Yet unlike most hardcore and punk outfits, whose message was often both personal and political, this quartet drew lyrical inspiration from the goriest horror and slasher films they could find.
“If you knew us back then, we just had fun,” says Olivo. “We got into horror movies. We got into going to punk shows and stage diving and all of that stuff. But we weren’t into real autopsies and stuff. Really, we just wanted to get more hardcore than the guys that we were with. They weren’t quite with us [in the band], so we just started all over again.”
Those revisions consisted of a brief name change to Ultraviolence—when the band actually opened for Slayer in Flint in 1984—before altering the moniker again to Genocide only a few months later. After drummer Phil Hiles replaced Auten, the band recorded their first rehearsal demo in Hiles’ basement in November of ’84. While the group still didn’t exceed the archetypal thrash metal velocity, the recording was Genocide’s introduction to the extreme metal underground. Soon Carlson and Olivo were tape-trading with national contacts they made via underground zines like Brain Damage and, of course, Maximum Rock n’ Roll.
By early 1985, the pair was regularly corresponding with a young Floridian named Chuck Schuldiner, who fronted his own extreme metal project simply called Death.
“I wrote Chuck a letter because Death sounded like they were sorta kindred spirits,” says Carlson. “Chuck sent me a tape with all of their material on it and I played it for Matt, and I was like, ‘This is pretty similar to what we’re doing.’”
“Chuck was sending horribly misspelled letters as correspondence because he was into Genocide and we were into Death,” says Olivo. “He would send us pictures of, like, dead rats and shit and we would talk about how we wanted our bands to be the sickest bands in the world.”
The two groups often commiserated as well. Over the next few weeks, Genocide’s lineup quickly disintegrated, leaving only Carlson and Olivo as members, while Schuldiner expelled Rick Rozz, the guitarist with whom he had continually butted heads, from Death.
“In the spring of 1985, Chuck and Scott were brainstorming,” says Olivo. “They were like, ‘Let’s just merge the two groups.’”
18-year-old Carlson graduated high school, and Olivo, a year his junior, quit school before the pair packed their belongings and journeyed 1,200 miles southeast to Schuldiner’s parents’ house in Altamont Springs, Florida.
“We just drove down there straight through, it was like a 24-hour drive, and knocked on Chuck’s door,” Carlson explains. “And the next day we were set up in the garage rehearsing. Matt and I held a bunch of crappy jobs while we were there. Chuck was working at Del Taco, which is like Taco Bell in the South. All we wanted to do was rock, then act like idiots.”
Only two weeks into the new union, however, Death drummer Kam Lee left the group. “It was such a bummer,” says Olivo. “So we hung around and tried a few different drummers, but nothing really seemed to work.”
“Since Kam wasn’t around, we just started writing,” says Carlson. “It became evident really fast that Chuck wanted to be more technical and do a lot more guitar stuff and, we just wanted to completely thrash out. We didn’t have a drummer, there was nothing going on, and we still really wanted to do something extreme. After just a couple of months there we just went back home.”
Upon their Flint homecoming, Olivo returned to school before he and Carlson resurrected the Genocide name and began their search for a drummer.
“The only guy that anyone knew that was available was Dave Hollingshead, who had been in some collegiate-type punk rock band, just kind of college rock,” remembers Carlson. “And he had recently made headlines in the local newspapers for getting arrested for grave-robbing, and I thought, ‘Perfect, that’s our man.’”
Rechristened Dave Grave for such behavior, the drummer had a difficult time initially adjusting to the band’s rapid tempos.
“To just keep the sort of thrashy Slayer drumbeat, Dave would struggle,” Carlson admits. “So he would do this thing where he was hitting the hi-hat every other time that he wasn’t hitting the snare, like a country drummer or a polka drummer would.”
The band showcased their newfound velocity on an October 1985 rehearsal demo titled Violent Death, leading to regular live performances at punk and hardcore shows in the band’s hometown of Flint. Thanks in part to the increased gigging, within a few short months, Hollingshead’s drumming skills improved dramatically.
“After a while Dave just became so proficient at what we called the cheating drum beat,” Carlson says. “It became ridiculously fast, and we realized that the beats per minute on the snare drum were so much faster than any other band, that we just tried to keep pushing that element forward. The reason that a lot of the initial songs sound so manic is that they were written to be played at about the speed of a Slayer song, and they ended up so fast that the lyrics are just garbled on songs like ‘The Lurking Fear,’ ‘Six Feet Under,’ ‘The Stench of Burning Death’—those songs were written to be played at a much slower speed, and they just sort of mutated into what they were. I give Dave a lot of credit for that, because at the time he wasn’t good enough to play it. By the time it was over, he was one of the gods, one of the guys that people measured themselves up to as far as speed. It was very accidental.”
By the time the group entered the studio of local public radio station WFBE to record their first proper demo in late January 1986, Genocide was the fastest band in the world. The band implored their friend Aaron Freeman to also play guitar on the recording engineered by studio employee Ken Roberts.
“They were normally recording classical symphony stuff in that studio,” remembers Carlson. “It was a big huge room with a bunch of music stands and chairs, and we went in there and he set up microphones, and we went straight to two-track recording. So the whole thing was just done as a live recording—there were no overdubs whatsoever. And [we did] one or two takes of each song, and we were like, ‘We’ve got a real demo, guys.’ And before the thing had even cooled off I was already addressing envelopes and sending it to every key person I could think of; whether they were a musician or a record label or a magazine, I was sending it to everybody. I probably sent out 25 copies of it the day after we recorded it, and then I just kept sending it to people unsolicited.”
This time, Carlson and Olivo’s efforts created an international impact in the extreme music underground. Most notably, copies of The Stench of Burning Death tape made their way to England, where members of the UK’s rapidly developing hardcore scene were exposed to Genocide’s heart-racing speed. But just as Genocide was beginning to make a name for themselves, they changed theirs. In May of ’86, with several other bands operating under the same moniker of Genocide, the group was rechristened Repulsion. This alteration, however, wasn’t enough to garner interest in the group from any record labels. Undeterred, the band decided to self-finance their own full-length LP, with Freeman now officially entrenched as the band’s second guitarist. Local record store owner and ardent supporter Doug Earp funded the $300 recording session in June of 1986. Although the resultant 18-track Slaughter of the Innocent was yet another step forward from their previous record in terms of speed, the label interest in the band remained much the same.
“We started sending that around, and I thought someone would pick it up and put that out, but it didn’t happen and we were just confused,” states Carlson. “I thought it was so great, I believed in it so much and I just couldn’t understand why nobody else was interested in it.”
“We were really hoping at one point to start a career of some kind, even if it was a little career,” says Olivo. “I remember thinking, ‘I know that a career would probably only last two or three albums, but I would just love to do it and then move on with my life.’ But it wasn’t happening. Hope was just dwindling.”
Soon the band’s members began drifting their separate ways. First, Hollingshead departed for the army in July of ‘86. “Dave totally lost interest
because Matt and I just ruled things with such an iron fist,” Carlson admits. “We were constantly just pushing him to get better, and I think after a while he just got sick of it.”
Following a brief unsuccessful stint with replacement drummer Tom Puro, the band went on an unofficial hiatus in September of ‘86. After one reunion show featuring Hollingshead back behind the drums in November 1987, Repulsion officially folded.
“It was just such an intense and very short period, like six or eight months, when we wrote those songs,” says Carlson. “Then it was just over. That was the statement. To me, all that Repulsion ever had to say was on that record. It was over, and I don’t think we could have done it any more extreme.”
The extremity threshold Repulsion attained was about to be tested in Los Angeles, California. Although his hometown’s music scene was currently besieged by the era’s glam metal insurgence, south central L.A. native Oscar Garcia was enraptured by the aggressive sounds of Slayer and Celtic Frost. After causing a brief clamor in the company of friends Eric Castro and Carlos Reveles with the atavistic rumble of an exclusively demo project called Majesty, Garcia sought a serious group he could front as a vocalist/guitarist. In fact, he began recruiting his band members right off the street, starting with 15-year-old local Jesse Pintado.
“I remembered Jesse from seeing him around because he would be wearing Iron Maiden shirts,” Garcia recalls. “One day I was walking down the street and saw him and told him that I was trying to get a band together and I asked him if he knew how to play. He said, ‘No, not really.’ So I just taught him a few chords myself, because I wasn’t that great of a guitar player either. We just basically learned from each other.”
Soon after Pintado and Garcia realized their fundamentals, the pair dubbed the new thrash metal union Terrorizer, after a song from an underground Chicago metal act called Master.
“It’s common knowledge that the Terrrorizer name came from the first Master demo,” agrees Master guitarist/vocalist Paul Speckmann. “If you ask any real metal band if they have heard of Master, the response is more than likely, ‘Yes’” Thanks to the international tape-trading network, Master, as well as recordings from Speckmann’s other project Deathstrike, was a cult favorite throughout the underground for their extreme take on traditional thrash metal.
“Actually,” says Speckmann, “I received many letters from the original Napalm Death patch [at the time]. It’s a really small world.”
The newly minted Terrorizer drafted a local friend named Alfredo—a baseball fanatic, who they nicknamed Garvey after his favorite player, Steve Garvey—to play bass. Following a revolving cast of drummers the group settled on an L.A. local simply known as Fish. “I don’t know why,” says Garcia, “but everybody called him Fish. He was a cool guy, but he wasn’t that great of a drummer. Basically, he couldn’t play much faster than a Slayer kind of beat.”
The band spent the next year attempting to secure an adequate practice space, playing at Fish’s parents’ house and Garcia’s garage before moving their equipment into a mutual friend’s garage near the end of 1986. By then, Pintado and Garcia’s tastes grew more extreme as they became deeply immersed in the international tape-trading underground.
“After your Metallicas and Slayers came around, trading more obscure music just made it more extreme,” says Pintado. “Because the obscure stuff was more extreme than stuff you could get in vinyl. Bands like Death and Master, at the time, you couldn’t get the records because they didn’t have records—it was just flyers and demos. The curiosity of seeking out more crazy stuff drew out our influences.”
“Jesse ended up getting the Napalm Death demo that would become the Aside of Scum,” Garcia explains. “I remember one day he said, ‘Check this out.’ And when I listened to it the first time, I called him and I said, ‘That’s it—that’s the way I wanna play.’ There were other bands that I heard that were supposedly trying to play as fast as they could, but it was nothing like Napalm Death.”
Napalm’s velocity wasn’t on the menu for Fish, however. And soon it was clear the drummer’s commitment to Terrorizer was, at the very least, floundering.
“I remember one afternoon we were waiting for Fish, and he never showed up because he went to the beach,” Garcia recalls. “He knew that were gonna practice at this time, and he just blew us off. And me, Garvey and Jesse would all wanna practice, so we would just stand around and try to make up stuff without a drummer. So that day this guy we knew walked in and he told us that he knew a drummer. I said, ‘Is he any good?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, he’s good.’ So we said, ‘Bring him.’ We naturally thought that he would bring him a week later or something, but about 30 minutes later he walked in with Pete.”
Pete was L.A. local Pete Sandoval. After a brief introduction, his first rehearsal came behind Fish’s drum kit, which was fastened together with a generous amount of duct tape.
“The first beat that he played was a superfast beat,” says Garcia, “and when we heard that, Jesse and I looked at each other and we looked at Pete, and we were like, ‘Hey, man, you wanna join this band?’ And he said, ‘You guys haven’t seen me play.’ And I said, ‘We’ve heard enough.’”
Sandoval immediately accepted and hurried home. Shortly after his return with his personal drum kit a half-hour later, Terrorizer were moving at top speed. “When Pete started playing our older songs with his style of drumming,” Garcia explains, “everything just started to click.”
With the lineup finally stabilized, the band recorded several rehearsal demos over the next year and began searching for shows in the L.A. area. “We weren’t doing any clubs or anything in L.A.,” Pintado explains. “We were doing backyard parties, and we refused to do the ‘Pay to Play’
Hollywood scene, so we had trouble really finding a home. Terrorizer was too fast for the metallers and not hardcore enough for the punks. You show up with long hair and they were like, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”
“We played with metal bands, we played with hardcore bands—we played with everybody,” says Garcia. “At a lot of shows people, didn’t like us, but we just kept doing it. Basically, we were our own thing out there.”
Just a year later, however, the band was rehearsing and gigging with less frequency. When bassist Garvey became mixed up with L.A.’s gang culture and was sentenced to jail time in early 1988, the group turned to Garcia’s old friend Carlos Reveles, who filled in admirably on bass. But to Pintado, it was clear that Terrorizer was faltering. “We were just barely rehearsing and doing not that much.” he says. “Nothing was going on.”
In the summer of ‘88, Pintado received a call from David Vincent, a pen pal from North Carolina. At the time, Vincent’s band Morbid Angel was in search of a drummer capable of breakneck speed.
Recalls Pintado, “David said, ‘We’re looking for someone to play fast. Can we get Pete’s address and phone number?’ And I said, ‘Here you go. Call him up.’”
“At the time I thought we were just about ready to do an album,” says Garcia. “Then one day out of the blue at a practice, Pete just busted out saying that he was leaving the band and that he was moving out of state. And that was pretty much it for us then. It was like we never had a chance.”
3
Death By Metal
WITH A LITTLE IMAGINATION, one could argue that Iron Maiden’s ubiquitous skeletal mascot Eddie is actually the catalyst of Florida’s entire death metal scene.
In 1983 at Lake Brantley High School, the only public school in the quiet Orlando suburb of Altamonte Springs (then with a population of just over 20,000), students like Barney Lee scribbled on notebook covers as a welcome distraction to pass time. Your average scraggly-haired high school pariah, Lee also sought solace in the music and garish logos of punk bands such as the Misfits and Samhain as well as the politically minded Dead Kennedys and the Exploited.
“One day I was sitting by myself, of course, and I was doodling,” Lee recalls of that day in 1983. “I was drawing t
hese little skeleton people, and this guy just happened to be looking over my shoulder, and he said, ‘Can you draw Eddie from Iron Maiden?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s no problem.’ And then we got to talking.”
That guy was a young metalhead named Frederick DeLillo, who immediately struck up a friendship with Lee and began foisting European heavy metal acts, such as Accept, Raven and Mercyful Fate upon him. Lee, however, remained relatively skeptical of the music.
“I would listen to the stuff and I would appreciate it, but it really wasn’t my kind of thing,” he explains. “I liked the Fate, but I never liked the high-pitched vocal stuff. But one day Rick came to me and said, ‘I got this band you’ve gotta listen to. It’s like Motörhead, but even more extreme.’ And he happened to bring in Black Metal from Venom, and that sealed it for me. I was like, ‘Yes, we can do music like this.’”
Venom’s musical interpretation of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal may have been crude and their lyrical interpretation utterly juvenile, but it was all the inspiration DeLillo and Lee needed. Soon the pair decided to form a band of their own. Lee would handle the drums and vocals, while DeLillo could provide the guitar—but the band still required more like-minded members. Within weeks, DeLillo contacted a fellow Altamonte Springs resident—the Long Island-born, 15-year-old guitarist Chuck Schuldiner, whom DeLillo had recently met through a mutual metal friend. When DeLillo introduced Lee to Schuldiner at a party in late 1983, Mantas was officially born.
Lifting their nomenclature from the stage moniker of Venom guitarist Jeff Dunn, the youngsters similarly altered their own names—DeLillo becoming Rick Rozz, Lee shifting to Kam Lee and Schuldiner adopting Evil Chuck—well before becoming proficient musicians.
“When I first started the band,” Schuldiner told Guitar School nearly a decade later, “I’d only been playing guitar for six or seven months—I couldn’t even play a lead.”
Choosing Death Page 5