By early 1995, Columbia started cutting its losses and began dropping the Earache bands one by one. In a matter of only a few months, Columbia had severed all ties with the label it had courted so aggressively just a few years earlier.
“It didn’t seem like a purging,” says Kahne. “We were still trying to look at the different bands, and the time ran out on the deal, and as I remember, it just got weirder with Digby and the bands. So then you get the bands calling, trying to get around Digby, and he was a real key guy because he was supposed to set up marketing, and he was supposed to be working in Europe through his distribution over there where there was already a following. And it seemed like their bands and Digby were always just screaming at each other.”
“David Kahne is quite right about the problems we encountered with the bands,” says Pearson. “In hindsight—and it seems petty and irrelevant now—Earache had five bands all caught up in the race to become the first platinum death metal band in the world. It was hellishly difficult to keep five or six driven bands toeing the Earache company line. You gotta remember, they were all selling well, all working with ambitious managers, all had their own agendas. Plus, even though the bands were all on Earache, they were also somewhat in competition with each other at the same time, so if one band got $25,000 tour support from Sony for a US tour, the next one wanted $35,000. It must have driven Sony nuts, and I know one Sony product manager did quit at that time, citing the stress of dealing with the Earache bands’ demands.”
“One of the other problems was that Dig didn’t really hold up his end with some stuff,” says Columbia A&R man Josh Sarubin. “Once he got the deal with Columbia, he was kinda like, ‘Okay,’ and he just didn’t do his part in a lot of it. Because he would be obviously more hooked into the underground than we would be, we were supposed to take it once the band had gotten to a certain level, then we would grab it and take it to the next level. And slowly stuff came out that the bands didn’t like him or wanna be under contract, and that whole part of it turned into a little bit of a mess.”
“Josh is right about them not wanting to be under contract,” offers Pearson. “Though, of course, they all were signed to Earache, a couple of managers saw fit to try to wriggle out of their Earache deals, presumably for their own financial gain. It was a real battle to counteract this, and quite unexpected on my part, through a lack of experience in judging certain people’s capacity for greed, I suppose. My relationship with the bands and their managers changed dramatically. Most bands developed a plan to snag a major deal of their own, some commencing legal wrangling for the sole purpose to get out of the Earache deal. Naïvely, it never occurred to me that the bands wouldn’t be happy to be part of the label deal. It quickly became evident that some bands’ managers would prefer to discuss their touring or release plans in the US with Sony directly, circumventing Earache in the process. We were powerless to stop this. Up until that time pretty much everything in the bands’ careers had been planned and carried out by Earache, but after Sony, we became more distanced from their plans through no fault of our own.
“In hindsight,” Pearson continues, “I don’t think anything too unusual was happening. It’s human nature, after all. Crudely put, why talk to the little guys in Nottingham when you can talk directly to the guys in the huge Sony building in NYC—the ones bankrolling the operation and who held the key to all your ambitions? It’s actually a common scenario played out regularly in the music business, every time a band signed on an indie has interest from a major, some maneuverings go on so the band can cut out the indie to sign directly to the major—the difference between indies’ and majors’ finances is just so vast, it’s nothing peculiar to Earache’s experience at all, it’s standard practice, even.”
If neither Columbia nor Earache were responsible for the unproductiveness of the deal, then one must confront the artists and their records. If, as most of the bands contend, they were simply progressing as artists, the first impressions of the groups for largely unfamiliar audiences were the bands’ “mature” records. That might have been too much to ask of new listeners.
“I think the whole Earache/Columbia thing alienated a lot of the kids that were into the underground scene,” says Cathedral’s Lee Dorrian. “In some ways, it made things brighter and stronger for the bands, but in other ways, they pulled these bands out of the underground scene and tried to throw them out into the mass market. By doing that they’re almost too glossy for the underground kids to like anymore, but they’re still too heavy for the commercial kids to like, and it kinda got lost in the cross fire somewhere.”
Seemingly, the bands had every conceivable factor in their favors. Each artist had a considerable and devoted fanbase, which they established through, in many cases, cultivating their own unique sounds. They had the deep pockets of a major label. And although there were no radio singles from the artists, Columbia and Earache even had the vital support of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball.
“We had a really strong relationship with Columbia, so it was good for those bands,” says Eva Nue, former co-producer of Headbanger’s Ball. “They were one of the labels that really stood behind their bands. So if you were on Columbia, you were getting heard and played.”
But ultimately, the product wasn’t right for Columbia.
“Money was certainly spent,” recalls Sarubin. “Don Einer, who was the president of Columbia at the time, definitely wanted to go for it. Maybe it just wasn’t the right time for that stuff. I don’t think any of them commercially had the track, maybe there wasn’t that radio single.”
“The ambition to be a rock star was blatant,” Pearson concludes. “We were all on the same page. We all wanted to make that breakthrough. We were kinda caught up in our hype slightly. It’s pretty humiliating that not even one of the six bands broke through. The sense of failure was pretty palpable. Sony, to their eternal credit, had taken a calculated gamble on the heavy/extreme Earache sound, throwing up the next wave of platinum rock acts. For the record, I have no regrets personally or problems about how things were handled by Sony at the time. Everything had gone so well for all the bands on Earache. The next album they sold more than the one before, and everything was on an up slope. The next stop was platinum albums—that was the plan. And everyone went along with that plan.”
Well, maybe not everyone.
“Personally,” says Napalm’s Greenway, “when the deal was done, I breathed a fucking ten-minute-long sigh of relief.”
8
Fall From Grace
SINCE EARACHE RECORDS HADN’T DELIVERED any new product to Sony Music since the autumn of 1994, Sony formally terminated its North American distribution deal with Earache in September of 1995—just two years into a three-year agreement. Sony concluded that all Earache material should again be released through RED, Earache’s one-time exclusive US distribution company, which was now owned and operated by Sony Music. Although this didn’t threaten the future of his company at the time, the public failure to bring his artists to a greater audience profoundly affected Earache label chief Digby Pearson.
“I was deflated,” he admits. “We’d only known success as a label. Then you reach a major label and you expect [your records] to go gold or platinum—maybe unrealistic expectations, but we were having them—but it didn’t happen, and the bands were dropped. Yet, at the same time, I was getting bored with death metal, to be honest. I was looking for something more exciting.”
The end of the Earache/Sony deal was symbolic of something larger: the dramatic plunge of death metal’s underground popularity. Of course, symptoms of the descent were surfacing in the years before the Earache/Sony deal was even completed. In the early ‘90s dash to sign anything that grinded, grunted and growled, labels indiscriminately handed out recording contracts to bands based often on a single demo recording. Unlike genre progenitors such as Death, Morbid Angel or Napalm Death, who had developed their approach for years prior to getting a deal, many bands of this second wave of death metal
lacked the sufficient time to hone their craft into something unique. By 1995, the international death metal scene was clearly oversaturated with a glut of uninspired, unoriginal acts.
“These bands popped out and flooded the scene,” says Suffocation’s Terrance Hobbs, guitarist of one of the period’s most often plagiarized acts. “That’s kinda flattering that they were trying to imitate what we were doing back then, but there were so many bands doing what we were doing. We went down [to Morrisound] to get the Scott Burns production like all the other bands had been doing, because that’s what Roadrunner wanted us to do. Stick a Dan Seagrave cover on there and it was like the instant Roadrunner package.”
“I got caught up in it,” admits Roadrunner A&R head Monte Conner of the mid-‘90s feeding frenzy. “I signed some bands that maybe shouldn’t have been signed. But soon we pretty much decided to get rid of the bands that we didn’t feel had a future—bands like Gorguts and Sorrow, who should have never really been signed, and Immolation who, at the time, took four years to write a record. We got rid of those bands, but we kept Obituary and Deicide, because they were such important bands for the label at the time and they really helped break the label. Maybe at the time we realized that those bands were never gonna be any bigger, but at the same time they were workhorses for the label and we made a profit on them and so forth, and it’s like, how can you drop those bands? It was really important, because if we would have just dropped all of the death metal bands there would have been an identity crisis.”
Perhaps an even greater concern to the labels was the sharp sales decline death metal albums were experiencing. Even the principal genre movers like Deicide, Entombed and Obituary were selling between 30% and 40% of what they had in the early ‘90s.
“The prime directive of Roadrunner,” says Conner, “has always been to sign a band, try to sell 10,000 or 15,000 on the first record, and then try to branch that out to 50,000 or 100,000 on the second and 200,000 on the third. After a while it just became no fun to sign these death metal bands with ceilings on them and know that no matter what you did, no matter what kind of record the band made, no matter who produced it, no matter how much money you spent promoting it, you were gonna sell this amount of copies, because this is what the market was. So it was like a combination of hitting that brick wall in terms of sales, as well as the genre completely stagnating, that made us get away from it and turn our attention elsewhere. So for me, when death metal got boring, all of a sudden I heard Pantera and Machine Head, and I was like, ‘Fuck, this is something new. This is different.’ And I started focusing my efforts on that sound.”
While Conner actually signed genre luminaries Death to a one-album deal, and Obituary and Deicide remained with Roadrunner, the mid-‘90s also saw death metal acts Malevolent Creation, Pestilence, Suffocation, Cynic, Gorguts, Immolation, and Sorrow either being dropped from Roadrunner or disbanding altogether.
Such aesthetical shifts signaled a decrease in employment opportunities for producer Scott Burns, the American death metal specialist. Along with the Roadrunner label, Nuclear Blast and Metal Blade stopped shipping many of their death metal bands south to Burns’ primary working studio, Morrisound in Florida.
“There was work, but there wasn’t the glut of bands coming out,” says Burns. “I think everything was just starting to flatten out. Back in the day, Monte would say, ‘Well, we expect to sell so many units.’ And then he started realizing they’re only gonna sell a certain amount of units with these kinds of bands.
“In my experience, there were very few bands that on their third and fourth record were putting out better records than their first or their second or even a demo,” he continues. “I mean, everybody got more money, everybody spent more time in the studio, and maybe technically things sounded better. But looking back on things, for the $5,000 that was spent on the Deicide demo or the first record compared to when you spent $45,000 or $50,000 on [1997’s] Serpents of the Light, it may sound better, but I can’t tell you that it’s a better record than the first Deicide record. Or even the first Obituary album, which was done on an 8-track tape machine for 500 bucks, compared to [1992’s] The End Complete, which cost tens of thousands more to make. They sounded better and they were all good albums, but in my opinion, death metal bands weren’t coming out with better records later on in their career than earlier in their career.”
“The way it works in this business is that once a producer gets tagged as being such and such a producer, very few people are ever willing to give them a chance and let them do anything different,” says Conner. “So we started pulling away from Scott simply because it became so trendy and it was just like assembly line stuff to go to Scott Burns, and to be quite honest, Scott’s sounds were just never really that great. I think Obituary’s Slowly We Rot record sounded good and [Sepultura’s] Beneath the Remains sounded good, but other than that, Scott just specialized in mud.”
“In my defense, it’s pretty hard when you’ve got a week to get the best, heaviest guitar sound in the world, and the [artist] walks in and he has no earthly idea how to get that guitar sound,” says Burns. “I’m not a miracle worker. I probably did 80 death metal records, but you’ve got drums, bass, guitar, they’re all playing double bass, they’re all downtuned and they’re all barking, so how many ways can you make it sound different? Eventually, everybody gets used to doing things the same way. So part of it’s my fault, but then part of it isn’t. And I probably got big for my britches at the time and would tell some people ‘whatever.’ But it was pretty hard when everybody just walks in and they expect miracles on shoestring budgets and they really don’t have a defined sound.”
“Everybody wanted their band produced by Scott so they could sell a lot, but they didn’t wanna spend a lot,” recalls guitarist James Murphy, who worked with Burns as a member of both Death and Obituary. “So he had the unenviable task of working at this studio where they had a very high hourly rate for what bands could afford back then. He had to try to work fast to get something done and he had to cut corners wherever he could. So basically he tried to help the bands, and he bent over backwards. I think he was just under a lot of pressure to do a lot of records in a short period of time and make them all sound professional quality. So if that happened to you, you’d fall back on some habits too that are tried but true.”
“Scott is one of the coolest human beings alive and he used to do this stuff for pennies,” offers Conner. “People liked his vibe and he got along with the bands. But we just stopped using him because we overused him and we realized that there were better people to do this stuff.”
Burns went on to engineer a handful of heavier mixes for industrial-flavored rock acts Gravity Kills and KMFDM, but was ultimately unable to shake his stigma as a death metal producer. In 1995, he returned to school, pursuing a computer programming career before leaving Morrisound and the record business a year later.
“You walked in a studio and everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re the death metal guy,’” Burns says. “So it was pretty hard to get other work without moving to New York or LA to have a shot. Maybe if I hung around something would have happened in Tampa, but I was lucky to be in the middle of a great scene for a while, and it’s better to be lucky than good sometimes.”
Fearing his own luck with death metal and grindcore was running out, Earache’s Digby Pearson turned his label’s attention in a decidedly un-metallic direction.
“I’d say ‘94 to ‘95 onwards is when I personally became a massive fan of electronic music,” Pearson explains. “In England, that music sorta took over—well, the harder stuff didn’t, but techno in general, dance music was inescapable. It struck me as a really radical, interesting form of music. At the time, I preferred programmers to guitarists and drummers. I think a hell of a lot of art goes into that, and it’s underestimated in the rock fraternity.”
While the hard techno sounds of D.O.A., Scanner and Delta 9 were a minor hit in the underground dance community, they clearly left
a negative impression with Earache’s metal contingent.
“The thing was, we never had any focus,” Pearson says. “It was kinda whatever I liked that got released on Earache. This new genre was extreme techno, so I thought it was still extreme, so I thought people would like it because I liked it for that reason. So releasing this kind of music did alienate a hell of a lot of metal kids who were the bread and butter and the whole staple of what Earache’s about.”
After the Sony deal expired, Pearson’s Earache roster appeared to be in tatters. Although there was never an official announcement, Fudge Tunnel disbanded in late 1995. Entombed also jettisoned the label, signing an ill-fated contract with East/West in 1996, only to move again to UK-based Music for Nations a year later.
The uncertainty of the band’s future also took its toll on Nicke Andersson. The Entombed drummer and founder would eventually leave the band in 1997 to pilot The Hellacopters, the garage rock band he initially formed as a side project in November of 1994.
Choosing Death Page 18