Deftones Guitarist Says Moreno Was Almost Kicked Out Of Band Wednesday October 11, 2006 @ 06:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff 
DeftonesThe
Deftones' fifth album, Saturday Night Wrist, will be released on Halloween. If you're wondering why it's taken so long to reach store shelves, guitarist
Stephen Carpenter has a very simple explanation.
"Chino," he states flatly, citing frontman
Chino Moreno's
Team Sleep side project as the cause of the frequent delays. "He decided to do a Team Sleep tour right in the middle of the process of working on our record, so that was about six months that was knocked out while we weren't doing anything.
"That's actually why we put together that B-sides and rarities album while he was away."
Moreno's decision didn't go over well with his bandmates. "It was upsetting for us," admits Carpenter.
"We were all pretty pissed. We almost kicked him out of the band at one point. We worked everything out, but for a while it was frustrating for all of us. We all did not like him at all.
"We thought it was pretty inconsiderate. We had already started writing and recording our record. We were already in that process, and then for him in the middle of it to decide that he's going to go do something with his other band, largely in part because he didn't have any ideas for our own music, we thought that was pretty lame."
Aside from Moreno's engagements with Team Sleep, Carpenter calls the band's label the main obstacle for Saturday Night Wrist. Even after the group finished recording, constant shifts in Maverick's release schedule prevented the album from being released.
"Our record company was really trying to control what we were doing at the beginning of the process," says Carpenter. "They gave us money to do what we wanted, but the way we see it, there's X amount of dollars allotted to us per album, right, but we want to spend the money the way we want to so we can do what we need to take care of.
"The record company wants to be the dolomite and just dole it out the way they think we deserve it. It's really fucked up, and that definitely set us back because… I went through a divorce. Me and [bassist]
Chi [
Cheng] were just both coming out of divorces when we started doing this project. I was fuckin' tapped out financially, so was Cheng. Chino, his life was falling apart. We all could use that money to set ourselves up a little bit.
"Instead, they all just left us hanging in the wind, suffering through the entire process. Definitely I have some serious resentment of record companies, man. I don't even consider them as part of the equation half the time."
The label woes started after their last album, the eponymous Deftones, failed to perform as well as White Pony in the label's eyes.
"After White Pony, which I guess was our most known record, when we did the Deftones record, we went out for six months," says Carpenter. "And after six months of touring, our record company was talking about it being dead and all this.
"We're like, 'We just won a fuckin' Grammy. We just did all this. You did what?'
"We ran out of promotional money. It's like you guys have a blank cheque in our name, and it gets charged to our account, and you spend it on whatever you want. I am not down with that at all. That has gotta be the one thing that pushes me out of this record company one day, the fact that they can spend money on your behalf and you don't even get a clue as to what it's about."
With the record done and its release impending, Carpenter is breathing a little easier and tensions within the band seem to have abated.
"Even at the point when we wanted to kick Chino out, I don't think we would've done it," admits the guitarist. "He would've had to really push us and say, 'Go ahead, kick me out.'
"He's just one of us. We're all the same. There might be something else, we might go from project to project, and it might take forever for us to start something else, but we'll never break up. I don't ever want to do a reunion tour. That's so gay."
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