It’s a safe bet that Machine Head vocalist/guitarist Robb Flynn won’t be caught jamming “Lulu” anytime soon. He recently had a rather blunt opinion on Metallica and Lou Reed‘s 2011 collaborative effort, along with some humility regarding his bands own attempts at branching out.
An exceprt from a recent interview conducted by Metal Shrine reads as follows:
“…I didn’t even get it. If those guys need to do that stuff to get their ya yas out, that’s cool and I respect them, but eeehhh… was Lemmy not available? Was fucking Iggy Pop not available? (laughs) I think there are so many people that might’ve been a better choice. I don’t know the dude, but maybe he’s the most charismatic guy in the world, I don’t know.
I fucking can’t stand Lou Reed. I don’t like his solo career and I don’t like Velvet Underground, so I don’t know much about it other than “Walk on the wild side”. Do I see myself… yeah, I mean we write plenty of songs that aren’t necessarily what Machine Head would be.
I love The Cure so I write a bunch of mellow stuff that’s like super gothy and… gay. (laughs) But I think it’s cool. You jam for a while and you come up with all kinds of shit. The thing that’s great about Machine Head is that it’s a pretty wide canvas we get to paint on.
We’re not afraid to try any idea, at least just to try it and see where it goes, because you never know where it’s gonna go, so we’re stupidly fearless in the sense that we’ll just try an idea and most of the time if that idea isn’t working within about a week or two we’re pretty good at figuring it out. In the past we may not have figured it out.
Lord knows we’ve got a couple of stinkers in our catalog, but I think overall, if you look at… we’re seven albums deep and we have a huge career and we’ve managed to transcend and maintain a level and just slowly keep on growing. Never really even going down, which is amazing. I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve been able to kinda get a vision and keep it.
We’ve never had a “Lulu” and we’ve never even had like a Blaze Bayley moment, you know what I mean? (laughs) Where it’s like “What is going on?”. We’ve always been able to do it and if you look at the breadth of our music overall, it’s pretty pioneering and pretty consistent and that’s what I’m very proud of.
I mean there’s a core Machine Head sound, but we never want a record to sound like the previous record and I think maybe sometime we almost ran too far away from what we had just done. I think we we’re better at it now more than ever and just going ‘Yeah, let’s try this way and see what’s over here.'”
