Mudvayne is known for their unique and visually striking stage presence. One of the most iconic aspects of their early career was their elaborate face paint. But why did Mudvayne wear makeup when they first started, only to eventually stop midway into their career? And why did they eventually bring the makeup back? Singer Chad Gray revealed the band's history with their makeup during The Jesea Lee Show podcast, explaining the reasons behind these decisions.
Why Did Mudvayne Originally Wear Makeup?
Despite Slipknot comparisons often being a talking point in the early days, Mudvayne's Chad Gray reveals that the Iowa-based rockers had zero to do with their initial decision to wear makeup. The band was inspired by visual arts and film. Gray explained, "We’re inspired by movies. That’s why we wear makeup. We were inspired by modern art, we were inspired by visual art, we were inspired by movies. That’s why we wear makeup."
He added, "With a movie, you get content, you get a visual and you get a score. With music, if you go to see a show live you get content and you get the score which is music, but you didn’t have the visual. We wanted to bring the visual to the live show. We wanted to make the live show look like a movie.”
Why Did Mudvayne Stop Wearing Makeup?
Simply put, the Slipknot comparisons got tiresome. Gray tells Lee that especially in Europe and the U.K. where press drives a lot of promotion, comparisons to Slipknot were almost always one of the questions.
“Every interview, it was the same fucking thing. We are not the same band. We are not the same bands even looks wise. They’ve got homemade fucking masks that they’ve generated and created on their own and we wear makeup," explained Gray.
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“It was frustrating for me to feel the need like I want to get away from this. I’m tired of talking about it. I’m tired of them drawing comparisons. Let’s just take the makeup off." He also recalls of his first time seeing or hearing of Slipknot, "I remember when I first learned who Slipknot was, I was like, “What? Really?’ Fuck. Goddamnit.’ Cause nobody else was doing it. But even me, it was like, ‘Oh, they wear masks? Well, ok. Cool.’ At least we were doing something different, cause they were about five minutes ahead of us.”
How Did Taking the Makeup Off Impact Mudvayne's Career?
Gray reflected, “I think that was a big downfall for Mudvayne when we did that. People fucking loved it, same as people love Slipknot’s masks. People loved it and all of a sudden, bam, we’re just not wearing it anymore."
"People were butthurt by it for sure. And rightfully so. We took the visual away from the music and that was the whole why we did it in the first place.”
Despite the comparisons driving them to drop their look, Chad Gray actually has very fond feelings toward Slipknot, recalling that Clown was an executive producer on their debut album and really gave them a platform early in their touring career.
“Clown didn’t really do anything musically with us, but I’m gonna tell you what, I’ve got to give that dude a mad amount of love because that motherfucker took us under his wing and we toured with those guys for the first seven months we ever toured," recalled Gray.
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"Clown did his part from a live standpoint. By him doing that, that showed the world that that band gave us their blessing, which was such a huge thing for us because we wore fucking makeup. If that band decided they didn’t like us, we would have lost their entire fanbase.”
He adds, “It was some of the best times of my life cause I got to meet nine really fucking rad dudes that I stayed friends with, two of them until their deaths. Joey [Jordison] and I and Paul [Gray] and I were fucking close to the end.”
Mudvayne - backstage facepainting
Why Mudvayne Returned to Makeup?
Eventually Mudvayne reclaimed the makeup. “I never really wanted to take it off in the fucking first place," admits Gray, who reveals how he still tried to play into the visual presentation after the decision to lose the makeup.
"I always did different shit, like blood and all that, with Mudvayne and I did a lot of costuming stuff just trying to keep it mixed up," he continues. "But I was always trying to bring back that visual to what we let go of when we took the makeup off.”
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Mudvayne in 2024 have some shows on the horizon. dates booked for May built around their appearances at the Welcome to Rockville and Sonic Temple Festivals. His band Mudvayne is about to dive into The Psychotherapy Sessions and, once NEPA Scene’s phone interview begins, it’s easy to see where the name of the tour comes from as it all comes spilling out. It all comes out honestly, like a personal healing session, and Gray wouldn’t - and couldn’t - present himself any other way.
With little prompting, he lets loose with strong opinions, revealing moments, and a sense of peace as he prepares to do what he loves once again - his “life’s work,” as he calls it. with Coal Chamber (another recently reunited band), GWAR, Nonpoint, and Butcher Babies, as well as the Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York on Friday, July 28 and Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey on Saturday, July 29.
CHAD GRAY: There’s no way I can describe to you… leaving home for six weeks, when you have three rehearsal days in Nashville, and then we traveled a day to here and then we’ve had two production days here and the show day is today. So, literally, I’ve already burned through a week’s worth of clothes and I haven’t even been on stage yet. Just getting ready to leave home has been chaotic as fuck and leading up to the show because we’re all just the king of procrastinators.
Well, most of us are, anyway, and we go right up to like yesterday. I was stressed, but I’m in my room now. I’m relaxed. I’m on the phone with you. You’re good with me and we’re all good.
NS: How do you feel now, just a few hours away from kicking this tour off?
CG: When we put this band back together, my main reason was for our fans because we went away before they wanted us to go away. We were still doing well when we disbanded, so a big part of me doing this is to give this to our fans. I have chosen this work as my life’s work, like I’m in this business now. You know what I mean? The reason I’m in this business is because, growing up, this music literally - if you’ve ever seen me play- saved my life a million times.
I mean, I really would not be here without metal. I really would not be here without hard rock. I really would not be here without music in general or music that I could lose myself in. I had a very turbulent childhood; I had a very turbulent adolescence. I was just dealing with a lot of bad. I was a big advocate of live music when I was growing up. I mean, I was at shows and I went to concerts and it was just such a big part of my life. So, back then, I’m standing in the fucking arenas and I’m standing in the theaters and I’m standing with other people, but I didn’t understand metal community, metal family, back then.
My mind didn’t process it that way. You know, I think it took me devoting my life to music, becoming part of the other side of it, traveling around the rock playing in different countries all over the world, seeing how they respond to live metal music. And honestly, dude, they don’t respond any differently than they do in Australia than they do in America. They don’t respond any differently than they do in Japan. They don’t respond any differently than they do in the U.K. It’s all the same. We all look different around the world, but if you’re into it, you react the same way.
Because, you know, when I was growing up, when I was in in my little personal hell, just not good people around me, stepfather and all that shit, I felt alone. Abuse and neglect and shit like that is not - and it’s the same with depression and anxiety - it’s not something you scream from the mountaintops about. It’s very introverted; it’s very personal. You hold it in. You don’t talk about it. You don’t talk about abuse. You don’t talk about being beaten. You don’t go to school and be like, “Hey, my dad beat me last night.” You just don’t do that, so it’s a very isolated world you’re living in, and knowing that and what metal music did for me way, way, way back then…
Like, my first album was Mötley Crüe, “Too Fast for Love,” and I thought they were fucking speaking to me, but it’s because I needed it that bad. Listening back, those songs weren’t speaking to me, but I needed it so bad I made it fit into my life. I’m a little more clear-cut, but I almost write a little bit of riddles. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t give it to you. It’s still very vague. It’s very ambiguous. But I start you down a road and it’s a write-your-own story. You can take any little thing I say, you could take an off-ramp, and make it your own.
In Hellyeah, the song “Hush,” the whole thing in that was you’re not alone. That was the whole vibe of the song. I’ve done that with multiple Mudvayne songs too - “Cinderella Story,” a big one. That’s what I want for this tour, getting back to the original question. I want people to come here and be selfish and be self-serving and give themselves something because life is fucking brutal. It gets its teeth into us. And we almost can’t see anything else other than work, bills, stress, worry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? That’s fucking life, and I’ve got my own shit, you’ve got your own shit. Everybody’s got their own shit. Since I do what I do, it doesn’t mean I’m fucking stress-free. I’m not rolling in fucking dough. I’m not like fucking flying private and fucking living like a billionaire. I’m just not. I’m a humble man. I live in a humble home. It’s nice, but I built it. That’s why it’s nice. But I’m a humble person, you know?
When I was growing up, I took advantage of these opportunities to go to a show and kind of just check all my fucking problems at the door. I knew they were going to be there when I left. I could pick them back up and I was going to feel stronger when I picked them up because of the music. The music is so powerful. You’re going to feel like that fucking 1,000-pound brick you left at the door, and when you walk into the show, it’s going to fucking feel like a 10-pound brick because you’re just that much stronger mentally, emotionally. On every level, you’re just a stronger human at that point, but what do you owe it to you? Do you owe it to me? No, you owe it to the music that I created. You owe it to the music that Coal Chamber created. You owe it to the music that GWAR created, that Nonpoint created, that Butcher Babies created.
CG: It’s really cool. I’ve known Miguel [Rascón] and Mikey [Cox of Coal Chamber]… holy shit. When they put out their last album or whatever, 2015 or 2016 or whatever it was, we went to Australia together and me and Mikey and Miguel were just absolute fucking triplets - we were fucking crazy. I’ve known those guys for a long, long time. Nonpoint we toured with in 2000. When we released our album, we toured with Slipknot for seven months. We did three different tours with them and we opened every one of those tours, then we went out on our own. When we went out on our own, we brought Nonpoint with us.
In 2020, the pandemic happened. Heidi [Shepherd] and Henry [Flury], the guitar player and singer for the Butcher Babies - they’re a couple - they moved from L.A. to Vegas, so [my wife] Shannon [Gunz] and I have a pool, and those two came and we spent the entire summer in my pool, so those guys are really, really dear friends of mine and my wife. We see them all the time, we go to dinner with them all the time. We live in Vegas. I don’t know the GWAR guys very well, but everybody else on this tour I know, like intimately. It was pretty cool because I was working on getting them on. These are the bands that I wanted on it, so I’m excited about it for that reason.
I’m excited about it for the fans. I’m excited about it for me because I haven’t been on stage in a fucking year, so I need this as much as any fan does. I need my fans as much as they need me. And they need to understand that. I want them to understand that. This is not at all about me or the band. This is about togetherness. And usually when you think of people using each other, it’s a negative thing, like, “That person used that person for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, they stole their money.” We use each other in the fucking best way. They use me to get something out of me for their life, and to make it a little bit smoother, and to be able to let go of their life for a few hours. I think they deserve that, right? And I need them for the same reason. I’ve got an hour and 15 minutes that I’m up on that deck, and I’m telling you what, everything goes right out the fucking window for an hour and 15 minutes. It’s that other fucking 22 hours and 45 minutes that sucks. That’s my time to live too.
Those are the reasons in a nutshell that I’m excited about this tour. You know, to be self-serving to myself because I need it. To give our fans something because they need it, and for the lineup and how fucking great the bands are that are in it. It’s really exciting. I just hope that people come out. I hope that people are willing to treat themselves a little bit because you can fucking lose yourself in not being a little self-indulgent here and there. You can’t just work for fucking bills and blah, blah, blah. That’s no life. That’s not being alive - that’s living. Living and being alive are two completely different things, so I hope they give themselves the opportunity to come to me and feel alive and, honestly, I’m supposed to be talking to you to promote my tour, but I love the metal fans so much I understand that sometimes they’re gonna have to pick and choose which bands they are going to want to go see, and my band is not on top of the fucking world.
I’m not in Metallica or something like that where they’re automatically going to come see me, but I hope that they go to at least a show this summer. It doesn’t have to be necessarily mine, but I hope that they do something for themselves and go to one of the shows. There’s a lot of bands that are going to be out.
NS: Once you got back together with the band in 2021 and 2022, you guys played some festivals and went on tour with Rob Zombie. Now you’re headlining.
CG: Yeah. Our production is fucking awesome. We really put a bunch of fucking money into lighting and stuff. It’s just so fucking rad, versus ramps and risers and shit like that. I’m like, “Man, put them in the sky, put some more fucking lights up there; save the money on the fucking ramp bullshit. Fuck that,” because I want to give the crowd a show. I mean, that’s what we’re here to do, right? For this one, dude, what’s really cool about this one is we’re doing two songs we never played before. Ever. And we just worked them out in rehearsal, and it’s pretty cool. I think that one of them is definitely a fucking fan favorite. I’ve got about 10 friends that love this song and we never played it live - it’s a fucking difficult song, very hard song to play. But it’s awesome. It’s really good. And then another one is just a really special song that we did probably 20 years ago when we were trying to get signed. It’s cool. We’re doing little things to just tweak it. I mean, obviously, we’re not going to fucking re-outline the entire syllabus. We’re not going to like not play anything we played with Zombie because people want their fucking favorites. But we’ve got a lot of favorites. We’ve got a lot of songs; we’ve got a lot of songs that were singles. We’re doing what we can to mix it up. Three songs out of what - we probably did 14 or 15 on the Zombie tour. So putting three new songs in - that’s a lot. It’s actually a lot.
A lot of bands fucking go and do a new album and they’ll come back out and only play one new song, whatever the new single is, and that’ll be the only song they play.
NS: Looking back on your discography and everything that you’ve done, what do you think it is about your music that has stood the test of time? There’s a lot of bands that came up around the same era that are long gone.
CG: I’ve had somebody ask me, “Do you think you were ahead of your time?” That’s not a question for me, but doing what we were doing then? We were pretty much the main progressive metal band at that time. We were the main progressive metal band in the nu metal genre, like legitimately progressive with odd times signatures and blah, blah, blah. I would get the songs and I would bring in my influences, and I think that that gave us a really cool mix because what I did with the band then was more current to the time versus what my band was doing as far as songwriting. Like, if you were to give those songs to a different singer and they would approach it differently, this could be a completely different band. It could either be monumentally successful or fucking never did a goddamn thing. My whole point with songwriting was always, always honesty. I mean, that’s the key. You have to be fucking honest. And I don’t think anybody wouldn’t know that James Hetfield wasn’t an influence, that Layne Staley wasn’t an influence, that fucking Phil Anselmo wasn’t an influence. But I’ve taken all those influences and I processed through my soul and they’ve come out Chad, you know what I mean? You have to be honest in your music, and I’m hoping that’s what’s done it. I hope that’s the one thing that we’ve done that has kept us successful and relevant, and I have a feeling, honestly, we have a lot of new fans.
We went away for over a decade, and we did not go away as a failing band. We went away when we were still successful. I see a lot of youth, but I don’t see a lot of 10-11-year-old youth. I see a lot of 18-22 youth, which would have been 8, 9, 10, or 11-year-olds or 13-14-year-olds. I see those kids now, the 24s and 25s that were 14 and 15 when we went away that are now young adults and our fans, and they didn’t discover us until after we went bye-bye, so they’ve never seen us. I don’t know the exact answer to that, but those would be my thoughts. I think doing what we do, especially now, is more relevant now than when we were doing it then because we were kind of solo. We were kind of the only band really being what we are back then, so I think that’s what keeps us relevant. None of us wanted to admit we were nu metal back in the fucking day because it just seems so fucking cheesy or whatever. But now it’s really cool to see the resurgence that’s happened with it because it’s an unprecedented fucking time in music.
NS: And many of them were influenced by what you guys were doing and other people of the nu metal era were doing. The term “nu metal” had such a bad connotation when it came out and bands wanted to avoid it, but now I interview new bands that are coming up and a lot of them freely admit they love nu metal and are influenced by it. They put it right out there.
CG: Yeah. I mean, come on, it’s fucking low guitar tunings on heavy guitars and heavy riffs and pretty straightforward twos and fours drums to cool melodies, aggressive melodies, but still singing melodies. Nu metal is very emotional. One of my best friends now, who I’m so fucking proud of, is Jonathan Davis. He’s one of my best friends in the world. He’s actually moving t...
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