Way back in 1986 - 31 years ago but seems like yesterday - me and Mr. D didn't have a place to play. We didn't have a drummer, either. But we knew this 18 year old kid named Sean who lived a half mile away. He said we could jam in his garage. We put up a lot of carpeting on the walls, created a makeshift studio. Sean said he could be our drummer. The fact that he'd never played drums didn't seem to be too big a problem at the time. We just wanted to be creative. We'd already played with other drummers of varying levels of skill, and it had never worked out for one reason or another, usually because they didn't wanna rehearse, or had personality problems. The usual story, right?
But Sean seemed different. I met him through Grimsley, who'd met him when he was housesitting for Ono in Reseda. This was in 1985. Sean's family lived in Reseda then, but moved two miles up to Northridge in '86. Sean had an original look, at least for back then : really long hair on one side of his head; head shaved on the other. No eyebrows, he shaved them too. He was a smart kid but many might think him weird because he had books like The Necronomicon, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and The Satanic Bible by showman Satanist Anton LaVey. In reality, Sean was about as Satanic as Mr. Rogers....
But what happened in the Summer of 1986 that was really cool was that Sean turned me and Dave on to Black Metal. I thought I knew all the bands, but it turned out I did not.
What the heck is Black Metal?
Sean said, "Have you guys ever heard of Celtic Frost, or Venom"? We had not.
Sean did not have any albums by those bands himself, as I recall. He was a poor kid and didn't have much money for anything, but he swore by these bands and so Mr. D and I went to the local record store to inquire.
The band Venom had an album called "Black Metal". If you ever wondered where the term came from, that's it. Venom invented Black Metal, and that album - raw as it is - is a classic. Every song is great.
But even better was "To Mega Therion" by Celtic Frost. Wow and Holy Smoke! That band had a very artistic and weird album cover by HR Geiger, of all people, the guy who created the "Alien" and who did "Brain Salad Surgery" for ELP. Listening to the album at my house (cause I had a massive stereo back then), we could hardly believe what we were hearing. This was the heaviest music we had ever heard, even moreso than Black Sabbath. They even used trombones in a song. The rhythms alternated between dirge and fast break, and the singer - instead of doing "witchy" like Chronos from Venom - did a guttural vocal, singing like he was deceased. With that, Tom G. Warrior (now known as Thomas Gabriel Fischer, his real name) invented The Death Metal Vocal, since perfected by Mikael Akerfeldt from Opeth.
But yeah, that was it, my fellow metalheads. Venom and Celtic Frost had invented a totally new kind of heavy metal, called Black Metal or Death Metal, and Sean knew all about it. Dave and I got hooked on those two bands that Summer, a Summer I could write a book about. We really liked Venom, and told Sean that he looked like Chronos, and when he put makeup on he looked like Marilyn Manson, before there was a Marilyn Manson. Sean invented that guy and I've got the pictures to prove it. Sean had even dug his own grave in the backyard of his house, that's how cool he was. It wasn't six feet deep, maybe 18 inches, but it was deep enough for him to lie down in, which he would do, just for laughs.
We were having a Black Metal Summer and we really got into it. We painted our fingernails black. We hung an upside down cross in the garage and we jammed. Sean somehow got the money together to acquire a snare drum. That was his drum set. He did get really good though, at twirling his sticks. That was something he practiced with diligence and as time went on, he was a damn good twirler. He also provided us with a megaphone. Don't know where he got it, but we hung it from a rope, from the ceiling of the garage, and Dave would use it to sing through, for a vocal effect.
Venom was great, but it was really Celtic Frost who inspired us, because they were so creative. They weren't virtuoso players, but hey - it didn't matter because their album sounded incredible and today is considered a classic, and with Frost it was all about the creativity, and thanks to the teenaged Sean, we were having a blast of creativity in his roasting hot garage in the Summer Of 1986.
I write all of this because Martin Ain, the bassist and co-founder of Celtic Frost, passed away yesterday. He was nearly as influential in the development of the CF music as was Tom G, and so it is important he be given credit. Me, Dave and Sean all got to see CF live that Summer as well. It just so happened that they were touring, and we saw them at Fender's in Long Beach. It goes without saying that we blew our minds as you would guess.
Some guys die young, or fairly young. My friend Dave died nine years ago this month at age 47. Celtic Frost was one of his favorite bands, and I am so glad that in one of our last phone conversations, in 2006, I asked him if he was aware that CF had reformed and were touring. I told him I had just seen them at the House Of Blues at Disneyland, with Sunno))) opening, and that it was a mindboggler.
CF at Disneyland! With Sunno)))!.......how amazing was that?
Dave called me back a week or two later, to say that he'd seen the same show in Arizona. He was working as a studio driver then and was on location in AZ. And he got to see the reformed Celtic Frost, with Tom G., Martin Ain, and a drummer named Franco Sesa. He got to see Sunno))) too, and he reported back about the whole show. It felt like old times, to use a cliche.
That was the last time I spoke to Dave, in October 2006. He passed away in October 2008.
Sean died in January 2010. He was 41 years old.
Celtic Frost's music is very heavy, almost macabre in some respects, and it is admittedly not to everyone's taste, even for people who love metal.
But for my friends and I, we all got it. It wasn't anything sinister, it was just creativity, and it sounded great, and we all shared the music and the feeling during a long ago Summer that feels like yesterday.
I love those guys...........you know?
In Memory Of Martin Eric Ain, and Sean, and Dave.
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