During an appearance on bestselling author Mark Manson‘s The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck podcast, LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe was asked if being in a band can be compared to a marriage where instead of having one significant other to keep happy, you’re usually fully committed professionally, financially and personally to a whole group of passionate, creative and often strong-minded individuals. Randy responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Is it the hardest relationship possible? … I think that the intensity of probably people who serve in combat together is much more intense than our relationship. And they form these lifelong bonds because they’ve been through these horrific experiences together. But hopefully in most places that sort of relationship has its time and its place and its intensities. Ours is long-term.
“It’s strange to me because there’s very few bands that last as long as ours [has],” Randy continued. “And it’s strange for me to say that. We’re kind of moving into the legacy sort of era. It’s very strange for me to say that, but most bands just don’t last as long as ours do — because of the personality differences and so forth.
“I think with us, it’s because, in so many ways, we have become better friends that we’re still here,” Blythe explained. “I mean, we’ve gotten in fistfights together. Me and my guitar player Mark [Morton] famously got in a drunken brawl in Scotland. I had adopted a Scottish accent. I was wearing a kilt. It was a nightmare. And we videoed it and put it out. And we do signings and people are, like, ‘I can’t believe you two are sitting next to each other after this fight,’ ’cause it’s this frozen-in-time moment. It happens in all bands. We were just stupid enough to put it out. We got a platinum DVD out of it. But Mark and I are extremely close friends — extremely. And we text and talk to each other very often, not just about band stuff, but about life. And I think we’re very fortunate in that.”
When Manson noted that it sounds like being in a band can be compared to being in “a synthetic family” that Blythe and his bandmates put together, and that “it comes with all the trappings of a family relationship,” Randy concurred. “You’re talking about this idealistic version you had of being in a band when you were younger,” Blythe said. “People seem to think, to this day… I’ve been in this band almost 30 years. When I’m at home and I’ll go to the grocery store or something, someone will be, like, ‘Where’s Mark? Where’s Willie [Adler, LAMB OF GOD guitarist]?’ I’m, like, ‘At home with their wife. We aren’t attached at the hip.’ Even in Richmond, where I’m from, people are, like, at the grocery store, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Buying produce, man. I’m a normal human being.’ ‘Shouldn’t you be on tour?’ ‘No, I’m allowed to be at home.’
“Somehow we have learned how to function better now than we ever did when we were younger,” Randy added. “[We were] very combative each other. And I think the only reason why we didn’t break up is because nobody wanted to be the guy that broke the band up because that would be defeat. ‘I quit.’ It’s, like, ‘I hate you.’ And you do spend so much time around these guys. You’re, like, ‘I hate the way this guy ties his shoes.’ But you don’t wanna be the guy to crack and, like, ‘Well, the band could have done great, but it went down the tubes ’cause you wimped out.'”
Blythe‘s second book, “Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head”, came out on February 18 via Grand Central Publishing (GCP).
“Just Beyond The Light” was described by Blythe as a “tight, concise roadmap of how I have attempted to maintain what I believe to be a proper perspective in life, even during difficult times.”
In December, Blythe announced more spoken-word and question-and-answer events to promote “Just Beyond The Light”. The special “evening with” event includes a spoken-word performance, an audience question-and-answer session, a copy of “Just Beyond The Light” and an opportunity to have the book signed.
In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan’s death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.
Blythe‘s prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD‘s 2015 album “VII: Sturm Und Drang”: “512”, one of his three prison cell numbers, and “Still Echoes”, written while he was in Pankrac Prison, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write his first book, “Dark Days”, in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.
Source: blabbermouth.net
