The night before I got on the phone for Howard’s show, I’d had a meeting with my bandmates at that same hotel. They weren’t much happier with me than everyone else was. They’d all dreamed of what we’d just achieved—a number-one album—and that success was being drowned out by death threats and accusations that we were all traitors. This was the band’s big moment, and my essay was threatening to ruin it for us all. At that meeting, the first thing our guitarist Daron said to me was, “Are you trying to get us all killed?” I remember telling him that what I wrote was the truth, that it was all
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