Alcohaulin' Ass

This is a track from Hellyeah's first album. The group included two members of Mudvayne: lead singer Chad Gray and guitarist Greg Tribbett. In our interview with Gray, he said that Tribbett was hot and heavy to write a "country song" in an effort to distinguish Hellyeah from Mudvayne. When their producer Sterling Winfield stepped out for a pickle (not a metaphor - he really went to get a pickle to eat), Tribbet came up with the riff, and Gray started writing lyrics, beginning with the line, "A little bit of me and a little bit of you." "He's like, 'You'd better write that s--t down,'" said Gray. "So I turned around and I wrote it down. And literally by the time Sterling got back from going to get a pickle, we were like, 'Dude, you need to set up a drum line, we got something.' We'd written the whole song in probably under 20 minutes - the first incarnation of it, which was just vocal and acoustic. And then we added the electric part where everybody comes in. Made it a 'Hellyeah, wanted dead or alive' kind of vibe."

The Hellyeah album was recorded at Dimebag Darrell's studio: Chasin' Jason in Arlington, Texas. According to Chad Gray, they could feel Dime's presence when they conceived this song, and there were many totems to his memory in the space (Darrell was shot and killed on stage in 2004). "I've always felt like we had a sixth member in Dime," Gray said. "There were handwritten notes everywhere - it was a magical space. All this guitar stuff had 'caution' tape all around it. It was still set up there that way from the last time he had left it when they went on the road with Damageplan."