Bullets

Bullets

KING

DIAMOND: LET'S GET MIKEY TO TRY HIM

by Anne Leighton and Michael Walden

My friend Mikey is not one of God’s original angels; he’s a hyperactive rocker who knows about rock stars before the press does. A new metal band comes around and they say, “We’re some band. ’Spose to be good for you.”

So I say, “Let’s get Mikey to try you. He hates everything.”

So Mikey tries this King Diamond and he likes it. He likes it. Hey Mikey. “I met King Diamond,” Mikey tells me. “And he growled at me.”

King Diamond was born in and lives in the land of mermaids—Denmark. He got into rock by hearing Black Sabbath. Alice Cooper was his favorite performer. It was right after a 1975 Alice Cooper show that King Diamond picked up a guitar. Soon he joined one band and was taught to use the entire range of his voice from a low growl to the most painful falsetto. Then he started Mercyful Fate, which captured cult followings of Mikeys all over the world.

Mercyful Fate broke up in April 1985, when one of the members submitted songs that sounded like Survivor’s “Eye Of The Tiger.” So the King Diamond band was formed. And they’ve released a new LP called Fatal Portrait—concept album about a virgin named Molly.

Because King Diamond passed Mikey’s test, I decided the dude was good enough for METAL.

We arrived at King Diamond’s office. “That’s him,” Mikey points to the next room! “What a bod," I murmured. “What7” ,

“Nothing...nothing,” I said, trying to keep my hormones from literally popping out of my bod, as if by magic.

King Diamond told us about Satanism. He said that it’s not how Christians perceive it, with fire and a guy with horns. “Satan means, according to the Satanic Bible, ‘the powers of the unknown.’ Some people who mess with it shouldn’t. Satanists can’t be on drugs, because they have to know what they’re doing. It’s dangerous stuff.”

King Diamond recounted unexplainable instances— including one thing that Metallica’s Lars and James witnessed when they stayed at his house, “growls from the bathroom. They said, ‘you ever heard weird things from your bathroom?’ ‘Oh? You mean the growling?’”

It was incidents like this and King Diamond’s philosophy on life that made him read books on the occult. It wasn’t until he picked up the Satanic Bible by Anton La Vey that his quench quench was satisfied. “The philosophy there was exactly how I was living my life. If it was Doodoo, I would have been a Doodooist. I don’t care what they call it.”

He’s quick to admit that he’s not a preacher and he doesn’t want to be influential as a man of religion. He wants to be known as an entertainer. Yet he will shirk any responsibility as being an influence. “I can’t concern myself about that as well. If I was singing about motorbikes going as fast as possible, then will I get accused of killing people for going too fast because they read the lyrics I write? I can accuse anybody of having influence, by asking, ‘Who did you speak to yesterday? What stories did they tell you?’ You can always find something to blame, especially an entertainer.”

Still, there’s something special about hanging out with a favorite performer, especially when they’re willing to share special insights with a young fan. Mikey liked King Diamond ’cause he explained the secret of the upward pinky and pointed fingers hand signal that he and Ronnie James Dio do onstage. “It's an ancient way of saying ‘hello.’ In the old days you couldn’t afford to say, rAre you a scientist like me?’ You’d get burnt at the stake...Although Dio says that this means rock ’n’ roll!”

In the language of the deaf, that hand signal means

NOT DEN, NOT OAS, BUT DIE KREUZEN

by Alison Aquino

Amid the trash that tunnels through the circuits of the underground, Die Kreuzen rises above them all as just an outrageous heavy rock V roll band. Singer Dan Kubinski’s do-or-die microphone-mangling vocals prove that rock was meant to be aggressive and mean. Guitarist Brian Egeness, bassist Keith Brammer, and drummer Erik Tunison each drive the audience through a killer set that comes perilously close to being illegally wild.

Formed in mid-’81 in Milwaukee, Die Kreuzen (pronounce it right: Dee Kroytzen. The band claims it doesn’t mean anything, but if you have your German-English dictionary handy, you’ll find out what it really does mean) quickly departed from the slam-andspeed syndrome that they had begun with. “We’re just a heavy rock hand,” they say. They are rightfully exhausted after their New Orleans show, and we sit beneath the humidity in their equally-tired van.

They are disappointed with their lack of major success “We’ve been paying dues for five years,” Keith says. This is because “we’ve been stuck in this one circuit.” The problem lies within being incorrectly labeled as a hardcore band, and even being labeled at all. They are not a hardcore band, a speed-metal band, a thrash band, nor a pop band. They don’t believe in labels. “Music is music,” Keith says philosophically. “If you don’t like it, you can leave. It’s not intelligent to put bands down.”

They’re a rock band. They leave it to you to decide. Hey, I’m still clueless, and I should know better.

“We’ve always done what we wanted to do.” They don’t want to cater to the subculture, because to do so would mean being “stagnant,” something that distresses Die Kreuzen. They’re not about having an attitude, wearing black clothes, or anarchy. They’re about music, being open-minded, and change.

Change is imperative for the band, but change on their own terms. They were offered a contract with Profile Records, but only if Profile could remix, rearrange, redress, re-everything. Record company as Big Brother. No way. Die Kreuzen stuck with Touch And Go, and their no-hassle verbal contract. “We couldn’t get a better deal,” Dan says. Their Michigan-based label has released their two LPs: their self-titled debut, and their second and latest, October File. “We’ll work as hard as we can, but on our own terms.”

They all write and contribute, but Dan writes the lyrics. If you listen to their latest, which is an excellent idea by the way, they don’t sound like anybody or any trend. They like discordant melody lines, and they use the famed “light/heavy” concept within and between songs. They’ve been musicians in their own right for years before Die Kreuzen was formed. They’re good driving music. Play them while you’re hotrodding down the freeway.

And people are playing them, though you’re not likely to hear them on your favorite radio station. They’re selling in the thousands in the U.S., and also in the U.K. and Germany. “We’re praying to go to Europe,” Dan says. Europe will have to wait (impatiently) until they’ve finished their upcoming East coast tour.

Let’s get on with the biographical information that’s so groovy to hear. The median age of the band is 22. They all have long hair, except Brian, who used to. They like to read (“Comic books are great for the road.”) Some of them attended the University of Wisconsin (don’t drag out your yearbooks, they weren’t there that long). They work in bars and restaurants back in Milwaukee, and they all share the same apartment, along with their road manager. They are apolitical, but like Clint Eastwood. They drink American beer and drive an American van. And they have frighteningly good taste.

I ask them the dreaded influences question, and get the answer the question deserves. “Everything.” Since I don’t get paid by the word, I’ll only list a few: Aerosmith, the Dream Syndicate, Led Zeppelin, the Cure, Madonna (“She writes good pop songs”). Well, at least they’re not narrowminded.

Would commercial success force them to sell out?

“We don’t pander to anybody. We just want to be heard,” Keith says. He then adds, “Hopefully all bands believe in what they’re doing.”

Like Die Kreuzen. “We’d rather do this than anything else,” Dan says emphatically. “We’re going to stay in it.”

So how is the next album going to he different from the last?

“Different instruments, maybe keyboards, horns, strings. You can definitely tell the difference between this album and the one before, so we’re going to keep changing,” Keith says.

OK, but why should people spend their money to see Die Kreuzen instead of a Generic Heavy Rock Band?

‘‘We’re not mainstream. We’re something different.”

There’s an understatement for you.

Now that Die Kreuzen are safely off to check out the French Quarter, with a case of Bud and Led Zeppelin, let’s be blunt. These guys are absolutely wild. It’s time we get the underground aboveground, and they deserve it. When you think of all the arrogant dumb bands that are crawling through the circuit (fill in your favorite) and the arrogant dumb bands who have made it out of the circuit and into the Garden, and then you think about Die Kreuzen, who belong in the stadium nearest you because they’re not arrogant and they’re not dumb, well, it’s enough to make you hang up your leather jacket. Look, if you believe that rook was meant to be everything that’s cool, then believe in Die Kreuzen. 0

RASZEBRAE’S RISING TIDE

by Akeem Olajuwon, Jr.

“Let’s see,” pauses Raszebrae (rhymes with “fast zebra”) front-gurl and leadsinger Deborah Patino... “there’s speed-metal, psychedelic metal, pop-rhythmatic metal, punk-metal and then punk-thrash metal! And... uhm...”

Topic up for grabs is the sonic nature-of-the-dog when it comes to classification-perse of the specific brand of metallurgy sound Raszebrae dishes out generously. No consensus, it seems, as to a particular sub-metal genre (even so-called “heavy metal” is confessed) the band pledges allegiance to (as, say, one above all others); the important point being that the trump card here involves an eclectic stew of fast-and-furious (not to mention young and scientific) loud, hard rock. “I think what’s really unique about us,” opines Katie Childe, Zebroid bass-player and one half of the Patino/ Childe songwriting dynamic duo, “is that we’re not very categorizable. We pretty much defy categorizing. We’re not punk rock, we’re not commercial pop and we’re certainly not like Motley Crue, Ratt or any of that stuff. But we’re real loud and I think it turned people’s heads around that girls can come off this aggressive and charged up playing what we play.”

In fact, knee-deep in the land of Go-Gos and Bangles, Raszebrae (“Ras” as in free, “zebrae” like plural zebra\ explains one of them) trail-blazed new turf mining the female side of the coin to metal-rock as hard-and-heavy (tho w/male gtr Chris Hoetger recently added to the lineup, the all-femme tag is lost—no loss to the image of the band, claim Kate and Deb).

Patino and Childe, college chums at Loyola U., formed the band in 1982, two years after matriculating from the ranks of academia. Katie previousiy’d logged time in the hot beat-combo, Milk (“sounded like the Jam, sort of”), while Deb grooved to the tunes of X, Patti Smith and the Doors. Add to this guitarist Ingrid Baumgart and SouthBay’s hardhitting Janet Housden (drums), and the incipient lineup of Zebrae was completed.

End of last summer evidenced the first of RawZebra-onvinyl, a long-player called Cheap Happiness Or Lofty Suffering (copped from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground —Patino being a std. of lit in college). Sounds in the grooves focused on the aforementioned rock-as-hard/heavy side of the slate, lots of ambient, shrill noise courtesy of Ingrid’s re-worked (distilled) Hendrix/Robin Trower maneuvers. Most of the songs pulsate in this synched-out type frenzy of wild, weird-timed odes to pain and suffering (not all that lofty). The lyrics wax a bit topheavy with complicated images and tough angst-ridden diatribe [‘‘The Bastardization (Of Jean Paul Sartre)”]; Patino describes the motivation behind the way-out "Psychedelic Cyclaaid” as an assignment by Mr. Poshboy hisself, Robbie Fields, to come up with a goof for an album of parody. ‘‘I was s’posed to write this song that was meant to be a take-off on X, we we’re gonna call the project Y,” explains the lead Zebe. Though Poshy’s platter never happened, the Exene-oid pokes’re pretty hilarious:

“A real life tragedy can be such fun/The idle generation/Applicators of ridiculation/lnjected numbness am I responsible... ”

Or how ’bout (same song):

“Speaking of the end of the world/Needing of the end of the world/Holding onto the end of the world/The parachute gone byebye/The world, the world, the world/And I’m an ant”

Ho ho ho!!

Important, i.e., to point out that a sense of humor inculcates the sonic vibes. Speaking of which, onna sonic-vibe level, the alb’s allout stomp-and-stand anthem, “To Be Excessive,” turns an abrupt 70 some-odd degrees from the noisy, sometimes amorphous forays of grungey sound the other tunes revel in. Hook-laden and as pounding as anything you’ll lay ears on in the major leagues of rock these days, the wail of the vokes and the thwomp of the Housden-beaten drums provide convincing evidence of the rising tide of Raszebrae: gtr prodigy Chris Hoetger has replaced ex gtr-madame Ingrid & as noted somewhere above, no longer does the quartet gleam femme. The resultant blast of sound ghosts less Hendrix-y, perhaps more commercially viable in that tunes appear to B more streamlined and straightforward in lyrical text and musical delivery.

Drummer Janet Housden, a fan of Seeds and Lime Spiders, chalks up impressive credentials v-a-v the punk side of the spectrum (herself a grad of the University Of Red Kross), w/newfound notoriety as the celluloid star of the justreleased SST home-movie Desperate Teenage Lovedolls Part II (she also donates percussive rites—making the Lovedoll scene when the band of the same name plays to promote the flick; this, of course, in her time spare to a busy Zebra schedule). Janet votes for anything Stooges-old and MC5 and more or less balks at the notion of trying out “anything too wimpy.”

This is good news, then, for the world at large. Raszebrae seemingly have slipped the shackles bonding the band to maybe too quirky an identitysome have suggested they sound like a “coven of witches” (To this, the singer scrunches incredulous: “WHAT???!!”).

“I think there’s certain lifelines of bands—like when they record, the time they have to play out whatever it is they offer.” Katie Zebra stops to reflect, then deadpans dead serious: “That there’s a certain amount of time to be productive—the time when your moment’s come to take advantage of opportunity and use this before it’s too late...I guess it’s sort of like having babies...”

Raszebrae’s pregnant. Look out. a