Dear friends, we have reached the penultimate installment of our coverage regarding the upcoming Czech edition of "Turned Inside Out: The Official Story of Obituary" by the American writer and music journalist David E. Gehlke. Last time we, among other things, delved in more detail into the contents of the book; today, we are as usual following up with an excerpt!

Specifically, the sample in question comes from chapter three, which is entitled "Xecutioner" and covers the key period between 1985 and 1989, when the music ambitions of the Tardy brothers and of Trevor Peres picked up strength and ultimately materialized in recording their debut album "Slowly We Rot", hence in the official beginning of Obituary. 

As usual, the whole excerpt is presented as it will appear in the Czech translation when printed, with layout and typesetting by Radek Doleží. Click on individual images to enlarge. 

The English original text is as follows:

During a 1985 Executioner practice, John Tardy stood quietly in the corner of his parents’ garage while his bandmates bashed away on “I’m in Pain,” a new Trevor Peres composition. One of the many tracks to emerge from Peres’ Celtic Frost-inspired songwriting run, “I’m in Pain,” had a unique arrangement—its chorus was placed at the very end, eschewing the conventional song structure Peres was already doing his best to avoid. The heavier direction Peres was taking Executioner required a different approach from John, who came away from the Metal Up Your Ass demo thinking there was more he could do as a vocalist. He was confident, though, that he no longer wanted to sound like a thrash singer. John had to find a way to match Peres’ fiendishly heavy guitar tone and his brother Donald’s dynamic style of drumming.

As his bandmates continued to hammer away at “I’m in Pain,” John hovered around the microphone. He had a basic grasp of what to do during the song’s verses (parts that would eventually be rewritten), but something about the chorus stood out. He strode back and forth as the song’s riffs and rhythms emanated from Donald, Peres, bassist Jerome Grable and freshly inserted new lead guitarist Mark Vittoe. When the chorus came around, he suddenly grabbed the microphone stand, reared back and, with every ounce of froth, aggression and fury in his not-even-18-year-old body, unleashed the line of “Help me, I’m in pain!”

Peres, Donald, Grable and Vittoe each looked at each other, astonished.

“What the hell was that?” asked Peres. “That was badass!”

“We have to do that again!” yelled Donald from behind his kit.

“Let’s go!”

Executioner then launched back into the song, each member almost hurrying their pace so they could get to the chorus, anticipating what John would do next:

“HELP ME, I’M IN PAIN!”

The song ended, and a satisfied John Tardy had now stumbled upon a vocal style that altered the course of both Executioner and death metal history.

“It was surprising that I was able to sing like that, but also scary,” he admits. “When I started doing vocals like that, I got tired really fast. I would also get hoarse very quickly in those early days. We weren’t touring or anything, so I hadn’t fully developed the style or the stamina. I remember some of the early shows that we did, and I felt exhausted after a few of them. It took me several years to get to the point where I am today. I just worked on things. It’s a weird style; it’s a weird concept. So many people hate death metal, and I completely understand why—it’s because of the vocals. Yet, most Obituary fans like Obituary because of the vocals. It’s a really strange thing that most of the world hates us because of me, but our fans like us because of me.”

“This was when John started to find his voice,” says Donald. “Compared to everything before that, he was horrible, and he didn’t know what he was doing, and he was trying to find his way. Then it felt like overnight, all of a sudden, he started turning into something cooler. It still wasn’t quite the ‘John Tardy’ voice yet, but he was on his way.”

“I was happy as hell when I heard them,” says Peres of John’s vocals. “I was so deep into Venom, Possessed and, of course, Celtic Frost and Hellhammer. We were always listening to that shit. It was like, ‘Yes, that’s what we want!’ That was our direction. When he did it, I said, ‘There you go, dude.’ It just got better from there. John’s vocals were so heavy to the point where they were like an extra instrument. At the end of the day, our music was about the feeling, the vibe, especially with the heavy guitar tones and brutal drumming we were doing. Put John’s new vocals into that mix, and it made my hair stand up on end.”

John had actually wanted to be a traditional metal singer like his hero, Savatage’s Jon Oliva. But aware that achieving a multi-octave range like the Savatage frontman would be out of reach, he turned his attention to Venom, whose vocalist, Conrad “Cronos” Lant, was one of the first to employ a “gruff ” style of vocals. Executioner toyed with the occasional Venom cover during practice, giving John insight into formulating more aggressive vocals. With Peres’ domineering guitar tone creating maximum heaviness, John felt compelled to try a style that was unhinged, relying on a series of sounds rather than lyrics. Without realizing it, he created a vocal style unlike anything in extreme metal.

“I tried to blend in with Trevor’s tone as much as I could,” he says. “Some of those early songs that happened when we started getting heavier, like ‘Til Death,’ what I was doing vocally was just noises. It didn’t mean anything to me. I never found it necessary to sit down and write lyrics to our songs. I don’t know why; I just never did. As we advanced in our career, I wrote things down, but the pronunciation of things… my approach was totally caveman back then. We didn’t even know what we were doing. I just started going for it and came up with sounds off the top of my head.”

John’s transition to death metal vocals came at a pivotal time. In 1985, a small but hungry death metal scene started to brew in Florida. The undisputed first band and subsequent leaders of the scene, Death, were beginning to become more than just an idea in Chuck Schuldiner’s head. The band’s Infernal Death demo was making its way across the United States and beyond via a group of tape-traders dedicated to the cause of spreading the word of underground metal. Another contemporary was Morbid Angel, who had recently changed their name twice—first from Ice, then Heretic, and had the unique setup of their drummer, Mike Browning, also handling lead vocals.

“We were just concentrating on what we were doing,” Browning says. “It was a weird but exciting time. Heretic used to do a lot of parties. We threw our own parties where we’d go to the beach, run a generator and start playing. There was also a park in Tampa with a little-sized hill that had steps to a pavilion at the top with electrical outlets. We used to go up there and just jam. We didn’t have a PA system or anything back then. Dallas [Ward, bass], Trey [Azagthoth, guitar] and I used to get up there and start playing Jimi Hendrix rhythms and going crazy for 20 minutes.”

Also emerging on the scene was Massacre, which included the talents of a diminutive lead guitarist by the name of Allen West. Massacre played many of the same venues as Executioner—including the Mango Rec Center, which was located near Armwood Senior High School. Grable got to know Massacre bassist Mike Borders from working at the often customer-less Fotomat booth, where they would talk well into the night about their bands and the Florida scene. The two arranged a show for Executioner and Massacre in the fall of 1985 that would serve as the first time the Tardy brothers and Peres saw West play live. They recognized that night that the smallest member onstage had the most talent.

Something was starting to brew in Florida. Although many of thrash’s early top bands wouldn’t make it to the Sunshine State until several years later, local record stores like Asylum Records and Melody Music carried more than enough metallic options to quench the thirst of would-be ravenous ’bangers. Whether they knew it at the time or not, Executioner were now firmly embedded in the Tampa scene. Heading into 1986, the band now had an even clearer direction. With Peres now supplying the riffs, Grable and Donald the rhythmic backbone, Vittoe the flashy solos and John the ungodly vocals, the next 12 months were poised to be critical.

In 1986, Brandon got an all-ages club, Side Streets. Since Executioner and other bands in their age group were too young to play the clubs frequented by locals Argus, Nasty Savage and Savatage, Side Streets quickly became one of the primary all-ages venues in the Tampa area. Grable, realizing that Executioner could likely bring in a few hundred kids per show, convinced the club’s owner to let the band perform regularly. Side Streets would use the plywood drum riser built by John and Donald as part of the deal. The club then took a small portion of the proceeds from the door and let Executioner keep the money earned from merchandise sales.

“We operated smartly back then,” says Grable. “We weren’t like other high school bands in the area. We were pretty deliberate in the things we did. We drew pretty well on our own, but there were times when we opened for Nasty Savage. Next to them, we probably had the biggest draw because, in the area, we were considered the ‘band’ of Armwood High School and had built a pretty good reputation.”

Like Executioner, Morbid Angel were steadily gaining momentum. Their lineup underwent a shift and now included Browning (still on drums and vocals), Azagthoth on guitar and John Ortega on bass. Browning and Azagthoth attended HB Plant High School in South Tampa and, like Executioner, played one of their first gigs at a high school talent show. Grable soon caught one of their club dates and knew that Executioner had some stiff competition.

“You can imagine seeing Morbid Angel for the first time,” he says. “You knew right then they were going to be great. When I look back, I was like, ‘Okay, what caused us to elevate and get better?’ To me, seeing Morbid Angel for the first time is when I knew they were next-level. We just knew we had to get heavier.”

Executioner and Morbid Angel shared a stage for the first time on May 25, 1986, at Rocky Point Beach Resort in Tampa. Also appearing on the bill was Hellwitch, which in two years would feature the services of eventual Obituary bassist Frank Watkins. The stage was set up near a hotel on the beach, a picturesque setting for two future death metal legends. One benefit of this gig was that the hotel was to be torn down the next month, providing the bands an opportunity to engage in one of rock ‘n’roll’s alltime reckless endeavors: destroying property.

“We were able to do whatever we wanted—it was insane,” says Browning. “We were throwing television sets out the windows, just picking up chairs and sticking them in the wall. People were walking down the hallway and punching holes in the walls. They let us do it because they were going to tear the whole thing down anyway, so the promoter was just like, ‘Do whatever you want.’”

Eventual Morbid Angel bassist/vocalist David Vincent had started scouting the Tampa scene for his own label, Goreque Records. Vincent took on the producer’s role for Morbid Angel’s 1986 soon-to-be-aborted “debut,” Abominations of Desolation, and showed interest in managing Executioner. In early 1986, Vincent came to the Tardy house to watch a practice and gauge the young band’s interest in a working relationship.

“We heard that this ‘big’ record executive or manager was coming to Tampa to meet us,” says Donald. “I had a friend, Ben Presgrave, who had this big, humongous, killer drum set that his mom bought him—I was still playing on a kit I had assembled from the trash. So, I’m like, ‘Let’s go to Ben’s house and do the meeting there.’ We were supposed to play a song for David, so I figured I’d be better off playing it on Ben’s set instead of my own. I don’t know how we were talked into having a 10-minute meeting about Executioner or what David could possibly do for us, but we figured out pretty quickly that we didn’t need someone’s sales pitch. We can manage ourselves. I didn’t need anyone talking for me and making decisions if you are that fake, plastic and weird.”

Vincent left Executioner practice without a deal. Later that year, he would replace Browning as Morbid Angel’s lead vocalist while taking over bass duties.

Executioner’s local reputation would only grow after their initial Side Streets performances. Taking another cue from Celtic Frost, John Tardy and Peres donned proto-corpsepaint in the same fashion as their Swiss heroes. The two also wore ripped T-shirts, leather pants and boots, ensuring they would immediately stand out from the pack. “We looked like a black metal band, but we weren’t totally white-faced like some of the Scandinavian bands,” says Peres. “We put some black shit under our eyes. John would spit fake green blood; I would spit fake red blood. We wore gauntlets and had leather shin guards. We even had upside-down crosses on stage. We went full-bore hardcore with it for a while.”

Executioner’s short-lived upside-down cross period (of which Grable and Donald abstained) would be short-lived. Grable says Executioner primarily did it to provoke the locals threatened by the “Satanic Panic” frenzy of the late 1980s. While Executioner’s lyrics never encroached upon these topics, they made sure their live shows had the appropriate effect, including large-sized chalices filled with dry ice that would slowly fill up clubs as their shows progressed.

The dry ice and flash pots would remain, but Executioner eventually transitioned to the standard T-shirts and jeans image that became the dress code for most death metal bands. However, like Jerry Tidwell, Mark Vittoe grew restless playing a primitive form of extreme metal and decided to leave Executioner in mid-1986. He never appeared on an official Executioner recording. Sadly, Vittoe passed away in 2018 at the age of 48 due to cancer.

Word soon spread that Executioner were in the market for a lead guitarist. As fate would have it, Allen West had recently split from Massacre and needed a new gig. He and Peres became friends after meeting at a party on a farm in Florida’s South Bend and Bloomingdale area. The two made conversation over a few beers, adjacent to a pig on a spit, with Peres enthusiastically telling West how much he enjoyed Massacre’s Aggressive Tyrant demo. Throughout this book, West, who is commonly referred to as “Big Al” because he has a son with the same name, extended the olive branch to Peres when he learned that Executioner had a lead guitar vacancy.

Peres: “Big Al called me up: ‘Hey, I heard you guys are looking for a guitarist.’ I said, ‘Bring your shit down!’ It was immediate. It wasn’t even a question. It was like, ‘Hell yes, get down here.’ He had already left Massacre, so it was as perfect as it gets.”

West was already 19 by the time he joined Executioner, automatically making him the elder statesman in the band. Quiet but friendly, West came from a broken family and lived with his aunt when he became a part of the band. Whereas the Tardy brothers, Peres and Grable stuck mainly to alcohol and weed, it was not uncommon for West to be carrying around a variety of substances deemed “illegal.” While this came as a surprise to West’s new bandmates, it was not considered a deal-breaker—back then, West was reliable and never missed rehearsals, shows or studio sessions.

The members of Executioner immediately hit it off with West and integrated them into their close-knit group of friends who hung around the Tardy house, drank beer, tossed around the football and watched sports. West was also a devoted tape-trader and was the first to contact Sepultura from Brazil and Coroner from Switzerland. Aside from being a solid guitar player, West had a reputation for speeding around Brandon neighborhoods in his white Chevrolet Camaro. West’s bandmates rode with him at their peril.

“He was fucking crazy in that Camaro,” says Donald. “He was a maniac doing everything wrong while driving, and he’d always have his guitar in the backseat while blasting music. But, he quickly became a good friend of ours. But I’m pretty sure Trevor nearly died the first time he jumped in Big Al’s car.”

So, enjoy and more next time!