Johnny Christ was born on November 18, 1984, in Huntington Beach, California. He joined Avenged Sevenfold as bassist in 2002 and made his first album with the band on 2003’s Waking the Fallen. That record, including “Unholy Confessions,” was also his introduction to the demands of studio recording.
Christ’s route into Avenged Sevenfold began before the position became permanent. He already knew members of the group and had played with them when their previous bassist couldn’t attend. While attending Marina High School, he stepped away from classes to fill in on a tour. What began as a temporary absence became a decision to leave school and commit to the band. He was joining people he knew, but the work itself still had plenty to teach him.
His enthusiasm didn’t mean he arrived fully prepared. In a 2021 feature for Kerrang!, Christ addressed his younger self with practical advice: invest in a better bass, prepare more thoroughly for shows and take learning seriously. He remembered breaking strings night after night and entering the Waking the Fallen sessions without fully understanding what recording an album involved. “This will be your craft for the rest of your life,” he wrote. The letter paired affection for that headlong decision with an acknowledgment that wanting the job and learning how to do it were different things.
Learning also meant finding agreement when the band wanted to change direction. Discussing 2013’s Hail to the King with WOUB in 2023, Christ recalled a difficult writing process. The musicians understood what they wanted to achieve, but the approach was unfamiliar, and they disagreed about how to get there. He remembered the work taking months. Once they reached the recording stage, his memories became warmer: the band stayed together in a rented house, with a ping-pong room and a fire pit where they spent time talking. Christ separated the frustration of writing from the pleasure of making the finished record together.
On 2016’s The Stage, a change in the arrangements gave him more room to play. In a 2017 MusicRadar interview, he contrasted it with the densely layered City of Evil, released in 2005, where he’d had to fit his bass into a narrow space. Working with drummer Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan had helped him understand how closely bass and drums needed to connect. Christ credited their years together with teaching him to lock into a drummer’s groove, a lesson he carried into the band’s subsequent rhythm partnerships. For The Stage, he could explore a more forceful fingerstyle sound, while retaining a pick when the music needed its sharper attack. His choice depended on the part and the feel he wanted.
He also drew on hip-hop rhythms to give some choruses more bounce. “How could I push myself creatively?” was the question he recalled asking during the process. One answer required him to learn something new: the bass part in “Exist” called for sweeping, so he worked out how to execute the technique with a pick.
