One of metal’s most notorious backstage tales has resurfaced, and this time Devin Townsend has offered the fullest explanation yet of why, as a teenager, he decided to relieve himself inside Steve Vai‘s guitar case. The prog metal polymath, now known for his sprawling solo catalog plus his work with Strapping Young Lad, the Devin Townsend Project and more, first broke through as Vai‘s vocalist on 1993’s Sex & Religion and the arena tour behind it, which opened for Aerosmith.
Speaking on the “Heavy Stories” podcast, Townsend framed the infamous stunt as a very literal expression of a frustration he had no other way to voice, chafing at being handed lyrics he simply couldn’t connect with.
“With Steve, I was only 19 or 20 when I met him, so that petulant part of my personality was in full bloom, right? When I got there, he was like, ‘I want you to sing these lyrics: sing this song, which is about my wife giving birth, and this song, which is about my experience with this,'” he said.
He recalled pushing back against material that felt fundamentally at odds with how he wrote:
“And I remember, at the time, just being like, ‘Man, I can’t!’ He’s like, ‘No, really give it on that line! This is the line where you really gotta reach for the heavens!’, and I’m just like, ‘But it doesn’t mean anything to me.’ I remember reflecting on that experience as being so fundamentally in opposition to how I learned how to write that it wasn’t that I considered it to be wrong, necessarily – and it isn’t wrong, necessarily – but I reacted to it in such a way as a kid that everything in my nature was just like, ‘No!’”
Asked directly whether squatting over the case counted as an act of protest, Townsend delivered the line that gives the story its punch:
“When you can’t articulate your discontent in a way that is able to be understood in a sitdown environment, I guess you’re left with only the s**tting option.”
Looking back, he’s willing to cut his younger self some slack, chalking the behavior up to a messy collision of youth, sudden fame and inexperience — and crediting that same frustration with sparking his most extreme project:
“I was too young to articulate it in any way that was rational. At that point, it was a culmination of a lot of circumstances, like arrogance, fame and confusion and relationships. All that stuff. I can forgive myself in hindsight for the ways I reacted at the time because I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to respond. I was lost, right? And I responded to it by creating Strapping.”
Townsend had landed the gig almost by accident. He came into Vai‘s orbit through Relativity Records, which released the guitarist’s music and had just signed Townsend‘s short-lived project Noisescapes. In a 1993 Guitar World interview, he summed up his reasoning bluntly: “It’s like cuttin’ your b**ls off if you can do something and you don’t, you know what I mean? When people ask me, ‘Why did you do the Vai thing?’, it’s like, ‘Because it was there.’ I had no intentions of joining a band. I didn’t even hear the Vai music until the day before we recorded.”
Despite the rocky start, the two have stayed close over the decades. Vai turned up on Townsend‘s 2019 album Empath, and again on The Moth, the multimedia symphonic metal opera that Townsend released in May after roughly a decade of buildup.
