Mastodon Pay Loving Tribute to Late Guitarist Brent Hinds in Emotional 35-Minute Video: ‘He Was a Wild Man, Our Wild Man’

Mastodon are opening up for the first time about the band’s difficult decision to break ties with co-founder guitarist Brent Hinds last March, just months before the rocker died in a fatal motorcycle accident in Atlanta in August at age 51.

In an emotional 35-minute YouTube video entitled “The Mastodon in the Room,” singer/bassist Troy Sanders, guitarist Bill Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor talk about the volatile nature of their relationships with Hinds, who they describe as a loving, but often volatile man who struggled with mental health and addiction issues.

“It isn’t easy to talk about Brent, he was our family, someone we all loved wholeheartedly. He was a wild man, our wild man, and that came with some challenges,” they wrote in the video description. “Both things are true and we aren’t interested in chasing one truth over the other. Losing him has meant sitting with a type of grief we never expected. No more hugs, no more high fives, no more disagreements, no more making up. That part has been hard, it’s real.”

The video opens with Dailor announcing Hinds’ death to a crowd at a show in Alaska last year, then cuts to him explaining, “I was confronted with it … it had just happened and I felt like I just wanted to talk to somebody about it. “We loved him so so so very much,” he says in the video from the show, in which Dailor shared that things were sometimes rocky and they had “ups and downs” in their 25-year relationship with the hard rock band’s co-founder, saying “it’s not always perfect. It’s not always amazing, but we were brothers to the end.”

In the new interview, he admits that he was not ready to address it at that show last year, at which point he didn’t even have all the details about how Hinds died. The film then moves on to the remaining trio smiling while screening a montage of playful video featuring Hinds in an Atlanta movie theater as they unpack their complicated, often contentious, relationship with their late friend and band mate.

“There was a certain level that Brent would get to where I just had to excuse myself, you know what I mean?” Dailor says of Hinds’ fearlessness and debauchery. “And he wanted you to come, you know? He wanted you to come into the abyss.” After any “incident,” Dailor says they knew the next show would be a good one. “It’s almost like what you hear with a battered housewife,” he explains. “The remorseful boyfriend or husband comes back with flowers. … He bought us diamond rings.”

And though the joy of having a great show would help them forget about the difficulties of Hinds’ erratic behavior, as the band watch archival footage of Hinds smiling and joking in the studio while shredding, Kelliher says it makes him forget that at one point Hinds “was that guy at one time … so into playing guitar in Mastodon.”

They delve into the difficult night in 2007 when Hinds got into a fight with System of a Down bassist Shavo Odadjian and musician William Hudson and ended up with a concussion and a traumatic brain injury in the incident in which Las Vegas police determined Hinds was the aggressor. In voice-over, Dailor says, “for the first time Mastodon felt real fragile … In his very, very drunken states would be a habitual line-stepper.”

The trio say they thought the band was over at that point and that Hinds’ brain damage might cause them to break up. But then they went to visit the guitarist and he had worked up some acoustic arrangements for what became their best-selling album to that point, 2009’s Crack the Skye, which debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200.

But with a lot of complicated guitar parts and vocals, Kelliher says that Hinds’ all-night partying made it hard to pull the tunes off in a live setting, with Dailor describing on-stage outbursts and Hinds lashing out at crew when things did not go the way he wanted them to. With Hinds increasingly unavailable to practice due to his late night excursions, the other three began going to bed earlier, doing vocal warm-ups and cutting back on their drinking, as Hinds retreated and the camaraderie and love began to dissipate.

“When it was great, it was great. And when it was horrible, it was really horrible,” Kelliher says, with Sanders describing the sessions for 2021’s Hushed and Grim double album, as “the most separate we’ve ever been in the studio … the dark tones and the alcohol and the things that had their nails in him harder than ever before.”

The tour in support of that album reflected the strain, with Sanders’ talk of endless “heart-to-heart” talks during sober daytime discussions and the exhaustion of “throwing all this love at something that was straight up not listening or not caring. At some point we realized we can’t do anything else. What is there to do?”

Frustrated and depressed, the band had a daytime meeting in which Sanders read a long letter describing the difficulties they were having with Hinds’ actions, with the guitarist realizing halfway through that the issues were all focused on him. Sanders says Hinds got up and walked out halfway through the reading and, despite being sure in his heart that there would be a rapprochement at some point and they would figure it out, it was the last time he ever saw him.

“It was horrible,” Dailor says. “It was really depressing and sad, f–ked up. We just wanted that beautiful, amazing creature Brent Hinds out there serving up the honey-baked ham and screaming his head off. … We desperately wanted that guy. But he showed us time and again that that person wasn’t coming back without some dramatic change.”

Following the split with Hinds’, the band hired guitarist Nick Johnston. Dailor told Blabbermouth in May that the group had finished their ninth album, the first with no input from Hinds. “It was a hard record to make. It was a very emotional time for us. I lost my mom, we went through all this turmoil with Brent, and then he passed away,” he said of the untitled LP. “It’s been tough. It’s all in the music, it’s all in the songs.” Last month, the group released the punishing “Your Ghost Again,” a tribute to Hinds on which Dailor sings, “When we throw love at this/ We let go of all these wasted years … I saw your ghost again/ Vision of a future non-existent.”

Watch The Mastodon in the Room below.