A Communion With Metal Church

A Communion With Metal Church

FEATURES

Kris Needs

Heavy metal, 1986.

Your head looks like a cat exploding in a padded chair. Your legs look like spandex pencils with a pair of tomatoes stuck on top. Your chest erupts in bare-bronzed ripples from a shiny flat bikini. The lips in your pudgy-but-made-up-to-look-thin face pout furiously. Your fist is clenched to say “We’re macho rockers and we mean business.”

You have The Look. The sound? Needs a name. Pick one— thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, black metal, HEAVY METAL. But isn’t that where we started?

Metal Church wear leather jackets, jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. Their hair is un-primped and relatively short. Bassman Duke Erickson, in fact, is proud to tell you that he does not own all he started with.

Metal Church sound . .. like Metal Church. They also proclaim—as proudly as Duke’s hirsute announcement—that their music is HEAVY METAL. Listen to their new album, The Dark, and you’ll see what they mean.

You can use all your adjectives, like the writer in L.A. who said they were like a rhino on amphetamines or a speedcrazed hippo, or whatever. But, simply, their music is honest, gut-churning, brainscorching and genuinely powerful, with a degree of invention that takes it beyond the mere puny pose. They not only kick ass, they stomp the old buttock regions into pulsating pulp!

The Dark is Metal Church's second album for Elektra and the best sound they’ve had on vinyl to date. And it’s selling by the bucket-load. As I scrawl this, they’re set to embark on their biggest (and second) tour of the States. Some of the dates are with the new-lineup Metallica—in California recently, Metallica supported Metal Church to try out their new bassist, Jason Waysted.

“We’re defying the laws of American heavy metal!” —Duke Erickson

Metal Church are on a roll. Their nononsense, trend-defiant, sheer HEAVINESS seems to be paying off. I met up with (school friends) Duke and guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof at Elektra's New York HQ to talk about it. But, first a bit of history ...

The band hails from Kent, Washington, but in the late 70s Kurdt was making a go of it in San Francisco with a punk group called the Lewd. “Musically it was pretty good,’’ says Kurdt. “Pretty heavy, that’s the way it was played. But we got out of that after awhile and spent a year or so trying to play heavy metal. It had gotten to a ‘Where do we go from here?’ kind of thing. You can only do so much with that moniker. We wanted to get a little more musical anyway. I started getting musicians together, but at the time there weren’t too many who wanted to play heavy metal anyway. Then it was a brand new thing. It just never really got together.

“I moved back to Washington and met some musicians and it started to come together really well. We started off doing cover tunes and stuff like that, had a couple of personnel changes and, as soon as we got a good lineup and everybody was stable, we became Metal Church again (the name Kurdt had used for his short-lived ’Frisco metal band).

Metal Church settled on their current line of Kurdt, Duke, Craig Wells (guitar), David Wayne (vocals) and Kirk Arrington (drums)—who each boast 10 years of musical experience—and they started working up original material. They recorded a demo, “4 Hymns,” sent it to everyone in sight and “kept our fingers crossed!” The press reacted fervently— especially U.K. metal-zine Kerrang!! The band appeared on the Northwest Metalfest and Metal Massacre 5 compilation albums.

By 1984 they were playing live with increasing regularity and started battering up a hefty following with their no-frills-butplenty-thrills approach. In July of '84 they recorded their debut album for Ground Zero Records: Metal Church, which was picked up by Elektra. The Dark is their first full-blown Elektra release with a producer (Mark Dodson) and sufficient studio time to allow the group to use the bathroom without a calculator.

Did that make it easier to function as a band?

“Yeah!” says Kurdt, an extremely affable geezer. “It's so much easier for the stores to get the album, so much easier than being an independent, plus we’ve a bit more money to work with. We have money to work with! The first album we spent three weeks on. This album we spent three months on—one extreme to the other. When we started we had three months booked in the studio and thought 'What can we do in the studio that would take three months?’ But we did a lot of experimenting with different sounds and everything, which was great.”

It shows. Metal Church don’t just take a doom-riff, crank it up and then scream over the top. That sounds great in the hands of a group like Slayer, the masters of sonic-Satanism. They know their aural onions. But too many groups sound like a gang of speed-freaks bowling through an alley of trashcans in the dark. Metal Church can race with the devil and back again without breathing hard, but they can also tackle a ballad or a rocker and never sound anything but heavy metal. As Kurdt explains:

“We’re just heavy metal. We don’t wanna get stuck in any one thing. We don't wanna be thrash metal, we don’t wanna be speed metal, we just like to do a bit of everything, because that gives us room to be creative. We don't get bored with our music. We can create new stuff and progress, whereas with a lot of bands you get stuck in one way and that’s it. Fine, but that would drive me nuts after awhile. If ever we wrote one rock ’n’ roll song and it became a hit, then we’d be pressured for the next one to do it again. We don’t want to have anything to do with that.”

Duke: “Everyone asks us ‘What sort of metal do you guys play?’ Well, all kinds We play heavy metal. We don’t like to be stuck in one vein.”

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Kurdt: ‘‘Then if we wanna do something different it’s ‘Oh, those guys aren’t as good as they used to be, they’re selling out.’ ”

Duke: ‘‘So now the next Metal Church album, nobody will know what to expect. It depends what sort of mood we’re in when we write new tunes. If we’re in a shitty mood it’ll be a shitty album!”

Kurdt: “Right now we’re in such a great mood we’re delirious!”

Duke: “We play anything as long as it’s heavy. Even our ballad is heavy! There’s all sorts of ways of being heavy. You can be heavy lyrically; you can have a really heavy melody ... I guess that word gets overused after awhile, but it explains it. This album’s so heavy you need a forklift to get it on your turntable!”

Metal Church are obviously gonna get some flak from the snow-white Swaggart braggart-brigade over their name. But there’s a line on the new Motorhead album which mentions the electric church of rock ’n’ roll—that same phrase coined by Jimi Hendrix nearly 20 years ago to describe the religious feeling of total unity and devotion the music whips up in its fans.

“Metal Church is not the Church of

Satan or the Church of Christ,” Kurdt explained in a record company press release. “The word Church is used as a figure of speech, not an anti-religious statement. Unfortunately, people try to read into music and lyrics. To weave in something that doesn’t exist. Consequently, the original concept and direction of a song will be taken totally out of context and a new negative meaning will develop.”

They have a bit of a problem getting radio play (probably also because the music packs a punch and would spurt all over the normal AOR wimp-gloss of soporific programming).

“We don’t get much radio play, so we depend a lot on fans’ support. We make a point to hang out and meet people after a show, shake a few hands and do our own P.R. We depend a lot on touring and the fanzines.”

There hasn’t been any pressure from Elektra to sheen up the sound for the airwaves either.

Duke: “Things have changed. It used to be that a major label would sign a band and influence the way they sounded. It’s changed. Us and Metallica can do whatever the fuck we want. It’s really weird. Of course they have to OK it, but we’re under no pressure to do any certain thing. The record label is totally behind anything we want to do. We expected it to be the complete opposite. We don’t mind using a producer, that was for our benefit anyway. It’s a really cool situation. They realize as much as we do that this kind of music doesn’t get played on the radio. Mostly just college stations. There’s a few stations that have gone completely heavy metal now anyway. Hopefully that’ll be a trend.

So Metal Church evolved in a small town isolated from the metropolitan trends of look and sound. Duke would drive a dump truck or wield a chainsaw at obstinate trees. Kurdt shaved many a lawn perched on a mowing machine— “just to keep the band alive.”

The records they grew with were the older school of metal.

Duke: “Any influence we have is real old heavy metal— Sabbath, old Priest, old Maiden, old Deep Purple, Alice Cooper ... stuff like that is basically what we’ve been listening to for the last few years.”

He agrees that there’s a lot of shitty metal coming out of the cod-pieces of those who follow for a fast buck and easy lay. Metal Church are original because they developed outside the confines of sudden-impact fashion.

“Every kid grows up and they want to be a rock star, so they learn how to play guitar. The underground scene is so big now that any shitty guitar player can start a band and play a few gigs. It’s just happened that these five shitty musicians are all together!” he adds with a modest tweak on a nacho-chip.

There seems to be a heavy metal rulebook in the U.S. for image (see start of story).

“We don’t try,” laughs Duke, “but God didn’t put hair on my head anyway so we can’t look like that! ‘Uh-oh, so you can’t be a heavy metal band.’ We’re defying the laws of American heavy metal!”

Why? Kurdt makes a good point: every music has had its own uniform, from flower power to punk.

“I think it happens with just about every music. I hate to say trend, but everything goes in cycles and it changes as it progresses. We just try and stay out of it as much as possible.”

Let’s talk about the songs. The Dark has 10. Butt-blasters all.

Kurdt: “There’s no set way we write. Maybe we’re just jamming and it turns into a song. We can spend anything from an hour to a couple of weeks on a song. It depends on the song.

“ ‘Method To Your Madness’ went through changes for about a year. We listened to the first version the other day and it wag funny—it had a jazz interlude!”

The lyrics concern a Vietnam War veteran speaking to a kid who wants to enlist—'7s the method to your madness to try to end your life?” How do the lyrics come about, Kurdt?

“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I think of something really funny like a quote, or a news item or a bad dream. ‘Western Alliance’ is one of my favorites. That’s about World War II—just about it!”

Duke cites “Psycho” as his fave—a reckless surger set in the mind of a murderer. “I like the fast stuff,” he says.

Kurdt mentions his fondness for the title track—“it’s a weird song”—which is all about being scared to enter a dark room.

And now the group is taking their tunes on the road. Do they get crazy crowds?

Kurdt: “It depends. A lot of people are just finding out what we’re about so we don’t know. We get a bit of everything.”

Duke: “In the big cities where all the crazies are, that tends to happen a bit. I was going to say our fans are basically mellow but that’s not the right term!” Kurdt: “Mellow Church!”

Both agree they’re big in Texas: “It’s weird to see 2,000 raging Mexicans! Now that people are starting to see what we’re about it’s getting received pretty well. It’s great because we’re not trying to face anybody out and make a concept or a formula. We’re just doing our thing and it seems to be working, so how on the level can you get?”

How, indeed?