Cannibal Corpse
- Story by Kory Grow
- Photo by Will Hawkins
Cannibal Corpse have been to hell, heaven and back again in their quest to Kill… and now it’s time for the autopsy
When Cannibal Corpse frontman George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher got the news that his wife was pregnant, he couldn’t contain himself. It was mid-April 2004 and he was about to play a Dublin show in support of his band’s then-latest album, The Wretched Spawn. It was the fastest he’d ever gone through a show, but even by the time they finished their encore, their Ace Ventura showstopper “Hammer Smashed Face,” he still didn’t know what to feel. His wife was pregnant the entire nine months the band was touring, and it wasn’t until Thanksgiving that he would get home to Tampa, Florida to really figure out what it meant to be a dad. His daughter was born three weeks later, and that’s when the standard-issue questions began.
“What do you do for a living?” asked the obstetrician.
“I’m in a band,” said Fisher.
“Really, what kind of band?”
“Uh, well, we’re called Cannibal Corpse. We play death metal.”
“Huh. Are you going to let her listen to that?” she asked about his newborn daughter.
Fisher knew the answer to that before she’d even asked the question—something that didn’t even qualify as a question in his mind. Since replacing original Corpse singer Chris Barnes (now with Six Feet Under), he’d been singing with the band for close to a decade, and had his “Corpsegrinder” nickname even before the band had formed. And despite the governments of New Zealand and Korea banning the band from playing in their countries, the German government censoring their set lists and record stores refusing to carry the band’s albums, nothing would separate him, or his family, from the music he loved. This is, after all, one of the most successful bands in the genre’s history, having sold over one million cumulative albums worldwide and broken into Billboard’s Top 200.
Now, almost a year and a half later, as he looks back at the doctor’s interrogation, he can laugh as he watches his daughter—his far-from-wretched spawn—jump around and play to Judas Priest and Dio videos on TV. It’s in her blood, like the blood that is the subject matter of so many Cannibal Corpse songs past.
The band spent close to a year on the road and the better part of a year at home before working on their follow up, and tenth album, Kill. In that time, both Fisher and bassist Alex Webster spent time with their daughters, guitarist Jack Owen grew sick of playing death metal and quit the band, and guitarist Rob Barrett, who had played on two of the band’s mid-‘90s albums, returned to the fold. From the time the stork brought Fisher his first greeting card right up until they entered the studio to record what Webster considers their most brutal album yet, Cannibal Corpse has faced trials and tests that would cripple other bands, and they’ve resiliently pushed on at every turn.
The thrill ride began when Owen, recognizable as the only member with a shaved head, gave his two weeks notice in May 2004, less than a month after Fisher had got his newborn news. The band had booked some big gigs in Mexico and South America, and approached Owen about playing them, but he had other plans. His other band, the radio-ready hard rockers Adrift, had booked a conflicting show in Los Angeles that they considered important. This was all it took for the typically quiet-mannered six-stringer to speak up. Despite writing a batch of songs for The Wretched Spawn, Owen’s interest in the band, and death metal altogether, had been quietly waning as his want to get Adrift off the ground had reached its breaking point.
“It’s a big decision to quit a gig that you’ve been in for 15 or 16 years and is your livelihood,” says Corpse bassist Alex Webster, enjoying one of his few remaining days off at his Tampa home before going into rehearsals for the upcoming Kill tour. “We wanted to make sure he was sure about it, and…” Webster hesitates for a second, “he was sure.”
The bassist called up friends of the band, and within a few hours Hate Eternal, and onetime Morbid Angel, guitarist Erik Rutan, who would later produce Kill, had the perfect suggestion: founding Origin guitarist Jeremy Turner. Webster rang up Turner at his Kansas home and asked if he’d be down with learning 20 songs in two and a half weeks. As practically any death metal guitarist would, Turner said yes.
The band toured relentlessly, and the South American dates went off without a hitch. In fact, everything went smoothly until the Eastern European leg of the tour. While playing a show in Latvia, they mentioned to some friends that they would next be playing the former Soviet state Belarus. Their friends told them, “Belarus has gotten a lot worse since you played there in 1998; the government there is getting very strict, almost going back to Soviet times.” To this Webster says, scoffing, “We’re a bunch of American guys. To us, our idea of a conservative government is being careful driving through Alabama.”
In fact Belarus had gotten much worse. The country’s smaller than Kansas, and their president (who’s been in office since 1994, yikes!) is known abroad as “Europe’s last dictator.” He’s supported constricting limitations on freedom of speech, press, peaceful assembly and religion. Divide these by one controversial American band, carry the remainder and you get one band stuck on a bus, $1,900 in border-crossing fees and 1,000 fans sent home. But it didn’t stop there. The band was held at the border so long that they entirely missed their show in the Ukraine, sending home another 2,000 concertgoers. Although he can’t confirm it, Webster says most of this happened because the Belarusian promoter wasn’t entirely honest with his government about what kind of band they were. If they’d just been honest, the band might have avoided one of the shittiest experiences of their career, literally, when they were waiting to get into the Ukraine.
“They won’t let us use the toilet at the border,” says Webster. “Nobody’s able to take a shit unless they brave going to the woods. I was not about to walk to the woods with these guards standing around with guns that don’t speak English. They might think I’m making a run for it, and they can shoot people there, I think… It definitely turned into a mess.”
At this point, Cannibal Corpse should be no stranger to controversy, especially in Europe. When their second album, Butchered at Birth, was released in 1991, it was almost immediately banned in Germany. (Thankfully, Deutschlanders can now access eBay, wink wink.) In fact, the band, under contract for about eight years and running, is still prohibited from playing any material from their first three albums at German concerts. Fans have to buy the Live Cannibalism DVD, which some government department okayed as not obscene (go figure!), to hear any of those songs at all.
A short time after Fisher joined the band in 1996, while the band was supporting their album Vile, the group had to change their name for one show only in Germany just to play. Fisher came out and said, “We’re Vile from Mongolia,” taking the name of the record and the country the band thought was least likely to have a thriving death metal scene. Eventually Fisher blew their cover by gabbing about it to a German magazine, which no less tightened the reigns on their current problems.
All things considered, the band felt relieved just to be playing music at all at 1:30 in the morning in Serbia after the Belarus fiasco. It had taken them 26 hours of straight driving through the Ukraine, and when they had reached the border, only 15 minutes to get across. And this is a country NATO, of which the United States is a member, was bombing, briefly, less than ten years ago during the Kosovo war. Perhaps some nations appreciate a band like Cannibal Corpse differently than others. Are they marked for confusion?
“It seems like it happens to us more than anybody else,” says Fisher in his husky, death-addled voice (he’s never smoked), as he hangs out among his numerous videogames and action figures in the den of his Tampa residence. “The government’s doing what they think is best for them,” he says about the people of Belarus.
While the band’s artwork has always been the main culprit—all courtesy of A History of Violence illustrator Vincent Locke—the lyrics have always been second in line. From the overtly-misogynistic, stomach-churning Chris Barnes-penned ditties “Stripped, Raped and Strangled,” “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt” and the inimitable “Fucked with a Knife” to the almost Jane Austen-like “Decency Defied” (well maybe not Austen) on The Wretched Spawn, Cannibal Corpse has welcomed criticism and guffaws alike. When they started writing Kill, everything hit at once.
Webster was sitting around at home, practicing his bass in time signatures of five when he got the idea to write lyrics that had something to do with the number five as well. He came up with the title “Five Nails Through the Neck” before the lyrics, a process that’s pretty typical when writing a Cannibal Corpse song. After deciding not to write a song about clawing someone in the neck with fingernails, he decided to go for thick, eight-inch long steel nails being hammered into someone’s neck. And he started writing a story about a sadist who kidnaps people by knocking them out with chloroform, takes them into his basement and proceeds to hammer them to a table. It was the sickest thing he could think of. He ended up writing six other songs for the album and in true Cannibal fashion, they can be taken tragically or humorously.
“We definitely don’t want ‘em to be funny, intentionally,” says Webster. “How could you actually enjoy that sort of thing? We want it to be as serious as a good gore movie. What people need to understand is that you can create disturbing art without advocating what’s going on in it, and some people have a hard time understanding that with music. If you write a book about something awful that happened or you make a movie, people see it differently than music. We don’t. It’s horror stories.”
“We don’t write the lyrics just for shock value,” says Fisher, separating dread and comedy. “Sometimes I’ll read some lyrics and I’ll just laugh. I get the humor in it. It’s so over the top sometimes, you can’t help but chuckle at it. It is kind of funny that the movie the band is in is Ace Ventura, which is a laugh-fest, with a song called ‘Hammer Smashed Face.’ I remember I got up in the theater. I was like holy shit. For death metal to be in a movie, and for a movie that’d done so well, it was really a victory for death metal.”
In a strange turn of events, the former Corpse guitarist that was in the band when they shot Ace Ventura, and at this point a Malevolent Creation member, Rob Barrett called Webster to ask about Owen’s guitar slot being open, sometime around the Thanksgiving that they had returned from tour. Ironically, one of the reasons Barrett had left the band originally was because he was dissatisfied with Owen’s playing and songwriting. At the time, he also told Webster that he thought drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz’s drumming was too straightforward and not challenging enough. When they had drafted guitarist Pat O’Brien to replace Barrett, they had gotten a technical guitar player intent on writing challenging music. In turn, Mazurkiewicz had to compensate on drums, so the reasons Barrett had left in the first place had disappeared. But Webster also says, “I’m sure, to be completely honest, he wanted to be in a band where he could make a living doing it.”
Cannibal Corpse were then faced with the dilemma of picking either Barrett or Jeremy Turner, whom they had been touring with since Owen quit. It was a difficult decision, but as Webster says, “We can’t be Lynyrd Skynyrd and have three guitar players.” Since Turner still had a wife and a house in Kansas, they chose Barrett, already a Tampa resident. It probably also doesn’t hurt they he played guitar on two of their bestselling records. They put Barrett right to work and in the short time for preparation to record Kill, he had penned “Barbaric Bludgeonings.”
Although the band members are now in their mid to late 30s, they’ve managed to maintain their senses of humor over the past 17 years they’ve spent together (in some form or another). If anything, growing up means they’ve graduated from ‘70s Italian horror flicks like Zombi 2 and Suspiria to Japanese and even American horror movies such as Ôdishon and Saw, respectively, as influences. And while they’ll never compromise their gorrific agenda, they can now handle debacles like the Belarus incident and even their German issues with added ease. One thing’s for sure, though, fatherhood won’t change anything for the Corpsegrinder… almost.
“I’m never like, ‘No way, we can’t do that,’” he says about the lyrics his band gives him. “Even if it was something about killing babies, I would still understand it… I watched the news yesterday and in Brazil, some lady threw her baby in a trash bag in a river. But some guy saw it floating and fished it out and the baby’s still alive. The baby still lived. Fortunately, she didn’t [kill it]. That’s just appalling. But if they gave me lyrics like that, I wouldn’t even hesitate to sing them because I know what I’m about. I know who I am. I know who they are. I know there’s no horrible intent behind those lyrics.” Somewhere in his rant, as the clock crawled closer to 8:00, his wife beckoned him and he excused himself. When he returns, he says like any doting dad, “I had to say goodnight to the little stinkerbutt.” And then he continues.
“I still think they’re just stories like a novel. You open a CD up, you look through the lyrics and each one is a short story. Some of them are very graphic and disgusting and will offend a lot of people and probably do, but I think our fans understand.”
Between taking the time to tend to his little “stinkerbutt” and dissecting the lyrics he sings, it’s gotten a lot easier to understand.
