Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  RICK ROZZ: Chuck wanted to get more serious and he wanted us to have our own identity, and that’s how the name Death came into play. I was really into tape trading, and we knew Possessed were out and had the song “Death Metal.” And we had our song “Death by Metal.” So we went with Death.

  KAM LEE: I left Death before they got a record deal. It wasn’t a business falling out, it was teenage kids falling out. I liked a girl; Chuck liked the same girl. I made a move; he didn’t. He got mad at me. Also, at the time, I was homeless and living in the street. I was kicked out of my home and when he could, Chuck would let me stay at his house, but I couldn’t live there permanently. So finding a place to live became a priority and they wanted to keep doing Death.

  CHRIS REIFERT (ex-Death, ex-Abcess, Autopsy): Chuck was about to broadcast a radio ad saying he was looking for a new drummer, and a friend at the local radio station told me about it before it went on the air. I was completely in shock because I had been collecting the demos and ordering the live tapes from the band. So I was super excited. I called him up and we got together, and things clicked immediately.

  RICK ROZZ: Combat signed us because they liked what they heard on the [1986] “Mutilation” demo. I was in and out of the band several times. I was let go before any recording was done because Chuck met a bass player, [Repulsion’s Scott Carlson], and the guy would only join if his guitarist [Matt Olivo] came, too. So I was let go and didn’t record on the first album, [1987’s] Scream Bloody Gore [which wound up featuring Schuldiner on guitar, bass, and vocals]. Then I came back to tour for Scream Bloody Gore and help write [1988’s] Leprosy.

  SCOTT CARLSON (Genocide, Repulsion, ex-Death): We knew Chuck [Schuldiner] and Death from tape trading, and he liked the Genocide demos, so when Kam and Rick left Death, Chuck asked me and Matt to move to Florida to work with him on Death. We sat around trying to write demos, but we could tell very quickly that our writing styles were going in different directions. Matt and I started writing faster and faster with more primitive riffs, and Chuck’s riffs kept getting more technical and melodic. So we decided to go back to Michigan and continue what we were doing as Repulsion.

  CHRIS REIFERT: We feasted on gore movies every night—the more blood and heads and guts flying, the better. A lot of the songs on Scream Bloody Gore were based directly on horror movies. “Torn to Pieces” is about Make Them Die Slowly, “Regurgitated Guts” is about Gates of Hell, and “Evil Dead” is about Evil Dead. “Scream Bloody Gore” is about Reanimator. It was just gore for the sake of gore.

  RICK ROZZ: For all the extreme music that Death made, we were a bunch of mellow guys. There was no substance abuse—hardly any alcohol. It was all about the music. But there was lots of chaos. Our first time in Europe, we came back twenty-seven shows early because Chuck wasn’t happy with traveling. We were in a shuttle van instead of a tour bus, and I went, “Dude, we’re saving money. Let’s go with this,” but Chuck wouldn’t have it. What do you say when your singer says, “We’re out of here”? You can’t say, “No, we’re not leaving.” We went home.

  CHRIS REIFERT: After the record came out, Chuck moved back and forth between Florida, California, and Canada. I wasn’t a big fan of Florida and the heat and humidity. So I stayed behind in San Francisco and started Autopsy.

  JIM WELCH: Chuck literally thought he was making more money [than he was], so he held everything hostage. He’d say, “I’m going home unless you write me a check.” He canceled multiple tours over time because of that.

  RICK ROZZ: I was fired from the Leprosy tour. Maybe I was a lazy guitar player because I didn’t feel like shredding. Chuck always asked me if I was practicing and if I had my guitar with me. I read between the lines, and when I was let go there was no fuss.

  PAUL MASVIDAL: I missed my high school graduation to go on tour with Death. I was eighteen, and Chuck had just kicked Rick Rozz out and needed a guitarist to tour Mexico. I became his emergency guy. When he kicked out [James] Murphy in 1989, he called me again. Although I was committed to Cynic, as a friend I was willing to lend a hand.

  JIM WELCH: Chuck was definitely the most difficult artist I ever dealt with. He was a violent, angry, irrational person. From day one, he thought the record company was ripping him off and that he was owed all this money. He was actually broke and in debt, but he didn’t understand that. Every day he’d have a tantrum, then he would be calm and morose. He never threw a punch at me, but did he throw shit around the room? Absolutely. I certainly felt like he could’ve gotten physically violent. He’d have fits all the time, and his mom would call up and apologize. It says something when one band goes through so many different musicians—twenty-seven—over its eighteen-year career.

  RICK ROZZ: We never really fought, even after I was out of the band and they kept using my stuff. I co-wrote the whole Leprosy record with Chuck and have a lot of writings on Scream Bloody Gore and Spiritual Healing, but I’m not credited. Even when Chuck was alive, I didn’t complain. But people would ask me all the time, “Did you write any of that? That sounds like you.” I was like, “Yup.” That’s just the way it was.

  As word of Death began to spread, another seminal Florida death metal band arose from the fetid earth. In 1983, accomplished guitarist and occultist Trey Azagthoth formed Morbid Angel with bassist Dallas Ward and drummer Mike Browning. Like Death, the band endured several lineup changes while Azagthoth searched for musicians who complemented his blasphemous vision. Then in 1989, after the demise of grindcore pioneers Terrorizer, bassist and vocalist David Vincent and maniacal drummer Pete Sandoval entered the Morbid fold, giving the band the boost it needed to carve its diabolical path. Still, it took the rest of the community a while to catch up to the band’s ferocious tempos.

  DAVID VINCENT (Morbid Angel, ex-Terrorizer, ex-Genitorturers): The letters of rejection that we got from various labels from our first few demos were amazing. One label went so far as say, “You do for music what King Herod did for babysitting.” But we always looked at it as though we were in battle, and every time someone said, “Slow it down, make it more melodic, write less controversial lyrics,” our response was always, “Fuck. You. You don’t like that one? Great. You’re definitely not gonna like the next one ’cause it’s worse.”

  MITCH LUCKER (1984–2012) (Suicide Silence): The first time I heard Morbid Angel, [drummer] Pete [Sandoval] fucking blew me away. He was doing these completely blisteringly fast blast beats in triple time. I had never heard anything like it—that insane speed was totally sick.

  ALBERT MUDRIAN: Morbid Angel’s debut album, [1989’s] Altars of Madness, was so Satanic and over the top. You had bands like Possessed that would dabble with stuff like that, but Morbid Angel took it a step further. It felt fucking serious.

  DAVID VINCENT: We heard some of those other bands from tape trading, but Morbid Angel was really shut off from everything else. For us, it was about the inner spirituality amongst the members of the band. We never saw ourselves as part of any scene and I don’t think we sounded anything like any of the bands we were associated with.

  TREY AZAGTHOTH (Morbid Angel): Morbid Angel assembled in 1984 to lift ourselves with [a] celebration of the gifts from the triumvirate: the spirit, true will, and creative faculty. That’s always been our purpose, to be their instrument on this earth and let their influence flow through us, and simultaneously be the sharp-edged weapon that destroys the influence of the enslaver and the falsifications, and also helps establish a new foundation to build upon once the limits of the paradigms have been shattered and the rubble is cleared out of the way.

  DAVID VINCENT: Me and Trey are very different people and we see things different ways, but I think that’s a strength. We have things we see eye to eye on and things we don’t. It makes for a bigger, more complete project, and although we look at things differently we’ll often arrive at the same conclusions, but for totally different reasons.

  Why Florida? The question has been asked repeatedly, but never definitively answered. Clear
ly it had something to do with the boredom teenagers felt roaming strip malls, and their desire to create their own culture. The fact that Schuldiner was there to plant the seeds of hate was also a factor. But as much as anything it seemed to be a matter of right place, right time.

  PAUL MASVIDAL: Central Florida is a hyper-conservative, religious retirement community. So it’s a weird place to begin with, and then you have these kids with no place to go. So maybe death metal happened as a reaction to that, or maybe it’s just some energetic physics thing—a spirit that’s in the air that kids just tune in to if they have an artistic bone in their bodies.

  PHIL FASCIANA (Malevolent Creation): The heat in Florida makes you fucking crazy, man. And between that, all the old people, tourists, and the fucking drunks, no wonder everyone wanted to make really extreme music.

  GLEN BENTON (Deicide): All the bands in Tampa were practicing in these metal storage units that you could rent. It was the only place you could rehearse, and there was no air conditioning. You get there and you’re totally sweated out before you even start playing. It builds endurance and feeds your anger.

  MONTE CONNER: I don’t know that there’s anything specific about Tampa that caused death metal to blow up there as opposed to anywhere else. If Chuck Schuldiner lived in Michigan, it could have been the Michigan death metal scene.

  KELLY SHAEFER: Chuck Schuldiner was a really competitive guy who was very protective of anybody being trendy. One of the main reasons Atheist ended up being such a strange band was we were trying so hard not to sound like anybody else that we went way overboard. We were outsiders in an outsider’s scene, so we made it doubly hard for ourselves.

  PAUL MASVIDAL: Atheist and Cynic were really the prog bands in the scene. We were nerdier kids and we had been into all kinds of music since we were really young. In late high school and early college I was really getting into jazz and fusion. When we worked with Chuck [Schuldiner] on the [1991] Death album Human, we didn’t see it as making death-prog, we saw it as doing what we do, but on Chuck’s tunes. It was how we would approach a death song and still have that [jazzy] sensibility. And it really inspired him to take his music in a new direction that was further from the growly, more simplistic stuff he started out doing.

  JAMES MURPHY: To be honest, the early Tampa scene was very divisive, and a lot of the bands didn’t like each other or talk to each other because it was extremely competitive. No one knew that literally every single one of their bands was going to get signed. There was an overall feeling that there were only so many record deals to be had.

  The actual death metal album sound, characterized by crisp, rapidly thumping bass drums that cut through walls of roaring vocals and buzzing guitar distortion, was conceived at Tampa’s Morrisound Studios by owner Tom Morris and then-fledgling producer Scott Burns.

  TOM MORRIS (founder of Morrisound Studios): We opened up in 1981, and two of the first bands we recorded were Nasty Savage and Savatage. Obituary was the first death metal band that came to us at our studio, and that’s when they were kids in high school going by the name Xecutioner. They cut a demo in a little eight-track studio we have and that’s what got them signed to Roadrunner. But when [vocalist] John Tardy and [drummer] Donald [Tardy] first came in, I almost told them to just go home. I had never heard death metal prior to that and I thought they were wasting their time and money trying to do it. But they were pretty insistent and went ahead and finished it, and, obviously, they knew something I didn’t.

  SCOTT BURNS (ex–Morrisound Studios producer): Xecutioner were doing their first album and [Morrisound engineer] Rick Miller was in an accident. I knew the guys from working sound at their shows, so I finished up their album. About the same time, Atheist came in and did Piece of Time. I’d also engineered for producer Dan Johnson. He was doing Leprosy for Death, so I met all those guys. After that, I was always either engineering or assisting.

  JOHN TARDY: Our first record, [1989’s] Slowly We Rot, wasn’t even something we planned on doing. Roadrunner heard our demo and said, “Do you wanna do a record?” and we were like, “Sure.” At the time, I really wasn’t interested in writing lyrics. I just liked making sounds that went along with the music. So, the low, growling vocals weren’t planned, they just happened. There were so many vocal parts on Slowly We Rot that went from a couple of real words to a jumbled mess of screams and growls that I couldn’t have written the lyrics out if I wanted to.

  KELLY SHAEFER: When I listened to Obituary’s demo I went, “Holy shit, you can hear everything!” Whenever we had gone to a studio before, we terrified everyone. And none of their engineers knew how to capture double bass drums or death metal vocals the proper way. Morrisound was the first studio in the country to record death metal without it sounding like a bunch of shit. They had a great way of tracking bass drums in particular.

  GLEN BENTON: Everybody wanted to record with Scott. He’s the George Martin [legendary Beatles producer] of fuckin’ death metal. He was good at getting the right sounds and he was also dealing with a lot of record labels, so he helped get a lot of bands signed.

  SCOTT BURNS: I always thought it sucked that you would hear some kid playing extreme double bass or fills and it sounded like a muffled echo. We spent a lot of time figuring out exactly how to mic everything to get the drums to sound good. When everything’s in a blender at 200 miles per hour, it takes a little bit of time to figure out how to get all the stuff to fit in. On the downside, I got typecast for the Morrisound sound. And it’s not like I got rich off it. I made more money than the bands, maybe, but I don’t think I ever charged more than $5,000 for a record, and I didn’t take any [percentage of royalties] off bands. I was offered royalties on two records and I gave them back to the bands at the beginning because they were getting screwed by their labels.

  Between Schuldiner’s leadership, Burns’s diligence, and the persistence of musicians wanting to make insanely heavy music, the death metal scene grew. Bands with records out launched low-budget national tours to spread the word, and groups from out of state immigrated to Tampa to be with like-minded individuals.

  ALEX WEBSTER (Cannibal Corpse): We started in Buffalo, [New York,] in 1988, but we didn’t move to Florida until 1994, and we went there strictly because of the death metal scene and Morrisound. Even before we did Eaten Back to Life there in 1990, we were listening to stuff like [Morbid Angel’s] Altars of Madness and [Death’s] Leprosy, which had been done there. We did four albums in Tampa before we finally decided to move there.

  TREY AZAGTHOTH: We knew we had to tour to spread the word, so we gutted out a school bus and made a cargo area in the back with heating in the front. It didn’t have any air conditioning. We went to Texas in the summer, and the heat was crazy. We didn’t have any money, so we slept in the bus and a lot of times we could only buy food or gas. We looked at it like we were a special forces unit going into enemy territory.

  RICHARD CHRISTY (ex–Death, ex–Public Assassin, Charred Walls of the Damned): Even though bands were doing well in Florida, not a lot of people around the country knew about death metal. Some promoters would book death metal bands to open for popular nationwide acts because they didn’t know any better. When I was in Public Assassin, we got booked to open for Molly Hatchet in Springfield, Missouri. We got up there and did a sound check of blistering, blast-beat death metal. And then the club owner went, “I’ll pay you guys $100 not to play.” We were like, “Screw that, we’re gonna open for Molly Hatchet!”

  CHRIS REIFERT: Autopsy played plenty of shows for ten or twenty people. There wasn’t a lot of mass acceptance of death metal in the Bay Area at the time. People just thought it was dumb. We weren’t being political or singing about banging your head in the mosh pit like all the thrash bands, so people looked down at it. I would try to explain to people what we were doing and I would get ridiculed, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going back to Florida.

  Death, Morbid Angel, Obituary, and Deicide all made their mark in Tampa, but it was Cannibal C
orpse that first exposed death metal to the mainstream, and it remains the most popular death metal band. Thanks to original vocalist/gore freak Chris Barnes (who was in the group from 1988 to 1995), their lyrics were uglier and more graphic than those of most of their contemporaries, often dealing (in their early days) with zombie invasions, serial killers, and the mutilation of women (in explicit detail). Their brain-in-a-blender riffs were so furious they would have sounded nearly nonsensical were it not for drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz’s precision playing. Cannibal Corpse struck a nerve with audiences seeking the ultimate in extremity. Song titles like “I Cum Blood,” “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt,” and “Post Mortal Ejaculation,” all from 1992’s Tomb of the Mutilated, were deemed so offensive that the album was banned in Germany until 2006. Ironically, the Jim Carrey movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective included a cameo of Cannibal Corpse playing “Hammer Smashed Face,” which is from the same album.

  MARK “PSYCHO” ABRAMSON (VP promotions, Roadrunner Records): Even in the beginning, you could tell they were great. Their stuff was a lot more simple than other bands, but they never had a problem with a catchy hook. And everything they did was always intense. Plus, they combined it with a twisted sense of humor that made it brilliant.

  ALEX WEBSTER: A lot of bands in Florida had a darker, anti-religion thing going on, so we decided to focus on gore. Most Western music is people singing from the heart, singing to a girlfriend, so a lot of people are freaked out by our songs. But our lyrics have nothing to do with our personal lives. It’s just storytelling, and it came from the kinds of movies we all used to watch, like Evil Dead or Gates of Hell. We knew it was going to be controversial, but we didn’t know to what extent.

  FORMER SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (I-CT) [1997 Congressional speech attacking entertainment industry]: The death metal band Cannibal Corpse . . . [has] one song describing the rape of a woman with a knife and another describing the act of masturbating with a dead woman’s head. I apologize for expressing—describing these lyrics, but this is what we are talking about. We are not overstating. This is extreme, awful, disgusting stuff that millions of kids are listening to.