Deftones Head up
Twenty years ago Deftones were skater kids from Sacramento who came together to create sound. Today they are a global rock force that's fought tension, tragedy and the vices of success. Now, at the dawn of a new album, Deftones are standing tall and refusing to turn back.
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Sacramento, California, summer 1988. Outside a small house, a teenage kid is sitting on his porch, a guitar across his lap. A few metres away, out of a small, locked garage, the most unholy noise is being blasted down the street. Death Angel riffs, Metallica riffs, riffs of the kid’s own invention all come roaring from a wall of amplifiers, connected remotely to the guitarist on the porch. In decades to come, legend will say that all this gear, all this racket, was paid for with the money the kid, Stephen Carpenter, was awarded after being hit by a drunk driver when he was fifteen. Truth is, he did get hit - and he did buy equipment with the money he got paid. But by the summer of '88, all that gear is gone and the kid, barely eighteen, is forced to beg and borrow the kit crammed into his mom’s garage. Either way, the neighbours aren’t all that pleased.
Another couple of kids walk up. They’ve all been in and around the local skateboarding scene and they nod hellos. One kid rocks a perfectly coiffed pompadour, like a lost Hispanic member of The Smiths or Depeche Mode. His name is Camillo Wong Moreno, but everyone calls him Chino. He’s here to introduce his school friend Abe Cunningham, a drummer, to Carpenter. The guitarist is relaxed. He tells Cunningham that, if he likes, he can go into the garage where there is a drum kit set up on a rickety stage amid piles of junk. Cunningham does as he’s told and, with Carpenter still riffing on the porch, he proceeds to batter the hell out of the drums. Carpenter looks at Moreno and says just one thing: “Woah!”. They don’t stop playing for the rest of the day.
In the coming weeks and months, Moreno will start singing over the top of the sounds Cunningham and Carpenter create. With another friend on bass, they will play the barbecues and house-parties of their school friends. They’ll write songs almost exclusively – and somewhat bizarrely – about food: there’s ‘The Vegetable Song’ about not wanting to eat your greens, there’s ‘Hot Cheese’ inspired by their bassist who burnt his mouth on a piece of pizza. For adolescent variety, they’ll write ‘Butt Booty Naked’. Moreno will later laugh about them all, chuckling at how “silly” they were. He’ll also comment on how, from the start, they were “tight”, that Carpenter was always a good guitar player, and that they practised their ass off, everyday. Then he’ll add that he was “the weakest link” and that his band mates would make fun of him for sounding like Gomer Pyle, “kinda like a mix of Danzig and Morrissey”.
Still, they will progress from their friends’ parties to playing the local venue in town, The Cowshed, where in years to come Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins will play, and two or three hundred people will come down to watch their first ever club show. No one will tell them that they suck. And because of that, suddenly they will begin to think, just maybe, they can do this. Perhaps they really are a band – possibly a good one, too. They know they might have to ditch the songs about broccoli, though.
It’s been over twenty years since that very first Deftones jam in Carpenter’s mom’s garage. It’s been over two decades since those kids decided that playing music was something they wanted to spend the rest of their lives doing. And, in that time, those kids have gone on to leave a legacy unrivalled by almost all of their alt rock peers.
Last night Deftones played in the town from which they’re now leaving. The gig was, as Cunningham puts it, “fantastic”. It was their first in America for a little while, and it followed a handful of Mexican dates. If all goes according to plan, they will be on the road – on and off – for the next twenty-four months.
Moreno, for one, is very pleased about this. “We’re warming up,” he says, voice full of eagerness. “We’re getting ready for a good couple of years.”
Perhaps he’s so buoyant because Deftones really haven’t had a very good last few years. There is a constant reminder of this when you look around their bus – their bass player, Chi Cheng is not here. Instead, he is semi-conscious in a hospital bed and has been for a year and a half. He was flung from the wreckage of a car crash while riding in the passenger seat and went into a coma from which he hasn’t yet fully emerged.
The accident happened when the band had nearly finished what would have been their sixth record, Eros. They shelved that project in the aftermath of Cheng’s crash, believing it didn’t represent them anymore, putting it aside out of respect for their bass player. Instead, they recorded an entirely new album, Diamond Eyes. This, though, is the first time Deftones have put in any serious road time without their fallen comrade. It’s taking a little getting used to.
“His bunk on the bus was always right across from mine. I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life right next to this guy almost every day,” says Moreno. “To be talking to him one day and not able to speak to him the next is a rough thing.”
All four of the rest of Deftones – Moreno, Cunningham, Carpenter and keyboardist Frank Delgado – remain distraught about their friend; he is never far from their minds. But there is an irony. It took Cheng’s accident to help save the band.
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Deftones (text) by Tom Bryant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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