Metal on Metal: Auburn Records celebrates its 20th anniversary at the 2nd annual Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles Festival.
CLEVELAND IS A METAL TOWN. Although, over the years, local media, promoters, and scenesters have mostly pushed alternative rock, hoping to find the next REM or nirvana on the North Coast.
They’d have better luck looking for the next Metallica.
“People in Cleveland love metal,” says WRUW, FM metal DJ Roger Ganley, who has been on college radio for 15 years. “People in this town are angry and metal is angry, and we're not very trendy; we don't change much in this city. Cleveland's blue collar and always will be.”
In the ‘70s, dozens of area bands cranked out Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin covers, but it was in the ‘80s that Cleveland produced the horde of original bands that gave Cleveland an international metal reputation that has lasted to the present. That they became known around the world was thanks to a handful of fans that dove into the business to help the bands they loved.
The bands haven't gone away either. A concert celebrating the locally based Auburn Records’ 20th Anniversary will take place on June 3rd as part of the 4 day Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles festival at the Odeon that kicks off on June 2. The Auburn Show will be headlined by Auburn bands Breaker, Destructor, and Purgatory with Manimals, Aftershock, Nightcrawler, Wretch, and Real Steel, rounding out the bill. Auburn's Shok Paris will also be part of the festival's June 5 lineup. of international bands.
Auburn Records was the brainchild of Bill Peters. An avid metal fan who collected underground and important metal records and was an early fan of European style power metal, he started his radio show ‘Metal on Metal’ on John Carroll University Station WJCU-FM (then WUJC) more than 20 years ago. It's still a Friday evening must-listen for area metal fans. He always maintained an open door for local bands to bring down their music, and he often frequented area clubs to hear bands like Black Death and Breaker.
“The first local metal band I saw was Breaker,” he recalls. “I ran into Jim Hamar. Jim and I had gone to school together, and I hadn't seen him in a while. He said, ‘Hey, Bill, I'm in a band.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? What do you do?’ He says, ‘I’m the singer.’
“I just couldn't believe it, because Jim was always the reserved, quiet kind of kid,” Peters continues. So I went to the Cleveland connection on Berea Road, and I could not believe how good they were. It was like watching a European band play. That's what totally motivated me to get into pursuing, putting releases out, that show specifically.”
He hooked up with another high school friend, Tim Stewart, who also had a metal college radio show on Cleveland State's WCSB. The 2 formed Clubside Records and put out a compilation called Cleveland Metal in 1983.
Although WMMS was often slagged for its lack of support for homegrown talent, the station jumped on it. Airing tracks by Breaker and Shok Paris, which had just formed when it contributed the only song it had completed to the compilation. The buzz from the airplay assured that Shok Paris would start its career as a headliner.
Jazzed by the success of the comp, Peters formed Auburn Records, taking out a loan to pay for studio time and pressing while Stewart became Shok Paris' manager. Peters hoped to make Black Death and Breaker his first two releases, but Breaker was with a local management company that was dangling major label dreams before its eyes. So the first two Auburn releases in 1984 were Black Death’s self-titled album, and Shock Paris's Go For the Throat.
Peters' goal from the start was to get the bands known outside of Cleveland.
“I was never focused on the local scene,” he says. “I love Cleveland, but I never got caught up in, ‘I want everyone in Cleveland to love me.’ We operated the whole '80s Auburn thing under the radar of the local music community. There were a few people like Plain Dealer rock writer Jane Scott that would mention things, but a lot of the big Cleveland movers and shakers didn't even know what was going on. My focus was the world – England and Germany and Japan.”
But a lively metal scene was a full swing at the Pop Shop underneath the old Agora on East 24th Street thanks to promoter Chris Andrews, who started Saturday metal nights. Everyone who was anyone hung out there, and any band hoping to get somewhere started out playing there.
“We knew that every Saturday night there was a place where you always had an opportunity to see somebody,” says Hamar. I really think the combination of Bill and Tim Stewart doing the compilation and the fact that Chris turned the Pop Shop into a metal night on Saturday was really what set it all off.”
Says Andrews, “Valerie Seely had been booking it, and they offered her a position upstairs. She presented me with the offer to take over the Pop Shop. We started to develop the format where Friday night was alternative, and Saturday was the hard rock and heavy metal bands. We kept it that way all the time to establish some consistency in format. People knew every Saturday night was metal night. They knew we were always trying to book best bands available, and the formula worked. People would come and just check it out without knowing who was playing. That was their scene.”
PETERS NEVER PLANNED to be a big industry mogul himself. He has worked a day job as a rep for WEA Record Distribution for 22 years, but his mission was always to help up and coming bands.
“My goal was to get the bands to the next level,” he says. “I never looked at it as a money venture for me. I was a fan that was just doing this. I loved these bands. I believed in them, I wanted people to hear them.”
An opportunity presented itself when someone he'd known through his day job moved to IRS Records and decided to start doing metal there. He asked Peters to give him a band.
At that point, he just finished doing Breaker's first album, Get Tough, and Shok Paris’ second Steel and Starlight. Both were sitting in the mastering plant, and he couldn't afford to release both, but Breaker had parted ways with Jim Hamar and hadn't been able to settle on a permanent replacement. So, he gave the Shok Paris album to IRS, releasing the Breaker album himself. Both came out in 1987.
Eventually, like most major label deals, that one would go bad when the band's Los Angeles-based management company chose a producer for the band's third album who changed its sound and sucked up its entire advance. In the meantime, however, there was a lot of excitement among local metal fans that one of its bands was on a bigger label.
Contributing to that buzz was that Destructor, one of the most energized in-your-face young bands on the scene, had its 1985 Auburn debut, Maximum Destruction, picked up for release abroad by Roadrunner. And when Peters inked a deal to link Auburn with yet another bigger label, Island in 1987, it looked like the future was wide open for Cleveland metal bands. Island gave Peters a budget. He rented an office and started to look for staff; he moved former metal DJ, Shelly “Steel” Hammer from Texas to Cleveland to work with him. He began recording an album with his first signing under the deal, Destructor. It looked like 1988 would be the best year for Cleveland medal.
MOST MUSIC FANS remember when they heard about Elvis or John Lennon's or Kurt Cobain's death. Most people in Cleveland's 80s metal scene remember when they heard the news about Dave “Holocaust” Iannicca. The bassist for the tight-knit Destructor, Iannicca was one of a group of old high school friends who had taken the scene by storm with an unbridled zeal and confidence that marked it as a future star in the thrash metal scene. Observers thought it could have been as big as Metallica or Megadeth, eventually. The island deal was a first step. But on January 1, 1988, Iannica was stabbed to death by a party crasher at a New Year's Eve party. Destructor was shook to its core. Island agreed to give the band time to regroup and find a new bassist, but a few months later, the label summarily dropped the band. Peters was outraged and the band was crushed.
“Thrown that kind of adversity just broke the spirit of Destructor,” says the group's guitarist, Dave, “Overkill” Just. “Not only losing Dave, who was such a good friend and an important part of the band, but the fact that Island Records just basically said, ’Next,’ It just started the snowball effect of, this is going down.”
Other things were starting to go wrong as well. Shok Paris was recording its third album, Concrete Killers, released in early 1989 when it became clear that it had lost control over its direction.
“We didn't realize what we were getting into until we were in the studio,” says Shok Paris, guitarist Ken Erb. “It's a great album. I still like it. It's just that we put so many damn backing vocal tracks. That's what the record company wanted. They were trying to get us into the what's hip mode.”
Adds vocalist, Fic Hicks, “It was like getting trapped in a spider's web, trying to jump into things without stepping back and taking time to make a rational decision. That's something youth tends to do. You want to grab the ring as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile, after another debacle with Colorado band, Jag Panzer, and an effort by an IRS A&R rep to sign Breaker without Jim Hamar, after Peters’ had worked long and hard to reunite them, Peter's extricated himself from the Island deal. He returned to another compilation he'd been working on. That 18 track compilation, Heavy Artillery, became the label’s swan song, but it went out with a bang. In December ’89, Peters decided to throw a concert/CD release party at the Phantasy Theater, booking most of the bands on the comp.
Says Peters, “I wanted to give something back to the Cleveland Metal community. I said, ‘Let's do a free show at the Phantasy Theater. I'll pay all the expenses, and we'll just get as many people out as we can.’ We had no idea what was going to happen. We had a blizzard the night before. It was one of the coldest days in December and 1,600 people showed up. I think that was the peak of that era. It all ended shortly after that. Island Records, IRS, Roadrunner, Dave's death, had all taken their toll. I was beaten so much. I just had to stop. I got married, we started having kids.”
Most of the band stopped, too. The most determined Destructor carried on until 1992 until they realized they were evading the inevitable.
“Music had changed so much. We didn't really believe there was an interest or market for what we had to offer anymore,” says Just. “When we finally hung up our leathers, I was relieved. It was coming to terms with reality, really. We didn't want to believe that was our destiny to go that far and to have it end.”
METAL WAS NOT FORGOTTEN in Cleveland in the '90s, although alternative bands gobbled up the media attention, it was bands like Chris Andrews’ Spudmonsters, Environmental Hazard, and Mushroomhea, spawned from Heavy Artillery contributors, Hatrix, who packed fans into the clubs. Peters continued to do his radio show, and Peters and the bands often heard from fans in Europe who loved the records. Martin Brandt, now a music writer for Germany's Heavy Magazine, recalls, “I called the number on my Shok Paris CD and got a hold of Bill's mom who was babysitting at his house.”
Says Vic Hix, “Over the years, I've been contacted by people that have been fans and have always wanted to know, ‘Hey, do you have any discs left or do you know where I can buy this or buy that?’ It makes you feel good that you've touched people in that way musically.”
By the end of the '90s, correspondence had become e-mail.
“The internet had gotten more popular,” says Peters. “European guys were flying over to Cleveland and driving through the city, searching me down to find me, ‘Is this the guy that did all these records?’ And people would email me and say, ‘Hey, can you reissue this or reissue that?’ I just got inspired to do it again.”
In 1999, Peters put out his first release in nine years. Breakers’ Accept EP. That was followed in 2000 by the CD reissue of Get Tough! And that year, Breaker regrouped to go to Germany to play Wacken, one of Europe's many big open air metal festivals. In 2003, he put out Destructors Sonic Bullet, and they also went to Germany where fans, it seemed, had never forgotten these Cleveland bands.
“It was a dream come true, says Dave Just. It was everything and more than we thought it would be. There were literally thousands of people that knew who we are. By the end of our two gigs, we were like, the potential here is just unbelievable. Were local boys from Cleveland and they're treating us on the same level as DO and Twisted Sister and Dawkin. It was a pretty fantastic feeling, especially after all the years of having things go so wrong for us. And not bearing any fruit from our efforts.”
Peters is now working to release his whole back catalog on CD, and is planning new releases with Aftershock (Vic Hix’s current band), Wretch, Destructor, and Breaker. Shock Paris is the latest band to regroup to head to Germany to play a festival in June and Breakers is going back in July.
Boris Kaiser of Rock Hard Magazine says, “I started listening to metal back in the mid 80s when I was 12 years old. I checked out Auburn bands like Breaker or Shock Paris, which are still all time faves. I met the Breaker guys when they were in Germany for the Wacken Open Air a few years ago. I'm really looking forward to the band coming back in July for the Headbangers Open Air – the second time I'll see the band – let's hope it won't be the last!”
“Basically, I think what really worked was that people like Bill are fans first,” says Peters’ early partner Tim Stewart. “He really has a natural love for the music and I think that's what's most important with the heavy metal scene. Bill helped discover a lot of bands, and with his heavy metal radio show, he reached a lot of people to sustain the enthusiasm for heavy metal in this area. Without Bill, a lot of the music wouldn't have been heard.”