So I actually missed Gridlink’s only US show until 2009 after posting about it. (There’s a video from Osaka there, too.) I heard after that I seriously missed out. I did get a copy of the Gridlink demo, and I’m pretty sure the forthcoming LP Amber Grey is going to be amazing. No hyperbole, this stuff is nuts. Hydra Head will be releasing the LP along with an EP by another Jon Chang project, Haiyano Daisuki. HD has Chang’s Gridlink partner and ex-Mortalized guitarist Takafumi Matsubara on guitar and bass, drummer Eric Schnee, and additional vocals from Michelle Bowlin. Headbanger’s Karaoke Club Dangerous Fire is a tribute to over-the-top shred metal and classic thrash. Along with Slayer and Yngwie Malmsteen, HD are so taken with obscure Japanese metal that three-quarters of the EP and the entire LP will be sung in Japanese. Chang gave a bit of background on the Japanese bands that inspired Haiyano Daisuki:

“Anthem and Mephistopheles are very old (started in like ‘84 or ‘85). The Mephistopheles stuff is very hard to come by but Anthem can be purchased on Amazon Japan. They have such a huge catalog it’s hard to single out a great release by them, but their new CD is awesome. Concerto Moon is almost like [Yngwie Malmsteen’s] Rising Force but played at faster Maiden speeds. Concerto Moon and Anthem are technical heavy metal, while Mephistopholes is a bit more raw.”

For now, there’s one unmastered track on HD’s MySpace page. Since we’re already talking about nerd shit, there are trailers up for Mother of Tears, the conclusion to Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers Trilogy“! And it’s not all that Argento-looking (at least what they’re showing us now), but it does look way less bland than every other horror movie in recent memory! So maybe it’ll be cool!

There’s a clearer and slightly longer one here, but it’s got really generic and terrible narration. Obligatory tie-in: One track on Claudio Simonetti’s score features Cradle of Filth vocalist Dani Filth.

Maybe it’ll be good!

By Sean McGrath, Impaled

Hi, I’m Sean McGrath, and I’m in the death metal band Impaled. We’ve been asked to do a “blog” by Decibel, and though I usually shy away from such things, or more accurately back away from them while forming the sign of the cross with my fingers, I thought it might be a good chance to lay bare a few well kept secrets about the music industry to those young and impressionable musicians who might have been fooled into thinking that signing a contract with a major label is a great honor and privilege.

In this day and age, record labels can do very little for you that you cannot do yourself with some hard work, talent, and ingenuity. Let’s assume that you already have talent. That cuts out seventy five percent of you. You can leave. The rest of you, please read on. This is the standard operating procedure for most labels:

Let’s pretend there’s a young death metal band. Let’s call this band… I don’t know…Injected Feces. That’s pretty good. (It’s copyrighted, so don’t get any ideas.) So Injected Feces has been around for a year or so, played some good shows, garnered some good reviews, done a decent demo, and gets a little interest from some labels. “Awesome!” thinks Injected Feces, “We’re going to MAKE IT!”. They pick the biggest and best label and sign the contract without having a pro look at it. Who needs lawyers? That’s not metal! And hey, the label is offering them $1,500! That’s four times what the demo cost! Sounds pretty good so far. Injected Feces goes into the studio and they just squeak by on the 1,500 bucks, but the finished product comes out great (as great as it can coming from Injected Feces). The promotion department tells the band this is the best thing they’ve heard since Colostomy Catheter (also copyrighted), and they’re sure to sell 40,000 copies. Wow!

Cut to a year later. Injected Feces has taken three months out of their lives to tour the country to promote the album. They had to buy the cds from the label at 6 bucks a pop, but it was worth it. Man, did they sell! At the same time, jobs have been lost. Relationships have been strained or ruined. But the band is doing great! They sold thousands of cds! They must be in the chips, right? I mean, they were mentioned in Decibel and Metal Maniacs! All the same, they wonder why they haven’t gotten a financial statement from the label. Ever.

They ask the label to provide a statement and after and few months of cajoling they finally get one. Holy moly, they sold 6,000 CDs! There is much rejoicing. But wait, what’s this? The label keeps 9 dollars of every cd sold and gives the band 65 cents per cd sold? Well, ok. I mean, they DID put all those ads in those glossy magazines… and that’s still almost 6,000 bucks! Hold on… They also charged for the cost of the ads out of the band’s royalties? And they pro rated the phone bill and internet bill and rent and took that from the band’s royalties? And they own the rights to the t-shirt designs?! And on top of that, they’ve been trading Injected Feces CDs for other CDs made by bands from other labels, and not reporting those traded CDs as sales?

Hmmm…

What a disappointment. Injected Feces only sold 6,000 copies. Sounds like a lot to the band, but it’s well below the 40,000 estimated. I guess they should be dropped from the label. Not profitable enough. After an initial investment of 1,500 dollars, they only raked in 54,000 dollars for the label. The good thing is, the label owns Injected Feces’ entire catalog. They signed it away! The material will never see the light of day again if the label does not will it.

Now let’s look at the other option.

Injected Feces has a bit of a following. They put out a demo. They do as many interviews in fanzines as they can. They try to get on shows with every touring band they can and make connections with the members and the promoters. They hook up with some out of state bands, do some split releases, talk their way onto some compilation CDs and into some bigger magazines, do a few DIY tours, have a decent website that offers free downloads of their music and interesting artwork. Injected Feces now has a name. They scrape together three thousand dollars, record a CD, and press it themselves. They sell 1,000 CDs on a DIY tour at 10 dollars a pop. 10,000 dollars goes to paying for gas, strings, a new tire to replace the one that blew out, a new guitar to replace the one that broke when that dude moshed into it, your drummer’s rent when he’s short, flyers, beer, a new banner, and not one fucking cent goes to some weasely prick in an office telling them how awesome they are.

Option number two is the future of underground metal.

Further reading:

Impaled go to see The Passion of the Christ.

“The Problem With Music” by Steve Albini.

Michael Donaldson, better known as Mikey Offender, was found dead last night in Barcelona. The cause of death has yet to be announced. Offender played bass on about half of D.R.I.’s Dealing With It, played with MDC and Sister Double Happiness, and founded The Offenders in 1981. If “Face Down in the Dirt,” performed below by the reunited Offenders in 2002, sounds familiar, it’s because Napalm Death did an admirable job covering it on Leaders Not Followers: Part 2 a couple of years ago. Buy Dealing With It today if you don’t have it.

MP3: D.R.I., “I’d Rather Be Sleeping” (from Dealing With It)

A while back, Justin Foley of The Austerity Program performed a statistical analysis of the letters that metal bands start their names with, concluding that “D” is the most popular choice. Then blogger Glenn McDonald took issue with Foley’s sources and presented his own analysis. We assumed the whole thing was dead until today, when we intercepted this missive from Foley to McDonald:

So I read your bit and I think you’re probably right. I hit this thing backwards, coming up with my graph and then going back and stripping out the “The”s. I think this because I went back and checked my list. What can I say? I must have gotten carried away. While you and I are still a bit different in what we’ve found (I’m enclosing my final numbers and list for you), it’s closer. This is due in part to my sloppy work.

Buuuuuuut, you haven’t sold me yet.

I think you’re underestimating the difference of our lists, even if I correct my error noted above. I see that that you and I are different from each other on average about .6%. Given that the average frequency in my set (you’re including #’s, which I didn’t) is 3.8%, this translates to meaning that you and I are expected to be different in the rankings of a letter about 1 out of every six times. That’s not insignificant. Most importantly, my revised list has D coming out as the winner. You attribute this in part to sample size. Eh, I think that’s less relevant. I’m going to
chalk it up to your source. You like your source and (despite the fact that you had to type all those numbers in for each letter) that comes through in your language describing it – some worldwide source for metal kids to wiki some meta-knowledge. But I’ve listened to enough shitty bands on Milwaukee Metalfest Samplers* to know that there’s gotta be some threshold to what you’ll consider to be a metal band. Call me elitist if you like, but I’ll call bullshit on the Encyclopedia’s QC. Case in point? My band isn’t even on that list. You may think we’re not metal, but try explaining that to my father-in-law. How else is he supposed to make sense of what we’re up to?

So I’m including for you the (actually closer to 750) bands in our set. Audit them if you like – there’s probably a few duplicates. Still, I’ll stand by this revised analysis as being more relevant and robust than the Encyclopedia. That’s right, I said it – your sample size is TOO LARGE. As for your concern that Excel isn’t going to get me there – I think you worry too much. Those SPSS and Minitab programs are great for people who deal with data analysis nonsense all day, but for the rest of us, Excel’s the best reason not to bomb Redmond. Really – install the data analysis tool pack and you’ll find it’s not that bad. Unless …wait, you’re not a stats software snob, are you?

WAIT, WAIT. There’s something great in my list that you don’t have in yours. Not only does it let me pick the best metal band letter to start with, I can actually figure out…THE MOST METAL NAME FOR A BAND.

Holy crap. I’m going to do that right now. (I’m excited because I’m just figuring this out as I type it)

First, we’ll need to figure out how many letters the band has in its name. Using my sample set, we run an average number of characters in a name (including a space as a character). Turns out that the average (the mean is the most appropriate measure of central tendency) rounds down to ten. So, the most metal band name is going to have ten letters.

Then we’ll figure out the most common letter for each letter position in the band’s name. My revised analysis shows what the first letter is most frequently D. The name starts with D. Next up is A, the most common second letter in a band name. D-A… We’ll keep this going until we have all ten letter slots filled.**

And now we have it. Are you ready for the most metal name a band can possibly have? The good news is that I don’t think it’s been taken yet, so someone out there can go hop on myspace and make this happen today.

The band name is:

DAREE EEEE

There’s one important note about this – I found that, once we got to the sixth letter slot, it was most common for a band name still in the running to have a space before starting the second word. Therefore, I considered the space and only the first space. Because three word band names were very uncommon, I decided not to continue counting spaces and introduce a third word. I think this is sound. Anyway, what an awesome band name. Daree Eeee. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. I think it’d be the regular word “dare” with an accented “E” for the second syllable. And then a quick breath. And then a high pitched, sharp and fading “eeeeeeee”. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see this screen printed onto some ratty 50/50 black Hanes. Oh, and with some graphics that look like the cover to the first Bolt Thrower record. I mean, who cares what they sound like, right? You’re gonna buy that shirt when you see it, especially considering it’s only like 7 bucks.

* I’m not talking about Disfigured. Disfigured were awesome.
** We’re not counting the spaces that occur after the last letter in a band name. Once a band name ends, its contributing letters (spaces, in this case) are taken out of potential considerations until we get to the tenth letter.

PS – I found out about this because of the Decibel magazine blog, under the heading “Will the Geek Circle be Unbroken”. Hey, Deci-dorks, don’t name your cutting-edge
blog entries after a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band record.

Do I have to do EVERYTHING around here?

As promised, here’s Part 2 of an excerpt of a rather lengthy interview with former Melvins bassist — and current Sunn O)) member/ solo artist – Mark Deutrom. Fun fact: Decibel writer Zach Smith transcribed this when he was an intern (the magazine’s first, in fact) way back in ‘04!

The Melvins are famous for pissing audiences off. Do you have any memories to share?
Anybody who has seen the Melvins will tell you there’s a point where they’re going to test your attention span, even to die hard fans. Prick would be a prime example of that — things you can’t really listen to. There’s a certain amount of arrogance and pride in that, and of course I took part happily in that type of attitude when I was in the band. Some of the more notorious examples of that are when we played in Dallas with Nine Inch Nails and we opened the set with a 9+ minute long instrumental. Nine Inch Nails fans don’t want to hear that stuff, so the audience melted down and ripped up the seats in this minor league hockey arena and threw ‘em at us. The old Melvins standby is to just let the feedback rip for 15 minutes. It’s as much of a trademark for the Melvins as Gene Simmons blowing fire is for KISS. It’s just part of the band, and if you love the band, then you kind of look forward to moments like that just to see how people who haven’t been exposed to the band will react.

You joined the band for a bunch of releases that everybody seems to be able to agree upon like Stoner Witch and Stag, as well as all the material that came out on Amphetamine Reptile, which is stuff that no one seems to be able to universally agree on. How were you approached to join the band?
Buzz and Lori both had this situation where they were still involved with each other, they both went into rehab, they came out, and they started getting interest from major labels. I’m not even sure if Lori recorded her parts for Houdini. If she did, it was all wiped. It became evident that Buzz was going to split up with Lori and kick her out of the band, and he was looking for somebody new. They had finished recording Houdini in ‘93, and I wasn’t doing anything, so when they asked me to join the band, I said, “Okay.” It was basically Buzz and Dale on that record, and I think maybe Kurt Cobain played some guitar, I’m not really sure; the whole idea of him producing anything is interesting. He just really didn’t do anything on that record except for kind of show up and pass out, but people…Cobain was addicted to heroin. He couldn’t have produced a crap after a cup of coffee at that point. You know, with all due respect to him, he had no experience producing records. It was kind of one of those sort of mismatches that I think Atlantic came up with or Kurt told the Melvins that he wanted to be there, and all the sudden he’s producing the record.

Can you give me an account of what happened wherein you severed ties with the Melvins?
You mean when they kicked me out of the band?

Yes.
Because make no mistake, they kick people out of their band. Our contract with Atlantic was up, and there were a couple of labels that were interested in us doing demos, but Buzz was like, “I’m not going to do anything for those motherfuckers, there’s no way I’m going to audition for them.” He looked at it purely as an insult, you know, and felt that he would kind of be selling out or being untrue to his own direction. We never sat down and had career move meetings between the three of us. The main thing I felt was “take advantage of everybody as much as you can for as long as you can and then get out.” And that was kind of the attitude we developed, there was certainly a type of mercenary sort of ruthlessness that we had.

My attitude was like, “Sure, we’ll make some demos for you; give us five grand or whatever.” They give you five grand, you go and record an entire record, you give them a couple of songs, and then if they don’t like it, you just put the album out that you’ve recorded on AmRep or Man’s Ruin or whatever, and then basically then you’ve got an album out of the situation for free. So you’re ahead. But I think he interpreted that as me wanting to become some band like Metallica or something, which would be completely ridiculous. Having known the Melvins for like 12 years at that point, I understood exactly what the commercial potential of the band was.

What would bring closure to the situation, what would need to happen for that to happen?
I don’t know, probably apologies or whatever. I’m not sure; I can only speak for myself. For me, it’s just kind of, I’ve been in plenty of towns where they’re playing and I always mull it over: should I go down there and talk to them? I’ll give full credit to Buzz in creating something that’s utterly unique and he created that whole thing by himself. There’s nothing like it and it’s respectable, it’s good, and you know, I was glad to be part of it, seriously. I had my own problems at the time, I had a great deal of depression in my life that started when I was a child, and so they had to put up with that. And I didn’t manage to seriously address it until a few years ago. I’m glad I got a chance to be in the Melvins. That’s it, really.

By Ross Sewage, Impaled

I haven’t written online in awhile. There’s a reason. I came to the conclusion it didn’t matter.

I used to do a blog on MySpace. It had quite the following for a minute there. MySpace used to be novel and I followed suit by writing blogs the length of.

Yes, MySpace was once new. You think I’m not 0ld sk001? Beyotch, I was writing crap on Friendster when Job For a Cowboy was still on dial-up. LiveJournal? I was there before Trivium lyrics featured boats, rudders, and strange mountains. Of course, I was writing blogs while fucking off at my job and getting paid hourly.

I don’t work at that sweet, sweet office anymore. I work at home now, where my time actually does mean money, or lack thereof. I’m not going to write blogs about super villains of the 1980s if I have to actually do quantifiable work for money in order to (kind of) eat. It just doesn’t matter.

Even less relevant was anything I wrote political. It’s amazing how people shut down after “their guy” lost. The election of 2004 ended all political discourse amongst my online friends through sheer melancholia. It seemed as though nobody wanted to debate anymore whether it was John Kerry rubbing a human femur on George W. Bush’s sphincter during his inauguration to Skull and Bones, or vice versa.

A friend recently reposted a blog I wrote about Dave Mustaine’s inane lyrics and his reversal in worldview onto the official Megadeth message board. Most of the responses stated I was a jerk and I had too much time on my hands. Whilst I concur with the former observation, the latter is coming from people who spend time posting on the Megadeth message board. Online intelligence, two words combined that can’t make sense.

One thing I’m certain of is Dave was absolutely furious and surely raised his fists to the sky and screamed, “Damn you, Sewage! Damn you to hell!”

A lot of these blogs were funny. Many were angry and some sad. All of them were completely irrelevant. Almost everything online is.

I say almost, because at one point I read… no wait. I heard it on the radio. Fuck me. It IS all irrelevant.

What I heard on the radio was from a comedian named Marc Maron who used to have an absolutely brilliant show apparently not enough people listened to. Well, it was on liberal Air America, an AM radio network that counted their listenership on two hands. Maron’s show could only muster one. He was on a rant about America’s Got Talent, or, as it’s more colloquially known, “The Absolute Abortion of Anything Culturally Redeeming Left in America.” The key issue brought up in his rant was about content. Like the networks’ ability to exploit desperate amateurs who will do anything to be on television, the democratization the Internet hath wrought is an exercise in free content for corporations.

How much money does MySpace dole out for episodes of Chad Vader sitting next to a sponsored ad for Good Luck Chuck starring Dane Cook and Jennifer Alba? Squat. How much was MySpace paying me for blogs posted next to banner asking “Whose Celebrity Body is This?” Dick.

Blogspot. YouTube. MySpace. Facebook. DailyKos. Photobucket. 360. Flickr. Are these really the populist windfalls people in the blogosphere rave about? No. These are websites owned by massive corporations raking in profit. Remember the sinking feeling when conservative oligarch Rupert Murdoch bought out OurSpace? Nothing changed, because it’s a gold mine with miners who work for free.

That isn’t to say I deserve money for writing. Sure, I had some regular readers who were certain I should be paid for my genius. I tried to get writing gigs for magazines. I failed miserably. I got offers from other websites to write more free content, though. Those articles I wrote ended up on those websites’ MySpace profiles: not even on the actual websites.

Is this the tragic story of a suburban-bred white male D-Grade musician on being underappreciated? No, this is the tragic story of overappreciation.

Online content is overappreciated. The Internet is overappreciated. YouTubed today, but will you care tomorrow?

Remember All Your Base Are Belong to Us by the Laziest Men on Mars? Seven years ago, that Internet meme had some legs. That was entertainment, being privately emailed to anyone who had a computer for a good six months! How about that more recent Chocolate Rain video by… what’s his name? Who was that eyeliner guy defending Britney Spears? I already forgot what video it was I was talking about.

How about those political movements on the web! I’m sure the fat cats in Washington are shaking in their boots when all those Mr. Smiths virtually march on Washington via their laptops in a local Starbucks. The blogosphere won’t stop the Iraq war by writing endless lists comparing George W. Bush to the devil any sooner than the Baby Boomers stopped the Vietnam War by taking LSD and passing crabs to each other during a rock concert. (Side note: the Baby Boomers like to think they stopped the Vietnam war in the sixties, even though it really ended in 1975 and they were too busy disco dancing and snorting coke to care anymore – but don’t say anything because they’re really old now, anyway)

Despite my lengthy tirade, here I am, writing another blog. I’m doing it so maybe thirteen or fourteen people who see Impaled’s name up on the Decibel website will take the time to download a free song off the Impaled MySpace profile*. This could translate into three or four people coming to an Impaled show and buying a beer. That will justify the one drink ticket I get from a stinking dive in Boise.

Yes… I am totally shilling my band. IMPALED IMPALED IMPALED. At least I’m getting that in return. The lesson learned? Give up on relevance and grab what you can.

* You can also download two new songs from Last Gasp, Impaled’s forthcoming LP, on Willowtip’s homepage.

There’s a huge oral history of the Melvins that appeared in issue #3 of Decibel that isn’t online, probably for the same reason that the Hall of Fame features aren’t online. We want you to buy back issues of our magazine, ok? Putting these things together is always a bear, especially in the case of the Melvins piece. We ended up with something like 15-20 hours of tape when the dust settled, including about 2 hours worth of conversations with former Melvins bassist/producer and longtime associate Mark Deutrom. Mark hadn’t spoken to anyone about the Melvins for years before that, and probably hasn’t since, but he had a lot to get off of his chest during that interview. Since we’re in a Melvins kinda mood, here’s part 1 of an excerpt of the conversation; part 2 follows tomorrow!

Very early on, you put out Gluey Porch Treatments on your own Alchemy label and you also produced Ozma. Is that how you came to know the Melvins?
My business partner Victor Hayden went up to Seattle, saw the Melvins, and came back and said, “They were crawling up the wall!”And he played me a tape of them, or played me there first ten song thing on C/V, and I thought it was good, so we decided to do a record with them. They came down from Aberdeen and we started working on Gluey Porch Treatments. Before that, my band with Lori Black, Clown Alley, played a gig in Olympia with the Melvins and Greg Anderson’s first band — he was only 16 at the time!

Years later, Buzz told me they had wanted to prove to themselves that they make this record without drinking any beer, which they actually did, much to their credit. At the time, I didn’t realize it was, you know, that much of a mountain for them to climb, but they did it and credit to them. We recorded in the record in Sausalito, where we got some really cheap time at a studio that Huey Lewis and the News and Whitney Houston were doing tracks at. And there was this incredibly huge room and it had moveable panels on the walls and that’s how that monster reverb was captured on “Eye Flies.” Another little piece of trivia is that I took the picture on the back of Gluey Porch Treatments; that’s the living room of the house that Lori Black and I were living in at the time.

Do you have any sense of what the general impression of the Melvins was when they were still based in Aberdeen/Seattle/the Olympia area, and was there a general awareness in that scene of community of the group moving to the Bay Area?
In 1984, you had Van Halen, punk rock was dead, and the only thing that was really cool and kind of cutting edge was crossover metal bands or bands like Black Flag or Bad Brains, you know, stuff like that. But it was still totally difficult if you had a band and you weren’t doing hair metal. But locally it was just like it’s always been, you know, people despised your bands, you went out and played a gig and there were always some pissed off people there who would just go to the gigs to yell “fuck you!” Bands were very isolated from each other. When the Melvins left, they left before everything got really huge in the Northwest, so it’s funny that they’re still considered the godfathers of grunge or whatever, because they were out so far ahead, they were out of Aberdeen, so far ahead of that whole kind of major label feeding frenzy in the Northwest that they weren’t even really part of it. I think of them as more of a San Francisco band, really. When you’re in an isolated community like Aberdeen, which is the end of the Earth you know really, there’s nothing to do there but drink and smoke weed and just pray to God that there’s some way out before you kill yourself. Who knows what would’ve happened to the Melvins if they had stayed there

They’d be dead.
They’d still be sitting around their front porch like drinking OE and smoking bud, you know. And I can relate to that, because I grew up in El Paso as a teenager, and that was like the end of the world, too. They were literally, like, if they could have burned that town to the ground, they would have. If they could have gotten away with it, they would have burned that town to the ground and left, laughing as the flames shot up in their review mirrors, you know.

You were living in England when the Melvins played at the Reading Festival, right?
Yes. I think it might have been ‘91; it’s the only date Nirvana played at Reading Festival. The Melvins were the opening band, and of course there were 20 bands and then there was Nirvana at the other end, so the irony was not lost on me at that. That was a really brutal gig. All these British people were completely hung over and they staggered out, it was pouring with rain and there was a sea of mud and the wind was blowing about 50 miles an hour, and here’s the Melvins playing, It was kind of apocalyptic and interesting

I read that for the show, the organizers dubbed the Melvins “the worst band ever.”
Yeah, that’s true. With Reading, it’s a tradition to have…I mean, its run by the British, they’ve got all the stupid flavor of the month bands up there. Before I did that tour with them, I knew that Buzz and Lori were using, and I was like, “I’m not interested in doing this if you guys are on drugs.” Sure enough, when we got to Amsterdam, Buzz and Lori disappeared off into some housing project or squat and came back to the hotel and started shooting up right in front of me with some homeless guy they picked up. And, of course, I’ve done my share of drugs, too. And I said, “You know what, I think I’m going to stay and just do dope with everybody else, because at least then I won’t be pissed off.”

But I wasn’t strung out yet at the time, so I could get away with it. This homeless guy they invited to stay in the van with us stank like a pirate’s graveyard and I told Buzz, “You gotta get this guy out of here, it’s like carrying a corpse around.” After that, the tour sort of fell apart. Lori got sick and I don’t know where Buzz went, he went back to San Francisco or something, I’m not sure, but Dale ended up staying at my place in London for about a week and I just kind of took him aside and said, “Look, you have people in your band who have a problem here with drugs. You can do whatever you want with that information but you can’t say where it came from.” And he was appalled and flabbergasted, he couldn’t believe it.

In a way, Bobby Liebling of Pentagram pissed away a prime opportunity to capitalize on renewed interest in the Maryland doom legends with Relapse’s excellent reissues First Daze Here and First Daze Here Too. But the version of Pentagram Liebling fronted throughout the ’80s (when his legendary heroin habit allowed) really had nothing to do with that “classic” ‘71-’76 line-up. As of 2001, Liebling was in pretty bad shape; Aimee Agresti’s excellent profile of the broken singer in the Washington City Paper contains the startling revelation that Libeling, still living in his parents basement, spent an entire year in a detention facility to kick drugs in 2000. Although Liebling may never do another full Pentagram set– he hasn’t since a show with Trouble backing him in ‘99 and an ill-fated gig at the Velvet Lounge seven years ago — you literally never know when or where he’ll appear next:

Hank Williams III w/ Bobby Liebling [10/8/06]

Witchcraft w/ Bobby Liebling [11/12/06]

Unorthodox w/ Bobby Liebling [4/14/07]