A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

This could arguably be the earliest Rampage song. It dates to some time in 1989. There’s more history than I’m about to tell, and I will tell it later at some point, so take this as just a crash course: The first Rampage tape, “Pissed off Teenz” (aka “the POT album”), was recorded sometime early in the summer of 1989. I got my first real bass, a black Mako, put on layaway in like February/March of 1989, and I know I had it by summer because it was during summer that we recorded POT and I know I had my bass by then. A friend from grade school, Stephen, had moved with his family to Asheville NC early on in high school, and we visited each other semi-regularly. I’m fairly sure that POT was done first, but I know that sometime in talking to him on the phone he told me that his brother got a drumkit when I told him about my new bass, and we got the idea to record some stuff.

Anyway, at his house in Asheville, we were in his basement, fucking around aimlessly, when he said we should write a total death song like all this Slayer/Death stuff I had just gotten into. Steve had a good sense of humor, and decided we should call this song ‘Ticket to Hell’ and have it be about a serial killer who kills babies and kids. First, we hammered out what the riffing would be - the verse is a no-brainer, literally, while I remember taking the chorus from adapting the pre-chorus to Slayer’s South of Heaven (I had just gotten the tab for that, so that helps date this as well).

So, after like a minute of working out the music, Steve and I sat on the couch with a pen and notebook and just started scribbling, riffing off of each other’s ideas (though, honestly, more were his than mine…):

I want to meet Satan face to face
So I'm gonna kill the human race
The devil's my conductor, this ax is my train
My fare won't be paid until all are slain

I kill people, I kill them well
This will give me my ticket to hell

Hear mommy cry, see her pain
Look at my ax and see baby's brain 
I kill people, I kill 'em left and right
Me and my ax, we fuck 'em up right

Killing babies by the midnight bell
This will give me my ticket to hell

It's the midnight bell

Knowing my own propensity for ‘fuck ‘em up right’, I think the second verse was largely mine, but Steve wrote the first one almost totally himself. When we recorded it he did some kind of tribal drumbeat, I did a distorted bass, and we worked out a ‘skit’ type of intro where I ‘killed’ his little brother as he begged for mercy. It was just the intro, the verses/choruses, then a superfast-blasting outro.

After recording it, I pretty much totally forgot about it for years, until Steve and I hooked back up again. See, one set of recording sessions I rarely mention is some stuff that Steve and I did in 1995, when I was between Early Warning and Skiptoe. Not long after I quit EW Steve came to visit me in Atlanta, and when the other guys were gone he and I went up to the common room in our house where we stashed all our gear. Steve had his Les Paul junior, I had my bass and rig, and I plugged him into Frank’s guitar rig. We set up the tape player and ripped out some stuff totally off the cuff, old-Rampage-style. This is when all the songs ‘co-written by Stevie Saline’ were recorded. We dug this one back up and just did it straight - except I had an idea for adding a solo, doing like a ‘satanic 12-bar thing’. The trick was, Steve had learned guitar but only a little bit - he could only solo in A - which is why I modulate the song from E to A for that solo.

When Paul and I started doing tapes again in 96-97, after one or two sessions I showed him Ticket to Hell, expecting him to hate it - he kinda liked it, though, even though we ended up only recording it once or twice. When I recorded it for real on This End Up, I basically used Paul’s drum arrangements.

Then, of course, Aerik rewrote the lyrics when we rerecorded it for the websingle, but he’s covered that elsewhere…

(Arguably one of the dumbest riffs I’ve ever done, but I still dig the song, probably because I dive in and own it - not only doing the riff in E, but moving it up to A and actually doing an evil 12-bar on it. The newer version I did on the websingle is definitely my favorite - not just because of the lyrics and better vocal performance, but also because of the extended bass-heavy intro with the guitar noises and because I always felt that solo lent itself well to a wah.)