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Deicide
- Story by J. Bennett
- Photo by Neil Visel
Death metal legend. Christ hater. Squirrel killer. Deicide's Glen Benton is a man for all seasons.
Margaret More: Father, that man’s bad.
Sir Thomas More: There’s no law against that.
William Roper: There is: God’s law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.
An exchange from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons
It’s 11 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday and Glen Benton is telling us which titty bars to go to if we want to get handjobs. “Just tell them who you’re with and they’ll be fighting to jack you off,” he insists. “I can’t go in there—they’d tear my balls off.”
Welcome to fucking Florida.
Potential hand-shandies notwithstanding, Decibel has traveled to Tampa for one of the very few reasons that anyone who lives in California might descend upon this sweltering hellhole on the Sunshine State’s west coast: death metal. In fact, we’re at ground zero for every Floridian death metal benchmark that ever left its mark on a bench. Morrisound Studios, nestled all by its lonesome in a quaint wooded area on a strip otherwise festooned with strip joints, jack shacks, shitty motels and drive-thru liquor stores, has been synonymous with death metal since the genre’s inception in the late ’80s. The names that hallowed these halls have passed into legend like ancient conquerors: Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Death, Obituary, Deicide. Most of them worked with Scott Burns, an engineer and producer who cemented his reputation on the strength of albums like Tomb of the Mutilated, Leprosy, Slowly We Rot and Deicide. But it’s not like the good folks at Morrisound ever confined their expertise to blast beats, cookie monsters and combinations thereof. Ozzy, Public Enemy and Marilyn Manson (you can take the boy out of Florida…) have done business here. Hulk Hogan, knowing best, recorded Hulk Rules—his seminal 1995 album with the Wrestling Boot Band—at this very location. Even General Norman Schwarzkopf caught the death-buzz: After stomping the shit out of the I-rackees in the first Gulf War, Stormin’ Norman recorded the audio version of his 1992 autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, at Morrisound.
Today, though, Five-Star Norm is probably polishing his medals and swearing at the television in some golf clubhouse across town. Meanwhile, Glen Benton is recording the final vocal tracks for Deicide’s ninth album, Till Death Do Us Part. Deicide’s bassist/vocalist, mouthpiece and all-around ringleader is also in the throes of his second divorce, the legal proceedings of which began in earnest when we interviewed him for the April 2006 issue—an interview that ended abruptly when the sheriff’s department arrived at his house to deliver a restraining order from Benton’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. Like any sensitive artist-type, Benton is expressing his real-world frustrations through his lyrics. “You’ve heard of a love story? Well, this is a hate story,” he says, before ticking off a list of new song titles that includes “Not as Long as We Both Shall Live,” “Severed Ties” and “Whore in the Halls of Stone.”
Other than the complete and utter lack of titular subtlety, this is clearly not the usual Benton fare. The dude who wrote such gospel-friendly jingles as “Kill the Christian” (for 1995’s Once Upon the Cross), “Death to Jesus” (for 2006’s The Stench of Redemption) and “Satan Spawn, the Caco-Daemon” (for 1992’s Legion) isn’t exactly known for being emo. “All my songs have double meanings,” he explains, “I like to compare myself to Willie Nelson, but of the metal world. I take all the tribulations and pains, all that personal strife and shit, for my writing. I mean, I wrote ‘Serpents of the Light’ [the title track from Deicide’s 1997 album] about a friend of mine that died.”
Benton has sung this Willie Nelson tune before—to us, even, back in that 2006 interview. Thing is, Willie Nelson doesn’t have an inverted cross burned into his forehead. Nor did the Red Headed Stranger announce that he would kill himself at age 33. Nor was Ol’ Willie systematically demonized by batshit Christian groups or overzealous animal-rights activists. As far as we know, none of Nelson’s guitar players were busted for steroid possession. Willie did marry five times, though—and Benton is apparently well on his way to number three. “I’m already engaged again,” he admits with a laugh. (Benton laughs a lot, by the way.) “Next to my kids and my career, she’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I finally found someone that can deal with me. They say the third time’s the charm, you know?”
TALES FROM THE BENTON FILE
Satan rules this world—just like the song says. How I know it in my life is things like this: I call the phone company to get my number changed and the woman is like, “OK, get a pen—here’s your new number.” I’m writing it down and the last three numbers are 666. You know what I mean? That’s how my life is. Everything rolls in that way and I just go with it.
—Glen Benton, January 23, 2008
If Morrisound enjoys a certain mythical status among death metal fanatics (and it does), Glen Benton has an entire codified mythology behind him—or at his disposal, as the case may be—complete with gods and demigods and calls to adventure and the crossing of thresholds and all that other Joseph Campbell shit. Tales from the Benton File, some of which remain nebulous in origin, seem to dominate and define his career. The first, chronologically speaking, is tame compared to what would transpire and/or allegedly transpire later. It took place in 1989, before the members of Amon—Benton, drummer Steve Asheim, and guitarist brothers Brian and Eric Hoffman—changed their band’s name to Deicide. As the story goes (we read about it in Choosing Death), Roadrunner Records’ Senior VP of A&R Monte Conner was on the phone in his New York City office when Benton busted in, threw a demo tape (recorded at Morrisound by Scott Burns, obviously) on Conner’s desk and said, “Sign us, you fucking asshole!”
Benton laughs when we repeat the tale back to him. “Me and my first wife were visiting family up in Buffalo and we went over to the city with a copy of the demo. Scott Burns had already sent it to Monte, though, and it was actually sitting on his desk. So I walked in and said, ‘I’m Glen Benton—here’s another tape. Don’t be an asshole—sign us.’ I wasn’t even back in Buffalo yet when they called with the contract offer. But Monte was a little shaken, man. I was a little scarier back then. The look on his face was like, ‘Security!’”
Conner’s only condition was that the band name had to go. “King Diamond had the record ‘Them,’ at the time,” Conner points out. “A big part of the concept behind that record was this house, which was called Amon. So of course, me working at Roadrunner, I had the name Amon fresh in my head and associated it with King Diamond. And I didn’t particularly think it was a cool-sounding name. And King Diamond was a pretty big deal back then, so I told them to change it. And I think we came up with what was a much better sounding name than Amon, even though I’m sure Amon would’ve been just fine.”
Back then, Benton and his boys were slugging it out in sweaty shitholes at the advent of Florida’s death metal explosion. Rocking metallic hockey-pad armor (go to YouTube and type in Amon/Deicide to see a poignant 1988 performance clip from Tampa cable access), they’d orchestrate live bloodbaths for bewildered and horrified crowds. Benton recalls Amon’s first show, at a place called the Sunset Club just up the street from Morrisound. It was 1987; today the place is a gym. “We did a meat show,” he laughs, “I took a mannequin and stuffed it full of pig guts and shit like that. It was a little boy mannequin, and I remember this one chick screaming as a couple of my buddies were beating it up with pool cues. Guts were flying everywhere and she was on the side of the stage screaming bloody murder: ‘Stop it! You’re fuckin’ killin’ him!’ The Hillsborough Sheriff’s Department showed up the next day to take samples of the meat to see if it was human. I guess somebody called it in and said someone was killed.”
Malevolent Creation guitarist Phil Fasciana attended another early Amon show shortly after he moved from Buffalo to Fort Lauderdale. “I think it was 1988,” he recalls, “Check out this show: I drove up to Tampa to see Morbid Angel, Atheist, Obituary and Nocturnus. Amon were the first band, and they were wearing all the armor and shit. It was like watching Slayer intensified a hundred times. It was at this airplane hangar and the stage was like 15 feet high. I remember Scott Burns was actually doing sound that night. I guess Amon had hollowed out a mannequin and filled it with fuckin’ blood and guts from a butcher shop… and then they threw the fuckin’ thing on the floor. Morbid Angel had these pit bulls with them back then and they were just tearing the meat up. It was a really weird scene, man. There was blood and meat everywhere. I was like, ‘Fuck, man—Florida rules!’”
On November 25th, 1992, Deicide were scheduled to play their first show in Sweden, at a Stockholm youth club that was run by the YMCA. Insision bassist Daniel Ekeroth was there. “The scene was excited about this concert, since Deicide was definitely the most controversial—and probably one of the best—death metal groups in the world at the moment,” Ekeroth writes in his recently published book, Swedish Death Metal. “The bill was impressive. Apart from Deicide, it featured hyped Dutch band Gorefest, the brutal Germans Atrocity along with Swedish bands Therion and Furbowl… It should have been the most intense concert of the year.” Gorefest was main support that night. “During the middle of their set, a loud bang was heard,” Ekeroth says, “but everybody assumed it was part of the show, so Gorefest finished their set as if nothing happened. We were soon to find out that this was the beginning of the end of the evening.”
As it turns out, someone had set off a bomb. To this day, no one knows who the culprit was, but Ekeroth echoes many others in assuming that “animal rights activists,” incensed by comments Benton had allegedly made in an interview (of unknown origin but legitimate by all accounts) in which the frontman said he liked to “torture animals,” got a case of jihad fever. After a lengthy delay, Deicide were apparently allowed onstage (if only to avoid a riot, according to Ekeroth) and blasted through a few songs in the now fully-lit venue before being ordered off again. “The night was a terrible mess,” promoter Jörgen Sigfridsson recalls in Swedish Death Metal. “Deicide had gotten a lot of media coverage before that gig due to their satanic image and especially Glen Benton’s comments about animal sacrifice. The entire day, two [female] animal rights’ activists kept on calling, wanting Benton on the phone to talk some ‘sense’ into him. I refused. Eventually, Benton got fed up with these calls and grabbed the phone out of my hand. Then he started telling these two young blonde girls that he was going to ‘put his big satanic cock up their tiny asses’ and stuff like that. They got absolutely insane, but he just smiled and hung up.”
Benton smiles again when we bring up The Stockholm Incident. “Come on, man—I’ve caused more damage with a fart than that bomb did. I’ve wreaked more havoc kicking over a coffee table. It was really nothing. It was just sensationalism on the media’s behalf.”
These “animal rights activists”—an apparently amorphous group that has never been, to our knowledge, specifically or substantively identified by anyone—have a history with Benton. Cue up The Squirrel Incident, otherwise known as The One That Everyone Even Vaguely Familiar With Deicide Has Heard A Thousand Times But That Haunts Benton To This Day. At one point early on in Deicide’s career (again, not even Benton is quite sure when exactly this happened), while Roadrunner was just beginning to milk the seemingly bottomless teat of Benton’s antichrist superstar image, British flavor-of-the-minute pop/rock weekly NME sent a pair of journalists to Benton’s parents’ house to do an interview and photo shoot. Unbeknownst to the weepy limey rock journos, the Bentons had a family of squirrels living in the attic and chewing the wires to the air-conditioning unit. In the weeks before the journalists arrived, Benton had managed to kill all but one. During the interview, the outlaw squirrel appeared on a clothesline in the backyard. Benton grabbed his pellet gun and shot it. The NME dudes promptly shit themselves, and Benton has been fielding questions about it ever since. We even feel compelled to apologize when we bring it up for what must be the millionth time. “That was ridiculous,” he sighs, “It was either one of the traps got him and he died in the attic, or I took him out. I was young, and I should’ve waited, but he was up there chewing the electrical conduit and eating the insulation lines on the air conditioner, so what do you do, you know? Let the thing go back up there and breed another 20 or 30 squirrels up in the attic? So it was done out of sheer necessity—not sensationalism. It’s like having rats, man—nobody makes a big deal about killing a rat or a mouse in a trap, but because I used a pellet gun, they made a big deal out of it. Once again, media sensationalism.”
And Benton should know: Sensationalism is essentially his stock in trade. In the early ’90s, he became an occasional guest on loudmouth radio evangelist and professional Satan-chaser Bob Larson’s weekday call-in show, Talk Back. (Morbid Angel guitarist Trey Azagthoth and NON mastermind Boyd Rice also appeared on Talk Back over the years.) According to Benton’s Wikipedia entry—and here’s where Wikipedia’s true value comes into focus, because for every spurious bit of information posted on the site, you can at least rest assured that every spurious bit of information will be posted on the site—he once returned the show’s release waivers with a scab he had picked off his forehead after re-applying the inverted cross. Unsurprisingly, Benton laughs at this suggestion, too. “Bob Larson is a carny, man. I called Bob up to use some excerpts from the radio show on [2001’s In Torment in Hell] CD and he was like, ‘Sure!’ He’s all about making money. But no—I never mailed Bob a scab.”
We could go on forever here, but thankfully Benton starts separating fact from fiction as we flip diligently through the various Incidents. What about the one about him having beef with King Diamond? “I’ve never had a problem with King Diamond,” Benton insists. “I guess Eric got in a confrontation with him on an airplane, poked him in the chest and told him he was gonna kick his ass. I have no idea why.”
Then there was Benton’s pronouncement that he planned to kill himself at age 33, a poetically significant age, given that Jesus of Nazareth was supposedly 33 at the time of his death. The idea that Benton might kill himself stemmed from the song “Sacrificial Suicide” on the band’s self-titled debut (sample lyric: I must die, in my wake, Seventh Gate, Satan / Suicide—end my life, I must die—Satan). When asked about the song in an interview—with England’s RAW magazine, as Benton recalls, though he can’t remember when (the magazine went tits up in 1991, so the interview was likely in promotion of the band’s debut)—he announced that he was totally serious. And yet Benton turned 33 in the year 2000. Since then, he has repeatedly explained that he was drunk during the RAW interview. “Every time I say something, there’s someone going, ‘You just contradicted yourself!’ But you know what?”—Benton extends his middle finger—“I don’t give a fuck anymore. Take me or leave me.”
Roadrunner Records took him. “The whole thing about how he was gonna kill himself at 33? I can’t tell you how much the press talked about it before the fact and how much they still talk about it to this day,” Conner enthuses. “We still get mileage from that one. But I don’t think it was a PR stunt—I think when he said it, he believed it. And I mean, this is a guy who burned a cross into his forehead—would you put it past him? I didn’t.”
CRUCIFIXATION
Interviewer: What’s so bad about God?
Glen Benton: Well, let me ask you: What’s so good about God?
—An exchange from a 1995 interview with The Onion
Now that we’ve slogged through all the Incidents in Benton’s File, our man is on a roll.
“People listen to the rumor mill and think I’m an asshole,” he says, “But then they hang out and meet me and they realize that this is just a gig—and that’s all it’s ever been. A lot of it is record company hype. Record companies love to hype shit up to sell records. Look, I’m the first one to admit that I was an evil little bastard when I was young, but luckily, the only thing I have to live with out of that experience is the crucifix burned into my forehead.”
The first time he did it, he was 23 years old. With a silver chapel cross, a branding iron and a propane torch. He’s redone it several times since then, just to get it to take. He was baptized Catholic, he explains, and then points to his forehead. “I used to tell people that I did this to burn it out. That was the story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.”
Look at it closely enough—I mean really zoom in and examine the fucker—and you’ll see that it’s a little bit crooked. In older photos it’s far more prominent than it is in more recent ones, but in person, without the glare of the flashbulb? Honestly? The upside-down cross seared into Benton’s dome is more of a nondescript indentation than anything you could readily identify as a radical (and permanent) anti-Christian statement. If you didn’t know who he was and he told you he’d gone through the windshield in a car accident 20 years ago, you’d believe him.
Fasciana actually saw Benton do it once, at the 1992 Milwaukee Metal Fest. “I’ll never forget it,” the Malevolent Creation guitarist says with lingering disbelief. “We were in a hotel room smoking some weed. Someone pulled out a pair of hemostats to hold the joint, and he grabbed ’em and torched them up with a little acetylene tank, formed a cross and put it right into his forehead. We were all shocked. It was like, ‘Whoa—fuck!’ I could see the smoke coming off his forehead. As it melted into his head, our bassist Jason Blachowicz was so intrigued by it that he went and pulled it out. Glen’s skin kinda came off and he was like, ‘Aw, you asshole! What the fuck did you do that for? You screwed it up!’ So he did it again.
“We went barhopping that night, and people everywhere were just fucking terrified of him,” Fasciana continues. “It was fucking hilarious. A bunch of Christian people were outside the hotel protesting all the Satanic bands at the festival, but they were mostly there to protest Deicide and Glen Benton. When we went up to them, Glen was wearing his Jesus t-shirt with the big circle and the slash through it. They were in shock—I don’t think they imagined they would come face to face with him. They were carrying this box of bibles, and he went over and smashed it out of their hands. The bibles went flying everywhere and the protesters just scattered like mice. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
WHEN SATAN CASHED IN HIS CHIPS
Yeah, Benton may have to field questions about this kind of shit for the rest of his life, but he’ll doing it while laughing all the way to the bank. “They were a label’s wet dream,” Conner says, “Between the inverted cross and the animal rights activists, the press ate that stuff up.”
As of this writing, Deicide have sold more records than every death metal band that isn’t named Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel. According to SoundScan figures provided by Conner, Deicide have shifted nearly 600,000 records in the U.S. alone. At roughly 116,000 units moved, the band’s self-titled 1990 debut is generally believed to be one of the best-selling death metal albums of all time. (Conner suggests one could easily add another 25,000 to this figure because the album was released nearly 14 months before the SoundScan era began.)
Whereas most bands hit the road to make money, Benton hasn’t played a live show in over a year. In fact, the current members of Deicide—Asheim, Obituary guitarist Ralph Santolla and ex-Cannibal Corpse guitarist Jack Owen—toured Europe in early 2007 without him. Seth Van De Loo, drummer for Dutch death dealers Severe Torture, filled in on vocals. Benton says he couldn’t go because of the custody battle he was in with his ex-wife over his now six-year-old son. Not that he seems particularly broken up about missing the shows. “I have no plans to tour anymore,” he says, “I don’t miss the headaches, I don’t miss the traveling; I don’t miss any of it. I make a pretty good living just sitting around collecting royalties and doing studio work, you know?”
Which is kind of inexplicable when you do the math. 600,000 is an impressive number of records for a death metal band to sell, but when you consider the fact that they were released over a 16-year period, the money starts to get thin. Then again, Benton himself admitted in our 2006 interview that the Hoffman brothers left Deicide in late 2004 because of a dispute over royalties and publishing. [Eric Hoffman, who was busted for steroid possession in Buffalo in 2003, told Decibel that he and his brother are “currently in litigation” with Benton and Asheim, but declined to comment for this article.] “There were always money issues within that band,” Conner says. “Plus, I think Eric and Glen just didn’t like each other. Early on, the band seemed so unstable because Eric and Glen fought all the time. I remember telling people at the label that I didn’t think the band was gonna last long because there was always so much drama. Every time they recorded a new album, I was amazed. It was like, ‘Wow—I can’t believe these guys are holding it together.’”
When Till Death Do Us Part is finished and released in late April, Benton says, his current contract with Earache Records will be up. “I’m pretty much retired now. As far as the world’s concerned and you’re concerned and anybody else is concerned, I’m retired.”
We ask him what he plans to do in his retirement. “I’m gonna barbecue a lot, but other than that, it’s up in the air. I might start my own business; I might do a solo project. We’ll see what happens. My only concern right now is the safety and well-being of my son and myself.”
Clearly, the Glen Benton of 2008 is a very different man than the one who burned that cross into his forehead 17 years ago. When you have a six-year-old son to look after, publicly hating God becomes less of a priority. “Look, man, I do what I do, and I’ve done what I’ve done,” he offers. “I’ve had to defend myself a lot, but just like any other writer or movie-maker, I create an image. On a personal level, I’m just like everyone else. I’m gonna leave here today, I’m gonna go wait for my son at the school bus, pick him up, take him home, make him a snack, put some cartoons on for him, make dinner and hang out, you know? Just like everybody else. Tomorrow he goes to soccer practice and then on Saturday he has a game and I’ll take him to that.”
And then: “I’m a soccer dad.”
Which is pretty much when our conversation turns into the complete opposite of every interview Glen Benton has ever done.
BENTON SPEAKS
Do you have much interaction with the other parents at your son’s school?
Well, I’m good friends with a lot of the parents out at the soccer field. They all pretty much know who I am and what I do for a living.
Was your image something you had to overcome in dealing with them? I mean, let’s face it—you’re walking around with an inverted cross burned into your forehead.
Not to get into my [divorce] case too much, but a guardian ad litem was appointed to evaluate both parties psychologically and everything else, and I got the guardian ad litem’s recommendation for custody. But as far as my cross, it’s like my father used to say: “I want you to learn from my mistakes so you don’t make those mistakes when you grow up.” We all do stupid shit when we’re kids, and what I did was probably one of the stupidest things you could probably do. And it’s something you have to live with for the rest of your life. But most of the time, I usually wear a hat wherever I go.
So you regret doing the cross?
Yeah. Now, at 40 years old, yeah—because I have to walk around with it all the time. But if I had it to do over again, I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done it. Is it a regret? Nah. It’s something I live with, and most of the people in my life don’t even see it. Like I said, for me to pass the psychological evaluation and everything else… that says a lot, you know what I mean?
It sounds like maybe you’ve mellowed out over the years.
It’s not mellowing out, man—it’s called growing up. [Laughs] When I was younger, just like a lot of these Norwegian [black metal] kids, I did some stupid shit. Those kids, half of ’em are in jail and the other half are dead. I’m just lucky I came out of it alive. People take that stuff a little too seriously. I mean, do I have an anti-religious view of the world? Yeah, and I always will, because religion has never done anything except create chaos. So I speak out against it. It doesn’t make me a bad person because I don’t believe in that shit.
Do you still tell people you’re a Satanist?
I tell people I’m a Satanist as Christians define it. To them, I guess I’d be considered one. But I consider myself an anti-religious person. I live my life like this: You do good things, good things come. You do bad things, bad things come. If you think positive, positive things come; if you think negative, negative things come. I don’t sit there and pray to anybody. It’s more like Crowley-ism, I guess.
But no ceremonies or rituals or anything like that?
No. When I was a kid, I was into that kind of stuff, but it’s basically retarded when you think about it—everybody standing around lighting candles and waiting for the devil to jump out of a cake. I don’t know, man—I’ve seen it all, I’ve done it all. Once you’ve done that, all you can do is make your own evaluation and do what’s best for you. That’s pretty much where I’m at.
See, that just sounds like common sense to me.
It is common sense. [Laughs] That’s my religion—common sense. Put that down: My religion is common sense. You know, there’s a lot of stupidity in the world, and that’s one thing I don’t miss about touring—the stupidity that comes out of people is really ridiculous. I’ve been around the world more times than most, and I’ve seen it everywhere.
What kind of stupidity—drunken idiots?
Drunken idiots, the stupid shit they say, the poverty of the world. It really bothers me. I hate being exposed to human suffering. I don’t miss going to Brazil and seeing how people there suffer, living in slums and shit like that. It doesn’t appeal to me. I can live the rest of my life happily not having to see it. Life’s simpler now, and I’m happier. I’d be just as happy turning wrenches at Harley-Davidson. I don’t need to live on a bus with a bunch of other dudes, with the drugs and the alcohol—I don’t want nothing to do with any of it.
Have you ever written anything just to press a button?
[Laughs] That’s all I do, man. I’m the master of button-pushing. That’s what I am. Do I do things to shock people? Yeah. Do I say things to shock people? Yeah. I’ve always been about that, and I get off on it. When I was a little kid, I never got enough attention at home, so I did things to get attention. I like to get a rise out of people. When I pull up to a light on my Harley, all you hear is door locks. So I do a lot of shit just to get attention, and I’ve made a pretty good career out of it. If there’s somebody upstairs pulling the strings, so be it. But to this day, I’ve never abandoned what I’ve started, and that’s where the success comes from. You’ll never get a straight answer out of me, though, because I say what I say to protect myself and my kid. But I’m just like you and everyone in this studio today. I’m just trying to make my way through this world and get on to a better place.
