BURTON C. BELL SPEAKS OUT ON THE FEAR FACTORY DRAMA
Burton C. Bell has remained pretty quiet on the whole Fear Factory situation up until now, but the good folks at Rock My Monkey have finally gotten him to open up and do some shit-talkin’ of his own. It’s an audio interview, but Mr. Blabbermouth has transcribed some key portions…
…which I’m not even going to re-print here. Because it’s mostly anti-climatic. But I’ll give you the short version: Bell’s side of the story is that during the mixing of the Dino-less FF offering Transgression, Christian Olde Wolbers started having an affair with the band’s manager, Christy Priske. And I guess things got pretty serious, ’cause the two are married now. Bell found Wolbers and Priske’s shitting where they eat as “completely unacceptable,” and things got worse when Priske, Wolbers and Raymond Herrera allegedly brought Bell some new business arrangement which he also disliked. And then things really fell to shit: Bell says he refused to work with Priske, Wolbers and Herrera refused to let her go and refused to reunite with Dino, and now we have all this fun mud slinging in a public forum.
But here’s the part of the interview I actually found really interesting, and this part I will re-print verbatim:
Rock My Monkey: So you definitely feel that they had a choice other than the legal action that they took to resolve this dispute?
Burton: [Laughs] They did not initiate legal action. Dino and I filed a lawsuit first. We filed a suit maintaining that we had the right to use the band name and to take care of some other issues. So we filed the lawsuit first.
Wow. Really? The Bell/Cazares FF started the lawsuit? That’s interesting. I’d be curious to know what these “other issues” are, but I wonder on what grounds they can claim to have “the right to use the band name?” While we wait for our boys at Metal Insider to weigh in with their music-biz expertise, are there any lawyers or former members of hair metal bands who care to posit a theory? ‘Cause it seems to me that if Christian and Ray-Ray are part owners of Fear Factory, Inc. or whatever, you’d have to provide a pretty decent legal reason why they’re unfit to be ongoing members of the board.
In any case, talking completely out of my ass, the whole thing still stinks to me. I just feel like there’s a piece of Bell’s story missing somewhere. Because in this version, Priske, Wolbers and Herrera basically teamed up against him. And, I dunno. Maybe they did. But my gut tells me the real story isn’t so black and white.
I’m dying to see what decision a judge hands down in this whole case, especially now knowing that the lawsuit originated with Team Bell.
-AR
