Max Cavalera was born in the city of Belo Horizonte in 1969. He helped build Brazilian metal from the ground up, alongside his younger brother, Iggor, forming Sepultura in 1984 in a country with a crumbling economy, no industry support and little global visibility.
What followed was one of the most startling ascents in metal history: a run of albums that took the precision of thrash (1989’s Beneath The Remains, 1991’s Arise), injected it with hardcore urgency (1993’s Chaos A.D.), and then detonated the rulebook entirely with 1996’s Roots, a record that fused downtuned grooves, the rhythms of Brazil’s Xavante tribe and politically defiant lyrics into a blueprint that would ripple through metal for decades.
Yet Max’s story is not one of uninterrupted triumph. The death of his father at a young age led to the sudden collapse of his family’s security. His stepson, Dana Wells, died in a car crash in 1996 in circumstances that remain disputed. That year, he acrimoniously split from Sepultura and was estranged from his brother Iggor for 10 years.
Article continues belowAll left deep scars that have shaped his music. After Sepultura, Max formed Soulfly as a vehicle for spiritual exploration, global collaboration and unfiltered heaviness. He’s also spun off a constellation of side-projects, encompassing the nihilistic industrial rage of Nailbomb and the all-out ferocity of Go Ahead And Die, and continues to collaborate with Iggor in Cavalera Conspiracy.
Today, Max stands as an elder statesman who still speaks with the urgency of that angry kid who found salvation in distortion and speed. A pioneer of what we now call ‘global metal’ – music that integrates the sound and spirit of its country of origin – and a well-loved lifer of the metal community, he bridges cultures, generations and extremes.
What were your early years like?
“My dad worked for the Italian consulate in São Paulo. I remember being little and getting dragged into these huge dinners with politicians and famous people, and my dad was right in the middle. We had a beach house in Praia Grande on the coast of São Paulo and we’d go there on the weekends. We were middle class. My dad made pretty good money and we had a nice car and a nice apartment. But then he had a heart attack and died.”
You were just nine years old. What do you remember about his passing?
“It was very traumatic because we went fishing in this lake – Interlagos – and he was complaining of chest pains when we were in the boat. We brought him back to the car and I held him in the back seat. I could feel his heart through his chest and he passed away right there in the car. I remember feeling, ‘That’s it. He’s gone.’ They took him to the hospital, and after an hour, my aunt came to talk to me, and before she said anything, I told her, ‘I know. He’s gone, right?’ And she said, ‘Yes. He passed away.’”
How did things change for your family?
“My mom didn’t really know what to do. Dad didn’t really have any insurance or any money that he’d saved, so suddenly, we went broke. My mom moved us back to Belo Horizonte and we lived in this little shack behind my grandmother’s house. We lost everything, including the beach house. It was, ‘You’ve got to go to school and get a job. Forget about childhood shit, you’ve got to be a man now at nine years old.’ That pushed me towards metal. I embraced metal with everything I had. I needed it like oxygen. I needed that true rebellion.”
Where did you first connect to metal?
“Around 20 of us started the scene in Belo. You couldn’t really get imported records in Belo at the time, so each weekend we’d select a guy to grab everybody’s money, go to São Paulo by bus – which was a 12-hour ride – and go to Woodstock [Rock Store] to buy a bunch of imported records. I remember getting Voivod’s War And Pain, Slayer’s Show No Mercy, Mercyful Fate’s Melissa… Every weekend we’d go to somebody’s house and listen to this goldmine! Once we found Slayer, it was like, ‘This shit’s over.’”
You formed Sepultura in ’84. Did you know it was going to be your career?
“Iggor did. He was a born drummer, a natural talent, but he didn’t have a drum kit until [third album, 1989’s] Beneath The Remains. I wanted to be a drummer at first, but he was way better than me, so I had to pick a new instrument and guitar seemed like the right choice. I didn’t know how to play. I still remember when I learned the first riff of [Black Sabbath’s] Heaven And Hell, I ran out and did laps around the backyard. I was like, ‘I made it! I’m somebody!’ Ha ha ha! It was like a moment in a comedy movie.”
What do you recall about Sepultura’s first gig?
“I remember playing with this band Overdose and they were really good, like a Brazilian version of Maiden. The girls loved them. We were the opposite. The girls hated us, we didn’t know how to play. The guitar player from Overdose took my guitar and everything was out of tune. He said, ‘Let me tune the guitar for you, bro’, but it didn’t help my playing. It was just noise. But there were two guys wearing Motörhead shirts and they fucking loved the show! ‘You guys are the greatest thing ever! It’s noisy, it’s crap, and we fucking love it!’ Two guys out of a hundred. Ha ha ha!”
You eventually got signed by Roadrunner Records, in the States. How did that happen?
“I had a free ticket with a guy that worked for [airline] Pan Am. My mom bought this really cheap suit, I pulled my hair back and I wore a Pan Am tag so I looked like an employee of Pan Am. I had to fly like that because it was a free ticket. I had a bunch of [1987’s second album] Schizophrenia records with me, and I went to Noise Records and Metal Blade, Combat, and Roadrunner, too. Dressing up, wearing a tie and flying to New York, that’s hustle. Eventually we ended up getting signed. That was one of the greatest feelings of my life.”
You ended up marrying your manager, Gloria. What were your first impressions of her?
“When we first met, I was like, ‘Ooh, OK, I like her!’ We played The New Ritz in New York, opening for King Diamond on Halloween night [in 1989]. Sold out. She was there and she approached us. She told us that she managed Sacred Reich and I thought that was cool. Me and Andreas [Kisser, guitarist] didn’t even have picks – we had to share a pick. She was like, ‘We’ve got to get you guys picks. We need to get you guys some endorsements.’ We were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’d be cool!’ Ha ha!
She said that she needed to renegotiate our contract. She said, ‘Listen up, I’ll work for free for a year. If you guys don’t like me, you can fire me, but I’ll try for one year.’ And she worked a whole year for free, and she did all that. She changed the contract, she got us endorsements and I wouldn’t be here talking to you if it wasn’t for her.”
How did your personal relationship come about?
“I ended up falling in love with her, which I couldn’t help. We tried to hide it from the rest of the band for a while, but that was crazy. I think it was in Mexico when my brother walked into the room – he had the maid open the room – and me and Gloria were in bed and my brother was like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Ha ha! It was the beginning of something very special.”
After a run of successful albums (1989’s Beneath The Remains, 1991’s Arise, 1993’s Chaos A.D.), Sepultura released Roots in 1996, which catapulted you onto the global stage. When did you realise you had just changed the face of metal?
“I just wanted to make a strong record with this theme of roots around it. The more that time passed, the more we realised that it was a special record; it branched out to different parts of the world and people loved it. The tribal thing got integrated. Heavy metal was never the same after Roots. There was metal before Roots and metal after Roots. But when we were doing it, we weren’t thinking about that. You never enter the studio thinking, ‘I’m making a classic’, or ‘I’m changing music’, or none of that. That’s all bullshit.”
What do people still misunderstand about your split from Sepultura in 1996? The band carried on without you, but fans were upset.
“The main thing that gets me is mostly the situation with Gloria. Most people think she got fired and that’s totally a wrong statement. She never got fired, her contract was done. I’m telling you right now, the things that woman did for us – for Sepultura – were incredible. The stuff we achieved with her... You’ve kind of got to be out of your mind to have wanted to replace that.
I still don’t understand that, because everything was so good. The shows were getting bigger and bigger. I could only imagine where we would have been if we stayed. But that thing, it got broke somehow, some way. Then my relationship with those other guys erupted. So it was kind of like, ‘I’m done, I’m just gonna do my own thing.’ That’s the main thing that bugs me. That whenever you go online, it’s, ‘Oh, she got fired because she was protecting Max’, and this and that. It’s all bullshit.”
You also lost your stepson, Dana, that year. How did writing Soulfly songs like Bleed, First Commandment and Pain work into your grieving process?
“It was really important. [When he died] we were headed to Donington [for Monsters Of Rock] – we arrived in England and we got a phone call. Again, the black cloud, just like my dad. I’m not the biological father but we lived together in the same house, and we were very close. It hit me real hard. Bleed was one of the biggest songs we ever did, on the first Soulfly record. It’s about paying homage to the fact that a young life was cut short. He had a full life in front of him. He’s always here with me in spirit.”
Your list of collaborations reads like a who’s who of metal. Who surprised you the most?
“All of them did in their own way, but one of the most exotic ones was Sean Lennon on Son Song [from 2000’s Primitive]. That was so off the wall! The way it happened was that we were travelling to Australia and we ended up sitting next to each other on the plane. I saw him drawing, and he was drawing the album cover from the first Soulfly album.
I looked over and said, ‘Oh, cool! You’re drawing my first record.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m a huge fan.’ It was cool, writing that song about our dads and how we felt as people who lose their dads when they’re young and how they deal with it. He didn’t want to stay in a hotel, so he stayed here with us in our house.”
After 10 years of estrangement from your brother, you and Iggor reunited and formed Cavalera Conspiracy. What was it like seeing each other again after a decade?
“He reached out to me but first he talked to Gloria, which I thought was really cool of him. He asked her for forgiveness for what happened. Gloria’s a very compassionate person and she totally accepted him back. After she talked to him, she gave me the phone and I talked to him.
He was like, ‘Listen, man, I want you to know my kids and I want you to know my family. I don’t want to grow old not knowing your family, just because of something that happened 30 years ago.’ The first time he came to Phoenix, we picked him up at the airport. We had flowers and I was so nervous! I hadn’t seen this motherfucker in 10 years, what the fuck?!
I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just gave him a big hug. We had a show the same night and that’s when I asked, 'Do you wanna play Roots with us tonight?' And when we played Roots, the whole place exploded. The universe was telling us that we needed to work together. So we started Cavalera Conspiracy.”
Chama, Soulfly’s latest album, is about a young boy who grows up surrounded by poverty and gang violence and finds a deep connection in the forest. How much of this story is autobiographical?
“Some of it. The part of him losing his mom and talking to the mom in dreams is very close; I had recently lost my mom. The story was created by my son, Igor. He’s a great writer. He writes Stephen King-type novels. I asked him if he could make a story to go with this record, almost like a concept album.
So he wrote the story of Chama, who grew up in the favelas in Rio, around violence, drugs, gun running. His mom died and she comes to him in a dream and tells him, ‘You have to leave the favela and go into the jungle and find the spirits of the forest. Go be with the forest.’ He goes there and stares at the fire and flame – that’s where the album title comes from, ‘Chama’ means ‘flame’ – and eventually he fulfils his destiny. You could make a movie around it.”
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in life?
[long pause] “Do what you love, surrounded by the people that you love. To share this journey with Gloria, with [sons] Zyon, with Igor Jr., with Richie and with our friends, it’s priceless, man. To me, that’s more important than Grammys and awards. Watching one of the Ozzy documentaries and seeing how frail he looked in the end… it’s inevitable. One day your body’s going to shut down. Until that day comes, I’m gonna fucking live, man, doing the things I love.”
What do you hope the world remembers about Max Cavalera in years to come?
“I hope I’m remembered as somebody that took risks to get the things that I did and to do the things I did. I was put on this planet to do this. Nothing else matters. Nothing. All the other stuff is all bullshit. And that I really loved what I did. Music saved me. It took me out of Brazil and brought me all of the things I have. I came here with a purpose and I did it. When it’s all said and done, I know that I came and I left a mark on the world.”
Chama is out now via Nuclear Blast.
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