Nearly seven years after his acrimonious departure from Machine Head, guitarist Phil Demmel has taken a major step toward reconciliation, candidly admitting in a new interview that the post-split animosity with frontman Robb Flynn was “probably 95%, 98% my fault.” In a moment of striking self-reflection, he described his past behavior of ignoring Flynn as “fu**ing dumb” and spoke about his long journey to forgive both himself and his former bandmate.
Speaking on The Candid Mic With Fran Strine podcast, Demmel offered his most mature and thoughtful perspective yet on the painful 2018 breakup.
“I think that we’re at a point where it’s civil. We’re not buddies, but it’s not bad,” he said of his current relationship with Flynn (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And I think that was probably 95%, 98% my fault. I’d ignore him [when we were in the same room]. And it just got to be so silly. It’s just, like, ‘What am I doing? He’s walking in here, and you’re just pretending he is not there. It’s just f**king dumb.’ I needed to really get past a lot of s**t on my end… and I’m glad that it did, that I was able to go through what I needed to go through to get there and put it in its right spot and forgive myself for what I was feeling, but forgive him for a lot of stuff too.”
He explained that his decision to leave the band after 16 years stemmed from a feeling of being undervalued, using a powerful analogy about an old car that is worth different amounts to different people. “It’s just, like, know what your value is and don’t stay where you’re not valued,” he concluded. “And I think that a combination of either I lost my value in that band or I wasn’t being valued the way that I felt that I should be. And it was time to move on.”
With years of hindsight, Demmel is now able to look back fondly on the positive aspects of his tenure. When asked what he misses, he joked: “I miss traveling in business class every flight,” before adding a more heartfelt sentiment. “I miss jamming with those dudes. I loved playing and writing music with Robb and Dave [McClain] and Adam [Duce] and Jared [MacEachern]. They’re tremendous musicians, and we wrote some awesome stuff, man. I miss when it was good. And it was good a lot.”
This new, more peaceful perspective comes years after Demmel described the situation in the band at the time of his departure as a “toxic entity in my head, in my heart that I had to purge.”
Demmel parted ways with Machine Head following the band’s fall 2018 North American tour, after nearly 16 years as a member.
