Mastodon Unleash the Beast Within

For Brian Hiatt's complete Mastodon profile, check out the latest issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands now.

Brent Hinds, frontman and lead guitarist for Mastodon, has reached the inevitable point in the evening when his speech starts to slur. A few hours back, during a listening session for his Atlanta metal band's epic new album, Crack the Skye, he polished off at least six Budweiser tallboys; here at a clubby midtown Manhattan steakhouse, where his tribal forehead tattoo and reddish lumberjack's beard are comically out of place, he's deep into a procession of Jack-and-gingers. He's cracking some increasingly nasty but harmless jokes about an encounter with a female celebrity (upshot: she's fat), when he slowly begins to remember that there's a reporter at the table.

"Don't put this shit in Rolling Stone," he mumbles, blue-gray eyes turning feral. His next words are not at all slurred: "I'll kill you."

When Hinds is functional, Mastodon are the greatest metal band of their generation — no one else comes close. Their music is a gloriously chugga-chugging throwback to the epic heyday of Seventies prog-rock and the best of Eighties thrash, led by drummer Brann Dailor, a Neil Peart-style monster who writes lyrics about Moby Dick, crystal skulls and interstellar travel. And in Hinds they have an authentic rock & roll madman — sometimes too authentic.

(Watch Mastodon talk LSD, Iron Maiden and singing in Dave Grohl's bathroom.)

The day the foursome first played together nearly a decade ago, Hinds got in a parking-lot brawl with a cook at a restaurant. Over the years, it's only gotten worse. In 2007, the guitarist almost died after a drunken incident in Las Vegas. Around 3 a.m., Hinds approached System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian and his friend William Hudson, swinging a wet T-shirt over his head. "He was more wasted than any human being I've ever seen," Odadjian says. When Hinds got close with the T-shirt, Hudson smacked him — in self-defense, according to Odadjian. Hinds went down, fracturing his skull on a curb and ending up in a coma. "He sucker punched me out of nowhere and almost ended my life," Hinds says. "If I ever see that dude, I will have to spend some time in prison."

At the moment, though, he's still more concerned with me. "Keep in mind, I will kill him," he tells Dailor, and then mumbles, "I'll kill you," at least one more time. But minutes later, he leans his nappy head companionably on my lap. "What do you think about stroking my brow right now while I lay back?" he asks.

"I feel kind of weird about that."

"Just asking," he says, sitting up.

Women — pretty, well-dressed yuppie women — keep coming over to the table to talk to Hinds, to admire his tattoos, to invite him over to the bar, to suggest that they're up for partying later. "It's always like this," says Mastodon's other guitar player, Bill Kelliher, a Star Wars obsessive covered with tattoos of the bounty hunters from The Empire Strikes Back.

Hinds' female admirers don't quite know who he is, but they're fascinated, even if his idea of making small talk with a Carrie Bradshaw type in a ruffled top is to ask, "Have you ever been homeless?"

"I'm definitely an alcoholic," Hinds says, sitting in his New York hotel a couple of days later, as he cracks his first Heineken of the day. "I've been a drunk person ever since I was old enough to drink booze. It sucks, but whatever, I can accept the truth." Ever gone to AA? "Nah," he says. "That's for losers."