Pig Destroyer
- Story by Andrew Parks
The surreal journey through life and limb
So this is how Pig Destroyer typically spend their Sundays: Shooting the proverbial shit at the suburban abode of Brian Harvey’s way-too-understanding parents, the same quaint, quiet Virginia spot they’ve terrorized nearly every weekend for the past eight years, including that one practice where singer J.R. Hayes cracked his skull with a cymbal.
Nothing will be rehearsed or recorded today, though. With the recent birth of Scott Hull’s second baby boy keeping the guitarist/family man/producer/federal cog more out of commission than usual (i.e. completely incapacitated rather than slightly), the band hasn’t played together since a Coalesce show in mid-August. As a result, everyone’s spending this surprisingly hot October afternoon hustling amps, pedals, guitars and a disjointed drum kit downstairs in hopes of restoring order to Pig Destroyer’s regular routine of once-a-weekend meetings.
Well, everyone but us. Rather than huffing and puffing our way past the kitchen table with a Marshall stack—like Hull just did—we’re busy hassling Harvey’s parents. Spread out comfortably on opposite ends of a winding, body-absorbing living room couch, they look quite content about the fact that their floorboards won’t be shaking this particular afternoon.
“It’s good clean fun for the kids to be practicing down there,” says Mrs. Harvey, smiling. “Is it annoying sometimes? Yes. It was much louder than I expected [the first time]. I’ve had things break before because of it, like plates and things on our mantle falling down. But with Brian being the drummer, there aren’t a lot of other options.”
As understanding as she seems to be, Harvey’s mother put her foot down when her own 84-year-old mother was in town not too long ago. Apparently, the band’s name alone almost gave her a coronary, so who knows how she would have handled songs like “Cheerleader Corpses” and “Pretty in Casts.”
“She wouldn’t be too keen on the words being sung,” Mrs. Harvey concedes. “When she asked the band’s name and I said Pig Destroyer, she just said, ‘What? WHAT?!’”
Which leads us to wonder whether Brian’s ’rents approve of Pig Destroyer’s slice and dice music either. After all, dad isn’t saying much.
“I can take it up here, but it’s too loud for me to watch down there,” says Mrs. Harvey. “I guess that’s the difference between the music we like and what the boys play: I can’t understand a word J.R. sings.”
She pauses and adds, “Actually, a few years ago, I said, ‘You know, you guys have really mellowed.’ And they said, ‘Nah, you’re just getting used to it.’”
HARD CANDY
The band’s right. Despite the ambient soundscape/tone poetry detours of “Natasha”—the 37-minute audio-DVD portion of their last LP, Terrifyer—Pig Destroyer haven’t mellowed out one bit. Hence the pole position of the self-proclaimed “lean, mean” Phantom Limb on Decibel’s Top 40 of 2007 list. As Hull puts it when the five of us (including Hayes, Harvey and noise technician/occasional bassist Blake Harrison) sit down for several pints at a local pub, “Last time was just too much, man. It was a lot of work because we were trying to take up space and attract the listener in a different way. Obviously, grindcore is very in your face and doesn’t really require you to engage with it. ‘Natasha’ was supposed to draw you in.”
To be fair, Phantom Limb has its own way of attracting onlookers to its car crashes and crime scenes without being redundant or too reliant on blast beats and smackdown tactics. Like the way “Girl in the Slayer Jacket” actually alludes to Araya and company—catchy-as-fuck thrash chords and all—or the mosh-about sink holes that are opened in the middle of “Heathen Temple” and the title track. They’re vicious enough to get an entire room of hardcore kids windmilling, in the same way that the dominant Southern-fried riff of “Fourth Degree Burns” demands the popping of a thousand Pabsts.
The interesting thing about the creative twists and turns that are crammed into Phantom Limb’s 38 minutes (including six minutes of chirping crickets at the close) is all the drama that went into the final product. As happy as the band is with it, Hull still sounds a little sour about the amount of money that went into recording sessions at Omega Studios (the one-time home of Bad Brains, Def Leppard and, er, Barbra Streisand), which he compares to being in a “really expensive hotel room for five days.” Not because they’re “just a grind band” at the end of the day; because he had to retrace their steps and do a lot of post-op mixing at his home studio, Visceral Sound.
What did work better than previous Pig Destroyer sessions was the actual songwriting process. Because the band knew they had to have everything ready for the on-the-clock environment of a pricey studio, Hull brought most of the material to rehearsals, where they could flesh out his ideas as a group and add/delete/rearrange parts over the course of several months. While this may sound like a control freak situation—as in, “Hey guys, this is your music; now PLAY IT, motherfuckers”—everyone sounds as if they were relieved by it.
“At first, I felt like I wouldn’t be contributing what I usually would,” admits Harvey, “But once I started hearing the songs, I was happy. It seems like Scott writes a more well-rounded song when he’s sitting by himself in the basement drunk at two in the morning or whatever.”
Hayes is even more to the point about the workload breakdown: “If we needed a new part or transition, we didn’t have to stare at [Scott] for 20 minutes until he figures it out.”
The staring (and the shoe-gazing) would come later, as Hayes tracked his vocals and the rest of the band attempted the unthinkable over the course of two days: a pair of 15-minute-plus drone-metal tracks. Or as Hull describes it, a “meditative, dirge-type thing. Each [song] is very dense—lots of thick, exaggerated distortion and amp worship. It’s very epic sounding, and simplistic, you know? There aren’t 40 riffs in every song. The hard thing is playing that slow, which is diametrically opposed to what we do.”
While Harvey is quick to compare the material to classic Earth albums like Earth 2 and Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions, he also suggests a reference point few would get right away, if at all: the down-tuned doom of Corrupted, the mysterious Japanese band that filled their last LP (admitted Pig Destroyer influence El Mundo Frio) with one 71-minute track of skyscraper-shaking bass lines, candied synth keys, brushed percussion patterns, hypnotic chimes and, well, Cookie Monster madness… sung in Spanish. What all this means in the context of Pig Destroyer’s catalogue is hard to gauge since the songs aren’t done yet. (Thus far, Hull tracked a lot of noise and Melvins nods, Harrison blew out a bass cabinet in pursuit of a wobbly, gut-punching low-end and Harvey added some drums to the “dirty, sludgy” mix. Hayes, on the other hand, hasn’t touched either track yet.)
“One of the songs is really cold,” explains Hayes, adding that he’s incinerated quite a few unworthy lyric sheets already. “There isn’t a lot of structure to it, so I’ll probably do something really harsh and maybe even bring someone else in to open up the space a bit. It’s a tightrope either way, between experimenting too much and staying true to who you really are. If it sounds cool, though, I’ll do it.”
As for the other song, Hayes says it has a “more melodic quality,” so he might switch things up with some affected vocals on it. Don’t worry, though. Hayes is quick to assure us that he won’t be “crooning the whole time” because he’s “not Danzig, after all.”
The other thing Pig Destroyer decided against for the initial vinyl-only version (due out sometime in 2008, along with a stereo remastering of “Natasha” tacked onto a rarities compilation) is including any of the tracks they laid down with a session keyboardist brought in to achieve Hull’s moonlit Pink Floyd fantasies, circa Animals. The result was worse than anyone could have imagined.
“It was an abortion—an R&B-like, Hammond B3 thing, not the dark rock of Pink Floyd,” explains Hull.
“It’s pretty out there,” adds Hayes. “It was fun while it was going on, but the whole time we could tell it wasn’t going to work.”
Harrison is more blunt: “Why are we still talking about it? It’s one of those things like, ‘Didn’t you date that girl?’ ‘No I didn’t.’”
Oh, about Harrison: While his role was barely defined during the recording of Phantom Limb—three-quarters of it was already finished when he joined—he’s now fully engrossed in every stage of Pig Destroyer and may soon be moving away from the somewhat stagnant sample-triggering role he’s had onstage.
“We’d like him to do some live composing,” says Hull, “Stuff that he has to perform, rather than just hit a button.”
One of the options that’s getting tossed around (and shot down) is finally incorporating a bassist into the band after a decade of people constantly asking why Pig Destroyer doesn’t have one. Hull seems to be the only person really behind the idea, though.
“I don’t really want it,” says Hayes, rather bluntly. “I think it changes the sound too much. I’m more about putting things around the edges and trying to create an atmosphere.”
“I used to want a bass player, but after years of not having one, it’ll make it sound like a different band,” adds Harvey. “I wouldn’t mind doing more doom stuff like a ‘side project onstage,’ but that’s about it.”
“I don’t care, as long as it’s brutal,” says Hayes. “That’s my only rule.”
NOW IT’S DARK
One surefire way to get the entire Pig Destroyer family talking is to ask them about the good old days—an idealistic DIY-or-die period that provides a sobering counterpoint to sudden interest in the band from people as varied as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and MTV. Like the time they played a Maryland boathouse with Mastodon until the owners of said boathouse (i.e. somebody’s rich parents) got pissed and pulled the plug. Or a get-in-and-get-out Connecticut gig with Daybreak (Harrison’s former powerviolence band) that featured five-minute sets from five bands so someone’s deaf mom wouldn’t get upset.
“You couldn’t write anything that’s more retarded than that,” says Hull.
Actually you could. Take Hayes’ entry into the music business, for instance. While many have mentioned his brief vocalist position in the Virginia grindcore band Enemy Soil before joining Pig Destroyer, few people realize that he’d barely touched a mic before being asked to try out in the middle of watching Dr. Strangelove at someone’s house.
“My first show [at a co-op in Boston] was the scariest day of my life,” confesses Hayes, who only had a month to learn the band’s songs. “If we were in DC at the time, I probably would have ran home. After it was over, it was a great feeling, though.”
Almost as great as Hayes’ second show—in front of 1,000 people at San Francisco’s Fiesta Grande festival, one of his last Enemy Soil appearances before a falling out with room/bandmate Mason pushed Hayes into the powerviolence arms of Hull and original Pig Destroyer drummer John Evans. The trio hit it off immediately, but it quickly became clear that Evans, a 15-year-old with barely any experience at the time, wasn’t going to work out.
“It was the kind of thing where if it was on, it was great,” says Hayes, “And if it was off, he’d be playing different songs than we were and it was a disaster.”
To solve this problem, Pig Destroyer essentially broke up and reformed with Harvey (another former Enemy Soil member) behind their ramshackle kit. Which, according to Hull, was a tough decision to make due to the “really bad picture” Enemy Soil had painted of the “unreliable” drummer.
“After that, the chemistry was so tight that we could come up with stuff consistently,” says Hull.
“The situation was definitely a lot better than Enemy Soil, where we fought over every riff and drum fill,” adds Hayes.
Things have pretty much stayed the same way in the years since, too, from the trio’s deliberately choppy and technical classic Relapse debut (2001’s Prowler in the Yard, which arrived soon after the Evans-period compilation 38 Counts of Battery) to the arty grind inclinations of Terrifyer, still the band’s best-selling disc at nearly 20,000 scanned copies. (Though Phantom Limb is already easily on pace to surpass that number.)
“We have our tiffs every now and then, but the reason we’ve stuck around so long is because this is a really relaxed situation,” explains Hull. “There isn’t a lot of tension involved, or reasons for us to be fed up with the band.”
One major reason for Pig Destroyer’s “really relaxed situation” is their blatant refusal to tour extensively, for better or for worse. Basically, the longest recent stateside Pig Destroyer tour was four dates with noise demigods Whitehouse and Wolf Eyes in support of Terrifyer. Ironically, the band’s longest tour wasn’t even in the U.S.; it was nine dates in the U.K.
“That one wasn’t that bad,” says Harrison. “This band never comes down to being stuck for six months in a van and someone saying, ‘You ate my cheeseburger,’ you know?”
“Even in England, though, I get moody, man,” adds Hayes. “I need some solitude at some point.”
In order to maintain such a light road schedule, Pig Destroyer have spent the past decade working their ass off, including geeky computer work for the government (Hull), survey engineering (Hull, Harvey), and sound design for major clients like the New York Yankees (Harrison). Despite the seemingly open door to get out of this situation and do Pig Destroyer full-time, no one wants to do so.
“We kind of hit our stride a little late,” says Harvey. “Maybe if we were 18, we could have just gone for it.”
“Well, we’re not going for it,” adds Hull. “I like my family too much to be on the road all the time. Because we don’t count on this for our livelihood, we don’t have to alter what we’re doing. We can do exactly what we want.”
DIRECTOR’S CUT
It only takes 10 minutes of alone time in Hayes’ cozy sedan—a screeching Steve Austin on blast, sounding surprisingly like Hayes, actually—to realize just how serious the singer is about every aspect of Pig Destroyer. Especially the oft-controversial lyrics he constantly labors over, sometimes for months at a time.
“If I’m going to go through the trouble of writing something, I want it to stand alone vocally and conceptually—not just put a bunch of crap in there that doesn’t mean anything to me,” he emphasizes. “I mean, if I’m not going to put a lot of time into my band, what the hell am I going to put my time into?”
During our brief drive to a local Metro station, Hayes ticks off a number of singers that he’s studied thoroughly in pursuit of becoming a brilliant writer, including Bruce Springsteen (“I’ve been fascinated by his stuff for a long time, despite the stigma that’s attached to him”), Nick Cave (“I hated him at first, but once I heard The Good Son, I bought his entire discography”), Hank Williams, Van Morrison and Lou Reed. Notice how none of those vocalists fit the prospective serial killer profile that many have tagged onto Hayes due to his ultra-violent tales of love gone very, very bad. That’s because the darker side of his writing process draws more inspiration from mindfuck film directors like David Lynch and a pre-History of Violence David Cronenberg than Manson, Dahmer and Gacy—material that’s “surreal and disconnected from true life experience.”
“With David Lynch, it’s like you’re watching paintings that move,” says Hayes, who visited the American Film Institute in Silver Springs, MD, just to see the director introduce an Inland Empire screening. “He could do a five-hour movie with no narrative and I’d be into it. People get too hung up on whether they understand something. It’s better to think about a film and not come to any conclusion than to not think about a film at all.”
Remember that last line, Pig Destroyer fans, because Hayes is in the midst of editing his long-rumored novel, a hand-written, 200-word opus that a friend typed out for the keyboard-impaired singer. Much like Mulholland Drive or the aforementioned Inland Empire, the as-yet-untitled book makes sense to Hayes “but only because I wrote it.”
Oh yes, there will be blood. And maybe this time a girl won’t feel compelled to devote an entire zine to how misogynistic Hayes supposedly is, which is exactly what happened after Terrifyer came out.
As Harrison put it earlier, “Do you really think Chris Barnes fucked a girl with a knife one time? In general, we’re a lot more mild-mannered than people assume. You know what I did last night? I read.”
“Nobody thinks Quentin Tarantino is a gangster or that Agatha Christie murders people, but if you’re in a band, people take everything you say at face value,” says Hayes. “That said, if people want to think I’m hacking people up in my basement or eating a rat in an alley, great. It’s much more exciting than what I’m actually doing. If there aren’t people out there to misunderstand me, though, what’s the point?”
