Glen E Friedman

Glen E. Friedman is a 31-year-old photographer with mussy, dark brown surfer hair and beach-weekend stubble on his chin. He wears a baggy blue t-shirt and loose khakis, black Jack Purcells. On his left wrist there is a silver band, bright against his tan, and on his right he wears a number of black rubber bracelets. Friedman follows a strict vegan diet and, perhaps as a result, his eyes are piercing; as dark and bright as polished onyx. See him on the street, you'd take the guy for the aging skateboarder he is. Hear him talk and it takes only a few syllables to dope out that he's lived in California for a good part of his life.

Friedman's first book, Fuck You Heroes, will be available in early September, in both New York and L.A.; distribution to the rest of the country starts in November. Fuck You Heroes compiles photographs Friedman took between 1976 and 1991, of skateboarders, hardcore punks and rappers. He's publishing the book himself, through a company called Burning Flags Press, because, as he says in his preface, most publishers he talked to didn't think that people interested in skating or hardcore even read books, "let alone come into bookstores."

It's odd how many of the photographs are familiar. Five minutes with the book and I'm counting the number of shots that were on my bedroom wall growing up. Skating pictures I cut out of magazines, mostly in Brooklyn, the summer after fifth grade, there was nothing cooler than the distant and unknowable West L.A. skate scene, but some punk bands as well, and the cover picture from the last Minor Threat EP, which I found, an empty sleeve, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge one afternoon in high school and put on the wall above my bed. The more recent work, too, is familiar: Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, Ice-T, the Beastie Boys. They're all CD cover shots. They're on my shelves at home.

First picture in the book: Jay Adams, radical skate hero of my 11th summer, tanned nut-brown, with sun-streaked hair and a look of fierce determination. He's on a skateboard that's just barely inside the deep end of an empty pool in Brentwood, at the apex of a run that took him from the shallow end, down into the bowl and up onto vertical concrete, out onto the coping around the pool. The photograph, taken in October, 1976, captures him with his lips pursed, his arms out behind him for balance, his body folded down tight over the skinny wooden board, caught between turning left or right, seemingly miles above the ground and yet below the camera's eye.

Then Tony Alva, in a photo I cut out of one of the skateboard magazines that was on my bedroom wall for two years, in a trashed West Hollywood pool. It's 1977. Alva is crunched up at the lip of the bowl, vertical and moving fast, a bandanna wrapped tight on his head, holding back a mane of frizzy hair, with just his frontside rear wheel touching the coping. He is in the midst of a turn. There's a sneer on his lips and with his right hand wrapped around his bent knee for balance, he's flipping the bird to the camera. He's probably nine feet above the bottom of the pool.

Paging on, I find little Harley Flanagan from the Stimulators, banging on his drum set, shirtless, screaming, 12 years old, at Trax in 1980. Henry Rollins, a guy I always vaguely despised, a gaunt skinhead with just one tattoo, screaming into his mic after joining Black Flag, at a club in Costa Mesa in 1981. Ian MacKaye with Minor Threat, amid the crowd at CB's in 1982, a desperate bunch of punks slamming around him, MacKaye's mouth wide and contorted. A skeletal and manic Jello Biafra in the midst of a Dead Kennedys show, slamming down his mic stand at The Whiskey in 1981. Ice-T in acid-washed jeans and a polyester Adidas t-shirt, cut off at the arms, posing against a chain-link fence off Highway 101, Hollywood, 1986. Run-D.M.C. looking somehow both hard and middle class, under a Hollis Ave. street sign in Queens, 1985.

Hold up, now. Friedman is 31. In 1976, when he took that picture of Adams, he was 13 years old. I ask him about that. "I took photography as an elective in seventh grade," he tells me, laughing. "With a pocket Instamatic. The typing class was really crowded."

Born in North Carolina, but raised in the New York area, Friedman moved to L.A. when he was in third grade and his parents divorced; he spent his childhood in West L.A.: Brentwood, Westwood, Bel Air, Santa Monica, Venice. Among skaters, this area (Dog Town, the skateboard magazines I read as a kid called it) was the epicenter of the world. He got a skateboard, he says, even before his mom found a place to live.

Friedman went to Kenter Canyon public school and Paul Revere Junior High, both, he says, "huge skating schools," and, on the steep playground banks at Kenter where the area kids carved turns after school, got to know the scene. "I was, y'know, an about-average skater," he says. "But the above-average guys? In '75, '76, they were getting into magazines! That was cool, and I really did think, how can I get in there too?"

The photographs Friedman saw in SkateBoarder (at the time the nation's only, and therefore most popular, skateboarding magazine) weren't really capturing what he was seeing. "The photographers were all surfers (that was what was big then) and I really thought I could do better. I got a D in photography, but I was out there every day, with my friends; I figured, let me at least try."

Friedman shot with his Instamatic for a while, got ahold of a 35 mm, lost it, and then borrowed another. In the fall of 1976, Friedman found a new pool where no one had been before and corralled Adams, Alva and a few others into skating it so he could take pictures. Slide film. He'd heard that was important. A few days later, he showed the results to a few of the skaters, and to a freelance Skateboarder writer he met on the Kenter banks, C.R. Stecyk. Stecyk told him to call Warren Bolster, Skateboarder's editor, and then to send him the pictures.

Friedman's calling Skateboarder was a brave act for an eighth-grader; the magazine's niche market was in the process of widening into a chasm; two years later, Skateboarder would claim a national readership of one million. Plus, it was a long-distance call down to the magazine's offices in San Diego, and it struck Friedman as he dialed that this was, you know, kind of a big deal. He hoped that his mom wouldn't get angry about the cost of the call. He hoped Bolster didn't know how young he was. The editor took the call. Friedman made his pre-pubescent voice sound as low as he could, and started dropping the names of some of the established skaters who lived in his neighborhood: Alva, Adams, Paul Constantineau, Stacy Peralta. Friedman told Bolster that he'd been taking pictures of them, in local pools and on banks. Was he interested? Send down the slides, Bolster said, and a small bean of panic set in Friedman's stomach at the idea of trusting his photographs to the mail. "It was really important to me to know what was going to happen to them," he remembers.

Friedman is still like that; he doesn't like to lose track of anything. But back then, he says, photographs "were like autographs. I'd take a picture so that I know I was there, that I captured a moment. I collected those moments. "I told Bolster I really didn't want to lose them. That I had to know as soon as possible whether he wanted them or not." Yeah, yeah, Bolster said. Send them down.

A month or so later, a letter from the magazine came in the mail. Inside was a tear sheet from the forthcoming issue (a full-page photograph Friedman had taken) and a check for $40. "My name was on the picture," Friedman says, smiling. He pauses, then breaks out laughing. "It was complete insanity from there. Eighth grade. I was blown away."

Since then, through junior college and UCLA, a stint as manager of Suicidal Tendencies, as a columnist for Maximum Rock 'N' Roll, as the creator of a one-time-only punk photozine called My Rules, Friedman has made his living by taking photographs. Of skateboarders first, but then of punk rockers and hardcore artists and, more recently, of rappers^×over 100 album covers in all.

His subjects are all, Friedman says, fuck you heroes. People "who have shown us different ways of doing or looking at things."

It's more complicated than that, of course. In Friedman's images, bird-flipping skaters, snarling punks and posing-hard rappers alike, the overarching message appears to be more than, simply, fuck you. It is instead fuck you with a subtext: I reject you outright. Reject you and all of your stupid, petty beliefs and limitations; I am against you and that for which you stand, so high and mighty. In the shorthand form, the sub-language of the moving body: the finger. I don't even need to talk to you. Fuck you. Think for yourself.

That is Friedman's message, at any rate. The subjects and the skaters in particular) are generally a bit vaguer. "You could never find a more aggressive, arrogant, rowdy, perhaps ignorant bunch of people than my friends," Alva told Skateboarder at around the same time Friedman was getting his first photographs published. "That's just the way we are; that's the way we skateboard; that's the way we talk."

Being rowdy in the pursuit of excitement, Friedman feels, was a definite fuck you: to all the clean-cut Valley kids playing Little League on sculpted fields, to screwed-up moms and dads and stepdads and families, lame semi-suburban towns and, as, Friedman says, "all those dicks I went to school with who listened to Genesis, that bullshit." The Dog Town skaters were reckless, crazy, the antithesis of all that; they didn't care for authority, would skate anywhere, anytime, anything.

In '76 or '77, Friedman can't remember which, they emptied a pool on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood (O.J. Simpson's house) and skated. Juice was away; construction was going on in the house. "When he came by," Friedman says, "he was actually cool about it." Whatever. It's probably unwise to ascribe much political significance to the skating pictures in Fuck You Heroes, except to say that the Dog Town skaters Friedman captured on film (whose rad-stoking-L.A. nonconformism sounds a lot like adolescent dickishness today) were idolized by kid skaters across the country.









Wherever you skated in New York in the mid-70s, for instance, whether in the unfinished drainage bowls that now lie under Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street, or on the banks under the Brooklyn Bridge, on loft ramps in SoHo or a plywood quarter-pipe in Riverside Park, there was always one guy with a bandanna and a mop of curly hair, an Alva board, an Alva style, an Alva attitude. I wanted to be Jay Adams, Paul Constantineau. I have dark scars on my knees and elbows to prove it.

On a smaller scale, Friedman was able to achieve a similar success with his punk-rock photographs. He was a bi-coastal child, spent the school year with his mom in L.A. and summers with his father in New Jersey. In high school, things got difficult at home; he reversed the process and went to school near his dad's. He had, he says, many of the classic adolescent rebellion problems: fights with his parents, beefs with teachers, difficulty with peers."I was difficult," he admits. Then adds, with a smile, "Although I never did anything wrong."

The atmosphere of punk (of straight-edge hardcore, in particular: no drinking, no drugs, no peer pressure, no anti-positivism) was perfect for him. "All these bands I was listening to at the start of the 80s," he says, "were saying things that I could relate to, talking about ideals, and integrity, what's fucked up and what's good." As with skating, Friedman says, the photographs he took were, at first, "an afterthought. I went to shows to slam dance, get out some angst, enjoy the music, just like everyone else."

It seems almost disingenuous, the way he says it, if only because the photographs he did take are so seminal and exciting: early, out-of-control shots of the Germs, Black Flag, the Stimulators, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, D.O.A., Bad Brains, S.S. Decontrol.

Friedman promoted the bands he liked relentlessly, first in Skateboarder, which was struggling to diversify after the skateboard boom of the 70s began to wane, then in the mainstream press and, after that didn't work, in 1982's self-published My Rules.

Friedman points to a picture he took of MacKaye in 1982, on one knee before the mosh pit at a club in Torrance CA, singing with the crowd. "I thought straight-edge was just this really great idea and I wanted to capture and spread it to as many kids as possible. To my peers. I thought we could try to change the attitudes of everyone who just went to parties to drink and get high, who didn't think for themselves."

Who knows. But look again at Friedman's photograph of Minor Threat, for the cover of the Salad Days EP in 1983, the band seated calmly on the steps of Dischord House in Arlington VA, staring at the viewer in skate shoes and jeans. It was the perfect picture of American punk rock, we are middle class maniacs; we live in the suburban house next door. You could be like us. Fuck you.

Then there's rap. Friedman got all hooked in with the Beastie Boys when they came to L.A. to open for Madonna's Like a Virgin tour; he'd met them in 1981 when they were still a hardcore band. They had been skaters. "Rap," Friedman says, "seemed to me to be the next step for hardcore music, a natural progression. The Beasties knew that." Granted, he says, "a lot of the kids involved were coming from harsher living circumstances, from a different direction. But the message was the same, and I wanted to spread that around." Through the Beastie Boys, Friedman got work with Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons; he did a tour book for Run D.M.C., album covers for Ice-T and the Beasties, for Public Enemy.

The resulting photographs, most of them posed, seem to lack the energetic craziness of his live-action skating or punk work, but they somehow continue to project the sneering, outlaw disenfranchisement Friedman craves.

Part of that is the hustler image: black leather, gold, guns. Part of it is the sneer itself. Sometimes, though, Friedman admits, "I think I've projected my own idealism onto my subjects, given them integrity they never really had."

Integrity, or the appearance of it, is Friedman's touchstone. "It's what you feel in your heart if you^Òre honest," he says. It is what, he says, his photographs are all about. One example might be one of the first photographs he took of Ice-T, standing by the 101 freeway in Hollywood, in April '86. Right hand on his hip, Ice-T stares down at the camera with a pursed-lip look of disdain on his face, a mesh gimme-cap perched sideways on his head. It is a posed picture, yes, but if you look into the rapper's eyes, blank and intelligent, as empty and foreboding as the sunglasses he wears in many of the later shots. You can detect almost the same fluid anger that comes out of the skater shots from the mid-70s, and from the sweaty faces of the punks. The message hasn't changed: fuck you.

"These are people who I look up to," Friedman says. "Or have looked up to, and that millions of other kids have looked up to, or still look up to, and have good reason to," he says, standing now, loud. Friedman's eyes are blazing. His demeanor is not aggressive, nor is it defensive. He's neither malignant nor benign. He only wants to explain. Forcefully: "That's why I called them heroes. They're not heroes in the traditional sense, but they are people who are speaking out or acting out about the bullshit that's going on in the world today, and they're not just sitting back and taking it. The image reflects that. And that's what's important to me."


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I wrote that article in August, 1994; it appeared in NYPress on Aug. 24, 1994 as a cover story. In the months and years that followed, Glen and I stayed in touch, and talked a great deal about his work. Recently, as Glen started to put together his second book, Fuck You Too, the music and skating photo scrapbook you're reading now, I made a few calls, both to his friends and to people who he's worked with as artists and in business. As it turned out, there wasn't much difference between the two groups.

"What's your reaction to Glen's work?" I wanted to know. "Is he as fuck-you as his photographs suggest?"

Russell Simmons, the rap mogul and president of Def Jam, who's hired Friedman for record covers countless times, started laughing. He didn't have much time, he said, but could sum up Friedman in a recent, typical scenario:"Fuck You Too? I just got a big deal, a huge deal, from Coke. To be their spokesman. And I ask my good friend Glen to take one photograph for me, for a Coke ad, for more money than he's ever seen, just one photograph. And he says, "Coke? Fuck that.""

Rick Rubin, Simmons' ex-partner, illustrious producer, head of American Recordings and southern wrestling impresario: "For the people who grew up in punk rock, he's by far my favorite photographer of that generation. Every time he picks up a camera, it seems, he takes good pictures. [And] he's talented far beyond what we see in his art, though his personality doesn't allow him to do some of the things he could do, like be the president of a record company; he values himself far too much to allow himself to start where he'd have to to do that."

It's an important point. Because in addition to being a consummate artist behind the camera, Friedman is above all else a gifted talent scout: he's been at the epicenter of three extraordinarily large youth culture movements in the United States (skating, punk and rap) and he was there at the start of all three. Not with those who faded away, but with those who determined the directions the movements would take; stars ascendent.

"He's definitely the O.G. of rap photography," Ice-T says. "His were the very first images of rap to cross America, and he captured them exactly, this white kid from where-in-the-fuck."

Craig Stecyk, the journalist Friedman met on the Kenter banks in the mid-70s who first encouraged him to send his work to Skateboarder, concurs."The amazing thing about Glen," he says, "is his propensity for repeatedly making once-in-a-lifetime e hook-ups. He gets into stuff early, gets into it deep; he works it thoroughly and he's out of it before other people are even hip to its existence."

"It's clear in his photographs," says Tony Alva, skateboarding demigod turned snowboard and skate-deck sales heavyweight. "Glen is always in the right place at the right time, with his finger on the pulse of the moment. It's his dharma, his gift. We were these little shithead skateboarders and Glen was there; he came up from underneath with the rest of us, doing what he loved. You look at those skating photographs he took, and then of the bands and later with hiphop, and you can see: it's timeless."

I wondered why. Ian MacKaye, who Friedman has known since the early days of the D.C. hardcore scene, provided the best answer.

"It's all in the eye," MacKaye says. "Glen believes in the intensity of life, and he's always looking for it, in skating first, and then punk and then hiphop. He has total contempt for the typical photographic process. And what he does is, he waits. I've done photo shoots with him where we'll be out for an hour and he'll take one shot. There's an intensity that he's looking for, that he obviously relates to. And he knows it'll come."

"He may talk a lot of shit," Ice-T adds, seriously, "but you cannot deny his experience."

That's true for rap, of course, and for punk and skating as well. The images in Fuck You Heroes, and in Fuck You Too, helped many of us define our understanding of youth-culture America; white and black, West Coast and East. They are images that will remain in our heads long after we've moved on: our collective memory. Believe it, Friedman might say, or fuck you too.

FDA to limit antibiotics in meat

The Food and Drug Administration released draft regulations intended to limit antibiotic use in meat-producing animals to prevent outbreaks of drug-resistant viruses.


The medical community has been warning for years that we all take too many antibiotics. Because, the more we throw at these bugs we're trying to kill, he more quickly they evolve to beat those drugs.

Now, the battle against so-called "antibiotic resistance" is going down on the farm. Today, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidelines designed to reduce the antibiotics fed to cows, pigs and chickens.


Jeff Horwich: Before we eat the vast majority of animals in this country, they've been eating antibiotics.

Jeff Bender directs the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety at the University of Minnesota.

Jeff Bender: We know that if we feed at these really low levels, somehow these animals don't get disease and they grow faster.

Faster -- and bigger, says Missouri farmer Richard Oswald.

Richard Oswald: Antibiotic feeding does stimulate the appetite of the animal somewhat, so they tend to eat more than they would normally if they were just out on their own.

The FDA says all those antibiotics have contributed to drug-resistant strains of e.coli, salmonella and other deadly bacteria. So today the agency said fattening livestock for market is no longer a good enough reason to give antibiotics. New draft regulations say they must be medically necessary and overseen by a veterinarian.

It's a challenge to the large, factory farms that supply most of the nation's meat. The University of Minnesota's Jeff Bender says where animals are tightly packed, the diet of antibiotics keeps disease from spreading.

Bender: This is going to require some innovation by the industry to think about what does this mean for us. Does this mean less animals that we have in confined spaces?

Bender calls the FDA guidelines "an important step." Just down the hall, his colleague, veterinary epidemiologist Randy Singer, worries it may be a backward step.

Randy Singer: I am concerned if we pull antibiotics out of the feed of animals that we'll see an increase in the illness of these animals on the farms, and therefore we will need more antibiotics at higher doses.

Singer says that's what happened when the EU made the same move four years ago.

Denver Airport

One of the murals at the Denver International Airport, painted by Leo Tanguma.

Face it: anyone who has flown ever since the 9/11 attacks know that airports are Beelzebub’s satanic stock yards, where passengers are treated like so much cattle. Communities can spend all of the millions of dollars they like in an effort to fill these massive spaces with soothing artwork and soaring terminal designs, packed with wall-to-wall retail shopping and fast food Valhallas. It doesn’t matter. Air travel has been made miserable, and airports are places to be avoided. But one airport in particular has attracted the attention of a wide range of conspiracists who see something sinister there, and it’s even worse than TSA cavity searches over forbidden shampoo bottles, corkscrews and nail clippers.

When Denver, Colorado outgrew its old Stapleton Airport, the city and county government decided to think and build big. They went 25 miles out of town and built a facility that takes up twice the landmass of Manhattan. The airport was designed with the future in mind, and is the largest airport in the U.S., the third largest in the world. As with any project of this size, there was much consideration given to the decoration and design of the terminal, and its unique roof line was made to represent the conical peaks of the Rocky Mountains. But it was the artwork inside that first attracted curious groups of the very, very nervous. And then more accusations started pouring in.

Here are some of the peculiarities noted by researchers:

• Evil words – Some conspiracists have pointed to words cut into the floor as Satanic or Masonic: Cochetopa, Sisnaajini and the baffling Dzit Dit Gaii. It turns out that these are actually Navajo terms for geographical sites in Colorado. The other creepy terms often pointed to as evil references, Braaksma and Villarreal, are actually the names of Carolyn Braaksma and Mark Villarreal, artists who worked on the airport sculptures and paintings.

• Creepy murals – We don’t know art, but we do know that a soldier wearing a gas mask, stabbing a dove with a scimitar and waving a gun over a river filled with women carrying dead babies is not really the sort of thing to uplift our spirits while dashing for a far gate on a short layover. Other bizarre images include a scene with caskets featuring a dead Navajo woman, a dead Jewish woman and a dead African-American woman. Artist Leo Tanguma wrote explanations of his personal, if odd, inspirations for the paintings, describing them as depicting scenes of violence and tragedy being overcome by peace and harmony.

Then of course, there's always the satanic blue horse sculpture with glowing red eyes that welcomes visitors.


• Masons and the New World Order – There is a dedication marker in the airport that is clearly inscribed with the square and compasses of the Freemasons, along with listing the involvement of the two Grand Lodges of Freemasonry in Colorado. All of this is mounted over a time capsule sealed during the dedication of the airport. Some claim that this is a futuristic “keypad” with some unknown purpose. Spookier to them is the notation of an organization called the New World Airport Commission.

The New World Airport Commission, says Denver Airport officials, was a group of local businesses that organized the opening ceremonies of the facility, and they chose the name because Denver was aiming to create a “new, world-class” city and airport. The Freemasons participated in laying the “capstone” (the last, finishing stone) of the airport project. This is by no means unusual. Masons have been laying cornerstones, capstones, and memorial markers for public buildings for almost 300 years. As symbolic heirs of the stonemasons’ guilds of the Middle Ages, modern Masons created a cornerstone ritual that has been used in public ceremonies that have included the U.S. Capitol Building, the Statue of Liberty, bridges, churches, university buildings, court houses, and the Tacoma Dome. Conspiracists think this is creepy. On the other hand, we don’t hear them grousing about the new wave of Feng Shui “space clearing” ceremonies popping up everywhere these days, consecrating everything from municipal buildings to nail salons.

BTW, the "control panel" is actually a braille inscription of the capstone text, so blind people can read it without crawling on their hands and knees.

• Masonic Great Hall - Another claim is that the large portion of the terminal is called the Great Hall, and is named after a room found in Freemason lodges. There may be Masonic buildings in the world with assembly rooms or dining areas referred to as Great Halls (London’s comes to mind), but it is by no means a common term in the overwhelming majority of Masonic buildings. It’s frankly a more common term in castles, from Chinon to Disneyland.


• Nazi Runways – Most modern airports wishing to utilize the most efficient runway designs are built these days with two parallel runways. Not so in Denver. Looked at from above, there’s no denying that the runways radiate like twisted spokes from the terminal building, and they do seem to resemble a swastika. Conspiracists claim this is either a fascist message to secretly show off the totalitarian power of the New World Order, or that it is an occult depiction of the old Germanic rune for power.

• Secret Underground Base – This is the most common charge against the Denver Airport, that it is built over the top of a massive, secret underground military base. The airport was budgeted to cost $1.7 billion, but came in closer to $5 billion when all the dust cleared. While it was built on a site chosen for its flat setting, millions of tons of earth were moved around the property, giving credence to the claim that something huge was being built underground. Bear in mind that the airport was over-designed, to be flexible for decades, to be easily expandable, and to use the very latest in technology – which created a nightmare of technical glitches throughout the first years of operation. Miles of tunnels were dug for underground trains between terminals, and for a troublesome subterranean baggage handling conveyor system that took years to get operating properly. In addition, there are other tunnels for a huge fuel pipeline system to pump jet fuel to gates instead of relying on tanker trucks. Part of the justification for all of this underground infrastructure is because Denver gets whacked with major snowfall for much of the winter, and the more that can be handled underground instead of dealing with snow, the more efficient it will be.

Conspiracists cry balderdash. They say there is a multi-level, subterranean base run by the New World Order, or the government, or both. One Alex Christopher claimed to have worked in the tunnels under the airport, and described what appeared to be vast holding areas for prisoners, strange nausea-inducing electromagnetic forces, and caverns big enough to drive trucks through, presumably filled with helpless political prisoners.

•There was already a well serviced Denver Airport, with no real need for another one. The new airport has no technological advancements over the first and less runways. This is very odd considering its size…53 square ,miles!

•The view of the airport from space is a.. Well take a look.

•There are massive cavernous concrete tunnels under the airport for ’storage’. Miles of ’storage’. For what? No airport needs anything like this amount of underground storage. Anywhere except here…

•Inside this airport, there are a plethora of MASONIC symbols on sculptures and artwork.

•The murals on the walls depict a story of mass genocide, followed by an Eden-like paradise! Odd for a family oriented airport really.

•Denver airport’s New World Airport Commission is mentioned on a large plaque, with the Masonic triangle sign of the set square and compass above it. There is no New Word Airport Commission!

•The very first mural shows a little girl carrying a Mayan tablet, surrounded by dead children, with trees and cities being destroyed behind it! Just a subtle hint at the infamous 2012 date here. There is a penguin in a protective box, depicting the preservation of some life.

•There is a floor inlay with Au Ag in the atrium of the airport, in front of the next wall mural depicting genocide, showing a military figure in a gas mask, carrying a gun and a sword. Au Ag is a deadly strain of hepatitis discovered by one of the sponsors of the airport! It’s full name is Australia antigen. End of the fucking day we will all find out the hard way.

•5 buildings were constructed initially and promptly buried. Apparently buildings are buried in Denver if they are ‘built wrong’.
•Ongoing work continues UNDER the airport, and staff are tight lipped about what they are up to. They are ‘not allowed; to answer!
•There is ongoing construction of large tunnels connecting the buildings together, resembling holding areas, with massive capacity. 88.5 square miles of underground space. What on earth could a minor airport store in that?
•A contractor claims that the tunnels have a non standard sprinkler system throughout, which were added to the concrete tunnel roofs.
What’s the use of a sprinkler system, in concrete tunnels 150 feet below the ground? What sort of fire do they want to put out down there? Maybe it has something to do with the Au Ag…
•The next mural is probably the most disturbing, given the shape of the airport itself. A German boy is surrounded by happy children, who are handing him their weapons or playing instruments, with the gas masked military figure lying dead at their feet.
•The last mural has a Jesus-like figure holding a plant, symbolizing rebirth. All the people are smiling and running towards him, and animals are playing.
•The barbed wire fences surrounding the airport face the inside of the airport, not out. Prisons keep people in.

The Return Of Sadat X

By Khalid Strickland a.k.a. Black Pacino

The mainstream news media likes to sensationalize hood news. Low-level drug dealers are portrayed as kingpins, dirty cops are exalted as heroes and all acts of violence are drug-related. Negativity is always highlighted.

Like many rappers before and after him, Sadat X of the legendary trio Brand Nubian was arrested in 2005 on a variety of charges. Here is the story as it was told by the New York Post back then:

A rapper who describes himself as a “Wild Cowboy” allegedly acted like an Old West gunslinger this week when he waved a large pistol at three teens in Harlem, police said yesterday. Hip hop star Sadat X, of the group Brand Nubian, allegedly boasted “I’m going to kill everybody” as he flashed a loaded .40-caliber black Beretta at a group of 18-year-olds at West 158th Street and Broadway Thursday, according to cops. Police sources said X also told the youths, “I’m looking for a guy with braids.”

After cops from the 33rd Precinct were called to the scene, the victims pointed out X, who was still standing across the street with the pistol. When police attempted to arrest the 37-year-old, whose real name is Derek Murphy, he ran. He was tackled quickly. He was arraigned yesterday in Manhattan Supreme Court on charges of criminal possession of a weapon, reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. Sadat X and Brand Nubian are most famous for the 1993 song “Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down.”

Sadat served one year at Rikers Island. After his bid, he kept busy with a lot of guest-rapper cameos and recorded multiple albums. One of these albums, Generation X, was distributed by Affluent Records in 2008. I’m cool with Oscar Sanchez, the CEO of Affluent, so I was given the opportunity to interview Sadat. Okay, so he wasn’t fresh outta Rikers when we spoke that night. Guess I’m guilty of media sensationalism my damn self. But the reprocussions of a bid can linger.

My story on Sadat X was published by the New York Amsterdam News. The full, raw interview was never released… until now. Below the jump, I’ve posted the Q&A session in its entirety. Among other topics, Sadat told me the real deal about his incident with the burner and he made very good points about Amerikkka’s flawed prison system. As long as niggas keep gettin’ locked up, a story like this never gets old.


Black Pacino: You recently paid so-called “debts to society.” Is that something you can elaborate on, as far as why you had to go away for a while?

Sadat X: Okay, well first of all the news reports was all wrong because everything kept saying I was in the middle of the street waving a gun wild and I ran up on kids. First of all, let’s get an understanding. Being that it was Broadway, I lived on 157th and Riverside. This is Broadway that they said I was waving the gun on and everybody knows that’s a hard drug capital of New York, as far as cocaine and stuff like that. If I would’ve even brought a gun in the middle of the street wild like they said I was, I would’ve been a mural on somebody’s wall.

And the second thing is, it was a dispute I had with these guys over something concerning my man. We was goin’ back and forth, me and these Dominican dudes. And this is not to say all Dominican dudes ‘cuz I lived over there and I got good Dominican friends. It just so happened these particular dudes we was goin’ back and forth with. Now, I usually always have my firearm on me… that was just from being in New York. They knew I had it on me, we was goin’ back and forth, they just called police on me. The day in question… when I woke up that day I went to the store. I went to McDonald’s, I went and got a haircut and I went and got my cleaning. Now when I was coming back down Broadway, that’s when police ran up on me like that.

I didn’t wave the gun at no kids or anything but understand this: If it was kids, then that means they would’ve been about 17, 18 or 19. If you out there portraying some type of role, when it comes back to you… you gotta take everything that comes with that role. If you playin’ a grown man game don’t front when something happens to you and claim kid. You understand what I’m sayin’?

Pacino: Hell yeah. You right.

Sadat: So it was basically like that and the dudes is grown men, it wasn’t no kids. I worked in a school and I coached basketball, I know the difference between grown men and kids. I wasn’t wavin’ no gun in the street. And they said I resisted arrest. How you gonna resist arrest with a gun? This article came out in The New York Post and I was wondering, “Well, who from The Post was outside when this was going on?” To actually see this and write this and where did they get this information from? You know? But basically I did that, I went to Rikers Island for the year. I got a gun possession charge, which was my second gun felony… which therefore nullified me for working with (kids).

And this is what really upsets me about the matter because now, I’ve got a violent felony charge. I was working at a school, working towards becoming a full-fledged teacher, which now in New York state I can no longer do that. I can no longer work in city jobs or anything like that. And my thing is, a lot of times with these charges, they give you a felony charge, they send you to Rikers Island, then they come out and you’re expected to get a job. Where you supposed to work at? You can’t get a city job. You can’t work in no schools. So what do they expect dudes to do but go back to what they was doin’?

And as far as Rikers Island goes for criminals, that’s the best place to make a contact. If you got Rikers Island and you was doing anything illegal… selling drug, guns or anything… what better place to meet people that’s in there with the same charges as you got? 9 times out of 10, most people in Rikers Island connect with people, then they come out in the street and do the same thing all over again… but that’s how they got the contacts.

Pacino: Like a networking party.

Sadat: Exactly. There’s no rehabilitation. The state has taken away the college programs and stuff like that so there’s no programs of rehabilitation on Rikers Island. Basically they’re just throwing you in a dorm setting or in a cell and just telling you, “Listen, try to maintain if you can and get your time off.” There’s no rehabilitation going on Rikers Island.



Pacino: Although it ain’t completely your fault that all of this shit happened, is your mindstate any different now than it was before you went in?

Sadat: Yeah. It was my fault because I know better than that and I’m mad at myself for allowing myself to become into a situation like that, so I do put part of the blame on myself. It has made me learn to control my attitude and my temper a lil’ more. And it made me, I guess, more reflective of what’s going on and how a single action can jam you and determine your life.

Pacino: As a pioneer, do you feel that New York rap fell off and if so, what can be done to regain our stature?

Sadat: Well, I don’t feel New York rap fell off, I feel we lost our identity at some point. Throughout the years, New York rappers have always been pioneers and trendsetters in this game. And I think for a minute we fell back and let other people dictate New York rap. And I feel on the radio and everything, they let other places dictate us. I have no problems with the South. I love the South, I love some of the Southern rappers but I feel like a lot of New York rappers felt that was the way to go and came out other than themselves. I feel like New York radio fell victim to this too. I give stuff to a lot of deejays… to Flex, Cypha (Soundz), other deejays… ‘cuz I don’t never hear my stuff, you know what I’m sayin? And I can say their names ‘cuz they not gonna come back and do anything to me. Flex, Cypha, a couple of them deejays I send stuff to. They give me their emails and I send stuff to ‘em and I don’t never hear my stuff. I don’t beef about it because I know my other lanes but I’m like, “Damn, at least give it a chance.”



Pacino: I was going to ask about your relationship with the other members of Brand Nubian but obviously, everything is all good if ya’all got some new shit about to drop.

Sadat: Yeah, see that’s the misconception. A lot of people think since we broke up, in that time we wasn’t friends. We been doing shows and stuff since then. It’s just that in New York, they don’t give our stuff no chance on the radio and it’s not that many shows and venues for us to perform at. Like sometimes we perform at Knitting Factory or S.O.B.’s. My dudes in the Bronx, Brooklyn and the hoods, they don’t know them spots. They just know the spots they hear about on the radio but we don’t perform at those spots. They don’t ask us to perform at those spots. But now it seems like it’s a resurgence, this last year I see, of supposedly old-school rappers that they are giving the venues again a lil’ sumthin. And that’s good but we’ve been performing all over the world for the last ten years.

Pacino: Do you feel like you’ve got to re-introduce yourself to these new fans nowadays?

Sadat: In a way you do because when you’ve been rappin’ for a while like myself and other rappers, you do in a sense have to re-introduce yourself ‘cuz a lot of these kids don’t know you and you always want to keep your music up to par. At least stay up with the times and stuff. I hear a lot of old-school rappers talkin’ about, “Rap owes me this…” Rap don’t owe you nothing. If you want to get mad at somebody, get mad at your mother and father for having you ten years too soon or whatever. But rap don’t owe you nothing. And a lot of these old-school artists are like, “I don’t get my stuff played” and this and that. A lot of old-school rappers think they can still rap in the way they did when they first came out. You can’t rap like that no more. If you make some bullshit and you’re an old-school rapper, I ain’t gonna listen to it either.

Christian Slater

No introduction needed here. Christian Slater is not only a cult great, he's also worked shoulder to shoulder with almost every great in the business. His work speaks for himself. Ladies and Gentleman. Mr Christian Slater.



Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in New York.
Yeah, my dad’s an actor, he was the first Jack Ryan on Ryan’s Hope and was a pretty big soap star. My mom’s a very well-known casting director. I would make my dad take me to work with him when I was little, and watch him do his thing. He was creative, and funny, and just this wild actor. He had a real command of the stage.

It’s in the DNA, you could say.
Yes, absolutely. I started auditioning for things and got discovered by the director Michael Kidd, who saw me on The Joe Franklin Show, and cast me as Winthrop in The Music Man.

Was there one particular moment you knew that you were an actor? Was there one play, or movie or performance you saw that crystallized it for you?
This might sound strange, but it was probably more recently that I realized I was really an actor, when I was doing some stage work in London, on the West End. As a result of making some choices to work with a teacher, it really brought a lot of things to light for me. For years, I felt like I was just kind of winging it, and that any moment this committee was going to show up and discover that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I worked with a great acting coach named Larry Moss, who’s just the best, and I learned a lot and rediscovered what a gift it is to be an actor, and that it really is a lot of fun. You get to escape from your own life for a couple hours a night when you’re doing a play.

The play was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right?
Yeah. I played McMurphy, at the Gielgud Theater. It was like doing a rock concert for eight months, really amazing.

Slater (center) with the London cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

So you got to assume the mantle of McMurphy, the role which most people would argue made Jack Nicholson, whom you were often compared to right after breaking out in Heathers. Was it tough to play a part that’s so heavily identified with one iconic actor’s interpretation of it?
It was tricky, and obviously I was scared of unconsciously imitating Nicholson’s performance. So I stayed away from the movie. I’d seen it of course, but not in years. I read the book, and that really provided me with my own source material for that character, and it’s a great character. Plus the book and the play are quite different from the movie, in terms of it being from the Chief’s point-of-view. I realized after doing it that Jack Nicholson has built a career out of doing that character. And why wouldn’t you? The guy’s heroic, he’s funny, he’s incredibly smart, just a great character.

What was your interpretation of him?
I didn’t play him as a lunatic, certainly. I played it more like it was all a big misunderstanding, and he was in this situation and trying to make the best of it, but he was in a totalitarian scenario, and his passion and ability to rally the troops and get the guys on his side was the thing I really identified with, and his ability to take on the system created a great sense of passion. The guy just wanted to have fun, and there was someone constantly standing in the way. He’s also a Christ-like figure who’s got his disciples and has to be sacrificed at the end in order to get these guys to rally.

It’s especially topical for the times we’re living in.
Oh yeah! It’s a universally identifiable story, and you can’t help but get caught up in it. We’d have nights where the audience would get so caught up in it that they’d be cheering for us to watch the World Series! One night people got into fights in the audience. Everyone really got into it. There was a sense of reality. Once the lights came up, I think they all felt like they’d been in the asylum with us.

Slater and Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose.

The first film I saw you in was The Name of the Rose, where you got to play opposite the great Sean Connery. Heady stuff for a kid?
Sean Connery was great. I grew up watching the Bond movies, and working with him at 16 was like having a master class in acting, life, all sorts of things. He’s an incredible professional, a real gentleman, a man’s man. He also didn’t take any shit from anybody. He had earned his right to be who he was, and things moved along according to his plan. He was concerned about every element and how everything was treated on the set. He didn’t even want to see the horses mistreated. There was a horse wrangler on the set, and Sean didn’t like the way the guy had hit the horse with his riding crop. So he grabbed it from the guy and said (in Connery’s voice) “Don’t hit the fucking horses!” (laughs) I watched the film recently on cable, and really got emotional because it took me back to that time, and everything I was going through. It really is an absolutely astoundingly beautiful movie. The work that Jean-Jacques Annaud did…I don’t think I had a clue then what a special film it was. Every once in a while there’s a special project you get to be a part of, and that was one. I was always a sensitive kid, and I remember that wrapping that film was really hard for me. It was five months in Germany and Rome, and it was hard to say good-bye.

You got to work with Francis Coppola soon after on Tucker.
Another great experience. Francis was great, and Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen…God, those cars were amazing! I got to drive one of the Tuckers on this track where we were shooting. We were shooting on these stages at Paramount, and I walked around and saw some of the other things that were being filmed. I walked onto this one stage, and there was the Starship Enterprise! Only it was little. It was tiny. It was in a weird shape, and I was like “What the hell is this?” And it turned out they were building the ship for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Then they were filming the ending of Witches of Eastwick, and they had that anamatronic Jack Nicholson there, which was really weird and scary to see, and just thinking “God, the movies are cool!” (laughs) I also remember working with Fred Forrest on Tucker. Fred’s got a real laid-back, kind of Nicholsonian drawl, and I remember being very aware of that, and really liking that. He was a big influence on me, Fred Forrest. Really interesting guy. The whole film was like a big family. Coppola sets that kind of mood. It was another instance of me looking around, age 18, thinking “Jesus, what the hell am I doing here?” (laughs) It still amazes me when I look at some of the films I’ve been a part of, and some of the people I’ve gotten to meet and work with. I also look back sometimes and realize that I was lucky to have lived through them and even to have survived them, at times. It’s certainly a testament to whatever I have in me that has that instinct.

I can imagine at that age, and through your early 20s, it was like sensory overload at times.
Yes, exactly. The overwhelm of being in these places, as exciting as they were, and dealing with different personalities, the intensity of this business, and the egos involved, dare I say it. It’s wild to be a kid and have those kinds of experiences.

Slater as pirate DJ "Hard Harry" in Pump Up the Volume.

But you also had two parents in the business who could help put it in perspective for you, certainly more so than if your dad had sold insurance and your mom was a schoolteacher.
Absolutely true. They certainly are passionate people, as well, and are colorful in their own ways, but they were always there to answer questions. As I said before, my dad was always the kind of guy who was willing to take me with him to work, and my mother being okay with that and with me being introduced to that life, it says a lot. My mother was casting Hair when I was about six, and I remember being downtown with that whole crew, and watching everybody rehearse, and just being involved in that world at that age was pretty rich. I remember that was the year of the big blackout, and we had to figure out how to get out of there in the dark…there were some really cool moments.

Heathers was the movie that changed everything for you. 20 years later you look at it, and you realize that nobody realized how fortuitous a film it was ten years before Columbine. It seemed so far out at the time, and now it plays much more disturbing than funny.
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. As time goes on, perceptions change. Everything’s changed, particularly after 9/11. It’s scarier and sadder, and not that I claim to know anything about politics, but certainly the last eight years have been difficult for everybody, and confusing and scarier than they were the previous eight years.

When we were growing up, there were certainly bad things that happened in the world, but nobody ever thinks they’ll look back on their childhood as being times of innocence, and now I feel like we really did come of age in a more innocent time.
It’s true. It was pretty simple. Reagan was this sort of father figure, and the ‘80s were a fun time, and now we’re in this warmongering period. I can only have hope for the future, that things are going to move in a more positive direction.



Did you all feel at the time that Heathers was exploring uncharted territory for a “teen” film?
I think we all felt that it was pretty interesting and unique, yeah. I think everything works in retrospect. You don’t really know what you’re working on when you’re working on it. You have ideas what you’d like it to be, what it could be, but you never know until the end result. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. (laughs) It was actually a really creative, fun shoot.

All the Nicholson comparisons started after that film. I’m sure it was flattering to an extent for you, but it must’ve gotten old eventually, especially considering I’m sure you were just being yourself.
Well look, if you’re going to be compared to someone…(laughs) Like I said, Fred Forrest has a lot of Nicholson qualities, as does my dad, so I’m sure a lot of that rubbed off on me. I’d seen Easy Rider and thought Nicholson was the coolest guy on the planet. When I saw Witches of Eastwick being shot, I just identified with Nicholson, and thought he was the greatest. When I read the script for Heathers, I guess I saw some qualities in the character of Jason Dean that I could identify with, and everything just kind of jelled into something that allowed people to make that kind of comparison. I was certainly playing a character. If they’d shot Jason Dean’s room in the movie, he probably would have had a poster of The Shining or Easy Rider because he was just that guy. So were there qualities in that character that were Nicholsonian? Absolutely!



Another groundbreaking movie we have to discuss is True Romance.
At the time I got the script, nobody had really heard of Quentin Tarantino. He’d made this little independent movie, Reservoir Dogs. I saw it with Patricia Arquette at the CAA screening room. It really affected me. I laughed, I was horrified, it was something new. I thought Quentin was great, and loved him and his passionate personality. The cast just kept getting bigger and bigger with more and more interesting people. The scene between Dennis Hopper and Chris Walken was one of the first scenes that was edited together, and Tony Scott showed it to us on the set, and we were all just blown away. So yeah, great experience, great script but again, you never know what a film is going to be until you see the final product. In this case, it was another one of those really special experiences that resulted in an equally amazing movie.



In Interview with a Vampire, you took over the role that River Phoenix was originally cast. Did you know him at all?
Not really. We’d met before and I respected him, and his work tremendously. That was so tragic, and it was really awkward to be stepping into that kind of scenario. But I think I eased my own discomfort by not accepting money for it and donating my salary to his charities. It was great to work with Neil Jordan, and Brad Pitt was great, and that was the second time we’d worked together, of course, after True Romance.



You got to work with the great John Woo twice.
Amazing filmmaker. He’s a very cerebral man, very sweet, but very quiet, much in the same way Neal Jordan is. I don’t know where John’s English is today, but at that time, he didn’t speak English that well, so our communication was limited. Basically, he told me I was supposed to be playing Steve McQueen and I forget who he said John Travolta was supposed to be, but that was all the direction I really got. (laughs) But what a genius he is, a real master of the medium. Also, when I did Windtalkers, it was a real treat to work with Nic Cage. He’s one of our greatest actors. Everything he does, every choice he makes, it just blows my mind. I just watched Face/Off again the other night. What an unbelievable movie that is! And Nic and Travolta are amazing in it. I could watch that movie all day.



Recently you were in Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, which I thought did a beautiful job of capturing a time and place in history.
Yeah, it really did. Emilio did a phenomenal job and to be a part of that incredible group that he assembled…I mean Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Sharon Stone, Martin Sheen, Harry Belafonte. It was like a who’s-who of talent. Everybody showed up on that giving 150%, we were all so proud of Emilio who, in my opinion, knocked it out of the park. The audience reaction was amazing in Venice, where it premiered. There was a ten minute standing ovation. What’s even more amazing, is that the film wasn’t even produced by Americans, but by Russians! In terms of acting, it was fun to sort of immerse myself in that character, who was so part of another time, and another mindset. Being on the set of the film was like going back in time. It was really powerful, very realistic, especially recreating those last moments. It’s funny, we shot at The Ambassador Hotel, where it all happened, right before they tore it down, and I’ve shot a couple other things there, including True Romance, and it was a really creepy place. But I’m very happy we got to shoot the film there while it was still standing.

You mentioned River Phoenix earlier. In the past year, we’ve lost a couple talented young actors tragically. You’ve been through a lot professionally and personally in this business, and you’ve survived. Is there an outlook one has to adopt to be a survivor or is it just something you choose?
What can I say? It’s a wild world. It takes a certain amount of denial sometimes just to wake up and get through the day. (laughs) But we try to show up, do our best, do our job, and try not to be an asshole in the process. If you can do that, then you’re ahead of the game.

That’s the magic word, isn’t it?


Amen, brother.

Unholy Matrimony

Hard rocking brides and grooms looking for an exciting unique way to tie the knot this summer can now walk down the aisle on their special day with the Unholy Matrimony Package at a stop on this summer’s OZZFest, August 14-24.

As with other wedding packages, the one-stop Unholy Matrimony Packages provides just about everything the happy couple will need…except a marriage license. Each special package includes a variety of items to mark the special day and 10 general admission pit tickets for the bride & groom and 8 guests; an official OZZFest wedding ceremony by ordained minister, OZZFest’s MC Big Dave; an OZZFest cake and champagne toast. In addition, all 10 guests will get early entry into the venue with an exclusive pre-show backstage tour hosted by Big Dave; access to the OZZFest VIP lounge; specially designed Ozzfest tour shirts; collectible tour posters (numbered, limited), PIIQ - Bass Masq Earbuds by Sony and official OZZFest guitar picks. Beyond the above, each lucky couple will be eligible for a special OZZFest wedding gift from the Unholy Matrimony bridal registry, generously supplied by this year’s OZZFest sponsors. Items will include a Monster Energy Refrigerator (with twelve cases of Monster Energy Drink to get started), a special ESP LTD Signature Series GUS-200. Details on the registry will be released in the coming weeks.

While the Unholy Matrimony Package options have already been sold for the California, Connecticut and New Jersey shows, the Tuesday, Aug 17 at the First Midwest Bank Amp. in Chicago, IL, Thurs, Aug 19 at the First Niagara Pavilion in Pittsburgh, PA and Tue, Aug 24 at the Comcast Center in Boston, MA remain available.

This year’s OZZFest main stage will feature full sets from Ozzy, Mötley Crüe, Rob Halford, DevilDriver and Nonpoint. Second stage headliners and six-time OZZFest veterans Black Label Society will be joined by Drowning Pool, Kingdom of Sorrow, and Goatwhore, Skeletonwitch, Saviours and Kataklysm. In addition to non-stop music on both stages, concert-goers can once again visit the OZZFest “Village of the Damned” featuring a mix of interactive activities, shopping and entertainment throughout the venue concourses. All six dates of the explosive Live Nation-produced tour will feature “all-in ticket pricing” which means there are no hidden fees whatsoever--no parking charges at the shows, no facility or surcharge fees--the price you see is the price you pay. Tickets prices start as low as $30 per ticket when purchased in a 4-pack. For complete ticket and tour information visit: www.OZZFest.com and www.LiveNation.com.

Stormqueen

By far one of the lesser known NWOBHM bands that spawned during the golden age of new british hard rock heavy metal music. Everyone is familar with Diamond Head, Budgie and of course Def Leppard, Saxon, Sweet Savage and tons more we will explore later. Stormqueen are one of THE most underrated of all the lot of metals most elite force that was birthed at that time. This is the truth.



Thanks again for giving me the time of day, you guys were gods. How did the band come up?



Dave: The band sprung up around myself and the other guitarist Neil Baker. We knew each other from school growing up in Barry, a smallish town in Wales. We had heard through other musicians that we both knew that we were both looking to form a band with the right people. Neil and I met up eventually at my house, he brought his guitar and some records he wanted me to hear. We jammed together and played each other records, showed each other ideas, and before we knew it we'd agreed we must start a band together.



After that it was a matter of finding people we felt were of the same mind set and had the abilities we were after. It didn't take long to find Boofy our drummer. he was and still is notorious as an absolutely brilliant rock drummer. So for us he was the first person we asked. Then we started jamming together and writing songs before looking for a singer and bassist.

Bryn Merryck seemed the obvious choice as bassist, again a brilliant natural talent (as was proven when he was later asked to join The Damned). Chris Glyn-Jones, the first vocalist came a little while later. That line up played around Wales for a while before Bryn left to join the Damned, and we felt Chris wasn't really what we wanted in a singer.



The classic line up evolved around late 1981, when we placed an advert for singer and bassist, and a guy called Mac answered it for singer. We went to meet with him but he wasn't right for us. however he had some mates in a band called Dead Reckoning, namely Paul Burnett on vocals and Nick MacCormac on bass. We checked them out and asked them straight away as Paul was exactly what we wanted. They joined not long after and the classic StormQueen was born.



Paul: There was a very close knit music scene in Barry South Wales, Dave, Neil and Boofy being friends as well as musicians, formed a band together. That band eventually became “StormQueen”.



When the demo tape was released?



Dave: Well that depends on which demo you mean. The first demo, which I guess is the one most people refer to as "The Battle of Britain" was recorded in 1980. That was with the first line up and it was recorded in a BBC studio in Cardiff, Wales. It was never released as such. Though I know many many copies are floating around and are traded on the net a lot.



It's strange that it should be the demo that has been focused on most as it wasn't by any means the best. We recorded three more demos after that one, and they are all better. The second demo recording was the one that was released as the single. Well two tracks of it anyway. I guess this one isn't as well known other than being the single.



Paul: I can’t speak for the “Battle of Britain” demo as I wasn’t around for that first recording. But I recall there was always great interest in all the following StormQueen demo’s.


Did many buy it?



Dave: We didn't really sell the demos to be honest, it wasn't really done so much back then like it is now. You have to bare in mind it would have all been on cassette tape then, that or vinyl as there were no other mediums everyone had access to. So it was more a case of giving tapes away at shows, sending them to radio stations and people would often record stuff off the radio. But the only music we ever sold as such was the "Come Silent the World" 7 inch single.


Paul: Well, not being involved with the band at that point I would have no idea. Dave is the person to ask really.


Did it have any cover?



Dave: Our demo tapes did have basic covers. Black and white photocopied artwork that I did myself. They changed as I got new photos etc. The 7 inch single did not have a cover. It was just a plain white sleeve. We had to keep costs down so......


Paul: I don’t think there was a cover on StormQueen’s very first demo, at least I don’t remember it as so. I could be wrong…but Dave would know best as he did all the artwork etc for all StormQueen publicity and releases.


What did the people think about it?


Dave: Well the response we got from people was just great. Our rehearsal room was pretty large and very central in town, so as word got round about the band and the place LOTS of people would come and hang out there. Watch us rehearse and write songs etc, they were special times. Feedback from our shows was always excellent. We always put on a hell of a live performance, I mean we're talking fireworks, flashbombs, explosions, huge back drop with the logo. We always hired in our usual P.A. guy and his 5k P.A. rig, and we always had a big light show too. So the a gig was always very definitely an event, and people lapped it up. Interestingly a couple of guys who always came to our shows and everything later formed their own band, TIGERTAILZ. They told me we were a big influence on them to start playing etc, which is great to hear.


Paul: I’m sorry, but again, as I was not part of the band at that point I really have no idea.But Dave can fillyou in for sure.


Why did you decide to call it Battle of Britain?



Dave: Well, that was down to me really. On the first demo I did virtually all of the initial song writing. Neil also contributed, in fact some of the songs we wrote the music 50/50 between us. Others I wrote on my own. I wrote all of the lyrics for the songs. I honestly have no idea where I came up with the concept of a song called "The Battle of Britain". I guess I was at an age where these things caught my imagination, and of course it is a very big thing in British history. We were always taught a lot about it at school and there is remembrance day each year in the UK, where we are asked to think of those who died at war, and the Battle of Britain always features strongly in that. I guess it has good overtones for a metal song too heh heh. Also I had this BBC sound effects album with war sounds on it, including the siren we used at the beginning and the plane sounds in the middle 8. I think that was a big factor, I really wanted to use my sound effects album heh heh, so wrote the song to allow me to do that. Partly anyway.

However, *we* didn't call it "The Battle of Britain demo". It was always referred to by each song title individually, or as our first demo. It's other people, fans, collectors and enthusiasts that have come to call it by that name. It still sounds strange to me to hear people call it that. We might have referred to it as "the BBC demo" too.



Paul: Oh dear, same scenario I’m afraid. I believe Dave wrote all the lyrics for the first demo, and practically all of the music too. So he’s the man to ask.



How many copies of the single were made?


Dave: Ahh well now there is a twist in the tale to this one (see next question). There was initially to be 500 copies in the official release. More ended up being produced due to errors and problems with the first pressing. But 500 *official* copies were pressed, plus a few test pressings for quality check. So, yes it was a small release.



Paul: There were 500 singles pressed, and I think about 100 or so mispressed singles. We were led to believe they were all destroyed, obviously they weren’t.


What I've heard the single also got misspressed. What went wrong?



Dave: Well, when we got the first test copies (10 or so) and an initial production run (which was about 150 - 200 copies I guess), there were flaws. Firstly the labels, which were red with black writing, had bubbled up very strangely and were sort of peeling off the discs. Also they had mis-printed the title of the A-side, it read "Come Silent the Night" instead of "Come Silent the World" as it should have done. I also recall that there were some audible clicks on the pressings on one or both sides, which we couldn't allow of course. And so these were all supposedly sent back to the factory to be destroyed. Apart that is from a few copies that we had given out when we went to do a radio interview (as we really wanted them to play it). After this it was then re-mastered and re-pressed. As far as I am aware, there were only the 500 silver on black copies, and the few red copies that slipped out. I actually prefer the silver on black myself.



Did you ever play live outside United Kingdom?



Dave: Sadly no, or should I say not yet. After all new StormQueen activity is imminent so that possibility is still a reality for us. But in those early days we never got the chance sadly.



Paul: It was a difficult time to be a band from Wales back then. The stigma attached to being form Wales really held you back. Thankfully that parochial attitude has disappeared... well leastways within music it would appear. And rightfully so.


What other songs did you play live? Except for the demo songs and the single.



Dave: Wow, this is a tough one. I mean it depends on which period you refer to. You have to remember the band was together in all for close to 5 years, so we had a *lot* of material during that period and of course it always changed depending on our choices of songs for the set. But we would play tracks that we never did record, some I can remember are:



StormQueen (Ironic given the title but we never did record that. We plan to record it very soon for inclusion o the OPM album release as a bonus 7inch)

D.O.A

Midnight Rendezvous

Seasons in the breeze

The Longest Night

Deadly Veil

Paul: StormQueen were always busy songwriters, so there was always a large set of material to choose from. Many of which I forget now. We never performed covers… it wasn’t part of our agenda at all.

Was the record company interested in releasing more of Stormqueen?



Dave: There was actually. We had interest from Music For Nations, Neat, Bronze, Castle to name a few. Our problem to be honest was being a Welsh band. Back then (and I know Persian Risk, Tokio Rose and other Welsh NWOBHM bands will testify to the same problem) bands in Wales weren't taken too seriously by labels. Well by most anyway. It was something of a stigma. It's very different now of course. But back then, and even subsequently with my later band Warlords/Lord you weren't taken seriously if you were from Wales. With Lord for instance which was even later still I had to tell gig venues and labels etc that we were from California to get gigs. Luckily we had toured over there and had loads of great press to back it up. But for StormQueen, the huge stumbling block was getting out of Wales.



Paul: StormQueen’s single was a self release. RealFire Recirds was our own label and distribution company combined if you like. Had we had the finances back then we would have released an album on the RealFire label for sure.


When and why did Stormqueen call it a day?



Dave: Why indeed... well the primary problem was that myself and Neil, the other guitarist found our musical interests moving in different directions. Neil wanted to diversify, bring in more jazz elements, basically get more experimental. But although I was up for experimenting, I felt there was too heavy a jazz/improvisational element to where Neil was going, and he felt the music was constraining him too much. So as time progressed it came to a head, and Neil quit the band. He was very difficult to replace, in fact impossible in terms of the chemistry we had when it worked. We struggled on, and eventually with a different guitarist and bassist (same guitar, vocal and drums) went on and morphed into Vancouver. But I guess that's another story. Paul eventually got itchy feet and had been made an offer from a band in London with management so, quite rightly he left as well. And that was that really.



Paul: The StormQueen split happened because of a number of reasons. I became frustrated that the band couldn’t seem to break through, but I was unaware that it wasn’t down to us, but this Welsh stigma. So I accepted an offer to join Tredegar. There was never anything personal in the break up of StormQueen, although Dave was very hurt and threatened to kill me. We believed in the music but sadly just didn’t get that vital lucky break. If we had been in London like bands such as Iron Maiden, we would almost certainly have seen better success. But hey, maybe it’s on it’s way 20 years later heh heh. There is not and never has been any animosity between us guys. We were always all great friends and remain so.


What did you do afterwards?



Dave: Well me personally, I went on to put together various bands over time. The band I am in presently is called DEFACE. I never stopped playing. I was always in a band doing original material. I've never been in a covers band or anything like that. Right after StormQueen there was a different version of the line up (Paul, Myself, Boofy, Nick MacCormac and a new guy Andy Carney on guitar) and we were called Vancouver. Though we did do a number of StormQueen songs too. So I guess it was a mutation of StormQueen in a way.



After that fell apart I teamed up with our former manager Joey Parratt and formed a band project called "No One". We did that for a while, did some TV appearances, videos etc. Then I hooked up with a band called More Than Passion. Who were Cardiff based. We got to play the Welsh Live Aid, which was amazing. Then I hooked up with the singer I still work with in DEFACE, Christian Sargent. We have been in many band line ups together. Warlords, Lord, DirtBox, Ikon, Mook, and now DEFACE. Warlords toured the USA in 1987, released an E.P. out there, and though the name then changed to Lord we released an album in 1991 also called "Lord". We toured extensively. It fizzled out though for various reasons, and in early 1992 I moved to Los Angeles.



Over there I formed a psychedelic rock band band called My Dragonfly (called Eve's Tattoo early on), where I was on vocals. I also did an electro/industrial project called Ubermensch which I am very proud of. Then Christian and I hooked up again and he came over to the states, moving up to San Francisco we did Dirtbox together. Before heading back to the U.K. to continue as Ikon. Then Mook with different people, and now DEFACE. So you see I have been very active outside of StormQueen.



Paul: I guess I just drifted really….I worked with Tredegar, Carerra, Ashmata Talan and then Ashmata again to record an album. But then I had a long respite from musical involvement, which was a bereft time. It feels great to have StormQueen back on path again. I can’t wait to do more new music.


Which Stormqueen song is your favorite?



Dave: Phew that's a tough one, it really is. I am very fond of "Come Silent The World", I think it is one of the more original songs we wrote. If you listen to it closely it doesn't sound like any other metal band at all. I also love "Cake/These Walls Have Eyes" and "Just For A Day" both from the third demo we recorded (soon to be available on the OPM release and hopefully on cd through specialist labels worldwide too). But I guess Come Silent The World holds a very special place as it was the single etc.



Pau: “Just for a day” from the third recording is very special to me. The lyric is very personal. It is a beautiful song.


Tell us about the current situation of Stormqueen.



Dave: Well it has been quite a roller coaster really since about the time Malc Macmillan published the new version of his book "The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal Encyclopedia". He wrote about us there, and about the single etc, and it kick started a huge wave of interest in the band again, which is great. After that we got tons of people getting in contact, and we talked with OPM records, and from that we are releasing a very special collectors anthology on vinyl with them. It is to feature all of the previously unreleased songs on a vinyl 12", with a full colour gatefold sleeve and picture book/sleeve inserts. To go with that we are recording one song from the early StormQueen days that we never recorded called... funnily enough "StormQueen". Plus one brand new track just written called "Can You Hear ME Thinking" in fact we recording that right now.



After that is complete and the OPM release is out, we are hoping to do a similar thing on cd with a number of labels, in a number of different countries. We may also work on more new material is there is enough interest, and if that goes well who knows, we could see some more StormQueen live shows. It's very possible. Thanks to all the interest, especially from people like yourselves it has been great for us. Just great to have people appreciating what StormQueen was.... Thanks to everyone.



Paul: There is an imminent compilation anthology album out soon on OPM records, in vinyl only format, with a single attached to it. The single will feature the first ever recording of StormQueen (the song) and one brand new song which is fantastic as far as I’m concerned.



Bring it on I say…… I’m raring to go!!!! Cheers!!!

Swedish Erotica

For the sick and depraved i suppose and those who fly the goon flag quite high this is a must have. From Bazillion Points home of the ghouls, and art by Wes Benscoter. Daniel Ekeroth who also masterminded the classic Swedish Death Metal book here orchestrates why we are lured into a new kind of death.

In the annals of grindhouse exploitation cinema, Italy owns the giallo, Australia offers Ozploitation, and Sweden has spawned—the SENSATIONSFILM!

“I look back with genuine joy. I am so very happy I could be a part of the seventies, it was so incredibly interesting. I carry it with me; it is a part of me. I would never deny being in those movies. I know that a lot of people do so, but I just had a blast.”— Christina Lindberg

“Into this rising whirlwind of madness, I was born in 1972. As the ‘70s came along, all limits were forgotten. Sweden was flooded with sexually explicit films of every kind, violent gangster movies…and all morals were gone.”—Daniel Ekeroth

In many respects, Sweden’s place in film history is secure and prominent. Swedish films are associated internationally with the success and high quality of Ingmar Bergman’s reputable works. However, another breed of Swedish film is notorious for its laissez-faire attitude towards nudity and relaxed sexuality. Produced in the backyard of the Swedish film industry, these sexually daring films join countless speculative or sensational movies that deal with shocking or taboo subjects—street punks, space aliens, hard drugs, and drunken vikings. Other efforts are simply too strange and Swedish to ignore. Once again, Swedish Death Metal author Daniel Ekeroth delves into the arcane culture of his homeland, returning with the first comprehensive overview of “Sensationsfilms”—Swedish Exploitation Cinema.

Includes reviews and release information on nearly 200 clandestine Swedish films produced between 1951 and 1993, plus a new introduction by Daniel Ekeroth; and an unpublished in-deep interview with actress Christina Lindberg (Thriller: En Grym Film/They Call Her One Eye, Maid in Sweden, Anita: Swedish Nymphet) Films include uncovered—and undressed!—early movie roles by stars like Stellan Skarsgård (Pirates of the Carribean, Mamma Mia!, Dancer in the Dark), Pernilla August (Fanny and Alexander, Star Wars Ep. I & II), Max von Sydow (Shutter Island, Minority Report), and Lee Hazlewood.

Tom G Warrior Speaks

Triptykon Announce First North American Tour

Decibel Magazine and Stereogum/Haunting the Chapel present the "Weltenbrand Tour 2010" featuring the North American debut of TRIPTYKON with 1349 and Yakuza rounding out the bill. Be sure to visit Triptykon's official MySpace page to view the entire tour itinerary. You don't want to miss out on this monumental event when it hits your city.

Tom Gabriel Warrior (vocals, guitars) describes his emotions on the eve of this new undertaking:

"Ever since my earliest days in Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, I have been extremely fortunate to be able to count on the support, fanaticism, and immense loyalty of the North American metal scene. The recognition my work has received there eclipses anything I have ever encountered in my own native country. Of the 125 concerts performed on the final Celtic Frost tour in 2006 and 2007, for example, a full 71 were played in North America. Some of these performances rank among the most memorable ones in my entire career."

"It is thus an immense honor for me to now bring my new group TRIPTYKON to North America for the first time. TRIPTYKON is further pursuing the path I once began with Hellhammer and Celtic Frost, and I am looking forward to continuing to forge this darkest of musical alliances with all of you. We shall all celebrate masses of unleashed heaviness and morbidity. Only death is real!"

The main purpose of TRIPTYKON is to continue where Celtic Frost left off and to satisfy Warrior's undying passion for extreme music. Indeed some of the material Fischer was working on post-Monotheist ended up on TRIPTYKON's debut album, Eparistera Daimones, so it stands to reason, besides the obvious fact that Fischer fronts TRIPTYKON, the two are sonically and spiritually closely connected. As can be expected, Eparistera Daimones is therefore a musical leviathan.

Next to Warrior, TRIPTYKON features V. Santura (guitar, vocals), Norman Lonhard (drums, percussion) and Vanja Slajh (bass). Eparistera Daimones was produced by Tom Gabriel Warrior and TRIPTYKON guitarist V. Santura. Like Celtic Frost's universally praised Monotheist album, Eparistera Daimones was mastered by Walter Schmid at Oakland Recording in Winterthur, Switzerland.


"It's testament to Triptykon's towering strength that Eparistera Daimones has the power to make its mark in the midst of the thousands of bastard offspring of its ultimate originator."
-- Metal Hammer, UK


"The end is not nigh, it has just begun. 25 years on from Hellhammer, Warrior is still redefining heavy".
-- Terrorizer, UK


"With Eparistera Daimones, Tom Gabriel Warrior's ability to execute his craft expertly is certainly greater than ever."
-- Decibel.


"The fact that Eparistera Daimones meets or exceeds every expectation is a testament to TRIPTYKON's talent. Say hello to the best album of the new year."
-- Invisibleoranges.com


"Thunderously heavy and epic in scope, a must-have album."
-- Metalpsalter.com


"This is one of the heaviest, angriest, gloomiest releases ever. This album is a strong contender for “Best of the Year” lists; it certainly tops mine at this point."
-- Teethofthedivine.com


"Abandon all preconceptions, abandon all hope: you don’t know heavy until you’ve heard Triptykon."
-- Bravewords.com


"Triptykon’s debut proves that Fischer is and always has been Celtic Frost."
-- Hellbound.ca


"Eparistera Daimones is a dark and pummeling debut."
-- Guitar World.


"The bottom line is that TRIPTYKON has succeeded in creating an album that will stand by itself while also pleasing the legion of established fans who wanted more releases from Celtic Frost."
-- The Examiner


"TRIPYKON is the logical extension of Celtic Frost version 2.0. Monotheist's contemporary flare, commercially accessible and modern crunchy guitars, and doom laden passages remain in tow; however it's darker (though less gothic), more bleak and hateful."
-- About.com


"Tom Gabriel Warrior is the mastermind behind some of the absolutely best metal albums ever in my opinion. The man is a genius and deserves all the praise he gets."
-- Nocturno Culto (Darkthrone), Terrorizer, UK