Zakk Wylde (ZW): It’s a sad day in rock [opening a non alcoholic beer].
AG: Do you think that was something that was inevitable?
ZW: Well, eventually you’re going to have to stop fucking drinking. I mean, it was fucking that with even Dimebag, you know what I mean, we would have had to slowed down sooner or later. But, no, what with the blood clots I got, cos I asked him, I said, ‘dude, does this have anything to do with the fucking alcohol and all the years of drinking or whatever?’ and he goes, ‘no, cos if anything it fucking thinned your fucking blood’ and he goes, ‘if this was hereditary, all your life it saw stopping you from getting it’. But I remember when I had blood work done and all this other shit, he goes, ‘dude, your liver enzymes are high, your pancreas enzymes are high, put it this way, the last thing you want is pancreatic fucking… your pancreas getting fucked, he goes, ‘Zakk that is so fucking painful and you’re dead’, it’s a death sentence. He said, ‘so maybe you ought to fucking chill the fuck out’, so I go, ‘alright’ and with the Kumanon I’m on…yeah, you’re done. There is not even like, ‘oh, you’ll be okay’, your liver can heal itself, if you stop. But with your pancreas, pfft, gone, I mean if that thing, if you’re at this point, up here and you stop you’re okay but if you keep on fucking going, it’s done.
AG: That’s what your body does : it copes with it to a point and then it says, ‘nope’.
ZW: You know, it’s so crazy, being 42 now, the majority of my friends, Jerry Cantrell, Jerry’s done, Slash is done, Duff is done so like all of my buddies out of my age now, they’re done. They don’t party no more, well, they can’t (laughs). Slash has a heart fibrilator in his fucking chest from all of the heroin, coke and the fucking booze. Duff had pancreatitis, he had an attack on the Us Your Illusion tours. He went to a hospital and said, ‘man, my stomach is killing me’ and they went, No, man, you have another fucking drink and you’ll drop fucking dear right over here’. I told Duff, ‘how much were you drinking a day?’ an he goes, ‘Zakk, I was up to about two gallons of vodka a day’, so I go, ‘Two Gallons!’ I mean, have you ever tried drinking a gallon of water? I mean, you’re pissing all fucking day long.
AG: On your health, there’s a certain irony that now you’re sobering up yet when you were with Ozzy you were pissed as.
ZW: Oh, now I’m not with Ozzy, I’m fucking sober (laughs). Even with all the times when Ozzy quit drinking we never brought beer around. We were never like, ‘Hey dude!’. Like if me and you went partying after the gig or if you were rolling with us on the tour bus or something like that, we’d be getting fucked up on the bus or whatever. But I mean, we’d go out and have fun, it’d be insane but we’d go out. But with Ozz, when he quit, no one ever walked around and went up to him with cold ones, you know what I mean.
AG: Has being sober given you a new perspective on life?
ZW: No. I was in hospital and was told that three of the blood clots went through to my heart. I found out that if one of them got further, you’re dead. So I went, ‘hmm’, my brother in law, Martin, one day asked me, ‘how do you feel knowing that the doctor told you, you could have died? You were that close to death’, and I say, ‘relieved’. We were laughing about it but I’d go, do I have a new perspective on life when I had my kids? I didn’t go, ‘oh man, it changes my life’, I went, ‘oh yeah, now it does, now I’m changing fucking diapers’, but I’m still going out doing the same thing that I did yesterday. So I mean, put it this way, any of those life experiencing things with like, ‘oh man, I finally saw the fucking light’, it like, ‘dude, you were either a fucking tool all your life or an asshole’ and you’re like, ‘maybe I should start being nice to people…put it this way, I believe in God and Jesus Christ so if He gave this shit to me so that some little kid doesn’t have to suffer then fucking cool. I mean, if somebody else doesn’t have to suffer then give it to me cos I can take a beating like it’s nobody else’s business. But yeah, I don’t question it, I don’t go, ‘hey, why me?’ I just go, ‘well, alright, next thing, whatever fucking…’.
AG: You do a lot of free weights, how much of that alter your dexterity?
ZW: I lift all the time, so no, not at all. Some of my buddies that play told me, ‘Zakk I can’t lift cos I feel like I’m getting cramps’, I never got that cos I lift all the time. The only thing I’ve ever got was fucking joint pain.
AG: Carrying around a Les Paul doesn’t help.
ZW: Well no, between the Les Paul, the guitar straps and the chain and everything like that. I think when I was sitting on the scale one day with my fucking boots on and between the vest, the guitar and the whole fucking nine yards of straps and everything, I was like 22 pounds fucking heavier, you know, something ridiculous (laughs)
AG: Does the weight alter your playing?
ZW: I’ve been so used to it for all of these fucking years of playing it so it never bothered me. I’ve known guys that are like, ‘I never liked Les Pauls Zakk, they’re too fucking heavy and all this sort of bullshit. That’s why those BFG guitars I’ve been making; they’re chambered in the back of the body and they sound fucking great too but if you grab one and you pick it up you’ll go, ‘holy shit’, you know, because obviously it’s chambered but I mean, the guitar sounds great though. When it’s not even plugged in, you hit a G chord on the thing and it’s lke ‘branngg’ and you think, ‘oh, it’s killer’.
AG: With maple and mahogany, did you think about the woods that you were using at all?
ZW: That’s what I have always used. On my one specific Les Paul guitar that I had, The Grail, I was like, ‘what is this guitar made out of? cos, you know, it’s this fucking great sounding guitar. But yeah, same thing, the mahogany, maple, ebony fretboard. The custom is always going to sound brighter than a standard cos the standard has the mahogany and then it has that rosewood fretboard and rosewood is darker cos it is a softer wood, it is not as hard and brittle as the ebony so yeah, that’s why Standards have a darker tone to them, it’s not as fucking bright. To me, it’s the Custom, I just love the way that they sound, I love the Standard too but for the shit that we’re doing, playing hard rock, and with the EMG pickups makes it really fucking tight and clean.
AG: So if the Epiphone just to make it more affordable for kids?
ZW: Oh yeah, you have to have that line, man, I mean, me and Dime were talking about it one day and he said, ‘Zakk, how many fucking kids do you know that can afford a fucking 4,000 dollar fucking guitar?’ It’s just like anything, you know, like when Mercedes starting making the 30,000 dollar Mercedes. Still an ass kicking car but this way now me and you could buy one and have a really quality looking car, but I guarantee that Mercedes were selling more of those 30,000 dollar ones than a fucking 120,000 dollar fucking Mercedes.
AG: So where is the cost difference? Is it just where it’s made and the woods used?
ZW: Well, I don’t know, cos I know the Epiphones are made in China now but they don’t slouch on the craftsmanship. Even on the Graveyard Disciple, it is just like whenever I play Jacksons; the Randy Rhoads V’s, you know the expensive models, the necks are just fucking great. But those Epiphones are killer, I wouldn’t pick up one of those Epiphones and go, ‘how much? Can you get this thing for a under a thousand dollars?’ Those GDs, you can get them for a thousand dollars or it’s 800 or something.
AG: What are the pickups?
ZW: The EMGs are the passive ones because that’s a cost thing; once again, that’s a cost of two hundred dollars. To them, 800 to the consumer sounds better than 1000 dollars, cos now there’s three 0’s on the end instead of two. Even though it’s only 200 dollars, to a lot of people they go, ‘oh that’s a thousand?’ and that sounds like a lot of dough whereas if it’s 800, oh that’s not bad, but you know how they sell everything.
AG: So do you have a say in the marketing and the ultimate look of it?
ZW: Um, well no, the way I got that GD, we were looking at Bo Diddley’s guitar and as ugly as that is, me and my buddies were talking about it, remember the late to mid sixties Vox – the phantom or the tear drop, you know, Brian Jones, they were really fucking weird shapes and the surf music guitars and we were just looking at them saying, ‘God, look at how butt ugly these fucking guitars are’ and we were taking a lot and going ‘oh’ and just buying the ugliest fucking guitars we could possibly find. Me and my buddies were taking a look at it and shit on ebay so ah, one of my buds was like, ‘why don’t you have them make you one of those Bo Diddley fucking guitars’ and you know how Billy Gibbons has that fucking Billybones guitar now which is godawfully ugly, man. It’s so fucking ugly that it almost looks cool. What happened is our merch company gave me a promotional item probably the size of this tape recorder and it was the shape of a coffin with the BLS with the crucifix in it and the tommy guns in it and the logo, it was a Halloween promotional item. You opened up the coffin and it had lollypops in it but it had all of the song titles like, ‘House of Doom’, ‘Graveyard Disciples’, ‘Death March’, ‘Genocide Junkies’ on the lollypops. It was fucking funny as hell. I had that and I just said, like if you and me were sitting there and I just put it on a piece of paper and I drew a guitar neck on it and you and me were looking at it, saying, dude, that would be fucking cool man, instead of making a Bo Diddley guitar. See, I played with fucking Ozzy and with BLS, I’ve got enough lyrics about death and doom and all that other shit. I go, that would be pretty cool. I just figured, see if they can make it and when they got it to me I thought, you know, they’re just taking the piss – I played the fucking guitar and it sounds great and plays like an SG cos it has that Steinberger thing on it. So when you’re actually sitting it, you know how with an SG you can get complete access to the whole fucking neck. It’s the same thing with the coffin cos there’s not even any horns on it. You can just fucking wail on that thing and then they stuck the Floyd on it so that’s another toy you can play with. Hell, they did a killer job on those things and basically it is like an SG, it has an all mahogany body, just like an SG, just one piece of mahogany and then, except for a mahogany neck with a rosewood fretboard it has a maple neck with a fucking ebony fretboard, like on my Les Pauls so I dig it, man.
AG: Your Les Pauls have always been 50’s spec necks?
ZW: I think so but it’s not, you know there is now binding on it or anything like that. Put it this way, on the GD there is more of a skinnier taper, it’s just a skinnier D shape neck as opposed to, you know like how on a Les Paul it’s more of a baseball bat type thing, so ah, it’s not super crazy thin but it’s definitiely lighter.
AG: So can you pick up any Gibson and be comfortable with it or do you need altered necks?
ZW: Yeah, Les Paul is pretty much it but I have my Teles and I’ve got my Strat at the house. The only thing with the Strat or anything is where the pickups are at – the metal pickups get in the fucking way if you’re not used to playing on a Strat. But my Tele I’ll just pick it up and start jamming on that like I’m jamming on a Les Paul – any guitar.
AG: Have you still got the one with the bottle caps on it?
ZW: Oh yeah, I’m still recording with that fucking thing.
AG: So that’d be one of the ones you don’t take out on the road?
ZW: Yeah, I got The Rebel, the original buzz saw, I bring that out on the road, The Grail, I leave that at the house, you know the one that Gibson made for me. I got the first seven sitting at the house. I leave the first two at the house and I bring the rest of them out.
AG: I remember reading that for writing and for practice as well, you just play and play until the ideas come instead of going over scales.
ZA: Well, I’ll still go over scales – set a metronome and just jam, you know, just jam over scales like blues patterns and that. Or if I want to noddle over scales with a metronome I’ll still do it, to me it’s not work, I just like playing around,
AG: When you started playing you didn’t have the transcriptions and internet we have now, you had to use your ear.
ZG: Yeah but I took lessons for two years from this guy, Leroy Wright, he was ten years older than me but he was awesome. He showed me scales, your pentatonic and diatonic, how it breaks down, how to solo and what the guys, you know, do you break down the language so you know what they’re speaking so it doesn’t sound like this gigantic mystery. It’s like somebody showing you a card trick, it’s like, ‘oh, that how you fucking do it’, that’s how it was with Leroy, he’d show me these fucking tricks and these illusions and so that’s how you fucking do that, that’s how it works and that’s why it works. It’s in the key of E minor so you’re around the twelfth fret. Aside from scales, he also showed me finger exercises. Plus the theory so if I wanted to learn a Sabbath, AC/DC or Zeppelin show, he’d show it to me, You can actually play and hang out with your friends and be Joe fucking guitar hero cos you can play Back in Black, [sings riff] that was a major breakthrough.
AG: Speaking of Guitar Hero, you’re part of it. Your kids beat you, does that give you a good laugh out of it?
ZW: Oh yeah, it’s fucking hysterical, my kids beat me. I get me ass kicked all the fucking time but my kids but then I go, ‘oh, alright wise ass, pick up the fucking real thing’, you know what I mean. None of my kids play, my daughter started taking piano lessons from Randy Rhoad’s mum, Delores. They really don’t – music, ah, there’s computer shit now, my son’s into snow boarding and hanging out with his buddies.
AG: Is it information overload for kids now?
ZW: Oh yeah, but I mean as far as the kids getting into music, you can’t force your kids into it, if they get interested in it, then they’ll do it, you know what I mean. I can’t force anybody, when I used to give guitar lessons I might have been teaching thrity or forty people and within that there were maybe 3 or 5 kids that I knew were fucking, that had it and not only that, they practiced, they actually wanted to fucking play. Then the other people kind of took lessons because I was the local guitar guy in town, it was like, ‘oh, yeah I take lessons from Zakk’ but they never fucking practiced and I could just tell. Whereas the other kids would come back and next week and they fucking knew it and they wanted to learn something new, ‘can you show me that Randy Rhoads thing?’, ‘show me eruption’ or whatever the fuck, you know what I mean.
AG: Do you reckon the people around Ozzy appreciated the amount of time and effort that you put into playing and learning guitar?
ZW: Well yeah, you know, I don’t think it’s so much that, if you could play, you could play.
AG: That whole Hollywood thing of the Osbournes was just something different that people who knew about Ozzy looked at and thought, this isn’t quite right.
ZW: Oh the whole TV show and all that bullshit. I always told Ozzy he could be a fucking comedian if he wasn’t a musician. It just shows another side, that’s all that was but there was a lot of goofy shit that went on with that thing.
AG: Playing with Randy Castillo and Rob Trujillo and coming back for Ozzy’s Back To Earth album, did you start to feel like a session musician?
ZW: Yeah when we did Down to Earth, I didn’t write anything cos I was out doing Black Label. Oz was writing with all of these other guys and I remember he called me up and he said, ‘Zakk, listen, do you want to come into the studio? I don’t want to go through the whole writing thing again. I’ve been doing this for the last fucking two years with these fucking guys and I don’t want to go through the whole thing of us fucking sitting around and just jamming on fucking music. What I’ve got, can you come down and just throw down?’ and I just said, ‘yeah, whatever the fuck you want me to do, dude’. But ah, yeah, because I am so used to being part of the whole writing process, but it’s just like, yeah, I went down and I always have a fucking good time – me and Ten Palmer were jamming on it. You know, I had fun, just like going in and jamming on somebody’s record, the songs are already in. When I did that Rockstar movie, I didn’t write anything on that. It was just like going in and being a studio guitarist, kind of like a session guy.
AG: Working for Mark Wahlberg must have been a dream come true?
ZW: (laughs) No, Mark’s a good guy though, man. A really funny dude, Even Mark knows, he said, ‘Zakk, I’ve got to be honest with you, this whole heavy metal shit, were I grew up I completely missed the fucking boat on all of this because my older brothers…’ cos that’s when rap first came in, he said, ‘these bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, I never even knew they existed, if I’d known about it, this is what I would’ve been listening to’. Same thing with me, I knew nothing at all about fucking rap music cos I never listened to it, you know what I mean and it was never on MTV then so I didn’t know shit about any of that stuff. I was too busy listening to Sabbath, Zeppelin, AC/DC, fucking Skynyrd and all of the classic rock shit, then I started playing guitar and getting into Van Halen and everything like that.
AG: When you started playing with Ozzy, did you feel that no matter what you did you’d always be compared to the late great Randy Rhoads?
ZW: Oh yeah, well, put it this way, I always laugh, no matter what happens, how many records you sell, Randy started that whole machine, without Randy Rhoads there’d be no Zakk Wylde and Jake E Lee. It’s like playing for the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth; it is always going to be called that stadium, the house that Ruth built, Roger Marris broke Babe’s record, 61 home runs but Babe set the record, you know what I mean. So you know, Randy will always be Babe Ruth but I always joke and they go, ‘well why do talk baseball?’ but I got no problem being Mickey Male, so fucking I’ll be the drunk Irish guy (laughs). Playing for Ozzy is like putting a uniform on for the New York Yankees, it’s an honour to wear the pin stripes, you know what I mean. Now that Gus G is going to be playing with Oz, you know it’s an honour to pay with Oz, that’s the most coveted guitar spot in heavy metal.
AG: From your point of view you can concentrate on BLS and it frees yourself up to dedicate yourself to that.
ZW: Oh yeah, it’s just entirely Black Label but Ozzy is where I grew up, you know what I mean, it’s like leaving your Mum and Dad’s house and I’m proud of all of the stuff I have done with Oz and all of the things I’ve accomplished with Oz and everything like that. So, you know, Gus G, fuck, he gets, he fucks his hand up in some bizarre porn accident on the tour bus jerking off (laughs), ah you know, if he fucks his hand up or if his wife gets pregnant and it’s like, ‘Zakk, can you come out for two weeks?’, it’s like, ‘yeah’ until Gus gets.. it’s Gus’ gig, I wish him all the best, he’s part of the team now. So, it’s no big deal.
AG: It’s very tactful of you to say that, some would be bitter and twisted.
ZW: No, I mean, it’s like you said, it’s not like I’m going to be jobless. I was looking at it that way anyway cos with Oz, that’s why I cherished the moments with him cos any day he could have said, ‘I don’t feel like touring anymore, I don’t want to fucking do this shit anymore’ so it’s just like, I always thank the good Lord for all of the moments I had with him.
AG: Same goes for Dimebag of course. How much of his influence rubbed off on your playing?
ZW: Ah, well no, what he created was whole another genre of music when you really think about it. He took metal or extreme metal and they created that genre. It was as heavy as Metallica was and all of that other stuff and with the thrash thing, Pantera came out and just..I remember telling Dime, ‘you look it up in the Webster’s dictionary and it says none heavier, it just says Pantera, that’s it, you know what I mean.
AG: Thanks for your time.
ZW: No problem brother, I’ll see you next time we tour with Black Label.
