Chiodos: The Power of Negative Thinking

Craig Owens quits his band once a month. Usually, he doesn’t tell anyone. He just says to himself, That’s it, I can’t take it anymore. When this happens, he’s often drunk, depressed, coming down hard off a Vicodin high or some combination of the three; by the time morning comes around, he decides to keep going. “I tell myself,” the singer says, “not to wallow in self-pity.”

Last year — several months after Chiodos released All’s Well That Ends Well, a bilious, screeching breakup alb­um that propelled the band out of the all-ages punk clubs of Flint, Michigan, their hometown, and onto the national emo scene — Owens quit the band out loud. He remembers guzzling a lot of booze that night. “Whiskey makes you an absolutely different human being. A monster,” he recalls, sitting in his tour bus before a concert in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In his rage, he punched a mirror and told the band that he was through. “I was pushing the guys away, because I didn’t know how to deal with any of the success or anything that was going through my head. These kids at our shows wanted so much from me, and I was confused, because I had always wanted so much from them.”

The next day, hung over and contrite, he apologized to everyone, but he had a nasty gash on his hand. It wasn’t the first time he’d hurt himself. He and an ex-girlfriend — the first girl ever to break his heart, he says — used to do it together. “It was a pretty destructive relationship. We would cut ourselves. She didn’t care about anything. Later, I found out she was sleeping with her ex-boyfriend the entire time we were together.” To this day, Owens, 23, still hurts himself, mostly while he’s performing: “I’ll bite into my tongue really hard.” Right before our interview, he reaches into his mouth and pulls out a piece of tooth. “Whoa,” he says. “This just fell out. I wasn’t chewing or anything.” He thinks for a moment, sliding a finger between his incisors, then decides on an explanation. “It’s probably because I slam the microphone so hard into my face.”

This intensity has been paying off. Filled out by keyboardist Brad Bell, bassist Matt Goddard, lead guitarist Jason Hale, rhythm guitarist Pat McManaman and drummer Derrick Frost, all in their early 20s, Chiodos closed out their 2007 Warped Tour stint in a prime main-stage slot. This fall, lacking any radio support, and with the backing of the small, Albany, New York–based punk label Equal Vision (which held Chiodos-listening “premieres,” ingeniously, at Hot Topic stores nationwide), their latest record, Bone Palace Ballet, debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart. At a time when the emo big tent has grown to include pop (Fall Out Boy), cabaret (Panic! At the Disco), glam (My Chemical Romance) and hip-hop (Gym Class Heroes), Chiodos are abrasive traditionalists. Their albums are dank confessional booths, crowded with speed-metal riffs, mosh-pit breakdowns and Owens’s violent fantasies about bloody girls (thank that one ex for his relationship issues, he says). There are bigger hooks on the new album than before, and even a bona fide piano ballad, but the band sticks hard to the masochistic screams and punishing, windowless dynamics of their genre’s roots. This is Owens’s influence more than anyone else’s. The other guys in the band are hedonists who never hit the road without at least two beer bongs and a Family Guy DVD. Owens says they keep him lighthearted — except when their lightheartedness pisses him off. “They’re just here to have a great time, and I’m very serious,” he says. “When it comes to my baby, I’m very, very controlling.” Frost puts it a different way: “I love Craig to death, but he’s in his own world. I’m not like that, but I wasn’t a dork who got picked on every day in high school, either.”

Spend enough time with Craig Owens, and you don’t know whether to give him the strongest hug you’ve ever given anyone or to run, howling, in desperate search of some puppies and rainbows. Self-mutilation, binge drinking, drug addiction: The guy’s haunted by enough demons to pack a dozen teen psych wards. “I feel like I’ve lived lifetimes,” he says.

And we haven’t even gotten to the time he almost died.

When we first meet Craig Owens, he’s curled up in the fetal position. It’s the morning of the Grand Rapids show, the first date of Chiodos’s two-month I’m a Mathlete, Not an Athlete club tour, and we’re in a steak­house parking lot in Flint, the band’s designated meeting spot. The bus has just pulled in, and Owens, six-foot-two and skinny, wearing a sleepy smile and a curtain of dirty-blond hair, has scrunched himself into a pleather booth. He suggests we take a walk. “I always hated it here,” he says outside. His parents divorced when he was 2 years old, and he became “a nasty little kid.” (He’s still close to his mother, who works at the regional offices of a bank but says he talks to his father only every few years.) By high school, he’d become obsessed with murderers and slasher flicks — Chiodos take their name from ’80s B-horror auteurs Stephen, Edward and Charles Chiodo. “My screen name for a while was Henry Lee Lucas,” Owens says, discussing his serial-killer fetish. “People didn’t really understand that.” At the same time, he had a theatrical side: He joined the school choir, tried out for student musicals like The Pirates of Penzance and formed the earliest incarnation of Chiodos with Bell and Goddard.

Several years ago, he moved to Rochester Hills, an hour away, leaving his bandmates in Flint — a depressed former-auto-industry boomtown made infamous by Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. “Even standing here right now, I’m starting to freak out,” he says, regarding a clump of evergreens at the parking lot’s edge. “It’s such a black hole.”