The Under The Spell Story…

The last song we developed for the demo was a song Dan Bryant had going called Golden Cross. Dan had wrote both the music and lyrics to this one and that’s how it appears on the demo. When we finally did go to record the new album I wrote new lyrics for it and is now known as Midnight Sun.

We were all pretty broke at that time and to this day we have not seen a dime from No Escape, but we still all had our day jobs. Dave Schmidt had a good job as a hazardous waste disposal engineer. He was on call and would have to go at the drop of a hat and go suit up and go help clean up some toxic chemical tanker truck spill on the free way somewhere. I talked to Dave just last year and he is still doing that kind of work but he is  higher up in the company now.

Bill Peterson worked as a Fire extinguisher sales and service man for a company called Bay Area Fire. I worked there with Bill too for a while but was not working there at this time.

Clint Bower worked in a copy  mat place where they have a bunch of copy machines and make flyers and photo copies etc.

Dan Bryant had a job making Flight cases for various music and other types of fragile equipment.

I was working in the painting trade painting houses in the Berkley and Oakland areas.

All of us having our day jobs made it possible for us to all save up and chip in to pay for what is now known as the Under The Spell Demo! Someone told us of a cool studio up in Northern California where we could get a good quality demo made cheaply. So we blocked out about a week of studio time and went up

there and laid down all the songs and material we had been working on. Two of the songs did not have lyrics and we were toying with the idea of having a couple of instrumental tracks on the album but Mike Varney talked us out of that idea later on. 

After the demo was all recorded and mixed I quickly sent Mike Varney a cassette copy including the lyric sheets. I think it took him a week or maybe two to get back to me. Let me tell you we were all very nervously awaiting Mike Varney’s response to our demo. We all poured  our guts and money into that batch of songs and we kind of figured that if he did not like it  for whatever reason and chose not to pick up the option for our second album, it would most likely be the end of the road for Hexx. 

Looking back now, if he had passed on the option we still had what we thought was a pretty good demo tape and could have shopped it around to other labels but of course everyone and their brother was shopping there amazing demo tapes around at that time. The competition coming out of the Bay Area at that time was becoming very fierce!

Anyway……… when you finally get to that point and are getting ready to finally record a record for real, lots of things have to happen quickly.  Not only do you have to have the band very well rehearsed and razor sharp to be ready to record in the studio, ……  ( After recording no Escape we had a good idea of how fast we needed to record to stay on budget and still manage to get a decent product that could compete with all the other metal records that were coming out at the time) …..but you also have to think about the cover art, who is going to do it? What should the cover be about and look like? What is the back cover going to look like? What about the band logo this time? What will be the track list….what will be the order of the songs? Which ones will go on side A? Which songs will go on side B? What about the liner notes and special thanks section? All the lyrics have to be confirmed and proof read for errors.  A photo shoot has to be set up and a new batch of photos must be taken and one chosen to go on the cover somewhere.  Oh yeah……and everyone in the band  AND the record label have to all agree on EVERYTHING!!!!!  Believe me, this takes nothing less than a bloody Christmas miracle!!  And, all this is going on while you are trying to concentrate on making the best album of your life because if it aint,  it very well might be your last!

Well, that all being said, It is still all very much fun, thrilling and exciting to go from thinking and realizing that the band might be totally over and done with, in one minute,  and all our hard work gone

for nothing,…..and the next minute, jumping right into gearing up to record a new album, having a second chance, a new lease on life so to speak, and having hope that we might still have a shot at climbing up the ladder of success another rung or two……..like all the other hundreds of bands all around us seemed to be doing!!!

Okay,  so right off we started to think about cover art.  Our friend Alvin Petty did the No Escape cover for us last time and he had also just done Metallica’s Creeping Death cover as well so we wanted to try something a little different this time around.

  My father was a very good artist, his medium was oils and he had been painting most of his life. He was known for being a little difficult to deal with and so far had not been able to sell many of his paintings. So I got the bright idea of having him do the cover art for us. He was broke…. just like his son, and could use the       $ 500.00  bucks we had for the cover art budget and I thought it could be a good break for him to possibly get more jobs doing album art. The guys had seen some of his artwork and agreed to give him a try.  We all went over to his house one day and brought with

When we got there and went up into his art studio, he unveiled the painting for us.  At first we all kind of gasped with excitement because it was very colorful and interesting, very well done and very close to what we had described for him to create for us.

However……there were some obvious problems with the painting.  What was supposed to be a real scary Voodoo witch doctor, turned into a mildly frustrated and pissed off looking Mayan tribesman.  Also there was no bones, sculls or shrunken heads on sticks!  After several moments of awkward silence I finally said to my father, who had obviously put a lot of time and effort into this painting……..Say dad this

is really great……..but I thought you said this was finished.  Where are all the bones, sculls and shrunken heads on sticks we had asked for?  He said as far as I am concerned it IS finished!!!  I won’t ever allow any bones, sculls or shrunken heads on MY artwork!! ….. Another

The album was finally finished being recorded and mixed, and most all of the production  parts were ready as well, except for the liner notes and special thanks section. In those days, it was a real cool  thing, and kind of a big deal to be mentioned in a bands special thanks section on their album, so we wanted to make sure we included all the people and things that had recently helped us and influenced us before and during the Under the Spell project.  We also managed to talk Mike Varney into letting us have a photo collage ( black and white ) on the back of our lyric sheet! ( No Escape did not have the budget to include a lyric sheet, so for us, this was a big step up! We all thought we were really big time now!! ) 

The photo collage that you get on the back of the lyric sheet with Under the Spell was a lot of fun to make! First thing we did was to all get ferociously stoned on killer green buds!! Then start cutting up our only, once in a lifetime photographs  of that time we had acquired, and pasting them onto a big sheet of cardboard.

We did it quickly in one evening because it all had to go to the printers the next day with the rest of the production parts for mass reproduction. Looking over the photo collage I am reminded of many funny stories…….one being from the picture of our drummer Dave Schmidt 

I know  this is going to be back tracking a little bit because this little story goes back to when Manzo was still performing with the band back in late 1984. We were doing a show at the Keystone Berkeley on University Ave  one night. In those days Dave had a little low tech pyro  trick he did at the end of our set. He would soak two old sweat socks in gasoline or something and tie them each around a pair of old drum sticks. At the end of our last song we would have a long dramatic pause where we would all hold a power chord for minute or two. During this time, Dave would take the opportunity to light his drumsticks on fire and then hit all his symbols furiously! Well…. for some reason on this night, one of those flaming, stinky old sweat socks came flying off his drumstick and went right into the first row of the crowd! It landed right on top of this dudes head that was head banging at the front of the stage and  burst his hair and whole head on fire!! We could not believe what had just happened! The people around him started hitting him about the head to extinguish the flames and he quickly disappeared under the crowd. After the show we were all back stage in our dressing room drinking ice cold beer and talking about what had just happened when the guy who we caught on fire was escorted into our dressing room by the Keystone security. This guy has something he wants to say to the guys in Hexx, said the security guard. I thought for sure he was going to start telling us how is father was going to sue us all and the night club or something like that. Instead he had in his hand a flyer from the show and the what was left of Dave’s old burnt up sweat sock. This poor guy had a big bald spot burned on the top of his head and had obviously suffered

and when we did, we did not seem to go over as well as before. The crowd would perk up a little when we would play our faster numbers like Edge of Death or The Hexx but that was about it. 

 Again with no tour support No Management, and continued difficulty in getting local shows, things started to look bad for the group. It also seemed like the press was not as interested in Hexx  anymore.  When No Escape came out I remember doing lots of magazine interviews and we were featured in many fanzines in Europe.  This time around it seemed like nobody wanted to know about the band. This really hit us hard because we really thought this album was much better than No Escape and would surely be our breakthrough album. There was however, a one page article in Crash Magazine from October of 1986 that gave us a great review of the album but that’s the only one I can remember.

 I could sense the morale of the band was getting  low and I could also sense that Dan Bryant was quickly losing interest in the band. I think he was getting offers from other groups to do things, and that our album was going to be more or less just  a stepping stone for him to move on to more successful projects.

There was one glimmer of hope though!  We were told that Kerrang  magazine in Europe was going to publish a review of Under the Spell in there next issue! This really gave us some hope because we thought that Kerrang was one of the biggest Metal magazines in Europe at

that time and a good review from them could really get the ball rolling for us in Europe. We already had given up hope for any success in the states at this point. I lived and worked in Berkeley at that time and would frequent the record shops on Telegraph avenue. They would always have the current imported Metal magazines for sale there. Around the time the new issue of Kerrang  was to arrive  I would  stop by the record shops to see if the issue had been delivered with the review  of our Under the Spell album. I remember thinking to myself that they are really going to love this album and give us a great review and this will save the band in this……… our most darkest hour of desperate need!

Well……. the day finally came!  There it was on the shelf!   The brand new  issue of Kerrang  Magazine.  I couldn’t wait to read the gushing review of our new record and run home with the magazine in my hand to the band with the good news!  I picked it up off the news stand and started thumbing through the pages looking for the album review section. There it was!  And they even printed a picture of the band right in the middle of the page! My heart raced with excitement and new hope!…. Until……I read the caption printed right under the photo of the band…….it  read…..HEXX , defiantly NOT Under the Spell. My heart sank, and a soul crushing, cold, numbing sense of doom came over me. I could not believe my eyes!  At first I thought maybe  it was some kind of  mistake, then I went on to read the article. The guy that reviewed the record was just not impressed with it at all, and he told the world so in this review.