“There was a guy singing for David’s band, Metal Mike, who was a friend of mine that used to live in Brandon, Florida,” says Browning. “Mike called me one day at my house from North Carolina and said, ‘Hey, do you still have that Morbid Angel band going? I’m working for this guy that’s got a record label, and he wants to hear you guys.’”
“I was going back and forth, working with hardcore punk-type stuff, and what was around at the time essentially a circuit of heavy metal cover bands,” says Vincent. “There was a bar, like a rock club, that was attached to this porno shop I was working at, so I would just get off work and go immediately over there, have a beer and hang out and watch bands. And every time bands would come through, like some of the bigger bands from the circuit, I’d always push them to add more heaviness. They’d come in and I’d play a tape for them, like, ‘Check this out. These guys are ridiculous.’ And usually the drummer would be the first one to frown, because he’d be thinking, ‘I don’t want my guitar player talking to this guy anymore, because he’s gonna ask me to play these hyperspeed beats.’ In reality, they were not that fast. It was around like Slayer Show No Mercy, and that was before [Slayer drummer] Dave Lombardo really went sick with it. It was a new thing. It wasn’t really accepted. Nobody really knew much about it, especially in backwards-ass North Carolina.”
“We sent him a practice tape and that’s how he signed us,” Browning recalls. “He never saw us, and he got one practice tape and that was it.”
With Vincent’s financial backing, Morbid Angel traveled to a Charlotte studio in the spring of 1986 to record their debut album and debut release for Vincent’s embryonic Goreque Records. While the resultant Abominations of Desolation LP was certainly the group’s heaviest and most uncompromising output to date, some of the band members, including Azagthoth, who stayed an extra week in Charlotte to assist in mixing, weren’t completely satisfied with the finished product.
“We all liked the recording at the time,” says Browning. “I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it had a lot of feeling to it.”
“Because of their performances, I just didn’t really feel the songs were really able to come to their potential,” Azagthoth counters. “I thought that a lot of the stuff still needed to be worked on. I didn’t really feel that the drumming was fitting in, and it was kinda hard to tell at practice because the practice space was kinda noisy. But once we recorded it, it seemed like it was missing stuff. I felt that the songs could have been a lot better, so I just really wanted to scrap that whole thing. So I deny it as far as being a record.”
In fact, Azagthoth was so displeased with the result, he elected to dissolve Morbid Angel’s lineup, booting Scarborough, Ortega and Browning from the band.
“When we came up there, I guess David was pretty amazed at the way that Trey played guitar, and he was just like, ‘I gotta have this guy in my band,’” Browning says. “So that’s basically what he told Trey when me and Richard and Johnny went back. First of all, he said that Johnny was a horrible bass player. I mean, I thought he was all right. And he said, ‘Get rid of Johnny and get Sterling.’ So when [that version of] Morbid Angel broke up, it was in late 1986.”
“Trey called me and said, ‘Not to worry you or anything, but I just parted ways with the drummer and bass player,’” says Vincent. “So it was just he and Richard at the time, and I thought, that’s funny—I was working with a drummer who was into basically the same stuff that I was—and I said, ‘Why don’t we get together and see what happens?’”
After agreeing to shelve the Abominations of Desolation recording indefinitely, Azgathoth and Brunell traveled 600 miles north to Charlotte, joining forces with drummer Wayne Hartzel and Vincent, who would handle the bassist/vocalist duties in yet another rendering of Morbid Angel.
“Well, David saw what I was doing, and basically copied that and improved it,” claims Browning of his vocal delivery. “He got those guys and he brought them down there and, they fucking worked 24 hours a day.”
“They came up and hung out,” says Vincent. “We started jamming, and it sounded really good to the point that we sounded, in our opinion, tighter and better and heavier than the record.”
The entire group moved into a six-bedroom house on Charlotte’s south side (what Vincent succinctly characterizes as “a kinda shitty part of town”) where they rehearsed and—invariably partied—nightly.
“At the time we were all young—I was only 19—and me and Trey were heavily into reading the occult and gore movies, and just doing everything on the dark side and trying to shock people,” says Morbid Angel guitarist Richard Brunelle. “It was pretty crazy. We used to stir up some attention. We used to go out of our way just to shock people. It was more than just music. Music was a big part of it, but it was a whole lifestyle.”
That lifestyle often carried over into the band’s live performances, where Brunelle and Azgathoth would regularly engage in the act of self-mutilation, slicing their arms open with razor blades on stage.
“Back then the big thing in metal was all about poofy hair and makeup, and we wanted to show that we were real,” Brunelle explains. “We cut ourselves to show people that we’re not fake and that we live the lifestyle and that we’re really into what we do. So doing that was to kinda prove the fact that we live what we do.
“Trey went further than I did,” he continues. “He used to eat live worms and spit them out onstage. I did the cutting and all the stuff, but that dude was overboard. He was just into it so hard. He’d literally go out and dig them out of the ground and save them and get them all ready for a show. It didn’t last too long, though. I don’t think it tasted too good.”
Unsurprisingly, Morbid Angel gained attention. And over the next several months, the group and their monstrous home became familiar fixtures to local metal hopefuls such as South Carolina teenager Karl Sanders.
“I stayed there for about a month once, because I was doing a classical gig with one of David’s friends and it was in Charlotte, so I needed a place to stay,” says Sanders, who also played guitar in a thrash metal outfit at the time. “I stayed in the spare bedroom. It was in between Trey’s room and Richard’s room, and it was in the middle of a stereo war. Each one of these guys had like 500-watt stereos that had speakers four feet tall, capable of massive levels of destruction. And each one of them would crank up and start blasting away with their little pet things that they liked. The drummer was really funny. He couldn’t afford to buy death metal records so he took his Iron Maiden records and spun them at 45, and swore that it was every bit as meaningful as that death metal stuff that everyone was listening to.”
Other amenities included a huge pit bull, which Sanders alleges band members “fed live cats,” and an old Buick stripped of paint and covered in death metal graffiti. In order to offset such costs, all four members of Morbid Angel took jobs at a car wash called the Auto Bell. “Back then if you lived in Charlotte,” says Sanders, “you could get your car washed by Morbid Angel.”
“We would just walk to work up the street, work our hours and come back and just like literally play all night, like six, seven hours a night practicing,” says Vincent. “And we just came up with a lot of really fucked-up shit. At that point, this is like when tape-trading was not passé, but we didn’t really focus in on it that much. We just focused mainly on staying at home, playing, writing a lot, working out new things, just melding, just making this beast.”
Still, the group was discovering some new music—particularly the high-velocity sounds of bands like Napalm Death, who were currently enrapturing underground ears throughout Europe.
“I remember I was at the Morbid house,” recalls Sanders, “and Trey came running out of his bedroom, holding up one of the very first Napalm records—it might have been Scum—running out going, ‘Oh, my God, I cannot believe this. Listen to how fast this is. They call this a blast beat.’
“But ultimately,” Sanders continues, “I saw Morbid Angel in its infancy rehearsing
these things. You would just go to practice and sit there, and it was this incredible unheard-of thing at that point. They were just taking things to this incredible new level. I was quite stunned. Just the guitar work, the drumming, the song structures—it was just amazing stuff, like music on warp 10.”
Indeed, over the next several months, the band developed as virtuosos at their respective instruments—Azagthoth’s contorted rhythms and demented soloing, in particular, bordering on the unfathomable. Some of the resulting compositions, according to Azagthoth, were even drawn from classical music arrangements.
After spending over a year and a half further defining their sound in Charlotte, where the band recorded 1987’s three-track Thy Kingdom Come demo in parts throughout three different studios and their rehearsal space, by 1988, Morbid Angel were ready to return to Florida.
“The cost of living was a big factor,” says Azagthoth. “It’s probably one of the least expensive places to live without it being out in the middle of nowhere. And there are places to play and, for me, it was more or less home.”
That summer the band relocated to the Daytona Beach area, where only after a few weeks, Hartzel mysteriously exited the group.
“I don’t know what his deal was, but he just flaked,” says Vincent. “One day he was up and was like, ‘I’m gonna go do something,’ and, like, in the middle of the night he packed up all of his stuff and bailed.”
The band was determined not to allow Hartzel’s departure to slow them down. In many ways, in fact, the drummer’s exodus accelerated Morbid Angel’s pace. The group’s first choice for a replacement, however—Terrorizer drummer Pete Sandoval—was located on the opposite coast of the United States, in Los Angeles, California.
“Trey had gotten this Terrorizer demo through tape-trading,” Vincent remembers. “And we were talking about it, and he was like, ‘Man, I really want this guy in the band.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t we find out about it?’”
Vincent immediately approached Sandoval’s Terrorizer bandmate Jesse Pintado, with whom he recently corresponded via tape-trading.
“I called up Jesse and said, ‘Are you guys doing anything? What’s up with your drummer?’” Vincent explains. “And he said, ‘It’s really relaxed. We practice every now and then, play a show at some high school.’ It wasn’t an on-the-front-burner kinda thing. So I said, ‘Why don’t you give me Pete’s number? Maybe he knows some drummers that play kinda like he does.’ So he gave me his number, and I said, ‘Maybe I could just take Pete.’ And Jesse goes, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ So we’re like, ‘Well, fuck it.’
“So I call, and I finally get Pete on the phone,” Vincent continues, “and as I start talking to him, Trey grabs the phone out of my hands and just started blowing up on the phone, ‘Hey dude, look, you’re gonna come down here! You’re gonna join our band!’ And the guy was probably just sitting down eating some dinner and watching some TV or something and there’s Trey going off on the phone.”
“I guess I was just really excited,” offers Azagthoth. “I felt that we had a lot of stuff going on and I believed that the band was really gonna do something, and I guess I just expressed a lot of excitement to him. I just said, ‘We’ve got this position and we love your drumming, it’s phenomenal, and I think we’ll make a great team. If you wanna come and take a chance with it, then let’s do it.’ Of course, we sent him a couple tapes of material that we had, like the Thy Kingdom Come demo and some rehearsal tapes, just so he could hear what it was about. But he really didn’t know much about our band at the time.”
On the strength of essentially only a few telephone calls, Sandoval sold his van, packed his belongings, bought a bus ticket and relocated some 2,500 miles to Daytona Beach, Florida.
“He came in and got right to work,” says Vincent. “The guy is literally the hardest-working person I have ever been in a band with. When he came to us he could not play double bass. Trey and I are good coaches, we showed him the math of what he needed to do, and he went down into our practice place and taught himself how to do it, just went on and on. We’d go to work, we’d come home from work, we wouldn’t hear any noise, all the lights would be off, and we’d go down to the space—it was like a basement underneath the house—and there would be Pete passed out on the floor in a puddle of his own sweat. We’d say, ‘Dude, are you all right?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, gotta get back to work. Gotta get back to work.’ And he’d just sit up there going dit-da-dit-da-dit-da-dit-da for hours and hours at a time. And within two months he was going sick.”
By then, in the autumn of 1988, the band was ready to embark on their first US tour. The only problem was they didn’t have a record, let alone a label to support them. Quickly Vincent and Azgathoth began phoning their East Coast friends in other death metal and thrash bands, hoping they could organize enough shows in their areas where Morbid Angel could perform a sustained tour.
“Basically, they called us up from Florida,” explains Ross Dolan, frontman of fledgling New York City-based death metallers Immolation. “This is when Pete was just in the band—and I remember talking to them on the phone and I was like, ‘What’s that in the background? It sounds like you’re jamming.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, that’s just Pete working on his double kicks.’
“They were like, ‘Listen, we wanna come up and do some shows. Can you guys maybe book a show for us?’ So we booked them three shows, a show right here in New York at a really good place called Streets, which was Morbid Angel’s first New York appearance ever. And then we booked a show out in Sundance, which was in Long Island, and we booked a show for them at a place called Escapades in New Jersey. And this was all in October of ‘88.”
“They were small shows, sometimes just 50 people,” says Vincent. “But we managed to get out there and make our way around. We had an old school bus that we had converted into our tour bus. We just did everything ourselves—we were hands-on guys. We had a tool kit, and when something broke we got out on the side of the road and fixed the shit. We were just so driven that there wasn’t anything that was gonna get in the way. We ate, drank and slept Morbid Angel, and whatever it took to do what we needed to do, we found a way to do it. We made it happen. We forced it to happen. And that really showed its way into the music. The music was really brutal—everything that we did, the approach to everything that we did in life was with that same brutality.”
Upon returning from the mini tour, the band relocated yet again, this time to its original birthplace of Tampa, where a pair of vile new bands was helping to further define Florida death metal.
While Morbid Angel and Death may have cut their collective teeth in high school, brothers John and Donald Tardy actually assembled the skeleton of their first metal band in elementary school a year later after their family moved from Miami to the Tampa suburb of Brandon in 1980.
“At the time we did not have any instruments of our own,” recalls the elder Tardy, John. “We started going over a friend’s house who had a drum set that we all started to play.”
Over the next few years, the Tardys found inspiration in the area’s small but supportive underground metal community.
“Living in Brandon, Savatage and Nasty Savage were really getting popular at that time, and we started hanging out with those people, and I thought they were the greatest,” recalls Tardy. “So, even though I don’t really think our music was influenced by them, those were some of the early bands that we just kinda looked at as motivation and support to start something out on our own.”
For the troubled young Glen Benton, however, encouragement of most kind was in short supply. “I grew up with the understanding that I was evil and that everyone else was good,” says Benton, “so I went with it.”
Growing up in the predominately Catholic town of Niagara Falls, New York before his family relocated to Clearwater, Florida when he was 6 years old, Benton was the son of a Quality Control Inspector for ITT Industries and a Lutheran Sunday schoolteacher.
“My mother kicked me o
ut of her Sunday school class,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was just there to scarf on the fucking cookies and Kool-aid. The rest of the time I was there, I was picking on other kids.”
Instead, Benton sought direction from an aunt on his father’s side of the family, who was a practicing witch. “She was a very powerful, very brave person who used her mind to manipulate situations,” says Benton. “I learned a lot from her. It helped me consider myself a Satanist as a little kid. I was coined that early on by my relatives. My old man still thinks I need to be exorcised. He used to tell me that I was possessed by the devil when I was a kid. But, hey, he also told me to be a plumber.”
His father’s job eventually led Benton back to Niagara Falls before the family was forced to relocate yet again to Georgia for nearly two years.
“That’s where I finished school—well, I didn’t actually finish,” says Benton. “I was more or less brought home in handcuffs, so my school days ended there. And I came back out here to Florida and just pursued my music.”
The Tardy boys already had a head start on Benton. Dubbing their family duo Executioner in 1984, the brothers began practicing in their parents’ garage, with Donald behind the drums and John filling in with whatever instruments he could find. That, of course, was before they discovered their first bandmate in Donald’s classmate and metal comrade, Trevor Peres.
“It was in the fall of 10th grade that Donald and I were in the hallway, and we were like, ‘Dude, we should start jamming,’” recalls the Jacksonville-born Peres. “He had a drum set and I had a guitar, and we barely knew how to play either one of them. John got recruited to sing by virtue of the fact that we needed a singer so we were like, ‘Why don’t you just fill in for now?’”
“Trevor would start to come over, and we just started jamming every day after school,” says John. “We got right into the garage, and we pretty much started writing our own stuff right from the get-go. We really did not play a lot of cover stuff at all, even though we were listening to a lot of Venom at the time.”
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