A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

I know I’ve said before that “Excalibur” was the oldest Rampage song in existence, as it goes back to that infamous “POT” session back in June/July 1989. That’s as a full song, though - in parts, it’s actually “The Spectre” that can truly claim to be the oldest Rampage song - sort of. Paul and I met actually trying to join/form a band with a couple of older guys back in late 1988. We never got anywhere beyond a couple of jams horribly playing covers, because just when I got my bass and amp the drummer had his drums taken away by their rightful owner. But for a couple of months there, I WAS IN A BAND!!! And Paul was too - and we lived it up - we hung out all the time, even just the two of us if the other guys were busy - we’d bandy about song ideas, trade lyric snippets, try to hash out riffs…

When one day Paul brings me a MONSTER of a riff, or so it seemed to me at the time. But with it he had a title - “The Specter”. It sounded so morbid I loved it immediately, but only after convincing him that spelling it with the ‘e’ last would look a bit more evil. Since this automatically made it twice as far along as any of our other ideas, we decided to run with it - he tried working out more parts to go with the one riff we had, and I started writing lyrics - three verses, an atrocious bridge, and an ending section.

Some were bad, egregiously so (the bridge, mostly), but some were actually pretty good. At least I thought so. Paul was a bit less enthusiastic, but admitted that some were good (fewer than in my estimation, but whatever….). It was all moot, though, when the band broke up, and in the shuffle of doing our own later Rampage stuff we never decided to resurrect this song.

And so there it sat, in the dust-filled attic, waiting for 1998.

As I was going through old papers I dug out of my parents’ attic in early 1998, while trying to write more songs for Rampage’s studio stints, I came across an old notebook that had lots of junk in it - old tabs, riff ideas, and lyrics - and in reading I finally found this. My memory kicked back, and I realized “you know, this is actually salvageable…”. Knowing what I already had in mind for This End Up, I thought it would be great to take that one abandoned riff and lyric sheet combo and turn it into a totally kickass song. So, true to form, while going over the lyrics, I started working out variations of riffs and counter-point sections that ended up creating the bulk of the verses and choruses of the song (note that the verse is just a restatement of the main riff but with the bass as main voice and the guitars just doing harmonies). The bridge between verse and chorus was a nice touch, I thought, as I conceived both guitar parts at the same time, something that was rare for me at the time.

Since I didn’t have choruses in the lyrics, I decided to co-opt the last lyric snippet as the chorus, but then realized it wouldn’t work for all choruses - so I went with ‘narrative’ choruses (you know, where they only restate the musical theme but actually fit linearly with the narrative of the song - effectively, they’re just ‘different verses’) which entailed me writing new ‘choruses’ for the first two.

When I got to the main middle break, I knew I wanted to mostly gut that atrocious vocal bridge, but also wanted a slow, grinding kind of riff - so I went with slow crunches just like you hear and then wrote some new lyrics around them, only keeping the first line (“slit your writsts, drown in drink”). And the solo parts just fell into place. The whole thing did, actually - I’m still surprised to see how intricate it got so quickly and with really not that much difficult effort on my part.

Anyway, the lyrics are below, and I’ll note before each section what’s original and what’s new:

(V1 - Original)

Cards, orbs and ouija boards
Have summoned me and my demon hordes
Power, wealth, complete control
All for the mere price of your soul 
Why do you fear, why do you doubt?
I am summoned to help you out
I will do whatever you say
From now until your dying day


(C1 - New)

I am summoned from below
To serve you day and night
All the wrongs in your life
I will set them right
You master my satanic power
Coming from below
But when you die you'll come to hell
And I will claim your soul


(V2 - Original)

You can't get out, a deal's a deal
I don't care how you feel
You say, I do; that's what we said
It only ends when you are dead
Don't send yourself to an early grave
You'll only sooner become my slave
You'll burn in Hell and do my will
So while you're alive, have your fill


(C2 - New)

Guilt and fear cripple you
For allying yourself with Me
Chastisement, self-punishment
Suicidal tendencies
Only one thought is keeping you
From your funeral bell
You know it's better to reign on Earth
Than to serve in Hell


(Bridge - the 'do you really want to die' line and first line are original, the rest is new.)


Do you really want to die?

Slit your wrists, drown in drink
I don't care how you come to me
Kill yourself, I want you to
And soon you know that you will too
Shouldn't mess with what you don't understand
Foolish, wretched knave
Mortal fool, now you die
Only to be my slave


(V3 - Original)

Work, slave, toil, sweat
You've had all the fun you'll get
You will serve my will forever
Hurting always and resting never
No second chance, you've made your choice
Now endlessly suffer, never rejoice
Millions have died by ouija boards
To serve the Spectre and my demon hordes


(C3 - Original)

Enjoy! Enjoy! Enjoy all you want
You can have it all
Take! Take! Take all you want
Before me you will crawl
Run! Run! You can't get away
I pursue much faster
Fight! Fight! It matters not
Now I am your master

And, of course, no discussion of this would be complete without mentioning the ending. The last set of chords that ends it was a bit inspired by Dark Angel’s “Darkness Descends” and a few of their other songs, where there’s a few chords they always play as a riff that can be used to either lead into a song or as the ending of a song. I came up with this back in the Skiptoe days, and we actually used it live a couple of times to end things. I figured I would use it again and again in Rampage, and I wanted it codified as an official part of one of my real songs, so I put it here. I also used it to lead into my cover of “Massacra” on the Hellhammer tribute, and used it to end “Six Bells at Midnight” on the live album. It’ll surely appear elsewhere before too long…

(At the time I thought the lyrics were an improvement, and from where they started they definitely were, but I’d have to take a scalpel to them to do this song again. Which I would totally go for, of course, because I love what I did with the song musically. One of my regrets recording this is that I didn’t do more to make the two guitar parts in the pre-chorus part stand out more - I wrote those totally on the fly, but they fit together perfectly, so much so that I worked out those cool harmonies based on them between the two solos. I also wish this had a stronger bass tone - it’s hard to hear on the original, but I wanted the guitars, particularly during the verses, to be kind of open and ringing with a big, pulsing bass rhythm under it.)