A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

Everything old is new again, but only after being both new and then old and new that gets old. Or something. This one goes back to that 1995 recording session with Stevie Saline in which we resurrected “Ticket to Hell”. Right after finishing recording that one, we wanted to do an updated ‘ticket to hell - 1995’ or something similar. Remembering how much music we literally recycled on the Rampage POT album, I thought we’d just write new lyrics for Ticket and use the same music, but Steve said “no, let’s change the music some…” - and he started working on the main riff, and with my help we just hammered out the song. Each section is pretty similar to what the final versions are now, but we didn’t have the single note parts or the same arrangement. I just made up lyrics off the top of my head, and they were both horrible and better than they should have been, under the circumstances.

I never thought of working it up with Paul when we were in the boombox stage, but when I was putting together songs for This End Up I remembered this song and wondered if I could make something real out of it. I knew it needed a complete lyrical/subject overhaul, and I knew with what when I started thinking about using the phrase ‘gates of ____’ somewhere in there. (Yes, I was on a big Possessed kick at the time…) I thought Gates of Hell or Gates of Eternity were both too cliche, and while Gates of the Abyss isn’t much less cliche, I couldn’t think of any metal songs that used that title - so I went with it.

I decided to mine Dante’s Inferno imagery for the lyrics, and actually came up with a lot of these images one day at work while on the toilet. I don’t know why, except that Inspiration can be a funny, funny muse. When I got back to my desk I scribbled furiously on one of their steno pads:

Now you're at the end of life 
Causing people pain, misery, and strife
You hear a hellish sound
You're not floating up, you're sinking down
Down into endless night
You find yourself seized with eternal fright
Filled with terror and fear
"Abandon all hope, who enter here"

Your only chance for Heaven 
You have missed
You are falling through
The Gates of the Abyss

The hallways of hell are filled with evil souls
In punishments so grotesque
Screams fly up from the pit down below
The air has the stench of death
The winding tail of Minos the judge
Crushes you and casts you down
The tortures all befall your weak little soul
In blood you'll boil and burn and drown

Your only chance for Heaven 
You have missed
You are falling through
The Gates of the Abyss
The Gates of the Abyss
The Gates of the Abyss
You are falling down

You are now enslaved by Satan's mighty wrath
No hope of redemption for you
All that fills your days, endless torture and pain
No return to the life you once knew
Forsaken by God, left to rot
Hell is your eternal reward
He says that He loves you but He casts you down
So what do you worship Him for?

Your only chance for Heaven 
You have missed
You are falling through
The Gates of the Abyss

Not much to say beyond that, really - I got the ideas, I wrote them down, and then tweaked the music and arrangement to fit it. Since the original Steve+Vic version was slow, I did this song slow on This End Up, but I think the version on the live album benefits from being more uptempo and having a more active drumpart (8th-note hat orientation instead of the more slack-sounding quarter-note hats). Given the nature of the solos on this one I think I might like another crack at it in a proper studio setting with a wah this time…

(As history showed, of course, I DID take a crack at it later, on the Death Beast live album - not only adding the wah, but also fixing up that atrocious first verse. Aerik’s words about the lazy life-strife rhyme were words I took to heart, and so fixing that one line led to me fixing up the whole first verse. The rest is okay, I guess - maybe not great, but not amateurishly bad.

Also funny how I originally did this so slow and doomy, but every time since I’ve done it faster - I think it was born to be an uptempo headbanger track. Of all the great stuff I did on This End Up, it’s natural to me to gravitate to this song but I totally can’t explain why - I always figured I’d go overboard on revisiting Six Bells or Satanic Death.)