DOOM METAL FRONT Zine #5 - 01/2011

foto: Sven Mihlan
local collector. And he played them The Obsessed. At
that time, the singer was thinking about leaving after
the tour anyways, ok. They never ended up the tour.
One day they came back to do a Make Up show and
at the Make Up show they made no money because
there were only ten people including myself. I got really
drunk and said: ‚I give you $20 for gas.‘ and the singer
said to me: ‘Hey, would you like to replace me
because I’m gonna leave and I heard the tape and we
really think you sound like God.’ That’s the story!“
That’s the story?
„So basically, I wanted to join really bad, but at the time
I was coming off the way I had this look, this deaf
Glam look, way back the make-up and maned
black hair.“
You had sideburns at that time.
„No, I had Glam Rock hair. The whole thing was to
look like a body pulled out of the river!“
How was the atmosphere working with Chandler &
Co?
„It was interesting because I had never met him before
in my life. I moved out of California, left everything and
moved, and you know. David was said he would not
listen and they tuned their guitars to normal A440.
That’s too high for me, so I couldn’t hear anything. So
I managed to convince them, it’s hard work man, managed
to convinced them, I bought an expensive tuner,
to tune down a half step for my voice, and as
soon as they did that, so, we rehearsed. I was in the
band now, we rehearsed five days a week, RELI-
GIOUSLY, and the songs for ‘Born too late’ we were
so fucking rehearsing. We used to rehearse in a little
room, in a shed, seriously. And we never threw the
beer cans away because we wanted to see how much
we get in. It was filled up with Budweiser cans. And it
was all tight and loud as shit. The guy to argue with
was a crack dealer. And that was a big problem because
I was making all this money, so later we lost
that place. But before that we were so well rehearsed
when we went into the studio. And the producer on the
record was Michael Lardie. He was the keyboard
player for Great White. A total pop band, but, man, you
know what: he got in our heads. He asked us what we
wanna do. We fucking made a great record, I think,
yeah. We were really really well-rehearsed, very tight.
Vitus was really like a religion, man, really for us then.
24
Because we struggled and we were willing to struggle
because it was a labor of blood, you know. It was
1985, 86. But we did a couple of little tours before
we had the record out too. But before
‘Born too late’ we recorded
‘Thirsty and Miserable’ EP – we
did one song on the compilation
‚SST Records - Blasting Concept’.“
Why is „Born too late“ such pink?
„Oh, because the record company fucked up, that up!
That was not supposed to be that color. That was really
supposed to be a much deeper purple AND the window
was supposed to be A LOT bigger. When we saw
that upcoming I was sort of like , what I only said
when I saw the cover of ‚Born too late’, I dropped it off
my front door and I looked at it and enormous puked
because I hated it so much. We were mad man, fucking
mad, we were mad about the pink! The picture turned
out like this, it’s a tiny window, color is wrong -
what can we do, they were
done. If you wanna have
me a question about SST I
can elaborate on that!“
I really love the album,
but the cover is so awful.
It’s really awful, but it’s a
very great album.
„I totally agree again. There
is one worse than that in
the Vitus catalog. I think
there’s no worse than ‘V’. I
think it’s pretty fucking
cheesy, man. Cheesy,
cheesy, cheesy ... no
good!“
You don’t like the „V“ cover?
„A cover?! It’s like a fucking
cartoon! “
Music sells at the end.
Interview
„That meaning is more like David’s. Sort of we left
Hellhound do the art direction, because they had that
one guy for everything, you know. It’s really important
to take the arrangement for the art, because the art is
as important as the music, it is. Because he music it’s
all art. The lyrics are important, some people say: ‘The
lyrics don’t matter.’, in Punk Rock days: ‘It’s just the
music energy.’ But basically, it has to be everything,
it’s like the pepper and salt, it’s all. And art goes with
it.“
That was very interesting to me because I was asking
that myself all the time.
„It’s like the first Obsessed record, right? All these
weird pictures of everbody like Fugazi, that was a concept
to have all my friends together. It was strange,
but pretty cool.“