“Right before the breakdown hit, I would go: ‘Your dick smells like his asshole,’” says Heidi Shepherd, smiling warmly in her Miami hotel room. Later this afternoon she’s embarking on a Caribbean cruise, but for now she’s reminiscing about Mom and Dad first coming to see her perform.
When her folks turned up to that show in Utah back in the early 2010s, the Butcher Babies majored in confrontation. In those early, heady years. Heidi and then-co-frontwoman Carla Harvey let rip, clad in little more than nipple tape, ferocity, and panties, consciously channeling the late, great Wendy O. Williams — the Plasmatics’ raunchy, chainsaw-wielding, barbarian warrior queen of punk.
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“It was so cathartic,” Heidi says. “When we first started [in 2009] there were females in this industry, but it wasn’t like it is today. It was shocking to see not only one girl up there screaming in your face, but two, and with a really intense backing band. It was very punk rock — spinning and screaming and we’d pull people on stage who’d come up bloody from the pit, and I’d swig whiskey and spit it in their mouth. It was wild. It was raw. And it was fun.”
Now 39 and living in Vegas, Heidi was born and raised in Provo, Utah, in the faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, before skipping town and starting a rock and roll band. When lurid photos of the Butcher Babies’ nipple-tape mayhem began appearing on the World Wide Web, Heidi’s parents, as dutiful adherents of Mormon codes of sobriety and modesty, were mortified. “My mother didn’t speak to me for three years,” says Heidi, the eldest of six kids.
Signs of Heidi’s waywardness had already surfaced before she went full Butcher Babe, however. “One time my mom found a Korn album in my closet and she broke it in my face — like, ‘I won’t have this shit in my house.’ Although she wouldn’t say ‘shit,’ so it was: ‘I won’t have this garbage in my house.’ I think it was Life Is Peachy. I also had Limp Bizkit’s Three Dollar Bill but she didn’t find that one.” Exposure to the illicit high of nu-metal first came in junior high, when Heidi started hanging at a Provo skate park where heavy fucking metal fucking ruled. “That’s where I found my love of it,” she says.
Nevertheless, even given her sly taste for the Devil’s music, Heidi kept on track — literally. “I was a cheerleader and did track and field at Southern Utah University; I competed professionally. I competed in the Junior Olympics. It was my life.” Athletics consumed her until one day in 2004 when as a sophomore at college she came barrelling down the track, pole in hand, set to vault to the heavens, and her back broke.
“There’s this step called the penultimate step,” Heidi explains. “The second to last before you jump. You take all your velocity going forward and put it into going up, and it is very jarring on your joints. I took the step and the L5 [the spine’s lowest vertebra, from which the coccyx descends] just full-on broke,” says Heidi. Recovery took a year and a half, but was incomplete, leaving Heidi with nerve damage and sciatic flare-ups.
Having long dabbled in acting, the battlescarred young woman moved to Los Angeles, where she appeared in a few TV shows, and then, with Carla Harvey, formed the dual-valkyrie sonic attack squad, Butcher Babies: the name coming from a Plasmatics song, “Butcher Baby” off the 1980 album, New Hope for the Wretched. As Heidi, Carla, and Co. toured, word spread of their raucous force, as did photos and footage of the woman’s near-naked, sweat-drenched physicality. Hence the aforementioned three years of silence from Heidi’s dismayed mother.
But then came a foray back into Mormon country. And lo, one night at a club in Ogden, Utah, when Heidi was about 24, her parents turned up.
“Even ‘crap’ was a bad word growing up. I didn’t swear in front of my parents. I didn’t drink in front of them. And then they come to a show and there’s me on stage with my stage persona … and I’m chugging alcohol — chugging Jäger,” laughs Heidi. “I couldn’t look my dad in the eye. It was so tough.”
Heidi steeled herself to go full beast, which brings us to that moment where, right before the band broke it down for moshers to go crazy, she revved up to let rip with: “YOUR DICK SMELLS LIKE HIS ASSHOLE!”
“My dad came up to me after the show,” recalls Heidi. “And he’s like, ‘Did I hear that right? Did you say, “Your dick smells like his asshole”?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah Dad, I said that.’”
Nevertheless, Heidi’s parents came again the next night to a Salt Lake City show, which felt “a little bit easier.” But the real parental gestalt moment came when the Butcher Babies were on the bill of the too-much-metal-is-never-enough Mayhem Festival with its thousands of devotees in thrall to sound and fury, and, at a Midwestern leg, Mom showed up.
“She saw what it really was at that point,” says Heidi. “She was like, ‘OK, this isn’t just some weird pipedream — this is something that they do well and that they love.” Thus began a new era for the Shepherds, one united in metal. “My family are huge supporters. When we play in Utah they look like a Butcher Babies cheerleading squad. All of them are wearing the t-shirts. It’s an awesome, awesome thing to see. We played Utah with Mudvayne — an all-ages show in 2023 — and I look down and see all of my nieces and nephews and the babies are there. It’s such an incredible thing. My parents are now like, ‘We love metal.’ They watched Gore side-stage. They loved Mudvayne. Even though metal wasn’t a part of my childhood, it has really brought my family together in adulthood,” says Heidi.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, though. Heidi was gripped by severe depression in December of 2019. “I made the unfortunate decision that I wasn’t going to live anymore,” she says. “It was the weirdest … the weirdest. Like I wasn’t in my own body. I remember sitting down and thinking about what I would miss.” Heidi’s heroine, the Plasmatics’ Wendy O. Williams, died by her own hand (in 1998), but that wasn’t on Heidi’s mind in her lowest hours in late 2019, she says. Yet friend Jill Janus, who fronted L.A. metal band Huntress, had killed herself the year prior, “and that was a huge shakeup for me,” says Heidi, wiping away tears. “I’ve seen it a lot in my life.” She turns back to her own descent: “I don’t … you know … it wasn’t really anything I could control. It was just … I was out of it. It was an out of mind, out of body experience — I wasn’t thinking about the repercussions of anything.”
Heidi takes a moment. “I don’t even know what ignited it. It was just there.” Thankfully, it passed (and is now the subject of a Butcher Babies’ song, “Last December”).
In 2023 her long-time partner in crime, Carla Harvey, left the Butcher Babies. This meant Heidi now had double the screaming load, which she says necessitated a more sober approach to touring for the sake of her throat and her general well-being. “And I’m a fun drunk,” says Heidi. “I’ve never had a problem holding my alcohol.” Of which there had been plenty for the metal queen. “We’ve been on the road constantly since 2011,” says Heidi, “and it’s just so easy: alcohol’s free [on tour] and you just pop a beer after your set — or for us it was a bottle of Jäger,” she says. “We had this notion in our head — and it’s true, Jäger is herbal — that it was probably better to drink than hard whiskeys. But it was an every night thing — this band used to be a crazy party — doing Jäger shots with everyone drunk all the time.”
Abstaining while touring has done wonders for her voice, she says, while the rest of her amps up via psychotherapy, High Intensity Interval Training — including beating the living shit out of kickboxing bags — and weightlifting. Under the supervision of a trainer who has “mastered what it takes to shape a female body,” Heidi has poured herself into the workouts. “Heavy lifting has proved to be really, really great for preparing for these shows.” To a point, she says: “Nothing really prepares you for running and screaming at the same time. Unless you’re doing that and then your neighbors are like, ‘What’s going on?’” Nevertheless, the cardio workout of pumping iron is “insane,” says Heidi, while lower body workouts including Bulgarian squats helps prime her for getting on stage and summoning her full, cathartic wild-woman power.
At least it did until last April, when, 20 years after her track career ended with that penultimate step, her back broke again.
This time it was a car crash in Las Vegas that left the other driver unconscious, Heidi says, and her with a fracture in the same vertebra that broke when she set herself to vault half her lifetime ago. “The exact same place,” she says. Yet the fracture wasn’t as severe as when she was a teenager (“that was a full break”) with recovery not taking so long but still cramping her style.
She credits the hours and sweat she’s put in these last few years, particularly those which strengthened her posterior chain, with lessening the damage inflicted in the collision.
Having twice broken her back, having alienated and then inspired her parents, having seen off a death wish and farewelled her fellow banshee, having released four Butcher Babies albums (most recently 2023’s double album, Eye for an Eye /… ‘Til the World’s Blind), and having thrilled metalheads across the globe, Heidi Shepherd still lives for the zone.
She remembers an early taste of it: “We were on tour with Marilyn Manson, playing in Edmonton, Canada, and started with ‘National Bloody Anthem.’ We basically just chant ‘There’s blood everywhere,’ and the chant increases and increases and increases until it goes into this really groovy heaviness. And I remember the crowd with their fists in the air, screaming, ‘There’s blood everywhere,’” says Heidi, wistfully. “It was the first time I’d seen people screaming our lyrics back at us, and after the show I sat in the empty hall and I was like, ‘I’ll never forget this.’”
Here in Miami, though, the hour approaches for Heidi to embark on her cruise, on which she will perform. For some of the shows onboard, Heidi’ll take a break from her own material and instead turn her tonsils to easier-going ‘80s fare: “I’ll be singing ‘Maniac,’ [from Flashdance] and Kiss’ ‘Lick It Up,’ … and ‘Don’t You Want Me,’ by Human League,” she says.
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