Evil Groove – An Interview With Alex Webster of Cannibal Corpse
Who would have thought back in 1988 that the death metal band Cannibal Corpse would still be executing their gory lyrics and crunching sound more than two decades later? Surely not Cannibal bassist Alex Webster who said with a laugh:
“Ten years ago I didn’t even think we’d be around in 10 years. I figured, ‘Oh well, around the time I’m about 40 this will probably be on its way out or something like that, but here we are having our best year ever like as far as popularity and sales and all that goes, so I guess we’re not on our way out.”
Nonelouder caught up with Webster during a short break of their daunting 2009 tour schedule. And although the breather is appreciated, the goal is to get back out, play everywhere, and resume the spread of their Evisceration Plague.
“We actually have just three shows in Japan lined up for June. We’re having a little break other than those three shows until I guess it would be July 2nd or 3rd we’re going to leave and start doing some shows before the [Rockstar] Mayhem Festival to get us all the way out there. The thing is we live down here in Tampa of course, and the first Mayhem show is way over in California so we’ll probably wind up playing a few shows to get us out there – it costs a lot of money to take the bus across the country. But it’s mostly pretty calm right now, like the whole month of May is basically just time for us to relax a little before the ‘mayhem,’” Webster chuckles, “literally and figuratively I guess. We have a lot of stuff coming up like directly after Mayhem, maybe a week or two later after that’s finished, we’re going to Australia and that’ll be about a week and a half’s worth of shows. Then we come back and we’re home for about a week or so and then we go to Europe for a month. Then we’re home for a couple weeks and then we’re hoping to do another North American tour after that, so we’re going to be busy the rest of the year.”
With just a few days off during the string of dates Cannibal just completed, is it catching up to Webster yet?
“No, I feel fine. The only problem I ever have with the touring is when I come home I’m still used to going to sleep at like five or six in the morning which is what we do on tour and it drives my wife crazy because she’s on a normal schedule. I have to work really hard to try to turn my body-clock around. But I don’t feel tired at all from doing the tours actually, and believe it or not there were more days off on the tour we just finished than normal for us. We’ve done some tours where we’d do like 25 shows with one day off stuck in the middle and that’s not a whole lot of fun really. It’s definitely better the way we just did it which is to have about a day off every week. That’s fine. It kind of gives you that day to just recharge, hopefully do some laundry and have a good, sit-down dinner somewhere. But we get out there. We get out there and just tour and tour and tour and do tons of shows and there aren’t a whole lot of days off going on with our band compared to some other bands.”
And how are the shows going so far?
“It was great. That tour was basically a tour for us to try and do places that we don’t normally do. Part of the reason for that is, I believe, contractually with the Mayhem Festival they didn’t really want us playing the same places we’re going to be playing on that tour. So what we decided to do was try to do a tour – we didn’t want to sit home until July with a brand new album out – so we wanted to tour North America so we tried to go anywhere that that festival wasn’t going that was able to work for us. So I believe it was 22 shows total and it’s something that we actually would do again just for fun in the future because we played places like Tulsa, Boise, and Spokane, Washington, and Thunder Bay, Ontario, places that we don’t go to all that often. And people were very appreciative. We had a lot of fun playing these places so I think we’re going to try to do that more often – get off the beaten path instead of just doing the circuit of really big cities again and again. We’ll try to do some smaller cities too because people really appreciate that.”
And fortunately for the fans that live in big, metropolitan cities, they always get the chance to see the shows they want to – smaller towns across America aren't usually so lucky.
“Yeah, believe me, we love to play big cities like Chicago, for sure, but I think it winds up being a situation where – you definitely have to take into consideration that people in big cities probably have the opportunity to see five or six big shows a month. Whereas when we played Tulsa that was probably the first show that had been there in awhile and it was awesome. The same thing in a few of the other places – Asheville, North Carolina is not a place that gets hit with the kind of music that we do, so people were very happy to see us and we were happy to see them. We love to play the big cities but there is something where everybody is like, ‘Damn, I haven’t seen you guys in five or 10 years.’ Or in a lot of the smaller cities we ran into a lot of the people we’d already met in bigger cities and they were used to having to drive six to eight hours to see us play somewhere else, and they were really happy to not have to have done that for once. So there were a few people who had seen us – for example, we played Ottawa, Ontario which we’ve only done about three times total in our career, and a lot of the people there would normally go see us in Montreal which is a two-hour drive for them. They were pleased to be able to see us close to home this time.”
With 21 years under Cannibal’s belt, and Evisceration Plague being their eleventh studio album – and the one they consider their heaviest yet – is there a limit to ‘heavy?’
“There’s probably isn’t. There’s definitely going to be a point for any group of musicians where you’re going to kind of hit a wall and the progression is going to happen a lot more slowly. Like I think for us, not so much on the heaviness but on the technical side of things, we’ve continued to get better but progression is a lot more gradual now than it was in the beginning. Like if you listen to the first four or five albums, from the first album to say the fifth album there’s a lot of growth on our part as players and that definitely slowed down a little. Because if you keep growing as fast as we were from the first couple of albums, well, it would be almost impossible to keep that rate of development going. You kind of level off but at the same time you do always want to keep pushing and even one little advancement where we feel like, ‘Hey, we’ve written a better song,’ or ‘This is heavier than anything we’ve done before,’ or ‘This one little part is the best part we’ve ever written,’ ‘We’ve got some great lyrics here,’ or ‘This is the fastest guitar solo we’ve ever done.’ Any of those little ‘firsts’ that we’re able to accomplish at this point, they almost mean that much more because it’s harder to get them whereas on your first album everything’s a first. It’s your heaviest stuff because it’s your heaviest album. It’s more difficult now but it makes it more rewarding when we really do manage to one-up ourselves in one way or another.”
And so where there any of those ‘firsts’ off of Evisceration Plague?
“It’s hard to say, like I think it’s our best sounding guitar sound in our opinion. There’s one thing where we feel we’ve kind of one-uped every other album we’ve done. We feel like the guitar sound itself, just the rhythm sound, is the heaviest. The lyrics for ‘Scalding Hail’ and the way they ended up being sung by our singer, George, our probably some of the fastest we’ve ever done. Those are the kind of areas where we have focused more on one-uping ourselves over the past ten years. I think earlier in the band’s career there was a little more emphasis on the gore side of stuff, we still have very gory lyrics and that sort of thing but we’re not particularly concerned with out doing ourselves in regard to how disgusting or grotesque things are. We want it to be grotesque and disgusting if it fits that particular song, you know what I mean, but there’s room for more subtle kind of horror in our music too. We’re definitely not subtle very often,” Webster laughs, “But we do like to leave that door open. We wouldn’t want to feel like every song has to be the fastest, gotta be the grossest, got to be the most disturbing, has to have the lowest tuned guitar playing and the most difficult parts to execute. We’re not going to focus on going beyond the extremities we’ve reached before on every single song because we need some variety from song to song. Some of them are pretty simple like on ‘Evisceration Plague’ and some of them are really hard. Like ‘To Decompose’ is really hard song to play where the title track, ‘Evisceration Plague,’ is easy, but they’re both equally heavy, I hope. Just we got there in different ways and certainly ‘Evisceration Plague’ is not the most extreme song we’ve ever done but it’s as heavy as any of them – just in a different way I guess.”
Are there any songs of the new album which Webster is particularly enjoying doing live thus far?
“Well, we’re doing five of them if I remember correctly. And I really like playing all of them. They’re all fun to do. The toughest one, for me, is ‘Shatter Their Bones,’ and that’s mainly because it’s a song I didn’t write, it’s Rob Barrett’s song. And that one is difficult but it makes it fun because when we get through it and I really feel like I nailed it well there’s a sense of accomplishment to that. And it kind of keeps me on my toes and I’m thinking a little bit while I’m playing that song. It’s fun, it’s a fun song to get through and do, it’s a good one. I also enjoy ‘Priests of Sodom’ a lot because it’s got some cool kind of evil groove parts in it that are a lot of fun to play. And ‘Scalding Hail’ is cool too. They’ve all been a lot of fun to play actually; it’s just nice to have a few different things in the set. It’s nice to have them mixed in there, we definitely want to represent every album we’ve ever done in our live set – at least if it’s a headlining set, it’s just not possible for us to do that anymore when we do an opening set. You know like on the Mayhem Festival this summer we’ll probably be playing about a half hour so there’s no way we’re going to fit 11 songs into a half hour, it’s probably be more like nine. And of course we’re going to want to play a couple from the new record so right there we’re going to have to cut out some songs from old albums – but in general, when we headline we want to represent every album and it’s fun to play the old stuff but it’s definitely a little more interesting to play the new stuff just because it’s new.”
However, representing each album in Cannibal’s live show will become more difficult as the band releases more and more albums over the next few years.
“Yeah, like even with the headlining tour we’ll play 20 songs – that’s what we did on the last tour, we played 20 songs – and if you have 20 songs and you’re trying to represent 11 albums that leaves very little room for there to be more one song per album played. At the same time we can’t extend our set too much longer because the live show will probably get a little boring. You know, we’re already up to about an hour and 25 minutes right now and that’s quite a lot. We don’t really want to go much farther because we’ll be getting tired and wanting to pace ourselves in such a way that it would reduce the overall intensity of the show. There’s a certain point where you’ve got to try to pace yourself when you’ve got too much and we’d rather keep the set a little bit shorter and have it be really intense rather than a long, more laid back set. You know, being laid back and playing death metal don’t usually go together,” Webster chuckled, “At least not on stage. But I can’t predict the future, that’s become clear to me, but who knows what will happen in 20 years, if we continue to be consistent and continue to make albums all the way along we should be up to about album # 20 in about 20 years and that’s going to be a lot of material.”
Maybe at that point Cannibal can do a Barbara Streisand-ish show with intermission and all?
Webster laughing: “Totally! We’ve joked around about that before – we say it’s ‘An Evening With Cannibal Corpse.’ We’ll just play for like three hours, one and a half hours and then we take a break and play another hour and a half. Man, we would die. Banging your head like your 25 years old is definitely challenging enough when you’re starting to hit your late 30’s and throw on top of that to do it twice in one day – forget it. No thanks.”
With the macabre and gore being a good part of Cannibal Corpse’s forte, after all these years does it ever become difficult to keep coming up with new gory ideas?
“That’s one area where we brainstorm together as far as just coming up with concepts for individual songs. These days, and really for the past 10 years, we’ve been writing the music mostly at home, individually. Like I’ll come up with maybe five or six riffs and arrange them and then bring it up to the guys at band practice and we’ll work on it together after I have the rough framework ready then we put it together and practice it together. Once the song is done though, rather than me just sitting at home trying to figure out a name for the song myself we’ll actually all sit around and throw names around. And the name of the song will more-less dictate what the song is about. Like a song like ‘Scalding Hail,’ me and Rob wrote that song together which was a little different than what we’ve been doing lately, but we wrote that together up at the practice room, and then just listening to it something about it just seemed to make us think of something like a bunch of debris hitting you or something like that, just something about the way it sounded – it was fast, it needed some sort of a frantic kind of lyric to match the frantic music and so ‘Scalding Hail’ seemed to fit. A song like ‘Evisceration Plague’ that’s a lot slower, and it seemed to make more sense to have the lyrics be more methodical – a little more subtle. Like a plague is definitely more insidious than somebody bashing your head in. They both have the same effect which is killing somebody but one is doing it in a more subtle way than the other. You wouldn’t want a really slow doom, heavy, slow song to be about tearing somebody’s guts out, and at the same time a really fast song wouldn’t work to have it be about a plague or someone gradually losing their mind or something like that. We generally use the music that we’ve written as the inspiration for the lyrics and we work on the concept of the song together, the lyrics end up doing alone like once we have the title then whoever’s going to write the lyrics for a particular song will take the title home with a recording of the song and start working on it.”
Has Cannibal Corpse ever come up with an idea and thought that maybe it was going a bit too far even for them?
Webster snickers: “Yeah, I mean some stuff is so gross it’s borderline stupid. And I’m sure we have some critics out there who would say that we’ve already crossed that line. We never intentionally did that though believe it or not, we were always trying to make it serious horror even though some of it winds up being so gross that it’s tongue in cheek. But any of the stuff that’s really over the top to the point of being so offense it’s almost ridiculous, we haven’t been going in that direction as much lately. I like to use the horror movie analogy and I’ve used this a few times before, we’re a death metal band and if bands are like horror movies the kind of band Cannibal Corpse is is like The Evil Dead or Bad Taste, or those kind of horror movies. But we’ve also lately had stuff that’s more like The Shinning or The Exorcist, where it’s a little more subtle/serious horror but maybe more effective in that way. And yeah, we’ve had a couple ideas – there was one back when Chris was in the band and when Chris was in the band we had songs like ‘Fucked With A Knife’ and ‘Entrails Ripped From a Virgin’s Cunt,’ so we weren’t afraid to do much, but we want to make sure it’s not stupid. Like we were wondering if it be ok to have a song called ‘Drink My Piss.’ And we kept thinking about it and we were like no, it’s too stupid. It is gross, you know if someone’s being forced to drink someone else’s piss it’s disgusting but it was also a little too stupid. So it’s a matter of taste, really, and of course we’re dealing with stuff that 99% of the people out there are going to think is in bad taste in the first place, but I guess we have varying degrees of bad taste,” Webster laughs, “And what we might consider to be too much, like I said it’s not really if something’s too much it’s really if it’s too stupid, there’s where we won’t do something. We’ll go as disturbing as we want to but we just don’t want it to be dumb.”
So what has two decades in the music industry taught Webster about life?
“Well, I definitely got to see people all over the world and got to meet people all over the world. And not to sound sappy or corny or whatever but you definitely learn that people have a lot more in common than they might imagine. I grew up in a town of 6,000 people that was fairly homogonous – we did have an Indian reservation so there was that bit of additional culture beyond the standard American apple-pie kind of thing, we had that but it was still pretty isolated. Nobody spoke different languages or anything like that and I never really thought I’d have the opportunity to go to another country other than Canada which of course is culturally super similar to the United States. So I didn’t learn a lot about other cultures until I started touring and I was always interested in them but you learn quite a bit more by actually being there. And I never would have had that opportunity without being in this band; I always wanted to travel but I never would have had it. And you learn people have got a lot in common. Fans are fans. You think about all the problems that nations have with one another but you take metal fans – or music fans of any kind I guess, but definitely metal fans are what I have experience with – and you can take metal fans from Iran, Israel, wherever, Germany, Japan, the United States, Russia, put them all at a festival like Wacken, and I’m sure there’s people from all those countries at the Wacken Festival, and everybody’s getting along fine. I got to learn a lot more about international cultures by actually being out there doing that and meeting people. We try to talk to a lot of people after we’re finished playing our show. We’ll generally get cleaned up and then just go out by our bus and talk to anyone who’s still hanging around. We’re not thinking about these people being from another country we’re just talking to them about music and you can have a similar conversation with someone from one place as another. And I might not have really realized that, you kind of dwell on the differences, I think, when you are just kind of stuck in your community and never got a chance to get out and around, you kind of don’t realize just how much everyone has in common.”
Webster continues: “I think the whole Internet thing is still a fairly new thing, obviously, and you do have a situation where people are getting to know – even if it’s just instant messaging and on MySpace or whatever – that people are getting to know people who have common interests from other countries, countries that may or may not have been adversaries of the country that they live in. And it’s going to change things over time. I don’t think we really know just how much it’s going to change right now, I think in 20 years or so there’s going to be a lot less trouble between the nations. There already is a little bit less, I think, but people have got to get to know each other. It’s easy to not like another group of people when you don’t know them, once you get to know a few individuals from that group because you share something in common with them it makes them seem less foreign and less easy to just not like. It’s hard to not like people once you get to know them. If everyone had a chance to go out and meet people – and of course it’s expensive so I understand – but like I said I wouldn’t have been able to do all this traveling, not even half of it, not even a tenth of it, without the band having paid my way. So I got lucky but I can report back to anybody who might be reading this in the States that there are definitely a lot of really cool metal-heads out there all over the world and they’re all just like anybody else – it doesn’t matter what country they’re from.”
In addition to all things Cannibal, Webster has been tossing around the idea of putting together an instructional bass playing DVD.
“Actually, yeah, I’ve been talking to a company called Rock House and we’re hoping to maybe do something in the future. We will see – it’s looking like a possibility. I’d probably do at least one or two DVDs with them. It’s definitely closing in on being a 90% certainty at this point. I’ve had some material prepared for awhile just basically the rudiments of the way I play. A lot of people ask me the same questions again and again when I’m talking to people at shows, and it seems like people want to know certain information so that’s the information that I’d want to put on a DVD. And just the way I play, obviously, I’m going to explain the way I play better than I would explain some other kind of bass playing. If I make an instructional DVD it’ll be how to play like Alex Webster not how to play jazz or how to play this or that. It’ll be me showing everybody what I’m good at, which is – well, I guess people know what that is if they’ve heard our music – finger-style, death metal bass. So yeah I defiantly want to do something like that and it seems like people want me to. So stay tuned - it might actually happen within the next year and a half, I’ll actually have something out.”
Mayhem Festival 2009 Tour Dates
July
7/10 – Marysville, CA at Sleep Train Amphitheatre
7/11 – Mountain View, CA at Shoreline Amphitheatre
7/12 – San Bernardino, CA at San Manuel Amphitheater
7/14 – Auburn, WA at White River Amphitheater
7/17 – Phoenix, AZ at Cricket Wireless Pavilion
7/18 – Albuquerque, NM at Journal Pavilion
7/19 – Englewood, CO at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre
7/21 – Bonner Springs, KS at Sandstone Amphitheater
7/22 – Maryland Heights, MO at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater
7/24 – Atlanta, GA at Lakewood Amphitheater
7/25 – Noblesville, IN at Verizon Wireless Music Center
7/26 – Tinley Park, IL at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre
7/29 – Scranton, PA at Toyota Pavilion
7/31 – Cuyahoga Falls, OH at Blossom Music Center
August
8/01 – Burgettstown, PA at Post Gazette Pavilion
8/02 – Clarkston, MI at DTE Energy Music Theatre
8/04 – Mansfield, MA at Comcast Center for the Performing Arts
8/06 – Virginia Beach, VA at Virginia Beach Amphitheater
8/07 – Camden, NJ at Susquehanna Bank Center
8/08 – Hartford, CT at New England Dodge Music Center
8/09 – Bristow at Nissan Pavilion
8/11 – Tampa, FL at Ford Amphitheatre
8/12 – West Palm Beach, FL at Cruzan Amphitheatre
8/14 – San Antonio, TX at A T & T Center
8/15 – Dallas, TX at SuperPages.com Center
Cannibal Corpse Related Links
Official Website
http://www.cannibalcorpse.net/
MySpace Page
http://www.myspace.com/cannibalcorpse
Alex Webster's MySpace Page
http://www.myspace.com/alexcannibal
RockStar Mayhem Festival
http://www.mayhemfest.com/
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