ABOUT FACELESS

Godsmack's new album, Faceless, may be a not-so-subtle reference to the multi-platinum band's image, but their latest offering could turn Sully Erna and Tony Rombola into metal's foremost poster boys.

Standing in the afternoon shadows beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, gazing across the East River to the Manhattan skyline, I'm seriously considering moving out of my cramped city apartment and into this comparatively serene borough. After all, the Empire State Building, its spire jutting through a lumpy, lumbering nimbus, seems almost within reach. And the Guitar One offices, nestled around the corner from that edifice, seem closer than the 30-minute subway ride would indicate.

Overhead, a high carpet of clouds rolls past the bridge's two Gothic towers, bound for the city. I think back to the morning weatherman's forecast: There's a cold front sweeping down from the arctic that will soon seize the Tri-State area with record lows. "Yeah, right," I think to myself. At the moment, it's oddly balmy—so much so that giant, melting icicles have been losing their grip on the uppermost ledges of the distant skyscraper; the authorities, not wishing to see what a chunk of ice falling from more than 1,000 feet above can do to a human head, have sectioned off the building's surrounding streets and avenues. I'm sure that when January is over, folks from Hoboken to Flushing will swear that the mercury never crept over above the freezing point this month, but nine days into the new year, it's hardly even jacket weather.

In real time, I only stand transfixed by the panorama for about two seconds; time for one breath of the unseasonably mild air. You see, I'm late to the Godsmack photo shoot, and I'm not sure which one of the buildings at the base of the bridge houses the photographer's studio. So I choose the biggest one I can see and take its rickety elevator to the fifth floor. Before I take one step onto solid ground, I hear music—loud music. Surely, this is what a rock 'n roll photo shoot sounds like. I must be in the right place. Somewhere in my pocket I have the exact room number scribbled on an old receipt, but it's easy enough to home in on the hubbub.

Down the hallway behind two large, gray metal doors, I find the studio, teeming with bodies. Besides the photographer and his assistant, a clutch of onlookers huddles around Godsmack guitarists Sully Erna and Tony Rombola, who are already busy posing when I arrive. A gentleman from FansRULE explains to me that his company has just launched the band's fan club, the Voodoo Tribe (voodootribe.com); two lucky Tribe members have won a contest where they get to spend the day with Godsmack. They are sunk into a couch on the back wall, seemingly overwhelmed by the hectic proceedings. Behind them, an artsy wooden lattice hangs on a dull yellow wall. A dusty stained-glass pendant dangles above a coffee table littered with the latest women's fashion magazines. No one dares to pick one up.

"Could we get some decent f---ing music around here?" grumbles a sunglassed Erna suddenly, striding toward a bookcase cluttered with CDs and more magazines. After thumbing through a few-dozen jewel cases, Erna pops in Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire, jacks the volume, and heads back to the center of the room.

With the music thing resolved, the photographer resumes snapping shots from atop a ladder. Apparently, the two guitarists spent the previous day at a similar shoot, and it's clear that they've beaten the "rockstar with a guitar" posture to death. Searching for something more original, Rombola begins one-arm curling his Gibson. Not to be outdone, Erna draws the butt of his stickered axe to his shoulder and takes aim while "Revolver" spins in the background. After exploring several more unnatural ways to hold a guitar, Rombola offers a test of strength: Gripping the top of the headstock between his thumb and four fingers, he removes on digit at a time until the six-string pendulum is suspended between just his thumb and index finger.

"Holy shit, look at that!" exclaims an awestruck Erna. After all, we're not dealing with a dainty Stratocaster here; this is a hefty slab of wood--a Les Paul Standard. It takes the prehensile strength of a vice to pull off such a feat. But then Rombola's meat hooks have handled things much tougher than a low E string.

"I used to work construction before we got signed, building houses," says the resident of Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. "I'd be smashing my hands all the time, getting blood blisters and stuff." And stuff? "About seven years ago I was building a garage, and it was freezing out. We were using nail guns with 12-penny nails, big ones. I put one right through the center of my thumb. I felt my hand move, but it didn't hurt--that was the f---ed-up part. I just pulled it out, and it was bleeding a little out each hole. So I threw some show on it and told my boss. He was like, 'I'll bring you down to the hospital, but we gotta finish putting up these walls first.'"

These days, Rombola realizes that hand-care is of the utmost importance. Not that he's into moisturizing, but he is taking measures to keep his hands out of harm's way. "I'm really into motorcycles," he says. "Ever since I was a kid I've had dirt bikes; I used to take them apart and replace the pistons. But I've been afraid to ride them lately because if I crashed and hurt my hands, I wouldn't have been able to finish recording the album. So I picked up golf a couple of years ago. I can't really hurt myself out there."

Rombola got in plenty of tee time during Godsmack’s recent sojourn in Miami where the band wrote and recorded their third album, Faceless (Republic/Universal), while living under the same roof. Having written all the material for their 2000 sophomore release, Awake, out on the road, the band reveled in their newfound rehearsal room face time. “We never stopped touring from our first to second records,” says Erna with an accent straight outta Boston. “We just swapped albums in stores, changed our set list and kept going. This time, we got away from the distractions and lived with the music for a bit. Nice weather, beach, golf, food, fun, sun—Miami”

Still sporting his dark, flame-emblazoned sunglasses, Erna definitely looks more Sunshine than Empire State. But since there’s not a trace of sunlight peering through the studio’s oversized windows, I’m guessing it’s a rock-star thing.

”Sully just didn’t get much sleep last night,” Rombola explains to me. “After yesterday’s 12-hour photo shoot, he went to the studio and tweaked the mix of one track until 3 in the morning. He won’t take off his glasses because his eyes are all bugged out.”

With just a few months till the release date, it’s crunch time, and having written all but one of the tunes on Faceless, Erna is hell-bent on seeing his chrysalis of riffs through the song maturation process. After all, he’s certain that this is Godsmack’s best work to date, even though he realizes that, at face value his words sound platitudinal. “Every band goes, Our new record’s the best shit we’ve ever done,’” he admits. “Usually though, by the time I get done recording, mixing and mastering an album, I f*cking hate it. But with this one, it’s not gonna leave my CD player. I really think we tapped into something cool, something that the kids have been deprived of for the last 10 years—rock music with cool solos, drum fills, and vocal melodies instead of squashed, condensed pop-rock songs with two verses and a chorus.”

For the frontman, this kind of glib smack-talking stems not only from a distasted for isotropic pop-rock but from a yearning for the arena rock of yesteryear, when the almighty riff ruled the roost. And with Erna at the helm as Godsmack’s Captain Hook, it’s no surprise that a thumping riff provides the ballast for each hard-rocking song. It’s a formula that has afforded the band much success, but it turns out there’s nothing really formulaic about it. Whereas some metal bands opt for mathematical riff writing, deriving complex patterns from numerical know-how, Godsmack’s riff arithmetic is the equivalent of counting on your fingers. But it’s the quotient that counts.

”It’s actually a joke, the way we write songs,” says a blasé Erna. “There’s no strategy to our shit. I’ll go, ‘Oh, you want a song?’ And then I’ll sit down and move my hands. I won’t even look; I’ll just find a note and bounce.”

It’s total reckless abandon,” laughs Rombola.

”I don’t know any of that technique shit,” says Erna. “I just find something that sounds good, and a few nice chord changes, and there you go. There’s your song. There’s your f*ckin’ song.”

”It doesn’t always work, though,” Rombola reveals. “Sometimes he’ll try for a few times, and then say, ‘Ahh, let’s go get some lunch or something!’”

In order to understand what makes Erna tick, you have to know that he handled a pair of drumsticks long before he picked up a guitar. In fact, when Rombola joined the band, Erna had only been playing for about a year. “he had to force himself to play a barre chord back then,” recalls Rombola. That’s where the drop tuning came in—it made it easier for him to pull off and hammer on chords, and that became a big part of the Godsmack sound.”

I don’t really credit myself as a guitarist,” relates Erna. “I think my playing has stepped up a few notches over the last 10 years, but I just want to be able to deliver good, choppy, percussive riffs to this band. The guitar is just a tool for me. A carpenter knows how to read blueprints of a building, but he needs a hammer to bang in the nails. For me, I know how to write a song, but I need the guitar to build it.”

One might think that Rombola, as the far more seasoned player of the two, might have trouble jibing with Erna’s crude, heavy-handed attack. It’s not so much that the main guitarist has to dumb down his playing as that Godsmack’s jagged, chugging riffs leave little room for him to incorporate his blues and funk leanings. “There’s a lot of guitar stuff I do on my own that I can’t really use in this band,” he says. “But I can do what I do in Godsmack because I was always into Sabbath and heavy music—dark stuff. Now, a huge piece of me is in this band; every time I pick up the guitar, I’m trying to play something that has that tough Godsmack sound. Sully’s always known what this band should sound like, and he’s very specific about what he hears in his head. I’ve always tried to follow his vision.”

”But Tony is the motherf---er in this band,” beams Erna. “He’s the guitar player. It’s easy for me to come up with percussive patterns, but sometimes I hear things I just can’t play.”

Fortunately, the two have developed a system for translating Erna’s ideas to the fretboard. “He’ll get on the drums and start humming something,” says Rombola. “I don’t know how to read music, but I’ve spent my whole life figuring things out by listening, so it’s easy for me to find what he’s humming—easier than if you wrote it on paper!”

Sound simple? Well that’s the idea. And though most of the rhythmic figures originate from a little drumming and a little humming, there’s nothing humdrum about Godsmack’s twisted riffage. “It’s very primitive,” admits Erna. “But that’s what hooks people in. The guitar riffs are based on simple stop-and-go patterns that create holes for the drumbeats to come through. It’s not intricate, but it has just enough of an edge to make it cool.”

”Even though I can play anything he comes up with, I’m always amazed at the things he plays,” adds Rombola. “I’m always like, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Like ‘I Stand Alone’—that single note way up high on the low string. When he first played it I was like, ‘What the hell are you doing up there?’ And he’s like, ‘How come nobody ever plays up here?’ It had a weird tone, but a lot of character. He’s not a guitar player, so that’s how he thinks. He’ll just touch it, make a noise, and then work off that.”

Godsmack fans who have had only the Grammy-nominated hit from The Scorpion King soundtrack to tide them over the past two years will be happy to know hat the fun and sun of Miami hasn’t taken the sting out of the band’s ferocious rage-rock. While some “heavy” bands have nipped and tucked their sound to create a cleaner, more commercially viable product, Godsmack have stuck to their guns, once again crafting rumbling beats—laid down by new drummer Shannon Larkin—and machine-gun riffs that have the impact of a backhand to the jaw. It’s still “dark,” as they like to say.

DARK—like the lenses of the sunglasses that Erna has finally peeled off his face. Two hours into the photo shoot, the photographer needs a break; with the number of shots he’s taken, I’m guessing he’s getting cramps in his click finger. This is fine by the guitarists, especially the bleary-eyed Erna, who seems relieved to plant himself on a nearby desk and rap about Faceless.

”My music comes from my emotions,” he says when asked about the often-sullen subject matter of his songs. “I usually don’t get good lyrics until I’m in a dark place—upset, depressed, or mad. And then the pen takes over. I just write what some people might put in a journal—I’m just able to make it rhyme. I’ve learned to vent and not repress anger; it’s good therapy for me. It’s not that I like being pissed off, but it always makes for a good song.”

”If something shakes him up enough, he’ll write a song about it,” relates Rombola. Evidently, this can happen anywhere, even next to the swimming pool in the back of the band’s chilled-out Miami casa. “One day, he was on the phone by the pool just getting pissed off. At the time, he was building this dream house next door to my hometown, and everything went wrong and turned into a nightmare. All of a sudden he’s writing lyrics. He’s like, ‘I got a song.’ It hit him hard enough where he had to make a point about it.”

And the pint is none to subtle. In the resulting song, called “I F*cking Hate You,” Erna lambastes the contractors who he says “put [him] through the ringer and tried to f*ck [him] out of his money.” But you won’t hear the words “house” or “build” in the lyrics. In fact, if you didn’t know better, you’d probably think the song was penned by a jilted lover. As Erna clarifies, “The lyrics are very generic on this album, but there’s not one song about a girl. Still,” he laughs, “I’ll bet everyone’s gonna leave that song on their boyfriends’ and girlfriends’ answering machines when they break up!”

The first record was about a bad relationship and was ‘poor me’ and that kind of shit,” he continues. “And then on the second record, I started to wake up a bit. I accepted that things were f*cked up, but I wasn’t going to beat myself up over it. It was like, ‘Now that you’re out of the picture, I’m doing better than I ever have.’ But it was much darker; at the end, I was saying ‘F*ck you.’”

Faceless, though a dark album in terms of its sonic scope, builds upon the cathartic elements of Awake. Sure, Erna drops the usual bevy off-bombs, and the guitar parts—three Mesa Boogie tracks thick—haven’t toned down a bit, but songs like “Make Me Believe,” “Realign,” “Releasing The Demons,” and “Serenity” add a few manic crests to the depressive tenor dominating the first two albums. It almost seems he’s found a happy place—for the time being. “I’m proud of that,” Erna confirms. “I’ve worked a lot of shit out, and at least my anger’s not repetitive anymore. The bottom line is that every song on this record has a good ending. Shit gets thrown at you, but there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—it’s just a son of a bitch getting there.”

Don’t think for a second that Godsmack is going soft; there’s nothing about Faceless that would suggest such an about-face. But those who have followed Godsmack since the band’s breakthrough low-budget debut will notice a more melody-conscious approach, complete with instantly hummable choruses. As Erna so gently puts it: “It still kicks ass enough for guys to smash their faces into a wall to it, but at the same time, the girls can sing along.”

For Erna, some of more adventurous melodies really tugged on his vocal cords. On “Make Me Believe,” he reached into the depths of his diaphragm to pull off notes he never dared attempt in the past. “Dude I sang that song for 10 ½ hours,” he says. “[Producer] Dave Bottrill pushed me to places I’ve never gone before. He just kept saying, ‘Do it—stretch it out a little and try something new.” When I was done with that song, I couldn’t sing for four days. I was like, ‘Tony, I’m glad we made room for a lot of guitar solos, ‘cause guess what you’re going to be doing for the next four days.’”

Of course, after recording all the rhythm tracks, Rombola, who names Jimmy Page’s live “no Quarter” solo as his all-time favorite, had no problem ripping into a few lads. “It just seems right to put a solo at a certain point,” he says. “I grew up on Sabbath, Aerosmith, and Zeppelin, so it’s normal to me. It’s a break in a song, and it gives it a certain attitude. For the solos on this record, I’d just sit in the lounge with the rhythm tracks and fart around on a little amp. I’d get the basic positions, a couple of licks, and the overall structure down, and then I’d just go in and wing it.”

”I never try to tell him what notes to play,” says Erna. “I look more for attitude than a polished lead. The classic solos—like on Aerosmith’s “Last Child”—weren’t perfectly performed leads, but to me, all those screeches and squeals are way cooler than hearing someone do arpeggios all day.”

Of the half-dozen solos on the album, a few stand out as Rombola’s strongest yet. Erna is especially proud of his axeman’s take on the epic “Changes,” which churns electric and acoustic parts into what he calls the texture of a big arena rock song. Tony’s solo is so heart-felt on that track, and it builds intensity along with the rhythms. And I love that diminished stuff he puts in there; it’s those sad notes that really make you feel it in your heart.” On perhaps the most guitar head-oriented solo on the album, during “Realign,” Rombola even pries his foot away from the wah pedal that marks most of his solos.

That’s actually the first solo I’ve ever recorded without using one,” he says. “I almost instinctively stick to it, because I love manipulating the tone. But on that one I decided to do a straight-up solo.”

As for Erna, he’ll probably learn to speak Greek before he develops a soloing vocabulary. (“I couldn’t play a solo if someone put a gun to my head.”) But that’s not to say he doesn’t have input on each solo. For the band’s first single “Straight Out Of Line,” Rombola had worked a solo out down to the last lick, from the opening bend to the final flourish. But Erna wasn’t feeling it. As Rombola remembers, “Sully was like, ‘I don’t want the solo to start right away; I want to have this drifty thing first.’ So I wound up doing this wild thing with an E-Bow to lead into the solo. When it comes to solos, he only has general suggestions, like which positions I should try, but I respect his judgment.”

The moment I step outside the building, I’m cursing the weatherman. He was right after all—it’s wicked cold. As Erna zips up his leather Harley-Davidson jacket and pulls on a baseball cap, he, Rombola, and the rest of the four-hour photo shoot survivors head for an SUV out front. Once inside, Erna talks more about the single and his mixed emotions about the band’s success. “That song is about the people who have changed around us. As we’ve become successful, we’ve been busy, and we’ haven’t been able to call the same people and hange out ins the same local bars. And now when we see them, they look at us all f---ed up and won’t say ‘hi’ because they think we’ve become rock stars. They think we’ve changed, but they’re outta line for being that way.”

But doesn’t selling 6 million units over their first two records make them de facto rock stars? It’s hard to listen to rock radio for 10 minutes without hearing Erna’s guttural growl and Rombola’s nasty guitar work. But as the guitarists tell me, the band still wrestles with the concept of their own facelessness. Says Erna, “We’re not a big part of the MTV/VH1 culture, and we’re not on the cover of every magazine; we’re still a bit under the radar.” He has a point, but there’s a certain irony here: Besides the fact that the guitarists are on their way to an MTV News interview in Times Square, as I look at Erna’s face, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the most recognizable in hard rock. I mean, who else has two bars through his right eyebrow and a star stamped on his cheek? As a frontman he’s unmistakable, or so you’d think.

One night in Miami, I was burnt out on rehearsing and decided to go cruising on my Harley,” he begins. “I drove forever and ended up at some bar. The bartender recognized me and wanted me to sign something for her daughter. But then this jock-looking dude just wasn’t convinced that I was the singer for Godsmack—even though he said we were his favorite band. So he decided to quiz me, and no matter what I said, he didn’t believe me. He’d just go, ‘Okay, sure, you’re the guy.” I was like, ‘Dude, how many singers that say they’re from Godsmack have a star tattooed on their face?’ And he’s like, “Anybody can put a f---in’ star on their face!’ I was like, ‘Hey, I’m not on an interview. Just get me a beer.’”

It’s a pithy anecdote, and one that pinpoints just where Godsmack stand at this stage of their career. Perhaps Faceless will contrary to its title, finally put a face with the name.

As the SUV picks through the usual rush-hour melee and pulls to a stop in front of MTV’s studios, Erna and Rombola prepare to shuffle inside. When they step onto the sidewalk, there’s no fuss—no shouts of “You Rock!” no autograph requests, no high-fives, no screaming girls. But it doesn’t bother them in the least; they’d rather not have a welcoming committee. “We’re a core band, a fans’ band—we’ll grab a thousand here and a thousand there,” says Erna. “And if you try hard and work hard, the results come slowly but surely.”

”We haven’t flown up to be superstars yet, like some bands,” adds Rombola. “But we’re chugging along, selling a few million records at a time. That’s fine with me.”