Caught In A Mosh: September 2009
Decibellwether
One of the highlights of my month (besides unveiling “Mosh” to my adoring readers) is the day Decibel magazine arrives. Between my mailbox and front door, I’ve generally already thumbed through the pages to find out what the Hall Of Fame entry is. I’m either livin’ a pretty pathetic life or Decibel Editor-In-Chief Albert Mudrian and staff are puttin’ together a pretty awesome feature. Maybe it’s both.
Decibel inducts an album into its Hall Of Fame each month, but not everything qualifies. For starters, the album must be at least 5-years old and, most importantly, every band member who played on the album must be willing and able to participate in interviews. If one person refuses, it’s a no-go. Someone’s dead? No HOF!
Don’t have a subscription? Mudrian and co. compiled 25 HOF entries into book form for the awesome Precious Metal, released in July by Da Capo Press. “Mosh” picked Mudrian’s brain on the process and why John Stanier may or may not be a douchebag.
M: How does a Hall Of Fame candidate get from meeting room to published page?
Albert Mudrian: I’d love to pretend that we have, like, big pow-wows about this, and that there’s a real scientific formula we implemented, but honestly it isn’t [laughs]. It’s a lot of e-mail exchanges, basically. At this point we’ve done like 56 of these, so a lot of the “no-brainer” Hall Of Fames have been knocked out, like Slayer Reign In Blood or At The Gates’ Slaughter Of The Soul and that kind of stuff. But, that said, sometimes we don’t get to no-brainers for a long time, like S.O.D.’s Speak English Or Die. That one is so obvious, and we did 50 Hall Of Fames before that one. We’ve got some other kind of big, obvious ones we haven’t done yet that will be coming up in the next few months. But to answer your question, it really is kind of a collaborative thing between me and a bunch of our staff writers who are regular contributors to the series. It’s just pretty much any message-board dorkery that you could imagine, just confined to some e-mail boxes.
M: I’m sure there are many examples of this, but is there one HOF in particular that was just a huge pain in the nuts?
AM: How about Metallica’s . . . And Justice For All? That was excruciating, because they’re Metallica. It’s also one of those things where you’ve got the lineup that recorded that record isn’t together anymore, so you have to convince someone who isn’t in the band to do it, and then you’ve got to let the rest of the band know that guy is going to be involved in this and they have to be O.K. with that. It was a lot of wrangling, and there was a lot of positioning, too, because Jason Newsted’s one stipulation for the interview was that he wanted to be interviewed last. So basically, he could respond to anything that was leveled against him. I didn’t really have a problem with that, because he’s the one that’s not in the band anymore, so he should be able to have his say. Yeah, that one was definitely down to the wire, and it was exceptionally alarming because it was tied to a cover story tied to our 50th issue. There was a lot of things that had to go right, and even a few days before we went to print, I wasn’t sure if it was going to get there.
M: How did you choose which entries made the book?
AM: I think it was a combination of a lot of things, you know? You wanted to have, like I talked about earlier, some of those obvious no-brainer ones, but you also wanted to have ones that aren’t just great albums, but additionally turned out to be great Hall Of Fame stories. Like Monster Magnet’s Dopes To Infinity, for example. I think that’s my favorite Hall Of Fame story out of all of them because I love that record, and I love . . . there’s a bit more drama in that one than a lot of the other ones. So you kind of want to have a good mix of good stories, those undeniable records, and you also want to kind of present a fair overview of the genres and the sub-genres of extreme music. You don’t want to have too much death metal, too much thrash, too much stoner. You want to kind of mix it up so you can just really see what extreme metal is capable of and also, from there, what Decibel is capable of – the fact that the Repulsion record [Horrified] is as important to us as [Dillinger Escape Plan’s] Calculating Infinity or [Botch’s] We Are The Romans or [Celtic Frost’s] Morbid Tales.
M: In the book’s introduction you mention some Hall Of Fames that have eluded the magazine. What’s Decibel‘s Holy Grail right now?
AM: It really is that Faith No More one [Angel Dust]. The fact that, like, four years ago we managed to round everybody up except Jim Martin and get them to be into it. And this was when Mike Patton didn’t really have any interest in talking about Faith No More. He was like, “Hey, if you can get everybody to do it, I’ll do it.” And we got Billy Gould and Roddy Bottum and [Mike] Bordin, and Jim Martin’s got, like, it’s just one of those things where there’s too much bad blood still. Obviously, Helmet’s In The Meantime, which I talked about [in the introduction]. There’s been another one recently. We tried to do Dio’s Holy Diver, but unfortunately What’s His Face, Mr. Def Leppard, Whitesnake . . . Vivian Campbell! Vivian Campbell has some serious issues with Ronnie James Dio, and that was just not happening. The ones that are the biggest bummers are the ones where somebody has died. And you’re just kind of like, “Man, I can’t believe we don’t get to do one on Vulgar Display Of Power or Scream Bloody Gore or Master Of Puppets.
M: What’s the oddest reason someone has given for not wanting to participate?
AM: Sometimes you don’t get any reason at all. They just say no. Like Refused just aptly says no. Neurosis say no, but they’re very polite. It’s generally you don’t get a reason. I guess the oddest thing is that pact the ex-Helmet members have. They all got together, or at least John Stanier I think was kind of the architect of that. We had Henry Bogdan and the other guitar player [Peter Mengede], and one of them had committed to doing the interview before John Stanier stepped in and fucking shut him down! I don’t know what went on in that Helmet lineup. I would assume it’s something not good. I would assume someone feels they were wronged in a serious way, and I’m guessing that guy was John Stanier. Whatever. We’ve tried. It’s nice, though because now I don’t have to pretend like I give a shit about Battles [laughs].
MEGADONE?: Mudrian gets HOF suggestions all the time from dudes on the street. So because I had to throw mine out there, I’m happy to say an entry for Megadeth‘s Rust In Peace looks to become reality. Dave Mustaine has apparently been hesitant for some time, Mudrian says, which is ironic given Mustaine compares his new record, Endgame (Roadrunner), to the band’s 1990 masterpiece in recent press materials – more ironic, given Endgame isn’t good. At all. Sure, the band hasn’t put out a solid top-to-bottom record in 14 years, but its two records since “reforming” (The System Has Failed and United Abominations) had moments. Endgame has fewer moments than Risk, for fuck’s sake. “Dialectic Chaos,” the face-melting instrumental opener, recalls “Into The Lungs Of Hell” glory, but there ain’t a memorable track among the remaining 10. Mustaine still cranks out some mighty riffs (“How The Story Ends,” “Head Crusher”), but he’s lost all ability as a lyricist, leaving us with ridiculous songs about drag racing (“1,320”) and bank heists (“44 Minutes”). Nso Cristina Scabbia this time, though.
— Trevor Fisher
Category: Caught In A Mosh, Columns, Monthly
