Bringing Back the Fun

Vinnie Paul walks into a liquor store, and he walks out with $1,000 worth of Jagermeister.

"Hope this lasts until the morning," his assistant says as they wheel out a grocery cart filled with dozens of bottles of the stuff, which tastes kind of like satanic licorice.

Moments earlier, they were doing shots in the store and they continue to do so with strangers in the parking lot -- taking the scene in, you get the sense that these dudes consider the world around them to be little more than a never-ending series of drinking buddies in waiting.

The sheer amount of booze on hand is enough to turn livers into dust, legs into gelatin and bad days into really good ones.

Or, for Paul and his bandmates in the rowdy metal supergroup Hellyeah, it's just enough to get them through their current tour.

"You know, we knew we were going to need some Jager for the tour, and we were going out of town to head down to New Zealand and Australia, so I felt like we needed to go ahead and load the bus up before it got here," Paul says with a chuckle from a tour stop in Milwaukee, recounting the liquor store encounter, which was videotaped and put up on the band's MySpace page. "So we went out and got some and had some fun doing it."

Having a good time -- at pretty much all times -- is where it begins and ends with this bunch, who include current and former members of such heavyweights as Mudvayne, Nothingface, Pantera and Damageplan.

Their catchy, libertine metal is heavy on the grooves and the hangovers, a loud, raucous Saturday night at the local punch palace captured in the form of a series of fist-in-the-air anthems whose titles spell out this band's modus operandi in big, bold letters -- "Alcohaulin' Ass," "Nausea," "Rotten to the Core," etc.

For Paul, it marks a suitably loose-fitting return to making music after his brother, innovative guitarist Dimebag Darrell, was murdered onstage in Columbus, Ohio, at a gig by the brothers' post-Pantera outfit, Damageplan.

"I knew I was going to play again, I just didn't know when," Paul says of his hiatus from performing after the December 2004 tragedy. "I was really focused on my record company (Big Vin Records), and I didn't really think that I was ready to get back into playing yet. These guys called me, and they were like, 'We love your drumming, you've got to be the drummer for this band.' And I'm like, 'Man, I don't think I'm ready to do this just yet.'

"I guess persistence pays off," he continues, "because they just kept calling and calling, and finally they caught me one night when I had been listening to some Kiss and drinking a lot of booze and I said, 'You know what, this sounds like a damn good idea.' They all came to Texas, and we clicked. We wrote seven songs in the first eight days that we were together."

The end result is Hellyeah's self-titled debut, a warts-and-all blast of riff driven hard rock that's as raw as a bullet wound. The songs are all meant to be shouted along to -- save for a couple of plaintive ballads -- a belligerent invocation of sore throats and sweaty denim.

In a time when much of modern metal has become increasingly terse, technical, harmony averse and straight-faced, this disc is the equivalent of the cut-up in the back of math class plotting a weekend kegger.

"One of the biggest priorities we had was just to have fun and make sure it was a good time," Paul says of making the band's debut. "Everything had to have a groove. I really feel like metal has really gotten away from that over the past couple of years, it's just gotten more and more technical and faster and over-the-top, so we wanted to focus on the groove and the songs. We really wanted to have songs that you could remember the lyrics to and not just a bunch of screaming."

Naturally, any band as willfully debauched as these dudes is all but predestined for Vegas, and a handful of the tunes on Hellyeah's debut sound like they will be blasted at the Spearmint Rhino for years to come.

Paul visits Vegas often -- so much so that he's thought of buying a house here -- and he's the type of guy who stridently does his part to ensure that Sin City keeps living up to its name.

"I'm still definitely looking to get a property out there," he says. "I was really interested in putting a Clubhouse out there, which is a strip bar I own in Dallas, but man, that city council, they've got 9 million ringers you've got to go through.

"I've got a lot of friends in the city," he adds. "Amazing Johnathan, Carrot Top, people like that. I'm hoping they come out to the show. It's going to be a good night, man."