HIGHWAY TO HELLOWEEN

HIGHWAY TO HELLOWEEN

Harold DeMuir

“It’s very hard over here, because this is not a rock ’n’ roll country,” says Helloween guitarist Michael Weikath, over the phone from his home in Hamburg, Germany. “The music magazines we have over here are just pop and disco, and there’s just a few radio stations which have a heavy metal hour once or twice & week. But there are about 200,000 people here who are listening to very hard heavy metal. And Germany is very small compared to the States, so that’s quite a lot of people.”

Helloween is currently expanding its sphere of influence with the U.S. release of their smash European album Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part I, which would have been out here sooner if not for a legal dispute over the rights to the band’s pumpkinhead logo. RCA, Helloween’s Stateside label, says Keeper is the fastest-selling indie LP in European history, and it’s not hard to understand why. The quintet combines prodigious speed, a knack for melody, a flair for Wagnerian dynamics and a sense of humor to create one of the year’s most impressive hard rock discs.

Though Keeper is Helloween’s second album, Weikath and fellow guitarist (and main songwriter) Kai Hansen have been working together for more than a decade. Along the way, they picked up bassist Markus Grosskopf and drummer Ingo Schwichtenberg; frontman Michael Kiske completed the lineup about a year ago, taking over vocal chores from the overworked Hansen.

The Keeper concept (whose centerpiece is the 13-minute mini-opera “Halloween”) was originally intended as a double album, but the band’s German label, Noise, was skittish about releasing a two-record set. So fans will have to wait until next year for the second installment.

Despite their name, and the horror-movie imagery of many of their lyrics, Helloween steer clear of sadism and the like. “We try to avoid things like death and blood, and we always try to make it funny,” says Weikath. “We don’t know why we should have to spill blood and act violently and all that. That’s just something brought up by the newer heavy metal generation, and we can’t quite understand why. There seems to be some kind of modern attitude that when you’re playing rough music you also have to have rough lyrics. That’s not what we think.

“You can say what you want, but you have responsibility to your fans somehow. If you act like monsters and sing about killing people, the people will believe it in some way. And that’s something we try to avoid, because we think there’s enough violence in the world and we don’t need to add to it. In some little way, you should try to make the world better, not make it badder.”

They didn’t always have that attitude, though. “We had a little different image in the beginning, and we actually sounded quite hellish,” says Weikath. “At our concerts, the people in the front rows would always be hitting each other’s faces, and we just thought, This is something we don’t want.’ So we tried doing the lyrics in a humorous way, and now we see the difference in our concerts. On the most recent tour we did, all the guys in the first rows were friendly and laughing.

“Maybe they come to our concert and make friendly, and then go to a Slayer concert the next day and act violently. But they come happy to our concert and they smile when they go out. That’s the main thing.”

Weikath admits to being a bit intimidated by the prospect of playing in the U.S. “I’ve never been to the States, and I don’t know anything about what’s going on there, so we’re very interested in finding out what people think of Helloween.”

But he’s not concerned about the possibility of the band’s name raising a stink with right-wing religious nuts. “We don’t have any connection with any of that Satan jazz,” he declares. “We just chose the name to be different, and because it was funny. I’m a Catholic, and if the rest of the band are agnostics or whatever, it doesn’t matter. If somebody wants to misunderstand us, he can do it, but I think most people will understand our intentions.”