A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

Ah, the power and joy of a ‘Big Swinging Dick’ song. Every band has one, just like lots of good bands have songs named for themselves. Oftentimes they’re not the same song, however, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone on this one - besides, the main riff that inspired it all was a monster. Too bad the rest of the writing wasn’t so easy. Well, it was easy for ME, anyway, but then I didn’t nearly choke on a chicken wing that day…. On my next-to-last recording visit to Paul’s, the time when we did the Bellum Infinitum EP, I was dicking around on his acoustic guitar during one of our breaks. He rarely tunes it, or deliberately tunes it to these weird settings. This time it was some weird perversion of open G where the lowest string is a G lower than the normal open E, so when you played power chords on the top three strings it had a HUGE, weird sound to it (root-octave-fifth above octave). I started playing on it and stumbled across what would become the chorus riff to “Rampage”. It was kinda heavy, but swaggering and rocking, and I thought it would make a good song.

Over the break until the next session I started fleshing out the verses and such, and just spat out the lyrics really quickly:

Death and destruction is our claim to fame
The name of the game is causing you pain
You can't stop us so don't even try
We'll only crush you down and laugh as you die
You better run when you hear our battle cry

Rampage

It's all over when we come to town
Don't bother hiding 'cos we'll hunt you down
The hounds of Hell nipping at your heels
Torture is the last thing you'll feel
We're gonna laugh 'til we hear your dying squeal

We're Rampage -- thrashing rage

Torture, pillaging, bringing death
We'll even steal your final breath
We're on our way and boy, we're pissed
When we bring down our mighty fist
You can bet you won't be missed

Rampage

I liked the idea of the five-line verses. Playing with crunching-type verse riffs (remember, I still had trouble playing and singing at the same time back then) I got the idea to modulate between G and D and back, and came up with a great turnaround that led back to the chorus - it fit naturally with a five-line verse, so that made it at least a bit more original than the normal big swinging dick song. The solo was just over the chorus part, originally, in G like the rest of the song.

Well, I got it ready, and on my next trip to Savannah Paul and I went out to lunch beforehand, and made the mistake of grabbing an appetizer - a plate of buffalo wings. Somehow, he got a nodule of grisle from a wing stuck in his esophagus just above his stomach, and so we had to go to the hospital and get it dealt with. Needless to say it didn’t get recorded that time. It wasn’t until a couple of months later, at our last recording session in May 1997, that we got the song recorded boombox-style.

It didn’t really take much adaptation to convert for the full-band recording on This End Up - I decided to make the intro be a drumfill+bass thing that builds into the song, and changed the solo part from G to one of those constantly modulating solo sections like old Priest - G to A to C then back to G, with the solos trading off.

And there it stayed, really, until Aerik decided to sink his teeth into it for the websingle, but that’s another story. And no, it doesn’t involve anyone choking on anything.

(What I love about this song is how I took what’s ultimately a pretty basic, simple riff and built a song that sounds at least a little more than basic. I’m actually about equally happy with both my lyrics and Aerik’s rewrites - which he actually rewrote by accident; he intended to sing mine, but lost the lyrics sheet before the studio session so he just winged it on the fly.

This was part of the second session of TEU recordings, because the bass sound is much stronger here, and I preserved that in the websingle rerecording. Those solos were also screaming out for the wah, which makes that later version my favorite in that department.)