Earlier this summer, the two groups launched a tour appropriately dubbed Ashes of the Leviathan. Both Lamb of God and Mastodon will play the aforementioned albums in their entirety when they roll into Jacobs Pavilion on Friday, Aug. 9. In separate phone interviews, Lamb of God bassist John Campbell and Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher speak about the tour, the state of metal and their lengthy careers with their respective bands.
Campbell: We were very familiar with them at that point. I don’t know if we knew we would be releasing albums on the same day. We knew them from Today is the Day when Bill [Kelliher] was in Today’s the Day. When we were tracking, Bill came down and wound up in that band for a while. We kept bumping into them and staying in touch since then.
Kelliher: I had been friends with those guys since Burn the Priest, which is the band prior. They came to record a demo run by up in Clinton, MA at a studio run by the guitar player and singer of Today is the Day. I was playing drums for that band. It was 1998. I was sleeping on the couch in the studio. They set up and when you went to record there, there were two rooms, and I became your roommate. We got to be friends real fast. I made friends with everyone who recorded there, but I had a blast hanging out with [Lamb of God singer] Randy [Blythe]. When the signed their record deal, they got on bigger national tours. I remembered them as the Burn the Priest guys, and it was exciting. We put Mastodon together after that. I remember our first show at Richmond at a place called Twisters. We got there about five minutes after we were supposed to be there, and the guy was locking the door, and the show was cancelled. Randy was there. He had come out to see the show. He probably would’ve been the only person there. He said we should play a house party at his house. We go to his house, and he had a crawl space, and we couldn’t even get our gear down there, so we just crushed some beers together. Long story short, we became friends, and we did the Unholy Alliance tour with them and a tour with them with Metallica. We’re thick as thieves!
How’d the concept for this co-headlining tour come about?
Campbell: I was sitting there in my lounge chair, and I thought of it. I’m kidding. It’s the 20th anniversary of our record and their record, and we thought something should be done. And it’s been a long time since we were on tour with those guys. We did the Unholy Alliance Tour with them and then some touring with Metallica in Europe, and Mastodon was on that tour. That was one of the best tours I’ve done in my life.
Kelliher: We’ve been talking about this tour for a long time. Two of our seminal albums came out on the same day, and we said we needed to do a tour on the 20-year anniversary.
Both bands have played Cleveland since the early days. Any great memories?
Campbell: The truth of it is that I would have to be back there to differentiate Cleveland from the blur of memories of other cities we’ve played for the past 30 years of touring. I remember playing [the now-shuttered] Peabody’s and the Agora. I believe our first time would have been with GWAR and Amen. We’ve played Jacobs Pavilion before too. For some reason, there were fireworks going on downtown that night we played, so we got a free fireworks show. I really like that venue.
Kelliher: We played Euclid Tavern and the Grog Shop and both the Agora Ballroom and Theatre. I think we played a couple of house shows. We played just about every venue in town. We used to crash at [photographer] Karen Novak’s house. We were friends with her. We played with [the Cleveland hard rock band] Keelhaul all the time. We’ve been coming to Cleveland forever. It was one of the first places we played where people actually liked us, so we thought we should go back.
John, can you talk about the making of Ashes of the Wake? You had been a band for 10 years at that point. What did you set out to accomplish with the album?
Campbell: That was a third of the way into our career in. I had no idea that this would be a career of a remarkable anything. We were just making a record as best we could. I think we thought it might be our last record. I think that was our first record with [producer/engineer Gene Freeman] Machine. Maybe not. We also did Sacrament with Machine. We recorded in Richmond at a place called Sound of Music. It was downtown on Broad Street. It was a wild time. Machine may have been living at the studio. It was very Richmond. We knew all the people working there just from living there forever, and it was great to work at home. And we were just getting into making records in the digital age.
Ashes of the Wake is about war. Do you find the songs are particularly relevant now?
Campbell: Sure. You can grab what the overall message is from some of these songs and apply them to today. It’s universal that humans have been dicks to each other for a long time and brutal to each other in ways that the two of us who are sitting here in our comfortable homes can’t even imagine.
Bill, Mastodon made a concept record with Leviathan. What made you want to retell the story of Moby Dick, which is what you did with that album?
Kelliher: I was on a rather long flight back from Hawaii and going to the UK to meet the guys, and we were going to start a tour in 2003. We were going to start a tour. I had it in my head that it would be cool to do a concept album. There were parallels between the story of us driving around in our big white van like sailors playing music in basements and halls around the country. It felt right. We decided that Remission was the fire record. We wanted to do the four elements, so we decided do do a water record, but that was pretty vague. I needed more. I bought the book at a bookstore in Hawaii. I had a 35-hour flight with all the layovers. I read the whole book, and by the time I got to the UK, I had my sales pitch down. From an aesthetic standpoint, we had the whale and clipper ships. They went for it and off we went.
Both Leviathan and Ashes of the Wake are very technical in terms of time signature changes and guitar work. How difficult is it to play them in their entirety?
Campbell: Some of those songs were written on purpose to be difficult. The guitarists were battling each other, and here I am the bass player sitting between them wondering what they were doing. It’s a really technical record, and some of the songs are really fun to play. The top half of the album includes songs that have been in regular rotation. We tend to stack all the good songs up front on our albums, but people love the second half, and for them to hear them live is going to be exciting. Nostalgia is killing it right now, maybe because of the uncertainty of the times. People want to go back to those times and relive that that moment when the record was important to them and to us. And it’s amazing to do this with Mastodon. I’m biased, but I think we have the best metal tour going around this summer.
Kelliher: I don’t know if it presents a challenge for the other guys in the band. For me, it’s a lot of drumming. I’ll be going crazy back there. It was before I started doing vocals for the band, so there are no breaks. There’s a version of me now that would’ve laid back on some of that stuff, but I need to be true to the songs of the album and do it right. I’ve been playing it for months more than anybody else in the band. For me, it’s an athletic thing. I have to get my stamina up. I’m ready right now. If we had to do it today, it’d be a stellar performance by yours truly.
You’ve seen metal go through different stages during the time you’ve been an active band. How would you describe the current state of the scene?
Campbell: I think it’s fantastic. Cultural strife always does well for heavy, aggressive, somewhat-angry music, and we’re primed for heavy metal to continue. There are kids coming out with good music too. We’re taking Malevolence out with us. They are young kids from the UK, and that’s encouraging.
Kelliher: It’s the same as it ever was. It goes up and down, and there are a lot of creative people and insane musicians. It has a lot of kinship with free jazz. It’s a genre that lets you do whatever you want. It’s not popular enough so that there are too many people at the top who want to get involved and make as much money as they can off the product. It’s right under that cusp. Plus, sometimes, metalheads are a little scary. I think it’s one of the most healthy genres of music there is. It’s got so many ridiculously talented players and styles and so many different sub-genres have sprouted off. They all share that base of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest and Deep Purple in all of it. You can hear the evolution of a pretty young genre of music. The forefathers are still alive. You hear newer bands getting popular, and I hear shreds of Sabbath and Converge. It’s like a rolling snowball going down the hill collecting all these parts. It sounds good to me.
What has kept your band going all these years?
Campbell: We’re creeping up on that 30-year mark. I could come up with some smartass answer, but I honestly have no idea. We’re all dedicated and talented and fortunate. We’ve known each other for a long time and have grown up in a lot of ways together. We managed to pull it off even though we never intended for it to last this long. It’s amazing.
Kelliher: We have to make this work at this point. If I have to get a regular job somewhere, that’s not in the cards. I’ll be working the nightshift at the minimart. I keep waiting for the entertainment police to take my license away. It’s like, “The jig is up. You can’t be doing this anymore.” But it’s really fun, and we have more to say, and there’s always a bag of riffs to dump out and look through, and that’s a good thing.
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This article appears in Jun 19 – Jul 2, 2024.
