Music: Static Cling

It starts, as all good stories do, with the Mandrell Sisters: Barbara, Louise and Irlene. Without the endorsement and product use by those big-haired Country legends, the White Rain Hair Product line might not have survived. For without White Rain Hair Products, Static X namesake Wayne Static’s locks couldn’t cheat gravity. And if he could not cheat gravity, he would not be able to see his guitar to pound out his group’s ferocious Disco-Goth-Metal.

Wayne and his hair are calling from a hotel lobby in Las Vegas, as Christopher Cross plays in the background. The band has been on the road for all but about eight days since their debut record Wisconsin Death Trip came out at the end of March. Doing Ozzfest and a small package tour with Coal Chamber and System of a Down has helped expose them to people who can’t really hear them on the radio because the heavy band quota has been filled by Korn and Limp Bizkit. Plus Static X don’t really fit there. Wisconsin Death Trip is a heavy record, comparable to Ministry or White Zombie, rather than the frat boy posing of Orgy, et al.

The Los Angeles-based band is part of a new breed of Metal heads, unafraid to deny the influence of few Hip Hop and Dance music. Static and bandmates Koichi Fukuda (guitar/keyboards), Tony Campos (bass) and Ken Jay (drums) aren’t stereotypical Metal heads.

They’re international (Fukuda is a native of Japan), come from a Goth background and mix those dance beats right into the thumping mix. Bands on Chicago record label Wax Trax! such as Die Warzau and Ministry mixed aggression into dance music, and since both Static and Jay grew up in that vicinity (later moving to Chicago then Los Angeles) it makes sense that it seeped into their consciousness.

“I was into that when I was younger,” Static admits. “I really had sort of forgotten about that stuff until a few years ago when I was already in L.A. and I happened to pull some old records out one day when I had nothing to do and said, ‘Hey, I remember why I like this stuff.’ ”

According to Static, the band’s own drum machine-inspired beats come before the riffs.

“We had no idea that we were going to get signed or anything or even had any idea of what our direction was going to be until half the record was written. Then we realized we had a direction,” he says. “We were just having fun. We’d just come up with something really stupid, you know. (He beatboxes a fast drum pattern) Something like that and make like a heavy guitar riff go to it. That was how our sound was born originally.”

Wisconsin Death Trip‘s sound is crunchy and punchy, but very aggressive. It’s not good driving music; it makes the idea of smashing into other people seem like fun.

“I get that a lot,” laughs Static. “Or it makes people want to drive really fast. Even our bus driver on Ozzfest — we gave him a copy of the CD and I went up there one day and he was going like 90 miles an hour at 4 o’clock in the morning on a 40-hour drive, listening to ‘Ostegolation’ (one of Death Ride‘s songs) or something. He got us (to the next show) before any other band.”

Besides inspiring speeding, Static X is helping to expand the fanbase of Metal. Goth and Metal outcasts in high school might find that they have more in common with each other than they thought. Static comments on the crowd at Holland’s giant two-day Metal-fest, Dynamo:

“People are being thrown in the mix together a lot more. When I was at Dynamo a few months ago the crowd was so diverse. You had skater kids, you had hippies, you had full-on gothers, old school Slayer fans with mullett haircuts and mustaches, and everyone seemed to deal with each other just fine,” he says. “And it seemed like most of the people liked all the music as well.”

Laughing, he continues, “It’s kind of funny to hear me make fun of other people’s haircuts. I get really tired of (hearing about my hair). I just do it because I think it looks cool and that was my original thing. Now it’s part of my Static X identity, so I’m kind of stuck with it for a while. I still think it looks cool, but on my days off I usually just leave it down, part it on the side, and try to look as dorky as possible so no one notices me and hassles me.”

He admits that when he was a kid playing air guitar in his bedroom that it never occurred to him that he’d have to pay attention to his hair, but he knew that bands had to have something in addition to the music to stand out.

“I always knew that there was some kind of gimmick, that every band had something,” he says. “I was a huge KISS fan when I was a little kid and for them it was all gimmick. It just takes you your whole life to figure out what your gimmick is. (Laughs) I started doing this a while back and I guess it never really caught on like it has now.”

The music or your hair?

“Both.”

This article appears in Aug 11-17, 1999.