The Fear Factory saga continues, though it’s really only entertaining when Dino is running his mouth. Our buddies at MetalSucks were nice enough to comb through vocalist Burton C. Bell’s very dry interview with Rock My Monkey and give us the gist of it, including the internal tension caused by bassist Christian Olde Wolber’s affair with manager (and now wife) Christy Piske:
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.
Bell goes on to briefly discuss the ongoing legal battle, claiming he and Dino Cazares, were the ones to initially file suit:
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.
The Sucks guys ask what the suit could possibly be, since we already know Herrera and Wolbers share equal stake in Fear Factory Inc. (and therefore, the trademark). If anything, you’d expect Wolbers and Herrera to be the ones filing, since they need to protect their stake.
We don’t know any of the details of the suit or how the company is structured in terms of who makes decisions. The Wolbers affair shouldn’t affect his shareholder status, though it may have implications in a court deciding his ability to proceed as a decision-maker within the “company.” Any lawyer-type, or better yet, anyone familiar with the case is more than welcome to help us out, since my legal experience ends with the time the cops found me digging through Tina Fey’s dumpster.
