Sevendust singer Lajon Witherspoon knew his band had made it when Ted Nugent turned up at one of their gigs with a live buffalo in tow. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, and the Atlanta five-piece were opening for Metallica at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome. The Nuge and fellow Motor City hero/future MAGA pitchman Kid Rock were also on the bill, as was the snorting 800lb hunk of meat Ted had brought with him.
“It was crazy,” Witherspoon says now, sitting in a dressing room beneath London’s O2 with Sevendust drummer Morgan Rose a few hours before his band take the stage as support to Alter Bridge. “We were in our bus and this truck pulled up. It was Ted Nugent and a big old buffalo. They had to reinforce the stage because he was gonna ride that buffalo on stage.”
That Metallica New Year’s Eve show was the result of a whirlwind couple of years that had taken Sevendust from unknown local band to national contenders. Their coronation would be complete at the end of Metallica’s set, when all four bands – Sevendust included – got on stage to jam on a cover of Kiss’s Detroit Rock City.
“At the end, James Hetfield gives me his guitar,” says Witherspoon. “I do not know how to play guitar, but I was playing my heart out.”
Have Sevendust spoken to any of the bands they shared the stage with that night since? Metallica, yes. Rock’s leading right-wing wingnuts? Not so much.
“Uh-uh,” says the singer, with a ‘do you really have to ask?’ look on his face. “Not me.”
Sevendust are one of America’s most resilient bands. They weren’t as successful as contemporaries such as Limp Bizkit and Creed, although a run of three gold albums on the bounce between 1997’s self-titled debut and 2001’s Animosity is nothing to be sniffed at. But their greatest achievement came afterwards – surviving the worst the music industry could throw at them. “Yeah, we’ve had a few moments where it looked like it was game over,” Rose says drily.
Atlanta wasn’t exactly a hotbed of hard rock and heavy metal in the mid-90s, but there were enough bands for Rose to cherry-pick musicians from to form Sevendust. As a teenager, the drummer had briefly been a member of local underground star and future Drag Race icon RuPaul’s new-wave band Wee Wee Pole. “I’m such a blip in that machine he’s run for the last forty years,” he says.
Sevendust rehearsed and sometimes gigged in The Wreck Room. “A rat-infested shithole,” as Rose puts it.
“There was a strip club next door,” Witherspoon adds. “You go in there you might not come out.”
They bagged high-profile management in the shape of former Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, who also produced their self-titled debut album. That the union didn’t last much beyond that record says much about the relationship.
Sevendust sold exactly 311 copies the first week. But it sold more the week after, and more the week after that, until it sailed past half a million copies. They were road dogs, and feral on stage too – one band they supported, long-forgotten alt.rockers The Nixons, threatened to kick them off the tour for being too aggressive live. Sevendust found a place in the nu metal scene, but even then they felt like outsiders.
“They were cool kids from LA, we were hicks from Georgia,” says Witherspoon. “They kind of ignored us a little.”
There were fuck-ups along the way, mostly from the people around the band. Such as the time their label, TVT, blocked a collaboration with Eminem, who Sevendust had got to know on the 1999 Warped Tour, just as the rapper exploded. “They didn’t think it was going to be a thing,” says Rose, rolling his eyes.
Still, things seemed good. They opened for Metallica and Limp Bizkit and hung out at TV shows with a pre-megastardom Beyoncé. They were one of the best live acts around, and their records consistently sold. But it all came crashing down in the mid-2000s.
“There was a lot of money coming through,” says Witherspoon, “and we were making nothing.”
The reasons are complicated and a legal minefield. The short version is that a succession of managers and accountants didn’t necessarily have the band’s best interests at heart.
At one point they were so broke that they had to leave in the middle of a European tour.
“When you’re a week in and you hear: ‘You’ve lost seventy-five grand’, it’s bad,” says Rose. “We had to leave cos we couldn’t pay our rent back home.”
Later, the band attempted to sue one of their ex-associates for mismanaging their money, only to end up having to pay them $40,000.
“There were times we came close to going bankrupt,” says Morgan. “One of the people who was stealing from us is now in jail for stealing for somebody else.”
It took nearly a decade, and a new manager, to pull themselves out of the hole. Even then, their trials weren’t over. In 2022, Rose gave a podcast interview in which he said the band were planning to quit at some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future. “Oh, that was a real thing,” he says.
Today he admits that he and guitarist Clint Lowery were deadly serious about it. The pair were tired and frustrated that Sevendust seemed to be going in ever-decreasing circles. Tours had been confined to North America – their current European dates are their first in eight years, and their previous UK shows were nine years before that. They were ready to walk. The others?
“Everybody else despised the idea,” says Witherspoon. “I stopped talking to him [Rose] for a while. I can tell you, if they’d have done it, you’d have seen a band called Threedust, cos we weren’t giving up.”
The solution was to do what men of their age don’t do: talk about it. They re-examined their friendship and everything they’d been through. They emerged with new album, One, a record whose title underlines their rediscovered unity.
“It’s been tough – we’ve been ripped off, we nearly went bankrupt,” says Rose. “We survived what many people wouldn’t have survived. I don’t know how we did it, but out of everything we’ve done, I’m proudest of that.”
One is out now via Napalm Records. Sevendust are currently on tour in the US, and play the UK and Europe in November and December. For dates and tickets, check the Sevendust website.
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