“We spoke again at the end when the album was finished,” says Harris. “It was all pats and there were no hard feelings. It was everybody’s fault but nobody’s fault.”
Napalm’s death metal-infused foray, however, would be their first formal introduction to US fans. Released in tandem with Morbid Angel’s Altars of Madness, Entombed’s Left Hand Path, Godflesh’s Streetcleaner and Carcass’ Symphonies of Sickness on December 7th, 1990, Earache’s first official Stateside releases were an immediate success.
“Obviously, the records were released in the UK before Combat was releasing them,” reckons Pearson. “So there was some kind of time delay, which meant that we were putting out more records in a shorter space of time in America, which might have added to the intensity of releases. Nine months’ worth of titles would come out in three months in America, because Combat had the finances to press all the records in one go. I mean, we were still struggling and waiting for the money to come in for one record so we could make the next one. We were still pretty much hand-to-mouth then, even though it was bigger numbers. But I think Combat shipped roughly 30,000 to 40,000 [initial copies to record stores] of the major league bands, like Morbid and Entombed and then go up to like 60,000 over time.”
With distribution secured, touring was the next logical step for many artists. Obituary, in particular, had some work to do. Despite not setting foot beyond their home state of Florida to support their debut album, the group was back in Morrisound recording their second record, and was now in need of a guitarist to replace the departed Allen West. James Murphy, who had officially left fellow Floridians Death in late March of 1990, after relationships soured during the group’s North American tour, was unexpectedly drafted to fill the position.
“I had no idea that Obituary was even looking for a guitarist,” says Murphy. “I called Scott Burns just to tell him what had happened with Death, because I had become friends with Scott. Basically, he said, ‘Dude, I’m working with Obituary right now in the studio, Allen left the band and they need a guitar player. Let me talk to them.’ So he called Trevor and the band, and I actually never even spoke with them until I arrived in the studio.
“We all sat down at the table in the lounge at Morrisound, and they just told me, ‘Here’s the way it is: Allen is leaving because his wife is having a baby.’” Murphy continues, “They said that he might return one day and that he was their bro’ from way back, and that if he did, they would consider taking him back. Basically, they were just covering their bases so I wouldn’t be mad if they did take him back.”
With the album nearly complete and his position within the band established, Murphy recorded his guitar leads and Obituary officially wrapped up the recording of Cause of Death in the spring of 1990. That summer the group would embark on their official US tour.
“We opened up for Sacred Reich; that was our first real tour going beyond Ft. Lauderdale or Tampa—the only places we ever played,” says Obituary guitarist Tevor Peres. “We called it Rotting Slow in America, because Cause of Death was getting ready to come out pretty soon, but we hadn’t toured our first album. Then we went to Europe, and the Cause of Death album dropped. So we basically did that one tour in America, and then we went to Europe and started touring for Cause of Death—we literally had four days off in between the tours for basically two albums. It was awesome, because we didn’t know that people knew who the fuck we were and people knew our songs. We didn’t even realize it at that point, I think. I look back at it now, and I go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty fucking crazy that people knew our shit.’ Something was happening.”
Indeed, the death metal groundswell appeared to be spreading into new territories throughout the United States. The movement had been festering in the New York/New Jersey region, in particular, for the past few years. The area’s robust thrash scene, anchored by speedsters like Revenant and Ripping Corpse, provided a fertile breeding ground for heavier and faster outfits influenced by the extreme sounds in the underground tape-trading network. As Revenant were restructuring their lineup in August of 1989, guitarist John McEntee departed the group to start his own brutal death metal band, Incantation.
“There were some New Jersey death metal bands, like Hatred, Savage Death, and Regurgitation, that I knew about before us, but they didn’t really play out a lot,” McEntee explains. “We were a lot different than most of the other bands in the area at the time. When we first started playing shows, people would either be going sick, or just look at us and try to absorb it all.”
By then, McEntee had already forged a bond with New York City neighbors Immolation—the death metal band that helped Morbid Angel put together their first mini-US tour in October of 1988.
“We were ready to do a demo, and right before that, in May of 1988, we had our first show at this [New York] club called Blondies,” recalls Immolation frontman Ross Dolan. “John McEntee called us up and said, ‘Hey guys, wanna do a show with us?’ So our very first show was supporting Revenant, Ripping Corpse, and a band called Deranged. That was the first time that I met John and the guys in Revenant, and, of course, we had another dilemma. We used to rent a rehearsal room, which was 20 minutes from where we lived. Now the night before the show we were gonna get our equipment out and we went and the studio was closed. The guy who owned the studio was playing a gig that night so we couldn’t get our equipment. So we called up John McEntee and we were like, ‘All right, listen, we’re not gonna be able to get our equipment.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, there’s plenty of equipment here.’ So right away there was that brotherhood, and they were like, ‘You can just use our stuff, no problem.’”
After some initial interest in the group via Earache Records in 1989—largely generated by lobbying from the band’s friends in Morbid Angel—had waned, Immolation signed their first record deal a year later with Roadrunner Records. They weren’t alone either.
“When we got signed, we thought it was such a special thing,” says Dolan. “We were like, ‘Wow, we’re finally signed. We finally have this under our belts.’ And it was something really special to us. And then in that same breath, Roadrunner signed like ten other bands. And we got no attention. We got no focus. It was just like, ‘Okay, here you go. The album’s out—go for it.’ So we were disillusioned really quick.”
By 1990, willing labels like Roadrunner had plenty of death metal artists from which to choose—especially in the New York/New Jersey sector where other suffix-friendly acts like Long Island’s Suffocation and the Yonkers-based Mortician joined Immolation and Incantation in cultivating a healthy Northeast death metal scene.
“When I first started getting out and playing in the scene with the band, all of those bands came and played shows with us,” recalls guitarist Terrance Hobbs, who co-founded Suffocation in early 1989. “To this day, the majority of all of those people are still playing and they’re still holding up their end of the bargain.”
The New York/New Jersey bands often acted equally as enthusiastic as their fans. Clad in the familiar uniform of jeans, sneakers and black band t-shirts on stage, death metallers didn’t present themselves that much differently from their admirers in the audience. With no true hierarchy, the new prospect of organizing exclusively death metal shows and day-long festivals was relatively challenging. One of the earliest, the Michigan Death Fest, included Virginia-based death metallers Deceased in the lineup.
“It was us, Morbid Angel, Sacrifice, Nuclear Death—it was bands like that that were coming up and, to me, it was real live death metal is here. After that, all the Earache bands, like Entombed and Carcass, had just started to break out and you just kinda realized that this shit was taking off.”
Mortician’s Will Ramer, who played the Buffalo Day of Death festival in October of 1990—the first of such high-profile death metal events—remembers the excitement of the period.
“We were only together about a year before we played that show,” Ramer explains. “The speed and aggressiveness of thes
e new death metal bands blew me away, and I figured I could do something like that. Also, I was heavily into horror movies at the time, and I wanted to combine horror and death metal and grindcore together. I have about 800 to 900 horror movies, so I thought, ‘I’ll never run out of ideas—there are so many movies I can write about. I can put out 50 albums.’”
“When a lot of the Roadrunner and the Earache death and grindcore releases started getting released in the US, things really started to take off in New Jersey,” says McEntee. “Soon after that, bands like Putrefact, Human Remains and Deteriorot started brutalizing over the Northeast. It was cool, because it exposed a lot of new people to death metal.”
As more death metal bands began rising, so too did new underground record labels willing to release their music. Tiny 7-inch and demo operations like, Thrash Records from France, Gore Records of Germany and Cleveland-based Seraphic Decay, had been pressing a few hundred copies of their releases for several years. Meanwhile, a new generation of labels, spearheaded by Relapse Records in Colorado focused on releasing legitimate compact disc recordings from underground American acts, such as Mortician, Deceased, Incantation and Suffocation—even gaining proper stateside distribution through Important Distribution, which would later merge with Relativity.
“Besides the stuff that Roadrunner was doing, which was already huge, there weren’t many underground labels that were doing a lot of stuff like that,” says Relapse founder Matt Jacobson. “And we, at least from my perception at the time, were working with bands like Incantation and Deceased and Mortician; the bands that had the biggest buzzes in the underground. Those bands in the tape-trading and the fanzine circles were the most well-known bands.”
The new breed of brutality even affected Germany. Though its actual death metal and grindcore output was limited, the country produced a pair of the fastest-rising extreme music labels in the scene. First came the Donzdorf-based Nuclear Blast Records, which was officially founded by Markus Staiger in 1987. Although it began with a concentration of hopelessly obscure punk and hardcore releases, Staiger began moving in a more metallic direction by 1990.
“I always loved the extreme stuff,” Staiger explains. “Righteous Pigs’ Live and Learn was the first grind album on Nuclear Blast. Guitarist Mitch Harris called me and sent some demos and I really loved the stuff. The second death grind album we released was Defecation, which we also got through Mitch Harris, which [at the time] was the biggest success for Nuclear Blast. Soon we signed other successful death metal bands like, Dismember and Pungent Stench.”
Staiger also had a close friend named Robert Kampf, who had been playing guitar for a technical thrash band called Despair since the mid-‘80s, but had yet to find a suitor for his group’s music.
“We talked to Roadrunner and several other labels, but I didn’t like them that much at the time and thought that it was better—coming out of the hardcore scene—to basically go the do-it-yourself way and start a label,” says Kampf. “So I convinced my bandmates to put trust in me and let me just do it, instead of giving it over to someone else where we were just band number 15 or 20 on the label.”
Staiger actually helped fund the release of the first Despair LP, pitching in one-third of the money for what would become Century Media Records’ inaugural release in early 1989. Kampf’s first official signing to the label, however, was Morgoth, whose Floridian death metal bombast belied their German heritage. Within a year, Kampf turned his attention to Sweden, signing the death metal trio of Unleashed, Grave and Tiamat.
British label Peaceville also continued to evolve, assembling an imprint called Deaf Records in early 1990. Although Deaf would only survive for a year, in 1991 the label scooped up At the Gates, who had just recorded a five-track EP, Gardens of Grief, with small Swedish indie Black Sun. In fact, the band actually formed only a few months prior out of the ashes of cult Swedish death metallers Grotesque.
“Grotesque ended up in this big mess, and we went to form At the Gates straightaway,” says former At the Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg. “The death of Grotesque was the birth of At the Gates. We were really happy with how far we’d progressed and were ready for more people to hear us.”
Earache, of course, was still the toast of the scene. In fact, they had the weight to send a band like Carcass to the US, even though, at the time, the group had no material available domestically.
“Combat wanted to have Entombed on the tour,” says Carcass’ Jeff Walker of the 1990 late summer trek his band eventually carried out with Death. “They had planned to release [Entombed’s] album, but since Entombed couldn’t do it we were, as usual, second best.”
After the December release of the label’s product in America, Earache wisely began dispatching more of their artists stateside. Hoping to mirror the success they’d experienced in Europe, the label organized a US Grindcrusher tour in April of 1991, featuring Nocturnus, the American debut of Godflesh, and headliners Napalm Death.
“It varied quite a bit, but generally we had about 200 to 300 people at most shows,” recalls former Nocturnus drummer/vocalist Mike Browning. “There were a few very small shows, like in Virginia and South Carolina, with like 30 or 40 people, but then some very large shows in California that even sold out with like 800 people.”
Combat’s Jim Welch helped supervise the 45-date tour.
“The first show at Sundance out in Bayshore [in Long Island, New York] was all fucked up, actually,” he says. “Godflesh couldn’t get into the country the first date because they had work permit problems, which was a fucking nightmare with all these bands all the time. Finally, we got them in for the second date of the tour, which was Lamour in Brooklyn, and they get up on stage to play and the place was jam-packed, and their fucking Roland RA drum machine blanked out, and they couldn’t play the show. I remember we drove to Boston overnight, it was Sunday morning, and we had to try to find them a new drum machine, which we actually ended up doing, and they sat on their bus and programmed in four songs. So their first real show was at the Channel in Boston on a Sunday afternoon, and it was fucking packed, and it was insane.”
Before the tour’s opening, however, Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris began reconsidering his future with the band.
“I’ll be honest, I had some new ideas for Napalm,” says Harris. “My first sampler was bought in ‘89, and I started to work with loops, and I wanted to introduce some loops into Napalm. Shane said, ‘That’s not gonna happen. If you wanna do that, do a project.’ So I said, ‘I wanna move on with Napalm, Shane. I’m not saying I wanna change things, but I wanna bring in some loops. I wanna play along to some loops. Let’s still keep it brutal, but let’s try and do something and move on a little bit.’ That’s all I can say, and I’m being honest there. I was listening to lots and lots of stuff. Things were influencing me. I don’t wanna say I got bored, I just wanted to experiment.”
“He was totally into his Killing Joke stuff, which we all were,” Embury recalls. “But it was like, we just did Harmony Corruption, and all of a sudden the blasting didn’t have an interest for him anymore, which I found quite difficult of Micky in some ways, because he did tend to leap from one thing to another without trying to let things grow and mature on their own.”
Harris’ troubles swelled in late 1989 during a particularly vexing Italian tour with recent Earache signing Hellbastard.
“I remember Barney started to have a few ups and downs emotionally,” Embury explains. “And Micky really started to give Barney his typical ‘Mick,’ and I just said, ‘Look, man, pack it in or otherwise you’re out of the fucking band.’ Which I can’t believe I actually said now, to be honest.”
“It was a particularly fraught tour,” agrees Greenway. “We played this one place where they were slaughtering horses and stuff, and that really did my head in. Things got a bit fraught, and Micky just got outta control. I mean, none of us dealt with it particularly well, but Micky just started freaking out. Towards the end, Micky was very much a ‘Jekyll
and Hyde’ character. I’ll never say that I didn’t love the guy, but beyond that Mick who was a real good guy, there was a real fucking sinister side to him. He would turn people in the band against each other by saying something to one person, getting a reaction from that person, and going back to another person.”
“I was rocking the boat, because I can be a fucking bastard,” Harris admits. “I know what I’m like, and I’m a bit of a tease. I was rubbing things in. I was playing a lot of music that was grinding them. I was being a bit of a bastard. I won’t deny it. Rubbing it in: ‘I like this. I like this.’ I remember Shane saying, ‘I’ve fucking had enough, Harris. Get it together. If you wanna play that shit, go off and do it. This is fucking Napalm and this is what we’re doing.’”
Napalm survived the tour intact before taking a well-deserved Christmas break. After reconvening in early 1991 to record the Mass Appeal Madness EP with producer Colin Richardson, the band set out on the Grindcrusher tour of North America. By then, however, it was clear that the “human tornado” had blown itself out.
“‘This is a six-week tour,’” Harris thought. “‘This is my last chance. It’s the biggest thing that we’ve done together—go and do it.’ Towards the end, you could see it. You could see that I wasn’t into it. I did what I had to do, and I remember those last few gigs—those last seven/eight gigs, I sort of just went into machine mode and played and just really cut down on the fills. It was, get it done, get off.”
After the tour’s final show in Trenton, New Jersey at the Trenton Gardens, the band returned to England, where a few days later Harris wrote three letters—one to Earache, one to Mark Walmesley, the band’s manager at the time, and one to Shane Embury.
“I sent everything registered so that they would have to sign for it and so they did receive it,” Harris explains. “I couldn’t face them. I wanted to see Shane, but it was a hard thing. Even though I knew Napalm was gonna read it, I put in the letter to Shane to come with me. I just said, ‘We’ve worked so long with this. I know Jess and Mitch are your friends. It’s not firing. It’s not sacking. But let’s get something new together. I still wanna work with you.’ He’d had a day to think about it, and he phoned up and he said, ‘Come on, Micky, you’re just tired.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s it. I can’t do it anymore, Shane. It’s just not there.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but we all want changes. You’ve just gotta work at things, but we can’t just change like that.’ I said, ‘Shane, I just haven’t got the feeling anymore. I’ll be honest with you, I left in November of last year. I just want you to come with me. Jess and Mitch are my friends, but me and Barney have grown so far apart. Me and Barney can’t be in the same room now.’ And he said, ‘Mick, I can’t leave Jess and Mitch, they’re my friends.’ I said, ‘No problem, Shane. Respect to you. Just do what you’ve gotta do. I’m sorry.’ And that was it.”
Choosing Death Page 15