“In ‘84, we did a demo tape, which was totally fucking cheesy, but it was cool,” says Peres of the recording, which featured songs such as “Metal Up Your Ass” and “Psychopathic Mind.” “We were the rock stars of our high school for a little bit.”
Clearly, Executioner’s influences were rooted in contemporary thrash metal, such as earlier Slayer and Metallica, but the youngsters continually sought out more aggressive sounds.
“When I got Celtic Frost’s Morbid Tales album, we literally threw handfuls of songs away and started all over from scratch,” says Peres. “So I wrote what was our heaviest song at the time called ‘I’m in Pain,’ and that was the first time that John actually sung heavy for us. Before that, we had all of this thrash stuff and it was kinda thrashy singing, but then with ‘I’m in Pain’ I kept begging him to do something heavier. I had him listen to Morbid Tales, and finally one day he went ‘Rrroooaaaar!’”
“Venom was probably about the earliest band that I can remember sitting there singing along with their songs with more of a growl,” says Tardy, whose own gravel-gargling howl stripped paint off any wall within earshot. “Keep in mind that I grew up with my older brother Greg, and he was all into Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of southern rock, which is what I grew up listening to, so when we started jamming I was like, ‘Well, I don’t wanna sing all that heavy,’ but ultimately it did not take that long before it started coming out that way. It kinda turned us into a real band.”
Conversely, Benton was still unable to locate suitable musicians in Clearwater to assemble a proper band of his own.
“I put an ad in one of the local music magazines, and I was just at my wits’ end,” he recalls. “I was looking for people to hook up with after I dealt with every fucking poseur in the state. It just got to the point where it was like there’s just nobody here that’s into the same shit that I’m into, so I was like, ‘I’ll put one more ad in, and after that I’ll go to California and put something together out there.’ So I put the ad in the paper and I got a call one afternoon—it was July 21st, 1987, I can’t forget that date—and it was Brian Hoffman, and he said, ‘Me and my brother play guitar and we’ve got a drummer.’ So I said, ‘I’ll come over and check it out.’ I went over there and I really liked what I heard. But they were rehearsing in this house which was completely fucking riddled with cat shit everywhere, and I couldn’t stand the smell in there, so I was like, ‘Listen, I got a nice clean garage over at my house, get your stuff together and bring it over.’ So the next day we brought all of that shit over and started writing songs, and within the first week or two we had like four or five songs.”
Within days, Benton christened his new group Amon, after an ancient Egyptian god, and recorded the crude Feasting the Beast demo in his garage less than a month later. Though certainly musically and creatively feral, Amon wasn’t deterred from playing the occasional gig in the Tampa area.
“We’d do shows and there would be like 25 people there, but the 25 people would leave covered in blood from just totally bashing away,” says Benton. “I used to take mannequins and fill them up with pig guts and blood, and then during the show we used to have a few of our roadies disassemble them. And then it just turned into one big fucking food fight.”
Sans the mess, Executioner was developing equally as fast. With their sound further cultivated by John Tardy’s malevolent vocal delivery, the band filled out its first proper lineup in 1986, recruiting former Massacre guitarist Allen West and bassist Daniel Tucker. After Peres left the band for a brief six-month hiatus that year (“My parents were being dicks, stifling me,” he says. “They wouldn’t let me play music for a summer, and then I rebelled and said, ‘I’m outta here.’”), the group recorded a demo in early ‘87, just prior to the guitarist’s return.
The recording quickly traveled through the tape-trading channels, landing in the grasp of Violent Noise zine editor and underground enthusiast Borivoj Krgin.
“I just immediately fell in love with John Tardy’s voice,” Krgin recalls. “When I first heard it, I thought it was the most brutal death metal voice I had ever heard in my entire life, and I just wanted people to hear it.”
He wasn’t kidding. Along with tape-trading Californian correspondent Marty Eger, the pair conceived a compilation LP featuring their favorite demo recordings of unsigned metal bands from the tape-trading underground.
“We didn’t really have any serious plans or long-term goals,” Krgin admits. “It was just an idea, and we would press up a bunch of copies and talk to some of these bands that we were in contact with directly and get their permission to do it without even really having any kind of written agreement; just get their okay and try and sell it with the understanding that they wouldn’t get paid. And of course, we didn’t have permission to do anything else with these recordings, and as soon as they got signed, if they wanted to re-record some of these songs or even use the exact same recordings, they had the option to do that. It was just something that we wanted to do to get the name of these bands out, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.”
Showcasing the track “Find the Arise” in the pole position from the new rechristened Xecutioner (the augmentation a direct result of a Boston hardcore band called Executioner who had recently released a record through the New Renaissance label), as well as songs from fellow Floridians R.A.V.A.G.E. (Raging Atheists Vowing A Gory End) and thrashers Sadus, the resulting Raging Death compilation was released in the summer of 1987. The LP was under Krgin’s own Godly Records and was sold almost exclusively via mail order.
“There were only 2,000 or so of them pressed,” says Krgin. “I think over time the legend grew much larger than the album itself.”
Krgin, however, saw bigger things for Xecutioner.
“After that, we were ready to record, and Borivoj said he would try to shop us around,” recalls Peres. “He literally told us that if he couldn’t find a record label to sign us he’d put the record out himself under Godly Records.”
“The band asked me if we would put it out if they gave us a finished album,” says Krgin. “They wanted to know if we would press it up and basically release it for them. I even gave them some money towards the recording session—very little, though, it was like a few hundred dollars—because they didn’t have the money to pay the balance of the recording costs.”
Taking place at the end of 1987 at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, those eight-track recording sessions became the first metal production credits for a young studio engineer named Scott Burns.
“They were just kids, so I thought they were pretty cool,” says Burns of Xecutioner. “And at the time, I thought these guys were pretty heavy—it was pretty extreme. I didn’t know if I was totally into it, but I thought it was a bit different. So they asked me to do live sound for them, and I went out to the local shows and was helping them out. So then a few months later, Rick—the engineer that was doing their recording at Morrisound—he got sick and had to take some time off, so I just kinda finished it up midway.”
“Once I got a copy of the tape,” recalls Krgin, “I thought that it would be to everyone’s benefit if I perhaps tried to shop the tape around and see if I could get them a proper record deal, rather than insist on us putting it out.”
Before the cassette had even cooled, Krgin played the recording for his good friend Monte Conner, the director of A&R at Roadrunner Records.
“I knew him well enough that I could just go to him directly and play him the tape and explain to him where everything stood,” Krgin states. “In the event that Roadrunner decided to pick up the band we would, at the very least, be able to be reimbursed for costs and make a little money on top of that.”
“Roadrunner picked us up and paid back Borivoj the money he invested,” says Peres. “They gave us more money to record four more songs, which is weird, because we went back in as a whole separate studio session. If you listen closely, you can hear songs that the production is a little different. But we didn’t care, we were ha
ppy we were gonna have a record, even though, before long, so would just about everyone else in the state of Florida.”
4
Acroos the Open Sea
WHILE THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED KINGDOM clearly had running starts in the death metal and grindcore sweepstakes, the rest of Europe, particularly Sweden, wasn’t far behind. Of course, Sweden’s socialist government didn’t trigger the same repressive rebellion that US and UK youth experienced, but young fans of hardcore and punk still gathered in the country’s capital city of Stockholm—where Nicke Andersson was raised on that same steady musical diet.
“When I was 7 years old I saw a picture of Kiss, and that was it for me,” recalls Andersson. “I thought that they were the best band in the world; you know how it is when you’re a kid. But then we got into punk rock, and the link for me was quite easy. We didn’t know any other people that liked punk rock music, so we went into the stores and looked at the band pictures on records. So we ended up buying the records of the guys with the freakiest hair, like GBH and Discharge, and got really into the fast stuff. I didn’t grow up listening to Slayer. I spent years before hearing that.”
Inspired by such aggressive sounds, the youngster proceeded to make a racket in his home, taking up both drums and guitar. Andersson’s parents’ only reprieve came during the summer, when they dispatched him to Smedsbo summer camp.
“I thought summer camp was always more fun than school,” says Andersson, who started attending the camp at the age of 8. “There were more people there listening to what I had to say.”
Two of them were fellow campgoers Alex Hellid and Leif “Leffe” Cuzner, whom Andersson met in the summer of 1985 when he was only 13 years old. Over the three-week stay the trio developed a friendship that was initially based on a common appreciation for aggressive music.
“It was probably because of those guys and summer camp that I got into metal,” says Andersson. “That’s where we formed our first band, Sons of Satan, because they had equipment at the summer camp.”
Although Sons of Satan never emerged from a campsite tent, Hellid, Cuzner and Andersson remained good friends over the next two years, eventually forming a new hardcore band called Brainwarp in early 1987.
“We were into Jerry’s Kids, DRI, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Brains, and that kind of stuff,” Andersson recalls. “It was a crossover period.”
This was certainly accurate for Andersson, who had also been playing in a thrash metal-inclined act since the 8th grade with local friends Lars-Goran “L-G” Petrov and Uffe Cederlund under a moniker, which, according to the drummer, “changed names every Thursday.”
“For me,” he says, “it didn’t matter if it was metal or punk, it just had to be super fucking fast. I remember going into the [Stockholm] record store Heavy Sounds, that carried all the speed metal, death metal, and punk records, and you would listen to a record on the headphones, and after two seconds if it wasn’t fast enough you took it off and had to hear another record.”
In direct response to his need for speed, the drummer elected to combine the lineups of Brainwarp and his unnamed metal project into a wickedly fast new death metal band called Nihilist in mid-1987. “Well, we put in those blast beats,” says Andersson. “The only other bands doing that would be hardcore bands at the time. But the influences definitely came from Napalm Death and Repulsion.”
Guitarist Cederlund and vocalist Petrov, however, were only considered “session musicians” by the time Nihilist recorded their first demo, the three-track Premature Autopsy, just a few months later in March of 1988.
“We were looking for a vocalist, and L-G, I don’t think he was an actual member,” says Andersson. “But it just turned out that we were onto something good.”
Well, kind of. Shortly before the recording, the band recruited vocalist Matthias Boström, crediting him as Nihilist’s new frontman in the Premature Autopsy liner notes, even through he was unable to perform on the recording. Just a few months later, however, Boström departed, and Petrov was installed as Nihilist’s full-time vocalist. But when Cuzner expressed his wish to move to guitar, the group was again in need of a bassist. Fortunately, the band’s members knew everyone within the city limits who might be interested in filling the position.
The first candidate was lifelong Stockholm resident Johnny Hedlund. 18 years old at the time, he may have been a little more mature than the rest of the group, but he wasn’t exactly exuding responsibility.
“He was four years older than us, so he was the one who went to the government liquor store,” says Andersson. “He was really cool about it. He was like an older brother, sorta. He took care of us and made sure that we didn’t drink too much.”
Socializing with a group of underground metalheads affectionately dubbed Bajsligan (Swedish for “the shit league”), the collective actually partied underground nightly in the city’s subway tunnels after service ended for the day.
“Some of the stations in Sweden, they don’t have any guards, so we figured, ‘Let’s take the biggest station where we knew the guards would be farthest away from the actual platform where people step on and off on the trains,’” Hedlund recalls. “So we would meet at 8:00 at night. After the first 15 or 20 people that showed up, that would be okay. But then when we started to be 50 or 60 or 70 people with tape recorders and beer bottles, that was just a terrible noise. And people had no idea what that was all about—all those people headbanging, it must have looked crazy. They would play very terrifying music to normal people. We played the first Morbid Angel demo or bands like R.A.V.A.G.E. at full volume, and it kinda disturbed a lot of people. We really had to find places where we didn’t disturb people and where they would not call the police on us.
“Back then, all the people that were into death metal hung out at those parties.” Hedlund continues. “In Stockholm, you could say that it was about 60 or 70 people in total that were really into this type of music—then maybe another 100 or 150 in the rest of the country. So it was really, really small back then in the mid‘ 80s. There were also really few extremely talented musicians. I mean, everybody was playing more for the heck of it and for the fact that we were definitely not poseurs. We wanted to start our own little world, which was pretty much what we did. And very few people that did not like extreme music would socialize with us. And then it grew. More and more people got into this music because they saw that we had a really good time. It was more or less like a family of people. As I remember it, I was probably just at a party where I was asked to join Nihilist because they knew I played the bass and they had a spot for me. But it was a natural thing to do as well. If I didn’t join Nihilist in ‘88, it is very likely that I would have joined somebody else or formed my own band probably the same year.”
With the addition of Hedlund on bass, Nihilist began writing new material and rehearsing with increased regularity.
“I was so fucking into the music,” says Andersson of the period. “I hadn’t even got laid by that time. That was really the wrong kind of music for that. There was no girl in that scene for at least five years.”
In early December, the band recorded another three-song demo, Only Shreds Remain. It was also their first session at Sunlight Studio with engineer Tomas Skogsberg.
“I worked with some speed metal and stuff like that, but I think the death metal started for real in ‘87 and ‘88,” recalls Skogsberg who founded the studio as a means to record his own punk rock bands in the mid-‘80s. “The first band I did was Morbid, who were another Swedish band, but then it was Nihilist.”
Often recognized for helping cultivate Nihilist’s unique buzzing guitar sound, Skogsberg is actually quick to defer the credit to a small piece of electronic equipment.
“Some of the guys call me the king of midrange,” the producer laughs. “I love midrange, that’s my frequency. We used the distortion pedal DS1, the orange one. I think I used it for everything in the beginning; for the vocal, for the hi-hat—everything.”
; “It was our guitarist, Leffe, who actually came up with that sound from the Boss Heavy Metal pedal,” offers Andersson. “You have the midrange on full. I think you have everything on full. He bought the pedal and just cranked it. He’s the one to blame.”
Shortly after the recording, however, Cuzner’s family moved back to his native Canada in early 1989, forcing the band to fill yet another personnel gap. The logical choice was former session guitarist Uffe Cederlund, who at the time was playing guitar for Swedish extreme metalists Morbid. Within months, the reconfigured Nihilist recorded their third demo, the two-song Drowned, and concentrated more on playing shows almost exclusively at Stockholm youth clubs.
“Nobody wanted to touch us, really,” says Hedlund of the band’s gigging reputation. “We were still the black dogs of hell. The media here in Sweden, they would spit at us. There would be no way in hell that they would accept our form of music or lyrics. We did this one show in ‘89, and it was at this place where they said, ‘You guys are not gonna pull more than 100 people, so you can’t demand money for this show or even food.’ So we said, ‘Look, there will be more than 100 people. We have friends that are 150 people.’ And the amount of people that paid to see the show was about 350. There was another 200 that were outside that were about to tear the place apart since they could not get in. So at that time we realized, ‘This is so big now that we could actually be able to do a record.’”
Hedlund, however, would never get that opportunity as a member of Nihilist. In fact, it was terminal creative differences between the bassist and Andersson that eventually led to the band’s sudden breakup in late 1989.
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