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It's official. The world has got to deal with Godsmack.
"If your first album does well, it's because you spent your whole life writing that," frontman Sully Erna said recently from a hotel room in Sioux Falls, S.D. "Your second album, you start to get some pressure. But that third album plants a seed in the industry. If you can pull that off, your band is going to be around for a while."
In that case, we'd all better get used to Godsmack, the monster-rocking, monster-selling quartet from Boston featuring Erna on vocals and guitar, Tony Rombola on lead ax, Robbie Merrill on bass and Shannon Larkin on sticks. The band hit platinum for the third straight time in May when April's release, "Faceless," joined its two predecessors as certified million-sellers.
Success has come in other forms for Godsmack, such as Grammy nominations (one in 2001 for "Vampires," two in 2003 for "I Stand Alone"), regular play on rock radio, especially for hits like "Voodoo," and even major ad campaign love -- the Navy uses one of the band's riffs in its current recruiting commercial.
The truest sign of the band's success is the success itself, which comes in an industry obsessed with hip-hop and pop and where even the "hardest" rock bands seem to have a DJ, a beat machine and/or songs laced with poppy hooks. But Godsmack thrives on the same dark, heavy and hard rock that inspired them. Not only that, they make it look and sound easy.
"We take pride in the music we make and the hard rock format we play, and (success) is kind of an extension of that," Erna said, with a voice that mixes heavy rasp and heavy Bostonian. "We screw around with some acoustic and tribal stuff, but for the most part, this is a hard rock band."
Despite all the band's props, Erna had one breakthrough on "Faceless" that may never receive its due.
He wrote the song every musician has wanted to write but didn't have the nerve to. It's called "I (expletive) Hate You," and it has quickly become an anthem of jilted lovers, dissed friends and disgruntled 9-to-5ers who have finally found a universal way to express their internal pain
"That's probably the most popular answering machine song in the world," Erna said with a laugh, implying his listeners have left the song on another person's voice mail as a sledgehammer-subtle message.
Erna said this day-gone-bad song came directly from the band's success, and not the kind of success that makes you fearless as an artist.
This ode to anger has its roots in money. It was inspired by a group of crooked contractors Erna said tried to run him through the financial wringer while building his Massachusetts home.
"It was supposed to be a beautiful experience, building my dream home, and it turned into a complete (expletive) nightmare," Erna said. "They thought they could charge me a million bucks and take advantage of me. I was writing lyrics at the time and I slammed the phone down, and those are the first words that came to me."
In the end, Erna's personal incident is beside the point. When it comes to being angry, it's all relative.
"The lyrics are just very generalized, and people can take them and transform them into their own situations," Erna said. "I have my own issues, but maybe those words can help people out of their own crap."