that fucking record blew those speakers right out. Fifty-thousand-dollar speakers, gone because of Roots

I first got into Sepultura in the late 80s. I grew up in Springfield, Virginia, and I loved rocknroll from an early age. I discovered hardcore and punk rock around the age of 13: a lot of my favorite bands had really strong political messages. I wasnt a revolutionary, but something about the marriage of message and mayhem really turned me on.

A few years later, my best friendwho was more of a metalhead than I wasstarted discovering underground metal. Wed seen Motrhead in 1984 on the British TV show The Young Ones , and we bought Metallicas first album Kill Em All on
cassette from a mail-order catalogue without having heard it, just because the band name and the album title sounded cool. People called Metallicas music thrash metal, and it opened us up to a whole new world of music. We started buying albums without having heard a note. We would buy an album for its cover or its title or the band name. One of these new bands was Sepultura.

At the time, Sepultura were considered the next Slayerand as far as I was concerned, that was like being the next Beatles! When I found out that they came from a faraway part of the world, I became fascinated with them, and I started to follow them and watch them evolve. There was something menacing about hearing a vocal in a foreign accent that I thought was so fucking cool. I was so used to hearing hardcore and metal bands from America and England, but when you heard them from Scandinavia or South America or other parts of the planet, it added a whole new element, almost of a wicked nature.

When Nirvana became popular, it was our mission to expose as many people as we could to music that they might otherwise never have heard, whether it was Teenage Fanclub or Sepultura. We would sit in the back of the tour bus and listen to music and think of ways to give props to musicians that we had a lot of respect for, because we considered them to be real. I thought that what Sepultura were doing at the time, which was around of the Chaos AD record, was not unlike what Nirvana was doing. We were making music from the heart that was entirely real, and it was more than just rhythms and nonsense: there was substance and depth to it.

I remember listening to Chaos AD on the tour bus with Krist Novoselic and saying, We should take this band on tourbecause we would take the Dead Kennedys on tour if they wanted to tour with us, and we would take the Bad Brains on tour if they wanted to tour with us, and we would take Sepultura on tour if they wanted to tour with us, because we all felt akin to each other. I looked at Sepultura as cut from the same cloth as the Bad Brains or the Dead Kennedys. These were the bands that we really looked up to. Unfortunately, it wasnt long afterward that Kurt Cobain passed away, but Im pretty sure that at some point our two bands would have met somewhere down the roadand it would have been great.

I recall the first time I went to say hello to Sepultura on their tour bus. I was nervous, because I admired them so much and I didnt want to seem like a fucking dorky fanboy. In their presence, though, I really felt like I was somewhere special. There is something about a group when it really feels like a group, and Sepultura felt like a gang from another planet. They were the perfect combination of all of the things that I love so much about music. When Roots came out in 1996, it changed everything. It raised the bar so high that still, to this day, I dont think anyone has got close to touching it.

I was fortunate enough to have Max sing on the Probot album which I released in 2004. Probot was an experiment: Ive always had a love of really heavy music, but I didnt necessarily think that it had a place in what the Foo Fighters were doing at the time. I had a studio in my basement, and I would write riffs and record them for fun. I did this for years: Id give cassettes to friends on road trips, just to listen to when they were driving. Then a friend of mine convinced me to assemble a dream-team lineup of vocalists and round them up to put vocals on these instrumentals. I thought of all my personal favorite metal singers, and Max had to be in there.

Because I knew the vocalists so wellnot personally, but musicallyI crossed my fingers and hoped that they would do what I thought they would do. What I wanted on the Probot track Red War was pure Max Cavalera. When the CD came back in the mail, I got exactly what I wanted: pure Max. It was amazing: his lyrics about the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan were totally prophetic. Lyrically, he never disappoints. Hes a brilliant, brilliant guy.

Max Cavalera is a legend. Hes never sold out, hes always kept it realand hell always be able to say, I made Roots . To me, that is fucking massive.

Dave Grohl

2014

Introduction

Im writing this book for many reasons.

Firstly, my story needs to be told, truthfully and accurately. I have been lucky enough to be a founder member of not one but two successful metal bands, Sepultura and Soulfly, and I have traveled with them around the world more times than I can remember.

Along the way there has been chaos, death, and addiction, and relationships have been made and crushed. The truth about Sepultura, my beloved first band, and why I left it has not been fully revealed before now, and nor has the truth about my struggle with alcohol and painkillers. Its time to set the record straight.

I also want to pay tribute to the people in my lifethose who are still with me, and those who have passed away. My wife, my children, my mother, my brother, my sister, my bandmates, my friends, and of course my fans continue to support me, even after so many years, and this book contains my gratitude to them. For my father Graziano Cavalera, who died when I was a boy, and for my stepson Dana Wells, who was murdered in 1996, no words can express my love for them and the sadness I feel in their absence as well as the words in this book.

Finally, I want to pay my respects to my home country, Brazil. It is a vivid, beautiful land of many faces, and my love for it runs deeper than I can say. I have seen Brazil at its best and its worst, from the gangs on the city streets to the native peoples of the jungle, and all these elements have fueled and inspired my music.

Sepultura was the first rock band to come from Brazil and achieve international success. We hoped that other bands would come after us and do the same, but in the 30 years since Sepultura formed, that has not happened. It is the job of my new band, Soulfly, to fly the Brazilian flag throughout the worlda job I consider a great honor.