Choosing Death

by Albert Mudrian

  “It was a surprise on one hand, and on the other it wasn’t,” says Embury. “We had just started to widen out. We’d just been to America for our first tour, and it went down really well, so of all the times, why now? He’d tell us that when we wanted to do the next album he wanted to do blasts where there shouldn’t be blasts, really weird, strange things. And it was like, okay, you wanna progress, we can appreciate that, but I think we wanted to go a little harsher after Harmony. So we had differing opinions, which was a bit of a blow, really. For as much as anyone could be a pain in the ass, it was still losing a member.”

  While Harris began the experimental electronic outfit Scorn—ironically with former Napalm Death bandmate Nick Bullen—Napalm Death were not only forced to fill one of the most demanding positions in extreme music, but to also replace the most visible drummer of the genre. Pintado remembered a friend from LA named Danny Herrera. Without a proper audition, Herrera was asked to join the band, and flew over immediately to begin rehearsing for a German festival show, followed by a six-week tour of the United States with Sepultura, Biohazard and Sick of It All.

  “Danny’s first show was in front of 3,000 kids in Germany,” says Embury. “We were setting up for a line check, and he had never line-checked before, so we said, ‘Give us your kick drum.’ And he hit it once. Then on the first track of the first show in Germany his stool broke. I said, ‘Danny, don’t even worry about anything else then, because nothing worse can possibly happen to you.’ But he pulled through.”

  Napalm labelmates Entombed also suffered through a tumultuous 1991, which began when drummer Nicke Andersson dismissed popular vocalist L-G Petrov from the Swedish band.

  “I was pissed off, because I thought he was hitting on my girlfriend,” recalls Andersson. “I’m not even sure if he did or not. If he did that’s probably a reason to be pissed off, but not a reason to kick him out of the band. I was so pissed off, I just said, ‘You’re fucking fired.’ And the other guys were like, ‘Are you serious about this?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I am serious.’ Looking back on it, I’m laughing about it. Like, what did I have to do that for?”

  Andersson drafted former Carnage bassist Johnny Dordevic as Petrov’s replacement, but when it came time to record Entombed’s sophomore LP Clandestine, the situation changed quickly.

  “Johnny was gonna be the singer, but we were rushed to the studio,” Andersson remembers. “He didn’t have the time to learn the songs, because we had to finish the damn album and go out on tour, so since I knew the words, I sang it. And I don’t know why, but we figured no one has to know. Looking back, it’s kinda funny. I don’t know why you’d do such a thing. We probably had a good thought behind it. We did get a lot of questions about it, like, ‘Is this really Johnny singing?’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, sure, yeah.’

  “But then it turned out that he wasn’t such a good singer after all,” he continues. “He didn’t have the heart. He really wasn’t dedicated.”

  Dordevic performed on half of Entombed’s first US tour, with Morbid Angel and Unleashed, in 1991—guitarist Uffe Cederland provided vocals for the second half of the tour—before the band officially asked Dordevic to leave.

  “Afterwards, we were like, ‘Why did we do it like this? Why did I get rid of L-G?’ But then I met L-G again later in the year, and I said, ‘Sorry, let’s just not talk about this anymore. Let’s forget it ever happened.’ And he came back.”

  While Napalm and Entombed regrouped, so too did Earache. In July of 1991, Earache’s stateside distributors Relativity folded their In-Effect Records imprint, along with the Combat Records imprint that had been carrying the Earache titles. That left Jim Welch without a job and Digby Pearson without a proper label in the US. The pair worked out a deal where Welch would run a US division of Earache, and Combat’s parent company, Relativity, would resume distribution of Earache’s titles. For the next two years, Earache’s US offices were run through the kitchen of Welch’s West 4th Street studio apartment in the West Village of New York City.

  “I can’t express how tiny it was,” Welch says. “There was a doorway for the kitchen, but there wasn’t a door that shut. The kitchen had a stove in it and a refrigerator in it and a big desk, and the cabinets of the stove and the desk, and that’s where all the promos were kept instead of dishes.”

  Surely that wouldn’t have mattered to the mounting number of young consumers purchasing death metal albums; 1991 proved to be the best selling year in the genre’s brief history. Media played a more prominent role than in the past, finally giving death metal’s vicious audio clear visuals. US publications such as Metal Maniacs and Rip awarded death metal the generous coverage it received for years prior overseas, while MTV’s heavy metal specialty program Headbanger’s Ball began playing videos from Sepultura, Morbid Angel and Napalm Death with increasing regularity.

  “I always believed that the Ball needed to play death, hardcore, grindcore—whatever you call it—I just call it the really heavy shit,” recalls Riki Rachtman, the former host of the US version of Headbanger’s Ball.” “Rock like Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were played during the day, so why not give time to the heavy shit? I got a couple hundred letters in praise of that music getting played on ‘the Ball’. Unfortunately, there were a lot more Poison and Ratt fans at the time. I was always butting heads [with MTV] because I knew what we should have been playing, but all my whining had fallen on deaf ears. We did, however, have Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death and a few of those types of bands on as guests. Although their fans hated me, I always knew we should have given that scene more airplay.”

  With death metal and grindcore’s heightened profile came a greater possibility of censorship. Much of the controversy started in England, where Earache Records was the first target of the UK’s Obscene Publications Act, a law created to prevent the sale of material designed to “corrupt or deprave.”

  “As we opened up one morning in early 1991, about eight policemen and policewomen barged into Earache’s office, totally out of the blue,” recalls Earache founder Digby Pearson. “They proceeded to ransack the place, including smashing open a locked steel filing cabinet with crowbars. They were looking for all things ‘offensive’ they could lay their hands on—they seized Carcass albums, but also Cadaver’s Hallucinating Anxiety, Filthy Christians’ Mean and—get this—a huge poster we had on the wall of Alice Cooper holding aloft a severed bloody head, theatrical style. They took away many bags full of ‘offensive’ LPs and CDs and posters as evidence.”

  A few days prior to the raid, British customs seized a package containing the artwork for the new album from Painkiller, the experimental noise outfit from avant garde instrumentalist John Zorn. The record, Guts of a Virgin, featured a gruesome photo of a dead woman with her stomach cut open to reveal a fetus inside. The police were immediately alerted.

  “I was fucking in shock,” says Pearson. “Obviously I knew the bands’ album covers were meant to be repulsive, but the fact they could be illegal as well never occurred to me. I had encouraged these bands to make the offensive sleeves in the first place, buying Jeff Walker the Forensic Pathology medical textbook to use its images for Carcass’ Reek [of Putrefaction] cover. Basically I wanted the bands to have record sleeves that pushed back the boundaries, using real-life gore, as opposed to the fake horror movie stuff that other death metal bands had at the time.”

  As the months went by, the chances of a successful prosecution against Pearson and Earache dwindled until, nine months after the raid, the case was formally dropped.

  “And I never did get that Alice Cooper poster back,” says Pearson. Swedish death metallers Dismember also came under fire—not for album art, but for the lyrics to the track “Skin Her Alive” from the band’s Nuclear Blast debut, Like an Ever Flowing Stream.

  “The English customs went through a package from Nuclear Blast Records to the distributor, and found our Like an Ever Flowing Stream album,” recalls Dismember vocalist Matti Kärki of th
e 1991 incident. “They read the lyrics for ‘Skin Her Alive’ and decided that this was ‘Indecent and Obscene’ and declared that the album should be banned from England.”

  The trial, which made headlines in UK music publications such as NME, ended with Dismember’s record deemed neither “pornographic, obscene or indecent.” The band’s UK distributor Plastic Head was awarded court costs of £7,500.

  While death metal’s commercial breakthroughs often centered around sensational storylines like these, independent record labels such as Roadrunner and Earache were obviously great success stories, boasting sales figures comparable to other indies specializing in “mainstream” music.

  “When I was running Earache [in the US] we pretty much knew that when we put out a record in America it would sell 20,000 copies or sell like 6,000 of an EP, no matter what it was, barring a fucking Lawnmower Deth record,” says Jim Welch. “The two years that I ran Earache independently out of my kitchen we sold about 600,000 records each year. And that’s why the major labels started calling by 1991, because they were like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’”

  Despite the label successes, personnel turmoil continued to plague artists on the Earache roster. Shortly after one of the label’s commercially strongest outfits, Morbid Angel, released their second album, Blessed Are the Sick, guitarist Richard Brunelle was dismissed from the band, leaving Trey Azagthoth the group’s lone guitarist.

  “I think a lot of it was that they were just progressing more than I was,” admits Brunelle. “I should have worked harder. I kinda took things for granted a bit. And Trey was a really talented writer, and he kinda engulfed me. By the time I learned one riff and was trying to write something, he’d have ten more riffs ready to go. He was just way ahead of me. So the band got together and made the decision for me that it was best [for me] to move on.”

  The loss didn’t dissuade Morbid Angel manager Günter Ford from testing the band in deeper commercial waters. In September of 1991, Ford began a dialog with several major labels. By the spring of the next year, he was in negotiations with Giant Merchandising CEO Peter Lubin and legendary music industry powerhouse Irving Azoff, founder of the Warner Bros. subsidiary Giant Records.

  “I have always been interested in supporting artists who are pushing the envelope in some way. I never worry about what others may think,” says Azoff. “They had developed a rabid grass-roots following with only the resources of a smaller label. I was intrigued with what they could accomplish with the larger resources Giant had to offer.

  “We didn’t think in terms of a specific goal,” Azoff continues. “We never expected a mainstream audience. Rather, we felt we could help the band and, in the process, support a band that was out of the mainstream. That was the point.”

  “The actual negotiations took ten minutes,” recalls Ford, who orchestrated an agreement with Giant, giving them the rights to release Morbid Angel records in North America before Earache negotiated a deal of their own for Europe. “They were done in an ice cream store in California. Irving asked me what kind of ice cream I wanted, and we finished the deal. I think that probably started other people looking at the genre.”

  Of course, there was no precedent for death metal bands and major labels. Giant, whose hit record at the time was from pop vocal group Color Me Badd, approached their Morbid Angel relationship tentatively, presenting the group with a one-album deal that included options for five more records. Ford made certain, however, his artists would not be pushed around by corporate muscle.

  “We totally trusted him to take care of us,” says Morbid Angel frontman David Vincent of the manager’s approach. “He got in a conference call with the A&R people over there who were ‘producers’ or who would want to have a ‘say-so,’ and he literally told them, ‘You guys are not allowed in the studio when they’re making the record, and you’re not allowed to call them, and if I find out you did, I’m gonna fly out there and kill you.’ He shielded us from any kind of corporate business and all the stuff that I know today is just the worst part of the business.”

  Unfortunately, not all of Earache’s artists had Ford in their corner.

  7

  Corporation Pull-In

  BY LATE 1991, MAJOR LABELS WERE WARMING TO THE IDEA of signing atypical rock bands, thanks to the colossal commercial achievement of “alternative” rock acts like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Such success proved no musical exponent too peculiar for commercial consideration. Yet, it was the search for the next metal megastar—not the next grunge god—that brought many major labels to Earache Records’ doorstep.

  While Morbid Angel’s signing to Warner Bros. subsidiary Giant established death metal as a viable commodity in the eyes of the majors, it was, ironically, Lee Dorrian’s post-Napalm Death project, Cathedral, which first caught the attention of Columbia Records—and, more specifically, Josh Sarubin—in early 1992. Freshly promoted from retail marketing to an A&R position by head of the department David Kahne, Sarubin was encouraged to discover new talent in the emergent underground metal scene. Cathedral’s Sabbath-induced doomy groove ultimately had a far more marketable appeal, partly because it was the polar opposite in terms of Napalm Death’s velocity. After Sarubin played Kahne a copy of Cathedral’s recently recorded four-track Soul Sacrifice EP, Columbia immediately began pursuing the group.

  “At that time,” Dorrian recalls, “I suppose they saw us as being the most commercially viable. When the Soul Sacrifice EP came out it was a bit more melodic than the other stuff that Earache was putting out—a bit more catchy, and it was a new crossover in the death metal thing. We were adding different influences to the heavier side of music at that time, and I thought they just saw us as being a bit fresher than the other bands of the time.”

  By the summer of 1992, Earache and Columbia had agreed on a North American licensing deal to distribute Cathedral. Word traveled fast in the tightly linked major label assembly, and soon labels like Atlantic, East/West and Def American Records were also courting other Earache artists.

  “We spoke with Mark Geiger, who worked for Def American,” explains Earache Records founder Digby Pearson. “He told us that [high-profile producer] Rick Rubin was madly into our stuff, particularly Godflesh—that was a key thing for the other labels. Godflesh were the prized asset, it seemed, even though they weren’t the biggest seller.”

  “Even before the Columbia thing happened, Atlantic were interested in Godflesh,” remembers former Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick. “We went to meet the big guy at the time, who was Danny Goldberg, and we were treated like royalty for a day. He flew into London, and we had a stretch car with all of this bullshit pick us up from Birmingham and take us [to London] and back. And he basically told me, ‘I want Godflesh, I don’t want the other bands. But Earache are claiming that they’ll only let us take Godflesh if we do take the other bands.’ The labels knew they could get sales out of all the stuff, but they really thought that Godflesh could be the next Nine Inch Nails and that we would be selling out fucking stadiums. The buzz at the time was ridiculous. It outweighed the sales, obviously. It was all hype.”

  “It was nice to be wanted,” says Pearson. “At the time, it came as a reassurance that Earache had something that was doing well, and in the bigger music industry it was sought after and could well be the next big thing—that’s what my lawyers used to say anyway: ‘If there’s a new Metallica, it’s coming from Earache.’”

  Clearly Columbia already had a crucial chip in place with Cathedral—whose Soul Sacrifice EP had already sold a respectable 15,000 copies—but Earache’s own US label manager Jim Welch was giving Columbia even more leverage in the developing bidding war for the Earache label.

  “When we started selling all of these records in America,” says Welch, “all these major labels started sniffing around, going, ‘What the fuck is going on here? How is this label selling so many records with just a distribution deal for all of this extreme music?’ So I was getting calls from one label about Fudge Tunn
el, one label about Godflesh, one label about Napalm Death, one label about doing a label deal—there were just all of these different possibilities. So at one point, Dig came over and we just started taking meetings with all of these people, and when people found out that I actually didn’t own Earache, they started offering me jobs. So basically I decided, ‘Let’s see how far we can take this whole thing.’

  “I knew Dig was gonna be okay, because he was gonna get a deal out of this, so basically I said, ‘I think I wanna go to Columbia,’” Welch continues. “Because I really liked the people there and I thought some of the people in their metal department, who I knew really well, could do a really good job with this music. So Dig said, ‘Do your deal—we obviously wanna be with you where you go. Then I’ll do my deal.’”