Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (77 page)

PHIL FASCIANA:
We played a club in Hallandale, Florida, called the Treehouse, with Obituary, and when I went outside to cool off I seen a kid with a towel on his face. It was covered in blood. When he took off the towel I could see somebody had bitten off his top lip. It was gone. Up until almost his nostrils there was nothing, and you could actually see the grooves from the person’s teeth in this guy’s fuckin’ face. This poor kid’s chances of playing the trumpet or growing a fucking moustache are not there anymore.

JOHN TARDY:
The fucked-up thing is he was laughing about it. I’m like, “Dude, I can see all your front teeth and your mouth’s closed. That ain’t right.”

KELLY SHAEFER:
When the New York hardcore scene mixed with metal, fists started flying. There were lots of broken jaws and knocked-out teeth. I saw someone get their eye poked out of the socket at a show with Solstice. The eyeball wasn’t just hanging out, it was pushed out to the side and the guy stayed in the pit with that fucked-up eye like that. I saw a guy get his ear half ripped off from the top. The whole top of it was flopping down from his head. That’s when I was like, “Shit, I’ll never get back into the pit.”

GLEN BENTON:
I saw Marilyn Manson get the living shit kicked out of him by twenty skinheads at one of our shows in Fort Lauderdale. After the gig, I went outside and him and his buddies were lying in the parking lot, makeup all fucked up.

KAM LEE:
I knew a guy in Arizona who was in a band, and he would eat human bones. I met him at this club called the Mason Jar. He would raid cemeteries and dig up bones. He invited me to his house, so I went, and he was wearing a black robe, doing the whole Satanic thing, trying to impress me. Then he brings out bone fragments and starts chewing on them, saying they’re human bones. I was like, “Okay, I guess if that’s cool to you, that’s how you get your thing. I’m not gonna chew no human bones. Just give me a Heineken.”

Some death metal bands accompanied their music with occult-themed theatrics. As with early Venom and Slayer, such drama was usually just for shock value. But two bands, Morbid Angel and Deicide, took their odes and gestures to Satan seriously.

GLEN BENTON:
By the definition of Christianity, I am a Satanist. Am I putting my goatskin leg pieces on and dancing around the fire? No. Am I a free thinker? Yes. I’m ordained at several Satanic institutions. I didn’t pay $99 to get my card. I think any organized religion is hokey. If you’ve got to pay to belong, fuck that. I don’t believe in God as far as putting my trust in him. So I don’t know what that makes me. It makes me Glen Benton. If Satan jumped up right now and asked me to do something, nine times out of ten I would probably do it.

KELLY SHAEFER:
I was walking backstage in the early days and seeing the guys from Morbid Angel sitting around a chalice, cutting themselves and bleeding into the cup. I thought, “That’s fuckin’ nuts.” We played crazy music, but we didn’t roll like that.

JIM WELCH:
The first show Morbid Angel ever played was at the Sundance in Long Island. Their manager introduced me to [vocalist] David Vincent, and he seemed like a really charismatic guy—a little off, but nothing too strange. So we walk into the dressing room and Trey [Azagthoth] was warming up on his guitar. When you look into his eyes you can tell there’s a lot going on in there that you’re never gonna decipher. Back in the day, every night before he went onstage, he pulled out a knife and sliced his left arm open. He’s bleeding all over the fucking place, and he grabs his guitar and goes onstage, walks up to the front of the crowd, and bleeds all over everybody. And he’s bleeding for most of the set. I mean, the wound was so big, you could tell it had been opened up so many times, that it just doesn’t stop. He’d get to the end of the show and there’d just be fucking blood everywhere. He did that for years.

DAVID VINCENT:
He
did
go for it. I don’t think he ever did enough damage to where he had to be hospitalized, but he wouldn’t have gone anyway. He’s not a fan of the medical profession. I don’t think he did it for shock value. It was an artistic expression.

GLEN BENTON:
One of the first shows we did was at the Sunset Club in Florida. We had a teenage mannequin onstage, and I packed it full of $60 worth of chitlins and beef livers and brought it onstage. And this wasn’t fresh meat. I left that shit outside in the sun to rot. A few of my friends attacked this thing while we were playing. Next thing you know, it was a slaughterfest of meat! One girl started screaming, “You’re killing him!” She thought it was actually a person. The club owner was mortified because the place reeked of decayed meat. The next day the sheriff’s department was in there taking samples and checking to see if they were human remains. Then the health department started sending people to my shows.

TREY AZAGTHOTH:
In New Jersey on one of our school bus tours, we got pulled over and thrown in jail because our whole appearance to them was questionable, and they found guns, a human skull, and occult stuff on the bus. I think they were wondering if we had killed this person and were carrying around his skull.

GLEN BENTON:
Deicide were up in New York and the clubs were saying, “If you bring any of that meat shit in, you’re out of here.” I had to bury a whole 30-pound beef liver in a shallow grave in the backyard of the place we were staying at. The cops came and dug the thing up because there were a million blowflies coming out of the ground and they thought I buried a dead body.

TREY AZAGTHOTH:
It was a time of tearing down the walls. For me that’s the only thing that Satanism is, and what it’s useful for. The most important thing for us is to use our music to lift up and give praise to the Ancient Ones, and then we take this stuff and share it. I am the living act of God. My true will cannot be denied. I create myself as well as my world. I want to be the instrument for the most high element of the living continuum and let their magic flow through it. As far as the death metal scene goes, I think that the bands that come from someplace of a high, beautiful, complimenting arrangement of values and purpose, and that use imagination and are of a high standard, they will be brilliant, too, and the rest, well, they will just be the trees in the forest.

JIM WELCH:
Trey had all kinds of demons in his head that he conversed with, and he would tell you that. There were names for them. And they
did
propel him to make music and perform in the same way that they would propel a killer to do what he does.

GLEN BENTON:
I think I put a little bit more into my art than [Morbid Angel]. They used to slice themselves up, but so do teenage girls. Whereas I would just all-out splatter the place. I’ve got an inverted cross branded in my forehead. I used to use a scarring effect [with makeup] to create the scar years ago. Then one day in 1992 I decided to burn it into my forehead. So I heated up a piece of jewelry and pressed it in. I showed up the next day with this big huge red fucking sore of an upside-down cross in my head. Everybody’s like, “What the fuck have you been doing?” You burn it and then you peel the dead skin off it and then it dries tight. And then it’s all red. I re-did it eight or nine times at least to make it more visible. The last time I did it, you could see the arteries underneath, so I didn’t really want to go too much further.

RICHARD CHRISTY:
There was this big rivalry between Glen Benton and David Vincent about who was more evil. They were the Vince Neil and Axl Rose of death metal. You always wanted to see them get in a ring and duke it out.

DAVID VINCENT:
I don’t feel that there was any competition between us and Deicide. If they look at it as competition and that’s what fuels them and makes them stronger, that’s probably healthy for them.

GLEN BENTON:
In the beginning, there was a little rivalry with Morbid. But after a confrontation at an airport, all that came to an end. We got on a plane together and I went, “Hey man, what the fuck is this shit-talking about?” And there was an about face. “Oh, we didn’t say that, man.” But we have some mutual friends, so we
know
what they said. I said, “If you want to take it to the next level, we’re ready.” And we made peace after that and realized we were all on the same team.

KELLY SHAEFER:
When he first came out [with Amon in 1987], Glen Benton was pretty convincing. Now he comes across as pretty pathetic and not somebody I see as a real champion of our scene. [By comparison,] David [Vincent] was confident and deserved to be at the top.

Like most forms of rock, death metal attracted groupies—but not many. Usually, the musicians looked for other distractions after shows. Since the longhairs looked like derelicts compared to the other twentysomethings in conservative Tampa, local law enforcement was only too happy to harass and arrest, so bands partied at private houses or at the strip club Mons Venus, infamous for stimulating lap dances and death metal pole dancing.

GLEN BENTON:
Mons Venus used to have all the local metal bands on the jukebox. You’d walk in and you’d need a fuckin’ stick to get out. All the bands who came to town to record would head to Venus after they finished their session at Morrisound.

PHIL FASCIANA:
It’s strange to go into a club that’s dark and gloomy and you’ve got crazy strippers running around dancing to fuckin’ Morbid Angel.

RICHARD CHRISTY:
The only death metal groupie I remember was this real muscular woman who used to come to lots of shows, and one of my old band members banged her one time and he said afterwards, “She was throwing me around like a rag doll.” It was pretty much a sausage fest. I knew if I went to a death metal show I was going home with my right hand.

KAM LEE:
Once in Germany, the members of the opening band, Demolition Hammer, gangbanged these chicks. There were two girls, and the dudes were passing them back and forth, like, “Okay, I’m done. Here, take her.” They did everybody in the opening band. It was like, “Okay, I’m not here to watch a live sex show,” but when you’re backstage, what can you do?

CHRIS BARNES:
I saw some guy fucking his girlfriend in the front row up against the barricade during our set. I was like, “Is he really doing that?” So I looked again. Shit, man, yes he is.

JEREMY WAGNER:
Former Deicide guitarist Eric Hoffman and I were solicited by some prostitutes outside an apartment building in Montreal. Eric said something about getting free oral if the hookers couldn’t accommodate his dick. The hookers laughed and said, “Sure,” thinking he was joking. Eric said he’d be right back and walked over to our tour bus. He used a penis pump on himself, and once his cock was inflated to, like, Hulk size, he limped back to the hookers. I was two blocks behind him when I heard the screams.

JOHN TARDY:
As extreme as the music is, most of the guys in this scene are pretty normal. Everybody likes to party and smoke weed, but I don’t see them getting mixed up with hard drugs.

PAUL MASVIDAL:
Half of us were still living at our parents’ homes, including Chuck, so there weren’t any huge scene parties. There was a lot of pot smoking and beer drinking, but nothing like the parties that happened in the glam scene.

ERIK RUTAN (ex–Morbid Angel, ex–Ripping Corpse, Hate Eternal):
The music we were playing was fast and precise and required you to be on your A-game, which didn’t leave much room for being totally obliterated.

PHIL FASCIANA:
We were on a U.S. tour in 1999 and our bus got pulled over in Little Rock, Arkansas, at 8 a.m. We all got out, and there were six cop cars behind us. They searched the bus and found three ounces of weed, so they took us and our small crew to jail for four days. They charged us with drug trafficking and they took everything—all the merch money we had, saying it was drug money, and threw us in fuckin’ jail and they tore the bus to shreds looking for drugs and weapons. Since they found the weed our bail was $12,000. When they first booked us and gave us our jail uniforms, they put us in a holding cell with these huge black guys, and one cop yelled out, “We got a bunch of bikers coming in here and they hate niggers.” I thought that our lives were over. The inmates were the meanest looking, baddest guys you ever saw, but they knew the cops were just busting our balls. They actually hooked us up with cigarettes and got us a couple joints. We spent a lot of time playing poker. Then, luckily, my brother was able to wire down 12 grand to get us out of jail. The whole thing cost us over $20,000.

For Atheist, the party ended in tragedy at the close of a 1991 tour with Swedish doom band Candlemass. Atheist was in Los Angeles and had three days to get its van back to Florida. On the way, they planned to stop at Mardi Gras. But right outside New Orleans, disaster struck.