The HEXX Quest for Sanity Story

Once again we found ourselves abandoned by our lead singer–this time with no more album options left on our Shrapnel deal, we were really down. This was probably the darkest and lowest point in the whole history of the band. It seemed like all the other bands in the bay area were doing well and prospering and we were just floundering and failing miserably. We fell into somewhat of a deep depression that seemed to last for months. It was during this time the songs for what would eventually become The Quest for Sanity EP were written.  Of course, as with everything bad and dark that always seemed to happen to the band, comedy and whimsical levity would also seem to spring up out of nowhere and sometimes in the most unlikely places. 

I was still living with my then girlfriend Paula Horychuck. We had moved out from my mother and stepfathers house in Richmond to an old

rundown rental house in San Pablo. The house my mother and stepfather lived in was in a nice part of Richmond on the border of El Sobrante, just walking distance to De Anza High school where I had graduated in 1980, as did my mother before me back in the 1950’s.  The San Pablo house we rented was on top of a small hill and from one of the windows in the living room you had a pretty good view of the whole Bay Area, including San Francisco on a clear day. Our land lord was a shady San Pablo Biker kind of guy and the San Pablo chapter of Hells Angels house was directly behind our house. The place was dirty and depressing but it was all ours! We could drink and smoke pot and listen to our music as loud as we wanted whenever we wanted.

 John Marshall’s parents booted him out of his house around this time and he asked if he could sleep on our couch and share in the rent until Metallica went back on the road again. John had become their main roadie and Kirks guitar tech and was going to go with them to tour in Europe in a month. A few weeks into that tour Paula and I were awakened in the middle of the night by the ringing of the telephone. It was John and he had terrible news. He told me they had just been in a bad accident and that there bus had flipped over and crashed. I was stunned, still half asleep and not even sure if I was dreaming or not I asked John what had happened

After the band returned to the states it was very sad and only added to the dark times we seemed to be having. Months later when they started to addition for a new bass player Bill got a chance to try out. He could play the material with ease but as we all know the job went to Jason Newstead.

I lost the day job I had at the time, Paula and I fell on hard times and could no longer pay the rent for that shitty, dirty, run down old house. There was an even shiftier and dirtier, and even more depressing, trailer camper that was sitting in the front yard though! Our land lord took pity on us and said we could move in the trailer if we wanted for $200 a month. That seemed like a lot for that old dumpy trailer, but we could afford it on what Paula made as a waitress in Albany. So there we were. The most depressing point of the bands history and now I was living in this shitty old trailer with a hole in the shower that the weeds would grow up into.

Bill and I had been invited to three bachelor parties right in a row all in the same month. The best was saved for last though–Bill and I were invited to Kirk Hammitts Bachelor party! 

 Back in those days Kirk would invite Bill and me to certain gigs and parties and we loved being included in some of the fun.  We first met Kirk back in the 7th grade. We would collect, sell and trade comic books together. Onetime Kirk invited Bill, John Marshall and myself over to see the house he had bought in the Oakland/Berkeley hills. It was a huge beautiful mansion, we were so impressed. He showed us around and we ended the tour upstairs in what he called his toy room–which was right next to his music room–which was right next to his indoor movie theatre etc. In his toy room we saw carelessly laying on the floor an original copy of the Superman #1 comic book. And not far from that just haphazardly lying around was a pristine copy of Batman #1 followed by 

Spiderman #1. Comic books we used to dream and lust over only a few years ago were just lying around on the floor in Kirks toy room. We felt that was his way of rubbing our nose in his fantastic success. There also happened to be in plain view the latest copy of billboard magazine opened to the page showing Metallica’s #1 spot in the album charts for the …and Justus for all album. Yup, Kirk had made it to the top of the heap and Bill and I just felt like hopeless worthless losers.

Bachelor party #1:

We only knew him as Lance. He lived in a bad part of Richmond and was poor and broke like the rest of us so his bachelor party was held in the back yard of his folks house. It was just a simple kegger beer party with bowls of potato chips and dip. Bill and I arrived around 9 pm and the party was in full swing! No strippers or anything like that, just a bunch of horny dudes getting drunk looking at girly magazines and listening to loud heavy metal music. (The simple joys of life in Richmond California!)  When we got there we were told that Lance was already wasted and he was out in the back yard rolling around on the grass all fucked up barfing, pissing and shitting on himself and laughing uncontrollably. Apparently he and his groomsmen had acquired a large bag of cocaine and been doing lines of coke all afternoon. They also had a bag of mushrooms they had been nibbling on as well as drinking beer and whisky . 

Sure enough, Bill and I step out into the backyard to see a large crowd of drunken dudes all laughing and shouting in a circle around Lance. Lance was rolling around on the grass with his pants and underwear down around his ankles. He was naked from the waist down and he had shit and pissed his pants and I guess he was trying to get them off but he could not get them over the boots he still had on. He had shit, piss and barf smeared all over himself. All over his

Bachelor Party #2:

Bill and I had another friend from high school getting married soon and his Bachelor party was next. We will leave his name out of it for reasons of privacy. We had some errands to run and other band related things to do that night so we decided not to go to the bachelor party after all. My girlfriend Paula was nice enough to drive Bill and I around town to all the places we needed to go. When we had completed our errands for the night it was still pretty early and Paula said, “We are close by to where your friends bachelor party is, you guys want to just pop in for a minute and say hello?” 

“Ah, nah let’s just go home we are kind of tired”, I replied. 

“That’s fucked up”, she said, “he is one of your friends and his house is just a few blocks away. The least you could do is just drop in and make an appearance, wish him well and then we can go home.”

“Oh alright”, I said, “ if you think it’s that important.”

 We pulled up in front of the house and Paula said I’ll just wait here while you guys go in and say hello real quick. I don’t think Paula really knew what a bachelor party really was and this was only the second one Bill and I had ever been to as well.

We went into the house and left Paula sitting outside in the car with the motor running. This bachelor party was of a higher quality than the one we had attended the previous weekend for no-chance-for-romance-shit-pants-Lance.

This party was in full swing–there were several TV’s set up with VCR tape players going showing hard core porno videos, there were lots of good food set out, lots of quality imported beer on ice, a full bar, and colorful balloons and streamers all around and heavy metal blasting out of the stereo.

As soon as we Bill and I walked in we were greeted like special celebrity rock star guests! We were very down and depressed about the state of the band and the last thing we felt like was

rock stars, more like hopeless miserable failures. It sure felt good! Immediately ice cold beers were shoved in our hands and lit joints passed to us as someone started to chop up big lines of cocaine for us. 

After just a few minutes of being there Bill and I were feeling really good and found ourselves in total party mode. We both totally forgot that my nice girlfriend was patently waiting for us right outside with the car motor running.

We were just starting in on our second beers and round of joints and lines of coke when all of a sudden a super hot stripper appeared in the living room! All the guys started hooting and hollering and her stripper music came on the stereo and she went into her stripper routine.  Bill and I were the only guys there with long hair wearing jeans and black leather jackets. All the other guys there were dressed like they were going to church or something. The first thing this stripper did was to strut right over to Bill and me, whip off her top, grab me by the back of the head and pulled me into her chest and began beating me about the face with her big luscious tits! After she did that I started screaming at the top of my lungs, HELL YEAH!!! Everybody started screaming and whistling and yelling really loud. Paula who? 

 She did the same thing to Bill and began to make the rounds around the room.

The groom was stripped down to his underwear and positioned in a chair in the middle of the living room.  When she got to him the first thing she did was to pull off his underwear so now he was completely naked. He struggled to keep his underwear on but she got them off of him in the end. His face turned beet red and you could tell he was very embarrassed. There it was again, he had coke dick just like no-chance-for-romance-shit-pants-Lance! Just a tiny little turtle head trying to go all the way back into itself! I was amazed!

Apparently the groom had been doing lines of coke all day long. Everybody was pointing and laughing up a storm.  It was too bad because his friends had paid the stripper to have sex with him but he could not get it up to save his life! I

This was after Cliff had been killed in the Bus crash but I don’t remember Jason being there just James and Lars and there road manager.

We were all just hanging around talking and I remember at one point Kirk telling Bill and me how we had settled for far less than we deserved with our two shrapnel record deals. I remember thinking he was probably right but what could we do about it now? Bill and I were already feeling pretty low about our music careers, and in stark contrast to Kirks wild success I was starting to feel very depressed.

This was about the time in my life when I started to notice my hair, that had finally after many years grown nice and long, starting to fall out. It was very

depressing. On top of everything else my fucking hair was falling out too! FUCK!

Kirk took notice of it at the party and asked me if I did a lot of speed. I told him that I had been doing a lot and he said I should stop because it was probably what was causing my hair to fall out. (I took his advice and stopped doing all hard drugs from that night on. When I stopped speed it kind of drove a wedge between my girlfriend, Paula, and me. She was not ready to give up hard drugs and it ultimately split us up and she moved out. We had been together for 5 or 6 years. After she left I really hit rock bottom but I still managed to stay away from the meth and coke. I really wanted my hair to come back. It did not. It got worse, my hair loss turned out to be hereditary. Thanks Grand-Dad! 

All of us guys formed a circle around Kirk and the two toothless crack whores  in the middle of the floor. Everyone was yelling and laughing really loud. The girls quickly took off all their clothes and started taking off Kirks cloths too. He struggled at first but soon just gave up and let them strip him naked.

These two girls were just grinning ear to ear and I could see that James and Lars

were really enjoying it as well. Rather  than go into the X rated details here, let’s just say that things were humming right along. Earlier that night I had wondered if Kirk would be doing Cocaine all afternoon like the other two bachelors I had witnessed had done. I was wondering if Kirk would have a shriveled up tiny little turtle head coke dick too. Well, if he had been doing coke all afternoon it sure did not seem to matter. His sails were at full mast, his kickstand was out and he was up and ready for action! You could say, he pretty much had the exact opposite of coke dick!

After a few minutes of X rated fun on the floor for our entertainment, Kirk got up and one under each arm took both of those two dirty, ugly toothless crack whores upstairs to finish what had begun on the living room floor. He seemed to just take it all in stride as

Bill, Clint, John and I became very close friends at this point in time. We felt like we were down and out and we bonded like brothers. We decided we did not want to get another lead singer type front man guy. We had been down that road twice now and we just figured fuck that! 

Bill, Clint and I thought that we would all take a stab at taking over on the vocals. We thought if one of us could handle the job of taking over in the vocals department this would be great because the four of us got along so well we would have no more lead singer problems to deal with. Well, Clint just blew us all away when he stepped up to the microphone to take his turn! We just kind of looked at each other and said, “Well shit. There it is then!”

Clint had his own style much more in the death metal sound and away from the high range melodic singers we had for the past two albums. He sounded really pissed off and angry when he sang and it really reflected our mood and feelings at

the time.

His vocal approach worked great with our faster, heavier and more aggressive songwriting direction. I had already written the music and had the title and chorus for Twice as Bright Half as Long. Together Clint and I finished up the verses and I think the first time we ever played that song live was at our last show with Dan Bryant at the Omni in Oakland California sometime in February 1986. It was so new Dan Bryant had to read the lyrics from the lyric sheet onstage. This song was about doing speed, or meth amphetamine which was readily available in the Bay Area. The idea was the candle that burned twice as bright would burn only half as long. This song would set the tone for our new aggressive speed thrash death metal sound.

Towards the end of the 1980’s the metal scene in the San Francisco area changed drastically. Our two power metal albums had gone largely unnoticed and unappreciated, or so we thought. If we wanted to keep gigging in the Bay Area we felt we had to play faster with

By this time Paula and I had moved into this little studio apartment on Hurst street in Berkeley California. Hurst st. runs parallel and is one block over from the main drag University Ave. Our apartment complex was conveniently located right behind a liquor store and an all night Hamburger stand. One night I must have had too much booze and cheeseburgers or something because I had the most startling dream. I woke up screaming and crying and shaking all over. I scared the shit out of my girlfriend even though she was used to my night terrors I would have several times a week. It was not unusual for me to scream and yell in my sleep but this was very different. I dreamt I was in a WWII era Nazi  concentration camp. It was so real–I still can remember the overwhelming feeling of dread and total fear.  It really had an impact on me. In the dream I was surrounded by other prisoners and we were all singing a song–in German!

After my girlfriend calmed me down and I told her about the dream I could

still here the song we were all singing from my dream in my head. All I could remember of the words was the phrase ,“ Die Gedanken Sind Frei”,  and the melody that went with it. I always kept a guitar and a tape recorder handy to play and record riffs and arrangements for songs and song ideas, I still do to this day. I picked up my guitar and began plucking out the melody of the song we were singing in my dream. It was very simple but clever, I could not remember the rest of the words we were singing, I did not speak German anyway. I recorded myself playing what I could remember on my guitar and went back to bed and tried to get back to sleep. I was so glad I took the time to record the melody of that song because the next day I could not remember it to save my life, but there it was on my trusty little tape recorder!

Several days passed and the images and feelings were still strong in my mind from the dream. I started thinking I must have got the dream and the song from an old war movie I had seen on television on the late-late show or something. But Paula and I always watched TV together and neither of us could remember watching any WWII movies. It just was not something we would watch at that time. In school there was not a lot of time spent on WWII in our history classes, or if there was I must not have been paying attention. The only images and information I thought I knew about the war was what I picked up from watching the hit TV 1960’s comedy series Hogan’s Heroes as a kid. I loved that show but I hardly think it was trying to be historically accurate. Also my Grandfather was in WWII and was wounded in battle in Germany. Maybe that’s how I heard it?

It turns out after doing some more research that this song might have been sung in some of the prison camps as kind of a protest song to the Germans. This would explain why it would be sung in German by people who might not necessarily speak the language. From this experience I became very interested in knowing all things about World War II, especially from the perspective of Germany. Clint also took an interest as well when I spoke to the guys about my dream and the new song I was writing called ‘Racial Slaughter’.  I used my own guitar rendition of the old folksong melody as the acoustic intro to Racial Slaughter you here on the Quest for Sanity EP.

By this time we were developing a kind of unhealthy obsession with all things related to World War II Nazi Germany. Clint and I were reading every book we could get on the subject.

Remember, there is still no internet yet! We weren’t trying to be like Nazi’s or anything, we were just fascinated by this particular part of world history. This is why Clint went off and wrote Fields of Death and Mirror of the Past. So three of the five songs on the Help Your Self Demo and later, the Quest For Sanity EP were songs about WW II. Soon after we had written our WWII songs we heard Slayers, ( Angel of Death). I remember thinking, “Shit, those guys beat us to the punch with that great song about Joseph Mengala and the Auschwitz concentration camp.” Oh well, that’s show biz! To this day I still don’t know why I had that dream or where I picked that song up, but we sure got some good HEXX songs out of it!

Time was marching on. It seemed like the other bands around us were getting record deals playing this more aggressive speed/thrash/death metal style.

miles outside of the Bay Area in the middle of all this flat dry farmland. We drove out there one night after work to meet the guy and check out the studio. John Marshall went with us because he was going to engineer the recording for us. John had just graduated from Recording school and was eager to get to work on our new project. The place was an old ranch and seemed kind of funky and run down. The studio seemed okay, it had a 16 track board and plenty of gear. John checked it out and said it should be fine for what we need and the price was right. I think we only had $500.00 to spend on the whole demo, including recording tape.

When we returned on the weekend with all our gear the place looked even more run down in the daylight. There were all these strange people walking about outside in there bathrobes and pajamas and stuff. They all looked like they just got out of bed and were all just kind of wandering around aimlessly. We all got a real weird vibe from it. None of these people were here when we came to look over the place a few nights ago and make the deal to record there.  It turned out that this guy ran a home for schizophrenics! Okay we thought, this is a little weird but maybe this is why the studio is so cheap? 

We got right to work getting set up and ready to record our new demo. We were full of hope and knew that if we could get these 5 songs recorded well enough we should have a good chance of landing a new record deal and take our rightful place among our peers. We only had the weekend to complete the recording so we were going as fast as we could. We recorded all day Saturday and well into the night until we were just exhausted. We had hoped to get all the recording done Saturday and then have all day Sunday to mix and maybe do an extra over dub or two if necessary. Well, unfortunately the studio was a little funky too. The board was old and had not been serviced in a long time. The patch cords were old and were cutting in and out. The sound would just cut out on playback sometimes and John would actually have to pound on the recording console to get it to come back on. We would tease him, hey John, did you learn that at the fancy recording school you just graduated from?  The problems with the equipment in the studio put us way behind schedule. The guy let us crash in the studio so we did not have to get a hotel room we could not afford. None of us got a good nights sleep. Turns out this guy was really weird. All night we would here all this loud moaning and bumping

and thumping about. Loud laughter and screaming from the room next to the studio where we were staying in. We kind of got the idea this guy was having wild sex orgies with all his mental patients or something. We really did not want to know. We just wanted to finish our demo and get the hell out of this crazy place.

We spent all day Sunday recording and then trying to mix the demo before our time ran out and we had to get back to the Bay Area in time to go to work on Monday morning. Well, we did the best we could with what we had to work with but after we got back home and everyone had a few days to listen to it we all agreed it just did not sound good enough. John Marshall found us another studio in San Francisco that was cheap and we went there for a few nights and re mixed the whole thing. It sounded way better! We had our new demo that captured our new aggressive speed/thrash/ death sound at last. We were very proud of it and no one had heard it yet. As far as the world, our friends and peers thought HEXX was dead, or at best struggling along with their brand of hopelessly out dated passé power metal. We were about to show everybody the new faster, deadlier and very pissed off version and evolution of HEXX. We had totally reinvented ourselves out of pure fury and frustration and we were ready to show everybody!

At the time it seemed like no one would help us so we decided we would help ourselves and call the demo the Help Yourself Demo. We wanted to show that we could still do this even if no one helped us at all. However, we did have help actually. Back before Paradox got signed to Shrapnel we had met a lady named Debbie Abono. She lived in Pinole and was helping local bands by letting them practice at her house and buying them music equipment.

A few more weeks dragged slowly by without any word from anyone. We had not been rehearsing or even playing our instruments. All our gear was still packed up from when we finished recording the Help Your Self demo. For the first time sense I first picked up the guitar at age 9 I did not feel like playing. It was awful. I just did not have the heart to play anymore. It felt like the best part of me was slipping away and slowly dying. We had no gigs lined up, our new demo showcasing our new style and direction had been rejected by all the record labels. The girlfriend who had been by side through thick and thin for over 5 years was gone, I was totally without the comforts of a woman and on top of all of that, my hair was falling out and I was going bald. I had slipped into a deep depression the likes of which I had never known before.

 By this time Bill Peterson, John Shafer, John Marshall and myself were all living together in a house we rented from my aunt and uncle in Point Richmond, California. We all had our day jobs that we all hated except for John Marshall. John Marshall had quit being Kirk’s guitar tech to join Metal Church so he was very happy and excited. Things were really on the up for John and we were all very happy for him. He was getting the chance to get out from under Kirks shadow and step into the spotlight where he belonged.

Every night, after a long day’s work, instead of going to band rehearsals Bill, John Shafer and I would just stay home and drink heavily and smoke pot. It got so bad we would be so hung over from drinking the night before we would take ice cold shots of whisky,

(we liked to keep whisky bottles in the freezer for such occasions), first thing in the morning before heading out for another pointless day of meaningless labor in the hot sun. We would also smoke a joint before we left the house for work. Looking back now, I don’t know how we all managed to keep our jobs showing up reeking of whisky and marijuana first thing in the morning like that. We had truly hit rock bottom and we just did not care anymore.

One night after work there was a message on our answering machine from Debbie Abono.  At first I didn’t think anything of it and did not feel like talking to anyone. She just said to give her a call back when we had time. A few more days had passed and there was another message from Debbie saying the same thing, to give her a call back when we have a minute.  It was Friday night, the long work week was over and we were really going to get drunk out of our minds tonight! John Marshall said, hey one of you guys should call Debbie Abono back. I had forgotten all about it because her messages got erased. “Alright, I better call her back now before I forget again.”

After talking to Debbie Abono for a few minutes I could hardly talk. I was overcome with emotion and my eyes were welling up with tears. We had given Debbie several copies of the Help Yourself demo package. She sent them to her contacts at Combat Records and Metal Blade. Both labels had passed on the demo so we thought no more about it. Unknown to us, she had also sent our demo package to a label from England we had never heard of called Music For Nations. They were knocked out by our demo and wanted to know if we would like to re record it and release it as a 5 song EP in Europe just to test the waters to see if metal fans would accept this radical change of music style from HEXX. They were offering us a recording budget of $8000 USD, plus full budget for

After much whispering amongst themselves behind the counter, the bank teller went into the vault and after a few moments emerged with a grey cloth bag with draw strings. She started counting out piles of money aloud and neatly stacking them behind the counter.  “Bla-bla-bla and that makes eight thousand dollars.” Then she just hands me this big bag of money,  “Is there anything else we can do for you today Mr. Watson?”

  I had smoked a joint with the guys before I left the house to go to the bank and I was still a little stoned and kind of tripping on the whole experience. I had never even seen that much money before, let alone have someone just hand me a big sack of it. I was caught off guard when she called me Mr. Watson. I instinctively looked behind me expecting to see my father standing over my shoulder.  Feeling kind of foolish I said ‘no thank you’ and walked out of the bank climbed into the luxurious 1980  sky blue Ford Pinto I owned at the time and headed back to  Point Richmond and Starlight Sound Studios to plunk down our deposit for our studio dates. We were on our way–once again.

By this time we had come up with the Quest for Sanity concept along with some basic ideas for some artwork. We knew we could not call it the Help Yourself EP. During the next two weeks, we worked on the artwork concept with Kent Mathieu while rehearsing the songs that would be on the EP.  Kent Mathieu was a super cool dude, he lived in Berkeley and grew killer green

buds so we always liked to go to his house , get high and kick around ideas for album cover art–it was great! By the time we were ready to go into the studio, Kent was working on the painting for the cover. The recording took less than two weeks to complete and again we hired John Marshall to engineer the record.

  The recording and artwork were finished about the same time. We shipped our recorded safety masters along with the painting, logo and title overlays, lyric sheet and another photo collage similar to the one we did on Under the Spell, off to England for possessing and pressing.  The staff at Music for Nations had no idea what the cover art was going to look like. It was kind of strange to us because the first two albums we did for Mike Varney, he handled almost everything. He would pay the studio, photo shoot and artwork costs. Here, this label all the way on the other side of the world who we had never even met in person just sent us a big bag of money and just trusted us to be responsible enough to send them a sellable product. We could have easily spent all that money on wine, women and song disappearing into the night and there would have been very little they could have done about it.

Another week past and our spirits were up. We didn’t seem to mind going to our laborious day jobs anymore. The heavy drinking subsided a bit as well. Or maybe now we drank to celebrate our reprieve from the “HEXX, where are they now file”. Music For Nations, being located in England made communications a little troublesome. This is before the internet and the luxury of email. They were 7 or 8 hours ahead of us and we would get calls from their office in the wee hours of the morning waking us from a dead sleep to talk business. I got the call one night from one of our reps there that

It took a little while for the word to get out that HEXX was back with a new release and that we had changed our style. In some ways this really worked to our advantage because there was a cretin curiosity factor there. We started getting asked to play shows again. We began doing some shows with Sadus and Autopsy. Soon we were opening for bands like Destruction, Dark Angel, Coroner, and playing the Keystone clubs again. We were having a blast! We would play Quest for Sanity in its entirety and throw in Edge of Death, Under the Spell , A time of War and Out for Control. We now had a killer live set and we could really get the mosh pit going full tilt!

We started looking around for an American Label to release Quest for Sanity domestically. We were told after a while from Music for Nations that EP’s don’t sell as much as full LP’s and that’s why the sales in Europe were just okay and not great. Still, we figured someone would surly pick us up now.  Pretty much the same thing happened with Quest for Sanity as did the Help Yourself demo.  We sent the EP to all the metal labels and they all said they weren’t taking on anymore thrash/Death metal bands at this time. SHIT! The EP had pretty much run its course in Europe. Again without any tour support we were going to be very limited with how many records we would sell there. It became obvious that it was critical that we get Quest For Sanity released here in the states as quickly as possible or our goose would be cooked—again.

We were doing a show somewhere in Los Angeles when after the show we were

approached by a guy calling himself Richard C. He explained how he had a small record label called Wild Rags Records here in LA. He seemed to know all about HEXX and wanted to know if we had a release date for Quest for Sanity here in the United States. We told him we have not yet found a label to release it domestically yet.  He asked us we would like to discuss the possibility of putting Quest for Sanity out on his Wild Rags Record label? We said sure why not? After all, at this point we had nothing to lose.  We reached an agreement and signed the necessary contracts and documents.

It turned out that Richard C. owned a retail store in LA called Wild Rags. It was a hip clothing store for hard rock and metal fans. He had a large inventory of rock and metal t shirts and record albums and cassettes. As well as all kind of heavy metal accessories like spiked wrist bands leather gear and so on. He operated his record label out of his store. He showed us some of his releases but we had never heard of any of the bands. He also had an underground Heavy Metal newsletter called the wild Rag. He said he would arrange for us to play in New York and in Texas with some of the bands from his label. As well as print up Quest for Sanity tour shirts to sell on the road along with copies of the EP. It was actually a pretty cool set up for us.

Richard C. pressed the new US version of Quest for Sanity within a few weeks and it was ready to ship out to his distributors and hit the awaiting US market. We were very happy! We managed to luck out again with

We were back to our normal schedule of rehearsing the set twice a night, every night. It was really brutal during the work week because after putting in a long day of hard labor we were just exhausted. We pushed ourselves on and after we got  to our practice room and smoked a joint and had a couple ice cold beers we would get our attitude adjustment and kind of get our second wind. It was around 4:50 pm Friday October 17th 1989, I was Forman on a paint job in Berkeley California. We would normally work until 4:30 pm and then spend the last half hour of the day cleaning up the job site. On Fridays I would usually knock off a half hour early so my crew would have plenty of time to get back to the shop and get to the bank in time to cash their paychecks. We were working on a 10 story apartment complex just off Ashby Ave. It was a big job and we had to use a set of falls to reach all the way to the top of the building. (A set of falls is a long plank made of wood and steel supported by ropes run along the rooftop and fastened to giant metal hooks attached to ledge at the opposite side of the building.) I had worked with a set of falls many times before but this was the first time I was responsible for the safety of the men while we are working on them and making sure they were properly secured every night before we left the job site. I was driving the company vehicle back to our shop a few blocks away. It had been a long

grueling work week with a full rehearsal schedule to boot and I was very tired and dreading having to be on my feet another 4 hours or so at practice.

 I was driving west on Dwight Ave towards the Bay when all of a sudden it felt like I had a flat tire or something. The truck became impossible to control so I pulled over to the side of the street to see what the matter with the vehicle was.  The truck was stopped but it was rocking back and forth violently. We were having an earth quake.  A BIG earth quake! I looked to see all the telephone polls that ran down Dwight Ave waving back and forth causing the telephone and power wires to look like they were skipping rope–I had never seen anything like it!

 Being born and raised in the San Francisco bay area I had been in several earth quakes and grew up knowing that we lived in earth quake country and someday the big one was going to hit us.  I thought to myself this must be it. The violent shaking lasted for what seemed like 5 minutes or so. People were coming out of their houses screaming and crying–it was really scary.

Then all of a sudden we heard a big explosion coming from behind us. I could see large plumes of black smoke coming from the direction of the University of Berkeley campus. I found out later that the science department building had blown up or something. After the shaking finally stopped, I decided I had better get back to the shop drop off the truck and get home to see if there was any damage to the 100 year old house we were renting from my aunt and uncle. Once I got back to the shop some of the guys from the other crew were gathered around one of the trucks in the

I never will forget how the city looked. It was so weird and creepy. Instead of seeing all the lights of the city skyline it was in total darkness–except for all the orange glow of all the fires burning. Needless to say our long awaited US record release party scheduled for the following weekend in Oakland was canceled and postponed indefinitely. As was I suppose most every other activity you could think of except getting the city and east bay area up and running again.

By February things had finally started to get back to normal around the bay area. We rescheduled our record release party at the Omni and it was a great success. For some reason Richard C didn’t give out our records as people came through the door to the venue. He waited until after our performance at the end of the night. Maybe he thought it was a smart marketing strategy or something.

When they made the announcement over the P A system that we were giving away free copies of Quest For Sanity at our merchandise booth, he was mobbed–it was total mayhem. He started to tell everyone to form a line and, of course, that just went out the window! By now our fans were nice and drunk and fired up by our performance. They just mobbed him like animals and took every last record we had as well as some other stuff we didn’t really want to give away for free.

Summer was approaching and so was our little mini tour of Texas. Texas is huge and one of the largest states in America. Metal was very popular there. Richard C. had two bands on his label from Texas, Sufferance (formerly Annihilator) and Gamacide. We flew into Corpus Christy and were met by Alex and the rest of the guys from Sufferance. We were going to do 3 or 4 gigs with them in the lower half of the state. We had never been to Texas before so we were very

excited to be there.  It was very humid. The place was kind of a mess. Broken trees and tree branches were all in the streets and everything looked disheveled. Alex explained that a hurricane had just hit Corpus Christy a few days earlier.

After picking us up at the airport they took us to our hotel where we would stay our first night. Our first gig was set for the following night. The hotel was right across freeway from the gulf coast of Mexico. We were traveling on a tight budget and both bands were staying at the same hotel complex, four guys to each of two rooms. Our hotel was about as cheap as you could get. The place was a rundown dump. Just the kind of place where drunk and unruly heavy metal maniacs should stay! We had been drinking on the plane ride over so we were still a little buzzed. It was getting late, after midnight. The hotel complex was very old and run down. The units were separate single story little shacks. 

As we started to walk along the driveway to find our room Clint noticed a huge cockroach crawling along the outside wall of one the hotel units. You know that saying, everything is bigger in Texas? Well for a lot of things that is true. It sure was about the cockroaches we saw there! 

We toured the southernmost part of Texas for about a week or so with Sufferance. Some shows were better than others but everywhere we went people seemed to know about us and we would usually have a decent crowd to play to. Alex and the guys from Sufferance were really cool guys and we all got along and had a great time with them. The Northern part of the Texas tour we would hook up with another one of Richard C’s bands called Gamacide. They were just outside of Dallas and all lived together in a house in a Dallas suburb. We had to take a bus from Corpus Christy up to Dallas. We had a few days before our first shows with Gamacide so it was a good opportunity for us to hang out, drink beer smoke dope and party with those guys , and get to know one another a little bit. We did another week’s worth of bookings with those guys and we all had a blast!

After we flew back to San Francisco we had about month to rest up before we were to fly to New York to meet up with another one of our Wild Rags Records label mates, The Jersey Dogs. This was the first time we had been on the east coast so we were very excited. Being from New Jersey, the Jersey Dogs were very proud of being from New Jersey and from the east coast in general. They drove us all around Ney York and showed

us all the sights. Those guys were also very cool and we all got along great and had a great time doing shows with them. The shows we did in New York were very much like the shows we played in Texas. They were mostly small clubs and all the metal heads from that town would show up to check out whatever band was touring through. Some nights we would have raging mosh pits and everyone going crazy but sometimes they would just stand there and stare at us in disbelief and then start clapping and cheering after each song.

After we returned home at the end of that summer Richard C asked us if we wanted to go back into the studio and record another EP to follow up Quest for Sanity. Clint had just written Watery Graves but we did not have any other new material ready enough to record right away. Richard C suggested we record speed/trash/death metal versions of Edge of Death and Under the Spell. We had been performing them in our live set anyway so we thought, why not? We went back to Starlight Sound Studios in Richmond Ca and again with John Marshall at the helm knocked out the three song EP in about 4 days. It was great because this gave us another chance to hang out with our artist friend Kent Mathew again, smoke a bunch of pot, drink a bunch of beers and dream up the cover art for the new EP. This time we would have our android friend from the cover of Quest for Sanity washing up on the beach after a bloody futuristic battle at sea. The title being of course, Watery Graves.

Watery Graves was a limited pressing and only released in the US at this point.