E-Mail This Article to a Friend Soft cell The other side of Godsmack BY MATT ASHARE

Sully Erna sits back and sinks his small but sturdy frame into a plush but utilitarian chair in one of the VIP rooms upstairs at the FleetCenter. The frontman of Godsmack is fingering a paperback copy of Many Lives, Many Masters, a non-fiction psychiatric thriller by Brian Weiss that he’s particularly excited about. "It’s amazing. It’s about some chick who has bad anxiety and bad fears of the dark and water, and this psychiatrist uses hypnotherapy on her. He doesn’t get anywhere at first, but then he starts to find out some molestation things with her dad, and then she starts experiencing these past-lives things. She goes through like 800 different times that she lives. And she starts to become psychic, and she speaks to spirits, and she tells the doctor things about his life and things that have happened to him. She knows that his first son died at 26 days old. And all these spirits start communicating through her into him. They test it by taking her to a racetrack one day, and she wrote down the winners of every race and handed it to him. And every single race came in like that. It’s crazy, dude. This book will change your life. It’s the most interesting book I’ve read in the past 10 years."

The supernatural and the dark side of spirituality have been running themes in the story of Godsmack — one of the more interesting rock-and-roll tales to come out of Boston in the past 10 years. Erna himself was something of a role player, drumming in various bands around town, including Stripmind, a hard-rock act that released one album on Columbia before flaming out. Exactly how that experience affected him is hard to gauge. But he came through it with a renewed sense of purpose, and through three albums on Universal, Erna and Godsmack have developed into one of America’s premier hard-rock bands, with multiple Grammy nominations and radio hits to prove it.

Sure, they still bear the taint of having hitched a ride on a grunge-related metallic trend that was spearheaded by Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots. And they took their name from an Alice in Chains tune. Of course, with Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley dead and buried and Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland in and out of drug trouble, Godsmack are now the most reliable purveyors of the dark, pensive, grungy sound that brought those bands platinum success. And with that, the importance of Alice in Chains in Erna’s world view has diminished. He barely acknowledges the Alice in Chains connection when I mention it, and they are not among the bands he points to as formative influences on Godsmack. "A lot of people have referenced our name to the Alice in Chains song and said that we sound like Alice in Chains. I’ve just never really heard that in our music. I grew up with Zeppelin and Aerosmith, Rush, and Sabbath. I went through the whole ’80s era, was into punk rock, was into heavier bands like Metallica [whom Godsmack will be opening for on tour this spring] and Pantera. I also like Elton John, the Doobie Brothers, I mean, I like all kinds of stuff. Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera. I just listen to a lot of stuff. I don’t listen to the radio, but to me a good song is a good song: I don’t care if it’s death metal or pop or hard rock. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t even think there should be categories: it’s just either a good song or it isn’t."

As for the name Godsmack, Erna offers an alternative explanation. "It happened at rehearsal when our drummer came in with a big cold sore on his lip. I was making fun of him all day because we had a photo shoot coming up. And then the next day when I came in, I had a big cold sore on my lip. So my guitar player said, ‘See, God just smacked you for making fun of him.’ "

Pop music is filled with mythmaking, with people who have reinvented themselves for public consumption. And perhaps that makes the truth, whatever the truth may be, irrelevant. What’s important is the power of the image a band project. Erna and Godsmack are currently in the process of emulating Alice in Chains’ crossover from the hard-rock audience of their 1992 Dirt to the broader audience of their 1993 Jar of Flies EP (both on Columbia); this week, the band will be releasing their new acoustic EP The Other Side (Universal). And that’s the main reason Erna’s hanging at the FleetCenter: Godsmack, along with members of Dropbox, the first band to sign to Erna’s Universal imprint Realign, will be performing between the second and third periods of a Bruins game. They’ll even stick around to do a few songs after the game. It’s a way of reaffirming their ties to the city they emerged from and a chance to get a little advance publicity for the new EP.

Beyond that, Erna projects an air of casual indifference. "This was set up through our manager. Otherwise, I have no idea. The FleetCenter wanted to do something with us. And it turned into this. Plus, the timing of this acoustic EP worked out well for us. It’s a good way for us to debut the acoustic side of what we do. I think this is the most attractive of our music for a broad audience. If it were a full-on electric set, then it might scare away a lot of the moms and pops."