There have been so many comebacks in metal in the last two or three years...of course we know about VV....Its a subject I find really fascinating. I thought about it a lot when I went to go see VV at Scion. It was both sad and inspiring. Sad in a nostalgic way... But also inspiring to see a band come back together again and create what what was thought lost forever in the past. This is the main reason why I never wrote about the experience up at Scion. I started it but just couldn't continue as it was just too much. Anyway here's an interesting story from Atheist's drummer Steve Flynn that really shows a side of this that I thought folks here would like to read:Blistering.com: I’ve been listening to your drumming for literally nineteen years and I’m always taken aback by your technicality and fluidity and, for a lack of better terms, your grooviness to how you play. But coming from the standpoint of someone who is not a musician by any means, how in the world does someone of your skillset and your prowess not pick up a pair of drums sticks for 14 years? How is that even possible? How does that even happen?
Flynn: Well, you know what I liken it to, because it has come up in other interviews over the years? Actually, [laughs] Kelly and I have been friends since junior high. He was really pissed when I left Atheist at first. Our friendship transcended that and he’s the master of metaphors. I would always call him the Ross Perot of death metal. Ross would always speak in metaphors and so Kelly would always be like, “You know… I got this Maserati that is parked in the garage and I can’t use it! Why the fuck aren’t you playing?!” There have been a number of people over the years that have asked me that question.
So to answer your question, I guess you’d have to know my personal experiences in the band. When you’re booed off the stage and you have dog food thrown at you, you don’t tend to have the most optimistic view on things. Not on your personal playing because I always set out to play exactly what I wanted to hear myself play and I was always fulfilled from it. So when we did Unquestionable Presence, my peers and my colleagues, the guys in Cynic, the people who wrote the magazines like Monte Conner and Borivoj [Krgin], all these people back in the day who were known as “thought leaders” were blown away. They paid such great compliments to what we did. That’s all I ever set out to get so I was supremely satisfied. When it was clear that when it came time [to quit the band], you know our bass player was dead. He and I were the centerpiece of this rhythm section and also driving what was the complexity of the band, so he was gone.
I liken it to gymnasts or tennis players and this is a very good parallel. If you start playing tennis or doing gymnastics at age ten and then you’re in the Olympics at age 16, after that you’ve been doing this thing for ten straight years and doing it hardcore. I spent a decade of my life from the time before I could drive a car until my mid-twenties. I was just burned out. I was burned out a ton and nobody liked what we did, we were getting booed off the stage and having dog food thrown at us, Roger was dead, Tony went and played with fucking Pestilence and it was just like everything was against us. There were no other bands for us to tour with that were like us and all the writing was on the wall. On top of all that, I was just burned out. I spent an entire decade playing drums for four or five days a week and doing nothing else. I just had to get away to get perspective. And when I got away, there was this fork in the road and the fork I took was as far away from as creative or exciting as you can get.
Shit, I got my masters degree in telecommunications and I do market research for a living from nine to five. I needed to take a break and I was so burned out and I wanted nothing to do with [music]. I had such a negative experience with it. One of my best friends was killed; it was just, ugh, it was done. So Kelly would always use his Maserati metaphors and I always told him that I’d play again because it’s part of who I am, but I just needed to get the fuck away from it. It was horrible! Everybody hated us! It wasn’t until like six or so years later with technology that people started to really appreciate us. My wife one day sent me an email that on eBay, one of our CDs sold for $75. I was like, “No shit? Who the hell would do that?!” Nobody likes us! Why the hell would somebody pay $75 for an Atheist CD?’ So that was like, actually, seven or eight years later and I was right. Had I kept in, I would have been even more miserable.
Blistering.com: What brought you back? What was the breaking point, more or less?
Flynn: I remember it specifically. It was January of ’05. It is vivid in my head. I just sat up in bed and I just knew I had to start playing again. I looked over at my wife and told her that it was just time to start playing again. So within two or three weeks, I sent out a few emails and introduced myself and told these guys of my experiences and that I just wanted to jam and play on weekends or in bars. I just wanted to play again. So it just happened that the guys who I met had been fans of Atheist for years and they couldn’t believe it. So I said for us to get together for lunch and we’ll talk, have a rehearsal and see how it works out. So when they showed up, they brought Piece of Time and Unquestionable Presence with them and the guy said he had it since he was 16. He couldn’t believe it was actually me and that I haven’t done anything in music for that long and that I should have been in some band playing somewhere. That guy was Chris Baker and the other guy was Jonathan Thompson. They just couldn’t believe it.
But yeah; I just needed a break because the music business is just a horrible business filled with horrible people. It’s a labor of love. I don’t care if you’re Metallica and you make a shit ton of money or if you’re the local garage band who plays at the pub on Friday nights; the only way you can be remotely fulfilled is if you do it because you just simply love to play. I took enough time off that when I did come back, I just wanted to play and I’m incredibly intense about it. I’m balancing my life between a corporate job, two kids, two bands and it’s brutal, but I love it so much that I don’t want to give it up.
posted October 19, 2010 13:25
