BURTON C. BELL SPEAKS OUT ON THE FEAR FACTORY DRAMA
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 3:30pm by Axl Rosenberg
Burton C. Bell has remained pretty quiet on the whole Fear Factory situation up until now, but the good folks at Rock My Monkey have finally gotten him to open up and do some shit-talkin’ of his own. It’s an audio interview, but Mr. Blabbermouth has transcribed some key portions…
…which I’m not even going to re-print here. Because it’s mostly anti-climatic. But I’ll give you the short version: Bell’s side of the story is that during the mixing of the Dino-less FF offering Transgression, Christian Olde Wolbers started having an affair with the band’s manager, Christy Priske. And I guess things got pretty serious, ’cause the two are married now. Bell found Wolbers and Priske’s shitting where they eat as “completely unacceptable,” and things got worse when Priske, Wolbers and Raymond Herrera allegedly brought Bell some new business arrangement which he also disliked. And then things really fell to shit: Bell says he refused to work with Priske, Wolbers and Herrera refused to let her go and refused to reunite with Dino, and now we have all this fun mud slinging in a public forum.
But here’s the part of the interview I actually found really interesting, and this part I will re-print verbatim:
Rock My Monkey: So you definitely feel that they had a choice other than the legal action that they took to resolve this dispute?
Burton: [Laughs] They did not initiate legal action. Dino and I filed a lawsuit first. We filed a suit maintaining that we had the right to use the band name and to take care of some other issues. So we filed the lawsuit first.
Wow. Really? The Bell/Cazares FF started the lawsuit? That’s interesting. I’d be curious to know what these “other issues” are, but I wonder on what grounds they can claim to have “the right to use the band name?” While we wait for our boys at Metal Insider to weigh in with their music-biz expertise, are there any lawyers or former members of hair metal bands who care to posit a theory? ‘Cause it seems to me that if Christian and Ray-Ray are part owners of Fear Factory, Inc. or whatever, you’d have to provide a pretty decent legal reason why they’re unfit to be ongoing members of the board.
In any case, talking completely out of my ass, the whole thing still stinks to me. I just feel like there’s a piece of Bell’s story missing somewhere. Because in this version, Priske, Wolbers and Herrera basically teamed up against him. And, I dunno. Maybe they did. But my gut tells me the real story isn’t so black and white.
I’m dying to see what decision a judge hands down in this whole case, especially now knowing that the lawsuit originated with Team Bell.
-AR
baby mama drama?
I don’t know man, Dino is a huge douche, and if my memory from highschool when they originally broke up serves me correctly, Dino and Burton originally had some beef. Because if I’m not mistaken for a while it was Christian, Herrera and Burton. So for him to try and get back together with his fat doucheness himself to try and reunite fear factory, christian and herrera had to have done something pretty shitty, like offering a new contract that fucks Burton out of the almighty dollar.
Thats just how i see it anyway.
Who cares. No one is gonna give a shit about whatever form of Fear Factory ever comes back. THey should just retire the name and go their separate ways and not ruin their already flimsy credibility.
sepultura 2?
Arkaea should just call themselves the Christy Conspiracy.
This reminds me of how Sepultura imploded. At that point I didn’t like Sepultura anyways (boo Roots). To be honest I haven’t even really heard the new FF albums, but seeing them at Gigantour was anticlimactic.
Maybe they have the wherewithall to top Demanufacture. I guess only time will tell. I hope they make songs about iphones and shit.
That’s the concept for the new album… the iphones become self aware and attack us when we least expect it.
LOOOL
I don’t really give a shit about the personal drama, I don’t it’s even worth reporting, Since both Arkaea and Divine Heresy suck, the next Fear Factory album better be gods gift to the world.
Better yet, the new TENET album will most likely kill all of them combined.
http://www.myspace.com/tenetforce
think*
Christy is the old FF manager, she is Christians wife which she now dates Raymond, she also dated Tommy cummings.
i’m glad burton set the record straight, the new FF will be amazing!
The problem with all this drama is it moves away focus from the truth; they really weren’t that great in the first place.
I look back on FF as jackals who stalked the U.S wasteland of nineties metal, but were elevated to the status of lions in the absence of anything better at the time.
Sea lion in the case of Dino.
That analogy is pretty fucking metal.
cant wait to see how dinos burps and farts are gonna sound along with burtons emo ass vocals.. they need to retire