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By Peter Atkinson Masters of Disaster Fate has a way of kicking Louisiana death metallers Soilent Green in the ass. Even when things are going great, as they have been since the spring release of its superb fifth album Inevitable Collapse in the Presence of Conviction, something inevitably goes terribly wrong. Case in point: During the band’s first show as the opening act for the Dethklok tour in June in San Francisco, an electrical problem sparked a small fire during Soilent’s set, brought the proceedings to a halt, prompted an evacuation and forced the show’s rescheduling. “When you’ve got all these bumps in the road it’s hard to keep the wheels straight,” reckons eerily prophetic founding guitarist Brian Patton from Seattle a few days prior. Yet in the Soilent pantheon of “bumps,” the Dethklok boondoggle was small potatoes. During the band’s 20-year career, the wheels have, in fact, gone right off the road — more than once. A van crash in 2001 sidelined Patton and then-bassist Scott Williams for months. And when Soilent got back on the road in 2002, a second crash nearly killed frontman Ben Falgoust. “When you’re pulling your singer out of a van and all you can see is two arms sticking out of the dashboard because it’s crushed around him, you’re talking about trauma, bad stuff,” Patton says. “We had to cut him out, and when we did his feet were twisted all the way around, bones were sticking out everywhere and we thought we were done. And for him to bounce back a year and half later, and tour with us when he was on crutches, that was pretty incredible.” Then, just after the release of Soilent’s fourth album Confrontation in 2005, came Hurricane Katrina, a disaster so epic and surreal that Patton still speaks of it with amazement. “I was on the road at the time, so we were watching that sh*t on TV and you see some dude go floating by and it’s like, ‘Hey, I know that guy,’” he says. “Everybody had some level of disaster. We lost Gene [Rambo] our old singer. He’s the second former member who’s died [Williams was killed in 2003 in an apparent murder-suicide].” “A few of us lucked out, Ben skated pretty cleanly, I got a lot of damage in my apartment but most of my possessions were OK,” Patton recalls. “But my family got really devastated, [drummer] Tommy Buckley’s family lost everything, we all had to relocate for a couple months.” Yet once again, Soilent eventually regrouped, and things got rolling not only with the band, but the members’ various side projects, including Falgoust’s black metal outfit Goatwhore and Patton’s infamous Eyehategod. “We’ve had to do a little soul-searching and find the reason why we started in the beginning,” Patton says. “But this has been my dream since I was 3 years old when I was playing with a broomstick, and to actually be out on the road playing music for people, that makes me the happiest. Our life is to be able to play.” Soilent will be among the 20 or so bands participating in this year’s revamped Ozzfest, which will be a one-day event in Dallas this month and feature Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica as headliners. Soilent and Goatwhore both will play the second stage, and even though it’ll be a one-shot deal, Patton is stoked. “We know [Ozzfest is] going to be ridiculously huge,” he says. “The tours, they were what they were, and they were just floating around the country like everything else, so it lost it’s meaning in a way. I look at this one like the old Monterrey Pop Festival or Woodstock. You put all of your energy into one show and make it really special.” On the web: myspace.com/soilentgreen |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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