Cannibal Corpse
Vile (Metal Blade)
An interview with guitarist Jack Owen
by Scott Hefflon
You’re in the middle of a tour right now, where are you, and who’re you touring with?
We’re in Cinncinati tonight, at a club called Bogart’s. It’s a killer club. We’re doing a bunch of shows with local openers between the gap between the two legs of the tour with… Huh, there’s a good way to put it. There are two legs of the Anthrax/Misfits tour, so we’re filling in the time off with headlining dates.
Are you hooking up with some good local bands?
Yeah, most of it’s been pretty cool. We played with Morpheus Descend, they’ve been around for a while and we’re long-time friends. There’ve also been quite a few young bands we’ve never heard of before, so it’s been a real mixed bag. All the headlining shows are set up by local promoters, so we really don’t know who we’re playing with until we get there. It depends on where you are and what you expect, but that still has nothing to do with what we actually get. We were in Northampton, not too far from you, I think, on a Sunday night. We weren’t really expecting much because we thought it was mostly a hippy scene, but the place was raging. I think we played with Exhumed, Scattered Remnants, and Tyrant Trooper, they were really great. We also just played outside of Cleveland last night. I guess we really should have played in the city because it was kinda beat, and they put an ’80s metal band on before us. I guess it’s pretty hit and miss.
What’s it been like on tour with the Misfits and Anthrax?
The Misfits are the coolest guys. They’re something to see, man, it’s like a flashback. I never got a chance to see them ’cause the last time they played was in ’83, so this has been really cool. Anthrax still has that arena vibe to them, but whatever. Charlie (Benante, drummer) and Scott (Ian, guitar) are into us, like they’ll play “Hammer Smash Face” at sound check, or at least they’ll try, but the arena thing is still sticking to them.
I read the interview Marco (former publicist of Metal Blade) did in Ill Literature, so anything he didn’t mention, feel free to bring up.
Well, he was pretty thorough…
How about some general info, seeing as how I’ve never interviewed you before; what the band name means, how long you’ve been out, and all that.
We’ve been together since ’88, and put out five full-lengths and an EP. The name was a good two word thing, both starting with the letter C. When we started the band, we sat down and figured out what we wanted the whole concept of the band to be. We were all really into horror movies, Venom, and Slayer. We thought up the song titles and even what we wanted out of the artwork.
You’ve used the same artist for all your albums, right?
Yeah, Vincent Locke, from Michigan. He did Dead World comic for a while, I think he’s working on Sandman now. So he’s steppin’ up.
Didn’t you change your logo?
Yeah, Chris Barnes drew our original logo. When it came down to legal matters, he wanted money for us to use his logo. So we ditched it, and Metal Blade made up the new one. The old logo was primitive and hand-drawn, this one is computer generated.
So when did you finally know it was time to part ways with Chris?
We were in the studio, with all the music done, and Chris started laying down the vocal tracks. We didn’t like the way it was going right off the bat, but we let him keep going. He got about seven songs done, and we were more fed up than we’d been at the start. We asked him to change some stuff, and of course he didn’t want to.
What didn’t you like about the vocals he was doing?
Well, he never really had any musical talent to begin with, so as far as arranging lyrics for a song, he really didn’t have much of a clue what was going on. He wasn’t prepared at all for this album, either. I’m not sure if Six Feet Under took away some of his creativity, or what happened. There was a big blow up in the studio; he was too stubborn to change anything, and things just came to a head. We’ve had personal problems since ’89 or ’90, with all sorts of band decisions he made without telling us. It was a sign before the album even came out, so we finally made the decision to fire him. Our number one choice of replacements was George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher, and that’s who we have singing for us now.
Did Cannibal Corpse used to play with George’s last band, Monstrosity?
Well, we’ve been friends with them for years, and we probably played with them at some point. They put out a killer album called Imperial Doom on Nuclear Blast in, like, 1990. They never had a steady line-up, and they weren’t doing anything at the time of our problems with Chris, so we called up George, flew him down to the studio, and we were all ready to go. We’d re-written the lyrics to a bunch of songs after we kicked out Chris…
Wasn’t it a pretty mutual kick-out? Chris had Six Feet Under, and you wanted him out?
Yeah, I guess. He really didn’t seem to give too much of a shit. He wanted three grand for the logo, and we offered him 38¢. That was pretty much the end of it.
Was George learning the songs in the studio as you guys wrote the lyrics?
Yeah, he was doing, like, two to three songs a week. It seemed like it took forever, but it was worth it. He had the lyric sheets in front of him, kinda pieced together. Sometimes we didn’t have lyrics for a specific part, George would put in a big scream, the sound of a dude getting tortured, getting his ‘nads ripped off. We were like, “Damn, we need more of those!” We just let him go to town on a lot of the songs.
Are your songs based on true stories from grisly murders in the newspaper, or are your lyrics purely fictitious?
Purely fictitious. The lyrics should match the horror and gore of the music. Each song has its own identity that way. The lyrics are like scripts to a horror movie.
How did you guys hook up with the Ace Ventura live appearance?
Jim Carrey is a fan of us, Napalm Death, and Deicide. He had his people call our people. The kids that were in the movie were kids that came out to see us anyway. They got paid $40 a day to slam while we lip-synched. All we had was this little click-track. They had to mute the music so they could do the dialog, and everyone had to slam quietly. You can hear a bit of the high-hat come through, and a lot of feet stomping.
That must have been a total trip.
Yeah, you never look at movie the same way again. Afterwards, you notice overdubs, bad cuts, and bad edits. That scene took us two days. There was a make-up lady on stage half the time patting us down because we were sweating too much. “You can’t have a glossy forehead!” And she’d come out with a towel.
