I MET ALEX WEBSTER OF
CANNIBAL CORPSE IN A LADIES' ROOM
...AND THEN HE AGREED TO DO AN INTERVIEW
April 24, 2009, by Marisa Connelly

I swear to you this stuff only happens to me. Any other journalist, on any other day, would not have met Alex Webster in a ladies' room. And incredibly, this is not the first time this has happened to me. I have a couple random bathroom stories to tell.
Anyways, my serendipitous encounters in the loo are not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to weird shit in my life. But Alex Webster has a lot to say and you should pay attention because he's really smart. He told me all about his opinions of the current metal scene, growing up in Buffalo, NY, and whether he would prefer being a cannibal, or a corpse.
To read the full interview - which you should or you're a horrible person that deserves to be severely tortured- go to upstatemetal.net or myspace.com/upstatemetal.

We're both from Upstate NY, do you still have strong ties to Buffalo?
Yeah, we actually just played Grand Rapids, and we had a day off afterward. The show following that was in Montreal. So what we decided to do was go to Buffalo on our day off, so I got to go there. My wife had actually come to visit me on tour, so she was along. My wife and I got to go eat dinner with my mom and my brother, so it was great.
So they still live there?
My mom and one of my brothers still live there. My other brother lives out in California, and Rob [Barrett] still has family there, so he visited them. And Paul [Mazurkiewicz] still has family there, so he got to visit them too. Pat [O'Brien] and George [Fisher] are not from Buffalo, so 3/5 of the band are still from there and we want to get there as often as we can to visit our family.

That's cool. Do you ever go to The Pearl Street Grill & Brewery?
A lot of stuff has been built up since we moved out, and that was in 1994.
Oh, um, because that's been there since the 1800's.
What? Pearl Street Brewery? Well, I know about that! [laughs] I never went downtown a whole lot actually. The only place we went downtown was this club called The Continental where they had alternative and sometimes metal was played. Cannibal actually played there in 1993. I didn't go out a whole lot. By the time we left I was only 24, so I'd only been of drinking age for three years when I lived in western New York. So most the partying I did was before I was 21, just hanging out with friends by a railroad track or an abandoned factory, you know, that sort of thing with a boom box listening to metal. The night club scene I didn't get to know that well because we left when I was 24.

I'm guessing you don't miss the snow in Florida?
Oh, I don't miss it. I miss the fall. That's the one thing about upstate or western New York that I really loved the most was September through November. It's my favorite time of the year. I just love it with the changing colors and everything. Florida you just basically got a winter which is similar to spring, as far as temperatures go. Maybe like springtime or even warmer. And the rest of the time is just varying degrees of summer. The real main part of the summer around July or August in Florida it's pretty oppressive heat that you have to deal with down there. So, where you get the brutal winters in Buffalo, you get the brutal summers in Florida. No place is totally perfect.

Isn't your birthday in the fall?
Yes. It sure is, it's in October. So that's, you know, you grow up as a little kid, and in addition to me liking the weather that time of year it's like, Ooh! I'm going to get a present!

And Halloween?
Yeah, my birthday is the 25th which is right before, so it's a fun time of year.

Yeah, I know. My birthday is on Halloween.
Really? No kidding! Awesome!

Do you think that in some ways MySpace has taken the place of tape trading and why?
Yeah, you know, it probably has because it's just easy. You want to hear a band, you don't have to wait. You don't have to mail to them, and ask how much the demo is, and then buy the demo from them. And then wait for them to mail it back which would take a long time depending on how far away they lived and how diligent they were about answering their mail. Now with MySpace, tell me a band name and I'll be listening to them within 30 seconds if I have a decent internet connection. So that kind of convenience can make anyone who's remotely motivated an underground metal aficionado, like, in a very short period of time you could really bone up on all these different bands quickly because it's all just there. Everything is just there for you. When we got started, you definitely had to dig around to find this stuff, and you'd be hearing a tape that might be a taping of a taping of a taping, like 8th generation. The first time I heard Morbid Angel was like that, and it was awesome! I heard their Thy Kingdom Come demo and I thought it was amazing. But it was also something that had been bootlegged countless times. Yeah, it was at least a 5th generation recording. [Laughs] So now, I think it's a good thing. A lot of us old-timers- or whatever you want to call people who are my age, I'm 39 so that makes me an old-timer, I guess- but some of the guys my age are like, screw MySpace! And I'm like, you know, it's something that gets the music out there to people, and that's a good thing. The more readily available the music is to people, the better. So I don't mind modern technology making that more possible. Even the illegal downloading thing, even though it's obviously been extremely bad for the CD business, and record labels have definitely taken a hit because of that. But it does tend to increase the overall visibility of these bands because these people can check everything out for free. If they like an album, they can listen to the whole album for free if they put their mind to it. I think the business of touring and the visibility of bands has increased a lot, even though the CD sales might not reflect that because it's so easy to get stuff for free.
Definitely. So, in your Headbanger's Blog article, you said, “Music, on the other hand, has no measurable 'winner.' Of course, you can, for example, measure the beats-per-minute a guitarist executed an arpeggio at, but you can't measure the effect it had on the listener.” Can you elaborate on that?
Well, they had asked me to write an article about something that's on your mind, that's kind of what the Headbanger's Blog guys do. And I was like, well this is something I've always thought about. You know, I'm completely guilty of arguing about music, just like anybody else who loves music will be like, well this band is better than that band. And I got to thinking about it, and I think all of know in the back of our mind that there's no winner to that argument. The best band is your favorite band. That's it, period. It doesn't really matter how good someone can play, it's how it makes you feel when you listen to it. If someone can play well, it usually makes it easier for them to play good music, but that's not always true. It doesn't always hold true that the best technique equals the best music. And that's kind of the point I was trying to make with that, and I think it's fairly obvious. I think most people do know that. It's not going to stop any of us from saying that our favorite band is the best one or whatever. But at the end of the day there is no winner, every individual person has their favorite music and nothing is ever going to change that. No amount of arguing is going to make me not love Slayer, you know what I mean? Like if I was talking to some guy who thought that Metallica was better then them, or whatever, trying to convince me that my opinion was wrong- no dude! When it comes to music and art, your opinion is right. Every single individual's opinion is right when it comes to music. It's your own personal taste, it's up to you what you want to listen to, and nobody's better than anybody else, I don't think. It's all up to the individual to choose.

Yes, I definitely agree. But, many metal fans are extremely passionate, and I've noticed many of them acting like elitists. Death metal vs. metalcore vs. deathcore, etc. And a lot of people that love early death metal hate the newer deathcore coming out, and, it's like, where do you think it came from?
As far as that stuff goes, like people not liking the new deathcore and that sort of thing, of course I personally prefer the old school death metal. But I also like to see it moving forward. I'm happy to see other forms of extreme metal that have some roots in death metal taking place. It's fine I think. It's fine for music to keep moving forward and mutating and that sort of thing. It doesn't need to stay exactly the same forever. As long as there are a good amount of bands doing the old school kind of stuff, there's nothing wrong with having a bunch of bands doing something different. People should just play whatever they want to play, really. And I don't think that there needs to be any limitations made or any rules. There's no rules that these guys are breaking by forming a deathcore band that's different from death metal. Would people really prefer it if everybody sounded the same way? I don't think so. I just think that people like to argue about stuff sometimes. And again, when it comes to that there's no halos over my head. I don't go online and argue with people, but believe me, on the bus, when all of us are sitting around talking about music we'll be like, 'No dude! This is better than that! Or no, this band is hard rock, they're not heavy metal, you're getting the genres completely mixed up.' We love music, and anyone that loves music is probably going to be kind of opinionated about it. I think as long as you don't get too serious about it and start taking your own opinion too seriously, I mean, when it gets kind of snobby and elitist- that's tiresome when people take it that far. But if you love music you're going to have a passionate opinion. I guess I won't judge anybody for going over the top with it.

I just think it's kind of funny that so many fans will separate themselves along sub-genre lines. We can't all just be metal fans, and I think that's where some of the elitism comes from. Metal isn't that big of a scene anyways, in comparison to other genres, so why would you separate yourselves into even smaller sub-sects?
I totally agree with what you're saying there. I totally get it, because if you take every sub-genre of metal and put all their fans together, it's a good amount of people. But it's still underground, or relatively underground compared to dance music or hip-hop or the dominant forms of music in society. Metal's not really one of them. To me it's the most important, but that's just me and a few million other people that really love it. There's probably only a few million metal fans in the world, we don't need to be dividing ourselves up. With 7 billion people in the world, and only a few million that love metal, we ought to stick together. I don't love every single metal band I hear, but if it's actually metal, I'll have a certain respect for it. I'm not going to run those bands down verbally because they're not playing what I want to hear. It's good to have a lot of variety. And I think that if someone's into power metal or technical metal, metalcore, death metal, black metal, thrash metal- we're all still metal heads and we share something in common and be happy about that. The things we have in common is what we should be concentrating on as opposed to the things that make us a little bit different. Because it's really not all that different, we're all into heavy stuff, it's all really killer guitar driven music that helps you get aggression out. I don't think that any metal head that I've ever known or met has the same kind of story. You know, you grow up in a town or a neighborhood or a city where you're one of a handful of people that love this kind of music, and everybody else didn't get it. So when we're finally all together at a show, it's a great feeling. You know, there we're all together like at a big festival, like Wacken [Open Air], there's 70,000 people there who love metal, all the various different types. There's power metal heads, and traditional heavy metal fans, and metalcore people, deathcore, death metal. Everything is there, like black metal fans, and everybody's getting along great. It's awesome. Because it's like, wow, here we are! 60-70,000 people, where when I grew up there was like 5 of us at my high school. So I'm all for metal unity, and I'll stop rambling on that and just sum it up with that- I'm all for metal unity…

TO READ PART II OF THIS CANNIBAL CORPSE INTERVIEW, VISIT (Coming soon) www.upstatemetal.net