There has never been a guitar player quite like Brent Hinds and there never will be. The former Mastodon guitarist, who died, aged 51, in a motorcycle crash last week, was the ultimate maverick.
You could see it in his style, how he carried himself and how he performed, even in his choice of electric guitars. The tattoo on his forehead was a tell. You could see it in his eyes but above all you could see it in how he played, which, as with all the greats, was a function of his style and personality.
Hinds was gratifyingly all id. He would baulk at being called a metal guitar player. His note choice careened all over the map, his playing steeped in the traditions of country guitar but expanded by a wayfaring musical imagination. Prog rock, metal, psychedelic rock; it was all there.
“I’m not a metal guitarist,” he told Guitar World in 2022. “Sometimes I stumble upon a metal riff and I’ve been influenced by bands like Isis. I get it where I can fit it, but I’m an oddball when it comes to the metal scene. I love country. My favorite country singer/songwriter is Johnny Paycheck and my favorite guitar-playing country artist is Jerry Reed.”
“I’ve always liked odd music, I’ve always been the odd guy,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2016. “Even back in high school, people would be like, ‘That guy is weird, hanging out over there sucking his thumb!’ My country swing heroes are Django Reinhardt, Jerry and Jimmy Reed, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins… there are just so many. On top of that, there’s Danny Gatton, Paco De Lucia...”
Hinds appreciated players with manual dexterity. He would later launch a pedal brand, and there would be pedals on the floor during a Mastodon show, but they were only as a means to an end; he preferred “the players that prove you don’t need effects, you just need to know how to play the goddamn guitar”.
![Mastodon - Teardrinker [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/sx1L2XW1N0c/maxresdefault.jpg)
Whether he liked it or not, Hinds would become one of his generation’s most exciting players to shape metal guitar. He was Mastodon’s feral berserker, cavalier and unorthodox, and that gave his guitar partnership with Bill Kelliher – the sensible one, “Uncle Bill” – the dramatic tension the band needed.
Hinds used his fingers, hybrid picking subversively establishing a bluegrass twang in some of the early ‘00s heaviest compositions. Mastodon’s third album, Blood Mountain, was released in 2006, nearly 20 years ago, and what Hinds was playing during the mid-section of Capillarian Crest still remains a mystery.
The antic rat-a-tat of the virtuosic Brann Dailor’s snare drum sounds like an urgent attempt to haul the band upwards to join Hinds on whatever plane he had ascended to in that moment. No, there has never been a guitar player quite like Brent hinds.
In interviews, he was radically unguarded. He sometimes took the opportunity to note his horror at the volume coming from Kelliher’s rig. In 2010, when speaking from a hotel room in Guatemala, Hinds told me Kelliher’s rig would do you an injury and the noise was really getting to him. He was only half-joking.
“Dude, if you were to come up onstage and stand in front of my amps, you could actually stand there and enjoy what is happening,” he said. “But then if you walk over to Bill’s side… When I walk over there it hurts my ears very badly so I have to skedaddle back. I am the lead guitar player, he’s the rhythm player, so why he’s that loud I’ll never know. I’ve told him for 10 years now to please turn down. It is hurting my ears and is just unnecessary.”
Dynamics was what he was interested in. Most players in this line of work want to turn it up and go for power. Hinds wielded the power of the riff judiciously.
Growing up in Alabama, he started out on banjo before moving to guitar. That was why he used his fingers so much, and couldn’t understand why more players didn’t use them.
I’m a kid from Alabama. I didn’t even know guitar players played with picks
“They’re just sitting there doing nothing right in front of the strings while you are flailing away with your pinched pick,” he said. “I would much rather work smarter and not harder at anything. Why would I exhaust all my efforts when there’s a finger directly in front of the string that can easily be plucked?
“I’ve tried to teach many of my peers and friends how to do the hybrid chicken-picking thing and it seems to go over a lot of people’s heads. I’m still trying to teach it to Bill.
“I guess because I started teaching it to myself when I was very young, 11 years old or something, it’s kind of an instinctive thing for me. I’m a kid from Alabama. I didn’t even know guitar players played with picks. The first people I ever saw playing guitar were playing with their fingers, so I immediately, instinctively started playing with my fingers.”
The lessons in chicken picking might not have taken. But he taught us all just how spectacular a banjo-rolling solo could light up a metal track, as he did on Megalodon, from Mastodon’s 2004 sophomore album Leviathan.
It was a moment in which the rest of the band stood down, presumably in awe, as Hinds’ 10-second southern-fried Eruption fired the starter pistol on the double-time pummeling that was to follow.
Leviathan (2004) was a coming-of-age moment for Mastodon, and for their then-label Relapse, whose early ‘00s roster was home to the likes of Neurosis, High On Fire and Unearthly Trance. Things were really moving.
A concept record inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was the sort of audacious power-move Mastodon had threatened since forming in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2000. Leviathan built on the enormo-riff approach of 2002 debut full-length Remission, using Melville’s narrative to supersize their sound.
Blood And Thunder and Iron Tusk were merciless tracks, descendants of super-muscular Remission-era standards like Mother Puncher, Crusher Destroyer, and March Of The Fire Ants. But their chord vocabulary had expanded.
Leviathan’s denouement, the 13-minute Hearts Alive, felt like an EP in and of itself – Mastodon’s Apocalypse Now on the high seas – before the album drifted to a close with the languid acoustic guitar of the haunting instrumental Joseph Merrick. Hooper and Brody paddling to shore, the exploded shark sinking into the deep.
Blood Mountain followed. The intervening years between Blood Mountain and 2009’s Crack The Skye were mixed for Hinds and Mastodon. After the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas in 2007, Hinds was assaulted and suffered a serious head injury.
This went some way to explaining why he wrote Crack The Skye on acoustic. Hinds complained of vertigo for months. But then he always wrote on acoustic.
“I’ve never written anything on an electric guitar,” Hinds said. “The heaviest sounding stuff we have, I wrote it on an acoustic guitar… I’ve played the electric guitar before, so I know what it is going to sound like when I put it through the stupid electric guitar. ‘Cool, it’s just going to be louder with distortion on it!’ You just have to have an imagination.”
![Mastodon - Crack The Skye [Live] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/1vGsUQqpByI/maxresdefault.jpg)
Since Hinds’ passing, Phillip Cope, guitarist/vocalist for Atlanta sludge band Kylesa, recalled him sitting on his porch with Hinds. The sun was coming up. Mastodon had just finished Leviathan. Hinds asked Cope if he wanted to hear it. Sure, he said.
“To my confusion instead of playing it on our stereo he proceeded to play the album in its entirety on my acoustic guitar,” writes Cope, on Instagram. “It was amazing. I always expected the unexpected when hanging out with him. I’ve seen it accurately said that anyone that met him has a story. I look forward to hearing those stories. Such a huge loss.”
Mastodon flew close to the sun with Crack The Skye. The touring schedule was brutal. The arrangements were not easy. Their musical progressivism was cresting. Hinds’ brain had been damaged in that assault but his mind was working just fine.
“My mind’s the most cosmic place I could ever visit,” he said. “All I have to do is zone out and play the guitar, and before you know it, I’ve visited places unheard of. I put all of that into Mastodon’s music.”
Produced by Brendan O’Brien, Crack The Skye was a trip, songs inspired by Tsarist Russia, wormholes and astral travel. The title track was a tribute to Dailor’s sister, Skye, who died when he was a teenager. Making it and performing it took its toll.
Once the touring cycle was done they had a decision to make; take some time out or switch up their style and do something besides a long-form concept record. They chose the latter, channelled influences like the Steve Miller Band and FM rock, and released The Hunter in 2011.
![Mastodon - Curl Of The Burl [Official Music Video] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/lAihDAJX8Ow/maxresdefault.jpg)
“We were all out of elements,” Hinds told MusicRadar in 2012. “I felt that it was a good time. If we moved on with another concept album about something super-crazy and psychedelic and ridiculous, and very hard to wrap your head around, it was going to do my head in. Fuck, I’m tired of being all serious and deep and talking in a quiet voice, explaining mystery to people.”
The Hunter was still super heavy, but super heavy and a good time. Tracks like The Curl Of The Burl, its riff dropped an octave via a Morpheus DropTune pedal, had put the smile back on Hinds’ face – and took Mastodon into the mainstream, where they performed it on Later… With Jools Holland.
“The way of doing this with these guys is to have ridiculous amounts of fun,” said Hinds. “I’d rather write some songs, have a good time, play some kick-ass jams, drink some wine, have some weed or whatever, party, have a good time – life’s too short to take everything so seriously.”
Those good times would come to an end earlier this year when Hinds exited the band, but for 25 years, Hinds and Mastodon’s rise proved irresistible.
By 2014, when it was time to track Once More ‘Round The Sun at Rock Falcon Studio, in Franklin, Tennessee, they had Nick Raskulinecz producing. O’Brien returned for 2017’s Emperor Of Sand. David Bottrill handled 2021’s Hushed And Grim. Major league producers.
Mastodon could count themselves one of the lucky ones, bands who grew their audience as their ideas got bigger.
As Mastodon got bigger, so too did Hinds’ guitar collection. Graduating from a collection of rare and obscure Gibsons, such as his Silverburst Flying V and Les Paul LP-295 Goldtop, Hinds would add more bespoke builds to his collection as the years progressed.
“I don’t really have any attachment to Gibson anymore, but when I was a kid, all my idols played Gibsons,” he said. “Whether it be Led Zeppelin or Thin Lizzy. In my mind, those guys knew the best way to play a guitar solo.”
Hinds commissioned Kevin Burkett’s Electrical Guitar Company to make him lucite Vs, complete with aluminium necks. Both he and especially Kelliher were big Black Flag fans. They had to own at least one lucite-bodied guitar.
“It’s kind of nostalgic of Greg Ginn and you can see through it, so it’s really neat,” said Hinds, during a 2015 rig tour with MusicRadar. “And when the lights hit it, it turns whatever colour the lights are. And it sounds good! It’s a bit heavier than your average gitfiddle.”
Hinds had a long standing collaboration with Matthew Hughes of Banker Guitars, an authorised Gibson partner that built him all kinds of boutique one-offs, like his Bigsby-equipped V out of black limba and the “Billy BigsBHinds Bender” that took a Billy Gibbons-style Gretsch ‘Billy-Bo’ Jupiter through the looking glass.
And we should mention Hughes’ personal favourite, the Black Ironman CT with the Flying V-style headstock and Bigsby.
“I knew this build would hit every one of his buttons,” said Hughes, in an Instagram post. “It has the whole man in black Johnny Cash vibe and pairs well with cowboy boots and Cadillacs but it looks right at home at Hellfest.”
Hinds also played a number of First Act guitars, including a Silverburst doubleneck, a Silverburst Lola 12-string doublecut that he used to perform Crack The Skye’s Ghost Of Karelia live, and a reverse Mosrite-style electric with a Bigsby vibrato. He had a similar looking offset made by ESP, this one with a Jazzmaster-style vibrato.
Amp-wise, Hinds made his bones with the ‘77 and ‘78 MKII 100-watt Lead Series Marshall JMPs he bought from Nashville Pussy back in the day, but he also worked with Orange on developing a signature guitar amp.
There was never as much gain in his sound as you might think. Listen to the clarity and sparkle in Hinds’ sound. And yet he could still take credit for Mastodon’s most extreme guitar moments, like tuning down to Drop A.
“I did that when I was trying to fuck around with our sound,” he said. “I was listening to a lot of Sleep and Sunn O))) at the time. I was getting more into the idea of noise… fragmented, augmented, whatever you wanna call it – fucked up stuff.”
Hinds could pull from all kinds of styles because that’s where his influences lay. If country was a foundational influence then so too was Neurosis and Melvins, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. Hinds could have been a character dreamed up in Zappa or Beefheart’s imagination. Maybe he was.
“Rory Gallagher is another guy that’s been a huge influence on my life and guitar approach,” he said in 2016, when Hinds’ musical curiosity had found him playing alongside Ben Weinman of the Dillinger Escape Plan. in Giraffe Tongue Orchestra.
But then he could sit in with anyone, guesting on records by the likes of Black Lips, CKY, Zoroaster – and with the Marcus King Trio live.
Their 2020 performance of Black Sabbath’s Electric Funeral – Hinds on his Banker black limba V and vocals – is even more poignant today given the recent deaths of Ozzy Osbourne and Hinds.
Like Osbourne, Hinds was no vocal technician but his drone/drawl had a shamanic quality that was all its own thing. Brent Hinds was all his own thing. We knew it. His bandmates knew it. And he knew it too.
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