Watch I Stand Alone- The Sully Erna Story (2023) Full Movie For Free

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Transcript

00:00:00 [Music]

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00:00:54 Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Sully Erner.

00:01:00 [Applause]

00:01:10 [Music]

00:01:16 Most people spend their entire lives just trying to figure out who they want to be.

00:01:22 Somehow for me, at a really young age, I just knew what I was going to do with my life.

00:01:27 [Music]

00:01:31 There's a lot of people, I guess they go through their whole life wondering what they're going to be when they grow up kind of thing.

00:01:35 I just knew I wanted to be a musician.

00:01:37 And when I picked up the live bootleg record one day and I seen that picture of Joe Perry holding up a BC Grinch,

00:01:42 that picture actually changed my opinion of wanting to be going from a musician to wanting to be a rock star.

00:01:47 [Music]

00:01:51 Sully Erner, he's just like a non-stop guy, you know, 100% energy that guy.

00:01:56 Sarcastic, tough in your face, down to.

00:02:00 Short, punk, who would pick a fight with the biggest kid?

00:02:04 Sully is driven, that's what he always was and still is.

00:02:07 He's got a tenacity that you fucking just would not understand.

00:02:10 What he goes for, he goes for.

00:02:12 Sully was always the guy that wanted to conquer the world.

00:02:15 When we think about Sully, it's not just as the lead singer of Godsmack, but it's really just a force of nature.

00:02:21 [Music]

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00:02:28 Ready, go!

00:02:37 [Applause]

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00:02:49 [Music]

00:02:53 [Breathing]

00:03:02 Growing up, he was always there for me, but when he could be.

00:03:05 He was always on the road, he was always touring, doing press, doing shows, whatever.

00:03:10 His job is obviously abnormal.

00:03:22 It's weird, like we don't see each other a lot, so we don't get to have that like family time that like a normal family would.

00:03:28 Especially when dad's gone all the time.

00:03:31 Eleven floor.

00:03:33 My dad doesn't talk about his childhood a lot, like the harder stuff.

00:03:42 I think that he's very closed off about that because it was a harder time in his life.

00:03:47 But basically all I know about his childhood is that like it was rough for him growing up.

00:03:52 And he came from like a really, really tough part of Massachusetts.

00:03:58 [Music]

00:04:03 [News Reporter Speaking]

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00:04:11 [News Reporter Speaking]

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00:04:19 [News Reporter Speaking]

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00:04:27 [Music]

00:04:30 My name is Sully Erna, I'm the founder and lead singer of the band Godsmack.

00:04:34 We were born as a band way before you guys were born.

00:04:38 But for me I was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts and I spent the first 18 years of my life there.

00:04:43 And it was a very challenging city for me growing up.

00:04:48 But I was raised with a musical family and my dad's still a trumpet player.

00:04:54 And so then I found out through my dad that my great uncle, who was my grandmother's brother,

00:05:02 was a famous composer in Sicily, Italy, which is where my family is from.

00:05:07 His name was Emanuele Carta.

00:05:10 He had composed and written all this Italian music that today has become very well known in Sicily.

00:05:17 When he passed away he left the house to his sister, which was my grandmother.

00:05:22 And then she went on to get married and raise my dad and his sister, my Aunt Rina.

00:05:27 I was born in 1944 in Sicily in a small town called Nelli Li.

00:05:33 Unfortunately when I was 14 years old my mother passed away.

00:05:38 A few years later my father brought me to the United States where we found work in a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

00:05:48 Oh, it was a beautiful city.

00:05:50 You never had to worry, your parents never had to worry.

00:05:55 You could go out, you could enjoy life, play in the yard.

00:05:59 Very different than today.

00:06:02 There was a lot of areas that you just avoided, especially where we lived.

00:06:08 Even as adults we didn't hang around that area.

00:06:12 So this is my house that I grew up in, 87 Basswood Street in Lawrence.

00:06:21 And it's so surreal being here right now because really this is the heart and soul of kind of the core of my life and what I remember the most.

00:06:33 We've got to come check this out.

00:06:35 Oh my God, I'm freaking out.

00:06:37 I haven't been here since I was 17 years old.

00:06:40 So this was it. This was my old home.

00:06:44 This was my mom's room.

00:06:46 Her bed used to be set up this way against the wall.

00:06:48 This was my little bedroom.

00:06:50 It looks so much smaller than I remember.

00:06:52 I used to have my little drum set there.

00:06:54 [Drumming]

00:07:01 My mom's going to freak out when she sees this film.

00:07:04 This is insane that I'm standing in this house right now.

00:07:07 What an amazing experience to be able to come back here after, what, 35 years?

00:07:15 [Children playing]

00:07:23 When Sully was little, as long as he had a spoon or a stick or something to bang on, that baby was happy.

00:07:31 [Drumming]

00:07:39 Fortunately, he always had it in his blood just like I did.

00:07:43 The earliest memories that I can remember, it was always somehow connected to music.

00:07:48 From watching my dad's band all those years, sitting in the basement from the time I was 3 1/2 years old on,

00:07:56 when they were done rehearsing, I used to always go to the drummer first and ask him if I could play on the drums,

00:08:00 and he'd sit me on the stool. I couldn't even reach the bass drum pedal, it was so small.

00:08:04 I can barely reach it now, actually.

00:08:08 Sometimes it would make me crazy hearing that steady banging and banging,

00:08:14 but I just had that feeling that he had something in him that maybe would develop later on.

00:08:23 I had gone to Constantino's where his dad went all the time.

00:08:27 One day, the owner of the studio came up to me and says,

00:08:31 "There's a mother here with a really young fellow, and she'd like him to sign up for drum lessons."

00:08:39 And they said, "How old is he?" I said, "3 1/2."

00:08:47 "Can you teach somebody that young?"

00:08:50 And I said, "Well, I have never done this before, this young. This will be a new experience, but I'm game."

00:08:56 So we went to two or three lessons, and the fourth time we went back, he told me,

00:09:02 he says, "Mrs. Ernie, don't stop him. He has gotten a natural rhythm for these drums that I can't explain."

00:09:14 He says, "But please, don't stop him."

00:09:17 So we bought him a little drum set for Christmas.

00:09:23 It was a cute little set, but it was paper.

00:09:26 And he put his foot to it, because he said, "This is not a real set. This is a toy set."

00:09:33 One year later, at the age of five, on my fifth Christmas,

00:09:37 there was my blue sparkling beauty real drum set for the first time I had some real drums in the house.

00:09:45 The smallest drum set they had was still three times bigger than him.

00:09:49 He just had such a natural talent. He was born with it.

00:09:53 And no matter where he went, his jeans, his high tops, his drumsticks in his back pocket.

00:09:58 So he was always beating on something.

00:10:02 But again, I wasn't a rock star back then. I wasn't successful.

00:10:06 I wasn't a celebrity. I had no money. We were raised so poor that we didn't even have milk.

00:10:10 Our milk was powdered. So we had a packet of powder that you mix with water,

00:10:15 and that's kind of what milk was for us.

00:10:17 My mom raised us, trying to hold down a couple of jobs to raise me and my sister.

00:10:23 I know that my mom and my dad didn't have a great relationship.

00:10:29 There was a lot of tension in the house, from what I remember.

00:10:33 My ex-wife, I have to make sure, it's not because I'm trying to be nice on this interview or not,

00:10:40 but my ex-wife is a wonderful person. I still respect her enormously.

00:10:45 Unfortunately, she probably doesn't feel the same way.

00:10:48 At least, I think I hurt her a lot when I left.

00:10:53 I think both of us got married too young.

00:10:56 And my reason, I wanted to get out of the house. And he was my out.

00:11:04 I don't remember having a lot of memories with my dad in that house, because I was really young.

00:11:08 And the memories that I have, they're not the best memories for a young kid to remember.

00:11:16 So maybe I shut a lot of that out.

00:11:23 But what I do remember is, they would fight all the time.

00:11:28 Anything could trigger him off. I could make something for dinner that he didn't like,

00:11:33 and he would take it and throw it in the wall. All different things like that.

00:11:38 He was physically, emotionally abusive.

00:11:42 He had a very short temper. And from what I understand, his dad was the same way.

00:11:49 He was taught to teach through hitting.

00:11:53 And so he was a bit too aggressive for a young kid to handle.

00:11:58 I used to pick fights. And I didn't care if the guy was six foot two.

00:12:03 As long as I threw the first punch, even if he beat the hell out of me.

00:12:06 The main point is, "Sully, I didn't want you to be like me, because you'd end up in jail if you kept going like that."

00:12:13 So I said, "That's why I told him, that's why I used to do what I used to do."

00:12:18 "If I smacked you, it's because I didn't want you to be like that."

00:12:22 But then as life goes on, he started to become more wise.

00:12:29 And I do remember this one specific fight, where I was told to go to my room,

00:12:34 and I could hear them screaming at each other in the kitchen.

00:12:37 And when I opened the door, I remember my dad had my mom by the back of her hair,

00:12:41 and he had her face, like, hidden on the stove.

00:12:46 And I remember him looking back and just telling me to shut my door.

00:12:51 And I just remember hearing the argument and the screaming,

00:12:54 and it just didn't sound good to me, and I was really upset.

00:12:58 He always carried a gun, which made me very, very nervous.

00:13:03 Because I knew he had a shot fuse.

00:13:06 I know one day we had a fight, and he picked up Maria, and she was about eight months old.

00:13:16 And he had a gun, and he took her out of the house with a gun and said,

00:13:21 "If I call the police, he would shoot her, and he would shoot me."

00:13:27 Sully doesn't remember a lot that went on when things were really bad.

00:13:33 Maria does.

00:13:35 There were times when we were little, I didn't think we were going to make it.

00:13:38 We grew up in a pretty rough environment,

00:13:40 and we didn't have a lot of encouragement from some of the family members.

00:13:44 And the fights got worse and worse,

00:13:46 and to the point where she didn't want it around us anymore.

00:13:51 And she asked him to go, and he left.

00:13:55 No matter what my mom went through with him,

00:13:57 she always sheltered me and my sister from it as best she could.

00:14:01 She never cried in front of us.

00:14:03 She never told us to hate our dad.

00:14:05 I have one thing to say.

00:14:08 You don't have to love him, but you do have to respect him, because he's your father.

00:14:13 When he walked out of the house, he walked out with nothing.

00:14:16 Not a bill, not a house payment, not child support, nothing.

00:14:22 It was just us struggling just to make ends meet.

00:14:29 And it was just so hard. I felt so guilty.

00:14:33 [♪♪♪]

00:14:38 Although I have no regrets about where I grew up,

00:14:41 Lawrence is one of those places that you have to get tough real quick to survive this place.

00:14:48 It really is one of the toughest inner cities you can find in America.

00:14:55 I had every challenge in the world.

00:14:58 I had next-door neighbors that were rapists.

00:15:01 I had people that I thought were amazing school teachers that got arrested for dealing drugs.

00:15:08 I watched people get beat almost to death just for wearing the wrong colors

00:15:12 'cause you weren't in their gang.

00:15:14 Thankfully, I had music in my life.

00:15:16 I loved it so much, I wanted to go home and practice.

00:15:19 And so when some of the group of kids were going out to do the really dark stuff,

00:15:23 I was home practicing.

00:15:25 [♪♪♪]

00:15:27 I was definitely going down the rock and roll path.

00:15:30 I started picking up some of the first records in rock and roll.

00:15:34 I was kind of molding myself to become that style of musician.

00:15:38 And that kind of rock and roll has always been rebellious.

00:15:41 And so I think it was just me trying to embody myself with that personality.

00:15:47 Once I found my love for drums, I just wanted to play all the time.

00:15:51 His drums were his life.

00:15:53 You know, he practiced and practiced.

00:15:55 And so I would literally skip school and go to my bedroom and strap on headphones for hours and hours and hours

00:16:02 until my hands were cracked and bleeding.

00:16:04 And I just remember thinking, "This is what I'm going to do."

00:16:07 I don't know how I knew this, but at a very young age, I just knew what I wanted to do with my life.

00:16:11 I wanted to be a drummer, and that was it.

00:16:13 And when my dad would come over to visit, I remember he got frustrated.

00:16:18 He would just discourage me in a way by saying that music should be a hobby

00:16:24 and that I needed to get a good education and a job.

00:16:28 And I remember thinking, "That's fucking crazy to me.

00:16:32 Everything else is going to be a hobby, and music is what I'm going to do for a living."

00:16:36 In my memory, you know, it just felt like he would show up,

00:16:39 and they would immediately be beating each other in a fistfight

00:16:42 and just kind of yelling and just slamming doors.

00:16:45 I just didn't understand why my dad was, it seemed like to me, was always picking on him, you know?

00:16:50 I always loved him, but I was a little bit afraid, the way he was growing up.

00:16:56 But I was still myself as far as not being a great father, if you will,

00:17:02 as far as the way I thought was the right way to teach.

00:17:06 That was the beginning of the end for our relationship.

00:17:09 It just spiraled out of control after that, and the more he told me no,

00:17:12 the more I just told him, "This is what I'm going to do."

00:17:16 And I really think it's the reason why I became a lot more rebellious.

00:17:21 And I remember it didn't help my attitude; it made me angrier.

00:17:25 And as years and years developed, I got really good at being bad,

00:17:31 and it becomes an addiction in itself.

00:17:34 And I got looped into that world, and I found myself getting involved in drugs at too young of an age,

00:17:40 and I found myself fighting at too young of an age, because I was a small guy,

00:17:44 and I always had to defend myself.

00:17:47 First day of freshman year, there he is, and there's this bully,

00:17:51 and he's giving him shit, he's picking on him.

00:17:53 I say, "Put somebody your own size."

00:17:56 So we've been friends ever since.

00:17:58 Freddy introduced me to Jimmy Mustapha.

00:18:02 He brought Sully along. I remember him saying he plays the drums or something,

00:18:06 and I'm like, "Oh, you play the drums?"

00:18:08 And I remember Sully doing something with his hands on the trunk of a car,

00:18:11 and I'm like, "Oh, wow, he's good," you know?

00:18:13 [laughs]

00:18:14 [rock music]

00:18:18 Jimmy Mustapha, Freddy Cristaldi.

00:18:22 Those three lived together.

00:18:26 When it came to music, Sully brought it to the forefront.

00:18:29 Whenever you were over his house, that's all he did, playing drums all day.

00:18:33 Sometimes I'd be there, I wouldn't be able to talk to him till the song was over.

00:18:37 "All right, take a break, kid, let me talk to you," because he would just be playing along.

00:18:42 We hung out every day, it seems like, just for years and years, you know, 1984 or whatever.

00:18:48 We were all heavily into music.

00:18:50 We were like metalheads, we wanted long hair and leather jackets and parties and chicks,

00:18:55 and we wanted to live that lifestyle. We all loved that lifestyle.

00:18:59 And Sully brought that into our lives, really.

00:19:03 Every day was just about finding someone to buy us beer at the local liquor store

00:19:08 and scraping up $10 to get a bag of weed and going to house parties.

00:19:13 "His to you, his to me, best of friends we'll always be, if we should disagree, fuck you, his to me."

00:19:22 We just had to kind of walk around the city and find each other.

00:19:24 And this was the meeting spot. Whenever they just said, "Meet us at the stoop," this was the stoop.

00:19:29 But we all hung in this little platform and buy weed and meet up with people and talk and chat.

00:19:35 Like, everybody that I knew in Lawrence, this is where everyone hung out.

00:19:39 To be honest, we all bonded because we all had tough home lives.

00:19:42 During my teenage years, the streets were a better place, I thought at the time, than home.

00:19:48 My father was a fucking monster. He was fucking insanely strong.

00:19:52 And then one night he came in drunk, didn't even know who I was.

00:19:56 He tried to kill me because I asked my mother to pull my pants over my cowboy boots for me.

00:20:01 She bent down and he snapped.

00:20:04 And I went in my room and just shut the door, and he came barging through the door.

00:20:09 I pushed him and said, "Get out of here." So I left.

00:20:13 But Lawrence was tough. And when your family goes down like that too, it's even tougher.

00:20:18 So you rely on your friends. And I did.

00:20:23 It certainly was part of the path that I walked in my life that maybe hardened my shell

00:20:30 and prepared me for some of the more serious things that came at me later in life.

00:20:34 It was a rough town. You don't forget any of that. It lives with you for the rest of your life.

00:20:39 But the man you become is the man you choose to be.

00:20:42 And the part of Lawrence that stays in you, and anybody from Lawrence, if you've noticed,

00:20:47 which you probably have, were all a bunch of wiseasses.

00:20:51 You had to be aggressive or have an attitude back in order to get along with other people and stuff.

00:20:57 Even Sully, I remember when he was a kid, short, punk, he would pick the fight with the biggest kid.

00:21:03 He wouldn't pick a fight with somebody his size. He would always pick a fight with somebody bigger than him

00:21:08 to prove himself. And that's a Lawrence attitude. You don't back down from a fight.

00:21:13 Me, Jimmy, and Freddy one night decided to go to this house party that we heard about.

00:21:24 And when we pulled up, I remember Freddy saying he needed to show us something.

00:21:29 I opened the trunk. They're the only two I showed this to.

00:21:33 And there was a sawed-off shotgun in the trunk. I was like, "Yes, let's take this thing out right now. I want to see it."

00:21:39 We took it out, and I picked it up, and Freddy was like, "Oh, fuck it. Pull it out in the middle of the street and put it back in the trunk."

00:21:45 Never mind. He shut the trunk. Don't forget it was even there kind of thing.

00:21:49 So we went upstairs to this house party, and I just remember looking around, and there was no girls.

00:21:56 It was just a bunch of dudes.

00:21:59 There's probably three or four girls in the whole entire party.

00:22:04 Sausage fest.

00:22:07 And we were like, "Well, this kind of sucks, but we're here now, and we got beer, and so let's just go in and fucking have a beer."

00:22:14 You know, we were jamming out to some tunes, but these guys wanted to take off after about an hour.

00:22:19 And we just weren't feeling it, so we decided to leave.

00:22:22 And on the way out, I realized that I had forgot my jacket, and those guys said they were going downstairs and they would meet me at the car.

00:22:29 And I grabbed my jacket, and on the way out, I was walking through the kitchen, and I had my head down or something,

00:22:36 and I had a beer in my hand, and this dude had a beer in his hand, and we smashed into each other and spilled beer on each other.

00:22:42 And next thing I know, we hit the ground and we were fighting.

00:22:46 The thing I remember after that was getting kicked in the face and kicked in the side of the head and kicked in the ribs,

00:22:53 and I started thinking while I was fighting this kid that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,

00:22:58 because these were all his friends, and my friends were no longer in the house.

00:23:03 Somehow I squirmed out of that mess, and I came down the stairs, and my shirt was ripped, and my face was all red.

00:23:11 He comes down, but you could tell something was wrong. He was huffing and puffing.

00:23:16 And just as I'm telling them what's going on, we could see them coming out of the house,

00:23:20 but then I remember seeing the kid that I fought, and he was coming towards me, and he had a knife in his hand.

00:23:26 And I felt like I was the only one that's seen it, and everyone's arguing and trying to figure out what the fuck,

00:23:31 and I just remember looking at this kid with a knife, and I'm like, "This motherfucker's gonna stab me."

00:23:37 "What's up, you? Give me the keys." "What? Give me your fucking keys." So I throw him the keys.

00:23:45 I remember popping the trunk and grabbing the shotgun.

00:23:50 I pulled the shotgun up to this kid's face, and I just remember feeling nothing at that point.

00:23:58 And I start to turn my head, I hear, "Shh, shh." And as he got close to me, I pulled the trigger.

00:24:13 And so we pulled the trigger. And till this day, it's one of the toughest things for me to talk about.

00:24:32 But thankfully, my friend was smart enough when he decided to put this gun in his trunk.

00:24:37 There's no bullets in it. So all I heard was click. And now I went, "Oh, shit. This kid's gonna kill me now."

00:24:50 He came down with the knife. I let go of the gun, and I grabbed his wrist.

00:24:55 And I just remember thinking to myself, "Do not let go of this kid's wrist."

00:25:00 Somehow, I weaseled out of this mess, and we got in the car, and we screwed out of there.

00:25:06 As we were leaving, I felt something kind of cool on my ribs, and I looked down, and he nicked me enough

00:25:12 that he was able to break the skin and put a small puncture in my side.

00:25:16 But thank God he never got that knife fully inside of me, because it was a big knife, and for sure, I would have been dead.

00:25:27 And I think about that story every single day, because it was such a pivotal point in my life that had that shotgun had a bullet in it,

00:25:39 a lot of things would have been different for me in my life.

00:25:44 Sully pulled the trigger not knowing that it wasn't gonna go off. He would have killed this kid. He would have shot him.

00:25:51 Sully was 18 at the time. It would have been 18 to life for him. I would have went down with him over a spilled beer.

00:26:00 There would have been a lot of things missing, and I would have pretty much spent my life in prison. I'm sure of it.

00:26:06 So someone was watching over me that day.

00:26:10 [Music]

00:26:24 I know my mom really struggled in the early days when we lived in Lawrence.

00:26:29 There was just no money coming in, and she was working as much as she could, and she struggled a lot more than I even realized at the time.

00:26:38 Yet somehow, she always found a way to make it work.

00:26:42 I don't know how she did it. Year after year, I was in so much trouble, and my friends were in so much trouble,

00:26:48 and yet my house was always the house to go to.

00:26:52 Whenever someone was really getting their ass kicked at home or needed to get away, it was my house they ended up at.

00:27:00 Sully came home one night, and he says, "Mom, can I talk with you?" And I said, "Sure."

00:27:04 He says, "I have a friend, Rick Jarvis. It's the winter, and he's sleeping in his car."

00:27:09 And I said, "Oh, my God." I says, "Go get him and bring him here."

00:27:13 Connie, listen, man, if there was ever an angel, it's his mom.

00:27:20 That's just the truth, man.

00:27:25 She saved my life. He saved my life.

00:27:28 It's a fact.

00:27:32 I was sleeping in my car outside his house every night, and then eventually she just said, "Tell him to come in."

00:27:38 And that's who his mother was. You know, she was a sweetheart.

00:27:42 You know, it's funny. My mom is really a very honest, simple person,

00:27:48 and yet she's harboring all these punks and criminals that I called my friends.

00:27:56 I knew where they were, what they were doing. I didn't have to worry.

00:28:01 And my mom used to say, "Oh, how do you stand all these boys at your house all the time?"

00:28:07 I'd tell her, "I know they're with me, and they're not in any trouble."

00:28:13 [♪♪♪]

00:28:20 I had met this girl, Michelle. It was one of my first really intense loves,

00:28:24 and she and I fell in love pretty quickly.

00:28:27 Michelle was a looker. It's easy to see why I saw how he liked her in teenage.

00:28:32 His hormones were going crazy. What do you think?

00:28:35 So there was this one day when I was walking to the store that was down the block from my house,

00:28:41 and this car screeched and pulled up in front of me, and these four guys jumped out.

00:28:46 And they were basically asking me if I knew Michelle.

00:28:50 And they put me up against the wall, and they started threatening me,

00:28:53 basically saying that if they see me with her again, they're going to come back and fucking kill me.

00:29:00 You know, later on when I had confronted Michelle,

00:29:03 she had told me that her boyfriend that had confronted me earlier

00:29:07 was actually in a gang called the Tenney Street Gang that lived up the street.

00:29:11 And I'm like, "Oh, gee, you couldn't have thought to tell me that before we started dating,

00:29:14 that your boyfriend was in a gang?"

00:29:16 So we were taking a little stoner's nap in my bedroom,

00:29:20 and I woke up to all these screeches and screaming and yelling,

00:29:23 and someone was arguing outside.

00:29:25 I had looked out this window here in my dining room,

00:29:28 and I had seen all these cars that had stopped in front of the house,

00:29:31 and my friend Rick happened to be standing in the yard,

00:29:35 and I remember him confronting a guy right here.

00:29:37 These two dudes walk up, and they're like, "Hey, man, do you know Sully?"

00:29:41 I'm like, "Yeah, I fucking--I know him, yeah."

00:29:43 "Well, he screwed with my girlfriend."

00:29:45 I said, "Well, that's your problem, man."

00:29:47 "If you got an issue with Sully, you take care of it in the street."

00:29:50 And he opens up the gate, and he says, "Nah, we're going to take care of it now."

00:29:54 I said, "You ain't going in the house."

00:29:56 I hit the motherfucker, and I went on top of the other guy.

00:29:59 So the next thing I know, these cars are pulling up.

00:30:01 And then they all started jumping on him,

00:30:04 and there was this big, crazy brawl going on in front of my house.

00:30:08 They were throwing bottles and coming over the fence

00:30:12 and putting their arms through the windows.

00:30:14 So I immediately ran back in my bedroom, and I grabbed a baseball bat.

00:30:18 And I came screaming out of my bedroom,

00:30:20 and my mother grabbed onto my fucking head

00:30:24 and pulled me backwards through the door.

00:30:26 And she was like, "Don't you go out there."

00:30:28 And I'm thinking, "What the fuck? Rick's getting jumped by, like, 25 kids right now."

00:30:33 I have to help.

00:30:35 There was some kid that had hopped over on the fence,

00:30:37 and in our yard at the time, there was one of those old push lawnmowers.

00:30:40 And the kid had it up over his head, and he was going to smash it on the back of Rick's head.

00:30:45 And Connie's grabbed on the cello, apparently, and I hear him,

00:30:48 "Look out for the lawnmower."

00:30:50 And this fucking lawnmower comes flying over my fucking head.

00:30:54 It scared me to death.

00:30:59 My brother-in-law came down. He had a shotgun.

00:31:02 Once these guys seen the shotgun, a bunch of those kids scattered as well.

00:31:06 It was just this excessive amount of blood all over the front yard.

00:31:10 I mean, it was psychotic. It was chaos.

00:31:13 I mean, the house was destroyed.

00:31:15 When the cops got there, my uncle was talking to them, and I had went inside.

00:31:20 And I remember my mom sitting at the kitchen table,

00:31:23 and she was hysterically crying to the point where she couldn't catch her breath.

00:31:28 It was just too intense for her.

00:31:30 As the weeks went by, it just got worse.

00:31:33 It got to the point that it was either get out of there or end up in the nuthouse.

00:31:40 After that whole nightmare happened, she had a nervous breakdown.

00:31:46 She was a mess, and she moved us away.

00:31:51 And that was the last time I ever lived in Lawrence.

00:32:00 I was just done with Lawrence. I was so tired of getting in trouble.

00:32:03 I was so tired of the fights and the violence and the crime

00:32:07 and everything else that was really consuming me

00:32:10 and taking away from this gift that I'd been born with

00:32:13 that I really wanted to pursue even more.

00:32:15 So that when the opportunity aroused to go to Fayetteville,

00:32:20 it wasn't even really a decision. I was ready.

00:32:23 I didn't have anything back in Lawrence.

00:32:26 So when he decided to go, I decided to go with him.

00:32:29 Once my mom decided that she was moving me, she took the whole crew,

00:32:33 basically everyone who was living in my house in Lawrence.

00:32:36 I had no family. My family was Sully and Connie.

00:32:39 And going to North Carolina was probably the best damn thing that ever happened to me.

00:32:44 When Sully told me he was moving down to North Carolina, I was heartbroken.

00:32:48 I was losing my fucking best friend.

00:32:51 We're talking rural Fayetteville.

00:32:56 Birds are chirping, trees.

00:32:59 The neighbors are like, "Hi, nice to meet you. What school did you go to?"

00:33:03 And I'm like, "What the fuck? School of hard fucking knocks, you asshole."

00:33:07 I remember when I first got to Fayetteville,

00:33:12 I went to the mall to go look for some kids my age

00:33:16 that would lead me to the music community.

00:33:19 I still had my long hair and I still looked like a musician.

00:33:22 I had my tattoos and that whole thing going on.

00:33:26 I remember walking through the mall and I started hearing someone heckling me from behind.

00:33:31 I just ignored it at first and I could hear sounds of like,

00:33:34 "Oh, it's Eddie Van Halen," or "Oh, it's Ace Frehley," and blah, blah, blah.

00:33:38 Being raised in Lawrence, I was taught to stand up for myself and never back down.

00:33:42 And so I hauled off and punched the kid right in the face and I walked away.

00:33:48 As I was walking out of the doors, two sheriffs were coming in.

00:33:52 And within seconds I heard, "Hey!"

00:33:54 And I turned around and it was the sheriff calling me over.

00:33:58 And I went to jail.

00:34:01 And that was my first experience.

00:34:03 Within two days of me being in North Carolina, I had to call my mom from the local jail.

00:34:08 She was like, "Where are you?" I said, "Well, I'm in jail."

00:34:13 She's like, "Are you fucking kidding me? We just got to this place. What did you do?"

00:34:17 And you can take the boy out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the boy.

00:34:22 It was near Fort Bragg, so it's all military.

00:34:25 Me and Sully had long hair, so we'd walk into a bar and it's all skinheads.

00:34:29 So we'd hang out with the band members, you know, "Hey, what's up, guys?"

00:34:32 'Cause they'd have long hair, you know.

00:34:34 And so it didn't last long for me.

00:34:36 I was there maybe a few weeks and I had to get out of there, you know.

00:34:39 It was very lame compared to the exciting city life, you know.

00:34:44 It was the first time I had really seen, you know, a new life surfacing for me.

00:34:49 And of course, my first mission was to just find musicians.

00:34:53 So I found some kids that kind of drifted into the mall, hanging around the arcade,

00:34:58 that had long hair and looked like musicians.

00:35:00 And so I approached some of them, and one of the kids that I approached, his name was John Robbins.

00:35:05 And he was a drummer, too.

00:35:06 Music back then was kind of what you had.

00:35:08 All we did was play music, think about music, try and be better at music.

00:35:13 Back in the '80s, when you got in a band, everybody in the band knew the term "make it."

00:35:16 What that meant back then was that you got a record deal.

00:35:20 And the way to get a record deal, at least from our understanding,

00:35:22 you would go and get in a band, try and get really good,

00:35:26 and then you would go out on the road and you would suffer.

00:35:30 And then at some point, somebody would see you in a big club and say,

00:35:33 "Yeah, we're gonna sign that band. We're gonna make it."

00:35:36 Fewer than one-half of one percent ever get contracts with record companies.

00:35:42 What happens to the other 99.5% while they're waiting for the big break?

00:35:46 Well, they play wherever they can get anyone to listen to them.

00:35:49 And they practice in basements and garages across America.

00:35:53 When we first moved to North Carolina,

00:35:59 then Sully had joined with this band called Malaya Craze.

00:36:02 The long-haired, freaky fuckers? Yeah.

00:36:04 It was a hair band. We called ourselves Malaya Craze, and we looked fucking ridiculous.

00:36:09 We were dead smack in the middle of the '80s and all that at that point.

00:36:12 That music was big at that time. It was the biggest music in the world, probably.

00:36:17 They reminded me of Motley Crue and Rat,

00:36:19 which was something Sully and I, we listened to back in Lawrence,

00:36:23 but kind of grew past it.

00:36:25 I was like, "Jesus Christ, man, there's no way Sully's gonna go with these guys."

00:36:29 But he did, so it is what it is, and that's really where it started.

00:36:37 Even though we looked like fucking a bad version of Twisted Sister,

00:36:42 Malaya Craze was actually the first band that I got on the road with,

00:36:47 and getting a little bit of money for it.

00:36:50 It wasn't much. I mean, we were playing for, you know, beer or 50 bucks.

00:36:55 We lived off of ramen noodles, oodles of noodles, all that stuff.

00:36:59 That was like breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but it was only once a day.

00:37:05 But we were on the road, and that's all I cared about.

00:37:08 And he started playing around North Carolina.

00:37:13 Of course, you know, Mommy would pack up the cars and drive the equipment,

00:37:18 and I spent my life delivering drums to the world.

00:37:22 I was, you know, starting to really live that lifestyle as a musician,

00:37:29 and the partying, the drinking.

00:37:32 Also, when I first started really getting a lot deeper into coke,

00:37:38 I had met this girl named Arlene,

00:37:41 and I remember that we were in our apartment one weekend,

00:37:45 and we went through a bag of coke that was probably like that big,

00:37:50 and it was cigarettes and coke and beer and coke,

00:37:54 and this went on for three days.

00:37:56 Finally, we realized that we were doing too much coke,

00:38:00 and when you have that much cocaine in your system,

00:38:03 it's just brutal coming off of it.

00:38:05 And it was the night that changed my life,

00:38:09 because I guess I had, in the middle of the night,

00:38:13 started choking on my uvula,

00:38:17 which is the little thing that dangles in the back of your throat.

00:38:20 It had swollen up to the size of, like, a plum, and I had swallowed it.

00:38:26 And I don't remember this part, but Arlene, thankfully, was there next to me,

00:38:32 and she heard me choking and woke me up,

00:38:35 and I remember literally having to pull it out of my throat

00:38:40 because it got lodged back there, and I was that close to death.

00:38:46 And if Arlene wasn't there to wake me up, I would have died in my sleep.

00:38:52 And it scared me so bad, I quit doing coke and any kind of hard drug forever.

00:38:59 I was 21 years old, and I had never touched a drug again.

00:39:18 Right around the time Malaya Krays was breaking up,

00:39:23 one day when we were doing a club,

00:39:25 and the sound man, who was named Todd Jackson,

00:39:28 he seen me play that night, and he approached me.

00:39:31 I was in a band called Lex Luthor, and we needed a drummer at the time,

00:39:36 so we brought Sully in for an audition,

00:39:39 and it was amazing to play with a drummer with that much precision,

00:39:45 as fast as he could play and still be precise.

00:39:49 I remember the bass player, Robert, and I walked out back.

00:40:05 We're standing there taking a piss together, and Robert looks at me,

00:40:08 and he goes, "Man, Sully's good."

00:40:11 [laughs]

00:40:14 So he was in the band after that.

00:40:17 It was, for me, a step above where I wanted to be,

00:40:23 and I felt like it was much more at my level.

00:40:26 And that really became my obsession at that point,

00:40:29 was now I'm starting to think, this is about writing our own music

00:40:33 and trying to get a record label interested

00:40:35 so we could do this for a living for real.

00:40:38 We wanted to get signed, we wanted a record deal,

00:40:41 and we wanted to write original tunes.

00:40:43 We knew what we were going to have to do to get there.

00:40:46 We were going to have to give up a lot to do it.

00:40:49 Sully was more than willing to give up whatever it took

00:40:52 to get to that point.

00:40:54 Todd started telling me about this kid named Shannon Larkin

00:41:02 that was supposedly this really great drummer in the area

00:41:06 that played with a band called Wrathchild.

00:41:09 [playing in fast-paced rhythm]

00:41:12 ♪ ♪

00:41:14 So one day we went to this club called The Attic,

00:41:18 and Wrathchild came on stage,

00:41:21 and I remember watching this kid come out from behind the drums,

00:41:26 and my fucking jaw hit the floor.

00:41:29 I had never seen a drummer so animated

00:41:32 and such a great live performer,

00:41:35 and his showmanship was by far the best I've ever seen.

00:41:39 It was like he was making love to the drum set,

00:41:42 and at one point I started thinking,

00:41:44 I'm going to go home and literally take my drums

00:41:46 and throw them right through the fucking wood chipper.

00:41:48 Like, I don't even want to play drums anymore.

00:41:50 This is ridiculous what this kid was doing behind the drum set.

00:41:53 From that point on, it changed the whole way I looked at drums.

00:41:56 I saw Sully and kicked ass on the drums.

00:41:59 We pretty much formed a fast friendship

00:42:02 that continued all the way up till now.

00:42:06 I think you have to really get into it to be like a heavy metal band.

00:42:11 That's what I like to see when I walk into a club,

00:42:14 'cause you can feel the energy flowing off the stage.

00:42:17 It's like, oh.

00:42:19 Shannon showed me showmanship,

00:42:22 and to me that was elevated to another level.

00:42:25 So now I needed to incorporate everything that I knew about drumming

00:42:29 and be visually great, and...

00:42:32 I ripped him off.

00:42:34 I stole all his shit. I started swinging fucking hands.

00:42:37 But I don't feel so bad now because I've learned throughout the years

00:42:41 that almost every drummer in rock has ripped off Shannon Larkin.

00:42:46 loud drum roll

00:42:48 At one point we found a new singer,

00:43:03 and his name was Dennis Bauer.

00:43:05 I had drove with him and his wife to rehearsal,

00:43:09 and on the way back from rehearsal that night,

00:43:13 I had started to get this weird sensation in my chest,

00:43:17 and my left arm started to go numb, and I felt this pain,

00:43:21 and my hand started tingling, and the more I thought about it,

00:43:24 the more nervous I got, and he could see something was going on,

00:43:27 and he asked me if I was okay, and I said, you know, I don't think so.

00:43:31 [phone rings]

00:43:33 Dennis had called me, and he said, man, he said something's up with Sully.

00:43:37 He's, you know, he's just not doing real great.

00:43:40 Next thing you know, I'm sitting in an emergency room

00:43:45 wired up to all these electrodes and machines

00:43:48 and wondering what's going on and looking at these white lights

00:43:51 and thinking, you know, am I going to die?

00:43:53 And at one point I started thinking, man, am I going to be

00:43:56 one of these unfortunate kids that at the age of 21 has a heart attack?

00:44:00 And they started to run some EKGs on me

00:44:04 and trying to find out what the problem was.

00:44:07 But every test they ran, there was no signs of anything.

00:44:11 They're like, your heart's strong, your blood pressure's good,

00:44:15 and we don't know.

00:44:17 And so I remember going home that night, and I was really confused

00:44:21 because something weird had happened to me, and there was no proof of it.

00:44:26 They're telling me it's anxiety, and I didn't know what the fuck anxiety was.

00:44:32 That really started a series of events in my life that changed my life to this day.

00:44:39 There was times where these anxiety attacks would hit me

00:44:42 when I'd be in the middle of a club hanging out with my friends

00:44:45 or I'd be here or there in public.

00:44:48 And I remember it started to bother me so much that I stopped going out

00:44:52 and I started alienating myself from my friends.

00:44:55 He would stay downstairs off to his self more.

00:44:59 He was just more secluded.

00:45:01 He didn't want to be around a lot of people.

00:45:03 I do remember Sully being extremely edgy to get out of North Carolina.

00:45:08 He wanted a way to get out.

00:45:10 I couldn't stay in North Carolina.

00:45:12 It was just a place that was becoming very dark to me.

00:45:15 I wasn't really playing music anymore at that time.

00:45:20 I couldn't find any good memories there anymore.

00:45:23 [clock ticking]

00:45:34 [music]

00:45:42 I always try to get in touch with him,

00:45:45 and one of the things over here that was hard for me is when he didn't answer.

00:45:51 So obviously I miss him when he's away.

00:45:57 I wish I could have him more, but he also needed his freedom.

00:46:01 And to me he was never gone because he was always on my mind.

00:46:06 It was hard.

00:46:08 It was very hard for me to accept the fact that he's gone away

00:46:13 because I always wanted him over here.

00:46:18 Sully stayed down here for, I think, three years

00:46:23 and decided he was going to go back to Lawrence.

00:46:27 I wasn't happy about it, but he had grown up a little bit more,

00:46:32 and I think seeing maybe the way life was down here,

00:46:37 he wouldn't go back to Lawrence

00:46:39 and get back into that rough area that we lived through.

00:46:45 And so I talked to John Robbins one day, and I'm like,

00:46:48 hey man, what do you think about coming to check out Boston?

00:46:51 I thought it'd be cool to have a friend from down there.

00:46:54 Boston sounded exciting to me.

00:46:56 It was a big city and a new scene, and maybe we could make it there.

00:47:01 [music]

00:47:03 There was a scene happening in Boston.

00:47:06 Boston's been known over the years to have birthed a lot of great bands,

00:47:11 and the scene comes and goes.

00:47:13 And this was one of those times where it was just starting to light up again.

00:47:17 There was a lot of cool bands playing in the clubs,

00:47:20 and it was a good time for music.

00:47:22 [music]

00:47:30 So the cheapest way and the only way for me and Sully

00:47:33 to get to Boston, Massachusetts from Fayetteville, North Carolina

00:47:36 is on a train.

00:47:38 I'd never been on a train before, for one.

00:47:41 We start out happy, smiling, it's a great idea, it's a big adventure,

00:47:44 it's going to be great.

00:47:46 And it was an 18-and-a-half-hour ride of hell.

00:47:49 This is not fun. This was not a good idea as far as the travel goes.

00:47:52 And it was hot, and it was smelly,

00:47:56 and it just felt like it took forever to get back to Boston.

00:47:59 But finally we arrived, and I was so happy to see the skyline

00:48:04 and get off that train.

00:48:08 When we got to Boston, we had to have a place to stay,

00:48:11 so we stayed with Sully's sister, Maria.

00:48:14 I had a little duplex, so he came and lived with me.

00:48:17 I was a manager of a big retail chain here,

00:48:20 and I got him a job and his friend a job,

00:48:23 and he would get me in a little trouble at work.

00:48:27 Sully's looking for bands, he's trying to find people to play with.

00:48:30 I couldn't find anybody to play with. I didn't quite fit in all the way up there.

00:48:33 John, he didn't stay too long, and he ended up splitting,

00:48:36 so it was just kind of me and my sister.

00:48:39 But the thing that came back to haunt me pretty quickly was the anxiety attacks.

00:48:44 Sully would have these panic attacks, anxiety attacks, whatever you want to call them.

00:48:50 He would just get so worked up.

00:48:52 I took him to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack,

00:48:55 and he would freak out, like he was thinking he was going to die.

00:48:59 And as time went on, the attacks got more violent.

00:49:04 They got scarier.

00:49:06 Once again, I found myself in and out of emergency rooms over and over again.

00:49:11 I found myself being carried into an emergency room at one point by my sister over her shoulder

00:49:17 because I couldn't even stand up. I couldn't walk.

00:49:20 I just was completely out of it.

00:49:22 And the doctor actually said, "You know, this stuff can kill you one day if you continue this."

00:49:29 I never forgot those words, and at that point

00:49:32 is when I started to put together a plan to battle the anxiety

00:49:36 because I needed something to distract my thoughts.

00:49:39 My mind was becoming my worst enemy, so I forced myself to be in public situations.

00:49:45 I forced myself to get involved in music again.

00:49:49 [playing "Summer of '90"]

00:49:55 I also, you know, had reconnected with some of my older friends.

00:50:00 When he came back around, it was like a renewed energy.

00:50:03 We picked up right where we left off, because we were always tight like brothers.

00:50:09 I knew I'd see him again someday.

00:50:11 Even if he was gone for ten years, once he came back, we could pick right up where we left off.

00:50:17 [singing]

00:50:30 I slowly got further and further apart from the anxiety attacks.

00:50:34 Little by little, it was just getting me back to feeling like me again.

00:50:38 [playing "Summer of '90"]

00:50:47 And finally I was finding a path again to, you know, some really good friends in my music.

00:50:54 [playing "Summer of '90"]

00:50:57 He ended up going to a band called the Fighting Hawks,

00:51:00 which was really difficult to try to book when you had to put that on a marquee somewhere.

00:51:05 They were really dirty Boston street guys.

00:51:08 I felt like I was getting closer to my comfort zone again.

00:51:11 And I've always loved Boston. I love the streets of Boston.

00:51:14 I loved it because it's where Aerosmith came from.

00:51:16 And so I was psyched to kind of get into the streets of Boston

00:51:19 and be in a basement right in downtown Boston playing with a rock and roll band.

00:51:24 And I joined the band.

00:51:27 I was back on the map as a drummer in Boston and making a name for myself.

00:51:33 And I thought that was really important because there was a scene happening in Boston.

00:51:37 It was the early '90s, and it was a good time for music.

00:51:41 And I had met Paul Geary, and he was just coming into the height of his career.

00:51:47 He was the drummer for a band called Extreme.

00:51:50 And so he'd come to my house when I was off tour, and we hit it off right away, became friends.

00:51:57 And I was just starstruck by Paul because, man, they were a big time as far as I was concerned.

00:52:02 I had never been around a celebrity that big at that time.

00:52:07 I was just so mesmerized by these guys. They were so polished and so good.

00:52:11 [music]

00:52:15 After I was with the Fighting Cocks for a while, I had actually gotten a call

00:52:20 from the management company of a band called Malaya Rage who were signed with Epic Records.

00:52:26 [music]

00:52:29 They were really heavy metal, like a Metallica.

00:52:32 And it was an opportunity for me to possibly get into a band that was signed with a record label.

00:52:39 Michael Monroe, lead singer, Malaya Rage, master, beater.

00:52:44 When he joined Malaya Rage, it was different. It was an established band.

00:52:48 They already had a record or two out. Not that they were phenomenal or big, but they were established.

00:52:54 And once again, we went out and hit the club circuit.

00:52:57 We were playing everywhere that we could, get a gig.

00:53:00 They had a following already. There was real people coming to see these shows.

00:53:04 I was really happy to be in that band.

00:53:07 [music]

00:53:17 That really pushed me further and further into getting away from normalcy as I knew it

00:53:24 and getting back into my fantasy land, which was music, because that was always my go-to.

00:53:30 Anytime something knocked me down, it seemed like music became this vehicle to heal me

00:53:36 and distract me and make me feel better, because when I'm on stage, I don't think about shit.

00:53:41 It doesn't matter what just happened.

00:53:43 When I'm on stage, I go somewhere else, and my music consumes me, and I lose myself in the music.

00:53:50 And everything goes away just for that small amount of time I'm on stage.

00:53:55 [music]

00:53:59 Yeah, Malaya Rage, that was a good time.

00:54:02 It was the life of a miniature rock and roller.

00:54:06 [laughs]

00:54:07 [music]

00:54:11 We decided to go to a strip club, and on stage was this amazing-looking girl named Lisa.

00:54:20 And I was just like, "Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."

00:54:26 About that time, he met this girl, Lisa, who was a stripper.

00:54:29 We got in deep fast, always together.

00:54:32 It was like instantly, they weren't apart at all.

00:54:34 She was quite the package.

00:54:36 She was every bit as crazy as she was pretty, that's for sure.

00:54:39 Just don't date strippers.

00:54:42 [laughs]

00:54:44 Went very quickly, very fast, and I was crazy about this girl.

00:54:49 [music]

00:54:52 Sully meets Lisa.

00:54:54 Can you tell me what she was like and what that relationship was like?

00:54:57 [sighs]

00:55:01 I'll pass.

00:55:03 [music]

00:55:16 Right around that same time, I actually found myself looking for work again,

00:55:21 and I was struggling for money.

00:55:23 I didn't want to live with my sister anymore.

00:55:25 It was just too much responsibility for her carrying me.

00:55:28 So I had moved out, and I just kind of used my van to house myself with a blanket

00:55:36 until Fro took me in.

00:55:40 So he came back from tour, had no job, had no place to live.

00:55:43 That's when I said, "Dude, move in with me. I live alone.

00:55:46 You can stay at my house as long as you want.

00:55:48 It doesn't matter. I don't have to worry about rent.

00:55:50 Fucking, I got it covered."

00:55:52 He had this cool place set up above this restaurant called the Cafe 97 in Haverhill.

00:55:57 The restaurant would close around 1 o'clock,

00:56:00 so he could actually play his drums as loud as he wanted.

00:56:02 It wouldn't bother anybody because there were no houses around that day.

00:56:05 [music]

00:56:09 We were hanging out there so much on the weekends, partying every weekend.

00:56:13 It was just the to-go place.

00:56:15 No one even had to know or call each other and say,

00:56:18 "What are we doing after work on a Friday?"

00:56:20 Everybody would just know to go to Fro's house.

00:56:22 Waiting for the Sync Bomb tournaments to start.

00:56:24 We have contestant one, Jimmy Mustafa from Turkey.

00:56:30 So it was a really fun hang place,

00:56:32 and I think that was the first time I started noodling around on a piano too.

00:56:36 It was also the place that I helped write some of the Malaya Rage songs

00:56:39 that we were working on,

00:56:41 but I had learned soon after I joined them

00:56:44 that they weren't signed with Epic Records after all.

00:56:47 They used to be signed with Epic Records,

00:56:49 and they were looking for a deal again,

00:56:51 and I'm like, "Fuck!"

00:56:53 I thought I got there, man.

00:56:55 I thought I snuck my way into a signed band,

00:56:57 and I was going to be more like Shannon and playing the circuit again.

00:57:00 And... [sighs]

00:57:02 It wasn't that.

00:57:04 I stuck it out with them for as long as I could,

00:57:07 but I just didn't see it was going to go anywhere.

00:57:11 [music]

00:57:13 But I didn't want to quit either

00:57:15 because I really loved these guys, and they were great.

00:57:18 [music]

00:57:24 He always thought I did support him.

00:57:27 [music]

00:57:32 And I remember, you know, he called me up,

00:57:35 and I had to send him--I believe at that time I had to send him something over there

00:57:38 because he didn't have no place to go,

00:57:40 and he didn't really have a job.

00:57:42 So I said, "Tully, being a musician,

00:57:45 I'm not doing this as a living.

00:57:48 I'm doing this more for fun than anything else

00:57:51 because the music business, there's very few people

00:57:54 that make it to the big time."

00:57:57 [music]

00:57:59 There's very few people.

00:58:01 So I said, "Tully, you know, it's okay to get a job

00:58:04 just in case it doesn't work out."

00:58:06 Well, he thought, "You're not supporting me."

00:58:09 That's not what I meant.

00:58:12 I tried to explain that to him,

00:58:14 but I wasn't supporting him because I didn't say,

00:58:17 "Yeah, great, keep going."

00:58:19 [music]

00:58:27 He called me once, and he said,

00:58:29 "If I don't make it in another year,

00:58:32 I'm giving it up, and I'm going to get a job."

00:58:34 And I said, "You know what? Just have patience.

00:58:37 It's going to happen."

00:58:39 And I always told him right along, "It's going to happen."

00:58:42 [music]

00:58:46 There was a band in Boston called Strip Mind

00:58:49 that had just signed a deal with Warner/Apris Records.

00:58:53 [music]

00:58:56 I believe at the time that Sully was playing

00:58:59 with Malaya Rage, and through a local manager,

00:59:04 he found out that we were auditioning.

00:59:07 And so he shows up, and I meet him,

00:59:09 and he seems like a crazy townie guy,

00:59:12 but he's a metalhead too.

00:59:14 So I'm like, "This is good, because I can relate with that.

00:59:17 That's me."

00:59:19 I'm like, "Oh, let me help you with your drums."

00:59:21 And we go out, and he has this total shitbox van,

00:59:24 and opens the back door, jumps in,

00:59:26 and starts fucking kicking his fucking drums out the back,

00:59:29 like kick drum, and it goes rolling.

00:59:32 [music]

00:59:34 And I remember the guitar player just going like,

00:59:36 "What the fuck?"

00:59:38 I've never seen anyone treat a musical instrument like that,

00:59:40 but I was like, "Whatever, they're fucking drums.

00:59:42 They're meant to be beat on. Load 'em up. Let's go."

00:59:45 [music]

00:59:49 [drums]

00:59:54 [music]

00:59:58 These guys played some seriously technical punk metal.

01:00:02 [music]

01:00:06 I was like, "You guys have a deal with Warner Brothers.

01:00:09 I can't fuck this up, man.

01:00:11 This is what I've always wanted.

01:00:13 This is my chance. I'm not going to fucking blow this, dude."

01:00:15 He took it so insanely seriously.

01:00:18 [music]

01:00:22 Sully showing up was the best thing that ever happened in that band,

01:00:25 because if he hadn't shown up,

01:00:27 I don't think we would have went on.

01:00:29 I don't think the record would have gotten made.

01:00:32 We're here with Strip Mind.

01:00:34 Come through and introduce yourselves.

01:00:36 Hey, I'm Tim. I play bass.

01:00:38 I'm Bill. I play guitar.

01:00:40 Sully, drums.

01:00:42 I'm Stu. I sing and play guitar.

01:00:44 This is so Metallica, man.

01:00:46 And I was in fucking seventh heaven at that point.

01:00:49 I mean, I was finally signed with a band and touring,

01:00:55 and I just thought at the time,

01:00:57 "It doesn't get any better than this."

01:01:00 [music]

01:01:03 We're at Pyramid Studios.

01:01:06 I'm going to take a walk in here.

01:01:09 The old tape machine.

01:01:11 It really gave me an opportunity

01:01:13 to showcase my ability to play the drums.

01:01:16 [music]

01:01:21 [drums]

01:01:24 Finally, you know, finally he's making it.

01:01:36 Finally he's going to be world-famous drummer.

01:01:39 People are going to know about Sully.

01:01:42 He was living his dream, and I was so happy for him.

01:01:46 I was psyched.

01:01:48 I was thinking, here it is.

01:01:50 This is what we've been waiting for, a record deal.

01:01:53 Go on tour, see the world, all that stuff,

01:01:56 but it was such a small record deal

01:01:59 that their first tour was a band tour.

01:02:02 [music]

01:02:05 This band didn't give a fuck about anything, really.

01:02:08 We were into drinking whiskey and smoking a lot of weed.

01:02:13 We were living more of a punk rock lifestyle.

01:02:16 Nobody really gave a fuck.

01:02:19 And along the way, Lisa had met my friend Dave

01:02:23 and somehow started sneaking around behind my back

01:02:26 and seeing Dave.

01:02:27 Things started changing, and she wasn't around as much.

01:02:30 I started to hear rumors.

01:02:32 The more I asked around, the more I started to hear

01:02:35 things that I just didn't want to hear.

01:02:37 Things like, you know, Lisa was

01:02:40 performing sexual acts for drugs.

01:02:43 These were things that were just really disturbing to hear.

01:02:47 Things that no guy wants to hear.

01:02:49 I had called my friend Dave, and he somehow admitted to me

01:02:56 that he had been dating Lisa.

01:02:59 And I'm thinking, what?

01:03:01 I was kind of in fuck you mode at this point.

01:03:04 I was getting really numb to kind of relationships in general.

01:03:07 But I also had this new band, Strip Mind,

01:03:09 and we were releasing a record, and we got on the road

01:03:12 and we started to tour at a national level.

01:03:15 We are hanging out in Detroit with Strip Mind.

01:03:19 Who is the main songwriter in this band?

01:03:22 That would be Stu.

01:03:23 All right.

01:03:24 So now you have songs like "Pentapussy"

01:03:26 and "I Wanna Fuck Your Girlfriend."

01:03:28 So let's talk about your songs a little bit.

01:03:30 Well, the way a lot of the lyrics are written is that,

01:03:33 I mean, I either am inspired to write by pain or by happiness,

01:03:37 and there isn't usually too much happiness going around,

01:03:39 so it's a lot of the pain and the anger that comes out

01:03:41 and that kind of motivates me to put the pen down on the paper

01:03:44 and get going.

01:03:45 "I Wanna Fuck Your Girlfriend" is basically about being pissed off

01:03:48 about your ex-girlfriend going out with a friend of yours,

01:03:51 and it's really kind of a heartfelt statement

01:03:53 about love lost.

01:03:55 Me and Stu didn't get along so good.

01:03:58 Stu came from a much better upbringing than we did.

01:04:01 His parents had money.

01:04:03 We were street kids.

01:04:05 Where the fuck is Stu?

01:04:07 He's in the other room.

01:04:08 Oh, what the fuck?

01:04:10 You wanna fucking play it or not?

01:04:12 I've been waiting. I don't even really play this.

01:04:14 Let's go.

01:04:15 So there was just a lot of tension, man,

01:04:17 and we were living it for the first time, you know.

01:04:20 All of us were kind of experiencing that,

01:04:22 being signed to a major label

01:04:24 and the responsibilities that go along with that.

01:04:27 We were right at the beginning of hearing about Pearl Jam

01:04:31 and Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden,

01:04:35 and although we loved a lot of those bands,

01:04:38 we didn't sound like that.

01:04:40 And we were at the tail end of the era

01:04:43 of the traditional metal going away.

01:04:45 You can only be ignorant to this kind of business

01:04:48 for so long before it just spits you back out.

01:04:52 And unfortunately in this band, there was no business sense.

01:04:56 We spent all of our dance on making the record,

01:05:02 which comes to find out you're not supposed to do that,

01:05:05 you're supposed to save some to live on, and we didn't do that.

01:05:08 We didn't know any better, so we just, like, spent it.

01:05:12 The band got to the point one day where Stu was able

01:05:16 to convince the other guys that I was the problem,

01:05:19 and they decided to fire me.

01:05:22 And I just remember thinking,

01:05:26 everything I went through my whole life

01:05:29 and all these bands and all these struggles

01:05:32 and all this bullshit to chase this dream

01:05:35 that I fantasized about since I was 3 years old,

01:05:39 and I finally got there,

01:05:41 and in a blink of an eye, it was taken away from me.

01:05:45 I was broken to the point where I just decided

01:05:48 I didn't want to do music anymore.

01:05:50 He was really down in the dumps, and he told me,

01:05:53 he says, Mommy, I'm going to quit music.

01:05:55 I felt that my only shot had came and gone, maybe that was it,

01:05:59 maybe that was my one opportunity to do something with music,

01:06:03 and it came and it went like that.

01:06:05 I didn't want to be a part of it anymore.

01:06:08 It was disappointing me over and over again,

01:06:11 and at 25 years old, it just didn't seem

01:06:14 like the right kind of life for me anymore.

01:06:16 And I told him, I said, Sully, don't get discouraged yet.

01:06:20 It's going to happen, I know it's going to happen.

01:06:23 You just got to give it some time.

01:06:26 It's going to be there, you're going to make it.

01:06:29 At that point, I put the drums away,

01:06:35 and I put my dream of being a musician, a rock star,

01:06:39 in a shoebox and put it up on the shelf,

01:06:43 and so I decided that I was going to quit music for good.

01:06:48 I think Sully gave up on music

01:06:54 'cause I think he got sick of chasing the dream

01:06:56 and not getting anything from it,

01:06:58 and he got real discoveries at that point.

01:07:00 He worked so hard, I mean, he always thought

01:07:02 from the time he was young that he was going to be a rock star,

01:07:06 but when those things don't work out,

01:07:08 it's like someone kept stepping on him

01:07:10 and stepping on his dream, you know,

01:07:12 and just crushing it, and he just gave in.

01:07:15 piano plays softly

01:07:18 guitar plays in bright rhythm

01:07:32 I didn't look back at that point, I just wanted a new life,

01:07:38 I wanted a different life, I wanted to feel like somebody again

01:07:41 because the only person I knew I was at that time

01:07:44 was someone that was sleeping on my sister's couch

01:07:47 and borrowing $5 from people to buy a pack of cigarettes.

01:07:50 And I finally started looking through the newspapers

01:07:53 and I found a job doing collections for an attorney.

01:07:56 You know, I'd chopped my hair off at that point too.

01:07:59 So he came over to my house and he walked in and he had no hair.

01:08:03 Say goodbye, never say goodbye

01:08:07 And I always dreamed to have long hair

01:08:09 'cause I had that stupid fucking fro,

01:08:11 so when he came in and he cut all his hair off,

01:08:14 I got so fucking pissed off I threw him out of my house.

01:08:17 What Christmas did you have for him?

01:08:20 Oh, for me?

01:08:22 What is this?

01:08:24 I think it's something you can use from time to time.

01:08:27 Ah!

01:08:29 I thought you came to find the Park Shadow Razor.

01:08:32 Yeah. I think your trimming needs a little easier.

01:08:35 What makes my hair greasy? I don't know.

01:08:37 Do we have power?

01:08:39 Then he met a girl, she was a different type of girl,

01:08:42 you know, 'cause she didn't grow up in the streets of Lawrence

01:08:45 like most of the girls, and he fell crazy in love with her,

01:08:49 and deservedly so, she was his sweetheart.

01:08:51 Her name was Erin.

01:08:53 She was everything you could ask for in a girlfriend, really.

01:08:57 And I found myself starting to live a different kind of life.

01:09:02 It was a life away from music,

01:09:05 with a 9-to-5 job and a really pretty girlfriend.

01:09:09 I remember for the first time in my life,

01:09:11 I felt as safe as I had felt when I lived with my mom.

01:09:16 A year or two into our relationship,

01:09:19 I just started missing music.

01:09:21 It had been with me my whole entire life.

01:09:24 I didn't know how to be anything else.

01:09:26 And I also think that the more I fell in love with her

01:09:30 and the more I seen how unneedy she was

01:09:33 and how she just was proud of me for, you know, whatever,

01:09:38 the more reason I wanted to show her how talented I was.

01:09:41 That's when I got the itch to start playing again.

01:09:44 With Sully, I don't care what he did,

01:09:47 he would never be happy without his music.

01:09:51 Up until that point, I was just the drummer in a band,

01:09:55 and I didn't have any say for the most part.

01:09:57 I just decided, you know what, I'm gonna write my own music,

01:10:00 I'm gonna try this a different way,

01:10:03 and I'm gonna try this my way,

01:10:05 and I don't want to listen to anyone else's direction.

01:10:08 Sully called me.

01:10:10 He said he wanted to get into a band and jam just for fun.

01:10:14 He was like, I'm in immediately, there was like no hesitation.

01:10:17 I go, well, you may want to hold on a second here

01:10:20 'cause I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna sing for the band.

01:10:23 I looked down at the phone, like a little smirk on my face.

01:10:26 I heard the phone drop and hit like every step going down the basement.

01:10:30 I got a message on my answer machine saying that he had

01:10:34 this possible gig for me and I was gonna laugh,

01:10:37 and that's all the message said.

01:10:39 When I called back and he said that he's putting this band together

01:10:42 and he wanted to sing, I didn't think that he could sing

01:10:45 'cause he played the drums.

01:10:47 So we started jamming, and then next thing I know, we're in the studio.

01:10:50 It was quite the experience, man.

01:10:52 Again, I was, you know, freshly inexperienced and new at singing,

01:10:55 and I was in the studio now about to record a demo,

01:10:58 and it wasn't good.

01:11:00 I was terrible, I didn't know how to sing.

01:11:03 Like, I was a screamer, but I had no pitch.

01:11:06 Hey!

01:11:08 I started singing, and I remember watching Robbie

01:11:11 walk right out of the fuckin' studio.

01:11:13 I'm like, hold on a second, I will get this.

01:11:15 You gotta give me a minute.

01:11:17 (Robbie vocalizing)

01:11:19 He's sounding like a wild goat in heat,

01:11:22 and I'm like, oh my God, you're awful.

01:11:25 (Robbie vocalizing)

01:11:27 It was the first time I was on a stage as a singer

01:11:41 in a real band, and not playing the drums at all.

01:11:46 How's everyone else tonight?

01:11:49 (crowd cheering)

01:11:52 It's not like everyone's doing well.

01:11:55 (crowd cheering)

01:11:57 And I gotta tell you, the thing I struggled with the most

01:12:00 was figuring out what the fuck to do with my hands,

01:12:03 because being a drummer your whole life is if it's not going well,

01:12:06 you can just kind of hide and get to the set.

01:12:09 But now I found myself in front of the band,

01:12:12 and I was the guy that had to entertain,

01:12:15 and I didn't know what the fuck I was gonna do.

01:12:18 (all talking at once)

01:12:21 Sounded like shit, actually.

01:12:23 Swear to God, man.

01:12:25 Eyes kept breaking up.

01:12:27 Tommy was fine, his fucking drums kept blaring out.

01:12:30 Robbie's bass was fine, the guitars kept breaking up,

01:12:32 and his voice kept breaking up.

01:12:34 You'll see-- no, I'm just saying.

01:12:36 I kept practicing and working with it,

01:12:38 and between performance and singing,

01:12:40 actually trying to learn how to get in pitch,

01:12:43 it slowly came together.

01:12:45 I had a lot of experience yelling my whole life,

01:12:48 screaming at people, I just had to get it in key,

01:12:51 you know, figure that part out.

01:12:53 Why are you laughing as if you're my friend?

01:12:59 Aaron would come out to the shows, and she was starting to see

01:13:03 that I had something a little bit more to me

01:13:06 than just being a guy in a collection agency.

01:13:09 Those were some really special times when I think back,

01:13:12 because it was where it was starting.

01:13:14 It was getting that initial feedback of what songs were working

01:13:17 and what songs weren't working, and we eventually started

01:13:20 to find a sound within people pointing out the heavier stuff.

01:13:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, gotta get up.

01:13:27 It was me and Robbie and Mr. Kid Lee,

01:13:30 our first guitar player, and Tommy Stewart.

01:13:33 We played a club called Axis, and right next door,

01:13:36 Korn was playing, a bigger venue, I think it was the Avalon.

01:13:40 And anybody from the Avalon had a ticket,

01:13:42 they could get into the show at Axis for free.

01:13:46 So soon as we got on, the club let out

01:13:49 and the whole place filled up, and I knew then

01:13:52 that we had something.

01:13:53 Nobody knew the songs, nobody knew us.

01:13:55 I'm like, I'm just looking around, I'm going,

01:13:57 wow, we've got something here.

01:13:59 Yeah!

01:14:02 About 2 weeks into it, Lee got that dreaded knock on the door

01:14:07 that every man fears, and when he opened it,

01:14:10 he found a woman on the other side that he used to date

01:14:14 that said, hi, this is your child.

01:14:16 And in honorably, he left the band to go be a dad.

01:14:21 So Robbie said, you know, I know this guitar player in the area,

01:14:25 his name's Tony Rambola, and he's really good,

01:14:27 you should come check him out.

01:14:29 Robbie Merrill brought Sully to a Crushed Tomatoes show

01:14:32 to check me out, I didn't know it.

01:14:34 I met Sully there, shook his hand, and they handed me a tape

01:14:37 and said, you know, learn this stuff, we'll see if we like you.

01:14:40 I went and auditioned at the train station where they rehearsed.

01:14:43 It was only like, I think, 4 songs, 3 or 4 songs,

01:14:45 so I learned them and I played them, and it was all good,

01:14:48 and that's when they kind of told me and said,

01:14:50 all right, man, let's do this thing, and that was it.

01:14:53 I guess I was in.

01:14:54 I was just psyched to be playing with such good musicians,

01:14:57 and first really original band too, you know,

01:14:59 so I was just excited about what was coming.

01:15:02 You gotta go away!

01:15:05 Right around the time that we started to get some momentum,

01:15:11 I ran into Lisa, my crazy ex-stripper girlfriend,

01:15:15 and when I seen her again, all these old emotions

01:15:19 came up really quickly.

01:15:20 For some reason I had forgot about the bullshit

01:15:23 that we had went through, and I just kind of was drawn

01:15:27 to her again, but I also knew that I had

01:15:30 this really great person in my life.

01:15:32 And although those thoughts went through my head,

01:15:38 I really didn't regard it that much,

01:15:40 and I kind of drifted back into Lisa.

01:15:44 I'm in a relationship that's pretty deep at this point

01:15:49 with a great girl that I'm living with,

01:15:52 and I'm just falling for this girl

01:15:54 that was just so bad for me.

01:15:57 And so I get a call one day from Erin,

01:16:02 who asked me to come meet her for lunch at her job,

01:16:06 and when I showed up, she walked outside

01:16:09 and she smacked me right across the face

01:16:12 and started crying and told me we were done.

01:16:16 And I immediately knew she knew something.

01:16:21 She had heard a voicemail that Lisa had left

01:16:26 on my answering machine, and she just turned around

01:16:31 and walked back into work.

01:16:33 And in that split second, I knew I had fucked up so bad.

01:16:38 I know it affected him because he knows he made a huge mistake,

01:16:43 massive mistake.

01:16:44 He potentially lost the love of his life.

01:16:47 I tried and tried and tried to work things out with her.

01:16:52 She wouldn't take my calls. She wouldn't come see me.

01:16:56 I showed up at her house one night,

01:16:58 and through the balcony I could see her

01:16:59 sitting in the living room through these glass doors.

01:17:03 And I climbed up onto the balcony,

01:17:06 and I opened up the slider,

01:17:07 and she kind of looked over at me and just looked back down,

01:17:12 and she had been crying and crying.

01:17:15 And I came in and I immediately got emotional,

01:17:20 and I just said, "You know, listen,

01:17:23 I just need to talk to you."

01:17:26 And she didn't say anything.

01:17:28 She just looked me in the eyes, and she just said,

01:17:32 "Will you dance with me?"

01:17:34 And I was like, "What?"

01:17:36 And she went on to explain. She goes, "You know,

01:17:41 the one thing that you never asked me to do

01:17:48 the whole time we were seeing each other

01:17:50 was dance with me."

01:17:52 I didn't even know what to say,

01:17:55 and she just came up to me and put her arms around me,

01:17:59 and she just wanted to dance one time with me.

01:18:03 And I also remember thinking I was really afraid for my life

01:18:07 because I thought she was going to stab me in the back.

01:18:11 And, um...

01:18:13 [playing softly]

01:18:16 I danced with her to some slow song,

01:18:34 then she opened up the door.

01:18:36 She let me out and said goodbye,

01:18:38 and that was the last time I ever seen her.

01:18:43 You know, sometimes you have to go through heartbreak

01:18:59 in your life, and then something happens,

01:19:03 and your life turns around.

01:19:05 I'm all busted up over a relationship that just ended.

01:19:09 The band is solidified now, but my head's all fucked up,

01:19:13 my heart's all fucked up, and I was in a lot of fuckin' pain.

01:19:18 And I just didn't have the energy

01:19:21 to go to rehearsal a lot of the times.

01:19:24 I just started jotting down my feelings and my thoughts

01:19:29 like a journal,

01:19:30 and all these journal entries started to become songs for me.

01:19:35 And I noticed immediately that it was really easy

01:19:39 for me to express myself on a piece of paper,

01:19:42 much easier than it was for me to talk about it.

01:19:46 And so I wrote and I wrote and I wrote,

01:19:49 and all of it came from this real pain that I was experiencing.

01:19:59 Through the pain I was experiencing,

01:20:01 something really beautiful was happening,

01:20:04 and it was the birth of Godsmack.

01:20:07 I just got a call from Sully one day.

01:20:10 You know, hey, I got a new band, it's called Godsmack.

01:20:13 We have a bunch of material, and we want to record it.

01:20:16 How can we do this?

01:20:17 We don't have a whole lot of money.

01:20:19 And we ended up borrowing $2,600

01:20:21 off of a friend of ours at the time.

01:20:23 And so for the $2,600, he took us in on a weekend,

01:20:27 and we basically tracked as much as we could.

01:20:30 Track after track just doing it,

01:20:32 trying to save money to do it fast.

01:20:34 That's the only reason we were doing it fast.

01:20:36 We did everything live.

01:20:37 Tony and I were on headphones

01:20:38 by our hands from different separate rooms

01:20:40 being recorded at the same time,

01:20:42 and we wiped out all 11 tracks in 2 days.

01:20:45 I was getting over my fears of being a frontman,

01:20:48 and I started to look towards the Stephen Tylers

01:20:50 and the James Hetfields and the Layne Stalys

01:20:52 and the people that I admired as a singer.

01:20:54 And I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that,

01:20:57 and then I went back and sang all the vocals.

01:21:01 And that was it. That was the record we put out,

01:21:04 and it was called "All Wound Up."

01:21:06 We put some awful artwork on it.

01:21:07 It was a picture of Sully's TV in his living room

01:21:10 with a girl in a chair

01:21:11 with cassette tape wrapping around her.

01:21:13 It's the most fucking ridiculous album cover ever.

01:21:16 I remember the first time I heard "Godsmack" for real

01:21:20 on a real produced CD,

01:21:23 and I was hoping that it was gonna be the one

01:21:26 where you get to make it.

01:21:27 By shopping around these CDs

01:21:30 and getting them to certain radio stations,

01:21:33 we drew the attention of this one guy named Rocco

01:21:36 who worked for a local Boston station called WAAF.

01:21:40 It's Rocco. Rocco!

01:21:42 I'm WAAF.

01:21:43 Rocco just used to go digging through the promotions bin,

01:21:47 and we always had a bin of local bands

01:21:50 that would send music in for airplay.

01:21:52 And Rocco thought the artwork was really cool,

01:21:55 and so he put it on the air.

01:21:56 And once he started playing it,

01:21:58 the listeners really started calling about it.

01:22:02 What's going on?

01:22:05 Monday?

01:22:06 I'm Rocco.

01:22:07 First, we were played on the nightly news,

01:22:09 and it was at 11 o'clock at night.

01:22:11 I used to work construction,

01:22:12 so I had to get up at 5 in the morning,

01:22:14 but I'd always want to stay up to listen to the nightly news

01:22:16 'cause he'd play "Keep Away" on there.

01:22:18 All wound up, this is "Godsmack" on WAAF.

01:22:21 I was over at a bar, and someone was like,

01:22:24 "Man, have you heard about this 'Godsmack' group?"

01:22:27 He says, "Man, yeah, listen to this shit."

01:22:29 So he put it on.

01:22:30 The first song I heard was "Keep Away."

01:22:32 I was like, "Who is this fuckin' asshole, man?

01:22:34 This is some good shit."

01:22:35 He says, "Yeah, man, this guy, his name's Sully."

01:22:38 "Sully Orner," I said.

01:22:40 "Could I go with that fuckin' guy?"

01:22:42 I'm in my shop one morning working,

01:22:43 and I've got it on this college station,

01:22:45 and I hear this song come on,

01:22:47 and I start listening to the lyrics of it.

01:22:49 ♪ Sickness spilling through your eyes ♪

01:22:54 And I said, "That's Sully.

01:22:56 That's fuckin' Sully singing."

01:22:58 ♪ Craving everything that you thought was a lie ♪

01:23:08 ♪ Yeah ♪

01:23:10 The band started to grow at this stage,

01:23:12 and all of a sudden, we had this huge momentum going.

01:23:15 ♪ Yeah ♪

01:23:17 So I went to this local store in New England

01:23:20 called Newbury Comics,

01:23:21 which is a chain of about 17 stores,

01:23:24 and there was a lady named Beth Doobie,

01:23:26 and I asked her if she would take the CD.

01:23:30 And she said, "Sure," you know.

01:23:31 She ended up taking, like, five of 'em.

01:23:33 And I was like, "Oh, that kinda sucks, you know.

01:23:35 "You have a whole case. You can take more."

01:23:37 And she's like, "Nope, we'll start with five,

01:23:40 "and if you sell these five, you bring us five more."

01:23:43 And then five months started to turn into

01:23:46 about ten a month,

01:23:48 and ten a month started turning into a hundred a month.

01:23:52 And the more they played it on the radio,

01:23:55 the more people would buy the CD,

01:23:57 and the more people would buy the CD,

01:23:59 the more they would show up at the live shows,

01:24:01 and on and on it went.

01:24:02 A lot of people were showing up,

01:24:03 and then we were selling out, selling out, selling out,

01:24:05 and then they'd play it more and play it more and play it more,

01:24:07 and then it just snowballed into something huge.

01:24:10 ♪ Hey, hey, I never misunderstood me ♪

01:24:13 ♪ I thought I'd found myself ♪

01:24:14 They started selling so many copies

01:24:16 that when they published the album sales numbers

01:24:20 of everything that they were selling week to week,

01:24:23 Godsmack was out selling as a local unsigned band's

01:24:26 huge national artist.

01:24:28 ♪ Keep away from me ♪

01:24:30 He had done a lot of work selling him to guys.

01:24:33 They were working the club circuit heavily.

01:24:35 They had recorded what was a great record,

01:24:38 and as I would come out and see them play live in clubs there,

01:24:42 I began to recognize not only the strength of what he was doing,

01:24:46 but also the cause and effect with the audiences,

01:24:49 and it was very small, but it was meaningful.

01:24:53 Me and Tony were at rehearsal one day,

01:24:57 and I came up with this drum beat.

01:24:59 How about going...

01:25:00 [imitates drum beat]

01:25:03 So it has a little bit of thud to the ending on it.

01:25:05 And Tony started playing this riff over this drum beat,

01:25:08 and it turned out to be the song "Whatever."

01:25:11 We wanted to add it to the CD,

01:25:13 but we didn't want to record a whole new CD and everything,

01:25:16 so we just recorded that one song and just taped it onto the CD.

01:25:19 As a bonus CD, because when that song hit the radio,

01:25:22 that's when it really blew up for us.

01:25:24 ♪ And I'm fuckin' going away ♪

01:25:26 ♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪

01:25:28 ♪ I'm doing the best that I can ♪

01:25:30 ♪ I'm doing the best I ever did ♪

01:25:32 ♪ And I'm going away ♪

01:25:34 "Whatever" was sold thousands of copies, like, bam, it went from--

01:25:38 we sold, you know, 5,000 to right away we're doing 2,000 a week.

01:25:43 And in the meantime, you know, AF was just playing the hell out of it.

01:25:47 So you could feel something happening.

01:25:50 ♪

01:25:53 We were playing a lot of places,

01:25:55 and we were really starting to build a name for ourselves.

01:25:58 And it sparked the interest of the record labels.

01:26:01 ♪ Let's go ♪

01:26:03 I think I was probably checking on sales of one of our records,

01:26:07 and I remember speaking to someone at Newberry Comics,

01:26:10 calling around, "Hey, how's this record?"

01:26:12 "Hey, it's doing great. It's number two this week."

01:26:14 "Well, who's number one?" "Yeah, Godsmack."

01:26:17 [record scratching]

01:26:19 I said, "Well, who's Godsmack?"

01:26:21 ♪

01:26:22 I said, "Yeah, I got this record called 'Whatever.'"

01:26:24 I said, "Well, can I get a copy?"

01:26:26 And it was a CD, and then it had a rubber band,

01:26:29 and then it had this white additional CD, blank CD,

01:26:34 just like that.

01:26:36 ♪

01:26:38 So I'm sitting in my little basement room,

01:26:41 and the phone rings, and I pick it up.

01:26:43 "Yeah, what? What? Hello? What?"

01:26:46 I said, "Hey, I'm from Republic Records.

01:26:48 How you doing?" He's like, "Yeah. What about it?"

01:26:50 "Quit fucking around, you asshole," and I hung up the phone.

01:26:53 [laughs]

01:26:54 I really thought it was a friend of mine fucking with me.

01:26:56 I actually hung up on the president of the fricking label.

01:26:59 And so the phone rings again, and I was like,

01:27:01 "Seriously, I'm not in the fucking mood for this today."

01:27:03 That was clearly Sully.

01:27:05 And he's like, "No, no, no, don't hang up."

01:27:08 He's like, "No, this is Avery Littman from Republic Records."

01:27:11 And he started to go on and talk a lot of different kind of terminology,

01:27:14 record label terminology.

01:27:16 And at that point I go, "Oh, my God, like, okay,

01:27:18 we don't even have a manager, and they're talking contracts,

01:27:21 and I don't know anything about that part of it."

01:27:24 So I called up Paul Geary, and he was into management at the time.

01:27:28 I had him look at the band a couple times previous to that,

01:27:30 but, you know, we just weren't ready yet.

01:27:32 Finally I called him, and I said, "Okay, listen,

01:27:34 if you're managing the fucking band, that's, like, what's going to happen,

01:27:36 because I get record labels call in my bedroom,

01:27:39 and I don't know anything about contracts."

01:27:41 This I'll never forget. I remember this intensely.

01:27:44 I was sitting in my driveway talking to Sully, and I said,

01:27:47 "Well, we actually have our first offer, but I think it's shit.

01:27:51 You know, I don't think that's what we want to do."

01:27:53 I remember him saying, "Are you sure? Are you sure?

01:27:56 We're passing on a major label deal here."

01:28:00 And I felt at the time, "Look, I've been doing this long enough

01:28:03 to know that I don't know what kind of deal we're going to get,

01:28:06 but we're going to get a deal."

01:28:08 And so they ask us to set up a show, and we're like, "No problem.

01:28:12 We can fucking play anywhere in New England, and we're going to pack it in,

01:28:15 and we're going to look awesome, and we're going to get a record deal."

01:28:17 And we show up, we do our sound check, band sounds great,

01:28:20 everyone's in a good place.

01:28:22 We hit the stage. Not a fucking person.

01:28:25 There may have been 14 people in the club.

01:28:27 I remember thinking, like, it wasn't full, and we were worried about that,

01:28:30 'cause here we were at the radio showcase, and there wasn't a full room.

01:28:34 I was probably optimistic, thinking there was at least half of a room.

01:28:38 We're dead. We're dead.

01:28:41 That never bothered us, you know, as far as, like, the small turnout in shows,

01:28:45 because we knew it was a process, and we knew it was just a matter of time,

01:28:48 and we just had to be patient.

01:28:50 And so we just said, "Okay, we got to pull our head together here.

01:28:53 They just want to see this band play."

01:28:55 And for whatever it's worth, man, we got up on stage,

01:28:58 and we got 15 people, just like we would play to 5,000 people.

01:29:01 Let's go!

01:29:03 And at that point, Republic came back with a real offer.

01:29:12 There's a rule of thumb in our business that, you know,

01:29:15 just when you feel like all is lost and your company's going down,

01:29:18 and you just, you know, for whatever reason, you can't make the rent,

01:29:21 you can't pay the bills, you can't do this, you can't do that,

01:29:24 in our business, you've got to hang on with everything you've got,

01:29:27 because at the end of the day, the Beatles can walk through the door.

01:29:30 And in our case, it was Godsmackin'.

01:29:32 Please welcome Godsmackin'!

01:29:34 Godsmackin'!

01:29:36 Godsmackin'!

01:29:38 He wanted it. If you want it, you got to go for it.

01:29:42 He's touched so many lives and helped make their lives better.

01:29:46 I mean, how can I not be proud?

01:29:49 He had this one thing that he always wanted his whole entire life.

01:29:56 I have no other words but just simply amazing.

01:30:00 We're lucky we didn't end up dead or in jail.

01:30:05 And music, it was the saviour for us.

01:30:08 Nothing was handed to him.

01:30:11 He worked hard for what he has accomplished.

01:30:15 Always knew he'd make it, and then he did.

01:30:19 # I'm doing the best I ever did

01:30:23 # Go away

01:30:25 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:27 # Go away

01:30:29 # I'm doing the best I ever did

01:30:31 # Go away

01:30:33 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:35 # Go away

01:30:37 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:39 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:41 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:43 # Now go away

01:30:45 # I'm doing the best I ever did

01:30:47 # I'm doing the best that I can

01:30:49 # I'm doing the best that I ever did

01:30:51 # Come on, give me your hands

01:30:53 # Come on, yeah, yeah

01:30:55 # I'm doing the best I ever did

01:31:02 # Go away

01:31:04 # I'm doing the best that I can. #

01:31:06 CHEERING

01:31:08 PIANO PLAYS

01:31:20 Sometimes getting to where you want to get to,

01:31:24 it's not as easy as it sounds,

01:31:26 and you're going to face challenges,

01:31:28 and life is going to knock you down on your knees a lot.

01:31:32 But the people who can stand tall again and get up,

01:31:36 no matter how many times life knocks you down,

01:31:39 when you can reach down and find your inner strength

01:31:43 and inspire others and keep working at it,

01:31:46 those are the ones that are going to make it.

01:31:49 Those are the ones that will never live with regret.

01:31:52 It's all just a part of the path we choose.

01:31:55 I don't remember a lot about my childhood,

01:32:06 especially not with him, because he was on tour a lot.

01:32:09 But I've noticed a lot that as I've gotten older,

01:32:12 he just wants to spend more time with me.

01:32:14 My dad now will talk for hours about, like, anything.

01:32:19 Seeing the fans connect with him so much

01:32:23 and sing along to his songs on stage,

01:32:26 it's really cool for me, but it's almost surreal.

01:32:29 All of these people love your dad, because, you know,

01:32:33 I don't look at him like Sully, I look at him like Dad.

01:32:37 [playing softly]

01:32:40 [playing in bright rhythm]

01:32:48 New record.

01:33:04 I'm not sure what you want.

01:33:07 So you're still fixing the camera?

01:33:09 Yeah, I think so.

01:33:12 So this is my mom, my dear mom, my one and only mother.

01:33:16 Thank you, that's it.

01:33:18 I think I only have one.

01:33:20 I hope so.

01:33:21 We got over our hang-ups, how I used to be versus what I am now,

01:33:25 and now we get along great.

01:33:27 Yeah, I think so. I think so too.

01:33:29 There's still a little bit of pain in my ass, but...

01:33:31 There's still a little bit of pain in my ass too,

01:33:34 especially when you don't answer your phone.

01:33:36 I know, I'm busy though.

01:33:38 I know, I'm busy too.

01:33:40 We're back at the stoop.

01:33:42 This was like our hiding spot.

01:33:44 This was our spot right here.

01:33:46 This was the hang.

01:33:48 I feel so comfortable here.

01:33:50 I still feel like I gotta kind of watch my back a little bit.

01:33:53 You guys don't ever fucking call me.

01:33:55 We're in front of my friend, he's made an impact in the music world.

01:33:59 I'm a little bit over pampered here right now.

01:34:03 It's been a great ride.

01:34:06 Let's keep it going.

01:34:08 electric guitar plays

01:34:11 electric guitar solo

01:34:14 I've told you this once before

01:34:35 You can't control me

01:34:37 If you try to take me down

01:34:41 You're gonna break

01:34:43 I feel your hatred

01:34:45 Nothing that you're doing for me

01:34:48 I'm thinking you are the figure of the way

01:34:54 I stand alone inside

01:35:00 I stand alone

01:35:03 Stand alone

01:35:05 You're always hiding behind your so-called goddess

01:35:10 So what, you don't think that we can see your face

01:35:16 Resurrected back before the final falling

01:35:21 I'll never rest until I can make my own way

01:35:28 I'm not afraid of fading

01:35:32 I stand alone

01:35:36 Feel that you're slinging down inside me

01:35:41 I'm not dying for it

01:35:44 I stand alone

01:35:48 Everything that I believe is fading

01:35:55 I stand alone inside

01:36:01 I stand alone

01:36:05 Stand alone

01:36:07 Now it's my time

01:36:14 Now it's my time

01:36:17 It's my time to dream

01:36:20 My time to dream

01:36:23 Dream of the sky

01:36:26 Dream of the sky

01:36:29 Make me believe that this place is invaded by the poison in me

01:36:41 Help me decide if my fire will burn out before you can breathe

01:36:53 Breathe into me

01:37:06 I stand alone inside

01:37:12 I stand alone

01:37:16 Feel that you're slinging down inside me

01:37:20 I'm not dying for it

01:37:23 I stand alone

01:37:27 Never ending that I believe is fading

01:37:34 I stand alone inside

01:37:40 I stand alone inside

01:37:46 I stand alone inside

01:37:51 I stand alone inside

01:37:57 I stand alone inside

01:38:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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