By Andrew Bansal
On an unrelenting run of tour dates since the release of their latest album ‘The Dream Calls For Blood’, San Francisco Bay Area thrash veterans Death Angel are currently trekking across North America to detonate audiences as main support act to Children Of Bodom. Death Angel’s recent years have been easily their most fruitful, as the band has successfully been able to release high-quality new music and tour worldwide on a regular basis. The Children Of Bodom tour made a stop at a sold-out House Of Blues Sunset Strip last Saturday March 1st, and as expected, Death Angel put on a powerful performance. A few hours before they destroyed the stage, drummer Will Carroll spoke to Metal Assault to discuss the tour, the Rainbow and the LA scene, his ideal soundtrack to rainy weather, live musicianship, and lots more. Enjoy this candid chat below.
How are doing today, Will?
Doing great! Just had dinner at the Rainbow and getting ready to play Hollywood again. I love Hollywood, so it’s going to be fun.
Whenever you’re in town, you always post on your facebook that you’re having dinner at the Rainbow. It’s become a kind of ritual for you for LA shows, isn’t it?
Absolutely! And I go there after the show too (laughs). I love 80s metal, hair metal and the whole scene down here. I mean, I was a thrash kid growing up in the Bay Area and everybody hated the LA scene, but I liked it. I thought it was a cool scene too. So I like coming down here and going to the Rainbow. It’s like a time capsule.
I’m surprised to hear that coming from somebody like you because you’re a Bay Area guy. As you said, they all hate the LA scene!
Yeah, it’s like black and white. They either love it or hate it. Specially in the 80s, it was like ‘Kill Posers’, ‘Kill LA’ and this and that, but I love Motley Crue and Ratt. I grew up listening to those bands along with the likes of Metallica and Megadeth. So I liked them both! Why can’t we all get along? (laughs)
Exactly, man. That’s what I keep saying too. So, what’s your favorite thing at the Rainbow? Do you have anything in particular in terms of food and drinks or do you just like to hang out there?
After I play, I usually get the pizza which is really good. Before I play I get either spaghetti or may be steak. But yeah, of course the pizza is the mainstay for me after I play. I just love going there to look at the stuff on the walls and hear good music. It’s a rock ‘n roll vibe and I’m all about that. We don’t have anything like that in San Francisco.
Interesting! Well, talking of this tour, last night you played the hometown show at the Fillmore so you must be in a good mood today. It must be great to play a hometown show in the middle of the tour, not at the start or end of it.
Yeah, I actually like it that way because it gives us a chance to kind of regroup. After two weeks in Canada and being in there forever in the snow and ice, it’s nice to get home, do laundry, take a proper shower, be with your loved one and it’s nice just to get your marbles back together, recharge your batteries if you will. Now we all have a second wind and it’s time to start doing it again. So I enjoy having San Francisco as a stop-gap in the middle of the tour.
You’re in LA today and it’s weird out. It’s rainy and gloomy, and it’s freaking us out because we’re so spoiled with great weather here.
Yeah, and it was raining up in San Francisco yesterday, man! It’s like following us or something. We’ve had bad weather this whole tour. Canada was just black ice and sleet, and it was awful. It was really, really hard to walk around. You’re just slipping and sliding everywhere. Now it’s pouring rain down here. What the hell, man! I guess we’ll have to wait until we get to Arizona or something to find some nice weather. But it’s kind of trippy (laughs).
You’ve obviously played all around the world in all kinds of weather. Have you ever had a show canceled due to bad weather?
Not since I’ve been in the band, but we played an outdoor festival somewhere in Germany. The weather was so bad that I wore a hoodie while I was playing. I never wear long sleeves when I play. I sweat a lot as I get really hot, but that particular show was awful. It was somewhere in Germany. If Ted was here, he would know exactly where and what the date was. I remember hail flying at us and everyone had their jackets on. It doesn’t look too cool when you’re playing in your hood and jacket like that (laughs). But we’ve never missed a show because of weather.
When it’s raining, there’s a certain kind of music that goes well with that atmosphere. Do you have any rain music that you listen to, any albums or songs in particular?
I think Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’ is a great rain album. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Song Remains The Same’ is also a great album for rain, and any kind of Jimi Hendrix and late 60s stuff like The Who, nothing too heavy and with a mellow kind of vibe. Master Of Reality is heavy but still ’70s heavy’.
Good choices, man. Talking of the live performance aspect of Death Angel, in any set you have old and new songs and you put out ‘The Dream Calls For Blood’ so you’re playing a lot of those songs as well. But when you switch from older to new songs or vice versa, do you feel a big difference as a drummer?
Oh it’s totally a big switch, because when I’m playing these new songs it’s the beats I wrote and the drum fills I created, so I’m a little more comfortable. But while playing the old songs I try to do it exactly like Andy [Galeon] did it, as much as I can. So that’s a little bit more of a challenge because those are someone else’s ideas.
You were an outsider for a long time before you joined the band. So, the songs that were written before you were in the band, do you look at them differently now that you’ve gotten to play them so much?
That’s an interesting question! I still like the songs the same because I was a Death Angel fan before I joined. So I would say I don’t really hear them differently. If I have my iTunes on shuffle and ‘Kill As One’ comes up, I’ll still listen to it and be into it. I don’t listen to it differently and analyze it in terms of whether I’d play a beat differently. I still like them the same as a fan.
For the sake of Metal Assault readers and older Death Angel fans who might not be too familiar with you, what kind of background do you come from in terms of influences? Do you incorporate the hair metal in your drumming at all?
Oh hell yeah! I’m also a big death metal fan. I love old-school death metal so I try to incorporate a little bit of that here and there. But I definitely do Bobby Blotzer kind of fills and live I try to ham it up a little bit. I definitely incorporate the LA rock ‘n roll kind of drums into it (laughs).
When I interview drummers, I’ve always observed that they have the largest musical vocabulary out of all members of the band. Would you say drummers are more open-minded than other musicians in any band?
I would say most of the time. I’m pretty much metal and rock n’ roll and I don’t listen to much of anything else even though there’s a couple of artists I love, like Gary Numan, David Bowie and Adam Ant. So I like some 80s new-wave but mostly I listen to rock and metal. In that realm though, I have a very broad taste. I’ll listen to Suffocation, then put on Black N Blue and then Forced Entry. I’m all over the place.
Awesome. Death Angel has opened for several bands in America and elsewhere and you do plenty of festivals as well. Is there any musician you particularly enjoyed hanging out with on tour, somebody you look up to?
To be quite honest, Tom Hunting from Exodus! Even though we’re both Bay Area guys, he’s a little older than me and he’s from the generation before me. So I never really knew the guy well until Death Angel, Kreator and Exodus toured together. That was a dream-come-true tour for me. Kreator is one of my favorite bands of all time, so to watch Ventor play and to talk to Mille every night, I was star-struck. I had Tom Hunting there every night with me, and we really bonded. We talked drums, music, 49ers, we’re both football fans. He’s one of the coolest people I’ve ever toured with. I’ve always looked up to him, he’s one of my drum heroes, and now we’re friends. It’s really cool, you know. Another band I enjoyed playing with was Voivod. I love them and now I’m friends with the drummer Michel. So it’s been really cool to be in Death Angel and getting the opportunity to not only play with these people but to get to know them and become peers.
I have one last thing to discuss with you. A lot of musicians are health freaks when on tour, specially the members of Death Angel.
Not me! (laughs)
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at. So everybody in Death Angel except for you are all about eating healthy and working out, right?
Ted’s not about eating healthy and working out, he’s just really skinny. Me and Ted went to high-school together and he’s always been skin-and-bones. So he doesn’t work out or eat healthy but the other three guys do work out and watch what they eat, although me and Rob do grub out together sometimes. Rob likes to eat some bad food too. He does take care of himself though.
Since you’re a drummer you don’t even need to take any health precautions, right? You’re getting your workout on stage every night.
I’m burning lots of calories! If I didn’t drink so much beer I wouldn’t have this gut. But yeah, I sweat my ass off on stage so that is my only workout and I don’t have to do anything else (laughs).
Related: Gig Review – Children Of Bodom, Death Angel & Tyr Rock Sold-Out House Of Blues Sunset Strip
Visit Death Angel on the web:
DeathAngel.us
facebook.com/DeathAngel
twitter.com/DeathAngel
instagram.com/DeathAngelOfficial
Remaining Tour Dates:
3/05 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Murray Theater
3/06 – Denver, CO – Summit Theater
3/07 – Albuquerque, NM – Sunshine Theater
3/08 – El Paso, TX – Tricky Falls
3/10 – San Antonio, TX – Backstage Live
3/11 – Dallas, TX – House of Blues
3/12 – Houston, TX – House of Blues
3/14 – Atlanta, GA – Masquerade
3/15 – Ft. Lauderdale, FL – Revolution
3/16 – Tampa, FL – The Ritz Ybor
3/18 – Asheville, NC – Orange Peel
3/19 – Charlotte, NC – The Fillmore
3/21 – Silver Spring, MD – The Fillmore
3/22 – Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
3/23 – Cleveland, OH – House of Blues
3/24 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrews Hall
3/25 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues
3/27 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club
3/28 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza
3/29 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza