Then and now - this end up, 20 years later
posted on 01 Nov 2018 under category History
As October 2018 comes to an end I go back to thinking about the past while also looking forward. After many long years of work I finally have completed the second Death Beast album, The Onslaught, and it looks very much like release will be this year - the discs themselves have already been pressed and I’ve reviewed PDFs of the layouts from the printer, so the next step is printing, at which time Super Sargasso will unleash The Onslaught on the world.
However, October also gives me fond memories because it was in October that one of my own prior releases was first unleashed, that being the first Rampage full-length This End Up, which I released on Halloween 1998. Again I note how people’s tendencies are to give more credence to certain round numbers, usually 5s or 10s. It’s not often you’ll see a 3rd anniversary or 12th annual celebration get as much attention as Ten Years, or Fifteen Years, or Twenty Five years. Maybe it’s just because of the numbers of fingers we have, but biological accident or psychology aside, Twenty Years is a damn long time no matter how you slice it - and, at the risk of getting into a Four Yorkshiremen ‘back in my day’ type of escalation, things were really different doing the DIY metal thing back then - and having the coincidence of two fast, heavy albums coming out the same month 20 years apart just got me thinking about how much things have changed.
In 1998 there was a lot that was still new to me. I had only been out of college and working professionally for a couple of years, and I had only been married a couple of years. While I’d already been in bands and playing music for a decade by that time, I was only just starting out doing a one-man band thing. I had been writing songs all through that time, but it changed from ‘things I might play with my band’ to ‘things I will end up doing EVERYTHING on my own on’, which really ups the amount of work and responsibility - and the sense of accomplishment when you hear it all recorded and mixed and go ‘fuck yeah, THAT’s what I was going for’. After a couple of years of working up a slate of songs I had enough to split into four rough piles. The concept album Bellum Infinitum was too ambitious, and I needed time to work on how to handle such intricate music with programming and layering and such. The Doom Metal album wasn’t totally done and would also have some pretty advanced stuff. That left the two easiest piled: a handful/EP’s worth of schlocky cock-rock-and-bad-jokes that I titled Misogyny, Thy Name is Woman (but now I would probably title it Toxic Masculinity), and then a whole album of fast, satanic death/thrash metal that ended up being This End Up.
I was writing and trying to figure out how to build a home studio setup from 1996 through early 1998, which was the time we finally got out of apartment hell and bought our first house. Being a young newlywed couple with no kids we used the two extra rooms in the house as his-and-hers rooms, each of us getting one. I got the spare room on the front of the house, which became my book-and-computer room and then, after a month or so of testing, quickly became rechristened as “Bloody Leg Studios”.
Thanks to work schedules I had guaranteed, built-in time alone at home a few nights every week which left me plenty of time to work uninterrupted on music - writing, practicing, recording, and even being able to do vocals with nobody else in the house. It only took me a few weeks in April, May, and maybe June to get that first EP knocked out and released, and then in June for sure I started working on This End Up, finishing it by early October.
I still remember a lot about the whole process. The computer was that very first workhorse, the little HP Pavilion desktop with its blazing fast Pentium 166 MHz chip and gigantic 2.5 GB hard drive. There was enough hard-drive space to record maybe five or six songs, depending on length and how many tracks each had. I had recorded the whole EP on its own, including the bonus tracks, but then it was time to clean it off just to make room for any more work on This End Up tracks. One, at least, was already done since I had deliberately done the song “Bloody Leg” first so that I could both use it as a teaser for the album and puff up the length of the EP. I deleted the extra tracks for the other songs, leaving Bloody Leg’s source tracks there so that I could tweak the mix a bit before going on with the other songs.
I don’t totally remember all of the recording order, but I do remember that I did the 13 songs in about three batches. I had started “Six Bells at Midnight” at the same time as “Bloody Leg”, intending it to also be on the EP, but for some reason I left it off the EP - I guess I figured one album teaser was enough. Then I cleaned it off and did a few more, then had to clean it off one more time. For each set, once I got all the tracks recorded and mixed, I dumped the audio to master cassettes and then deleted the source data for the next run. For mixing, I had to use the tape deck on our home stereo setup. I went to Radio Shack (!) and got a 1/4” stereo cable that converted to two RCA plugs, plugged the studio PC out into the stereo tape deck, then I had to hit record and un-pause on the tape deck, run in to the PC room a few feet away, and hit play on the PC, then pause/stop when the audio finished playing. I was always searching for those good high-bias Type II cassettes because they were more durable and reliable for saving my audio masters.
I wasn’t a gym member at the time, so my method of exercise was to ride my bicycle around the large loop of my neighborhood. Once around the perimeter road was right about 1 mile, so I would make six loops in about a half-hour, and so my exercise routine for most of that Summer and Fall was to listen to the latest test mixes of whatever part of the album was done. Right after recording my master I used the tape deck’s dub feature to dub a second one for repeated listening so that my actual masters wouldn’t degrade.
I don’t remember song-by-song exactly when I finished what, but in general I remember parts of it. As I said before, Bloody Leg and Six Bells at Midnight were first. For the most part I kept the same sounds, and the guitar sounds were consistent throughout since I used the same knob settings on the Metal Zone pedal I used for my sound back then, but the bass sounds changed for some reason in between. The second batch, which included “The Spectre”, had a more muddy bass sound that got lost in the mix no matter how much I tried to bring it out. I’m pretty sure that this set also would have included “Born in Hell” and possibly “Satanic Death”, and maybe “Ticket to Hell” too - and if that’s true, then it would also have included “The Gates of the Abyss” since I remember doing the two songs with distortion on the bass together. I know for sure that, because of the bad bass mix on “The Spectre”, that I got a more sharp, audible bass tone for the next set, and so I’m sure that this is when I did the songs “Rampage” and “Eye of the HellStorm”. The bass soloing on “Satanic Symphony” and the up-front bass part in “Heaven’s Gate” make me think these were in that third batch too.
I remember that the last two songs I did, just in their own little batch, were the two covers at the end - “Jailhouse Rock” and “Witches Sabbath”. These I know for sure because my regular amp died towards the end of the session and so I had to borrow a co-worker’s husband’s amp to finish it off - a little Peavey combo amp. I still used the Metal Zone for the bulk of the tone so they don’t sound terribly different, but there is a bit of a change to them.
Speaking of bad luck, that temporary death of my regular amp wasn’t the only mini-disaster I had to deal with on that album. Just as I was about to mix together the last few songs my PC’s power supply blew up - I turned it on one day and *POP*! Fortunately there was a computer repair shop down the street that could get a replacement in a week or two. This was early October, I remember, because I was worried that the repair schedule meant I wouldn’t be able to get the release out by Halloween - but they did it. Also remember this was in the days before Amazon and super-cheap overnight or two-day shipping, so you really needed these kinds of physical repair houses.
The last bit was the duplication and layout, of course. Our office had just bought a massive CDR duplicator - put in an original and a stack of blanks and it would read the original and then burn it to the blanks until it was empty. The only catch was getting that first CDR, and at the time I didn’t have a CD burner. I found a company online, “Crescent Digital”, which would take audio tapes with a timeout tracklisting and burn you a CD. I had used them for the EP a few months before and I managed to get them the tape master for This End Up and get the master CDR back just in time to start duplicating for Halloween. In the meantime I had printed out color print masters and was duplicating copies at a local printshop (Kinko’s forever!). I’d print the things out then take them home and cut them by hand. Good times.
Nowadays I’m still pretty happy with what I did on This End Up. I still consider it my first proper release since the EP before was such a mixed-up mixed bag of material, and now that my views on women and those particular relationships have evolved over time I kinda cringe at that stuff now. I suppose it could be seen as a bit of a joke since it’s so over-the-top with the ‘evil’ vibe of the lyrics, and maybe the cover and title was just a bit too joke-y to think of it as a purely serious album, I think it’s still a bit in line with the early days of death/thrash/black metal, since you know Venom had their tongue firmly planted in cheek, and if you really look at it you know Possessed and Slayer were having their share of laughs at things as well. I do wish I hadn’t compressed the hell out of everything - it does have a thick, raw sound and it’s plenty harsh on the ear, but I miss some of the details I remember from playing and writing that were squashed out by the Wave Hammer. (And yes, that was literally the name of the compressor plug-in that I used the most on that album - on all of those very early UHR releases, actually.)