DOOM METAL FRONT Zine #5 - 01/2011

I wanted to play guitar.“
You reformed The Obsessed in 1 990 then, right?
„I reformed The Obsessed with a different line-up. Because
I had moved to California, and I’m still in California
to join Vitus, and I reformed the band with Keith
from the Dutch band God, and Greg Rogers, he was
in an American band, pretty obscure band. So there
were two different guys. We played around locally and
then the Columbia Records people started coming
around asking questions now. The Hellhound guys,
when I was on Hellhound, they got me, and this is
cliché and really dumb, they got me really drunk and
they got me to sign an artist agreement. So when Columbia
Records later was trying to sign The Obsessed
in the States, this artist agreement came up out of
nowhere and the Hellhound dudes who had always
been really cool and who said they would help us, if
we tried to get bigger did exactly the opposite. They
were totally fucking greedy, they put Columbia over
bail and we had a huge legal battle. My whole
dream was to be signed to a major label. When that time
happened, it was like:
‚Uhh fuck!‘ It was more of a
disappointment of dream
because of these Hellhound
cats. I understand that they
lost money on Vitus. They
wanted Vitus to keep going
and stuff. But again, the label
didn’t treat us fairly.
We’re friends now. But they
would never tell us anything
about how many records
we sold.“
You released The Church Within in 1 994. For me
it’s definitely the strongest Obsessed album. Do
you agree?
„Yeah, I do agree because we had matured from ‘Lunar
Womb’ (first official full length in 1 991 -die Red.),
and we also were on a major label so we had a big
budget. And instead of doing it digital, we decided to
do it all analog. So we looked around really hard to
find a studio that did all on tape, that’s all. It was good,
yeah, it’s cool. We had a whole second record
written that was gonna be even heavier,
man, but, you know, we never got a
second record.“
It sounded a little bit like The Hidden
Hand stuff later to me.
„That’s cool, that’s interesting. Yeah, I
guess so. It was kind of, like more mathy
or whatever “
Why didn’t The Church Within sell so
good? It was of excellent quality, wellpromoted
„Timing, wrong timing! Well, because
foto: Sven Mihlan
26
Grunge had just happened and Kurt Cobain he had
just killed himself, right then at that time. We didn’t
fit in. They couldn’t market us. We could have done
the motorcycle thing, but everybody
would soon do the motorcycle
thing, ‚Girls, girls, girls‘ and shit.
We weren’t Grunge, and we weren’t
like what Grunge became, that kind of like, you know,
Punk, the suitable Punk-Indie thing. So they couldn’t
do anything with us and their idea was to put us right
on the way with Rob Zombie, because they had a
good exposure. Rob Zombie just got double platinum,
but The Obsessed in those days on tour with White
Zombie I mean 10,000 kids there to jump. We didn’t
even have a record out yet. It was a nightmare. We
didn’t fit in then. The timing was wrong!“
Interview
But was that the cause for the split up again?
„Man, yeah, we didn’t
work, we struggled, and
then the label said, we
were on Columbia Records,
and they said: ‚Ok,
you guys are not selling
enough records with The
Church Within we can’t
market you. If you want to
stay on the label you have
to be pop‘. Of course we
said ‚No!‘ But we made
one mistake, ok. We probably
could have been,
could have fought more for the chance, if I had been
more assertive with the other two guys because the
song that I wanted to be the single from The Church
Within, when the excitement was still there with the label
was ‚Streamlined‘, okay. It’s a motorcycle riding
song; it’s like a three-minute song. That’s a song that
they liked! The guys of my band said: ‚No, no! Even if
it’s a good song but that’s not indicative for our sound.‘
They wanted to be something slow and doomy. But I
wasn’t strong enough to tell them: ‚Fuck no!‘ Instead
we chose ‚Blind lighting‘ for the single, which is like a
7inch song, and they said: ‚That’s not gonna be a
fucking single.‘ And at the same time the engineer, the
German guy Schneebie (Mathias Schneeberger, Produzent-die
Red.), he erased parts of ‚Streamlined‘ at