Choosing Death Page 4

  “This was for no reason other than it being a demo,” Broadrick insists. “There was no label then, obviously. But we played it to a number of people, including Digby, who hadn’t even released one album, I think. But he still couldn’t decide what he could do with it and didn’t get back to us. Everything was still so small and selling such small amounts of records. It was a big risk and a lot of money, even to press a thousand.”

  Shortly after the recording, the band recruited Birmingham local and fellow Mermaid frequenter Jim Whiteley on bass. For much of the year, Whiteley’s apartment served as a makeshift hotel for the numerous out-of-town teenagers attending weekend gigs at the Mermaid.

  “I lived in a multi-story, 92-apartment tower block on a large ‘60s council housing project in Kings Norton, about nine miles out of the center, and the Mermaid was located nearer to the city center, about two miles out on the junction of the Stratford and Warwick roads,” says Whiteley. “The most [people] I had stay was between 20 and 30. I lost count. There were bodies everywhere, even on the external balcony. And if Shane and Mitch ended up crashing that usually meant Mick Harris would tag along, also, so no one got any sleep whether there was music blaring or not.”

  “Jimmy started to play the bass because my enthusiasm was waning,” says Bullen. “I said, ‘Oh, let someone else play the bass. I’ll just sing.’”

  Shortly after the addition of Whiteley, Broadrick was offered the drummer position in Birmingham rock band Head of David, who had recently released a record on Blast First, then the UK home to acts like Sonic Youth and Big Black. He accepted, partially because of his desire to join a band he perceived as successful—Head of David recently entered the UK independent charts—but also because of the rapidly declining internal state of Napalm Death.

  “Literally, within the space of a couple of months, the band really turned to shit with loads of infighting,” says Broadrick. “This was just the product of being young. I mean, even in rehearsals, there were many times that I would literally stand there and watch Nik Bullen and Mick Harris rolling on the floor fighting. It was quite mad, to be honest. It was a lot of very volatile personalities. Almost inevitably, it would come to blows.”

  “Sorry, but being the one who has done the least drugs and booze, I have no recollection of any fights whatsoever,” offers Harris. “Both Nik and Justin got bored from where I was standing. Justin always wanted to go places, and with the offer of joining Head of David on drums—a band that was ready to sign a big deal and tour—that was his break, his way out. Nik seemed less and less interested as time went by. Each rehearsal he would turn up more and more drunk, and I remember having to ask him if he was bothered [to rehearse] anymore, and he never came to rehearsal again.”

  Harris did his best to keep Napalm moving forward, but with Broadrick’s departure and Bullen’s lack of commitment, a split of the band seemed unavoidable.

  “I got a bit bored with it,” says Bullen of his Napalm Death experience. “I liked hip-hop and things like Joy Division and power electronic and ‘60s drug music, and I got a bit bored, because at that point as people were in the audience just shouting, ‘Faster, faster!’ I was thinking, ‘Well, if everybody just wants us to play faster and faster, it is a bit like a novelty act,’ and they’re not really understanding on some level why we wanted to play it fast in the first place, which was just to mirror their kinds of emotions and to bludgeon, really. And when Justin left, I had a lot of respect for him and I got on better with him, and I just thought, ‘Well, it’s gonna change now.’ And it did change, and so I just sorta stopped going to rehearsals.”

  “To be honest,” says Broadrick, “no one in the band cared at all about anything. And I was left with the master tape, and I was gonna give—literally, just give it—to this other label Manic Ears. It was gonna be a split album with another band. And this guy Shane Dabinett who ran the Manic Ears label actually turned it down in the end. He said that he just couldn’t be bothered, and he might be able to release it in about six months. So I managed to get Digby’s phone number and just said, ‘Do you want this Napalm Death thing? I’ve left the band and nobody else seems to care.’ And I sent it to him for no money and that was it. I joined Head of David and went on tour to Germany. And I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s as far it goes. That’s a piece of history.’”

  2

  Whirlwind Struggle

  DESPITE THE SOCIOECONOMIC SIMILARITIES, the American underground music scene couldn’t possibly develop in the concentrated manner its English counterpart did. Instead, such a sprawling territory gave birth to several select pockets of disenfranchised youth throughout the country. And in the early part of the ‘80s, America’s extreme music strength was underground hardcore—an accelerated, altogether angrier take on traditional punk rock. Washington, D.C. birthed the hyperspeed formula of the Bad Brains and Minor Threat. New York City unleashed the metallics of Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags, while Los Angeles spit forth bands like the Descendents, the Circle Jerks and the primal power of Black Flag. Though sometimes overlooked, Boston had a powerful scene of its own. To most, Boston hardcore is forever defined by SS (Society System) Decontrol and their confrontational brand of punk, which, along with Minor Threat, helped characterize the straight edge movement. But the Boston area, quite simply, had the fastest bands, several of which actually hailed from small suburban towns in western Massachusetts.

  Amherst was such a place. A two-hour drive west of Boston, the picturesque college town was also home to a young local named Joseph Mascis. In 1982, the 15-year-old Mascis—simply known as J to friends—wasn’t much different from the town’s other few proud punk rockers, often spending his free time roaming the racks of local record store Main Street Records in North Hampton.

  “I met this kid in that store that looked kinda like Dee Dee Ramone,” Mascis recalls. “I talked to him a little bit and he seemed to be into some of the same hardcore stuff as me. The next week I saw a flyer up in the record store and I figured it had to be that kid because I didn’t know anybody else that was into stuff like Discharge and Minor Threat.”

  That kid was Scott Helland, who, along with his friend Lou Barlow, sought a drummer to play “superfast beats”—as their flyer bluntly stated—for their fledgling hardcore band. The group was practicing for several months before the painfully shy Mascis answered the advertisement. After joining, Mascis insisted the band draft his friend Charlie Nakajima to sing. Days later, Mascis christened the group Deep Wound, and within a few short months they began playing sporadic gigs with local hardcore punk groups, such as Helland’s other outfit The Outpatients.

  “We just wanted to play as fast as possible, and, I think, sometimes it was to the detriment of our songs,” says Mascis. “All we were concerned with, really, was playing faster and faster.”

  For that crown, Deep Wound would have some competition. In another small western Massachusetts suburb named Weymouth, local drummer Robert Williams and his 10th grade classmates, guitarist Kurt Habelt and bassist Henry McNamee, had been instigating a racket since 1981, shortly after their first exposure Minor Threat and Discharge. On the weekends, the trio frequently made the half-hour journey east to Boston’s premier independent record store, Newbury Comics, to feed their appetites for scorching punk rock.

  “It was such a special time to be discovering music,” recalls Williams. “I can remember coming home from Newbury Comics—which was just a closet, with cardboard boxes of comic books and 7-inches on wooden shelves—and my hands were shaking I was so excited to play these records. I remember the look of absolute snobbery and disgust on the face of the cashier—a young pre-‘Til Tuesday Aimee Mann—when I came up to the register with an original pressing of the Meatmen’s ‘Blood Sausage’ 7-inch, which had a used condom with pubic hair on the cover. I had a rating system—the faster my mom would run upstairs to get me to shut it off, the better it was. I couldn’t get through a side of Black Flag’s Damaged. Flipper, [I] couldn’t even get throug
h a song.”

  Further inspired by their trips into the city to see Black Flag and NYC punkers the Misfits, Williams devoted more time to his musical project, which had recently been dubbed Siege.

  “The three of us were jamming together in Hank’s garage and then later in a church, making absolutely hellish dissonance that resounded through the neighborhood,” Williams remembers. “Locals still come up to me, now grown, and talk about how they used to drink beers in the woods with their friends and listen.”

  Soon the quartet recruited singer Kevin Mahoney, from yet another western Mass. suburb, Braintree—a town rich in hardcore heritage and home of the original Gang Green and Jerry’s Kids. By 1983, Siege began playing shows in this rapidly developing western Mass. community.

  “It was a healthy, awesome, real DIY scene out there in western Mass.—a clique of very excited groups,” Williams explains. “It was one of the places that you played when you made the rounds, another being Stamford, Connecticut. They were very positive scenes, but very few of them made the ride to Boston to play shows. They were younger, artsy types and they weren’t the most driven, savvy entertainers in the world. These were just punk kids and they happened to live in a very remote place. More often, Boston would go out to western Mass. to play.” That community had already accepted the speedy Deep Wound, but withstanding the sheer velocity, violent lyrics and developing metallic leanings of Siege would be an even greater test. After all, this was a band both faster and heavier than the crossover thrash punk of Cryptic Slaughter and Septic Death, which was then regarded as the pinnacle of aural intensity in the US.

  “There was a time when we made a deliberate decision to set out to be the absolute fastest band,” says Williams, whose speed training included playing AC/DC’s Highway to Hell LP at 45 RPM and duplicating the drum beats while wearing headphones. “The track ‘Beating Around the Bush’ becomes galloping Brit punk when played on 45,” he notes. “I loved metal, too—Venom, Priest, Motörhead’s ‘Iron Fist.’ In fact, we covered Venom’s ‘Warhead’ at our first show, which was at our high school’s battle of the bands—we got disqualified for obscenity, plus our bassist Hank smashed his bass. But it was about speed. We would listen to the fastest punk and hardcore bands we could find and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna deliberately write something that is faster than them, because we are going to be the fastest.’ We took it very seriously.”

  Williams and the rest of Siege, however, didn’t hold Boston’s straight edge movement in similar regard.

  “I was a heavy pot smoker,” says Williams, whose drug use was in direct contrast to the prevailing sentiment within the hardcore scene at the time. “And we were younger guys, newcomers, certainly not straight edge, and didn’t fit in with the original Boston crew, who were bullies. Their thing kind of grew into the jock-infested macho one-dimensional shit that half of hardcore is now—the baseball cap-wearing, smack a kid up shit. The other half being the Maximum Rock n’ Roll peace-punk, crust leftist, reverse conformism—but this was before all those terms and before things were so clichéd.”

  By the time Siege was making its own way in early 1984, however, their kindred spirits in Deep Wound were simply going away.

  “The hardcore scene was kinda dead to us,” says Mascis. “I was more into the Birthday Party and the noisier types of bands after that. Scott, the bass player, was really busy with the his other band Outpatients, too, so basically he went in the Outpatients full-time and the rest of us formed Dinosaur, but we were called Mogo then and we still had the same singer from Deep Wound, Charlie, but then after one gig we decided that Charlie was a no go and then we officially started Dinosaur [which later became Dinosaur Jr]. We had a totally different concept. We went for being a kinda really loud country [band] or something, because hardcore had just died out for us.”

  Before Deep Wound officially disbanded, however, the group managed to record a self-titled 7-inch EP and a few tracks for the Bands That Could Be God compilation with local producer Lou Giordano at Boston’s Radio Beat Studios. Giordano recorded Boston’s top punk and hardcore acts, such as SS Decontrol, Negative FX, the FU’s, Jerry’s Kids and Proletariat in the tiny reconstructed AM radio station in the heart of Kenmore Square.

  “There was a small staff there.” Giordano explains. “There was the owner, Jimmy Dufour, and then I joined up in late ‘82, and that was right about the time that the Boston scene was really exploding. Black Flag had come through town and basically just freaked everybody out, and it was never the same after that. And the Boston bands were kinda racing to catch up with the rest of the country ,and all these bands sprung up overnight with a completely different sound than anywhere else—it was like they passed them all.”

  Unsurprisingly, Siege elected to make their first recordings there as well, entering the studio with Giordano in February of 1984.

  “The way our studio operated was that anything that comes in—there’s no value judgments made about the music,” Giordano recalls. “We just record it. Still, one of the things that I guess was cool about being a staff engineer is that I wouldn’t have sought out a band like that. I wasn’t philosophically into anything that they were doing, but that they were all good musicians—you would have to be to stay together at the speeds they were playing at. So there was that aspect of it, and just the whole pushing the envelope thing. It sounds like it’s just gonna completely break apart going 700 miles through the sky and then all of a sudden everything just comes right together again.

  “And they were some of the most unassuming, laid-back people to ever work with,” he continues. “I mean, they had no attitude at all. They just came in and they were just really polite and very thankful, and then when they turned on the amps and made that noise, it was just unbelievable that it was coming from them.”

  “He had seen a lot of that kind of thing, but we were serious about equipment, and that may have been one thing that set us apart,” Williams remembers. “But it was nothing new to him. He was really adept.”

  Siege would return to the studio in October of that same year, recording three more tracks—“Walls,” “Cold War” and “Sad But True”—for a compilation assembled by artist and Maximum Rock n’ Roll scribe Pushead called Cleanse the Bacteria. That session would be this lineup’s last. A little over a year later, with internal tensions mounting, Siege imploded before what was to be their first ever New York City gig at the celebrated rock club CBGB’s. “The vocalist was bickering with the guitarist,” Williams explains. “The van was loaded for our show. We never played the show. Kev never showed up, and I really can’t blame him. After that, we stopped playing.”

  There were several false starts over the next few years, the last of which occurred in 1990, when Williams and guitarist Kurt Habelt were joined by local Boston vocalist Seth Putnam.

  “We were recording and writing, and I had written a bunch of revolutionary stuff, like violent lyrics, and that same guitarist changed some of my lyrics with weak rhyme, making them pacifist rather than revolutionary, and really changing their context,” says Williams. “He delivered that to Seth in the studio behind our backs. And he went so far as to erase one line of Seth’s singing and put in his own voice. I still have genocidal resentment about that. We never planned on compromising our extremity.”

  Some 750 miles west, in the midsized industrial town of Flint, Michigan (population: 450,000), locals Matt Olivo and Scott Carlson shared a similar idealism. Although the pair initially met when “we didn’t even have front teeth,” according to Olivo, they didn’t become good friends until junior high school, years later. By then, the two had cultivated a healthy love of traditional heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

  “In the early ‘80s we started getting into stuff like Motörhead,” Olivo recalls. “We’d find out that Lemmy would wear a Discharge shirt and we’d go buy a Discharge record, and then suddenly we were listening to a pretty wide variety of hardcore punk and heavy metal.”

  “Di
scharge especially had a profound impact on my musical direction just because they were so doom,” says Carlson. “Everything was about the end of the world. Some metal bands said similar things, but Discharge was describing it in gory detail, sort of like putting it right in front of your face, and I think that’s what I liked about them so much, that they were kind of scary.”

  In late 1983, however, the pair’s primary focus was still very much heavy metal. Olivo, in fact, was busy playing guitar in his own heavy metal band—an outfit that strictly adhered to Maiden and Priest covers—when Carlson introduced him to the speedy thrash of the first Slayer LP Show No Mercy.

  “Matt came back to me with this song that would later be titled ‘Armies of the Dead,’” says Carlson. “It was Matt playing this extreme Slayer riff—except for the fact that we were playing in a garage and our equipment was a lot crappier than theirs. We were down-tuned too, and, it just sounded sludgier. But we knew we wanted to play something that fast.”

  The discovery led the pair to form their first band, a proto-thrash metal act dubbed Tempter, with locals Sean McDonald handling bass, James Auten behind the drums, and Carlson supplying the vocals.

  “The first Tempter gig we played was at a punk show,” Olivo recalls, “and we were a little worried because we had on Metallica t-shirts. Back then the punkers were still kinda like, ‘I don’t know about these metal dudes,’ and metallers were like, ‘I don’t know about these punk dudes.’ But in that first gig in our little hometown of Flint, after the first song people just went nuts. It was like this huge reception that we got, and from that point on, we just had a home.”