During an appearance on a recent episode of “Stoke The Fire”, the alternative lifestyle and culture podcast hosted by musician Jesse Leach (KILLSWITCH ENGAGE) and DJ/presenter Matt Stocks (“Life In The Stocks”), LAMB OF GOD singer Randy Blythe discussed the importance of maintaining perspective during the pandemic and being positive about seeing the reality of the situation and not some biased version of the truth.
He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “This whole pandemic thing — and I’m not trying to sound like a dick here, because people have lost things, and people have died, and it has been rough on people emotionally, financially, mentally, all that stuff; it has been rough — but when you’ve been to prison, sitting in your house for a year with Netflix, and you are able to leave whenever you want… You can still get groceries. You can still order shit on Amazon and have it delivered to your fucking house. You can play Xbox. You can do whatever. Even if you don’t have money to do those things, you can get outside and go for a walk and exercise. Compared to prison, it’s not that big of a deal; it’s just not. I’m not downplaying the severity of this whole thing, but it’s just not the end of the fucking world — it’s just not.”
He continued: “And the other thing — and this is a pet peeve of mine; not to be negative, but I’m just gonna go ahead and speak on it. If there is one phrase I could have removed from the English language until everyone learned how to use it properly — upon pain of death, proper use of this word — the word is ‘unprecedented.’ This whole last year — ‘this unprecedented pandemic,’ ‘this unprecedented political turmoil,’ ‘this unprecedented this.’ No, none of this is unprecedented. Not even in America in the last hundred years — we’ve had insane political figures; we’ve had the Spanish flu; we’ve certainly had deadlier pandemics before; we’ve had natural disasters; we’ve had economic depressions. My grandma was raised in it; she’s a hundred years old. We’ve even had violently insane toilet paper hoarding before — in the ’70s. Johnny Carson made a joke on ‘The Tonight Show’ during the gas shortage in the ’70s, when I was a kid, he was, like, ‘Now there’s no toilet paper on the shelves.’ That caused four months of a toilet paper shortage and violent hoarding. So none of this is unprecedented.
“When you’re talking about perception, when you pull back from the myopic vision that the modern age gets us — this is just now, now, now, now — and you look at the bigger picture, you’re, like, ‘Okay, humanity has been through this shit before.’ With far less technology, with far less communication devices.
“This is not the Black Plague — it’s just not,” Randy added. “And we’re gonna get through it. So maintaining perspective on those things is important. And I think to do that, you have to look at history.”
In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan’s death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.
Blythe‘s prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD‘s 2015 album “VII: Sturm Und Drang”: “512”, one of his three prison cell numbers, and “Still Echoes”, written while he was in Pankrác, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write the memoir “Dark Days”, in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.
Last month, LAMB OF GOD issued a three-disc deluxe edition of 2020’s critically acclaimed self-titled album featuring the full record with two bonus tracks and a live version of the album, along with a DVD performance of “Lamb Of God”. The live CD and DVD portion of the deluxe edition features the first of LAMB OF GOD‘s two ultra-successful live stream events from September 2020, in which the band performed “Lamb Of God” in full, plus an encore of four songs, including “Ruin”, “Contractor”, “512” and the debut live performance of “The Death Of Us”, a new song the band wrote and recorded in quarantine for the “Bill & Ted Face The Music” movie and soundtrack. The DVD includes a new director’s cut with bonus material.
