Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (76 page)

PAUL MASVIDAL:
Atheist and Cynic were really the prog bands in the scene. We were nerdier kids and we had been into all kinds of music since we were really young. In late high school and early college I was really getting into jazz and fusion. When we worked with Chuck [Schuldiner] on the [1991] Death album
Human
, we didn’t see it as making death-prog, we saw it as doing what we do, but on Chuck’s tunes. It was how we would approach a death song and still have that [jazzy] sensibility. And it really inspired him to take his music in a new direction that was further from the growly, more simplistic stuff he started out doing.

JAMES MURPHY:
To be honest, the early Tampa scene was very divisive, and a lot of the bands didn’t like each other or talk to each other because it was extremely competitive. No one knew that literally every single one of their bands was going to get signed. There was an overall feeling that there were only so many record deals to be had.

The actual death metal album
sound
, characterized by crisp, rapidly thumping bass drums that cut through walls of roaring vocals and buzzing guitar distortion, was conceived at Tampa’s Morrisound Studios by owner Tom Morris and then-fledgling producer Scott Burns.

TOM MORRIS (founder of Morrisound Studios):
We opened up in 1981, and two of the first bands we recorded were Nasty Savage and Savatage. Obituary was the first death metal band that came to us at our studio, and that’s when they were kids in high school going by the name Xecutioner. They cut a demo in a little eight-track studio we have and that’s what got them signed to Roadrunner. But when [vocalist] John Tardy and [drummer] Donald [Tardy] first came in, I almost told them to just go home. I had never heard death metal prior to that and I thought they were wasting their time and money trying to do it. But they were pretty insistent and went ahead and finished it, and, obviously, they knew something I didn’t.

SCOTT BURNS (ex–Morrisound Studios producer):
Xecutioner were doing their first album and [Morrisound engineer] Rick Miller was in an accident. I knew the guys from working sound at their shows, so I finished up their album. About the same time, Atheist came in and did
Piece of Time
. I’d also engineered for producer Dan Johnson. He was doing
Leprosy
for Death, so I met all those guys. After that, I was always either engineering or assisting.

JOHN TARDY:
Our first record, [1989’s]
Slowly We Rot
, wasn’t even something we planned on doing. Roadrunner heard our demo and said, “Do you wanna do a record?” and we were like, “Sure.” At the time, I really wasn’t interested in writing lyrics. I just liked making sounds that went along with the music. So, the low, growling vocals weren’t planned, they just happened. There were so many vocal parts on
Slowly We Rot
that went from a couple of real words to a jumbled mess of screams and growls that I couldn’t have written the lyrics out if I wanted to.

KELLY SHAEFER:
When I listened to Obituary’s demo I went, “Holy shit, you can hear everything!” Whenever we had gone to a studio before, we terrified everyone. And none of their engineers knew how to capture double bass drums or death metal vocals the proper way. Morrisound was the first studio in the country to record death metal without it sounding like a bunch of shit. They had a great way of tracking bass drums in particular.

GLEN BENTON:
Everybody wanted to record with Scott. He’s the George Martin [legendary Beatles producer] of fuckin’ death metal. He was good at getting the right sounds and he was also dealing with a lot of record labels, so he helped get a lot of bands signed.

SCOTT BURNS:
I always thought it sucked that you would hear some kid playing extreme double bass or fills and it sounded like a muffled echo. We spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to mic everything to get the drums to sound good. When everything’s in a blender at 200 miles per hour, it takes a little bit of time to figure out how to get all the stuff to fit in. On the downside, I got typecast for the Morrisound sound. And it’s not like I got rich off it. I made more money than the bands, maybe, but I don’t think I ever charged more than $5,000 for a record, and I didn’t take any [percentage of royalties] off bands. I was offered royalties on two records and I gave them back to the bands at the beginning because they were getting screwed by their labels.

Between Schuldiner’s leadership, Burns’s diligence, and the persistence of musicians wanting to make insanely heavy music, the death metal scene grew. Bands with records out launched low-budget national tours to spread the word, and groups from out of state immigrated to Tampa to be with like-minded individuals.

ALEX WEBSTER (Cannibal Corpse):
We started in Buffalo, [New York,] in 1988, but we didn’t move to Florida until 1994, and we went there strictly because of the death metal scene and Morrisound. Even before we did
Eaten Back to Life
there in 1990, we were listening to stuff like [Morbid Angel’s]
Altars of Madness
and [Death’s]
Leprosy
, which had been done there. We did four albums in Tampa before we finally decided to move there.

TREY AZAGTHOTH:
We knew we had to tour to spread the word, so we gutted out a school bus and made a cargo area in the back with heating in the front. It didn’t have any air conditioning. We went to Texas in the summer, and the heat was crazy. We didn’t have any money, so we slept in the bus and a lot of times we could only buy food or gas. We looked at it like we were a special forces unit going into enemy territory.

RICHARD CHRISTY (ex–Death, ex–Public Assassin, Charred Walls of the Damned):
Even though bands were doing well in Florida, not a lot of people around the country knew about death metal. Some promoters would book death metal bands to open for popular nationwide acts because they didn’t know any better. When I was in Public Assassin, we got booked to open for Molly Hatchet in Springfield, Missouri. We got up there and did a sound check of blistering, blast-beat death metal. And then the club owner went, “I’ll pay you guys $100
not
to play.” We were like, “Screw that, we’re gonna open for Molly Hatchet!”

CHRIS REIFERT:
Autopsy played plenty of shows for ten or twenty people. There wasn’t a lot of mass acceptance of death metal in the Bay Area at the time. People just thought it was dumb. We weren’t being political or singing about banging your head in the mosh pit like all the thrash bands, so people looked down at it. I would try to explain to people what we were doing and I would get ridiculed, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going back to Florida.

Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, and Deicide all made their mark in Tampa, but it was Cannibal Corpse that first exposed death metal to the mainstream, and it remains the most popular death metal band. Thanks to original vocalist/gore freak Chris Barnes (who was in the group from 1988 to 1995), their lyrics were uglier and more graphic than those of most of their contemporaries, often dealing (in their early days) with zombie invasions, serial killers, and the mutilation of women (in explicit detail). Their brain-in-a-blender riffs were so furious they would have sounded nearly nonsensical were it not for drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz’s precision playing. Cannibal Corpse struck a nerve with audiences seeking the ultimate in extremity. Song titles like “I Cum Blood,” “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt,” and “Post Mortal Ejaculation,” all from 1992’s
Tomb of the Mutilated
, were deemed so offensive that the album was banned in Germany until 2006. Ironically, the Jim Carrey movie
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
included a cameo of Cannibal Corpse playing “Hammer Smashed Face,” which is from the same album.

MARK “PSYCHO” ABRAMSON (VP promotions, Roadrunner Records):
Even in the beginning, you could tell they were great. Their stuff was a lot more simple than other bands, but they never had a problem with a catchy hook. And everything they did was always intense. Plus, they combined it with a twisted sense of humor that made it brilliant.

ALEX WEBSTER:
A lot of bands in Florida had a darker, anti-religion thing going on, so we decided to focus on gore. Most Western music is people singing from the heart, singing to a girlfriend, so a lot of people are freaked out by our songs. But our lyrics have nothing to do with our personal lives. It’s just storytelling, and it came from the kinds of movies we all used to watch, like
Evil Dead
or
Gates of Hell
. We knew it was going to be controversial, but we didn’t know to what extent.

FORMER SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (I-CT) [1997 Congressional speech attacking entertainment industry]:
The death metal band Cannibal Corpse . . . [has] one song describing the rape of a woman with a knife and another describing the act of masturbating with a dead woman’s head. I apologize for expressing—describing these lyrics, but this is what we are talking about. We are not overstating. This is extreme, awful, disgusting stuff that millions of kids are listening to.

JEREMY WAGNER (Broken Hope, author):
Some lyrics I write for Broken Hope are over-the-top in violent imagery, horror, and explicit sexual content. That said, here’s the scary part: many of my lyrical ideas come from real life. Songs like “Bag of Parts,” “Coprophagia,” “Decimated Genitalia,” “Preacher of Sodomy,” “Penis Envy,” and more were all drawn from actual events that happened in the news and in some highly respected medical journals. Society is much more horrifying and strange than any fiction I could dream up.

PAUL MAZURKIEWICZ (Cannibal Corpse):
When a crime is being committed against a woman, it’s generally more disturbing to people. Like, some people have been really freaked out by our song “Fucked with a Knife.” But, damn, it’s just a song.

CHRIS BARNES (ex–Cannibal Corpse, Six Feet Under):
When those guys wrote music, it presented such a violent image to me I felt like I had to match it with the lyrics. And I was able to pull from my imagination some sick qualities of mankind and put it down on paper. For example, “Entrails Ripped From a Virgin’s Cunt” was based on a true story my friend told me, and I twisted the facts in my head and filled in the blanks.

ALEX WEBSTER:
Some people saw Chris’s lyrics as misogynistic. He is not a misogynist and neither are the rest of us. But I can understand how people who didn’t know us might misinterpret that.

CHRIS BARNES:
My lyrics almost got me killed at gunpoint in 1994 before a show in East LA. Some gang members got on the bus somehow and told me they didn’t like my lyrics. One of them had just got out of San Quentin, and he had a .38 stuffed into his belt lining. He picked up his shirt and showed it to me and said, “We’re gonna kill you if you keep writing about this shit.” I tried to talk to him calmly and say, “Hey, I respect your opinion.” Luckily, we had a really good tour manager, who somehow got those guys off the bus.

ALEX WEBSTER:
I don’t buy the argument that our music makes people violent because with our stuff you always have that comfort zone—that separation of reality. That’s something most people know about our lyrics. They’re just for entertainment. They’re not condoning real violence. They’re about zombies and serial killers. It’s like a horror movie. So for people to focus on it just because it’s so lurid is ridiculous. Maybe one or two bad things have happened over the twenty-five years thrash and death metal have been around. How many bad things have happened involving fans of country music, rap, or R&B?

PAUL MAZURKIEWICZ:
I find real violence extremely disturbing. I watched the movie
Faces of Death
years ago, and it wasn’t at all entertaining. Real gore is a completely different and upsetting thing.

The insane speed and aggression of death metal probably had more appeal to audiences than did the brutal lyrics. Nonetheless, the music attracted a violent and rowdy crowd. Those brave enough to enter the pit risked bodily harm from fans treating the floor like a gladiatorial arena. And some musicians fed off the brutality.

GLEN BENTON:
There’s a lot of motherfuckers in this world walking around with teeth missing because of me. If you came up on the stage, I’d be the first one kicking the shit out of you. I had a three second rule. You turn around, you jump back off—otherwise your ass is mine. A lot of people fell prey to that. With all the armor, spikes, and nails, I was a human meatgrinder, man. I was into the whole making of the armor. One night, I made this armband with .308 spitzer [bullet] heads on it, and I went through the crowd sticking that thing into people’s backs. At the end of the night there were all these people walking around with big bloody spike marks.

CHRIS BARNES:
Our first club show almost started in a riot, and the last show I played with Cannibal Corpse in Australia ended in a riot. It’s been a pretty wild ride.