"It was twenty years ago today..."

It's really only the big, important days in your life that you can say "I remember exactly where I was (10, 20, 30, whatever) years ago today."  Well, today that number is 20 years, and I can safely say that Rampage and Death Beast would not exist, certainly not as they are, without the experience I had 20 years ago today, on February 28, 1992.  On that day, late at night, I sat in the little broadcast studio of WREK studios in Atlanta GA and watched as Disjecta Membra rewrote everything I thought I knew about metal.

I've mentioned before in an interview some time ago how that came to pass.  But I don't think what I describe there really set the stage for what that night meant to me.  Let's put it into context.  At 16 I got my first bass.  I bought tab magazines and books, figured stuff out by ear, and could pretty much play my way through a good deal of Metallica's first four albums.  I spent hours in my room trying to figure things out, trying to cop those bass lead licks from Anesthesia, even goofing with friends trying to write and record stuff.  Those recordings became the artistic and inspirational genesis of Rampage, but at the time I was indulging in fantasy as well.  I didn't just want to play, I wanted to play live, in front of people, with songs that I wrote, watching them go 'wow' the way I did when I threw on Leprosy or Ride the Lightning.

For two years I was a bedroom rock star, and so when I finally got to college I started searching for other people to try to make it happen.  A few months of searching put together the embryonic version of Early Warning, who played exactly one gig for a bar crowd before we took an extended break.  It was a taste, but it wasn't enough - it was a bunch of guys who knew each other playing a shitload of covers and a couple of songs that Frank wrote.  It wasn't the kind of thing that would set the world on fire.

But by the end of the summer of 1991 we finally got the full lineup together.  We had two writers. We had drive.  We had time and space to practice.  We had some gig connections.  It looked like it could really happen.

But, they were still the other guys' songs.

Now, don't get me wrong - I loved what we were doing, and I had a hand in arranging my own parts, but it's different when it's YOUR song idea running down the spine of what you're playing, and I wanted to wow people with what I could do.  And while I liked the proggish touches to our music, I wanted something faster, meaner, heavier - something that make me feel like I did three years before when I was blasting thrash and death metal nonstop.

And that's where Disjecta Membra came in.  As I described in the interview above, we met them before our first gig on Feb. 9, 1992, at a short radio interview at WREK.  But seeing them didn't prepare me for what I heard that night when they played after us.  It was so fucking loud and heavy that it blew my mind.  These guys should have been huge.  They had the sound and the style and the talent.  And, what was the kicker - I could see it happening in front of me.  It wasn't sounds on some CD or tape that was blowing me away - it was the guys with guitars standing three feet in front of me, flooring me with "Earth and Stone" and "RYMOT".  That was the first time I realized that all this music I loved comes from real people, and if that's the case then it's possible for ME to make that, too.  I don't have to be a superstar - I just have to be good, and true to what I liked, and the sounds would come.

And so, of course, through the good luck of my friend Selbie at the radio station telling me about their gig on "Live at WREK", I got in.  I remember helping them set up, and I was flattered that they remembered me from the gig almost 3 weeks before.  They even said they liked our stuff, which was cool.

The lights went down, and then they blew my mind again.  Without having the whole jostling crowd to contend with, I just got to focus on watching them and hearing them, and it floored me.  Imagine being a Sabbath fan who got to see them at the Star Club in Hamburg during that month-long stint they did there - that's about what it felt like.

Again, I've told before how the tape I had of that night was stolen, and then how a few years later I managed to get myself another copy from the same sound engineer when my own band (Skiptoe, at that time) did a "Live at WREK" gig.  It was the best stroke of luck I've ever had, and so I put it out through UHR for a while, then just started giving dubs away free.  Everyone I've given it to loved it.  It just goes to show it's who you know, because they blow away most of the shit I've heard in the 20 years since that night.  It was just so honest and raw, but so polished and, for lack of a better word, BIG.  It was big songs about big ideas, and they were good at tapping into their love for the style and making it come out as something mean, ferocious, and heavy.  They weren't thrash, or death, or black, and they were far more than just power or heavy metal.  They really had their own sound, and THAT inspiration, while it took a lot longer to realize, is what I've been chasing with my own music.  Not making something that sounds like X, or Y, or Z. Making something that sounds like me.

I've rocked "Electric Satan" and "Neptune's Realm" hundreds of times in my life, but it never gets old.  My only wish is that something I've written (or will write) touches someone even half this deeply.  Because when it comes to art, if you're not changing hearts and minds you're just wasting your time.

And Disjecta Membra was most certainly not a waste of time.

News and Updates for a New Year

In previous years I always put up some kind of a "New Year's Resolution" post explaining what I planned to get accomplished that year - putting semi-reasonable goals of getting X, Y, and Z done before the next 365 days are up.

And I usually failed.

This year I didn't do that, but for some reason after the xmas holidays, with the extra time and buoyed by the recent relaxation I started getting done a lot of shit I'd been meaning to do.  So, I'm not resolving anything, but just telling you all (all 3 of you) what I've been up to.

1) Ever since the demise (let's not bullshit ourselves) of UHR I've been wanting to revitalize it in some way.  Influenced by some life-changing moves of a friend and co-conspirator of mine, and thinking about how to keep evolving the label along with the evolution of what music has become in the face of the Internet, I've been trying to convert UHR to a digital-only online netlabel.  This involves getting properly indexed archives of everything I've released set up and organized, and then going through the bits that I have rights to and aren't cover songs and uploading them to the Internet Archive, thus transitioning UHR completely to a netlabel.

Well, I'm about 90% done with the musical file organization.  I have to arrange proper graphics files to go with these, so that I have a removable hard drive that contains the totality of UHR's output.  Then I plan to make a copy and share with a friend off-site so that I have a proper backup plan.  Second, I plan to go through what I am okay with uploading and do it, and for the parts that I'm not I will secure the rights or permission if I can.

2) Just this week I've finally got all of the Rampage recordings I completed in 2006 into Aerik's hands so that he can finish them off and we can see about finally getting some new Rampage out there.

3) I finally completed the re-assembly and mixing of Death Beast's live gig from a couple of months ago after the horrendous nightmare of the gig itself and its aftermath.  That will see some kind of release soon.  A few samples are on Death Beast's Facebook page - http://listn.to/deathbeast

4) As some of you may have seen by now, Death Beast is now label-less, as Black Goat has decided to call it a day with Barbarian Wrath.  I will not let this mean the end of Death Beast, and so we will most likely just move over to UHR for the release of our next album "The Onslaught".

5) Speaking of which, I'll be honest, "The Onslaught" only has 3 finished songs now, but I'm working on more.  Slowly, but working on it.  It's not like setting hard deadlines has gotten me anywhere in past years, so let's see what a softer approach yields.

I think that's enough for now.  Let's see what goes on from here.

No, really, this time...

Look at the first post of this blog, and notice that it's almost exactly two years ago, and I was saying exactly the same thing as I am now.  I really need to work on this thing, as with so many other things, and so I decide to try to regularly do SOMETHING, hoping against hope that building any sort of structure of creativity will spread to other areas.

After all, only one live gig and a few demo tracks after six years is unconscionable.

So, stay tuned here.  More is coming, both here and elsewhere.

Thirteen Years Gone - RIP, Mr. Schuldiner

As a metalhead, I'm quite aware of the remembrances of the day going out for Chuck Schuldiner, death metal pioneer and mastermind behind one of the biggest underground metal bands of the 80s/90s metal scene. He passed away ten years ago today, yet at the time I found out I remembered that his death was three years to the day after his last live performance. December 13, 1998, Death and Hammerfall played The Masquerade in Atlanta, GA to close out the Sound of Perseverance tour. It must have been added at the last minute because I remember at the time being surprised that they weren't playing Atlanta at first, and then I also remember getting the "Live in LA" CD and the booklet omitting mention of it in the tour listing printed there.

And I also just remembered that they were all sold out of merchandise, which is where the rest of this post comes in.

In 1998 I was writing for Eternal Frost webzine, an online metal zine headed by the enigmatic Goden (fanatic for gore/horror and all things doomy and gore-grindy). He passed off lots of thrash and speed metal albums to me to review, let me do the occasional interview, and on the rare occasion I got to go to a gig I would do a gig report. Well, Issue #5 (which can be dug out of the Internet Archives' Wayback Machine) came out just after that, and in that issue I wrote a gig report for that show. And so, to honor the day and the man, I reprint the review I wrote of his last gig. It's almost like one of those snapshots - you can project the future of that time, which is now your past, onto what you see there, but it's strange to look at what was and realize what we didn't know was about to happen. Innocence is the best word for it, and when discussing Innocence I think Chuck himself said it best:

Savor what you feel and what you see
Things that may not seem important now
But may be, tomorrow

RIP, Chuck.

-----

Written for ETERNAL FROST Webzine, #5.

DEATH/HAMMERFALL
@ The Masquerade
Atlanta, Georgia
December 13, 1998

This show happened to be the last show of DEATH and HAMMERFALL on the U.S. tour and this show was not originally on their tour schedule, so it was indeed a special night. There were plenty of surprises, but no exhaustion or 'this is it, one more and we're done' - it was simply great. (It would have been perfect, but since they didn't originally plan on this show, all of Death's merchandise had sold out. . . oh, well, that's metal).

Hammerfall has been getting a lot of flak for being on this tour, and this isn't really the place to go into the "why"s, the "who's right"s and the "who's wrong"s. All I'm going to say is this: I don't see how anyone who is a true fan of metal could have been there watching Hammerfall and not enjoyed the show. There are influences (HEAVY influences) from lots of old '80s metal bands (JUDAS PRIEST and HELLOWEEN being most prominent), but these guys definitely had their own sound - very fast, aggressive, but still melodic, they sort of wrapped that whole "'80s sound" into one package. And then there was the show - THEY KNOW HOW TO PUT ON A SHOW!! Some may have thought that the 'posing', or the 'unison banging' or the fact that they looked like they were having a ball detracted from the show, but to me it just brought home a sad fact - nobody puts on a show anymore. Still, I saw most of everyone in the club banging their heads and fists, shouting along with the lyrics, playing back to the band just like the band was playing to the crowd. It was the most fun metal show I've ever seen, and that includes BODY COUNT. . .

Then, after the beer break, the lights dimmed and out of the speakers came the eerie score from HALLOWEEN. The dim shadows took their place, and at the crescendo, BOOM! Death blasted directly into one of the best renditions of "The Philosopher" I've ever heard. For the first time that I've seen them (out of four times) Chuck had the same live lineup that he had in the studio, so there was no weak link in the band at all. Scott Clendenin laid down the bass foundation, Richard Christy never missed a splash or crash or tom, Chuck was in fine form (as always), and Shannon Hamm made those sweep arpeggios look too damn easy!

Chuck has never been the best at stage banter, but they kept that to a minimum, simply blasting from one song to the next with barely a pause for breath. The set list was composed of mostly newer material, but enough classic stuff for some of the die-hards. However, the only song earlier than the "Human" album was the encore, "Pull the Plug". Still, with songs like (in no particular order) "Suicide Machine", "Together As One", "Symbolic", "Zero Tolerance", "Crystal Mountain", "Scavenger of Human Sorrow", "Spirit Crusher", "Flesh and the Power it Holds", and "A Moment of Clarity", who could complain? I was worried that some of the newer stuff might not come off well live, with all of the layered guitars, but they managed to arrange those sections well to focus on the melodies and they just poured in the enthusiasm. A fantastic show. . .

But then, after "Pull the Plug", something strange happened - a closing band, called "The Waffleheads" (probably because of the Waffle-House paper hats they had on), took to the stage - they looked suspiciously like the two guitarists from Hammerfall, a drummer who looked like a roadie, Scott Clendenin on bass, and the lead singer of Hammerfall on backing vocals - but the lead singer, though he looked a lot like Richard Christy, had on some weird nerd glasses, a fake nose, and suspender tights a-la Tarzan. And they ROCKED!! After a little intro, they slammed into a song that must be a cover, but I have to confess I don't know what it was (lame of me, wasn't it?) - but it rocked! The chorus went something like "Let your tongue roll over my bunghole/you're my kind of girl!" - if anyone can help me identify it, please e-mail me.

Maybe 'fun' is a bad word in the metal world these days, but I think what made this show so great was the fact that you could easily tell that both bands were having a blast playing, and I think the crowd mostly picked up on that (skinheads and mosh-morons aside, and fortunately there were very few of both), making this a special night for everyone there. I can't wait for Death's and Hammerfall's next albums - would the fates be kind enough to let them tour the U.S. together again? Damn, I hope so. . . --Lord Vic

If I didn't have bad luck...

... I'd have no luck at all, or so the old song goes.

Maybe no luck would be the way to go, given my experiences with bad luck this past month. This will probably be the last time I bother buying a new instrument. I just don't have the endurance for it anymore.

So, I had some extra birthday cash in early November and I decided that I wanted to get a new guitar. For quite some time I'd had my mind set on getting a BC Rich Mockingbird - I've always liked how it's a strange mix of edgy and classic, and since Kerry King and Chuck Schuldiner each used them on albums I grew up worshipping, it made sense (and would make a nice companion piece to my P-Bass, my SG, and my Strat - each of which I own for the same reasons...).

All of the new Mockingbirds you can get now have those quilt-top finishes with the wood grain - pretty, on its own, but not right for such a metal-looking guitar I think. I wanted a vintage, flat-black metal monster. With a Floyd Rose. Anyone who's heard my music knows how integral a Floyd is to my 'style', such as it is, and all of the current budget-model Mockingbirds are fixed bridge. So, new instruments were out and the used shops in my area were dry of anything even remotely metal.

That left eBay.

Now, I'd bought a guitar on eBay before - my SG, in fact. However, that one was lucky enough to be a local pickup, so I haven't ever dealt with shipping on a guitar through eBay. Still, TONS of guitars sell that way, and they're not all ripoffs, so in my naivete I thought it couldn't be that bad. So, I searched, and found a great-looking NJ series Mockingbird - jet black, with a Floyd, and better yet it INCLUDED the case. The price was right, and I was even luckier that the guy dropped the price right before I bid. So, I managed to get it for right at my budget, including the shipping. The guy had 100% feedback with a 500+ rating, so I figured I couldn't lose.

Silly me.

I paid for the guitar in mid-November, and then proceeded to wait. And wait. The projected shipping window came and went and still no guitar - and, worse, no email from the seller about when or even whether he shipped it. I had no idea if it was lost or what. And, having been burned on eBay before, and knowing how short their timeframe for payment return is, I decided to open a case.

Finally the seller started contacting me, telling me he sent it, but he couldn't tell me when or by what method and wouldn't provide tracking or a receipt scan. So, knowing it's a pain but preferring to be out a guitar rather than out a few hundred bucks I escalated the case. And got my refund. Just the day before Xmas Eve. The seller emailed me again, asking about the refund and whether or not I still wanted the guitar - an odd question for someone who told me he sent it already. I told him that if he hadn't shipped it, don't bother - I didn't trust that it would arrive.

So xmas came and went, and then a few days afterward - AFTER the refund came through, mind you, and AFTER I told the guy not to send it - guess what arrives in the mail. Yes, my guitar. Postmarked AFTER I told him not to bother. I guess he trusted I'd pay him again for it after all. As I suspected I would, I would forgive the jerking around the second I had my dirty little hands on the guitar itself. But boy did it need some work - new strings, and the bridge needed to be blocked.

So, I set to work on taking off the strings, cleaning it, blocking the bridge, and then changing the strings - when one of the little string-clamp blocks in the bridge broke. Damn - now I need to replace that little block. I kept stringing it, and then was tightening another string-clamp block and SNAP! The entire saddle assembly just broke, right in two. On the plus side, I pulled the clamp block from that saddle and fixed the other one, so I only need one saddle assembly now. But NOBODY in town has one. So, it's back to eBay, to fix this goddamn white elephant of a mess I've gotten myself into.

So, when you hear some story about me dying in a car wreck on the way from some music shop, you'll know why.

Ramrod, May You Rape the Angels

It was a weekend of rare good fortune. I didn't have to bring work home, my birthday was Monday, so it was nothing but well-wishes, good fortune, gifts, and a great steak dinner to look forward to. I was even buoyed by an email in my inbox on Friday morning at work - an old friend from my childhood, whom I have not seen or spoken to in 24 years, emails me to reconnect.

Fate is a vindictive bitch.

And so, in the course of my normal internet rounds, I turn to Fa(e)ce(s)book, and receive the worst news.

"Ramrod" Ryan Weiss is dead.

I could lament the many musical things about him, and I will in a bit, but first I have to acknowledge the greatest tragedy, that this brother, son, father, and husband is gone. Family man, and friend to many.

And I'm not going to bullshit like I was one of his best friends. We knew each other a while, shared quite a bit in common, even worked together (culminating in ultimately futile attempts to collaborate in each other's main bands) on occasion, but there are others who knew him better, saw him more, were there with him in his life and at its end.

And yet I do feel the loss - because that's the kind of guy he was. He knew you and remembered you.

Not to mention he was a big Venom fan, which is what ultimately drew us together. (this is where the reminiscing starts for all those who were wondering)

It was back in 1999 or 2000, when both Rampage and Unsung Heroes Records were in their infancies. I had just started the idea for an online Venom tribute - get bands to record a song for a tribute (because the tribute album trend was just starting) - but fuck the trend by putting it up online, for free - a true labor of love. I got a few collaborators, and then I got an email from Ramrod - he had not one but FOUR songs he wanted to contribute. At the time I was writing for the Eternal Frost webzine, and so he also included a three-song demo of Chemikiller, the "Delaware Black Metal" demo along with the four Venom covers.

Needless to say, I was hooked. EFW is now in the digital dustbin (Goden, if you're out there, put it back online!!!), but I remember writing a very good review of it, and before hosting bandwidth killed the project his four Venom covers were the highlight of the online tribute.

We stayed lightly in touch over the years, as he sent me newer demos of Chemikiller as well as other bands of his - The Nasty Nymphos stick out the most. Finally, in 2003, at the urging of Aerik Von, I decided to see if Ramrod would be interested in releasing anything on UHR. Up until then he had releases on several other labels and he was quite happy to also dub and burn copies himself, so I wasn't sure he'd need or want to deal with us - but he was quite eager, and so he compiled the "Hellrockin' Demos" collection for release in early 2003, followed by the 70+ minute compilation "Hellrockin' Demos II" later that year. They both did pretty well, as did the live album by the Nasty Nymphos and the first demo of his collaboration with Aerik, The Von Frankenstein's "Blood Sucking Freaks".

Ramrod also did the cover art for the Black Moon Rising/Gortician split release "Double Penetration". Knowing the sick depths of depravity Ramrod was capable of, the cover was surprisingly non-censor-worthy, yet still managing to convey the shock and horror of the title's implication. But, again, that's just the kind of guy he was - he lived and breathed the raw, rude, fun, laugh-til-you-puke-or-die iconoclastic attitude at the heart of where rock and roll meets metal.

That's what makes it a shame we never got our collaborations together. Technology was what did us in - my computer couldn't record on his software, and importing his songs into my software wouldn't get the music and my recordings to synchronize properly. Sadly, he had the same problem on his end. Could you imagine Death Beast "The Wakening" with Ramrod's throaty rasp? Or my thumping basslines on "Evilspeak: Passion of the Antichrist"? At least there was a taste of that on the Death Beast demo comp, featuring the few songs that technology could not subvert.

And so we end where our collaboration began - those four Venom tracks he sent all those years ago. I had some tracks set to be a split tribute to Venom with Megiddo, but ChorazaiM could never get his songs recorded, and then it was too long we felt like it was best to just let it die. I still had these four songs, though, raw and about 90% finished, when one day I came across the original CD Ramrod sent me of those Venom tracks for the online tribute. I asked if he'd be interested in finally getting a split with Rampage and Chemikiller completed, he said yes, and thus Twelve Inches of Blasphemy was released.

In 2007. When I was in the midst of what would turn out to be a creative Sargasso Sea. Though one largely of my own making.

I'm not going to bore you with what I was going through - this post is about Ryan, not me. Suffice it to say that motivation dropped, and I could have worked through it like I have every time before, but I let days pass, and days became weeks, and weeks became years. And during the time I would talk to all of the people I was involved with musically, Ryan included of course, and we'd chat about the old days and what I was 'working on', and then I'd go back to sleeping, or playing the FPS-du-jour, or just not much of anything but drinking myself into a stupor and watching my life stagnate and rot.

And I heard Ryan was sick, talked to him a bit, but filed it away under "well, I'll talk to him again soon."

Sometimes Fate, bitch that she is, changes 'soon' to 'never'. And all that time you thought you had vanishes just like that. I never got the chance to say good bye. To tell him how much I loved his music and the chance to work with him. I did tell him I wanted to cover one of his songs as a bonus track for the next Death Beast album, and he had my blessing (said "It would be an honor" - exact quote) - but now he'll never get to hear it. Unless they have iTunes down in Hell.

So, at least I have this lesson - maybe Fate will make my 'soon' into 'never' tomorrow, or the next day, so do what you can while you can. And maybe when I croak someone will wish they had the chance to say good bye to me and tell everyone about how much they'll miss me.

Because you never know. You just gotta do your best while you can, try to get those kicks in before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

Rest in peace, Ryan. You are missed.

The First Stirrings of the Death Beast, Pt. 2

So, we left off the last post sometime in 2002, when Sado-Stan Dementor, Axecutioner, and I had hammered his first lyrical ideas into what you all now know as the "Apocalypse Metal" demo - four original songs and a few covers. At the time we decided that this stuff was so good, and the ideas were still flowing, so we should go for broke and have a go at making a full album. Dementor sent me some more lyrics while Axe and I hammered riffs out.

At this time I was really busy. Though Rampage would end up going nowhere for a couple of years, I was working hard at it trying to write more stuff in the "New World Blasphemy" vein. I was working on Death Beast. I ran UHR, which was both a label and a store at that time.

And as if I didn't have enough to do, Black Goat came calling.

Being pretty impressed with my label/distro abilities, he approached me in 2002 about running "Barbarian Wrath Vinland," his second attempt to get a satellite distro running in the US. I had been in contact with him before, of course - he sold me my first Countess CDs, and I got to know him through his association with ChorazaiM of Megiddo. I even sent BG some Rampage stuff, figuring he might like Rampage enough to sign us - but he told me my vocals needed a lot of work. And it turns out he was right - and ultimately that's what led to what happened next.

Just as he was chatting me up about running BWV, I had already decided to let him hear Death Beast. I figured that if he liked my music but not my vocals, then he should love Death Beast, since it's (mostly) my music and someone else's vocals. I sent him some MP3s, and then he demanded the full demo. I burned what we had and sent it to him - and thus Death Beast became a new Barbarian Wrath band.

Fate is funny, though - it would be three more years before the album finally got released... but those are tales for another time.