Bellum infinitum - the beginning (pt. 1)
posted on 14 Apr 2005 under category History
Since starting on preproduction for rerecording Bellum Infinitum, I remembered that I had promised to tell the story of this album here and put up the lyrics since so many requested it. I’ll be getting to that over the next few days. However, the creation of the album itself has a story that spans several years, and this seems a good place to cover it. I alluded to some of what will follow in the radio interview I did with the guys at Hell on Earth on CKRG Radio Glendon, so bear with me if I repeat something you’ve already heard, and I’ll try to dig through my old memory for plenty of new (to you) details. Back in 5th grade (age 10-11 or so) I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends. We used to game most weekends, all summer, whenever we could. Sometimes we would play other RPGs, and we had two or three different D&D campaigns going, but the one we all liked the most was one in which I played a Drow Elf Assassin who I named Legolas. See, as a kid, I wasn’t all that imaginative with names, so I thumbed through a copy of Fellowship of the Ring (before I read it), found an elf named “Legolas”, and used it, little realizing he was a hero and I was making a villain. This is why, in the liner notes, I refer to him as “L__” - it’s an old literary device that some fiction writers used in the 19th and early 20th century. Not sure why, but it adds to the feel of antiquity, and hides the fact that, after playing this character for nearly a decade, I can’t separate that story from that name.
Anyway, as all things do, the group fell apart, everyone moved away, and Legolas faded into the rose-colored haze of childhood memories.
When I was in Early Warning in the early 90s, I wanted to expand from just playing bass to trying to sing and do some songwriting for the band. One day in particular I was complaining to Frank how they never worked on any of my songs or ideas and he told me, without mincing words, that it was because they weren’t any good. Then he gave me some advice that I still value to this day - he told me that he had written and thrown away something like 30 songs when he was first starting to write, and that I had to get used to that idea. I had to be ready to write something just as an exercise and learning experience, and fully able to sacrifice song A or song B in favor of gaining ability overall. Not everything I write is going to be gold.
So I gave up trying so hard, and just sort of let things flow out. Oddly, or perhaps not, the ideas would flow easier after that. Then came bastard-mas break of 1992, when I had to go home to visit the family for a week. I took my bass along, and one night bored in my room I started playing a few riffs. Thin Lizzy’s “Emerald” was in my head, both for the triplet, heavy feel and the idea of some kind of nebulous, eternal kind of war. It made me think of those old D&D games, and also remember that one of my over-ambitious early songwriting projects for Early Warning was to write an album about all that - after all, even in that first-boombox Rampage tape we did a song about Untwain, which was Legolas’ sword. By that time I realized that writing a whole album was too much to start with, but one song would do - a song that was sort of like a dream, or a prophetic vision, of that battle between good and evil, one that just happens over and over again. Mix in a few riffs and BOOM - I had “Storm over Avalon”. I scribbled down some lyrics, showed it to the guys a couple of weeks later, and they liked it enough to gut it and totally rework the arrangement - but that didn’t matter, because *I* wrote it… :)
(There’s a lot more I could go into on this part of my history. In fact, I probably will. For now, I think this speaks for itself)