This is a story of a dedication to the dream and a true brotherhood. In the beginning of the 80's three young brothers decided to leave Fairbanks, Alaska, to conquer Los Angeles' rock scene. Simple as that. And they made it. To some degree. They headlined shows at the Troubadour, the Roxy, the Country club and all other famous venues. Metallica and Poison opened for them. They were on the very first "Metal Massacre" compilation and had a deal with Metal Blade Records. But unlike some other bands who also were on that album, Pandemonium never got a deal with a major label or a chance to tour the world. And not because they weren't good enough for that? But why?! David Resch, the eldest of the three Resch brothers, tells the story of Pandemonium.
Note: this interview was done in 2022.
David, I know that you are half German. How come that one of your parents went that far from Germany as Alaska is?
Well, my parents were both born in the United States, actually. My dad was from San Francisco and my mom was from Wisconsin, but they were each half German. Their relatives, their parents were from Germany. So, I'm American, second generation, but I have lots of German heritage. But both my mother and my father were both half German. I've never been there though.
And how was it to live in Fairbanks in the 70s? Did you start playing music because of boredom, because there was nothing else to do?
Well, the 70s was when they built the Alaska Pipeline. They discovered a whole bunch of oil in the very northern part of the state. They built a huge pipeline down to the southern part of the state so they could load all the tankers up with all the oil. So, it changed Alaska a lot. But suddenly, Fairbanks went from kind of a sleepy little town to a very busy town. Thousands of people came up there from all over the world to help build the pipeline. And I started playing guitar in high school when I was 17. Me and my brothers decided to start a rock band. Our parents owned a nightclub up here. So, we grew up around musicians and music and stuff. And we started playing music ourselves and decided that was something we wanted to do. We started playing backyard parties, beer keggers and stuff. And eventually, we worked our way up into playing local bars. And we started writing our own songs. Later we decided that we needed to leave Alaska and pursue our dream of doing music. So, we moved to Los Angeles in 1980.
The club your parents had was Upper Limits. Did your parents let you play there?
They closed it up in the mid-70s. We didn't start playing music until about 1976, 1977.
And were there record shops where you could get latest albums or magazines?
Oh, yeah. In fact, I managed a record store right out of high school. When I got out of high school, I went to work. I was 17 years old and I was working at a record store. And I started collecting records and bought my first guitar. We had all the rock magazines at the time, too. And I just became fascinated with that whole thing. There were about 20 bars in the 70s that had live music. And it was a combination of local musicians, local bands, and some of the bigger nightclubs brought up bands from Seattle and even Los Angeles. The drinking age was 19 back then. And as soon as I turned 19, me and my friends would go to all the bars and we would see these really good bands from Los Angeles and from Seattle playing up here in Alaska. Fairbanks metropolitan area has about 100,000 people. We have lots of modern conveniences.
Usually when a family has a few kids, they play different roles. One is reliable, responsible, one is troublemaker. So who was who in your family?
Well, I had two brothers that were both in the band with me. And then we had a younger sister. I was the oldest, so I would say I was the responsible one. I was the one who actually kind of came up with the idea of moving to Los Angeles and seeing if we could make any music and stuff. I talked my brothers into that. In fact, my youngest brother, Eric, when we moved to Los Angeles, he was still in high school. He actually dropped out of high school to move to Los Angeles with us. So I would say I was the planner, you know, the ambitious one. My brother Chris, the singer, he was the troublemaker. And Eric, he just followed us and did what we wanted to do.
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| David Resch circa 1980 |
We had a very close, tight-knit family, lots of love and stuff. We actually grew up on a farm. We call it a homestead up here in Alaska. We lived about 10 miles out of town and had a farm with chickens and horses and cows. We raised all our own food in a big garden and had big fields where we planted hay for the cows and horses. So we grew up in kind of a country lifestyle. And what was the rest of your question there? (Laughs)
What were some pros and cons of playing in a band with your siblings?
Oh, yeah. We got along really well. But we did have occasional fights sometimes, especially me and my youngest brother Eric. Sometimes, even though we were a very close family, we would get in arguments. And he and I got in a couple of pretty good fistfights. But when you're brothers, you have a fight like that, and five minutes later, you're hugging each other and apologizing and saying, I love you, man.
Later on Pandemonium had a song “Don't Touch That Dial”. It's a story about a guy who lived in a homestead and listened to the music too loud that the neighbors came and said to shut it down. Is it about your personal experience?
Well, things like that kind of happened. That song, though, actually was the only song that we ever did that we didn't write. My brother Chris wrote some of the lyrics, but the drummer wrote most of that song. It was the only time that we did an original song that somebody wrote instead of one of the three brothers. But yeah, definitely we had experiences like that in life, yeah.
Could you tell me a bit about the band Demon, which you had prior to Pandemonium?
We were called Demon at first. And we did most of the covers, a lot of songs like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and Rush, you know, bands like that. We played a lot of parties, backyard parties and stuff and high school dances. And then we eventually started playing in bars. And when we were getting ready to move to Los Angeles in 1979 or 1980, we discovered that there was a band from England called Demon. They were part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. The whole British heavy metal scene kind of took off around 1979, 1980. And we found out there was a band called Demon because I worked at a record store and I was in charge of buying the imports from England and stuff. We realized we were going to have to change our name. And if you notice, in the middle of the word pandemonium is the word Demon. So it was like we had a new name, but our old name was still in the middle of our new name. So it was the perfect name for us. Actually, our sister came up with the name Pandemonium.
And who was the drummer in those days?
The drummer back in those days was a guy named Kevin Fitzgerald. He was from Fairbanks also. He was the same age as Eric. And we moved to Los Angeles with him originally. He actually played on our first album. But before the album came out, he decided that he didn't like the heavy, dark rock, the Black Sabbath type stuff and all that, because he was a Christian. So he quit our band in 1982, right after we recorded the tapes for our first album. He joined a glam rock band in Los Angeles called Mary Poppins. And we had to get a new drummer. Kevin's picture isn't on the first album, even though he actually played the drums on it. He thought our music was too dark and too evil, so he quit. And we got a Los Angeles drummer and Los Angeles drummer named Glenn Holland. You know, if you’ll notice, we had a different drummer on every album. I think a lot of that was because there was three brothers in the band and we wrote all the music and we kind of ran the whole business and stuff. So I think the drummers always felt like the odd man out kind of. You know, we had a problem keeping drummers.
That was my next question, actually. Drummers were the weakest link in the band and my guess was that it was hard to accept someone outside the family for you.
Yeah, that was probably always a problem because the three brothers, you know, we wrote all the songs and stuff and we were very close. So we tried to always make the drummers feel at home and part of the family. But it was still probably hard for them because they were in a band with three brothers, you know, so I'm sure it was difficult for them.
There is a rumor that Steven Adler from Guns N' Roses played in Pandemonium for a while.
He did. We had started to record our second album with Glenn Holland and had two songs done with him. But then Glenn got an offer to join W.A.S.P. He quit Pandemonium and he only lasted about six weeks in W.A.S.P. because he got fired. But in the meantime we had to get a new drummer. We started holding auditions and auditioned about 10 different drummers. And one of them was the drummer from Guns N' Roses, Steve Adler. And we rehearsed with him for about six weeks. And we finally realized that he wasn't going to be good enough. He wasn't really very good back then. He had a great look, you know, he had a really good image, long blonde hair, good looking kid, really nice guy. But he just wasn't able to keep up with us. So we fired him and ended up getting Dave Bash for the second album. But it's funny, Steve Adler from Guns N' Roses was in our band for six weeks and we actually fired him because he wasn't good enough.And then, you know, a few years later, he's a huge rock star. So I guess we were wrong.
Okay. So as you said, you wanted to pursue the music career and move to Los Angeles. But why not Seattle, which was closer to Alaska? Or, I don't know, San Francisco, New York? Why especially Los Angeles?
Well, our family had gone on vacation. We would go on vacation every winter. Get out of Alaska in the middle of the winter. And we would go to Hawaii and then Los Angeles. So we had been to Los Angeles a couple of times. And my brothers and I would go out to the famous nightclubs, like the Starwood and the Whiskey and stuff. We would see Los Angeles bands when we were on vacation there in the late 70s. And we just saw how good the music scene was and how incredible the bands were. And we just knew that was the place we needed to go. At the time, Seattle did not have nearly as good of a music scene. In the late 70s, early 80s Los Angeles was the place to go if you wanted to try to have a career in music.
Did Los Angeles satisfy your expectations when you moved there?
Well, it was pretty scary, I'll tell you, because, we came from a town in northern Alaska of not even quite 100,000 people. And suddenly we're in Los Angeles, which has millions and millions of people. So it was a very large culture shock. I'm amazed we didn't get into more trouble than we did. But we loved it. We were young and wild and adventurous. We just took the challenge and met it head on. But yes, it was quite a difference. You know, a very, very big culture shock.
Did you have a place to stay when you moved to Los Angeles? Or did you start everything from scratch?
From scratch. We didn't know anybody there. Me and my two brothers, we loaded up my old Ford Econoline van. We loaded up all our Marshall stacks and our Marshall amps and our record collections and our clothes. And we drove all the way to Los Angeles from Fairbanks, Alaska. It's about a 3,000-mile drive. So you have to go all the way through Alaska and then northern Canada, down through Seattle, Washington, Portland and stuff, all the way down to L.A. It was about a 3,000-mile drive and just the three of us. I was 21 at the time, Chris was 19 and Eric was 17. And just three brothers from Alaska all of a sudden just picked up and moved everything to L.A. We stayed in the hotel for about a week. And we were looking through the local newspapers, the advertisements, the classified ads. We found a house to rent and got jobs. We all got jobs at record stores.We all worked at Tower Records, which was a huge, well-known record store chain. So we were all working at the same record store. And we had our house and started playing music. We couldn't find a drummer that we liked down there. So we ended up paying for the plane ticket and we flew our drummer, Kevin Fitzgerald, from Alaska down to Los Angeles and started playing the clubs and went from there.
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| Eric Resch |
It was. You know, what we started to do to get a following, we started writing our own music and stuff. We went in and recorded a demo, a five-song demo at a cheap recording studio. And we started playing big parties in Los Angeles. There were always wild teenagers that wanted to throw big parties when their parents were out of town. So we started by playing several big, big backyard parties that would get like out of control, just hundreds of people. And the police would come and break up the party. It was always a wild scene. But by playing these big parties in L.A., we developed a fan base, you know, a bunch of kids who really liked our music stuff. So from doing that, we developed a following. And then we booked our first nightclub gig. I think we played at Guzzari's, which is where Van Halen got their start. We played like on a Wednesday night at Guzzari's, and then like on a Thursday night at the Troubadour. And we had such a big following from the parties that we were able to have really good attendance and made money for the clubs. So slowly but surely over the next year, we started getting better and better bookings. And within a year, we were playing like Friday and Saturday nights on the weekends. And you have to remember this is like 1980, 1981. We were sharing the stages at the Troubadour and stuff with other bands that were just getting their start. They ended up becoming really famous. We played with W.A.S.P. a couple of times, Grey White, Ratt. We played with Raii at the Troubadour and with a whole bunch before they were famous too. So all of us, all these bands had moved to Los Angeles from all over the country. Some of them became very famous, but they were all getting their start, you know, in like 1980 and 81, just like we were. We even played with Metallica on Thanksgiving Eve 1982. We actually headlined and Metallica opened for us.
Yeah, I heard that story that Metallica and Bitch opened for Pandemonium.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Lots of big bands opened for us. In 1984, when Poison moved to Los Angeles from Pennsylvania, one of their very first gigs was opening for us at the Troubadour. So, we shared stages with lots of bands that ended up becoming very famous. And in some cases we were actually more popular than they were at the time, and we headlined over them.
Well, you recorded a couple of demos before the first album, and those songs sound very Sabbath-esque. Did you fit to Los Angeles with this type of music?
Well, our influences and our sound was probably a little heavier than a lot of those bands. To be honest, bands like Poison and stuff, we didn't like that kind of music at all. We grew up loving Black Sabbath, that was our favorite band. So we were a little heavier than a lot of those bands. And if you listen to our albums, like by “Hole in the Sky”, the second album, especially the third album, “The Kill”, you can hear how we got heavier and heavier. And we were kind of going in the opposite direction of the Los Angeles scene. You know, the Los Angeles scene in the early 80s, a lot of those bands were still pretty heavy. I mean, like Ratt was actually a pretty heavy band, even though they had big pop hooks. They were pretty hard rock. And W.A.S.P. was pretty heavy. But as the 80s moved on into the mid 80s, when Poison hit the town and the whole glam rock scene kind of got really big in like 84, 85, 86, we went in the opposite direction because we didn't like that kind of music. We got back to our roots of heavier Black Sabbath type stuff. So yeah, we were kind of going in the opposite direction. In retrospect, we probably should have just totally glammed out and tried to be like Poison. But that wasn't what was in our hearts.
And there were plenty of heavy metal bands like Armored Saint, Abattoir, Agent Steel.
Yeah, you know, Armored Saint were good friends of ours. We played with them a couple of times. They got their start on Metal Blade Records just like us.
How did you get in touch with Brian Slagel? I believe that was way before you contributed a song to his “Metal Massacre” compilation.
Brian worked at a record store called Oz Records, and I used to go there, it wasn't too far from our house, and I used to go shop at that record store and buy imports from new British and European bands. And I got to be friends with Brian. One day he mentioned that he was going to start a record label. And he was looking for demo tapes from bands to put on an album, a sampler of Los Angeles bands called “Metal Massacre”. And I gave him one of our songs, “Fighting Backwards”, on a demo tape. He really liked it and next thing you know, he put us on the album with Ratt and Metallica. So yeah, our very first record came out in 1982. And we were honored to be on the first “Metal Massacre” with bands like Ratt and Metallica, Bitch, Malice. And almost every band that was on that record ended up getting record deals. So that was the start. That album was the start of the LA scene really starting to pick up. And we were lucky enough to be on it.
Was “Fighting Backwards” was from your very first demo tape?
That was actually from our second demo tape. It was a five song demo. And we picked that song to send to Brian.
Did you like other bands of this compilation? Bands like Cirith Ungol, Metallica, Malice?
We loved all those bands. And we did shows with all of them. We played with Malice a couple of times at the Troubadour. We did a bunch of shows with Bitch. We played with Metallica twice. We played with Cirith Ungol, I think, a couple of times. Very good band. I love Cirith Ungol. It's kind of cool to see that they're still out there playing.
And did you see that some of those bands would be huge or popular?
Yeah, you could tell the band that really stood out. You could tell they were going to go somewhere. It was Ratt. Ratt was an incredibly very good, very tight band in the early 80s before they got the record deal. And they always drew huge crowds. We opened for them probably two or three times at the Troubadour. And then we opened for them at a big show at the Roxy right before they got the record deal. And you could always tell that Rat was going somewhere. Ratt was a cool band because they did have the pop metal hook. But they were also, especially live, they were actually very heavy, you know, very heavy guitars and stuff. They were a cool band. When we played with Metallica, they were very young. And to be honest, I never thought Metallica was very good. When we played with them in like early 1982, they were still just kind of getting started and they weren't really very good. And then you could tell W.A.S.P. was going somewhere. They had a great show. Malice was a really good two guitar band. They had that kind of Judas Priest thing going.
And now let's talk for a while about the first album. And as far as I know, you weren't satisfied with the sound engineer. What was wrong with his job?
Well, there wasn't really anything wrong with what he did. It's just that we didn't have much money. And so that whole album was recorded and mixed in like three days. So it was done very, very quickly. So it was done very very quickly So we didn't have a chance to do like much overdubbing or anything or we didn't have enough time to really get the guitar sounding good. So that album, it has good songs, but I always felt the guitar mix was a little lightweight, it didn't have enough heavy guitar in it. But that was mostly because it was done so quickly and with such little money. It was basically a demo that got that ended up being our first record. Brian Slagel, the owner of Metal Blade, didn't have a lot of money. He put the “Metal Massacre” out and did really well. So then he started signing bands direct contracts on. Bitch, Armored Saint and Pandemonium were, I think, the first three bands on Metal Blate Records. But Brian didn't have a lot of money so he couldn't pay for the recording. So basically we went in and did this brief session in like three days and that became our first record. By the time when the second and third albums came out we had a lot bigger budget and more money, so we could take a lot more time and that's why those help us sound so much better. But i'm still proud of “Heavy Metal Soldiers”, I like songs on it. And a lot of people love that album to this day. Fans from all over the world contact me on Facebook and say how they love that album.
I don't know what to tell you. I didn't like the cover of our third album “The Kill”. I actually like the cover of “Heavy Metal Soldiers” though. That was done by a friend of mine who went to school with me up here. He's a well-known artist in Alaska — Dixon Jones, and that's actually a futuristic painting Of Alaska. That's the Denali mountain and stuff you see in the distance there. So I actually really like that cover. Well, okay, we probably should have probably put at least on one of those albums a photo of the band on stage, and the lights and the explosions going on. We had a really good live show.
So, you had an album in your hands and what was next? Were you satisfied with Metal Blade Records and the job they did for you?
We probably should have waited and tried to go with a major label. But you know, we were young and from Alaska and suddenly we had Brian Slagel offering us a record contract and we just jumped at it. When the album came out we started to get even more popular The album came out in late 1983 and that whole next year was probably our best year. We were headlining all the well-known clubs like the Roxy, the Whiskey, the Troubadour. The biggest club in L.A. was a huge venue called the Country club. They held about 1200 people. We were drawing huge crowds and headlining shows at all those places. And in the summer of 1984 we got picked to fly back up to Alaska to Anchorage. the big city in Alaska, and open for the Scorpions. And that was all because of the first album. We actually got to open a big arena show in Anchorage in front of like 12 000 people for the Scorpions and we got to hang out and party with them. We were the first band from Alaska to get a record deal ever. And the promoter of the Anchorage show knew about us. He contacted us and said, “Hey, we're bringing the Scorpion, the first big internationally known heavy metal band to play in Alaska. Are you interested in opening the show?” And so we did.
Did you have a proper manager or a booking agent at that time?
No, and that's another reason why we probably never made it bigger than we could have. We just managed ourselves. We booked our own shows. Me and my brother Chris, and our mom helped us out a lot, too. We never had a booking agent or a manager and that's something that we should have done. But we were three kids from Alaska. We didn't know any better and we were very naive in many ways.
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| With John Candy |
Well, the Troubadour is in West Hollywood. So it's kind of right in the middle of the Hollywood area and stuff And I think he did like hard rock and heavy metal because I heard that he used to go to the Troubadour once in a while And he just happened to be there that night with his date who was also an actress. She was in a popular American tv show called “The Wonder Years”. She played the mother on that show and he was dating her at the time. They were at the Troubadour on a Saturday night when we were headlining. It was a packed night, like 500 people to it or just sold out pack. Our sister was a waitress in the Troubadour and it turned out that while we were playing she was the waitress for John Candy. He said to her, “I really like this band. I'd like to meet them”, and she said, “Well, they happened to be my brothers so I can arrange that”. So when we get off stage, we go upstairs and there's John Candy in our dressing room with his date. He gave us all big hugs and we partied with him for a few hours.
Did you meet him later?
No, that was the only time we met him. He was filming a movie with Richard Pryor at the time called “Brewster’s Millions”. About four in the morning we were all very drunk and finally left the troubadour and said good night to him. He invited us to the movie set that next day. He said, “i'll get you guys passes. You can come see us filming this movie with Richard Pryor”. But we were all so hungover that we didn't make it.
Okay, I see. Well, your second album was recorded in the famous Track Records and was engineered by Bill Metoyer. Did you like his job as a sound engineer?
Oh, yeah, Bill was great. You can hear the difference in the sound from the second album compared to the first album. Again, we didn't have a very big budget or a lot of time. I think we recorded that whole album for about 5.000 dollars. But instead of three days like the first album we had like a week this time. So it was still kind of rushed but it was definitely a large step up. Bill is just one of the nicest persons you'd ever want to meet. He's produced and engineered so many famous albums. He helped us definitely start to sound a lot heavier and better. I'm still friends with him this to this day. We chat on Facebook all the time.
On that album Eric is credited for some rhythm guitars. Why did you let him play guitar and why didn't you record everything yourself?
Well, I did probably 95% of the guitars still but a lot of bass players like to play guitar. Too. They aren't very good at playing lead guitar but most bass players can play a little bit of rhythm guitar. And Eric was a good songwriter. He and I wrote most of the music for the band. He just asked if he could play a little bit of rhythm guitar in a couple of songs. When you record an album you do multiple tracks with guitars. What you think is one guitar is actually usually three or four guitars all playing the same thing/ That's how you make it sound thick and heavy. Sothere's always a lot of guitar overdubs to do so. I said, “Sure, Eric! You can play a little guitar”. So he played like alternate rhythm guitars on a couple of songs. But most of what you're hearing is me.
You already mentioned David Basch who recorded drums for this album, and It seems that that was the only album he did on a professional level. How did you find him? And where did he disappear later?
Well, um, like I mentioned we auditioned Stephen Adler from Guns N’ Roses after Glenn Holland quit to join W.A.SP. and that didn't work out, so then we held more auditions and Dave came and he had a great look and a beautiful drum set and he was a super nice guy and an excellent drummer. So he got the job, but I don't think he ever went on to do anything else after Pandemonium. He was probably my favorite of all of our drummers, very very good drummer. Very nice guy.
I'm interested in the song called “Imprisoned by the Snow”, it's one of my favorites and it has very promising title. When you think of a band from Alaska recording a song called like that you imagine something very interesting. So could you tell me a story behind this song?
It's kind of a science fiction type song. I mean obviously being from Alaska, you know, the snow and all that, It has a little bit to do with our history but it's more of like a science fiction song, like the end of the world, mankind has screwed up the climate and the world is slowly freezing. Eric and I would write the music and Chris would write a lot of the lyrics and that was his idea. The whole world is freezing over and slowly dying. And that's one of our heavier songs. You can hear the Black Sabbath influences in that. It is closer to the reason we got into playing music. I know I keep repeating, but Black Sabbath was our favorite band. And that was one of our first songs that we felt we were going in the right direction, you know, that Sabbath influenced heaviness. And also it had better lyrics. Some of the songs on our first album were kind of just typical, like boy meets girl type songs, songs about women and stuff. But we wanted to be better than that. We wanted to write songs that had meaning. Although the same kind of theme was used in “Radiation Day” on the first album.
It took three years to record “The Kill”. Were these years even full for the band?
Well, after the second album came out 1985 and 1986 were still pretty good years. We were still pretty popular. But Poison had started to get very popular. Poison and some of those glam bands. So that whole direction was starting to take over. We were just having problems with the band. My brother Chris got married and had a young daughter. And that's not good for a young rock band in LA in the 80s trying to make a career in music. Suddenly our lead singer who was the front man and all the girls loved and everything… Suddenly he's married and has a baby daughter. That took away a lot of the energy from the band and Dave Basch quit. So It took us a couple of years to find another drummer and start writing more songs and get our energy back. We realized that we still wanted to make music even though it was harder because of Chris being married and having a young bride and a young daughter. So it took us a couple of years to get our act together again.
“The Kill” was recorded in three different studios. Why was that? Didn't it cause some troubles during recording process?
Actually if you look at the recording credits of a lot of the albums, that Metal Blade did back then, a lot of them were produced and engineered by Bill Metoyer and Brian Slagel had good deals for those studios. One studio was good for recording the basic tracks. It had a really good drum sound. A lot of the bands in Metal Blade would do that. You'd go into one studio with a big room to get the live drums down. And then when you're doing all the guitar overdubs and the vocal overdubs you go to another studio. That's a little bit more intimate, smaller place. And then you go to another studio to mix the album because it has a bigger nicer board or whatever. So that was very common for a lot of bands back then.
We added Chris after we recorded the third album. He didn't play on “The kill”. I did so many guitar overdubs. If you're familiar with that album, it's very very heavy. We finally were starting to get that whole heavy black Sabbath sound, and I did a lot of guitar overdubs. So we realized that when we started playing those songs live It would make the sound thicker and heavier live if we had a backup guitarist, a rhythm guitarist. So Chris was actually from Anchorage, Alaska, and he had moved to Los Angeles. We needed a second guitarist so we added him for our live shows.
What was your point to record two covers of Golden Earring and Black Sabbath? Were you short of original songs?
Oh, no, we had lots of originals. We always wanted to record a Black Sabbath song because they were our heroes. We always played different Sabbath songs live for encores. And we had also been playing our own version of “Radar Love” for many many years. Even as far back as Alaska. So we just always wanted to do both those songs. But we never had a shortage of originals. I mean, there's still eight of our own songs and then two covers. We probably should have just done one cover but we loved both those songs.
Got it! Chris missed that scream “Cocaine” which Ozzy did every time as loud as possible. Was it just happened or was Chris against drugs or something like that?
You know I haven't listened to that in a while. Are you sure that's not in there somewhere? I'll have to listen to that again. I swear. I thought he says it, might not be as loud as Ozzy did but I think it's in there if you listen to it again. I think he says “Cocaine”. It might be buried by the wall of guitars. (Later note: yes, Chris does say “Cocaine” but very silent. — Author) We weren't against that to be honest like most musicians in the 80s. I mean there was drugs everywhere. Cocaine was a big part of the L.A. music scene unfortunately.
Did someone from Pandemonium use drugs?
Oh Gosh! Everybody used drugs back then. Mostly just marijuana though. Okay, we were drinkers. We're from Alaska. We liked our beer.
Which album gives you the warmer memories when you think of Pandemonium?
I would say my favorite is the second album, “Hole in the Sky”. I just love that album. I love the songs on it. I'm proud of all of them and I like all of them but “Hole in the Sky” is my favorite.
As you mentioned, you shared the stage with so many bands from the Scorpions to bands, which played a few gigs and remained unknown. So could you share a couple of stories abouy musicians being top class or being jerks and stuff like that?
For the most part everybody was really really nice back then. We all had a similar goal and many of us have moved from other cities and towns. So we were all kind of in the same situation, and most of the bands especially in the early to mid 80s were very friendly and very niceю So I don't really have any bad stories that I can rememberю Maybe probably the closest one would be Poison, I think it was late 85 and early 86. We played the Country club which held 1200 people that was the biggest music club in Los Angeles. We were headlining over poison but they were getting pretty popular then. So they went on right before us and they wanted to drop a bunch of fluorescent green balloons from the ceiling that said Poison on them. But they had to ask us, because technically even though they were very popular, we were still kind of the headliner that night. We told them no and they weren't very happy about that. So maybe that's the closest to a bad story. Good stories got all the bands were so nice and so friendly. In 1988 after our third album we had the chance to open for a couple of really incredible bands. We opened for Savatage and for Kings X. And those were two of our favorite bands. And they were both just starting to get big and they were super nice, really friendly guys. Well, Savatage singer had to have his own separate dressing room so he could warm up his voice. And we could hear him in this small room Just screaming at the top of his lungs and he would spend like an hour just screaming. Another great story was when we opened for the Scorpions in Alaska. Do you remember the song by them called “The Zoo”? When they would do that song whatever city they were in they would go to a local strip bar and they would hire topless dancers to come out during that song. After the concert the Scorpions invited us into the dressing room and we were partying, smoking pot and drinking and all the strippers that they had hired to come out on stage during “The Zoo” were in the dressing room. We heard noises coming from another room and all of a sudden the door opens and the drummer Herman Rarebell was in that room with like eight naked strippers hat had been on stage. It was the wildest scene.
Well, we put out “The Kill” and played a bunch of shows for that. We were very proud of that album. That was probably our heaviest album but we had such a long break, almost three years between the second and third album. The music scene in L.A. had changed. We'd gotten into the whole glam rock scene and stuff and it just seemed like we weren't playing the right kind of music and we didn't want to become like Poison or Warrant or anything We didn't want to be that kind of band so in 1989 our third drummer Dave Grayfield quit and we just didn't have the energy, we didn't see a future in that kind of music. So instead of finding another drummer and doing a fourth album we just decided that we'd had a good career. We had a good 10-year run. Music was changing and we were all getting older. I'd turned 30 and it just seemed like we were stuck at that level, It didn't seem like we'd ever be able to get up to the next level. And we were also getting very tired of Los Angeles. It was a very fun place to live but it's very big and crowded and it's very hot there. Being from Alaska we missed seasons, fall and winter, and we actually missed snow. So we broke up the band and we didn't want to live in Los Angeles anymore. We always loved Seattle. It was kind of a big city with a good music scene, but it was a lot more like Alaska. There are mountains there and it snows once in a while and rain, you know, it's not hot all the time. So we just figured Seattle would be a good place. So we broke up the band and me and Eric moved to Seattle. Chris was married and had a daughter so he stayed in Los Angeles. Eric and I moved to Seattle with the rest of the family and we were going to start another band. But then the whole grunge thing came along and we had fallen into playing in cover bands, and we found that you could make really good money doing that. So we just kind of got sucked into that scene. But we were making way more money doing that than we ever did the Pandemonium.
So you witnessed the rise of grunge. Did you like that type of music?
We moved to seattle in 1990 and that's right when the whole grunge thing was starting to take off. And we even toyed around with the idea of Eric and I of starting a grunge type band. But like I said, we were making so much money playing the hits and all these nightclubs and stuff. And I don't know if we would have been good at writing grunge music anyway. If you listen to a lot of that Seattle grunge It still had a very strong Black Sabbath influence, especially bands like Sound Garden and Alice in Chains. And that's the answer to your question. I still love Alice in Chains and Sound Garden. But even though you call it grunge if you listen to them, they were just really good hard rock bands, almost metal. I'm actually really good friends with the bass player in Alice in Chains Mike Inez. Eric and I have known Mike for over 30 years. We used to work with Mike at a big record distributor warehouse In Los Angeles. So we knew Mike before he was a rock star. He wasn't even in a popular band in Los Angeles. He he played Wednesday nights or a little small pubs but all of a sudden he got the job with Ozzy and then Alice in Chains, then Heart and then back to Alice in Chains.
I’ve always had that feeling that your songs on the first record had very grungy feeling in there. So that was grunge way before grunge came in.
Maybe we should have tried to be a grunge band. Like I said a lot of the best grunge has kind of a heavy metal influence. I kind of like Pearl Jam, they have some good stuff. Nirvana was okay. Seattle was a beautiful city. I loved living there. I lived there for 20 years before I came back to Alaska.
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| Chris Resch |
Heart problems run in our family genetically. My dad died of a heart attack at 67 and both our grandfathers died in their early 60s from heart attack. So unfortunately, sometimes stuff like that is in your family, in your genes. Chris also went back to Alaska in the early 90s. He moved back before any of us. Alaska is a beautiful place and there's just something about being in Alaska. Even though we have long cold winters, it's a beautiful place and he just always loved Alaska. So when he moved back he put on some weight. That probably didn't help. He wasn't like big fat guy or anything but he definitely gained some weight and wasn't taking care of his health as well as he should have. What can I say? It was a very sad thing. He was my best friend.
Yes, that's sad. i'm really sorry.
Maybe I'll see him again someday, who knows?
Retrospect Records reissued Pandemonium the albums in 2011. Isn't it about time to re-release these records again?
It it is and actually we have a couple of record labels that are currently talking to me right now about doing that. We've just got to decide who we're going to go with. Retrospect did a really nice job if you'll notice like there's all kinds of songs from our demos on all three of those reissues. So we were talking earlier about the two demos that we did. All the songs off those demos are all spread out amongst the three reissues. But unfortunately Retrospect just disappeared. They went out of business and just disappeared. They kind of left owing a lot of bands money Including us. Oh well. live and learn… But yes, I do have two or three labels right now that all want to reissue Pandemonium.
By the way, do you know selling numbers of your albums in the 80s?
Well bearing in mind that Metal Blade Records at the time was an independent label we did really well. All three of our albums sold over 10 000 copies each. Then they were licensed to other labels. Brian Slagel licensed a lot of the metal blade albums to Europe but we never got any sales figures for our European sales. And I don't think we got much in the way of royalties either. We kind of got screwed on that, It was kind of a shady deal. So I have no idea.
Could you say a few words about your present life?
I'm a huge record collector. I have an incredible record and CD collection. I still play music up here. I'm blessed with still looking young. Even though I'm in my 60s I ook like I'm 20 years younger. I still have long hair and lots of guitars and Marshall amps and I play in a very popular band here in Fairbanks. We do lots of classic rock and stuff. So i've been a musician for 45 years of my life now.
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