In a brand new interview with MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn‘s “No Fuckin’ Regrets With Robb Flynn” podcast, NAPALM DEATH singer Mark “Barney” Greenway reflected on the passing of the band’s guitarist Jesse Pintado.
After Flynn brought up the fact that Pintado would get into intense confrontations while intoxicated during NAPALM DEATH‘s 1994 tour with MACHINE HEAD, Greenway said: “By that time, he was pretty much a full-on alcoholic. It took his mind in certain directions. I don’t really wanna judge him and say [anything] negative, but things do open up your mind when you’re [taking various] substances or drink or anything like that. So he got into some actually pretty interesting stuff along the way. But it did get pretty intense. I don’t exactly remember when he started to go beyond that and start disappearing and stuff like that, which was always interesting.
“We had a couple of recordings a little bit later on, and he just disappeared out of the country completely when we were supposed to be recording,” he continued. “It all led up to a point where we had to let him go for a bit, or rather let him go back to Los Angeles, to be with his family and hopefully get himself straightened out. Unfortunately, it didn’t work in the end, with the obvious end result. Yeah, it got really intense.”
Pintado passed away at Holland’s Erasmus MC hospital on August 27, 2006 due to liver failure.
“It’s a weird one, looking back at it, because he made his choices, definitely,” Greenway said. “Jesse was always his own person, and I admired him for that. Unfortunately, some of the choices killed him.
“I do miss him. He was fucking annoying sometimes, but he was also a great guy. And I do miss him.
“He had been out of the band for a few years at that point,” Barney continued. “We were on tour, and we were maybe flying back from somewhere, and [bassist] Shane [Embury found out] that he died. And we didn’t find out the facts until afterwards. I remember getting home, walking through the door, and then the realization kind of hit me a little bit harder. And I just kind of cried for a while, and I got it out of me. And after that, I was quite philosophical about it.
“Jesse, he took his path. And before he got heavily into the alcohol — he was a good guy after that, but before it, he was also just a good person. And it was sad to hear that he left, that he passed away.”
“As far as we know, it was that that basically killed him. Literally, his body was just poisoned.
“People always think in the physical terms — ‘Oh, yeah, your liver just disintegrated’ — but, actually, it’s the chemical change; that’s what can set you on a path to the point of no return, basically. So, without going into the exact details of it, basically, Jesse‘s body just turned toxic to the point of no return. And I think when they found him, they obviously rushed him to hospital, but he was effectively brain dead, as far as I understand it.”
Pintado reportedly coined the terms “grindcore” back in 1983 to describe a fledgling musical revolution that incorporated the extreme aggression of political anarchic chaotic sounds of U.K. punk rock and the ferocious sledgehammer guitar chord grinding of extreme metal.
Pintado‘s final release was the TERRORIZER reunion CD, titled “Darker Days Ahead”, which came out in August 2006 via Century Media Records.
