Death Angel at the 2020 GRAMMYs
Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images
Death Angel Drummer Will Carroll Opens Up About Fighting COVID-19: "It Looked Like I Was Going To Die"
It looked like 2020 was going to be a banner year for Death Angel. The quintet were still on a high from their first GRAMMY nod for the title track of their ninth album, Humanicide, and were celebrating their role as progenitors of the Northern California thrash metal scene on the sold-out Bay Strikes Back tour in Europe with Testament and Exodus.
But less than a month after the GRAMMY ceremony, the coronavirus had begun its sinister spread across Europe, and gigs were getting canceled. Less than two months post-GRAMMYs, Death Angel drummer Will Carroll had contracted Covid-19 and was on a ventilator in a medically induced coma, fighting for his life in a San Francisco hospital. Neither his fiancée nor his family was able to see him, as Carroll, a previously healthy and happy-go-lucky 47-year-old, suffered heart failure from the meds, and was "proned" 18 hours a day—turned face down—in a desperate effort to save him. He spent 12 days in a coma—time he recalls as rife with "bizarre visions, which I remember vividly; one of them was going to hell"—before turning the corner.
"It was a rude awakening," he tells the Recording Academy. "I don't remember the trip to the hospital or being at the hospital. So when I did come to after my 12 days of the coma, I was shocked. I was like, 'Where the hell am I?’ I didn't know if I was even in San Francisco, or the United States, for that matter."
By the time Carroll and other members of the tour were flying home from Europe to SFO airport, the drummer knew something was wrong: "I haven't had the flu in years, and I don't get fevers and cold chills and stuff like that," he says. "There were other people really sick before me on the tour bus, too." Members of both other bands on the Bay Strikes Back tour tested positive for Covid-19, but none became nearly as ill as Carroll.
Singer Mark Osegueda remembers that initially, while playing gigs in Europe, news of the virus "seemed mythological. I’m an optimist and of course you think ‘I'll never be touched by it or people I know will never affected by it.’ We're so safe in our [tour bus] cocoon here.” And the positive feelings around their GRAMMY experience was still fresh: "When we got nominated, I flipped out, and telling my parents we were nominated just gave me a chill and brought tears in my eyes," the singer says. "It's a childhood dream come true right there. It felt really magical."
No one could have predicted that Carroll, who has been with Death Angel since 2009, would have gotten so sick. "My fiancée [Leeshawn Navarro] was going through hell herself at home. She was calling the hospital multiple times a day to check, and they were using words like ‘dire’ and ‘grim’ and ‘grave.’ So it looked like I was going to die," Carroll says. "When I did come to, the doctors couldn't believe it. They were coming in just to see for themselves, looking at me like I was a miracle. It was really scary when I saw the looks on their faces. like, wow, I must've been that close, you know?"
An article on Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle quoted his doctors at the California Pacific Medical Center, saying that the hospital "tried every treatment they had heard about, from hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to the experimental drug remdesivir." As one of the early Covid-19 patients the hospital had treated, Carroll’s case, especially the use of proning, "changed how the California Pacific Medical Center staff handles coronavirus cases."
While Carroll isn’t a lyricist in Death Angel, he’s certainly given Osegueda plenty of fodder for a new record. The drummer is understandably a changed man. While those unfamiliar with Death Angel may have wrongly surmised that the band and their lyrics negative or Satanic, you couldn’t meet a more positive and friendly bunch of guys. As lead guitarist Rob Cavestany explains, "Let it be known that we are a very, very, positive and positive spirit and energy kind of people and band. All the dark topics and brutal things happening in our lyrics or in our concepts are meant as a message or warning; a wake-up call kind of thing." And, "Humanicide," with a creepy prescience related to the pandemic, is about the destruction of the human race, with lyrics like "Flames / When nothing's left, no remains / There's no one left to blame /Global denial /This is the reason all hope is lost." Cavestany explains, "We're not saying it should happen, but it's where we're going if we continue like this, so we need to do something about it, so that kind of thing does not happen."
Carroll, a huge fan of KISS and Twisted Sister with the tattoos to prove it, says that he was "into the dark stuff" prior to his Covid-19 drama, but now notes that his experience shifted his "outlook on spirituality. I kind of believe there is higher presence, a higher power. And between that and everyone's collective positive energy, people rooting for me and sending me messages to get well, I think that collective energy was what got me through it. I do believe in the spirit world now, and energy and karma and stuff like that."
Carroll has high praise for the medical team, who, once he was awake, asked him, "You get a lot of people calling you; are you famous or something? I said, ‘well, I play in a heavy metal band that's famous in the heavy metal world.’ They're like, ‘Oh, what's the band called?’ Death Angel. Then they were kind of like, ‘Whoa, and didn't have much to say, but they eventually looked me up and found videos of me, and were like, ‘Oh wow.’ I guess they were impressed," he says with a laugh. "But it was funny, between the name Death Angel and my semi-evil tattoos and weird band logos, they were taken aback a little." He did, however, play the GRAMMY nominee card. "Yeah. I definitely threw that in!"
Death Angel: turning the world on to metal, one person at a time! Osegueda believes that metal "is definitely getting accepted a bit more now. It's a slow climb, but it's definitely more than it was say, even five years ago. It used to be the larger publications pretty much just covered Metallica. And when they did the Big Four show, then they covered the Big Four show. It’s an underground movement still. But undeniably there are sales that are reflecting that it's not declining. So I see an upswing in it. I don't know if it’d ever be, you know, as prominent as, say, R&B, or when rock was king. But I definitely see it as respected in a much bigger way now."
The band, who formed in 1982, has endured way more than its fair share of ups and downs, including a 1990 tour bus accident that ultimately caused the band to break up. They reformed in August 2001 for Thrash of the Titans, a cancer benefit for Testament frontman Chuck Billy. Billy, along with his wife, also tested positive for the coronavirus after returning to California from the Bay Strikes Back tour. Carroll’s finacee, who he was home with for several days before being hospitalized, tested negative for the virus.
As parts of the world slowly, amid much controversy, begin to emerge from lockdown, Carroll is close to being his old self, albeit more conscious of drinking (not much) and striving to develop the healthiest habits possible. Upon emerging from the hospital he had to learn to walk again. "I can't imagine people who were in a coma for a year or two, what kind of condition their body must be in, ‘cause I was only in one for 12 days and I couldn't walk," he says. "My muscles, I had atrophy all over the place, I came home and used a walker for first three or four days, and then I was able to walk on my own. Now I'm almost a hundred percent." On May 29, about two months after his ordeal, Carroll played drums for the first time since the last show of the Bay Strikes Back tour. "Everything felt as it should," he says. "I’m super stoked to be back on the horse."
