Freedom & Ambitions

What is it like to spin the turntables for hard rock band?

Frank Delgado (turntablist): Yeah, man, I can dig it. The way I approach it, at least, is not conventional as compared to a lot of bands who use DJs nowadays. But I've always tried to approach it a little bit differently with these guys because, right away when you get a DJ in a rock band, people automatically think, "Oh now they're going hip-hop." That's just the way people think. I don't feel like I need to bring that to the table. Yeah, I play that music and I make that music -- but I don't feel like I have to bring that urban part to this band. I'm just trying to be creative with these four other guys, and that's all we're basically doing. So I just try to approach it a little differently. It's taken a while for people to acknowledge it or even see it because it's so not what everyone thinks a DJ is.

Does the deftones format allow you freedom to experiment with all of the styles you're interested in?

Abe Cunningham (drummer): Totally.

Chi Cheng (bassist): Yeah, I think so, definitely. We don't really place restrictions on anyone musically. We don't necessarily always agree, but we never place any restrictions on anyone musically. You can bring whatever influence you have to the table with this band. And as long as it's good and it comes from you, it's fine. This gives us a lot of creative freedom but, like I said, a lot of creative tension -- which is good. It helps fuel our band. Diversity tends to be both our strongest and weakest quality.

Cunningham: There's no recipe. I think every band works differently. People try to ask us, "How does it work?" But we've just been together for quite a long while now, going on 12 years. We just have this way of going about our things, and it's definitely the tension, but there's a lot of smiling too.

Your EPK (electronic press kit) shows an interest in film. Do you have any desire to do music for films?

Cheng: I think we'd love to. I'd love to score a movie. We're all such music fanatics that to do something like that would be great for us. We're totally open to any kind of creative process that we can get our hands on.

Chemistry, On & Offstage

Does it help make the songs come alive for you when you're playing them live?

Delgado: Oh, hell, yeah.

Stephen Carpenter (guitarist): No, they come alive better when our sound is right.

Delgado: When we've got a good soundman.

Carpenter: Yeah, when our sound guy's doing his job correctly, that's when we feel the best. But it's dope. When you play onstage to an audience, it's one of those things that you can't explain unless you do it. There's no explanation to it other than the fact that whether they're praising you or they're booing you -- there's a feeling that comes off having thousands of people screaming at you. You take out of it what you want to take out of the live experience. So when you've got people out their there singing your lyrics and they know what's coming -- everyone's just getting loose and having fun -- you can't help but feel good. You get empowered by it, not because that's your job or anything like that, [but] it just takes you over because you know those people are feeling what you're feeling; that's why they're giving it back to you that way.

Perils of Success

With the wave of bands that have adopted the hard rock sound, do you feel as if you're being crowded out of a style you helped define?

Delgado: I guess I can agree with you there. There are a lot of bands on the radio who are looking and sounding like deftones maybe five years ago, first-album era. But that's the whole reason why we go left. They can't keep up with us. As far as all those bands who are very influenced by us or whatever, we're already onto this other shit.

Carpenter: And we don't go left because of those bands, we go left because we just want to do something different.

Delgado: Yeah, and we have to be happy with ourselves.

Carpenter: If you're in a band, you're a fool for just doing what's already being done.

Delgado: Look, dude, we're in a position right now where … Maybe if our first album popped like a lot of the bands do, came out of the box, popped with the first single, blew up -- if that would've happened to deftones, maybe we wouldn't have been able to make this album. It happens to do with the position we were in. We weren't that big, but we sold tickets; that's how we survived. We didn't have radio airplay, and it's like we sold tickets, we had a fan base, so we didn't have this single we had to live up to or this perception that the media thought we were -- even though they did think we were rap/rock or Korn, Limp Bizkit; we always got tossed in there. But we never ever really were that. And our fans know that. The position we're in now, we knew we could take it wherever we wanted, and we did. We're not trying to catch up to anything. If anything, before we even started writing this album, there were people saying, "You've gotta catch this wave, radio's playing heavy music now." For all that, we even said, "Fuck, we're gonna take even longer now for just that reason alone."

Carpenter: I was laughing at people.

Delgado: Yeah, he's the one that's really good at that.

Do you find that because deftones has been together for a while, that's made it's it easier to handle success?

Carpenter: I was successful a long time ago, man. When I freed myself of the slave, day-to-day job, I knew I was there.

Delgado: If it all ended right now, we're the most successful people there are. There's nothing but gravy from here. We're already successful in our own rights.

You always hear the cliché about how a band is like a marriage. Would you say that's true with you guys?

Cheng: Yeah, I would say it's definitely a marriage. It's gone far beyond even a brotherhood. It's just become one dysfunctional, cheating, mistress, drug-induced marriage that is very cool.

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