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November 2001
Combining powerful U.S. metal with an elaborate stage show, Halloween have thrived in the metal underground for nearly 20 years. Their "Heavy Metal Horror Show" has become their trademark, providing the perfect backdrop to the band's brand of metal mayhem. The band has been plagued with countless setbacks and near misses, but they may finally be on the edge of garnering the recognition that they deserve. With all of their sought-after albums finally available on CD, and with a brand-new record on the way, the band is ready to take on the world. I recently found a telephone number (called the "Halloween Hotline,") on the band's web site, and a few days later found myself talking to the entire band about their colorful past and their bright future. So here's the Halloween story, as told by Bill Whyte (drums), George Neal (bass), Donny Allen (guitar), Brian Thomas (vocals), and manager/zookeeper John Guarascio.
Note: Band comments have been condensed into one group response instead of being attributed to specific individuals, so the interview is presented as being between HMF and the group Halloween.
Let's start with your forthcoming CD, The Fire Still Burns. I think you have a new single out already that gives a taste of the new disc.
The new single is called "Go to Hell." It's an Alice Cooper cover. We thought it would be a good song for us to do, since we all love Alice Cooper. And Alice Cooper and KISS were really big influences on the band back in the early days. We actually did a cover of KISS song on the No One Gets Out album.
 Right, you did "Detroit Rock City." That was a good version.
Thank you. So we actually got to do cover versions of both bands that were strong influences on us, obviously due to the stage show and the theatrics. You can tell that was part of our upbringing. We always felt that, doing the style of music that we do, since it's really not danceable, we really wanted to keep people's attention with the theatrics, along with the music. We don't want to take [attention] away from the music, but it gives everybody a little bit more for their money.
I think the original name of the band was Bitch. Did you have the stage show back then, or did the show come later after the name changed to Halloween?
Yes, the band was originally called Bitch. At that time, we did use stage props; it started out with a single skeleton, and it just grew from there. "The Heavy Metal Horror Show" was actually our nickname before we changed the band name to Halloween. It started because the band originally got together around Halloween in October of 1982. We wanted to name the band Halloween at the time, but we didn't because another band in town at the time had just written a song called "Halloween." Our drummer in Bitch was friends with that other band and thought that they might feel that we were ripping them off. But the whole reason we wanted to name the band Halloween was because that was the time of year when we were getting together, and we had the basement where we rehearsed decorated with Halloween stuff. When we started playing out, we just brought the spider webs and candelabras and all that stuff with us as a stage show and developed "The Heavy Metal Horror Show." About a year later, when the drummer wasn't with us anymore, we decided to change the band name, so that's when Halloween started in 1983.
Did you record anything when you were called Bitch?
No, nothing official. We would tape our live shows, but a lot of the stuff we were doing then was cover tunes. We would do the cover tunes that wouldn't get you into the clubs. We played the stuff that we liked; we were playing Scorpions, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Twisted Sister before anybody knew who most of those bands were.
I'm just curious, but what was the other band that had written the song "Halloween"?
It was Seduce. That song was actually covered on the NOGO album.
Oh, so the song "Halloween" on that album is actually a Seduce song? Is that the same Seduce that was on Decline of Western Civilization 2 - The Metal Years?
Yep, that was them. At the time, Chuck from Seduce was our drummer in Bitch, the first official drummer but actually the second guy in the band. And a guy named Mickey St. Claire was playing drums for Seduce, and Chuck and Mickey were good friends. Chuck thought that if we called our band Halloween that Seduce would think we from the name from their song. We all knew that wasn't what we were doing. Bitch was our second choice, basically because we dressed like tough women. [laughs] We went out in public in our stage clothes, wore the make up, and had our hair all freaked out. The funny thing is that people would stare at us and they would say, "What, do these guys think it's Halloween?" And if they only knew...[laughs]
 So how were you together before you began to record your material? Did you do some demos before you recorded Don't Metal With Evil (debut album)?
Actually, we recorded DMWE twice. The first time was on an eight-track in the woods; we went on a camping trip and made a demo! We took the equipment and a tent, and it was freezing and it rained. We were trying to do it cheaply. For 18 years we've been trying to cut corners, but that one didn't work out. When we heard other recordings, we knew that what we had done wasn't going to work. So invaded George's family and borrowed money to try and go do it right. We still didn't get it quite right, but it was a good start...
What did you do with the original eight-track version from the woods?
That version just faded away. That recording included all of the tunes from DMWE except for "Scared to Death,' which we wrote in the studio later.
But even the second recording session was done on your own, on Motor City Metal (MCM) Records?
Yeah, everything we've ever done has pretty much been on our own.
So it was just a matter of getting enough money together to get into a proper studio?
We budgeted out how much time we got, and I think we did that whole album for about $2,000. We bought a block of time, and our manager at the time was like, "You can't go over by five minutes, or it's coming out of somebody's ass!" We got the record done in 13 hours…recorded, mixed, out the door.
Were you satisfied with it at the time?
At the time we thought it was cool, because we didn't know any better. [laughs] But now that we know better, it seems like it's lacking in quality. Then again, at that time, it was good, and other stuff that came out at the time was pretty much the same. Too Fast for Love by Motley Crue was out around that time. It's kind of like the way Metallica progressed from Kill `Em All up to Ride the Lightning. We've been waiting to make that technological jump. We've never had very good luck in the studio. We always felt that we were writing good songs and had a lot of good ideas and good intentions when we would go into the studio. But there's always been some kind of exterior problem that has made life in the studio hell for us.
What kind of problems did you have?
For DMWE, we were in a time crunch. For Victims of the Night, we recorded at the crack of dawn the day after playing a weekend of gigs. We'd get out of the smoky bars, puking blood and loading out the equipment in the rain, getting home at 5 or 6 in the morning. In fact, one time we played a show about an hour north of here, then drove all the way back home and unloaded the truck. I think Brian got back to his house at about 6 a.m. and was out at the studio at 9:30 a.m. trying to record his vocals. Henry Weck, the old drummer for Brownsville Station, owned the studio where we were recording the second CD. (VOTN was recorded in 1986 but was actually the third CD that Halloween released, finally hitting the streets in 1997.) So Henry would be out there mowing the lawn, repairing the sink, building a wall, and there's a train going by, and here we were trying to cut vocals in this one-room schoolhouse. It's this big echoing room, and you can hear every noise that's going on everywhere around. We started to think that there had to be a better way.
 That doesn't sound like an ideal situation.
And also, Bill was toying around with electronic drums for the VOTN record. When we went to remix and remaster the songs (for the 1997 CD release), we were stuck with the drums that had been bounced down into two tracks. At the time (back in 1986), we paid a lot of money to get the drum sampler, and the producer told us he could work it. What you hear on VOTN is basically just the drum triggers, and we were going to use the sampler to put in really good drum tones. But that project came to a screeching halt when we didn't have the money up front. We had paid $1,000 initially and were supposed to pay another $2,000 after the record was done, but it wasn't even finished yet and the guy was demanding money from us. We didn't have it, so the project just got stopped.
So that's why the album sat around for 10 years before being released?
Absolutely. Then, when John Mestad from Molten Metal got involved with us and wanted to put out the album, we were stuck with those drum tracks because they had already been bounced down, and because of the money problem we had never used the drum triggers to sample a good drum sound. Recording project #2: a shambles...
It could have been worse, I guess…
Actually, NOGO was recorded twice also. We had been doing some demo work here in Detroit and we had already recorded the whole album here. Through playing gigs and hooking up with people, we ended up getting in touch with Jon Oliva of Savatage, and he offered to produce the CD. So we packed up our bags and drove to New Jersey to what we were told was an incredible, immaculate studio, and we started the whole album over again. So after the record was already in the can, done and ready to go, we got a chance to go work with somebody who was already pretty well known in the business and who wanted to produce us. When we got out to New Jersey, the studio was shit. It was basically some guy's garage, and he had a sixteen-track recorder and some lame, old equipment. We were told not to bring our equipment, and that they would have everything that we could possibly need. We knew it was a bad sign when we walked in and Jon Oliva had gotten there before us, and he was just sitting in the control room staring off into space with a look like, "I can't believe I got talked into this." It was actually one of Jon's connections, Dana Piper, that got us that studio, and there's actually a funny twist to the whole story. When we got there, they told us they had a house rented for us, with a rehearsal studio in the basement, etc. It turns out that there was some band that was out on the road, and one of the roommates rented us their house, and the band didn't know that we were there. We thought it was a set up for bands that came in to record, but I guess the roommate just wanted to make some extra money.
It's too bad that the Savatage connection didn't work out better.
We thought we were getting into a real deal, because Dana Piper is the guy who got Savatage signed to Atlantic Records, so when he put us together with Jon Oliva we figured we were going to hit the big time. But it was just a clusterfuck from the minute we got to New Jersey. We tried, you know. We recorded the stuff, but it wasn't coming out as good as the stuff we had done back in Detroit. So the NOGO CD that actually came out is the original recording, and we didn't use the stuff that we did with Jon.
That could've been "it"", the big break...
It could have been. Jon is still friends with us, but it just didn't work out then. And at the same time, Savatage was starting to record their Streets CD, so we couldn't even hook up with him after that. But I'm sure we'll cross paths again.
 What about the new album, The Fire Still Burns. Is that finished?
Bill is recording the record at his place, and it's coming out better than any other stuff that we've ever done before. It's pretty close to being done. All the songs are pretty close to being mixed out, and they just need to be mastered and it'll be done. What I like to do is compare the tracks on multiple systems. I've compared all the songs to make sure that they all sound like they're in the same bunch, instead of sounding like stuff that came from six different recordings or something. It's a little bit tricky, and it's Bill's first attempt at recording. We went out and bought a bunch of stuff: mixer, a bunch of microphones, power amps, speakers and all that. We're using a computer to record on with Qbase. It's been a long process, and the learning curve is huge, but it's coming out well. Bill is doing a great job with it, and we can't wait for the record to come out so that people can see that we still have a foot for kicking ass.
Will the album be all-new material?
That's the interesting thing. It's a grab bag of stuff, a lot of songs that should have been recorded in the past but never were, mixed in with new stuff. There's some stuff that was left over from the NOGO era, stuff that got recorded and then got lost. On the liner of the original NOGO pressing, the last track "A.B.F.$" says "To be continued..." That song was basically a backward segment of one of the other songs on the album, and we thought it sounded it cool. We thought it would make an awesome song, so Donny learned the riff backward, and we wrote "Wake Up Screaming," which is going to be the opening track on the new CD. That song smokes, too; it's a hell of an opener. "Fighting Words" was left over from the NOGO recording session, and we actually have a version of that song that Jon Oliva worked on with us, but it's nowhere near as good as the version we're getting ready to put out.
Anything from the early days?
There are some songs that go all the way back to the VOTN era, stuff like "Nobody's Home." "The Battle" is one that's almost older than the DMWE stuff, but it came out awesome! Bill mixed in a lot of war sound effects, like bombs dropping and stuff, and the timing right now is perfect, with what's going on. "Candles" is another one that is from way back. We can't wait to get this CD out. We're excited; it's gonna be really good. The song "The Fire Still Burns" is new, and it's really cool, and there's "The Seer", "Exist", "Ways of Man."
So how many tracks will make it onto the final CD?
We've got 15 recorded, but we're thinking about just putting 13 tracks on the CD. The Alice Cooper cover of "Go to Hell" will be on there, too.
OK, so it'll be the single and it'll be on the album, too.
Yeah. We also did a song dedicated to Osama Bin Laden. It's kind of like a Weird Al thing, but it's not quite as comical as that, it's more in yoru face than that. We covered Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and called it "Exit Sandman." Some of the lyrics are, "Say your prayers evil one, we won't forget what you've done, need justice for everyone/Now we're in, we will win, you'll pay for your sins until the sandman is gone/Sleep with both eyes open, gripping your ankles tight/Exit spite, enter fright/Here's our plan, we're off to bomb Afghanistan..."
 Is this song actually recorded?
Oh yeah. We did it last Sunday. Brian is a DJ at a topless club and he's been playing it there for a week straight. Everybody who hears it asks us, "Why isn't this on the radio yet!?" In fact, John just got a copy to WRIF, which is our major rock station here in Detroit. We're hoping to get some airplay before they turn over Bin Laden and it's not funny anymore. We actually decided to record it about a week before the bombing started. When George came over to record, he said, "Hey, we've started bombing Afghanistan." So about an hour after the bombing started, we started recording the song. It took about four hours, and it turned out great. The music turned out so well that you really can't tell that it's not Metallica, and everybody who hears it says it sounds like Brian singing to a karaoke track.
Is the song going to actually be released, or is it just for fun?
Well, it's just for fun, really. We're looking into getting some CD singles made and sell those and then donate the money to one of the charities. A few people have said that Metallica might get pissed off, if for some reason they think it's in poor taste. It's not in poor taste, unless you're a Bin Laden fan. But anyway, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have Metallica help you get some publicity. The only real problem is that our version is so close to the original that if you're not paying attention to the words you might not realize that it's the real "Enter Sandman."
Continued...
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