Max Cavalera: ‘The Bob Marley of metal’

“I hate set lists!” barks Max, seated in a dark lounge at the back of his tour bus outside London’s Electric Ballroom. “I’ve always hated them, as far back as the Sepultura days, but in Sepultura I didn’t have much power, because it was a democracy. In Soulfly, the other guys thought I was completely crazy because I didn’t want a set list. But then I said to them, ‘Every night is different, with a different crowd. How do you know that the set list you’ve written will be good for every crowd? It won’t be — you’ll just be forcing it on them’.”

He has a point. As he shrugs, “I think there’s more of a punk vibe that way. I don’t think metal needs to be all that professional, myself. In fact, we have an excuse: we can say, ‘It’s metal, it’s OK to f**k up!’ So now the other guys in the band love it. For example, if you’ve got a crowd that goes completely apes**t for the fast songs, then you play the fast ones. Or if they’re really enjoying the jamming, jam a little more. So out of the 25 songs we play in the set, we play five that are special, but everything else comes from me telling the guys what’s next, right there on stage.”

“I also have a white ESP that is similar to the BC Rich Warlock, which I used for many years. A lot of people liked that one, with the Discharge sticker. I’ll have to get a sticker for this guitar! D is the tuning I use most. The second tuning is B. The last tuning is A, which is for the song ‘Eye For An Eye’, the last song in the set. That’s quite low, but that song only needs one string — I use 13s.”

Asked if his guitars require special intonation because the string tension is less with only four strings, he says, “No. The guitar just gets used to it by nature. It’s like if you chop your arm off, you’ll get used to it, right? It’ll still be missing, but life goes on.” To make up for his lack of shredding ability, Max has always worked with guitarists who can supply leads, from the sublimely fast-fingered Andreas Kisser in Sepultura to Marc Rizzo in Soulfly. He shakes his head in admiration of Marc’s technique, a blend of insanely fast alternate and sweep picking.

“Marc can grab a piece-of-s**t guitar and make it sound like a vintage Gibson,” he laughs. “He also carries an extra distortion pedal for me. I’m not into worrying about my guitar sound, so I said to him, ‘You love guitars. Do it for me’, and Marc sets up the distortion for me. I don’t play most of the clean guitar parts these days, I just let Marc do it, so my distortion is always on.”

Max’s on-stage setup is simple. “I use two pedals. It’s been like that for 10 years,” he explains. “One is a Boss flanger, and the other one is my favourite pedal ever. I’ll tell you why I like it so much; the thing is rigged wrong! Something went wrong with it somewhere. It’s supposed to be some kind of octaver, but it doesn’t do that. What it does is amplify whatever you’re playing in the weirdest way. It does add a little bit of octave, but it makes sure that what you’re playing is 10 times louder than anything else on the stage. It’s the loudest pedal ever and my soundman hates it. He tried to hide it and throw it away once. He didn’t succeed because the rest of my crew saw him and said, ‘Don’t touch that!’ If it ever breaks, I’ll have to call somebody and ask them to make something that does the same thing. It’s so crazy. I don’t use it a lot, but when I use it you’ll know!”

Still, things annoy Max sometimes. Although he doesn’t pay much attention to the backline (“We use Peavey amps, but I don’t know which models”), when he doesn’t get a decent guitar tone it bothers him. “We played in Siberia not long ago and the gear we used was from the cave era!” he snorts in disgust. “All they had for me was this thing... I don’t even know its name. It didn’t even have distortion. I was like, ‘I can’t play with this f**kin’ Chuck Berry sound!’ I don’t even know what Chuck Berry sounds like, but I was like, ‘Get the f**kin’ Chuck Berry sound out of my amp, I don’t care what you guys do. Do what the Kinks did and rip holes in the speakers. If we have to do that, we’re gonna do that!’ Luckily, Marc had a spare distortion pedal...”

Rizzo to the rescue once again, it seems. In fact, Max likes to leave most of the equipment settings and other technical details to Marc, a guitar virtuoso who ensures that Soulfly’s live gear delivers the goods. His primary job in the band is to complement Cavalera’s guitar playing with his own wide range of instruments. As Marc says, “I play Peavey HP Specials and an Ibanez seven-string guitar. My backups are the same. I also use a double-neck Yamaha: one neck is electric and one is a nylon-strung acoustic.” These run through Peavey JSX heads and Peavey cabinets — a combination that has to sound right every night, as the band don’t bother with monitors. “I don’t use monitors because they never sound good to me, although I do have the drums in the sidefills,” explains Marc. “I always listen to the backline, although I’m not very picky when it comes to backline mics. Any microphone is cool with me.”

Despite this range of responsibilities, Rizzo is no micromanager, trusting the Soulfly crew to do their job. When it comes to soundcheck, for example, he shrugs, “Soundcheck is for the FOH engineer! We don’t soundcheck at every show, anyway.”

If the crowd doesn’t react quickly enough, though — or, God forbid, act bored — they’re in trouble. Max recalls an occasion when he felt obliged to rouse some sluggish gig-goers. “I remember the first time Sepultura opened for Ozzy Osbourne in the States. We were playing all the fast s**t from the Arise album and I saw all these businessmen-type guys, all dressed up, right in front of us. I was like, ‘I’ve got to p**s these people off’, because they were just sitting there, drinking beer. I could have done voodoo and these people wouldn’t have got into a mosh pit. They weren’t even Ozzy fans. So I started throwing water at them and cussing them out. I thought we were gonna get kicked off the tour, but it turned out that Ozzy really liked it. He didn’t care!”

Mostly, however, Max is there to look after his fans, especially in the all-too-frequent cases when the security guards get too, er, ‘enthusiastic’. “I only stop the show if people are being beaten up by security,” he insists. “It happened when we were supporting Pantera in the States once. It’s a f**ked-up story. I remember this guy, he was all tattooed and he was standing right in front of me. He knew all our lyrics. They told me later that he was drunk and f**king with the bouncer. Well, whatever. I saw the security grab him and take him out, but they were pretty cool with him — no fighting or anything. A couple of months later we got a phone call talking about that show, and that kid had been paralysed for life. They took him outside and 10 guys just beat him to dust. I didn’t know, or I would have stopped the show.”

Max himself has sustained a few injuries while playing live. “I broke my collar bone 15 years ago. It still hurts now,” he says. “It was when Napalm Death played in Phoenix, Arizona, where I live, and I was invited to sing on ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’. This was in my drinking days. Me and Napalm’s drummer, Mitch Harris, had done a lot of J germeister shots, and in my f**ked-up mind I thought that it would be really cool to stand behind the drums, do a somersault over the top of the drummer, land in front of the mic and start singing. I thought, ‘This will be the perfect entrance!’ So I climbed on top of the drum riser and jumped... and landed on top of the cymbals. The edge of a cymbal cut through my collar bone. I woke up the next morning and that whole part of my body was black.”

With Max’s drinking habit long gone — thanks to a stomach ulcer, he restricts himself to Gatorade and Irn-Bru these days — he occupies a guru-like position in the metal scene. What advice has he got for touring musicians? “I really like the phrase ‘It’s not what instrument you play, it’s how you play it’,” he ponders. “I think it’s true. You can camouflage your sound with a good instrument, and you can fool some people a little bit, but not for the whole time. In the end, you are who you are.”