'They Let Us Go Totally Crazy': John Stanier Looks Back on Helmet's Weird, Wonderful 'Betty' at 30

Helmet's original drummer on melding hardcore with drum corps, how producer T-Ray shaped the distinctive sound of the band's third LP and what he really thinks of the record's various oddball detours

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I’m trying something a little different this time and presenting an original interview with the great drummer John Stanier — currently of Battles and formerly of Helmet — that I conducted back in February. As always, it’s hard to know in advance what shape this newsletter will take going forward, but I may publish more conversations like this in the future. For now, thanks for reading, and if you enjoy this installment, please consider sharing the post on social media or just telling a friend.

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A couple of months ago, I was sitting in my basement in front my Alesis electronic drum kit, playing along to Betty, the third record by the alternative-metal band Helmet. While taking a quick break, it occurred to me that 30 years prior, shortly after the album was released, I was sitting in another basement, around 1,200 miles to the southwest — in front of a real kit, set up at my lifelong friend Kyle’s family home — doing the exact same thing.

As listeners and players, there are records that excite us and move us, and maybe even enthrall us, but then there are records that somehow become wired into the circuitry of our brains, influencing every musical decision we make. For me, Betty is one of the latter. Savagely heavy yet strangely elegant, it sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard, and — with all due credit to the brilliant contributions of guitarist, vocalist and chief songwriter Page Hamilton — a huge part of that has to do with John Stanier.

I love all the acknowledged legends of classic rock, from Bonham to Baker and Peart, and so on. But for me, deep down, the pinnacle of heavy drumming in a rock context has always been John Stanier on Betty. I have never heard a rock drummer play with such pulverizing force, such staggering precision and such wild abandon, all at once. The grooves on songs like “Wilma’s Rainbow” and “Clean” feel almost architectural, like they’re etched into steel and glass, while the fills on “Street Crab” sound gloriously haywire. Each song has a distinct percussive flourish — from the stomping unaccompanied intro to “I Know” to the beautifully audacious tom rolls on “Rollo.” And complementing these performances, courtesy of producer Todd Ray (a.k.a. T-Ray) is a drum sound so harsh — featuring gut-punch kick drum and ear-splitting snare, tuned precariously high, in trademark Stanier fashion — that it seems to pin you in place as you listen.

Since Helmet’s initial late-’90s breakup, after which Hamilton eventually re-formed the band with a new lineup, John Stanier has moved on in a big way — going on to become one of the world’s most accomplished and respected drummers in the heavy/avant-garde rock cosmos, bringing his punishing minimalism to bands such as Battles and Tomahawk. While I’ve read many interviews with Hamilton about Betty (this Rolling Stone feature by Richard Bienstock is a great place to start) and the way it marked a deliberate left turn from the streamlined beatdown of its predecessor, Meantime — throwing in a few left-field detours, including deconstructed jazz standard “Beautiful Love” and slinky funk experiment “The Silver Hawaiian”— I’d never really heard Stanier’s perspective on the record beyond a couple conversations dating from the time of its release.

Sitting there trying to perfect my own renditions of “Wilma’s Rainbow,” “Street Crab” and others day after day, three decades on, it occurred to me that maybe I should just go ahead and ask him. I’d been following Stanier on Instagram for a while, so I sent him a message asking if he’d be up for a chat looking back on Betty in advance of the album’s 30th anniversary this year — coming up on June 21 — and he kindly agreed. The ensuing conversation was a total thrill for me: the chance to pick the brain of one of my favorite drummers about an album that helped to shape my musical DNA. His perspective was enlightening, and often hilarious, and I can’t thank him enough for making the time.

So here, in tribute to the enduring magic of Betty, is my conversation with John Stanier, lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Thanks for taking the time to do this. I know that you’re not the most backward-looking artist in the world, but I thought I’d ask…

Yeah, sometimes I am; sometimes I’m not. I just don’t want to be based on my past, you know what I mean?

Absolutely. And more than most people, you’re not!

Cool, thank you.

So obviously Meantime was such a moment for Helmet, but looking back on the shift into the Betty era, what comes into your mind, in terms of where things were with the band, and just the overall mindset?

I will tell you that it was such a heavy-duty, insane, crazy time that I don’t remember really specific parts. It happened so freaking fast. I mean, from Meantime to Betty, we’re talking, I think, less than two years. We recorded Meantime, went on tour, recorded Betty, continued to go on tour and then finally took a break. Meantime was a grueling period, but also incredibly fun. And this was all very new to us. Unfortunately, we lost [co-founding guitarist] Peter Mengede at the very end of the Meantime touring…

But anyway, we pretty much started Betty immediately right after that. And in between, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on us to do better than Meantime, which went gold in the U.S., probably almost platinum, and [sold] God knows how many millions of copies worldwide. So there’s a lot of pressure on us. And in between Meantime and Betty, I think we did the Judgment Night soundtrack. Rob [Echeverria, Helmet’s second guitarist from 1993 to 1996] had just gotten into the band, and I think we wanted to do something different. The track we did, “Just Another Victim” with House of Pain, we got so much mileage out of that, and it just clicked so good that we were like, “You know what? For the next record, let’s just go with this guy T-Ray,” who did a remix of the song for the 12-inch, and he had already produced the second Cypress Hill record. He had done Funkdoobiest. I think he had done House of Pain. He was just like this up-and-coming Soul Assassins dude from South Carolina. We really liked him as a person.

Interscope was just like, “Go nuts. Do whatever the hell you want. We don’t care. Just keep touring and sell a lot of records and we’ll try to get you on the radio and on MTV.” I mean, that was the thinking in the early ’90s. It was just all about the big-label, “Money is no object, just keep touring, do videos, and let us take care of radio and MTV; you guys just stay out on the road,” which is basically kind of like the ’70s and ’80s mentality, just throwing MTV in there. So they let us kind of go totally crazy with Betty, and we had a very good budget and we just chose T-Ray.

Obviously that decision turned out to be crucial. The drum sound on that record is fairly iconic among fans, just in terms of how distinctive and unusual it is. I’d really love to hear about how you and T-Ray zeroed in on that — I’ve never heard another drum sound like that on any other rock album.

A thousand percent. Some people love it or hate it; it’s so extreme. The snare drum sound is so extreme on that record and the kick drum, but especially the snare drum was just like, “Oh, my God…” But then again, it was also extreme on [Helmet’s 1990 debut] Strap It On. And if you had seen Helmet live, it’s like, I’m the cranked-snare guy. Like, that’s my thing; it’s always been my thing. I kind of pioneered that in a way, not to sound weird or anything… So that was definitely my thing for Strap It On. Meantime was mixed by Andy Wallace, who just totally dumbed that down and resampled my snare. And then Betty was T-Ray and [engineer] Anton Pukshansky just going nuts. I think there was an 808 [drum-machine] layer on all the kicks on the entire record. I mean, it’s a rap record! It’s mixed like a rap record.

“I mean, [Betty is] a rap record! It’s mixed like a rap record.”

In a totally different sense, Helmet Betty is very similar to the first three Danzig records. The first three Danzig records are done by Rick Rubin, who is Def Jam, who does Public Enemy and does rap records where the drums are really dry and super upfront and they’re the loudest fucking thing in the room, by far. I mean, Rick Rubin did Masters of Reality — listen to that record that he did. It’s rap drums: dry and upfront. Slayer, Reign in Blood, really dry drums, totally upfront.

And T-Ray didn’t just copy that, but I think he took the same philosophy, because I know that Anton Pukshansky — who for the record should get a lot of credit for the sound of Betty, for sure, because he engineered the really early Eric B. & Rakim records — he was into samples. He did tons of early hip-hop, way more old school than T-Ray. T-Ray was a very of-the-moment rap guy, but he had a vision and I feel like he made that totally happen.

And as far as the drums, goddamn, they’re just so loud. Especially the kicks are just like, holy shit… And they’re layered by 808s or 909s. I don’t think anyone had ever done that with a loud rock band before. I don’t even think Rick Rubin did that. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.

They were just like, “The drums are fucking loud as shit, and they’re crazy, and let’s totally exploit that.” And I mean, that’s what’s happening live, and that had been what’s going on in Helmet since the Strap It On.

Absolutely. So just to backtrack a little, are you saying that you were less than happy with your drum sound on Meantime and that the Betty drum sound was more—

Revenge? No, no… I thought the drum sounds on Meantime totally sound like shit, but I didn’t put my foot down. It’s my fault. Betty, they just went crazy with that, and I think they went so much more crazy than anybody was expecting. And the funny thing is that, we would record songs during Betty, and I remember Anton was like, “Yo, we’re going to layer this 909 kick. It’s just going to shatter car windows. It’s going to be Miami-bass low for all the kicks.” And I was just like, “Wow, that sounds really fucking cool. Tell me more.” And they wouldn’t even give me a hint of that in the premixes. There’s premixed versions of Betty and then the final mixed version of Betty that are night and day, and it’s basically like they turned all the layers on and just did what they do. But I just remember [on the premixes] I was like, “Man, I like the way it sounds, but the kick drum sounds super weak.” And Anton kept telling me, “Don’t worry…” And maybe they overemphasized that just because I was busting their balls so much. I mean, I don’t think so, but yeah, holy shit, it was night and day; I couldn’t believe it.

And you liked it, right?

Oh, hell, yeah.

Just following up on the T-Ray thread, I’m looking at his discography, and it does look like he hadn’t done a full rock record of any kind before Betty.

I don’t think so, no. He did a bunch of nu metal after that, right?

A little bit, yeah — there’s this Snot record from 1997. But from what I was reading, he got out of the game pretty quickly. So you’re crediting T-Ray and Anton a lot, but obviously you had very specific ideas about the sound of the kit. Like you said, the cranked-snare thing was your signature already, and I read a 1994 Modern Drummer interview where you said that you viewed the kick drum as a “big tom that you happen to be playing with your foot”…

Honestly, I came from a dual sort of really weird background in the sense that I came from hardcore, but I also came from drum corps. And I was an orchestral percussion major, and that’s this whole other side to me that has nothing to do with rock music. And I’m not saying that I got a ton of information out of that, and I threw that into playing in Helmet, or anything stupid like that. It all goes back to, Helmet was so damn loud; I just needed to be heard. So that’s why the snare drum was so high. That’s why I used three ride symbols: I used three 22-inch ride symbols and 15-inch hi-hats, just ’cause they were so damn loud.

As in, you used ride cymbals as crashes?

Yeah.

And how big would the bass drum have been?

It was 22, but then when I got the second set that Tama gave me, which is the yellow one that I still have, that I use in Battles, that’s 24, so I went crazy with that one. But for Helmet, it was 22-inch.

And then the snare is just standard 14?

The snares are all over the place. I used so many damn snares, I don’t even know… They’re mostly metal. I try to keep them six inches deep and then it’s just really all about how I tune them at the end of the day.

Moving into the songs themselves, I read that as opposed to Meantime, a lot of this Betty material was kind of thrown at you at the last minute, like you had only heard some of these songs maybe a couple days before you recorded them. Is that accurate?

Meantime was written before we even signed to Interscope, or at least half of it was. So we had been playing those songs for a very long time. Betty was quickly after doing this incredibly long Meantime world tour that went on for basically two years. And Page was just pumping out material. I wouldn’t say they were completed songs, but there were just definitely tons of riffs. But yeah, I think a lot of Betty was kind of like, “No time to rest — we’ve got to go in the studio,” and I don’t remember rehearsing to-the-death the songs on Betty, where I do remember that with Meantime and Strap It On. Like “In the Meantime” and “Unsung” and all that shit, I remember playing thousands and thousands of times, and then playing them thousands and thousands of times on tour before Meantime was even out. Betty was very quick, so you’re a hundred percent right.

Zeroing in a little more, I’m a drummer, and I’ve spent some time both back then and recently playing along with the album and at times trying to learn the parts, and one thing that stands out to me is that the performances are extremely “live-take-y.” Many of the fills sound to me like you’re just kind of going for it — they have a real almost seat-of-the-pants feel…

That’s great. It’s incredible that you think that. That’s what I want!

Yeah, and I think that is such a rare quality. It’s obviously something that has almost vanished from recorded rock drumming today, but I think even then, you read about how they’d started to edit drum tracks on Nevermind, for example. I mean, there are fills on Betty that I can listen to a hundred times and not be able to reproduce because it’s so clear that they’re spontaneous. For example, there’s this fill in “Street Crab” that I’m very taken by. There’s sort of a lead-in into the second chorus where you drop out for a bar, and then you come back with this really crazy, cramped-sounding snare fill. I love the frenetic energy of that.

[Ed. note: The fill I’m referring to happens around 2:04.]

That is a thousand percent hip-hop. That’s all that is. If you listen to any ’90s hip-hop, the verse will go on for 16 bars, and sometimes the bar right before the chorus, the producer will mute the drums and then bring it back in for the chorus. That’s all that is. The mute is on purpose, but then I didn’t want to just go [sings conventional 16th-note fill] — that’s boring. So I did, “Mute, and then super crazy fill to get back into it.”

That sequence captures what I love about the drumming on Betty overall. If I could sum it up, it’s like there’s a juxtaposition of super tight and mechanical with something that almost sounds like it’s going haywire, or off the grid. And those two feels are coexisting, almost like bar to bar. Do you know what I mean?

Man, that’s so crazy. Thank you so much. Yeah. I mean, sure, I agree. Totally agree. [Laughs] Again, like I said early on, all this shit happened so fucking fast, and I was so young, and I was just like, “Wait, what? New record? I have to play this new song right now?” I was just going for it. So yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, that [juxtaposition] sums it up perfectly because it’s like hardcore meets drum corps — meaning hardcore is just wild abandonment, anything-goes craziness with the extremely strict, regimental drum corps aspect where it’s like: Always be in time.

I mean, I’m a Neil Peart fanatic, and if there’s one thing you can say about Neil Peart from Rush, it’s that it’s so metronomic. Like, everything is on time. People wax poetic about Bill Ward from Sabbath. And I love Bill Ward, but he drags every fucking fill. He’s totally out of time. It’s like, “Come on, man.” He’s not metronomic. Whereas Peart, Bonham, these people are like metronome fiends. And to me, that’s super important. Meter is really important, but then again, being off the cuff and complete insanity is also important. Rush taught me meter; that’s awesome. In that same sentence, I don’t want to be Dream Theater, because that shit sucks. You know what I mean? But why can’t those two worlds meet? Why can’t you be this insane, crazy drummer, but also play in time?

That’s a great question. I think part of the reason I keep coming back to this record is because I can’t find very much rock music where those things do coexist — there’s this bullseye that you hit on this record that I look for elsewhere and can’t find.

Man, thank you so much. Holy shit. I had no idea… A lot of people are just always like, “Dude, the kick and snare sounds just so gnarly on that record. The songs are crazy and you did some cool fills,” but it’s never like… I don’t know, this is all new to me.

I’ve heard you talk before about Neil Peart, who’s obviously such an overriding influence for so many players. But there’s something happening in your playing that’s not anywhere in his, which is this extremely funky, syncopated groove thing that you hear on songs like “Clean” and “Speechless.” Where does that come from?

I mean, this is going to be a really lame answer, but my very first influences are Lenny White in Return to Forever, Billy Cobham and Rush, and then I marched in drum corps, and it’s kind of as simple as that. So I’m not even that big of a jazz person. I’m way more of a fusion guy, but I mean, goddamn, Lenny White… Lenny White and Bill Bruford are huge influences on me. And they were funky as shit, but precise.

I think Carl Palmer too, really, is a funky, funky dude, and he gets zero credit. Alex Van Halen — big-time funky. Funky and powerful. So it’s mostly Rush, and it’s mostly, like I said, I was this orchestral-percussion major, and it’s very strict and stiff and all that. But I mean, I’ve listened to hip-hop all my life, and I love fusion. I love Lenny White, and I love Billy Cobham and just funky dudes.

And it’s like, why can’t you have both? Why can’t you be funky? And funky does not mean you have to be sloppy and loosey-goosey. You know what I mean? And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I want to be as powerful as Neil Peart and as funky as Lenny White at the same time, and who says that’s not possible? And it’s not like I sat down and made this manifesto of, “This is how I’m going to make my name,” or something; it was never like that.

Right, as it should be. At the same time, in retrospect, this record is the manifesto! Just to pick out a few more key spots, so the intro to “I Know” has always been a big thing for me. That was honestly one of the first drum parts I ever learned, and it’s just such an instantly catchy, beautifully constructed thing. Do you remember coming up with that and designing that? Or was that more spontaneous?

That was just, “Play eight bars of the beat before we bring the guitars in.”

Wow.

Yeah. That was probably in one take. That was absolutely not preconceived or written out or anything. Hell, no. I guarantee you that was one take.

Well, congratulations on that — you came up with this thing that sounded like it was written in stone. I love that triplet phrase you play on the bass drum; that part in particular is so tasty.

Thank you. It just happened so fast and it was so last minute. It is a really long drum intro. It was kind of like, “Alright, ready? Here you go. Rolling.” And it’s just like, “Make it interesting because it’s going to be 16 bars!” So I’m just like, “Goddamn…” So I’ve got to do something, but I don’t want to do a shit-ton of fills because you’re leading up to such a monstrous guitar riff.

That’s wild to hear that. And then, yeah, obviously, there’s that big dropout and then the beautiful fill leading into the verse

Yeah, yeah, that is good… I didn’t want to go too crazy, but I didn’t want to be too stupid, either. It’s like I wanted to have my own little introduction, my own little personal ditty to that song. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any fucking publishing for that. But hey, there you go. [Laughs.]

So “Rollo” is obviously a very distinctive drum part, with the constant rolls during the verse. Can you talk about coming up with that?

Man, I don’t know that much about the part. I will say, though, a little side note is that Battles, two records ago we did a record called La Di Da Di. On that record, there is a song where, as we were recording the song, I think it was the 20-year anniversary of Betty, so I basically completely reproduced the “Rollo” thing in a Battles song. And to this day, only one person referenced that, and this was an 18-year-old kid in Manchester, U.K., who worked at the club, and I was like, “Holy fucking shit. You are the only fucking person that picked up on that.” To me, it was so obvious. I basically just replay the entire drum part for “Rollo” in a Battles song, and no one fucking got it.

[Ed. note: Stanier breaks into the signature “Rollo” beat around 1:50 here.]

That’s wild. I definitely didn’t! I’m going to have to go back and pick that out. It’s such a distinctive part… So we’re talking about this kind of spontaneous, haywire quality, but listening back to “Milquetoast” — which I know was recorded separately, prior to the other tracks and released earlier on the Crow soundtrack – it almost sounds more robotic, almost more like the way you play in Battles.

For sure, because “Milquetoast,” was, like, way rehearsed, because we’d been playing that. “Milquetoast” was written during the Meantime era, I think. A lot of Betty, you are totally right, 75, 80% just came out of nowhere; I had to pull fire out of my ass. Whereas, yeah, we’d been playing “Milquetoast” before and we’d rehearsed the shit out of it. So that was not off the cuff.

So on the song “Clean,” I love your part there, because you seem to be constantly switching up how you orchestrate the riff between the snare and bass drum. But you’re completely in the pocket the whole time, so it almost doesn’t matter if you’re hitting kick or snare.

I think it’s just playing along to the guitar riff, which I do a lot, and which I did a lot in really early Helmet. Strap It On, so many of those drumbeats, I’m just playing the guitar riff. It’s almost like War’s “Low Rider,” where it’s this one riff that’s driving the song, and so the song “Clean,” the riff is driving it, and I’m just bouncing around the riff. And it doesn’t matter where the two and the four are, it doesn’t matter where the kick and the snare are, because the hi-hats are there, so the rhythm will still keep moving and the riff will keep driving the rhythm, and it’s not dependent on this really specific, boom-bap kick-drum-and-snare-drum thing. I feel like maybe I accidentally exploited that. I could be playing anything, and the riff is just rolling.

Yeah, that sense of rolling, massive laid-back groove is a huge part of this record. “Street Crab” and “Wilma’s Rainbow” are two that just have that amazing sense of groove.

Man, “Wilma’s Rainbow,” I also definitely remember playing that live way before we recorded Betty. I could be wrong on that one, but I mean, that was just kind of a no-brainer, super Zeppelin — Page is Zeppelin, AC/DC all day long, so it’s like that. And then “Street Crab” is way more complicated. I think doing that was like, “Oh, my God, what fill am I going to play on this?”

I think there were definitely a couple moments in Betty where I was pacing around the parking lot outside chain-smoking, like, “Holy shit, what am I going to do?” And what sucks is that as a drummer, you have to be able to adapt and create brilliance out of nothing. And you’re constantly put on the fucking spot, and it fucking sucks, and then, of course, you get no credit for it. You certainly don’t get any publishing for it. But you do it anyway. So that might’ve been the hardest song on the record. That was, like, agonizing over which fills to play on that song.

Another highlight on the album is “Tic,” where there are these massive, almost chasms of space in the riff, and you’re the only one in there. It seems like you were very comfortable just taking that space for yourself and not filling it up too much, but adding just a little bit of tastiness.

I think “Tic” is abso-fucking-lutely my favorite song on Betty, for sure. A hundred percent. The subtleties in that and the je ne sais quoi, especially the fucking beginning of that, before the guitars even come in and it’s just the vocals, is like… holy shit. That’s really good.

The song “Speechless,” it’s not an unaccompanied drum intro, but it’s got this really beautiful, gradual set-up that leads up to a big pause. It’s just a very elegantly constructed part where you let the space of the whole thing just breathe.

Man, thank you so much. I appreciate that — no one’s ever told me that. I think it was like this is an obvious thing to do. There’s a killer riff coming in. There’s no need for some insane drum fill. It’s like 101: Let the riff drive the song.

In a way, what you’re saying is kind of like the driving philosophy of Helmet, which is letting these riffs kind of do their job. And your drumming highlights them without getting in the way of them. The way that you come at the riffs, it brings them into relief, but the space that’s inherent in Helmet is allowed to be there. You know what I mean? There has to be this sense of breathing and space.

Extremely well put, and not many people have ever gotten that philosophy. I mean, you just basically nailed the philosophy of Helmet right there. It’s not this thought-out, talked-about concept at all, and it certainly wasn’t like, “Hey, I’m Page. I play guitar. I was just in Glenn Branca, and I love AC/DC.” It’s not that simple…

So we haven’t talked about Henry Bogdan, whose bass playing is obviously so important to achieving these effects, and who you had such an incredible chemistry with. Can you talk a little bit about working with him and what he brought to it?

Yeah, I mean, he’s way older. He was the original drummer in Poison Idea from Portland, and he was just this super weird dude that was into the Swans. And I don’t even know where he was coming from, but he approached stuff at a completely different angle. On Betty, he wrote two songs, “Silver Hawaiian” and “Rollo.” He’s just a killer bass player and wrote rolling bass riffs, but fuck, he was nasty as shit. Just so in the pocket and just the perfect bass player to play along with — just played everything right. The perfect complement to Page’s incredible riffs, like the perfect complement to that. It could not have been more on point, I think.

Since you mentioned “The Silver Hawaiian,” that’s such a distinctive song. In some ways it’s the least heavy song on the record, but your groove there sounds to me sort of like the trademark Helmet sense of groove, just with the dynamics turned down…

I think “Silver Hawaiian,” to be totally honest, is — and this is not dissing on Henry at all — but I feel like it’s so out of place for the record. Like, it was almost forced on the record. It’s a cool riff and a cool little song. Maybe if it was paid a little bit more attention to, it could have been turned into something much cooler.

Do you feel the same about the “Beautiful Love” cover?

I think that shit is terrible and embarrassing.

So you don’t even like it as kind of…

Fuck, no. [Laughing] Do you?!

Well, here’s the only thing I was going to say about it: I feel like in so many ways, Betty is very much a weird left-turn type of record from Meantime…

A thousand percent. Yes. Everything: album cover, producer, song titles, “Silver Hawaiian,” fucking Wes Montgomery jazz-intro thing we’re talking about right now. It’s basically Page in 1993 getting nervous that he thinks we’re going to turn into fucking Pearl Jam. [Laughs] And you can quote me on that one, too, in big letters!

“[Betty is] basically Page in 1993 getting nervous that he thinks we’re going to turn into fucking Pearl Jam. And you can quote me on that one, too, in big letters!”

Yeah, I think that oddball quality of this record is really charming and it kind of shows a different side of the band. I mean, if you made the record 10 tracks instead of 14 and sliced off all the fat, you’d have the most savage 10-song record. But in a way, that’s what Meantime already was. You guys had already perfected that…

And then we were like, “Oh, well, we can’t do that again!” I do think Betty is a fucking awesome record. And at the end of the day, if I had to choose between the two, between Meantime and Betty, I would fucking definitely choose Betty. I think it’s just so much more crazy. I think I play better on it. It sounds better. It’s mixed better. It’s produced better. It stands out more. On the other hand, a quarter of the record is like, “Ehhh, OK…” You know what I mean?

It’s funny though, because that Meantime vs. Betty contrast, in some ways it’s the story of 1992 vs. 1994 — like Nevermind versus In Utero, for example. It’s like everyone kind made their straightforward, kick-your-ass statement and then they made a weirder record to follow it up.

Everyone was trying to be way too more clever than everybody else, and no one wanted to, like… God forbid Nirvana would just reproduce Nevermind, so In Utero is way more clever and weirder. Everything had to be weirder. So, yeah, it just went with the territory.

Yeah, I don’t know how Meantime could’ve been topped in terms of a total beatdown record. Betty lets some air into the aesthetic and it raises questions. I think even just picking up that record, seeing the title, the cover, the font, it’s all like, “Wait, what??”

Right, right. I think if Helmet would’ve just done Meantime, part two, same songs, we would have been Pantera; we’d be playing stadiums right now [laughs], and we would not be having this interview. But that didn’t happen. You know what I mean? Pantera did that, not us. So I think that Helmet had to fucking change.