Soul On Fire - The Life and Musi Jeff Wagner [PDF]

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Dedicated to the memory of Peter Thomas Ratajczyk and Barbara Emma Banyai

Soul on Fire: The Life and Music of Peter Steele Copyright © 2014 FYI Press, Inc. All rights reserved. www.petersteelebio.com Cover photo by John Wadsworth Cover design by Scott Hoffman and Adriene Greenup Photographs as credited Book design by Scott Hoffman for Eyedolatry Design Copyediting by Valerie Brooks Editing and additional contributions by Adriene Greenup First published in the United States in 2014 by FYI PRESS Greensboro, NC 27403 www.fyipress.com ISBN 978-1-934859-45-2 Printed in the United States of America

“There is no weapon more powerful than the human soul on fire” —General Ferdinand Foch

“Do you believe in forever? I don’t even believe in tomorrow” —Peter Steele

CONTENTS Prologue: Too Late for Apologies Part I: RED 1 Ground Zero Brooklyn 2 Into the Reactor 3 You Are What You Eat 4 Extreme Neurosis Part II: GREEN 5 Power Tools 6 Into the Sphincter of the Beast (and other Fecal Origins) 7 Religion…Women…Fire 8 An Accidental God 9 Product of Vinnland Part III: BLACK 10 It’s Coming Down 11 The Death of the Party 12 Repair — Maintain — Improve 13 All Hail and Farewell Gratitude Endnotes

Anyone who met Peter Steele never, ever forgets it. Throughout the

writing of this book, I talked to many people who met Peter, and every person’s story has an element of humor, pathos, profundity, and danger, or some combination of those things. The briefest brush with the man would leave an indelible impact. His imposing frame, basso profundo speaking voice, scathingly selfdeprecating sense of humor and caustic wit … these were his most identifiable traits, and there was a lot more just below that surface. His seemingly manic-depressive behaviors and too-rude-to-be-true jokes belied an extremely shy personality. He was a master of contradiction, most of it intentional. While he was hardly the stereotypical rock star, just as soon as he walked in the room, you would have known he was famous even if you didn’t have a clue who he was. If you met him before he was touring the world and selling hundreds of thousands of records, you knew he was going to be a rock star. He couldn’t have stayed employed by the New York City Parks and Recreation Department all his life, even if he always harbored a desire to return to the simplicity of no-surprises blue collar living. He had too much talent to spread wood chips and pick up garbage all his days; too much vision, too much to get off his chest, too many private demons to slay in public. He answered his calling with loads of exclamation marks; he worked his sense of humor into a kind of sophisticated vulgarity with which he laughed at the life he so angrily despised.

I met Peter Steele three times, and the first meeting was good enough to get my name in the thanks list of Bloody Kisses. I didn’t deserve the honor, but Peter thought I did. It was 1992 and I had just started my own fanzine. A fan of Peter’s since the first Carnivore album and now wildly into his new band, Type O Negative, I used what paltry connections I had in the industry to secure an interview with Peter and Josh. The Origin of the Feces had just been released and the interview was memorable from the start. Someone miscommunicated regarding the interview schedule, so I was napping soundly one afternoon when I heard the phone ring. Bleary and barely aware, I found Peter Steele and Josh Silver on the other line. I made excuses, fumbled for my tape recorder, hooked it up and attempted to play the serious, investigative reporter. Fifteen seconds later I tossed my list of questions aside, realizing these guys weren’t going to take anything seriously. They were very kind, however, darting from one silly subject to the next, keeping themselves and their interviewer amused for the 30 minute time slot until moving on to the next unsuspecting amateur journalist. Apparently I was such a good sport that Peter made sure to tell his publicist I should be thanked on their next album. Eighteen months later, I met Peter a second time. Type O played a medium-size club in Des Moines, Iowa named Hairy Mary’s. Bloody Kisses had just been released but had yet to grow into a phenomenon, wallowing in an uncomfortable purgatory between the loss of fans that didn’t get its directional shift and the gain of new followers that eventually made the album an incredible commercial success. Type O played to about fifteen eager disciples that evening. Near the end of the set, Peter handed his Mogen David wine jug to the worshippers in the front row, gesturing for us to drink. We each took a sip as this guy who looked like a goth/doom version of Jesus Christ looked on. It felt like a very special communion. After the show we went out to the band’s bus for autographs. As he always was, Peter was there to give us what we wanted. I remember how sweet, gracious and cordial he was to each of us. Never being much into autographs, I asked Peter to dot a beauty

mark onto one of the girls’ faces on my Bloody Kisses shirt. He laughed, said with amusement “that’s a new one,” took his Sharpie to my shirt and honored the request. We all left feeling like we’d gotten face time with God. The third time I met Peter was somewhere in Manhattan at 2 a.m. in some hallway in some club whose name I’ve long forgotten. It was around 1996 or so. We were there waiting for Lycia to take the stage after an interminable delay. We said hello, I reminded him of the mole he put on my shirt several years prior, he said he remembered that, we laughed, and he went on to satisfy the attentions of the many other people who recognized him. By that time, he was on his way to becoming a household name.

Josh Silver told me at some point during the writing of this book: “The only way this would do Peter justice is if it pissed off everybody.” Noted. I learned a lot of amazing things about Peter Steele before I got into the thick of writing this book, and the thing that resonates the loudest is how incredibly, insanely possessive people are of this man. “Peter wouldn’t want this book written.” “Peter was a private person.” “Peter would hate this.” On and on the peanut gallery opined. Some people forget that Peter himself was considering writing his own book someday. In 2003 he told Ink19 magazine, “I have a title for it: Give Pete a Chance. I have tons of really funny, strange, sad and sick things that have happened to me that are just unbelievable. Stories about school, or family or tour stories— misadventures. Maybe someday, when I get my head screwed on correctly, I will pursue this seriously.” He never got his head screwed on correctly—at least not long enough to write his book—so you’ll have to settle for this one. (Peter talked about writing his own book more than once, too, offering another title idea, White Dope on Punk, a paraphrase of the Tubes song “White Punks on Dope”.)

Why wouldn’t Peter want this book written? Because he was a private person? A guy who posed in the nude, rock hard, in Playgirl magazine, was “private”? A guy that revealed so many fears, insecurities and struggles in his lyrics, for decades, was a private person? Just as this book was nearing completion, Josh Silver told me this: “What’s great about being dead is you really don’t care what people remember. That concept is only romantic during life.” As well as Josh knew Peter, Josh never tried to tell me what Peter would want. In fact, most people acting as Peter’s selfappointed posthumous mouthpieces weren’t people that ended up having much to offer this book. This phenomenon of people taking it upon themselves to speak for Peter after his death, to apparently know what Peter would and wouldn’t want, is the domain of the numerous losers and hangers-on Peter tried so desperately to shake off while he was alive. But I get why Peter Steele makes people so incredibly possessive. He had this power, this way of making people feel like they were the star, like they were the center of the universe, even if it was clearly Peter who was the center of the universe in any room he walked into. Peter’s concern and attentiveness was genuine. He could make even the most insecure person feel like a million dollars, despite having numerous insecurities of his own. It’s why he continues to command loyalty and reverence. It’s why girls who admitted they only met him for 40 minutes say that albums such as Bloody Kisses and October Rust were written about them. Had Peter wanted to be a cult leader rather than a songwriter or a municipal worker, he would have been the greatest and most dangerous cult leader in the history of cult leaders. We should feel grateful he left us with so much amazing music rather than a pile of psychoticallydamaged disciples.

Early in the process of this book’s creation, some hubbub was made of the fact that the surviving members of Type O Negative did not want to talk to me on record. This was disappointing, but I’ve

come to understand it. Each member assured me it was nothing personal. Josh even eventually offered some respectful correspondence via email, even if it was limited and near the end of this book’s creation. Sal Abruscato, Type O Negative co-founder and original drummer, said it was simply too difficult to speak about Peter within a project of this magnitude. As for Johnny Kelly and Kenny Hickey, they had apprehension for various reasons. And it seemed like they too were still harboring pain from Peter’s death. Not only did they lose their careers the day Peter died, they lost an incredibly special friend. This has to be respected. Soul on Fire is a story of many different viewpoints, of many different truths and even untruths. I have tried to avoid or correct the untruths wherever possible in telling this story, and where I cannot possibly know the story, I let those who were there tell it for me. Peter would probably ignore or shrug off the kind of attention he gets throughout this book. The sad fact is that he’s not here to pass judgment on it. But the guy was a great sport. He could laugh at himself and did often. I hope he’d laugh at some of this if he was able to read it, and I hope he wouldn’t kill me for using this as an excuse to exalt him. It’s definitely not an attempt to speak for him. Nobody has that authority, although many have tried since his death. Pass the wine jug around wherever you are, Peter. Whoever is in your circle of friends and family now loves you like the rest of us among the living do. We’re all with you, man, laughing and crying and triumphing right along with you. — Jeff Wagner, October 2014

“I do have faith, I just hope when I die I don’t go to Queens.” — Peter Steele, 2007

The black-maned demigod seems invincible up there. His four-string

weapon slung over his left shoulder in battle position, his bellow obeyed by thousands of eager lieges, his presence commanding respect, his every move profound. He has the magnetism of a dictator lording over a rally of 100,000 subjects. In that moment, he is eternal. In that moment, he is all. In that moment, he’s wishing to be home with Mom and Dad in Brooklyn, in his basement bedroom with his cats, power tools, and textbooks. He’s shitting his pants. The stage fright is unbearable. It’s June 28, 1996, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark: the giant and his three cohorts cut a menacing shape onstage, each seeming titanic in size. Thunderous rhythms detonate, ominous melodies ooze, guitars and synths weave crystalline colors, lights pulse … their passion is on fire and exploding for thousands of Europeans to witness. The horde of sophisticated barbarians known as Type O Negative had traveled a long way from their home base, and for once in their cursed career things were on schedule and running smoothly. The audience devoured “Christian Woman,” “Blood and Fire” and other

magic spells the band threw at them. They had arrived on the continent with the hugely successful Bloody Kisses album behind them and a new one, October Rust, chomping at the bit for August release. It would also do well. The black and green crew was adding gold and platinum to its color wheel. The year 1996 was one of innocence lost for the band’s leader, Peter Steele. The bassist, vocalist and songwriter had been on a mission since the dawn of the 1980s. His post-high school band, Fallout, became local Brooklyn heroes, and his malicious Carnivore slammed an ugly fist down on the New York underground in the mid ’80s. When Type O Negative’s first album debuted in 1991, Peter’s vision was fully realized. As the ’90s went on the band became a dominating force in the rock/metal landscape, yet they swam apart from any main stream. Despite massive success, business pressures and personal heartbreaks nearly swallowed Peter whole. While always master of his creative domain, the six foot eight giant wrestled with a number of personal demons and temptations in a protracted struggle that lasted well into the 2000s. He weathered the storm to write and realize a remarkable body of music that exorcized demons for those who listened and believed, but in trying to keep Type O Negative vibrant, and in extending his over-generous hands to anyone around him in need, Peter Steele sometimes neglected to help himself. Helping others was easy—Peter was as adept at that as he was at writing music. In fact, his selflessness became almost as legendary as the music itself. Yet he suffered from depression and used sharply self-deprecating humor to veil his insecurities. Life was hard enough, and he found life in the spotlight even harder. Touring was not at all to his liking. That long slog away from home was nothing Peter ever wanted. But his musical vision made it a necessity, a byproduct of immense talent and relentless creative drive. Peter would have rather spent his days working for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, a job he treasured but had to forsake once the demands of artistic success forced him to make a choice. He was, after all, just a blue-collar boy from Brooklyn. Gold

albums and mass-scale adulation did not alter the fact that his heart was in Midwood, and in Prospect Park, and in the comfortable womb of his lair on Eighteenth Street, his dwelling underneath the family home. As Peter liked to say, he lived “around the Mother Mary on the half shell, past the eight garbage cans, down the crypt-keeper stairs, under the heat pipe and you’re there.” Peter’s talent practically forced him onto the global stage, but the familiarity of his own quiet environs, the simple life he longed for away from the glare of lights and cameras, was what Peter truly thrived on. Peter Thomas Ratajczyk legally became Peter Steele in 1996, but he would always be Peter Thomas Ratajczyk to those who knew him best. Peter Ratajczyk the bookworm, Peter the prankster, Peter the son, brother, uncle, band mate, boyfriend, and pal. Peter—the incredibly generous boy who longed for peace, and when he discovered peace was not an option, harbored a constant and disturbing wish to die.

It seems fitting that Peter was born where novelists, poets, gangsters, and horror pioneers made their mark. Norman Mailer, Al Capone, and H.P. Lovecraft all spent significant time in a section of South Brooklyn called Red Hook. A peninsula sitting at the southern edge of the borough’s downtown district, Red Hook was settled by Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century, giving the area its original name, Roode Hoek, for its reddish soil and distinctive shape. The first major battle in the Revolutionary War following the United States Declaration of Independence was fought there; the Battle of Brooklyn was home to Fort Defiance, a major fort in the battle and one that General George Washington called “small but exceedingly strong.” After the war was won and the British evacuated the area in 1783, Red Hook never saw such conflict again, although it went through periods of drastic change, with upswings in economy and employment, and downfalls too. In 1990 LIFE magazine named it one of the worst

neighborhoods in the United States, and “the crack capital of America.” In an era of prosperity, the Red Hook Recreation Center opened in 1936, as the country was climbing out of the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program was in effect. The fifty-eight-acre area includes a paved path, handball courts, softball fields, a soccer and football field, running track, and the Sol Goldman pool. Maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, its opening was cheered by 40,000 area residents and was instantly popular, especially on weekends, when local workers retreated to the park with their families. Families were started there too. In the summer of 1938, Peter Paul Ratajczyk and Annette Catherine Pallon met at the Sol Goldman pool. Toweringly tall with striking blue eyes and ash-blond hair, Peter was an excellent swimmer and somewhat of a local hero on the ball diamond. He was working as a lifeguard, and Annette cut a figure so beautiful that Peter could not ignore her. Described by her daughters as resembling movie starlets Vivian Leigh and Jean Simmons, Annette quickly fell in love with Peter, and they were married a year later. They had a simple legal service in City Hall on August 10, 1939. Seventeen years later, when enrolling their daughters in Catholic school, the couple was informed they would need a marriage certificate from a proper Catholic wedding before their children could be enrolled. So, in the summer of 1956, they wed again, this time under the church’s watchful eye at Red Hook’s Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church. But it was mere formality; they’d been in love since 1938, and it was a love that lasted until death. Family friend Mark Martin remembers seeing evidence of Peter and Annette’s fondness for one another. “Every day Mr. Ratajczyk would come home from work, he would grab his wife, and the two of them would walk around the corner and around the block every day. You could see that there was true love between the two of them. They were absolutely infatuated with each other.”

Many of Red Hook’s Italian, Irish, and German residents found employment at Todd Shipyards or the nearby Domino and Sucrest sugar refineries. Peter worked at the shipyard, a rigger/ engineer at first, eventually moving up to become a boss, or “snapper.” He worked on the first Queen Mary and some of the enormous oil tankers that rolled in and out of New York City’s ports in the 1950s and ’60s. With the variety of locales from which ships would come, Peter was able to secure exotic gifts for his daughters— umbrellas from Japan, or soapstone that Peter and Annette (“Nettie”) the children would use as chalk. It provided Ratajczyk, 1941 income enough for his small but rapidly (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family) growing family, and there was much to provide for. Peter and Annette were having daughters regularly, one arriving every few years. The first was Annette (nicknamed Nancy), followed by Barbara, Patricia, Pamela, and Cathleen. Around the time of the birth of their second daughter, Barbara in 1944, Peter was drafted into the army at the height of World War II. The Allies were gaining ground against the Axis, and the US increased troop numbers to assure victory. Serving in the Army Corps of Engineers, where he helped build bridges, Peter was also awarded medals for marksmanship. He was honorably discharged on February 15, 1945. Although he served less than a year in the service, Peter lost his job seniority at Todd Shipyards once he returned home. While he was able to secure occasional employment at the yard, he was forced to “shape up” daily and hope for work between steadier, more dependable full-time positions. With his experience in engineering, foundry work, and related specialties, not to mention an impeccable work ethic, the head of the Ratajczyk household always made do for himself, his wife, and five daughters.

In 1962, with a surprise sixth child on the way, nobody got their hopes up that a boy would finally arrive. Except, that is, for Dr. Milton J. Meyer, who hinted to Mrs. Ratajczyk that she should be prepared to have a boy this time. She believed no such thing would happen, but Dr. Meyer’s prediction came true. On January 4, 1962, Peter Ratajczyk was born at Adelphi Hospital in Brooklyn. (His middle name, Thomas, was taken upon confirmation at age eleven, after his mother’s brother Tommy.) Peter was big, even at birth. He later said, “I was born twenty-four inches long and ten pounds. My mother said it was like giving birth to a pumpkin.” Peter came into the world greeted by adoring females, and he adored them right back. This remained a constant throughout his life.

In September 1964, before baby Peter turned three, his father moved the family to the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Situated between Avenues K and L, life on Eighteenth Street was good. Midwood in the 1960s was a microcosm of the American melting pot ideal. Polish, Jewish, Russian, and Italian families peacefully coexisted. Kids played ball in the street, fathers hunched underneath car hoods trying to get the damn things to go, and the occasional block party gave everyone an excuse to mingle en masse. The Ratajczyks were happy in their new neighborhood. As longtime neighbor and family friend Gary Kippel relates, “We’re Jewish; the people next to us and between us are Italian, and then the Ratajczyk family was Polish. And it was very heavily Jewish for many years. Peter’s father once said that he was very comfortable living in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood because there was a family background where, if you’re aware of history, Poland was a very poor country. There were famines and economic hardships. Peter’s father mentioned that there simply was not enough food to go around, and when his family didn’t have food, the Jewish families nearby, who also barely had food, shared what little they had, even

though they came from a different religious background. He would say to me, ‘They were neighbors. Good people.’ He said that most respectfully.” The Ratajczyk family’s heritage is a mixture of Polish on the paternal side and Scottish, Irish, English, and French on the maternal side. While it’s been reported the family carries some Icelandic blood, that’s complete fabrication arising from Peter Thomas’s fascination with and desire to visit Peter’s first Christmas, 1962 Iceland (which he eventually did in (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family) 1999). Despite knowing Polish, Peter’s father insisted the family speak only English in the home. They were proud Americans, after all, although that didn’t mean their cuisine was all American. The family loved kielbasa and babka, as well as a variety of Celtic dishes. Food was plentiful and diverse in the home, and so was music. The handsome Ratajczyk father was six feet five inches tall and possessed a robust singing voice to match. His deep, beautiful baritone belted out ditties such as “Ramona” and “Old Man River” when the family would gather, usually on weekends, for bouts of singing and playing. While he harmonized with his wife (nicknamed Nettie, to distinguish her from the eldest daughter, Annette), other family members, including the parents’ siblings, nieces, and nephews, chimed in on piano, ukulele, mandolin, harmonica, guitar, and tambourine. The anchor of the event would be the family’s player piano, its repertoire covering classical music up to more contemporary fare, such as “Mammy” and “I Don’t Know Why (I Love You Like I Do).” Cathy O’Connor, the youngest of the Ratajczyk daughters, remembers, “On the weekends, after everybody worked so hard to raise their children, people would gather to play music in their homes. We were not trained musicians, but everyone could play

something.” The very young Peter Thomas even got in on the act, playing a comb with paper threaded through its teeth, a sound that resembled the goofy, rattling toot of a kazoo. Music was ever-present in the Ratajczyk household. Nettie would even be singing while taking care of the kids. The sight of her in a housedress and spiked high heels, dancing with a broom, is an image her daughters still remember fondly. This wealth of music left a great impression on young Peter. His sisters were digging into the popular music of the day via 45-rpm records, and it didn’t take long for Peter to follow their lead. Says sister Barbara Stilp, “I remember coming home from school and he’d be sitting on the windowsill, in this great big picture window, with my phonograph. He knew how to play 45s when he was only two years old, maybe younger. He’d be playing Elvis Presley as I was coming in the door, and I’d say ‘What are you doing?’ and he’d say ‘I’m playin’ wekkids.’ He called them his ‘wekkids.’” It was sister Patricia Rowan who first tilted Peter’s ear toward the bass clef: “I was trying to teach him how to dance one time. I said, ‘Peter, listen to the bass line. Every time you hear the bass, that’s when you want to take a step.’” Pat also remembers that, “Peter got his baritone voice from dad, who sang the ‘Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep’ sailor song as a lullaby to baby Pete.” The 1897 song, “Asleep in the Deep,” conveys the fear of drowning at sea. An unusual choice of bedtime music, perhaps, but considering his creative aesthetic later in life, baby Peter may have very knowingly absorbed its dramatic power right there in the crib. It’s easy to imagine his father’s rich baritone softening the song’s tough subject matter, giving assurance that everything was going to be okay: “Loudly the bell in the old tower rings bidding us list to the warning in brings. Sailor, take care! Sailor, take care! Danger is near thee. Beware! Beware! Beware! Beware!”

But little Peter slept soundly those nights. Everything was right in Midwood. There was nothing yet to fear.

As the baby of the family, Peter maintained a close relationship with his parents and five older siblings, despite the frictions that come with any family dynamic. As Peter grew (and grew and grew), his father taught him all he knew, passing his knowledge of construction, machinery, and engines along to his son. Mark Martin recalls, “His father used to have a station wagon, and when Peter was older they would work on that car incessantly. You could see the bond between them. Plus, Peter was his only son, so it was a really, really strong bond.” And his love for mother Nettie was evident; he constantly brought her gifts. In his younger years, Peter presented her with bouquets of flowers, remnants compiled from various neighbors’ gardens. Peter easily absorbed the lessons taught him both in school and church; and indeed, these institutions were intermingled. From kindergarten to eighth grade, he attended Our Lady of Refuge, a Catholic school described by his sisters as much less strict than the Catholic schooling they went through in Red Hook. Barbara notes that, “Our Lady of Refuge had both nuns—Sisters of Mercy—and laypersons as teachers. The Josephite nuns we had were much stricter. They would hit you with a ruler. They were allowed to hit you. Peter’s teachers did not do that. There was no abuse.” Raised Roman Catholic, the family’s church attendance was no more than once weekly, plus holy days of obligation, and while the Christian faith was ever-present, it was not dominant in the family’s life. Despite the reputation of Orthodox Catholicism as a rigorous, demanding faith, the Ratajczyk parents kept things cool. Everyone was baptized and went through all the sacraments and confirmations, but they generally adhered to the basics of any other mainstream Christian denomination: Know your Ten

Commandments; respect others; practice a sound moral code. Simple, easy-to-follow stuff. Peter was a very good student and stayed attentive during church services, which was unusual for his peers. In school he showed an aptitude in math and science, although he preferred reading independently versus whatever the teachers assigned. As with most schools, music was part of the curriculum, and here again Peter dove in and attempted to learn all he could. And his teachers loved him. Cathy explains, “Because Peter was brought up around women, and his nieces were all women, he was very flirtatious from Peter (right) and John the start. He was charming. He Campos hanging out in charmed his teachers. They loved him. Midwood (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family) They seriously loved him.” In an early example of his creative and generous sides conspiring, Peter would corral the neighborhood kids when the school held a half-day, telling them there was no bus to take them home. He’d call a car service, everyone would pile in, and when the car would arrive on Eighteenth Street, he’d run into the house to beg his mother for the fare money. On those days, the kids would arrive home in style, courtesy of Peter with a little help from Nettie. Peter was also extremely bashful. His sister Barbara tells a story that, knowing some of his proclivities later in life, seems almost unbelievable. “He was an extremely modest child,” she says. “He would go to the store for my mother. She wanted, say, two pounds of chicken breasts, and he was ashamed to say ‘breasts’ to the butcher. So he called them ‘chicken chests.’”

While his stoic father provided the example of a strong work ethic and told his boy that he should never let people see him cry, his mother and sisters encouraged Peter’s sensitivity and artistic whims. He was a collector, amassing a healthy coin collection and an assortment of rocks and fossils in addition to a growing heap of books and records. He particularly loved unusual sounds; a favorite record was Disneyland Records’ Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. He underlined his favorites in pen on the back cover: “The Dogs”; “A Collection of Creaks”; “Screams and Groans.” Peter showed aptitude in art and drawing, and enjoyed learning how to be a handyman from his father, who had mastered everything from car engines to deck building. He also showed adeptness with word games, toying with puns, accents, sound effects, and rolled Rs every chance he got; he had a keen ear for sound, too, as Cathy relates, “If you dialed on a push-button phone, he could tell you what numbers you were dialing just by the sound.” Living in as rich a musical environment as the Ratajczyk household, Peter became well-versed in a variety of music styles as the 1960s came to an end. On top of big band swing, show tunes, classical, and pop, he added his own discoveries of the heavier rock music emerging at the time. He was already infatuated with the Beatles, who remained a lifelong fascination, and this greased his wheels for something with similar impact. Sister Pamela Wendt can be credited for first bringing rock and roll into the house, which exposed Peter to hard rockers such as San Diego’s Iron Butterfly and English power trio Cream. His other sisters kept music playing constantly—through this, Peter absorbed the sounds of the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, and Detroit combo MC5. It was Cathy who unwittingly offered the epiphany that changed Peter’s musical life. In late 1970, just before Peter turned nine, she brought home an album titled Paranoid. It was the second release by

a young quartet from Birmingham, England, named Black Sabbath, and this discovery was huge. “I brought Black Sabbath into the house,” she relates. “We were only allowed to play it so loud, except when the parents left, then it got blasted. When ‘Iron Man’ was played for the first time on my record player, Peter ran into my bedroom, grabbed hold of the An early inspiration: Chilling, volume knob, cranked it up loud, Thrilling Sounds of the and stood in front of the stereo Haunted House (Disneyland rocking and singing, ‘I am Iron Records, 1964) Man!’ Honestly, I really think that it started then.” The boy was utterly galvanized by Black Sabbath, unquestionably the heaviest rock band of the day. Tony Iommi’s morbid chords were thick as tar; the band’s rhythm section, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, delivered a forbidding Neanderthal thump, and the chilling, neurotic-sounding vocals of Ozzy Osbourne combined to transport a listener to darkly difficult dimensions. The otherworldly atmosphere that Black Sabbath laid down made a significant impact on Peter, something that profoundly shaped his musical life. By 1973, Peter became interested in playing guitar. He was already toying with a variety of other instruments, but the power of the guitar had become clear. The comb-and-paper kazoo didn’t quite have the impact of a distorted electric six-string. Peter took formal guitar lessons for a few years, but found deeper satisfaction mimicking songs from his favorite records. And he had plenty of time for it. Peter’s sister Cathy was athletic, as were some of his other sisters and many of his peers, and while Peter liked to play street ball, street hockey, paddle ball, and stoop ball, and longed to take part in organized school sports, he was restricted by metal leg

braces. Diagnosed with “pes planus,” or flat-footedness, at age two —a fairly common affliction—Peter’s case required correction. Already an intensely shy young man, the braces, combined with a chunky, husky frame, made him ripe for bullying and name-calling. The awkward preteen years were worsened for Peter by physical conditions beyond his control. Mark Martin notes that Peter’s attitude about the braces was “not to show them. If you didn’t bring them up, he didn’t talk about them. Also, Pete was growing, and he was never comfortable with his height. So the braces were just another thing that people gawked at. He was very self-conscious over all this. More often than not he wore long pants to hide the braces.” A growth spurt in Peter traded boyish chub for awkward preteen lankiness. His frame was suddenly an imposing one, finding him a full head taller than most of his peers, and even boys older than he, yet his shyness and “gentle giant” demeanor kept him on the defensive, pelted with taunts from younger, smaller kids who felt they had something on the gangly Polish boy. Despite being likable to the core, there were still kids in his school and neighborhood who found Peter an easy target for abuse. He gradually withdrew, spending more and more time alone, reading and listening to music. As an introverted kid, Peter dove headlong into these activities. He still played like any other boy, whether it was baseball in the street, casual neighborhood basketball, or roller-skating, but the braces were a barrier to greater agility. Sister Pat relates, “He did whatever he wanted to as best as he could do it. When he couldn’t do it any more than that, he would turn to something else and become an expert at that.” Peter’s leg braces came off just before he turned ten. It would have been a great opportunity to finally pursue sports and become one hell of a basketball or football player, but by that time, team sports were of no interest to him. “He didn’t like organized sports where he had to play on a team,” says Mark Martin. “He wanted everyone to be successful, but he wanted to be the driver of it, so he preferred individual sports that he could work on in his own time and become very good at, and he did.” But Peter concentrated on sports

less and less the farther he got into his teens. Something more important was beckoning. The bullying that made an introverted boy even more introspective, and the braces that had him sitting on the sidelines, pushed Peter into intellectual solitude. He went out of his way to learn everything he could, even away from school. While he always loved the outdoors, he stayed inside a lot. He not only listened to music, he studied it. He not only enjoyed machines, but learned the mechanics behind them. He was fascinated for a while with train sets, which he set up and played with in the basement of the family home. He loved instructional manuals, beyond the assigned textbook reading in school. Sister Barbara recalls, “He was always learning on his own. The more things he could learn, in regard to increasing his intelligence more and more, he would.” That learning included his self-assigned curriculum of total music absorption. The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, King Crimson, the Doors, Santana, and so many more were being spun on his turntable, and the fantastic artwork of the album sleeves added to his experience. This stuff was incredibly exciting to him and offered a variety of sonic portals to explore. Later, image-heavy bands such as Kiss and Devo gave Peter his own ideas about uniformity and identity in a rock context. Gears turned in his head; primordial concepts began to form; he kept playing guitar, learning from the twentieth century’s decibel-driven long-haired masters. “I’d never heard him practice,” Pat recalls. “Then all of a sudden, one day he was down in the basement playing guitar. I don’t know if he was forming it in his mind before he picked up an instrument and actually did it, but all of a sudden it was there.” The braces and bullies that once caused him hurt and embarrassment now provided fuel for his creative fire. Away from sunshine and plugged into pure electricity, Peter Ratajczyk’s transformation was underway.

Life fades away all too fast To live in the past But the pictures of times gone Somehow do live on — “Bleed for Me,” 1981

In 2007 Josh Silver took a walk through Coney Island, “home of the

hot dog, home of the mugging victim.” He offered commentary on its infamous amusement area and attractions such as the Wonder Wheel and the Parachute Jump. Delivered with unimpressed wryness, his mass of wiry hair, epic grayed goatee, multiple piercings, and tattoos barely disguise the gentle, highly intelligent human being underneath. Described variously by people close to him as steady, private, consistent, skeptical, on the ball, sardonic, caustic, visceral, suspicious, an enigma wrapped in a riddle, and like an M&M: hard on the outside and amazingly soft and sweet inside, Josh Silver is an impressive human being, a complicated puzzle, and a tough nut to crack. During the Coney Island jaunt, Silver fixes on the Cyclone rollercoaster. “You’ll never find me on the Cyclone,” he says, “but you might find a few decapitated young people who stood up and thought they were cool and ended up headless. There have been a number

of deaths on this wonderful attraction. It’s rickety and it sucks, and I wouldn’t get on it if my life depended on it.” He buys one of the camera crew a ticket to ride the Cyclone, and hands it over. “Ticket to death. Here you go. Enjoy.” At the time of this amusing waltz through Coney Island, Silver had, for many years, been trudging through the trenches and scaling the heights of rock infamy with his Brooklyn-based band. An excellent keyboardist, Silver is possibly an even more gifted producer. Given his mordant humor and keen understanding of music, he was bound to forge a long-lasting bond with another complex individual on the block of Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood where he grew up. The yin and yang relationship between Josh Silver and Peter Ratajczyk started when they were ten years old. Peter was digging into music and science fiction and all those other escapes that made the awkward preteen years worth enduring, and Josh fully related. Josh Silver, born November 14, 1962, met Peter Ratajczyk in 1972. That year the Silver family moved to the same block the Ratajczyk’s lived on, East Eighteenth Street in Midwood. Even though the Ratajczyk working-class life was in contrast to the Silver’s more professional one (his father was dean at a local college, his mother a psychologist), the boys’ love of music, combined with their intelligence and complementary sense of humor took root quickly to form a kinship that lasted decades. Sometimes tumultuous and tense, like the love between brothers, their partnership was kismet— Josh was the black to Peter’s green and, when it mattered most, the wind that fanned the flames of Peter’s fire.

A couple years prior to meeting Josh, Peter found an ally in another neighborhood kid who shared his fascinations. The fourthgrade classroom of Our Lady of Refuge brought Peter and John Campos together. The pair discovered similar tastes in music, movies, and humor, and it didn’t take long before they were playing

music together, first in church and later in a more twisted secular project. With a clear and growing interest, perhaps even obsession with music, various family members encouraged Peter to take guitar lessons when he was eleven years old. Taught by local teacher Charlie Rampino, who made house calls to the homes of his students, Peter and his niece Nancy took lessons together, with guitars bought by Peter’s oldest sister and Nancy’s mother, Annette, who also paid for the lessons. Peter and Nancy sometimes argued about who was to take the 7:00 p.m. lesson and who would get to watch Barney Miller, which aired at the same time. John Campos also began taking guitar lessons, adapting easily to the instrument and quickly becoming something of a prodigy. For the next several years the boys absorbed all the knowledge they could about their six-string acoustic guitars. Peter and John, together with Nancy and neighborhood friend Susan Penta, made their first public appearances as musicians in church. Sister Theresa Kelly directed the kids in practice every Wednesday, with the fruits of their rehearsals heard regularly on Sundays at Our Lady of Refuge’s Folk Mass. John remembers how Peter, ever the subversive, would initiate playing forbidden music in church. “It’s me and Peter playing guitar for the Sunday morning Mass. We’re both sitting there, we’re in a Catholic Church, and Peter leans over and goes, ‘Let’s play “Paranoid.”’ So we both start playing Black Sabbath at the 10:00 Mass on Sunday morning. That kind of sums Peter up right there.” Peter and John’s acoustic guitars were eventually usurped by the tantalizing lure of electric ones and the amplifiers that gave them the power of volume. Peter continued to play guitar throughout his teen years, but early into his forays with electric instruments he became a bass player. It was a move made out of total necessity. By age thirteen, Peter was jamming with Josh Silver. Josh, who has said he was “forced” to take piano lessons, started his study of the instrument at age eight (later noting that he gradually became “less concerned with actual playing than with how the overall band sounds.”) Decoding the secrets of their heroes by playing along to

albums, the guys worked up a repertoire of cover songs, and the group of neighborhood friends starting making noise in the Silver household. Josh shared Peter’s fascination with the Beatles and Black Sabbath, and he also brought a love of Deep Purple and Kiss into the mix. It was in this band that Peter took up the instrument he eventually became synonymous with. “I started to play bass when I was about thirteen,” Peter remembered later. “I was in a band with Josh. I was a temporary rhythm guitarist. They were looking for a bass player, and as soon as they found one, they were going to kick me out. So I ran to the store. I was playing left-handed at the time and traded my guitar for a bass. The asshole at the store would not trade me for the left-handed bass because it was more expensive than the right. He said, ‘Take the right-handed bass and you’ll learn to play it.’ I did, but that’s the only thing I do right-handed.” It was a perfect fit. Peter had already been drawn to bass clef instruments like the sousaphone tuba and the trombone in school— he even toyed with an upright bass in band class—and he embraced the electric bass. With the talents of Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath, Paul McCartney of the Beatles, and Roger Glover of Deep Purple guiding his way, the new bassist set his sights high and proved to be a natural on the four-string. Naming Josh and Peter’s band proved challenging. They went by different monikers depending on the day. The name that stuck the longest was Aggression, but they also dubbed themselves Hot Ice and, for an even briefer time, Children of the Grave. With Peter on bass and Josh on keyboards, they cycled through singers, guitarists, and drummers with incredible frequency. As Josh notes, “during that time, members were changed more often than underwear.” Once the kids had their bearings and could keep time together without messing up too badly, they began gigging. Sister Pat relates, “I was his first roadie. I had a VW Bug, and all of their equipment could fit in my car. They used to play lunchtime at some of the schools. They would get special permission to perform. I’d bring the equipment for them, and they would set up and play during

lunchtime, and I would take the stuff home. I would stay to watch them too.” Although they didn’t have much to promote, they promoted themselves aggressively. A fourth grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 199, in 1976, Bobby Tanzilo remembers Hot Ice playing at his school. “For some reason that remains a mystery to me; the school booked Hot Ice to play in the auditorium during the school day. I knew nothing of them, though I remember seeing their gig posters pasted up on poles in the neighborhood. They were full-on rock and roll—the clothes, the posture, everything—and seeing it come alive onstage before my very eyes most certainly helped fuel my passion for music. They seemed older and worldlier and living the rock and roll dream. It was only later that I thought about how influential this band I knew so little about was to me. The show must have been my first concert.” Even if it was in front of impressionable rock and roll newbies and not a seasoned, older rock audience, Hot Ice, just kids themselves, made an impact. Peter continued to explore his new instrument with fervor. Most bassists begin on guitar first, Peter included, but even as a youngster he had a philosophy about the bass, including its role in a rock band, its attraction as a player and listener, its greatest practitioners, and what distinguishes it from the six-string guitar. He said that “a bass line should be a bridge between melody and rhythm, and Paul McCartney’s bass lines are counterpoint. He fulfills his bass function, but at the same time he says something without interfering with the vocal line. What I don’t like is when bass players play like guitar players. You gotta work with the drummer.” Whenever he talked of McCartney and his influence, Peter took care to emphasize how difficult it is to play bass and sing a complementary but different melody on top of it. He never gave himself credit for doing the same thing, especially as a left-handed person who taught himself to play right-handed. Peter was far too humble to take credit for his considerable musical talent. He preferred to point out the talents of others, even if he possessed the same ability.

Another major influence, Geezer Butler’s work in Black Sabbath is something Peter upheld as the pinnacle of bass playing. “The ultimate clean bass sound is Geezer’s in ‘Planet Caravan.’ You can hear his fingers hitting the string, and you can hear the string buzzing a little on the fret … and that’s a cool sound.” Butler showed Peter and the rest of the rock audience that the bass needn’t be a mere background rumble, that it could take charge and deliver its own caustic splash of color onto the rock and roll canvas. Aggression/Hot Ice/Children of the Grave was nothing more than a few kids banging away on instruments, yet even in this modest form, Peter and Josh had a clear directive, bent on making an impact by not only learning the songs of their heroes, but their moves and their volume. Peter’s conceptual sense of organization and design could be seen in the T-shirts he created for the unit. Although they were only playing cover material, a visual identity was already forming in Peter’s mind. He created a shirt that, while primitive, pointed the way for more serious endeavors far down the road. Positioning the words “HOT” and “ICE” in a right angle to each another, Peter would take the design to its logical limit later in his career. For now, Josh and Peter’s band was content to jam on Beatles and Black Sabbath songs and have their own T-shirts to wear as a uniform. Creative restlessness would come to define Peter’s artistic life. As such, change came quickly. His and Josh’s band dissolved as rapidly as it formed. There were other neighbor kids besides Josh and Peter playing instruments, kids as serious about it as they were, and pretty soon a core of four members solidified into a new unit. John Campos came into the fold, and they were fortunate to find another neighborhood kid into The Northern Lights lineup before their kind of rock. It was even they were Northern Lights.

L to r: Josh Silver, Dennis Rizzo, luckier that Dennis Rizzo actually Peter, John Campos (used by owned a drum kit. Equipment was permission of the Ratajczyk family) expensive, and the kids coveted any piece of it they could get. Family friend Mark Mueller gave Peter his first amplifier, and the boys acquired gear when and however they could. Jam sessions continued, with the kids lugging equipment between the Silver and Ratajczyk households on a regular basis. They dubbed the quartet with the celestial designation Northern Lights.

Keeping it simple: Northern Lights business card, circa 1978

“In the early years of his life, Peter was on the shy side and his humor was already very self-deprecating.” John Campos remembers the mid ’70s, hanging out with Peter, right at the point where they were trading in their baseball bats and roller skates for guitars and records. “He was extremely intelligent and so intuitive. Even though he was on the quiet side, he could tell when people were bullshitting him. He was also an avid music listener. We would sit there and listen to the Beatles, Black Sabbath, all the groups that were influential from the ’60s and ’70s, and he would analyze it all. He would pick up stuff from it, and we would show each other what we learned.” Northern Lights grew out of the grammar school circuit quickly and were soon playing local high schools. They were the hot teenage band of the day, at least to those in the Midwood section of Brooklyn who were witness to their sets. They developed a strong repertoire and showcased themselves at block parties, high schools,

and local Mardi Gras celebrations. There were even some gigs in local bars and clubs. But Northern Lights was comprised of extraordinarily ambitious kids. They wanted more, and this ambition caused the first rift in their unit. They had differing ideas about exactly what they wanted and how to get it. They might have been a happening name in Midwood, but they didn’t mean shit in nearby Flatbush and Bensonhurst. World domination was a long way away.

“He was like a Frank Zappa, a Syd Barrett, or a Brian Wilson to me,” says Peter’s sister Cathy of her brother’s creative vision. She was in awe of her brother from a young age, as were all of his sisters. And while those kinds of comparisons wouldn’t quite apply to Peter circa 1978—Northern Lights was still just a cover band—once he started writing original music, a new Peter began to emerge. And when the first bursts of his creative vision wormed into the consciousness of those around him, it brought him entirely new levels of respect. Although still in its nascent stages, Peter had a sense of exactly how everything should be, down to the tiniest details. “Most of the cover song choices were democratic,” says Rizzo. “But then, near the end of Northern Lights, I saw Peter taking a much stronger role as a leader, saying he was going to write original songs, and he wanted to play gigs performing those songs. I think that’s when the conversion occurred, from kids playing covers to the development of Peter as a leader and a songwriter.” It wouldn’t be long before Peter’s sense of symmetry and uniformity took over entirely. This would mean eventually ditching his trademark white jeans and feathered brown hair along with the cover band routine. He was starting to aim for something more imposing, more his own, something powerful, unified, and original. Wheels were spinning in that restless mind.

Peter in Northern Lights, entertaining the gathered Midwood masses at the neighborhood’s annual Mardi Gras celebration; right, a boy in the trees, before he was the Green Man.

In June 1978, at the age of sixteen, the budding bassist and songwriter secured his first job at Crazy Joe’s Metalworks on Quentin Road in Midwood. There, Peter constructed and designed iron security gates, doors, staircases, and custom car and motorcycle parts. As a means of keeping himself in bass strings, amplifiers and other necessary weaponry, it did the trick. This was Peter’s first real job, and it kept him gainfully employed for nearly five years. He showed a committed work ethic and took it seriously— having a father who provided a shining example of the dependable worker instilled a sense of responsibility that stuck with Peter throughout his life. The job ended in February 1983, at which time, according to Peter, “Crazy Joe really went crazy and was committed to G Ward, Kings County Hospital. He lost the business, and I was forced to find other work.” In the autumn of 1979, during Peter’s senior year at Edward R. Murrow High School, Northern Lights transitioned from playing covers to performing original material. With that evolution a new

identity for the band was forged. They would henceforth be known as Fallout. A much less hippie-ish moniker than Northern Lights, the name Fallout was well-suited to their dark, edgy, new songs and the imagery of paranoia and apocalypse they intended to convey. The band adopted the fallout shelter design to create a simple but strong visual impact: three triangles arranged in a circle. Its symmetry spoke to Peter, who very much liked to have things in just the right order. The symbol’s communication of warning, disaster, and contamination was exactly the kind of dystopian unease he wanted the new band to convey. With the foundational influence of the Beatles, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, and Kiss, and more recent inspirations as widespread as Van Halen, Devo, and the Cars, Fallout emerged from the sublevel basements they practiced in with a solidified conceptual framework in place: a heavy-metalmeets-new-wave mutation with lyrics based on various horror, sci-fi, and film noir movies. Campos co-wrote much of the new material with Peter, and he recalls the bassist’s penchant for fusing pop-like accessibility with uncomfortable themes. “Fallout was meant to be apocalyptic,” he says. “It was goth before goth rock even had a name.” But Peter grew up listening to pop music; he loved the Beatles and all those ’70s singles, so he had this sense of melody, but he was also touching on topics that were kind of taboo, but it was very wellveiled. I remember saying to him, ‘Peter, you’re writing these sick lyrics, but musically it’s a pop song.’” This was a creative combination that served Peter very well in later years. The newly-christened Fallout was excited about playing original material such as “Bleed for Me,” “Out of Control,” and “Batteries Not Included,” but drummer Rizzo was reluctant to proceed into these uncharted waters. He remembers, “In order to play gigs, we had to hire a guy with a van, and his name was Tommy. Cool guy, a rocker. He would take us from gig to gig. He invited me to watch his band, and Tommy’s band was absolutely unbelievable.” Although Rizzo doesn’t remember the name of that band, he remembers their impact.

Peter and his 5 sisters, approx. 1980, l to r (oldest to youngest): Annette, Barbara, Patricia, Pamela, Cathleen, Peter (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family)

“I saw Tommy’s band,” he recalls, “and went back to my band and said, ‘Listen, I know we’re playin’ out, I know you guys are way into this, but Tommy, our van driver, his band is great, but they’re doing originals and they’re not going anywhere, they’re playing local small venues. What are we doin’?’ That turned into a discussion about how I wanted to turn the band into more of a wedding band, get some horns. You know, ‘Should we create a band where we play covers and make some money?’ But we had started playing original songs, and Peter and Josh said, ‘If we’re gonna make this a career, we’re goin’ for it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t.’” Rizzo truly could not. It was late 1979. He was on his way to college, he had a job, he played sports, and had a girlfriend. Time did not allow for him to follow the rock star dream. Enter Louie Beato.

Louis Beato was born July 17, 1963, in Brooklyn, a year and a half after baby Peter dropped into Red Hook and a year before the

Ratajczyks moved to Midwood. Beato graduated from Nazareth Regional High School, a Catholic school in East Flatbush, not far from Midwood. As a junior at Nazareth, Beato had his own band and went looking for a bass player. Not only did he find what he was looking for, he found a whole new band to jam with. “I went to [music store] Sam Ash, on Coney Island Avenue and King’s Highway. They had a bulletin board where musicians would post availability, and I got a few names off there. But I also saw an ad for this band Fallout, who were looking for a drummer.” Beato’s band was just a bunch of friends in a garage, but Fallout appeared to be more established, despite Beato never having heard of them before. “I convinced myself on the way home that I should give them a call,” he says, “and it turned out to be Peter’s number on that ad. We spoke on the phone for quite a while. He asked if I knew his guitarist, John Campos.” Beato didn’t know him, but he certainly knew of him. Campos would hang around Louie’s high school running track, playing Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin songs on his acoustic guitar. “So I was really looking forward to auditioning for the band, just because John Campos was in it.” The existing Fallout trio usually met in Silver’s basement, although the band volleyed back and forth between there and the Ratajczyk home. As Campos relates, “It kind of depended, because people would get pissed off over the volume, and then we would get kicked out and have to go somewhere else for a little while. Some of it was in Peter’s basement, some of it was in Josh’s.” Beato fit in perfectly, although he was initially put off by Silver. “Josh is somebody you need to get to know, and if he wants to be your friend, he’ll be a great friend. If he doesn’t want to be your friend, he’ll brush you off, not to be mean, just indifferent. My first impression was not a good one. I arrived at his house to do the audition. I rang the bell and he came to the door and was like, ‘You’re the drummer? Around the back.’ No ‘Hey, my name’s Josh, your name’s Louie.’ No introduction. Very cut and dried. But then Josh became a really good friend.” The new Fallout began rehearsing in earnest, and songs like “Rock Hard,” “Parthenophagia,” and the Sabbath-esque “Under the

Wheels” quickly took shape. The latter song dealt the gory details of death by subway train, while “Parthenophagia” was a word Peter invented. The first half of the word suggests “parthenogenesis,” a form of reproduction in which an unfertilized egg develops into a new individual. This recalls the Biblical story of the birth of Jesus Christ, a concept that would fascinate and sometimes trouble Peter, as would many of the precepts of Christian faith. The “-phagia” suffix, meaning to “to eat,” brings the odd title into focus: “Parthenophagia” is the consumption of an unfertilized ovum. While the Fallout ad in Brooklyn music actual lyrics are lost to time, this was paper. Note misspelling of the sign of an original and unique Peter’s last name, mind that favored bizarre topics, with and no vocal credit religious overtones. Peter’s fascination with vocabulary was a constant feature of his writing. His sister Cathy recalls that, “Peter always had a play on words. When that band the Turtles came out with ‘So Happy Together,’ Peter’s interpretation was, ‘So Happy To Get Her.’” Puns and other wordplay were particularly fascinating to Peter, and would permeate his whole life. A close friend of Peter’s confirms his friend’s fascination. “We had this pun game where we’d serve it over to the other person and the person would have to make a pun back. One of the topics would be suicide, and you’d say, ‘I don’t have time to hang around right now.’ That led to something like ‘Pete, don’t say that, you’ll make me really cross.’ Finally we’d get down to ‘would [wood] you stop doing that?’ It was sort of like verbal chess.” New songs kept coming from the creative epicenter of Peter and John Campos, complete with strange titles, including “Equinox,”

“Druid,” “Fallout,” “Sometimes They Come Back,” and “Walter Todd.” The latter title is particularly odd, its subject matter something the other members of Fallout don’t recall. Could it be about twentiethcentury ornithologist Walter Edmond Clyde Todd? Peter did love nature and animals, and he has written about stranger things…

Peter and Josh’s first cover bands provided the necessary growing pains that eventually cemented Fallout’s foundation. Fallout became local legends, and it was only partly on the strength of their music—much of the band’s success was due to the special working relationship that existed between Peter and Josh. John Campos had an up-close view into what made their chemistry work. “Peter was the artistic guy. He didn’t really care about the business aspect. He was always focused on writing and creating. That was his goal. Josh, on the other hand, was much more business oriented. He wanted to promote. He wanted to put together a marketing plan. So the two guys together balanced each other out. They needed each other, and it worked.” Peter’s sister Pat characterizes Josh as “a genius” and “an extremely talented guy.” And there was a kind of familial bond there. “Josh’s mother loved Peter, and my mother loved Josh. They were truly like brothers.” Cathy notes that, “Josh and Peter were a lot alike. They were both very thickheaded, very controlling, and very, very smart. Yet humble.” Fallout’s live shows in Brooklyn were often successful thanks to the band’s aggressive promotional efforts. Fallout had a particular look, a concept, a vibe. It was not only a real band in terms of original material, but their attempts to create an escapist world, or something more along the lines of speculative science fiction, resonated with rock fans who weren’t totally aligned with the disco craze that dominated the late ’70s and early ’80s. Longtime friend and collaborator Richard Termini states, “Peter and Josh both had a great talent for design and promotion. Their

posters, buttons, and artwork for the band were terrific. They and their crew would poster Brooklyn like no other band around. I suspect there are still places with their posters stuck to a wall here or there.” Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1956, it was Richard Termini who first recorded Peter’s music. A Brooklyn native who spent some of his youth in Orange County, California, and now lives in Australia, Termini played in a number of bands throughout the ’70s, most notably Dune, and the New York Space Ensemble (the latter name of which he continues to record under today). Veering between progressive, avant-garde, electronic, and new wave music, Termini specialized in keyboards and was a student of recording technique. In 1977 he built and operated Soundscape Recording Studio on Avenue M and East Eighteenth Street in Brooklyn. In 1979, Termini’s then-wife, Vicki Zollo, also the singer for Dune, saw Fallout playing at a street fair. She approached the band and told them about her husband’s studio. “I first heard Fallout play in Josh’s basement after meeting them at my place,” remembers Termini. “I thought they were great and made a deal with Josh to record them. It wasn’t long before I was doing their live sound and working as their producer. By the way,” he adds, “none of them had any tattoos at this time!”1 Termini saw serious potential in the young band. “This was a time when punk and disco ruled, but I still had a place in my heart for heavy metal, and there were few all-original bands playing metal around Brooklyn and New York as far as I could hear. Until I met Peter, Josh, John, and Louie. Fallout was fantastic. They were the real thing. A real band with real writers. Peter was the main writer and idea man with John contributing. The big sweeping concepts of the pieces were Peter’s, but on some stuff John would contribute and add extra melodic polish and amazing guitar solos. ‘Batteries Not Included’ is a great little sci-fi story set to progressive metal.” Peter’s talent as a bass player was also recognized by the more experienced, slightly older Termini. “Peter had a great way with words, but he was also a very good bass player, clearly influenced

by Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler. Peter liked to design and modify his basses. I remember him cutting big holes in his bass and painting it himself. He added chains and such. He was always playing around with his gear like that. He used to rip the strings off the bass with his bare hands at the end of the shows.”2 When the bass strings were still on, Termini captured Peter’s instrument on tape, along with the rest of the Fallout ensemble. At the time, Soundscape had a dual 4-track setup (making it, essentially, an 8-track studio), which was good enough for them, and probably seemed like Abbey Road to a band of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who had never seen the inside of a recording studio before. Fallout recorded one song per session with Termini, spread out over the course of a year. From late 1979 to the spring of 1981, five songs were demoed: “Rock Hard,” “Batteries Not Included,” “Parthenophagia” (which evolved into the also-recorded “Executioner”), “Under the Wheels,” “Bleed for Me,” and “Fallout,” plus various incomplete odds and ends. For the band’s eponymous song, Termini says, “I did what was called the ‘World War Three Soundscape’ using my Oberheim TVS-1 synthesizer and added to this the voices and screams of the band, the roadies, and their girlfriends.” It was a soundtrack-esque bit that Peter and Termini would revisit in a later project. Where are the Soundscape session tapes now? Termini reveals, “All those recordings were in the possession of Josh Silver. I’ve asked him about this over the years, about cleaning them up and releasing them, but he doesn’t want to do that. The last time anyone asked Josh about the recordings he said they were lost. I doubt that, but he obviously doesn’t want to release them.” Immortalizing their music on tape empowered the band, even if the material wasn’t released to the public. And they began making waves in earnest with their live shows. Along with various poster Homemade Fallout buttons designs, the band created a wide variety of buttons, further cementing the Fallout identity. While the first buttons

were made by Silver and Termini using the Pressman Mad Fad Button Making Machine, Fallout’s penchant for more, bigger, and better led them to eventually purchase a more professional handoperated button maker. Termini remembers that one of their major button-making days was December 8, 1980—the day John Lennon was shot and killed in neighboring Manhattan.

Fallout shows were designed to make an unforgettable impact. The volume was crushing and the presence each member exuded was beyond his years. In addition to Peter’s string-destroying rampage, the end of Fallout’s set found Silver obliterating his keyboard setup, a frenzied rage that bands like the Who and Kiss popularized before them. Fallout made it appear as if the band had an endless amount of money with which to buy a new keyboard after every single show, but drummer Beato says that “Josh had a hook with Sam Ash where he would get a keyboard that was on the disabled list and purchase it for fifteen or twenty dollars. He would have it onstage and make it look like he was actually playing it. He had a whole rack of keyboards, and that would be the one he would pick up and smash. It wasn’t like we were smashing functional, new equipment.” Campos adds, “There was always an element of destruction going on at any one of our shows. Something was always being destroyed, and Peter kind of formed his own persona. He was telling people from the stage, ‘Get on your knees before me! Bow to us … even though I suck!’ He had that going on already.” Peter’s onstage presence was part of the Fallout appeal. Already standing a full six foot eight at eighteen years of age, Peter’s frame was imposing. Standing on an elevated stage, he seemed positively superhuman. His lengthening hair still sandy brown, and just fresh out of a long phase of wearing white denim jeans, Peter might have seemed a god up there, even that early on, but it was an image he was at odds with. It was a position borne of necessity, and was

weirdly ironic—the very stage that gave Peter larger-than-life presence was the same one he was mortified to step onto. “Peter had such a presence when he was performing, even as a teenager,” relates Campos, “but he was a shy person, so this persona he had was something he hid behind. He would put on this persona that wasn’t really him. The joke was on everyone else. He was this shy, intelligent genius, and that’s how he dealt with the attention.” Campos recognizes this as something that was necessary for Peter not only in Fallout, but in the coming years when there was far more attention on the bassist. “He was always in the spotlight, in a way, because of his size, and there was always someone challenging him because he was a big guy, so that became part of the persona. He had to step up and be this guy with that tough exterior, but deep down inside he always remained that person that I knew, which was this reserved, self-deprecating, extremely intelligent genius.” Of the “genius” description, Termini fine-tunes it. “Peter was a very smart, intuitively creative and visceral talent. He had a sincere interest in discovering the truth about things and was a very curious person. He loved words, language, science, and history as much as he loved music.” Fallout’s music was getting to the point where it looked like bigger things were on the horizon. Termini recalls the chemistry that made it happen. “Josh and Peter tended to go into a dark place, which worked very well for the general vibe they were after. Fallout was such a great mix. Peter was dark, as was Josh. They could be funny, but it was still dark humor. John was much more upbeat and had just a bit of optimism, which was a nice balance. And Louie was just great. All power. The perfect drummer for that band.” Fallout played often at Zappa’s. Located on Thirty-sixth Street and Clinton Road, the Brooklyn club was one of the most popular haunts at the time, although the now-infamous L’Amour overtook it by 1984. Another Brooklyn boy, Stan Pillis, was a few years younger than Peter and a huge Fallout fan. He saw the band play Zappa’s and various street fairs. As a young guitarist, Pillis was enamored

with John Campos. “He was very inspirational to me, as a player. John just had this punk rock attitude: ‘You can do this, anyone can do this, we’re fans of rock, you’re a fan of rock, you can do this, too.’ John was great that way.” Pillis still has one of the Fallout buttons they gave out during shows, and remembers the band’s front man as being particularly impressive. After he befriended the bassist, Stan came to understand the depth of Peter’s vision. “He always had these big ideas. The band should be loud and powerful, and he wanted lots of lights. He just had this thing with being so big. Mind you, he was playing in bars and clubs at this time, but he just had this thing of, ‘It should be a big show, all the time.’ Not only was he into the musicality of it, he was also into the image.” Usually Fallout’s intertwined concept of image and music worked brilliantly; other times it fell embarrassingly flat. Drummer Louie Beato recalls, “We played a Battle of the Bands. It was a weekend event, and I think there were three bands each night. It was at a movie theater on Eighteenth Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street in Brooklyn called the Walker Theater. I can’t even remember what the prize was, but it was a hugely promoted event. All the bands played original music, from Southern rock to heavy metal. We actually made costumes for this particular show. It was gonna be a big deal to us. There were going to be, like, a thousand people there. So we rented a hearse to arrive at the show in. We had this image of us arriving in this hearse and a crowd of people outside. We’d pull up right to the curb and get out, let all the people see us, photos being taken and whatnot. But it was actually quite pathetic. We pulled up to the theater and there were all these cars parked in front, so we had to double-park. We get out of the back, and there’s no one there because everybody is already inside. It was this whole elaborate plan that just fell on deaf eyes and ears.” They triumphed elsewhere, though, when the band landed a few gigs opening for Twisted Sister. The Long Island band struck global gold in 1984 with their third album, Stay Hungry, but in 1981 Twisted Sister was only popular in the New York/New Jersey region. Still, they packed every club they played, mixing original tunes with

covers of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin favorites. A couple of the Twisted Sister/Fallout gigs occurred at 2001 Odyssey on Sixty-fourth Street in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, a club immortalized in Saturday Night Fever four years prior. It was 1981, an era when disco was still king, at least in Brooklyn, and as Campos describes, “We grew up in a time where the disco people hated the rock people, especially in Brooklyn. So if you had long hair in Brooklyn at that time, it was rough.” Despite the odds, Fallout was proving to be a popular band among the kids who stuck by the durability of hard rock and early heavy metal. The band decided they needed to take the next step and get a real record out, but their efforts in shopping themselves to labels were entirely unsuccessful. So, with the band members’ knowledge of the grassroots heavy metal movement happening in Britain at the time, where bands were self-releasing their own 7inches and LPs, they decided to do the same. Emboldened by a loan from Josh Silver’s father, Fallout took matters into their own hands. The keyboardist formed Silver Records and financed the recording and release of two of their strongest songs. Once again enlisting the help of Richard Termini, everyone involved felt that, while Soundscape worked well as a testing ground, a bigger, more professional studio was needed to capture Fallout’s grand designs. After hiring audio engineer William Wittman, the band entered Sound Mixers in Manhattan to lay down a curiously rocking song about a body in postmortem, called “Rock Hard,” and Peter’s zany sci-fi metal-meets-new-wave epic, “Batteries Not Included.” The necrophilic themes in “Rock Hard” formed a thematic basis for much of what Peter would obsess on in later compositions: lamentation of a dying or dead loved one, and the inability to accept it and let it be. In hindsight, Termini regrets choosing Wittman and a more expensive studio. “I made arrangements to get a 24-track studio on the cheap. Josh was paying for all this, so I did not take a fee, but we did have to pay Wittman and the studio. I don’t think I ever took money from them for anything. It was my goal to help Fallout get a proper deal, and I would produce that record, and then I would expect my producer’s share from the major record deal and sales.

This was all on what they call ‘spec,’ or speculation. I was working for free toward a future goal.”

Immortalized onto vinyl: The 1981 Fallout single

Unless Silver changes his mind, the world will never know if the Soundscape demos are actually better than the Sound Mixers session. But Termini says, “the Soundscape recordings felt like the band. I made a deal with William Wittman that he would give us this very expensive studio at a very cheap rate in exchange for his getting a production credit, but this was a mistake. He rushed us out the door. He had no idea what the band was about. His lack of understanding was enough to negatively affect the performance, and Peter’s in particular. Peter didn’t like being rushed, and frankly should not have been rushed. At the session for the single he was not free to be himself, and that’s a shame.” The A side of “Rock Hard” sounded like the Cars trying their hand at heavy metal, a fun little tune as catchy as it is perverted, complete with Peter using an affected British accent. His young voice was clearly less commanding than it would become, but still carried unmistakable Peter-isms such as rolled Rs and lyrics that could have been part of any number of later compositions: “It feels so good it goes straight to my brain / Those tears come pouring out … not unlike like the rain.” It’s the single’s B side that shows a truly original band coming through. “Batteries Not Included” is a frenzied four minutes of cyber sci-fi madness delivered by Peter’s bellowing baritone voice,

stronger than on the A side, laid over a relatively complex arrangement that features cold slabs of keyboard and a tight bunch of angular yet grooving riffs and rhythms. Peter’s bass is clean and clinical as he spits out unorthodox verbiage. His fascination with language, as well as his interest in dystopian and post-nuclear war concepts, results in stanzas such as “Iconoclastic polyplastic / All mechanic pro-satanic,” and “Android-robot-cyborg-monsters all break down and cry / For psychotic computers have run out of time.” It was truly original in musical and lyrical scope, not at all representative of anything happening in rock music at that time. The song fades out after the four-minute mark, leaving the nagging feeling that there’s more to it than we’re allowed to hear. “‘Batteries Not Included’ was originally six minutes long,” reveals Termini, “but I let myself get talked into cutting it down for a ‘single,’ as if that really mattered in this case. I was wrong for letting that happen. It should have been the full-length version rather than the terrible edit that is there.” Pressed in a run of 500 copies in 1981, the single’s sleeve features a busty girl in a fishnet shirt and a gasmask concealing her face, and it has since become a highly coveted collector’s item. At the time, the band had only moderate success selling the single at shows and on consignment at local shops like Zigzag Records and Bleecker Bob’s. While it seems unfathomable now, many of the 7inches were given away; the band simply wasn’t able to unload them all back then. These days it fetches big bucks. It was once auctioned off for $900 on eBay and typically sells for around $500 whenever one comes on the market.

As Fallout was attempting to reach the proverbial “next level,” Peter Ratajczyk, son, brother, and friend, was continuing a safe and secure life. Upon graduating high school in June 1980, he continued working at Crazy Joe’s Metalworks and remained focused on band

activities. In late October 1980, he met Mardie Sheiken, a fourteenyear-old Midwood resident and student at Edward R. Murrow. Earlier that month, Peter and Mardie Sheiken locked eyes as strangers on the subway’s D line. She and a friend got on the train at Brighton Beach and were heading into Manhattan. Peter and Josh stepped on next and sat across from the girls. As Sheiken remembers, “He gets on the train, and my thought was, ‘That’s the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen in my life.’ He was with Josh, and they got off at Avenue M. He stood there as the doors closed and I just stared at him. My friend was talkin’ and talkin’, and I interrupted her and said, ‘I should have said something to him.’” On October 24, Fallout played a Battle of the Bands at Sheiken’s school. A girl named Marlene informed her that she had a boyfriend in Fallout. Sheiken asked her, “Who’s your boyfriend?” and the girl pointed to the tall bassist/singer. Sheiken was stunned, recognizing him as the “beautiful boy” she’d seen on the train. After the band’s set, in an act of almost uncharacteristic forwardness, Peter walked up to Sheiken and said, “You’re the girl from the train.” The other girl, Marlene, is perhaps the first known case of a woman claiming ownership of Peter when there was nothing there at all—just a phenomenon of romantic illusion that would occur numerous times throughout his life. By the next day Peter and Mardie had become inseparable. It was not only the beginning of the first real relationship for both of them, but they eventually lost their virginity to one another, six weeks shy of Peter’s nineteenth birthday. Peter was a relatively late bloomer, due to shyness, no doubt, but once he was involved, his focus was total. Sheiken found Peter to be extremely loving, even possessive in a positive sense. “When he was with you, he was wholly with you,” Mardie notes. “Nobody else existed. He devoted himself wholly to people, but he also got disappointed in people very quickly.” The two remained close for decades, long after their romantic relationship ended. Sheiken doesn’t remember if Fallout won the Battle of the Bands that day in October 1980. “I have no idea. My eyes were only on Peter.”

The summer of 1981 found Fallout at critical mass. While the 7inch single established them as a legitimate local force, the success of their shows varied wildly. John Campos recalls, “We would do a show with Twisted Sister”—always a packed house—“and then the next week we’d be back playing some bar.” And it wasn’t easy packing any Brooklyn club playing original material. “We’re trying to do original music, but we, and especially Peter, were way ahead of our time. We just didn’t fit in. When people saw us they were somewhat in awe, because we were all really good musicians, but no one was getting it. The final shows for Fallout, there were maybe ten people there, when before we had been filling rooms,” says Campos. The failure of Fallout to find record label interest was not for lack of trying, at least not on the part of their biggest supporter, Richard Termini. “Every label I took their demos to—CBS, Epic, Polygram, RCA, MCA—told me there was no market for metal. If I had known about or understood the small labels, things might have been different, but all I knew were the big guys, and that’s where I took the Fallout recordings.” Whether it was truly a case of being ahead of their time, or record companies simply not putting value on something unique and original—a consistent pattern throughout the decades—tensions within the band were growing. Their stunted and seemingly negative growth began to take a toll. Campos recognized a rift growing between the bassist and keyboardist almost six months before the band’s official demise. “Josh and Peter had a falling out. They’ve always had a bit of a contentious relationship. There wasn’t one specific thing, it just fell apart over the course of some time.” Beato feels that part of the growing rift in the band was creative in nature. “Josh and John wanted to go for more commercial music, and Peter and I were more interested in going to the darker side of what Fallout was doing. There was a conflict of tastes and direction.

Josh and John wanted to be little fish in a big pond, but Peter and I wanted to be big fish in a little pond.” “I was very surprised when Josh told me that Fallout might be breaking up,” says Termini. “So, 1981 was the end of Fallout. I thought they should stay together. They were destined for greatness. I believed then, as I do now, that John Campos was a positive influence on Peter’s writing and a terrific writing partner for Peter. Fallout did songs that were like little movies. Peter had all these great themes that he wanted to explore that could easily fit into filmmaking genres. Very eclectic and interesting.” Before the termination of Fallout, Termini assisted in helping Silver build what eventually became known as Sty in the Sky. The work on Silver’s home studio supplied the keyboardist with plenty of technical knowledge, wisdom passed on to him by the more experienced Termini. Bands set up in a room on the main level of the house while recording took place in a room one floor above, hence the studio’s name. Silver’s parents were lenient enough to allow their son to drill holes in the ceiling so cables could be run between floors. Sty in the Sky would become a valuable resource for Peter and Josh, and for a number of bands later in the decade. Peter had big things in mind for his next band, but he approached this as-yet-unformed endeavor with careful fortitude. Ever the practical thinker, Peter took a realistic attitude about his future in rock and roll. To ensure he had “something to fall back on” (a fatherly phrase he’d heard a lot from his own dad), he kept working at Crazy Joe’s. He also enrolled at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, in September 1981, located at Manhattan Beach, east of Coney Island. While not a day went by that he wasn’t working on a creative musical endeavor, he hit the books hard the next several years, eventually graduating with an associate’s degree in liberal arts, with a concentration in science, math, and music. This combination of interests would intersect with the music he created throughout his entire life. His final grade point average upon graduation, in April 1984, was 3.8. At that point Peter was twenty-two years old, and he continued to live with his parents. It served his purposes. He had

been occupying the basement of the family home for three years, a private lair that served as the creative hideaway that would eventually deliver to the world Lord Petrus T. Steele, overlord of a post-apocalyptic tribe of thermonuclear warriors called Carnivore. Footnotes _________________ 1 Not long after meeting Termini, however, Peter got his first tattoos—a griffin on his right bicep and a mountain lion on his left. They symbolized strength and his admiration for animals. Both tattoos were done by Brooklyn-based tattoo artist Huggy Bear Ferris at a time when tattooing was still illegal in New York City. 2 This particular bit of theater eventually became a feature of Manowar shows, when bassist Joey DeMaio would do the same at the end of their sets. Forming in 1980 and hailing from Auburn, in upstate New York, one wonders if DeMaio saw Peter performing this stunt with Fallout and adopted it as his own.

In a perpetual effort to find order in every facet of his life, twenty-

year-old Peter Ratajczyk found the dissolution of Fallout a worrying interruption to an otherwise well-ordered existence. But he had the tenacity to forge ahead, and he was doing just fine. He had a steady girlfriend in Mardie Sheiken, was making excellent grades at Kingsborough Community College, and had a secure job at Crazy Joe’s Metalworks. Humor also helped keep Peter grounded. His friends and family adored his sense of humor, and it was present in nearly everything he did. When it came time to put together a resume, he amused himself by spelling his place of employment “Metalwoiks,” in the Brooklyn vernacular, and giving his Catholic elementary school the fictional address of 666 Ocean Avenue. Even the way Peter ate food had humorous repercussions. His obsessive-compulsive sense of order meant he could not have different food items touch each other; he also preferred his french fries all cut to the same length. His sisters and many friends affectionately note that Peter liked to eat from stainless-steel military-style mess hall platters so that his food could be sectioned off into separate compartments. Peter wasn’t embarrassed about this quirk. In 2006 he told an interviewer, “My food can’t touch each other. Except for foods like stews and goulash, stuff that’s meant to be mixed together. It’s allowed to touch. But my nightmare holiday is Thanksgiving.”

The interviewer asked, “Does the gravy and mashed potatoes freak you out?” “Oh, they’ve touched,” responded Peter. “It was like when worlds collide.” Peter’s favorite local Chinese takeout restaurant—whose owners nicknamed him “Giant Round Eyes”—grew weary of his requests to separate the various ingredients of his order. When requesting to separate the meat from the vegetables from the sauce, they would tell him in exasperation, “You too particular!” His food hang-ups were a peculiarity since his teenage years, and in 1982, this exacting need for total order might have been the worst of Peter’s quirks.

The kids who became local legends with their hybrid of metal thunder, hard rock swagger, and new wave pulsing, with songs about necrophilia and eating unfertilized ovum, had completed their neighborhood rampage. Fallout split like an atomic nucleus, and out of that fission came two distinctive entities. Josh Silver and John Campos formed Original Sin, who recorded and released a Richard Termini-produced 7-inch single in 1982. The songs “Penalty of Love” and “Already Gone” are pure pop, complete with sultry vocals by Cheryl Alter, who eventually married Silver. Original Sin lasted a couple After the Fallout: Josh and years, and they even traveled to Laguna John’s Original Sin Beach, California, to visit Termini, who had relocated there. While in the area, Original Sin played some gigs, but they didn’t attract industry interest, and they returned to New York without much to show for themselves. The other tentacle to sprout from Fallout was a heavier, nastier proposition. Without wasting much time, Peter and drummer Louie

Beato put together the sound and vision of a band they christened Disciple. Disciple was intended as something more visceral and to-thepoint than the relative diversity of Fallout. Says Beato, “After the split, our music became targeted toward a more specific audience than Fallout.” Their first step: finding a guitarist who could play at the level of John Campos. Disciple was to be a power trio. No keyboards. Stan Pillis was a freshman at Edward R. Murrow High School when Peter was a senior there, and the two forged a friendship in music class. Mr. Fannelli’s “Musicianship” was a course in which students would present recorded music of their choice for the class to evaluate and critique. Pillis, already adept on guitar for his age, remembers Peter being brutally honest and intensely analytical when it came to music. Peter invited the freshman to the Fallout shows that were happening regularly at Zappa’s, something Pillis remembers with fondness. He’d even seen Northern Lights before they morphed into Fallout. He was already a fan, especially of guitarist John Campos. “Campos was the local hero,” Pillis recalls. As for Peter, Pillis was impressed with him in every aspect—his politeness, his musicianship, and his enthusiasm. He looked up to his older friend with something approaching awe. The earliest version of Disciple included a guitarist named Larry, but he didn’t work out, and Pillis eventually got a phone call from their bassist. At the time, Pillis was a junior and Peter was finishing his first year of college. In April 1982, the young guitarist found himself in the Ratajczyk basement auditioning with two guys older and much more experienced than he. Amid Peter’s couch, bed, and bench press (“he liked to lift weights a lot,” says Pillis), the young guitarist began noodling around, eventually spinning out passages from Frank Zappa’s Apostrophe album. Impressed with Pillis’s handling of such sophisticated music, Peter suggested jamming on material they could all handle. With songs by Black Sabbath and Deep Purple leading the way, the first real emanations of Disciple were cranked out with an incredible power that surprised each of the musicians.

“The three of us started playing, and it clicked,” remembers Pillis. “Bam! It was like the classic suns aligning with the moons and the planets and the stars.” Pillis was excited, but then Peter gave him a scare. The bassist summoned Beato from behind his drums, and the two left the basement. Peter said to Pillis in a deadly serious voice, “Excuse us. We have to speak in chambers.” They disappeared for an agonizingly long five minutes, but the guitarist had nothing to worry Just before the transformation into about. Upon returning, Peter skipped Peter Steele: smart and the step of giving Pillis a “yay or “nay,” sartorial Peter Ratajczyk saying, “We rehearse on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Sundays, and we might be getting into Saturdays.” “That was his way of telling me that I was in the band,” says Pillis, laughing.

From the time Northern Lights first stepped onto a stage in front of a live audience, Peter suffered extreme stage fright. The anxiety usually forced him to run to the nearest bathroom stall and clear his bowels before a show or, in more extreme cases, he would become considerably nauseated. While the dominating onstage persona helped Peter distance himself from the reality of what was happening, deep inside he was mortified. Being the center of attention onstage petrified him, and combined with growing selfesteem issues, he judged himself unfit to sing for Disciple. He felt his ideal role in the band would be to contribute as a songwriter and relegate himself to the peripheral shadows of stage left.

With Pillis freshly indoctrinated, the trio’s attempts to morph into a quartet were fruitless. Even though Pillis and Beato pleaded with Peter to sing, he refused. Prior to Pillis joining, guitarist Larry had come to the band with a singer in tow. That lasted a month before fizzling out, but even with Pillis in the band, Peter continued looking for a singer. He had his drummer convinced it was the right thing to do. “He wanted someone that could sing for real and not just growl,” Beato recalls. “Peter had a lot of really interesting lyrics, and he wanted them to be audible and up front.” When all attempts to find a suitable vocalist failed, Peter grudgingly took the microphone, hoping it would be temporary. Disciple followed a rigorous rehearsal schedule; the Ratajczyk basement regularly filled with a crushing new noise. Pillis remembers, “The girlfriends started hanging out together at rehearsals. Peter was dating Mardie, Louie was dating who he’s now married to, Martine, and I was a dating this girl Carol. But the girlfriends would sit on the stoop outside because the music would get too loud. We were one loud band, man. You could literally hear us blocks away.” At the time, Pillis didn’t own an amp that could match the power of the Beato/Ratajczyk rhythm section, so he plugged into Peter’s Kustom PA system. “My guitar had a couple pedal effects,” he says, “but I just went through that PA system, and it sounded so colossal.” Mom and pop Ratajczyk encouraged Peter’s musical endeavors, although his father never pretended to like or understand the music. When he’d had enough of the noise, “his father would come down the stairs and flicker the lights and say, ‘Peter, you wanna shut that thing down?’” says Beato, laughing. “That’s what he used to say, ‘Turn that thing down.’ As if the band was one item, one volume knob.”

From the earliest days of Fallout, Peter was a major songwriting force, even if it was a collaborative unit. Disciple’s early

compositions, too, were originally intended to be a product of group effort. As Pillis recalls, “In the earlier stages it was a lot more collaborative. I would come up with song ideas, and then Peter had these great ideas for material. My stuff was more progressive, sort of like Yes meets the Police. I was also a fan of Rush. My head was geared toward that direction, but I was also listening to a lot of Black Sabbath, Motörhead, and Angel Witch.” Peter, too, was a listener with a broad range of tastes. At the time, his love of Black Sabbath led to a hunger Peter gifted with a t-shirt of for the scathing, dark, bombastic one of his favorite movies metal bands of the day, particularly (used by permission of Donna White) campy satanic British trio Venom and metal obsessive Manowar, whose material featured a radical mixture of tempos, from frantic speed to crushingly slow passages. The stew of inspiration began to boil over as each member of Disciple brought his tastes to the table, but Peter’s focus was so intense, his ideas so rife with purpose and detail, it rendered the other members’ contributions pointless. Pillis recalls a pivotal moment in the life of Peter Ratajczyk, songwriter. “One day I left my guitar and bag of effects at his house, in the basement. I had a date that night right after rehearsal. The next day I go to his house and he hands me a tape.” “Listen to this,” Peter said. “This is some stuff that I’m working on.” Pillis took the tape home and gave it a listen. It was packed with original Peter-penned tunes. “There was this amazing guitar playing,” says Pillis. “Not Yngwie Malmsteen-type stuff, but really beautifully articulated parts and melodies, and just really cool riffs.” Pillis called Peter and asked him about the music on the tape.

“That’s me on guitar,” Peter confirmed, and then apologized. “I hope you’re not upset with me using your stuff here, and if you’re not cool with that, I’ll never do it again.” “He was very apologetic,” says Pillis. “But I said, ‘No, Pete, it’s okay. If you have something you want to lay down, I’m totally cool with that.’” Peter’s creative floodgates opened that spring day in May 1982. The tape was packed with material: a riff for a song called “End of the World”; skeletal to almost-complete arrangements for “Reign of Terror,” “Male Supremacy,” “Author Eves,” “Deliver Us from Evil,” (soon renamed “Deliver us to Evil”), and “Executioner,” the latter a holdout from the Fallout days. Although Pillis laments that this tape is now lost (“My girlfriend used to record all the rehearsals, and unfortunately we broke up, and when she moved she threw all her tapes out”), he remembers the material well. “It was a cross between Black Sabbath, Rush, and Mastodon. The newer band, Mastodon. Very heavy and drop tuned. The guitars were down to C-sharp standard. Black Sabbath did that, and the other band doing it was Witchfinder General, and that was a band that had a great impact on Peter. They tuned down to a C standard, and that’s where he got the idea of drop tuning really low.” Drop tuning the guitar from the traditional standard is now common in metal and other genres, but in the 1980s it was still a novel way of achieving fat, crushing heaviness. Peter was going for extremity, and also a balance of dichotomous extremes. “He was experimenting with a lot of half time, slowed down stuff. He loved the stuff really slow and really heavy.” Peter continued to present original compositions to the band. One new song, “Carnivore,” butted sludgy dirges up against speed-freaked thrash. Peter’s evolution as a bona fide composer was part inherent talent, part intellectual fertility, and part musical curiosity. While he was listening to Witchfinder General and Venom, he was also digging into English new wave and synth pop artists such as Duran Duran and Gary Numan. While Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler and Deep Purple’s Roger Glover fostered Peter’s natural attraction to the bass—his low voice and imposing size mirrored the instrument’s

inherent qualities—the twenty-year-old continued to also write and practice on normal six-string guitar, piano, and drums. Pillis recalls, “He had a record player and he had Louie’s drums in his basement, and he would put on [Gustav] Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, ‘Resurrection,’ and play drums along with it. He would then pick up his bass guitar and play the intro solo to Black Sabbath’s ‘N.I.B.’ And he wrote a lot of parts on piano, like ‘Male Supremacy,’ playing the bass and treble clef together,’ and I was just, ‘Wow.’” Disciple was no longer a collaborative effort. “Peter would think of all the arrangements,” recalls Pillis. “He arranged everything. In the beginning it was more collaborative, but I said, ‘You know what, let’s go your direction.’ Just what he was doing, how he would arrange the drums, the parts for guitar, the bass parts, even the vocal parts. I figured, I’m going to take a chair and let Peter take the reins as far as the look, the musical direction, the sound, the volume, the attitude. Everything. He had a go-for-it attitude.” Peter Ratajczyk totally went for it. But there was the issue of the band’s name. Not only was the name Disciple taken by another local band, but the trio felt it sounded “too black metal,” in Pillis’s words. They loved bands like Venom, but Peter’s music was heading down a completely different conceptual path. Even if he was questioning religion, reading German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and challenging the fundamentals of faith in his thoughts, Peter wasn’t ready to commit his band to an all-out antiChristian, atheistic platform. In June 1982, the trio took a break from rehearsal to brainstorm the image of the band and decide on a new name. A number of ideas were offered, many just for laughs. Pillis noted how each member had weight issues (he and Beato were stocky, Pete was just perpetually big) and so suggested Obesity. “All right Stan, you can go the fuck home now,” replied Peter. Pillis then turned to the question of image and suggested, “Why don’t we come out like the ’70s bands do, in Japanese kimonos?” “Stan, are you kidding me?” said an offended Peter. “We’re not Earth, Wind & fucking Fire.”

“Well, all right, maestro,” countered the guitarist. “Do you have any ideas?” Peter paused for dramatic effect and said, “I’ve come up with a name that will change everything. The name will be Carnivore.” Pillis loved the sound of it, but confessed, “I have no idea what it means.” Peter informed him, “It means ‘meat eater.’” Pillis laughed. “I figured we all liked Big Macs, so why not?” But Peter’s vision had more depth than that. Taking some of the ideas he’d explored in Fallout and crystallizing them, Carnivore would be the name of a roving triumvirate of post-apocalyptic thermonuclear warrior cannibals, fighting with and feasting on the humans who had burrowed into the earth after the nuclear devastation of consecutive World Wars III and IV. Big Macs were like tofu to these survivalist bastards. They were after living meat. It was Mad Max meets Soylent Green; Road Warrior meets Night of the Living Dead. Their manifesto promised: “The trinity pledge allegiance to God, country, and most importantly—to each other. They will stop at nothing in their quest for raw, hot flesh, and women (alive or dead) and the ultimate acquisition of the planet.” Into this fantasy world of survival, savagery, and hypersexuality, Carnivore was born.

Munching on endless bags of potato chips and drinking two-liter jugs of Coca-Cola, the “trinity” practiced like demons. Months flew by, each musician got better, the band grew tighter, 1982 gave way to 1983, girlfriends came and went, and mom and pop Ratajczyk endured the noise as best as they could. New songs arrived in the form of “Predator,” “Thermonuclear Warrior,” and “World Wars III and IV.” One of Peter’s oldest compositions, first titled “Parthenophagia” and then “Executioner,” was getting slower and slower, growing to a nearly ten-minute behemoth compared to its origins as a four-minute Fallout song. It

was all getting pretty radical, and in keeping with the band’s new name, Peter proposed they cover “Food, Glorious Food” from the musical Oliver! It was a terrifically left-field idea, even if it never materialized. For a band that didn’t want to associate itself with the satanic imagery becoming common in metal at the time, a song such as “God is Dead,” another new composition, seemed contradictory to Carnivore’s intent. Its lyrics were provocative: “You gang-raped Mother Nature, I love a virgin’s cry / Blood poured from the earth, she suffered and she died / Rusty scissors still in hand you castrated father time / feed his balls to the hounds that drink his cum like wine.” But by the end of the song it reads more like a warning, or condemnation: God rejects humanity outright and commits suicide, leaving his creation to suffer alone. It doesn’t take quite as defiant or philosophical a stance as something like Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist. This was pure fantasy, if on the extreme edge, but it was an edge Peter was very comfortable walking, and something he found empowering. Ever the provocateur, Peter would explore concepts of similarly powerful and fantastic extrapolation as “God is Dead” throughout Carnivore’s career. His love of wordplay brought about unorthodox lyrics that were loftier than the majority of bands that indulged in more obvious heavy metal clichés. Words like “cytoplast,” inventions like “phlebophilia,” and phrases like “plutonium anthropology” and “smoldering humanoid mess” were coming from an imaginative autodidact who read physics textbooks for the sheer fun of it. Even at their most gruesome, Peter’s lyrics were engaging. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine the boys in future death metal legends Carcass and Cannibal Corpse listening to Carnivore and poring over Peter’s lyrics, such as this ensanguine verse from “Predator”: “Broken splintered bones, boiling blood, torn and bleeding skin / Blackened burning flesh, melting fat, amputated limbs / Eviscerated, lungs torn out, heart ripped from the chest / Decapitated, a meal of vagina and breasts.” This creative awfulness came complete with humor, Peter rolling his Rs while delivering the word “breasts.” It was absurdity, horror, comedy, and escapism fused

as one and delivered with the pulsating power of Carnivore’s superheavy brand of doom-laced thrash metal. The delivery of his lyrics was important to Peter, and so the search for a vocalist continued. But by April 1983, one still had not been found. Finally, after Beato and Pillis’s constant encouragement, Peter capitulated. “I got a call from Peter at one o’clock in the morning,” recalls Pillis, “and he goes, ‘Stan, I’m going to do it. I’ve decided to be lead singer of this band.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, God.’” With that established, Carnivore prepared for live performance. It had been almost two years since Peter and Louie played live with Fallout, and despite Peter’s fear of performing in public, he was anxious to get out there and premier his new band to the Brooklyn faithful who remembered. June 6, 1983 marks Carnivore’s first live appearance. The show was at Zappa’s, which hosted Fallout many times, and Peter’s new band was there to destroy. The set list comprised all the songs they’d rehearsed since early 1982, and the band dressed in embryonic versions of the outrageous costuming that evolved over the next couple years. Despite a late start (well after 1:00 a.m.), Carnivore’s live debut was a success. Pillis recalls an incident that happened just prior to Carnivore taking the stage. It speaks to how Peter sometimes went to extremes to cope with performance anxiety. “My parents came backstage to wish us luck. Peter goes, ‘Mrs. Pillis? Can you pass me that rusty razor blade up against the window there?’ And he takes the razor blade and slices one arm twice, and then twice in the other arm. Blood starts dripping down, and my mother looked at him with this terrified look on her face. Like, ‘Self-mutilation. Wow. Interesting. Okay.’” This bloodletting wasn’t actually uncharacteristic for Peter at that stage in his life. He later admitted, “Blood always meant some kind of release to me. When I was young and angry with myself, I would go down to the basement and cut myself with a razor blade and write all over the walls in my own blood.” Carnivore rehearsed in that part of the basement, lit by a single light bulb that, as Peter recalled,

made “the blood on the walls turn black. It looked really, really creepy.” Peter hid this self-mutilating behavior from most people. Everyone knew him as a helpful neighbor, a giving friend, and a grateful family member. These kinder sides of his personality were certainly genuine, but whom he really was and how he behaved would become a more difficult and complicated matter as time moved forward …

Before Carnivore made their live debut, Peter severed his twoyear relationship with Mardie Sheiken. While their bond would remain strong for decades, Peter made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would not put up with Sheiken’s cheating. But that “cheating” had nothing to do with another person. “I started doing drugs at a young age, and Peter was disgusted by that,” says Sheiken. “He considered that cheating on him. I did not cheat on him, ever, but to him, my smoking pot was cheating. It was a betrayal, because he was repulsed by it. He was also repulsed by cigarettes.” Pillis remembers the twenty-year-old Peter as a healthconscious, clean-living young man. “It was a very different Carnivore back then. It was fun. We were a very healthy band. We didn’t do drugs. We didn’t drink. There wasn’t any marijuana, there wasn’t any Budweiser or Heineken. None of that shit.” Pillis, however, wouldn’t stay in Carnivore beyond the band’s first gig. “Stan made such a great musical contribution to the band,” acknowledges Beato, although the guitarist himself admits it couldn’t have lasted. “We had a little bit of a falling out.” While Peter was always a listener with wide-ranging tastes, his musical focus with Carnivore was narrower than what Pillis wanted. The guitarist moved on, although he and Peter eventually reconciled and remained friends for decades.

With what Beato calls “unwavering creative conviction,” Peter forged ahead, determined to make Carnivore stronger and better. Taking an ad out in the Village Voice, Peter cast his net into the New York City area to snag the most appropriate guitarist he could find. He came in the form of Keith Alexander Bonanno. Born November 23, 1963, the nineteen-year-old Bonanno was instantly impressive to the remaining Carnivore members. Peter Steele emerges… “He completed the band,” says Beato, “not only because of the way he played and looked, but he was into the whole scene. He wrote letters to fanzines, sent pictures and got the attention of these publications. He did a great job as far as putting us on the map.” Carnivore had been missing the element of promotional enthusiasm that Josh Silver had provided for Fallout, but they regained it with Bonanno. The young guitarist had his ear to the ground, ever aware of what was going on locally and internationally. (He even saw Fallout open for Twisted Sister at one of the infamous 2001 Odyssey gigs.) The growing metal underground demanded ambition on the part of young bands. The communication and information network of tape trading and fanzine publishing was mushrooming into a vibrant underground scene, and Carnivore needed to expand their reach beyond New York City. Bonanno was immersed in this network and eagerly took the reins as the band’s point of contact. Bonanno was still pretty green as a guitarist, though. This would cause problems when the band finally entered the studio, but for their live show, he was just what the band needed. His frame was

almost as big as Peter’s, with a mane of thick dark-brown hair that complemented Peter’s shaggy locks. With a new guitarist fleshing out the sound and image of the band, Carnivore reestablished itself, tightened the new lineup, and added a few new songs to the repertoire, including Bonanno’s composition “Cry Wolf.” The song would make it to the band’s live shows but never any farther. Peter’s songs were clearly stronger, and with such a focused concept forming in the leader’s mind, contributions from anyone else could never measure up to the clarity of his own vision.

The night before Peter’s twenty-second birthday, he met Donna White, who would become the only woman Peter ever married. And he did so twice. Before their formal meeting, White had eyed Peter in the halls of Kingsborough College, and much like Mardie Sheiken’s experience, the initial eye contact with Peter made a strong impact. “We used to see each other in the hall every day,” White remembers. “I would stare at him and smile, and he was so shy it was unbelievable. He looked scared when I smiled at him.” The two had their first real conversation on January 3, 1984. Peter and Louie were hanging out at Brooklyn’s legendary L’Amour club when Louie pushed Peter to go buy this attractive girl a drink. As White remembers, “He was really nervous, but he came up to me. I knew exactly who he was. I was in love with him before I even met him. We had drinks together, but Peter wasn’t really a drinker at the time. He had one drink.” Peter drove Donna home, and the two sat in his father’s borrowed station wagon until six in the morning, just talking. They resumed the next day and were together for nearly four years solid thereafter. Says White, “We fell madly in love.” It wasn’t long before Donna joined Peter in his basement quarters, the two becoming inseparable, joined in everything to the point that the outside world seemed a dim and unattractive reality

compared to their vibrant inner existence. Except for their trips upstate. “The most important thing to Peter,” says White, “was going out into the woods or somewhere in nature. For his serenity. He always had this dream that we were going to live in the woods.” “I love when we go away on our little trips and nobody knows where we are,” Peter would say to Donna often. She remembers driving up to the woods many times in the autumn, where they would “do things like go pumpkin picking, or other such romantic, ordinary things that people would never think he’d do, if they only knew him from Carnivore.” White recalls that, “Peter would always make a fire. He loved nature so much, he was so connected to it. It was everything to him.” His love of nature extended to animals, especially cats, of which he always had several. He loved them unconditionally and doted on them as children. In February 1984, Peter was promoted to crew chief at Laminates Unlimited, a job he’d started the previous February, where he worked as a carpenter of kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom furniture. That April he graduated from Kingsborough College, earning an associate’s degree in liberal arts. But besides working, all he wanted to do with his time was spend it with Donna, his family, his cats, and Carnivore. Later that same year, the band employed the services of their first manager. Ken Kriete had been booking local talent at L’Amour and was impressed with Carnivore’s live show. Kriete approached the band with a contract and a plan, and approached another local band, Deathslayer. Suddenly he found himself in the management business. Despite being only seventeen years old, Kriete was as involved in the underground scene as much as new Carnivore guitarist, Keith Bonanno. Kriete promised to help promote and raise global awareness for Peter’s new band, and with a demo tape in the planning stages, Carnivore would soon have something for him to work with. Two years after forming, Peter felt Carnivore was finally ready to offer recorded music to the growing metal audience, a tool to help spread their name within the global underground. A few days were

booked in a small studio called Systems Two on Avenue U in Brooklyn, where the band recorded three of their best songs: “World Wars III and IV,” “Carnivore,” and “The Subhuman.” The sessions went quickly and without incident, capably overseen by Systems Two engineer, Mike Marciano. Having had prior studio experience, the Carnivore rhythm section did their work quickly, and Bonanno did his best to measure up. With warning sirens ushering in the first song and a nuclear explosion ending it, “World Wars III and IV” is nearly eight minutes of doomsday theatrics. It epitomizes much of what was coming out of the metal underground at the time, yet remains entirely distinctive. Part of its individuality is the eccentric vocal performance, pumped high in the mix while the song rapidly shifts parts and tempos. Peter rolls his Rs at every opportunity, and his bass is prominent, especially in the Manowar-esque hammer-on flurry of the middle section, followed by Peter yelling, “We hate this planet!” The band gallops triumphantly into the final minutes toward a devastating climax. “Carnivore” is the band’s mission statement, a speedy attack that finds Peter’s voice resembling Venom’s Cronos, another brash and ballsy bassist/ vocalist leading a radical metal trio. “The hunger I feel makes you a meal, ooh girl, you sure taste sweet,” Peter caterwauls with passion, suggestively suturing cunnilingus and actual meateating. “Carnivore” is Peter’s early music in a nutshell: stringent, always audacious, never subtle, and intelligent even in the crudest setting. “The Subhuman” creates a fascinating sound-world. At just over eleven minutes long, there were very few metal bands writing such lengthy compositions in 1984. The glacial pace of the song is a clear expansion of Peter’s Black Sabbath influences, a foreboding plod taken to its farthest extreme. The lyrics set a chilly scene: a tundra formed by nuclear winter, seen through the eyes of a subhuman “Freon neonate.” The bassist’s fascination with odd vocabulary comes through again, with invented words like “heliocaustic” and “macromesomorphatite” falling easily from his lips. There is imagery throughout “The Subhuman” that foreshadows Peter’s later vampiric

fascinations: “Stalactited blood drips from my pores, her skin between my teeth / Relieved of her life, a warm heart still beating becomes a delicious treat.” The song creeps slowly through a forest of wild verbiage and slow-motion doom until the seven-minute mark introduces a minute-long sequence of keyboard-led melancholy atmosphere, recalling the most gothic of Fallout’s material and foreshadowing the sonic aesthetic Peter would become known for years later. In a 1985 interview for Denmark’s Blackthorn fanzine, Carnivore’s members collectively expressed their appreciation for bands such as Venom, Manowar, Dio, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest, and New Jersey peers Blessed Death. Bonanno later noted that the few bands playing slow metal at the time were also hugely influencing Carnivore, especially Los Angeles’s Saint Vitus, and Chicago’s Trouble. He also mentioned German heavy metal titans Accept as important to the band’s development. It all went into the stew of ingredients that made Carnivore a unique voice in the primordial US metal underground. “We wanted to appear larger than life,” states Beato. “Everything about the band had to be excessive. Everything exaggerated.” With a conceptual framework forming around the postapocalyptic scenario, the time came to transform the members themselves into the surface-dwelling neo-barbarians depicted in their songs. As Beato relates, “Pete and I would talk about what would happen at the end of time as we know it, if there was a holocaust that wiped out the planet. That’s when the Mad Max movies came out, and Road Warrior, Quest for Fire, Conan the Barbarian. Musically we were influenced by the heaviness of Black Sabbath and the speed of Motörhead, and Peter always had an affection for punk. We rolled all that up into a ball as far as the image and music goes.” Inspired by Peter’s lead, the trio brainstormed costuming ideas. They amassed as much fur, leather, and chains as possible, fashioned it into wearable garb, and added spiked shoulder and elbow pads. Friends and family chipped in on the costume-making. “I was helping make their costumes in the basement,” says Donna White. “It was like the Thunderdome down there! I had this long,

black rabbit fur coat, given to me as a present when I was a kid. I hated it, because I don’t wear fur. So we used the coat, cutting it up in millions of different shapes. That’s where the fur is from on their costumes.” Peter’s mother, Nettie, was an excellent seamstress, so good that she didn’t need a pattern to make a dress, and she helped suit up the boys for their escapist musical war. Peter’s attempts to get his sister Barbara to contribute her fur coat were unsuccessful, but Nettie was less protective of hers. Says sister Cathy, “Mom would help Peter sew the costumes together. She collaborated and helped make changes and improvements when Pete needed them. She even gave Pete one of her old fox stoles from the 1940s that still had the fox head on it. It was perfect. Along with the fur, he incorporated football shoulder pads by drilling six-inch-long screws through the underside of the pad, making the spikes stick out like little spears off both shoulders. The final outfit was very menacing.”

Carnivore caged, l to r: Keith Alexander, Louie Beateaux, Lord Petrus T. Steele

Bonanno was not into the costuming idea at first. “I fought the whole shoulder pad bullshit. I wanted to be seen as a legitimate musician. I wanted to be taken seriously, so at first I fought it. But

over time I got into it. I figured, ‘Fuck it, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it.’ I went out and bought some shotgun shells and took out the buckshot—everybody was wearing bullet belts, so I figured I’d make a shotgun shell belt. I remember making wristbands with steel shark fins. And I remember coming down to the basement with the costume I had built and Louie saying, ‘You’re into it, you got it, that’s what we’re going for!’” The band then documented their radical transformation. Richard Termini took photos of the new and improved Carnivore in the unkempt marshland section of Marine Park, in Brooklyn. The resulting pictures depicted the band wielding various weapons of barbaric war: clubs, hammers, knives, nail bats … anything that could crush a skull. In keeping with this transformation from mere humans to warring flesh-hungry neo-barbarians, the members altered their names. Louie Beato became Louie Beateaux, Keith Bonanno took his middle name as his last, becoming Keith Alexander, and Peter Ratajczyk dubbed himself Lord Petrus T. Steele, which stuck for a while before he became known simply as Peter Steele. There was no significant reason for Peter taking the name “Steele,” other than it being much easier to pronounce than “Ratajczyk,” and that it conveyed hardness and durability. For someone as creatively unwavering and unbendable as Peter, it made total sense.

By the middle of 1984, with their demo tape circulating among metal maniacs worldwide, Carnivore had become a live force to reckon with. In the late summer manager Ken Kriete entered them into a Battle of the Bands contest at L’Amour. Competing against other local metal acts such as Cities, Deceiver, and Disciple—the band that prompted Peter to change his own band’s name— Carnivore blew them all away and easily won the competition. That success and Kriete’s pull led to some prestigious opening slots

around town, with madcap British trio Raven, Canadian heroes Anvil, demonic demigods Slayer, and many others. Carnivore’s notoriety grew, and their gigs attracted increasingly bigger crowds on their own, often showing up the headliners. Carnivore appeared at other local clubs like Cheers and The Hangout, scaring the hell out of audiences with their loud and artful mixture of speed and doom, their detailed lyrics shouted out by a bassist covered in fur, spikes, and chains. The occasional chunks of raw, bloody meat the band lobbed into the audience helped spread the gruesome news. On Halloween of that year, Peter and Donna married in secret. Rumors persisted in later years that it was due to Donna being pregnant, which turned out to be one of many fabrications that followed Peter throughout his life. The couple simply wanted to make their bond legal, but the privacy of the event raised suspicions. Nevertheless, the couple did as they pleased. Peter ordered roses dyed black and orange, suitable for the couple’s favorite holiday, and went to Brooklyn City Hall to exchange vows. Donna remembers, “Nobody knew. It was our secret little thing. We went home and watched horror movies all night as our honeymoon.” Carnivore continued playing live, but with Peter’s aversion to public performance, and despite the incredible time and attention that went into his band’s live presentation, it was really the studio where Peter was most comfortable. In the live setting, a mistake could not be fixed; an error could fly into the air for everyone to hear and judge. The studio was safer, especially for someone like Peter, who insisted that everything be aligned, in its place and absolutely perfect. “The thing that irritated Peter the most,” remembers Louie Beato, “was when we did live shows and we would screw up. Keith can’t be the only one to blame; I would screw up sometimes, too. But Pete would walk off the stage completely upset, like it was the end of the world. We’d always be like, ‘It’s fine, they didn’t notice, Pete. What are you talking about? It was a great show!’ But he’d be completely upset, like we damaged one of his children.”

While Fallout failed to find a proper recording contract in 1981, things had changed for radical underground metal bands in the intervening years. By early 1985, outfits such as Metallica and Slayer were making enormous strides with their uncompromising mayhem. Metallica signed on with major label Elektra Records that year, and New York’s own Anthrax was on the verge of signing with another major, Island Records. If Fallout was ahead of its time, Carnivore was right on time. In early 1985, Dutch music fan Cees Wessels was seeking new talent for his small independent record label, Roadrunner. Wessels founded the label in 1980, licensing various recordings by American singer-songwriter Jim Croce, who had a strong following in the Netherlands, and also licensing punk bands UK Subs, The Exploited, and Dead Kennedys for Dutch release. Always on the lookout for the cutting-edge, Wessels began taking an interest in the vibrant metal scene of the early ’80s. Signings like Mercyful Fate proved he had an ear for talent, and keen enterprising found him securing licensing deals for the wider European release of albums by Metallica, Anvil, Japan’s Loudness, and New York’s Virgin Steele. With Virgin Steele gaining a respectable amount of attention in Europe, and other New York bands such as Overkill and Anthrax making waves on both sides of the ocean, Wessels sought out more bands from the metropolis to call his own. Connie Barrett was part of the New York City metal and hardcore scene in the mid 1980s, booking bands at the famous CBGB club in Manhattan and providing consultation to Wessels. Barrett was never an official employee of Roadrunner in the US, but she was instrumental in helping launch the label in North America. (At the

time, Roadrunner was dubbed Roadracer, distinguishing it from the European mother ship). Barrett first suggested that Wessels sign Whiplash, a much-respected band hailing from New Jersey. Roadrunner released the band’s Power and Pain debut, complete with cartoony cover art by Sean Taggart, another fixture on the New York scene. The album was recorded at Systems Two, where Carnivore’s demo was tracked. Thanks to an introduction by Richard Termini, Barrett also became acquainted with Carnivore. On her prompting, Wessels was introduced to the music of Peter Steele via their demo songs. He was immediately intrigued. While hindsight leads Louie Beato to describe Barrett as “flaky,” at the time she was good at getting the band gigs, and she did bring the band to Roadrunner’s attention, even if she was unhelpful on a number of other levels. Barrett moved in as the band’s manager, usurping Ken Kriete, who felt Carnivore was growing too big for his then-modest managerial experience. (Kriete would come back into the Peter Steele picture several years later). The contract Wessels presented to the guys in Carnivore might as well have been written in Martian. While Keith was the networker and Peter was well-read, their knowledge of legalese was nil. Besides, the details of the contract hardly mattered—the band just wanted to get a record out, and this was the first serious offer they’d seen. They might not have signed to Roadrunner had King Diamond not given Wessels the go-ahead to do it. Known for his macabre theatrics and occult lyrics, the infamous King Diamond had recently dissolved his first band, the extraordinarily influential Mercyful Fate. He had freshly instated his namesake band when Wessels came to him for advice. As Beato tells it, “We were waiting for a phone call from King Diamond, who advised them on whether they should sign us or not. He was the top star on their label at the time, and these industry people, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. They’re just doing it for the money. They don’t know what’s good, what’s not. So they had to rely on somebody, and he was their top-selling artist, so they asked him.

His phone call came in, he said ‘Yes, sign them,’ and they signed us.” It wasn’t the worst contract in the world, but when the label’s own lawyer is interpreting it to the band, it’s easy to see a conflict of interest. Nevertheless, Roadrunner lawyer Jules Kurz assured Carnivore that everything was in order, and the band signed. Thanks to Barrett, Wessels, and King Diamond, Carnivore had a record deal. Beato calls their naïvety at the time of the signing “stupid,” but it turned out to be a pretty good move after all. To celebrate, the band and Kurz toasted the union with warm bottles of Asti Spumante.

In 1985’s sweltering July heat, Carnivore recorded their first album over a series of night shifts. While they would have preferred to record in the familiar environs of Systems Two, “we relinquished control of that aspect of our existence to our manager and the producer she brought in, Norman Dunn,” recalls Beato. Connie Barrett was also involved with Whiplash, and she had gotten Dunn to produce their Power and Pain album (which included some backing vocals by Peter and Louie). While that album was done at Systems Two, the decision was made for Carnivore to record at Braille/East Side Sound in Manhattan; only the mixes would be completed at Systems Two. The trio recorded between midnight and seven o’clock in the morning. The night shift brought a discounted rate, and for a young band on a tight budget, it would have to do.

The trio was well-rehearsed. They had been playing “Carnivore,” “Male Supremacy,” and “World Wars III and IV” for two years already, and “God is Dead” had origins dating to the late ’70s. There was fresher material on offer too, including the bleak imagery of “Armageddon” and the fuck-it-all “Legion of Doom,” a song about biking and boozing that only loosely tied into the post-apocalyptic concept. Carnivore was released in November 1985, boasting a simple, eyecatching cover drawn by Sean Taggart, an artist popular with a number of New York-area metal and hardcore bands. Based on a logo design by Peter, the cover—a red Carnivore logo that appeared to be made of muscle and sinew against a black background—loudly announced the band’s official arrival. A color scheme was established which would represent Carnivore: red and black. Red, the color of blood and anger; black, the color of night and death. The album cover looked much like Peter’s vocals sounded: gigantic, authoritative, explosive. Over the album’s eight songs, Peter’s voice booms with aggression and intensity. Mixed higher than the instruments and often sounding double-tracked, it carries a barely controlled element of threat and hysteria. He delivers every lyric as if he truly was a bloodthirsty thermonuclear warrior, the very embodiment of his Lord Petrus T. Steele character. The music on Carnivore is almost as obnoxious as the vocals, its momentum cantankerous even in the sludgy Sabbath-inspired moments. Although it was dubbed “thrash metal” upon release, the songs have a rocklike looseness at odds with the stricter confines of thrash. Peter’s audacious presence on the album is simply despotic. His voice is far out front, and his thick and grinding bass tone leads the way. Drummer Beato handles the various tempo shifts admirably, but he would improve in the coming years. And while the guitar work

is satisfactory, it’s not remarkable. There were problems with Bonanno in the studio. “Keith’s playing was not the greatest, but he learned,” recalls Beato. “The biggest problem with Keith was he would be able to play exactly what he was told to play, but when left to his own devices, let’s say to produce a lead for a song, that’s when he ran into trouble. And when we’re spending a hundred dollars an hour in the studio and you don’t have a structured lead that you can lay down on the album, it eats up studio time because you’re trying to figure one out.” Peter would only take so much ineptitude before losing patience and taking the reins to see his creation through. “There were some things that were compromised because we ran out of time and money,” says Beato. “A lot of that time was spent on the leads that Keith was doing. In fact, ‘Thermonuclear Warrior’ was a lead part that really stank.” According to Beato, Peter got frustrated with Bonanno’s lack of imagination while tracking the song, so he took the guitar and recorded the solo himself in one quick take. Never a solo-oriented band in the first place, the part at the song’s end is less a lead and more of a thematic passage achieved through Peter’s best hammer-on technique. It does the job. The recording of Carnivore was plagued with other problems, like a malfunctioning tape machine that producer Dunn had to constantly recalibrate, leaving less time for various overdubs the band hoped would give the album more spice in the sound spectrum. They did, however, find a way to expand the album closer “World Wars III and IV” to a full ten minutes, thanks to a three-minute soundscape conceived by Richard Termini. The piece was something Termini came up with during the Fallout sessions he’d recorded several years before, and it worked well for this album’s concept. Termini used the same synthesizer to recreate the sound effects for “World Wars III and IV” that he used on Fallout’s eponymous song several years prior. His work also opens the album with forty-eight seconds of sirens and what sound like helicopters before Peter heralds the band’s arrival with an insane bellow, launching into the speed-vs.doom of “Predator.”

One of the most remarkable moments on Carnivore is a section that foreshadows where Peter would take his music the following decade. “Male Supremacy” is typical Carnivore in its heaviest moments, but the break after the three-minute mark is a complete severance from metal orthodoxy. The churning pace suddenly becomes quiet and reflective as a sultry vocal delivers a sumptuous, memorable melody. Throughout this passage Peter shows he can sing, and with incredible passion, too. While his deep melodic voice isn’t as husky or commanding as it would become, the song shows very clearly that he had a gift. With the lyrics and melodies being unusually tender, the thermonuclear warrior shows his romantic side, coming home weak and sore after the war, joining with his lover for much-needed respite from the chaos. The line “When on the fur / I make love to her / how her body sings” is followed by a gorgeous bass solo, similar in trebly tone to Metallica’s Cliff Burton and much like a slowed down Rush passage. Lasting a full three minutes, the part is made more effective by the impact of the crashing metal that follows. John Campos called Fallout “goth before goth rock had a name,” which makes “Male Supremacy” gothic metal before ’90s bands like Paradise Lost, Tiamat, and The Gathering were dubbed as such. The song presages the type of material out of which Peter would eventually sculpt a career, and is notable as perhaps the first-ever “goth metal” song. The band members were satisfied with Carnivore at the time, but as Beato notes, “Pete learned a lot from that experience. It was the least amount of control he’d ever had in something that he was part of, basically because he was young and this was our first experience doing it professionally.” Ultimately, Carnivore was a more diverse album than most being released on metal independents at the time, and something obviously conceived by a gifted mind. While it had some commonalities with British pioneers Venom, the earlier epics of Manowar, and the similar tempo variety and ’70s influences of New Jersey buds Blessed Death, Carnivore stood apart from other metal albums. It had nothing to do with the stiff technicality of up-and-

coming metal bands Metallica and Megadeth, and zero affiliation with the Sunset Strip glam bands boasting big sales (and big hair) at the time. As with everything Peter did, it was completely unique.

Mind the spikes: Carnivore in a rare mellow moment…

Carnivore did not tour to support the album, which kept them mostly a regional sensation. The record was in stores all over North America and Europe, but without touring, it was destined to be a cult favorite at best. This was not for lack of Roadrunner’s trying, and Beato and Bonanno were eager to tour, but Peter had no interest. “Pete wasn’t big on touring,” Bonanno recalls. “We didn’t really leave Brooklyn. Part of it was because Pete had a real job. I’d quit a job to do a show on a weekend, it didn’t matter to me.” While the guitarist was committed to the Carnivore cause, his tenure was short. Peter found Bonanno’s incompetence in the studio to be barely tolerable, but his live performance was the last straw. Beato recalls that, “Keith loved the whole rock star thing; he was really caught up in it, but he had a hard time maintaining his place in the songs when addressing the audience, all the gesturing and the moves and stuff. Peter didn’t want any part of that. He was very

introverted when it came to the audience. Pete would rather play with his back to the audience.” Also, as previously noted, Peter could not handle the other musicians making even the slightest mistakes in his songs. Bonanno got the boot. “I was into moving around, putting on a show,” says Bonanno. “Perfection was less important to me. Pete’s definitely a perfectionist. I’m not. He and I clashed a lot, and the final straw was me fucking up onstage. Whatever. It’s fucking rock and roll. If it’s perfect, it’s lame.” Donna White remembers Peter’s militaristic work ethic. “Peter’s drive was so insane that if somebody didn’t come to practice or was late, he’d freak out. Especially on Keith. It was so important to him, it was like the army. ‘You have to be here, we have to practice.’ And that’s why they became so good. Practice, practice, practice. You had to be driven, and if you weren’t, forget it.” Beato remembers that, “Peter had no qualms about admitting that ‘it’s my ball, we’ll play the game I want to play, or I’ll take my ball and go home.’ Peter wasn’t phony. He didn’t try to be something that he wasn’t. He knew what he was. It wasn’t like he was infallible or anything. He knew that things would eat at him and he’d get to the point where he couldn’t tolerate it and it was only a matter of time before enough was enough.” Peter’s unwavering vision would be manipulated by no one, and it was driving forward at a rapid clip. By the time the first album was released, Peter was moving Carnivore onto the next frontier. The new material he was writing infused a street-level hardcore sound into the band’s metal foundation. Bonanno wasn’t into the hardcore direction, nor the directive from Peter to dress down and maybe even cut their hair shorter. “It took me long enough to dig the science fiction shit,” says Bonanno, “but when I got into it, I got into it, and I wanted to keep going on that. Pete had other ideas.” By late 1985, Bonanno was out and the Carnivore rhythm section yet again went in search of a worthy guitarist.

When he wasn’t surveying post-nuclear wastelands and cannibalizing surfaced subterraneans as Lord Petrus T. Steele, real life was cruising along nicely for Peter Ratajczyk. He was still gainfully employed as a crew chief at Laminates Unlimited, and the family was still taking occasional trips out of the city, to rural New Jersey or various wooded areas of upstate New York. His wife, Donna, came along on these trips; the couple was together always. A year after Peter and Donna’s 1984 Halloween marriage at City Hall, the couple exchanged vows in a public ceremony. Their 1985 Halloween party/wedding was a bash Donna remembers fondly. “Everybody was there—family, friends, a big wedding with a mosh pit and costumes and dry ice. A crazy, amazing Halloween wedding.” This one was held in the basement of the apartment building where White’s mother lived, on West Second Street in Brooklyn. Donna’s younger brother and his friends dressed up as grim reapers and served drinks and appetizers; the DJ dressed as a vampire. Considering Halloween was both Peter and Donna’s favorite holiday, the event was truly an extension of their personalities. Donna recalls seeing a sudden change in Peter’s attitude toward the church—anything to do with the church—upon the planning of their first wedding in autumn 1984. “We knew we were going to get married on Halloween, there was no doubt about it. But before we did it at City Hall, we went to St. Brendan’s and met with the priest and signed up for Pre-Cana classes. I was going to convert for him and get married in the church. He wanted it and I wanted to do that for him. But at the last minute Peter said, ‘Forget it. I don’t want to do it through the church.’ And that’s kind of when it started. But I don’t know where that came from.” Mark Martin recalls Peter’s disillusion with religion having some root in the peculiarities of the Orthodox Jewish folks that populated his neighborhood. “Jewish people can’t ring doorbells on Saturdays, but they had no problems asking a goy to do it. Peter would say ‘No problem, Rabbi,’ and would be the official door ringer. The rabbi across the street absolutely loved Peter. Peter reveled being the goy. He found it all extremely humorous, but almost his whole life he had a problem with religion. The problem was the contradictions. His

feeling was that the Jewish religion was hypocritical, but not just the Jewish religion. It was his own religion too, Catholicism.” Fallout guitarist John Campos recalls that he and Peter lost their taste for religion due to experiences in Catholic school. “It was very strict, and there was always a level of hypocrisy, where they’re telling you to do something but they’re not always following it themselves. He was always getting in trouble, I was always getting in trouble, and that was kind of the glue that started our friendship. When you’re constantly hearing you’re a bad person or you’re not doing the right thing or you should be in Sunday church every week, it has an impact. It definitely had an impact on him. For a while, both of us turned off to the Catholic Church. You rebel when you’re a kid. You have nuns telling you what to do and inflicting physical or psychological punishment on you, and they’re telling you to be a good person at the same time. It kind of flips you out when you’re a kid.”

Carnivore vinyl bootlegs

Peter’s serious questioning of Christianity goes at least as far back as 1979. That year, he and new friend Richard Termini would

often discuss the topic and related ideas. “Peter liked to talk philosophy and physics with me,” Termini recalls. “I mentioned Friedrich Nietzsche to him and he got interested and began reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra contains the famous dictum ‘God is dead.’ In those days, Peter was moving toward atheism and at the time was certainly an agnostic. We had many interesting talks, he and I. There weren’t many other people around us in those days that were as interested in these things, so this was a connection we had beyond the music.” In early 1986, a new Carnivore song emerged called “Angry Neurotic Catholics.” A total reversal from the post-Armageddon concept of the band’s first phase, it dealt with the oppressive guilt hammered into followers by the Catholic Church, complete with a harrowing depiction of a suicide attempt. Whether based on a reallife experience of getting caught masturbating in Catholic school, or just a bit of fiction, the lyrics find Peter questioning the church’s condemnation of natural human urges. These early lyrics for “Angry Neurotic Catholics” didn’t make it to the final version of the song. They’re rough and rather juvenile, and were eventually replaced by cleverer lines, but they provide an example of Carnivore’s about-face in 1986. They had begun dealing with realities of life in the here and now. Savage post-nuclear fantasies were officially relegated to the past: Caught me in the boys’ room, porno mag in hand With the other jerking off as quickly as I can Nun bursts into the stall, eyes bulging down at me Said I would be damned to hell for being so filthy Now the whole school knows what a pig I am Priest said to say some rosaries, like one or two thousand Parents called to get me, come pick me up at three Say that I’ll be grounded ‘til I’m over puberty In a later interview, Peter offered, “You’re going to tell me that it’s a sin to lust, when this is my program? This is what I was born to do

—I was born to reproduce, and this is wrong? What could the outcome be except for extreme neurosis?” At the age of twenty-four, Peter was starting to understand that the happy life he was promised—by elders, by teachers, by pop songs, and the media—was fictional bullshit. His evolving views on religion and the church confirmed that all was not as preached. Adult life was hard and would only get harder. Donna White saw Peter growing more disillusioned by the day. He would even talk of suicide and hint that he had made attempts to end his life, although there was no real evidence for it. His first girlfriend, Mardie Sheiken, had seen this in Peter even earlier. But his talk about committing suicide was just that: talk. “I truly don’t think they were legitimate attempts,” she reckons. “I think he was very unhappy at many times. But I don’t think his attempts were legitimate. If they were, he would have done it. He knew how to do it. He was so brilliant, but simplistically and on a higher level, life was very hard for him. He constantly wanted to redefine himself. He was always a work in progress. He never felt complete.” “With Peter, everything was very intense,” White adds. “More than an average person. Everything was magnified.” She describes his suicide talk as “an expression of extreme anger and helplessness.” Having had a stable home life, with parents no more or less strict than the average parents; siblings who were no more rivals than the average; and a Catholic church and school upbringing that was actually less oppressive than what many other people had experienced, Peter’s growing anger and despair revealed clinical depression for which there was no obvious cause, although there may have been a genetic predisposition. White vividly recalls a conversation they’d had about Peter’s view of the world, how it differed as a young adult than what he remembered as a child. He told her this exactly: “When I was growing up, I thought the world was going to be completely different. I had a different picture of what the world would be like. Now that I’m grown, I don’t like it. I find it very difficult to live in the world the way it is.”

Nothing can stop the pain … and nothing can stop the pain. — “Inner Conflict,” 1987

On April 4, 1986, Carnivore played Manhattan’s Ritz as openers for

British trio Venom, with local band Overkill in the middle slot. Part of Venom’s double live album, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, was recorded at that evening’s show, and the members of Carnivore were psyched to be opening for a band that had helped inspire them. A prestigious gig in one of the city’s most famous rock venues, Carnivore’s set was heavy on material from the first album, but also featured the as-yetunrecorded “Suck My Dick” and “Sex and Violence.” The new material was as crude and stripped down as the titles suggest. Unlike the older fantasy-derived Carnivore songs, these dealt a tough-as-nails street-level attitude. They would have fit in better at the legendary CBGB club than the ritzy environs of that evening. Carnivore’s sound was in transition, and so was their look. They were evolving away from their Road Warrior-meets-Conan the Barbarian image, but still cut an imposing figure onstage. After the Ritz show, their music would veer farther into the direction of New York hardcore. To match this vibe, the raven-haired leader the crowd saw that April night would soon have his metalhead locks chopped in favor of a buzz cut; the trio’s fur and shotgun shell belts would be replaced by sleeveless T-shirts, suspenders, and steel-toe boots. It

wasn’t so much a snub to their past as an embracement of hardcore’s here and now. It was evolution. It was thinking forward … the only kind of thinking the restless Peter Steele knew how to do.

Premiering in December 1973, CBGB (originally focused on country, bluegrass, and blues, hence the initials) would become legendary for fostering the American punk movement and booking left-of-center underground bands. CBGB hosted a young AC/DC in 1976 and was the site of the first shows by local boys the Ramones that same year. The venue’s dense, dank atmosphere was a perfect fit for edgy and ferocious music. Remembered fondly by post-punk and new wave aficionados as the East Coast’s ground zero for those movements, by the time the early 1980s arrived, New York’s homegrown hardcore scene thrived at CBGB. Hardcore was the next logical step for punk rock—harder, heavier, riotous, and violent. Everything punk rock from the 1970s promised, hardcore actually was. It found root and grew like wildfire throughout Southern California, with bands such as Black Flag, and the Descendents, leading the charge. In Washington DC, the ferocious sound was given shape by Minor Threat and sped up considerably by Bad Brains. As for New York, the no-bullshit rage of Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, Crumbsuckers, and Cro-Mags showed that America’s noisiest, smelliest metropolis would not be outdone by youth from the sunny SoCal suburbs or their neighbors in the District. Journalist Sam McPheeters summed up what it all meant in an article for Vice magazine in 2010. “What early New York hardcore bands lacked in distinctive output, they more than compensated for in sheer menace. As the scene coalesced in Reagan’s first term, the New York hardcore scene—known in the shorthand of graffiti and knuckle tattoos as ‘NYHC’—injected class into the subculture in a way that no other city could. It was a world marinating in poverty and violence.”

In 1986, Peter Steele found much to relate to in NYHC. As Agnostic Front and Crumbsuckers absorbed metal into their hardcore roots, Carnivore did the reverse. Their new songs merged the savagery of metal with the bluntness of hardcore punk. The themes in hardcore lyrics—of social injustice, corrupt governments, fight over flight—resonated with Peter. He found life’s realities difficult to endure, and hardcore’s message of standing up to the fight and taking nothing lying down resonated with and empowered the Carnivore leader. As with nearly everything he did, however, his views weren’t exactly black or white or status quo, not even within this new urban counterculture that beckoned him. The same month Carnivore played with Venom at the Ritz, Peter left Laminates Unlimited, citing that “the job offered no advancement possibilities.” He jumped to McDonald Metal and Roofing Supply, where he was in charge of shipping, receiving, and delivery of roofing and home supplies. Donna continued to live with Peter in the Ratajczyk basement, the couple now nearly two years married. He continued to write songs for Carnivore’s second album and was listening to a lot of the hardcore music coming out of New York and other locales. He was primed and ready when Agnostic Front found itself in need of assistance. Guitarist Vinnie Stigma, who had gained local notoriety during his time in punk rock troublemakers the Eliminators, formed Agnostic Front in 1980. Finally settling on a rhythm section, plus vocalist Roger Miret, the band began releasing music to the public in 1983 with their United Blood EP. When the time came to record their second full-length album the band was experiencing constant lineup changes, and with their new material being more musically demanding, featuring a healthy metal influence, Stigma and Miret called on the Carnivore rhythm section for help. “Our manager, Connie Barrett, also manages Agnostic Front,” Peter said at the time. “They were looking for a drummer to do the album, and Louie was asked to do it. There was a point where they just ran out of lyrics and they asked me if I could come up with something.”

The two bands were acquainted already, not only through Barrett, but from sharing the same rehearsal space. (When Carnivore’s noise became too disruptive to the Ratajczyk household, Peter and Louie found a rehearsal spot outside of the neighborhood, on Fourth Street and Ditmas Avenue. Agnostic Front rehearsed there as well.) Louie had an easy time adapting to Agnostic Front’s needs, and he became a stronger drummer by working daily with two aggressionpacked bands. He didn’t, however, expect to find such disarray within their ranks. “Agnostic Front was prominent in the punk scene at the time,” remembers Louie, “and with Carnivore looking to include those flavors in our music, I thought it would be a great opportunity to be involved and be directly influenced by a prominent New York hardcore band.” He continues, “I was rehearsing with Carnivore and then after the Carnivore rehearsal I’d be rehearsing with Agnostic Front. They were a strange band. I was used to working with Pete, who had everything thought out precisely, and here’s a band where they were completely opposite. Carnivore was so anal about things, and that’s what I was used to, but Agnostic Front was so undisciplined in their approach to doing a record. I was surprised they weren’t a little more focused. Only portions of songs were completed, and [there were] loose ends all over the place. I remember contributing in terms of terminating songs. They didn’t know how to end them. I told Vinnie and Roger, ‘I want you to be honest with me; if you don’t like something and you feel it’s sounding too metal and not punk enough, let me know.’ And they said, ‘No, we want that influence in this album, we want it to sound metal, we want double bass, we want to change up the sound.’ It was interesting, because here we were as Carnivore looking for a punk influence, and then Agnostic Front was looking for a metal influence. There was a lot of collaboration going on in the studio. It was the perfect scenario.” The resulting album, Cause for Alarm, features typically colorful Sean Taggart artwork and music that defines “crossover,” the mesh of hardcore and metal into a new hybrid sound. Some of the lyrics were controversial, raising the ire of iconic Dead Kennedys frontman

Jello Biafra and punk fanzine Maximum Rocknroll for their right-wing sentiments. As it turns out, Peter Steele was behind the album’s most debated lyrics, but Peter didn’t care about making friends. He just needed to get some shit off his chest. Peter’s parents, especially his father, instilled a strong work ethic in him. Peter had been working consistently since he was sixteen, and when he wrote the lyrics for Agnostic Front’s “Public Assistance,” he was pissed off about where he felt his taxes were going, and to whom: “Uncle Sam takes half my pay / So you can live for free / I got a family and bills to pay / No one hands money to me.” The song, band, album, and New York hardcore scene would have made no significant impact outside hardcore circles where Agnostic Front was preaching to the converted. But in 1986, when daytime talk show host Phil Donahue ran a piece about the music and its related controversies on his immensely popular daytime television program, the movement instantly gained countrywide notoriety. Members of Agnostic Front, Youth of Today, Murphy’s Law, Token Entry, and the Cro-Mags appeared on the show, and fans in the audience spoke out about an article on New York hardcore by Peter Blauner that had just run in New York Magazine. A longtime fan and participant in the New York hardcore movement, and a close friend of Peter’s years later notes that, “The song that made Agnostic Front famous was ‘Public Assistance’: ‘We won’t take no resistance, cut their public assistance.’ The song that Donahue chose to highlight was from Cause for Alarm, and of course the lyrics are very right wing.’ But as for Peter getting into the politics of stuff like that, Peter was not a bigot. Peter treated every person equally.” Amid the chaotic Donahue segment, Vinnie Stigma defended his band’s views. “We just speak of social unrest. Turmoil brings controversy. It speaks for itself.” As for Peter, he was just helping out some pals, telling friend and author Steven Blush after the fact, “They were on a critical time frame, so they asked for my help. I didn’t want to diverge from their style, so I did what they asked and wrote within it. It was a good album for its time. They still owe me money, but whatever. There

were certain people that didn’t like the lyrics I came up with. I have two things to say about that: First is that I was told what these songs were to be about; I was to write based on the subject matter. Second, I would not have written these songs if I did not agree with what I was saying. I had no problem with what they asked me to write about.” In a calm, nonbelligerent tone, Peter clarified his views several years later on a Dutch television news segment. He said, “If people choose not to work, if they choose not to contribute to society, why should they have a voice and why should they have a say in what goes on? If you’re not contributing, then you must be taking away.” The interviewer responded, “That’s a very right-wing point of view,” to which Peter said, “You can call it what you want, but I come from a background where normal people work for a living. They don’t live off the government’s back. They don’t live off anybody’s back. They have pride. They stand on their own two feet. If a person chooses not to work, that’s fine, but don’t go and collect benefits just because you’re too lazy to get out of bed.” Still part of the working class at the time of the interview, Peter said, “I have to wake up for work at four-thirty in the morning, get my ass out of bed and into the freezing cold because I have pride, and yet I pay taxes so some slob can sit in bed watching cartoons while I’m out cleaning the park for them?” He pauses and then says, “That’s my point.” Around that same time, Peter again tried to clarify where his head was at while also exposing what he saw as extreme political correctness. “I reacted to the fact of living in an environment where, as a white, heterosexual male, I am excluded from things because we’re considered the majority, but that is not really the case here anymore. It doesn’t sit too well with me that when you take a civil service exam here in the city you get more points if you’re not white, or if you’re disabled, female, or you served in the military. So I wish that I’d been born a poor, black, deformed lesbian because then I could have any job I want.” Although never identifying himself as racist, and never truly holding such views, Peter was used to taking heat for his supposed

“right-wing” attitude. Every band of his, starting with Fallout, was accompanied by a symbol to represent the band, and even these symbols would catch flak from people quick to judge. As Peter told an interviewer in 1999, “I’ve always been into symbols, like corporate art in business—they have a logo and a color scheme.” The first era of Carnivore was symbolized by a “tripligram,” three right angles joined at the center. When asked in 1986 what it meant, Peter replied, “Since the band has three members, it has three arms. The symbol represents survival of the fittest, and at the same time, individuality. When I designed it I had an ultra-military look in mind. It’s not based on a swastika, as some people may think, because I don’t believe in the Nazi philosophy. But it is supposed to have a military look to it.” He said several years later, “If you go to any fallout shelter there’s a symbol which is three triangles, and if you just make a stick figure out of the triangles and remove one of the sides you get the old Carnivore symbol. Carnivore was based on a post-nuclear war society, and what better symbol than a mutated radiation symbol?” It’s probably most accurate to call Peter’s political and social views “Darwinian.” In 1992 he said, “I consider myself an evolutionist. I believe that superior specimens should dominate. I think that the weak should perish. And I don’t think these are cold thoughts. This is the way things have been for the last billion years. Once you stop adapting, you stop evolving.” That same year, Peter wrote a piece for Creem magazine, which asked for a personal commentary on “human rights.” He said, “In every species, except our precious own, the inferior are left behind to perish, freeing the more adapted to go on about their worthy lives. This insures that healthy offspring will be produced by superior specimens. But woe is me, my little lambs, for due to advantages in technology and medical science, a most horrible, intolerable, and downright crummy thing is happening: we have ceased to evolve!” The piece was judged too inflammatory by Creem and went unpublished. The entire rant was eventually printed by The Fifth Path magazine.

Uproar regarding Peter’s lyrics followed the release of Agnostic Front’s Cause for Alarm and the second Carnivore album, and there would be no lack of additional turmoil in the coming years. Calling Peter a misunderstood provocateur only skims the surface of his complexities, but longtime friend and collaborator Richard Termini felt he understood exactly what Peter was about. “Peter expressed himself in simple, honest terms, and he got reactions,” states Termini. “Like John Lennon simply pointing out that the Beatles meant more to kids than Jesus and then found himself targeted by crazy murderous lunatics, Peter found himself in similar situations time and time again. And I think he was not nearly as aware of the danger as consciously as John Lennon was. Peter, whether he wanted it or not, was a kind of human social experiment set to music. His work is not finished and should be picked up by others—standing up and speaking honestly about a question and seeing who throws rocks at you, who calls for your extermination, who calls for your silence. Peter found himself outing hatemongers and enemies of free speech simply because he has a few thoughts and a few questions and was ‘rude’ enough to ask them in public out loud, over a mic powered by 10,000 watts all set to music. There are few rock artists that moved into the subjects and topics that Peter managed to do and do it well.” Steven Blush witnessed Peter’s selflessness and generosity toward others, regardless of color. “He helped out anybody in his neighborhood, any of the old Jewish ladies, if they needed stuff fixed. It’s very different, coming from the city. I remember all the hardcore guys got labeled with this Nazi thing. As if Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, and Murphy’s Law were Nazis. They weren’t Nazis. They may have been highly reactionary characters. All of their friends, all of their culture, and all of their scene were in cultural New York City. It comes from a New York psyche. It’s not white supremacist at all.” While Peter continued to explore his thoughts and views in a world he found harsh and disappointing, his shift in thinking in 1986, and people’s reactions to it, would not be the last time he’d find himself in the eye of a controversy storm.

After putting their stamp on NYHC with the Agnostic Front affiliation, Peter and Louie continued to rehearse material for the second Carnivore album with a brand new guitarist. Once Peter and Louie parted ways with Keith Bonanno—a personally difficult but creatively necessary step—the duo placed ads in various local music papers, including the Village Voice. Through the Voice ad they acquired guitarist and Carnivore fan Chris Abell, but the applicant lasted only a few days. Peter and Louie found Abell more equipped to be a fan than a bona fide member of Carnivore. Disappointed, Abell told his friend and fellow guitarist Marc Piovanetti that the band was still looking for the right fit. Marc was familiar with Carnivore; he and Abell had seen them open for British band Tank, at Manhattan’s Studio 54 in late 1985. Piovanetti figured it was worth a shot and requested an audition. Born November 18, 1966, Marc Piovanetti would be instrumental in not only altering the sound of Carnivore, but the band’s image. “I started teaching myself music from books,” remembers Marc. “I had been playing by ear for many years and then started taking lessons. I started to learn music Carnivore 1987, with new guitarist theory and scales, and I began Marc Piovanetti (left) practicing a wild amount. I would literally wake up in the morning, have breakfast, pick up my guitar and play all day and all afternoon, all the way into the evening. I was playing ten or twelve hours a day at times.” Some of Marc’s influences matched Peter and Louie’s. He had grown up on the Beatles and considered Black Sabbath and Judas Priest as major inspirations, but Marc’s other interests went in a variety of directions. Melodic hard rock/metal bands such as Vandenberg and Dokken were part of his musical diet, as were

Canadian bands Rush and Triumph, rockers Ted Nugent and Van Halen, and even Billy Joel and the early jazz-rock material of Chicago. Marc’s familiarity with Carnivore made him eager for the audition. He knew he could nail the music, but questioned whether he would be deemed worthy of the band’s image. Marc recalls that, “Carnivore was well known on the local metal scene for several years before their first album was released. Their stage show and Mad Max-style costumes received a lot of attention.” But the costumes would not last into Marc’s tenure with Carnivore. Their music was changing, and so was the greater underground metal scene, which was crammed with hundreds of bands whose image was “no image,” just jeans and T-shirts, the sort of everyman look hardcore and thrash bands made their own. “Marc came down and auditioned,” Louie recalls, “and there was nothing about him that he initially presented that appealed to us. It sounds shallow, but image is image, and he looked like Geraldo Rivera. The mustache, the bushy hair. And he breaks out a guitar, and it’s white with a white bow on the headstock, as you’d see on a present. We were like ‘What is this guy?’ But then he played and it sounded good. When we decided to have Marc in the band it became clear that he wasn’t going to fit the massiveness of the band image, because he was tiny. He wasn’t short, but he was very skinny, and putting shoulder pads and fur on him wasn’t gonna look right. We decided it was time to eliminate the costumes. Also, we didn’t want to get locked into any image, we wanted to show we were evolving, and it was thought that something a little different should happen with each album, so the second album was the street scene, crossover, putting all that neo-barbarianism in the past.” The guitarist recalls that the image transition didn’t happen overnight. “Pete was getting very into hardcore, and he always had new visions and new ideas. At that time he wanted to push Carnivore in a hardcore direction. Since they didn’t think that I fit the barbarian image, Pete used that as an opportunity to push his agenda and have the band become more hardcore in image. It still had a theme, with the kind of clothing that might be found after a

nuclear holocaust or whatever—ripped up shirts, torn and battered pants—but it didn’t involve the shoulder pads or fur or any of the barbaric stuff.” Marc’s first-ever show with Carnivore was his first show with any band. From obscurity to a CBGB hardcore matinee, Marc’s premier with Carnivore was an auspicious event, followed by an opening slot at L’Amour with rising locals Overkill. “L’Amour sold out and packed in people way over their legal limit,” recalls Marc. “There were over two thousand people there that night. When the screen went up it was wild. There were people as far as the eye could see. To me it was like playing at a stadium, and it really energized me. That’s when I knew I was part of something special.” While they premiered a couple new songs, most of the set was culled from Carnivore’s first album. As Marc recalls, the fast parts were being played much faster than on the album. “Sometimes Peter’s influences and the new music he listened to would rush over him and push him too far. Later it became more of a balance and became more graceful and tasteful, but in 1986 he was pushing for the Carnivore songs to be played way faster than they had been recorded. Pete wanted to play it faster and faster and faster until it was hardcore speed, and a lot of those songs lost their power when they were played too fast, and the lyrics were going by too fast to understand what Pete was saying, like in ‘Predator’ or ‘Armageddon.’” Carnivore’s summer of 1986 was spent rehearsing new songs with an again-stable lineup and making as loud a noise as possible in their rehearsal space. The space itself was in an unlikely location, owned by an equally unlikely landlord who might not have appreciated some of the material Peter was preparing on his property. Marc recalls that, “This young Orthodox Jewish man named Dave had turned his small toolshed in the back of his house into a music studio in order to rehearse with his klezmer band. He was in his early thirties and it was something that was behind him in his life, so he wanted to make some money and rent out the space to bands, and Carnivore was it! We had all kinds of junk around—a

giant jar that you’d piss in, stop signs, barriers, camouflage, and gas masks.” It’s both an uncomfortable and hilarious irony that this rehearsal space is where the seeds were first sown for “Jesus Hitler,” one of the most controversial songs Peter ever wrote. In the songwriter’s own words, it’s “about one man who’s born with the souls of both Christ and Hitler within him. He’s totally confused because he doesn’t know if he wants to kill the Jews or save them—‘Is this the Second Coming or the Fourth Reich?’—the guy’s torn inside, ripped to shreds.” “His mother, a nun, raped by a Nazi at the end of the second great war”—thus begins one of Peter’s most fascinating concepts, one that gave him a great excuse to invent yet more odd vocabulary and unusual puns: “Nazolics,” “Neotheofacists,” “The Holy Swazifix,” “Reich Und Roll” … all squeezed into this infamous tale of Jesus Hitler, a character born from an immensely fertile mind, a character that offers confusing possibilities: “Hess on my left and Peter on right / Will it be war or peace?” Peter’s initial indecision about whether their new guitarist would fit the band’s image resulted in the bassist asking Marc to shave his mustache to resemble Hitler’s and dress in a Nazi uniform onstage. “He was completely serious about it,” Marc remembers. “Not from some sort of malicious racist/Nazi ideal, he just thought that the accomplishments of Nazi Germany were spectacular and sensational and shocking.” Which is exactly what Peter himself was always going for with Carnivore. But what he was asking of this rookie guitarist was too much to believe. Marc quit almost before he started. He remembers that, “Whether it was a joke or a publicity stunt, it could have really been taken the wrong way. I might be burning bridges for my future, and I just didn’t think it was gonna work. I thought he had gone too far over the edge. But he wouldn’t let up about it.” Marc’s attempt to leave the band ended up with Peter gaining new respect for him. He remembers telling Peter and Louie of his decision to leave.

“I’ve thought about it, and I’m sorry,” Marc told them, “but I can’t dress up like Hitler. You should look for another guitar player. I’ll play with you until you find someone so that you can play a show or fulfill whatever obligations you have, but it sounds like you’re looking for someone to do something that is not really me. I can’t be a part of it anymore.” Peter appreciated his honesty. “It changed something in his viewpoint of me,” says Marc. And so, Marc Piovanetti remained.

The first Carnivore album might have built a cult following for the band, but the record company’s failure to secure a tour and Peter’s dislike of traveling far from home, along with continuing changes in the guitar department, forced a reality onto Peter and Louie—they would have to get real jobs in case Carnivore didn’t pan out for the long haul. Taking a job briefly with UPS, while still working for the roofing supply company, Peter eventually realized that a position in the civil service would give him a secure future. His first step in that direction was guided by his sense of right and wrong, leading him to consider a career in law enforcement. He once said, “I am a complete conformist. I’m completely pro-government, pro-police, prorules. I am extremely anti-anarchist. I would have made a wonderful totalitarian.” In the summer of 1986, according to Peter, he “thought about becoming a cop. I went down, scored well on the test and was investigated, which is part of the interview procedure. They were so happy with me that I was scheduled to go into the academy right away. But the night before I was supposed to go in I decided being a cop was not something I wanted. So I didn’t show up.” Skepticism remains whether Peter went as far as actually taking the test. Peter’s sister Cathy is in agreement with her brother (“I think he took the test and passed”), but Marc says, “That’s just a fable; none of that ever happened.” Louie isn’t sure one way or another.

“That’s a gray area in his history,” he says. “I can’t remember him taking a test. Pete was a buff as far as cops go. He had a lot of cop friends. Maybe that has mutated into [the story of] him having taken the test for the police department.” One of those cop friends, Sherry Stein, who Peter befriended later in the mid ’90s, says, “I think he was only considering taking the test.” Regardless of the truth, as a result of his gig with UPS and a potential law enforcement career, the burly neo-barbarian from Brooklyn made one of his more shocking moves: he shaved his head. As menacing with a shaved dome as with his flowing mane, Peter has also mentioned that the image change was because “I was hanging out with a lot of skins, starting to get into their lifestyle. I was getting a little sick of my hair too, I suppose. I considered it to be a bit dated. I’m going to grow it back, though. I hate having short hair. I’ve had long hair since I was sixteen.” His sister Pam remembers that, “Peter said when he cut his hair how differently people treated him with short hair, as opposed to his long hair. How completely different it was.” He found that people were nicer to him, on the defensive less than when he sported long hair, and generally less judgmental. The social experiment continued. As the summer wound down, it became time to document the new Carnivore music for posterity. Naturally, Roadrunner Records was curious how the new stuff was coming along, and because the first album didn’t exactly break sales records, the label, according to

Marc, “insisted on hearing a full demo of what was going to be the second album before they would pay for it. It was specifically for the purpose of sending it to Roadrunner president, Cees Wessels, to decide whether what he heard was worth keeping their end of the contract, because they had the option to drop the band at any time.” Even though Peter considered sending the label nothing but a tape of white noise (“static and a scraping pick across guitar strings,” according to Marc), better sense prevailed. In the summer of 1986, Peter, Louie, and Marc entered Josh Silver’s Sty in the Sky studio and laid down most of the songs slated for the second Carnivore album. The studio setup was curious. As Louie explains, “It was kind of awkward. The live room was in the basement, with cables running from the basement through holes in the first and second floors up to what used to be Josh’s bedroom. Cameras were in the basement so Josh could communicate with whatever band would be down there. Fallout and our road crew constructed a live room for a rehearsal space. Fallout rehearsed mostly in Josh’s basement.” Only for Roadrunner’s ears, some of the songs showcased a markedly different but still caustic Carnivore. The antiterrorist, promilitary “U.S.A. for U.S.A.” seethed with anger and surged with pride, a jingoistic balls-out frenzy in the NYHC tradition. The bass and guitar tones are still metallic, but this song and the equally blunt “S.M.D.” (aka “Suck My Dick”) were official proof of Carnivore’s directional shift. “Sex and Violence,” however, might as well have been a leftover from the first era, featuring a bass intro on the demo that was left off the later album version. The intro recalls the hazy chill of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan,” but once the song kicks in, it’s a burly, malicious beast that bridges the old Carnivore sound and their newer approach. The song holds what became Carnivore’s motto: “If you can’t eat it or fuck it, then kill it,” serving to link Carnivore’s early bloodthirst and their newer streetwise attitude. Other demo material recorded for Roadrunner featured more deeply layered arrangements beyond the hardcore-oriented tracks. “Technophobia,” “Race War,” “Ground Zero Brooklyn,” and “Angry Neurotic Catholics” proved that the more ambitious brutality of the

first Carnivore era could be fused with the stripped-down force of the new one. Once the new songs were in the hands and ears of Roadrunner, and Cees Wessels in particular, a decision was easy— they, and no other label, would continue to work with Carnivore. The label collectively recognized that they had a special musical vision lurking in their stable with Peter Steele. The original contract remained in place, and plans were underway to record a second album. Springtime of 1987 found Carnivore embarking on Retaliation. Time was split between the familiar surroundings of Systems Two and producer Alex Perialas’s upstate studio, Pyramid Sound, in Ithaca. Perialas was one of the hottest thrash metal producers at the time, lending his expertise to albums by Anthrax, Overkill, Testament, Nuclear Assault, and S.O.D. He was chosen, according to Marc, when the guitarist “brought down a bunch of my metal records and had a listening party in Pete’s basement. That’s where we decided what would be best and who to consider for the project.”

Peter’s hand-written lyrics, on cardboard graph paper, for Retaliation (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family)

Louie had found employment as a city bus driver. Being a new employee, days off were scarce, so the drummer recorded his parts, as Peter did his bass, at Systems Two. The guitars and vocals were then tracked in Ithaca. The band cruised through the Retaliation sessions, and the ferocious comeback signaled by the album title also reflected in the pulp comic-style artwork—figures in military Hazmat uniforms with missiles looming in the background. The continuity from Peter and Louie’s days in Fallout was obvious. While Peter would have always favored studio creation over live performance, he found the studio environment in Ithaca to not only be unfamiliar, but sterile. Yet his vocal performances on the album are inspired exhortations of pure rage and passion, and there’s a good reason why. Marc remembers, “In order to bring the theater and the hatred and the primal element that was in the songs to a vocal performance, it was easier for Pete to do it in front of a raging crowd than in a quiet room in front of a microphone. He was looking for a way to get into a dark, hateful mood to deliver that, and start sweating and feeling angry.” A man’s man, Perialas had a plethora of tools in and around the studio. He was building a boat at the time, and Pete had a fondness for tools. While listening back to some early takes, Peter picked up a big hammer and unconsciously tossed it from one hand to the other as he listened. He then asked to record more vocal takes and went into the sound booth. Marc says, “He ended up literally swinging the hammer around like a psychotic madman while screaming out the vocal parts for Retaliation.”

Retaliation was built of ten original tracks, a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” and an intro skit titled “Jack Daniel’s and Pizza.” The latter was a depiction of too much whiskey and pizza coming out the way it came in. Peter created this lovely piece by shoving fingers down his throat to produce a retching sound and tossing canned tomatoes into a sink full of water. There were other

skits recorded that didn’t make the album, including one of Louie doing a high-pitched cackle, Peter hamming it up as a chuckling goon, and Josh Silver’s girlfriend screaming as a buzzsaw blade pierces the psychotic din, with someone sawing into wood to make it sound like blade into bone. Even though it was shelved, the idea was revisited for a future project. As with the first Carnivore album, Retaliation swims against the stream, playing out more elaborately and eclectically than any other metal/hardcore crossover record. Marc recalls Peter’s reaction after they had completed the album. “I remember him being disappointed with the record, but he was always disappointed with every recording he ever did. But when he was speaking favorably about it, Peter said he thought it was the best record he’d ever heard. He called it the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s of thrash.’ I thought that was a good way of describing it.” For a guy who rarely discussed the details of his music even with his closest friends, and who would never compliment himself without some degree of self-deprecation, calling Retaliation the “Sgt. Pepper’s of thrash” was sky-high self-praise … but it made sense. Within and around the mainframe of the songs, which varied in pace from manic hyperspeed rhythms to dreary slow-motion dirges, there was plenty of ear candy, including the one-minute intro skit; the false start and do-over of “S.M.D.”; the overlaying of monk chants and a Hitler speech in “Jesus Hitler” (Hitler rants, “The aim is that all decent Germans will be National Socialists—only the best National Socialists are party comrades!”); and the section of “Technophobia” that incorporates a passage from Frederic Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre.” The cover of “Manic Depression” is revealing, its original psychedelic elements stripped away and replaced with primitive rhythmic pounding and a desperate, pleading Peter belting out lyrics that were closer to home than many realized at the time. He altered

the lyrics to fit his needs (a pattern he would repeat in most future cover song choices). “Manic depression is a frustrating mess,” sings a tormented Peter. “I think I’ll go kill myself … I’m going down … I’m going down! Down! There really ain’t no use in me staying here and hanging around. I gotta get out!!!” Retaliation found Carnivore performing at a higher level than ever. The hailstorm of drum blasts in “Ground Zero Brooklyn” is nearly equal to that of the insanely fast grindcore starting to gestate over in England in 1987. And with Marc’s dexterous manhandling of the brute material and Peter’s always spot-on bass work, the guitar/bass team proved extraordinarily capable, giving the complex “Technophobia” and forlorn melodies of instrumental “Five Billion Dead” an impressive, authoritative edge. Marc makes note of Retaliation’s peculiar guitar/bass mesh— something that became a sonic trademark of Peter’s later musical pursuits. “Both of us used the same distortion box, a Boss DS-1, and you have a real hard time telling the difference between the bass and guitar at times. It becomes one big, huge sound.” Although Retaliation sold a little better than Carnivore and the band’s profile increased slightly, it was not an album with mass appeal. Several songs were grossly misinterpreted by knee-jerk liberals who couldn’t read between sarcastic lines. Right out of the starting gate, Retaliation was hated and loved in equal measure. “Jesus Hitler” was digestible to those with a dark sense of humor and an understanding of parody, but if his critics would have delved a little deeper into the album, they would have found a troubled and even fragile human being behind these songs. “Manic Depression” was a tip-off, and the guilt-ridden suffering in “Angry Neurotic Catholics” speaks for itself. A lot of the other material held a mirror up to the storm brewing inside Peter’s twenty-five-year-old head, such as these lines from “Inner Conflict”: Somebody kill me Somebody put me out of my misery (and at the end):

Hate is fear! Hate is fear! I rip at my face in the mirror Death approaching! Death approaching! Expiration growing nearer I’m rotting inside. I’m rotting inside! I’m disgusted with myself. I’m in hell! I’m in hell! I’m in hell! Then, whispered weakly after the music comes to a screeching halt: Help. Only the a cappella break in “Ground Zero Brooklyn” matches “Inner Conflict” for a gripping open-book reading of Peter’s anxieties: Jesus, I beg of thee! Don’t take my life Return me to the womb From which I was torn Birth is a sin And the punishment is death I wish you had left me unborn! But of all the incendiary lyrics on Retaliation, “Race War” caused the most controversy. While it could easily be mistaken as a call for total racial segregation, and lines like “We fell from different cunts and your skin’s an ugly color” seethe with disgust, “Race War” was not endorsement, but documentary. It’s the same distanced, observational stance Slayer took when writing about the Nazi regime’s gas chambers or when horror-movie directors depict ghastly, horrible scenes of gore … it’s simply audacity for its own sake. There’s no message, no agenda, nobody taking sides. It is depiction without need of elaboration or excuse.

Anybody who ever knew Peter knew two things for sure: he loved to stir up the pot and then stand back and watch the reaction; and he did not advocate racism in any form. A close friend of Peter’s notes that, “I never, ever heard him say the word ‘nigger,’ and he would not tolerate that from anyone.” Louie adds that, “Pete’s a great guy. I never saw him act racist or have misdirected anger at any particular group of people. I just think he was angry. He was not racist, but he was proud to be white.” If Peter’s goal was to thrust humanity’s ugliness into everybody’s face and expose it for what it is, he succeeded beyond his own imagining. The ramifications of “Race War” would take on an even more disastrous shape in the coming years.

Retaliation’s thanks list (“Carnivorous Appreciation”) references a variety of alcoholic beverages, and while Peter was, at age twentyfive, only starting to dabble with drinking, it was hardly a crutch or problem. Depression, however, led him to seek professional help as early as 1985, and by the end of 1987 Peter was regularly keeping up with his Prozac prescription and trying to remain balanced. “It just got to the point that I didn’t know what to do,” he said of his decision to seek pharmaceutical assistance. “I was feeling suicidal and figured I should talk to somebody before I did something I would live to regret. Prozac doesn’t make me happy, it just somehow prevents me from feeling really bad.” Similar to the feelings he’d confided to Donna, Peter told Sound Views magazine in 1992, “I contemplate suicide every day. I’m angry and depressed all the time. I was disillusioned about what life was supposed to be, and I don’t like what life is.” Close friend Mark Martin recalls, “I specifically remember Peter saying to me that people had told him what he was going through, with depression, could be chemical and he was going to investigate it. His wife at the time was very influential in that.” It was indeed Donna White who encouraged Peter to seek medical help for his depression in 1985.

“Peter suffered from depression early on,” she recalls. “This is when I finally pushed him to go and see somebody and get help, and this is when he finally got on meds. Just an antidepressant, because it was getting worse and worse.” “I never once saw him take a drug or drink in the early ’80s,” recalls Richard Termini. “He was health conscious until what appeared to become a self-destructive phase. I remember during the period of Carnivore, he showed me a bottle of Prozac. From my point of view it looked like someone had convinced Peter to get treatment and put him on psychiatric drugs. It was after that that he began to become confused and self-destructive.” Beyond his own chemical makeup, Peter had reason to feel disillusionment in 1987. Carnivore’s future was looking bleak, and he and Donna were separating with divorce clearly on the horizon. Donna couldn’t handle living in the basement of the Ratajczyk household any longer—not because she didn’t get along with Peter’s parents and his sisters (she very much did), but because it felt stifling, like stunted growth. She wanted the couple to share their own place, but Peter wasn’t ready to leave the only home he knew. Donna moved out as Peter remained in the familiar quarters of the family basement. In July 1987, Peter took a job with the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. Assigned as a City Park Worker in Brooklyn’s District 2, Peter drove a dump truck and was in charge of a mobile crew that worked at various public swimming pools and parks in the district. Over time he completed forestry and treepruning training, achieved various promotions, and learned how to operate a variety of machinery and tools, including tractor-trailers, wood chippers, and jackhammers. His parents were pleased with his new occupation—it assured good pay, excellent benefits and a lifetime of security as long as he performed well and stuck to it. And he did—Peter loved his job and being immersed in nature. He was grateful to be getting paid to be outdoors, surrounded by trees, grass, and fresh air. Peter got along well with the guys on his crew, and the steadiness of blue-collar life appealed to him. It also offered

opportunities to work holidays so he could earn days off, which was helpful when Carnivore had a series of live shows to play in the area. Peter eventually gained the nickname “The Green Man” because of the job, which required him to dress in an olive-green uniform and work amid the greenery of the parks. Peter genuinely loved the parks he cared for and the forests of upstate New York. He said later, “I was the ‘green man,’ the guy who maintained nature. If someone littered or abused the property that I maintained, I would confront these people. I became very vigilant about it, and it never happened again.” Amid Carnivore’s shaky future, and Peter’s depression and failing marriage, the Green Man had found an anchor with the Parks Department and grasped on tightly.

Louie Beato says, “Peter had been dealing with bouts of depression since I met him. He always had issues and always felt trapped in a situation. We’d talk about an issue and I’d be like, ‘try this’ or ‘try that.’ But he would just keep debating and refuting anything I would say as a solution. But that was Pete. He wasn’t happy unless he was miserable.” And Louie Beato would know. He’d been playing music consistently with Peter for eight years solid. By 1988, Peter’s labor of love, Carnivore, was slowly going nowhere. Bound to their day jobs, neither he nor Louie could take much time off to tour extensively, keeping Carnivore grounded as a New York-area phenomenon. They could only play L’Amour and CBGB so much before thinning out their local appeal. Marc, however, was not tied down to a regular job, and an opening with crossover phenom Crumbsuckers was too good to turn down. Marc joined the band after the release of their Beast on My Back album, playing live shows with them while also remaining in Carnivore in an attempt to carve out some kind of living as a musician. Marc remembers Carnivore opening a show for legendary California punk/metal band Suicidal Tendencies in 1988, an occasion that put things in perspective for the band. The crowd was familiar

with Carnivore’s material, and reception was decent, but when Suicidal took the stage, the packed club went berserk. It set into motion an uneasy feeling that while other bands were taking their extreme music to an international level, Carnivore was perpetually stuck in the trenches of the NYC club scene, never to escape. “It was a huge factor,” Marc recalls. “Peter’s constant thinking was that once again the same thing had happened as with the first Carnivore album. Retaliation had all these high expectations, but nothing really came of it. He was sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, expecting that the band’s genius was going to be discovered by someone.” Once Peter resigned himself to the fact that, in Marc’s words, “this wasn’t going to work,” he didn’t exactly disband Carnivore, but instead decided to take things to an even more demented extreme. “He figured if all he’s gonna do is play shows locally, put out an album that’s gonna get a few interviews and reviews in some magazines, and be sold to only a few thousand people, well, now he can take his mask off and really focus on the shock value and madness without any thoughts of what people wanted to hear. He wanted just to be extreme. He was as happy with the thought of getting onstage and people being mortified with what was going on and running for the exits to get out as he was with people being attracted to the music.” When he saw bands such as Anthrax and Overkill achieving worldwide fame, securing great record deals and touring the globe, Peter grew increasingly frustrated. He began closing the door on the idea that his music would ever be appreciated on an international level. Peter was a practical thinker, and he knew there was nothing practical about thinking his controversial and misunderstood metal band could “make it.” According to Marc, “Peter and Louie certainly weren’t going to quit their jobs and get in a van and go on tour, or fire the manager or try to get on another label. There was a reluctance to work on it themselves, to do something about the situation. I was of the mindset, ‘Let’s do whatever we can,’ but they were both like, ‘We’ll do whatever we can, but the jobs are now our first priority.’”

Peter’s quest to cut away all frivolous excesses and morph Carnivore into something more extreme came with his first postRetaliation composition. Titled “White and Proud,” the song was not a white-power anthem, but a reversal of the hypocrisy Peter saw around him. He did not like people coming into the country and skating by on unemployment benefits; he also did not like the idea that African-Americans could openly celebrate Black Pride, but if Caucasians celebrated White Pride, accusations of racism would ensue with firestorms of controversy to follow. Peter was simply proud to be white, in the same way blacks were proud to be black and Hispanics were proud to be Hispanic. This didn’t sit well with Louie. “One of the issues with Carnivore’s demise was the direction we were heading as far as lyrics go,” says Louie. “The third album that we were working on was lyrically heading in a direction that I felt was going to alienate us completely. Music was evolving and things were changing and the doors were opening a little bit for this type of music. They had started to play some of this music on the radio. I suggested to Pete that perhaps not every song should have the word ‘fuck’ in it.” In addition to feeling that Peter’s writing was too extreme even for the extreme world they dwelled in, Louie was happy in his more traditional lifestyle. He got engaged; he had a solid job with the New York City Transit Authority; and he was happy enough with everything Carnivore had already achieved. “I want to stress that Peter was not a racist,” Louie says, “but I felt that he was going to be hurting our overall success to go in this direction.” Louie bowed out of Carnivore in the spring of 1989, effectively killing the band. Peter did not want to continue with Carnivore if his drumming partner of eight years was not going to sit behind the kit. Marc remembers that, “There was this mentality of ‘this is never going to make money.’ Not like it was all about making money, we

loved what we were doing and we were creating it the way we wanted, but it wasn’t working. Louie had gotten the bus driver job, and he wasn’t going to be able to meet the rehearsal schedule anymore. And Peter wanted to do this album called White and Proud, but Louie couldn’t commit to something that was destined to be a commercial failure. They couldn’t really get it together. There was a kind of conversation, like, ‘Carnivore will be no more.’ But we did play more shows after that once I came back from a Crumbsuckers tour. “Each of us had completely different agendas,” continues Marc. “Pete was getting Extremely rare Carnivore into a place where his depression was vinyl bootleg, compiling starting. His dreams were crumbling. He demos from 1984 and 1986, thought he was gonna be a rock star and and the two songs from Fallout’s now he was raking leaves and driving dump 1981 7”. Only trucks. And he had this music that he was 88 copies pressed. working on for the third album that was never going to be heard. It wasn’t being met well—Louie didn’t like the ideas at all. But Pete didn’t want to cater to anyone for anything.” Peter continued to write new material, despite the end of Carnivore drawing near. Musically it went beyond Retaliation in its multifaceted ambition, drawing from a wider array of musical influences than before. The songs were more emotional in content, more personal in nature. As Marc recalls, it was becoming more about Peter’s “mental health and relationships. Actual things that were happening in his life. He was making music that was for him alone, down in his basement. His world was getting smaller and smaller.” In the personal and professional confusion that was Peter Steele’s world circa 1988, Carnivore began its final spinout. Clearly the true progeny of Fallout—rather than John Campos and Josh

Silver’s shorter-lived Original Sin—Carnivore created something of great value and originality, but it was probably too radical to survive any longer than it did. Marc notes that, “After Carnivore stopped playing shows, Retaliation started to take on a life of its own without any promotion from the record company. Just by word of mouth and being played on college radio. It became this legendary underground record that reached more people than the band realized, behind the scenes and across the world.” But it was too late for the band to capitalize upon its newfound popularity. By the spring of 1989, the Carnivore beast had no choice but to lie down and die.

Back cover of Carnivore/ Retaliation 2-on-1 CD longbox

Twenty years after the demise of Carnivore, Marc Piovanetti went through mental health issues of his own. He had also dealt with issues of emotional instability even before joining Carnivore, ones that necessitated hospitalization. He’s finally on the winning side of that long battle, but for a time—a very scary time—Marc had serious challenges to overcome. With everything he’s learned, he now looks back on his interactions with Peter in 1988 and keenly grasps the emotional distress and confusion Peter felt inside. Marc recalls a particularly rough breakdown Peter faced at the end of the Carnivore era. It reveals where Peter was in his life, where his creativity would take him, and what he would be facing when the new decade rolled around. “I remember one night, Peter was really depressed,” Marc begins. “He drove me home from rehearsal, and he didn’t want the night to end. He parked and we were talking. He asked me how I felt

about this and that, and then he began telling me about some things that were going on. He didn’t feel like there was any hope, telling me about being completely unhappy with himself and his life and the world. And I realized he was starting to cry. He was having a total panic attack. He was melting into pieces right in front of me, which was really unusual because Peter was so tall and carried himself so high and he had that stoic look on his face. It was hard to tell unless he broke out into a smile whether he was feeling good or bad or what. He just had this imposing look, and you always felt below him, and examined by him, like he was a machine or something, but he was very human, and that was really the first time I realized Pete was just a bunch of fragile pieces that were being held together and that there was something wrong with him. “I had seen him be very human many times; we all laughed and hung out and he was just one of the guys around us. He didn’t act like a dictator or anything. It was just like being at a job. We acknowledged that he had greater credentials for that higher position of telling people what to do. He was open to all ideas and all participation, but you were down here and he was up there, because he had earned it. Or he was born with it. “But that night, the way he was talking, I thought he was going home to kill himself, to try to commit suicide. So we ended up talking quite a bit longer and I was holding his arm; he was ashamed that he was crying, and he was trying to shrug it off. I told him about my own struggles and personal problems that I had gone through when I was hospitalized, and I told him it was a distorted perspective, and when your chemicals are flowing differently, you’ll see things differently. It comes and it goes, and what we’re doing is great, your job is great, the music you’re making is great. But that’s how fragile he was at that point in time. “That night was the first time I remember being worried about Pete. That something bad could happen to him—that he was a vulnerable figure with a mental issue. I saw cracks that could either seal back together and he could become this strong superhuman person, or those cracks could open up and he could fall to pieces. And at every point after that night I never looked at him the same

again. There seemed to be a recklessness about him and a lack of logic; someone fueled by emotions and chemicals. His behavior always seemed a bit more unpredictable to me after that. When Pete got angry, he could resort to violence. Or he could hurt himself, or make poor decisions about his career, or take it too far with partying and things like that.” The music Peter was writing for the third Carnivore album finally materialized in 1990 as a demo cassette titled None More Negative by a whole different band named Repulsion. For its creator, the music on the tape provided total catharsis. “Making the Repulsion demo literally saved him,” Marc says. “He was waking up at four-thirty in the morning to be to work by six. The job was very calming to him in some ways, but his mind must have been racing with thoughts about what could have been and what could be and what he wants to do. His confidence was shaken by what he saw as the failure of his music. He got off work pretty early and then went home. He wasn’t the most social guy. Sometimes he’d go off and do things, but at that time I don’t think he went out much. He was home, he was in his basement and he was unhappy, so picking up the guitar and working on that stuff, thinking ‘This is for the third Carnivore record,’ and knowing from the things going on with Louie, and me playing with the Crumbsuckers, and how far out of the loop of everything he had fallen, he had to wonder, ‘What record label is gonna want to do anything with a guy who works full time doing something else?’ I think he felt that his new music was never going to see the light of day. He was making it for himself, by himself.” Little did Peter know the music he was writing for his own private catharsis would eventually cause great controversy far beyond the Brooklyn basement in which it was birthed. From the final bursts of Carnivore noise to the formation of a new project with entirely new members, about six months elapsed. In this critical time, Peter found solace in his job with the Parks Department, delved deeply into writing his new music, and spent time with new girlfriend Patrice Mack. All this helped keep negativity at bay, which was crucial, but not always successful in a time when pessimism

seemed to haunt Peter’s every thought. But he would use negativity as a creative outlet. His new music took shape in the form of complex, multi-part songs between seven and thirteen minutes in length. His compositional range expanded considerably, and his lyrics were operating on an entirely different level. Although there was an obscene amount of worry, hatred, depression, and disappointment in the songs, there was also a sense that laying out all those burdens in diary-like form delivered Peter to a happier, clearer place. One of his new songs featured this lyric: “I feel the weight of the world on my back / I’ve seen the future / the future looks black.” He talks in this song about feeling flattened by the gravity of disappointment, about suicide and mental instability. Despite so much of the song’s hatred being directed outward, Peter acknowledges he is his own worst enemy and that only he can save himself: “I built myself a nice little cage with bars of anger and a lock of rage / I can’t help asking ‘who’s got the key?’ when I know damned well it’s me.”

“That which doesn’t destroy me makes me crankier” — Peter Steele, 1996

It was a terrorizing killing machine, a post-nuclear Mad Max-styled

vehicle equipped for maximum impact and primed to inflict ruin on anything and everything in its path. Peter Steele’s bad-ass ride was built to disturb the Brooklyn peace as it prowled the streets. No car maker in Japan or Detroit was capable of manufacturing an asphalt assassin that appealed to Peter, so he did what any creative gearhead would do—he customized and created his own bona fide original … the Doom Buggy. Peter described his Frankenstein-like creation as “an excess of testosterone.” Most modified muscle cars are, but his went several steps beyond. The imposing ride started as a 1985 Grand Prix and was altered Steele-style. He claimed to have put a tractor engine in, said it was equipped with a PA system, and installed a Long Island railroad train horn that was tuned to the “devil’s triad,” the ominous three-tone note sequence popularized by Black Sabbath’s song “Black Sabbath.” He changed the rear end and drive frame, put on swamp tires and painted it, first in a camouflage pattern, then with flat black and yellow primer, which he gradually plastered in Russian national symbols. Every inch of chrome was blacked out, with yellow

and black caution stripes added to the exterior. It also boasted painted yellow rims and a raised hood scoop. Peter said of the color scheme, “In nature, black and yellow signifies a poisonous creature that is never touched. I saw this documentary on PBS about this locomotive in England, this filthy black and yellow locomotive that somehow started up by itself and went full speed down a track, pushed a passenger train off a mountain and killed hundreds of people—and I said, ‘That is the color scheme.’” He was also quite proud of its lone bumper sticker, back when its stock back bumper was intact: “Fix a (212) POT-HOLE.” He added that the Doom Buggy, his very own custom locomotive, “doesn’t have a muffler. Everyone on the road has more to lose than me, so when they see me coming, they get the fuck out of the way.” Even for the six months that he had no band to lead, Peter Steele made ungodly noise and turned heads.

Peter’s car was monstrous, his music exceptionally punishing, his public persona confrontational. He couldn’t have presented a more formidable exterior. Yet his family, closest friends and neighbors knew his other side, which was courteous, generous, and shy. And while there were confrontation and challenges ahead, he was learning about and adjusting to his deep-seated issues of anger and depression. Medication helped, and so did the music he was writing. He was purging, and he could do anything he wanted with the music now that he was no longer beholden to a record company and the politics and assorted bullshit that came with that association. With Carnivore dissolved, Peter settled back into a relatively normal life. He relished his work with the New York Parks and Recreation Department, cleaning pools in the summer, picking up garbage, trimming trees, moving earth where needed … a jack-of-alltrades position, and he enjoyed the benefits and security of its

potential long-term employment. It was a point of pride for Peter, and he intended to keep the job until retirement. He hung out with family and friends; he had a lot of family and just a handful of close friends, and other than attending select rock and metal gigs he was most comfortable at home. Peter attempted to cope with a failed marriage and depression. Prozac was his savior, and he took the little green pill as prescribed. Without Carnivore he was just a normal human being again, with normal Polaroid with Peter’s handwriting, officially dubbing his human frailties and problems. car the “Doom Buggy” The club-wielding, bile-spitting doomsayer faded into the background. He was Peter Ratajczyk again for a little while. But he kept writing music. That never changed. By 1989 Peter was in the middle of a new relationship with Patrice Mack. He met Patrice in late 1987 at a show Carnivore played with Arizona thrashers Flotsam and Jetsam and headliner— and catalyst in Carnivore’s signing to Roadrunner—King Diamond. Peter offered Patrice and a friend a ride home in the Doom Buggy when someone else snagged the girls’ car service pickup. Later, Patrice saw Peter at a Zodiac Mindwarp gig at L’Amour, and by 1988 their relationship was in full swing. As were most women, Patrice was enthralled by Peter—not just his physical appearance, but his interior world. “He had a mind like a steel trap. And he was beyond principled. He talked the talk and walked the walk. He didn’t just say it, he did it. Everyone that didn’t know him thinks he was this tough guy, and he really wasn’t. He was sensitive and soft, and a brilliant musician.”

Peter’s softer side was all his neighbors on Eighteenth Street ever knew. He was often found helping older folks in the neighborhood, or those less able-bodied than he. Whether it was snow removal, moving furniture, or helping repair a door or engine, Peter was there. He did these things expecting no reward. He wanted no adulation or thanks. He just wanted to be good and do good. Mark Martin met Peter when they were both two years old, and they remained close for the rest of Peter’s life. Martin fondly recalls that, “My aunt lived down the block from the Ratajczyks and was partially paralyzed in the leg. Pete would come over and change light bulbs and fix things. My aunt would have to force him to take money, and he would say, ‘Absolutely not.’ This is just the type of person he was. Peter was a great man.” His sister Pam recalls that, “Peter was very giving. He was always bringing my mother presents. And he was the mayor of the block. We lived in a very Jewish community, and they loved my brother.” Sister Barbara adds, “They called him Super Goy.” Everyone in the neighborhood remembers Peter having a T-shirt made with that very moniker. Neighbor Gary Kippel states that, “Peter was a very down-toearth kind of person that you’d have no problem speaking to. I never found him to be judgmental. He had his own opinions, he had a good brain, but he was always a delight. If you asked me to give you one word that describes Peter, I’d say ‘helpful.’ Anytime, day or night, he would be there if a neighbor needed help. There were times when I scratched my head and wondered if sometimes people asked of him a little bit too much. Is he being too nice? But he didn’t think twice about it. There was one neighbor lady in particular, her husband had a stroke and was not able to do anything. This woman really would depend on Peter and call him and ask him to do this and that, and Peter would simply stop whatever he was doing and help this woman. That was just a very wonderful characteristic of him.” Kippel relates a story of a time Peter went out of his way to make things easier on others. “A neighbor lady had a husband who came back home from the hospital. He was delivered in an ambulance and

they were having trouble getting the man out of the vehicle. Suddenly Peter walked over, picked him up like a baby, and carried him inside and into bed.” The wife of the man was greatly impressed, recounting the event often with various neighbors through the years. She was fond of telling anyone who would listen that, “For that act alone, Peter deserves his place in heaven.”

For six months in 1989, Peter had no band. He had new music, but Carnivore had fizzled. The ideas that were brewing needed an identity. Fortune came in the form of Sal Abruscato. Born July 18, 1970, young Sal banged screwdrivers on buckets before his parents relented and bought him a drum set. The drummer’s first band of note was Toximia, which skirted metal/hardcore lines the same way Carnivore did. Their 1986 demo, Another Beautiful Day, resembles a low-rent version of their hometown Brooklyn heroes, as does their War album from 1987, released on tiny label Kiva Records. Sal’s links to Carnivore were strong. His drum teacher was none other than Carnivore’s Louie Beato. Even at a young age, Abruscato’s tastes were diverse, ranging from Beastie Boys to Latin music to the pioneering extreme metal bands of the day. And he really loved his hometown heroes. Toximia bassist/vocalist Matt Siegel remembers hearing Carnivore for the first time through Sal. “Sal played us the Carnivore demo tapes, and they immediately became our main influence, not just because they were from the neighborhood, but because they were blending hardcore and metal in ways that bands like Slayer simply weren’t.” Sal was unintentionally being groomed to follow in Louie’s footsteps. According to Sal, “When I was a kid I took drum lessons from Louie. He lived up the block from me. He was my idol when I was fourteen, and he used to take me to the Carnivore rehearsals.

That’s where I first met Peter—in his basement, where they were rehearsing. I was like their little brother, going to the shows, helping out. I was exposed to these guys from a very young age.” That potentially mind-warping education fueled Sal’s creative urges in nothing but positive ways. He studied Carnivore, particularly Peter’s way of writing and thinking about music. “I learned how to play guitar and bass because of that guy,” Sal says. “I also learned how to compose music and tune my ear because of that guy. I did nothing but analyze him. The guy was a monster musician. He was theoretically trained also. Just to sit there and watch him do shit would be mind-blowing. He would tell you the key signature of anything, and working with him made me a better drummer. He’s one of my biggest influences.” In 1989, Sal and Peter’s bands played together on the same stage, when Toximia opened an evening at L’Amour that was—in a beautiful case of foreshadowing—titled “Negative Night.” Held on February 24, 1989, and hosting nearly two thousand rowdy patrons, it proved to be one of Carnivore’s final performances. The night Carnivore and Toximia meet, also featured semi-legendary locals Sheer foreshadowing greater things to come… Terror and a new band called Biohazard. Given their name by Peter himself, Biohazard featured Carnivore roadie, Evan Seinfeld, on bass and vocals. During the final throes of Toximia’s short life, Sal’s family bought a building on Quentin Road for the drummer to run as a rehearsal studio for other bands. It was a business, and Sal took it seriously, putting more time into the potentially lucrative prospect than the slowly-going-nowhere Toximia. Before splitting, Toximia’s Matt and Sal attempted to replace their departed guitarist, Toxic Bob. They auditioned former Carnivore member Keith “Alexander” Bonanno, but it didn’t work out, and Keith continued with his own band, Primal Scream. Coincidentally, none of these bands made it into the new decade; Primal Scream, Toximia, and

Carnivore were all defunct by 1989.1 Matt Siegel recalls hearing about Sal’s next move after Toximia. “I heard from Sal’s girlfriend that he was now drumming for Pete Steele. When I asked Sal about this, he said they were ‘just jamming’ and that it was no big deal. We had this conversation in his car, he dropped me off at home, and that was pretty much the last I ever heard from Sal.” It really was that simple: Peter and Sal were just jamming. The drummer approached Peter when he heard the bassist wasn’t doing Carnivore any longer, and with Peter needing someone to help give shape to his new music, the pair started making noise together. For Sal’s part, this was already success enough, jamming with his neighborhood hero. “I was just happy to be playing with Pete, with a musician like him,” says Sal, “and that I was good enough to play with him. I was an angry kid, too. I had a lot of issues at school and stuff, so all that angry music and playing really hard and heavy and slow and fast, it was like therapy.”

For Peter, attempts at therapy only helped to a point. To cope with a variety of mental issues that haunted him—depression, insecurity, paranoia, heartbreak, and the failure of both his band and marriage—he tried what he could. Medication only briefly tempered his overactive mind; one-on-one counseling seemed but a momentary diversion; and music-as-therapy was difficult when he didn’t have a band behind him. “Peter Steele was gigantic and scary,” says friend Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, “and he wasn’t comfortable with that side of himself. He wasn’t that person. That’s what the conflict was. That’s where the torture was: a guy not comfortable in his own shoes. He scared and intimidated people, and on one hand that was awesome, but for him it was really a living hell. Most of us can’t empathize with that, but that was the gist of his

conflict. It was like the classic Frankenstein movie, where the monster wants to play with the kid, and the kid is scared. That is a good metaphor for Pete Steele. That really was him.” On October 15, 1989, Peter decided suicide was the only way out of his mental quandary. Peter and girlfriend, Patrice Mack, were going through a series of breakups after almost two years together. She adored Peter, and he did her. “For the two years we went out, everyone thought I had died or fell off the face of the earth. We were together all the time. I really had no time for anyone else.” But she describes the end of their relationship as “tumultuous. It was really bad at the end. Breaking up, getting back together, breaking up, getting back together. He wanted to get married, and that’s not where my head was at.” Patrice says of this time, “Peter was seeing a psychiatrist. He was tortured. His marriage to Donna had dissolved, and he was so sensitive. But looking back now, I realize that there was a lot more going on. He was never comfortable with anything. He always used to say to me, ‘If I hit somebody, I’m considered this big asshole that punched this little guy out, and if I don’t, I’m considered a wimp.’ And I think that’s how it was his whole life. The other thing he used to always say—and I’d get very upset about it—was ‘I’m not gonna see fifty. People my size, they just don’t live long.’ He used to say it all the time. And he would say, ‘I’m gonna kill myself. I’m not gonna do this anymore.’” To all of this, she adds that Peter “was also insanely jealous.” Dealing with this collection of difficult thoughts and emotions finally felt like too much for him to bear. On that mid-October day in 1989, Peter tried to cut himself to death. He did it, of course, in typically over-the-top fashion. “He came to my mom’s house in Bay Ridge and tried to kill himself,” Patrice recalls. “We’d been fighting. I decided to get away from him because things were so bad. I took this job as a flight attendant for TWA and was gone at the time. There were certain people from other bands calling me and telling me he was seeing other women. I was jealous and crazy about it, and I stopped answering the phone. He was kind of stalking and following me. So

he came over to my mother’s house and told my mother he was going to kill himself. His hair was all cut off, and his wrists were slit. He wrote all over my Firebird car, in blood: ‘I love you,’ ‘You set me on fire,’ all kinds of crazy things. My mother contacted me where I was and said, ‘I have to call the police.’ I asked her not to, because I was scared they’d put him in a thirty-day observation or whatever. I said, ‘Call his mom.’ My mother called Peter’s mother, and I don’t remember if Peter drove away himself or if his mother came and got him, but after that he claimed he was going to kill me, because we contacted his mother about it.” After the incident, a Mack family member called Peter to make sure Patrice never heard from Peter again, and she didn’t. But she remembers Peter fondly and forgives his final episode. “He was such a gentleman. It was always the best Valentine’s Day ever, the best cards, little things hidden in my car, little phone calls during the day, flowers delivered. But there was always this thing with Peter, which is why he had so many resentments and so many girlfriends—the fact of knowing he didn’t get the unconditional love from whatever woman he was with like he did from his mother. It was impossible to fill those shoes.” In 1994 Peter looked back on this time, saying he “really hit rock bottom. I was a fucking maniac, berserk, stitches in my wrists. But my life changed drastically after that. I learned I had to depend on myself. A man is not really allowed to express pain, and I think I’m an overly sensitive person, so I usually take it out on myself.” An even later recollection of that dramatic day in October 1989 found Peter saying, “I fell in love with the wrong person.” It has never been completely clear whether he was referring to Patrice or Donna or someone else. What’s certain is that this episode and era of Peter’s life fueled the lyrics he was writing for his new music. Both Patrice Mack and Donna White now feel that the subject matter of those songs wasn’t about one particular relationship, but a composite of all the jealousy, passion, and loss he had dealt with. Peter himself admitted that the lyrical matter he was formulating at the time was “about a couple of women with whom I had bad experiences, and now I’ve dealt with them.”

Patrice and Donna were significant women in Peter’s life, certainly, and so was Mardie Sheiken. And there were others. Each of them tell of how difficult it was to carry on with other relationships, post-Peter—not because he left them scarred, but because, despite his faults, he imprinted upon them an extraordinary passion and devotion. Incorporated into all this was Peter’s sensitivity, insecurity, and continuing bouts of depression and the medication he took for it. Add the disappointment and restlessness of not having a career in music anymore, and Peter Steele’s head was like a simmering cauldron waiting to boil over and explode.

With an ambitious pile of lyrical stanzas on paper, inspired by events brewing in Peter’s life and inside his ever-active mind, the bassist continued hammering out skeletal musical ideas with Sal. The drummer eventually introduced a guitarist to Peter, a fellow Brooklynite named Kenny, who was chomping at the bit to get involved in some kind of solid project beyond the tired cover band routine. Born May 22, 1966, Kenneth Shaun Hickey had been prowling the same Brooklyn streets and rock venues as the Carnivore crew. He was but one of the familiar faces within the borough’s hard rock and metal community. Counting Queen and Kiss among his musical inspirations, Kenny’s prowess on guitar wasn’t his only talent. He possessed a raunchy yet melodic singing voice and a penchant for storytelling matched only by Peter himself. Working variously at a supermarket deli counter and as a plumber, Kenny fell into joining Peter’s new project and never looked back. The trio of Peter, Sal and Kenny worked up songs that finally had names: “Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity,” “Xero Tolerance,” and “Der Untermensch.” While the latter song spoke of Peter’s disgust with people expecting handouts from the government (“you’re a waste of life,” goes one line), the other songs

were intensely emotional in nature. Carnivore may have specialized in semi-sophisticated reflections of anger, but these new songs went beyond—they were rabid, lavish depictions of jealousy, loss, rage and hostility. A couple more new songs were added to the band’s arsenal. “Prelude to Agony” and “Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 × 10-⁸cm³ gm-¹ sec-²” were massive and complex works that took shape thanks to the structured regimen Peter demanded from his new musicians. With only five songs combining to fill sixty minutes of air space, it wasn’t just their titles that were eclectic. By this time, Peter was listening to difficult industrial acts such as Throbbing Gristle, Einstruzende Neubauten, and Skinny Puppy, along with myriad other influences ranging from gothic rock to new wave to heavy metal to hardcore to ’70s AM radio rock. The sum of these parts was a hybrid of remarkable originality. Half a year after Carnivore’s sputter and burnout, Peter now had a real band taking shape. August 28, 1989, is the date Peter has identified as the origin of his new band, an outfit that, for its leader, was not just a mere band but a sonic renewal of intensely cathartic purpose. It was time to record the music for posterity. Shortly after Kenny arrived, Peter asked longtime friend and former Fallout band mate Josh Silver to join the trio. Peter knew Josh could be an ally on a number of levels—in promotion, and in recording and production. In Josh, Peter would have someone by his side who knew his mind and artistic intents better than anyone else. Peter had also been devising different ways to incorporate keyboards and sound effects into his new compositions. Patrice Mack remembers, “We’d be going to see a lot of bands play live, like Devo when they played the Ritz. That’s when Peter was saying he really wanted to have keyboards in his new band. And he really wanted to include Josh.” The tempestuous Steele/Silver union that gave Fallout creative fuel was ignited once again. Peter noted later, “Keyboards opened room for sampling. I consider virtually every sound to be music if it’s used properly, and that includes fifty-five-gallon drums being thrown down a flight of stairs, tires screeching, or babies crying.”

With a solid four-piece lineup in place, the band set about immortalizing their new songs on tape. Sessions took place at Systems Two, where most of the Carnivore recordings were created. As he did for the Fallout single nine years prior, Josh borrowed money from his parents to help fund the recording, and for this and several other future projects, Peter’s sister Nancy and her husband, Rob, contributed funds to the cause. While the cost of recording this new material was higher than Fallout’s seven-inch project—six-thousand dollars—it’s a minor miracle the recording is so detailed and vibrant given such a limited budget. It speaks well of the people involved. The creative success of any Peter Steele recording from this time forward can be credited not only to Peter himself, but to Josh Silver, their chosen studio, Systems Two, and the engineer who helped put to tape what they heard in their heads, Mike Marciano. Systems Two began operating in 1975, owned by Mike’s brother, Joe, and sister-in-law, Nancy. Originally offering rehearsal spaces for bands, as well as recording facilities, it slowly evolved into a state-ofthe-art studio, moving locations as it grew from 8 tracks to 16, and eventually a fully professional 24-track operation. While Marciano records a lot of jazz there now and has been credited on hundreds of albums by a huge variety of artists, he cut his teeth and made his mark recording material by New York hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Crumbsuckers. He first met Peter Steele when Carnivore entered the studio in 1984 to record their first demo tape. It was the start of a creative partnership that lasted decades. Marciano first witnessed the chemistry of the Steele/Silver partnership with the recording of their new band’s demo. “They were like brothers,” he recalls. “They grew up together. They really knew each other. They were really close. Josh was totally instrumental in everything they recorded, always adding his input. Peter would tell him, ‘I’m going for this,’ and Josh would try to make it happen. He would have his keyboard set up, and Peter always had his bass on. It seems like he never took that bass off in the studio. He would always use it to get his ideas.”

The band’s name was something of an ever-changing uncertainty for almost a year. Peter felt the Carnivore tag carried too much baggage. He wanted to propel himself forward and clean the slate. The first name given to his new unit was Nu Minority (alternately remembered as New Minority by some who were around at the time), but, stated Peter, “We thought that was a bit too political sounding and we didn’t want to get into that.” After toying with the name Raw Sludge, they figured Utility would be the moniker of choice, “but that sounded a bit too techno,” Peter later said. It was then decided that the band would be called Repulsion. It was a good fit, considering Marc Piovanetti’s observation that Peter only wanted to mortify people with his music at this point, not please them or make them happy. For a while, the Repulsion name stuck. The music that came out of the Systems Two sessions emerged as a cassette bearing the title None More Negative, with three songs on each side (“Side Blood” and “Side Fire”). The last track on Side Blood was the first of several recorded practical jokes the band would play. For example, “The Misinterpretation of Silence and its Disastrous Consequences” was a song of almost nothing: one minute of quiet tape hiss. The Repulsion sound-world was a sonic oddity. Peter’s bass was typically fuzz-drenched, but here in this new music it rumbled with a crippling intensity, its throbbing roundness complementing Kenny’s steely gray guitar tone. The two combined to create a disturbing, otherworldly wall of warped air. Use of feedback was a huge part of the Repulsion ethic, as heard in the dirge of the tape’s first song, “Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity,” and elsewhere throughout the recording. Keyboards delivered sampled noise, harsh effects, and creepy beds of sound that generated everything from bombastic church-like organs to goofy, campy melodies akin to 1970s-era TV show theme songs. Sal’s drums were dry and loud, with a mercilessly deep cracking snare delivering extra aural punishment. Marciano acknowledges the uniqueness of the Peter Steele bass tone, but remembers that he and the other guys in the band would try to talk Peter into trying something more traditional sounding.

“Sometimes we’d like a little more bottom, a little more bass, like a real bass, but that’s not what Pete did. That’s not what he wanted. He would run through all the pedals—that was his sound. But we used to go, ‘Hey, maybe we should try it just this once to put in a regular bass sound, more of a clean kind of bass. But he wasn’t interested. That was his sound.” There was usually no talking to Peter once he got a creative idea in his head. The only person who ever had any success, according to Marciano, was Josh Silver. “Josh was the only one who could talk to Pete or say anything contrary to what Pete wanted. Still, Pete was his own man. I don’t know how much he listened, because he was very focused, intensely focused, and very set in what he wanted to do. It would take a lot to get him to change his mind.” Josh totally understood what Peter was trying to accomplish, sonically, and partnered with him to achieve the very particular sound they were aiming for. “[It’s] instrumentation unlike most bands,” he says. “We use keyboards for guitar parts; we use bass for guitar parts; guitars do keyboard parts. The standard rules don’t apply. Things that people would swear are guitars are keyboards [and vice versa]. It was a very free environment. Anything goes. It was a weird combination of stuff, and we never really questioned it.” Sal fondly recalls Peter’s intense focus in the studio, a focus that Peter’s former drummer, Louie Beato, called “unwavering.” “Peter pretty much wrote all the music,” Sal says. “He would play it for us, and he would allow me to write my drum parts. Sometimes I’d have to argue with him, but I’d get the freedom to write appropriate beats and stuff like that. As far as musical writing, musical modes, none of us really had anything to do with that. The only person who came close was maybe Josh. But Peter would walk in with everyone’s parts done, what the guitar was doing, what the keyboards were doing, what he was doing, how fast or slow he wanted it. And at times he would kind of be like a dictator about it.” None More Negative exploded with Peter Steele personality. While elements of Carnivore could be heard in his new band— hardcore barking, shouted gang vocals, metallic ferocity, prominent bass work—Repulsion was an entirely different animal. Each song

was a pastiche of influences. Added to Carnivore’s melded frame of metal, classic rock, and hardcore were slabs of industrial noise, dreary gothic rock, non-musical sound effects, and the increased presence of Peter’s cleanly sung baritone. Where Carnivore’s sludgy parts were remarkably slow, Repulsion’s slowest passages not only held a solemn quality, but they felt excruciating and torturous, with long chasms of time separating each beat. It was beyond slow—it bordered on inertia. Barring “Der Untermensch” and the minute of tape hiss, None More Negative is a conceptual work. Four of its songs revolve around Peter’s revenge fantasy regarding a cheating girlfriend and her lover. For all the hand-wringing hatred and raging jealousy, the conclusion of the nearly thirteen-minute “Unsuccessfully Coping …” offers an almost triumphant delivery of the memorable chorus, “I know you’re fucking someone else!” with Hickey snaking gorgeous melodic lines around the refrain until it reaches conclusion. “Unsuccessfully Coping …” was an open announcement of where Peter’s head was at musically and personally. He felt betrayed and wronged in prior relationships; he was grappling with depression, self-loathing, paranoia, and doubt. He had to purge before he hurt others or himself. “Unsuccessfully Coping …” addresses all of this but offers no real answers. At the end of this journey into despair, Peter remains reticent and confused. He lashes out and brands his woman a “slut,” a “whore,” and a “cunt,” but ultimately admits that all she’s done is made him hate himself. All this delivered in suite-like fashion, with passages spanning ball-busting hardcore, agonizingly slow doom, acoustic guitar-led gothic passages complete with erotic female moaning, mutated ’60s-esque pop elements, baritone croons over grandiose pipe organ sounds, and good old heavy metal. It flows well too, hardly the stylistic train wreck it could have been. This piece alone showed Peter’s songwriting maturing to new levels of sophistication. Because of this and other songs on the recording, Peter was branded as a misogynist, although nothing was farther from the truth. Peter said several years later, “I was talking about one woman, not all women.” The source of all the anguish was a cheating partner,

according to the lyrics. Yet Patrice, who was the subject of Peter’s suicide attempt in October 1989, swears she never cheated on Peter, and Donna won’t comment on the subject. They continue to feel, as do other women involved with Peter at that time, that these songs were simply an exaggeration of Peter’s actual experiences and emotions regarding his relationships, to which Peter himself admitted, “If I just wrote about my own experiences in everyday life and didn’t exaggerate them, it would be very boring.” Ridiculously, Peter was forced to defend his love of women to the media: “Even after having five sisters and five nieces and a mother that I love very much—and I’ve always had girlfriends—I got branded with this sexism label. My priority is to please my partner. I would never force her into doing anything that she would not want do.” He has also said of None More Negative’s subject matter, “It’s only because I love women so much that I let them cause me so much pain. I don’t hate women, I love them—that’s the problem!” The tape’s other songs embrace the same sort of diversity and a similarly varied sonic spectrum as the infamous opening track. “Gravitational Constant” takes the self-hatred of “Unsuccessfully Coping …” and expands it philosophically, questioning whether suicide might be the way out and incorporating a half-time swing, the specter of early Black Sabbath, subtle psychedelic flourishes, mechanized weirdness, and the kind of bestial metallic rock that typified Carnivore. Two songs into the tape, it’s clear Peter’s vocal range had expanded considerably. Whether it was unharnessed anger or sensual crooning, he delivered it with more passion and urgency than ever before. As with all the other songs, “Gravitational Constant” is separated into smaller movements: “Unjustifiable Existence,” “Acceleration (Due to Gravity) – 980 cm-² sec,” “Antimatter: Electromechanical Psychedelicosis,” and “Requiem for a Soulless Man.” This method of segmenting long songs into shorter chapters was perhaps a tribute to progressive rock bands such as King Crimson and Pink Floyd, both of whom Peter admired. Once the quiet hiss of “Misinterpretation …” subsides, a flip of the tape offers a twelve-minute epic, “Prelude to Agony.” The first vocal section, bearing the subtitle “God Love Fire Woman Death,” finds

Peter admitting that “love is life, life is love, love is pain, and pain is death.” Do the math and it’s clear that, in Peter’s world, love equals death. The song then moves into the bloodthirsty “Jackhammerape” section, which gives the “hate fuck” concept a fatal new twist. The musical and vocal delivery throughout “Prelude to Agony” assured that Repulsion was an entirely new and more challenging beast than Carnivore ever was, although the moment of tortured female screaming in the song’s final section, “Pain (is Irrelevant),” is based on an idea Carnivore recorded for Retaliation but never put on the album. “Prelude to Agony” is also highlighted by the monk-like chanting of the lines “Absolution, I am whole, absolution, I am,” and evermore painfully labored dirges. “Der Untermensch” breaks from the revenge fantasy concept to address Peter’s societal concerns. Originally a post-Retaliation Carnivore song called “White and Proud,” the song is the most NYHC-oriented one on the album, although the harrowing passages of gothic industrial aesthetics break up what would be an otherwise typical hardcore tune. Peter noted of his intent, “I wanted to talk about those people who are so lazy that they leech off society. They refuse to work, live on the backs of others, and often end up dealing drugs. It disgusts me.” The hatred of “Der Untermensch” eventually caused big problems for Peter, but for its creator, it was just another way to circumvent the rage he felt by those who had the guts to bully him. He could have pounded these people to a pulp, but instead he took the high road and internalized it … and turned it into art. He later recalled, “[I’m] this white guy working in black neighborhoods, having bottles thrown at me and being screamed at like, ‘Fuck you, Tarzan!’ Meanwhile, the guys yelling at me were selling drugs to little kids. So, yeah, the song was provocative and it was supposed to be. I was baiting the hook.” Ending the massive None More Negative is “Xero Tolerance.” Here, the revenge fantasy turns homicidal with Peter on the handle side of a pickaxe that ends the life of those who betrayed him. Within its psychotic acting-out are lyrics that have a little fun with the situation (“Well buddy boy, I hope you enjoyed her / ‘cause I’m an

equal opportunity destroyer”) and a sense of humor in the almost cheerful ’50s rock delivery of some otherwise disturbing lyrics. Just as he referenced Chopin in Carnivore’s “Technophobia,” in “Xero Tolerance” Peter gives a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach. The composer’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582” is heard at its conclusion, rendered in dreary acoustic guitar as an axe hacks away at what we can assume are human body parts. None More Negative was recorded before the days of recording software such as Logic Pro and Pro Tools, before any sound imaginable could be obtained within seconds at the tap of a button. It was a time that required some ingenuity if a band wanted to experiment with unusual sounds. Many of the various effects and machine noises heard throughout None More Negative were created using Peter’s own toolbox. An amused Mike Marciano recalls, “All those sounds were made organically. They weren’t off of sound effect CDs or anything. So Peter would bring his own power tools into the studio: drills, hammers, sledge hammers. It was funny because we’d be recording and we would finish, and then months later my brother, Joe, would be like, ‘Pete, you’ve got to come in and pick up all your tools, man!’ There would be wood piled up in some corner, and his drills, hammers, chainsaws, circular saws, et cetera.” While Carnivore was important and unique, None More Negative found Peter Steele emerging as a bona fide genius. Its level of musical ambition surpassed anything he had conceived before, the depth of the art and its construction suggesting that Peter might just have a bright future ahead of him, as long as the public could tolerate his challenging, provocative concepts. Bolstered by the capable musicianship and distinctive talents of Sal, Kenny, and Josh, the darkly difficult new quartet held greater promise beyond the cultonly confines of Carnivore.

Although their commercial aspirations for None More Negative were modest, and realistic, Repulsion performed the material as a live unit, despite Peter’s misgivings about public performance. Their first show was held at Brooklyn’s L’Amour, who had hosted Carnivore numerous times, and the club was more than happy to host the debut of Peter The Repulsion cassette demo, Steele’s new band. Repulsion took to the None More Negative, circa 1990 stage March 29, 1990, and performed all five of their new songs, rounding out the set with old Carnivore favorites “Predator,” “Jesus Hitler,” and “Race War.” While the audience was generally enthusiastic—locals were naturally curious about Peter’s new project—most who witnessed Repulsion’s first performances were confused, unsure how to process what they’d just seen and heard. Sal recalls the public’s first taste of Repulsion. “No one got it at first,” he says. “At the live shows the audience was like, ‘What the fuck?’ All this keyboard shit, jackhammers, chains, all the other shit.” Peter’s aesthetic sensibilities were in place at this very first show, and ever onward with each of the group’s performances. He played in the middle of the stage, a towering figure of menace, sometimes adorned with a construction worker’s hard hat. Josh was stage right, cutting a shape of nothing but keyboards and curly hair. Kenny stood stage left, unassuming and stealth. Behind Peter sat Sal and his drum kit. Wooden police barricades were set up in front of the stage, dividing band and audience. Painted black and green—in what would become the band’s signature colors—the barrier idea was one Sal brought to the table, and it dated back to his prior band, Toximia. Matt Siegel remembers that, “Sal and I got it in our heads that we needed to have police barricades in front of the stage at our shows. We would leave them in the original NYPD blue color, or we would paint them to look more military and industrial. We would also hang rolls of barbed wire off them to cut up the people at the front of the stage.”

Flying behind Sal’s drum kit was an emblem that became synonymous with the band: an encircled minus sign, conveying the band’s resolutely negative disposition—zero … nothing … less than nothing. To further unify them, each member had his upper deltoid tattooed with the symbol, showing lifelong loyalty to the cause. Peter and Sal’s little “jamming” project was now an endeavor of absolute commitment. Even Peter’s sisters wore the mark … sort of. “They had just started Repulsion,” remembers sister Pat regarding an early performance. “It was in the middle of the summer, and I had on a sleeveless top, so I took my eyeliner and drew the symbol on my arm, and everybody was like, ‘Oh, man, look at the sisters, even they have a fuckin’ tattoo!’” Repulsion’s None More Negative cassettes were distributed through the usual channels, sold on consignment at local record shops like Zigzag, on Avenue U in Brooklyn, and at the band’s early shows. It was also disseminated and duplicated through the underground tape-trading network. While plenty of people were eager to hear Peter Steele’s new post-Carnivore band, there was a lot of uncertainty about the material initially. There was simply no precedent for what the band was doing. Many found the music difficult to grasp, yet a small group of people recognized the tape as representing something wholly unique and inspired. Among them was a young New York-area metal fan named Mark Abramson. “It’s where I was at in my life as an angry young kid. I got this tape, the Repulsion cassette, and it changed my life. It reached out to me in a primal way. Peter had the strength to bare his pain and his soul, and that was what got me, this primal rage and primal hurt. It was a guy who was a six-foot-eight Goliath of a man in the metal and hardcore world, laying out all of his pain and hurt, which takes true strength and courage. Where I was at in my life, with my relationships and stuff, I was in my own little rough spot, and I got this cassette and it was like, ‘Oh my God.’ So you have emotional purging and then you have a guy who’s combining the Beatles and Black Sabbath, but it’s so much more than that. It was the Beatles

and Black Sabbath and goth and industrial and everything. They were one of the true originals. No question about it.” With a demo circulating and news leaking out that Peter Steele was back, Repulsion played various clubs in the New York metro area, including L’Amour, The Red Spot, and even the Ritz with headliners Prong and Flotsam and Jetsam, the prestigious venue where Carnivore played with Venom four years prior. Peter continued working diligently for the Parks and Recreation Department, accruing vacation days by working as many paid city holidays as possible, each of those days awarding him time and a half, and another day off with pay. This allowed him to balance his band and occupation, which at this stage comprised his entire life. In late 1990, Peter approached onetime Carnivore manager Ken Kriete, asking if he might be able to garner record label interest with the None More Negative tape. Kriete had already become interested in Peter’s new project back when they were dubbed Nu Minority, and he’d gained much managerial experience since the last time he was involved with Peter, working with Overkill, White Lion, Tyketto and other major label bands. He accepted the challenge. Kriete quickly attracted the interest of several independent metal labels, but once word got around to Roadrunner Records that Peter’s new project was up for grabs and other labels were interested, the label intervened. Technically, Peter had not fulfilled his obligation to his original contract with Roadrunner in the wake of Carnivore’s demise, which meant they had first right of refusal on any future work by the bassist. Only Roadrunner could decide whether Peter stayed at the label or was free to seek other deals. But they were interested, particularly a young Roadrunner employee name Monte Conner. Conner, who began working for Roadrunner in 1987, was instrumental in signing Sepultura, Fear Factory and Biohazard to the label, as well as later platinum successes Slipknot and progressive rock legends Rush. Conner remembers that, “Peter was the only guy from Carnivore that made it to Repulsion, obviously, but we had Pete contractually bound to Roadrunner. It was Cees Wessels who gave me the Repulsion cassette and said, ‘What should we do with this?’

Cees was inclined to let him go. Peter was seen as problematic at Roadrunner. The Carnivore records didn’t sell well and Pete was a bit of a scary character. People looked at it as a difficult project. So Cees was inclined to release Peter from the contract. That’s when he came to me and said, ‘I want you to make the decision.’ I heard that tape and I’m like, ‘This stuff is amazing! We have to keep him, don’t let him go.’ I guess I can technically take credit for signing them, and we inherited a finished record.” Indeed, it was decided that the None More Negative recording was good enough to pass as an album, so Roadrunner set the wheels in motion to resume Peter’s contract with this new band. But they wouldn’t be able to keep the name Repulsion. In 1989, Michigan death metal band Repulsion released their debut album, Horrified, through a UK-based record label. The album quickly gained global notoriety, establishing them as the most wellknown band named Repulsion, and it sent Peter in search of yet another name. He settled on Sub Zero, which worked well in its meaning and with the already-conceived symbol of a minus sign within a circle, or zero. The guys in the band had committed themselves to the band with the tattoo, and Peter’s sense of order led him to choose a band name that had a logical link to the emblem. They were going under the Sub Zero name by the time Roadrunner became interested, but even that name would not stick. An act in Queens had already claimed the name, a hardcore band that went on to flourish in the punk underground. It was back to square one of this seemingly never-ending name game. “After getting this stupid thing tattooed on ourselves,” Peter recalled later, “it was up to me to think of a name to compensate for the logo. I don’t normally listen to the radio, but there was a request for type O negative blood by the Red Cross, and I was like, ‘Well, that’s it. Type O Negative.’ ‘O Negative’ matched the tattoo, and it sounded like no one else could possibly have rights to it.” Blood and negativity. It was perfect. Peter’s fascinations had been revolving around blood and negativity for years. He mentions blood in Carnivore’s “The Subhuman” and “Predator”; there was the “Negative Night” benefit show in 1989 that Carnivore played with

Sal’s old band; Repulsion named their demo None More Negative; the members gave up a little symbolic blood to have the green negative sign tattooed into their arms; and, not insignificantly, Peter had a history of cutting his arms and painting the walls of his basement in the stuff, and there was his bloody suicide attempt. Also, the first Repulsion songs revolved around profoundly negative emotions. Type O Negative had to be the name of this new band— no other name could be more fitting. Peter justified it by saying, “Blood always meant a lot to me. Then I was reading this old police investigation textbook which said that the one blood type that isn’t traceable in semen samples after rape cases is type O negative, which seemed perfect since I’d already gotten this bad rap for supposedly being pro-rape. I thought I might as well go all the way and get clinical about it.” The band’s new name was announced publicly on May 3, 1991. They played a big show called The Last Thrash Bash at L’Amour (others on the bill included Biohazard, Cro-Mags, Leeway, and White Zombie). At the end of the set, Peter proclaimed, “We’re Type O Negative now. We’re not Repulsion anymore. It’s the name of the week.” The name stuck considerably longer than a week.

Roadrunner Records welcomed Peter Steele back to the label, but the reunion wasn’t easy, nor was Peter happy with the scenario. “I didn’t like what they did back [in the Carnivore days],” he said in early 1992. “I was like, ‘Fuck them, let them take me to court.’ We solicited [the tape] to other record companies and ended up with offers of up to a hundred thousand dollars. I couldn’t believe anybody would pay that kind of money, but I wasn’t about to turn it down. Then Roadrunner got wind of what was going on and faxed every record company around saying ‘Don’t deal with this guy or there’ll be legal [repercussions]. He’s still under contract.’ So the

three offers that we got were dropped overnight. We re-signed after I went in and renegotiated every point of the original contract that I didn’t like.” Peter claimed it took eight months to reach a compromise between the old Carnivore contract and the new one for Type O Negative. He said of the deal, “It was a demo the record label gave us thirty grand for. Capitalist that I am, I took the money and handed them the tape.” While it was considerably less than the $100,000 other labels were offering, Peter’s hands were tied, and both parties were happy enough with the final agreement to sign on the dotted line. The record execs signed in regular old ballpoint ink; Peter signed in his own blood and semen. His choice couldn’t have been more appropriate, considering the subject matter of the music that ignited the label’s interest in the first place. It was also a knowing nod, admitting to the world that he was signing his life away to the music industry, as if to say, “Here, take it all, my blood, my semen … my soul.” In what would be the first of many attention-grabbing stunts Roadrunner would employ in cooperation with the band, they made a minor media spectacle of the contract signing. Fan-turned-Roadrunner employee Mark Abramson remembers the event but was not an eyewitness to Peter’s semen collection. “I cannot verify that that substance was semen. There was a baggie of a white substance that certainly seemed like it. I didn’t run any chemical tests. But if you ask me, I would say yes, because the blood Cutting for the contract was there. We saw that. He did cut signing, 1991 himself.” Doug Keogh, a longtime part of the Roadrunner team, was there too. “I know for a fact that he pulled the blood and semen in the

office. There was a screen somebody put up. Nobody actually watched him create the semen sample, though.” Everyone did watch him draw the blood, however. Peter took a razor and cut a square around his Type O Negative tattoo, collected the blood, mixed it with the baggie of semen, and signed the contract on the spot. Once officially united by contract, the two parties prepared the release of Type O Negative’s debut album. The None More Negative songs were re-sequenced, and another track added. The experimental “Glass Walls of Limbo (Dance Mix)” was a piece that Peter conceived as an answer to the gothic and industrial music he was listening to. “Glass Walls …” is nearly seven minutes of monks chanting mournfully over chains clanging in laboriously slow rhythm. Josh Silver oversaw its recording and recalls that the song “probably had thirty-six tracks of vocals alone. There were three parts, and they all had twelve tracks apiece. There was no Pro Tools back then; no pitch correction. Peter had to do them ‘til he got it right. There was a lot of punching in. Engineers and producers now don’t even know what a punch-in is. They just hit ‘undo.’” The demo-turned-album was re-christened Slow, Deep and Hard, an apt description of the musical content that also conveniently worked as a sexual pun. It was also a great excuse to drape the material in provocative artwork. A still from a porno film was used for the cover, a shot showing the point of penetration, although it went through considerable manipulation before reaching its final stages. The result is a wash of grainy green abstraction. The band name and album—plain white block letters—wrapped around the upper left and lower right corners of the album in right angles. The color and lettering scheme was a pattern that would become the band’s trademark for every successive release. It had instant appeal and stood out considerably from other albums being released at the time. The artwork gave no indication of what kind of music was inside, which was appropriate, considering there was no easy label to put on the music anyway. “I wanted to make it slightly more blatant, and the record company wanted to make it more subdued,” Peter recalled. “So we settled on what it is now. On the actual cover there’s no doubt about

what was going on there. I look at this as some kind of postmodern artwork.” Peter made sure he had full control over every detail of Slow, Deep and Hard, including the artwork, even when capitulating to record label interests. Even in compromise he needed to have the last word. Lynda Rath, who worked at Roadrunner as a graphic designer, describes Peter’s directives when it came to the tiniest minutia of his album designs. “He would always screw with the top management of the label. He wanted an art director’s fee. There were always a million things connected to his requests that I would throw at the management of Roadrunner and be like, ‘I don’t know what you want me to do with this.’ He would send me into these crazy directions with packaging requests. But his whole thing was just to fuck with everybody, to annoy everyone, and bother Cees. He would ask for things that in a million years the label was never going to pay for. Ultimately, he wanted beautiful artwork. He really did care, but his shtick was to drive everyone insane at the same time. I was always on the band’s side, especially with him. I was always fighting for what he wanted, but it was always really difficult. It was completely, obsessively anal. Everything had to be so precise with a very specific green. He would have these very specific measurements. I thought he had a lot of good ideas, but he would just get carried away with some of the details. He would literally measure down to a thirty-second of an inch. There was nobody like him, that’s for sure.” The packaging of the album was as compelling as the music, song titles, and cover art. They flew the “None More Negative” slogan under a four-panel assemblage of the band’s faces, while live shots of the group were labeled beyond the usual credits of “bass,” “drums,” “guitar,” and “keyboards.” Peter was listed as “vox, bass, hammers and axes, bulldozer, frontend loader and Once a demo by Repulsion, steamroller, all fire and wolves, autumn,

now an album by Type O green, dusk, iron, 8, anger, emerald, Negative. The 1991 debut. north, Druid.” Josh was credited with “keys, vox, saws and shears, diesel crane and steam derek, all air and lions, winter, black, midnight, silver, 69, despair, onyx, east, Vampire.” The other members were credited accordingly. Type O Negative’s attempt at world-building, at presenting a tightly unified and recognizable band concept was achieved. With just one album, they established the band as a force of four equal but different personalities whose universe was total and whole. Much like their heroes in the Beatles and Kiss, Type O Negative set themselves apart from the norm. They made their own rules, and they would break those rules as needed while adhering strictly to others. The band’s name and the “None More Negative” slogan indicated that the band’s power was coming from a place of practiced pessimism, but as Josh Silver noted, “We don’t consider it negativity. We consider it realistic. Optimism, to me, is a shroud of denial. Just look at the world around you. It’s pretty obvious.” The proverbial yin to Peter’s yang, Josh held an even dourer outlook on life than the other three members of the band combined. “I count on the worst possible things, that way I’m never disappointed,” he said in 1994. “We never have fun—it’s just a matter of moderating the misery. Life is just a waiting room for death. You’re here, waiting to die. Some disastrous end is surely coming, and we’re just wasting time until it happens.” None more negative indeed.

Released June 16, 1991, sales of Slow, Deep and Hard were initially not very impressive, but promising enough that the label considered putting the band on the road to generate further interest. Touring was not something Peter was eager to do, but he realized it was a necessity, and he had accrued enough vacation time to do it. In keeping with the traditional promotional churn of tour, publicity,

and radio promotion for a new album, Roadrunner had the incredibly difficult job of deciding what song to release as a single. None of the songs were short enough to consider—besides the two novelty-type tracks, the shortest proper song was “Xero Tolerance,” clocking in at a cozy 7:45—and their lyrical content was decidedly radio unfriendly. It’s not that a label like Roadrunner or a band like Type O Negative depended on radio for its success back then; it was more about selling the band through touring, and via the underground network of fanzines and word of mouth, as well as any larger mainstream magazines willing to spare a few pages on this weird new outfit from Brooklyn. But Roadrunner’s Doug Keogh took matters into his own hands, just for fun. It was a whim of an idea that struck a chord with those who would listen. “I made a shortened version of ‘Unsuccessfully Coping …’ designed for college radio,” says Keogh. “But of course with the decency laws and the FCC, we had to edit it. It was all bleeps. It was fun to count how many bleeps were in that. We actually serviced it to radio, and Josh was so pissed off with me. I meant well, and it was really funny, but Josh … he’s probably still pissed off about it. He wasn’t mad at me personally, but I embodied the authoritative record label guy who doesn’t bother consulting the artist. Which was stupid, but then again, he never would have let me do it. ‘I know you’re [bleep] someone else.’ We didn’t bleep ‘slut,’ but we did bleep ‘cunt.’ We were very careful. And there were no videos for Slow, Deep and Hard, just that radio edit that Josh was all pissed off about. But I think it probably helped.” In 1991, the heavy music landscape was changing dramatically. As evidenced in the approach of hybrid bands like Jane’s Addiction and Faith No More, an unprecedentedly wide array of influences was nudging into many bands’ sounds, widening the heavy metal and hard rock scope. It was not unusual for modern heavy bands to incorporate ’60s psychedelia, industrial, funk, R&B and the looseness of ’70s hard rock into their music. Genre delineations were getting blurry. A wide-spectrum spray was no longer an anomaly; it was now the norm. When Sal claimed that the band’s collective influences at the time of recording Slow, Deep and Hard

were Black Sabbath, Nine Inch Nails, Bauhaus, Ministry, and Deep Purple, it was backed up by the diversity of the music and welcomed by adventurous fans who could relate to such a difficult, challenging record. Despite being darker and more difficult than most bands, Type O Negative somehow fit squarely into the new musical world of the 1990s.

At home, Peter was continuing his daily life as a proud, hardworking member of the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. He stayed mostly to himself when he wasn’t working or rehearsing with Type O Negative—reading, learning, and doing. “I’m a serious science book fan,” Peter once said. “I like physics and chemistry and ‘How To’ books. I refuse to pay money for something I could potentially do myself.” To that end, he added a deck onto the Ratajczyk family dwelling and worked on cars—his own Doom Buggy, and less threatening heaps owned by various family and friends. Peter gained a sterling reputation for his helpfulness in the neighborhood. Even with more people around the world paying attention to his musical endeavors and the increased amount of time he was putting into his new band, he always had time for those who lived nearby, those who only knew him as smart, witty, helpful Peter Ratajczyk, the one they’d known since he was a baby. This was quite a different Peter than the one portrayed in his music, and Peter knew it. “I’ve shown people one-tenth of one percent of a side of me, which could be likened to a psychopath, the wounded animal side of me. And I like to do crazy things sometimes, just to see how the press is going to react.” Gary Kippel is one of many who valued Peter’s presence in the Eighteenth Street neighborhood. “He was a good person. The little things he would do for neighbors said more about him than other things that I might mention. That’s the barometer, that’s the index.

Nobody’s watching. There’s no press, there’s nobody taking notes. It’s the things you are doing when nobody’s watching. There’s nothing in it for him.” Of course, some people outside of Peter’s immediate circle made him out to be quite the opposite of a saint, based on the Type O Negative album and some of the thorny material he’d written for Carnivore and Agnostic Front. He was branded a racist and a woman-hater. Some thought of him as nothing less than an ultraviolent monster of a man. Even though Peter clearly explained to the press that Slow, Deep and Hard was “therapy,” critics were quick to point an accusatory finger his way. Peter’s defense, as an artist and creator, was not enough. Even this reasonable explanation of the anger within “Unsuccessfully Coping …” failed to appease his most ardent attackers. “‘Unsuccessfully Coping …’ is for anyone who has had their heart broken,” he said. “When someone takes something away from you that you want very much, you are going to resent them for it. I don’t know anyone that cares about women more than I do. I’m offended that people say I hate women.” His love of women and defense of his lyrics become redundant, oft-repeated issues Peter had to address far more often than he cared to. Every song on Slow, Deep and Hard created its own controversy. Recalling “Prelude to Agony,” Josh Silver says, “We got a letter about that one. You know how murderers type those letters using all different typefaces? It was one of those, and it said something like, ‘Rape is not funny or fashionable. Fuck you. Die.’ It was really freaky.” He goes on to explain that the song “is about betrayal, obviously. A lot of Slow, Deep and Hard was about betrayal—feeling betrayed by relationships and being fucked over by women. That’s what most young men are concerned with, and so were we. It seemed to be a running theme through most of the album, and that was the imaginary revenge portion. But people take the metaphorical content out of context so they can say, ‘You’re promoting rape.’ Well, no, we’re not. We’re expressing anger.” As for the women Peter felt had fucked him over, this material— which he started writing as Carnivore disintegrated, a time when his

mood disorders became dangerous—served as revenge. The catharsis was complete. For a little while. Peter had a new band, a new record deal, and was back to making trouble in the metal underground. He had the love of his family, friends, and neighbors. And his band was going on a real tour for the first time ever, a jaunt that would take him, Sal, Kenny, and Josh beyond the local area into the heartland of America. His pals and protégées in Biohazard would go along with them as the two bands opened for English punk legends the Exploited. It was going be a killer time and a healthy kick-start to Type O Negative’s career. But the tour sucked, and the European one after that was an unmitigated disaster. Footnotes _________________ 1 In one of many intersections of the incestuous Brooklyn scene that found Peter Steele at the axis, the Crumbsuckers—which included Carnivore’s Marc Piovanetti—recruited vocalist Joe Haggarty in 1988, who had previously played in Keith “Alexander” Bonanno’s Primal Scream.

Peter Steele purged a huge load of bitterness with Slow, Deep and

Hard. Now that it was out of his system he was hoping to move forward and feel clearer than he had in years. But that didn’t happen. Instead, he received a lesson in how undependable, petty, ignorant, and downright ugly human beings can be when Type O Negative embarked upon their first-ever touring jaunts. He didn’t even want to go on the road. He hated the idea. But others in the band wanted to make a career out of Type O Negative, and Roadrunner Records was not willing to keep them a strictly local sensation. Type O Negative was obligated to tour. Peter took vacation time from his day job and begrudgingly did what was required. “Peter never planned to go out on the road,” confirms guitarist Kenny Hickey. “He didn’t want to be a rock star. He couldn’t give a fuck about being a rock star.” Then, imitating Peter’s low voice, he says, “‘I fuckin’ feel like a big goof.’ He never wanted it. Pete would’ve been completely, perfectly happy writing songs in his basement, releasing records once or twice a year, working for the Parks Department, and driving his Grand Prix. Peter liked order and routine. He would’ve been perfectly happy with that lifestyle. Routine, order, symmetry. These are the things that made him feel good. Punching the clock, knowing where he was going every day.”

But Peter found ways to adapt and cope while on the road. He admitted, “I’m basically an introvert, and when I walk out onstage I have to become someone else, which is why I usually have my handy bottle of wine with me. It takes the edge off things and brings my Brooklyn out. It makes me into a wise guy and gives me this false ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude that people mistake for confidence, while I’m actually a drunken park worker onstage—just instead of a rake in my hand I’ve got a bass.” For their first US tour, the band was booked to open for English punk legends the Exploited, with fellow Brooklynites Biohazard as part of the package. Biohazard’s presence helped Peter cope with the string of thirty dates that were scheduled throughout the US in November 1991; having friends along helped buffer the strains and stresses of road life. But the pairing of Exploited’s upbeat, antigovernment rants with Type O’s cacophonous hybrid epics were not accepted well by many show-goers. “We came out,” Peter remembers, “four long-haired freaks from Brooklyn, confronted mostly by punks and skinheads who at first didn’t even like the way we looked, and then thirty seconds into the set didn’t like the way we sounded. They expected something fast, and we come out playing this dinosaur music, so they were throwing shit, screaming. We were scheduled for about thirty shows, with the Exploited canceling one out of every three of them, and they wouldn’t even tell us when they canceled. They had the Peter with Joey Z from Life of Agony, trailer with all the gear hooked

backstage at L’Amour, 1992

onto their van, so we couldn’t even play when they didn’t want to. They would play shows by whim. Then [Exploited vocalist], Wattie, got sick and said he wouldn’t be able to make the next five shows, so I said, ‘I’m out of here, I’m going home.’ I was tired of walking out onstage, having stuff thrown at me and feeling like a big dick.” Ken Kriete recalls, “Wattie from the Exploited was a maniac and kept canceling shows. We did about two and a half weeks and then said, ‘Enough.’ Type O bailed somewhere in Kansas and made a beeline back to Brooklyn.” Wattie’s bouts of sickness arose from various moments of temporary insanity, like when he started breaking light bulbs in his hand, causing a serious case of blood poisoning. Peter realized it was the wrong tour for all kinds of reasons: musical, personal, even ideological. The Exploited were blatantly anti-law enforcement and anti-government, with songs such as “Police Shit,” “Boys in Blue,” and “Don’t Pay the Poll Tax” among the tunes on the album they were touring for at the time, 1990’s The Massacre. Peter said of the Exploited/Type O Negative pairing, “We shouldn’t have been on the bill with a punk rock band because we’re not punk. I am not anti-government; I believe in laws. I believe people should be punished and punished extremely for their crimes. I believe there should be no mercy because mercy is detrimental to the progress of evolution. The human race has ceased to evolve because a lot of people that would have died naturally have continued to live, producing inferior stock. It’s talk like this that got me in trouble with the Germans.” And the Dutch. And the Austrians. And various politically correct factions in Scandinavia. Shortly after arriving home from the ill-fated US tour, Type O Negative was sent right back out on the road, on a European tour where helpful, well-mannered Brooklyn boy Peter Ratajczyk was wanted dead for misogyny, racism, Nazism, and various other sordid behaviors. The Europeans smelled blood.

The first indication that Type O Negative was public enemy number one in Europe came when English band Cerebral Fix—also signed to Roadrunner—pulled off the bill when they found they’d be touring with Peter Steele. Their concerns were that his lyrics throughout Slow, Deep and Hard and the Carnivore albums were misogynist and racist. It was a view held by many others on the continent. Austrian death metal sickos Pungent Stench fearlessly stepped up and took the slot Cerebral Fix left vacant, but that December jaunt through England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria was a trying three and a half weeks for both bands. The controversy began with Carnivore’s 1987 song “Race War” and the infamous Steele-penned Agnostic Front tune, “Public Assistance,” and it boiled over once Peter came out with equally incendiary lyrics on Slow, Deep and Hard. Apparently unable to comprehend sarcasm, fantasy, catharsis, exaggeration, and social criticism, there were people on the extreme left-wing side of European society that would not have Peter Steele and his band appear in their countries; they took great measures to show their displeasure. In hindsight all they did was underscore their own ugliness and insecurity, but at the time their rage proved a very real danger to Peter and the band. “It was a fucking disaster,” Kenny recalls. “The Norwegians, Swedes, and Danish thought it was sexist. And the Germans, with ‘Der Untermensch’ and all that shit? Forget about it. They were canceling shows up and down the line, they were breaking windows on the bus, there were threats of riots, and we couldn’t walk the streets.” A year after the tour, Pungent Stench drummer, Alex Wank, said, “Peter’s definitely not racist. But I can see people thinking stuff about him, especially in Europe, because times are getting really rough here, a lot of shit is happening with racism, especially in Germany. It

probably wasn’t the best time for a guy like Pete to come over. But all the left-wing people in the hardcore/punk scene were very wrong; they did too much—smashing the bus, bomb threats, just unbelievable. All the real racist bands are in Germany! They play shows, they’ve sold thousands of records in Germany, they sing in the German language. Total fascist bands, and nobody’s doing anything because nobody can do anything. The tour was three weeks, but we played maybe eight times. It will change, though. Many people have already changed their minds about Type O. If they come again, they will get a fair tour.” Officials in the Netherlands went so far as to ban Type O Negative from stepping foot in the country. “Not for our views, but because they feared for public safety,” says Josh Silver. “It got real out of hand. I think we did about three shows, and the rest of them got canceled. Peter was so pissed off he flew home. The rest of us stayed, because that’s just the kind of assholes we were. We went to the shows even if we weren’t playing, and some people broke the bus windshield. There were all kinds of factional idiots doing exactly what they were accusing us of. It was like, ‘These guys are Nazis, so we’re gonna use violence to suppress their opinion.’ Isn’t that the same thing?” Josh noticed that, “You can’t do sarcasm in Europe. They’re translating the lyrics literally. They don’t get the twist, the spoof.” To which Kenny added, “A lot of it was just a language barrier. But this Brooklynese sarcasm doesn’t even go over in the Midwest, you know?” Despite Peter’s imposing figure and “will to power” talk, the sensitive Type O leader was deeply affected by the events of December 1991. “What I was pissed off about,” he says, “was that they were using fascist tactics and yet they called us fascists. They were going to clubs and smashing windows, throwing battery acid into places, throwing sulfuric acid. This is just human nature, plain and simple: total hypocrisy, total idiocy.” Peter went over to Europe expecting flak. “I’d heard from other bands who’d gone over there that there were certain bands who were rumored to be ‘fascist,’ and I really didn’t think too much of it.

Two days before we flew to Europe we found out the first show in Hamburg was canceled, and we didn’t think too much about it—one out of twenty-two shows. Big deal. Then it was Berlin, this city, that city, and it spread to Austria and then finally to Holland.” As the band toured from canceled show to canceled show, they spotted posters plastered to telephone poles with Peter’s face on them, and in big letters at the top: “KILL THIS GUY.” Peter notes that, “Not one single person had the balls to come up to me. Mobs of three hundred people came down to the shows to confront the band but not one person alone.” Peter’s no-holds-barred sense of humor added fuel to the growing fire. “I did an interview with a German magazine, and they were asking me how popular I thought Type O Negative was becoming. I said, ‘At this point I think Type O Negative is more popular in Germany than Adolf Hitler.’ It was much the same thing John Lennon said about Jesus Christ. I thought I was being a funny guy, but they don’t get it.” Then, mocking a German accent, he says, “‘Ah, so you are a fascist, Mr. Steele!’ Then there were protests, riots, and bomb threats.” Some of the controversy arose from Peter being quoted out of context in interviews. “I said I hate blacks and whites, I hate everybody. Everybody’s an asshole. So they quoted me out of context: ‘Pete Steele says he hates blacks.’ Then when I went to Austria they had a big press conference at this club that catered to the left wing, and it was like being judged by a jury of Communists. They were throwing questions at me, digging into my past, back to the days of Carnivore. It was like a tribunal, so I threatened the whole room. I went crazy. I said, ‘If you people have got something to say to me why don’t you suck my fucking dick right now. Any one of you, I’ll take my dick out and put it right in your face. Let’s go!’ These people are all looking around at each other like, ‘Oh my god, this guy’s sick.’ Yeah, I’m sick—sick of the bullshit! We’re this dopey band from Brooklyn who traveled five thousand miles to Europe to try to make a few dollars. Leave us alone.” Frustration with ignoramus interviewers led to a tactic that Type O Negative adopted from the Beatles: never answer a question the

same way twice. After the European tour, Type O Negative interviews usually devolved into total silliness, and quickly, leaving the band laughing in the wake of frustrated journalists. Peter reasoned in 1992 that, “I was doing twenty interviews per day, and these fuckin’ jerks would ask the same questions over and over again. ‘Are you this?’ ‘Are you that?’ ‘How do you feel about this?’ ‘How do you feel about that?’ So I would give each and every one a different answer because I don’t care what the fuck they think. Their lives are so small that my activities are in their newspaper. Why don’t you people just fuckin’ kill yourselves now?” With much less anger, a close family member of Peter’s recalls that, “He started the joking with interviewers because in some interview he’d said something and they wrote something opposite, so he figured, ‘If I say something opposite, maybe the truth will come out.’ He started changing things and seeing what people said. So a lot of the interviews were crapola, whatever he felt at that moment in time.” As a result, ridiculous stories and rumors began flying around about Peter and the band, nonsense that lingered for years. The real truths about Peter and Type O Negative became difficult to determine.

The concept of the “scapegoat” dates back to ancient Egypt and Syria, and is also detailed in the book of Leviticus. Various histories lay claim to its origin, but the concept is the same: banishment of an animal or person, sacrificed or cast out to absolve people or entire nations of their sins. It served to bypass and ignore the real root of the sin or problem. Peter Steele was like any other of the great scapegoats in history—he was in the wrong place in the wrong era with the wrong people who were all too ready to point the finger and shift the blame. It has been pointed out that the accusations of fascism and threats of violence toward Type O Negative in late 1991 were themselves fascist—the very definition of “the pot calling the kettle

black.” It was apparently lost on uptight Europeans that Type O Negative had a Jew in the band, and that all accusations of Nazism were therefore ridiculous. Josh himself says, “I was called a Nazi. I asked them, ‘Should I go kill myself?’” As the saying goes, “bad publicity is good publicity,” and there’s no better proof of that than the amount of press and attention Type O Negative received after the European incident. “I consider that tour a success,” Peter said shortly after arriving back home. “It got us so much free press that it just boomeranged on the people who wanted to damage us. We sold a lot more albums than we should have.” Josh Silver found the European episode amusing once the band was safely back on American soil, framing the experience in the context of something many people seemed to forget about in the midst of all this: the music. “When you’re in a band, there’s always a point where you’re very naïve, musically and professionally. And I’d say that Slow, Deep and Hard is probably our most naïve moment. And you can never go back. Being in a band is a lot like childhood— you don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late. Obviously we had a lot of opinions people had problems stomaching, and that’s okay. Let them misinterpret it. Let them say how fucked up we are. Let them make it a big deal. We’re only a stupid rock band, and if you wanna make us that important in your life, then go right ahead. But it wasn’t a wise move. If they had said nothing, we probably would have vanished.” Nearly a year after the debacle, Peter’s anger subsided to make way for a more philosophical attitude. “People are excited by buzz words like ‘racist’ and ‘Nazi’ and ‘bigot,’ and once you get labeled with that then all the ears perk up, the media jumps on it, and it’s like a circus. That’s what happened to me. Stereotyping is easy and it’s very simple to brand people a certain thing and have them try to defend themselves that they’re not that thing, like you’re on trial. I can’t even bother with these simple people because when you argue with an idiot, then you’re just two idiots arguing. So I try to walk away from them.” Peter’s detractors failed to appreciate the simple fact that he was venting, and part of that release included hyper-exaggeration. One of

the pitfalls of interpreting any sort of art is taking it too literally. “The person that writes these songs,” Peter said, “[is] a very small side of me. That’s the angry side. I’ve got ninety-five percent more besides that. I’m a semi-decent human being at times. People should realize that it’s an act. I don’t like performing. I don’t like being up onstage. I don’t like being judged by people.” Adding to that, he noted, “Songs are sonic therapy for me. I sublimate my feelings into something that’s socially acceptable. It’s the only time I can write songs, when I’m fucked up in the head. If people like what I do, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s great, too. These are very personal things to me.” And, after a pause, weary of stating the obvious for critics who wildly misinterpret his lyrics: “And I thought people who could read English would understand them.”

After returning home to Brooklyn, Peter and Type O Negative headed into a year that treated them much better than the previous one had. In 1992 their record sales picked up considerably, thanks to the controversy in Europe. Slow, Deep and Hard was selling well enough that Roadrunner Records demanded some kind of new release to capitalize on the fortune that, ironically, arose from their misfortune in Europe. Despite having no new material written, Peter jumped at the opportunity presented by Roadrunner. He was constantly dissatisfied with whatever his latest work was. As soon as a recording was completed he would identify everything that was imperfect about it and feel as if he failed. Thus, the climate was ripe for Peter to try and perfect Slow, Deep and Hard, which did, after all, begin as a therapeutic creative vehicle never intended for widespread consumption. Roadrunner’s Doug Keogh states that, “The success of Slow, Deep and Hard, especially in Europe, demanded a follow-up. So, into turnover as always, we wanted to get more product out there, especially if it was happening, and Slow, Deep and Hard, all that

notoriety from what happened in Europe made it somewhat of a hit, especially in Germany. So whoever was running the German company, along with Cees, decided they wanted another record. The original idea was to record an EP, but the band didn’t have any new stuff ready, so that’s how they came up with the fake live record.” “The songs from Slow, Deep and Hard really mutated as they were played live,” says Ken Kriete. “Peter was no longer happy with the way they sounded on Slow, Deep and Hard, so we thought we’d make a record with more up-to-date versions of the songs.” Monte Conner adds, “They came to us with the idea of doing The Origin of the Feces. Peter grew unhappy with the [first] record. He was like, ‘I would have done it this way.’ So Origin of the Feces was an excuse for Peter to redo the record. We released it under the guise that it was ‘live,’ and it’s filled with their sense of humor, with the garbage truck and the evacuation and the crowd chanting, ‘You suck, you suck!’ It was brilliant, but that was really just Peter wanting to have a second chance.” The band didn’t try too hard to sell the recording as an actual live album. In a candid interview with the author in 1992, Peter and Josh revealed that The Origin of the Feces—subtitled Not Live at Brighton Beach—was a total scam. “We ripped the record company off,” claimed Peter. “They gave us a hundred thousand dollars, and we only spent two hundred on the fuckin’ tape [to record the album on]. We went out and bought Harley-Davidsons.” Josh continued, saying, “So we go to my house and record there and they don’t know the difference, and we sell it to them for whatever we can get.” That interview led to a discussion of how cool 1971 biker/horror flick Psychomania was, which was relevant for another reason. Josh, Sal, and Kenny often worried that Peter was going to kill himself one way or another, and at one point they were convinced it would be on a motorcycle, a matter that would be briefly addressed on a future recording. On the creation of the Origin album, Peter said in the same interview, “We did all the crowd sounds [at Josh’s studio] and then went to the big studio, Systems Two, and laid down the basic tracks. We mixed everything all together and tried to make it sound as live

as possible. We also put in some of the things that happened to us here in the States and over in Europe—getting bottles thrown at us, bomb threats, police with dogs, people jumping on the stage and attacking us.” Systems Two engineer Mike Marciano remembers The Origin of the Feces as a particularly fun project where creativity ran wild. “There was a crowd sound continuously running throughout the album. The crowd sounds were recorded on an analog machine, and then we spliced the tape and made a loop of the tape that actually went around the whole control room. It was a big control room too, so the tape machine was in the corner, and we ran the spliced tape all the way around the room, around the mic stands to keep tension on the tape. So if you came into the room you had to duck under the running tape. It was pretty funny.” It’s debatable whether Origin improves upon the Slow, Deep and Hard versions, but it’s an interesting listen, and a markedly different one from the debut. Four songs were re-titled, while “Der Untermensch” and the two experimental tracks were left behind entirely. “Prelude to Agony” became “Pain,” neutered to a brief 4:40 compared to its original twelve minutes. The other songs (now renamed “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else,” “Kill You Tonight,” and “Gravity”) added new parts and truncated others. They sat among a couple fresh offerings. “Are You Afraid?” is a haunting twominute interlude that reached into pure goth territory, while “Hey Pete” is a reworked version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” The latter is the second Hendrix song covered by Peter, and the first of many Type O covers that significantly retooled and reimagined the original. It was manipulated to become a personal call-and-response, with Kenny belting out questions: “Hey Peter! Where you going with that axe in your hand?” Peter moans in response, “I’ll tell you, wolf boy. I’m going to kill my old lady, ’cause I caught her screwin’ ’round with some other man.” It puts a psychotic spin on the original, acting as a proper addendum to Slow, Deep and Hard’s axe-murder fantasy, “Xero Tolerance” aka “Kill You Tonight.” The album closes with the big piano strike that ends the Beatles’s “A Day in the Life” from the seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was homage to

their ultimate heroes, and another interesting detail in an album packed with interesting details. The band’s sick humor and the practical joke concept of The Origin of the Feces was reflected in the artwork too, not least in the literality of the cover, showing Peter’s ass cheeks spread wide for a photographer who remains anonymous, refusing to be credited with the work to this day. It shows, clearly, the “origin of the feces.” More fun comes in the song listing on the back, the titles part of a long line of various drugs and ingredients: “carbonated water … sodium benzoate … acetaminophen … I KNOW YOU’RE FUCKING SOMEONE ELSE … methyl alcohol … FD&C Yellow #5 … Ludiomil … ARE YOU AFRAID … Prozac … riboflavin …” and so on, finally ending with “Blue #2 Black #1.” The album’s liner notes credit “Anal Expose” to “Verdigris Phlogiston,” a Peter-concocted phrase combining the word for a pigment of green and an obsolete scientific theory regarding combustion and fire. Peter’s sense of world-building that began all the way back in Fallout and continued through Carnivore was stretching into an even wider panorama with Type O Negative. His attention to tiny details showed an exactingly resolute vision. His ability to turn lowbrow gutter humor into high art was unrivaled, although this Slow, Deep and Hard redo closed a certain chapter of the band’s evolution that they would never revert to. Peter kept himself and his band mates moving ever forward.

Cool under fire

The obnoxious album cover of Origin was pulled from the shelves a year after its release, replaced with another, tamer image in 1994 of a green and black treatment of a fifteenth century woodcut by Michael Wolgemut, The Dance of Death. The Origin of the Feces is a successful piece of subversive art, outselling Slow, Deep and Hard by many tens of thousands. Some even consider it the official second Type O Negative full-length, distinctive enough from the first album to be judged so. It in no way negates Slow, Deep and Hard, but it did buy Peter more time to write the proper second Type O Negative album. It also signaled the end of the band’s first phase. The album cover and the feces dropped onto each band photo in the booklet (the same photos that appeared on their first album) were as ribald as the band would get. They would not go for further gross-out with the next one. Type O Negative never totally lost its playfulness, sarcasm, and gift for

subversion, but these elements were presented in subtler shades going forward. The next Type O Negative studio album would be a mystery to everyone but Peter in its early stages. Not even his band members were sure what direction his writing was taking. Those expecting a direct response to the experiences of the ill-fated tours and the monster of a man Peter was made out to be would have to settle with The Origin of the Feces as that response. Peter had already washed his hands of it, as far as he was concerned. He told journalist Neil Aldis in 1992, “The things that I’m writing about have nothing to do with the problems that the band encountered. I don’t want to touch upon that stuff because that would just give the people who caused it satisfaction.” Anyone who thought they finally had Peter Steele figured out were in for a big surprise when the album emerged in 1993.

“There’s nothing like driving down the street and hearing your brother’s songs on the radio.” — Patricia Rowan, sister

Type O Negative’s 1993 album was finally complete, but it needed a

suitable cover image. This was to be their first recording of all-new material since the Repulsion cassette-turned-Type O Negative album of 1990. Anticipation was high, especially with the unintentional publicity generated by the European tour controversies and the success of The Origin of the Feces. Peter was initially calling the new album Things Worse than Death and Other Acts of God, but that changed when he borrowed a song title from the new album, a mournful epic titled “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family).” The album Bloody Kisses was recorded throughout February and March of 1993 at Systems Two studio in Brooklyn, and released August 17, 1993. To anyone familiar with the first Type O Negative album, it seemed a radical departure. Even the artwork signaled a shift in perspective. The photo sessions for the band’s new album found the members conveying less streetwise grit than before, with Peter embracing a pseudo-religious look that was both a tribute to and mockery of Catholicism. This new aesthetic carried over to the album cover, an image remarkably different than the tasteless Origin of the Feces

cover and coital abstraction of Slow, Deep and Hard. If Peter Steele had never been a predictable artist, he was defiantly underscoring that fact with this new album. In a state of perpetual forward motion, Peter was still absorbing new influences that would be incorporated into Type O Negative’s music. His tastes were as varied as they’d ever been by the time he began writing material for Bloody Kisses in early 1992. Along with his background in metal, pop, hard rock, and hardcore, he’d been tuning into the ethereal music of acts such as Lycia and Cocteau Twins, legendary goth rock bands The Cure and Sisters of Mercy, and the hypnotic swirl of “shoegaze” pioneers Slowdive Outtake from previously unpublished and My Bloody Valentine. He’d photo session, photograph by long been a fan of early ’80s John Wadsworth new wave acts like Gary Numan and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD). He even enjoyed lifting weights at home to Madonna and Kylie Minogue albums. Peter wasn’t afraid to show the gentler, more introspective side of his personality, and that applied to the music he listened to. Many years later, Peter reflected on the changes he made to the band’s direction. “Most of the songs on Slow, Deep and Hard were leftover Carnivore songs. But with Bloody Kisses I wanted more of a challenge. During the ’80s, I’d go to CB’s and L’Amour with my longhaired Motörhead friends and could never admit that I liked Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Psychedelic Furs, and shit like that. At thirty years old, I became a different person, so I just decided to do what I wanted to do.” And it wasn’t just Peter; the other guys in Type

O enjoyed soaking in different sounds and scenes. Sal remembers that, “Me, Peter, Kenny, and sometimes Josh would go out every weekend to Alphabet City, and at that time, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was a pretty good goth scene going on around Avenue A [in Manhattan], in all these bars that don’t exist anymore, like Alcatraz and King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut. We were all very heavily influenced by that.” Peter was also making changes to himself, confronting his anger and finding hindsight a valuable tool in dealing with it. Looking back, he admitted that he was not blameless for the controversies that erupted during the disastrous European tour of late 1991. “I have to admit,” he said, “I was ignorant. You can’t go around saying stupid shit in Europe. World Wars I and II did not occur in Brooklyn, New York. I made a mistake, and I do apologize.” In 1987 Peter had written in Carnivore’s “Sex and Violence”: “If you can’t eat it or fuck it, then kill it!” Several years later Peter’s disposition was changing. He said, “I wish I could still live by that motto, but in this day and age, if you follow your instincts you usually wind up in jail. Now, if I can’t eat it or fuck it, I pretty much leave it alone.” It’s not that he was wimping out. He would never wimp out. But he was more conciliatory in his late twenties, playing his cards closer to his chest, a matter of maturity and survival. Heading into the recording of the band’s next album in early 1993, he felt different, and clearer. His body was as beautifully sculpted as it would ever be, thanks to intensive weight training and attention to eating right (although he would never totally kick an extreme attraction to American fast-food chain KFC). His mind was less obsessed with rage and revenge. His new music was deeper, richer, more accessible. Type O’s new album was bound to show growth, because Peter had grown. He was still troubled by insecurity and doubt, but he headed into the new year with a sense of optimism that those close to him hadn’t seen for over ten years. Peter had a lot to purge in 1990, and Slow, Deep and Hard certainly served that purpose. It was time to move forward and leave past controversies behind. Thus, a significant transformation was

due for Type O Negative—the music, vibe, atmosphere, and aesthetic shifted. They were still going to be interesting and compelling, but it was all quite different than before. The core of Type O Negative was still pure, but instead of lashing out with clenched fists and unbridled rage, the lyrics looked inward. Hatefucks were replaced by religious erotica; threats of homicide and misdirected anger gave way to the sadness of lost love and lost lives. If black stood for pure hatred and revenge in 1991, in 1993 it stood for the seduction of nighttime and the deep melancholy of mourning. And a specific shade of hair color dye.

The cover of Bloody Kisses features two girls, a blonde and a brunette, nestling cheek-to-cheek in the midst of an apparent lesbian tryst. It was hot yet tasteful, and might have been inspired by the artwork of My Bloody Valentine’s 1990 Glider EP, which depicts two people kissing and takes up the entire frame, although their gender is ambiguous. The Type O name and album title took up opposite corners of the Bloody Kisses cover, as on Slow, Deep and Hard, but the font was smaller and the corner positioning was different. Still, its design retained a sense of continuity. The band’s artwork was becoming as recognizable a trademark as their green-and-black clothing, dyed black hair, and Peter’s resonant voice. This cover image, however, did not come easily. As with every piece of Type O Negative artwork, the seed of the idea sprouted first in Peter’s mind. But the artwork everyone now associates with Bloody Kisses was originally intended to be very different. Peter came to Roadrunner with the directive that the front cover art would show a large pair of green female lips against a black background. The idea was nixed immediately. Says Roadrunner product manager at the time, Howie Abrams, “We had this great album, and I told Peter, ‘That’s a really bad idea.’ Other people [at Roadrunner] agreed with me. That image didn’t live up to this album. We ended up getting together with Pete, which was

always difficult, as he didn’t like to come in to the office. We had to tell him, ‘We don’t like your cover idea,’ and he was like, ‘What the fuck are you meddling in our shit again for?’ It was because we actually cared. It just was not enough, it wasn’t up to the standard of the album he gave us. They spent so much time on the album, why would they come up with a C+, at best, album cover? The cover that ended up being the actual one is now an iconic image.” (The green lips originally meant for the cover Outtake from the photo session for were relegated to the print of Bloody Kisses (John Wadsworth) the CD surface.) Forced into finding a more viable idea, Peter brainstormed something that meshed insatiable sexual lust and the dangerous sensuality of vampirism. He wanted an image that captured the sophistication of his new music while touching on fascinations and fetishes close to his heart. He’d had a significant other in the past with whom, on her initiative, he performed vampire role-play during intimate moments. Hesitant to take credit for what became an image synonymous with Type O Negative—even long after they had moved on to other themes—she also turned Peter onto the writings of Anne Rice. The attraction to all things bloodsucking came naturally to Peter, considering he already had a fascination with blood. Naturally—and as with everything he did—Peter took the vampire concept to its farthest extreme. In the time that Bloody Kisses was taking shape, he went to see a dentist in Brooklyn, Dr. Wasserman, who sculpted Peter’s canines into sharp vampire-like fangs. Accentuating his thin but muscular frame, his dominating tallness, his deep voice, dark features, and long dyed black hair, the fangs

helped Peter transform into the ultimate vampire god. This dark image complemented the direction of Type O Negative’s new music, setting the band not only on a fresh artistic course, but down a new aesthetic road as well. To help realize his new vision for the Bloody Kisses cover art, Peter requested that photographer John Wadsworth conduct the photo shoot. Wadsworth had previously sent samples of his work to Roadrunner and their gothic/industrial imprint, Third Mind, figuring his style might be suitable for Third Mind artists. “I sent my portfolio to them, and it got into Peter’s hands. Peter loved my juxtapositions of sex and death and darkness, and that’s exactly what he wanted Bloody Kisses to be, so I got the gig,” he says. Wadsworth remembers Peter’s tightly focused directive. “He wanted two girls on the cover. I shot the first version in New York, and when Peter and I talked, he wanted it to be vampire-esque.” But Roadrunner didn’t like the vampire imagery and asked for a re-shoot. Wadsworth then shot the images that were eventually used for the album in Virginia Beach, using the same two models. The blonde was his wife, Kim, and dark-haired Gabriella was a good friend of the couple’s. Wadsworth hoped to use models from the famous Wilhelmina agency, for which he’d already done many photo shoots, but “Wilhelmina wouldn’t let me use any of their models for the Bloody Kisses shoot,” he says. “They thought it would be a bad image for them.” The resulting session with Kim and Gabriella worked just as well, even without the horror element of the original shoot. It was incredibly sensual and still carried the undertone of darkness Peter was going for. It was also very different for Type O Negative. Peter loved the results of the second photo session and so did Roadrunner.

Type O Negative demoed the Bloody Kisses songs at Josh’s home studio before fleshing everything out at Systems Two. The new material revealed a band that had gelled into an extremely cohesive unit over two previous recordings and two bouts of touring (tumultuous as those may have been). When the band began feeding various tracks to the eager ears at Roadrunner, people there immediately felt the material was special. Doug Keogh remembers first hearing the songs meant for Bloody Kisses. “We knew it was great, but it was so monstrously different. We couldn’t fathom it at first.” Publicist Sophia Fry was equally transfixed. “I fell in love with it because I was really big into goth music—Sisters of Mercy and that sort of thing—and I couldn’t believe the album he was creating. It was so different than anything they’d done before. The evolution of the band was incredible. I was blown away.” “Myself and the bosses at the label were immediately blown away,” says Monte Conner, “by the huge progress and reinvention in sound from Slow, Deep And Hard, which still bore a bit of a resemblance to Peter’s past in Carnivore and the NYHC scene. This was a whole new lush, layered, epic, goth metal beast. We zeroed in on ‘Christian Woman’ and ‘Black No. 1’ immediately as the two key tracks—and it wasn’t rocket science, because the demos of these songs had all the same magic you hear on the final album versions. These songs came to us fully formed, and that shows just how strong the band’s vision was right from the start.” Howie Abrams knew about Peter from the days when Carnivore was wearing fur and spiked shoulder pads, and remained a fan as the band transitioned into a more down-to-earth crossover sound. He began working for the label as Type O was preparing Bloody Kisses and remembers, “As the album was being complete there was this buzz around the office, around people who’d always loved Pete and Carnivore and on into Type O. At first I was a little shocked by it. It

seemed to shed everything they had done previously. It was from the heart, but it was a whole different thing. It was very polished sounding also. The songs were really well put together. The feel of the album was very consistent and really strong. We had no idea it would become what it became, but we knew it was an important album.” When Type O Negative brought the Bloody Kisses demos into Systems Two, it was with a clear idea of exactly where they were going, despite the material being a far cry from the first album. According to Mike Marciano, the creative process for every Type O album followed a routine pattern—methodical, well-planned, everything in its exact place, even at the demo stage. “They used to record the Type O demos at Josh’s house,” Marciano says. “He had a nice little set up there. That’s when they would really get what they were looking for and get all their ideas going. Josh did a great job. He would bring in the demos, and we would listen to them and use those as a guide and then just re-record with a much bigger setup and sound.” Between Peter’s resolute creative vision and Marciano’s technical know-how stood Josh Silver, the only person who could argue with Peter and sometimes even win when debating the merits of various creative ideas. He also had the technical knowledge to act as a helping hand to Marciano. Together they sculpted the unique soundworld that characterized Type O Negative. Every Type O album credited Steele/Silver as the production team, with Marciano’s careful engineering expertise guiding the sounds onto tape. It was a creative chemistry that worked, and it resulted in numerous magical moments within the confines of the Systems Two lab. “We would really go over the edge with how much we used to do,” recalls Marciano. “We did so much layering—doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of everything. They didn’t go that crazy on the demos, it was just to get the idea of the song together. It was just a rough format. In the studio is where Pete would start creating and going off on his own. We would usually take about 30 days to record an album, and he would come in late pretty much every day. We would try to start around 11 o’clock. He would come in late, order

lunch, and take his time. He would go off in the bathroom or he’d be gone for a while, so it took a little bit to get him going. We’d be like, ‘Pete, we’ve got to get this going.’ It was funny because the whole time he would just be joking—the guy was hysterical; sarcastic like you wouldn’t believe. We would have to prod him to get him going but then after a while he would really start getting into it. He would focus and start layering the parts that he would hear in his head. He did a lot of experimenting. We would just start laying down tracks and he would say, ‘Let’s try that. Can you reverse that, make that backwards?’ or ‘Let’s try this and that.’ We would just keep on layering things until we got something that we liked.” The heavily layered hybrid of sounds within Slow, Deep and Hard took on incredible new dimensions for Bloody Kisses. Thickly stacked voices, lush instrumental atmosphere—more like classical orchestration than a typical rock band—various experimental links, the inseparable, oversaturated hum generated by guitar and bass merging together…it was anything goes at Systems Two, and it resulted in a specific layering technique the Steele/ Silver/Marciano team dubbed “fur.” Bloody Kisses was completely draped in fur. “We would layer a lot of tracks; there were probably always five or six tracks for each part, to make it really thick. Then we had an effect from an old Yamaha unit that we had at the studio. We actually have two of them, Josh had one in his studio, and it was this piece that we came up with and it was kind of like a chorusing effect. You would put a signal into it and the left side would be brought up a few steps in pitch and the right side was brought down a few steps in pitch, so we used to use that like crazy and we called it ‘fur.’ Whatever we would put it on, we would do a part and go, ‘You think that’s okay? Well, let’s hear it with fur.’ We would put a lot of effect on it. It didn’t change what was there; it just made it very thick. That was the first thing we would put on, as an effect. We would return the fur to a part, and while we were listening, Pete and Josh would be like, ‘Put a little more fur on the vocals and on the guitars.’ We would use it for everything. That became part of the sound. Of course, we always had these long reverbs set up, like a long hold on the reverbs so that those snare heads and bass drum hits would go on infinitely.”

Marciano is a Christian, and when Peter brought something as provocative as “Christian Woman” to his studio, the engineer notes “We got into some very interesting conversations based on religion. And Pete knew Catholic doctrine, so all that discussion and debate made for some interesting tension in the studio.” Together with the creative tension that always existed between Peter and Josh, it all eventually got hammered out one way or another. Some things were thrown out as disposable to the project, with the sonically valuable material remaining. Every effort put into the creative process and recording of Bloody Kisses, including heated religious debates, resulted in what might still be considered the apex of Peter Steele’s musical vision.

Bloody Kisses opens with “Machine Screw,” mechanistic noise laid over the sound of a woman moaning with pleasure. It was performed by an ex-girlfriend of Josh’s, as was the orchestrated moaning on the first album’s “Unsuccessfully Coping…” Peter’s voice then introduces “Christian Woman,” paraphrasing Luke 23:34: “Forgive her, for she knows not what she does.” In nine dramatic minutes, “Christian Woman” distills everything that would typify the new Type O direction. Split into three parts —“Body of Christ (Corpus Christi),” “To Love God,” “Jesus Christ Looks Like Me”—the song relates the tale of a woman so infatuated with her Christ figure, she eroticizes the Catholic image of a nearnaked Jesus on the cross. As with many of Peter’s songs, it originates with an ex-girlfriend, a devout Catholic who enjoyed breaking the rules, going so far as to occasionally ask Peter to dress up as a priest during their lovemaking. The lyrics of “Christian Woman” are among the most theatrically stimulating Peter would ever author. Anyone expecting Slow, Deep and Hard Part 2 had only to look at the lyrics of this first Bloody Kisses song to know that something very different was in store.

The song’s musical tones are deep and sensuous, fitting the sacrilegious eroticism of the lyrics. Most notable are Josh’s keyboards, their cavernous and choir-like layers sounding as if they were recorded in a Catholic cathedral. Over these and the throbbing mountains of green guitar/bass fuzz, Peter’s voice is utterly compelling. While he had been introducing more of his basso profundo voice with each new recording since the Carnivore days, he had never featured it throughout an entire song until “Christian Woman.” The storytelling of the song, its gigantic sound picture, its plush layering, all combined to deliver the news that now, in 1993, Type O Negative had evolved in an incisively innovative direction. The first album now seemed leagues different from where Type O was heading. After the twelve minutes of intentionally campy caricature with “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)”—an epic parody of and tribute to goth girls, named for the black dye they favored for hair coloring— fans yearning for some of the old aggression had to settle for “Kill All the White People.” At a relatively brief 3:24, it’s a tongue-in-cheek stab at the controversies that surrounded the band in the years prior. Peter had stated while writing Bloody Kisses that its lyrics would not be a response to his enemies, although he did take quick jabs with this song, and another featured in the second half of the album, “We Hate Everyone.” These tunes were not angry in the way Retaliation or Slow, Deep and Hard were angry—they simply stated that “shit comes in all hues” and reminded that “TV interviews, free publicity, increase record sales dramatically.” Sal explains that, “‘Kill All the White People’ was a sarcastic take on African-American feelings about ‘the white devil.’ It was very humorous to us at the time.” Josh adds that the song was “a media experiment. Like, if you hate yourself, then who do they yell at? I understand why it’s okay for black people to use racial slurs about themselves, but it isn’t okay for white people. There’s a double standard there. We’re supposed to have attained this enlightenment, but the truth is that it’s gone completely in reverse. Instead we have a complete suppression of everything that’s real and honest. ‘Kill All the White People’ was making fun of that.”

These two songs added depth and variety to Bloody Kisses, offsetting lamentation dirge “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family)” and pop-meets-psych-meets-doom masterpiece “Too Late: Frozen.” The title track reads like an epitaph to someone departed from Peter’s family, and in essence that is true, although he later revealed it was about a cat. Peter’s adoration of felines was lifelong. One of his greatest loves, Venus, was with him from the late ’70s until the early ’90s, and the Bloody Kisses title track was his veiled ode to her. The latter song was sweeping in scope, juxtaposing sweet pop strains, hardcore shouts, gothic dreariness, and frosty psychedelic passages that utilized Josh and Kenny’s vocal abilities, in addition to their leader’s commanding croon. For many fans, “Too Late: Frozen” represents the pinnacle of Peter’s writing, the ultimate snapshot of the band’s special, unique chemistry. Inspiration from the Beatles began taking a more blatantly obvious role in Peter’s music with Bloody Kisses. “Set Me on Fire” and “Can’t Lose You” feature overlapping harmonies and straightforward arrangements, simple but substantial songs with a wealth of hooks. If the extreme aggression of Type O Negative’s past work was gone, these songs replaced that ingredient with extreme brightness. It was an uncomfortable transition for some fans to make, but eventually won over an entirely new audience for the band. A friend of Peter’s since the mid ’80s, musician Paul Bento was brought in to record sitar on “Can’t Lose You,” the album’s final track. Clearly a nod to George Harrison’s sitar-led Beatles songs “Within You, Without You” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Peter was determined to add this element to the album, even if Bento wasn’t as proficient on the sitar as he would later become. Bento remembers that, “Peter didn’t know what level I could play sitar at, and he’d already made an arrangement with the band, so I just picked up the sitar and started playing something, and about a minute into it, he said, ‘Let’s do it.’ It was really interesting how much he wanted to venture out. I didn’t understand it at the time. Some of the members of the band also, at the time, had issues with where the album was going. The way preproduction goes in studios, sometimes musicians

who are used to a particular patterning or formatting of constructing music see someone coming out of left field with ideas, and they can’t see the bigger picture, because they’re in segmented parts and not complete. Peter came from a different view in terms of the way he structured things. Bloody Kisses was an immediate departure from the early Type O Negative sound.”

Peter with Northern Lights, Midwood Mardi Gras, late ‘70s

Early drawing by Peter, circa late ‘60s (used by permission of the Ratajczyk family)

With Fallout, early ‘80s

“Black no. 1” makes its first appearance

Fallout rehearsal

Early Carnivore performance

Dressed for battle. L to R: Keith Bonnano (aka Keith Alexander), Peter Ratajczyk (aka Lord Petrus T. Steele), Louie Beato (aka Louie Beateaux)

(photo: Richard Termini)

A man and a car, together in progress

The Doom Buggy stalks the Brooklyn streets at night

Used with permission of the Ratajczyk family

(photo: John Wadsworth)

Alternate cover shot for Bloody Kisses (photo: John Wadsworth)

Type O Negative in their green-tinted glory. Clockwise from top: Josh Silver, Kenny Hickey, Peter Steele, Johnny Kelly (photo: John Wadsworth)

(photo: John Wadsworth)

Howling in the open air, October Rust era

First Carnivore reunion, July 1996 (photo: Debbie Poccia)

Signing at Sam Goody record store, March 1998, New York City (photo: Debbie Poccia)

Serenity in the subterranean lair

(photo: Debbie Poccia)

Type O Negative, live at Roseland Ballroom, New York City, World Coming Down tour, October 29, 1999 (photos: Debbie Poccia)

(photo: Debbie Poccia)

(photo: Debbie Poccia)

(photo: Eugene Straver)

(photo: John Wadsworth)

Peace in the September sun, 2009

Mark Abramson shirt collection, used by kind permission, except Hot Ice, used by permission of the Ratajczyk family According to the other members of the band, some songs went too far into pop territory. While Peter loved “Blood and Fire,” possibly the most blatantly rock and roll song he ever wrote, Josh later said, “I know gay people who hate that song because it’s so gay. The song is too ’80s.” Sal didn’t like it much either. He says, “I remember all three of us cringing when we had to play that song. It felt like we

were doing something that was trapped in another era, but Peter had a big thing for it, so I gave it my all nonetheless.” While Peter always conceived his albums as complete journeys, something beyond just a collection of songs, Bloody Kisses took that approach to a whole new level. While he had said Carnivore’s Retaliation was the “Sgt. Pepper’s of thrash,” it’s easier to say that Bloody Kisses is the Sgt. Pepper’s of Peter’s career, not just because of its artistry and innovative production, but because no one who grew up in the colorful rock world of the mid 1990s forgets where they were when hearing it for the first time. Even its four short conceptual pieces aided in taking the listener deeper than the typical album experience. Josh says, of the intro “Machine Screw,” as well as the enticing sound-scapes “Fay Wray Come Out and Play,” “Dark Side of the Womb,” and “3.0.I.F.,” “I was stoned out of my face one day and made some crazy shit and said, ‘Peter, listen to this.’ And he said, ‘That’s great, let’s put it on the album!’ That was the kind of atmosphere we were working in. Anything went. Then he came in and made up titles and added stuff to them.” One of them, “3.0.I.F.”—which begins with the sound of a speeding motor and moves into dreamlike, even nightmarish voices and sounds—came from a band in-joke. Josh, Kenny, and Sal would often mess with Peter, saying it was likely he’d never see his thirtieth birthday due to the extreme recklessness with which he handled his motorcycle. One of the finest moments on Bloody Kisses is the unlikely cover of Seals and Crofts’s soft-rock hit, “Summer Breeze.” It was intended to appear on the album as the more vile “Summer Girl,” which replaced the harmless original lyrics with stanzas such as: “Kenny Hickey lying on the sidewalk / Devil music from the house next door / So I step on over his vomit / Through the screen and across the floor.” Peter wanted to change the lyrics “because they made no sense! They were just so stupid,” he said. “Such hippie, drugged-out, laid-back crapola. So I had to make it a bit more sensual and also put a sense of humor in there.” The publishers who controlled the song didn’t see anything funny about it. They disallowed Type O Negative and Roadrunner from

releasing it with the altered lyrics, so the band played it straight for the album version. Slowed to a down-tempo crawl, with Peter’s hypnotic voice oozing out the words in time with the somatic rhythm, the song exudes a lush majesty that kept it from sounding like the jokey attempt it could have been. “Summer Breeze” was bound to be recorded by one of Peter’s bands. When Type O first formed, Peter remembered that, “At rehearsal I said to Kenny, ‘Play this fuckin’ riff.’ Someone in the band had some pills, and we were chewing them up and swallowing them, so I started singing, ‘Some of these make me feel fine.’” Even all the way back in 1982, original Carnivore guitarist, Stan Pillis, suggested the idea of playing the song to Peter. “Type O Negative was not the first band to do it,” says Stan, “We were the first. I said as a goof, ‘Peter, why don’t we do “Summer Breeze”?’ so we started horsing around with the song. Peter was coming up with these cool riffs that you hear now in the Type O Negative arrangement. It really sparked off from us back in 1982, with Carnivore. It was just an idea then, but he later took it with Type O Negative and ran with it.” “Summer Breeze” is the result of Peter’s upbringing and family influence. “I have five older sisters,” he said in 1995, “and having been born in 1962, I was bombarded with Motown, psychedelic, and early heavy metal.” He added that each of his sisters had “their own stereo. I was always subjected to different music. The light sounds of the ’60s/’70s became childhood favorites. When I hear these songs on the radio, I think of fond memories and good times.”

Emerging from the studio in March 1993, Peter was pleased with the outcome. On the first few playbacks of the full album, Mike Marciano and the band knew they had created something extremely special. They also knew it might not be to everyone’s taste, especially those fans that looked to Peter Steele as spokesman for their rage and anger.

Aware that the album was a far different beast than Slow, Deep and Hard and The Origin of the Feces, the crew at Roadrunner sent advance copies out in a manner different from the usual way of working a new release. Two hundred select print and radio media members—high-profile “tastemaker” types—received an unlabeled green cassette in the mail. Some guessed what band this new music belonged to, others assumed it was a brand new Roadrunner signing. Roadrunner said only that it was a new band and they were looking for feedback. Response was overwhelmingly positive. Other than the color of the cassette, the only hint as to the origin of this “new band” was an unwrapped Coney Island hot dog that staffers loaded into each package, something Roadrunner’s Howie Abrams admits was hilarious, and in keeping with the band’s peculiar humor, but also “disgusting.” Once in the public stream, the album caught the ear of everyone who listened. Legendary mastering engineer, the late George Marino— who put that all-important finishing touch on multi-platinum albums by Metallica, AC/DC, Journey, and Guns N’ Roses, among many others —was impressed when he mastered the Bloody Kisses tapes at Sterling Sound studio in Manhattan. Paul Bento remembers, “George was a master of his craft. I talked to him after he mastered it, and he said how much he enjoyed the album. You could see it all over his face. His The beginning of a Bloody comments were so cool, and that campaign: print ad for was really good to hear, because Bloody Kisses those guys that do mastering work, they don’t always enjoy the music they’re working with.” Bento’s assessment of Bloody Kisses accurately captures Peter’s creative frame of mind in 1993. “He took off into a whole different

direction. It was amazing. His writing expanded to other realms. The way the Beatles tried new things, Peter drew from the inspiration of the Beatles and how they experimented that way. Some people didn’t hear it or get it right away. But he just kept going and did his thing, and it is a fantastic album.” The tone of Peter’s new music was decidedly different, and Mark Abramson observes that, “After the hurt of a failed relationship, the pain eventually dulls, and so the rage in his music had subsided a bit. He was also genuinely into goth stuff like Sisters of Mercy and Lycia. So that’s where his heart was, and he gravitated toward that, which was for the best, because it turned into something many more people could latch onto. It went from primal rage to sexuality, and sex is always more appealing than rage.” It all played into Peter’s master plan, a desire he voiced quite a few times in the ensuing years. “Ninety percent of Type O fans will hate this and the other ten percent—the few who have actually known what I’ve been trying to say—they’ll like this stuff. Hopefully this ten percent will blossom into something much greater than we had before so I can make a little money, because money to me represents independence, and I want to get away from mankind forever.” Whether joking or serious—likely somewhere between the two— Peter often mentioned his hope to amass enough money so he could move to the country, or Iceland, to rid himself of the nagging hangers-on, losers, and generally idiotic human beings he felt smothered by in New York City.

Everyone at Manhattan’s Roadrunner Records office was floored by Bloody Kisses. They believed in the record and were committed to working hard for its success, none more than current VP of Radio Promotions at Roadrunner, Mark Abramson. A fan since the Repulsion days, he set a personal goal to get Type O Negative on the radio and go big with it. With Josh Silver’s smart edits of

“Christian Woman” and “Black No. 1” in his hands, Abramson felt he had what he needed to break the band into the mainstream. He worked ceaselessly toward that mission, and while many radio stations around the country were beginning to open their formats to something as original as Type O Negative, New York City radio was oddly cold to these songs. Abramson eventually found an open ear in Vinny Marino. A onetime DJ and programmer at New York City’s WAXQ, Marino was willing to hear Abramson out, not because he eventually came to like “Christian Woman,” but because he remembered Peter from their days back at Edward R. Murrow High School. “Peter was a senior when I was a freshman,” says Marino. “Everyone knew who he was. He was already that tall in high school, and when Peter walked down the halls it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Everyone walked to one side to let him pass. He was threatening looking, but was really just a pussycat.” In late 1993, WAXQ, or Q104.3, started its programming as a rock station, a 180-degree turnabout from the station’s prior life spinning classical music. They were open to new ideas in rock radio, the kind of station that played Metallica at six o’clock in the morning. WAXQ gave airtime not only to the grunge and alternative rock that dominated the mainstream in 1994, but more cerebral acts such as Queensrÿche and their platinum-selling Empire album. Still, Type O Negative’s “Christian Woman” was a hard sell, and at first Marino wasn’t biting. “Mark Abramson would come up every single week and pitch me Type O Negative. He knew that I had known Pete, so he thought that was going to make it really easy for him. I was known as the toughest add in the country. I was very slow to add new music because it had to be right for us.” As open as the station was to the new rock bands of the day, Marino says, “It was not always going to happen.” Abramson kept pounding at his door, relentless in his quest to see Type O Negative get the rewards they deserved. “When I first heard Bloody Kisses,” recalls Abramson, “I was like, ‘This is genius.’ I never allowed for it to not work. When I say it was a life mission for

me, I mean that this is probably my number-one band, and it was something where I was obsessed, and possessed. I would bring the band to radio, and they would look at me like I had three heads for even suggesting that they play something like ‘Black No. 1’ or ‘Christian Woman.’ But I had the strength of belief and the strength of ignorance. I was starting off my career in the commercial radio world, and I didn’t know what couldn’t be done. I didn’t know the limitations, so I didn’t think there were any. I just said, ‘This is gonna work, damn it!’ It’s as simple as that. I was completely bullheaded, passionately beating down doors, getting people to listen to this thing, getting this thing on the radio. I didn’t allow for failure. We just kept going. When we got it on the radio, it exploded. Phones would explode. Sales would explode. People heard it, and it was a genuine reaction. “This was something that everyone needed to hear. Everyone needed to hear Type O Negative. Period.” Marino did not initially share Abramson’s enthusiasm. “When Mark brought me ‘Christian Woman,’ I listened to it and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I thought it was a novelty record. It was like Lurch from the Addams Family backed up by Black Sabbath. I continued to listen, and he continued to bring me data from other radio stations. Mark was tearing his hair out, because I wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘I just don’t hear this record being a hit.’” Finally, Abramson invited the DJ to a Type O Negative performance. Marino says that after that experience, “I totally got it.” He put the song in rotation, and it did what it had done for other radio stations throughout the country. “The phones blew up. People loved this sound, and when they found out the band was from Brooklyn— and when I was on the air I mentioned I went to high school with Pete—there was that whole local connection. Within a week it became our number-one song. We were playing it forty times a week. It became massively huge for us.” “Christian Woman” was so huge for WAXQ that they promoted a homecoming show for Type O Negative at L’Amour in Brooklyn, which sold out weeks in advance of their appearance. Marino reunited with his old schoolmate backstage, where Peter jokingly

threatened to kill Marino if he ever revealed Peter’s real last name on the radio. The bassist then became serious and expressed his appreciation to Marino. He said, “Thank you so much for the airplay. It’s great to be able to hear our stuff in New York City.’” While Roadrunner had released “Black No. 1” as the first single and video from Bloody Kisses, it was “Christian Woman” that pushed Type O Negative into the limelight. On the back of that success, “Black No. 1” was given a second push, the song and its Breaking radio silence: trade accompanying video suddenly ad for industry publication appearing on every radio station and television channel remotely open to playing new rock music. Says Marino, “‘Black No. 1’ was released as the next single, and that did really well for us, too. I admitted to Mark Abramson that I was wrong. But it was Mark’s perseverance and love for the band that did it. I figured if a record label guy is this passionate about one record, then there’s got to be something to it.” There was a lot to it, in fact, and much more to come. Throughout 1994 and into 1995, success after success snowballed for Type O Negative. Those two years would be a whirlwind of touring, MTV airplay, talking to an endless line of journalists, and putting themselves in the public eye more than they ever dreamed possible. The friendship between Peter and his first love, Mardie Sheiken, went through various cycles of communication and distance over the years. In the Bloody Kisses era, they were pursuing different life paths; Mardie wasn’t following Peter’s music that closely. Driving through the city one day in 1994, she tuned into WAXQ, as she sometimes did while in transit. She recalls that, “The first time I heard ‘Christian Woman’ on the radio, I was driving. I heard that

voice—I heard this new sound, and then I heard that voice. I was like, ‘Holy shit, he made it. He’s on the fucking radio. Peter made it.’”

Peter

Steele was stalked by many people—women, men, boys, girls, groupies, fans, opportunistic leeches, and more women. His mother answered numerous phone calls at the Brooklyn family home throughout the years, dealing with crazed super-fans from all over the world. These occasional callers had gotten Peter’s home number because he casually gave it to anyone who asked. He had a peculiar effect on people: After sharing a drink or conversation with the giant, many people felt Peter was their new best friend, likely because Peter’s disposition with anyone, be it record exec or grocery store clerk, was to put them at the center of his attention. He made a person feel important, even when it was he who was clearly the most dominant figure in the room. It was one of his greatest powers, and entirely genuine. Some of these callers and new “friends” weren’t even stalkers, just committed admirers who wanted to get closer to the mighty Peter Steele. Young Phil Anselmo, a New Orleans native who had just joined Texas band Pantera, was one of those that phoned Peter’s house. “When Retaliation came out,” Anselmo recalls, “that’s when my brain exploded. Retaliation was the most brutal listen, and it was monumental. It was such a gigantic influence on the New Orleans music scene. Pete Steele would take hardcore ideas and then incorporate Black Sabbath—way before it was cool to do so—and do

it with that distorted bass sound and drop into these slow dirges that became the staple of the New Orleans sound in such a big way. I have friends from the ’80s who were such big Pete Steele fans, they’d call his house and talk to him. Matter of fact, I called him one time before I ever met him, just to hear his voice. Just to say ‘Hey, Pete, I’m a big fan.’” Aside from well-meaning fans and upcoming superstars like Anselmo, there were genuine, hair-collecting, breaking-and-enteringtype stalkers. There were the harmless people who might have walked by the house on Eighteenth Street while visiting New York City on vacation, taken a picture, wondered whether Peter was home or not, and went on their way, but then there were the creepy ones who took their obsession with Peter and Type O Negative to the extreme. When Bloody Kisses went gold in November 1995—sales exceeded half a million copies— Peter Steele had transformed from public enemy number one to one of the most recognizable and exalted rock music personalities of the 1990s. Those who wanted a piece of Peter changed from the kind who wanted him dead to those who wanted him live, in the flesh, and preferably unclothed. Peter’s sister Cathy remembers one particularly memorable obsessive. “This one girl came to the house for Christmas and Peter wasn’t home. My mother came to the door, and when she opened the door the girl had on a red suit Time travel: Peter on stage again with jacket with fur, and when she Carnivore, 1996 (photo: Debbie Poccia) opened the jacket she was naked. My mother said, ‘You’re going to catch a cold like that!’”

This was a story Peter recounted when he appeared on a Jerry Springer Show episode about rock star groupies, in 1995. This new kind of attention and exposure surely seemed surreal to people that remembered Peter from the days of sci-fi barbarians Carnivore and the true-life grit of New York hardcore, but no one was more challenged with the strange new world that developed around Type O Negative than Peter himself. His high talent level resulted in the creation of the extremely accomplished Bloody Kisses, a tidechanging album that gained about a thousand fans for every one it lost. He said in 1993, “The average Type O fan is going to hate it. They’re going to think we sold out and call us posers, which is fine. Now we’re going to appeal to a much larger audience. If somebody has never heard Type O Negative and they pick up the new album and like it, and then find out about the two other albums, they’re going to be in for a shock. It’s like peeling the face off a beautiful person and finding maggots crawling underneath.” Having taken a significant step up in the rock ranks, the demands on Peter’s time and the number of people that wanted to get close to him was beyond anything he’d ever dreamed of. While he appreciated the validation of his art, this intense focus on what had started in his basement in a time of desperate emotional purging was troubling for its creator. Peter could only stay in step with this weird new world for so long until he had to shut off and get back to his favored reality: lifting weights in his Brooklyn basement, his everpresent cats offering unconditional love, and time spent with friends, family, and new steady Liz. Yet the time he would have for that sort of thing became a rare commodity as Peter entered an extremely busy mid ’90s. These years were verifiably very different than any he’d experienced before. Like it or not (he mostly did not), it was an impending future toward which he had been hurling all along.

Any band that breeds hordes of fanatics is doing something right. Whether it’s Metallica, Pearl Jam, or the Grateful Dead, commitment

runs deeper than water and thicker than blood when music burrows deep into the heart. So it was with Type O Negative, Bloody Kisses, and the fanatical fervor of a few certifiably insane audience members. Roadrunner’s Kathie Merritt recalls the infamous one simply dubbed “Stalker Girl.” “Their fans were very loyal. They probably had more stalker-type fans than any band I’ve ever worked with,” says Merritt, “and I’ve worked with some crazy-popular bands. But there was this one girl, they used to just call her Stalker Girl. I don’t know what her real name is. But she had a ridiculous amount of disposable income and took the Bloody Kisses album and decided she wanted to meet every person whose name was on that album. That was her goal. She made a photo copy of the credits and the thank-you list and started flying around the country, having her picture taken holding the CD with the people in the thank-you list.1 She put those photos in a scrapbook and presented it to the band. We were in Texas at the time, and it was right around Christmas. She brought everybody a Christmas gift. Kenny invited her on the bus and was like, ‘This is so great, you’re so into it!’ But Peter and Josh were flipped out. There were pictures of her in front of their houses, in front of their dentist’s office, in front of every place that was ever mentioned or any person that she could find that was in the credits for that album. All of a sudden Peter and Josh realized that they were public figures and perhaps they weren’t able to walk to the store and get a coffee in privacy. That was the first time I saw them realize that their privacy didn’t belong to them anymore. They were freaked out because some of these pictures showed relatives of Peter’s and neighbors of Josh’s. She had no qualms about getting on a plane and flying somewhere, knocking on the door and asking, ‘Why are you thanked, and what did you do, and how do you know them?’ She just wanted to be a part of it.” Type O achieved the kind of fame many kids getting into rock and roll fantasize about, although the people closest to Peter claim he was never interested in that. He was too shy and insecure to want the world’s eyes on him at all times. The adulation and

encouragement could have been a benefit or a hindrance for his various insecurities, depending on which way he chose to handle it. It validated his musical genius, too, even if he took great pains never to admit it. He would instead swing in the opposite direction, wildly and constantly, at every opportunity, belittling his art in interviews, on album artwork, even in his lyrics. His self-deprecating humor became sharper the more popular he became. The back cover of Bloody Kisses, in lieu of listing song titles, loudly proclaims: DON’T MISTAKE LACK OF TALENT FOR GENIUS. Later, in 2003, he continued to be his own biggest critic, stating in “Less Than Zero (