From www.lvrj.com- It was love at first whiskey.
He met her as a shot girl, a taut and tattooed former adult film star who brought him his hooch onstage during a stint on Ozzfest ’07.
And it didn’t take Wayne Static long to realize that he’d found his future wife.
Call it a 50-proof love affair, and the two have seldom left each other’s side ever since.
“My wife travels with me. She’s sitting right here next to me,” says Static, the pointy-haired headbanger who fronts industrial metallers Static-X and is married to Tera Wray Static. “She travels with me everywhere we go. We’re inseparable. Being married has not affected my career at all other than just making me happier to be on the road.
“She’s kind of become part of the show,” he adds, calling from a tour stop in Chicago. “She brings us our shots onstage. I’m putting her in all our videos; she’s in the album artwork. She’s here to stay, and definitely going to be a part of Static-X from now on.”
The couple exchanged vows here in Vegas in January 2008, deciding to tie the knot on a whim during a late night out at Tao.
Speaking with Static, it sounds as if he’s been grinning ear to ear ever since.
And for good reason.
After all, he is wedded to a sultry brunette who is, shall we say, pretty open minded in the bedroom.
“I like girls, and I like sharing my husband with a cool hot chick,” Tera Wray Static said in a recent interview with The Daily Rock Web site. “It wouldn’t be fair to just make him watch. Whoever said two’s company but three’s a crowd never had a threesome, obviously. Trust is important, but true love is what holds it together.”
And so, suffice it to say, Static is a pretty happy dude these days. Still, you’d never know it from his band’s latest disc, the brooding, subtle-as-a-battle-ax “Cult of Static,” a teeth-gnashing OIshirwall of terse, steel-toed riffs buffered with an undercurrent of harsh, swarming electronics.
“I felt like I wanted a little bit of a darker record this time,” he explains. “I think (the previous album) ‘Cannibal’ was great, it was just like, hit your face right from the beginning, just brutal from top to bottom. This time, I wanted to start where that left off, then go on a different journey. I wanted to do some epic dirges with lots of layers to them. I wrote the whole thing at home this time, and it was awesome. I could work at night. I wrote a lot of the record at like three or four or five in the morning, all messed up and everything, and it shows.”
As such, the disc fits right in with the career arc of this bunch. After going platinum with its 1999 debut, “Wisconsin Death Trip,” which was driven by the dancey grind of the hit single “Push It,” Static-X has gotten heavier and heavier with each successive release, largely eschewing the more commercial tendencies of the band’s initial offering in favor of a hard-hitting digital snarl.
“I think our first record was a fluke, really,” says Static, a rock lifer who got his first guitar at age 7 and won a talent contest with it the next year. “The fact that it went platinum and all that, it was all due to one video and the timing being just right. MTV was still playing videos, and we happened to have someone help us out and make a great video for almost nothing. Radio caught on, and everything just kind of happened at the right spot. I don’t know where we would be today if ‘Push It’ had never taken off. I’m sure we’d still be here, but that helped a lot.”
Still, Static-X has been able to maintain a certain level of concussive consistency since then. The band’s records don’t sell quite as well as they used to — though many acts have seen their numbers drop in recent years — but they generally cruise past the 100,000 mark, and the band has remained a solid draw on the road.
What’s more, they’ve certainly fared better than many of their peers from the nü metal era of the late ’90s, a pock mark on the face of hard rock that only a handful of groups have weathered, Static-X being one of them.
Granted, they’ve seldom gotten much love from the critics, but that’s never slowed these dudes down.
And besides, considering his marital situation, Static seems plenty covered in that department anyways.
“We just cruise along,” he says. “Any of the bands that came out at the same time as us, they’re either gone now, or they got just mega huge, like System of a Down or Incubus. I think we’re the biggest underground band in the world right now.
“For many records, everyone was like, ‘Oh, this next record is going to be their last, blah, blah, blah,’ ” he continues. “But here we are on our sixth full-length studio album and we debut at No. 16. It’s obvious we’re not going anywhere. We’re here to stay. And that’s the biggest accomplishment, that we’re still around.”