This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with vocalist/drummer King Fowley by telephone on March 22, 2010.

DECEASED is a name that commands respect from any true Metalhead - they are a band that has given their all for the last 25+ years with passion and no compromise or bullshit. Whether they play for big crowds or just for a few diehards, they give it their best and remain grateful for the support their fans show. With their first new album in six years, Surreal Overdose, being released later this year, you can bet that DECEASED are going to make an impact in 2011.

Phil: First of all, tell us about the upcoming album, Surreal Overdose.

King Fowley: Well, it's a long time in the making, the longest we've ever gone between records. I guess the last one was recorded in November 2004 and here it is March 2011, so it's been awhile. A lot of changes since then which kind of built up to it all. We actually started writing the album as far back as 2005 when we finished the last one, but one of our main guitar players, Mark Adams, he retired from playing music and it took awhile to get all that going again and we found a new guitar player in an old friend of ours named Shane Fuegel and he's really helped out a lot with the album. Mike Smith has always, the other guitar player, he stopped playing live in 2006 and he's still just a studio guy. He basically writes the riff and me and him get together and derange, arrange 'em, however you want to call it. But it's been a long process; since then I've gotten married, I live in Philadelphia now, the new guitar player, Shane, lives in the DC area, Mike still lives in Virginia and our bass player, Les, he lives in Texas. [laughs] So we're all over the place. We've been writing and, as I said, arranging, de-arranging for years. We got together, I usually drive down to Virginia and meet up with Mike and Shane and we all kind of write our thing. We take it back home, go over it, talk on the phone, this and that, get together for the last couple years. Finally we decided it was time to get in the studio, we used the same guy we used last time, Kevin Gutierrez, who did a hell of a job on As the Weird Travel On. And we started tracking, let's see, three weeks ago this Saturday and we laid down the drums and then two weeks ago we put down the bass and we just laid the rhythm guitars down that same weekend. We took a weekend off last weekend and this weekend we supposed to be laying down the vocals and we're going from there, so three or four weeks it should be done and then we'll get it mastered and we'll have it out around mid-May. But it's DECEASED. I don't know what to say. I was going to say it's DECEASED 2011 but I guess it's DECEASED 2005, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. So it's still us, it's still Death Metal from the grave, it's just a new batch of songs this time around. We have eight new songs… actually seven full songs, one guitar piece on there. It clocks in around forty-five minutes. It's still a lot of the longer songs. There's a lot going on. It's not a concept record in any way. It's a lot of tragedies on the album and stuff, sticking with our morbid ideas that we usually have with the band. But we're really pleased; so far everything's going down fine. We had a little issue with the drum pedal on the first go-round; I actually went back to playing drums on this record, though I won't be playing live still and other than that it's been going fantastic and we're so happy to be finally getting this done 'cause a lot of these songs, most of these songs, are at least three years old to us, even the newest songs on the record are three years old to us now.

Phil: Are you doing anything different in the studio this time than you have in the past?

King Fowley: I wouldn't really say so. I mean, it's pretty much, since we used Kevin on the last one, As the Weird Travel On, we've really just… we always try to be prepared. This one's a little different because obviously, like I said before, we all live in different spots now, but everybody has to be ready to roll when we go in there so we, quote-unquote, do our homework more than ever. It's the same old thing - we get in, we track it piece by piece, we put it all together and then we'll fine tune it. Nothing out of the ordinary, you know, same type of production and stuff. We're going for kind of an energetic sound. I'm pretty much producing this one, so I'm trying to make it a little bit more edgy, a little bit of rawness to it without polishing it up too much as far as sound. Playing-wise, it's a fast record; a lot of the songs are pretty fast and then some of it's laid back. To describe it… I really can't describe it. People have been asking me how to describe it and the only thing I can think of that at least might be close to what it is… is I almost thought maybe if VOIVOD's Dimension Hatross was a Speed Metal record or a faster record.

Phil: What would be your favorite songs off of this album?

King Fowley: Let's see… I don't know - I like 'em all for different reasons. I think some of my favorites would probably… I like the song Kindred Assembly, which we'll probably try to put out as the track, we'll try to get that one around to Sirius Radio and all that, the samplers and stuff like that. That one's a fun one for me; it kind of flows real quickly and stuff and it kind of hits you over and over and over. I like that one. I like the longer song, like In The Laboratory of Joyous Gloom is a little bit in-depth thing. I like them all for different reasons, I really don't have a favorite yet. I'm only saying because sometimes once the vocals are down I hear one I thought "Oh, that's my least favorite" might become my favorite, so if you ask me that again probably in two and a half weeks, I'll probably give you a totally different answer.

Phil: What inspired the cover art? Was it taken from lyrics of the songs or did you give the artist free reign?

King Fowley: Well, basically, I had this idea in my head for a long, long time and… have you seen the artwork?

Phil: Yeah.

King Fowley: Okay, well people have been asking about the hand people with the butt. [laughs] Some people call them the hand people with the butt. Basically, it was this movie from the '70s, it's a British movie with Joan Collins in it called The Devil Within Her and on the picture it had this hand with legs holding a pair of scissors. I always thought that was the weirdest type creature. I'm like "One day I want to use that for something, " so when it came for this record, basically the reason I went with this was I wanted to show that at the same time something great is happening or everything's just happy, at the same time, something awful is happening. It could be right in front of you in so many different ways, you know, that's what gives it kind of the surreal thing. And there's always something going on around you - you could be in the greatest of places and awfulness could happen or vice-versa, you could be in an awful place and something great happens. It's kind of like that play on good against evil or bad and good or whatever the wording is for that now. There's no real concept. I just wanted to show in one bed, you have somebody peaceful, recovering, maybe from an illness, just there recovering in general and then in the other bed, you have this person who's in traumatic hell but the people seem to not notice it, so it's almost like it's slipping by, it's almost like someone's getting taken advantage of and not even knowing it.

Phil: Yeah. The artwork with the hands kind of reminded me of a Clive Barker story called The Body Politic. Have you read that one?

King Fowley: No, I haven't. I've heard the name, but I haven't read that, though.

Phil: Okay. It's about people's hands revolting, severing themselves and then trying to take over.

King Fowley: Oh yeah? That's not a bad idea at all.

Phil: Nah, it's pretty good.

King Fowley: I've felt like that sometimes, just saw off my hands. [laughter]

Phil: What will be your touring plans for this album?

King Fowley: Well, last year was our 25th anniversary and we did so much touring that this year it's kind of odd. This is our 26th anniversary and a new record but we're probably not going to tour that much. What we decided to do was we're going to take a handful of… I don't want to say upper echelon, but just stuff like more high scale places, kinda like New York, LA, Florida and places like that and try to get out and play Chicago, things like that, and go play long sets. Before we'd go out and play a fifty minute set on the last tour. We did an East Coast tour with SUPERCHRIST and we did a West Coast tour with RUMPLESTILTSKIN GRINDER last year and it was fantastic. They were pretty much our shows with support and things like that and it went really well. But this year, since we did that, a lot of us in the band, especially my guitar player and our drummer, they do so much work that this year they're just dead in the water for that and as you know, the whole world's rattling now trying to keep afloat. So we're going to have to be picking and choosing, sadly. I'd like to play every day of the year - I'm all about playing live, but we're going to go out, we're going to try to play a close to two hour set when we do play. We've got two shows lined up as we speak; one's the Buffalo Day of Death 2, which is twenty years ago we played the one there with us and REPULSION and AUTOPSY. The guy, Brian's putting a new one on this year to kind of celebrate his book, The Glorious Times, that he and Alan Moses did. That's in July. July 16th, I believe it is and then we're playing in November in Texas at the Goregrowler's Ball, which is us and EXHUMED, SUFFOCATION, a few others, maybe ABORTED from overseas. Basically what I'm saying is those are bigger places. It's kind of like bringing the people to see us more than us going to every little nook and cranny this year because of the time restraints and the work and all that.

Phil: What was your impression of the West Coast tour you did last year? I was at the Portland show and you guys almost didn't make it because of vehicle problems, right?

King Fowley: Oh yeah! [laughs] I loved it. I knew twenty-five years, and this has always irked me and this would be a two hour talk on that on the side, in all our years we never really got to tour. Whether it be we're so young we can't do it because we don't have the money to go yet or we didn't have the record label backing, by the time we got the record label backing people were working, it was hard to do that or the record label backing really wasn't record label backing once we started doing things. In all our years, the best thing we ever did was the little Contamination tour with a few bands like EXHUMED and CEPHALIC CARNAGE, ORIGIN, some of those bands back when we were on Relapse and that's 2000. Here it is 2011, that was 2010 last year, so we decided 25th anniversary, the guys said let's go go go, since we had some new blood in the band, they hadn't had to do all this stuff before at all. They were gung ho, so basically we went out there… it's crazy how it all went. It's a Lifetime movie [laughs] in itself. Basically, we went out there, we played Las Vegas, it went fantastic. We had a good time, my buddy Marco set up the show; he used to work for Metal Blade and it was off to a great start. Well, as soon as we head off to Arizona for the next show, it seems that in the middle of the night I had some kind of issue where… I've had health issues for the last ten years with blood clotting and I actually had a stroke and a bunch of stuff, I don't know if you know that, but all these health issues. Well, I was trying to go to sleep when we got to Arizona about 6:30 in the morning and my heart was just racing out of control, would not slow down no matter what I did. So I went to the front of the hotel, told the lady to call the ambulance, the ambulance came, actually the fire department came, they said I had an abnormal heart beat. Go and end up in the hospital first day of the tour… first night of the tour. They saw me, they said "Yeah, you have an irregular heart beat," they gave me some medicine, they wanted to keep me for a week and of course, we'd already set the time and stuff and Shane and Eric, the drummer and guitar player, had driven from Baltimore to Las Vegas, so it was a two day attack on their part in the van. We flew out, me and the other guitar player, Matt, who was in the band then from Boston and our bass player, Les, who lives in Texas, he flew out there too. So "I cannot stay here, whatever it is, I gotta deal with it - just feed me some medicine." So the whole tour… it was creepy in a way because I didn't want that to come, but of course you know, as you saw the show, I act pretty crazy for a big, silly guy. [laughter] So I was like, "The hell with it - whatever happens, happens" and actually, your show, a friend of mine who is a doctor was actually there.

Phil: Yeah, Raj.

King Fowley: Oh, you know him?

Phil: Yeah, he's a cool guy.

King Fowley: Okay, yeah. Well, Raj was there and we were talking and all that stuff and he took a look at all my stuff, 'cause I talked to his buddy Kevin on the road before that, he said "Raj is going to be at your show in Portland, bring all your paperwork for the emergency room." So he was like, "You're all right, man - you're going to be fine." By then it was almost the end of the tour anyway. The Arizona shows were fun, we did two shows there, we did three shows in California, the last one, San Francisco, was a bust - that's when the van broke down. Shane, the one guitar player, had to stay with the van because the cops towed us off the first exit, but where we ended up was some dead end in the middle of nowhere and there was no way we could leave all the gear there. So Shane stayed back, me and the other three guys took a cab all the way to San Francisco and it was a $125 cab ride.

Phil: Ugh.

King Fowley: We did that, we got there, we played as a four piece and then somebody there said "Oh, I'm driving right back to where you guys van is broke, " he gave us the hour and twenty minute ride back, you know. He had a van and everything. It was the craziest thing - cool as hell guy. So we get back there, the next day we get a rental car by luck and we drive all the way from San Francisco around one o'clock to you guys in Portland. I don't know how long a trip that's supposed to be, but you know when we got there.

Deceased's King Fowley

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

NEXT

Formed 1985
    Arlington, Virginia  USA
Label: Patac Records
Genre: Death/Thrash Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

King Fowley:  Vocals, Bass & Drums
Les Snyder:  Bass
Mike Smith:  Lead Guitar
Shane Fuegel:  Lead Guitar

DISCOGRAPHY:

Luck of the Corpse (1991)
13 Frightened Souls EP (1993)
The Blueprints for Madness (1995)
Fearless Undead Machines (1997)
Supernatural Addiction (2000)
Behind the Mourner's Veil EP (2001)
Up the Tombstones!!!
                                   Live 2000 (2002)
As the Weird Travel On (2005)
Inject the Ugliness EP (2007)
Stalking the Airwaves [Live] (2010)
Surreal Overdose (2011)

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

April 16, 2011

NEXT