Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (40 page)

KURT BRECHT:
We started the band in 1982 and created our own record company, Dirty Rotten Records, just to put out our own first seven-inch [the twenty-two-song
Dirty Rotten EP
]. The mosh logo for the label came from a project my brother [and original drummer] Eric and I did when we were both in commercial art school. We had to do a project called “signage,” where we made three or four signs using different logos. One of his was “No Moshing.” It originally had the “anti” line through it, and the guy [on the sign] had a Mohawk. But we decided the logo would be good for Dirty Rotten Records, so we took the “anti” sign and the Mohawk off.

MIKE DEAN:
We got together in 1982. The name Corrosion of Conformity was our response to the conformity within this scene—this milieu that was supposed to be anticonformist. It immediately turns out that it’s an alternate conformity. We wanted to be semipolitical as well. Music-wise, we liked the Necros, SS Decontrol and Void as much as Motörhead and Black Sabbath. We were totally DIY at first. We put out our first album [
Eye for an Eye
] ourselves [in 1984] because it was the only way we could release it. We got a really good artist, Errol Englebrecht, to do our logo [which was used in the cover art]. I think he got a pittance for drawing that and is probably pretty irate about that to this day. But it’s been great for us in a corporate way, ironically, because it’s been good for merch.

KATON W. De PENA:
C.O.C. was one of those bands that released their own records and then finally got a deal. That was really inspiring. A lot of those bands, including D.R.I., would tour most of the year on next to nothing. What was different about the crossover bands and a lot of the metal bands was that they really did do it DIY. They were booking their own tours, surviving on the road, selling their own merchandise, screening their own T-shirts, pressing their own vinyl. Those bands taught a lot of other bands how to run their own business.

KURT BRECHT:
We played one show where we asked everybody to bring a can of food for us so we’d have something extra to eat. We toured for years before we found out that you could ask for food at the venue—that you could tell them in advance that you wanted a pizza or a deli tray. G.B.H. were the first ones to tell us that. They were like, “Yeah, all you do is give them a rider, tell them you want beer and food and water, and they’ll have it all for you when you get there.”

REED MULLIN (C.O.C.):
Since we were in North Carolina, which is the textile capital of the world, we could buy T-shirts and print them for cheap. We’d sell them for $5 to $10 a piece. We financed our road gigs that way—that and stolen credit card numbers we got from different people. We’d also sell sperm, blood plasma, and hair when we were out of cash. One wig shop gave us $45 for our discarded hair. But I found out, much to my chagrin, that I have a pointy head like a golden retriever. And, of course, we’d stay with anyone we could when we were on tour because we couldn’t afford hotels. Once a dog took a big dump beside my head while I was sleeping and I woke up to the smell of dog shit. That’s when you wish you had slept in the van in a parking lot, which we also did a lot.

KURT BRECHT:
We had to donate blood plasma on tour and get, like, $7 each, which was usually enough to get us to the next city. The problem is you can only do it a certain amount of times before you run out.

MIKE MUIR:
I have all these old punk fanzines from when the first record [
Suicidal Tendencies
] came out [in 1983] and they all said we suck, [that] we’re metal. Punk rockers had a real hard time when we came out because we didn’t dress the way they did. We had [guitar] leads. We broke a lot of the punk rock rules.

ROGER MIRET:
A lot of metal kids that got into Suicidal branched out and discovered bands like us, Cro-Mags, D.R.I., and Corrosion [of Conformity]. We worked really hard to spread the word because it was all still very underground.

MIKE DEAN:
We could play really fast like Motörhead, but also slow like Black Sabbath. The timing was good because other bands were doing the same thing at the same time. SSD put out
How We Rock
[in 1984], and Black Flag were playing slower and sludgier as well.

REED MULLIN:
We played with Slayer in 1984 on their very first tour. They were cruising around in [drummer] Dave Lombardo’s Trans-Am and a U-Haul truck. They were on the
Haunting the Chapel
EP tour and we played with them in Baltimore. It was the first time they ever saw us, and they dug us. After the show, they said they were gonna get us a record deal. Two days later, we got our very first record label deal [with Metal Blade offshoot Death Records], which we gleefully signed—probably prematurely.

MIKE DEAN:
It was good for us even though we didn’t see any money from it. I mean, businesswise, it was a bad move. We were young and dumb and signed the worst thing ever, because the lawyer we paid assumed that was the
best
we could do. But I think it was ultimately positive because it got us known on the West Coast. We had a really good experience playing all those shows in Los Angeles with Slayer.

KURT BRECHT:
When
Dealing With It
came out in 1985, we had already started mixing slower songs into our set, because we had forty songs that we played in about twenty or thirty minutes. We wanted to start letting our old, slower metal influences seep back in. This was the time the New York hardcore bands were doing slower mosh parts, so we started incorporating that as well, and the metalheads liked it. They heard influences from bands like Exodus and Metallica and Slayer and Anthrax coming out in our music.

SCOTT IAN:
When we toured for the
Spreading the Disease
in 1986, we had a guitar tech named Arnie Ring, who was a really small guy. He’s the last dude who would ever want to be out in a pit. We played a show in Denver and there were kids all over the stage. At one point, Arnie ran out to grab this kid who was stepping all over [guitarist] Danny Spitz’s pedal board and both him and this kid got tangled up and tumbled out into the crowd. I could see Arnie stand up and there were kids going in a big circle-pit bashing into him, and he’s just getting destroyed. He looked like a pinball. The next morning everyone was waking up on the bus and Arnie’s moaning and groaning and he’s covered in bruises. He goes, “Oh, God, I got caught in a mosh.” We thought that was the funniest thing. That’s where we got the title for “Caught in a Mosh” on the
Among the Living
record.

Some crossover shows in big cities were booked at established rock clubs. But in regions where the bands weren’t as popular, the gigs went down on the outskirts of town at gymnasiums, community centers, VFW halls, and rickety warehouses. Whether that exacerbated the violence at the concerts is unclear, since some shows in well-known clubs also erupted in chaos.

MIKE DEAN:
We played a show in Spokane, Washington, in a disused industrial building downtown that probably should have been condemned. We were on the second floor. It’s getting hazier and hazier, and the room is full. Suddenly, the fire marshal comes in and makes them take some people outside. We’re still playing, and pretty soon I’m like, “That smells electrical, we’ve got to stop.” So we stopped. Everyone leaves. It’s smokier and smokier, and as we get the last of our gear down the fire escape and I’m going up to get a check from the promoter, we open the door, look up one last time—and the entire drop ceiling falls in like a firestorm. There’s rafters and all this material on fire. It all just fell in, literally ten minutes after the room had been full of 350 people.

ROGER MIRET:
It was a white minority thing. You’d put on this show in a full-on black ghetto in California. Someone says something to somebody outside, and next thing you know it was a full on black-against-white riot, and the whites happened to be the punks. Once this guy came up to a kid and sliced him from the bottom of his neck right across. He was going out with a friend of ours, Terry, and she comes running in. Next thing you know, a riot’s happening and this guy’s bleeding to death. We threw this guy in our van and drove him to the hospital. One of our good friends was a nurse and she saved his life by holding him together while we took him to the hospital.

BILLY GRAZIADEI:
We played a show at the Marquee [in New York], and these dudes ran up to one of our boys and stuck this huge Rambo hunting knife into his abdomen and sliced him up the center and left him there, saying “Payback, motherfucker.” That was pretty sick, and our boy was on the verge of death for weeks, but he recovered. That seemed to be a common thing. Your boys jumped me, my boys are gonna jump you. Next time you come back with bats, then knives. It just escalated.

MIKE MUIR:
A lot of people, if they lived in the suburbs, their only exposure to blacks and Mexicans is on TV robbing and raping people. The first time a lot of white people saw blacks and Mexicans was at our shows, and they freaked out and assumed they were all in gangs. You’d have all the [police] units there and they could say, “Oh, we were beating people up in the show because there were gang people there.”

MIKE CLARK:
People don’t realize that, for the most part, we were an incident-free band. It was the crowd that started the melees. We were never troublemakers. We never got into drugs. We did some beer drinking, but we never got off on being wild.

JOHN JOSEPH:
Harley had some beef with Mike Muir early on. They beat Harley up, and then when [Suicidal] came here [our guys] beat [Mike] up. The shit all got settled. Then, years later I’m walking Venice Beach and twenty motherfuckers surround me. One of ’em shouted, “You, you’re in the Cro-Mags,” and they were ready to do some fuckin’ damage. I went, “Yeah, but I’m not the one who had the fuckin’ problem. That’s been squashed for years.” They seemed to accept that. I mean, shit, [ex-Suicidal Tendencies] guitarist Rocky George
played
in the Cro-Mags.

MIKE CLARK:
I think the Harley and Mike thing was probably the first East Coast/West Coast rivalry. I don’t know what started the situation, but one time when we were leaving town, Cro-Mags dudes were chasing the bus, shooting at it and throwing bottles. I think Louiche [Mayorga], who was our bass player at the time, got into an argument with one of their members, and then that escalated. But we have no problems with them now.

Of all the rock clubs around the country that promoted crossover, the venue that became synonymous with the movement was New York City’s legendary CBGB, which had spawned the punk and No Wave scenes years earlier. By 1983 the club had established a Sunday afternoon matinee that featured a lineup of hardcore bands. The matinees were a ritual until the shows became too violent and club owner Hilly Kristal canceled the series. Before the good times came to an end, many bands released concert albums or DVDs called
Live at CBGB
, including Bad Brains, Agnostic Front, D.R.I., and Cro-Mags.

ROGER MIRET:
All these bands like Anthrax and Metallica would come and see us at CBGB. It was like the welcoming home of all these bands, and I think meeting each other and seeing each other’s bands really cemented the crossover scene. [Our second album,]
Cause for Alarm
, which came out in 1986, is a landmark crossover record for us. I don’t remember sitting down and saying we have to make this metal, it was just what was happening. We were rehearsing in the same room with Carnivore and Biohazard, and we had the same management as Carnivore, Crumbsuckers, Whiplash, and King Diamond. We all watched each other rehearse and went to each other’s shows and hung out. We didn’t know we were influencing each other, we just were.

PETER STEELE:
[Carnivore’s second album, 1987’s]
Retaliation
was extremely influenced by my discovery of hardcore music at CBGB in ’85 and ’86, which instantaneously I was attracted to. What I strived to do was create an album that was half Black Sabbath and half Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, Sheer Terror, Black Flag, stuff like that. I loved the heaviness, the slowness, the dirge of Sabbath. But at the same time, going to CBGB on Sundays for the matinee, there was so much unbelievable energy in there. It didn’t even matter if bands were not in tune.

SCOTT IAN:
I used to go to the CBGB hardcore matinees and that got me totally into Agnostic Front, C.O.C., and D.R.I. You’d have all these hardcore and metal kids coming together to see these bands and there were definitely fights, but at the same time you felt this sense of community.

Bands like Agnostic Front and Suicidal Tendencies may have been a gateway to metal for hardcore fans, but it was the thrash band Anthrax that did more than any other metal band to connect metal kids to crossover. Their hardcore metal side project, Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.)—which featured guitarist Scott Ian, drummer Charlie Benante, ex-Anthrax bassist Dan Lilker (Nuclear Assault, Brutal Truth), and vocalist Billy Milano (M.O.D.)—recorded the legendary 1985 album
Speak English or Die
, which was brutally fast but loaded with tight, metal riffs and slow, crushing breakdowns. The politically incorrect, tongue-in-cheek lyrics only added to the defiant quality of the project. Cro-Mags’ debut,
Age of Quarrel
, shared the same rebellious spirit, but the lyrics of songs like “Street Justice” and “Hard Times” were instead rooted in the musicians’ reality.