BIOHAZARD's BILLY GRAZIADEI: 'We're Like ROCKY BALBOA. We Shine Best When People Count Us Out'

By David E. Gehlke

Seminal Brooklyn, NY metallic hardcore veterans BIOHAZARD announced the reformation of their classic lineup of Evan Seinfeld (vocals/bass),Billy Graziadei (vocals/guitar),Bobby Hambel (guitar) and Danny Schuler (drums) in 2022, which was subsequently followed by a run of dates in 2023. It helped turn the page on an otherwise tumultuous century for the band, dotted with inconsistent studio albums, lineup changes and a lack of Stateside label support, most notably for 2012's "Reborn In Defiance", an LP which has still yet to see a proper release on these shores. Things perhaps hit their nadir in 2017 when Seinfeld's replacement, Scott Roberts, left BIOHAZARD, thus leaving the band's future up in the air.

The sudden passing of former manager Scott Koenig in 2021 was the catalyst for the original members of BIOHAZARD to bury the proverbial hatchet, leading to what Graziadei is calling a "restart." The term feels fitting upon the release of "Divided We Fall", an LP that ranks among BIOHAZARD's most cohesive since 1996's sorely underrated "Mata Leão" and its predecessor, 1994's "State Of The World Address". Alas, Graziadei feels BIOHAZARD is at its best when facing adversity and being counted out, which was one of the many topics on hand when he chatted with BLABBERMOUTH.NET.

Blabbermouth: What's been the most satisfying thing about the BIOHAZARD reunion thus far?

Billy: "That's a good question. I would say the most satisfying thing about BIOHAZARD is realizing it wasn't a reunion. I had moved on with different bands and was done with the BIOHAZARD saga — the comedy and tragedy it was, the ups and downs of our career and the revolving door of members. I'm the only original member of the band. But I moved on. Our manager, Scott Koenig, who was with us for most of the early part of our career, called me up one night when I was working on a new POWERFLO record, and he asked more about me and what I was doing than he talked about himself. He was in the hospital. He was practically on his deathbed with some severe complications from some heavy health issues, and he had Covid. He was more interested in talking about me than answering his questions about how he was doing. We were on the phone for more than an hour. Sadly, the next day he had passed. He said he was coming home the next day. The last thing he said to me was, 'Bury the hatchet. Put the bullshit behind you and put the band back together.' I said, 'I've done it. I've done POWERFLO and BILLY BIO. They are my focus.' He helped me with those bands and gave me a lot of advice. Those were his last words. I woke up the next day, and he was gone. We were close. He was a great dude. Well-loved, liked and respected in the metal community and underground world.

"I bumped into Evan at a memorial at the Rainbow. I shook his hand and told him I wished it were under different circumstances. We exchanged quick pleasantries and went our separate ways. Over the next several months, those words from Scott dangled in my head. To make a long story short, I ended up conceding: 'Yeah, let's get in a room.' That's what it was. It rocked, bro. We went out to dinner. We hung out. We jammed some more. It was so much like our youth back in the late '80s and '90s. The rawness, and I guess the things that mattered to us back then, are so far below what we're concerned about these days. None of that shit bubbled up. I was like, 'Okay, cool. Maybe we'll do a couple of shows.'

"We booked a show with Jamey Jasta's Milwaukee Metalfest. It was unrehearsed, so raw and unpolished, but amazing. That's what BIOHAZARD always was; what I love about the band. We're more like Rocky Balboa, where we don't have all the best training gear. It was never a big, heavy-level production band. We shine best when we're underground, and when people counted us out, that show was like that. We were high fiving on stage. It was like, 'This is fucking fun. This is great!' Then I realized it wasn't a reunion. A lot of reunions happen when people put bands back together. It's often when you have a few years left on your mortgage, you're getting older, your day job sucks, and you're like, 'Let me rub some of those glory days.' It wasn't like that. Most of us had moved on and had different things in our lives that we loved, different businesses and investments, but being onstage with the guys and finding out, 'Holy shit. This is the fountain of youth.' We deliver more energy at our age than most bands in their 20s do now. The thing was it was all fucking fun. It never got worse. I thought, 'Okay, cool. Now we have three shows. Milwaukee. Two in New York.' Then someone suggested we do a tour. I didn't think we'd make it through the tour, but we did. It got better and better. With smiles and high-fives, along with the energy and atmosphere onstage, we were having so much fun that the audience could see it. People dug it. It just worked. It was cool! Everything seemed natural. That's what it was. I know it's a long-winded answer and you guys like short anecdotes, but I hadn't been hit with that question. I realized it wasn't a reunion. It was a restart. We started sharing music, sharing ideas. It was like, 'Yeah, that's fucking cool.' We played a new song live. I always hated playing new songs before the record came out. Nobody knew it, but when the audience crossed their arms and stopped moving, the energy would drop. I do it too, but with this new song, it was like we were playing 'Shades Of Grey Part II' or 'Punishment Part II'. People were going, 'Is this new?' They were trying to sing along.

"Matt Hyde, our producer, I owe a lot to him. Matt said to me, 'Listen. You moved on. You have POWERFLO and BILLY BIO. Love it. All cool.' He loves POWERFLO, knows Sen Dog from POWERFLO, and did the CYPRESS HILL demos from back in the day. He said, 'I don't want you to be Billy Biohazard in 2023. I need you to be Billy Biohazard from fucking 1993.' He goes, 'You created something unique, special and powerful. Just be the band. Be you. All the shit you learned, don't try to out-write yourself. Don't try to impress Dave Mustaine [MEGADETH], James Hetfield [METALLICA], or Kerry King [SLAYER] with your writing. Just fucking be BIOHAZARD. Be the band that you were that the world fell in love with.' I learned over the years by studying with different vocal coaches that I'm not the most melodic singer, but I can sing melody. I learned all these things from music theory, songwriting theory, practice, vocal approaches and similar things. I threw it all out. I do warmups every day, even if I'm not singing. I threw all that shit out. I was Billy Biohazard, 1992, walking into the studio without warmups. My voice got destroyed. I remember we went on tour. I finished singing the last song on the record, and we were doing a tour the next day. I found a vocal coach and a vocal therapist who help rebuild your voice. I just approached it like a working-class dude digging a hole. I know what I know. I did what I do best. Matt helped bring that out of me, but he did the same with Evan, Bobby, with his killer leads and Danny with drums. Being BIOHAZARD from back in the day, playing everything live, capturing that fucking energy, it's all on film. We filmed the whole thing. We got this great thing we're working on—I can't talk more about it. Now I'm telling the world because Blabbermouth is the pulse of the underground. [Laughs] I wouldn't have believed it if you said, 'Hey, Bill. We're going to be talking about your new record in three years.' We fucking love it. We were never concerned with what other people thought. It was about how we felt. If it moved us, that's all that mattered. To have a record that I'm super proud of — all of us are. That's another shocker. I would have never bet on that: 'Something's going to happen. It was a lot of fun, but someone said something stupid or brought up something from the past.' We moved past those things. As we got older, some of the things that mattered when you're in your early 20s don't matter. Some things are more important."

Blabbermouth: Was the band just not in a good spot around "Reborn In Defiance"? Were a lot of the hurdles you mentioned just too high at the time?

Billy: "Yeah. It was a great record. [Blabbermouth] gave us a lot of support, but it was a very short reunion. We weren't close. Some of us were. We just weren't resonating on the same wavelength. That was a reunion. I think I went into this restart with the same mindset, but it is what it was. We're trying to make a record…it's like a different band. 'Divided We Fall', the way we made this record versus 'Reborn In Defiance' in 2010. Evan quit the band while we were making it. That was insane. Then we got Scott [Roberts] in the band. We couldn't even do photos. We made videos. I did a contest on social media and asked our family. I prefer to call people 'family'; they're not 'fans.' I asked them to make a BIOHAZARD video for a song called 'Vengeance Is Mine'. We released a video that way. I came up with the idea of taking old photos and adding skeletons, as if they were X-rays. Evan had gone through so much crazy shit with his old lady at the time. Looking back, it would have been great not to attempt to do that. There are moments on that record that I love, but I'm really proud and happy to be where we are now. Those 12, 13 years, a lot changed."

Blabbermouth: Where are you coming from lyrically on the new album? Is it a reflection of the current state of the world?

Billy: "One hundred percent. The title is a line in 'Fuck The System'. I suggested, 'Let's change the [album] title from 'Fuck The System' to 'Divided We Fall. It's more timely.' We kept 'Fuck The System' as a song title. It worked for the record. I hate to say it, but I think we do progress, although sometimes, two steps forward and one step back still feels like a regression. It's so crazy, and perhaps it's because of social media, and we're living our lives with a feed of information. Some of it's correct, some of it's wrong, some of it's manipulated. It has caused a lot of division. I watched the underground scene kind of ebb and flow, like it was growing and shrinking. Metal, the underground subculture, has always been there. It will never die. Sometimes it's more popular. Sometimes, it's less popular. It's always going to be there. There's always bullshit and strife in the world that builds up this pressure. We all need a release; we all need to let it out. It's constructive to do other things, but going to a concert, stage-diving or screaming at the top of our lungs or head-banging, it's a release, and it's a great thing for all of us when there is a lot of pressure, like there was back in the late '80s and early '90s, when we started. We just spoke out about reality, the things we were going through. It resonated with a lot of people. Those lyrics are just as relevant now as they were then. So, to have a song made by the same dudes is exciting. We're the only band from our genre that has the original guys. Nobody from that era has the original members. It's the same, same dudes, same heartfelt, passionate and focused vibe and expression of BIOHAZARD. To see that and to feel it, hear it, read the lyrics from dudes who are still writing about similar subjects, similar themes, like survival, overcoming adversity and welcoming challenges and division. It kind of makes you a little bit of a cynic. Looking back and saying, 'Wow. The shit is the same as it was in the '90s.'"

Blabbermouth: I think of a song like "Five Blocks To The Subway". The theme of "this is what I have to do every day" still resonates.

Billy: "There's a great story about that song. We got approached by these two dudes. Took a meeting with Scott. They said, 'You have a song, 'Five Blocks To The Subway'. It wasn't out. I remember we recorded a version of that song for 'Urban Discipline'. We didn't release it. We ended up re-recording it and released it during 'State Of The World Address'. We recently reissued 'Urban Discipline' with that song, and it's amazing. It's way more metal. Chunky guitars and less bouncy. Those dudes sat us down and they're talking about the song. They said, 'We want to create a game based on your song. It's going from your house to the train station on Flatbush Ave. and the shit you saw along the way.' We were like, 'What? Fuck you. No way.' Well, respectfully, we said, 'That's not our thing. Our integrity is all we've got.' We're like, 'Thank you, but no thank you.' Those dudes went on to form Rock Star Games, and that game became 'Grand Theft Auto'."

Blabbermouth: That would have been a pretty cool opportunity.

Billy: "If you think about the lyrics, that's what the game is about. That's what it is. It's all the shit you have to go through to get where you want to go. It's 'Grand Theft Auto'. My son plays it. I told him the story, and he chuckled, and my wife said, 'Are you kidding me? We'd never have to pay a mortgage.' I'd rather still dig for a token in my pocket and be proud of the decisions we made, then be, 'We sold out for a video game.'"

Blabbermouth: You were on Warner Bros. when all this happened. Was life on a major a good experience?

Billy: "I like a certain type of bread. I don't give a fuck what truck brings the bread in. I'm going to buy the bread I like as long as the bread tastes the same. I remember catching a lot of flak. That was an era where it was almost, 'You can't be a band with ethics and be waving a certain flag and be on a major label.' It was the anti-Christ. That was the analogy. We said, 'We're able to reach more people with the same message we've been saying since 'Urban Discipline' and the first record.' It was a bigger soapbox for us. It changed. After that, I remember KORN and SOULFLY started getting Adidas endorsements and all that stuff, which, when we were younger, we looked at it like it was selling out. I'm not saying KORN and those guys sold out. All of a sudden, it became more accepted. When you had a record deal on a major label, it was more looked at, 'Oh. They are successful.' It worked differently. The times changed, but as I went through that, I especially loved Roadrunner. It's probably one of my favorite record labels. There have been a few that I clicked with as well. The new one, BLKIIBLK. It's similar. What I liked about Roadrunner was that everyone at the label, except for a few legal people, was a fan. They liked the fact that they could have a job and get free tickets to see the band they loved that was on the label. It was the best and biggest record label for that genre of music. It was killer. BLKIIBLK is similar. They're all fans. We've known some of the people and worked with them in the past. It's a great place. We like to surround ourselves with people who like doing what they do and don't look at things like a money grab."

Photo credit: Istvan Bruggen