Hexx - under the spell rar

I had also recently had horrible nightmares one night after eating too much cheap Chineese food and drinking way too much whisky! I think I had came up with the lyrics first and then put together a bunch of riffs I had left over that did not make it into other songs. If you listen to that song the riffs and chord progressions are really weird and trippy……kind of like my nightmares!

The last song we developed for the demo was a song Dan Bryant had going called Golden Cross. 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.

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. 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! The day finally came when I was to receive the call I had been waiting for from Mike Varney…………..

On the demo one of the songs I wrote was a little more thrasher and had no lyrics and no title. We just referred to it simply as the instrumental. Mike Varney did not like the thrasher elements starting to develop in our music, however he was impressed enough with the rest of the songs we recorded with Dan Bryant to pick up the option for our second album and we were then put on the schedule at Prairie Sun studios in Cotati California to record the Second full length Hexx album!

All our persistence and hard work had paid off. There would be at least one more album from HEXX!!!!! Now with another full blown studio album to record soon, we still needed at least one more song. Bill Peterson had a riff and some lyrics with an unusual feel to it that we started messing around with.

This developed into what would become Hell Riders. Dan Bryant tweaked the lyrics, I added some solo parts and now all the material was together for our new metal offering! The odds are really against you on so many levels.

Looking back we were pretty lucky to have one record out, let alone getting to do a follow up. I really think being able to get Dan Bryant on board at that time had a lot to do with us being able to continue and move forward after Manzo left the band. We figured Manzo would be a hard act for anyone to follow so he would have to be really good!

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 …..

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….

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.

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.

Okay, so right off we started to think about cover art. 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…. 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. My dear old dad was never quite up on current trends of music or fashion ……or anything really So after looking over all the album covers we went ahead and pitched the idea we were all talking about.

We wanted something darker and a little more disturbing than the No Escape cover, something to reflect what we thought was our newly evolving heavier and darker sound.

We described to him Something like a real scary looking Voodoo witch doctor dancing around in a lit up hexagon with a bunch of bones and sculls and shrunken heads on sticks and stuff under a creepy moon lit sky in the jungle or something. He seemed to like the idea and said he would come up with some preliminary sketches for us to look over in a few days or so. When we went back to look over the sketches it actually looked pretty cool, and much like we had envisioned……..

He had not put in any bones, skulls or shrunken heads on sticks that we requested. When I pointed this out to him he just kind of shrugged it off like it was no big deal, this was just a rough sketch kind of thing so we thought nothing more of it and told him to go ahead and start painting it.

A couple weeks went by and he called me to have everyone come by and take a look at the finished painting. We were all very excited and thrilled to see the next Hexx album cover art! 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. 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!!! We all knew that this artwork as it was, would not be scary or shocking enough to compete with all the other metal album art that was flooding the market at that time.

The way he said that to us let us know there was no hope of working with him further and talking him into adding the sculls and shrunken heads and things. We all just instinctively looked at each other and silently walked out of his house. I was so embarrassed and angry with him that I did not speak to him for two or three years after that. Many years later he gave me the painting as what I perceived as a kind of peace offering.

The painting was just as we had left it, except he painted in our logo on the lower left side. Okay……so ….. We had already had wasted too much time with that whole debacle and time was running out. We had to find another artist fast and start all over from scratch! Luckily Mike Varney was working with an artist that had just done some work for some of his other bands. He put me in touch with Guy Atchison, I think he lived in Chicago.

We had some phone conversations and I think it was his idea to change our original idea from a witch doctor dancing around outside at night, to more of a wizard in a cave conjuring up spirits and things. I told him the story of what had happened with my Dad, and that we were in kind of a hurry. He asked me if we wanted him to paint our logo on as well and I told him…… whatever you do, do NOT paint the logo on the artwork!!!!

I told him that we have an overlay we will use so we can decide the best placement for it on the artwork. There was nothing we could do about it. It was too late, we had run out of time and the painting had to go into production just the way it was. Big weird looking red logo and all! We were all pretty bummed about it at the time but we just had to live with it. The artwork itself we thought was amazing!!! So we eventually got used to it. But now, almost 30 years later, Metal Blade records is re releasing No Escape and Under the Spell and we have corrected the problem by having the blue logo from No Escape put on the Under the Spell as well!

Now that the artwork was done we still had to take new band photos fast! By now it was December of We were about to go into the studio sometime in mid January to start recording, so Mike Varney hastily booked us a photo shoot with one of the photographers he often used for all his other bands. For some reason we all decided except for Dan Bryant to smoke a big fat joint before we went in to do the photo session. The studio was large and had a bunch of stage props lying around so we all started goofing around with various things that were lying about.

Somebody found this big frosted plastic hallow ball with an opening at the bottom of it and we got the idea to put a light in it.

After we got back the proof sheets see photo we picked one, and one of those is the photo you see on the back cover of Under the Spell! It was up in Northern California on this large property, like a ranch. They had these cool little guest houses we would stay at because It was too far for us all to drive up there every day.

It was great fun for us! We would pack in lots of food,……mainly crap!!! Bags of potato chips, pastries, cookies, candy,…. Not to mention, lots of ice cold beer, and plenty of killer green buds as well!! We would record in 8 to 10 hour shifts. It took us about two weeks to do the whole project. In those days, we would record the bass and drums first…. Then overdub all the guitars, then record the vocals, and then do all the mixing! On the morning of January 28th , at around am we were all just waking up in the guest house we had rented and were starting to stir around.

Someone turned on the television set just in time for us all to watch the famous launch of the United States Space Shuttle, Challenger! We were still just rubbing the sleep from our eyes when the ship just blew up!

We could hardly believe it! They kept showing it blow up, over and over again on every channel! We finally just had to turn it off and get back to work on our new album. One night I was scheduled to track some more of my lead guitar solos. I was having some technical issues with some of my equipment that could not be resolved until the next day for whatever reason.

There were some bass overdubs that still needed to be done so our producer, Steve Fontano said to go and fetch Bill so we can track his bass.

Smoke weed, drink beer and whisky, and do a little Cocaine once in a while as well! When we were involved in one of our recording projects, be it a demo or a full blown album, whoever was not slated to record that day would usually be indulging in having a good time with everyone that was there or just hanging around. I was scheduled to record all night so both Bill and Clint had been drinking and smoking weed…..

We could not waist the studio time so Poor Bill had to do his bass overdubs totally wasted! Good Times!!!!! We had gotten a few demo tapes of guys and most of them were just not good enough to follow what Manzo had done on No Escape. Clint Bower had a long time friend and drummer by the name of John Shafer. Dave took John under his wing so to speak and showed him all the things and techniques he had learned. This worked out well because shortly after Under The Spell was released Dave Schmidt left the group and John Shafer took his place and is back with the band today carrying on the legacy bestowed to him by Dave Schmidt!

John told us about a vocalist we should check out he saw not too long ago performing at a local gig that sounded a lot like Ronnie James Dio. John somehow knew or found out where this guy lived and we all went to his house in Oakland to check out his band rehearsing one day. This guy turned out to be Dan Bryant! He had these young kids backing him up and I think he was teaching them how to play all their instruments. Dan Bryant as we soon found out could also, in addition to being a great singer, played guitar, bass and drums!

And he did have a voice that sounded kind of like Dio and we thought he would be a suitable singer to take over for Manzo and would fit in great with the group and help us sound the way we wanted our new material to sound.

We explained to Dan Bryant our situation with our record label and talked him into doing a demo with us to see if we could get our second album out. During the weeks and months prior to finding Dan Bryant I was feverishly working on riffs and putting together material for us to work on to go on the demo.

I had the riffs and basic arrangement of the next song and after a little polishing tweaking and working together with Bill Peterson, The Victim was born! I was starting to listen and become more aware of the trash and speed metal styles that were popping up around the S. Bay area. I wrote Edge of Death in about an hour one night. With a little trash metal influence combined and contrasted with a slower and heaver verse sections. A Time of War I think was the next song to come together.

I wrote the lyrics and Bill Peterson , Clint Bower and I all collaborated on the music and arrangement. I think I probably came up with the intro and solo section. I think Clint Bower had come up with the main riff for Out For Control , then Dan Bryant and Bill Peterson and I came up with the rest of the arrangement and again I probably came up with the solo section.

I think Dan Bryant had a hand in the lyrics on this one too. I think our drummer Dave Schmidt had the drum intro going and we kind of built the song around that I think Dan Bryant wrote most of the lyrics for that one. I soon had all the riffs, music and arrangement for what was to become Suicide but I did not have the lyrics yet. At the time my girl friend, Paula Horychuck and I had moved into my mom and step dads house temporarily until we could find another apartment to live in.

One night Paula got a phone call from her father telling her that her cousin whom she was very close to had just committed suicide. That night, with tears streaming down her face she wrote the lyrics to Suicide.

I came up with the vocal phrasing and fit it to the music I had going and that one was done. Fever Dream was based on a story by Ray Bradbury. Bill was reading one of his books at the time and had turned me on to the story. I had also recently had horrible nightmares one night after eating too much cheap Chineese food and drinking way too much whisky! I think I had came up with the lyrics first and then put together a bunch of riffs I had left over that did not make it into other songs. If you listen to that song the riffs and chord progressions are really weird and trippy……kind of like my nightmares!

The last song we developed for the demo was a song Dan Bryant had going called Golden Cross. 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. 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. 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! The day finally came when I was to receive the call I had been waiting for from Mike Varney………….. On the demo one of the songs I wrote was a little more thrasher and had no lyrics and no title. We just referred to it simply as the instrumental. Mike Varney did not like the thrasher elements starting to develop in our music, however he was impressed enough with the rest of the songs we recorded with Dan Bryant to pick up the option for our second album and we were then put on the schedule at Prairie Sun studios in Cotati California to record the Second full length Hexx album!

All our persistence and hard work had paid off. There would be at least one more album from HEXX!!!!! Now with another full blown studio album to record soon, we still needed at least one more song. Bill Peterson had a riff and some lyrics with an unusual feel to it that we started messing around with. This developed into what would become Hell Riders. Dan Bryant tweaked the lyrics, I added some solo parts and now all the material was together for our new metal offering!

The odds are really against you on so many levels. Looking back we were pretty lucky to have one record out, let alone getting to do a follow up. I really think being able to get Dan Bryant on board at that time had a lot to do with us being able to continue and move forward after Manzo left the band.

We figured Manzo would be a hard act for anyone to follow so he would have to be really good! 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 ….. 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…. 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.

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. Okay, so right off we started to think about cover art.

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…. 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. My dear old dad was never quite up on current trends of music or fashion ……or anything really So after looking over all the album covers we went ahead and pitched the idea we were all talking about.

We wanted something darker and a little more disturbing than the No Escape cover, something to reflect what we thought was our newly evolving heavier and darker sound. We described to him Something like a real scary looking Voodoo witch doctor dancing around in a lit up hexagon with a bunch of bones and sculls and shrunken heads on sticks and stuff under a creepy moon lit sky in the jungle or something.

He seemed to like the idea and said he would come up with some preliminary sketches for us to look over in a few days or so. When we went back to look over the sketches it actually looked pretty cool, and much like we had envisioned…….. He had not put in any bones, skulls or shrunken heads on sticks that we requested. When I pointed this out to him he just kind of shrugged it off like it was no big deal, this was just a rough sketch kind of thing so we thought nothing more of it and told him to go ahead and start painting it.

A couple weeks went by and he called me to have everyone come by and take a look at the finished painting. We were all very excited and thrilled to see the next Hexx album cover art! 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. 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!!! We all knew that this artwork as it was, would not be scary or shocking enough to compete with all the other metal album art that was flooding the market at that time.

The way he said that to us let us know there was no hope of working with him further and talking him into adding the sculls and shrunken heads and things. We all just instinctively looked at each other and silently walked out of his house.

I was so embarrassed and angry with him that I did not speak to him for two or three years after that. Many years later he gave me the painting as what I perceived as a kind of peace offering. The painting was just as we had left it, except he painted in our logo on the lower left side. Okay……so ….. We had already had wasted too much time with that whole debacle and time was running out.

We had to find another artist fast and start all over from scratch! Luckily Mike Varney was working with an artist that had just done some work for some of his other bands. He put me in touch with Guy Atchison, I think he lived in Chicago. We had some phone conversations and I think it was his idea to change our original idea from a witch doctor dancing around outside at night, to more of a wizard in a cave conjuring up spirits and things.

I told him the story of what had happened with my Dad, and that we were in kind of a hurry. He asked me if we wanted him to paint our logo on as well and I told him…… whatever you do, do NOT paint the logo on the artwork!!!! I told him that we have an overlay we will use so we can decide the best placement for it on the artwork. There was nothing we could do about it. It was too late, we had run out of time and the painting had to go into production just the way it was.

Big weird looking red logo and all! We were all pretty bummed about it at the time but we just had to live with it. The artwork itself we thought was amazing!!! So we eventually got used to it. But now, almost 30 years later, Metal Blade records is re releasing No Escape and Under the Spell and we have corrected the problem by having the blue logo from No Escape put on the Under the Spell as well!

Now that the artwork was done we still had to take new band photos fast!