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| Conrad Lant a.k.a Cronos |
Anyway, "Witching Hour" is the first Venom song I ever heard. Back in 1989 or so, I was really into Exodus after having seen them play on the Headbanger's Ball Live Tour. For a while there, I was listening to their Fabulous Disaster album non-stop...even at school between classes – until my ridiculous homeroom teacher made a big deal about me bringing my Walkman to school (Yeah, thanks a lot, loser...It's a good thing I'm not the bitter type). One day, a guy from my English class (or maybe it was called American Lit that year) told me he had just gotten a hold of the Combat Tour Live: Ultimate Revenge home video and that it had about 4 Exodus performances on it (from a Paul Baloff-era show at the old Studio 54). Also included on the video were performances by Slayer and by Venom. I knew Venom by their name only and I wasn't really too psyched about seeing or hearing them, but when the guy loaned me the video, he encouraged me to check them out. Going on 20 years later, I still have my dubbed copy of Ultimate Revenge. In fact, I just watched it again last week.
So, the first time I watched Ultimate Revenge, I had no idea what I was in for with Venom. After a few Exodus cuts and a Slayer performance, they were up next. The first of 2 Venom cuts was a lip-synced video for "Witching Hour." I think it was a single version of the song, because it's just a little bit different from the Welcome to Hell LP version (although the LP version is just as good). I hesitate to be so clichéd to say that I was "blown away," but it might just be the most apt description in retrospect. Their intensity and stage presence was just so HUGE and leading the way was the ugly, growling Cronos. Something about the way the video was shot made Cronos look larger than life, menacing and incredibly evil. There he was, singing about all kinds of nasty things and in between verses, he was dancing around like some kind of demon and it was just sooo awesome. My favorite shot from the video is of Cronos pounding his bass yelling "Witching hour!" for the last time before Mantas starts tearing up the amplifiers behind them. Venom is still a mainstay in my CD collection after all these years, but I don't listen to them when the kids are around. When I'm all alone, I do like rattling the windows with the best of their old stuff and the new stuff too. Thomai bought me the MMV box set for Christmas a couple of years ago...The right Christmas gift for so many reasons. Hail Venom!
The video for "Witching Hour" is available on YouTube, but I wouldn't recommend it if you're easily offended.
14: "Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix (from the 1967 album Axis: Bold as Love) lyrics
I wasn't a Hendrix fan before I met Thomai. In fact I probably only knew a few of his songs when I first met Thomai in 1993. One of our first really lengthy conversations was on a day in which I found her trying to write the lyrics to the Hendrix song "Fire" in one of her school notebooks. She told me she really liked the song and that she wanted to learn the lyrics so she could sing along when she heard it on the radio. It would become a running joke between us that despite her best efforts, she could never really get the lyrics down. I had heard Skid Row's cover of "Little Wing" on their 1992 EP of covers B-Side Ourselves and I really liked it. I think Thomai must have had a CD anthology of Hendrix songs (or maybe I bought one after I found out that she liked him) and while we were dating, "Little Wing" became "our song." It was the song for our first dance at our wedding.
...and yes, dear...I wrote three times as much about Venom as I did about "our song."
13: "Living After Midnight" by Judas Priest (from the 1980 album British Steel) lyrics
Living After Midnight from the Judas Priest LP British Steel |
12: "It's My Life" by Kiss (from the 2001 Box Set) lyrics
When The Box Set was released in 2001, it was quite a big event for me. Kiss has been my favorite band since I accidentally discovered them in 1983 or 1984. Long before we had a VCR, my mom would occasionally "record" television shows using an audio cassette recorder. She would put the tape recorder up next to the speaker of the television to capture the audio from shows like "Mork and Mindy" and I would listen to the shows again and again. One time, she had recorded a strange special about the history of music. The show featured an actor playing the part of Thomas Edison and he was introduced to a string of musical acts from the 1950's up to the present day (which I guess would have been 1978 or so, judging from the "current" acts that were profiled...One of them was Sha-Na-Na). My mom only taped a handful of the acts off the show and very little of the dialogue. It was a really odd collection of acts on the tape, including the Mills Brothers performing "Hold That Tiger Rag" and Don McLean performing "American Pie." At the very end of the tape was a medley of Kiss performances (much later I found out that the medley was drawn from an Alive II promotional package. You can find it on a lot of bootleg collections of Kiss material). So, as it happened one day in '83 or '84, I was listening to the cassette in my bedroom and when I got to the Kiss medley (Detroit Rock City/Rockin' in the USA/Love Gun/Shout it Out Loud), I was totally and completely hooked. By a strange coincidence, around that time I had also come upon an advertisement for the Kiss solo albums in an old issue of Marvel's John Carter, Warlord of Mars, so I spent a lot of time listening to that medley and drawing their faces over and over again. Just a few years earlier, I had been scared to death of Kiss!
"It's My Life" is something of an out-take from the Psycho Circus sessions. It's a great song for a lot of reasons, but mainly because the lead vocals are shared by Gene and, of course, Ace Frehley. As an Ace fan, this is a big deal to me. Ace does a great job on the second verse and his solo is full of vintage stuff – material that Bruce Kulick one referred to as "Aceisms." I used to crank this song a lot on the weekends and I played it so often that K. learned the chorus at a very young age. One day, Thomai said to me: "The day K. says those words to you for real, you'll be crying." She's probably right.
11: "Ballad of Dwight Fry/With Teeth" by Melvins (from the 1991 album Lysol) lyrics pt.1 | lyrics pt. 2
I think I bought Lysol in 1994 or 1995, more or less based solely on the two-sentence description I had read in a C/Z Records flyer. I had heard The Melvins before and I was something of a fan, but I was truly unprepared for what I would experience when I listened to Lysol. One of the most striking things about the CD packaging is the cover image, which is based on Dalin's remarkable sculpture "Appeal to the Great Spirit." The CD was just over 30 minutes and it was only one track (I was convinced there was something wrong with the disc the first time I noticed this). There was no track listing on the packaging and despite the fact that I had purchased a new copy of the CD – shrink-wrapped and all – the album title "Lysol" had been blacked out with magic marker (I'd get the scoop on this sometime later). It was really a weird package, for sure. Anyway, I remember that day well, because I put it in the CD player and turned it on for a quick listen...and then 30 minutes later, I really couldn't believe what I had heard. The whole thing was just incredible. When you get down to it, I suppose I could have just claimed the whole album as a "favorite song" if I wanted to, seeing as how it's just one big continuous track. But there are six distinct cuts and these days the names of the cuts are well known to fans."Ballad of Dwight Fry" is actually an Alice Cooper cover and I am glad to have squeezed an Alice song in on this list, even if it's not his original version (Check out Alice performing the song live at Montreux in 2004). "Ballad" is the fifth "song" on Lysol and it's something of the climax of this quasi-concept album. The Melvins truly make this song their own, with slow, sludgy vocals and a slow, pounding tempo. It's my favorite Alice song, too, but I have to give a nod to "Go to Hell" and "Teenage Lament '74" as well. If "Ballad is the climax, then "With Teeth" is surely the denouement of this tour de force. With tremendous thundering riffs and percussion and lyrics that are virtually incomprehensible, the song is a undoubtedly a Melvins classic. If you've never, ever heard Lysol, you're really, really missing out on an amazing experience.
