Dead Pharisees

I finally got around to uploading an album from a band I started when I was 18.  (Or maybe a tad
earlier) Since I was 13 and discovered heavy metal I had fantasized about being in a metal band.
And since I was thoroughly embedded in a Christian Evangelical subculture where metal bands
were allowed to thrive (as long as they were actively promoting themselves as evangelistic tools
for ‘ministry’) there was a powerful synergy between my fiery faith and my testosterone induced
love of metal.  I was hugely influenced by “Christian bands” from the early 90’s such as
Vengeance Rising, Deliverance, Mortification, Tourniquet and others. The harder, faster and
growlier, the better.

I was living in a small town of a couple thousand called North Pole in Alaska. So the prospects of
finding enough like-minded individuals to start a Christian metal band seemed slim at best.  I had
one friend who was a year older than I, and we started taking guitar lessons together, but it turned
out that was hard, so that didn’t last long. But fantasizing about screaming on stage and writing
zealous lyrics was easy, so I did a lot of that.  I was also busy getting engaged at 16 and married
at 18. (The only way to have God-approved sex according to my sub-culture) But at some point in
that whirlwind of insanity I found that some of my Bible Quiz compatriots were also metal musicians.
(Brothers: Luke and Mark Burcell, and friend Jeremiah Patterson.)  They were several years younger
than me, but had an incredibly supportive dad and so I guess when I came along with a very clear
and defined vision for a band, that was something they were excited to jump on board with. I had
several songs written -lyrics, not music- and so we got together and they started writing music for
the lyrics and I started teaching myself to scream.  

Sadly, shortly after starting the band, my wife and I decided my t shirt airbrushing in a tiny town in
Alaska along with an indie Christian metal band with young teens wasn’t going to pay the bills. So
we left for Seattle so I could attend the Art Institute of Seattle. (I thought I’d learn to build animatronic
monsters for movies) But the band went on! Luke moved from bass to vocals, and the Kovacs
brothers joined. (Sean and David; another set of evangelical metal-loving brothers with a supportive
dad… what are the chances?) They did some inter-state touring, got a song in a compilation album,
and eventually recorded the album in this video.

The recording must have been around July of 1996 because my first son had just been born and
we drove straight from Seattle to North Pole when he was a month old. Ostensibly to visit my wife’s
parents, but I was excited to be able to lay down some vocals for the album.  The studio was just
some dude’s log cabin. The sound quality of the recording bear witness to this quite plainly, haha!
I spent a couple hours and ended up with 20 seconds of verse on the album. (That’s right at the 50
min. mark.) I remember it took a LONG time to get the recording guy to understand what I meant by
overlapping vocals.  

So that’s how this artifact came to be. Now I want to reflect on it, and on my teen self and the lyrical
content I created for the album. As mentioned previously, this KIND of artifact was created in the
cultural context where everything in life, including art, was presupposed to be a tool for evangelical
outreach.  Remember, according to this subculture, EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the world who
wasn’t in our specific subculture, believing the exactly the right thing, was going to spend eternity
being tormented in hell. It would be incredibly selfish to put ANY activity above spreading our gospel
so fewer people would be tortured forever.  And one of the best ways to convince young people that
they should believe our message is to scare them with threats of the hell that will await them if they
don’t believe. This insight is absolutely necessary to understand how lyrics like I wrote came about.

The mechanism is fear, but the motivation is love. That doesn’t make me less embarrassed by them.  
But I’m also glad they are recorded for posterity. They are a time-capsule of a very passionate young
man set on a trajectory by this odd confluence of culture, belief and practice. To anyone outside that
subculture the messages in the lyrics are… monstrous… pathological, really. Endlessly dwelling on
hell, torture, suicide, satanism, abortion, and fear fear fear.  So much fear. But again… that’s what a
belief like eternal hell will do to you if you take it seriously. (Well, for ME, specifically.) There was no
way to ever promote love or life above the ever-present threat of eternal torture. It colored
EVERYTHING in my life. But I’m not going to ramble on about doctrine and religion any more. I had
my fill of that about a decade ago. If you want my thoughts on that do a search for hell on this blog.  
It’ll be a GREAT time! (not)

But it wasn’t all bad to this now-40-something-year-old. There are some glimmers buried in there of
the more peaceful Loving guy I grew into. In the song Knock Me On My Face, I’m pleading for God
to knock everyone on their faces.  The “world” (ie: those not in our subculture) the “church” (ie: those
in our subculture but not as wise and mature as ME) the devil (ie: God’s enemy who we believed to
be literal entity) but the final line always jumps out at me. “But most importantly, let it always be,
remembered that it starts with me.” It’s interesting to me that one of the core tenets of my Christian
evangelical tradition was the seed of its own undoing. That is the idea that are fallen fallible creatures
in constant need of correction and self-examination. I was good at parroting that sentiment without
ever actually internalizing it… for decades. But eventually that parroting paid off. At some point the
right confluence of influences that triggered some epiphanies that lead to actual deep soul-searching.  

And here’s just random thoughts and observations.

Sadly, because I felt a need to write an entire sermon for every song, so while I did SOME iteration
with the band before I left, most of the music was written after.  Meaning poor Luke inherited these
massive sermon-lyrics that they were trying to cram into normal-length songs. This resulted in… not
the best blend and lots of slurred/skipped words.

The song ‘Suicide’ was not written by me and has what find to be the most tasteless and damaging
lyrics. The old Christian tradition that suicide means you go straight to hell. The intention -as with all
these scare tactics- was to help people. Just a tragic misfire here.

The terribly poetry on the last track was my attempt at adding some classy depth to the record.
Needless to say, my poetry career skyrocketed and I’ve been a celebrity poet every since!  No, wait…
oh… I meant the opposite of that. Anyway, it’s so cringy I thought adding the visuals I was trying to
evoke in the video was a fitting homage.

The cover art was my first (and possibly last) attempt at an illustration done entirely in Photoshop.

If you’re curious why you can’t find my name anywhere in there, it’s because i thought it’d be super
cool to have a mysterious alter-ego by the name of Scrybe.  Super. Cool.