Perhaps more astutely, Pearson capitalized on the renewed interest in death metal and grindcore bands that never existed beyond the demo stage. First the LA grindcore outfit Terrorizer—originally featuring current Morbid Angel drummer Pete Sandoval and current Napalm Death guitarist Jessie Pintado—reunited with original vocalist Oscar Garcia to record a proper full-length LP in the summer of 1989. Morbid Angel frontman David Vincent supplied the bass.
“Terrorizer was actually signed to Earache before Morbid Angel was signed to Earache,” says Vincent. “When Morbid Angel got Pete in the band, Terrorizer never had the opportunity to make a record. When I was over in England delivering the masters for the Altars of Madness record, I spoke to Dig about Terrorizer and said, ‘Hey, if you are still interested, put a budget together and I’ll find a fucking way to make it happen.’”
“Well, Earache was interested,” says Pintado. “But there wasn’t a big budget or anything, so Oscar and I just hopped on a bus and went out there to Florida and all the Morbid Angel guys all lived together. So we stopped there for a few weeks over the summer and did the record. And Vincent ended up playing bass, because we didn’t have bass equipment. We went in the studio and recorded it and mixed it in three days.”
Massacre, the Florida demo band, which featured vocalist Kam Lee and three current members of the now increasingly popular Death—Bill Andrews, Terry Butler and Rick Rozz—were earning attention courtesy of Benediction and Napalm Death vocalist Barney Greenway, who was liberally crediting his vocal influence to Kam Lee’s style. It was through a conversation with David Vincent that Lee actually discovered the veneration the contemporary death metal scene had for his former band.
“Dave comes up to me and he’s like, ‘Man, you have no idea what it’s like overseas. So many people love Massacre over in England,’” Lee remembers. “So it was pretty much David sitting down and talking to me and saying, ‘Look man, you’ve gotta get Massacre back together.’ And I was like, ‘How am I gonna do it? They’re all in Death.’”
Actually, Death guitarist Rick Rozz had recently departed the band for Florida metallic experimentalists the Genitorturers in 1990. When he learned of this, Lee proposed the idea of resurrecting Massacre to Rozz one night after a Genetorturers show. Rozz immediately refused. That wasn’t enough, however, to deter Earache’s Pearson from pursuing the matter.
“Digby calls me, and he started asking about the chances of Massacre ever reforming, and I said, ‘Right now it doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen,’” says Lee. “‘Bill and Terry are still in Death and they’re over in Europe,’ and I said, ‘I don’t see how it’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Well, give me Rick’s number.’”
“I think money motivated him a little bit,” Pearson says of his initial conversation with Rozz. “I do remember having to make them join up together again by giving them the pep talk, telling them that all of Napalm Death were singing the praises of Massacre, and all the tapes were going around the UK and Europe and the US, but they never made their classic album, which they need to do. I was like, ‘Get it together. I’ll give you money and buy equipment to help things.’ I remember having to buy Rick a whole Marshall cabinet. I was on the phone with a credit card, buying it from some Florida music store, and then sending Rick to go there and pick it up, along with guitars and strings. But I didn’t mind, because we needed the record by Massacre.”
Andrews and Butler eventually rejoined Massacre as well after a difficult European tour with Death, but that wasn’t enough to keep the group together for very long. Tensions between the band members eventually escalated during a European tour of their own, and by 1992 Massacre folded once again.
“They made their From Beyond record and did a bit of touring, but then they imploded again pretty quickly,” says Pearson. “I still don’t know, to this day, what their actual problem with each other is.”
There was one final seminal grindcore act that Pearson was intent on unearthing—Flint, Michigan’s Repulsion. Surprisingly, there was already interest in signing the group from Carcass’ Jeff Walker and Bill Steer. The pair hoped to sign off welfare by starting a record label and exploiting England’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the same fashion in which Pearson launched Earache only a few years earlier.
“Initially, I got a tape of the Electro Hippies’ first recording and took the idea to Revolver, the label that distributed Earache in England,” recalls Walker. “Revolver would basically pay for the pressing of the records and sleeves, they’d distribute it as well, and all you’d have to do is provide the recordings. You’d have to be an idiot, really, not to make money back. As long as you thought you could sell 1,000 albums, you’d be laughing. So we discussed doing Repulsion with Revolver, and Dig found out and he started shitting himself, because he thought we were trying to do what Heresy did, which is walk away from the label and start our own thing, and that really wasn’t in our mind at all. We just wanted to get some financial breathing space while we were still in Carcass.”
As it turns out, Pearson had already sent Repulsion into the studio to remix their 18-track 1986 Slaughter of the Innocent demo.
“Repulsion kinda became a pawn, and Dig was like, ‘Well, I wanna do this Repulsion too, but I don’t wanna do it on Earache,’” Walker remembers. “So he said, ‘Why don’t you just put it out through Earache on a sub-label?’ And we really weren’t too bothered either way, so that’s what happened.”
The Repulsion demo was rechristened Horrified and released through Walker and Steer’s freshly minted Necrosis label in late 1989. The debut LP from the now-defunct Carnage quickly followed as well.
“They were a little after the fact,” says Walker, “but still obviously worth releasing.”
While Earache had already earned a reputation as the world’s first exclusively death metal and grindcore label, already established American metal labels began turning their attention toward the genres by late 1989. In their first eight years in business California-based indie Metal Blade never signed anything more extreme than Slayer, although the label did license early European thrash bands like Sodom, Kreator, Destruction and Celtic Frost to the US market.
“Almost all of our stuff at that point was the Flotsam and Jetsam and the Sacred Reich element of things, which was straight-on thrash,” explains Metal Blade president Mike Faley. “But we were aware of what Earache was doing over there. They had that article in Sounds on the label, and NME was talking about Napalm Death and all of these grindcore type of bands, and that was pretty interesting to me to see what they were doing.”
A native of Buffalo, Faley was also aware of what was happening in his own backyard. In December of 1988, a new death metal band called Cannibal Corpse rose from the remains of Buffalo’s two largest metalcore groups, Beyond Death and Tirant Sin. When he wasn’t growling his guts out with Cannibal Corpse, vocalist Chris Barnes worked in the warehouse of local record chain Cabbages. Fortuitously for the group, the head buyer at the chain, John Grandoni, was actually old friends with Faley and sent him a copy of Cannibal’s five-song self-titled demo.
“When Cannibal came in,” remembers Faley, “I was like, ‘Okay, let’s take a shot at it. Here’s something that’s pretty cool and something much different.’”
The band’s lyrics, exclusively penned by frontman Chris Barnes, weren’t exactly your typical horror movie-inspired paeans either. In addition to the now almost requisite gore and murder themes—rape, incest, sexual torture and a general violence against women—were recurring subject matter in early songs such as “Butchered at Birth,” which featured the lines, “Mother ripped apart/ Smashing her face/ My knife cutting holes/ Fucking her remains.”
“I was kinda shocked the lyrics weren’t picked up on more,” says Barnes. “It’s some pretty fucked-up shit that I wrote, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten more attention—you know, negative attention, which is good to me. I kinda thrived on it. But that was all set up by the record company, because the pr
ess eventually picked up on it a little and wanted to talk to me, because they wanted to know what kind of sick fucking idiot wrote that shit.”
In February of 1990, the freshly signed Cannibal Corpse made the nearly 1,300-mile journey by van from Buffalo to Morrisound Studios in Tampa to record their debut album with producer Scott Burns. “It was rough,” recalls Cannibal bassist Alex Webster. “I got really sunburned on the way back up north. I was driving through the snow and we didn’t have heat in the van. I was getting the chills.”
“Scott was really the person that we looked at when it came time for Cannibal to go in there,” says Faley. “They were looking at Obituary, they were looking at Death, they were looking at Morbid Angel, and they were seeing the quality of the sound that was coming out of those records, and that’s what they wanted to have on their records. So it was important for them to enter that same realm.”
Roadrunner Records was busy raising its own death metal profile, thanks largely to Monte Conner, who continued to recruit new talent in the rapidly developing genre. But sometimes, as in the case of Amon, the Florida-based death metal band fronted by the flamboyant Glen Benton, the artists came to him.
“I was sitting at my desk one day, and Glen Benton storms in, walks across the room, throws a tape on my desk and says, ‘Sign us, you fucking asshole!’ And storms out,” recalls Conner. “I was on the phone, and I literally didn’t even get off it. I see the tape on my desk and it was a six-song demo, and of course it was done at Morrisound with Scott Burns, and I’m just thinking, ‘What is this crap?’ I put it in and I was blown away.”
“I was in New York City at the time, and I figured, ‘Fuck it, I’ll walk in there and introduce myself and give him a copy of the demo,’” Benton explains. “I figured if I went in there and scared him good enough he would at least listen to it. And by the next day I got a call and they said, ‘Hey, we’ve got contracts coming to you.’”
After a name change to Deicide (meaning “the killing of God” or “one who kills God”) in late 1989, Benton and his band of not-so-merry men were signed and began preparations to record their debut album. Released in 1990, Deicide was an instant success, thanks in part to Benton’s overtly Satanic image. Burning a three-inch inverted cross into his forehead and spewing lyrics such as, “Kill the chosen righteous son/ Claim the cross inverted one,” and “,Suicide Sacrifice/ Destruction of holy life/ Blood of unholy knife/ Satan!” Benton attracted a storm of controversy.
“The UK press was just going crazy over Deicide,” recalls Conner. “The whole cross in the head thing—they ate that up.”
There was one particular interview with British mainstream weekly NME, however, which brought the frontman some undesired publicity. During the interview conducted on his property, Benton shot and killed a squirrel—an incident the author included in the final version of the story.
“The next thing you know, I was getting death threats from animal rights activists,” says Benton of the sharpshooting fallout. “I killed the fucking squirrel because it was in my attic chewing the fucking electrical wire on my fucking air conditioning unit, and I was trying to get the last one out of the house so I could block the hole up so they couldn’t get in anymore. But there was this one squirrel that every time I’d see his ass he’d jump back in the fucking hole. So I’m sitting there doing the interview, and the motherfucker comes trotting out on the clothesline, sitting there watching us. So I was like, ‘You stay right there, I’ll be right back.’ And these guys were like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I come back and Bam! Clip the fucking squirrel off the clothesline. They just looked horrified. I mean, it’s just a rat with a bushy tail, man.”
Despite such antics, it was ultimately the aural brutality of the first Deicide album that captured the dark hearts of death metal fans. Recorded at Morrisound Studios with producer Scott Burns, Deicide was the latest in a successful string of death metal albums laid down at the studio. In fact, by 1990, Morrisound was the place to record for such American death metal bands as Death, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and Obituary, who all tracked their latest albums in the studio owned by Jim Morris.
“There weren’t a lot of high-quality recordings for the fast bands,” Scott Burns explains. “Even if you listened to some of the Earache Records, they were extreme, but I don’t think the early ones sounded so good. So I think the one thing is perhaps that there was a little more definition and clarity with what we were doing. And for the American bands, the drums were very important to them, and playing correctly and being able to blast, and no clicking your sticks on tom fills, and not cheating—things like that. You could always tell on one of my records or one of the records that we did—if like the sound or not—it was always a cleaner recording to a point. The bands liked that.”
Already desiring more death metal influences, Morrisound seemed like the logical place for Napalm Death to record their third album.
“It was a decision for probably more me and Shane,” says Napalm drummer Mick Harris. “We were very much into what Scott was producing. It’s got to be [Death’s] Leprosy record—I loved that production. So we were like, ‘Let’s go there.’ We got out of England. A more death metal influence was certainly coming into the songwriting. The pair of us—Shane and I—couldn’t keep writing the 30 to 40-second long songs. There was only so much. It was also my way of getting to play drums. So it was a conscious decision, definitely. We had to move on.”
“We decided we’ll do death metal, still with the hardcore ethos,” says Greenway. “The ethos never died, because it never does—a principle is a principle. Our musical approach just changed because we were just sick of getting fucking hassled by punks. We just had enough. We were getting shit—shit from people that were supposed to be our fucking friends and we thought would support us, and they turned their backs on us.”
“Napalm came down, and they were more into the Kam Lee/Massacre/Death scene and things like that,” recalls producer Scott Burns. “They were definitely into the whole Florida scene. So I think that’s what they wanted to try, because that’s where everybody recorded and that’s the sound they wanted to capture. It was a weird predicament, because they were a grindcore band but yet they picked up metal players.
“Mick’s more of the traditional European grind player, and he definitely has a style, but I guess when you put it under a microscope and really try and get a good recording of it, you see some things that aren’t so good,” Burns continues. “From American players versus European players, perhaps some of these things weren’t as tight as they should have been. And that really didn’t fly with Mick at all. He was the man, and no one tells him what to do. Basically he’d tell me, ‘Who the fuck is this guy? I’m the king of grindcore.’ Which was a valid point. So these were some of the dynamics that were going on. For instance, spending some time doing drum tracks, Mitch and Jesse would be saying, ‘Really, the timing isn’t so good on these things.’ And no one could really do too much, because Mick was the deciding vote on everything, so that was both difficult and strenuous.”
“It was a fucking team,” Mick Harris explains. “That’s how we worked and we played. But for sure, there was a tension there. I had a big problem with the fact that Jess, Mitch and Shane were partying a lot. I’m not a party pooper; we all have our vices. If people wanna abuse themselves, then let them. But I think it was a new thing. We were away from home and at this famous studio. Mitch had friends that were turning up at the studio, and for sure he’s gonna go out with them. But it just continued. And I felt a bit of pressure that the record was just left to me. This built up, and one night Jess and Mitch were out, and the next day they didn’t show up, and I was thinking, ‘I’m fucking here being told that this is noisy and do it again. I’m not doing the drum track again. I think it’s good. This is the way I like it.’ So I remember one day I just lost it under stress and I snapped at Scott and I called him a fucking cunt. Straight away, he walked right out of the studio and goes into Tom Mor
ris’ room and he tells Tom. Basically, they called up Earache, and Scott was ready to pull the session and pull the tapes and send them back to England.
“Tom comes back and has a word with me,” the drummer continues. “He was like, ‘Mick, if you know somebody around Tampa, you should call them and get away from here for a few days.’ So first I spoke to Dig on the phone and he said, ‘Mick, please.’ And I said, ‘Dig, it’s not fucking working. It’s not sounding right. It’s not going to be Napalm.’ He said, ‘Come on, you can make this right. There’s a lot of money [invested] in this [recording],’ and sweet-talked me, and it helped me get out of there for a few days. And I remember phoning David Vincent up, and he said, ‘Look Mick, you’ve gotta get out of there and clear your head.’ So Dave took me in. And then two weeks later, I went back and I felt fresh.”
“Ultimately, I don’t think those guys had a real vision of what kind of sound they wanted,” says Burns. “They just wanted something heavy. And it definitely sounded too clean for them, and I just remember when we were done, listening to an Entombed tape, and Mick was very disappointed because he wanted it to sound more like Entombed. And hell, a lot of people would probably like that sound. They wanted to be extreme but in a death metal way, and that album didn’t make them sound extreme. I definitely think as far as they were concerned, it was a big disappointment.”
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