LAMB OF GOD’s RANDY BLYTHE Says He Was ‘Weeping Uncontrollably’ At His ‘First Sober Show’ More Than 14 Years Ago

During an appearance on “The New Man” podcast with Tripp Lanier, LAMB OF GOD frontman Randy Blythe spoke about being 14 years sober. Asked about how he got over the notion that really creative people, including great writers, need alcohol or drugs to find their best ideas or perform to the best of their ability, Randy said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “That’s a sort of cultural mythos, especially in rock bands, and even more so in a metal band. I believe that that mythos is sort of shifting, that paradigm is shifting, and the young kids don’t think it’s as cool to be fucked up anymore like we did when we were kids. It was part of the deal. And it’s a lie, it’s definitely a lie that you need all that stuff to do what I do. But it’s a cultural sort of mythos that I bought in to, not just with music, but with writing, because like any other angst-riddled 20-something male American dude, I loved reading Hemingway, I loved reading Bukowski, I loved reading Hunter S. Thompson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, all these members of this supremely male canon of authors who really reshaped modern English literature. And all of them had a few things in common — all of them were wild, did wild manly shit, which I’m for. All of them drank to excess and generally got into some sticky situations from time to time. It’s a cornerstone of your identity, it becomes so. So for me, in my twenties and thirties, I would talk about being a writer a lot and I was doing all the things that all those writers, Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson and Bukowski, all those guys did — I did a lot of drinking, I did a respectable amount of womanizing, I did some fist fighting here and there, I got into some crazy shit, I was practicing, I was doing all the things the great writers did except for the writing part. That’s the hart part. So that’s that cultural mythos with the writers. And then with music, and being in a heavy metal band, and the sort of cultural perception of that, that baggage, and me personally knowing some of the legends from this who did drink and drug to excess, I bought in to that. And in a sense in the beginning, alcohol was useful, and every now and then some drugs were useful.”Asked what he means when he says that alcohol and drugs were “useful”, Randy explained: “Well, if you have a sense of stage fright, a liquid courage, a little bottled confidence [would always help in the early days]. And we were very confrontational band, so our earlier gigs were at house parties, squats and things like that. They weren’t even in clubs, and you’re on the floor with people, and [they were] very physical. The crowd can either aggressively not like you or aggressively really like you — either way.”There’s no school to teach you how to be a frontman, how to get in front of people and do your thing,” Blythe continued. “You’re not, like, ‘Okay, I’m relying on my training,’ like a Navy seal, like falling back on to the level of your training. It’s, like, ‘Okay, let’s go out and see what fucking happens.’ And so that can give you the nerves. And in the early days you, I could quiet those nerves with some alcohol. Most certainly. They don’t call it liquid courage for nothing. After a while, that inhibits your ability to do your job. Luckily, in my case, I wasn’t doing Al Green. I’m not Pavarotti. So if Pavarotti or Marvin Gaye got up there all fucked up, people would be, like, ‘Oh my God, this sucks.’ When you’re in a heavy metal band, there’s an element of danger to it, which I think is valuable in music, at least in what we do. And there was definitely an element of danger to what we did. And alcohol was part of that. The thing is, though, man, you don’t need that. That’s a lie.”Regarding how he turned that corner, Randy said: “I had to get beat on the head repeatedly that I was going to die if I didn’t stop drinking. I can tell you about my first sober show if you want [to hear it]. We were in Australia, and we were on tour with a band called METALLICA. And we had been out with them for about a year over the course of two, two and a half years. We’d done Europe, United States a few times, and we ended this tour in New Zealand and Australia. And my last night of drinking was in Brisbane, Australia. And I went out with some friends and just got completely, utterly fucked up, except for that it didn’t work. I drank enough and I’m sure had I been given a breathalyzer, they would have been, like, ‘Jesus Christ, how is this dude still alive? There’s almost no blood left in his alcohol system.’ … And the alcohol, for me, was a thing that shut off the voices in my head, the voices that were angry at the way the world was behaving, that were angry at myself for my own shortcomings and asshole-ish behavior or moral cowardice at times — whatever. The inner critic was incredibly harsh — and still is sometimes. But I’m trying to ameliorate that from time to time. But anyway, I went out and it stopped working. And I woke up in Brisbane on a hotel balcony. And I looked out on the street below… And one of my favorite bookstores in the world was directly across the street from the hotel. And then down the streets more were great restaurants, plenty of food. And then over to the left was the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, which are cool. And they’ve got all sorts of beautiful, weird plants we don’t have. And of course it’s Australia, so you’re gonna see weird-ass animals and birds. It’s just a gorgeous place. And so I looked out from my hotel balcony. And I had a suite. It was very nice. We’re in Australia. I’ve got money in the bank. I’m on tour with fucking METALLICA. It’s the biggest heavy metal band in history, not to mention one of the biggest bands in the world, period. I’ve got money in the bank account. My band, I’ve learned somehow to function well enough, drunk, that I can still do my job. I still had a romantic partner at that time, a longterm romantic partner that ended eventually, but at that time I still had her. And everything on the outside was good. And I looked out over this street and all this cool shit and I realized I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to exist. It wasn’t like I felt suicidal, like ‘I wanna kill myself’, but I was, like, ‘I don’t wanna be here anymore. I just want to vanish from existence.’ And I looked over at this table where I had set the beer bottles from the night before ’cause I’d been drinking for a few days and I’m kind of a weirdo OCD dude with my surroundings. So I had very carefully, even while intoxicated, lined these beer bottles perfectly up in this — you know how bowling pins would be, like they’re just perfectly lined up, touching each other. All the labels are facing the right way. ‘Cause I’m trying to, by controlling my external environment, exert some sort of control on the disaster that is Randy. So I looked over at these beer bottles that were empty and they were stacked there and I realized that they were a metaphor for my life. Because on the outside, just like my life, everything was perfect and orderly and in its place. But, just like those bottles, I had just become an empty receptacle for alcohol and drugs. And all it would take would just be a little push, and those bottles would just fall and shatter. So I looked. I was, like, ‘Fuck. I don’t wanna exist. I’m just an empty beer bottle now. And I thought, ‘Man, maybe I ought to really try and quit drinking, honestly, this time,’ because I’d been trying half-assed for, like, four or five years. And this time I took it serious. And I was, like, ‘Hey, I have to quit drinking.’ And so I asked the universe, I was, like, ‘God, please help me.’ Whatever’s out there. I had this moment where it wasn’t, like… I didn’t have a picture of a bearded dude in the sky or anything, but I just asked — I use the term ‘God’ for lack of a better term. I asked, ‘Whatever is out there, please help me because I don’t know what to do.’ I knew then, like, ‘Let’s stop and try drinking,’ and a peace washed over me, like immense calm in that moment. When I was just, like, ‘I’m fucked,’ ’cause that’s the only way, if you have a problem, you’re ever gonna get better, is if you realize that you’re fucked. It was a realization of reality, to put it simply recognizing that I was indeed totally fucked. So I had this brief moment of immense peace wash over me, and it lasted for approximately 45 seconds. And then this little devil on my shoulder, like little Satan, he’s always there or whatever, the demon, it was, like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Let’s think this through. Maybe you just had a bad night. Maybe you’ve just had a bad 22 years of solid drinking and drugging. It was crazy. It was crazy. I totally didn’t wanna live anymore. And it wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way. And I’d had these repercussions for drinking… You feel like you can’t function. And I felt that. And I was, like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. A second ago you were all good, and then before that you wanted to die and now you wanna drink again. You’re crazy. You are crazy, bro.'”Some of the guys in METALLICA’s band and crew were sober on that tour, and they had had words with me,” Randy added. “I’d been getting signals for fucking 15, 20 years from parents, family, kindly members of the Richmond Fraternal Order Of The Police, judges. I had a journalist in Richmond write a story about me, like, ‘This dude needs to sober up.’ I was, like, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you. You don’t know what I do. If you had to do what I did, you’d drink too.’ So I was, like, ‘I think what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna try not to drink.’ I made a decision, ’cause there was beer in the fridge right there in that hotel. I was, like, ‘I’m not gonna go get a beer. I’m not gonna go get a beer. I’m gonna go to tonight’s show and I’m gonna talk to these guys. I’m gonna be, like, ‘Will you fucking help me? What the fuck do I do?’ So I went to the gig, and I showed up early and I found a couple of those guys. I’m, like, ‘Look, I’m fucked. Help me. I’m trying to be sober.’ And they were, like, ‘We got you, bro.’ And my hair was still long then. I walked on stage that night in front of 14,000 people, falling to pieces, weeping hysterically. Luckily, like I said, I had long hair, so I kept it in my face. And our music is, like, super aggressive, so I’m just crying… I think [the emotion at the time] was just, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. What is going on? What happened to my life? How did I reach this point?’ It’s like someone had scraped my entire skin, like road rash all over my soul. So I stood on stage in front 14,000 people screaming my head off while weeping uncontrollably. Luckily, no one could tell because I was just constantly running and headbanging. And I made it through that show. And that was my first day sober. And that was October 18th, 2010. I haven’t had a drink or a drug since.”In a separate interview with the The Lydian Spin podcast, Blythe spoke about the challenges of going on tour and being around people who are drinking. The 53-year-old musician said: “I can be kind of antisocial in general anyway. By the end of my drinking, I just wanted to be alone: ‘Leave me the fuck alone, and let me drink.'”I can go out,” Randy explained. “I’ll go anywhere. I’m not afraid of being around alcohol or drugs. If I was, I would never tour again. For me, being around utterly shitfaced people is fairly intolerable now. And so if I go to a party, if there’s like a house party, friends of mine are having dinner, I’ll hang out and I’ll hang out until people hit me with the ‘I love you, man,’ like a couple times. I’m, like, ‘Okay, it’s time to go. I had a great time, and you guys can carry on and God bless. Good luck and godspeed. I’m outta here.’ So, I don’t have a problem [being around people who are drinking], and I don’t walk around like some sort of angry curmudgeon, like, ‘Don’t fucking talk to me.’ And when I am trapped by those people, I look at it as a karmic debt. I look at it as a karmic debt, because I fucking terrified and annoyed countless people for decades. So it’s, like, what comes around goes around.”Randy previously discussed his sobriety during a September 2022 appearance on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”. He said at the time: “It’s not attractive to sit up and fucking drink and snort coke and say a bunch of stupid shit with a bunch of morons when you’re [in your early 50s]. It’s just not. [Laughs] I haven’t had a hangover in over [more than a decade]. I don’t know if I would survive one now.”Asked by host Eddie Trunk if it was “tough” for him to be on the road where alcohol can be found everywhere, Randy said: “No. Hell no, dude. Seeing people party and stuff, especially when they ‘party party’ and get stupid… I don’t judge, but it makes it more repulsive to me, ’cause I was, like, Jesus… I was pretty bad. Nobody looks cool when they’re wasted, so it just doesn’t appeal to me. And I have better things to do. I’m trying to do good things with my life — write books and do photography and shit like that. I can’t do that when I’m drunk. Plus, man, I drank enough. I did it for 22 years. I’m not gonna discover anything new in drugs and alcohol.”Pressed about whether it bothers him when people around him are drinking, Blythe said: “It doesn’t bother me. It only bothers me if they’re fucking wasted and saying stupid shit to me and then I run. But it doesn’t make me wanna do it, if that’s what you’re asking. It has the opposite effect. Seeing people drink does not bother me at all. The only thing that bothers me is when they’re hammered and in my face. But other than that, I don’t expect the rest of the world to behave… I can’t expect the rest of the world to behave in the way I do and not drink because not everybody’s an alcoholic like me. Some people are perfectly okay, and that’s no problem. God bless. Have a good time. But if you’re wasted and the ‘I love you, man’ starts, then I just dip out. It’s not a problem.”Blythe discussed his battle with alcoholism and how he got sober after a couple of decades of drinking during a book-signing event and question-and-answer session for his memoir, “Dark Days: A Memoir”, in 2015. At the time, he said: “Most people, when they stop… It’s entirely individual… Some people hit bottom because they wake up in jail, because their wife has left them, because they don’t have any money left, because they lost their job, or because they just can’t… they can’t take it anymore.”He continued: “When I woke up the morning… I wrote about this in my book; I wrote about the last night I drank and the first day of sobriety. I woke up, and I was on tour. I was in Australia. I was opening up for the biggest band in metal, in the world — ever, in the history of metal. I was in a beautiful place. I had money in my bank account. My wife hadn’t left me yet — and she still hasn’t, somehow amazingly. And everything on the outside of my life, to anyone looking at it, beyond the fact that I looked kind of busted, everything would look good. Like, this dude is in this band, he’s on this tour in this beautiful place. It’s Australia, it’s paradise. He’s getting paid…. Not millions of dollars; don’t get me wrong. But he’s making money. I woke up one day and I just did not want to do anything. It’s the strangest feeling to not want to… I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to do. I didn’t wanna eat, I didn’t wanna sleep, I didn’t wanna read a book, I didn’t wanna go to work, I didn’t wanna… drink. I couldn’t imagine not drinking. I didn’t want to do anything. I felt completely empty.”Blythe added: “So, for me, it was a very emotional flatline… like, bottom. It wasn’t anything traumatic whatsoever. I just reached a point where I was, like, ‘I’ve gotta do something else, or else I might as well be dead.’ And I firmly believe I would be dead [by now if I hadn’t stopped]. So it was just a weird thing. I don’t know why. I drank 22 years — heavy — and finally I got enough pain where it’s, like, ‘Okay, this sucks. I’ve gotta stop.’ But it’s different for everyone. Anybody who’s ever had a drinking problem can tell you that it’s different for everyone.”Blythe’s second book, “Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head”, is due on February 18, 2025 via Grand Central Publishing (GCP).”Just Beyond The Light” was described by Blythe as a “tight, concise roadmap of how I have attempted to maintain what I believe to be a proper perspective in life, even during difficult times.”In December, Blythe announced more spoken-word and question-and-answer events to promote “Just Beyond The Light”. The special “evening with” event includes a spoken-word performance, an audience question-and-answer session, a copy of “Just Beyond The Light” and an opportunity to have the book signed.In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan’s death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.Blythe’s prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD’s 2015 album “VII: Sturm Und Drang”: “512”, one of his three prison cell numbers, and “Still Echoes”, written while he was in Pankrac Prison, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write his first book, “Dark Days”, in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.[embedded content]