"I did! I did totally and we all kind of did but we were like you know, like the one thing about Don is that he would never show up to rehearsal, he would suck live, he was terrible and we'd be like 'Dude if you'd just rehearse, you'd get good!' and he would never bother to come to rehearsals and you know, he's a really good looking guy so he was a total playboy, all he just wanted to be in a band is to get chicks, you know like in playing this kind of music he was not getting girls playing Thrash Metal so he didn't care, he'd be off at the mall or to the movies on the weekend picking up girls or whatever so... when he came back he was really into it for about like two or three weeks and I was like 'Well I'm a little tenuous on this but he's showing up', he's showing up to every rehearsal, he's got his lyrics memorized, he's you know going for it and I didn't want to say for how long it's gonna last but you know I did say it a couple of times and sure enough it lasted for two or three weeks or so, maybe a month and then he started missing rehearsals, you know we had a big show coming up in a couple of weeks and you know couldn't get him down..."
With him back in the band, you did some dates in the L.A. area like with POSSESSED, CRYPTIC SLAUGHTER, EVIL DEAD, then opening for SLAYER at the Hollywood Palladium on their last date of the "R.I.B." world tour, also with SACRED REICH and VIKING, and in July '87 a handful of dates in Texas as headliners and that's when the problems with him started to re-surface since he missed the first Texas show in San Antonio where you did a brand new song 'The Death Of Innocence'...
"I sang at that first Texas show. We did that new one? Cool! That must have been an instrumental... and I remember, what was that song originally called... 'The Cursed Earth', were we calling it 'The Death Of Innocence' then?
I'm not certain but I think so...
"Okay. I knew what the lyrics were gonna be about then but that was just, Jim's writing the riff, here's the song title you know?! As soon as the song comes, boom it's got a title, doesn't matter what's the song is gonna be about, it's got a title but I had overruled on that one..."
And there was 'Black Prophecies' played as well...
"I think it's about the only time. Yeah I think pretty much after that tour, I was like 'Fuck don't put in this song live ever again!' but now I can do that double bass all day long you know so it isn't anything that I can play that song all the time now."
By the way at that famous San Antonio show, one of you sung some of the lyrics during most of the songs, I guess it was you right?
"Yeah that was me and that was the one where I
kind of pulled off, I knew the lyrics and I'll try to sing 'em' you know?!"Was it during that string of Texas shows that you had Jason Mc Master (WATCHTOWER / DANGEROUS TOYS singer) as guest bass player as it's written on the "Leave Scars" credits?
"Oh that's right yeah cos he came up and he's like 'Dude fuck...' cos he's my bro, he's like 'what's say' you know 'Jason why don't you come up and play 'Merciless Death' with us', he's like 'Cool yeah' cos he was always playing that riff cos he came to stay with me for a while when WATCHTOWER was doing some west coast shows (October '86 - Laurent), he stayed with me for a couple weeks after that... so he was always playing that riff all the time (doing the riff), I think he did that one, I'm pretty sure so yeah I go 'Yeah come on, play bass for us' so that was cool, something fun to do."
So Don did the two other remaining shows in Texas and also a show at Fenders in September 1987, and I think it was his last one, correct?
"Yeah that was his last show and it was going to be, like we all knew it, we knew it was gonna be his last show but we were giving him like one last chance if he shows up, pulls it off, does a great job then okay we'll carry on but if he doesn't like we know he's not gonna do that so we knew going into it that it's gonna be his last show because he wasn't showing to rehearsals and he's gonna have another shitty gig and sure enough he did so... that's like, it drives me nuts when people say 'Well I like Don Doty better' you know it's like 'Fuck you asshole! Fuck you, Don was an idiot. And fuck he didn't care, he didn't care about you, you know or if he would have showed up he would have become probably a pretty good frontman, a pretty good singer and a legend' but you know he didn't care then fuck you for caring."
Did you part ways with Don friendly despite all the shit you went through with him during the last months he was in the band? Also from mid September '87 to December '87 when Ron Rinehart (ex- MESSIAH) joined the band, did you try out lots of singers?
"Yeah it was friendly enough, it was like 'Don come on! You know this thing was happening, you don't care so won't you let us get on and you carry on and do your thing' and he's like 'Yeah you're right, cool' so it wasn't big tears or anything like that fuck... and we actually thought we had a guy lined up, he was the dude from the band WRATHCHILD AMERICA, they were in L.A. for a little while doing some stuff and they weren't doing anything, they weren't signed or anything and they've been there for a while so it was like 'That guy's got a pretty good voice and is he gonna do it?', 'Of course he's gonna do it!' and we approached him, it was like 'Fuck you're kidding me! I don't wanna sing in your band!', we're like 'Oh!' so we went in fact to the Metal Blade offices and William Howell from Metal Blade, he opened up the office and the demo reels, you know like the demo box, he's like 'have at it boys you know' and so we got that going, in fact we're even like... in our first choice instead of Jim Drabos was Phil (Rind) from SACRED REICH because we had done some shows with 'em and in fact we discovered SACRED REICH. Yeah because Gloria (Bujnowski), she ran a little club in Phoenix and her son Dana had seen us at the Troubadour - his dad had brought him up to L.A. a few months earlier and this kid was like 9 or 10 and happened to catch us at the Troubadour, we became his favorite band with his mom who ran a local club said "Son, what do you want for your birthday?", he's like 'I want you to bring DARK ANGEL to town' so we got a call from Gloria saying "My son saw you guys and he's 10 and he wants you guys to come and play for his birthday!", we were like 'Sure! On weekend cool', this band SACRED REICH opened for us and I was like 'Fuck these guys are cool! Man they're total SLAYER rip offs but they're cool, they've got some definite shit to 'em' so you know we got some demos and I took 'em to the Metal Blade office and said "Hey check this guys out, you might like 'em" and they did, they got that song 'Ignorance' on this Metal Blade compilation and then they got a deal and "Yeah go SACRED REICH!" so I thought pretty good about that. Those guys probably don't even know like to this day they probably don't cos it's not something I went 'Hey man I've got you guys signed' it's not like I ever brought that to 'em but you know... that's pretty damn funny. So yeah in the middle of all that, we went to all these demos and stuff, trying to find somebody and then my brain just popped open to this guy I had seen about a year earlier singing with this band called MESSIAH and I was like 'Fuck yeah I remember that guy. Shit my old girlfriend had taken me to see this band she was friends with or whatever, you know the band was pretty generic but the singer was pretty good! I was like 'Fuck man, what is that guy and what could he do with Thrash Metal singing?!' cos I remember loving the guy's voice, he looks cool, a big fuckin' burly guy, tattoos, long hair and... nobody had tattoos back then! You know GUNS 'N' ROSES had not came out yet so you know... so we were like 'Fuck' I got in touch with them, would he be interested in coming on down and he came down, checked out a rehearsal, he came back again like a few days later and we ended up doing the 'Immigrant Song' together, he's like 'I don't know any of your songs but do we...' we have been goofing on the 'Immigrant Song' and he was a ZEPPELIN fan so that's kind of why we recorded the 'Immigrant Song' on "Leave Scars", cos that was the first song we ever played together! And he did this ripping version and we're like 'Dude, you're in! You're fuckin' in dude' but we had to be cool like you know, we got to talk outside for a couple of minutes, it was like Ron inside the room, Ron was like dancing in circles going 'Yeahhhh!!!!', we came back in, it was like 'You want the job dude?', 'Yeah that would be cool! Yeah!' so that was cool, so that's how Ron got in the band but it took like six months. We rehearsed with this guy named Ice who had a really good voice but he wasn't much of a showman, he was a little short little dude and he sang for somebody else later on. He had a pretty manly voice, he was really into it, he was trying hard, we auditioned EVERYBODY and there was a guy named Strephan (Taylor) from the band SACRILEGE BC that we really wanted and I just think of relocation for everybody involved at the time wasn't happening... we couldn't pay anybody and it was like 'Okay you wanna move down to L.A. and... get a job down here then join our band' cos weren't making a lot of cash back then so..."
When you finally solved your singer problems, problems
started to appear with Combat, the way they were handling the bands in
particular and you re-negotiated your contract with them at that time, can you
give us details about that?"Well we re-negotiated before "Leave Scars" and... it wasn't like we were having problems but our new manager that we got who was a real motherfucker, he was a killer, he looked at our contract and said 'I won't manage you with this contract I'm going to take care of it' so he went in yelling and screaming and pissing everybody off at the label but he got the job done, but he was a weird dude... he re-negotiated it and we got a ton of money for "Leave..." and we put a ton of money into the record and it still sounded like shit. But unfortunately like when we recorded "Leave...", there was... like our producer at the time just... he was a guy that our manager found, Michael Monarch, and the reason our manager got him was I guess they were friends or whatever but this guy played guitar in STEPPENWOLF so yeah he knows how to get a heavy guitar sound! He's the guitarist on 'Born To Be Wild' and that's the very first H.M. song so he knows what he's doing and we're like 19 years old going "Okay" and you know like three or four days into the session when we have recorded all the drums, we're deep into the guitar tracks already, he's like turning to us 'Guys, obviously I really don't know what I'm doing here so I'll tell you what, I'm gonna sit in the corner, read the magazine, I'm letting you guys have at it, if you have any questions let me know' (laughs) so it's like 'Great, oh oh' so that's why "Leave...".. "Leave..." was killer music, the production was shitty, fuck and then "Leave Scars" killed us you know?! Combat sank so much money into the record, and the record looks great, all the ads look great, the band was working hard, we were out touring tons but it just can't polish a turd, it's just a shitty sounding record and we totally took the blame for it you know, it's like even the tones were okay, just the mix was terrible and the studio we were in was awful and we just didn't know what we were doing, it's like you know, turn five monkeys loose in the studio with 40.000$ and here's what you get you know?! So it came out like shit totally and so damn... if people ask you if you have any regrets: yes the production of "Leave...", things would have been a lot different all the way across the board ."
It seems you even got major label interest during that time, so do you think you made the best choice to go on with Combat instead of going elsewhere? But was it really possible for you to sign with another label when you had first signed for a seven albums deal?
"We did but the majors were like 'Don't worry about that, at the time you need independent. If we want you bad enough, we'll get you' you know and so I guess the majors didn't want us bad enough which is cool cos in fact Combat became really good around the "Leave..." era because they got Scott Givens working for them and Scott who eventually came to manage DARK ANGEL was great, he was a friend, he was the guy that I was penpals with and he's like 'Dude, I got my little tiny record label (Facemelt Records), I just signed AGGRESSION from Canada and I'm a big fan' and we ended up hooking up and he became my bro, total bro and he got a job with Combat and he ended up... you know now Scott Givens is a major pubah in the whole deal of everything, he worked for Roadrunner for ten years and did well... after we hooked with him, like he was our dude at Combat so he was the guy really doing all the work so he made so many cool things happening for DARK ANGEL that probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't him doing it so... We were happy with Combat for a little while but once like you know... we were happy with them for about a year and a half, two years and then the bottom fell out again so... and they probably never got over this gigantic contract they had... they were being basically extorted into and given us by our old manager, you know the motherfucker, fuck he was a bastard so we said to Combat 'No it's fine' until it wasn't so..."
The newer stuff showed a somewhat different musical approach since the majority of the tracks were slower, not as fast as the stuff on "Darkness...", why did you choose to go that way?
"Speed was never an issue, you know it's like, if this song should be fast so it shall be, if this song it shouldn't then... that's why we got 'Cauterization', 'Never To Rise Again', and 'The Promise Of Agony' and stuff like that which were fuckin' total blisters but you know, we had like five Thrash Metal tracks on there so, five of to nine so..."
This time, not only you had a big hand on the lyrics - even if you had new singer, but you also wrote some of the stuff and did play the instrumental 'Cauterization' except the lead on it that Jim did...
"No I think I did the lead too on that... or maybe, I don't know, god I can't remember. I remember I wrote that tune and we were never gonna play it live so the guys were like 'Dude if you want to just record that one, go ahead' so I was like 'Okay. Cool' and then for 'Leave...', the song itself, that was the last song written for the record, well that and 'Cauterization' - 'Leave...' was written about a week before we went into the studio - I thought nobody knew it as well as I did cos I wrote, like Jim wrote a big part of it then I wrote like the majority of that tune so it was like whoever knows the song best record it. And I remember we played it too fast and so in order for me to record... that's why the song 'Leave...' sounds like it was recorded on an AM radio, because this is back before you know we had like a computer program to do this for you but... I couldn't play it fast enough but I knew all the riffs so we had to slow the song down so I can play to it and then we pitched it, I had to play in a different key then we pitched it back up and it sounded like a tin can but at least the riffs were all on there so... that's why every song sounds so different on 'Leave...' man, what a tragedy! (laughs)"
Talking also about the lyrics, did you get lots of
controversy concerning 'The Death Of Innocence', I heard Combat didn't
want to print the lyrics to start with, they found some of them too graphic..."Yeah... it's just because people didn't get it, you know people didn't want to read like the actual meaning of the song, they just saw, okay well the guy in the song is a molester of children so therefore the guy who wrote the song is a molester of children and totally condones it and you know I'm saying the exact opposite and it's right there in the lyrics?! I'm an aberration, I deserve to die you know and the little thing I had to put at the bottom of it you know like 'leave the children alone' like... just some of the Christian groups, they saw the bat wings on the cover and the girl getting frightened in her bed and the first song on the thing is 'let's molest children' so this band is evil. You know it's like fuck, if only they knew like we were doing a service for the planet god damn it because that's got to be one thing I'm still like violently against is child molestation so like any sort of forced anything you know?! Rape or whatever so that was... we got some flak but overall they were more concerned with TWISTED SISTER at the time (laughs), evil... THE MENTORS were making quite a name for themselves around, El Duce he was condoning rape so... and there was some shit and Combat didn't want to print the lyrics at all but it all came out good at the end so..."
When Ron joined the band in late '87, how much of the new material was completed exactly? And did you have to re-write most of the stuff with Ron in mind?
"No... like a lot of the stuff I was like 'Cool' cos I wanted Don to step up and do some singing on this record, and some real singing not that like (singing the chorus of 'We Have Arrived') you know that sort of stuff. It was an easy transition, I had a guy who was willing to work and he was illiterate as a motherfucker so some of these ten dollar words that I was using his girlfriend - now his wife - would write them down phonetically for him and he'd come to practice with like just big pages of re-written lyrics but you know it was still the same lyrics just written in Ron's speak sort of thing cos he'd just got out of jail when we got him in the band so he was a hardcore criminal so that was that... and we had told him "Dude you've got plenty of time to learn everything, we're not gonna do any shows so...", we got him in the band in December of '87 and he ended up doing a show like in January, we had told him "We are not gonna do any shows, you've got three months to learn, we're gonna go in studio around May - oh yeah by the way we've got a show booked too" so he was like 'You bastards!', did the show, that was cool and he learned all the lyrics, it was just cool you know, he came to work totally. I think his voice is great, fuck what anybody else thinks man! He might sing off key, he might not be a classic vocalist but fuck he had so much character! And plus live he was a great frontman you know?! He just unplugged his brain and said whatever came to his mind, he was entertaining."
I understand that the song 'Angel Of Death' from ANGEL WITCH which should have appeared on "Leave Scars" as a cover but it didn't happen because of the SLAYER track...
"Yeah that's right! A fuckin' song title you know and we wanted to do it for "Darkness..." and we had tried to do like 'War Pigs' and fucked that up."
There was also 'Symptom Of The Universe' which had been tried...
"Yeah, yeah we noodled with that one too and then we didn't know what to do at the end so... we didn't know where to go with that one, we fucked up every cover we ever tried to do (laughs) but we wanted to do 'Angel...' for "Darkness..." too... you know what's kind of funny is that we had in fact actually done it for "Darkness..." maybe... I don't know, the other 'Angel Of...' had already came out anyway, they were recording at around the same time anyway so fuck whatever but that would have been cool, we would had two albums coming out at the same time, same title...That was a ripping song, I mean that's a fuckin' deadly tune so... somebody should do it damn it!"
What do you think this album lacked to make DARK ANGEL enter the "big five" (METALLICA, MEGADETH, SLAYER, TESTAMENT, ANTHRAX) because this album should have been the album that should have propelled DARK ANGEL in the big league!
"Well the production was awful and we couldn't get like... back then you really needed to have a good support slot with a cool band that's out there doing stuff and the big four wanted nothing to do with any of the other bands except for TESTAMENT, you know TESTAMENT in fact became the little five because they were pretty safe, they had catchy tunes, they weren't gonna destroy the headliner, DARK ANGEL would of! Because back then live we were a fuckin' force and you know we did a couple of shows with SLAYER and they were like 'We don't wanna play with you anymore, piss on you guys' and so it was like 'Fuck!', nobody would take us... METALLICA was already out of the loop, they were already huge, ANTHRAX, fuck who the hell were they... they were taking TESTAMENT on the road or something, you know the good safe opening band, OVERKILL was the other like opening band for a lot of those bands, they were gonna show up, play some Metal, play it well but not make you forget about the headliner you know?! METAL CHURCH, the same thing, good band, fuckin' getting up there playing some solid meat and potatoes Metal but you're not gonna come out and go "Oh my god METAL CHURCH destroyed SLAYER!" you know but fuck yeah DARK ANGEL we were out for everybody's throats, we were going for everybody's blood like there's no band that can step up and play a live show like we do, we were fuckin' insane live you know?! Way too fast, way too crazy, no rules, just fuckin' kicking ass and smiling as we did it so..."
So more than two years after "Darkness..", "Leave Scars" was issued in January '89, but before you had already played at the famous Ultimate Revenge Festival in Philadelphia, any memories of that fest?
"Well that was my very first show with my new bass
pedals, they were five years old at the time and I still use them so I haven't
changed that... they were the same one so the bass pedals that I've used on
pretty much everything are about 20 years old! Very antiquated and old but
they've got the job done! Any other memories, well like FORBIDDEN EVIL, that was
really cool cos they became our pals after that, Craig (Locicero) from FORBIDDEN EVIL,
he's my brother now so like it started a long friendship with those guys and I
think what I remember about that day a lot is... like I used to worship RAVEN, I
used to love 'em and me being a young stupid punk like... nobody got soundchecks
except for RAVEN cos they were kind
of headlining that and it turned out not to be RAVEN's fault, I just thought
they were poking along being rock stars but there were problems with the board
all day which I did not find out until way later and so I went on record and
said "RAVEN sucked! Fuck 'em! Bunch of rock stars" and there's... I
think it was like in Metal Hammer or something like that and John Gallagher
wrote a letter to reply to some of my tirades and he's like 'Young Gene, let me
tell you a few things about that day, let me point out some things and this is
in all truth' and he was basically saying it wasn't their fault and I was like
'God, what an idiot I am! Of course it wasn't their fault' so I did get to meet
'em a few years later and it was like, everything was cool, I explained to all
the band, I'm sorry, I was just being an asshole so I remember that about that
day and... seeing DEATH play, that was cool."Were you happy with the video / LP soundtrack that they released later? Do you think it represented real well DARK ANGEL despite the guitar sound problems during 'No One Answers'?
"Yeah, no we were terrible like we didn't have a good sound live, we never sounded good live, we were awful, we were really terrible so like live we were like I said we were hoarse we were loud, we were just ugly you know and you can bang all your heads off but we just never sounded good at that time..."
Because after you finally got the right clear live sound for the first European tour - thanks to Big Mick "Big Mick" Hughes who had previously worked with METALLICA...
"In fact we got Mick for the U.S. tour so that was cool, made it well but a lot of it was our own sound like... it's hard to say this but like a lot of times you can be a great guitarist and a great songwriter or a great riff master or whatever but your own sound isn't that good, your tone-like me, I am one of these like I can play guitar like a motherfucker, I can rip off, I can play guitar like a bastard, my guitar tone sucks like you can tell on the songs that I record the ones that I record because I don't play guitar like a guitarist - there's something about my tone that is awful but I can write riffs like a champion and at the time you know, there was certain elements to the band that they can write riffs like a motherfucker but boy they can never get their sound together so... I think that's got a lot to do with it but... and the fact that we used to play like fuckin' mach ten speed like how can you be tight you know, I've learnt over the years that, now I'm like cut back the tempo a little bit it's still fast and the guitarist can keep up with the tempo you know like don't kill yourselves so... and guitar playing has come along so much in the past like ten years like, I've got to talk with one of the Century Media guys, I was talking with Leif (Jensen) today about like how the '80s were... you know songs are really fast but the guitarists were really sloppy and that's why the Thrash of like the late '90s or whatever, a lot of the kids grew up playing along to those old Thrash classics, they've got their shit together, lots of these guitarists are tight solid bitching so that's just back to the old thing, there were no rules back then so..."
Do you remember that review that Borivoj Krgin did in Metal Forces for this particular show and Jim had to reply to it?
"Yeah and I in fact thought Jim was like... being silly you know?! It's like I didn't know Jim was doing that and I wouldn't have told him not to do it if he felt strongly about it but when Jim took an ass ripping after that, I was like 'Dude you're going up against Borivoj!' you know like 'What do you expect man?! He's gonna rip you a new ass all day long and you got no comeback Jim so-big deal... so somebody criticized your live sound, ooopps badadoum' you know it's like there was no reason to like fuckin' fire off a letter... Jim got what he deserved I tell you."
Then mid April '89 the Ultimate Revenge U.S. tour was organized as a co headline thing between DARK ANGEL and DEATH...
"Ha that is a mistake, it was never a co-headlining, it was equal billing and that is the thing that is different like I had to learn it on that tour because we went through a lot of problems with DEATH over that co-headlining as opposed to equal billing. Co-headlining is when you get paid the same, you get like the same set time, you get all that sort of stuff, equal billing is more of a - at least at the time it was like if one band name is gonna be one size in the ad, the other band name is gonna be the other size or the same size in the add it has nothing to do with the actual show so... just to clarify that but that's started the whole mess of a mess."
Jim left the band early on in Boston because of family problems and the rest of the tour was done with Brett Eriksen (VIKING) as a replacement, tell us what happened at that point because DARK ANGEL seemed to have more support than ever, first with that "big" tour and then you were scheduled to go on your first European tour...
"Yeah and then like when it came to Jim the wheels
fell off and man that was a confusing time! It's like... fuck, here we were in
Boston and like when Jim disappeared, we didn't know he had disappeared like we
were looking in dumpsters around the club for the guy because we had some
skinhead problems that night, Boston is a well known skinhead problem town - and
we were thinking, maybe Jim stepped out to get a bite to eat or something, saw
some of the skinheads that we had been getting problems at the show and Jim
won't back down from a fight with
anybody so but you know... Jim one on one or one on two or one on three, he can
take them you know, he can hold his own but one on six, one on eight, ten you
know so... we could not find him after the show, we were looking all over the
place after that show, looking in
dumpsters, looking in the alleys, looking out all over the place and then my
drum tech Steve came up, he's like 'Bing!' a light bulb went off over his head, he was like 'Dude let's
check to see if his guitar is here, let's check where is his bag' and sure
enough his guitar is gone, his bags are gone and then we were like 'Oh fuck, he
fuckin' left out on us!' you know?! So we tracked his progress like we called
every train station, every plane, every airport trying to find out you know, did
he leave from Boston, did he... obviously he went home, we assumed he was
having fuckin' problems and we were able to... I think he took a bus to New York
City, we would call all the bus places and like the bus for NYC just left ten
minutes ago, and where's it gonna stop you know, this place, by the time we
would get ahold of that place it was like 'Oh it was here, it just left' and we
tracked his whereabouts all the way home in fact and got in touch with him the
next day and I was like 'Dude come back. Doesn't matter what your problems are
at home, just come back', he's like 'Yeah - I know what my problems are at home,
I'm not coming', I'm like 'Dude, fuck!', we had to go through so much shit to
get him back, I bought him a ticket to come back and he had some crazy demands,
lots of fucked up demands for him to come back, involving his family back home
like certain members of his family had to come with him on the road so it was
like 'Okay fine. Fine! I can't afford to pay two tickets to NYC but we got the
biggest show in the world tomorrow, the biggest show of our career tomorrow so
we got to get you here' and we bought him a ticket and... he didn't show up! And
that's really when all the problems started like, yeah I was mad with Jim for
like another year after that but we fuckin' settled those differences but like
Eric never forgot it you know?! Eric was like 'Fuck he left us fuckin' high and
dry' like when the things were going good, he had to fuckin' put the brakes to
everything so I guess that's when the problems that we started now started like
'many years ago' so... whatever."What was that huge show you had to play?
"It was a show in Brooklyn at a place called L'Amours, we ended up playing as a four piece but we sounded good! We were the tightest we had ever been because you know it's like... I love Jim to death, I fuckin' love Jim but you know like... when you're playing with one guitarist as opposed to two, things are gonna sound tighter, you got one guitar not two piles of buzzing bees, buzzing around each other."
Did you recruit Brett because you were a close friend of VIKING? If I'm correct Brett wasn't supposed to be a full time member at first so why did that fact change at the end?
"Because we weren't sure what was gonna happen and in fact VIKING crumbled under breath while we were doing that tour like he came out and... like when he got back home, like he came and did the next two months with us and by the time we got home, he didn't have a band to go to so we're like 'Of course Brett, fuck you've got a home here' and Brett was great, a great songwriter man, I dug his songwriting, I think he shine on "Time Does Not Heal", I think "Time..." was great because of Brett you know?! To me I'm a pretty average riff writer but I've got those riffs that will come support the great riffs that the real guitarist writes and so Brett and I became a songwriting team after that, it was all cool after that but... yeah you know everything crumbled underneath that so that's why Brett joined us permanently."
Even if the problems that happened between DARK ANGEL and DEATH during that tour are buried in the past, what really happened between DEATH and DARK ANGEL during that tour, which finally ended up with DEATH leaving the tour in Florida after several disputes? It seems it had more to do with managers problems than with the members themselves?
"Yeah that's what...where I had to learn, co headline, equal billing you know cos the contract stated DARK ANGEL 100% headliner, DEATH 100% support act so somebody didn't get the contracts, on some end of the line there you know, somebody didn't read their contracts but at the end of the day, look at the funniest thing out of all that could have happened, I joined DEATH you know?! (laughs) And Chuck went on to become the Metal God after that so all the stars ended up aligning over it, it was all cool at the end of the day but Chuck and I definitely had a few giggles when we were putting "Individual Thought Patterns" there as DEATH together just like 'Dude people are gonna be like 'What?! What?!'... totally' it was all water under the bridge sure enough, misunderstandings and... Chuck is a fighter, he's a fighter, he would stand tall for what he believes in, he was led to believe and that's what he should believe in, his management at the time who he ended up not getting along with them after that tour... led to believe in a few things that in reality... that wasn't the case, it's hard to say, hard to admit but you know, fuck! That wasn't right so... water under the bridge totally."
Was the full tour (that you finished even if DEATH left the bill) a success for the band?
"Yeah totally! Yeah that was a good one, like all shows were really well attended and people seemed to dig it... and at the time I thought "Leave..." was great! You know that's what you do and that's your second album like 'Oh fuckin' great this fuckin' album' , only in time did I realized " Waouh this record is really stinky!' you know so it did well, I believe we tooled around Billboard there for a little while, stuff like that, now that was pretty exciting for us 'Hey we're number 169 on Billboard, yeah!', I think we ended up getting 124 or something like that 'Hey we're the top 125 records of the nation yeah!' so that was all good... and yeah that was a successful tour, it was good and we became a pretty tight knit band after that cos that was a total clusterfuck for DARK ANGEL, I mean... when we reminisce, when all the guys get together, all the guys in the crew and all of that from that tour man it's like, all the road stories from that tour were just fuckin' hilarious, Jesus! So good time."
Then in October '89 you finally came to Europe for the very first time, why did it take so long for you to come over since bands like POSSESSED and others had already managed to come over a while earlier?
"Good question, yeah I was wondering the same
thing, it's like 'God damn, it's 1989 and we've been putting out records for the past four years now it's our
first time over' so... I really never had answer for that but hell at least we
were there then. But it was all those other things we've already talked about,
probably had something to do with it, you know like 'Fuck we have to find a new
singer' that takes a few months, we got this other singer that's been a fuckin'
idiot and we can't really book anything because our singer has been an idiot,
and the record label is like... I'm sure the record label would have said 'Yeah
cool!' but we're having other problems with
them, renegociate this contract you know and another good question, why
did it take two years between every single DARK ANGEL record to come out you know?!
Nowadays that's not really all that rare but back then, it was like god damnit
you put out a record a year."Even if you opened for NUCLEAR ASSAULT (with ACID REIGN as guests), was it a total success for the band? What kind of memories do you have from that tour?
"Ha great ones! Yeah it was a great success because it's like, we got to play in front of packed houses every night cos NUCLEAR ASSAULT were on the top of the game back then, fully and everywhere we played there was always a ton of people and sold a whole lot of merchandise, have a whole lot of filthy road stories to bring back home to the boys and stuff like that... and then Gon (Mike Gonzales) got thrown in prison (laughs) and that was a great road story, it was like... if you sit around with three other bands and you know 'What's the hardest thing that happened to you? Well this thing' 'Oh you guys that thing' and 'Well our bassist went to jail for a week!'."
What happened to Mike exactly because he was in jail in Germany and Dan Lilker had to fill in as bass player for the last three dates or so?
"No I think that was seven dates or something like that, but fuck it was something crazy! It was some stupid shit, all the guys from the entire tour went out to this Thrash Metal club in Bavaria - I guess Bavaria is a pretty hardcore place, you don't fuck around in Bavaria - so we were in Nurenberg... like at the end of the night a bunch of the guys came out and there were all these cars that were just parked, just parked back to front, nuts to bust and so somebody got the idea 'let's start in one line and run all the way across all the cars, you know just one after another you know because you could and some of the guys in NUCLEAR ASSAULT did it, some of the guys from ACID REIGN did it and some of the guys in DARK ANGEL were in fact involved but Gon was not and that ended up... you know all car alarms are going off everywhere, the cops got called and at the time in DARK ANGEL we all had these denim vests with the same backpatch on the back and somebody grabbed Gon inside a Burger King, he was sitting down, having a bite to eat at the end of the night and someone comes in and says "That's the guy!" and got pulled out by the cops, thrown in jail, this and that and the other and all the people that were in fact involved in the fracas or whatever, they came forward, you know, he's innocent , he wasn't involved, we were cos like when I found out what was going on, I was like 'Fuck you! Get my fuckin' bassist out of jail!', I was like 'Damn, Eric you're involved, GREAT' but I was like 'Eric step up man! He's in fuckin' jail for something he did not do so fuckin' step up and fuckin' take the shit for it', Eric is like 'You're right' so... but it didn't matter like the German cops were like 'We got our guy , we got the guy, that's the guy so fuck it' so it ended up costing us 50.000 DM to get him out and at the time that was like 31.000$ so..."
A while after, a video was released called "Three Ways to Thrash" featuring all the bands from that tour recorded live at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, what do you think of that product? Did you have any word to say about this release?
"I liked that better than I did with "The Ultimate Revenge". It looked better, it sounded better, we were a little tighter, at the "Ultimate Revenge", that was Ron's third show with us ever and that was our first show in like eight months and in the "Three Ways..." we'd been on the road for the past six months straight or something crazy like that so... so I do like that one... but we were a terrible sounding live unit, I fully admit that."
Then a month after you went on a U.S. major tour as support for OVERKILL in mid '90 and you did a small tour on the east coast, how were those tours?
"They were cool. The OVERKILL tour, that was one where we were using Mick (Hughes) in fact... that was the first one we used him and yeah it was all good, we got to play in front of a whole bunch of folks then, I think like OVERKILL were on their strongest album ever I thought! You know, was it "Years Of Decay"? Oh that was a killer record! And Terry Date produced it and that's in fact where the first time we got the idea of 'we've got to improve upon "Leave...", "Leave..." fuckin' sucks' by then we were like 'Well yeah we can't make the same mistake twice' so... and "Years Of..." was Terry Date and we're like 'Hey this album sounds pretty good!' and he was in the studio at that time doing this band called PANTERA, it was like I knew PANTERA from like the "Metal Magic" days so I was like 'They got him to do that, they must be going in a crazy direction' and "Cowboys From Hell" came out a few months later but... so he was doing that at that time so we talked to OVERKILL and said "How can we get in touch with him?", they're like 'Here's his number' so that's the best thing that happened about that OVERKILL tour. There's lots of road stories of course, that would take a Penthouse or a Hustler to tell those stories."
Let's talk about "Live Scars", why did you decide to release a live EP exactly? Was it the same live session that you had recorded for Westwood Radio during mid '89? Were you happy with the final result and do you think it represented really well how DARK ANGEL was sounding live?
"It was the same recording. Westwood One was gonna put it out on a radio thing and for some reason they said 'Okay we're not gonna so here's your tapes back' and... King Biscuit Flower hour, DARK ANGEL, yeah wicked! That would have been awesome. So they gave us the tapes back and we're like 'Well, it's gonna take another few months to get the fuckin' record out' so we'd put it out merely as like for the fans only sort of thing you know?! As soon as we were done with the show, the album was complete, it was mixed on the fly by some boneheads and they had no ideas of what they were doing but... yet another in the long line of crappy DARK ANGEL products so... and we put it out like that was totally for the fans, like if you are a fuckin' DARK ANGEL freak, here's something for you to kill some time before the next record, so that's all that was."
So once you finished all that touring, you started to work on a new album, "Time Does Not Heal", how much input Brett had on the material? What major changes did you find between his style and Jim's style?
"Brett had a huge influence and Brett could write some great heavy but really catchy riffs and at the time like when Jim was working on like the next DARK ANGEL record man, I gotta tell you, I wasn't really happy where Jim was going with his riffs. They just weren't catching me, they weren't grabbing me and when Brett came out, he came out and he had done this little demo, a little 4 track of a new tune that he was working on which became 'The Act Of Contrition' and that's such a mighty song, you know like I was like 'Fuck dude, you're welcome to stay in this band if you want! Let's have that song' you know?! 'Act Of...' is a fuckin' great song like the riffs and stuff were just sick so and he had this little demo of that and that's where Brett was going with, that's where he was with his songwriting, I was like 'Fuck! Deadly!' so Brett could write great killer catchy riffs that were very memorable you know like a lot of the riffs song "Time Does..." are in fact one that you can hum to it more than you could with some of the "Leave..." stuff and definitely were better than what Jim was coming up with at the time."
You're gonna be surprised now because I think that album didn't have the exciting / insane catchy riffing plus the material was a lot slower than what could be found on the previous releases even if the press praised it, looking back don't you think that this album was maybe something like too huge a departure from the older material?
"Well that was kind of the... like let's evolve
and Jim was not gonna come back in the band, now we were not gonna have Jim,
he didn't want to come back and believe me, some of what he wrote at the time like he had one cool song that he
brought to the table and he had about four or five others like works in
progress, I was like 'Damn!' you know?! Like I really liked this one song - it
ended up turning up on one of the DREAMS OF DAMNATION records - but it was like
'Hum I'm not getting you. Jim I'm not getting where you're going' so I was happy
to have Brett in and I think "Time..." fuckin' rips! That was like...
like I said an evolution in progress, it's a cool sounding record and... there
are faults with it of course but fuck I was really happy with it and it's like
'man this band does want to carry on in like ways that people don't even know.
The struggles that this band has to go through to carry on, we're gonna carry
on' so if anybody has any bitches about any of the DARK ANGEL stuff like '
"Time..." is fuckin' wimpy' or whatever or it's a departure, it's like
"Sorry buddy, we were carrying on, we're evolving', nobody gave VOIVOD shit
for "Angel Rat" or "Nothing Face", even "Dimension
Hatross" which did not sound like VOIVOD or "Rrroaaarrr"... like
bands are gonna evolve you know?! KREATOR for "Renewal" took a ton of
flack for it, why? Because they are eight years on the road and started like
branching out and let some of their other influences flow, you know that's what
a band is gonna do over the course of eight years so... here you go." (well
sorry Gene but I give shit to VOIVOD for going the way they did after "War
And Pain", to KREATOR after "Pleasure To Kill", to DESTRUCTION
after "Eternal..." and more recently to SLAYER after
"Undisputed...", that progression thing is just not understandable to
people who really enjoy the bands for what they were about at first, look at
bands like MORBID ANGEL, NAPALM DEATH (minus a couple of albums where they went
out of the road but understood their mistake) or SACRIFICE, they always stayed
true to their original approach or sound. Better change your name if you plan to
deliver stuff that doesn't have the sheer ripping class that you first
delivered, that's no problem but other than that don't deliver to us that type
of different sounding stuff which is most of the time plain boring / weak -
Laurent)Was it easy to work with Terry Date?
"Totally! Yeah Terry is a fuckin' king man! He's a great producer, he's an awesome guy and he was really cool to us, I had a really good time with that guy."
That album featured more of your lyrics, some dealing with sexual torture, rape and stuff, why did you choose to write about those subjects? Did you have problems with the label or other people concerning those lyrics?
"Not too much but like for instance we had a song
'An Ancient Inherited Shame' and that song was written about rape from
the woman's standpoint and, you know I thought it was gonna catch lots of shit
from woman about that like 'How dare you write about something I had to go
through?' and stuff but I got so many letters and stuff like that, the label got
so many like letters to us and stuff saying like 'Waouh! How did you know? How
did you capture that?' you know, I can pull myself into the mind of somebody who
was tortured pretty easily so... and it just carried on the scenes of like 'The Death Of Innocence', maybe like
'The Promise Of Agony'
or whatever, we just took it to another level and at the end of that
"Leave..." tour, I started to
go a little bit nutty cos we spent six - eight months on the road and I was going
a little bit loopy so I had to get away from everything so I went to NYC, I was
like 'I'm gonna write lyrics and I know what I want my themes to be about and
I've wrote lyrics all over the road. You know I've been writing like little
pieces of it, that's why I put down like 'Where I have finished' or 'Places I
had written the lyrics in?' you know, just like sitting in a hotel room or in
the back of the bus or whatever that was, at the end of each song I put down the
final date I've finished the lyrics on and some of the cities I'd written the
lyrics in so I moved out to NY for about six months and inhabited
all the filth districts, you know, I
was going through a phase so... and also there's an author named, Andrew Vachss
who has been a big influence on me, he's an author, himself he's a lawyer who
deals with like sexual abused children and he's got a series of books like he's
got 18 books out on pretty much that same subject, the main character in his
books goes insane when it comes to child torture or stuff like that, I
identified with the guy, so he was a big influence on my writing so every single
record I always thank Andrew Vachss and his novels."Which lyrics are you the most proud of in your career? Do you think people really paid attention to the quality of your writing during all these years?
"No people never pay attention to lyrics like lyrics are not important to people so... And as I would write and like if you'd ever read interviews and stuff for they say 'Looks like he put a lot of time in his lyrics, do you think people care?', I go like 'No! Please don't!', people don't care about lyrics, they want catchy hooks or riffs or... some songs just to be agro or fast or catchy or whatever so I would write lyrics for the 2% of people that in fact cared so with that in mind I guess, like 'The Death...' and 'An Ancient...' were the most... like I put my balls on the line with these lyrics so... I'm gonna take some shit for these but these are the couple of themes that I care a lot about you know?! 'Psychosexuality' that was another one it's like 'Fuck!' I'm gonna talk about some of the things that people don't talk about, 'Time Does...', I'm talking about some of the things that happen to children that people don't like talking about, that talked about how your parents can fuck you up, it's not from a personal standpoint you know because my parents were great but... I can identify those who are tortured so... Nowadays that's the big thing to write about, 'Mommy and Daddy just hated me and I'm so sad' stuff like that so I'm like 'Dude those are DARK ANGEL lyrics man!', KORN? Fuck! What did you grow up listening to cos Jesus, you quoted the old DARK ANGEL stuff for that shit."
Concerning the lyrics, I always wondered how Ron managed to deal with those hella long texts, did he have problems sometimes remembering some of the lines or...?
"Ron he would just always happen to have the shit written in front of him when he was singing and he would just bitch at me all the time like 'Dude can you write a fuckin' short song?!' but Ron was like you know he had his wife like I said, like that's why the lyrics started getting simpler, the texts were so long but the words themselves were getting simpler because Ron was just killing himself... you know like 'Macramation' why should it appear in a song like he goes 'Fuck!' , but I was always an English major, just like I was a young man with a big vocabulary so... like always in the gifted classes and always at the top of my school cos school was so easy, like I started to go in high school when I was in fourth grade which you're nine, you know I started going to high school when I was nine so... shit like that... like if somebody is gonna do something with their brain, here's the chance to do it sort of thing so... here we go."
Brett did the majority of the rhythms on this album, how did that happen that it was him and not Eric?
"Because Eric could not play guitar that well. And Eric didn't learn the... it was hard for Eric to learn riffs, Brett he could play a riff he knew it, boom right then and there you know?! And some of the technical riffs, Eric would be like a little off on the count, he would be faster and stuff like that so... that was kind of the thing you know when he got a riff down, he's a motherfucker with it but like learning them was like 'Dude you gotta play it right, this is recording. Whatever we do live you're gonna do live, do it but we gotta record this thing correctly anyway' so that's it's like on 'An Ancient...' and 'Trauma Catharsis', I played all the rhythm guitars on them so there you go because they're pretty technical songs, I knew we're probably not gonna play any of those live ever so... and that's where I was saying, it's like 'I've a pretty terrible guitar tone' like you listen to those two songs, you listen to like 'Time Does...', 'Pain's Invention Madness', 'Act Of Contrition' big mighty sounding fuckin' guitar stuff! But 'An Ancient...' is just awful sounding, so was 'Trauma...' in fact?!"
During that period, you did some backing vocals and a
lead on a DANGEROUS TOYS album..."In fact I never did!"
Oh shit I read that in an interview with you in Metal Forces!
"Okay! When I saw that question (from this very interview), I was like 'Man, did I?!', and you said I played a lead on a DANGEROUS TOYS album, I don't remember doing that but then again there's alot of stuff I don't remember, that could have been one of 'em but I don't remember ever doing anything for DANGEROUS TOYS but... you know I was totally... like I said Jason was my pal so maybe I did!'
Then in mid '91 you did your first European tour as headliners, what kind of response did you get from the fans concerning the mix of the new and the old stuff?
"Some said they didn't like the newer stuff and other people were like 'Fuck! Your new album is the best ever' you know?! It's all a matter of opinion so you can't please everybody and especially when you go through a main line up changes and as many songwriter changes, we'll probably talk about this later bbut when we got Chris (McCarty) we went through a songwriting change again which got back to really heavy Death Metal shit so you know, what can you do? It's like... the only thing that is gonna kill this band is apathy from the band members like at that time there was like '91, I remember... like fuck, the album was getting soaring reviews from the reviewers and the fans were just kinda going 'Damn I wish it was "Darkness..." ' you know so... you can't please everybody, you gotta be in a band to please yourself and that's definitely what I was doing. I was happy with everything that DARK ANGEL released that was coming out out so... and I was really happy with "Time Does...", if you didn't like it sorry buddy you know?! Fuck you're gonna like it in ten years sure enough like a lot of folks... I remember when I was on tour in the "Individual Thought Patterns" days, "Darkness..." was the album like 'Oh my god "Darkness...", holy shit! Fuck this and that' and then I remember in "Symbolic", I never heard anything about "Darkness..." from the fans, it was all "Time..." so go figure, fans are pretty damn fickle. Like they're gonna be there for you until they feel like you're not so..."
So what happened with Brett Eriksen after that tour, why did he leave the band? Did he want to have his own thing going like maybe get back together with VIKING?
"No I think VIKING was pretty much dead dead dead by then but Brett was just like... I don't really know why he left, Brett was my good friend and he was just like 'Dude I don't wanna do the music anymore. I want to go in a different direction' and he started like doing some techno stuff after that. Hell like in 1996 Brett and I moved in together, five years down the road so... whatever, he just wasn't into it anymore, maybe has a girlfriend or something that, maybe he said he wanted to spend more time with his girlfriend but... he just didn't want to do it anymore which was kind of sad because I thought Brett was killer!"
He was replaced by Cris McCarthy from SILENT SCREAM, did it have something to do with the fact that it was your first attempt as producer for their first album?
"Well Cris was there and he was like 'Dude, once
we need a replacement, do you mind if I gave it a shot?', I was like "Are
you into this?' cos he's kind of a Death Metal guy but Cris and I went to high
school together and stuff and he's like 'Yeah fuck!' you know?! And I loved a
lot of the stuff he was doing in SILENT SCREAM like he went from a not too Metal
guy to an extremely Metal guy that
was quality so I was like 'Man do you want to jump on over here? Fuck we're not
really that far apart musically speaking', he's like 'You're right' so... and he
can write some technical riffs that I was really into it so the next record
"Atrocity Exhibition" that never got released, man we were writing
some stormer songs you know? I got really tired of doing eight - nine minute
songs there so we had a bunch of like three minute blasters that were just like
killer! I was still writing and... me, every riff I ever wrote, I threw in. I
never like edited anything so I needed a writing partner to go "Come on!
That riff sucked, come on!' and so every riff I would write I would chuck it
right on in so here we go, that's why there's eight and nine minute DARK ANGEL songs?! Probably half of the riffs were good, the other half were just fuckin'
sucky but... and so, Chris had a great attitude and I'm very fortunate to have
three great writing partners in DARK ANGEL. It's just a shame none of the Chris stuff
was ever able to come out."How strong was his position in the band?
"The band was pretty nebulous at the time so he's like 'Dude I'm along for the ride if we're gonna make this record, let's make it' so...it wasn't really a positional stronghold or anything like that, it was just like 'Chris, let's see if you and me write this killer record' and we were in the process of doing it when you know, all the wheels fell off so... the next record would have pleased a whole lot of people again you know?!"
How would the next album have sounded exactly from what was written?
"Well, it was definitely a new era of brutal Metal, lots of speedy stuff, lots of technical stuff, lots of crazy playing, it's got crazy vocals on it and Ron was like... I wrote the lyrics and the vocals cos I wrote all the vocal lines for "Time..." so people that have problems with it, talk to me, don't yell at Ron! I wrote 'em all, I was a big CANDLEMASS fan so lots of Messiah Marcolin vocal lines but... Ron at the time was like 'Dude I'll tell you man, I thank you for "Time...", I got to sing my ass off on it but I got that out of my system man, I feel pretty agro right now, what do you feel?', I'm 'Same way. Fuck just scream the vocal lines, just yell 'em', lots of old... like catchy bits here and there, catchy chorus here and there but lots was just screamed in your fuckin' bag off, screaming for the pain of it you know so... and that's what the next record was gonna be about, and that was gonna be even more twisted lyrical ideas and stuff like that so.. that was psychotic lyrics on that one man, I finally started to get them down at the time."
By early '92 you were touring again with DEMOLITION HAMMER as openers, it was Chris' first touring experience just like it had been the case three years earlier for Brett, how did those guys handle that side of things and how did that new tour go?
"Well that was definitely when DARK ANGEL and all of Thrash Metal - classic Thrash Metal - was taking a backdoor to Death Metal, you had CANNIBAL CORPSE, MORBID ANGEL, DEICIDE all these raping the scene and taking it to a new level so... and lots of the classic Thrash sort of sounds were bombing and... so that was a Johan tour which Johan is known for the small cheap tours, played lots of small places, had some good crowds, there was some shitty crowds and a lot of people just didn't care. That's why like 'So many people are so into DARK ANGEL a long time ago, DARK ANGEL fuck reformed, play the Wacken and...' I'm like 'Fuck you man! Where were you in '92?!' you know?! 'I'm from Freiburg, Germany', it's like 'Where were you man? There was ten people to the Freiburg show! You were not one of 'em' so...People are fickle when they want to tell you whatever they want to tell you so..."
How did you manage to have the chance to do two headlining tours in such a short period of time? Does that mean Under One Flag did a good job, way better than what Combat / Relativity did?
"Well Under One Flag was very very into the album,
I remember them telling us like 'We are gonna kill ourselves to break you cos
this album is...' they were totally behind "Time..." and like I said,
that's why you can't really pay attention to the reviewers because all the
reviews were like five K's in Kerrang, 10 out of 10
and 95 out of 100, stuff like that but the album still sucked and bombed
so... but Under One Flag, did they ever were like 'Fuck, we'll throw some money at it
and see what goes on', I don't think they really supported that last... like the
Chris tour too much, I think by then, it was like... whatever, we pretty much
funded it ourselves, got a little bit of tour support but you know didn't make a
lot of cash on it... that's okay you know?! Fuck it was a European tour
yeah!"Getting back with label problems, what happened with Relativity / Combat exactly? Did you get dropped just like FORBIDDEN or CYCLONE TEMPLE?
"We worked so hard to get out of the contract, they were like 'Man we're so into you for so much money and we're gonna fuckin' keep you guys' and it took us ten months to get out of the contract but you know... we finally did! It took us a while man, lots of negotiations and lots of dumb shit and at the end if they say they dropped us, cool! You know whatever, just get us out of there cos they weren't gonna do a damn thing for us because like I said Death Metal is the new thing and for Relativity Rap is their new thing, so Metal was gonna just take backseat number ten sort of thing you know?!"
What about the States - did you do any touring for this album there except in Hawaii?
"Not enough! That was kind of the thing that broke the camels back you know, to have a 65 date tour where like we were packed and ready to leave and then Combat pulled the plug on it so that was like 'Okay, that's the final stuff, fuck you!' like 'We hate you, why do you want to keep us? Why are you gonna make us sit out of this contract and give you shitty records? I'll give you another four records right, another five albums right now! Five albums with the bullshit material to get out of this and release 'em every two months if you want!' but it took a while to get out of the contract, took about ten months like I said and finally we were out, we were like 'Yeah! Move!' you know... big weight lifted off our chests so..."
From what you said two years later in a DEATH newsletter, you expected to be able to release that unreleased material with Chris one day because it seems a full album was completed, so what is the news concerning that, can we still hope to see that released especially now with DARK ANGEL being back?
"Well... like the songs were completed but we never recorded that so you know I have 'em on a 4 track demo sort of thing and it sounds pretty rough but..."
Any chance to release that one day?
"Oh no! No. Because it sounds like a 4 track with no vocals and no bass... in fact the vocals are mine on 'em. I'm laying down the vocal tracks cos that's what I did on those, every single DARK ANGEL song that I wrote, there's a track of me singing on it really."
What happened from that point, did you disintegrate following the label bullshit? Did you get label offers after Relativity dropped you?
"Well we started working on... we were gonna do a demo and start shopping that and right around that time which was like the summer of '92... on September 5th 1992, Ron came in and quit the band! He was like 'Dude, yes I'm fuckin' quitting, this I'm not just bullshiting, thought about this for too long', quit and so... that was that and so it was like 'Okay we can take another six / eight trying to find another vocalist and right now it's like, morale was high in fact but when Ron quit it was like 'Damn!' you know like that just took all the wind right out of the sails' so it was like 'Fuck!' so I told the band 'Man if you guys want to carry on with another drummer, feel free but I think I'm going to step off now too. I just don't feel like I can do this eight month vocal search again' so... you know having a third vocalist for DARK ANGEL with the last one was such a travesty to most people you know... like fuck man, nobody got Ron and I was mad at DARK ANGEL fans or people who were interested or not interested in the band because Ron was killer and fuck if you didn't think so! After all that Don Doty bullshit I was telling you earlier, it was like 'Fuck' ."
It was over..
What was your initial reaction when you saw that poor DARK ANGEL compilation "Decade Of Chaos" that Relativity released at the time (a similar treatment was given to EXODUS, FORBIDDEN, POSSESSED...)
"Yeah, it was like 'Waouh! Talk about just cashing in at the last minute' you know?! I didn't okay any other songs, the band didn't okay any of the songs, there's a few songs on that I would not put on and there's a few songs that I would have put on! Just whatever, you know the packaging was all the exact same for all the bands, it's like 'Fuck'.... do you think putting those out as like a mass like a box set or something at the time or was it like just 'Oh we're just gonna release a bunch of records!' you know?! If they had put it out as a boxset like 'Here's some of the stuff from some of the bands that were on the label and here's the big old box set of it' ... and you know it's gonna be so high priced that you'd better be into this stuff to buy it! Nobody was into it and at the time nobody would buy it so... it was just one last cash grab, it was just kind of sad really."
From all the DARK ANGEL albums you have appeared on and which one are you the most proud of and why?
"Hmm I'm proud of "Darkness..." because it was my first record and it was such a legendary album and it seems to have become a legendary album and I'm proud of "Time..." because of the work that went into it, love and the fuckin' pain and the heart that went into that album you know?! Like talk about a motherfucker baring his soul for you, the average Thrash band who's gonna give a shit about anything other than breaking up their rusty knife or jumping into the pit or you know I'll mutilate something down here that is a monument of a person's pain and you're gonna feel it. And... I don't care man, that album influenced tons of bands and DARK ANGEL I will fully admit influenced tons of bands, in so many ways so I'm proud of all DARK ANGEL, I'm proud of DARK ANGEL you know?! Doesn't mean I really want to see it resurrected you know but fuck you have to bow to the pressure some day."
Have you stayed in touch with the other
DARK ANGEL members
during all those years? Were you familiar with some of their new bands like Eric
and Ron were involved after the DARK ANGEL split in HUNGER and are now in SWINE
(Eric) and OIL (Ron), Jim in DREAMS OF DAMNATION...?"Oh yeah yeah, I'm checking all them out. Well... those guys would not like bat an eyelash at the fact that like 'Man I'm in STRAPPING' you know that's the reason why I don't listen to anybody else's music but like... I remember HUNGER and that was decent stuff like Ron's vocals were cool and he was trying to do that kind of PANTERA sort of action there, I know that's what Eric wanted and SWINE, hell I helped them writing a couple of their stuff recently like for a chorus for Eric and stuff like that to a couple of lines... OIL, hmm I love Ron you know?! I'm gonna support all those guys in everything they do, Jim's DREAMS OF DAMNATION, I'm gonna support Jim and everything he does, and I want those guys to be successful with their band, I hope all of their bands just sign HUGE deals and all get HUGE. I wish success for every, every member of DARK ANGEL and what ever they're doing you know?! Totally."
"We Have Arrived" was issued as a bootleg CD in the early / mid nineties first and more recently by Axe Killer, were you contacted for that?
"Oh no. It's like I never knew about this stuff but I became aware of it when like somebody would come to a show and have me sign a disc, I'm like 'Hey check this out, where did you get that?!' you know 'Oh I bought it in a store last week' and this is like 'Oh cool!' so I hope all the members of DARK ANGEL can do stuff with the old stuff where they can make some money out of it, Jim Durkin can make some money of... like signing a license deal for "We Have..." to somewhere, go for it brother! Fuck yeah you know?! Everybody from DARK ANGEL deserves... make a little bit of cash for yourselves, totally! Like one of the reasons I got involved in that tour that was supposed to happen on the west coast was our booking agent said "Dude if you don't get involved, I can probably get three of four shows around the L.A. area for the band and that's about it but if you get involved I can get you guys shows wherever you want for lots of money" so that was like 'I can make the rest of my ex bandmates some cash!' that's why we�re gonna do it, that's why I'll do this because I make a comfortable living doing what I do, sometimes things are ruff, things are hurting or whatever but if I can spread it around with the rest of the DARK ANGEL guys and just the fact that I'm involved in it will make the rest of the guys some cash, fuck what's wrong with that?! If I got the time hell yeah! Obviously it's not all about money but if it's gonna be like 'Gene is involved, yeah!', 'Gene is not involved... whatever' you know?! Here's a couple of hundred bucks for you guys, fuck I'm get involved if I got the time, fuck cos I want to spread around with these guys, totally!"
Last year Century Media re-released the old Combat catalog including "Darkness.." and "Leave..."... are you happy to see that those albums are finally available again on CD at a time old Metal makes its comeback or...? Did they ask you your opinion about the re-releases?
"Yes they did and yes I'm happy about it because like back when all the like 'Hey will DARK ANGEL ever reunite?!' sort of thing were happening sort of back in like '97, '98 or whatever and I was like 'If we do, fine but if we don't I tell you, one thing I'd love to see happen is all the old records being made available again on disk' because CD's came around about half way through the "Leave Scars" sort of era really and you know I had a little "Darkness.." CD but that was brand spanking new stuff. I remember like my mom's friends saying 'You have a CD! Wah' and stuff like that, that was back when that was brand new stuff so... it's like the main goal that I ever wanted has already been achieved, that got re-released and... if people want 'em, they can get 'em, if they don't piss on ya at least that's just... any bands just want their stuff being made available."
Also I expected some real unreleased tracks as a bonus on these releases but that wasn't the case...
"There is no bonus man! We released everything. I tell you one thing, there is one song that we recorded for "Time..." but that never even got the lyrics put to it but I laid down the rhythm guitar tracks for it and all the drums and stuff, a song that never even had a name but fuck you can get somebody in there, singing some stuff to it and if that tape can ever be found, that was the one extra bonus song that... from start to finish like I don't remember... like we fucked up 'War Pigs' and I don't think we ever even got to a semblance of a recording like 'Angel Of Death', never really got recorded and then like for "Leave..." we used everything, "Time.." we used all but this one song so there is no bonus! Here's the bonus track used from that "Ultimate Revenge", garbage!�
Yeah it's garbage and the song is cut!
"Yeah,'What's that?!' It's like the first time I heard it I was like 'We must have made a mockery to the ending or something' this is just like a train wreck at the end -l ike 'Thank you good night!' - yeah I was really surprised with that but you know it's like fuck, what can you do with the record label."
Anything to add that maybe wasn't covered in this short feature?
"Well brother, this interview has been five years in the making, sorry for all the dodging and I'm glad we finally got to do it, it's been a total pleasure and to anybody out there reading, thank you very much for all of everybody's support, that I really appreciate it and I'm gonna carry on trying to make as killer of fuckin' next level of Metal that I can do so I appreciate everybody's support, thank you to everybody involved in my career totally."
Since that interview was conducted, shit happened in the DARK ANGEL camp (used from www.blabbermouth.net):