Saturday Night Wrist is their greatest album to date. And it only took them two years, nearly firing their lead singer, and almost breaking up to make it.

By Jon Wiederhorn
Photo by Angela Boatwright

Stephen Carpenter dips into a sizable bag of weed, pulls out some papers, and starts to roll a large joint. The guitarist—who’s perched on a bench on the Deftones tour bus before a Family Values show in Holmdel, New Jersey—has just finished an hour-long interview with Revolver about the making of the band’s new album, Saturday Night Wrist, and he’s ready for a smoke break.

According to the carefully planned schedule, it’s now singer Chino Moreno’s turn to speak, after which he’s slated for a 6 P.M. photo shoot. Problem is, Moreno is sleeping in the back of the bus and doesn’t seem to want to get up. And when he does finally rise, he announces that he won’t do the interview until after the show. This raises some real concerns.

Moreno is already obligated to do a post-gig meet and greet, and he has promised to take the stage with headliners Korn (the first band the Deftones toured the country with back in the early Nineties, when both groups were getting started) during their set, leaving just a small window for our discussion. And there’s a good chance it won’t happen at all since Moreno has been especially unreliable over the past year. This is the guy who promised to finish lyrics for Saturday Night Wrist, then kept his bandmates waiting for six months while he took off to tour with his side project, Team Sleep.

Frustrated, we explain that if there’s no interview with Moreno, there’s no story. Carpenter laughs. “It’s like if there’s no lyrics, there’s no album.” He exhales a plume of a smoke. “Okay, this is like a little glimpse of what it’s like to be in Deftones. Chino has given you his promise. He says he’ll be there after the show. Now we get to see if he’s gonna pull through.”

And three hours later, Moreno does just that, candidly discussing why he left his bandmates in a lurch during the writing of Wrist, what stifled his creativity, how the Deftones almost broke up, and what it ultimately took to put the pieces back together.

*****

On Saturday Night Wrist, their fifth album for Maverick Records, the Deftones sound brutally compelling and brazenly unified. The music veers between White Pony’s aching, atmospheric rock and the jagged, crashing metal of the band’s first two discs, and the melodies strike a midway point between weariness and desperation, with Moreno alternately gazing at the sky in “Cherry Waves,” licking his wounds on “Hole in the Earth,” and tearing flesh on “Combat.” “This really feels like a new beginning,” says bassist Chi Cheng, especially considering the making of the record almost took the Deftones to their end.

The bandmates starting working on Wrist back in early 2004, when their label told them their self-titled 2003 album had failed to live up to commercial expectations and they needed to make a new record soon. The Deftones were happily on tour at the time, but they nonetheless agreed to begin work on a new release. In early spring, the bandmates found a house in Malibu where they could live and work together. “We figured that instead of having the band be like a job, where we had to punch in and punch out, we would just hang out and make music together,” Moreno says.

While in Malibu, the Deftones searched for a new producer. They wanted somebody who could help shape the songs, as their longtime producer Terry Date had done, but they didn’t want to go with Date again because he was too close a friend, and they needed someone who could really crack the whip. For about a week, they worked with Dan “the Automator” Nakamura (Gorillaz, Dr. Octagon), with whom Carpenter got on famously, but then veteran producer Bob Ezrin, who has worked with Pink Floyd, Kiss, Jane’s Addiction, and countless others, agreed to come hear the band play.

“We played a song and got halfway through the chorus going into the second verse, and he shouted, ‘Stop!,’” recalls Moreno. “No one’s ever commanded us to do anything. Steph was the first one to stop, and he completely listened to what the dude had to say, which never happens. So I thought, Wow, this is gonna be good for us because it’s going to be disciplinary, and we need this.”

But Carpenter was bummed about not working with Nakamura, so he removed himself from much of the writing process to play Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf on his Playstation, which became a complete obsession for him in late 2003 after his divorce.

“I was the No. 1 player online for Playstation, and I was on a mission to retain my title,” Carpenter explains, completely serious. “Unfortunately, those who don’t play online videogames don’t understand it’s an absolute, all-time-consuming event because if you’re not the one playing online all the time, the other guy will be. So I’d do my guitar parts, and instead of hanging around and working with everyone else, I’d be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go play golf now. Let’s see what you guys can come up with on your own.’”

During that time, Moreno wrote some material, but he found it increasingly difficult to focus—and with good reason. The singer, who was married with two kids, had just discovered that his on-the-side girlfriend was pregnant. “I didn’t tell anybody in my band because I was so confused,” he says. “I was trying to decide which of the women in my life I wanted to be with. So I spent the whole time in Malibu with all this weight on my shoulders. Six months into it, I finally told my wife, and my marriage didn’t last through it.”

The singer started drinking heavily. He began to second-guess his vocals and grew distrustful of other people’s opinions. “Terry Date is the only one I’ve ever bounced ideas off of, and I trust him so much,” he says. “There was no one I felt I could trust there for feedback, and I was questioning myself all the time. And once I started doing that, I wasn’t making anything worth keeping.”

Then, one sunny Sunday morning in Malibu, fate upped the ante. Cheng was bicycling on the Pacific Coast Highway, when a car pulled out of a hidden driveway and plowed into him. “I was lying in the street, and I couldn’t move at all, but I never lost consciousness,” the bassist recalls. “They had to airlift me out, and when they landed, they were like, ‘Oooh, this guy’s done for.’”

Amazingly, Cheng had no internal injuries or major breaks, though he did blow out both knees, separate his shoulder, and break a tooth, which makes him look a little like a homeless man when he smiles. “I was on crutches for a while, and my knee still pops out sometimes onstage, which is pretty painful, but other than that, I’m pretty okay,” he says.

When Cheng returned to the Deftones house, the band was ready to do some tracking and needed a change of venue. So, three months after their arrival in Malibu, they flew to Ezrin’s studio compound in Connecticut. “Bob is a person who keeps a strict schedule,” Carpenter says of working with the famed producer. “He’s very disciplined, and he wants to hear full songs. But we don’t work that way. I don’t think he was ready for us to be so unprepared.”

Although the mood in Connecticut was tense, the band tracked the drums, guitar, and bass for Saturday Night Wrist there. Ezrin then wanted Moreno to start recording vocals, but the singer wasn’t ready and got defensive.

“Everybody’s main concern was just to finish the record, and at that point, I didn’t feel like it was even close to being finished,” Moreno says. “I felt there had to be a lot more experimenting. The vocals I was coming up with were okay, but I wasn’t blown away by them, and it just seemed like everyone was trying to shovel them off and move on. That’s what happened on the last record [2003’s Deftones], and I don’t think it was as good as it could have been because of that.”

Carpenter has a different take on the situation. “The real problem was that Chino didn’t write the vocals when we were writing the music,” he says. “If you leave everything to be done all by yourself at the end, of course the weight of the world will be on your shoulders. You put it there. And when you can’t pick it up, don’t blame everyone else.”

*****

At the end of the Deftones’ third month in Connecticut, Moreno had reached an impasse with Ezrin and the band, and the singer made plans to go on tour with his side project Team Sleep. “I felt like I had hit a wall,” Moreno says. “I needed to get away and do something I didn’t feel pressured about.”

“He told me and Cheng that he was gonna go, and he didn’t care that we were upset,” Carpenter recalls. “It was just really rude of him.”

With no singer to work with, Ezrin threw his hands up and sent the Deftones packing. For a short while, the band worked on putting together their B-Sides and Rarities compilation. After that, there was a whole lot of sitting around.

Six months after Moreno’s departure, they still hadn’t heard from him, so the remaining members considered kicking him out and hiring another singer to finish the vocals. But unbeknownst to everyone, Moreno was starting to write again and was getting ready to return to the fold when he heard that he might get booted from the Deftones. In a rage, he penned “Hole in the Earth,” the first single from Saturday Night Wrist.

“The metaphor of that song was there’s something wrong with this situation, and it feels empty,” Moreno says. “I was saying, ‘You guys are supposed to be my friends, and no one here is talking to me, and I’m hearing stories that you’re going to get another singer. So fuck all you guys. You just want to put a record out for the sake of putting a record out.’”

When Moreno returned from the Team Sleep tour, no one in the Deftones was talking, and management scheduled a full team meeting to determine the group’s future. “At that point, I had no idea if we were even going to stay together,” drummer Abe Cunningham says. “It was a very uncomfortable thing to realize the band might break up.”

But the exact opposite happened. Everyone emphasized how important the Deftones still were to them. “There was a big miscommunication thing because I thought they were being nonchalant about the band, and they thought I didn’t care anymore,” Moreno explains. “But we were all, ‘Fuck, yeah, I want to do this. That’s all I want to do—make this band back to the way we know it to be.’ Once we cleared that out of the way, it felt like the beginning of the whole record-making process again.”

*****

After clearing the air, the Deftones found themselves more productive than ever. “We started communicating better,” says Moreno. “I’d finish a song, and I’d be so happy with it, I couldn’t wait for the guys to hear it.”

Moreno worked with a couple of different hitmakers over the next two months, and at night, he’d go to the home studio of his friend, former Far guitarist Shaun Lopez. There, the singer hit his creative stride, regularly working until 4 A.M. “I could bounce ideas off of him, which is just what I was waiting for,” he enthuses. “If someone tells me I’m on the right track, it’s fuel. Things start pouring out. And before I knew it, we had a finished record.”

“I was like, ‘Finally,’” laughs Carpenter. “Because, shoot, I’d been done with all my guitars for well over a year.”

With a completed record under their belts, the Deftones scheduled the Family Values Tour with Korn. The dates were a huge success, and the members of the group grew even closer. “We’re getting along really well now,” Moreno says with a wide grin—his first real smile of the interview. “We make fun of each other, too, which means we’re comfortable enough to joke around again.”

The improved chemistry is evident in tonight’s performance in Holmdel. The Deftones open with “Feiticeira,” from White Pony, and within moments, Moreno is jumping up on his monitor, then leaping back as if electrocuted; Carpenter is sawing away at his guitar; and Cheng is prowling the stage with little concern for his damaged knees. New songs like “Hole in the Earth” and the smoldering “Beware” are as well received as older numbers such as “7 Words” and “Hexagram.” And when the Deftones lunge into “Change (In the House of Flies),” the roar of the crowd is so loud you’d think the Deftones were headlining.

Clearly, the band is back on track. And Moreno is trying to modify his behavior so that it stays that way. “I’m really trying hard to be more responsible,” he insists. “My dad always told me that keeping your word is the most important thing. But for a long time, I had this mentality where I would think, Well, I’m successful, and I’ve done things pretty much the way I’ve wanted to do them, so I’ve earned the right to work when and how I want to. But now I realize that it’s so selfish to think like that because no matter what, there are other people relying on you.”