A Brief History of Panic (Part II)

At short last, here is the second wordy, cloying, indulgent installment of a not-so brief history of Panic. Questions up-top; responses below. Pack a sandwich… 

Tell me about the very early days of Panic. What influenced you to get in touch with other guys and form a band? What can you say about your first demo from 1988? Was it any good? Would you play it to your children nowadays?

I won’t bother you with questions about each demo but can you say a few words about that demo-era of Panic in general? Was it flooded with live gigs, new friends, business contacts, parties and whatever or was it pretty steady?

Why did Rondo Middleton quit the band and how did you get to know Jack Coy? Am I right thinking that Jack is older than others in Panic and already had some experience of playing in a band?

How did you get a deal with Metal Blade Records? Was this label your main goal? Did you send your demos to other companies? Do you remember your feeling when you got positive answer from Metal Blade? Was it like a dream came true or were you confident and ready to conquer the world?

And now the time machine brought us in San Francisco, 1991. You’re in Alpha Omega Studio with Gary Holt and Rick Hunolt, Steve “Zetro” Souza is scheduled to record back vocals for you, Marc Senasac is the guy who will mix the album. How cool was that?! I bet you were like children in a candy store! How did you like famous San Francisco and Bay Area? Was it still a kind of thrash metal Mecca by the time of 1991? Did you get a chance to meet other bands and musicians like Paul Baloff, Kirk Hammett etc.?

How do you view the album “Epidemic” nowadays? Do you still listen to it once in a while? How substantial was contribution of Gary Holt and Rick Hunolt to this record?

Can you comment on the lyrics on this album? They sound a little bit strange to a non-native speaker like me. What kind of message you tried to express on this album?

What can you say about the response on the “Epidemic” album? Were you satisfied with the level of promotion of your debut effort? Was it possible to see your video for “Blackfeather Shake” on MTV?

Early personnel changes

George & Rondo, NYE 1985

Rondo had quit college by the autumn of 1985, and one day he & George drove to Bellingham to tell me they wanted to fire Gary and get Marty in the band. I told them they were crazy. Gary Allard was a great guy and a solid player. He had a car and a job. He came from a supportive family and was really cute and totally reliable. Marty was a dirtbag dropout who barely even had a guitar, let alone a car. I was outvoted, and the change was swiftly made. It turned out to be the right choice, of course. Marty is a gifted musician—the best guitarist I’ve ever known let alone played with. He’s also a great songwriter with a wide range of musical interests and one of my closest friends for more than 30 years. You can see him now alongside another Seattle legend, Eddie Spaghetti in the Supersuckers.

Jeff & Gary + corn whisky 1986

It wasn’t too long afterward that George & Marty drove to Bellingham to say they wanted to fire Rondo and get Jack. After Marty’s departure, Strychnine had shuffled some personnel and reformed as Myra Mainz. As with Gary, I was reluctant to change members. I was friends with Rondo– he’d introduced me to the band. But it was also true that he was a single-bass drummer in a double-bass genre. And though he was certainly no tapper, he also wasn’t an animal like Jack Coy. The change was made. Rondo briefly joined Myra Mainz, but largely out of spite, I think. Panic was again a stronger band for the switch.

Kent, Washington was a small town. We knew those Myra guys and would see them at parties. Bad blood was costly, but George was ambitious. I’ve never known a more pure guy in my life than George Hernandez. Dedicated craftsman, disciplined student of the genre. Driven, and fiercely loyal—unless he needed to dismiss you from the band to get someone better, in which case you were a stone goner. Nothing personal, just business. He’s now a fully-vested member of Sanctuary always touring Europe.

I am about a week older than Jack. I didn’t know him very well before he joined Panic, but we became pretty fast friends once he did. Jack really liked alcohol, and he & I really pushed each other in those early days. George & Marty weren’t 21 yet, so Jack & I would spend some time drinking in the bars. Jack is the happiest cat I’ve ever known—always a nice word and he thinks everything is a goddamned laugh riot, which is true if you want it to be. Jack was a foreman on a concrete crew in those days. Still is. He always had a killer tan on his huge tattooed arms, but if you ever saw him in shorts his legs were pale because he had to wear long pants at work even in the summer.

Metal Blade

With the line-up in place, we turned all our attention to the band. We all worked day jobs, but every spare minute and every spare dollar was spent on building the Panic brand. With Jeff Gilbert’s help, we started to get better gigs. We were just breaking into the bar scene, which at the time did not yet feature the anchors of the OffRamp and RockCandy– the two places where the metal/heavy grunge scene really thrived later. The Crocodile was just getting started and though we were welcome at Pioneer Square bars like the Colourbox and Central Tavern, the central city bars like the Vogue, Squid Row and Ditto were not as interested in us.

We recorded another demo in about 1989, called Morbid Curiosities. The song later featured on Epidemic made its first appearance here. We continued sending these tapes out to labels and media, but we were still having trouble attracting attention from outside Seattle.

About this time, we connected with local promoter Soozy Bridges who started booking us. Soozy had spent time working with Susan Silver who managed Soundgarden & Alice in Chains. We still weren’t in that cool kids’ club, but we were getting closer. Soozy helped us get even better gigs and pretty soon we were playing weekends at the better clubs as RockCandy and the OffRamp opened up and moved into instant prominence.

Our big break came in the summer of 1990. Soozy had helped us get a showcase at a fledgling music conference in Seattle called the Northwest Area Music Association (NAMA). NAMA fancied itself the NW version of SXSW, and although it never took off completely, it did have a couple of good years. We played a daytime showcase at the conference and we just sucked. Sandy Pearlman was there and he told us we’d played too loud. It wasn’t what a proud young metal band was particularly anxious to hear, but he couldn’t have been more correct. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon at a sterile convention center that was not very metal-friendly to begin with. Luckily, we also had a club date scheduled for Sunday night, the last night of the conference. Gary Holt and his manager Toni Isabella were in Seattle for a panel at NAMA. We didn’t realize it at the time, but Gary & Toni had come to Seattle very specifically to identify a baby metal band that Gary could produce. Mustaine had done the Sanctuary record and it had worked out very well for both mentor and protégé. Gary knew Seattle was popping and he sought to attach himself to something hip but still heavy coming out of this hotbed. I think he could have looked at a thousand bands and still chosen us, but the fact was that we were one of the few really viable options he would be exposed to that weekend. We were heavy & hungry, but still more contemporary than what was happening in the Bay Area at the time. And we had that all-important label, MADE IN SEATTLE.

With Toni (in Syndicate hat). Photo by Karen Mason

Gary approached us backstage after we played a totally killer set and said “I love your guys’ band and I want to produce your record.” I don’t even remember knowing he was in the crowd. It was a very powerful moment. We’d worked hard for 5 years, and now here was this established rock star guy saying he wanted to take us under his wing. We were stoked.

Toni was awesome to work with. She was used to herding cats dealing with Exo, and she put her skills to work managing Panic. She had a deep network of connections, and she got us in-front of a lot of major labels, but we were too heavy metal for all of them. It was the end of 1990 by now, and the grunge cat was well out of the bag. The labels were swarming Seattle looking for the next grunge heroes but none of them wanted a metal band. Forced Entry and Bitter End lacked the management we had lucked into, and they couldn’t get a major deal either. In the end, all three bands settled for minor league deals. Ours was with Metal Blade.

In the end Metal Blade didn’t turn out to be a very good fit for us, but I don’t think any of us second-guess the choice. The minor leagues all looked about the same, and we liked the idea of working with Brian Slagel. In the end, he didn’t turn out to be the advocate we’d hoped he would be. He was more interested in putting out re-issues of Thin Lizzy albums than cultivating the current, relevant talent on his roster. He, like everyone, liked the idea of humping the Seattle Dream. But he was more-inclined to say Alice in Chains was his favorite Seattle band than he was a band on his own fucking label.

Toni Isabella worked for Bill Graham Presents, and she squared us up with some perks & delights we had not necessarily earned yet. We went to San Francisco to demo some songs with Marc Senesac at Different Fir Studios in the Mission District in the spring of 1991. We flew to Los Angeles for the Concrete Convention later that year. We certainly weren’t encouraged to ‘quit our dayjobs’ (never did) but we did get some nice meals and a lot of cocktails. Whether we were paying for them all along via advances, I don’t think we ever understood for sure. But we were having a pretty good time thinking we were just an album away from the motherfucking Grammys. Sometimes pretty girls would stop to chat.

As we moved toward the June release date, there was some hype gathering. I had a friend at Rolling Stone who had committed to doing a “New Faces” column on us. Rip magazine was prepared with a “Fresh Metal” piece. Toni thought she could get Rikki Rachtman to play the video on Headbanger’s Ball. We played a big outdoor show in the shadow of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle on a sunny Friday in June, the week the record was released. Shortly thereafter we drove to Phoenix, Arizona to start a 2-week West Coast tour with David Wayne’s new band Reverend.  We were stoked to be on a real tour with a real record to promote. We’d always been fans of David’s, and we had a great time getting to know him and his band, celebrating a homecoming in Seattle at the end of the run.

Epidemic

We finally got into the studio to start working on Epidemic in January 1991. We packed all our gear into a rented van and drove down the west coast to San Francisco, a trip of 800 miles that we’d already made a few times by then. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and had been proud to show off The City to my mates during previous trips. By now, it belonged to all of us equally—our home away from home. We were booked into Sandy’s studio Alpha & Omega, which was in a very bad part of San Francisco known as the Tenderloin. It’s worse these days, but back then it was home to lots of skidrow alcoholics and prostitutes. We loved it! Toni set us up at the very (in)famous  Phoenix Hotel, at the corner of Larkin & Eddy, just twoblocks from the studio. The Phoenix was where the cool touring bands would stay when in San Francisco, and the management had a generally loose standard in terms of behavior. The rooms were arranged in a large 2-story horseshoe surrounding a pleasant courtyard and swimming pool. The Phoenix had a Caribbean theme, right down to Miss Pearl’s Jam House restaurant and bar. During the day, they piped the sounds of tropical birds into the courtyard; at night, the soundtrack changed to crickets.

I really don’t remember a lot about the 3-week recording process. I don’t generally care for recording—I much prefer the live performance aspect of being in a band. I remember I had a little trouble getting going and was pretty frustrated a couple of nights in terms of how my voice was responding to the pressure of being in a bigtime recording situation. Everyone else nailed their parts fast like they always did. We were prepared, there was no doubt about that. We’d been playing some of these songs for years by this time and even the newer ones were well-rehearsed. Panic was very well-rehearsed. We were tight.

Eventually I got in a groove vocally and the second half of the sessions was more fun, doing the overdubs, backing vocals and various sweetening. Gary & Rick were around, and we had a lot of laughs. I don’t really recall what their specific input was—there wasn’t any room in the arrangements for interpretation. Every note was already

accounted for, and we didn’t change a thing in the studio. I suspect they were consulted extensively in getting guitar tones, but otherwise I just remember them smoking a lot of pot. We had a riot doing the background vocals. One session in particular recording the background shouts on “Morbid Curiosities” was hilarious. Rick and Marty can be heard stumbling on the trainwreck! line in an outtake at the end of side one of the record. Zetro didn’t hang around too much, but did come in to help with backing vocals on “I Stole Your Love” which are pretty signature Zet. Gary & Rick did guitar solos on that song as well, of course. Aside from it being a cover song, it sounds different than the rest of the stuff on the record, which I like.

Panic & the H Team, drunk again. Beacon Hill, 1991

Marc Senasac is a great guy, very patient. We had already done some demos with him by that time, so we were used to working together and Exo liked him, too. Sandy wasn’t there a lot, but Marty and I would get some real quality Sandy Pearlman time when mixing the next record. Toni was at the studio every day, keeping us honest. It was an incredible experience. We’d get up in the late morning every day, grab some coffee & doughnuts and wander down to the studio. We’d work through the afternoon and take a burrito break in the evening. We’d work as late as Marc could stand it, then we’d go back and drink in our hotel room at the Phoenix and watch TV. I don’t remember going out much. One night Toni took us to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but otherwise we just lurched between the studio and the hotel. Sometimes we’d play poker. One night we ran out of beer during a card game, so we went back to the studio in the middle of the night to raid the soda machine which we knew was stocked with Budweiser.

On the night the record was finished, we all jumped in the pool in the middle of the night, naked. We ran back to our room giggling, like a bunch of little girls. We were always laughing about something. Those were very free times. We didn’t have the goddamned internet in our pockets all the time, and we weren’t afraid of anything. We were convinced that what we were doing was right, and we didn’t give a shit about fuck.

We went back to Seattle to wait. We hadn’t done this before, and we had no idea what was supposed to happen next. We had some vague notions about touring, and I suppose we had an outline of what the promotional process would look like. We knew we had a killer product, though. Epidemic is a very good record—I liked it then and I think it has really held up well. We didn’t want to make a record that sounded like Testament or Death Angel or Exodus or Metallica. We liked a lot of what those bands were doing, but we had different ideas about tones and beats. We’d resisted the urge to add a second guitar player, something which separated us from the prevailing sound coming out of the Bay Area. All those bands were two-guitar bands. The fact that we just had one put us in a slightly different category and made us way more unique, more balanced. On record is one thing, since there’s always a ton of guitar tracks. But live we were really able to reproduce what we were doing on-record, and the clarity that resulted from not having that wall of guitars was a valuable attribute. It wouldn’t work for just anyone. You had to have a very strong guitar player to be able to hold that up, and you had to have an equally strong bass player to understand the dynamic and play to it. We had those guys in Marty & George.

Both those guys are very talented songwriters. I know they both look back fondly on the time they spent together crafting those songs. It was a pretty even collaboration in my recollection. George would have a riff and he’d teach it to Marty and maybe Marty would have another piece for a turnaround and they’d sit knee-to-knee for hours building these insane songs. Really complicated riffs some of them, but ultimately very digestible. Toni used to say that some of our songs were like three songs all in one, and eventually she tried to get us to simplify things a bit. But I think those nine original songs on Epidemic are timeless—smart, catchy and super heavy.

For my part, I definitely sought to avoid the Bay Area vocal trap. Listening back to those records now, I wasn’t entirely successful—particularly on the second album. But my favorite metal singers were not the growlers. I preferred John Bush and Bobby Blitz to Hetfield and Baloff, or Zetro for that matter. I fancied myself more of a rock singer than a metal singer and I definitely thought of myself as more of an intellectual than most other metal lyricists. I did write songs about drugs (“Pile of Bones”, “Spider Desire”) religion (“Devil’s Night Out”) mental illness (“911”, “Hypochondriac”) and politics (“Hellfire Club”) like everyone else. But my approach to them was more abstract and indirect than most others. I’m sure to a non-native English speaker a lot of those songs don’t make any sense whatsoever! The truth is that some of those songs probably don’t make much sense to kids who grew up speaking English. But I took a lot of pride in my lyrics. I studied literature in school and have always been fascinated by words. They’re too important to waste…

Seattle icons Camlin Hotel, Space Needle, and Tom Ensign. Top of the Paramount Hotel for the “Blackfeather Shake” video shoot, 1991

With the record in the can, we turned our attention to packaging. Toni got San Francisco artist Sean Wyatt to do the artwork, including the eyeball compass logo which we all got tattoos of. (Our roadie Pinky is the only other person with the tattoo). Seattle photographer Karen Mason took the photos. George & I flew to LA to do a couple of days of telephone and lunch interviews. Jim Sorrenson from Seattle designed some new shirts. And we hired Bellingham filmmaker Tom Ensign to make a real live music video.

Making the video was a wild experience. We rented a helicopter for Tom to shoot us from, hovering over the roof of Seattle’s historic Paramount Theater where we had set up. On the second day of that shoot, the theater management burst onto the roof and yelled at us because people were running out of the matinee performance of the ballet being staged downstairs because the sound of the chopper was scaring them! Again, in our post-9/11 security culture, you could never hover around downtown Seattle in a helicopter!

Surprisingly, the most-expensive thing about the video was not the helicopter, but instead the trained crow. “Blackfeather Shake” is a metaphorical song about crows, and we hired a bird charmer who brought her trained crow. The crow can be seen in various clips of the video, perched on my shoulder or on the headstock of George’s bass.

From there, we drove in a rented 24’ motorhome across the United States to upstate New York where we joined a tour with Coroner and Nuclear Assault. Marty & I were big SOD fans, and we were pretty stoked to be hanging out with Dan Lilker. Danny turned out to be a really cool guy and he seemed relieved to have some young goofballs like us on the tour. We didn’t have much in common with the other bands musically, and they both had followings in every town. But we always put 100% into our set every night as we made our way down the east coast, doubling back through the American Midwest. Danny joined us onstage at the First Avenue in Minneapolis on the last night of the Nuclear leg for a rousing version of “United Forces.” It was November and the snow drifts were four feet high. We were home in Seattle by Christmas, hoarse & sore and not sure what was supposed to happen next.

Next week: Cowboys from Hell, Fact, and Philo’s Phinger