"I'm getting better each week," says Alien Ant Farm frontman Dryden Mitchell, in his first interview since a May bus crash that broke his neck, killed the driver, and injured the band and six crew members. "People kept telling me everything was going to be OK, but I could feel it in the doctors' voices that it wasn't for sure. I broke my C-2 -- Christopher Reeve broke the same one. And my bone flicked into my spinal cord. That's not good."

It took the fusing of two vertebrae, massive rehab and about three months in a halo brace with screws drilled into his skull, but now Mitchell is slowly getting back to work. "I have a lot of nerve damage. Dead fingertips, so its hard to play the guitar, and if I move my head down, my arms fall asleep. Weird sensations."

Mitchell made his first public appearance on September 7th, when he joined 311 onstage in Irvine, California. "Nick [Hexum] called me and said, 'Pick a song,'" says Mitchell. "So I picked 'Homebrew.' After all this happened, I wanted to sing his line 'I won't ever be the same.'"

As for the Ant Farm, Mitchell says it will be a couple of months before the band returns to the studio. "No rush," he says. "I devote all my time to therapy. I've been riding a bike, which does me good, especially considering that the bike could have been a wheelchair."

AUSTIN SCAGGS
(September 26, 2002)