Joe Hasselvander's Blog of Dooom!!!

Dickie Peterson: Gone But Not Forgotten

2009-11-11T02:53:00.006-05:00

I find myself up at 2:57 am after a restless sleep in my home in western Massachusetts. Only two weeks ago I was in Germany playing the "Hammer Of Doom Festival" with my old band, Death Row. It already seems like that was months ago. Just a week before I was en route to Tennessee for rehearsals when I was informed by my girlfriend that Dickie Peterson bassist and vocalist for Blue Cheer had passed away from a long battle with liver cancer. I had spoken with Blue Cheer's guitarist Duck MacDonald only a month before on the phone and he had told me that Dickie had fallen ill and that he would be receiving treatment for his condition and that hopefully he would regain his health and be able to resume performing as there were still tour plans in the works for Blue Cheer. It was not until the day before Dickie died that I had an inkling that things had turned for the worst and that Dickie was on his death bed. I had a terrible feeling that I would be hearing even worse news very soon and I was right. The next day my childhood rock and roll idol, mentor, band mate and very close friend Dickie Peterson passed away around 5:am Monday morning on Oct. 12, 2009.

I'm writing this now because I just woke up from a very vivid dream about Dickie and Blue Cheer and I felt compelled to write this.

The dream was kind of an official goodbye from Dickie and to my time with Blue Cheer as their drummer. In the dream they were back at my home rehearsing like it was 2004 all over again, when suddenly the band starts packing up their gear as if they were loading up for the next gig when Dickie says in his gruff voice, "Well Joey, It's time for us to leave and it's been real but we have to get a move on to the next gig. You've got a wonderful place here and you've got a lot of people around you now who love you! Be a good steward of all these things Joey!" He then walked down the stairs and headed for the door to an awaiting truck with his bass in hand. As he walked out the door I ran after him to say my last goodbye and to tell him what it really meant to me to be his friend and that I had appreciated all the down and serious heartfelt talks we had about life, love and the universe and that all of that was more important to me than playing drums for him. I suddenly woke up! It was a dream, or was it?

I will never forget Dickie and the kindness he showed me. He knew that I was his biggest fan and that he had probably been the catalyst for me choosing the fucked up path of a career in rock and roll. He saw the poverty that my son and I were living in at the time and he knew why it had happened to us.
You see , he was living the same reality himself after a lifetime of mismanagement, shady deals and squandered savings. The music industry didn't care about his talent or what he meant to young kids like me or that he was a pioneer of heavy rock that gave us everything we know today as heavy metal. He was swept under the carpet but managed to stay alive and gigging despite it all!

I remember during his stay at my place , my then twelve year old son Joe Jr. was giving me a real hard time about a Play Station game that he wanted but that I couldn't afford. My son called me a loser and asked me why I couldn't have a regular job like normal fathers and make regular pay checks? I was embarrassed mostly because my son had a right to ask that question no matter how much it would hurt. Dickie sat him down and said,"Joseph, You should never talk to your dad like that! Don't you know that your the luckiest kid in the world to have a dad like him? One day you'll realize what a cool dad you have! Most fathers don't have time to hang out with their kids or worse yet, they don't even notice that they are there!" He loves you man!"

I spoke to Dickie a few more times over the years by phone and he always wanted to talk to Joe Jr. or at least ask about him before we would start our discussions. It always blew my mind watching him hang out with my kid or arguing with him about something and knowing that when I was my son's age I was up in my room every day standing in front of my mirror playing air guitar to Dickie's records and pretending I was him!

Joseph Hasselvander Jr., Paul Whaley, Duck MacDonald and (Uncle) Dickie Petersonbackstage at Pearl Street Northampton, Ma. 2005

I feel very fortunate to have shared the stage with Dickie and in what would have been considered grueling endless rehearsals to most were to me to an opportunity for me to play my favorite Blue Cheer hits with the man that wrote them as many times as I liked! For me it was more than a dream come true , it was a miracle from God that I got play with the man!

Dickie Peterson and Joe Hasselvander 2004

Now I've said it! I can finally drift back to sleep as my conscience is now clear.

God bless you Dickie and thanks for the visit!
God's got you in his band now!

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME!!!!

2009-09-24T10:38:00.001-04:00

DEATH ROW at HAMMER OF DOOM OCT. 17!
See the classic line up that started it all with very special guest: Eric Wagner, vocals!
Don't miss this rare appearance of Death Row at the following:

VICTOR GRIFFIN - GUITAR

JOE HASSELVANDER - DRUMS

MARTIN SWAYNEY - BASS

VERY SPECIAL GUEST - ERIC WAGNER(TROUBLE) - VOCALS

Tales From The Abyss PT. 4: Chernobyl Chickens At Wounded Knee

2009-05-01T22:00:00.068-04:00

This final installment, in fact all the installments of "Tales from the Abyss" are dedicated to the late great "LUG" who was the greatest crew person and kindest soul you could ever ask for. Even after his passing our thoughts are still with him as he was a guardian angel to all of us on this tour. God Bless You, brother. You are very much missed.

The giant blue tour bus from Newcastle, England with the word "Liberty" painted on the side came roaring into Hungary with a cargo of heavy metal misfits calling themselves Cathedral and Godspeed! We arrived at the border welcome center and had our precious Deutsch marks exchanged for ragged Hungarian money which our tour managers simply referred to as "shitters". After doing the transaction I remember thinking, "Wow! I sure did get a lot of shitters for my money!"

Locals in Budapest sweeping up "Shitters" out of the street.

We were playing the giant circular arena in the center of Budapest and the promoters expected a large turn out of fans for the doom metal extravaganza with Black Sabbath, Cathedral and Godspeed. When we arrived we were met by a buzzing metropolitan beehive packed with pedestrians and cable cars. This town was a perfect example of old world Europe at it's finest with all it's ancient Gothic architecture intact. I have never seen so many cathedral spires in my life.

The enormous Budapest Arena looking much like the mother ship from "Close Encounters" was the site of my first show ever in an eastern block country.

The beautiful city of Budapest was the backdrop for Cathedral's crack-up during the Black Sabbath tour of 1994.

Now that we had some national currency we could go about finding some lunch as catering wouldn't start until dinner time because of our late load in. We soon found out that there were loads of Americans in town and almost everyone spoke a little English. It seems that a lot of American kids extend their educations in Budapest because it's cheap, exotic and the quality schooling there is second to none.

As I said in my last blog, Victor's girlfriend flew back to the states from Hamburg and it seems his small slice of heaven was now temporarily over until the tour's finish and his arrival back home in the U.S.. He was now facing a reality check that would prove to bring on his worst anxiety attack ever!

Later that night, we played a gig to the biggest audience so far on the tour. I think there were around 6,000 people there. The stage was 20 feet in the air above the crowd. If any one of us fell off the edge it would most definitely mean being hospitalized in traction for months or even death from a broken neck!

This is a photo of Queen at the same venue, just to show you the enormity of the place and the turn out for Sabbath and Cathedral was similar.

After the show Victor was in a funk and told us that he had contemplated diving off the stage head first to end it all. Lee Dorian said "What do you mean? That was the biggest and best audience so far on the tour! Isn't this what we are all living for?" He replied, "I know, I know but you guys just don't understand."

Quite frankly, Victor wasn't going to fill us in on what "we didn't understand" anyway. He just flat out refused to be positive about anything. At this point I was done trying to make him enjoy what should have been a wonderful milestone in his career as a guitarist and if I was to continue I would be endangering my own once in a lifetime experience. After all he is an adult. There was only so much I could do for him, even as a best friend. Already the Sabbath camp had figured out that Victor and I came on the tour as a package deal on loan from Pentagram and they automatically lumped me in to whatever he did that might be troublesome to them. This became alarmingly evident as I was now catching the occasional evil eye from all of them and their entourage.

We all decided to go out on the town and cheer Victor up, Godspeed included as it would be many hours before we would leave town. I was walking ahead of everyone with Scott Carlson and my drum tech Rudy when suddenly we heard loud banging and yelling. We could see Victor, Lee Dorian, Gaz and the Godspeed guys throwing cafe menu boards across the road and chairs being flipped over and tossed also in to the road! Things were getting hairy and it was all spearheaded by Victor who had now downed a healthy load of drinks.

The entourage caught up with us and we ducked into a sleazy little bar that had dancers baring it all through a clear Plexiglas ceiling. Everyone got settled down which I was thankful for. The horrible piped in Madonna songs made me sick but the booze was cheap and we eventually discovered a downstairs lounge that was much more private and would conceal any insanity that might ensue.

Suddenly a pack of prostitutes showed up who were propositioning us in their native tongue. Obviously this downstairs lounge was their pick-up area. They stuck it out with us despite all our drunken insults that were squarely aimed at them. They soon found out we couldn't care less and just kind of blended in to the weird drunken scene.

Just when we thought it was safe inside a warm cozy strip club some prostitutes showed up adding to the mix and soon Gaz and Lee were back to needling Victor which led to the famous blow-out!

Clearly, this was the biggest drunk we had all pulled on this tour. Rudy and I went to the upstairs bar to do the rest of our drinking as Victor was being needled in the downstairs bar by Lee and Gaz about his behavior at the gig and anything else they could come up with. To me it was pointless to keep bringing up Victor's negative behavior as it was just going to irritate him further. Unfortunately they did and it cost them!

I finally cried uncle to Rudy and suggested we get a cable car back to the tour bus parked at the arena before first light came. He agreed and off we went.

Rudy and I left the bar just in time before the fight broke out. We took our remaining money and got a cable bus ride out of there. We reeked of alcohol and the early morning locals going to work were trying their best to stay well away from us. We must have looked like death!

Somehow we got on the wrong car and we headed the wrong way to the other side of town. It was now light out and I realized that we were dangerously drunk and needed to get back as soon as possible to our bunks. We managed to get 3/4 of the way back when we saw the arena in the distance. Rather than take a chance at getting lost again, we got off at the next stop and staggered back to the bus on foot.

I went to push the lock button on the bus when I realized that the door was open which was odd. Inside I found Lee and Gaz sitting there staring into space. They had miraculously found their way back before us. I was relieved until Lee spoke to me and said, "Your friend Victor tried to kill me and I'm not doing any more shows with him! Gaz chimed in, "Yeah, it's over!" I'm thinking, "What the hell happened?" It seems that the both of them kept needling Victor back at the bar after Rudy and I left until he snapped and picked Lee up by the neck with one hand while his feet were dangling in mid air - effectively hanging him!

Rudy and I found Gaz and Lee back at the tour bus seriously shaken by an incident in the bar that we had left hours ago!

Lee said to me, "You better go have a word with your buddy!" I went to Victor's bunk and asked what had happened and that's when I found out the gory details. I was too smashed and tired to deal with it and slithered into my bunk only to get awakened 4 hours later by Victor telling me , "Joe! They're shipping me out!" I was still woozy and this suddenly had become a living nightmare! Victor told me that he was waiting for the taxi that would take him to the airport to catch the first flight back to Washington, D.C.! I told him that I loved him like a brother despite what had happened and that I would contact him when I got home in a month. We said goodbye and that was that.

Victor and I had to say some quick goodbyes as he was being shipped out of Hungary on the next plane.

I woke up later on and found Lee and Gaz threatening to quit the tour and go home. I looked at both of them and said "Do you really want to show the world how unprofessional you guys are? Secondly, do you want to crap out on your childhood idols Black Sabbath and leave them in a lurch without an opening band?" "This tour" I reminded them, "is supposed to have two opening acts!" I told them that if they didn't steer this ship back on course both Cathedral and Black Sabbath would suffer a lot of negative press. I told them that I did not want to be the guy that was responsible for marring these two band's careers and that if they were in their right minds they wouldn't want to be either!

Lee and Gaz were acting like stupid kids who didn't deserve the "big time" and I told them so. I said, "You know what you're going to do? You're going to pick up the pieces and carry on with your commitment to Sabbath and to yourselves! Otherwise you are just spineless wimps! Now get your shit together, we're going to play the biggest show on the tour in 2 days in Prague!" After much hemming and hawing , they agreed.

Our tour bus was now off and running to the next venue via a snowy mountain pass through the Carpathians. We came to the only structure standing in that part of the world to relieve ourselves, get a bite to eat and and perhaps make a phone call. Wouldn't you know it, we had parked in front of a strip bar in the middle of nowhere and the only food we would get would be a glass boot full of lager! We stayed awhile long enough for the bus driver. No one was speaking as everyone was in shock at Victor's departure. I think it finally set in that we were all complete alcoholics and that it was time to chill out or die!

The guys in Cathedral were very afraid of carrying on as a 4 piece but I knew instinctively that the band would sound tighter. Gaz had always used a second guitarist as a crutch so that if he screwed up a part the other guy could cover for him. Well, it was time for him to now take the reins as he should have long ago and become the excellent guitarist that he was destined to become!

The following day we arrived at the venue around the same time as the trucks carrying the stage gear. We were all just waiting for the venue to open it's doors. Prague's beautiful 10,000 seat Sazka Arena was going to be witness to a good old fashioned doom metal hootenanny and what a perfect setting among the Gothic spires and city walls!

Prague's Sazka Arena was host to the largest attended concert on the tour. This would be the proving grounds for the new 4-piece line up of Cathedral. The show was sold out!

The posters for the gig were all over town with a horrific image of an old zombiefied witch killer with white eyes and few teeth in the middle of a graveyard summoning the undead! I of course was in the middle of the road with the truck drivers in the Sabbath crew having some Jack Daniels and a spliff. It seems I was the only one on our bus who didn't learn his lesson about sobriety. Well, at least I didn't use it as a vehicle to do violence.

Godspeed delivered their set as usual that night and it was now time for Cathedral. Lee and Gaz were petrified at the prospect of playing the largest show we would be doing without the safety net of a second guitarist. I was eagerly anticipating it knowing that Scott Carlson and I would rise to the occasion like the professional rhythm section that we were and that the rest of the guys would fall right in line behind us. I was correct! We brought the house down of 10,000 strong and left them wanting more! Even Tony Iommi came up to Gaz and told him how much better we sounded as a four piece and that you could hear everyone's playing much better without the extra guitar that up until now had been muddying up the band's natural sound.

Now years later, I look back and think that Lee and Gaz weren't the only people doubting whether the existing 4-piece Cathedral could pull it off. Gaz and Lee have never turned back and obviously took Tony's views to heart. Gaz still goes it alone as guitarist and sounds great!

The next day we were off to Slovakia and when we reached the border the guards let us through the checkpoint after we gave them a load of t-shirts and CD's. Suddenly minutes after we pulled away we were told to pull over again in a plaza that was out of use. We saw the guards heading for the bus with guns and the whole bit. We were thinking, "this is it!" Time for cavity searches!" The guards stepped up in the bus with their military fatigues and a package wrapped in plastic. We're thinking what the hell is in that? It can't be good! One of the border patrol unwrapped the plastic from the cinder block size package only to reveal a kilo of high grade hashish! He said, "Anyone want to buy?" We all burst out laughing and shouted, "Yeah!" After that we were sent on our merry way! I later told the promoter of the next gig about this and he said, "That's what we in Slovakia call, free enterprise!"

Border guards stopped our bus a second time and then wanted to sell us hash!

Our next gig went smooth and the venue had set up a meet and greet complete with 20 bottles of Champagne. No one came though because Tony Iommi had kicked out all of the press that would be there. Apparently they had jumped the gun and hounded Tony for an interview before sound check barely letting the man get off the bus and into the venue. I remember him coming through the front doors of the place around 2:00 in the afternoon with little dark haired paparazzi crawling all over him like flies! The road crew successfully beat them back. Anyway, I was in the plush layout they had prepared for us all by my lonesome having caviar, cocktails and champagne when in walks Lee and Gaz. Both of them had smiles on their faces for the first time since the incident with Victor. Lee remarked to Gaz "Look at Joe, he's cool". I knew then that everything would work out fine for the rest of the tour and that they were glad that I had talked them in to continuing on.

The next night we found ourselves playing in Poland at a huge venue that looked like an armory. In fact the military was the security for this concert and there were tanks and jeeps lined up in front of the place with a tunnel leading to the front doors made of camouflaged canvas stretched over metal framework. The whole town smelled like sulfur from all the coal fires in the houses and the air was chalk white with the thick foggy smoke.

Gaz and I were video taping from the front of the venue in to the town and slow focusing in on random pedestrians when we spotted a metal chick with spiked arm bands, stripey white pants and multiple body piercings walking her dog. On closer inspection we discovered blood running down both of her arms where she had most likely just shot up heroin. Lovely!

Suddenly we noticed that the air was becoming statically charged and the sky turned dark and before we could speak it started hailing! It was coming down in bucket loads and didn't let up until the cloud had passed and 4 inches of quarter sized ice pellets had covered the ground all around us. We quickly ducked in in the venue and found our way in to the catering room for dinner when the caterer informed us that she was serving Chernobyl chickens. Apparently everything in this particular area of the world had been effected by the legendary nuclear power plant meltdown. All things living here both plant and animal were exposed and all of our food had come from the local markets. Bon appetit!

The gig went down great even though the military were obviously paranoid of the fans having a good time. I saw a kid get batoned by a soldier for attempting to get a look through one of the dressing room windows. His head was bleeding profusely! Chalk it up as another freaky gig on the Black Sabbath tour!

As we were loading out after the show, one of the truck drivers told us that MTV Europe was going to air the Stuttgart show from a few weeks earlier on TV and that he had a satellite dish in his truck and a TV to view it on. It was a very strange scene, me viewing myself for the very first time on MTV in the middle of Poland with the truck driver pointing his dish at the satellite from atop his truck as I finished digested glowing chicken meat.

At the polish concert one of Sabbath's truck drivers informed us that they were airing the Stuttgart concert on MTV and he just happened to have a portable satellite dish and TV monitor to watch it with!

We now headed for Fulda. If you remember the last few entries I had mentioned the Arch Bishop of that town. He had supposedly damned all of us who played a certain few gigs to eternal hellfire and especially the show in Fulda. Of course any believing born again Christian knows that judgment of souls is exclusive to the Lord God himself. This man was no prophet or saint or anything other than a cog in a denominational machine. I believe that he has faith but also enjoys the upper rooms and exclusive treatments of a bishop that have greatly warped his perception of himself versus the human family.

Yes! We were all sinners but some of us in our entourage had very deep running faith although we weren't exactly demonstrating it at the time. In my case I was running away from the hard truth of my mistakes in life and found a band aid in alcohol and pot. I'm sorry I put myself through that for so many years because today I am clean and sober and living as close to the Lord's bosom as possible and enjoy life and music so much more! As for the others in our clan of misfits I can honestly say that they have also changed their lifestyles for the better.

Cathedral at Fulda, Germany. The Arch Bishop of this town claimed that all of us involved with the Black Sabbath/Cathedral tour would be damned if we played in this city.

The gig was a small recreation center near a park and the Arch Bishop showed up with a scowl on his face but as the night progressed he found himself inside the gig watching the bands. I think he realized that we weren't the monsters that we seemed to be and that it is wrong to condemn others who don't share your exact views on philosophy or theology. After all, we are only human and all of us, the Arch Bishop included, are born in sin.

The next day we awoke to the sound of heavy rain and the bus was pulling in to downtown Leipzig. We stopped and made a mad dash into the venue which to our surprise was a massive "Tiki bar" complete with giant fake palm trees and plastic tropical flowers. An ideal setting for a doom metal concert, right? All the while it was just pissing down rain like I've never seen before. The rain was hitting the roof so hard that the whole place was humming.

I couldn't believe that our show in Leipzig would be held at a Tiki Bar!

We played the gig and sounded great that night. Strangely that was the beginning of a trend. We were starting to become a seriously heavy outfit since Victor's departure and now our new instrumentation was creating a whole new sound. We started giving Sabbath a run for their money. A fact that slowly turned some of them against us all over again.

We had to drive back into Austria once more for a show in Lienz. This small town was nestled deep in the Alps and sheer vertical peaks arose from all sides of the village giving the place a strange claustrophobic effect among it's natural alpine beauty. The sports hall was a small "A" framed gymnasium that Geezer later described as a wedding hall for Elvis impersonators. I went on a search for hairspray in the small downtown section near the railroad station. The hairdresser women who sold it to me looked at me as if I had just arrived from Venus. In some ways they were correct!

It took extra long to fit all the gear into the small venue so I decided to make myself scarce as not to bother the Sabbath bunch. As i was crossing the parking lot I heard a whistle then a "Hey Joe!" It was coming from a fan in a small yellow Italian sports car. He told me in perfect English that he had driven all the way from northern Italy to see me play the drums. He was a big Pentagram and Raven fan and apparently had all my albums. I pointed out to him all the huge peaks that surrounded the town and said that it was too bad that we couldn't get to the top of one of them. He said, "No problem, hop in and we'll go up one of them!" So off we went and sure enough we found a road that went straight up! we kept going and going and going as it got steeper and steeper to the point of imminent danger! It was very hard to turn around under those circumstances. What a view though! We made our way back down just in time for my sound check. This venue looked to me like a large Moose Lodge or something like that.

We did our usual set and then Black Sabbath hit the stage. It was a packed show but something seemed really wrong with this gig from the beginning. In the middle of their set some fans started throwing hypodermic needles at Geezer's feet until there was a medium sized pile of them there. Geezer walked off the stage and phoned Gloria and said that he was done and that this is what it had all come to. Personally I would have felt like jacking it in myself. This was a case of a very bad booking. I was so embarrassed for them that I nicked out to a local disco with Lee and Gaz to get away from the weird scene that was playing out. When we returned we found the road crew all bloodied and holding lead pipes. They looked like they had just been through a war and they had!

It seems that the entire crowd rioted after the gig and tried to steal all the gear off the trucks. Then the lead pipes came out. This had gone far beyond a bad booking and was now a full blown nightmare! It was at this time that I felt for them. Whether they liked us or not, they didn't deserve that kind of treatment, nobody does. From that point on we all stuck together in a strange sort of way.

The tour was now winding down with only a few more gigs to go. We still had to drive down to Italy for 2 shows, one in Florence and another in Milan. We made it the next afternoon into Florence and we had a day off to enjoy the ancient city that had been the home of Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo. It was notably hotter and we parked at the venue outside of town center. All of us were hungry and needed to find a money exchange and a restaurant. It took us all day to find this as the narrow streets of Florence are like a honeycomb and finding the center was next to impossible unless you live there. We all got our small bit of money and made it to the cultural center of town with all the museums and the famous El Duomo Cathedral. We just happened to get there at the same time as Sabbath and their crew. They shunned us like the plague. By this time we didn't really care as they had only said two words to us on the whole tour anyway.

We arrived at this medium size arena in Florence Italy early the next morning where we would be playing our next show. we parked our bus right in front of these stairs to get some much needed rest until it got so hot that we had to evacuate and go into town for some food and a cold one.

The streets of Florence were narrow and honeycombed the city with tall buildings on either side which made it difficult to know where you were going unless you had a map. The simple task of finding a money exchange was next to impossible .

El Duomo Cathedral was in the nerve center of Florence and this is where we found cash and also ran into Black Sabbath on a sightseeing tour. We were the last people that they wanted to see. We did our best to stay away from them and give them their space.

This bridge stretching over the river was probably the oldest thing standing in this miraculous city. It was after inspecting this that I found my troubles with Godspeed.

The afternoon dragged on into early evening and I started hanging out with Tommy from Godspeed and their drummer and bassist. They had toned it down a lot and were becoming more comfortable as a band and trying their best to be civil without letting too much of their bad boy attitude go, which was fine with me. Tommy and I got into some deep discussions about life in general and we both realized that we had giant chips on our shoulders from dealing with too many corrupt idiots masquerading as booking agents, promoters and A & R people. Tommy's upbringing in Asbury Park was a little rougher than mine in suburban D.C.. It obviously shaped his outlook on life and the music business. Bitter would be an understatement.

We started having a few drinks and decided to go on a Florence pub crawl where we instantly spent most of our remaining money.

Suddenly without warning, Tommy and Rob grabbed me, sucker punched me and threw me into a bullet proof glass window in the foyer of a closed bank. My head just bounced off the glass and my knee slammed into a marble ledge beneath the plate glass window crushing the cartilage in my left knee. I hit the ground. Then they picked me up, quite proud of what they had done, and set me up against a wall. I was seeing stars and with the added alcohol was more than disoriented. I'm sure I had a slight concussion. I tried walking up the street aimlessly and was saved by good old "Lug", our guitar tech who I had mentioned earlier in the story. He dragged me a couple of miles to the bus. How he got me there, I'll never know! I'm convinced to this day that God sent the man there where he would find me and take me to safety. Lug died from a broken heart years later because a judge thought him unfit to be a custodial father to his kid and favored his girlfriend but to me he will never know what a hero he was that fateful night in Italy.

The next day I awoke to find all the cartilage in my left knee disintegrated from the impact of the marble ledge against it. I had to hop around with my leg bent. I was really in a predicament and needed medical help. Black Sabbath's wardrobe mistress found me and went to find Geezer. Meanwhile Sabbath's stage manager and light man Keith Olsen asked me, "Are you going to play or not? Hurry up and tell me so I can get you guys off the bill!" He was an insensitive prick who I will never forget nor will I sing his praises!

Geezer finally showed up and asked "What happened to you, now?" I told him about Tommy and Rob and that he and his wife managed them and what were they going to do about this situation? I told him that clearly I needed some crutches or something! Nothing was done. It was ignored and swept under the carpet. Meanwhile I was hobbling everywhere I went. The strangest part of it was , as long as I had my knee bent I was not in pain which made it possible to actually play the drums but as soon as I stood up I would almost pass out from the pain.

Rather than bitch about my situation I decided to become super-human and continue on the tour for the final gigs. It didn't get any easier but I noticed that Geezer started hanging around a lot more and chatting with us. That was nice and all and I do appreciate it but it was hardly enough and in hindsight I should have sued them, the management and Tommy! To this day I can't jog. Jogging was one of my greatest pleasures in life. It prepared me for grueling concert tours and kept my weight down to a healthy norm all the while giving me an excellent feeling of well being. I could barely walk for 2 years and I still can't run for more than a few yards.

The next day we headed for Milan. There we were met by Paul Chain, guitarist from Death SS . I instantly hit it off with Paul and he saw the problem with my leg and sympathized with me. He cheered me up by calling a guy up from a drum magazine to do an interview with me a few blocks away at a pizza restaurant. I hobbled over there with him and did a cool interview. That was the first interview I had ever given to a drum magazine. I consider Paul one of my very dearest friends and he is a super guy! He turned my horror of a day in to a pleasant one! Musically we are both kindred souls and I assure you it was no random act of nature that we finally met.

Paul Chain, Italy's premier guitarist, rolled out the welcome wagon for me upon my arrival in Milan which is an act of kindness I will never forget!

Paul's friend, Carl had come to record Cathedral for a radio broadcast that later became a fantastic bootleg CD. We went down much better than Sabbath that night and it was all caught on tape!

While I was playing that gig broken knee and all , I turned to get my water and towel from my drum tech, Rudy and was surprised to find Bobby Rondinelli passing me my towels and water with a huge smile on his face. He even went to Tony Iommi and said, "Man, those guys are really good , have you actually sat down and listened to them?" Tony wanted no part of it and walked off. The truth was that Cathedral had started sounding more like the classic Sabbath line-up of Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward than this new cabaret version of Sabbath. Whatever the case Mr. Iommi was not amused in the slightest.

At the show in Milan I turned to get my towel and water in the middle of the Cathedral set and instead of my drum tech Rudy handing them to me there was Bobby Rondinelli passing me my stuff with a big smile on his face.

He should have lightened up and realized that we were huge Sabbath heads and that our styles of playing had all been ultimately formed by their example. All of my bands have been accused for years of copycatting Sabbath but I know that musically Sabbath play correctly and that they have set the highest standards in metal. I'm a perfectionist and I want the best sounds that I can achieve. I won't settle for less! Tony Iommi is the most consistent guitarist I've ever seen or heard and night after night he does it right! Mistake free and professional! Geezer is also the best melodic bassist I have heard other than John Entwistle. So yes, I'm always going to sound a little bit like them.

We headed out of Italy and into Austria where we had a night off in Vienna and a gig there the following evening in a giant circus tent outside town. This was the first time I could get a real long hot shower without any distractions and take my good old time about it. I could see the big ferris wheel about a half mile away that had been left over from an old world exposition and had become one of Vienna's most recognized landmarks. I had played in the old city on the Danube many many times before with Raven. It felt at home again and back to reasonable sanity. I have lots of friends there and was sure that I would be seeing them all the next night.

The great Ferris wheel in Vienna , Austria was a welcome sight to me on the tour as it represented better times on previous Raven tours and the good friends that I would be seeing again at the show.

After I got myself all cleaned up and rested I hooked up with our caterer, "Mouse". She wanted to rave it up in a dance club and unwind from all the tension created by the demands of the tour.
She took me to a small bar where she could drink a lot of Red Bulls mixed with alcohol and dance her anxieties away. I didn't blame her and joined the bar tender/owner in rolling a giant spliff on the bar. I thought to myself, "Wow! You can't do this in the States and get away with it!"

The next night we played the venue and my friends Doris and Wolfgang from "Metal Axes Magazine" arrived just as I thought and we immediately made it for the dressing room but were stopped by Bob Ward, Sabbath's road manager. He said, "You know I can't let these people back here!" I looked him right in the eye and said"These are my dear friends from the music press and they are coming with me whether you like it or not, end of subject!" He just stared as I pulled them in to our dressing room. Needless to say they thanked me over and over for sticking up for them. We had a real nice chat about music and life! We hung out on the bus late until it was time to go and I was real saddened by saying goodbye to my old friends. Doris had been with me during saner times and had done several interviews with me on friendlier tours with Raven. They knew I wasn't happy and they could see why. They wished me luck and off we went to Salzburg.

The next day found us at the venue in Salzburg and you could see the "Eagle Nest" once belonging to Hitler perched atop the vertical peaks of the Alps right out the windows of the sports hall. We were informed that night that Godspeed would not be allowed to play the last gig in Zurich, Switzerland because the truth was finally found out through the grapevine that they were ultimately the trouble makers on the tour. I couldn't have agree more and I think that they set the tone for a lot of bad things that happened but would run and hide behind their manager's skirt before anyone could pin it on them. I should have been happy when I heard this news but come the next to the last gig in Salzburg, Austria and Godspeed's final gig of the tour I suddenly felt terrible for them! Down deep I loved those misguided jerks. They honestly didn't know any better. They were just green and didn't know how to act. Now, that doesn't mean that they are excused for crippling me but I blame their management and record label just as much for not checking them out closer. They shouldn't have been touring until they were ready! So I can't put the whole blame on Tommy and his crew, Godspeed.That's just the normal shit that goes on in their neighborhood.

Just to show them that I understood and with the hope that they might someday understand my compassion for people that goes beyond their hatred and betrayal of me, I dressed up posing as their manager complete with leather waistcoat, tied back hair, cigar and drawn on mustache and came out on stage to announce them on this their final gig on the Black Sabbath tour! I shouted to a packed house in my deepest Jersey accent: Hey what's cookin' out dare doit bags?"Lady's and Gentlemen will you welcome from da' guttas of New Joisey, GODSPEED!!!!!! Then I flicked the cigar across the stage at the drum kit and it burst into a fountain of sparks and without hesitation, they were off playing their hearts out! I looked down at the side of the stage and caught all of Sabbath's crew checking that one out! After all it, was for them as well!

Godspeed weren't really bad guys but I guess that they felt that they needed to be in order to play rock and roll. When the promoter in Switzerland decided to pull the plug on their performance the day before the show, I decided to act as their manager introducing them to the public in Salzburg which would be their final gig on the tour.

Next day we arrived in Switzerland for tour's end. Geezer Butler came and sat in our dressing room for a few laughs and hung out with us until showtime. Tony Iommi and Geoff Nichols reluctantly came back also to sign our tour posters and had to endure the childish heckling of Gaz who totally worshiped Tony in reality.

Gaz later asked them if they would mind if Cathedral did half of our set as a Sabbath medley? They told us that it would be all right.

Cathedral hit the stage with "Tomorrow's Dream" and suddenly we shifted gears into the famous Sabbath blues jam from "Live at Last" and then "Cornucopia" all of it on the fly as we had heard these tunes so many times in our lives that it was a snap! I was being pelted in the head throughout the set with grapes thrown at me from stage right by Geezer Butler. He was having an obvious good time watching Cathedral breeze through songs that he had written . I think it took him back to the old days and gave him an opportunity to see a little bit of of himself in us. Hopefully it helped validate his and Tony's hard work all these years.

After our show I got Geezer and Tony to sign my poster from the Prague show with the hideous old witch killer on it. Geezer just simply wrote "GRAPE!! , Geezer Butler". We also signed his poster and a poster for his son which showed Geezer Butler what he was, one of the grand gentlemen of rock.

Our tour bus left directly after our goodbyes to bands and crew. The next three days became a blur to me as my injuries from Italy began worsening. I literally fell apart as the air started coming out of the balloon. Thank God I had Scott Carlson there with me! Anyone who knows Scott knows that he is the most caring nurturing soul on the planet and he helped me through 3 days of total disorientation and pain.

Scott Carlson and I at the side of the stage at a Raven gig in Los Angeles in 2008. Both of us reliving the horror of that tour and both coming to the conclusion that it is something that we'll never forget!

The people back home who had loaned me out to this endeavor were getting back someone entirely different. I remember arriving at the airport in Washington in my black stage clothes that smelled like 3 months worth of stale cigarettes and hashish and looking like I'd just gotten run over by a tractor/trailer! I had tons of posters and tour shirts overflowing out of my bags and dropping to the floor. The other travelers around me were clearly viewing me as a horror! They were correct! Even my new born son, Joseph didn't recognize me and started bawling. I also found a pinch hitting husband waiting for my wife in my living room when I got home! I promptly bounced him out the door. Divorce was right around the corner! Welcome home!

As it all ended up Cathedral dumped their uncaring manager and found real members that would stay with them throughout their career. Lee and Gaz have also visibly matured as people and become more caring towards others which will serve them well.

Victor found God and quit Pentagram and started his own band , "Place Of Skulls" and found his own audience and went back to Europe many times despite his mistakes there in the past.

Tommy and Rob disbanded Godspeed after a quick firing from their label, Atlantic and a tour with Dio. They started a proper doom metal outfit called Solace and are working even today. Tommy and Rob have settled down much over the years and Tommy is now a family man. He also apologized to me in the most sincere way and we are in touch and have buried the hatchet even though I don't let him forget that I can't function the way I once did. I also recently ran into Rob, Godspeed's bassist at the Templars of Doom festival that I headlined with my solo band, the Hounds of Hasselvander. I brought up the incident in question on the Sabbath tour and he replied by saying, "Man, we were just little kids back then!!" And I said, "Yeah, my leg never healed to this day!". I think I got the last laugh when his ulta-hot wife Stephanie wanted him a photo of her and I together!! Good job, Rob!

click!!!

Black Sabbath went on to revive the original line up and have since won back their integrity and have turned yet another generation on to the classic Sabbath sound. As of late they are visiting another chapter of the Dio years line up!

Bobby Rondenelli went on to play drums for Blue Oyster Cult who I'm sure treated him better.

Tony Martin formed a new solo band featuring his talented son on guitar and I was fortunate enough to share the stage with them on his first show since the dreaded tour. Geoff Nichols was also playing keyboards for him and we all had an incredible re-cap of our experiences on the cross purposes tour. I was surprised to find out that their feelings about it were much the same as mine.

I played the 2006 Bang Your Head Festival in Germany with Raven and once again shared the stage with the multi-talented Tony Martin. We spoke about the Cross Purposes tour and I realized that it had taken it's toll on him and the others in Sabbath as well. It seems that no one was exempt from paying a price!

Directly after the tour, I found myself recording a new album with Raven on a new Japanese label that eventually afforded me the luxury of recording a second one live in Tokyo, "Destroy All Monsters" and we haven't stop working since. I also still enjoy making music with my other solo and side projects.

Cathedral earned their traveling shoes on this tour. It changed them from a 5 piece with no real direction into a 4 piece band that played played like men! Unbelievably, Tony Iommi played some guitar on their next album.

Godspeed disbanded after being dropped by Atlantic Records and being booted off the Dio tour. Tommy and Rob changed horses and dropped the grunge shtick and formed a great sounding, proper doom metal outfit called Solace.

Victor Griffin crawled around in the dark searching for himself for a few more years but then emerged out of his muck with the mighty Place Of Skulls and has since gotten control of his anger and is at peace with himself and his audience.

Right after the Cross Purposes tour I recorded more albums with Raven and recorded my first live album in Tokyo.

Jack Starr of Virgin Steele gave me the name "The Godfather Of Doom" which at the time we laughed about. But on the 1994 Black Sabbath "Cross Purposes Tour" I truly earned that title and I dare any human being to try taking that away from me!

I will never forget the things that happened on that tour nor will I forget how people famous and not so famous who lack confidence in themselves react unfavorably toward others. They are in reality, screaming inside with the undiluted fear of losing control after leaving their comfort zones where they are used to being in control of everything! This goes for all of us! Let's hope we do better when we have to meet God!

I pray for each and every poor soul who was involved in any way with this excursion into madness. And I would hope that they have taken any little bit of good that they could glean from it as I have done and turned it into compassion for others and a deeper love for their families, friends and fans so that one day we all make it to that big concert in the sky!

Doom On Brothers & Sisters! Life is too short for you to write this one off!

Joe H.

Tales From The Abyss Pt. 3 "Madness In The Euro-Sheds, Damned By The Arch Bishop and The Flight From Hitler's Airport"

2009-02-18T09:49:00.037-05:00

The ground rules were now set! Godspeed were going to do whatever they wanted, hijack our tour bus and our right to privacy. In such close quarters it's hard not to step on someone's toes occasionally but these guys took that concept to the moon. It was inevitable that some shit was going to go down!

Our tour bus made it to Dover for the morning crossing over to Belgium. It was a welcome break from the insanity that had ensued all the way from our final show in the U.K.. We were able to split up and get away by ourselves on the ferry and for me and old English breakfast was in order! Fried bread, eggs, beans and that incredible sausage all topped with a little side of mushrooms and a dab of H.P. Sauce. Man, I was in heaven even though my arteries were in the hospital!

I made it back to the lounge only to find Asbury Park's finest once again drinking it up. Godspeed were obviously binge drinkers and somehow they thought it made them more rock and roll but in reality it made them look like hooligans. Their insecurity about their own musical talent was telling. Their leader "Tommy" was like one of those kids that spent his entire youth in reform school for skinning all the neighborhood cats and hanging their pelts in the branches of their owners trees.

We finally got to the coast of continental Europe and got back on board the bus. We then made our way to Brussels. This is when we finally broke the ice with Godspeed and Gaz was the first to stand up to their madness as they had taken control of the tape player with their entire collections of Flipper, M.D.C. and Dead Kennedy's tapes. They were a walking frat house party and it was time to stop them! Of course amongst great protest, Gaz just simply ejected their hard core punk tapes and gave them back. He then slipped in Amon Duul II. What a master stroke!

Those guys looked like someone had just pissed in their cornflakes! This just didn't go with their plans of usurping! They thought that they were going to call all the shots for 3 f**king months. At this point we ramped it up and we all got our tapes and CD's out. We were listening to High Tide, Clear Blue Sky, Blue Cheer, Quartz, Kiss you name it! The Godspeed camp all of a sudden went very quiet! I hated it but we were going to have to raise these guys like little children and educate them a bit about being on tour and learning to share.

The show in Brussels went well but unfortunately for me my nerves were shot from traveling with people that never slept and continuously partied. I was not in my right mind and susceptible to my own bad judgment. I was outside of the venue when Black Sabbath was doing their last number. I was right at the end of the front walk out to the street from the main entrance when I saw this guy crouched down on the sidewalk rummaging through a bag in desperation and then he said "Ah Ha!". He had pulled out a huge bag of crystal meth and asked me if I would like a snort? I said to him that I didn't do "crank" but that at one time in my life I had occasionally dabbled in cocaine. He said, "Coke?" "I've got lot's of coke!" "You want some?" I said well maybe a little bump. At that he put out a line 12 inches long heaping on the concrete and said hurry up and do it the doors are opening and the audience is heading this way! Like an idiot, I'm on the sidewalk snorting this gigantic rail fit for an elephant with the fans and the concert goers who had just seen me on stage in all my glory now walking around me as I was on my knees on the ground reduced to life in the gutter snorting drugs! Some of them even commented as they walked by, "Isn't that the drummer for Cathedral?" "Man, that's disgusting". They were so right!

After all that, it was time to hit the road towards our next show in Paris. I was totally tweaked and confessed it all to the guys and apologized for my stupidity. I think after my confessions of sin everyone kind of blended together better as we were all misfits in one way or another.

Our gig in Paris was at an old theater located at the bottom of the hill from where Jim Morrison was buried. I had played there once before with Raven on our tour with Kreator in 1989. I remember them having a strict noise ordinance that turned a lot of bands away from performing there. So what were they going to do with 2 of the world's loudest bands in the house?

Lee Dorian and Gaz were now detaching themselves from the rest of the band as they had now become the only Brit musicians on the bus since Godspeed arrived and they decidedly didn't like our American sense of humor. As rough around the edges as Godspeed were, they were trying their New Jersey best to fit in with Victor, Scott and I. So on this night of the Paris show we slipped out during Sabbath's set and checked out the Parisian night life with them. They were cool and we started getting along. This definitely brought the anxiety level down, at least for a while. Still, Lee and Gaz wanted no part of them and now us. At some point I lost the Godspeed guys in a disco and went looking for them in every bar and pub that I could which led me in to a bar that was actually a brothel. This place was dripping with red crushed velvet and old ornate golden hanging chandeliers. There were these chicks right out of Moulin Rouge on the laps of every guy with a 3 piece suit on. Some at the bar and some in little private booths with scarlet curtains. You just knew for these guys, that there was a wife and kids at home waiting for them all! As soon as I approached the bar to ask if my new found pals had come through for a drink I was told to, "Get out!" "We don't let your kind in here!" yelled the 300 pound Madam! She was a poor imitation of Divine in John Water's "Pink Flamingos"I yelled back"I'm glad I'm not your kind you sleaze bags!" All of a sudden the french bastards with suits on and messed up hair and ties are outside threatening me as I'm throwing one of them in to a parked Renault on the street! I took off running as they were yelling for the Jon Dam! You would have thought Jack The Ripper had come calling the way they were making such a fuss!

Beds,brothels and a bevy of brie eating babes!

I managed to get back to the gig before Black Sabbath's last encore and just hung out in the dressing room with Gaz and Lee telling them of my little adventure. We heard Sabbath come in to their dressing room next to ours and some harsh words were being exchanged over the set that they had just played. We kind of slipped out of there before anything else happened and prepared to spend the night in town.

The next day Cathedral's manager, Paul Loasby met us at the bus with a car and took us to The Louvre and the Eifel Tower. Unfortunately Victor ran off with Godspeed to another watering hole and missed out on this once in a life time opportunity. This was great fun and it took us away from the rock and roll madness for a day. It was also good to do something together as a band besides playing and talking about music as we were still trying to get to know each other.

Seeing the "Mona Lisa" at close range was indescribable as was seeing a mammoth painting of a coronation that needed a warehouse to contain it! When you got close to it you could actually see woven threads in the clothes of these giant people in the painting. Magnificent! This was something I will never forget for the rest of my life as I'm a painter and illustrator also. This was the grail of fine art.

Paul Loasby took all of us in Cathedral to the Louvre as a special treat for a job well done. Seeing the exquisite art in the Louvre will stay with me the rest of my life!

After our trip into the world of fine art we headed to the Eifle Tower and got a ride up to the top in the worlds scariest elevator! We stopped half way up and realised the enormity of the structure. We were wondering if we should continue any higher as we were already high above the city. We chose to proceed. It was becoming windy out by the time we got to the top and the huge World's Fair relic started swaying in the breeze and was most felt in the top section. We all got one good Kronenburg down our necks when we decided that it was time to get back down to the street.

We said goodbye to the beautiful city of Paris with a trip up the Eifel Tower and a quick beer!

Our next gigs were in Germany and we were to spend a day and night in Cologne for our days off. I remember seeing the giant cathedral set in the center of town from almost 11 miles away as it was so massive!

We parked our tour bus down by the waterfront along with all the tourists visiting that lovely city! We decided the best plan of action was to find a pub that sold Guinness. This time Lee and Gaz decided to come along for some adventure. Our road crew consisted of 2 guys, Rudy from Scotland and Lug from Newcastle. Lug had been a life long friend to Cronos of Venom and was one of the people responsible for smuggling in black powder in his carry on luggage to the states for the pyro show at Venom's infamous 1981 show at the Paramount Theater in Staten Island, N.Y. . Nowadays he would have been a candidate for "Gitmo"!

Lug and Rudy decided to come with us for the festivities. After the first 3 beers the day became a fog as we rolled in and out of every bar and pub in Cologne. Around 9:00 pm I staggered back to the bus only to find Godspeed's manager Mick totally shit-faced drunk. Scott Carlson was also on the bus and had also decided enough was enough as he was as broke as I. Everyone of us had blown their food money on booze.

Mick the tour manager suddenly started acting crazy and shouted out to the bus driver to leave! I asked him, "What the hell are you thinking?" "The rest of the guys from both bands are still out and about in the city!" Mick wouldn't have any of it and shouted even louder for the bus driver to leave and then suddenly the engine kicked on! This guy was fast becoming Captain Bligh from "Mutiny On The Bounty"! Those of us who were in the bus managed to wrestle his drunken ass to the ground but it was too late as the bus started moving! Next thing we knew we were out of town and missing 11 people. We had already crossed the bridge out of town and it would be very difficult now to double back much less find the place where we had parked the bus earlier.

Mick the road manager lost his mind and had the bus driver depart Cologne leaving behind most of Cathedral and Godspeed! We had to wrestle him to the floor and threaten the bus driver with an ass beating if he didn't go back for them!

I told the bus driver that I would personally throttle him if he didn't turn around and wait for the rest of the guys to return! I finally talked sense in to him and we returned to find all of the lost orphans of our entourage waiting in the parking lot where we had been earlier. It seemed to me that one person after another was falling victim to some kind of unseen panic syndrome. This , I later found out was true and it wasn't just exclusive to the Cathedral/Godspeed camp either!

Our next few gigs were kind of a blur as the entire group of us were partying all night every night after our gigs and I had to purchase a couple of small Jager Meisters from the freezer of a vendor every night and down them in order to get any sleep through the madness!

I remember playing in Berlin and it was very cold. It was also the first chance that I had to call home since I had arrived in Germany. Victor was becoming depressed over some personal issues and Lee and Gaz were playing head games with him a lot when they should have been backing off. This always seemed to happen on our days off as well. I couldn't wait for days "on" as everyone had something important to do other than drinking themselves to death.

We set out over night for the city of Erfurt. All night I was tossing and turning with a sharp pain in my back. I figured that a piece of luggage or something to do with the bus had poked through to my ground bunk. That morning I found the culprit! It was a high heeled woman's shoe belonging to one of 2 Japanese girls who had stowed away on the bus right before we had left Berln! It seems that Gaz from Cathedral had found these girls and while they were in the toilet he snagged one of their shoes and stuck it directly under my mattress heel up. Finding Japanese female fans on your bus is a very common thing on tours. You will glance up to the front of the bus and see 2 or three dark haired little girls hiding in the front like mice. They are so quiet and sneaky about it that you can harldly tell them to get off the bus when they've been so clever about it and haven't bothered anyone! Anyway, that morning when I awoke with that shoe in my back I yelled out "I've been impaled!!!!" Everyone on the bus died laughing.

We were headed to the town of Erfurt when we were informed about this particular show and 2 others in the near future. It seems that the Arch Bishop of Fulda, Germany had officially damned the Black Sabbath tour and that if we played the three towns of Erfurt, Offenbach or Fulda that all of us would be cast in to the pit! Apparently the Arch Bishop himself had been on the radio for weeks protesting our arrival in Germany. He had even managed to have the concert posters censured and new ones had to be put up with Godzilla jaws in place of the burning wings of the angel on the original poster.

I do understand someone's concern about a show or idea attempting to discredit our Lord as I and other Americans are witness to atheists and scientologists doing this blasphemous act every day! I, being a Chritstian have an aversion to inverted crosses, satanic imagery and satan worship. This however, does not give me the right or the power to damn someone! That lies exclusively with God the Father and not any one human including the mistaken Arch Bishop of Fulda! If anyone was committing blasphemy it was him! For him to curse us would be tantamount to voodoo. There were several of us Christians on that tour who knew the difference between reality and show business. Apparently he didn't.

We arrived in Erfurt for our concert on an unusually warm day for that time of year and we all went about our day's business. The caterer went to market as usual to buy food for the bands and crew. We all tended to the things we needed to make the show go on and then took a break to eat our meals. Suddenly none of us felt very good after dinner. In fact all of us had felt strangely all through the day. I remember it being extremely hard to breath anywhere in the venue. Could this have been the Arch Bishops curse? I sensed worry from the Sabbath camp about this show and the threats made against us all. Tony Iommi was even hanging around our dressing room door kind of feeling out how we were dealing with it. On my way to the stage I waved hello to him and prodded the other guys with "Hey , let's go do this f**king thing! " We played our hearts out and totally entertained the audience. Black Sabbath then later did the same. The trifecta of the damned was now one third over with and as we were loading out, we found the 2 little Japanese girls in the company of Godspeed and I spotted the girl with one shoe. I told her where she could find the other one and that was the last I saw of them for the rest of the tour.

Erfurt, Germany was the first stop on the "gigs of the damned" trio self described and ordained by the Arch Bishop of Fulda! Funny though, how difficult it was to play that gig and the other 2 to follow as well!

We next arrived in Hannover at a circus tent venue that fit inside of a massive old factory building that once pumped out Nazi U boats in WW II. The allies never discovered it's location and it was never bombed. It had catwalks all the way up to the ceiling. You just knew that Das Fuhror had at one time walked these steel catwalks with his cronies. Now in 1994 it was Tony Martin walking the steel path overlooking the proceedings in the factory now turned concert venue/cable warehouse. I had also played this venue before with Raven on the Running Wild tour in 1990. To give you an idea about the size of this place , when you got to the top of the catwalk and looked down at the giant circus tent that was the gig, it appeared to be the size of a small coin held at arms length tucked in a corner of this behemoth of a structure!

Black Sabbath as I said earlier were having their own disagreements about things but on this night everything was running smoothly and all of us were laying back and just enjoying the event. Our guitar roadie "Lug" was testing the guitars on stage and each one he picked up he would plug in to the amp and play his horrible rendition of "Symptom Of The Universe" in front of the waiting crowd. In fact he had been doing this every night on the tour. Sabbath's road manager Bob Ward pulled him aside and politely asked him to not to do this anymore as it was upsetting to the guys in Sabbath. Lug was one of those guys that can't leave well enough alone and stuck his head inside Sabbath's dressing room to appologize. They were cool about it and just told him to lay off sound checking with Sabbath songs as it was unprofessional to do so. Lug in his child like way then asked, "Well if you don't want me to play your stuff do you have any requests?" Needless to say they broke out into uncontrolable laughter. Lug was an one of a kind!

"Lug" taking time out for a snapshot with Victor. Lug was a classic Geordie from North Shields and had a great sense of humor . He died a few years later from grief over having his child taken away from him in a custody battle. It made the British papers with a clip saying "Sabbath Roadie Dies From Grief"Rock and Roll tends to cut some of it's finest people down like dogs! You'll be missed "Brother"!

Tony Iommi came by our our dressing room to say hello and have a few quick laughs with us before he went on stage as did Geoff Nichols and Tony Martin. All the bands went down well and this is when the members of Black Sabbath began speaking with the other bands a little more. The ice seemed to break for a short time but this was also a volatile mixture of people and situations that would soon come to an uncomfortable impass! But for now, things were good.

Over the next 2 weeks we played a few identical sports hall gigs that all look the same and are no big deal. Godspeed trashed the dressing rooms night after night leaving wet towels all over the floor and leaving water running and trash heeping in their wake! Their fearless roadmanager Mick once again lost his mind and blamed all the carnage in the dressing rooms on Cathedral. He went to Gloria Butler and Bob Ward from Sabbath about it and also told the people promoting the rest of our shows in Germany and Switzerland that Cathedral was at the root of all the problems on the tour and that we should be kicked off! This guy was a real "prat" and unfortunately for him, the truth always prevails as you will see later on the story!

Suddenly all kinds of privelages were cut off from us. We were denied dressing rooms, phone calls and guests in our dressing rooms. Sabbath's crew and especially their light man/stage manager Keith went out of their way to distance themselves from us. I remember Keith screaming at us during our soundchecks to "Stop playing that shit and get off the stage"! When we were going up the ramp to play our set he was standing there on the side of the safety rail with his maglight telling us if we didn't hurry up that he would stop our show all together! That's when I got in his Irish face and told him that I would rip every limb off hs body and flog him with the bloody ends if he ever entertained that thought again! I never heard another peep out of him. Besides he was just pissed off along with the rest of Sabbath's crew that none of them had yet recieved pay through their bank accounts and the tour was now close to half way through.

Victor Griffin was having a very hard time with the fact that Pentagram wasn't on this tour and that he would have to suffer the indignity of supporting his childhood heroes, Black Sabbath in a sub-par doom metal band like Cathedral. I continued reminding him that for now we were in Cathedral and that this was their gig and that we would have to do our professional best for them. We were after all, very lucky that they had invited us along. I also thought that Cathedral were pretty damn good for young guys. Victor had also gotten news that his father had been diagnosed with cancer and it didn't look good for him. I was also saddened as Mr. Griffin was like family to me. I think Lee and Gaz knew down deep how Victor felt about Cathedral and offered to feature a Pentagram song in the set that Victor had written. We were now going to add "Evil Seed" to the set list. This cheered Victor up for awhile but his drinking got evermore out of
control.

Victor had problems back home and was stuck on a major European tour with others equally troubled. Unfortunately his only outlet for his frustrations were found in a bottle which ultimately made everyone nervous.

We once again arrived in a town in Germany that I'd never heard of to play yet another identical sports hall gig. It was a beautiful spring morning. I got up at 8:00am and had the bus driver come with me for a scotch whiskey breakfast. When I arrived back at the bus Victor's girlfriend Anne had flown in to be with him as he was going through troubled times. I was glad for him but knew that once she had to fly back that he would snap under the pressure he had been going through.

Our roadies Lug and Rudy were outside on blankets with some cute young German girls that they had met and they were smoking a little hash and having a picnic while listening to The Black Crowes. Cathedral's manager Paul Loasby had also flown in to be with Lee and Gaz. He took them to a hotel to get away from the rest of us. They obviously didn't say anything good about the tour to him and sighted Victor and I as the problem. That came as no surprise to me as that's the way they operate no matter who is in their band. It's always been Lee and Gaz against those guys!

Word got out that Victor was drinking Black Sabbath's crew's beer and tension started developing once again between the bands and Paul Loasby found out that Cathedral were now playing a Pentagram song in the set and that we hadn't rehearsed any new material for the upcoming headline shows in Ireland after the Sabbath tour was over. Paul blew his top and started setting up our gear in the middle of the hall while the crew were trying to set up the staging. He wanted us to start rehearsing now! We all knew that this would go down terrible with Sabbath and Sabbath's crew. We were between a rock and a hard place. Finally it took Scott Carlson to speak up for all of us and he told Paul that it would be an impossibility to do what he wanted as there were others in the hall that wouldn't be happy and that it wouldn't look good on the band!
This was equivilant to telling the master of the workhouse in Olliver Twist that we wanted more
Pourage. Paul snapped like a twig and walked off. We didn't see him again until end of tour.

After getting through a tough gig and a tough day we headed for Stutghart with Victor's girl Anne in tow. We found out when we got there that MTV was filming 3 songs from each band and that there would be an interview after the show. We had a few hours to kill and Lee Dorian had been going on about a killer used record shop in the downtown area so we went. It had all kinds of goodies for people like me who love 1970's heavy blues rock. I remember buying the gatefold version of "Jane 2" by the krautrock band of the same name. I also found a copy of Slade's rarest and heaviest album. "What Ever Happened To Slade". When we got back to the venue Geezer Butler was blocking our way in to our dressing room and asked me what records I had on me so I showed him the Slade album. I knew that he certainly must know who they were as both Sabbath and Slade were from Birmingham. He said, "Do you really like them?" I told him, "Man, this album is the holy grail". He just shook his head.

I think Cathedral's show went down good and we got decent reviews for it as well. The interview with MTV was also cool as they mentioned Pentagram for the first time in their history! They filmed 3 songs from the band, "Ride", "Midnight Mountain" and "Autumn Twilight".

MTV filmed 3 songs from each band in Stuttgart and Kerrang Magazine also documented the event with favorible reviews for Cathedral.

Later after Black Sabbath's set Bob Ward and then Geezer got in a shouting match with the caterer of the tour about a sandwich that was usually provided after the show for Geezer with his name written on the plastic rap that had seemingly gone missing and the caterer had locked up her kit for the night. She got so wound up by all of this that she now was threatening to pull out of the Eastern Block section of the tour and leave all 40 of us to finding our own food and preparing it ourselves . This would have been tragic as everyone knows they boil rocks for soup where we were going!

Somebody from Kerrang Magazine happened to be present and the problem in progress became leaked to him. The next article written in Kerrang about the tour was entitled "Sandwich Bloody Sandwich" ! It featured all the problems and tribulations facing the tour and posed the question , would we be able to finish it before a Chernobyl type meltdown occurred?

The next day we were headed to Docks in Hamburg but not before Victor dropped off his girlfriend, Anne at the airport to return to the states. Victor was poised and ready to have an emotional breakdown. His little bit of safe time from the tour with Anne was now over and he was going to have to face the rest of the grueling schedule without her. The next 2 nights were going to be in Hamburg set in the notorious Reeperbahn.

The venue in Hamburg was Docks, situated along the notorious Reeperbahn next to strip clubs, peepshows and brothels. Disneyland it was not! We spent 4 days of debautury in this slime hole along with U.S. sailors, pimps and heroin addicts !

After our first night I headed to some bars I knew of from past tours through Hamburg. I mistakenly brought 2 guys from Godspeed with me which set the tone for a dangerous night out!
We went to a bar that had been the actual site of The Star Club's stage. The original club where the Beatles and Jerry Lee Lewis had played was long since burned down in a fire and only the stage area was left. The club owner always took good care of me in my times at his bar and requested an autograph from any touring bands in town on one of his ceiling tiles. I had already done this years before and now Tommy from Godspeed was doing it. After that it was free drinks!

The owner of the bar decided to take the guys and me out to one of his favorite bars in town but the Godspeed boys were starting to get out of hand when we got there so after some funny looks from my old friend, I grabbed the Godspeed guys who had not stopped picking on each other and wrestling since we started having drinks and headed on foot back to the tour bus.

When we finally got back we found the rest of our 2 bands and the crew wanting to hit the town also. They were planning to take taxi's to another bar I was familiar with that catered exclusively to the touring bands. All you had to do to drink for free was to give up a stick on backstage pass! We had hundresds of them!

I got in the taxi with Victor, Lug, Lee and Gaz. Mick, Ian, and Scott Carlson jumped in the other and off we went. Victor was acting really strange since Anne had left and had already been trying to drink it off. I tried to tell him that he should relax and enjoy the tour because this was a big one and that these opportunities rarely come more than a few times in a musician's life! He kept saying "I know, I know, but you just don't understand! I'm trying but I just can't keep it together." I said to Victor, "This is the third European tour I've been on and you will learn to love this if you only give it a chance!" It seemed that no matter what I said to him, he was going to make our special time out to be a doomed effort.

We arrived at the club and there was my old friend Jurgen who owned the bar and it was a triumphant return home for me and him! Everyone gave him their passes and or drum sticks, guitar picks and anyththing else considered as tour paraphenalia to be promptly displayed behind the bar so that the free drinking could commense!

Black Sabbath's guitar techs were there and some local Hamburg recording stars. We were all having a blast and unwinding from the gruelling schedule of the tour with some much needed laughs about the whole situaiton.

I recognized the guitar player from Helloween sitting in a booth and sat down for a chat with him. I had met his other band mates through members of Running Wild when I was editing a Raven video in Hamburg a few years earlier. He was nice enough until I mentioned that I had trouble getting paid by Cathedral earlier on in the tour and now it was time for my next paymrnt and it too was late! The guy turned to me and in his best Jeckyl and Hyde, said, "That's the trouble with you Americans, you only play music for money! Us Germans do it for honor!"
I turned to that guy and said, "Hey Mack, that's the biggest line of horse shit I've ever heard in my life!" You just knew by looking at him that he would be the first person to cry "Uncle" if he wasn't paid properly. This guy was a true "Jerk Off"looking for trouble! Well, he got it!

Helloween's guitarist and resident big mouth, Michael Weikath decided to have a go at me for my philosophy on getting paid for my services as a musician! I later spotted him being chased down the street like a little girl in Hamburg by a pissed off Victor Griffin! That one was on the house!

The second before throttling this Helloween idiot, Victor comes to our table and he doesn't look amused. I said, "Hey man, this is my friend Victor. He's a huge fan of your band and I'm sure you both have a lot to talk about!" Then I sat Victor down with him knowing that he was now going to converse with a time bomb! I full well knew that their friendship was going to last half a second! Out of nowhere, Wham! Victor was chasing that guy down the streets of Hamburg in horror! It was beautiful!

Victor came back and told me what had happened but the incident left him wrung out and disoriented more than he should have been. He asked me where the toilet was and I pointed him in the right direction. I started talking with Tony Iommi's guitar tech about Tony's stage gear when everybody in the bar was interrupted by loud banging in the toilet and a lot of yelling. This continued for some time until they dragged out the culprit and it was Victor! He had pulled the toilet out of the wall with his bare hands and destroyed the partition among other things. Geezer Butler's bass tech, Charlie, managed to get him outside and calm him down. I came out and asked if he was OK and Charlie said "I've seen this before with Zack Wylde in Budapest. He destroyed a whole club and came back the next day to help clean up his carnage." "Victor", he said, "was just suffering from touring pressures especially since it was his his first!" Charlie was an understanding guy and got my respect immediately for seeing the problem for what it was. Jurgen, the club owner also invited Victor back in the club if he could control himself and all would be forgotten. We later found out that he had done $2000.00 worth of damage.

The next 2 days were spent in the streets of Hamburg. For me, there was no place to go but my bunk as I was severely broke and hungover. Everyone else was out an about at the peep shows and strip bars of the Reeperbahn. It became incredibly hot out for that time of year and we had no showers so when we showed up in Offenbach 2 days later with hair of grease and stage clothes of death we were informed that there were no showers and no dressing rooms as the available space was now being used for yet another f**king Sabbath production room! After all, they needed that space to house more photo copiers and laptops! I finally exploded in the venue in front of everyone and said "This is the biggest Mickey Mouse tour I've ever been on if you can't provide a dressing room for these tired people who need to get out of the bus for a while! What would you guys do if we refused to play your f**king show? Suddenly with the help of the caterer and my regretful outburst, we got a dressing room! Apparently the caterer promised to stay on with the rest of the tour if they turned over the extra room to Cathedral and Godspeed. This was totally unexpected and she was a real peach for doing it!

With all that being said, the hall had major power problems and every time you would play with the lights there would be a loud crackle over the P.A. system and the amps. We now had to wait for generators to be delivered from the adjacent town of Frankfurt that the lights would be plugged in to. The show was 2 hours late and the crowd outside was getting pissed off! It suddenly dawned on me that this was the Arch Bishop's second cursed show!

The show finally went on, and to our surprise it was a great one for Cathedral! Gaz had managed to get someone to video the show with his camera. The footage we later saw on the bus was killer!

The next day we headed for Munich to play Terminal One which was Hitler's airport in WW II.
It was also the site of his last speech. When we got there we saw the giant art deco clocks that all of us have seen on the walls in old newsreels about Hitler's last speech. They were now turned into tables for the patrons of the massive club. Quite frankly after exploring this hall I was left with a creepy feeling! Cathedral did a photo shoot out on the old runway in very foggy conditions. Nothing about this gig was pleasant. I remember watching Black Sabbath"s set from the back of the room and them playing their namesake song and thinking , how fitting for such a miserable place!

Terminal One was the creepiest destination on the 'Cross Purposes" tour as it was the location of Hitler's last speech! From there we departed into the eastern block for the next week.

Don't miss the next and final installment of the story in "Tales From The Abyss Pt. 4 Dishonorable Discharge, Chernobyl Chickens At Wounded Knee and There Is A God!"

Tales From The Abyss Pt. 2 : Cathedral, Black Sabbath And The Marquee de Sade!

2009-02-08T18:45:00.021-05:00

Tour Schedule for the U.K. dates of the "Cross Purposes" tour. When I got one of these I knew we were going!

The Manchester Apollo was the first gig on the Black Sabbath "Cross Purposes" tour. I spent my first hours waiting for ever in a fish and chips shop for sound check to happen. It was a beautiful sunny day but blustery cold with the wind howling at times. Victor, Scott and I had arrived on the tour bus with our opening act, Godspeed from Asbury Park, New Jersey. They were already drunk and trying to play king of the sand box with us. At first they were an annoyance but later through the tour would become a living nightmare to deal with. One of their "two" bass players was already suffering from a broken ankle received the night before from one of his own band mates. There would be many other broken things to come. At the time though, we were only concerned with pulling off our gig with a slightly under rehearsed Cathedral.

Me in front of the marquee for The Apollo checking out the billing.

I entered the venue through the stage door and went to work on some adjustments I had to make on the Premier drum kit that I was using for this tour. In 1990 the rep from Liechester told me that there wouldn't be a problem getting a kit for me on lend if I was ever doing a high profile tour in England and to call him anytime if I needed Premier's services. Well, it was now 1994 and they made us buy the bloody kit! That was strike 2 against me after Victor and I missed the first flight to London. Paul Loasby was not amused!

I was changing out certain drum heads with better ones behind the back line when I saw these black shoes coming in to my field of vision and walking up right in front of me. I looked up as I was tightening the lug screws on a bass drum when I noticed a smiling face with sun glasses belonging to Tony Iommi. He was shaking his head in disbelief that I was working on my drums behind their amps. I got up real fast and offered him my hand shake and introduced myself to him. I told him that I was looking forward to the tour with him. He shook my hand and said absolutely nothing, then walked off! The only thing missing was the black cape , black helmet and resperator sounds!

Photo taken behind Tony Iommi's amps with the weathered SG and spair guitar.

Black Sabbath began their sound check as Victor and I sat in the auditorium. They sounded good as they had just finished up the American leg of their tour. They went through all the set pieces involving the heavy keyboard parts of their show. Bobby Rondinelli was drumming for them and was having to watch a metronome light to hold back from speeding up. It also kept Bobby from pulling out any fancy fills making him just any other drummer. I had played a show with him in 1981 when I was drumming for the Boyz and we opened for Rainbow. He was full throttle back then! It was a shame seeing him being restricted like this.

All day long a fog machine sprayed out it's mist to give the entire venue a smokey atmosphere so that the lights would show their beams better. It suddenly hit me that we were playing in an awesome old time theater. The Apollo was the most ornate theater I had ever been in with it's gilded gold trim and fancy scrolling wood work . The ceiling was full of beautifully colored stars and moons outlined in gold and the seats were upholstered with fine valuer. I should have brought my opera glasses! I could tell by Sabbath's sound check that it was going to sound great in there too!

Victor and I went on an expedition to meet some of the crew and people we would be working and living with for 3 months. Right away I ran into an old friend named "Sunshine" who once used to come to my early shows with Death Row at the infamous Happy Pickle. She was now the wardrobe mistress for Black Sabbath and was regularly working with Deep Purple also. When I met her years ago she worked for Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. It was great to see her as we had both had a slight spark for each other in the old days and it was good to see her happy and successful. I also ran into an old friend from my days in the Kim Simmonds band named Charlie. He was Geezer Butler's bass tech and then the ultimate surprise was meeting Bobby Rondinelli's drum tech, Wade who i recognized immediately as the drummer that I replaced in Leslie West's band back in 1976!

This was a real small world and it became a kind of full circle for me but with all the old friendships and aquaintences present, it still wasn't enough to make this beast of a tour comfortable or friendly for any of us in the end!

Time came for Cathedral to sound check when we got word of a terrible traffic jam from London all the way to Manchester. Lee Dorian and Gary Jennings were in the manager's car en route from London. They were hopelessly stuck in traffic so Godspeed got up and did their sound check until they were told by Sabbath's stage manager and light man Keith Olsen, to knock it off!

It got later and later until it was showtime and still no sign of the rest of our band. Godspeed did their thing and then it was time for Cathedral and still no Lee or Gaz! We told Sabbath's people what was happening and apparently Geezer Butler's wife was also stuck in the same traffic jam, so they understood. I was flipping out! It was opening night of the tour and a load of press were there to report the happenings of the evening and set the tone for the shows to follow. It almost came down to the wire whether we would play or not and suddenly Lee and Gaz showed up and plugged in. We only got to play 4 songs but it was a killer show despite that fact. It looked like the rag tag team up of Pentagram and Cathedral members were going to work out fine together as the new Cathedral!

A lot of problems beset our first show at the Manchester Apollo but it got favorable reviews in Kerrang Magazine .

A moment that really sticks out in my head about that night was when Black Sabbath started the beginning of "Iron Man". Victor phoned his nephew back in the states from a pay phone that just happened to be on the stage at stage right and pointed the receiver at Black Sabbath so that Greg Turley , his nephew could here it live on the phone! This was a moment in time that young Greg will never forget!

A rare photo of the guitar titans of doom, Tony Iommi and Victor Griffin

The agreement Victor and I had made with Cathedral weeks before we left the States required them to wire money to our accounts before we flew over and during certain parts of the tour at specific dates, more money would be wired so that we could pay our bills at home while we were on the road. I especially needed this as I was a new father with my new born son, Joseph Jr.. There was no one home working as my wife had her hands full with a newborn. Here we were on the second show and we still hadn't been paid and my wife at the time was letting me have it on the phone because the utilities were being cut off at our house for non-payment. I knew that we were going to have a hard time with this as Paul Loasby, Cathedral's manager felt that Victor and I weren't worth the money agreed upon. It was obvious that he was was trying to convince us of that as he avoided our phone calls and disappeared when he knew that we would corner him for money!

On this night we were playing the legendary Hammersmith Odeon in London. This was to Victor, Scott and I the equivalent to playing Madison Square Garden would be to a Brit. So when I had to play a game of financial chess with Paul Loasby with the chance of ditching the gig, I was really saddened! This was a battle that I had to win because there was no other alternative. My family came first!

Me, in front of the Hammersmith, now called Labbat's blocking the doors form anyone entering the venue!

Early that morning I rang up "Hammy" from Peaceville Records who was putting out Pentagram's "Be Forewarned" and told him the situation. He agreed that this was the time to strike if I wanted to get paid as all the other gigs didn't mean near as much as this Hammersmith show would to Paul. So Hammy agreed to buy 2 tickets on British Airways back to the states for Victor and I for the following day and that we could use this as leverage! If Loasby didn't immediately wire the money to our families then Hammy would send a car for us before we went on stage leaving the whole concert package in a lurch! If he decided to pay then Hammy could refund his money for the airline tickets in time and no one would be the worse for wear.

I was elected to be the heavy in this matter and confronted Paul at my dressing room door. I told him what I had planned and that my wife had still not received the money wire. I told him that my family came first and that I couldn't give a fat rat's ass about his bullshit or this tour if I didn't get paid. He said to me in his starchiest London accent, "You...You...You're having a go at me aren't you?" I said "It's funny you mentioned the word "Go" because that's exactly what I'm going to do!" I then said"I'm going to call my wife in 2 hours and if I don't hear that the first part of my payment is in my bank account, a car will be sent over to pick Victor and I up to be taken to an undisclosed location to be be later put on the first plane out of here and back to the U.S. .

We had 8 hours before we had to go on and that gave him plenty of time to start honoring our agreement. I called home after 2 hours and "Wa - Lah!" Our money had arrived! Paul hated our guts after that and I really didn't care! He was wrong and got called on the mat for it from someone who's been through hundreds of situations like that in the past! My first encounter with that type of greed almost landed a switchblade in my back when I was 16 years old! I'm no stranger to people trying to see how much they can get away with whether they be small time or big time. It's all relative! Strike #3

We were scheduled to go on in 15 minutes. I noticed that Lee was getting a case of nerves as it was a prestigious gig with Black Sabbath recording a live DVD and probably the most important showing for Cathedral as a true arena act. I kept giving Lee time updates every minute as to play on his stage fright. "You have about 3 minutes now to play Hammersmith" ding... ding! All I got out of him were these anxiety ridden moans like a wounded animal! I was nervous too but I was looking forward to this gig of a life time while Lee was agonizing over the prospect of it! I realized right then that these guys were "green" and I had been falling for their guilt trip about whether or not Victor and I were good enough to play with "them" ! They were now proving to be the amateurs and not us.

Needless to say , the show went down a storm and got favorable reviews from the press. After the show Victor and I found the upstairs lounge and met the gals from Girlschool and had a blast downing a few libations with them. Adrian Smith of Iron Maiden was also there talking to me about his new upcoming solo effort. The evening ended up nice but Cathedral was now becoming divided and stayed that way throughout most of the tour except when we were on stage. I don't hold it against them as they were young then and did what their manager told them whether it was right for them or not.

Our next gig took us to Wolverhampton in a nice large auditorium. We were scheduled for a photo session at 3:00pm so I got up early and went to town looking for Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet paraphernalia. I found a vendor that had everything I was looking for. When I made it back we were told that the photo shoot would be in the back of the hall by the load in next to the flight cases.

The photographer knew what he was doing and captured some great shots that stayed with us in the magazines for the whole tour. It was strange though because I think that he took it that I was the lead singer because I was told to be in the foreground in all the shots! "Strike #4"

Pictures from this photo shoot in Wolverhampton ended up being the main photos used to promote the tour in the magazines.

When the photo shoot was over we all took off running like madmen towards the front of the hall! I was in the front and ran down the stairs at the side of the stage heading for the hall when "bam!" I knocked this big grizzly bear looking bloke with funny shoes and a fuzzy beard down the stairs but managed to catch his fall! As I kind of dusted him off, I told him that I was sorry and that we were acting like stupid kids running around like that. He said, "Pay it know mind lad, I'm OK".

That night everyone seemed to play a great set and it was a tremendous success. Black Sabbath was going to host a meet and greet in the lounge and it was rumored that some of the guys from ELO would be there. I was in the dressing room getting changed an chilling out when Scott Carlson came upstairs and said "The guys from ELO are hear including Bev Bevan and you won't believe who they brought with them!. They brought Roy Wood!" In case any of you don't know who Roy Wood is, he was the founder of The Move and later formed ELO before going on to a solo career and forming Wizard. Roy was one of my biggest childhood heroes and influenced me enough to become a multi-instrumentalist like himself.

Without hesitation I bolted down the stairs to the meet and greet and then Scott pointed Roy out to me. To my horror it was the same guy I had accidentally knocked down the stairs earlier in the day. I was looking at them but they were pointing at me and Roy didn't look too happy either but Bev Bevan was laughing his ass off. I felt that it might be inappropriate to say any more to him as I had said and done enough to the poor man!

Roy Wood, When we played Wolverhampton I literally ran into him!

Our night liner pulled out of Wolverhampton and made it's way to Newport, Whales under the cover of darkness. The Godspeed guys were acting up and whispering a lot of stuff about us behind our backs. They were real jealous that we had the slot before Black Sabbath and not them as they were managed by Gloria Butler, Geezer's wife. Godspeed was not a metal band nor were they a punk band, but somewhere in between. One thing was for certain, they had no good intentions for anyone that got close to them. They had made a recent video for MTV in America for their song "Houston Street" (pronounced Howston) and were promoting the new album. They were the kind of kids that in no way should have been thrust into such a large tour. Someone was going to lose and in the end it was everyone!

The show in Newport was excellent for all the bands and the audience got their money's worth! This was the last time Godspeed's management would be around until we got deep into Germany. We picked up their tour manager named Mick for the Europe shows. Unfortunately he let his band act as shitty as they wanted to. They would break something or make trouble with the promoters and Mick would report back to Gloria that it was all Cathedral's fault. Meanwhile these little animal fucks from New Jersey were holding hard core punk karaoke every night on the bus while fighting and smashing bottles and everything else that wasn;t nailed down. This would last long into the morning and no one got any sleep for the next day's gig. These lot were the worst! Unfortunately we were stuck with them on the bus for 3 months!

What happened next will expose how unglamorous the life of a rock star can be! Don't miss the next installment of "Tales From The Abyss" Part 3

Tales From The Abyss Pt. 1: Pentagram, Lee Dorian And The Serpent's Gold

2009-02-04T08:08:00.029-05:00

Here's one that I have been holding back for some time. This is my personal account of my experience on the 1994 Black Sabbath tour for their album "Cross Purposes". This 3 month romp through Heaven & Hell was an extremely noteworthy one and is not likely to exit my brain anytime soon as I sacrificed much and gained very little. In hindsight I would not have missed it for the world!

It was Halloween night 1993 and my old band Pentagram had made it's 3rd attempt at re-forming due to public response for the re-releases of "Relentless" and "Day Of Reckoning" on Peaceville Records now part of Music For Nations. We had just played our first show back on the circuit in Northern Virginia a month before to a capacity crowd of new and old fans that was absolutely overwhelming! This Halloween night though was to be an extra special one for us as a band.

The venue was an old ski lodge in Braddock Heights, Maryland that was rumored to once house Nazi spies in World War II and a few of them as the story goes took their own lives in that place rather than divulge what they knew about the Third Reich! It was kind of spooky to say the least with it's dressing rooms stretching down very old and poorly lit hotel hallways.

Fans and old friends kept sneaking through security to get a peak at us, especially the girls wanting to see their favorite Penta-member in a compromising position getting our stage clothes on! I finally gave up and just asked them if they would please not spill their drinks on my clothes.

A beautiful nymphet dressed in her devilish best drops by Joe Hasselvander's dressing room as he indiscriminately removes his drawers!

The show at Spectators on Halloween night was packed with pretty girls looking for heavy sounds!

The band took a few photos on the stairs in the hall as a drunk Marty Swaney attempted to put his fist up my ass through my leather pants so that I would take a bad photo. You can see this stupidity in the photo. We were wondering if he was going to be all right to play the gig.

Catching a quick photo session with funny man Marty Swaney diddling where he shouldn't!

We all huddled in Bobby's room to go over our set when Lee Dorian, vocalist for British Doom band Cathedral popped in the doorway with a female friend. He had come all the way from New York to see the show. He told us he had waited his whole life for this night as he was a huge fan of Pentagram. We had a great conversation about the state of doom metal and how it fit in to contemporary hard rock.

Lee Dorian stops by to catch the Pentagram set at Spectators in Braddock Heights, Maryland

Bobby Liebling contemplates wearing his carrot orange outfit but luckily comes to his senses!

Bobby putting on the war paint!

It was time to hit the stage and it was no easy task as the small room we were playing in was packed to the rafters with very drunk touchy feely fans! I barely got to the stage with all my clothes and jewelry intact! We played a blistering set which still exists on video today. What I didn't know was that meeting Lee Dorian was going to change my life forever.

Pentagram bring down the house!

Weeks later Victor received a call from Lee Dorian informing him that Cathedral were still in the states wrapping up promotion for their new album, "The Ethereal Mirror" and wanted to do a couple of shows with Pentagram before returning to England. He also wanted to have our friends Iron Man on the bill. All of us in the band agreed and a concert was set through Cellar Door Productions at the Bayou in Washington, D.C. and the following week at The Grand in New York.

Ads in the local music papers for Pentagram's two gigs with Cathedral

The day of the show the band arrived early at the venue and met the rest of Cathedral who were really nice lads. Their road manager came walking up and told us that Pentagram would be headlining the show even though the tickets said that Cathedral were headlining. I asked the guy what was up with that and he told me that Lee Dorian considered us his Gods and that he would not feel right headlining over Pentagram in their home turf!

A night of Doom Metal in Washington, D.C. that the fans would never forget!!

Iron Man was the first on that night and it did my heart good to see them playing a more prestigious gig than what they were usually offered. Then Cathedral hit the stage with their slower than molasses riffing and Lee Dorian's stage antics with the microphone cable wrapped around his neck feigning suffocation! They were the heaviest sludge band I had ever seen!

It was now time for Pentagram to start getting ready when Victor told me that Bobby was not in the venue and wouldn't come out of his house some 15 miles away near the Pentagon! I couldn't believe that he was doing this! Whether or not a friend brought him to the show or if Victor went to get him was unclear but suddenly he arrived and was out of his friggin' mind! He was talking gibberish, locked himself in one of the dressing rooms and wouldn't come out. He was having an argument with his imaginary rubber gorilla, "Gilla"! That's when I knew we were in deep trouble. The stage manager kept coming up to us asking why the hell we weren't on stage and told us we were now 11 minutes late! He told me that if we didn't take the stage in 5 more minutes that he would shut the show down! This was the first time that Bobby's substance abuse got in the way of his usual professional work ethic! Little did I know that this event would repeat itself many times down the road ( Read "The Grusome Twosome, The Rebirth and Fall Of Pentagram" in an earlier blog.)

The band took the stage anyway and suddenly Bobby appeared and seemed to be fine. The show went down well and was videoed. I remember seeing the footage and hearing that Marty Swaney's bass had swallowed up the rest of the band's sound! I remember my drum throne vibrating off the ground from his bass.

The Bayou, when Bobby Liebling did finally arrive it was like prying out teeth to get him out of his dressing room to play the show.

We didn't know what to say to Bobby but realized that he had come to a grim impasse and his days as a performer were waning. We just kept silent so we could fulfill our obligation with Cathedral in New York the following week.

We arrived in the "Big Apple" in the afternoon as the show would be an early one because at 9:00 pm the venue turned into a disco. About 50 people showed up to see the event including my band mate from Raven John Gallagher and his wife Melanie. My old vocalist from Savoy Brown and now Catus, Jimmy Kunes was also there with his new wife. It was great for them to come out and support what I was doing and they made the last week's fiasco with Bobby melt away! Now I was ready to kick ass! The venue didn't give anyone time to fiddle about with their gear. They said, "You're On!" and the curtains opened. It reminded me a lot of "The Gong Show".

Later after the gig we said our goodbyes to Lee Dorian and thanked him for the chance to play out with them. He promised that he would keep in touch with Victor in the future. When I finally arrived at the Hotel I found a nodded out Bobby Liebling on the toilet with full stage clothes on. I thought, "If this is what it means to be a rock star then I want no part of it".

Unfortunately my last memories of a day's work are the ones I remember the most! This was becoming a recurring story with Bobby!

The following weeks found Pentagram doing a new album for Peaceville/Music For Nations called "Be Forewarned". If only I had heeded that warning! By this time Bobby was more than "out there" and staying in the public bathroom in the hallway outside the studio going about his twisted business. The studio engineer actually set up a camera facing the downstairs door that lead to the outside so that he could monitor the front door in case the police happened to charge in looking for the source of the strange chemical odor coming from the building. It was as if Bobby was now recording the album via TV remote. He came in to the control room only a few times during the recording of the whole album and that was only to argue with Marty Swaney to the point that Marty was ready to punch him. Bobby was going on about how Pentagram could never do any wrong and that he was a super star. Of course at that time, we all knew different!
Some of this stupidity was caught on video by Victor's nephew, Greg Turley which ended up on YouTube.

Victor also didn't seem well during this period and had started drinking heavily and finally quit the album for 2 weeks because he was unsatisfied with his guitar sound. When he finally came back with a good amp rig we laid down the drum tracks to "Vampire Love". after listening back he told me he didn't like the way I played it. I couldn't see anything wrong with it. It was a simple song to begin with but he insisted that I change it. I suggested that we leave it alone for a day and move on with something else and later come back and see if he felt the same about it. If it still didn't sit right , then I would retake it. Victor blew his top and smashed a beer bottle! With the bottle still in his hand, the jagged edge was now intended for me! I told him that he would have to kill me if he tried to use it on me because it would certainly be the last thing he ever did if he didn't use it! Victor was also coming apart at the seams like Bobby but alcohol was his problem. The whole project was becoming a nightmare! If it weren't for the engineer we never would have finished that album. Victor later apologized to me but I told him that what he had done would never happen again, at least not the way he thought it would work out.

Victor Griffin threatened me with a broken beer bottle in the studio but I knew it was a case of bad nerves and beer muscles and I was able to defuse the problem!

I came by Victor's 2 nights later to ride up to the studio with him when the phone rang and it was Lee Dorian calling from his hometown of Coventry. He told Victor that their guitarist had quit the band and that they were considering him as their new second guitarist for the upcoming support tour with Black Sabbath! He muted the phone and told me the news and then asked me what I thought he should do because they needed him in one week. Seeing how the "Be Forewarned " album had been going and the negative environment around it, I told him that he ought to take the job and never look back! After all, if he kicked ass he could finish all his remaining guitar tracks that night! Then he got back on the phone with Lee and once again muted the phone and turned to me and said " Their drummer quit the band too and they're looking for a drummer!" My mind started flipping over all the possibilities. This would be a dream come true as Victor and I both had been massive Black Sabbath fans since we were kids. I'm thinking, "How cool would that be?" Maybe this would also heal the recent incident between him and I for good and it would once again be like old times when we were in Death Row together. I told Victor to ask him if they would be interested in having me fill the drum slot for them. On the other end of the line Lee Dorian said he would think that one over but he would have to ask his partner Gaz and their manager Paul. He said that he didn't think it would be a problem.

Needless to say Victor finished up all his remaining guitar parts that night and we set up for our first mix the following evening. We were getting ready to go up and mix when we were again contacted by Cathedral but this time from their manager, Paul Lowesby. He told us that we were in the band and that we were now to learn the material that spanned 3 of their albums. He would be giving us flight information soon.

Over the next 2 days Victor and I mixed "Nightmare Gown", "Petrified", "Vampire Love" and "Too Late". We then informed Bobby and Marty what our plans were. Marty said "Man, if you don't go on that tour you're crazy" but Bobby was crushed like an egg, He kept asking why we couldn't get Pentagram on that tour. I told Bobby it was because it wasn't our tour, it was Cathedral's. He somehow couldn't grasp that concept. Suddenly he wanted to come out of the toilet and work but it was too little, too late! We were going! The engineer said that he could easily finish mixing as Victor and I had set the tones and the drum sounds that would carry the rest of the record and that he could duplicate the overall sounds we were after. I have never left an album hanging like that in my entire career as a recording artist but in this case it was the best thing and the album came out fine in the end thanks to our engineer friend Chris and our wonderful studio Cue Recording!

The management and staff at Cue Recording managed to complete the album in Victor and my absence when we were off playing on tour with Black Sabbath!

The day came for Victor and I to depart from Dulles Airport in Virginia to Newark Airport and then on to Gatwick Airport near London but the lines were too long and we missed the flight to our connector during check-in. So we departed the next day for Newark and Scott Carlson, Cathedral's bassist just happened to be on the same flight. Victor had brought these little plug-in speakers to his Sony "Walkman" and stuffed them up in the headrest in front of him. This served to annoy the flight attendants all the way to England as he blasted Kiss, Pentagram and the Dead Boys all the way! Scott Carlson was a real cool guy and figured out our routine in seconds! Drink, drink, and drink! We were laughing hysterically about absolutely nothing for hours all the while blasting that little tape player. No one stopped us though as they were scared to death of us!

Around 3:am the plane went through a bad storm over the Atlantic and we dropped 1,500 ft. in elevation in seconds! The passengers were flipping out but we were singing "I Want To Rock And Roll All Night And Party Every Day" in our best champagne fueled karaoke! We were so obnoxious that the other passengers didn't have time to have a nervous breakdown and after the plane stabilized the whole crew and passengers bought us several more rounds of drinks for keeping everybody relatively calm during what could have been the end!

We arrived at Gatwick Airport at 7:00 am and stood in line at customs what seemed for ever. There was some kind of delay beyond their control and the customs agents and airport personnel begged us each for our patience when one of the younger girls asked us if we were in a band and we informed them that we were and that we were arriving to join the Black Sabbath tour that started in the next few days! All of a sudden out of nowhere came tables and chairs for us right in the queue and they asked us if we would like to sit down and they would go fetch some tea for us! The rest of the passengers looked at us like they were ready to club us! I had been to this very entrance to Britain a year earlier with Raven and was harassed terribly by customs! This was a complete turn around! Then the tea came! I felt like asking for a foot massage at that point.

Paul Lowsby showed up and helped us with our gear but Victor's guitar didn't make it and would be coming on the next flight in. So Paul drove us to Birmingham to Rich Bitch rehearsal studio and returned to the airport! That's when I dropped out from exhaustion on the floor of the drum riser while White Zombie was being blasted through the whole studio complex.

Paul later returned with the guitar and Lee and Gaz for rehearsal. Lee had grown a beard since the last time we had seen him in the states making him look like what the press called a "hillbilly starchild". When we finally got down to rehearsing we found out to our amazement we had been told to rehearse all the wrong songs off the 3 albums! We had to get this together rather quick as we would be playing some big venues and would be expected to sound very tight and polished for the Black Sabbath fan base that would be packing the houses across England. I remember that we sounded good though, just a little under rehearsed the first day which by my standards was very promising for our upcoming shows. I told Gaz that we would have it together better the next day as we were jet lagged. He replied, "You better" with this punk ass look on his face. I knew then that these guys were going to be a little funny to work with. That didn't bother me as I was playing heavy metal since they were shittng yellow in their diapers!

We were slated to play a warm up gig at a small pub in Coventry called "The Sir Collin Campbell". Like all the rumors of "George Washington once slept here" The Campbell was known for the Beatles' John Lennon having been a regular patron of the place in his time.

Early on before the gig, the place started filling up with the usual pub crawl crowd and I noticed Lee Dorian putting away a few more pints than he should have. He was cocked and loaded by the time we went on and "Blam" down he went on the monitors! I guess it was all the pressure of playing in a band with Victor and I and going on a tour with Sabbath the next day that got him!
We ran out of songs after 59 minutes and reverted to the Kiss catalog with, "Parasite" and "She" and then ZZ Top's "Beer Drinkers And Hell Raisers". Finally the inevitable "Paranoid", War Pigs" and countless others. Not a bad gig considering that we had only been playing together for a total of 12 hours.

This photo was taken seconds before Lee Dorian fell over the monitors and laid there like a crumpled wax paper bonnet!

Later we went back to our bed and breakfast to party down and suddenly a loud knock came at the door. It was the owner's husband who was sent upstairs to stop the noise as other customers were trying to sleep. It wasn't long before we had him partying with us and now pounding drinks down at rapid speed! Then the door flew open and the man's wife was standing there giving him a right bollocking which of course he deserved. This was our last night in Coventry and the next day was the beginning of the rest of our lives! All this and more next time in Part II.

Queen "Sheetkeeckers" The Return Of Rock 'n'Roll's Holy Grail!

2009-01-23T19:00:00.027-05:00

As I sat in front of my computer freezing, snowed in and huddled in the upstairs of my 90 year old New England farm house, I sat virtually alone as my son and our dog were fast asleep in the adjoining upstairs lounge. We were doing our best to escape the bitter sub zero cold that seemed to seep in through the old weather worn walls of the downstairs part of the house. I was writing the story about my first drum kit as seen in this blog as a holiday interest piece. My girlfriend Rys was away in Brooklyn, N.Y. spending much needed time with her mother and friends and like anyone out there I was developing a case of the holiday blues especially when I didn't have all my loved ones present. Everything tends to slow down up in the north country where I live. The winter months help add to the gloom even though the countryside at that time of year is beautiful.

I took a break from writing and it was still early so I decided to call my old friend Jeff Lee and wish him and his family a Merry Christmas. I caught him at home as there is a 2 hour time difference in Texas where he lives and the east coast. I told him that things were going to be tight this holiday season and that my son would likely be the only one receiving gifts in our household. He said, "Correction! I'm sending you some CD's I've burned off of some amazing albums that I bet you've forgotten about!"

Jeff's collection of records is as big as mine but he branches off in directions that I don't and usually comes up with some noteworthy items to listen to from time to time. I said, "What heavy rock album could you possibly have that I don't?" The first album he mentioned was, "Sheetkeeckers"! This was an ultra rare bootleg live album from 1975 featuring Queen in concert at London's Rainbow Theater in 1974 .

I had completely forgotten about this record as my copy was stolen along with 200 of my other albums in 1978 from a friend's house! I managed to find these albums again in various cut-out bins and junk shops in my travels but never could I find another copy of "Sheetkeeckers". I remember it being really good but in later years I had purchased other live albums by Queen hoping to gain the same thrill. Some of these albums were bootleg and some were official releases from concerts after 1977 that were okay but still a few classics like "Stone Cold Crazy"or "Now I'm Here" were thrown in for a nostalgic look back at their early career. Even so, Queen still had it and were exploring other possibilities in their music.

Queen in their later career appealed to a much wider audience worldwide and became more diverse in their musical direction but they stiil managed hanging on to a few of their heavier rockers and played them just like in days of old!

A few days later on December 22 I received the CD in the mail from my friend Jeff. I was tearing into it before I could even get the front door open! I immediately ran upstairs and slapped the disc in my player and suddenly I hear a taped intro of "Procession" being pumped through a very huge P.A sytem in a very big echoing hall! First the bass drum, "Boom, Boom, Boom...Boom...Boom,Boom! Then the majestic harmony guitars with all their regal pomp! Then the lilty cascading high register guitar pattern with a building feedback sustain and then, WHAM! with a resounding GERRRAWNNNG! and a fantastic Freddy Mercury belting out "A Word In Your Ear, From Father To Son" and then the band roaring into the most powerful sounding set I've ever heard by anyone including Black Sabbath! Brian May's guitar tone is over the top and excruciatingly loud all the while kicking in his "Echo-plex" for optimum dual effect! Each power chord being heard loud and clear! Meanwhile, Roger Taylor's drum work is among the heaviest found anywhere and as brutal as anything John Bonham or Bill Ward could ever dish out! His extra large Ludwig tom-toms beating out the more savage parts of the songs for extra girth! John Deacon's bass playing is the anchor to this instrumental madness as he plunks down some of the tightest and most percussive bass lines available along with brilliant melodic embellishments! Then we come to England's finest vocalist, The Late Great Freddie Mercury as he cuts through the mighty assault with his perfect virtuoso voice that is beyond special! All of this together is equal to a melodic atom bomb detonation that must be heard to be believed! I can't remember when I 've heard anything heavier! It is by far their best performance, best sound and most inspired record ever made! It is almost unnecessary to listen to the studio versions of these songs after hearing this monolith of an album!

It all came back to me after hearing it again almost 34 years later. In 1975 I had played a gig with my band The Boyz at Dixon's Pizza King on Rt. 1 in Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. It was a club owned by the father of Hollywood actress Donna Dixon who is now married to Dan Ackroyd. The in- house drummer at the time was Robbie Leebrick. Robbie played anything from country to rock as it was demanded of him by different musicians every night. He really liked my band and to our surprise, we both realized that we were mutual fans of Blue Cheer. He had 30 albums in the back room of the Pizza King that he would listen to on break by bands like Budgie, Status Quo and many others! He had also sabotaged the clubs juke box by replacing the George Jones and Dolly Parton hits with Sweet and Black Sabbath singles. It's no wonder I knew that day that Robbie and I would be friends for life. He invited me to come over to his house the next day and check out the real collection of albums

Robbie Leebrick with Buddy Rich in 1975. Robbie was and still is, my partner in crime when it comes to heavy music! I trust his opinion like gold and he has remained one of my greatest musical consultants through out the years! Not bad for a guy that once played on an album with Johnny Cash!

I arrived at his house the next day to find his extensive record collection lining a whole wall of his room. We listened to a lot of things and talked a lot about our heroes, Budgie and Blue Cheer. Then he pulled out the heavy artillery! The first was "Gr'ndle Poll", an unbelievably heavy Black Sabbath bootleg that was later released as "Heaven and Earth" on CD in 2002 with a board mixed quality version as "Gr'ndl Pol" was recorded from a reel to reel by a fan or possibly a local crew member the same night at the Asbury Park Convention Center in 1975. Then he played the now much sought after Sweet live album "Strung Up" with the classic track "Burning/Someone Else Will" from The Rainbow Theater in London 1973. Then he played Queen's "Sheetkeeckers"! Man, I thought the walls were going to cave in! I knew I just had to get that album! Robbie told me it would be no problem as he had the bootlegger's address and phone number to order from!

The next day I called the Korneyphone Records label in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and talked to the bootlegger himself! He sounded like an old hippie with a strong southern accent. I asked him about the awesome Queen bootleg and he told me that it had only been out for 2 weeks. He also wanted to sell me Deep Purple "Perks and Tits" and Led Zeppelin "Live On Blueberry Hill"! He had only one copy of Black Sabbath's "Gr'ndl Poll" left in stock. I told him I wanted one of each! They cost a reasonable $12.00 per album. He had also been the man who had released the notorious MC5 bootleg, "Motor City Is Burning"which later became a legitimate release complete with a pony bottle condensation stain on the color xeroxed paper cover art!

I must have waited a month for those records to arrive. The Queen and Black Sabbath bootlegs were finally delivered but the others had gone out of stock so he sent me his catalog to pick 3 different ones which I did later! The most important thing was that my 2 favorite picks had made it into my hands safe and sound! Queen's "Sheetkeeckers" made me decide once and for all to keep playing drums for heavy rock bands rather than the jazz fusion bands I had been experimenting with at that time. That really turned out to be to my benefit as jazz fusion died out quickly and heavy rock became king! So from then on I stayed focused on the heaviness of Sabbath and the musical prowess of Queen when writing music or performing it!

The "SheetKeeckers" album was rumored to be a BBC (live) recording as the quality is excellent but it turns out that it was recorded March 31, 1974 at The Rainbow Theater in London, England by EMI for a promotional (live) EP but was later shelved by the company with no reason given never to be released until it was stolen or copied and fortunately for us, dumped into the hands of a criminal bootlegger! It was eventually put out by the Kornyphone label with 6 different color xerox paper covers scotch taped to white cardboard sleeves (what class)! "Sheetkeeckers" also was re-issued on different labels several times over the years even finding it's way on to CD which is equally rare! The track listing for the original bootleg was as follows:

Intro; "Procession" (Tape)
"Father To Son"
"Ogre Battle"
"Son And Daughter"
"Keep Yourself Alive"
"Seven Seas Of Rhye"
"Modern Times Rock'n Roll"
"Liar"

extra bonus track : Sweet playing "Ballroom Blitz" which makes no sense at all!!!

"Sheetkeeckers" came in 5 variations on the Kornyphone Record label featuring 5 different colored xerox covers with photos and liner notes.

The CD version of "Sheetkeeckers" Top-Front cover, bottom-back cover

Now on Christmas 2007, this "Holy Grail" of heavy rock once again falls into my lap as if by providence and manages to cheer up my attitude and by Christmas morning bring me to my most joyous Christmas ever! No doubt Queen's "Sheetkeeckers will serve to further guide my way through the hallowed halls of heavy metal and once again keep my focus on what is important in my own career in the music business!

Freddy Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor knocked Led Zepplin and Elton John right off their over- hyped pedistles and raised the bar ever higher for future bands to come like Judas Priest and even recently "The Darkness" and "Muse". Queen in 1974 were a hungry heavy rock animal that pulled out all the stops and their album "Sheetkeeckers" is the proof!

Queen in their heyday were head and shoulders above the rest!

This is an album meant for all fans of hard rock and heavy metal and I hope EMI or someone decides to put it out proper with liner notes and photos from the gig as it so deserves!
One of rock's true desert island classics!

Dooom On!
Joe Hasselvander

"The Gruesome Twosome Take On The World" The Rebirth And Demise Of Pentagram PT.2 "Sub-Basement"

2009-01-06T11:56:00.067-05:00

After the initial release and public support of "Review Your Choices" died down in 1999, I was asked to record a new Raven Album "One For All" at Michael Wagner's studio in Nashville. Tenn.! Mike's production style had always impressed me and this was the first time in my career that I would be working with such a great producer! He had produced all the Dokken records along with groups such as Accept, Malice, Skid Row, Ozzy Osbourne and Janet Jackson! The session went great and I learned a lot from watching him. He taught me the importance of microphones and microphone placement! I also realized that he and I both had giant collections of sound effect records on file for use on albums! He was very easy to work with and truly loves what he does which ignited a whole new passion in me for my work as an independent producer! Mike's work on "One For All" made Raven's new release very successful and got us a tour with U.D.O. in Germany and in America in 2000!

Raven's "One For All" produced by metal master, Michael Wagner.

Later that year Pentagram was asked to record a new album for Black Widow Records. This was perfect timing as I had just gotten off the road with Raven and had learned so much about production from Michael Wagner! We were also asked to record 3 songs for 2 different tribute albums! One was to be for "Thousand Days Of Yesterdays" A Tribute To Captain Beyond and 2 for "Blue Explosion" A Tribute To Blue Cheer.

Pentagram's old friend and sound man Chris Koslowski invited us to record at his home studio in the beautiful Catoctin Mountains of Western Maryland. The studio was an old farm house complex built in 1812. Chris ran a cable out of his top floor studio into an an old schoolhouse on the property that was the drum room and sometimes guitar & vocal booth! The well house was also used for guitars as were other parts of the farm house. The old wood in these structures made it highly conducive for great ambient sounds!

Chris Kozlowski's studio in Western Maryland was a perfect highland retreat to record "Sub-Basement" without outside distractions! The old wood and stone of the structure was ideal for getting a natural ambient sound!

We cut the tribute record tracks in an afternoon which proved to us that Chris's studio would cut the mustard for our upcoming album "Sub-Basement".

3 months later we were back in to record "Sub-Basement". We laid down "Buzzsaw", "Bloodlust", "Sub-Basement" and "Sub-Basement Intro" in March of 2001 and then took a small break as the Easter holiday was approaching and a special surprise phone call was coming my way!

The next week I received a phone call from an old flame from my New York days. "Gloria" and I had been inseparable in the early 1980's and were the most flamboyant poser couple in the New York metal scene in those times. She had become a millionaire seemingly overnight and was now living in Westchester, N.Y. next door to brain surgeons, stock brokers and other well payed citizens. I ended up moving there with my son to be nearer to her and to try carving out a better life. Gloria's house was in an exclusive part of New York so I was able to have enough privacy to continue writing the other songs that would be needed for "Sub-Basement".

Gloria had me sell my old car and bought me a used Buick Park Avenue to travel around in. She also gave me several cell phones so that she could always keep tabs on me! This later became a problem as I was now a kept man. My trips down to Maryland to record were now becoming little escapes from her domineering big bucks attitude. I still had to check in by phone every ten minutes or catch hell from her! Can anyone say "High Maintenance?"

Soon "Tidal Wave", "Going In Circles" and "Target" were in the bag as well as others. The album was becoming a masterpiece of metal setting the bar higher for all aficionados of doom!

On my third and final trip down to Chris's studio before the mix, I got a strange phone call as I was laying down the final lead track for the album. It was my new love, Gloria freaking out about something but I couldn't understand what until I got her calmed down! She told me that my son was in a closet crying and scared to death about something! Anyone who has ever known my son knows that he is very rational, polite and not given to panic. Something was wrong and I had a feeling it had to do with "Gloria" and not my son!

I promptly unplugged everything and dropped the session like a hot potato and rocketed my car the whole 250 miles back to Westchester to help my son! When I arrived Gloria was running out the front door with her arms outstretched for me like in a romantic comedy which was the total opposite of her high maintenance man hating behavior. She had done something to my son and I knew it! After speaking with Joe Jr. my worst fears were confirmed! She had chased my son into the closet hitting him and abusing him all the way for something incredibly petty and insignificant! I didn't let on that I knew what had happened as Joe had relayed the whole story to me several times and it didn't change. I agreed with Joe to keep our little secret and act like nothing had happened. We both agreed that we would bide our time until we found the perfect window of opportunity to get out of there! I had realized after a month with her that it might be difficult breaking things off with her as she revealed herself to be more of a hostage taker than a lover!

The next day Gloria and her 4 year old daughter went to a local diner with some friends and Joe and I packed the Park Avenue full of our belongings and bolted out of there before she returned! She had never intended to give me the title to the car which I later had to load on a transport truck back to her! What a nightmare! I later found out that Bobby was going through a similar situation with his girlfriend except he had the added pleasure of his becoming a personal drug parasite!

With my debacle out of the way, I was able to finish the record. Bobby slept through most of the recording and production of that album and can hardly be credited for producing! He twiddled one knob on one part of a song. He also nodded out repeatedly between his vocal lines all the while hanging on to the microphone stand. That's the way it was done for years. I ended up actually producing those records not Bobby although he takes much if not all of the credit. I felt sorry for him back then and covered up the truth to make him and ultimately myself, look better. In short, it was a miracle that we were able to finish the album. If it weren't for my work ethic and Chris Kozlowski's consistency in the studio the album's release would have been delayed by months!

In times past Bobby had been a fireball in the studio and was involved in every aspect of recording! By the time the late 1990's rolled around he was a shell of his former self and very difficult to work with!

Soon after finishing Sub-Basement and sending it off to Italy for pressing, I was talked in to headlining a doom festival by Bobby and a promoter named Doug Romer. Bobby assured me that he would work his ass off to make up for things and seriously wanted me to be his guitarist and main man out there!

I had 2 weeks to put together a band for this show which was hardly enough time. I hired Dale Russell who had been my drummer in Electric Warrior and had also played with Paul Chapman of U.F.O.. I also recruited Walter White from "Black Manta" on the bass. We only managed to get 3 rehearsals in and primadonna Bobby Liebling only made it to one of those! It ws hillarious as he showed up in old man corderoy slippers and his white socks were glowing in the black light that was lit in the rehearsal space. He looked much like E.G. Marshall in his role as a man with "roach phobia" in the movie, "Creepshow"!

Photos taken of the only rehearsal with the full band before the doom festival in Towsen, Md. 2001

Time came for the show in Towson Maryland at the Recher Theater. There was a good sized crowd waiting for us as we rolled our gear in. Our showing was much anticipated. As more and more bands finished their sets the later Bobby became. We kept calling him and managed to get a garbled message that he was on his way. 5 hours later it was time for us to get ready to go on! Bobby was still nowhere in sight. I figured that he would make it just in the nick of time but that wasn't to be! This time Bobby had truly blown it in the name of drugs! I had to make a quick decision whether to play the gig instrumental or cancel! I opted for canceling as this would be my debut as the guitarist for Pentagram and the debut of a band that just a week before had no inkling that they would be in Pentagram until this moment. The whole thing had been a gamble at best and I thought it would be better to cut and run and to return another day in a better situation! That wasn't to be either! The club owner and the promoter came backstage and told me that I had to play the gig no matter what the problem was as the fans started getting rowdy and throwing things! The owner said to me, "Their going to tear this place apart if you guys don't play!" "You have to do it, please!"

The Recher Theater in Towson, Maryland - This was the site of Bobby's fall from grace with a classic no-show that has set the tone for all of his live shows to this day!

Against my better judgment, I went out there on stage in front of a slightly drunk and annoyed audience screaming for Bobby! I told them that Bobby didn't think it important enough to show up for them. The place went bonkers! I thought fast and threw a microphone out into the audience! I said, "You guys know the words, you sing it!" "This is Pentagram Karaoke!" That proved to be the smartest move of my career as it calmed their doom metal souls!

Then, at the stroke of midnight Bobby showed up and slithered onto the stage like a snake in the middle of the last song of the set! I immediately kicked him in the leg as hard as possible! I thought to my self "How dare he try to share the stage with me now!" I kept ducking in to the dressing room and behind the P.A. stack or any where I could go to avoid having to share the stage with his sorry ass, all the while playing my SG at full volume! This was straight out of an episode of The Jerry Springer Show and the audiences loved it as they also felt ripped off by Bobby! Fortunately this was all caught on camera by a very intelligent fan named Mike Pritchard! That was truly the end of Bobby and I as a working partnership! We have shared the stage since in friendly guest appearances but never again under the name Pentagram and my life has been better for it!

Joe Hasselvander sweats it out but doesn't back down from the difficult position that Bobby left the band in! The show must go on!

Dale Russell pounds the drums in his debut show as Pentagram's drummer! Dale saved the day as Bobby's no-show made it a very difficult performance for us without vocal cues!

Walter White of Black Manta hammers out the bass lines for Pentagram despite Bobby's no-show!

The band as a three piece still laid down the doom and I am very proud of Walter and Dale for being troopers and taking on an impossible situation against all odds! This event ultimately showed me that I can play my doom metal without Mr. Liebling's help which I have continued to this day!

After all the emotional avalanches and seismic disturbances associated with the recording and fiasco of the no-show gig, we got an album release date! The much anticipated Pentagram album, "Sub-Basement" would be coming out 9-11-01 !!! Little did we know that the World Trade Center in New York City and The Pentagon outside of Washington , D.C. would take direct hits from three hijacked commercial jet airliners!

One of the blackest days in American history, 9-11 was slated to be the release date for '"Sub-Basement"!

Notice what appears to be the devil's face in the smoke and debris cloud coming from the burning WTC!

Thank God Black Widow Records had the decency, wisdom and respect for the fallen to postpone the release for a few days later. 2001 for me was the worst year on record as nothing seemed to go right for anyone! It was almost as if God himself was trying to tell us not to be too confident in our daily routines and to be vigilant of an upcoming crisis!

Sub-Basement was released on September 17, 2001 and emerged as Pentagram's heaviest album to date! When a lot of the shock of 9-11 subsided , reviews started coming in hailing this album as the classiest and most definitive work of the band ever! In this , I was proud. I even forgave Bobby's weaknesses for a short time and decided to at least be his friend although working with him in the future would never again be an option.

Sub-Basement was originally slated for release on 9-11 but was thankfully held back a few days. The cover art was drawn on a napkin by Joe Hasselvander and later airbrushed !

In October of the same year, Bobby Liebling acted out his most self destructive act by releasing his 1970's demos with the original Pentagram of long ago called "First Days Here" on Relapse Records which is a much more visible label than Black Widow in the States and had bigger world wide distribution. By doing this in tandem with our new album, he effectively eclipsed the great success "Sub-Basement" was starting to enjoy and it suddenly dropped off the radar at the starting gate as the new and current release! Bobby's old inferior recordings were now overshadowing the most important Pentagram album ever recorded, "Sub-Basement". He did this out of desperation for quick cash and suddenly didn't care about all the time and talent invested in our follow up for Black Widow Records! His timing was so bad that "Sub-Basement" went underground for years! Except for the die hard serious fans, "Sub-Basement" was virtually unknown and has just now started to receive it's proper accolades! This also resulted in me not receiving any profits from the album until years later when it was re-issued on another label.

Bobby went on to a new set of musicians who were willing to babysit. I actually recommended them to him. It was the band Internal Void with Kelly Carmichael on guitar. They had everything that Bobby would need to get a record and a show together and maybe he would try harder in a band that had all the bugs worked out as it had now become a "make or break" situation!

They were successful in rehearsing and recording the "Show 'em How" album which wasn't half bad for their first go around. I was actually happy for them and even showed up for their debut gig at the Black Cat in Washington D.C..

I was amazed at how much advertising and promotion was put into the show in very intelligent yet simple ways. This made it all glorious and effective hype! There were posters of Bobby everywhere in the venue making it "Pentagram Night"! Kelly is clever with things like that!
It was really very cool! I even got sucked into it and was now anticipating the show!

I was suddenly approached by the band members girlfriends telling me that they were having a problem with Bobby and could I somehow go backstage and help? I went back their and found a wiped out narcoleptic Bobby Liebling who could barely stand up and he was talking gibberish! I had never seen him this bad out in public! I told Kelly that Bobby shouldn't be out of his house.
He finally sat down and past into a sort of coma! Bobby was now out for the count. I finally convinced them to call the rescue squad as he was breathing in shallow breaths and had stopped perspiring and was not responding to anyone's voice or to being shaken!

The paramedics suddenly came running down the stairs to the dressing room and gave him something that was basically charcoal that absorbed any substance that might be in his system. Bobby suddenly jumped up and and said let's do the gig and ran up the stairs like nothing had happened.

The band hit the stage and the lights went down and so did Bobby with a resounding thud ! He tested the mike and then fell backwards into Kelly's amps! They got him off the stage and strapped him into a straight jacket as he was going into full blown heroin withdrawal and was lashing about in a sort of beach chair with straps on it as well!

My last vision of Bobby that night was the six paramedics standing at attention in the amber lit freight elevator with expressionless faces very much like crew members on Star Trek awaiting the transporter beam to send them down to a strange planet! Only, here was Bobby seated in front of them thrashing about like he was possessed by the devil! Then suddenly to my surprise the elevator doors started closing! Not side to side but top to bottom like some sort of diabolical set of metal jaws belonging to a giant robot! I heard a big clang and down they went as the amber light showed through the cracks of the safety door descending to the awaiting ambulance in the street below.

After witnessing that, I was in shock and I will never forget it as long as I live! Pentagram's bassist , Adam asked me if I would get up and sing a Pentagram song with a few others in the hall who knew specific songs to save the packed out show? I was hesitant at first as I hadn't sang in 3 years! I also didn't know but a few words to" Twenty Buck Spin"! Sherman from Earth Ride told me he would be on the side of the stage with a mike filling in any parts that I might have problems remembering. So with that in mind, I got up and did the song with a good alcohol buzz on for extra courage as I was not prepared for this. I managed to wreck the microphone stand and just let it all hang out! My much less than perfect performance ended up on YouTube a month later and is still up and running today!

Bobby never seemed to get it back as even years later he still only makes cameo appearances with other bands including The Hounds Of Hasselvander.

Bobby Liebling guest appearances on 3 shows with The Hounds OF Hasselvander! Top - Krug's Frederick, Md. New Year's Eve 2007, Middle - The Kyber Philadelphia, Pa. 2-8-08 , Bottom - Velvet Lounge 4-31-08

In no way do I regret the brilliant music that Pentagram has created over the years in any of it's incarnations. I could have however, done without all the rip offs and empty promises from Bobby that showed no basic respect for me or others whatsoever! He has used all of us in connection to this band as doormats! What is important to him is that the work should be done by others so that he can fool the public into thinking that he deserves all the credit as he owns the name Pentagram which in my book is a curse not a blessing!

Update: I have just re-released "Review Your Choices" and "Sub-Basement" through French label Season Of Mist! Both albums include alternate rough takes worthy of a listen and jewels to a collector of Pentagram music! Finally the two albums are seeing the light of day and hopefully will be enjoyed by a whole new generation of fans! Both of these albums can be purchased on this website via the Paypal button on the top right corner or they can be purchased directly from Season Of Mist Records!

Doom On!

Joe Hasselvander

The Gruesome Twosome Take On The World - The Rebirth and Fall of Pentagram - Part I - Review Your Choices

2009-01-05T08:01:00.037-05:00

It was early fall of 1998 and 4 long years had passed since Pentagram's last album release, "Be Forewarned" and also 2 years after my last album and tour with Raven. As a consequence I had buckled down into an unforgiving and unrewarding job putting up commercial fence. My boss was an old friend from school days who time after time welcomed my services in his company only to later despise everything about my living being and showing his displeasure by never giving me a raise. He constantly reminded me that only losers play music and that he had grown out of all that thereby insinuating that I was a child and he was a responsible adult! He used the classic tear them down to build himself up tactic with me and others that he was secretly jealous of. He had major issues with misplaced anger and often took out his frustrations on others as a lot of bosses do! A text book "toxic" personality! The only problem with that was that the work was physically demanding, tedious and grueling. We also worked outdoors through the winter. So the last thing I needed was his crappy attitude aiming at me!

We worked through the summer and then at the end of September he announced that there was no more work in the near future which was most likely a lie. I thought to myself "This is what I get for trying to take the high ground and take any job I could get to support my family!" I have since thrown that stupid idea to the 4 winds as I now play music and work inside the music business full time! I've never looked back and have managed to keep everything going despite recessions and the like!

After finding out that my job was essentially over, I got a phone call from Bobby Liebling. He informed me that an Italian record label called "Black Widow" was offering to sign him to a new record deal and wanted to know if he could resurrect the band with Victor, Marty & I? Of course that was out of the question and I told Bobby that we could still do it as a 2 piece! I would play all the instruments and he would just have to sing the songs! I told him that I had done 4 albums like that before and that it would be a snap! I suggested that we split the song writing and we could make half of the album old classics of Bobby's that had never been properly recorded and the other half could be new compositions written by me giving the fans the best of the old and modern ultra-heavy new ones! I had often toyed with the idea of doing that with Bobby anyway as I had always had a secret vision for the Pentagram sound!

At first Black Widow were skeptical of whether or not I could pull it off but as time went on they agreed and we signed our first contract as a 2 piece and began a very strange journey that I must now take "you" the reader through!

I knew which studio to use right away as I had been doing some recordings there with Avenger's old guitarist Greg Reiter and the sounds were good and it was affordable. Best of all it was 5 miles away from my front door!

We began recording "Review Your Choices" on the last few days of September in 1998. Greg Reiter ended up engineering the project. He meant well but I later found out that he had used all the wrong microphones on the drums which made the album very difficult to mix later on. Greg supplied my guitar cabinets which had once belonged to Richie Blackmore when Deep Purple toured for their come back album with Gillan and Glover in the 1980's. They were white Marshall 4x12's that sounded great with my vintage Marshall head! The majority of the tracks were fully recorded in 3 days. I saved some of Bobby's more intricate compositions for last so that he could be present to guide me through the parts and achieve the feel that he wanted.

When Bobby finally came to the studio he got along great with the owner Mike Houndshell and Greg Reiter. They even played around all day making a mock interview with Bobby concerning his imaginary friend and toy rubber gorilla, "Gilla"! Mike and Greg put together 3 or 4 African tribal sound effects in the background as Bobby explains Gilla's ancestry originating from Hawaii, Africa! The result is one of Bobby's pathetic drug induced delusions which made it on the album at the very end to defuse the doomed out mood so that the listener could go about her or his business on a light hearted note!

2 days later it was time for Bobby to lay down his vocal tracks that would mostly be scratch tracks for reference points as he wanted to make it easier on himself when he laid down the permanent vocals. The scratch tracks themselves were not his best attempt but we did find a line or two that we would keep as they were iconic sounding! When we took a break Bobby headed to the bathroom to relieve himself and when he came out we decided to knock it on the head and start fresh the next day and nail it down!

Later that night I received a phone call from the studio owner, Mike. He was screaming at the top of his lungs about something Bobby had supposedly done in his studio! I couldn't make heads or tales out of what he was saying as he was shouting like a madman on the other end of the line. When I got him calm enough to talk coherently he told me that he ventured into his bathroom shortly after we had left the studio earlier that afternoon and found a strange water mark on his ceiling that looked like it had come from a hypodermic needle! He said that he had once been an intravenous drug user in his youth and knew the tell tale signs and that he was now concerned that Bobby had been using Heroin in his studio bathroom! I told him that I knew nothing about it and asked him if he could be mistaken? He was adamant! He then told me that the scratch tracks that we had done with Bobby would have to stand as the album tracks because he would never allow Bobby into his studio again!

Bobby's "hypo hi jinx" almost cost us an album! This showed me that Pentagram was now in it's death throws as far as Bobby was concerned and that he was beyond rehabilitation! He had finally lost all respect for himself and the band!

I went directly over to the studio the next morning to see this for myself and on the bathroom ceiling was a sprayed substance that could have come from the clearing of water from a needle and it was fresh! I was at a complete disadvantage and was now fighting for the life of our album that might possibly be canceled! We were almost finished and the money was almost entirely used up!

I managed to get Mike calmed down and told him that he had nothing to worry about with me and that I would take the rest of this album to a speedy conclusion. He finally agreed and I assured him that I wasn't using drugs and that he could depend on me to do the right thing.

The day came to mix the album and that's when Mike realized that Greg had not used the right microphones for the overheads and snare! It became very difficult to EQ or manipulate the drum tracks to the desired sound! So we had to compromise a little and settle for a less than perfect drum sound! I had heard similar sounds on the early Budgie albums and decided that things weren't as tragic as they seemed.

The lead guitars were made up of 6 different takes per song and we had the option of compiling bits from each solo to make one or simply choose our favorite take. I played a desk mix for Bobby over the phone and he suggested leaving all of them in as he loved them all! So we figured out a way to include all of them by controlling the levels up or down throughout the solo sections. This turned out very similar to Lynyrd Skynyrd or Molly Hatchet which actually worked and gave this new doom album a definitive signature unlike any other!

"Review Your Choices" proved to be mg biggest challenge on my 2nd instrument, the guitar. My guitar playing on this album would set the stage for the metal masterpiece "Sub-Basement" and later my solo project, "The Hounds of Hasselvander"

By far the hardest thing to deal with was the vocals as they were dodgy at best! I managed to use several different effects on the voice and also match certain notes with guitar fills that took some of the attention away from the vocals just long enough to appear to be passable! Now years later, I enjoy listening to them and it gives a much direr feel to Bobby's doom metal rantings!

The Mix was finally done and now it was time to listen on the big system in Mike's home to double check it! What we heard at full volume was indescribable and we had never heard anything that thundering up until that time! Mike's attitude toward the album instantly changed from "I can't wait to get these guys out of my hair" to "Wait a second , this album is the best thing that has ever come out of my studio!"

He got this real worried look on his face and then a kind of repentant attitude which sent up red flags to me for reasons that I couldn't explain until the next day!

The very next day I rushed over to the studio to get the masters from him and without warning he informed me that he wanted more money or he wasn't going to give me the tapes! He realized that this album might go big and all of a sudden he was holding "Review Your Choices" hostage and for ransom! He threatened to call the cops about Bobby's supposed drug offence and if I didn't back off and give him more cash! I told him that he was breaking our agreement and that he would not be receiving another penny from me or the record company as he had already been paid in full! He then said he also wanted full production credit for this album! I had produced this recording from top to bottom under much stress and hard work and wasn't about to let him hijack me! I finally agreed to make the credits as follows; Produced by Pentagram with Mike Houndshell. People's egos can really get out of control when you make something good in their presence or at their facility. This guy was clearly panic stricken and could have easily destroyed the tapes and that's why I agreed in writing to give him any credit whatsoever! He then gave me the tapes and that was that! In my world this is just another day at the office!

A week later I mailed the tapes and CD's off to Genova, Italy for Black Widow's approval and when they got it they were blown away on an emotional level and were very satisfied with the product!

The cover artwork was my next chore as it was up to us to provide it. I found a velvet painting probably from Central or South America depicting the devil and all his alluring temptations circling about in his cloak and the earth at the bottom! I found this painting sitting in an old friend’s house along with other paintings that were similar and went with a set of 6. These were perfect for the album's title "Review Your Choices"! We immediately cleaned them up and made professional photos of them. Black Widow also added special horror style graphics to the mix and all of it together created a great package for such a heavy album!

Original Artwork for "Review Your Choices". I found this picture hanging in the basement of an old friend covered in cobweb's and dust. After a good vacuuming and professional photo-session, this became the cover.

"Review Your Choices" surprised us all by getting almost all positive reviews world wide and jump starting an ailing Doom Metal scene by influencing a whole new wave and generation of doom metal and stoner rock groups to follow in our footsteps!

Front and back cover of the finished product.

Pentagram receive world-wide press coverage of this album, and gave a shot in the arm to the dying doom metal genre.

Stay tuned for the next installment of The Gruesome Twosome Take on the World - The Rebirth and Fall of Pentagram - Part II - Sub Basement

The Greatest Cover Band Ever!

2008-12-22T00:56:00.050-05:00

I became divorced from my 2nd wife in 1995 after she abandoned our 2 year old son and I to take up residence with a cocaine dealer who had been our mechanic! I knew nothing of his background other than his excellent work on cars and later my wife! He had been recommended by the ex-bassist of Pentagram Marty Swaney! He knew nothing of his background either other than his reputation as a mechanic!

My son Joe Jr. was devastated as was I but my sorrow was for my son's loss of his mother and not for me! I would have to deal with that at another time as I was too busy raising my beautiful boy!

I moved back to my mother's home as she was getting on in years and the cost for rent on my townhouse was too high for me to pay on my small salary from the dye casting factory where I worked! Besides, I needed a female figure to help in Joe Jr.'s growth as a child!

At first things were difficult as you should never move back home with your parents after living on your own! But I saw that my mother needed help with normal every day things that we young and healthy people take for granted. So it was a hard thing to do but in many ways it worked out to be the best idea for all involved especially for my son as he loved his Grandma!

After settling in to my new life and new job I began to feel the emotional pain of the break up! I was also hearing terrible things about my ex-wife and finally reading a public interest piece in a local paper provided by the A.P.I. about an incident involving my ex-wife and her new baby that she had with the drug dealer! I won't go into the specifics but it was such a terrible child neglect case that the A.P.I thought it notable enough to be published in hundreds of newspapers nationwide! My son and I were so lucky that a judge had ruled in my favor for custody because this easily could have been little Joe's fate!

At this point it was time to let it all go, start living a little, checking in with old friends and maybe sitting in with a band or two in town! That is when I came to an open mike night at an establishment called "Sully's" near Dulles airport in Chantilly , Virginia. My old friend from the Jack Starr days in Long Island , Ned Meloni had moved to the Washington D.C. area and had gone through a similar divorce himself and was now the M.C. for the said open mike night!

I came down not expecting much when Ned asked me to come up and play some Ted Nugent songs on the drums and also wanted me to play guitar on two old British glam rock songs as well! Ned remembered that I had played guitar on "Devil Childe" , "Phantom Lord" and my solo album "Lady-Killer" and was hoping to bring a little life to the party as some of the so called musicians at this weekly event were horrendous!

What Ned didn't know was that I had only played guitar in front of a live audience 5 times in my life and only considered it a hobby! I thought, "What the hell, why not? What have I got to lose after almost losing it all?" I got up on stage and strapped on a Les Paul Junior and was accompanied by Ned and his good friend Terry Arnold who also played the guitar! Ned asked me if I knew David Bowie's "Suffragette City and Alice Cooper's "Eighteen" . I told him that I did and the drummer counted off the beat and we were off and running!

Playing guitar in front of an audience and playing the songs I loved best was a healing experience after all the courtroom drama I had encountered in my divorce!

Right away Terry's style and mine clicked and this huge signature sound came out not unlike Kiss or Judas Priest once had! My sound was full of low end and mids as Terry's was more on the thin, high end side and he also played an octave higher than me on most of the parts! This gave our sound a tremendous studio album feel! We were all amazed afterwards and agreed to do it again the following week!

Terry Arnold's guitar playing was a perfect foil for my deep electric cello fiasco's on the Gibson SG!

The next week came and this time loads of people showed up to see us do it again as the word had gotten out about our previous rocked out showing! The crowd loved it and showed it with wild applause! I later told Ned that we ought to brush up on some other glam rock classics from that era as they were all dead simple yet authoritative! He agreed and we all went home later and learned "Children Of The Revolution", "Twentieth Century Boy" by T.Rex. and "Mama We're All Crazee Now" by Slade!

Pretty soon we were learning 3 songs a week and amassing a huge song list! Enough for 2 sets! The best part of it all was the fact that I was being healed of the pain of divorce! I finally had something to do outside of my fatherly duties at home and it was making me happier around my kid! My mother and Joe Jr. started to see the difference in me and we all started getting along much better! Who says music can't save your life? I got my "Mojo" back!

Ned rang me up one day and proposed that we actually try forming a band around what we were doing! He had a drummer in mind for the job, Dale Russell who had played with Ned in "Ghost", a band formed by U.F.O. guitarist, Paul Chapman! Ned was also playing bass for Kix's ex-vocalist , Steve Whiteman in his solo band "Funny Money". Ned told me that we would have to work around Steve's schedule which later became a huge drawback to what we could achieve but for now, I just wanted to do that first gig to test the waters! I also had my own duties with Raven playing festivals around the world but business had been a little slow and I was always open to try something new and crazy!

Dale came down to Virginia to Ned's house in Centerville from his hometown of Philadelphia and discussed over much Seagram's 7 the possibility of forming a glam rock tribute band called "Electric Warrior" named after the 1971 hit record by Marc Bolan and T. Rex.. We knew that we would have to put on the glitter and the make up for the show and also sport the crazy outfits! We even made up ridiculous stage names for ourselves parodying the very musicians who's music we were celebrating! I was "Quartz Boulder" named after Trevor Bolder, Dale was simply "Gone Bolan" after Marc Bolan, Ned was "Over Ten Watts" named after the legendary Overend Watts of Mott and Terry was now "Ariel Blender" instead of Mott's Ariel Bender! The only thing we left out of the mix was the platform heels!

Dale dons the "clown white" in order to give the audience more bang for their buck!

Two porcelain china dolls ready for the shock rock arena! Dale Russell and Joe Hasselvander

We found out very soon in rehearsals that Dale was going to be perfect as a drummer and showman! He led the charge to put on the clown white make up which we all were hesitant to do but once that happened we found our identity as a shock rock band!

This was at a time when "grunge" was "in "and we were about to venture into the complete opposite end of the current contemporary music spectrum. The bands of the mid '90's were trying to dress down and their hair was worn straight with the beards and all that! Nirvana, Sound Garden and Pearl Jam were ruling the roost back then. This was going to be a hard sell! We were one of the very first "tribute bands" that you now see everywhere these days making a pile of money! All we seemed to get though in 1995 was a pile of shit!

It took a lot for me to get used to the idea of playing cover songs again as I vowed that I would never stoop that low! I made that promise to myself in 1987 when I exited a band called Monarch. I only took that job because it was steady work, travel and chicks! Besides, it beat going back to construction work after I came home from my 3 year stint playing drums for Savoy Brown!

Electric Warrior's cover songs though were ultimate show stoppers and never gave me that embarrassing feeling that makes you hope and pray that no one you know discovers the venue where you are playing!

This was our set list as best as I can remember:

"Suffragette City", Moonage Daydream" "The Man who Sold The World" - (David Bowie)
"We Will Rock You" (Live Rocker Version) - (Queen)
"Fox On The Run", "Action" - (Sweet )
"Baby Strange", "Children Of The Revolution" "Twentieth Century Boy" "Jeepster" "Bang a Gong" - (T.Rex )
"Goodbye To Jane" - (Slade )
"Rock & Roll Queen", "All The Young Dudes" "One Of The Boys" - (Mott The Hoople)
"Eighteen", "School's Out" "Be My Lover" - (Alice Cooper)
"Rock & Roll Part II - (Gary Glitter)

We had all the bells and whistles you would need to pull this off , trip lights, fog machines, glitter sparkled cloth to line the drum riser, chrome fringed mike stand sleaves and loads of large sized TV sets all over the stage playing glam rock videos with everyone from T. Rex to Mott The Hoople on the screens! We were shocked to find out that people liked us a lot. I remember our first hard core fans. It was Skull and Hillel of the Doom Metal band Black Manta! They loved what we were trying to do and came out to most all of our shows bringing more and more people with them each time!

Electric Warrior at Jaxx 1996!

The local concert rock club Jaxx decided to give us a whirl and we soon found ourselves opening for Leslie West. We did our sound check first and Leslie walked up to the stage and said "I'm going on before you guys!" "You 've got too much going on their, you headline". We begged him to change his mind as it was his show, but he refused again! It turned out to be a great night as Leslie's fans all stayed for our gig out of curiosity and we were thankful. At that point everything started rolling out! More bookings and our reputation was becoming bigger than us! Everything was peachy except the money! We kept at it anyway!

Joe Hasselvander AKA "QuartzBoulder"! I was always a Marc Bolan fanatic from the first time I saw him play on the "Electric Warrior" Tour of 1971!

Booking gigs around Steve Whiteman's band was becoming difficult as he increased his work load! I saw that Ned was not real happy with what he was doing musically with Steve but Ned felt it all important to be in a cock rock band in order to keep a huge female following and to keep his $100 a night payment! Funny Money was basically living off the Kix albums and it was no different in that respect than what Electric Warrior was doing. The only difference was that we were covering the greatest songs of all time that other bands were afraid to cover and we smoked them with our extreme volume and conviction! I never saw the attraction to playing in Steve's band as I had played drums with them for 4 shows and immediatly wanted out of their deal! Steve was not a cool person to work with either. He was on a Napoleonic trip and had serious control issues. He also fancied himself as a drummer and drove every drummer he had ever hired right out of the band, including me! All of this being said, Electric Warrior was having to turn down show after show because of Neds situation. It was a shame because in my experience in doing a band from the ground up, when you get a steady growing audience and steady job offers your are on your way to bigger money and bigger noteriety! You just have to keep doing what you're doing and eventually it pays off!

Down deep Ned loved our little band. It gave him as well as the rest of us a strange type of freedom that you just can't describe! We were able to feel a little of what our childhood music heroes must have felt as we played their songs loud and authentic to the original compositions.

Electric Warrior backstage with "Pino" from Black Widow Records(Italy) The Zu 1996 Dundalk, Md.

We managed to squeeze out a modest amount of shows for the next 3 years in between Funny Money gigs and my one off concerts with Raven when we were asked to open fo Blue Oyster Cult at Jaxx. I remember Jay Nedry the owner screaming at me 2 minutes before we started our show that if I didn't turn my amp down that he would personally pull the plug on me in front of the now packed house and would throw us bodily out of the club! He said, "Hasselvender, if you play as loud as you normally do in here you will give these old people that are fans of B.O.C. a heart attack!" So I unplugged my 100 watt Marshall head and plugged in to a 50 watt Pierce amplifier that sounded great but didn't have the bulldozer effect that I prefer. The gig went great and Blue Oyster Cult were standing at the side of the stage watching us for our whole set! They loved our song choices and I'm sure it took them back to the days when they were fans. They told us that we were the best cover band that they had ever seen and to keep up the good work!

Electric Warrior at Jaxx Night Club in Sprinfield , Va. 1996

A month later we were back at Jaxx and again playing with Leslie West and again he forced us to play after him! This time he stuck around for the show to sign autographs and watched our set and seemed to enjoy himself!

Enter my highschool friend Tracey Mentiply! Tracey was the epitome of the whiskey drinking , beer swilling, overall wearing, construction working, truck driving redneck class! I loved him all the same! He loved heavy rock and the louder and the wilder the better! Alice Cooper was one of his favorites as was Grand Funk Railroad and even The Sex Pistols! As long as it rocked he was in! I brought him to his first Electric Warrior show and within 10 minutes his shirt was off in the club of course signaling to the club security that someone was getting ready to start a fight! The paranoid bouncers were there in seconds and made him put his shirt back on! It wasn't a pretty sight either as Tracey weighed almost 400 pounds! He later went to work that morning at the town rock quarry and showed up with glitter nail polish on and bits of glitter in his hair! His redneck boss and co-workers asked him what this was all about and he replied "You don't want to know!"

Tracey came to every show after that albeit, drunk as a skunk! But for some reason he seemed to compliment our very strange circus like ontourage! Sometimes he would show up with a crazy South African party girl named "Soda Pop" and they would take over the dance floor in our set and actually get applause from the audience over their tactless spectacle!
Joe Hasselvander, Tracey Mentiply & Dale Russell backstage at The Zu - Dundalk, Maryland 1996

Tracey was finally invited to one of our infamous after gig "tea parties" when he got a bit lude with Ned's new girlfriend and future wife! That pretty much sealed his fate with the rest of the band but Dale and I continued being his friend anyway as he didn't mean any harm he was just polluted!

Ned started getting on his high horse about being the leader of "our" band which no one was aware of. He was also getting in the habbit of barking orders at us as if he was the boss! Ned was becoming the classic "Ziggy Stardust" that David Bowie had sung about 20 some years before and like the song's lyrics "He broke up the band"! I think that Steve Whiteman, Electric Warrior and it's full blown alcoholic tea parties had taken it's tole on Ned! Suddenly he decided to move to Florida where he had once lived when he was in a band with Paul Chapman. His mother -in-law had in fact married Paul Chapman. Ned was also now starting a family. Ned and his wife were probably doing the right thing to insure the well being of their new daughter. Being the parent I am, I helped him renovate his house to sell on the market!

Ned Meloni - self appointed leader of Electric Warrior! In the end he fired himself!

After Ned moved, Terry our other guitarist and I kept in touch and had dinner at his house many times with his wonderful wife and we played lots of records and talked about the enigma of Electric Warrior for hours! That band was so fun to be in and was such a close bonding of friends that it was very emotional to admit that it was all over! The upside to this was that I learned my stage craft on the guitar and found my limitations and my strengths in a very deserving band that most people could only dream about being in! Terry was the only one who really got the raw deal as it was his first ever band and I don't know that he ever recovered from the loss. Also, Ned his best friend had now moved 1400 miles away to Florida! Dale and I continued working on different projects including a live gig with Pentagram! We are still in touch on a weekly basis to this day! Ned and I also later recorded another album in Florida with Jack Starr like we did in the old days of Long Island called "Under Savage Skies" which is an upcoming story in a future blog.

Tragedy struck though in the fall of 2003 when our biggest fan, Tracey Mentiply died in his sleep at his home in Woodbridge , Va. . He had just been at my house the night before and I made him listen to The Yardbird's song "Mister Your A Better Man Than I". He hugged me real tight before he left my house and said "Brother , You know I will always love you and don't you ever think anything different!" He got up to leave and I didn't want him to go , but I had things to do. That was the last time I ever saw him. 2 months later my mother Lucy Hasselvander also passed away. This was a very sad time of death and a changing of the guard that still effects my life today!

The photos of Tracey and Electric Warrior provided here by Dale Russel through a wonderful Christmas e-mail, influenced me to write this story that is totally true and has given me pause to think of all the small blessings that make a person's life worth living!

Happy New Year To All! May 2009 bring togetherness, love, care and Rock & Roll!

The Little Drummer Boy

2008-12-16T04:10:00.018-05:00

My family dates way back through European history with some significant figures present. My father's family came to this country via the Port of New Orleans as simple cabinet makers from France and even further back they had fought by Napoleon's side in the battle for Moscow and Waterloo. My mother's side of the family came from France and Scotland and Sir William Boyer (my 6th Great Grandfather) had partnered the London Company and then later the Virginia Company with John Smith which brought the first colonists to America in the 1500's. Another one of my direct ancestors was Patrick Henry who coined the phrase "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death!"which is evident when I visit my parent's graves among the hundreds of Henry graves surrounding theirs in southwestern Virginia!

Christmas has always been the most important time of the year for both sides of my family! My Great Grandmother Steiner was Jewish. She converted to Christianity and celebrated her first Christmas here in America. She gave birth to my Grandfather Peter Paul Hasselvander who became a witness for Christ as a preacher in West Virginia and saved many a soul. He later moved on to erect The First Christian Church Of Radford, Va.. A church by the way that he built with his bare hands along with the parishioner's help! It still stands today with the oldest wing of the church now called "Hasselvander Hall"! A huge touched up photo of him hangs in the sanctuary and dominates the view as if he's still looking over his handiwork

Peter Paul Hasselvander was my grandfather. He was a preacher and built The First Christian Church Of Radford , Va.

Very few people are aware that I got my start in music in the church! My first paying gigs were held there and my first life lessons about people's jealousy towards real God given talent were shown to me under those sacred timbers! Something I face on a daily basis even today!

The rules of my musical life were laid out plain and simple before me under God's watchful eye! God has always steered my career one way or the other in order to keep me in the game! I fully credit my beginnings in Christ's church for my success and longevity in the music business! I have escaped drugs and alcohol when it looked like the end! I have been led down the path that suits me most as a musician and a humble servant of God! This is why I credit Jesus on every album that I play on or produce!

I feel sorry for those people who want to take a hard line as an atheist or agnostic only because they are afraid of being called wimpy or cornball! It is only their insecurity of being exposed as normal flawed human beings that makes people posture in this way! Society nerves them out and they want to be viewed as invincible which we all know is bull! You came from dirt and you'll go back to dirt but your spirit will live on in one of 2 places! One of those places is definitely not user friendly!

I don't care what people think, I just do what the Lord tells me! It's nice to be able to communicate directly and freely with the one who created the universe, one on one! It is a privilege to celebrate his greatest work and triumph on Christmas day which leads me to my story!

My Father watched me grow up in my brother's shadow and saw my horizons broadening ever more each day! He took me to the New York World's Fair in 1964 which opened my mind to all the possibilities of advanced technology and outer space! But throughout all the Jetson's -like future world resonance there was one thing that stood out the most and that was seeing The Benny Goodman Orchestra perform at the fair! My dad saw the enthusiasm in my face over this swing jazz event and secretly knew that I would be a musician from that time on!

My Mom and Dad always wanted the best for me even if it meant playing Rock & Roll!

As I described in my first blog my brother was instrumental in furthering my interest in music.
My parents new that I could already play the drums as I had learned from listening to the Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts and Dave Clarke. My dad told my mom that it was time to buy me a drum set and best of all it would be a Christmas present!

I know that he must have gone into hock to afford these drums as they were quite expensive in those days. My father was an english teacher at Lee High School in Springfield, Va. and I know that his salary alone was hardly enough to feed our family much less buy a drum kit!

One of his students was a rowdy, big mouthed, trouble maker named Jay Nedry. Jay today own's the premier concert venue of the Washington, D.C. area called Jaxx! He's had every major label act or members of, in his club at one time or another! He still likes to tell the story though of how little Joey Hasselvander got his first drum set!

Jay Nedry was a problem child in my dad's English class who got so out of hand that he had to put his desk up by my dad's facing the classroom! He later went on to open Jaxx night club which is everybody's venue of choice!

My father came home from work one day a few weeks before Christmas in 1965 mad as hell about some young kid that disrupted class and asked him so many questions that he had to permanently pull his desk up along side of his facing the class so that he could keep a closer eye on his shenanigans! Every day he also had to be kept after class for punishments of various classroom crimes. My mother always said to my father that Jay acted that way because he admired my father. That was his twisted way to get attention from him as later I found out to be true!

Jay told me that after class my father told him "Well, I bought my boy a drum set! It's red sparkle and I can't wait to see his face on Christmas morning!" Jay said "You mean Phil? I thought he played guitar?" "No", my dad said, "This is for little Joey my youngest! He's the best drummer you've ever heard!"

I was a happy kid in 1965 and I could play drums as good as any adult!

So every day up until Christmas break he would talk and brag to Jay about the drum kit that I was getting! Funny thing was , it actually helped Jay's attention deficit problems and his behavior changed dramatically allowing him to finally take his place with the rest of the class facing the blackboard!

Jay Nedry, owner of the D.C. area's premier rock venue Jaxx was one of my father's high school students who was in on the secret of my first drum kit!

The first time I met Jay Nedry was at a club called Route One South where I was playing drums for Leslie West and Mountain in 1976 and this is where I first heard the story about my dad and his special Christmas present to me! Even when Raven played at Jaxx with Udo Dirkshneider in 2000, Jay got on stage before we played our set and told the whole story exactly the way I'm telling it now! I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or proud! I think it was a little of both! Anyway, this was the part of the story that put the whole puzzle together about my father who passed away when I was 13. Jay's account helped me to know my dad better and to help me see him through the eyes of an adult!

The first time that I met Jay Nedry was at Rt. One South, a small rock club in Alexandria, Va. the night I played drums for Leslie west! This is a photo from the gig! Jay told me many things about my dad that I never knew!

On Christmas Eve 1965 I knew something great was going to happen! I could just feel it in the air! I had poured over one of those Sears wish books so many times that it had become a ragged, dog eared mess especially on the page with the musical instruments! All I could do was focus on that red sparkle 4 piece trap kit right next to the Dan Electro Guitar with the amp built in the case! I'm getting that feeling all over again just writing this!

Needless to say there was no sleep to be had and I could hear the sounds of metal things clanging around and being snapped together and things being taken out of plastic bags and boxes with my dad cursing all the way! He wanted this to be perfect and for me to wake up with the drum kit set up like in a showroom!

Christmas came and there they were! I stared at them for hours and didn't much care for the socks, shirts and pants my mother had gotten me! Bless her heart, she understood! We later brought the drums down to the basement and the torture began and didn't let up until 1983!

Christmas was always the most anticipated event of the year in my family going back for centuries! This one had to have gone down in the record books in our family's history!

In the 1960's "The Little Drummer Boy" was a big Christmas hit on TV and radio and you couldn't escape it! I know what the song represents but I always identified with it because I have pounded out the drum rolls for the procession of God's will on earth and his only begotten son for 44 years!

God Bless All Of You! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!
From Joe Hasselvander

Savoy Brown, Curse Of The Blues PT. - 2

2008-12-12T07:11:00.033-05:00

For those of you who read "Savoy Brown, Curse Of The Blues Pt. - 1", here is the second installment for your perusal!

If it wasn't for Arnie Goodman's quick thinking, I don't think that the Kim Simmonds Band would have rebounded so quickly! Losing Gary Bordonero was more than just losing a great bassist! We were losing a great performer and back up singer as well! It's no wonder The Rods fell apart after his departure from their group!

Here I was in Northern Virginia hanging with my old cronies and dabbling in things that I shouldn't be! I had left the area in 1983 and landed in New York in the hopes of moving up in the music world. Now, here I was back in Woodbridge, Va. 1985 with less money than before! It's funny how your friends are happy about you stepping up in life and they're so supportive but if you have a temporary set back and you are back among them they tend to become abusive about it. To the point where you have to say goodbye to them as friends forever.

I felt dreadful with the "What are you going to do for a closing act?" stigma attached to me!
Suddenly I got a call from Arnie Goodman telling me that he was working on getting a bass player for the band and that he had booked shows in Canada! This was great news on a gloomy December day! The news got even better when he told me that he was thinking of getting Chris Romanelli to fill the bass slot. Chris had been the bass player for Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics. They happened to be one of my favorite bands. I had seen Chris play with them on the "Coup d' Etat" tour.
He had a phenomenal sound and he also wrote their heaviest hit, "The Damned"!

Chris Romanelli had been the bassist on The Plasmatic's "Coup d' Eta" and I knew he would be a perfect addition to K.S.B. !

Kim Simmonds called me the following day to confirm the rehearsals and give me all the details.
He told me that he had fired our old road crew which consisted of ex-roadies and tour managers from Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. He replaced them with new people. He said in his thickest starchy British accent, "We'll Be working with Kerry Wittig"! Little did I know that he had hired the craziest rock and roll lunatic currently doing the circuit!

Kerry Wittig was the craziest rock & roller I had ever met! Years later he was notorious for wrecking Overkill's tour bus whereupon he was instantly fired!

Rehearsals were scheduled for early January and Jimmy Kunes and I were to return to Cortland, N.Y.. I remember driving up from Virginia through a blizzard that started in western Maryland and continued all the way to Scranton, Pa.. My 1973 Ford Ranger pick up truck finally gave up the ghost with a blown engine as I climbed the last hill before reaching town!

I managed to get towed in to Scranton and called up this Kerry Wittig guy and told him my problem. He said he would come right out to get me as he only lived an hour away!
Standing in a gas station and drinking gallons of coffee I watched a small banged up Japanese car pull into the parking lot and a crazed balding maniac got out which had to be Kerry! He turned out to be a real character and it looked like I finally had someone who would be on my side in the organization. He asked me to stay at his place for a couple of days while he arranged to sell my truck. He managed to find a buyer for it, blown engine and all who was willing to pay 3 times what I had paid for it in 1983!

Kerry was a drinking man and he took me to a bar with his old music buddies who also liked to drink! They were ordering rum and cokes and throwing the drinks, ice and all into each other's mouths from 2 feet away! Obviously they had done this kind of work before! It wasn't long till I myself became a semi-pro at this! I was carrying around this huge wad of money from selling my truck and I'm hammered! I told Kerry to go get us $600.00 worth of cocaine and he being the resourceful chap that he was, came back with the stuff in a flash! We went to his house and marveled at the fact that my whole pick up truck now fit perfectly on his glass coffee table! That night of substance abuse almost killed me! It ended a terrible trend in my life that was getting out of hand! Now it was time to get down to business and straighten myself up or lose my rock & roll dream! Needless to say, I never went to those extremes again and would never suggest to anyone to try cocaine or any other drug other than life itself!

Rehearsals started and Chris Romanelli worked out perfectly for the band! He gave a certain pizazz to our sound and he was a decent back up singer. Chris and I quickly became the best of friends! He had brought a closet full of Plasmatics stories with him that were outrageous.

Chis Romanelli became a great friend as his attitude was street level with all the brutally honest Brooklyn humor to go with it!

The day came for our mini-tour of Ontario. This was the first time I had ever been out of the U.S.! Our first gig was in Brampton and at sound check Kim had a hissy fit with the lighting guy and our soundman/ tour manager Kerry Wittig. Kim was not happy with the production elements that were going on and suddenly stopped the sound check! You could hear a pin drop it was so silent! Kim then pontificated from his lordly pulpit, "I want to be seen and I want to be heard!" then silence again. It was all we could do to keep from bursting out laughing. To this day, that phrase has been ingrained in the minds of all of us that were present and to those we told about it later! It's still one of the greatest megalomaniac moments in rock & roll history! I even thought about writing a rock opera around it!
All the shows in Canada went down well and the Brampton show was videoed and is still featured on YouTube!

Kim Simmonds: "I want to be seen and I want to be heard!"

Chris and I got in a little bit of trouble after the Kitchener show when we brought back two blond beauties to our room! Suddenly the door to our room flew open and this "crazy" with a knife and a plaid lumberjack shirt claimed that he was with the girls and he now wanted them back! They told him to get lost and then he just got crazier! Chris and I managed to kick his podunk ass out the door and lock it! We kept hearing him cursing his head off outside and then the cops grabbed him! Good work R.C.M.P.!

These 2 lovely girls from Kitchener , Ontario proved to be pretty poison when their lumberjack friend threatened us with a knife if they didn't leave with him!

When we got back to New York we played the Sundance in Long Island with White Lion opening up for us! As you know from an earlier entry I had been White Lion's original drummer for about 2 weeks and was canned by their management. At the Sundance gig I was setting up my drums and White Lion's guitarist Vito Bratta was sitting there nagging me about my drums not being polished. "Hey, why don't you clean those things, they look disgustingly dirty!"I thought he was joking but then Mike Tramp chimed in with the same crap and told me that I should know better and I said to them, "Your the guys opening for me, not the reverse"! Then it was just cat calls from there on. To this day I don't know what that was all about because I always took Mike Tramp for being a nice guy!

The beauty of it all was that their bass rig later went down with a blown transformer and they demanded that we lend them our bass amp but after all there childish animosity towards me they got paid back with a big "NO SIR"and had to finish their set with both bass and guitar going through Vito's rig! The reviews in the Long Island Ear also said that we walked all over them musically, professionally and that we were light years above them! That was sort of sweet revenge for me after being rejected by them 2 years earlier! Of course we all know that they later became the darlings of MTV with their 2 forgettable hits and then fizzled out like the rest of those kind of bands!

The Kim Simmonds Band never seemed to be hurting for work and finally it was time to put on a showcase for the major labels so that we could reach the next level! Enter Ira Sherman! He had helped out many signed and unsigned bands in his career. He was to help us with our overall presentation stage show, etc. ! He did a wonderful job in finding our strengths and weaknesses many of which we weren't aware of. This also meant that we would have to record 2 new songs to round out our already recorded 5 song demo. We hired Raven's drummer Rob "Wacko" Hunter to produce as he had learned a few tricks from the legendary Eddy Kramer in his sessions with Raven. We recorded the Def Leppard like "Angelina" and the kick ass Detroit blues rocker "She's So Good".

The Kim Simmonds Band with Arnie Goodman , The late Ira Sherman and his wife, far right!

Ira spared no expense and got us the finest photographers and built a nice bio on us and got a decent buzz happening with record companies! L-R Chris Romanelli, DuckMacDonald,Jimmy Kunes, Kim Simmonds and Joe Hasselvander

While we were preparing for our showcase we had all planned a birthday party for Kim at the Rock & Roll Hotel where now Chris lived also with Jimmy Kunes and I. It was Kim's big "40" and we were inviting the whole town! The Party came with all the trimmings including a cake made to look like 2 large female breasts! The rest of the guys from Raven had also come home from their "Stay Hard" tour and were also presentfor the festivities! It was a lot of good fun and mischief rolled in to one! Kim had been getting a little nervous about the upcoming showcase and this would help get his mind off of it at least for a night!

Kim's 40th complete with boob cake!

Jimmy Kunes asks Kim if he likes his booby cake!

Jimmy tries force feeding!

Meanwhile, Joe hasselvander and Chris Romanelli go for the real boobs!

Arnie Goodman booked SIR Studios in Manhattan for the showcase. We had booked the big room where Kiss and others used to rehearse. It had lights and P.A. with a stage comparable to any large venue. This was the best possible forum for a major label to view a band in New York. Kim was starting to feel the pressure and was becoming irritable in the anticipation of the showcase. So, I traveled by myself to the city without the rest of the band so I could get away from all that and keep a cool head for the show.

SIR studios in N.Y. supply the greatest showcase environment in town for musicians!

I was sitting in the lobby of SIR waiting for the rest of the band to arrive and I suddenly heard this music start up in one of the rooms with this high pitched squealing voice that was surreal. Then I kind of dozed off sitting there when I heard female footsteps sort of shuffling my way and then a soft and gentle voice asking "Are you OK?" I looked up and it was Yoko Ono!
It was her voice I had heard earlier coming from the room adjacent to the lobby. I told her that I was fine and that I was showcasing later and that I wished her good luck on her upcoming shows.
She wished me the same and I thought "Only in New York"!

The showcase was difficult as Duck broke a string on the first song and had no spare guitar! He had to string it up behind his amp as we played on and Kim seemed out of it and beaten! This was dually noted by CBS and the other 4 or 5 labels present! Needless to say we didn't get a deal! We were all pretty bummed! So much had been put in to this one night and now it was a bust! The only upside to the whole evening was the arrival of our guests, Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer and T.C Tolliver of The Plasmatics. They loved the show but they weren't the perfection seeking business men that we needed to sign a deal with.

After we licked our wounds on that one we continued our usual gigs in the mid-west. Chris and I kept getting into girl trouble as usual until one day Chris told me he was offered an audition for W.A.S.P. and that he was flying out to L.A. after our upcoming gigs in Pennsylvania. Chris finished up our last shows and departed with freshly dyed black hair! He returned a week later without the job with W.A.S.P.. Evidently back at his hotel in L.A. he slept through an important meeting he was to have with Blacky Lawless after his audition that would seal the deal. As everyone knows Johnny Rod from King Cobra got the job.

Photo's taken with Chris right before his last performance with K.S.B. with Arnie Goodman taking the brundt as usual!

This era of the band had the best shot at the big time but something was always working against us!

Kim wasn't about to take Chris back in to the band and I guess I couldn't blame him. The rest of us were really going to miss him though because he was a real fun loving guy and a great musician!

The winter snows of the north east finally thawed and Jimmy and I had relocated to Elmira, N.Y. from Cortland and were now ready to play! We were back in business with an untried bass player named Danny who actually was a guitar player. It was June and we were going to play Sun Fest again in Ford City, Pa.. We had played it in 1985 with Mark Farner and now we were headlining this year's outdoor event! We played a couple of shows beforehand in the area and they weren't the best as the bassist could not remember his parts and it was too late to do anything about it. Our motto was always "The show must go on!"

The night before the festival we played a bar in Pennsylvania that you could have only found with a G.P.S.! Kerry and I tied on a whopper of a drink fest after the show and I went back to the hotel depressed about the band's future and mine as well! How could this have happened to us? We were now officially floundering! I woke the next morning and all of the furniture, TV, and drapes were now stuffed in the bathroom! Kerry informed me that I went on a Keith Moon style rampage and did a little remodeling in my 80 proof euphoria. For the first time I became scary to myself! I was banged up and hungover and so was the rest of the band. Apparently they were all drowning their sorrows the night before! We really should have called it a day but we felt if Kim was still in, then so were we!

We loaded our gear and got ready to go when a married couple affiliated with the show from the night before came to get us and have us follow them over to Ford City. The man was talking to us and we told him that we were a little bit worse for wear. He whipped out some truck driver speed that he claimed were caffeine pills with vitamins in them and that they worked wonders for hangovers. Duck,Jimmy, Kerry and I each took 2 tablets and we were on our way! We just didn't know to what!
I noticed an hour on into our journey that Jimmy was acting a little funny as was Duck. I felt a little strange myself but paid it no mind as I had a job to do later in the afternoon.

We arrived at Sun Fest and it was filled with 4000 people! This was going to be a fun gig!
Everything that happened up until we hit the stage is a blur! We started into our set and I noticed that Duck was throwing a lot of Jimi Hendrix shapes as he played guitar in a highly unusual manner! Jimmy was also ramping up his act from his norm and cracking strange jokes with the audience between songs then for a crescendo we all started wrecking our gear! Duck was humping his stratocaster on the stage while Jimmy was kicking monitors off the front and I was on top of my drums throwing cymbals and sticks and snares all over the stage!
Out in front Kerry had pegged the huge concert PA system to it's maximum volume and turned every piece of outboard effects on to full so that the band sounded more like a fleet of F-16s taking off with their after burners on, than a band! It suddenly occurred to all of us after the gig that these caffeine pills we had taken earlier were indeed high grade LSD! Kim came in to the dressing room and said "I never realized what great performers I had in my band!" We didn't dare tell him what had really happened!

When we got back to Elmira Jimmy and I were discussing leaving the band as it was now taking it's toll on our health and our wallets. Kim hired a new bassist named Jeff Howle who played really great but the rest of us told him after his successful audition that the band was not long for this earth! He understood but wanted to play the remaining gigs with us anyway.

So, we played again at L'Amour opening for Blue Oyster Cult except this time Vicky our friend who had let us stay at her house , arranged it so that Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley would come to our show that night! They were curious about the band and knew Kim from their old days at Winterland. We put their names on the guest list but when the bouncers of the club informed them both that they didn't do guest lists Gene became irate! So, Paul and Gene headed back home and Vicky received a call in the middle of the night from Paul asking "What the hell happened?" She told him what had probably happened and he understood and said he was not bothered but that Gene was acting like an old man about it. I couldn't believe that anyone would be moronic enough to turn away Kiss from their club!

Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were turned away by bouncers at our concert in Brooklyn even though they had been put on our guest list!

The curse of the blues got us again, and again we had to pick up the pieces! Duck found out that Kim was already moonlighting with another band and calling it Savoy Brown, They were more of a blues band like Savoy's early albums. We confronted him with it and he admitted it saying that he wasn't making enough money with our band at this time. He also said that he would play any gigs that we got but that business had slowed in heavy rock. His new Savoy Brown could play any blues club any time!
We booked 2 more gigs with Kim, one in Bath N.Y. and the other in Ithaca. John Gallagher from Raven came out to the Bath show on his first date with his girl Melanie who is now his wife. John had always liked me and I him because we were both rabid Budgie fans and we also loved the classic Groundhogs album "Split"! I thought it was great that he would finally get to see me play!

I aired my disappointments in the way things had gone to Kim and Duck in the dressing room of the club and I was a little rough on them! It was just misplaced anger at a situation that I had no control over and should have put a stop to months before. It was such a shame to see a fantastic band go down the tubes!

The band hit the stage and we kicked major ass! I think this was the very moment that John Gallagher started considering me for the drummer slot in Raven as they were having their own problems with Rob "Wacko" Hunter at that time. My distant horizon looked a lot better than I knew! I would just have to wait a few months!

Kim eventually moved to Elmira and started writing a column in the local paper once a week. He went on to write that he had heard my solo album "Lady-Killer" and was surprised to find out that I was in fact a good guitarist as well as a drummer and that indeed everyone involved in his band in the last 2 years were phenomenal musicians and that he was proud to have played with all of us! I realized then that Kim was down deep a very nice guy but was trying to survive in a hard business and keep a roof over his head. I believe that some of his tough guy veneer had cracked off and he was finally finding some peace within himself!

It became official! The resignation came from Kim and not us! We would finish up by playing 2 more shows. the already booked Ithaca show was to be the first and then we would end it all at Corning Community College. The night came and we played our best show for all of our local friends who had helped out over the years at Captain Joe's in Ithaca! It was kind of a sad going away bash but our friends and fans let us know how much we had meant to them. The next day we had a farewell party for the band at Cary Whittig's house which Kim did not attend as he probably didn't see any point in it.

The final shows for K.S.B. were hard charging and spontaneous as if down deep we didn't want it to end!

Some photos from Kerry Wittig's party that was meant to be a goodbye to The Kim Simmonds Band! Kim didn't attend

New bass player, Jeff Howle and Danny who had sat in for 2 gigs as bassist ,comparing notes on the imploding star of The Kim Simmonds Band at Carey's farewell party!

The last gig was a great show playing for college kids at Corning. It was not for drunken losers in a bar but concert going kids who loved music which is the way it should have been all along. I pulled my car up after loading my drums and saw the band all standing there and said jokingly "I hope I never see your ugly mugs again!" Duck laughed, Jimmy looked confused and Kim looked blank. Then I drove off and away from yet another chapter of rock & roll madness! You can bet it wasn't long before I jumped into another one!

My biggest regrets about the Kim Simmonds Band were all the fantastic studio and live recordings we had made that may or may not ever be heard by the public! One day I hope to release the live tracks before interest in rock & roll finally dies.The band I had joined with Kim and the rest of the guys was a learning experience to say the least! We played some great shows together and it taught me a lot about putting the effort into the making of a rock & roll show all the while kicking ass and taking names! Kim's guitar playing was fiery and authoritative and Duck's was solid and steadfast! Jimmy's singing was out of orbit and all 3 bass players were magnificent! I can only hope that my efforts were equally appreciated!

The lessons learned were basic! I hung up partying as it was a road to nowhere! I immediately assert myself if something seems wrong or unfair in a band situation and I will never be someone's side man again!

Thank you for taking the time to read about my exploits and the curse of the blues!
Cheers,
Joe Hasselvander

Savoy Brown, Curse Of The Blues PT. - 1

2008-12-09T12:27:00.028-05:00

My audition for Savoy Brown occurred in a flea bitten rehearsal room in Brooklyn, N.Y. in February of 1985.

As I had said in the last entry: Jack Starr "Lost In Limbo" I had met Arnie Goodman manager of Savoy Brown and owner of Zig Zag Records, a collector's paradise of heavy metal albums and rare used vinyl. He set up an audition for me with Kim Simmonds, founder of legendary blues rock band Savoy Brown. It would just be the two of us in a small rehearsal room jamming on standards and playing some of the new songs for his ongoing project.

Arnie drove me to a small rehearsal hall somewhere in Brooklyn and there we met Kim Simmonds. I towered over him as I'm 6' 4". He looked a little intimidated. We played together reasonably well and he told me that he liked my use of the snare drum. The playing part of the audition went extremely well so we nicked out to a nearby coffee shop so that Kim could pick my brain about music and try to get better acquainted. Just like with Rhett Forester so many month's ago, Kim was having a problem looking me in the eye and was being very vague about his band and me being a part of it. I later found out that he was spooked at the fact that I was dressed to hit the stage in what was to be a casual meeting and that he had a hard time taking me seriously! This also would be a trend throughout my 3 years of service with his band! Arnie suddenly walked into the small coffee shop and Kim and him went off into a corner to discuss whether or not I would be their pick. Arnie assured Kim that I was more than capable of doing the job as he had seen me play with Jack Starr in Long Island. He asked Arnie if I was on drugs because he had never seen anyone dress or look like me. Arnie told him once again that he had personally checked me out and if he wanted a good drummer, I was his man!

Kim Simmonds was reluctant to have me as his drummer which only further discouraged me in my journey to the "big time!"

Kim was still hesitant. Arnie and him had a few more words and then Kim suddenly left the coffee shop. I thought to myself " Oh boy, not again!" Arnie informed me that Kim wasn't sure and that now his band would have to make the decision. So I was to now drive to Cleveland, Ohio the following week and meet the rest of the band and play with them. If they liked what they heard, then that would be good enough for Kim. Arnie also told me not to get my hopes up as he thought Kim would immediately be bowled over by me but now was apparently skeptical of my professionalism! I thought to myself, "I've been doing this sort of thing probably as many years as Kim" "If he doesn't like what I do screw 'em!!" He didn't bowl me over either, at least not on that night!

So, the following week I made my way out of Virginia and up through Ohio until I came to Cleveland. It was going to be St. Patty's day that upcoming weekend so the town was mobbed with people and traffic. I made it to my destination on the shores of Lake Erie at a three story office building which was converted in to a rehearsal hall and recording studio.

I was greeted by Gary Bordonero, Duck MacDonald and Jimmy Kunes! I had seen all of them play on stage in the not so distant past! All three of them were awesome musicians! Gary was the Bassist for "The Rods", Duck had played guitar for "Shakin' Street" on the Black And Blue Tour in 1981 with Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult and Jimmy had just recently played L'amour in Brooklyn with ex-Riot members in "Silent Partner" as their vocalist! All of us were top flight musicians and I was sure that this was going to be my next band if I past their litmus test!

We unloaded my truck of all the drums and carted everything up the lift to the rehearsal room! Right away Jimmy and I became close friends and he was excited about having me on board! Duck and Gary seemed very occupied on the phone with Carl Canedy, drummer of "The Rods" about a solo album that Duck had just recorded called "Thrasher". The first 2 days that I was there that was all they seemed to be interested in. So initially my only contact was with Jimmy which was fine.

The time came for the rehearsal/audition. Kim arrived and was still avoiding me which started pissing me off! I would never treat someone like that who had made it to the ranks of an audition because a certain amount of research must have been made to suggest that the person was worthy of said audition. I didn't deserve what was behind door number one, two or three but I did deserve basic respect! After all I had just driven 600 miles to be there!

We went through 3 of the songs that I was told to learn and Gary Bordonero turned around and asked sarcastically "Do you listen to much John Bonham?" I asked "Why? You don't like Bonham?" Immediately Duck MacDonald turned to me and said "That's it!" I'm thinking "Oh No, They don't like me!" Then Duck spoke again and said 'I'm now done looking for drummers and Joe, your it!" Kim Simmonds got the look of horror on his face and they went in to another room to discuss it further! Evidently Kim was trying to negate this decision as Duck was the band leader for Kim and the quality control officer of the the group! Duck was adament about his decision and went as far as to say that if they wanted to send me home that he was leaving too!

Duck MacDonald went to bat for me when Kim Simmonds called my musicianship into question!

I never forgot that act of kindness from Duck and as you can see from my first blog entry "A Ground Breaking Revelation At 13" Duck's kindness was payed back in spades!

We rehearsed many hours a day until we got it right and were ready to play out. We even tried recording a studio cut but the recording engineer's set up was sub par so we knocked it on the head and went out in the streets of Cleveland to celebrate St. Patrick's day with 10,000 drunk Irishmen! This is where the rest of the band started warming up to me and realized that I loved having a good time even if it was at my own expense. They also found out that my strangeness got us a lot of attention with passersby who for the first time asked Duck and Gary "Do you guys play in a band?"

Later that night the studio engineer who messed things up wanted to make it up to us by taking the band to a huge club that he knew about that according to him had loads of beautiful women who patronized the place! We said "Hell Yeah, Let's go!"

We arrived at a very large establishment in "the flats" of Cleveland. We walked in the club all of us in full leathers, to a giant crowd of people. There was a caberet act on the stage with a woman singing and throwing garters into the audience while straddling a chair! It was something straight out of a Marlena Deitrick movie! As we stood at the bar several women approached the band in micro-mini skirts and push up bra's! One of these came up to me and started whispering stuff in my ear but the musical performance was to loud for me to make out what she was saying. Before I could get around to getting a good look at her Gary Bordonero ran up to me in a panic! I asked him what was wrong? He asked me if I had taken a good look at this girl who was trying unsuccesfully to put the moves on me? I said that I hadn't gotten around to that and that I was getting ready to before he came barging in! Gary said "Look at her, she's got an"Adam's apple!" It was a guy! In fact all of the chicks in this place were guys! Gary said "We've got to get out of here!" Damn if he wasn't right! Even the woman on stage was a female impersonator! All of us were shocked and we'd been had! So, on the way out of the bar there was a massive suit of armor at the entrance of the hall which I dry humped until it fell into a pile of metal arms and legs and then shouted "Viva la France!" and exited the building! I could see that the rest of the band were quite impressed at my strange exhibitionism but extreme circumstances demand remarkable actions!

When we got to the car we let that engineer guy have it for bringing us to this horror show of a club! He laughed his ass off and said "I thought you guys would enjoy it!" To this day I never go to a club on someone's recomendation unless I've check it out myself! I have to admit though, we were closer as a band from that moment on because we couldn't make up stuff like that!
You absolutely need living witnesses!

The following weekend came and we drove to Ann Arbor, Michigan for our first show together as Savoy Brown at a ratty college bar called "The Blind Pig". I was glad that we started there because my heroes, MC5 and The Stooges were from Ann Arbor and it was kind of symbolic to me. The gig was great and Kim found out real quick that I was great at sussing out spontaneous moments in the set and that I was consistent throughout! From then on he acted a lot better towards me!

A rough and tumble looking Savoy Brown. L-R Duck MacDonald, Gary Bordonero, Jimmy Kunes, Kim Simmonds and Joe Hasselvander.

Many other gigs followed and we were still based out of Cleveland until one day we learned that Kim and his wife Tina had parted ways. He was devastated and I totally understood as I had lost every woman I had ever loved to the music industry! Kim decided to move into exile in upstate New York as Gary and Duck were from there and it seemed the right thing to do! Jimmy Kunes and I also had to move there and we found a place to live in Cortland, New York with a women who provided the accommodations for all the bands recording at Pyramid studios in nearby Ithaca. Her name was Vicky and her house had even been dubbed "The Rock & Roll Hotel".
Metallica had once lived there and now Raven were living there although they were on tour most of the time. Jimmy and I stayed in the downstairs part of the house with Vicky. I had once met her in Long Island as she used to date Ned Meloni who was still playing bass for Jack Starr. I knew from that meeting that she was a ballsy rock and roll chick and was no pushover!

Vicky Calandra took care of Jimmy Kunes and I like a mother and made a hard situation easier for us!

Jimmy and I would vacate the house to give Vicky her space and for us to get some excersize in the local parks around Cortland! These photos of Jimmy and I were taken at Tremon Falls.

Our new base of operations was much better although our shows were all in the mid-west. But at least now it was easier for Jimmy and I at the Rock & Roll Hotel under Vicky's care!
We were booked for a show in Detroit at the premier blues club called "The Soup Kitchen". When we drove out there we were joined by legendary guitarist of Mitch Ryder and Cactus, Jim McCarty! Kim and Duck left the stage while Jimmy Kunes, Gary Bordonero and I played "Parchman Farm" which Jim had recorded years before with his old band Cactus! Jim smoked on guitar while we played the most authentic Cactus imitation we could muster. That was a surreal moment and I told him so! I was a huge fan of Cactus and still am! Gary and I thanked him for letting us be Tim Bogart and Carmine Appice for an evening! Ironically Jimmy Kunes became Cactus' vocalist in 2005 with Mr. McCarty on guitar!

Jim McCarty sat in and played Parchman Farm with us and blew the roof off the building!

While all this was going on people were cramming into the small blues bar to see what was going on. Parked outside in front of the place were 2 red limos containing Jimmy Page and Paul Rogers! The Firm had just played at the local arena and they were now coming by to hear Kim play but got spooked when they saw the overflowing crowd so rather than coming in they just sat there and listened through cracked windows.

Savoy Brown at the Soup Kitchen in Detroit with Jimmy Page and Paul Rodgers listening on outside in their limos!

Another memorable gig from that time was "Sun Fest", an outdoor concert in Ford City PA. with an average audience of 2000. We played in support of Mark Farner who was one of the friendliest and most down to earth people I have ever met! He came up to me in the food line in catering and said,"Don't eat the potato salad, you don't know how long that's been sitting there." That opened the conversation between him and I about a lot of things including his dear friends who had once worked with him who kept drinking and drugging it up! He told me about their tragic endings and that he had since adopted a zero tollerance policy about folks who indulge in such stupidity! I was a health nut in those days and I had to agree! Gary Bordonero and I asked him if he would take a photo with us in the classic Grand Funk Railroad pose? He agreed.
After our show he was in his stage outfit ready to go on and Gary and I were fresh off the stage soaked in sweat and took the classic hands out shot! It was a great pleasure meeting him!

Top - Savoy Brown at "The Office" in Ford City, PA. the night before the open air "Sun Fest" with Mark Farner!

Below - Joe Hasselvander playing the outdoor event in front of 2000 people.

That whole summer was filled with gigs. Some outdoor events and some in large venues like Harpo's in Detroit among others in the midwest.

One show in particular makes me shudder when I think about it. We were playing with Molly Hatchet somewhere in Ohio at an outdoor festival and Jimmy Kunes and I were invited in Molley Hatchet's trailer to talk with Dave Lubeck. Let's just say that Dave and the rest of the band were enjoying their type of lybation in powder form! Jimmy and I of course did as the Romans do as to not offend anyone and found ourselves tweaked! Dave went on to tell us that the way him and Danny Joe Brown learned about per diem was that they were once shagging these 2 girls and while doing so were reaching down in their pocket books and relieving them of their cash! Dave said, "And that's where Danny Joe and I learned about per diem"! These guys were hilarious but were also kind of dangerous to be around!

Jimmy and I went back to our trailer and found a 17 year old girl lying in bed naked! She had been running the consession stand at the festival. And now here she was summoning Jimmy and I to come have sex with her! Gary Bordonero suddenly burst into the room with a camera and told us "Go ahead guys and I'll take pictures!" It was no sooner than he said that, when the festival security stormed our trailer and confiscated Gary's camera and tore the film out of it! For some strange reason this seemed like a classic frame up and for all I know it was! Kim and Duck walked in to this horrible scene in disbelief! The festival security were ready to call the authorities on us! So Kim calmed them down enough to let us go and we sped off in the van to our hotel to only later be visited by Molly Hatchet's tour bus! They had tracked us down because they had heard of the incident and wanted to commend us on our rock & roll attitude!

There was a buzz starting to happen around the band and it was at that time that Kim changed the name of the band from Savoy Brown to "The Kim Simmonds Band" or "K.S.B." and decided to primarily focus on the new material we were playing and the new songs that were coming fast and furious as our rehearsal schedule ramped up!

I was asked to replace the drums on an earlier demo of four songs that had been recorded 2 months before I joined the group. The drum tracks that were laid down by the previous drummer were inadequate and so was the overall mix. So, we went in the studio with Carl Canedy at the helm and replaced the tracks in an afternoon which shocked everyone! I was used to doing things like that and I've always had a good ear so it wasn't a problem. The demo was then remixed and produced by Carl who did a super job also!

We played a few more shows one of them being support for Blue Oyster Cult at L"Amour in Brooklyn, N.Y. and then we took a small winter break.

We hit the road again in May and played an outstanding show in Chicago where we met up with Dean from Dean Guitars who offered us a development deal with an unending budget for recording to the tune of $100,000! The only stipulation was that Dean wanted to personally manage the group as he thought we were one of the rockingest bands that he had ever seen. Kim flat out declined the offer as he would not leave Arnie Goodman behind as our manager. I loved Arnie as much as everyone else but I think Kim blew an incredible deal for the band which he did several other times in my tenure as drummer.

The pay from Kim was getting ever smaller and it became suspicious to me but I held my tongue and continued playing these shows as it was educating me about putting on not just good concerts but great concerts! This was to prove invaluable to me in later years.Some people in the band weren't as tolerant. Gary Bordonero was feeling the pinch and was fast becoming disillusioned! I believe the only thing that kept him around was that we were a great live band. He had met a woman who would later become his wife and he needed to be thinking about a nest and a nest egg! I was happy for him.

Our final round of shows with Gary were to become the "Make Or Break Tour"! We would be traveling to Florida for 3 dates in Orlando, Cocoa Beach and Ft. Lauderdale and then on to Stone Mountain, Ga. to play and be showcased by Mary Tyler Moore's record label, MTM. Then we would rap things up with a gig in Detroit.

Our trip to Florida took 17 hours. We arrived in Daytona and we all jumped in the hotel pool and for the first time realized that we were better friends to each other than we had been willing to admit. We had come a long way to being the great band that we were and we were finally loosening up and just enjoying the ride of rock & roll miles away from the frigid cold of upstate New York! The Gigs went down fantastic and we never were aware of how famous Kim was down in Florida. It all made for a great time especially with all the beautiful women we had in tow!

Top - Tickets for our shows in Cocoa Beach and Orlando.

Below - Joe Hasselvander "The Hairspray Whore" had to nick out for the gooey stuff before the gig in Ft. Lauderdale!

After moving north and playing the showcase in Georgia we ended up in Detroit for a show at "Tracks" where the legendary Dick Wagner came out to see us. I remember him coming up to me after the show and telling me that he really liked my drumming as I reminded him of Neal Smith, the drummer of the Alice Cooper Band. He asked me if Kim was around. I said he's in the dressing room, could I ask who's looking for him? He said, "Tell him that Dick Wagner is here and wants to speak with him." I suddenly recognized him and told him that I had always wanted to meet him and had I known he would be there I would have brought my Frost and Ursa Major records for him to sign! He just stood there and looked at me funny! I later found out that he too had offered Kim a smaller but tidy sum of $10,000 worth of studio time if he could produce and share in developing the band! Kim turned him down also! This was a super missed opportunity as Dick Wagner had been instrumental in the making of Lou Reed's "Rock & Roll Animal" and Alice Cooper's "Welcome To My Nightmare"!

Photos from "Tracks" Detroit, Michigan the final stop on our mini-tour ending the Gary Bordonero era!

When we got back to New York Gary announced that he was leaving the group and so we all took a bit of a break until December and I was able to go home and see family and relax awhile.
I was never really able to do that as I found my old home town friends all addicted to cocaine and it wasn't long till I developed my own problems with it. I was also very depressed about the band's status at the time. No band has ever aged me as much as The Kim Simmonds Band. It was hard work for long hours with next to no money and no place to live except on somebody's couch that didn't nesessarily want you sleeping on it! Big changes were about to come and this had only been the first chapter!

Don't miss the 2nd entry on this very talented band that 's story hasn't been told until now! Next week in Savoy Brown, Curse Of The Blues PT. - 2

Jack Starr "Living Life In Limbo"

2008-12-07T00:48:00.020-05:00

1984 found me in Long Island N.Y. with the help of an old friend from back in The Boyz' day, Rhett Forrester. He used to sit in with us when we played in Baltimore back in 1981 and later moved to New York to become Riot's vocalist and front man!

I had been living in Manhattan with my girlfriend while auditioning for countless bands. Most of them looked the part but when it came down to it they really sucked as players! I must have auditioned for 35 of these so called bands that were nothing more than posers! I was beginning to think that moving to the big apple wasn't a great idea after all. Then one day Rhett phoned up looking for my roommate and we started talking about old times and also how he had quit Riot and was doing a new project with Jack Starr from Virgin Steele. He told me that they were auditioning drummers. I asked, why not give me a shot, as nothing seemed to be panning out in the city. He told me that he would run it by Jack and that I would be getting a call from him later in the evening. I thanked him and later Jack rang me up.

The late Rhett Forester was an old friend from way back and an old southern boy at heart like me! He helped me get an audition for Jack Starr's new project! Rhett was murdered in Atlanta Georgia many years later in a drug deal gone bad! He will be missed!

Right away I thought that Jack was a funny little guy as he seemed to be playing head games on the phone with trick questions to keep me off balance. I think he was just trying to see if I was a poser like all the geniuses I had been auditioning for lately. He asked if I had video of myself and I told him that I had one with me playing drums with Death Row at the Silver Fox. He told me to take the first train I could get out to Huntington that night so he could meet me and check things out. It was late but I agreed.

My train pulled in and there were Rhett and Jack standing there waiting for me. We hopped in Jack's car and headed for his house. When we walked in I noticed that Rhett was looking at me funny and I figured it was because he had not seen me in a while. I had platinum blond streaks in my hair and was dressed in my usual full on rock attire that everyone wore in the city. I soon realized that Long Island was kind of "hick" as compared to Manhattan. That was strike one against me!

For the rest of the night Rhett could hardly look at meand when he did I got the impression that he wanted to start a fight! He was a Georgia redneck anyway and I didn't care much about what he thought of me and just continued talking with Jack who was much more receptive to my image.

Jack told me that he was looking for "serious people only" to play in his new band and they had to be able to duplicate the music on his new solo album "Out Of The Darkness". He played the cuts from his album and I was impressed and told him that I wouldn't have a problem with learning it. Rhett just continued watching TV and ignoring me.

Jack then wanted to see the video I had brought of Death Row and I thought to myself "Man, Rhett's really going to love this with all Death Row's Kabuki make up and black lipstick! He's going to think I'm a fool!" Then I thought "Screw it if he doesn't like it I'll take him out back and kick his hillbilly ass!"

The video slid in the player and the "Halloween" soundtrack came on and then "Blammo" , DEATH ROW in all their hideous glory smashing on to the screen with no apologies! Rhett's eyes bulged out of his head in disbelief and Jack Starr's jaw hit the floor! I'm just thinking "What the hell have I done?" The tension in Jack's Starr's living room got so thick you could cut it with a knife! I couldn't take the pressure and headed for the bathroom!

After I found my composure, I entered the living room and told them that they had seen enough. Jack said "No, this is really wild stuff" and Rhett at this point was willing to slit his own wrists! He turned to Jack and said I'm going to bed and left the room. Rhett didn't like it but Jack was all smiles. He took me back to the train station and thanked me for coming out and told me he would sleep on it and call me the following day. The next day came and no word!

Years later the story from Jack was that Rhett was saying "There's something wrong with that guy." "Did you see the streaks in his hair?" "He's just too much for this band and what about that video?" Those guys were really out there!" Jack informed Rhett that he shouldn't be too hasty in his judgment as he thought that I was really on to something! He said to Rhett, "Besides, look at the bands on MTV nowadays! They look crazier than Joe" "I'm willing to see what he's got!"

So 2 days later I got the call to come to Long Island and meet the bassist who had apparently played on the new album. Jack wanted to hear how we played together at a rehearsal studio by his house. So, I made the trip once again and this time Rhett was excited and happy about me coming out. I jumped in the back seat of Jack's car with Rhett and I saw this set of eyes peering at me through dark sunglasses from the front passenger seat with a big smile attached to the face. Jack said "Joe , this is our bass player Ned Meloni". I shook his hand but I noticed he kept smiling and looking back at me. I got this real funny feeling that Ned was going to be a long time associate and that we crossed paths for a reason! The 22 years since that fateful meeting have proven me correct!

Ned Meloni proved to be a long time associate of mine and was the voice on "Phantom Lord"!

When we got back to Jack's house Rhett announced that he had waited for this moment for a whole year and was ecstatic! He told us that he finally had all the right band mates now standing in the same room with him. He was getting a little choked up over it.

The rehearsals went fine and Jack informed us that we would be playing a huge outdoor festival in France and that we were going to have to rehearse for several weeks for it. He also asked me to move to Huntington as he needed me close by. Once again I knew that I would lose a girlfriend over this because "Gloria" hated Long Island and things had been a little shaky between us anyway. This would be the final straw! It is never easy on wives or girlfriends of struggling musicians.

The day came for me to move and I arrived at the apartment that Jack had set up for the band but only Ned was there. I asked him where Rhett was and he told me that Jack had taken Rhett to France to play the festival with Carl Canedy and Gary Bordonero of the Rods as they had played most of the rythym section parts on "Out Of The Darkness". I was pissed! I had uprooted everything that was good in my life for this opportunity and now I had been screwed by yet another set of liars! Ned tried calming me and told me that Jack was going to make it all up to us by recording 3 brand new albums with us as soon as he got back. I didn't know what to think but for now I was stuck out on the island with nowhere to go but Virginia and I wasn't going to go back there!

Jack came back into town and met with us and told us that the gig went miserable and that he had made an error in judgement. He also told us that the "Out Of The Darkness" project was over because Rhett was leaving the group. I was thinking screw this! Jack though, did finally make good on his promise to record with Ned and I.

Jack"s way of making up for our disapointment came as a deal he had struck with Dutch East Records to complete 3 albums at a reduced cost. He proposed that we take on the challenge of recording and mixing each album in 12 hours time. He told Ned and I that it didn't matter how bad they sounded as all the new bands sucked anyway and we would use suedonyms instead of our real names just in case. This would also make it appear like 3 seperate groups. Jack informed us that he had already written the bulk of the albums in cookie cutter fasion but that I would have to write the remainder of the songs myself on the spot or use any material that might be floating around in my cranium. On Halloween of 1984 we went in to the studio to record the first of the 3 albums. "Devil Childe" was to be a spin off of Venom and Iron Maiden but it sounded more like a train wreck! The budget for this album was a whopping $200.00! You can just imagine the crap sound we got out of that. It does have it's moments though and I very much enjoy it today. It has since become a cult classic for collectors of rare metal. Side B features a drum solo by me and 3 songs that were intended for Death Row, "Through The Shadow", "Grave Robber" and "Beyond The Gates" which I'm sorry to say could have been done better.

Devil Childe was the first of 3 albums put out by Dutch East Records for Jack Starr and I in 1985.

Our next recording would be a spin off of Metallica and Slayer entitled "Phantom Lord".
From the get go this album proved that no rehearsal equals rubbish. Again this one was recorded for $200.00 and again this featured a few songs written by Jack Starr and the rest were written and performed by me on the spot in the studio! I was picked to produce this abomination and the night I did it I had a temperature of 104 and my ears were totally stopped up. Most of this album has a very scratchy and abrasive sound. With the exception of "Fight The Thunder", Phantom Lord is a throwaway although it does have the distinction of being one of the very first thrash albums in existence. Many years later it also became a cult metal collector's item. This album was repressed 2 times! I guess there is no accounting for taste.

The abysmal Phantom Lord album has the worst production of all time! I know, because I produced it!

L-R Ned Meloni, Jack Starr and Joe Hasselvander. The makers of Phantom Lord and Devil Childe!

Jack loved having girls in the photos with us! These two gals ended up being our dates! These were taken during the Devil Childe and Phantom Lord period!

Jacks next big project was going to be "Lady-Killer" featuring a phoney all girl band on the cover with me playing all the instruments and a female vocalist. This was his bright idea of cashing in on the Girlschool and Rock Godess craze! The record company decided it was now going to get behind me all the way and give me an increased budget of $400.00. "Woo Hoo!!!" We were going to ask the singer from a Long Island based band called "The Poison Dollys" to be the vocalist. I didn't really mind as I had a giant crush on her anyway! Somehow that was not to be because come the day of recording, she was nowhere in sight. I had written 8 heavy rock songs with a slight glam rock appeal that were full of hooks and sing along parts. The songs were heavy though and contained a lot of elements of my 2 favorite bands at the time, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. When it came time to sing them I had no choice but to give it my best Alice Cooper treatment as I really didn't know how to sing in those days. I finished the album up with Jack Starr coming in to bang out the lead solos in an hour. He was not expecting it to be very good but was pleasantly surprized at the song writing and told me "You know what Joe?" "Your songs are better than they deserve to be". As weird as that sounded coming from him, I took it as a complement.

What came out was a bitter sweet musical success for me as the recording was only as good as the $400.00 it took to make it. I decided that it would become my first solo album even though the recording was questionable. I thought at the time the songs stood well on their own and I needed something with my actual name on it for better or worse!

"Lady-Killer" came out on my mother's birthday May 30th 1985 and I was shocked by the cover as it looked like a Xeroxed hand bill on blue paper.

"Lady-Killer" was the last of 3 albums for Dutch East Records and became my first solo album which is still in print today!

Jack Starr's attention now was on creating a new solo band for himself called Jack Starr's"Burning Starr". He came by our apartment with 2 sets of stapled together sheets of paper with his scribblings on it which he referred to as "The Booklets". They were the lyrics to his new songs with extra paper to right notes on about song arrangement. We went about the task of learning the material for his new project with the promise that we would record the album in 2 months and also do some live shows. At best this became rough going as Jack couldn't remember the parts he had written to his own songs. This made him constantly rearrange everything we had worked on from minute to minute. It became an insane game of follow the leader that never ended!

Ned, Jack and I getting down to preproduction for "Burning Starr"!

Ned and I finally realized that if we didn't push Jack into some local shows we would never stop marching around in his field as his space cadets! Jack knew this himself and finally booked some shows around New York. Our first gig was at L'Amour East in Queens. The show was packed out and we got a good reaction as we played Jack's new songs and a couple from "Phantom Lord" which went down a storm! I remember Rhett Forester coming out to see us and he said to Ned and I "Man, it's really strange seeing you guys up there doing it with Jack and doing it like pro's!" "It makes me proud!" Ned and I told Rhett that we wished that he would come back to the band but he was getting ready to record his own solo album in L.A..

Top - A handbill for our first concert at L'Amours East Long Island City, N.Y.. Bottom- Jack always used to brag that his new band had enough hair to stuff a mattress!

As the weeks went on it got colder and colder in the apartment that Ned and I lived in and the money was running out. We had barely enough to eat and relied on the local groupies to supply us with food and clothes. Even though we had day jobs, It was still not enough to live in expensive Long Island. I figured out a way to get coffee creamer for the whole week by going to the local 7-11 food store and filling up a large coffee cup full of creamer out of the carton and pretending it was a large coffee I was buying. The cashier never knew the difference and we would add our instant espresso to it back at our place. I also remember eating a lot of hard pretzels as they trick your stomach into thinking you have eaten meat! I can't count the times that we bought different shapes of macaroni only to trick ouselves into thinking that we were having something different for dinner each night! That's Rock & Roll!

Our bachelor flop pad was fast becoming hard reality for Ned and I not only for the lack of good nutrition but also the revolving door of psychotic groupies who were literally coming through the door only to let out the last batch that had just been there! I remember one night being at home alone when suddenly there was a knock at the door and when I opened it a hand gun was shoved in my face with a very mad groupie behind it telling me to sit down and shut up while she went through Ned's drawers! She told me that she was pregnant and looking for any money or phone numbers with his parent's name on it that she could find! She placed the gun on the top of his buero and I quickly grabbed it and through it out the door into the snow, then grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and kicked her ass out the door too! I then called the cops!

The day came that I had enough! My nerves were frayed and things seemed to be reverting backwards. Jack and I also weren't speaking much because he didn't approve of my new relationship with a certain girl that he fancied at the time.

Burning Starr was scheduled to play that night at the Stage Door in Deer Park and I decided that hook or crook after that show , I was getting out of Long Island! A friend of mine named Arnie Goodman who owned Zig Zag Records in Brooklyn came to the house that night to come with Ned and I to the show and told me that Kim Simmonds of Savoy Brown was looking for a drummer and had shows lined up all over the U.S.. I asked if he had a contact number and he said "I am the contact, I'm his manager!" Once again I was saved by the bell!

The Stage Door In Deer Park, N.Y. was my last gig with Jack Starr in the 1980's before I left to play drums for Kim Simmonds and Savoy Brown!

Photos of one of the many rehearsals for the Deer Park show that was to be our goodbye!

When we got to the gig I told Jack that this would be my final show. He told me that he was sorry that I felt that way but understood. A local Long Island DJ was hosting the show named "Fingers" and had promoted the show excellently as every rocker on the island was there! Even Jack's old band mates from Virgin Steele were their heckling him all the way through the show!
It was by far our best gig but it was too little too late and I would be home in Virginia in a week getting ready to drive out to Cleveland, Ohio for my audition with Savoy Brown!

This wouldn't be the end of my story with Jack and Ned though. We briefly got back together again in 2003 with Smolik Avigal to record the classic metal album "Under Savage Skies" as Jack Starr's Guardians Of The Flame! More about that in another entry! Thanks for reading this one because it's a story that has needed to be accurately told for years and was the beginning of much bigger things to come! Cheers!

Death Row, "Pay For All Your Sins"

2008-12-03T08:20:00.063-05:00

Anyone who has followed my career or Pentagram's is well aware of the name Death Row!
They would also know that Death Row later adopted the Pentagram name for the release of their first album which had previously been called "All Your Sins" under the Death Row name.
This was originally the brainchild of Victor Griffin and I back in 1981!

In order to tell it straight I have to go back to 1981!

I met Victor in late August in Morristown, Tennessee at his parents house.
I was living with his sister Cindi Griffin at the time and was playing drums for a very well paid
rock band called "The Boyz", not to be confused with the new wave band from the U.K.!

I had everything a young musician could want, a hot girlfriend, a popular band, plenty of money, 2 cars and a nice apartment! One thing I didn't have though was a band with a recording contract pushing the boundaries of heavy metal in a shock rock forum! This is what I wanted more than anything even if I had to take a cut in pay!

The Boyz in their heyday! L-R Bret Reese (Guitar), Joe Hasselvander (Drums, Jeff Watson (Vocals), Steve Angel (Bass))

Joe Hasselvander Louies Rock City - FallsChurch Va. 1981

The Boyz were Baltimore and Washington, D.C.'s most popular band ! If they had stayed focused on their heavier material they would have conquered the universe! Instead they squandered their talent on selling out to a Beatles type of formula which was nice but wasn't going to stand up to an ever increasing heavy metal market!

The Boyz were not supplying my need to rock heavier! As much as I appreciated the money and local fame I also resented their cover band mentality and their misplaced arrogance just as much! I knew it would later cost them in failure! The stuff they were writing was more commercial and sing songy than what was considered light weight even for radio! They were so eager to sell out! The philosophy they embraced that had given them so much success was now becoming overkill! I had spent so much time pushing them into a heavier sound and now suddenly they were writing this crap that sounded like the Archies! I knew that my days were numbered as I would only go so far with their new direction!

The world suddenly wanted it's music heavy and so did I! The N.W.O.B.H.M. movement was proving that point every day and I wanted a piece of that as I was poised and ready!

When I first heard Victor Griffin and recorded our first home demo that August evening so long ago, I knew that this would be the future for not only Victor and I but also the potential fans who were just waiting for something like this! Victor had successfully fused the early Black Sabbath "Master Of Reality"sound with the modern day guitar attack of bands like Judas Priest and Angel Witch! I knew from the vibe of our demo that we really had something special!

A rare photo showing a young Victor Griffin and Lee Abney playing songs that would one day be classic doom! This photo was taken 3 weeks before my first jam session with Victor in 1981 that was to eventually change the face of music!

Victor Griffin discovered a unique blend of sounds that have been imitated by hundreds of bands around the world and he was the first to tune to "B"!

So, the day came that I had to say goodbye to The Boyz and it was not easy! I knew that I would not be able to hold on to my apartment or my love affair with Victor's sister as I would have to move back home to my Mother's house to make ends meet! I would also have to get a day job to support myself and help fund Victor's move to Northern Virginia! It was all a great sacrifice as even today I don't make the kind of money I did in The Boyz! Not even touring the world as I do! In hind sight though, it was worth the gamble as our dreams of becoming a major force in heavy metal were realized!

Once Victor and I got everything into place we were able to start tooling in the songs which were coming fast and furious! We also enlisted the help of Martin Swaney as our bassist!
He added an even heavier element to the mix that was unexpected giving the songs a more menacing overtone than before!

Martin Swaney had a redneck attitude but a heavy bulldozer sound that was the perfect addition to our strange little band!

We finally had the music straight and the course of action mapped out! Now all we needed was a singer who could front the band with strength and make his voice cut through our heavy wall cloud of sound!

We auditioned a few local people that looked the part but were too teenybopper sounding for us!
We wanted someone who could sing like Ian Anderson from "Jethro Tull" but deliver it with Ozzy's register! Of course I knew who the perfect candidate was and that was Bobby Liebling as I had played drums for Pentagram back in 1978! I also knew that he wrote songs and had a lot to bring to the table musically!

Bobby Liebling, always the megelomaniac, tried relentlessly to change the band's name to Pentagram in order to gain an advantage over the rest of us but we were cautiously aware of that fact! Ultimately he caused a major rift that sent me packing!

I knew that Bobby was a substance abuser from my work with him in the late 1970's! He suffered from delusional behavior every now and again and was given to fits of Napoleonic outbreaks that made him constantly try pushing his will on whatever band he was in! Bobby demanded always that Pentagram should be the band's name which in his mind would gain him more control and create an unfair monopoly for himself! This would eventually bringing him most of the profits and notoriety! The only problem with that was that all the members of Death Row were responsible for the sound and image we had created! Bobby just didn't understand this nor did he want to! He felt that being the singer gave him total ownership! Something that he struggles with even today! Victor, Marty and I didn't start the band to be side men! We wanted any wealth or fame equally shared as much as possible! Bobby resented this down deep and it was to play out later down the road as you will see!

Bobby wanted it all and expected us to give it to him! Funny thing is, he never even owned a microphone!

Our early shows were in small low rent bars that didn't mind our extreme volume or the fact that we played 3 hour sets of original music! One bar in particular with the funny name "The Happy Pickle" became our temporary home! It was a delicatessen by day and rock & roll hell hole by night! They hired us as a house band after seeing the healthy sized crowds we were bringing in! This reluctantly became a perfect platform for us to showcase our sound and help to create the massive following that we enjoy today!

L-R Victor Griffin, Joe Hasselvander and Marty Swaney. Humble beginnings in front of the meat counter at The Happy Pickle later sent Death Row and ultimately Pentagram hurtling into world cult status!

The Happy Pickle started out as a joke but developed into a Godsend for the band! There was no pressure on the audience or the band to act or behave correctly! The whole low rent atmosphere was relaxed and friendly as we shared the stage with bands such as The Obsessed, Asylum, Hellion and Reactor who almost always brought their unruly but devoted fans who later became ours!

After every show we would host an after hours party up the street from the club at a friend's house! So every one would pile in their cars for a short drive to Brady's Hill Road to get down and party with Death Row! There were plenty of Metal heads and rednecks on hand that seemed to get along perfectly much the same as today's Doom Metal and Stoner Rock scene! In the end fans were coming down from New York and Philadelphia to be part of our madness!

Young Doom Metalists having way too much fun backstage at the Happy Pickle! L-R Victor Griffin, Vance Bockis, Mark Dark, Wino and Joe Hasselvander

We did play other venues and did very well for ourselves but it seems that our shows at the infamous "Pickle" and the owner's higher class establishment "The Silver Fox" became the most remembered by the fans! I think that was due in part to the availability of the band to the fans and the after hours parties which were crazed!

A 9 year old convert displays the attitude caused by Death Row's Heavy sound at the Silver Fox in Woodbridge, Va.

Death Row played the Silver Fox as a deal with the owners that we could play it every other month if we kept playing their crap club "The Happy Pickle"as no bands in the area had any desire to play this hole in the wall!

After we had developed our act to a certain point of professionalism we thought it was high time that we entered the recording studio to lay down our most epic tracks! We picked Gizmo Studios in Mclean, Virginia to do the deed as our friends Hellion had just recorded a demo there and they got a decent sound!

So, the day came and we moved our gear in the small basement studio! We discussed what would be the best strategy for recording the bass and guitar! After a quick line check the engineer, Bob Dunbar was pulling his hair out as Death Row always played on ten with no compromise! He was ready to throw us out but suddenly decided that he liked our sound but was still bitching about the volume thing!

Suddenly he got a brainstorm and had this idea of facing the bass and the guitar cabinets at each other about a foot apart with 2 microphones in between and covering the whole mess over with moving blankets as to make a giant tea cozy out of the whole affair!

I've recorded in some of the greatest studios the world has to offer in my career but I to this day, have never seen a more cockamamie set up than that for recording guitar and bass! I remember thinking "How in the hell are they going to get any separation out of that?" The whole thing just seemed like an impossible waste of time to me! For some weird reason beyond science it worked beautifully and gave us that signature sound that we were getting live at our gigs! Everything worked out smoothly and without a hitch after that except one highly strange incident!

Bobby and I took a copy of 3 songs back to my house to check out the overall recorded sounds! We plopped the cassette in the player and the song "Death Row" came on for 2 bars and suddenly the music stopped and a horrific disembodied scream or cry of anguish came ripping out of the speakers AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHH!!!!!!
Bobby and I just looked at each other in disbelief and we immediately played it again to make sure that it wasn't the unit making the noise! It wasn't ! It was on the tape! We were laughing hysterically at this weird anomaly that showed up on our tape! It was actually very frightening!

We took the tape back to the engineer the next day and asked him if his machine had printed this sound on the tape! We listened again and AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!! there it was again! Bob the engineer looked at us and his face had gone pasty white! He said not only had his machine never made sounds on tapes like this but he had never heard any thing like it in his life! He was visibly shaken! From that day on Bobby and I called the voice "Tape Head" and we even gave him credit on the album for backing vocals!
That demo became "All Your Sins" and later was released on vinyl as the debut Pentagram album that is still the favorite album of all our fans world wide!

The little cassette album that started it all: Death Row's "All Your Sins" - 1982

The debut Pentagram album on Dutch East Records NY. 1985 was a remixed version of the original Death Row demo "All Your Sins" ! Later on in 1992 Peaceville records U.K. signed the album once again for rerelease in England and restored the origial mix of "All Your Sins"!

Death Row played on the road only once in our brief career while under that name! That was in Knoxville , Tennessee in 1982! The World's Fair was held 2 blocks from where we played and oddly enough the venue was called "Bundulee's Pickle You Pub" right on main street! We were making jokes that from now on we could only play in venues that made mention of vinegar soaked gherkins in their names!

Death Row made good on it's promise of bringing banks of speakers to the small downtown Knoxville club, or was it a threat?

Death Row L-R Martin Swaney, Joe Hasselvander, Bobby Liebling, Victor Griffin and original bassist Lee Abney!

This gig was groundbreaking for 2 reasons! It was the first time we had ever played the classic songs, "Through The Shadow", "Petrified" and "Drive Me To The Grave" which was a turning point in the band as we were now venturing into unknown musical territory! It also proved that we went down the same everywhere we played! We were treated with great respect by people who had never heard us until now! After performing down south we were confident enough to move things forward without second guessing ourselves into the grave! We finally found our identity! Unfortunately that was also the green light for a power play from our singer, Bobby!

After our return from Knoxville we were feeling pretty good about things and decided to throw a few parties at a local house where our friends Hellion were rehearsing! Hellion had also come along to Knoxville to perform in our little package tour "Cold Day In Hell"! So they too were feeling great and this party went on for the next 3 months! Bobby decided that he would finally come out of his drug induced shell and join the rest of the world in celebration of good times and good friends at the Hellion house! This was something Bobby had not done in years as he had become a hermit!
I remember being shocked to find out that he had come out of his house and away from his pusher long enough to hang with the boys! Of course the alcohol was flowing but it still seemed better for Bobby than where he had been!

It was at this time that Bobby developed a close relationship with Victor! At first I was thrilled that for once he took more than a passing interest in his band mates as people and not just some guys he occasionally shared the stage with!! But underneath there was an ulterior motive brewing that would eventually tear our band apart and unfortunately it was aimed squarely at me!

Victor began visiting Bobby regularly in the hopes of becoming closer friends and maybe , just maybe convincing Bobby to co-write some songs with him as Bobby had not written anything since the early 1970's with the original Pentagram! The result was an epic opus entitled "Burning Savior" and it was 6 minutes long with many written harmony guitar parts that could only be performed correctly in the studio and also the hyper metal classic "Live Free and Burn"!

I couldn't help noticing the overall feeling of dread that these songs inspired nor could I ignore Victor's extreme change in personality that had appeared as if out of nowhere! Bobby and Victor were up to something and I wasn't sure I liked any of it! Victor's songs became less fantasy oriented and more Satanic in nature! The lyrics Bobby and him were coming up with were becoming subliminal curses rather than God Vs. Satan morality plays as before! They were removing the brutal charm of the first album and replacing it with nightmarish ritual ! I went along with it anyway thinking that it 's not my place to tell them how to write especially if they are happy with their new theme and direction! Still I noticed Victor detaching from me as a friend more and more and Bobby wasn't speaking much either!

Birth of the "Glimmer Twins", Bobby Liebling and Victor Griffin

With all this animosity going around I was getting confused about the whole situation with the band! So I thought well maybe it was time for me to write some new songs too as I didn't want to seem like dead weight being one of the band's principle song writers and maybe that was the reason for all the blanking I had received from Bobby and Victor!
So I wrote a new batch of songs on a friend's Gibson SG ! They were, "Bride Of Evil", "The World Will Love Again" and the heavy cruncher, "Whore"!

I rang up Victor soon after and told him that I had written some great new songs that I thought were more than worthy for the band but his reaction was cold and distant! He reluctantly agreed that he would "Look them over"! I felt like I had just pissed in his cornflakes from the reaction I got but I paid it no mind and set up a rehearsal for them to learn the songs! Victor started complaining about learning any of it until he gave a halfhearted try and suddenly he was in to them! Victor had put up so much resistance at first that I knew something was afoot but Bobby and him weren't going to give it away just yet! Marty also had written a song that would contain his bass solo and he too ran into problems with both of them! All of these new songs were however, what I considered as the 3rd wave of the Death Row master plan! Now came time to play them out live!

We booked a show at "The Wild West", a converted movie theater that became a concert hall!
If we could break this room it would be a good venue to add as it had the clientel and great atmosphere we were looking for! Our new material went down a storm with the audience and we were pleased with that! After 6 songs the Virginia State Police came and told us to turn down! We did, and continued until they came back except this time they were pissed off to the max! They told us if we didn't shut the show down that we would be hauled off to jail! Luckily we had just played our next to last number! This show was recorded and became an official bootleg live album entitled Death Row "Death Is Alive" on Game 2 Records in 1998!

Death Row "Death Is Alive" contains a late 1982 concert at "The Wid West" club in Springfield, Virginia!

The State Police shut down the show because of the volume!

1983 arrived and we were inundated with more bookings as the band became evermore popular!
Between Death Row, Obsessed, Asylum and Duce we were unknowingly creating a real scene around the D.C. area and word was getting out all over the east coast that D.C. had a healthy original music scene that should be checked out! I believe that this was the time that our legend was born which has sustained us in the underground to this day!

Poster for "The Wilson Center" show! Gigs like this were giving the D.C. doom metal bands a lot of attention! Death Row proved that point by blowing away the audience!

Death Row was now playing all the songs that we would ever write under that name in our live gigs and the fans loved the variety that was coming out of us! Unfortunately by this time Victor and Bobby and now even Marty refused to tear down their gear and would just leave it for me! Now bare in mind that I booked the majority of the shows , rented the trucks to haul our gear , I owned the light show and the P.A. and provided the rehearsal space in my mother's basement! I believed in Death Row that much but when they started saying "I've got to go, I've got work tomorrow!" and leave me standing there by myself with all their mountains of gear, I felt more than used! All of a sudden I realized that my sacrifices for the band didn't count and how dare I expect them to sacrifice anything! That got old real fast!

Soon all this didn't matter because I suddenly contracted Hepatitis B from my New York girlfriend! I was out of commission for 4 long months! I almost died when I made the dumb decision to play out again with the band in Baltimore and on the way home after the gig I felt like worms were crawling just underneath my skin!

I survived that night but it gave me pause to think! Was this band worth all the effort when the singer and guitarist could care less if I lived or died! They hadn't been by to see me the whole time I was ill! It was evident that I was purposely being avoided!

Time passed and I was now fit enough to start up where I left off and we booked several shows for decent money and for once people had missed the band and it really showed at our last and final show at "The Silver Fox"! Once again we were recorded and again years later the tapes ended up on an Italian bootleg simply called Pentagram "Live In Woodbridge" undoubtedly to cash in on the highly successful Pentagram albums od 1999 and 2001!

This Death Row bootleg from 1983 is possibly the last ever recording of the band as Death Row but was later released under the Pentagram name!

We were now having promoters and agents knocking at our door to do a string of shows! Our boat had finally come in locally and I was shopping "All Your Sins" to independent labels and management in New York every other weekend! Posters of the shows were being put up all over the area and radio stations were finally advertising our return when I then learned through the grapevine that Victor and Bobby were planning to sack me as the drummer and replace me with a so-called "Big Name"! When I called to confirm this all I got was Bobby's girlfriend on the other end of the phone telling me that "Yes, they've been saying bad things about you for some time now and if I were you I would tell them to shove it!" I asked "What have they been saying?" She informed me that they were changing the name of the band to Pentagram permanently and that they thought that drummers like myself should keep their mouths shut and just play the drums! They also said that no drummer should or could write songs, much less showing the real musicians in the band how to play them correctly as I had been doing! That took the biscuit, and after all I had done for those dead beats! I was now through with them and their games and inflated egos!

It was now over and for me to return to the band was out of the question although I was mighty hurt by it all! Fortunately for me a few days prior to this I had heard of a band that was forming in New York called "White Lion" and I had a number to call which I almost threw away until I was alerted to Death Row's situation! So I did the right thing and made the call! I spoke with Vito Bratta, White Lion's guitarist and he told me that "yes, they were auditioning drummers and could I come to New York in the next few days to audition?" At this point there was no turning back and I was not about to throw away 20 years of playing the drums and call it a day! So I told him that I would make arrangements to come to the city for an audition! The audition day came on and around the Death Row engagements and I didn't see any reason in carrying on any further with them! What would be the point?

I notified Marty that I was going to New York for the audition and he didn't blame me one bit and actually came to my house and slipped me a 100 spot and said"Here, You'll be needing this!" He told me that he would tell the glimmer twins what was happening so that they could cancel their shows! I thanked him and the next day I was off to New York!

Poster for the Death Row shows that were never played! Looks like their "Big Name Drummer" never materialized! Surely with his credentials he could have played those gigs blind folded!

I made it to a New Jersey Motel where I met Mike Tramp, the vocalist of White Lion! We got along famously and discussed music all night while listening to Black Sabbath's latest release at that time, "Born Again"and Motley Crue's new one "Shout At The Devil"! I told him what had happened to me back in Virginia with Death Row and he told me that I was better off not working with people like that and assured me that New York had everything I needed to succeed at my trade in music! He was very supportive and hoped that I passed the audition with White Lion which I did the next day! But as fate would have it, a few days later a drummer that their management had been checking out for months decided that he now wanted the job as he heard of my arrival! All of a sudden the guy wanted to be counted in, as he should have because White Lion were going places! I was let go by the management and Mike was truly sorry especially after knowing what I had just been through with my old band! He is a great guy and a talented singer! I wish him all the luck in the world!

Mike tramp welcomed my arrival in New York after leaving Death Row to audition for White Lion! I knew that they were going to be big but later they decided on another drummer1 Their music was too commercial for my tastes anyway! Vito and Mike were great musicians though!

White Lion's brief appearance in my life helped me to quickly forget my loss with a band that I had a major hand in creating, Death Row! Mike Tramp's advice to me was taken to heart and soon I was living in New York doing the rounds meeting the people and recording the music that matters! I eventually found myself in a charmed and fantastic career that most musicians can only dream about having! The rest of the story will have to wait for another time! But in light of this one I have learned that what Jesus said was true, "Never cast pearls before swine"

"You Can Never Win... Pay For All Your Sins"