Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  The only way to upstage the ferocity of UK grindcore was to take the violence and brutality from the music directly into the crowd. For better or worse, Massachusetts brawler Seth Putnam was the master. While his band, Anal Cunt, wrote sloppy, unremarkable songs that dripped with bad riffs and sick humor, their performances were filled with palpable danger—brief, sonic melees of chaos and destruction that often ended in riots.

  SETH PUTNAM (1968–2011) (Anal Cunt): When we started in 1988, we wanted to be the least musical band possible. If you take death metal and hardcore to its furthest extreme, that’s basically what we were doing. The original lineup from ’88 to ’90 [which featured Putnam, guitarist Mike Mahan, and drummer Tim Morse] was really intense, but the shows weren’t as violent as when we reformed in ’91 [with guitarist Fred Ordonez replacing Mahan]. During the year we had off I became a total alcoholic. And the new shows basically were just me and the guitarist going out and punching everyone in the crowd in the face while the drummer kept playing. The guitar would get unplugged and my mic would get broken. That’s why we got a second guitarist [John Kozik]—so we could keep the noise going when Fred’s guitar became unplugged and my mic wasn’t on.

  ALBERT MUDRIAN: Musically, I don’t have much time for Anal Cunt. I have one record because the song titles crack me up. But it’s just button-pushing. I will never have the urge to listen to any music Seth Putnam created.

  KEVIN SHARP (Primate, Brutal Truth): Anal Cunt were the masters of blur grind. It was chaotic and noisy and no one will ever touch them, not any gore grind or porno grind band—no one.

  SETH PUTNAM: We used to beat up people who took videos of us because they never sent us copies of the videos. Once there was a guy standing on a bar stool videotaping, and I went to Fred [Ordonez], “Okay, I’ll get him from the left, you get him from the right.” We fuckin’ crunched him. The guy fuckin’ fell on the ground, his camera broke, and we kicked his camera and kicked him in the face.

  RANDY BLYTHE (Lamb of God): Anal Cunt was on tour with Eyehategod, and I took a road trip to see them in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Seth had this 10-foot-tall stepladder. He opened it up, sang two songs on top of the ladder. Then he got down, closed the ladder, and threw it feet first at the bartender, who was this fifty-year-old woman. It smashed her head into the glass mirror behind the bar and the mirror shattered everywhere. I was like, “Dude, you are fucked up!” I’m not advocating violence towards bartenders or women. I love both of them, but it was pretty intense.

  MIKE WILLIAMS (Eyehategod): One time I saw them, the band starts playing the first song, and he comes out and punches this girl in the face and that was the show. He even attacked me on that tour. We were in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m standing out in the crowd just watching A.C., and the next thing I know, Seth fucking picks up a chair and swings it wrestling style into my back. I had a beer in my hand, apparently. He knocked me completely unconscious, and as soon as I came to, I was asking, “Where did my beer go?”

  SETH PUTNAM: After we reformed in ’91 I played every show fuckin’ wrecked. I blacked out at half the shows. I don’t remember what happened. Some of the best stuff we ever came up with happened when I was blacked out. The alcohol and drugs were a huge part of what I did. Mostly, I was doing coke, speed, or meth. I was really into shooting cocaine. I’d usually only shoot heroin after being up for five days straight shooting cocaine. I just wanted to come down because I was bored of being up for five days. Or I’d do speedballs. I just did heroin every now and then, but it wasn’t one of my main choices.

  KEVIN SHARP (Brutal Truth): I saw Seth throw a mic stand like a javelin at [guitarist] Terry [Savastano] from Grief—flattened his face like a fuckin’ coin. Seth was an original. PC he wasn’t. Get over it. He wasn’t claiming to be anything other than what he was—a fuckin’ lunatic.

  SETH PUTNAM: In Somerville, Massachusetts, in 1998, I OD’ed on heroin and was pronounced dead. An ambulance came and the paramedics [used a defibrillator] on me, and it didn’t work. They tried it again for the fuck of it and I woke up in my kitchen with no idea where the fuck I was. On the ambulance ride to the hospital, one of the paramedics said, “You’ll probably have brain damage for the rest of your life.” And by the time I got to the hospital my thoughts were completely back to normal and I saw a shitload of cops in the hallway, so I ran away from the hospital and went home because I thought they would arrest me for having heroin. I’ve been arrested ten times. The first time was in San Francisco for punching a lesbian in the face. Back then we weren’t really getting paid for shows. We just fucked up every place we played and punched out a bunch of people because we knew we weren’t getting any money. I almost ripped a guy’s ear off with a mic stand. I broke some girl’s arm. After a while, we made a plan. We’d pick a place three blocks away where I’d hide when the cops came. The band would tell the cops, “Sorry, he’s already left,” and then they’d pick me up and we’d leave.

  MIKE WILLIAMS [2010 interview]: Seth is not a nice guy. He’s a fucking son of a bitch and he’s an asshole. He fucked up a lot of people, and I don’t agree with any of that. And I don’t agree with any of his racist shit either. He’s just stupid and I can’t take him seriously at all.

  SETH PUTNAM: That racist accusation is bullshit. We have a song “Hitler Was a Sensitive Man,” and I can imagine someone hearing that and getting all pissed off. But the lyrics are all true. Hitler went to art school when he was young. He wanted to be a painter. He was a vegetarian. He was a nonsmoker. So how can you get mad at that? And the song “Into the Oven” is about cooking a turkey. Everybody thinks it’s about Jews in the Holocaust. Yeah, we’ve got songs like “I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “Ha-Ha Holocaust” just because we thought that was funny. I’m trying to be as offensive as possible, but fuck, I have friends who are gay and Jewish, black and Jewish, female and gay. I naturally hate everyone until I somehow get along with them.

  The Nazi ideology might have been a joke for A.C.—just another way to antagonize listeners—but in 1990s Europe, the neo-Nazi movement was on the rise, and some of its followers flooded shows by Napalm Death. At the same time, thugs also became interested in the music, and rival gangs waged war at its concerts.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: Even though our message was very left-wing and pro-vegetarian and pro-choice, we used to get Nazi boneheads who would turn up en masse without any warning, and start fights. At one point, the Mermaid put iron bars across the door, and the Nazi skinheads would literally be barred out. They’d kick the shit out of the doors, but they didn’t get in. The same thing happened in America. A ton of them turned up on the Sheer Terror tour, and they kicked the shit out of kids and beat up the promoter as well, who was a white Rastafarian guy. Another time, a guy drove up in his car. He opened up the back and he had this rack of guns. He looked at us, looked at the guns, then closed the trunk and drove off again. Clearly, that was meant to send some kind of message.

  LEE DORRIAN: A lot of people missed the political messages of the band. Some bands played fast but had racist or sexist lyrics. That wasn’t us. We were totally against violence and discrimination of any kind.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: In Los Angeles there was a gang called Killed the Liars that attached itself to Napalm. Kids would get stabbed in the crowd when we used to play certain songs, which really saddened me. The gang used signals when they were about to attack someone.

  As the intensity and speed of grindcore gained popularity, former thrash and death metal musicians started forming their own grindcore bands. Leading the charge was Brutal Truth, which was anchored by Dan Lilker (ex-Anthrax, ex-S.O.D., Nuclear Assault) and music journalist Kevin Sharp.

  DAN LILKER: By 1990, thrash was stale and boring and I consequently couldn’t create it anymore. So I formed Brutal Truth. The two bands, Brutal Truth and Nuclear Assault, overlapped for a bit but that was too hectic. Brutal Truth started as a side project but became legit, and I had to make a choice.


  KEVIN SHARP: In America, there were only a handful of people doing this kind of music back then, and that’s when the music was at its purest, because it was original.

  DAN LILKER: Jim Welch hooked up Kevin and I. Kevin was a scenester who worked at CMJ. And Brutal Truth had gone on for almost a year without a vocalist. I was doing most of the vocals, ex-drummer Scott [Lewis] was doing some of ’em. And it got to the point where we wanted to speed up ridiculously and it was getting too hard to do both at once. Jim suggested Kevin, who had a nice roar and mixed in the influence from Japanese hardcore bands [such as Hanatarash and GISM]. The shows were kind of extreme. We used to have a car door that we brought onstage and bashed with a crowbar, then we took a grinder that made sparks, which caught a few people in the crowd, but that was part of the show. It’s just a nice, natural, healthy way to purge the bad emotions.

  KEVIN SHARP: This is a crazy business, and anything can happen. You stick around, you see your share of tragedies and overdoses. Everybody was abused at that time, and in turn, everybody abused. CDs were flying out the door and the labels were holding on to every last dime and not paying you, and instigating the mayhem. We were totally exploited. We had to run out and tour eight, ten months of the year, come [back] broke while they sat around and counted their money. The exploitation game drives the self-abuse game, drives the madness. It’s a miracle that more people didn’t overdose. Why do you think you always get two cases of beer on the fuckin’ rider? So you’re completely obliterated and don’t fuckin’ realize you’re getting stunted by everybody—all the fuckin’ people digging in your pants giving you the pull and tuck. When Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses was selling 100,000 copies, we didn’t get dime fuckin’ one. We’d play to 3,600 people at the Palladium, $20 tickets. We got paid $50.

  SETH PUTNAM: In October 2004, I went to Rob Williams, the drummer for Siege’s, birthday party. I got $200 worth of crack. I smoked that. Shot a bunch of heroin, drank a huge bottle of whisky. And then I got a hotel room the next day and I actually considered killing myself, but I decided that would be gay. I was taking Ambien at the time. And a lot of people who take Ambien sleepwalk or forget what they did. I had gotten a two-month supply before I went to Rob’s house. So, I’m pretty sure I took all that because there were no pills left when the cops came. I don’t think it was a suicide attempt. But I was in a coma for a month and when I woke up, I couldn’t move any part of my body except my eyes and my mouth. I couldn’t walk for eight months.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: [Ex–Napalm Death guitarist, ex-Terrorizer] Jesse [Pintado] was a severe alcoholic for a long time and it got progressively worse. He got very unpredictable. It got to the point where we had studio time booked, which costs money, and Jesse just didn’t turn up. We gave him more chances after that happened. But in the end, it was just too much. We couldn’t do anything without fear of Jesse disappearing when we were booked to go play gigs. We tried to help as much as we could as friends. I love Jesse to bits, but we couldn’t help him, because he didn’t want to help himself.

  JESSE PINTADO (1969–2006) (ex–Napalm Death, Terrorizer) [2006 interview]: The other day I was browsing the Internet, and they stated I was dead! I thought, “Oh shit, I’m dead!” I really don’t pay much attention to that.

  BARNEY GREENWAY: The whole structure of a touring band didn’t help Jesse because free booze is there—a couple of cases of beer on a rider a night. And there you go, instant damage. I guess Jesse succumbed to it. [He died on August 27, 2006.]

  Beginning in 2007, a new style of death metal emerged in America—deathcore. These extreme bands borrow the styles of nineties grindy death metal bands like Suffocation, Dying Fetus, and Cattle Decapitation and blend them with the sounds of newer, more popular groups, including Job for a Cowboy and the Red Chord. Then they present their digitally enhanced music on flashy websites adorned with spiky, illegible logos. Adored by the young, ridiculed by their elders, these bands are stuck in a vacuum between trendiness and credibility. For this reason, most, including Carnifex and Emmure, object to being called deathcore, but it seems the most appropriate tag for bands that blend death metal brutality with multiple hardcore breakdowns.

  CHRIS BRUNI (owner, Profound Lore Records): There seems to be a real surge in technical, polished, digital-sounding death metal. That’s getting really huge. I don’t really like most of it. But there’s also an underground movement in death metal now where the darkness and sinister vibe of classic death metal is making a comeback. Some of that is really cool.

  BRIAN SLAGEL: I love the fact that a lot of these [deathcore] guys are influenced by that older stuff, like Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse. They’re all doing something interesting and a bit different from everyone else.

  JIM WELCH: We used the word deathcore when we were writing fanzines in the eighties. It’s not like it was a movement; it was just a cool fucking word. But it’s a good marketing term for labels like Victory Records to describe the next step after metalcore.

  ALEX WADE (Whitechapel): We’re not afraid of admitting we’re a deathcore band. But we have three guitarists, so that gives us a different flavor than deathcore bands that just focus on slammy riffs all the time. We try to make the guitar work really interesting.

  SCOTT LEWIS (Carnifex): I think Between the Buried and Me was the first deathcore band. As progressive as they are, they were one of the earlier bands to combine traditional death metal with metalcore breakdowns in a really cool way.

  FRANKIE PALMERI (Emmure): Deathcore is a genre that has always sort of existed but just recently become really popular. But I don’t care. We can be deathcore. Or we can be power slop. Whatever you want to call us.

  MONTE CONNER: At least bands like Job for a Cowboy and Suicide Silence aren’t just regurgitating the same old death metal. They’re putting a fresh twist on it and combining it with other things to give it a new feel. And I think that’s why that stuff is working. They’re taking their influences and modernizing it to reach a new generation of kids.

  GUY KOZOWYK (Red Chord, Black Market Activities Records): There’s definitely bands out there that are doing deathcore in a decent way, but there’s this whole wave of trendy, fuckin’ sixteen-year-old kids with scratchy logos who scarcely know how to play their instruments and have plugged into a microphone and are doing pig squeals. I just want to publicly apologize to the world for having any part in influencing any of that garbage.

  11

  IN THE NIGHTSIDE ECLIPSE: BLACK METAL, 1982–PRESENT

  The international media thrived on it. Fans obsessed over it. And musicians made it not just their career, but their calling—one that, for some, led to arson and murder. Black metal, the most controversial and titillating metal scene, is steeped in history, mythology, and demonology. For some, the occult was a vehicle for expression, not a platform for worship. But for others, the glorification of man’s dark side and exultation in anti-Christian deities is as important as the blazing guitars, crushing beats, and banshee vocals. Much of the metal community scoff at or dismiss black metal’s excesses—the sweeping, symphonic keyboards, stage theatrics, and ghoulish face painting. Yet for those who take it seriously, black metal is a complex, emotional, and transcendent form of music, and many of the champions of the genre, regardless of their extremism, are talented songwriters and gifted players.

  VEGARD SVERRE “IHSAHN” TVEITAN (Emperor, ex-Peccatum): Being very intense and dark, black metal enables us to roar out of the dark atmospheres at high energy, giving it a very strong appeal to those of us who enjoy these kinds of emotions. Our intention is to bring the listener on a journey into those nightside landscapes we describe in our songs.

  JOSE MANGIN: Black metal is a static wall of noise with shrieking vocals. It’s church-burning music. It can be symphonic, but it’s usually low-fi. When I think of black metal I think of corpse paint and Norwegians in freezing-cold forests with torches. It’s depressed music for people that have no hope.

  KORY GROW: Black
metal reintroduced the minor third and major third back into extreme metal, which death metal wasn’t using so much. Death metal was still very much about power chords. Black metal guitarists were more interested in two-note chords that had a little bit more melody, and they would emphasize those minor keys more within the tonality.

  GRUTLE KJELLSON (Enslaved): The so-called first movement of black metal started with Venom, because they called their second album Black Metal. That was in the early eighties, and there were other bands that took the lead from Venom [such as] Bathory and Celtic Frost.

  OLVE “ABBATH” EIKEMO (Immortal): Bands like Iron Maiden, KISS, and Black Sabbath always ran into trouble with Christian people who complained about rock and roll. And they would all say, “No, we’re not Satanists.” But Venom didn’t give a fuck. They just said, “Praise Satan,” which was a statement to all these people like, “Fuck you all.”

  STIAN TOMT “SHAGRATH” THORESEN (Dimmu Borgir): I didn’t like the music of Venom so much, but the imagery and lyrics were fascinating.

  CRONOS: Look, I don’t preach Satanism, occultism, witchcraft, or anything. Rock and roll is basically entertainment, and that’s as far as it goes. It’s always nice to hear that we came up with the phrase black metal. A long time ago I had an idea for a band, and I thought that idea was only mine and the two guys I was with. But when I realized that there are so many millions of people around the world who also like that style of music, well, that’s just the most amazing thing in the world.

  DAVE GROHL: I went to England to see Cronos from Venom, and he really is that guy. I don’t know if he’s really Satanic, but we went to dinner and he drank like a Viking and ate a piece of meat that was almost still alive. The outside was kind of brown, but it was cold and bloody. And he told us about going into supermarkets and eating raw meat when he didn’t have any money. I told that to Lemmy [Kilmister (Motörhead, ex-Hawkwind)] and he said, “Yeah, well I used to suck the meat out of raw sausages.” It was like a contest for who could be more metal.