Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  MONTE CONNER: For me, death metal really peaked in 1992 when we put out Obituary’s The End Complete. You could sell between 100,000 and 125,000 records at that time. After that, bands started stagnating and repeating themselves. Between 1994 and 1995 the whole scene started to crash, and death metal started to wane.

  CHRIS BARNES: There were a lot of bands popping up, but it didn’t really affect bands like Cannibal, Obituary, Morbid, and Death. Our attendance and record sales kept going up year after year. All the bands that were big back then are still around and do pretty well. I think the labels just started to see a lot of generic recycled stuff, and they eventually leaned away from signing new death metal bands because they weren’t seeing anything exciting that hadn’t been done and done better.

  KELLY SHAEFER: So many bands were going to Morrisound and recording, and that was the beginning of the end because everything started sounding exactly the same. Then bands like Soundgarden came out, who were heavy in a different way, but they were also marketable. At that point, death metal had run its course.

  JAMES MURPHY: I can tell you exactly what happened: Seattle. The big metal record labels all decided they needed to sign bands like Gruntruck. I was working at a record store and I witnessed it firsthand. Over the course of a couple years, guys I knew from the death metal scene came into the store wearing flannel and selling all their death metal CDs.

  ERIK RUTAN: When I started Hate Eternal, I had labels telling me there was no market for extreme death metal anymore and that this would never sell. We were trying to bring the music to a new level of extremity, and a lot of that was out of the frustration and rage of hearing, “Oh, death metal’s dead.” I just thought that was a bunch of bullshit. You don’t kill a whole genre of music if it’s good. I knew death metal would come back around.

  To death metal fans, Death front man Chuck Schuldiner will always be a legend, but when he was diagnosed with a brain-stem tumor on May 13, 1999, on his thirty-second birthday, death metal had gone so far underground that his illness was largely ignored by the mainstream media, which had embraced his acolytes, Cannibal Corpse, just five years earlier. In the beginning stages of his illness, Schuldiner was still able to perform and record with his new band, the more power metal–oriented Control Denied, whose only album, 1999’s The Fragile Art of Existence, shed new light on Schuldiner’s depth as a musician.

  To battle his tumor, Schuldiner underwent radiation therapy and an operation. In October 1999, his family announced that he was recovering, but the cancer returned worse than before. On December 13, 2001, the forefather of death metal died, leaving an entire community in grief. In some ways it was the end of an era. Yet in the underground, death metal refused to die. Cannibal Corpse replaced vocalist Chris Barnes with George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher for 1996’s Vile and continues to release an album every couple of years, as do Deicide, Six Feet Under, Malevolent Creation, Nile, Immolation, Incantation, and others. At the same time, technical death bands inspired by Death, Cynic, and Atheist have captivated the underground community; these include Necrophagist, Arsis, Decapitated, Origin, and Psycroptic.

  GLEN BENTON: Every ten years the whole metal thing takes a hiatus and then it kicks back up again. So what’s happening now is a lot of kids are tired of this fuckin’ emo metal bullshit, and they’re making new hybrids that incorporate death metal. They’ve learned their lessons from what we did fifteen years ago from their uncles or parents and are mixing it with this new shit to create new sounds. Good for them.

  ERIK RUTAN: I knew death metal would come around, and it did. Now there are so many hybrid death metal bands. And a lot of these kids weren’t even born when [1989’s] Altars of Madness came out.

  To most, death metal began as an American phenomenon in Tampa, Florida. However, at the same time as Death, Morbid Angel, and Deicide were damaging eardrums in the States, a close cousin of death metal, grindcore, was brutalizing audiences in the UK; a savage punk-rooted form of the genre was battering Stockholm; and just a road trip away, a more technical and listener-friendly version of the genre was sweeping through Gothenburg, Sweden—one that would greatly influence the American metalcore scene that dominated the landscape in the early 2000s.

  The heralded UK grindcore movement—popularized internationally by its hometown label, Earache Records—started in Birmingham and eventually brought two of the heaviest bands ever, Napalm Death and Carcass, to major label Columbia Records as part of a distribution deal. Other UK grindcore groups, including Extreme Noise Terror and Bolt Thrower, also developed international fan bases. It was, however, a Michigan metal band, Repulsion—whose bassist and guitarist worked briefly with Death’s Chuck Schuldiner—that helped trigger the UK grindcore scene.

  MARK SAWICKIS (Impetigo): Repulsion was one of the main gore/grind pioneers. They were so fast and brutal and their lyrics were sick and twisted, and that was way before Carcass. They were definitely one of our influences.

  SCOTT CARLSON: A lot of our speed came from our drummer Dave “Grave” [Hollingshead], and we actually hired him because he was convicted for grave-robbing. He was seventeen at the time, and he decided he wanted a skull for his drum set. So he and one of his knucklehead friends decided the best way to get one would be to steal it; so they broke into a mausoleum and stole a skull out of a coffin. But then Dave took the skull to high school and bragged about it, and someone got freaked and called the authorities. It was in all the newspapers. We didn’t know him when it happened because we were in Florida playing with Death. After we came home, Kam Lee played drums for us, but that fell apart also. So Matt and I went back to Michigan, and we’re hanging out at the local record shop thinking, “Who are we gonna hire to play drums?” And we see this article tacked up on the bulletin board about this kid who was busted for grave-robbing. And we were like, “Hey man, I remember that guy. He was in a skate punk band called Bloody Coup. Let’s get him.” So we called him up and jammed with him, and next thing we knew we had this infamous grave robber in the band. We changed our name to Repulsion and started writing new songs.

  KORY GROW (journalist): Everything about their one album, Horrified, was done to the extreme, with songs about everything from being eaten alive to odes about various states of decomposition. The songs literally could make you feel sick, even if they were played at human speeds, which they weren’t.

  SCOTT CARLSON: As the scene got bigger, it started to attract more weirdos, and I saw people that were taking it way too seriously, which was a bit disturbing. In Detroit, this kid picked a cockroach off the floor and bit it in half in front of me thinking that I would be impressed. Just the general mentality of people made it seem like they were more serious about the sick side of things than we were. To us, the graphic lyrics were kind of a joke. We took the band seriously, but we didn’t take the imagery seriously. It was more like a silly horror movie, and after we broke up in 1986, I thought that was that. Then I was working at a record store and this kid pulled the Napalm Death record [Scum] out of a box of imports that had just come in. I heard one of our riffs, note for note. At first I thought it was a bizarre coincidence until I picked up the album cover and started seeing [photos of] homemade Repulsion T-shirts and hats. I was like, “Wow, we actually influenced another band that has a record out.” Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass were actually instrumental in getting our album released on Earache three years after it was recorded.

  There’s no question that Napalm Death was the reigning pioneer of grindcore. Its debut album, 1987’s Scum, was influenced by Repulsion, Massachusetts band Siege, and Florida’s Terrorizer, yet it was explosively original, blindingly fast, and poignantly political, igniting a powder keg across England that set their careers and the grindcore scene in motion. Never mind that it was written with two almost completely different lineups.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK (ex–Napalm Death, ex-Godflesh, Jesu): I knew Nik Bullen because we worked on my [eighties] noise band, Final, together. Two weeks after our first session, he
came over and heard me playing guitar. At the time, he was having some problems with Napalm Death and invited me over. We jammed some of their songs and were like, “Wow, this is great.” I replaced the other two guys, [guitarist Graham Robertson] and [Finbar Quinn], and we became a trio with a drummer named Rat.

  BARNEY GREENWAY (Napalm Death): In the really early days, Napalm were as influenced by My Bloody Valentine and Swans as [much as] anything metal—especially when [drummer] Miles [“Rat” Ratledge] was in the band.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: Early in ’85, someone gave me a tape of Metallica’s Kill ’Em All and we were blown away. I brought some of those types of riffs to Napalm Death, and Nik got into it as well. That led to hearing Slayer, which made us want to really ramp it up. And basically, Rat couldn’t play fast enough, so he left and we got Mick Harris, who could reach this hyper speed.

  JIM WELCH: Mick Harris has a nickname—the Human Tornado—because he’s the fucking Tasmanian devil—on the drums, personality-wise, humor-wise, everything. He is definitely the drummer of Napalm Death and you couldn’t have scripted it better.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: If we were rehearsing for two hours in a room, we’d only be making music for twenty minutes and the rest of the time Nik and Mick would be rolling around the floor fighting. Once at a party, they started arguing and spat in each other’s faces, and that turned into a bout of fisticuffs. And Nik, at that time, would get absolutely slaughtered both on drink and drugs. It was almost a part of his onstage personality to be this fucking train wreck. By contrast, Mick was totally in control, especially playing beats that fast. But there was an air of extreme tension both within the group and what it caused offstage. There was a lot of fighting in the crowd and we would stop the show whenever it turned into a bloodbath, which happened fairly frequently at the Mermaid in Birmingham, where we’d play eighteen times every weekend.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: They were magnificent in concert. They were my favorite band before I joined them [in 1989]. They totally blew me away, not only with the intensity, but the songwriting.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: A lot of the catchiness came after we discovered Celtic Frost, almost by accident. We’d go to the thrash metal sections at the record stores and literally laugh at the way the bands looked on the sleeves. We had punk backgrounds, so metal to us was still fuckin’ hilarious, even though we liked Metallica and Slayer. We weren’t used to geezers in spandex and long hair pulling poses. We literally picked up the Celtic Frost sleeve and were laughing at the way they looked. Next thing you know, Mick Harris actually bought one of these records, played it to me, and I was like, “Fucking shit, this is amazing. This is like punk.” It was so maximal in its attack, but so minimal in terms of riffing. So I started coming up with these Celtic Frost rip-off songs, where it was like, “Let’s have these slow breakdowns with these super-heavy riffs. And then let’s go into this really hyperspeed shit influenced by Siege and Discharge.” And that’s how we ended up with side A of Scum.

  NIK BULLEN: We played a show in Leeds with Justin just before he left, and after every song, all the people did was shout, “Play faster!” I felt like we were performing bears in a zoo and that nobody was listening to the content of the songs in terms of the politics.

  JUSTIN BROADRICK: I got fed up and gave the tape of side one of Scum to Digby [Pearson] at Earache [Records] and said, “Just take it off my hands,” because at the moment it seemed like no one was interested. Nik and Mick had a falling out; it looked like the band was over. I was offered the chance to join Head of David playing drums, and I viewed that as a safer option and something I was a bit more musically interested in.

  Unable to get along with Mick Harris and feeling isolated without Broadrick, Bullen quit Napalm Death. Undeterred, Harris hired greenhorn vocalist Lee Dorrian and started writing new material. At the end of 1986, Pearson contacted Harris and offered to put Napalm Death back in the studio to record side B of Scum. In February 1987, Harris recruited guitarist Bill Steer, and the revitalized Napalm practiced in Steer’s parents’ house for a few weeks before heading back into the studio on Pearson’s dime. To say they were flying by the seat of their pants would be an understatement. At first, Dorrian didn’t even want to make the record.

  LEE DORRIAN (ex–Napalm Death, Cathedral): I never wanted to sing. I had no intentions on joining a band. We were friends, and I just got asked and I thought, “Well why not?” I had zero experience. I had been a fanzine writer and a concert promoter in Coventry when I was sixteen. So I had booked Napalm Death and written about them. But I didn’t know how to sing for them. My obvious [vocal] influences were [Kelvin] “Cal” [Morris] from Discharge and Pete [Boyce] from Antisect. So I kind of copied their style and tried to make it deeper, more extreme and manic, with some Japanese hardcore thrown in. When we did the B-side of Scum, I was totally unprepared. Mick had to cue me when to come in.

  DAN LILKER: I was working at Important Distribution, which gave me and [Nuclear Assault vocalist] John Connelly jobs at the warehouse picking records for the distributor when we weren’t on tour. Scum had just come in and somebody ran it to the warehouse and said, “Man you gotta hear this.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” I had heard stuff like Repulsion before, which, ironically, Napalm had taken a lot of influence from. But to hear it presented in that context—even faster and noisier, with forty songs on a record—that was a big moment for me, almost as huge as the first time I heard Black Sabbath.

  LEE DORRIAN: I made my mind up [to quit Napalm Death] in Japan, [which] was one place I had always wanted to visit. I got so drunk on the plane going home; I was awakened by a Japanese air hostess who was shaking me whilst I was asleep with my head in the toilet, my hair and face covered in puke. The next half of the journey back to the UK was quite possibly the most painful twelve hours of my life.

  Napalm Death didn’t just lead the charge for UK extreme metal; the members it shed along the way started their own equally influential outfits. Broadrick played in Head of David and launched pioneering industrial metal group Godflesh and post-rock outfit Jesu; Dorrian formed doom band Cathedral and launched Rise Above Records; Mick Harris created isolationist ambient bands Scorn and Lull. And perhaps most significantly for the continued development of grindcore and death metal, Bill Steer started Carcass, a gory grindcore outfit whose lyrics were culled from medical texts.

  JEFF WALKER (ex-Carcass): In 1985, I was in Electro Hippies, which was a crossover hardcore band like Siege, MDC, and D.R.I. The guitarist [Andy Barnard] was a total metalhead, and I was a punker who had started getting back into metal again. I got ejected from that band because they said I wasn’t contributing enough, but I think it was really because the drummer, Simon, who was originally the vocalist, wanted to be a vocalist again. So I met up with [guitarist] Bill [Steer], who was playing in a Discharge-type punk band called Disattack. They asked me to join, and they went in a more metal direction. Then we had a coup d’état by getting rid of the drummer and the vocalist, and we got Ken [Owen] in, and that’s how Carcass was born [in 1986].

  MATT HARVEY (Exhumed): When Carcass came out, that total medical gore fascination was just perfect. I thought, “Fuck, why didn’t I think of that when I was fourteen.”

  JEFF WALKER: My sister was a nurse, and she had a medical dictionary. I used to sit there and try to sound articulate and intelligent by using this dictionary as a source of inspiration. Carcass was meant to be a scientific approach to death metal because it was so boring listening to lyrics that would say “I’m gonna kill you” in fifty different ways.

  BILL STEER (ex-Carcass): The intention from the start was to take advantage of the English language. There’s a lot of vocabulary there. Perhaps early on we felt it was a compliment if people read our lyrics and then picked up a dictionary to try and figure out what they meant.

  JEFF WALKER: An English journalist came up with the idea that we all went to medical school then formed a band, and for the longest time people really believed it. In reality, 1988’s Reek of Putr
efaction was meant to be the ultimate death metal album, the album that killed Slayer’s Reign in Blood. But, of course, no one ever said that because the production was so raw. In fact, the only good reviews we got in the beginning were from [late BBC radio legend] John Peel. And I think part of that was because Bill and Ken are from the same area where he grew up, and he wanted to support us.

  ANGELA GOSSOW (Arch Enemy): I worked as a journalist for a while, and the reason I did it was just so I could interview Carcass. I loved them more than anything else. And they were slagged off by almost everyone.

  JEFF WALKER: All the heavy metal mags hated us. Our second album, Symphonies of Sickness, got such a bad review in Metal Forces—1 out of 100. The woman who reviewed it was so offended.

  JIM WELCH: Bill went on a mission to become the most amazing guitar player and that’s when Mike [Amott of Arch Enemy] joined the band, which gave them a dual guitar approach, and that’s when their musicianship got noticed by metal bands all over the world—not just grindcore bands and death metal bands. Carcass became one of the most important metal bands of that time.

  JEFF WALKER: Our music was extreme, but we weren’t these maniacs. We were very boring. We should have been out partying, getting girls, and doing drugs, but we weren’t. Everyone in that [British grindcore] scene was the same. We used to go to the Mermaid in Birmingham to the gigs and just see bands. I was so poor I couldn’t afford to drink.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: For a band and the scene that we came from that was never meant to have icons or put people on pedestals, they sure made a big song and dance about Lee [Dorrian] not being in Napalm Death anymore, and about me stepping into his shoes [in 1989]. People were like, “Oh, it’s not Lee and Bill anymore. That was the band.” It used to really get to me in the old days because I was like, “I’m really trying my hardest to contribute to the ethos and the musical heritage of the band,” and I was being met with this negativity. The lesson I learned from that was, “Fuck those people.”