CANNIBAL CORPSE drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz has offered an unusually frank assessment of what nearly four decades of extreme metal drumming does to a body — and how much longer he expects to keep it up.
Asked by Shawn Ratches of Laughing Monkey how he is holding up physically, the Florida death metal veteran started with gratitude and moved quickly to the work involved. "I feel pretty good, luckily. I think that's the key," he said. "I don't wanna fool myself or feel like I'm just gonna go up and go through the motions. I wanna feel good up there. And I do."
Staying there is another matter. "Of course I gotta practice — probably practice way more than I've ever had just to sustain and maintain," Mazurkiewicz said. The rest of the regimen is deliberately unglamorous: "You get older, you gotta eat right, you gotta stay hydrated. You gotta exercise. You gotta get good sleep. Those things are so important." Genetics help, he concedes, and so does ice hockey, which he still plays.
The honesty sharpens when he describes the difference between 30 and 58. "I'm not 30 years old anymore. You don't have that natural adrenaline flowing. Or I don't, anyways, and I'm a hyper kind of a guy," he said. "There's a couple of guys that I look at that are our age, my age, going, 'Man, where do you get all this energy from?' I still have it, but, man, it's waning, of course, and I really gotta work on it to sustain that."
Skip the maintenance, he warns, and the fall is fast: "If I don't, then it's gonna be really quick where I'm gonna turn around and go, 'Wow, I can't do this.' It's harder to come back to it, harder to maintain. We're not getting any younger."
Which leads to the question he cannot answer. "Am I gonna be able to do what I do right now in 10 years? I don't know. We don't know. Maybe, maybe not," he said. "I mean, in 10 years I'm gonna be — what? 68 years old? So am I gonna be able to go up there, 68, 70 years old, blasting, doing 'Hammer Smashed Face' with conviction, feeling like I'm able to just kind of do it — without dying or feeling like I'm about to pass out? Who knows? Only time will tell."
He is equally aware of how improbable the current situation would have looked to his younger self. "You definitely don't think that you're gonna be in a band this long," he said earlier this year. "I remember thinking, like, 'Oh yeah, when I'm 40… I'll be old.' And I'll be 58 this year, and who would have ever thought that I'd be still playing drums in a death metal band and [that we would still be doing] as well as we're doing."
CANNIBAL CORPSE's sixteenth album, "Chaos Horrific," arrived in September 2023 via Metal Blade Records, recorded at guitarist Erik Rutan's Mana Studio in Florida. It was Rutan's sixth production for the band and his second as a full member since officially joining in 2020. Formed in 1988, the group have spent their entire existence at the front line of death metal — and, by Mazurkiewicz's own account, are performing better now than at any point in their history.