Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (16 page)

MARTIN BIRCH (producer):
Bruce was capable of handling lead vocals on some of the quite complicated directions I knew Steve wanted to explore. So when Bruce joined, it opened up the possibilities for the new album tremendously—and for that reason,
Number of the Beast
was the turning point for Iron Maiden.

BRUCE DICKINSON:
When I was recording
Number of the Beast
, there was that quiet, whispered intro. [There] wasn’t a question of [me] not being able to physically sing [right after that], but there was an atmosphere [producer] Martin [Birch] wanted, that I couldn’t quite get, and I ended up throwing chairs, and going, “What is it you want?!” We were in the control room and Martin said, “Look, when we were doing
Heaven and Hell
with Black Sabbath, Ronnie came in, and they were all ready to go, and we started recording the song ‘Heaven and Hell,’ and Ronnie was note-perfect. Then Martin stopped and said ‘Ronnie, we need to do this again, rethink it,’ and Ronnie said, ‘What’s the problem, was it out of tune?’ Martin said, ‘No, no, but if you listen to your opening lines, it says,
Sing me a song you’re a singer
. You
are
a singer. It’s your life. So I just want those two lines delivered as if your entire life depends on it.” That was the way Martin got inside your head.

ADRIAN SMITH (Iron Maiden):
The
Piece of Mind
American tour was probably the start of the whole band becoming a little bit more sensible. In the past, touring America had been so easy. We’d do our spot early on and spend the rest of the night having a good time. Now we were headlining and we couldn’t afford to piss around. People said we were wrong to go out as headliners in the States so soon; that we weren’t ready for it and we’d never be able to pull it off. We had something to prove. We all took it a little bit more seriously.

STEVE HARRIS:
For me, [1983’s]
Piece of Mind
was the best album we’d done up to then, easily. I carried on thinking that right up until [1988’s]
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
album, five years later. I’m not saying the two albums we did in between, [1984’s]
Powerslave
and [1986’s]
Somewhere in Time
, weren’t good, ’cause there’s a lot of stuff on those albums I still think of as some of our best ever. But
Piece of Mind
was just special. It was [drummer] Nicko McBrain’s first album. [Di’Anno-era drummer Clive Burr left in 1982.] We felt like we were on a high, and you can hear that mood on the album.

In the wake of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, two main subgenres emerged: thrash bands—including Metallica, Exodus, and Anthrax—which were heavily influenced by the musicality of Diamond Head and Raven and the speed of Motörhead (and will be addressed in detail later); and doom outfits, which were more drawn to the lazier tempos, psychedelic textures, and sludgier, Sabbathian riffs of Angel Witch and Witchfinder General. Pentagram, which had been around in the Washington, DC, area since 1971, suddenly came alive, and in 1985 released its eponymous debut. Sweden’s Candlemass; Chicago’s Trouble; Washington, DC’s the Obsessed; and LA’s Saint Vitus (the latter two of which were fronted by Scott “Wino” Weinrich) weren’t far behind. From those tangled roots sprung Down, Cathedral, Kyuss, Eyehategod, Sleep, Orange Goblin, and countless others who valued the intangible journey to the end of a song as much as the elements that brought them there.

BOBBY LIEBLING:
I was a huge Sabbath fan. When Tony Iommi first came on the scene, he was the fastest guitar player I had ever heard. Their music was all bummed out and sick, soupy, heavy moan-tone guitars. I was crazy about ’em.

JOE HASSELVANDER (Raven, ex-Pentagram):
Sabbath wasn’t the first band to do doom metal. There were many other bands at the same time doing the same thing. Most of them were German and Italian: Black Widow, Night Sun, Iron Claw. There’s a band called Zior, and the guy who did their first album cover did the first Sabbath album cover. There was a whole lot of sinister riffing. Even Toe Fat had stuff that was as sinister sounding. Sabbath’s first album, to me, sounds a lot like the first two Taste records by Rory Gallagher. It’s jazz-oriented, but yet it’s hard rocking, too.

BOBBY LIEBLING:
We started Pentagram on Christmas day, 1971. At the time, nobody knew what the word
pentagram
meant at all—I mean
nobody
.

JOE HASSELVANDER:
Bobby had been in bands called Shades of Darkness and Ice. Pentagram was going to be called Stone Bunny as a joke because [guitarist] Randy Palmer said, “Pentagram? You might as well call the band Stone Bunny, it’s so stupid.”

SCOTT “WINO” WEINRICH (Saint Vitus, ex–The Obsessed):
I met Bobby Liebling a pretty long time ago, but he’d already been doing Pentagram for years before I had a working band. He was definitely the first guy from our area to be doing that heavy music that we love. I was coming out of a Motörhead concert and I saw Bobby standing outside asking everybody that came out if they had drugs. I was like, “Wow, that’s so radical.”

BOBBY LIEBLING:
My favorite Pentagram album of all time is [1991’s]
Sub Basement
, and that record is extremely bummed out and depressing and horribly difficult to listen to—for me, even. It’s total sonic overload and it makes you want to kill yourself. We wanted to do the most depressing album in history. We were going to call the album after
Sub Basement
“Bummer.” It was really cool to be suicidally depressed and in absolute hopeless despair.

JOE HASSELVANDER:
Bobby got the job done musically on
Sub Basement
because I
made
him. If I hadn’t been there, it wouldn’t have happened. He had all his drug paraphernalia and sat on the couch downstairs while I’m upstairs in the control room mixing the record. I’d come downstairs. He’d wake up and go, “Sounds perfect. Don’t change a thing.” How would he know? He’s not even upstairs listening. I used to have to wake him up in between lines in the song. He’d fall asleep standing up. But I would make him do it. I have compassion for people. Bobby is extremely talented. Nobody can take that from him, but he has to have somebody there doing it for him, then he always takes the credit. When you work with Pentagram, he gets the glory and the band who did it gets nothing. I played all the instruments on the entire album. I mixed it. I didn’t mind, but when I found out he had taken some of my songs from earlier years and claimed he wrote them, and when I went to BMI and found out that he was the composer and author of my songs, that was it. That was a sign of someone who’s desperate and wants to make sure he always has that drug money.

WINO:
One time me and Bobby shot drugs together. He had all the connections—anything you wanted any time of day, night or day. He’d say “park here.” Five minutes later he comes back with the stuff. He had huge scars all over his body. It looked like somebody held him down and put cigars out on him for about a week. We were in the bathroom one time and Bobby said, “Will this freak you out?” And he just jabs the fucking spike straight down between two tendons in his wrist, right into an artery. I’ve never seen anything like that.

BOBBY LIEBLING:
I should have died twenty-five years ago. I should be dead ten times over. I’ve been addicted to heroin for forty years and methadone for thirty years. I was on methadone and shooting heroin on top of it seven days a week and smoking $500 to $1,000 of crack every single day around the clock. I’ve had lots of near-death experiences. The last one I had, I had just taken my methadone. I had been awake around the clock smoking crack for six days straight before a gig. No water, no food, not a minute of sleep. And I was debuting a brand new Pentagram lineup at a packed house at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. I wasn’t aware that I came out onstage twice and then fell into the drum set and blacked out. Then, of course, I seized because of all the drugs. I flatlined twice on the way to the hospital. Next thing I knew, I was going down a tunnel of light. Many people who have died and then been revived talk about the tunnel of light. It’s all true. I couldn’t believe it. There’s a funnel, and at the end of it there are globule amoeba-type things. One had my grandmother’s face, but they’re translucent and out of focus, and they kind of glob together like an overhead light show projector. Everyone is beckoning you with their hands, telling you to come to the light. And you’re sliding down the slide, tranquil as a baby. I almost got through the tunnel. Then it felt like there was a kaleidoscope closing up the hole in the middle with these propeller-like flaps, and I felt like I got sucked back up a sewage pipe, and realized I was alive. God told me I wasn’t ready. I’m a very strong believer in God nowadays, regardless of the name of the band.

Even though Washington, DC, was the launching pad for ’80s U.S. doom thanks to Pentagram, Saint Vitus, Obsessed and Internal Void, a decade later New Orleans became “doom central.” Major bands included Eyehategod, Crowbar, Soilent Green, and Down, a supergroup that featured Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo and bassist Rex Brown (who quit in 2011), Crowbar front man and guitarist Kirk Windstein, Corrosion of Conformity guitarist Pepper Keenan, and Eyehategod guitarist Jimmy Bower (on drums).

MIKE IX WILLIAMS (Eyehategod):
New Orleans is a grim place. It’s very hot in the summer, there’s lots of poverty and crime. I guess it did manifest itself somehow in the music and with the feedback and the dirty sound. We were huge Melvins fans and we liked Black Flag. But besides being into them, we liked that [doom metal] was easy to play because we weren’t very good musicians when we started [in 1988]. We basically played three chords a song, but slowed down with me screaming over it. Our shows were pretty crazy. I used to break a lot of glass and cut myself with it—stupid, childish stuff, really. After we started getting a following, people would put bottles in front of me onstage because they knew I would smash them. One time in Dayton, Ohio, I cut myself really bad on the forehead and I started getting kind of dizzy, but we finished the whole set. It was a weird night because a bunch of the kids in the crowd had brought angel dust and I did that before we played, which made me feel weird to begin with. Anyway, I guess I hit an artery with a shard of glass because my forehead was pumping out blood. A friend of mine, [horror director] Jim Van Bebber, was there with his girlfriend. She was standing a foot or two away from me and she kept getting sprayed by my forehead—all over her chest. We went next door to the fire station and they bandaged me up and told me I had to go to the hospital, and from there I got stitches, which I took out myself three days later.

PEPPER KEENAN (Corrosion of Conformity, Down):
We grew up together in New Orleans since we were fucking kids. Phil [Anselmo] and I used to jam in 1992 when we was sixteen years old. We were into Saint Vitus, Sabbath, Trouble, and all this heavy shit, and we were all stoned and drunk so the music came out really doomy. We went in there for a laugh, but ten minutes later we weren’t laughing anymore. So we made a tape and started trading it around. Next thing we knew, six years had passed and people were still asking about it.

JIM WELCH (ex-A&R, Earache Records):
I’ve never seen anybody as a collective group take more different kinds of downers than Eyehategod and Crowbar. Guys in New Orleans are really into that, which I never really understood. But shit, you can hear it in their albums.

PHIL ANSELMO (Down, Pantera, Superjoint Ritual) [2002 interview]:
For six months after my first real bout with hard dope, I used to have dreams about it. I used to yearn for it a lot. That’s where a lot of the depression comes from—wanting something you can’t have, and you really can’t have it because you damn well know what’s coming. That’s why I say do it in moderation—so you don’t get caught up in the fucking game. Don’t go chasing it. There’s a time and place for just about fucking everything unless it fucking sucks you in. [After surviving a crippling addiction, overdoses, and major back surgery, Anselmo kicked hard drugs. He has since reversed his stance on moderation and now helps struggling addicts get clean.]

MIKE IX WILLIAMS:
We played at the Covered Wagon in San Francisco and I drank a lot of Jagermeister and had some dope. I got back to the house we were staying at and I had the bright idea to do some more heroin, which was stupid after drinking that much. I was locked in this bathroom and I wouldn’t be here right now if there hadn’t been a window in the bathroom. There was hardly anybody at the house, but somebody said they heard a thump. That was me hitting my head against the wall when I fell off the side of the toilet overdosed. Miraculously, they heard that and ended up breaking through this window and pulling me out, and somebody else gave me mouth to mouth—so I’m still here. I remember I jumped up, I don’t know what I was thinking, but I remember coming to and seeing all these people standing over me, and they said I jumped up and started humming as if nothing happened.

BOBBY LIEBLING:
When they came out, I wasn’t crazy about Saint Vitus or Trouble. I had been doing that kind of a thing already for ten years. If I’m to be completely honest, I was kind of bitter that I had never gotten recognized for anything and these bands got overnight acclaim and were viewed as pioneers.