He  is the man who left Sepultura to form Soulfly.  He is the uncredited yelling voice of the Scorpion King (The Rock) in “The Mummy Returns”. He is the father of 4 children with wife Gloria; Zyon, Igor, Richie, and Roxanne.

He is the man who said: 

I do hate a lot of ‘religion’ but people like Christ – yeah they inspire me. I mean if you look at Christ, He was hanging around with the lowlifes, prostitutes and the losers you know, not going around with those high society motherfuckers you see trying to sell Jesus today!

He is the man who played a game with me, and it goes something like this:

Hi Max!

Let’s play a game to celebrate the release of the new Soulfly album, Rituals.

I’ll give you a word or a phrase and you say the first thing that pops to your mind.

Ready? Go!

1 Taco Party

Amazing

2 Embracing Change

Necessary

3 Rituals: Give me a color

Red.

---

Chelf: I thought Primitive was the red one.

Max: Yeah, this one is orange red.

Chelf: Aha, like tequila sunrise, which would go perfectly well with the tacos at the taco party that you had for the release of Rituals.

Max: Exactly, yes.

---

4 Brazil

Roots

5 Bloody Roots

Brazil

6 High Society

A bunch of snobs

7 Friendship

Beautiful

8 Signature Sound

Trademark

9 Eddie Vedder

Drunk nights.

-Tell us the story.

Max: I was pretty drunk on a ministry tour, I was on the ministry bus, hanging out with them and Eddie Vedder was sitting next to me, I was having too much rum and I puked on his leg. Right after that I asked for an autograph for my sister, cause she’s a Pearl Jam fan, I’m not really into that kind of stuff, you know? So it was an exciting night, maybe not much for him but for me it was.

10 Culmination

I don’t know, we try to use different words on different albums, words that we haven’t used before, so me and the producer we use lots of dictionary words, sometimes I don’t even know what those words mean, but it sounds cool.

-Interesting approach Max.

GAME OVER

 If you’d like to share a few words about your latest album that would be awesome as well.

 I’m very excited for Rituals, it’s really a solid record, it has all the elements that make SOULFLY interesting to the listener, and I think this record will hopefully please the existing soulfly fan but also get us some new fans, maybe some people who did not like Soulfly they will like this one, I have a feeling that might happen.

So once again you are embracing change and hoping that people will get that.

 Yeah, you know, it’s a very open record, even the influences, it has everything from groove, to thrash stuff, black metal, everything we listen to, on everyday basis, is in this album. And there are a few very cool collaborations in there too, from Randy Blythe of Lamb of God and Ross Dolan of Immolation, which makes the record even more exciting.

And you had an actual Taco Party for the release of the album?

Yeah, our friend Jose from Liquid Metal, he’s been a friend and a fan for a long time, I love the guy, he is an old school Max fan. I always hear about those Taco Parties, I’ve never been to one, he (Jose) brought tacos to the bus once, when I was on tour, and it was really good, so I thought this would be great.

We also got ESP to donate a guitar so we had a contest and one of the fans won one of my guitars so that was really cool.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with your fans?

 I wanna thank them and I’d also like to say that it’s a really good time for metal now, they should try to support everything they love so that we can continue making music for them. Rituals is an album made by a fan for the fans cause above all I’m a metal fan and I hope to see them all on the tour starting mid-January, it’s gonna be  great fun to see everybody on the road.

Check out Max’s interview on Metalheads Fovever magazine as well.

Until the next one,

Chelf