"I was kicked out of the Deftones show 'cos I was being too aggressive in the pit. I was like, 'I used to be in this band!'" What it was like being in one of the world's biggest metal bands in their earliest days

What's it like to be in a massive band at the very beginning of their career - only to leave before things take off? It's a question posed in the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine, which interviews a bunch of ex-members of some of the biggest metal bands around, including Trivium, Papa Roach and Faith No More.

One interviewee is Dominic Garcia, the original bassist for Californian alt metal titans Deftones. In 2026, they're bigger than ever, a post-pandemic boom seeing them draw in a new generation of fans, release some of their most critically acclaimed work and headline the biggest venues of their career. But once upon a time, they were just another new band on the scene, trying to scrape some momentum together. Dominic gives us his memories of those forgotten early days - and explains why, in his opinion, he technically never quit the band in the first place.

"I've read on the internet that I was invited to play with the band as the first bass player. That’s not true – I’m a founding member. Abe [Cunningham, drummer] and I met in high school together. We were in the marching band, and every day we would go to his house after school and jam.

“Stephen [Carpenter, guitarist] lived in the neighbourhood – he was 18, a couple of years older than us. He’d ride around on his bike, and one day we were jamming out and Stephen must have heard us ’cos he poked his nose through the window and invited us to come jam with him at his house.

“At that point, it was the three of us. We were mostly just making noise, but Stephen was the riff master - he came up with all these amazing riffs. It was Stephen who came up with the name The Deftones, because he loved Def Jam Recordings so much. It was always The Deftones when I was in the band, from what I can remember.

“After a year of jamming, we started auditioning for singers. Stephen wanted somebody who could rap. The first guy we auditioned was named Gilbert, he was strictly an MC. He was really good. But the other guy was Chino [Moreno]. I knew Chino since first grade, maybe seven years old, though we weren’t really close friends. Word had got around that he could sing – he’d go to parties and sing The Smiths. We auditioned him with a Danzig tune. I can’t remember which one, but it was great.

“We’d started writing our own songs. We had one called Butt Booty Naked, which had a total Chili Peppers vibe but with a really heavy riff. There was another song called The Vegetable Song, and another was called Cold – that was a real banger.

“The first show we did was at a place called The Cattle Club in Sacramento, where all the big acts would play. It was a pay-to- play gig – we had to pay something like $100 for a hundred tickets, and we wound up giving them away to our friends. The place was packed. It was just a crazy show. “

"Around 1991 or 1992, Abe actually left The Deftones to join another local band called Phallucy, who were really hot at the time. I took over on drums and that’s when [bassist] Chi Cheng joined the group. I loved Chi, he was really cool - he was into poetry and all this stuff. Just a wonderful, kind-hearted person.

“I never actually left The Deftones. Phallucy’s bassist left, so I figured it’d be super-cool to play two different instruments in two different bands. I found out from a third party that Stephen had got a guy named John Taylor to play drums in The Deftones. I was a little bit heartbroken because I’d started the band, but we were still friends. I used to give Stephen a load of shit because he wasn’t a shredding guitar player like Eddie Van Halen. I was just being a snob, a cocky kid, but maybe it was low-key bullying.

“Phallucy wound up breaking up because of management stuff, but I was kind of moving away from rock music at that point. I took a world music class at Sacramento City College and started getting into ethnological music - that touched my soul. I started digging into the roots of Latin music and that’s been my passion ever since. I recently got a grant to learn how to carve sacred Bata drums, which are used in spiritual Yoruba ceremonies.

“I don’t have any regrets about leaving the band. I went to see them the last time they played in Sacramento. I took my daughter. I enjoyed the show a little bit too much – I wound up getting kicked out of the show ’cos I was being too aggressive in the pit. I got escorted out! It was funny – I was like, ‘I used to be in this band!’”

Read more interviews with forgotten members of some of metal's biggest bands in the new issue of Metal Hammer, out now. Grab yours online