Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (75 page)

RICK ROZZ:
The three of us got together a week later and all dropped out of school within a week of each other to spend seven days a week in Chuck’s garage working on music. We started with covers of Slayer, Metallica, and Savatage and then we wrote originals. We had the same taste in music and wanted to do stuff that was heavier than anything.

KELLY SHAEFER (Atheist, Neurotica):
Chuck Schuldiner put the stamp on death metal and said, “Hey listen, my band is gorier and darker than anything else.” He stepped out on a limb at a time when that wasn’t fashionable. He had already cooked his dinner, and we were all just on the burner. Kam Lee was the first one to have that low death metal growl when they called themselves Mantas.

KAM LEE:
Chuck and Rick introduced me to Venom’s first album, [1981’s]
Welcome to Hell
. We didn’t have a name yet and someone said, “Why don’t we call ourselves Mantas after the guitar player in Venom?” We started doing rehearsal tapes on weekends and recorded the first Mantas demo in Chuck’s garage. Since we didn’t have a singer I was like, “Well, I could play drums
and
sing.” I was fourteen and I hadn’t gone through puberty yet. But by ’85 I knew I didn’t want to go in the same direction as all those other vocalists who were singing in high-pitched screechy voices like Jeff Becerra from Possessed. So I started singing lower. Then, other people took what I did and made it deeper and deeper and that became the template of death metal.

CHUCK SCHULDINER (1967–2001) (Death, Control Denied):
I’d only been playing guitar for six months—I couldn’t even play a lead. I just wanted to bash out the most brutal riffs ever with the most brutal guitar sound ever, but I always had an urge to become a better guitarist.

RICK ROZZ:
The first gig we did was at a Knights of Columbus hall opening for a band called Tempter. Everybody was like, “What the fuck is this?” We were a three piece, we had no bass player. We tuned really low to C, and Kam was growling. At the time in Florida, promoters were only booking hair metal cover bands for clubs, so there was no way we were gonna get a gig at a real venue. We played this pizza place in Orlando. We played at a restaurant at the salad bar—anything we could get.

KAM LEE:
The heaviest thing most people in Florida were exposed to back then was probably Ozzy. So when we started playing everyone was like, “Oh, these teenage kids are terrible.” And that’s the reaction we got until the late eighties when bands like Kreator started gaining popularity and the San Francisco thrash scene caught on.

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. Clearly 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.