The group compensated for their musical deficiencies by developing an aggressive theatrical element to Mantas, covering themselves in fake blood for their first and only official live performance. But their true objective remained clear to Schuldiner.
“My main goal was to bash out the most brutal riffs ever,” he said in that same interview, “with the most brutal guitar sound ever.”
That search helped foster Schuldiner’s growing obsession with tape-trading. Armed with dubbed copies of both Mantas’ debut rehearsal demo Death by Metal (recorded in his parents’ garage during the summer of 1984) and the band’s October ‘84 “proper” demo Reign of Terror, Schuldiner set out to uncover the fastest, heaviest band in the world. Soon he discovered the demo of a California band called Possessed.
Formed by San Pablo native Jeff Beccera, along with junior high school friends Mike Torreo and Mike Sus in 1982, Possessed began gigging almost immediately, perplexing audiences throughout their area with a blistering take on thrash metal and overtly Satanic image.
“At first people didn’t know what to think, because there really weren’t any other bands doing the kind of thing we were doing,” says Beccera, just 15 years old at the start of the band. “After a while people started to catch on, especially by the time we had a record out to sell them.”
In 1984, Possessed signed a recording contract with the tiny Combat Records label, and a year later set out to Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, California, to record their debut LP Seven Churches.
“To this day I still refer to that album as ‘Seven Chickens,’” Beccera explains. “It was on a chicken ranch. Most of them were in chicken coops. And I remember they were running around, and when you’d actually start playing they’d go to the other side of the yard. Horses will do that, too, when you play death metal—it’s completely unnatural to them. Death metal scares the fuck out of people, too, and 99.9% will hate you, animals included.”
The result was an overtly dark and violent thrash-paced album. Moreover, it was the first proper LP to feature what would become the standard growling death metal vocals for the genre.
“Mike [Torreo] said, ‘Try to be like Cronos from Venom and try to be like [Slayer’s] Tom Araya,’” recalls Beccera of his vocal coaching. “He said, ‘Just go rrrooaarr! ’ So I pretty much just yelled my guts out. The first time I ever sang it sounded too heavy. I’m yelling on Seven Churches, but it was really much heavier than that, it was just too much. So Seven Churches is really a calmed-down version of the earlier stuff.”
“To me, Possessed is still the first American death metal band,” offers Lee, who discovered the band shortly after Schuldiner. “When we were in Mantas we still had a more Venom/Motörhead sound kinda going on. And then I remember Chuck getting the Possessed demo, and I just remember hearing it and just freaking out like, ‘Man, this is the way we gotta be.’”
It was Possessed’s Beccera, in fact, who is widely credited with actually coining the term death metal, writing Seven Churches’ closing song, simply titled “Death Metal.”
“I came up with that during an English class in high school,” the bassist/ vocalist explains. “I figured speed metal and black metal were already taken, so what the fuck? So I said death metal, because that word wasn’t associated with Venom or anybody else. It wasn’t even about redefining it. We were playing this music and we were trying to be the heaviest thing on the face of the planet. We wanted just to piss people off and send everybody home. And that can’t be, like, flower metal.”
Fearing their obvious Slayer and Venom influences were no longer extreme enough to be considered death metal, the Mantas members reevaluated their approach just before that Christmas.
“I remember it was just after the movie Evil Dead had come out to the theaters, and we were going constantly,” says Lee. “First Evil Dead premiered at the theater, and then they started playing it as a midnight movie every weekend, and we were going every weekend. And I remember we were standing in line all talking, and Chuck said, ‘Why don’t we just change the name of the band from Mantas to Death?’ And we were like, ‘That’s perfect.’”
Now more specifically categorized, according to Lee, under the blood-soaked banner of “Corpse-Grinding Death Metal,” the band played their first gig as Death opening for Florida thrashers Nasty Savage at Ruby’s Pub in Brandon on New Year’s Eve 1984, a show which was recorded and circulated throughout the tape-trading underground. Only a few weeks after that initial triumph, however, it was clear that the band’s relationship with guitarist Rick Rozz was deteriorating beyond repair, leading to his dismissal.
It was then, in the spring of ‘85, that Schuldiner hatched his ill-fated plan to merge forces with Scott Carlson and Matt Olivo of Michigan metallers Genocide. Within only two weeks of uniting under the Death moniker, Lee exited the new group.
“A lot of people think Chuck kicked me out, but the truth is I quit because me and Chuck started being a little bit different,” Lee contends. “Chuck wanted to step in more and sing more songs because, at the time, Chuck was only singing about a third of the songs and I was doing the vocals, and he said he wanted me to concentrate more on drums. And the fact is, at that time I wanted to step down from drumming. I was talking to Scott and Matt about maybe getting their [old] drummer to move down and Chuck didn’t wanna do that. You hear it all the time, but ‘creative differences’ is exactly what it was. And pretty much the basis of the whole thing was, I no longer wanted to play drums. I wanted to become a frontman vocalist, and Chuck wanted to also be a vocalist, and that wasn’t gonna work. And it turned into a heated argument, and basically I ended up quitting.”
The remaining band members spent the next few months trying to find a proper drummer before Carlson and Olivo returned home to Michigan. Before they left, however, the pair became enamored with the Surrender or Die demo recording from underground Canadian metal band Slaughter.
“We took a little of everything we loved and grinded out some of the heaviest shit around,” offers former Slaughter guitarist Dave Hewson. “Not just speed for the sake of speed, but our fast parts worked well off of our slower, heavier parts. But, I must say that when we played fast, we played fast. [It was] some of the fastest metal, with no blast beats. We just went right for the throat and in for the kill—fast and painful.”
“Chuck had the Slaughter demo at his house, and I put it on, and I immediately wanted to stop playing with Death and just change my musical direction, and go faster and harder,” recalls Carlson. “When I played it for Matt, he too was like, ‘Oh, my God, these guys are amazing.’ It was total Celtic Frost, but much, much faster and they had this wicked sense of humor that Matt and I were both totally into. And we just said that we wanted to do something more like this.”
In terms of extremity, Slaughter may have been only a very fast thrash metal band, but Schuldiner was equally captivated with the group, and set out to start a band of his own that was even faster and heavier than the speedy Toronto-based outfit. Requiring a rapidfire drummer, Schuldiner moved to San Francisco in September, teaming up with ex-D.R.I. drummer Eric Brecht. After recording only a single rehearsal demo with Brecht, Schuldiner quickly grew weary of the union’s unadulterated brutality and returned to Florida by December of ‘85 in hopes of developing a more dynamic outfit.
Only a month after his Florida homecoming, however, Schuldiner made contact with Slaughter guitarist Dave Hewson, who convinced the young frontman to relocate yet again and join his band as rhythm guitarist.
“Chuck flew up and we rented him some gear and we rehearsed for about ten days,” recalls Hewson. “Some of the tapes we made were fucking heavy. The living arrangements were not working out, though, as Chuck was living in Terry’s parents’ basement—not to their liking. We also felt Chuck was not ready to retire Death, nor were we totally comfortable being a four-piece. With the recording of [our album] Strappado only a few weeks away, it was decided to part ways.”
“When [Chuck] called af
ter two weeks to tell us of his change in plans, we wired the money to him to fly home,” recalls Schuldiner’s mother Jane. “His father and I respected his decisions and gave him financial freedom to go wherever his search led him for his career.”
By the time the nearly nomadic Schuldiner returned home to Altamonte Springs, his former bandmate Lee had departed 95 miles southwest to Tampa, where the thrash tandem of Savatage and Nasty Savage led the city’s burgeoning underground metal scene.
“I was there about three months, just going to shows, and I got word that there was this death metal band looking for a vocalist,” Lee explains. “It happened to be this band called Massacre, and it was just horrible. The vocalist that they had was more or less kinda like [former Anthrax frontman] Joey Belladonna. When I’d gone to the rehearsal, they pretty much had no originals at all. They were playing Anthrax covers and a couple Overkill songs and some S.O.D. songs. And the first thing I said—I guess I came off kinda cocky—was, ‘Look, if you guys want me to sing, this stuff that you’re playing now has gotta go. You just gotta completely start over from scratch.’”
The band, rounded out by Bill Andrews, Alan West and Mike Borders, generally agreed with Lee’s blunt appraisal.
“These guys had come to that show when Death had played with Nasty Savage, so they knew what I could do,” Lee continues. “So they said, ‘Try it out and see what you think of us.’ So when it came to Massacre, I said, ‘I wanna step away from what I was doing in Death, I wanna go even deeper with my voice.’ And when that came out, a lot of people said, ‘God, that sounds like you’re vomiting.’ And it got nicknamed ‘death vomit vocals,’ but I never came up with that. Before that, I don’t think anyone was growling that deep.
“But it was probably three weeks after that initial meeting that we were just practicing, and we had enough material to put out the first Massacre demo,” Lee continues. “At the time, Alan and Mike both had some kind of hook where we could go into a student project studio for free. So ‘85 was like, ‘Boom!’ I moved to Tampa, I was there three months, and I was already in a band. It happened really fast.”
Chuck Schuldiner, however, was in a much different situation. Disillusioned with the dearth of like-minded musicians in his hometown, he decided again to relocate to San Francisco in early 1986. Within a few short weeks of his arrival, Schuldiner began actively courting local musicians to play with. In the small San Francisco suburb of Concord, a young drummer named Chris Reifert soon got the word.
“I was still in high school, and they had—and still do—a high school radio station. And they were about to place an ad for Death looking for a drummer, which was insane because I had been buying and trading Death demos for the past year or two, and thought, like, ‘No way, it couldn’t be the same Death,’” says Reifert, about to turn 17 at the time. “And I knew this girl who worked at the radio station, and she said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna run this ad, and I thought I’d tell you about it before I ran it.’ So I called up—I think it was even before it was on the air—and I just said, ‘Is this the same band?’ And they said, ‘Yep, we’re just over here now.’ I was one out of either one or two calls that he received, so it was pretty much a cinch.”
The pair immediately recorded a two-song rehearsal tape late in March of ‘86 before quickly following it up with the band’s most polished material in the form of the three-track Mutilation demo several months later.
“Something teased me from the very start,” Schuldiner later told Aardschok-Metal Hammer in April of 1989. “All the time I kept one main goal: a record deal!”
Mutilation earned Schuldiner that elusive recording contract with the tiny New York indie Combat Records. That summer he convinced Reifert to relocate to Florida to record Death’s debut album.
“We did all the rough tracks and they sounded so lame that Combat just decided to throw them away as a mistake and just start all over again,” says Reifert of the ill-fated session. “So we had to basically start from scratch.”
This time Schuldiner and Reifert packed up and headed to Los Angeles’ Music Grinder studios in November of 1986. There, with little incident, they laid down the tracks for Scream Bloody Gore with producer Randy Burns.
“I was totally happy with the way the record came out,” Schuldiner told Metal Forces when Scream Bloody Gore was released in May of the next year.
Metal Forces agreed, describing Scream Bloody Gore as “death metal at its utmost extreme, brutal, raw, and offensive—the kind that separates the true death metallers from countless trend-following wimps. Just one listen will have you either thrashing around your room like a mindless maniac, or heading for the nearest toilet in total disgust. If anything, it should certainly establish the band as one of the heaviest acts on the face of the earth.”
“Randy gave us a superheavy production, and he was very easy to work with in the studio,” Schuldiner said in that same piece. “The only thing I kind of regret now is not hanging around for the final mixes.”
Schuldiner, however, definitely wasn’t interested in hanging around California. Again he tried to coerce Reifert into moving to Tampa, but this time the drummer wasn’t budging.
“Chuck said, ‘This is where I belong, and you can come down and keep with it,’” recalls Reifert. “And I was like, ‘I think I’ll just stay here.’ I didn’t feel like—Florida is so fucking hot, man. It’s like humid and just kinda redneck, so I wasn’t into it, and I just wanted to stay here, so I just did that and started Autopsy from there. It was like, time to start a new band—there’s nothing else to do. So it was out of necessity or desperation or both.”
Arguably that same motivation guided another group of young locals. Like kindred Florida spirits Death, this outfit’s initial stages developed in high school, where in 1982 both 11th grade guitarist George Emanuelle III and senior Mike Browning attended Tampa’s H.B. Plant High School.
Bonding over their mutual appreciation of bands such as Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, within months of their meeting the pair formed their own heavy metal cover band called Ice.
“Our first show was actually the school’s talent show,” laughs Browning, who handled the drums for the group. “We weren’t Ice for very long.”
Upon graduating from Plant in 1984, Emanuelle moved to Temple Terrace on the other side of town, effectively ending Browning’s stint in Ice. Emanuelle replaced him with a local drummer and recruited friend Dallas Ward on bass and continued to further develop the band by crafting his first set of original material.
“When I first started playing guitar, and writing songs I wanted to try to make something that had the feeling of the really fast, aggressive stuff with the more deep, trippy stuff,” he says. “I wanted to have multiple styles together—maybe examples were like mixing Slayer, with, like Mercyful Fate and trying make a song that had those two worlds coming together.”
Before long, however, Emmanuel found himself yet again without a drummer. Without hesitation, he asked Browning to rejoin the group, which was then operating under the name Heretic.
“We soon found out there already was a Heretic,” says Browning, “and that’s when we got the name Morbid Angel.”
“I just came up with that, because I was looking for a great name to actually call the band,” Emanuelle says. “We had all of these working titles, but I came up with that name in ‘84. Before that it was us playing funny parties and just doing goofy stuff, going to a park and just setting up and playing. But 1984’s when Morbid Angel really got started.”
“The first thing was that you wanna have a cool logo so people think it’s cool, and t-shirts—you wanna get the imagery out there,” he continues. “And you wanna have some kind of message, some kind of thing where as far as what the intended meaning is. I always wanted that to be about the real magic about life and the idea of spiritualism.”
Additionally, Emanuelle, who always felt uncomfortable with his regal-sounding full name, embraced the nickname Trey, complementing his namesake
stature as the third. He also chose the appellation Azagthoth—a blind, mad god of abomination often referred to as the “Lord of Chaos”—as his new surname.
Morbid Angel itself underwent several other renovations. The young guitarist devised a lyrical approach directly inspired from the Satanic tome the Necronomicon , while his music reflected that content, growing darker, faster and altogether heavier.
Despite such artistic strides, a proper vocalist continued to elude the band. Their first frontman selection was local Kenny Bamber.
“He was a lot older than we were at the time, and he looked like a big Ted Nugent kinda guy, but he tried to sing in a falsetto, like King Diamond, for some reason,” recalls Browning. “So we tried it, and he was in the band for about a month. But the guy wanted to pay for a recording, so we went in and recorded a couple of songs.”
With Bamber ousted shortly after the ‘85 recording, bassist Ward assumed the primary vocal duties. Only weeks later, another Florida native, Richard Brunelle, entered as the group’s rhythm guitarist, joining Ward as a second vocalist.
“Dallas kept getting in a lot of trouble with the law, so he ended up getting arrested,” Browning explains. “Richard wasn’t really into doing the vocals because he had a problem singing and playing guitar at the same time. So we really didn’t have anybody that could just sing, so I said, ‘I’ll try it.’ And for some reason, it just kinda came out that way with me growling, and it worked.”
With a suitable vocalist finally in place, and the additions of guitarist John Ortega and bassist Sterling Scarborough, who soon adopted “Von” as a faux middle name, Morbid Angel spent much of the next year writing new material. During that stage, Browning made acquaintances with a Charlotte, North Carolina musician named David Vincent.
Choosing Death Page 6