EXODUS Drummer Talks About Hitting Rock Bottom

Marisa Connelly of The Daily Rock recently conducted an interview with drummer Tom Hunting of San Francisco Bay Area thrashers EXODUS. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Daily Rock: What's the key to longevity in music?

Hunting: To be true to yourself and try to stay away from drugs.

The Daily Rock: As you did?

Hunting: [laughs] Yeah! No actually, we embraced it for quite some time, on and off again. But, everybody's clean and sober now, so it's good. But the key to longevity is to, you know, you're going to have a certain fan base, and you have to evolve musically, but at the same time not leave your fan base behind because they want you to do a certain thing. It's kind of hard to please everybody. But I think that's one of the key things, for sure. And take good care of yourself to where you still can do this. So, I don't know, there's the two I can think of. I'm not the smartest interviewee in the world.

The Daily Rock: Different members of the band have spoken publicly about drug problems with meth. also about hitting "rock bottom" or having a moment of clarity. and for some people, they go through 10 or 20 of them.

Hunting: And for some people, it never works. They don't realize that they're at rock bottom.

The Daily Rock: No, they have no idea. They'll be getting arrested, covered in their own shit and they think they're fine. What was rock bottom for you?

Hunting: "Rock Bottom", wasn't that a UFO song? But for me personally? I was living at the place where we practice at, the studio, and it was basically a warehouse full of tweekers. It was a very enabling place, because the lifestyle that was perpetuated there was just ongoing drug abuse. I never smoked speed, I only did lines of it. But that was enough to take me pretty far out there and make me lose my vehicles, and lose, you know, not everything, but pretty much on the fucking verge of everything.

The Daily Rock: Like, what's everything?

Hunting: Cars, lapse in payment of the registration of your vehicle. Like, go and scrape the tag off another vehicle and put it on yours. Then you can take that money you were going to register it with and buy a sack of shit. But, eventually the cops catch up with you, and you get a suspended license and you go to jail because you get caught driving on that suspended license. And it just snowballs.

The Daily Rock: Did you go to jail?

Hunting: Yeah, for a couple nights. The band bailed me out though, because we had a gig. It was actually Paul's last gig. I'm glad I made that one. But, like we were saying, rock bottom is different for everybody and that was my rock bottom. And I was fucking miserable and I'm never going to go back there again.

The Daily Rock: Did you have to go though meetings, or rehab?

Hunting: No, I didn't. Well, I mean, I went through a stage of like, where I was good for three weeks, or good for a month, and then I would slip. And I would have to say the music kind of saved me too. We had touring coming up, and the band was starting to work regularly again. You can't carry on that lifestyle and be on tour and play every night, at least not when you're 43! Maybe when you're 23 or something, but not as you get older. [spoken in a hillbilly accent] Now it's all about a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and a place to get horizontal at the end of the night, you know what I mean?

Read the entire interview from The Daily Rock.

A one-minute trailer for "Assorted Atrocities", the forthcoming EXODUS three-disc DVD/CD set, can be viewed below. Due late summer, the package will contain the band's July 2008 performance at Germany's Wacken Open Air festival, plus a 105-minute documentary following the band through the last five years of touring as well as about 45 minutes of bonus footage, with photo galleries and all of the group's promotional videos. The set will consist of two DVDs plus an audio CD of the Wacken performance.