The YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly features interviews with “people who are frequently invisible in society—the unhoused, the sex worker, the chronic drug user, the runaway, the gang member, the poor and the sick.” A new episode on the channel posted three days ago features Cameron Heacock, former frontman of the Minneapolis nu-metal band American Head Charge. In the 45-minute interview, Heacock’s first public appearance in seven years, he discusses his current life: unhoused, living on the streets of Los Angeles, addicted to fentanyl.
American Head Charge had been dormant since 2018, when Heacock was arrested while driving a van containing numerous stolen items including over a dozen guitars and a motorbike. He had previously been arrested for drug offenses, and two of his bandmates, guitarist Bryan Ottoson and bassist Chad Hanks, died in 2005 and 2017 respectively.
Unfortunately just smack in the middle of the Mudvayne tour our best friend, and just amazing guitar player person, Bryan Ottoson ended up passing away in the tour bus. And really nobody was prepared for that. We — none of us were — none of us had the tools to, I don’t know, process that. The best thing we could come up with is, you know, Bryan would want us to be out on tour making music if he were in our shoes. And so we went home for like three days, buried him, and ended up coming right back out on tour. And we were out of our minds. We didn’t know how to deal with it, how to process it.
So there’s a lot of sideways anger and animosity coming out all over the place to each other to… it was everywhere. And nobody was dealing with it. And then so we did that Static-X tour with a actual friend of Bryan‘s, a guy named Benji [Helberg] who ended up being [our] guitar player off and on for the subsequent years.
But after Bryan died, I really, I love that dude. I loved making music with him. And I didn’t, I just I couldn’t process it. I felt a lot of guilt for his death because he died in part… He had been taking antibiotics for strep throat. He had gotten strep throat for like a second time. He didn’t deal with… He wasn’t able to deal with the rigors of being on tour and and all that goes into that and your immune system’s just got to be on… It’s tough and he just wasn’t used to it. That was his first, well his second, tour and his body was just not handling it.
So he ended up taking some pills that I had. I mean, I was deep in my addiction. I had a jar of pills like about this big and it was just a grab bag of like every opiate, benzo, muscle relaxer. It was… at the time I thought it was awesome, but you know, I think in a lot of ways, had that not been there, Bryan might still be alive.
So I struggle with a lot of guilt over that. It certainly fueled more spiraling and I really kind of turned my back away from the band for a number of years, and then started to write music again. And I just can’t really get away from it. I mean it’s like every record seems to be doomed somehow.
When when we released the debut record [The War Of Art], we released it August 28th. Well, August 28th, 2001. Well, September 11th happened two weeks after we released our record. So, it was, we were doing great. Like, sales wise, we were on course to… you know, other records that have gone gold were right where we were in terms of sales.
Anyway, so that first record had 9/11 happen. The second record had Bryan die. Um, the third record — well, we did an EP actually between the second and and third one — and that one really didn’t have any like major tragedy to it.
But the third one, by the end of it, the guy that I had started with, my bass player [Chad Hanks], he had had Hepatitis C for a long time [and he] refused to stop drinking. He basically locked himself in a friend’s basement a la Leaving Las Vegas; he basically drank himself to death. Drinking just massive bottles of vodka every day until he ended up needing to be in hospice because he all his organs were failing. And so that one I didn’t deal with very well either.
That one was… I mean it, Chad and I had a connection that was otherworldly, and when he died I just really went off the deep end. I had no intention of waking up the next day. So, like my my days were, I was down for whatever. I was doing a lot of stuff that I shouldn’t have been doing. I was hanging out with a lot of people I shouldn’t have been hanging out with.
Luckily I ended up getting arrested randomly. They did, the cops — this is in Orange County at the time, I was living in Orange County at the time — the cops did a sweep of this hotel that I wasn’t staying at, but I was there seeing somebody and they just happened to catch me. And when I walked out of that hotel room, there was — mind you, the city I was living in, they get a little overboard with the cops — and I came out to like 30 or 40, 20 or 30 cops, all guns drawn.
I look back on that, I’m really lucky they did because I had some bad plans with some bad people to do some really nasty stuff. And I’m really glad I didn’t get a chance to do any of that. Anyway, I ended up doing like three months, and then I had to do some treatment to satisfy the courts. I did that, came out, and we made our last record.
So I mean Chad died and I just, like I said, I wasn’t trying to wake up at all, and I kept waking up. And then I got out of jail and somehow my guitar player had bought a house in the hills of Los Angeles. And little did I know that while I was in jail, he had become addicted to slamming meth and had completely lost his mind. He [became] paranoid schizophrenic.
It’s just, he was beyond help. I mean there was nights where [I’d] just hear kicking and screaming and him throwing things around his room and there’s nothing anybody could do about it. He’s screaming at the voices in his head. I mean… the fact that he got a new girlfriend that was… basically it was just me and him in the house, and it was his house.
But when he got this girlfriend [they became] convinced that she basically wanted a house for herself and him to be alone. I can’t fault them or fault her for that, but you know, it was this is somebody that was like my brother I expected to live to an old age [with] and and he would always be there.
And I came home one night, or one morning, and he had changed the locks. And through the screen door. I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And he just says, ‘I don’t want you in my life anymore.’ That was such a such a gutshot. I didn’t even like, I just, I had no idea that that was anywhere on my horizon. And I had nowhere to go. I had a motorcycle at the time and I ended up homeless.
I ended up homeless down in Echo Park. And I migrated after they closed Echo Park down to a couple different places and then ended up down in good old MacArthur Park and [I’ve] been there for years.
A couple of my friends were looking for me. It sucks because I love music. I love making music. I love the whole process. I love touring. I love everything about it and it’s just been so much negative, like every person I’ve lost in my life has been like almost directly a result of me, or my involvement in the band.
For whatever reason, either I got to fire the person because they’re not doing, you know, what needs to be done, or they die, or they go crazy, or they kick me out of their life because I’ve been doing drugs the entire time they’ve known me, but suddenly now I need to stop. I’ll admit, [they’re] probably right, but I’m a stubborn motherf*cker. And so really I just still have a bunch of music in my mind and my heart.
It’s just bringing myself to do that. I mean, I pour everything into the records when I make them and it’s like I know I have at least two to three records in my head that I want to release. I mean all the music I make is really just for myself, but it’s like my therapy and if I don’t, I don’t I know, I’m going to die.
The full interview is available to watch below.
