A GRIM TALE

A GRIM TALE

Bullets

Judy Wieder

Grim Reaper is back, and if you knew what they’ve gone through to get back you’d give their new album, Rock You To Hell, your undivided attention. Still rallying their cataclysmic energy around the awesome guitar of Nick Bowcatt, the leather-lunged vocals of Steve Grimmet, the steady rhythms of bassist Dave Wanklin and the bracing sticks of drummer Marc Simon, Grim Reaper is metal’s shiniest example of the idiom: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

“We don’t deny that we may not look as good in lipstick as Poison or Motley Crue, and we know nobody’s going to confuse our songs with Bon Jovi,” Nick explains in heavy Droitwich, England tones, “but we’re quite proud to stand by our music!”

Standing by their music was no easy fling for Grim Reaper. It cost them two years of their lives and they’re plenty pissed. Signed to a small label in England called Ebony Records, “a one man, one woman operation,” Reaper recorded two records in “a stupid amount of time, like four days!,” somehow caught the interest of RCA Records (who made a licensing deal with Ebony) and had minor hits to the tune of over 200,000 records sold in America!

“See You In Hell and Fear No Evil did well in the States but failed in Ebony’s own backyard,” Bowcatt continues. “They kept telling us they didn’t have any money— though Ebony suddenly moved into a mansion!—and we were penniless. I ended up having to sell my guitars and my girl friend walked out on me. ..! It was a nightmare. The final blow came when we recorded (our first version of) Rock You To Hell at Ebony, in England. We were so poor I was actually on social security. It bothered me so much, made me so ashamed, that I got off it as soon as possible and basically supported myself writing guitar columns for rock magazines in England and America.”

While recording their first rendition of Rock You To Hell in Ebony’s studios, things seemed to be going reasonably well. The band left the project pleased with the mixes they’d listened to on the studio’s larcfe monitor speakers. However, a week later, Nick got a frantic call from Mark (the drummer) asking him if he listened to his cassette of the album since he’d left the studio.

“I told him to give me a break,” Nick remembers, “ ’cause I’d been listening to it for six weeks straight. I could do with a few days off. But Mark insisted I listen to it because he said his tape sounded dreadful. I took it to my parent’s house, because they had a better stereo, put it on their system and really couldn’t believe my ears! It was horrible!”

Still hoping that both he and Mark had somehow gotten bad copies of the final mix, Nick called up vocalist Steve Grimmet, who promptly discovered that his tape sounded like dog poop, too. The band was hysterical. They called Ebony Records and complained, wrote follow-up letters, bitched and moaned, only to be told that they were wrong, the tapes sounded fine.

“When RCA heard the master tape—not our copies—they were as upset as we were,” Nick says. “TtTey told us: 'No fuckin’ way! If we release this, it will kill the band!’ In the meantime, Ebony is still saying: ‘Oh no, we think it is a fine release.’ We were stuck, at a complete stalemate.”

The key to the screw-up of Grim Reaper’s master tapes turned out to be the simple fact that Ebony’s new mansion studio “... excuse my French, is shit! I should have known the day I brought in a copy of Metallica’s Master Of Puppets album,” Nick continued. “I thought it was a great album and wanted the people at Ebony to hear it. The owner told me he’d already played the album and he thought it was horrible. I couldn’t believe him. But he put it on in his studio and, sure enough, it did sound awful. At the time I just figured he’d bought a bad pressing of the album. But all the time it was his studio. Building a control room for a studio is an art. There are acoustic experts who make a very good living designing and building control rooms. So we were stuck with horrible tapes that never could be heard. As far as Ebony was concerned, they just went on with other bands, refusing to release us to record for other labels. I was basically losing my mind. Thankfully, both RCA and our management never lost faith in the band. Years went by and they stood by us, helped us fight the legal battle.”

After Ebony refused to let RCA re-mix (at RCA’s expense) the master tapes, Grim Reaper’s management began hunting up ways to break the band’s contract with Ebony. They found a loophole when they discovered that Ebony had received a large sum of money from RCA and had not passed on the appropriate amount to the band. Reaper informed Ebony of the breach of contract in a letter, waited the proper amount of time for Ebony to either "cure or disprove” their claim, and headed for the States to re-record Rock You To Hell with superproducer Max Norman (Ozzy Osbourne) at the dials and RCA as the sole label.

“I feel like we’ve been reborn,” Bowcatt concludes. “I keep telling people this is our first proper album. I’m a very grateful human being. It was an awful, awful experience for all of us and we suffered greatly. Playing in a rock band is like being a sportsman. You can’t be kept off stage, out of action. My only consolation for all that time away from playing was when I interviewed other famous guitar players and Tony lommi of Black Sabbath answered my ‘any advice to upand-coming guitarists?' question by saying: ‘Buy yourself a guitar, learn four chords, then go get yourself the best lawyer you can find!’ It’s funny, but when you’ve gone through what Grim Reaper has gone through, it’s a pretty chilling thought.”