Godsmack Fans

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Godsmack is a Boston-based band who were simply too undeniable to be ignored. Their self-titled major label debut isn't a calculated, big-budget offering. In fact, it started out as a self-released CD the band recorded in 1996 for about $2,500 with money they borrowed from a friend. Expecting maybe to make back the costs of recording, they peddled the disc to a local radio station WAAF embraced the song "Keep Away" and began playing the song on hi weekly evening program. Meanwhile, the band was performing regularly on the Boston club scene and soon drew the attention of Paul Geary, a long-time friend of Sully's and former drummer and manager of the group Extreme, who inevitably signed the band to his management company PGE.

Before long, airplay increased dramatically. With the blistering track "Whatever" (a combustive cut that grooves as it grinds) being spun regularly on WAAF, sales grew at a staggering rate. The disc became the #2 best-selling album at Newbury Comics.

"I was really shocked," recalls Sully, "Our album began selling 900 to 1000 copies a week!" After meeting with several interested labels, Godsmack chose to sign with Republic Records in July 1998.

Before Sully formed Godsmack, he played drums in a band called Strip Mind, which broke up in 1994. For a year, he went into hibernation, then he started getting that itch to write music again, so he called up his friend/bassist Robbie Merrill and asked him if he was interested in jamming on some new stuff. The two hooked up with drummer Tommy Stewart (ex-Lillian Axe) and local guitarist Lee Richards. A few months later, both Richards and Stewart quit the band. Guitarist Tony Rombola skillfully slipped into the guitar slot and a guy named Joe Darko filled the drumseat for a few years, although he didn't actually play on the band's record. That honor was held by Sully, who has been playing drums since age four. In 1997, after the band's star sign had begun to rise, Darko left and Godsmack invited original drummer Stewart back into the fold.

Throughout the album, Sully sings about the emotional extremes that often shadow people with intense lifestyles. "Timebomb" addresses the day-to-day pressures and frustrations that life often dished out, "Immune" is about urban vampires who suck the identities from their victims by emulating their fashion sense and behavoir patterns and "Voodoo" is based on the bizarre film epic The Serpent and the Rainbow.

"There are a lot of emotional highs and lows in my songs, but they're genuine emotions" says Sully, "I seem to do my best writing when I'm down. For me, writing is a release of energy." In addition to channeling his energies through Godsmack's aggressive music, he channels that energy via more spiritual paths as well. He is practicing Witch of the Celtic Religion (WICCA) under Salem Witch Laurie Cabot, and he continues to weave the Wiccan arts and rituals into the fabric of his daily life. "It's been my salvation," he says candidly. "A lot of people are confused about witchcraft, it's simply about worshipping the power of the earth, and that's it! It's a positive religion that has helped me through a lot of bad times."
Godsmack has sold over 10 million albums in the United States with an additional two million worldwide,including over 2 million singles sales worldwide. The band has had two number one albums (Faceless and IV) on the Billboard 200, which ranks the sales of all popular music. They have had a record-breaking fifteen top ten mainstream rock singles, a debut album selling over five million copies in just two years and have also been nominated for three Grammy Awards. The band have sold almost 17 million albums, singles, DVD's and compilation CD's, making them one of the US's most successful modern rock bands.



SULLY ERNA
BIOGRAPHY
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Full Name- Salvatore Paul Erna
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Birthdate- Feb.07, 1968
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Birthplace-Lawrence, MA
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Height- 5'4"
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Weight- 140
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Eye color- Green
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Children- One daughter, Skylar Brooke Erna, born Dec.17, 2001
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Siblings- 1 sister and 1 step sister
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Pets- Bulldog named Stomp
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Astrological sign- Aquarius
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Hobbies- Harley's and boxing
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Before Godsmack- Sully was working for an attorny doing collections.
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Fave food- Lobster
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Fave soda- Canada Dry Ginger Ale
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Fave beer- Corona
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Fave actor- Al Pacino
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Fave actress- Liv Tyler
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Fave horror movie- Interview with the vampire
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Fave show- The Sopranos
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Fave singer- Lisa Gerrard
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Fave bands- Dead Can Dance, Sevendust
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Fave store- Circut city
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Previous Bands- Strip Mind, Meliah Rage,and The Fighting Cocks
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Necklace -The necklace Sully wears all the time is a Celtic rune called Kanuz. They date back to about 200 B.C. and were developed by the Northern Tribes of Europe, the Nordic. They believed that if the correct symbol was chosen, then the element or force it represented would be enabled.This paticular rune is called Kanuz. It represents Fire generally, illumination, and good for craftspeople and artists for creativity.
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Religion- Sully is Wiccan and studies under Salem Witch Laurie Cabot
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Quote on his beleifs
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"This is the book. This is the way.Beleive it or go to hell.Fuck that. And who knows ? I could be wrong. Maybe when I die I could go to purgatory and there could be Jesus going, See? We tried to tell you the whole time, You fucked up now go to hell.



BIOGRAPHY:
Sully Erna is lucky to be alive -- and he knows it. He's now the singer of the million-selling Boston band Godsmack, but he could just as easily be 6 feet under and forgotten. His story is a harrowing journey through a violent childhood on the wrong streets of the north-of-Boston city of Lawrence. His experiences prompt him to write of it as a "place that makes the South Bronx look like a tropical resort."

Erna is now a drug-free father enjoying rock-star status, but "The Paths We Choose" doesn't titillate with details of that stardom. Instead it probes his longtime street-punk anger in hopes of spurring similarly lost youths to do something constructive with their lives.

Erna writes in an entertaining, fast-paced style, but it's not for the squeamish. He doesn't sanitize his past in any way. The only son of divorced parents, he was expelled from nearly every school he attended. He once threw a desk at a nun in school. He stole money at 11 and at the same age did his first bong hit, a prelude to cocaine and other drugs.

He later burned his books in a school locker and would go to the Showcase Cinemas in Lawrence to smash the windows of cars and steal their stereo systems. "It really freaks me out when I think of those times," writes Erna, whose mother moved him to Fayetteville, N.C., to start a new life. After getting into more trouble there and suffering crippling anxiety attacks, he moved back to the Bay State.

The only thing that kept him going was music. His father, a trumpet player, led the Salvatore Erna Band, which played an annual festival in Lawrence. Young Sully discovered an aptitude for drums and feverishly studied such rock drummers as John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Joey Kramer (Aerosmith), and Neil Peart (Rush). Erna's first band was called Slaughter, but its debut gig in Salisbury Beach in 1983 was canceled because police discovered cocaine in the dressing room.

Other bands followed: Lexx Luthor, Attic Bratt, the Fighting Cocks, Meliah Rage, and Seka. Erna finally began writing songs based on his own experiences, and that sparked the success of Godsmack, which signed a three-record, half-million-dollar deal after a gig at the Tank in Revere.

Erna had previously financed his music by working in warehouses, ..ing docks, and at Gillette on the assembly line, placing caps on underarm deodorant. He also installed carpets and worked at a collection agency. "My alias was Brad Sullivan for those of you who might have gotten a call from me," he writes.

For a long time, Erna seemed like a character out of Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets." He even had the gall to ask bikers not to wear their colors at early Godsmack gigs because he felt they were scaring off fans (especially women), and they agreed. And meanwhile he was living next to a police station in Methuen where he had once been arrested for larceny.

It's a rock-star-rags-to-riches story that feels genuine throughout. Erna has grown up, but the scars from his childhood still haunt him. At one point he goes back to his old Lawrence neighborhood and sees a fresh crop of kids standing on the corner and drinking liquor out of paper bags.

"I wanted to go over and talk to those kids about their dreams and goals," he notes in the epilogue. "I ended up doing what I felt was the next best thing: I wrote this book.