Malice. This band still means a lot to me. I remember how happy I was when I discoveerd them and how I almost wrecked my neck banging my head to "Air Attack", "Stellar Masters" and "Godz of Thunder". They had everything: awesome songs, cool image, incredibly talanted musicians, a deal with a major label. And yeah, they rocked like the greatest bands of the era. But after two outstanding albums they split, and it is probably the most unfair thing in the show business. There is also a very personal story. Some 15 years ago I was offered a chance to write an article for a printed music magazine. That was my very first attempt in writing. Of course, Malice was my first choice. That was the time when Myspace rulled the music world and I contacted Mark Behn via that platform to get some information about the band. He was very kind and answered my questions. Imagine, how happy I was! The article was done in time and I even got paid for it. 15 years later I decided to bother Mark once again to do an in-depth interview about Malice and to pay a tribute to the late Mick Zane. And here is the result — almost 3 hours long interview !
From what I heard, you played baseball in high school and were quite good in that. So why did you prefer music over sport?
Yeah, I was a fairly big kid, and I had a lot of success in athletics, you know, baseball, football. I played a little basketball, but not much. And baseball was the sport that really drew me. I guess I had more success in that than anything. So I was really honed in on baseball. And, you know, music just kind of crept in there. And it was, as far as my decision to do one or the other, it was more about time dedication, because I knew that music took a lot of time to be good at it, as did baseball. And go to school during the day, and you had homework, and I had all kinds of activities. And baseball was taking up all my time. And if I was going to be good at music, I had to spend some time on it. So in my teen years, that's kind of where it really shifted. I went, it's got to be one or the other, I couldn’t do both. That was kind of how it came about. But I still love baseball. So that stuck with me.
And hockey, as far as I know.
Oh, I wanted to play hockey so bad, but it was an expensive sport. And I was growing fast. You had to buy new equipment every year. And I was growing out of equipment. So my parents bought me a baseball glove and said, this is way cheaper than hockey. But I still love hockey.
So how did you get involved in music? Why did you pick up bass guitar? Did you try other instruments like drums or guitar?
I took piano lessons early on, from about, I would say, eight to 12 years old. And so I learned classical style music, that was being taught. And so I learned to read and write and then the key signatures and timing and all that. So that was I was cool until a certain age when I started liking popular music, I was exposed to, you know, folk music and jazz. And then of course, when rock music came into play, so there were some older kids down the street who had a music room with all these records and everything from the Who to Sabbath, Zeppelin, and stuff. And I was like, wow, this is mind exploding. And so I started getting into that. And then also, I thought, well, drums or guitar, I liked both of those. And I presented a concept of playing drums at the house where I live, my parents were like, “Oh, no, no, that's not gonna happen”. And so I started taking guitar lessons. And I liked guitar, but my hands are kind of big and guitar is such a delicate instrument. Once I was in a music store somewhere and there was a four string bass. And it was, it was more aggressive and it lent itself more to my hand structure. I started focusing on bass players in my favorite bands. And and then I just kind of saved up money and went and bought bass guitar and started learning about it, and I had guitar lessons. I just built on from that and then I started looking to people for people to play with. I really was into practicing, I had learned that from the piano lessons and guitar lessons, that I had to practice and get good at this before I could go out and play in front of anybody.
Was Kharma your first band?
Kharma was my first band. And that was with Pete Holmes from Black and Blue, later Monster, and he's with Ratt now. And another man named Marty Alberts, and we were high school buddies and lived close to each other. Pete's mom and dad were generous enough to let us practice in one of the rooms in their house. Something we all laughed about later saying we would never let our kids do that, you know, because we came in with amps and drums, and the bass was the worst because it reverberates through the whole house, it's this low tone that carries blocks. And we would play at high volume. Kharma was a real fun band, we would play our favorite stuff, you know, Sabbath and Kiss and all kinds of songs. But we listened to a tremendous wide variety, everything from Yes, Rush was coming about then to other progressive bands. And we would play some garage and basement parties. We just played everywhere we could. It was a lot of fun to do that. And through in and through there, too, we started writing our own songs. We would just put a tape recorder in the room, push record and then we would just make noise for 30 minutes, and it was complete gibberish. But when we listened back to it, you'd have complete noise. And then it'd be like 20 seconds of like, whoa, we all played together and it all made sense. And so we would mind those tapes for ideas and then write songs from that. And it was a good exercise that we put into practice later on, too. It happened with all bands I played with. We did that same thing, recorded the jazz and then listen to them and pull ideas from that.
So did you use any of those early ideas later in Malice, maybe?
That's a good question. We did. And I'm trying to think which ones. There was an idea that later on in Malice I had presented and said, “Hey, let's try this”. And, you know, we were all better players. It was four or five years later. And then having Mick Zane play the part, that earlier guitarist who was 15 years old played, was tremendous. So Mick put a whole thing up. But we never we never recorded those songs. They never came to fruition. One was called “Mountain Mover”. That was a Kharma song that we played in Malice. We rewrote it but never recorded it. I mean, jumping forward a little bit, there were ideas in Malice that I had written in FireEye. But as far as Kharma goes, we had about, I want to say, five of our own songs.
Okay, I see. So how did you meet Mick Zane? I know that you were in different schools, which were kind of rivals schools. So was it really serious rival?
No, not at all. I answered an ad in a local newspaper. Mick’s band was called Shadowfax and they were looking for a bass player that was into Blue Oyster Cult and Sabbath and things like that. I had played with Kharma, but I had changed schools and ran into Jamie St. James. He was a schoolmate of mine. And Julian Raymond as well, jammed with those guys and stuff. But I was kind of in between bands. I didn't have a band really. Kharma had run its course and they were doing other things. So I answered this ad, Mick had called me and I went over and jammed with him and a couple of his buddies. And I really liked him. I thought he's a good guitar player. In through that we talked about, we discovered that we had actually played football against each other years before. And I kind of remembered this big guy. He was really strong. You know, it was a very vague memory. But we realized, “Hey, we've met each other before!”
And did you stay in that band? Or did you quit them after a while?
Well, I actually joined that band and we were a four piece band with a singer Bill Riley, drummer Brad Simpson, I was on bass and Mick was on guitar. Then we added another guitar player named Ted Doty. And that became Jade. And then we switched out drummers and Pete Laufmann joined at that point.
I read a story how Mick invited Glenn Tipton from Judas Priest to his garage for a jam. And Glenn took some guys from UFO with him. So we were there in that garage when Glenn came? 
The jam with Glenn Tipton
Yeah. Mick went to a record signing event that happened at one of the local music storesAt that time we were playing in Jade. We rented a warehouse and we had a drum stage and all the gear set up. And we had curtains that Mick got from a local theater — they had replaced the curtains and we took the old ones and put them up. So it made it really cool looking. We also had lighting and all that. So we had a really nice rehearsal place that we would play. Well, Mick went to a record signing event where Judas Priest was at. And he said, “Hey, when the gig's over, you want to come over and jam with us?” And I was like, yeah, whatever. Well, then we went to see Priest that night. It was Priest and UFO at the Paramount Theater in Portland, about 3000 seats place. UFO was headlining. Priest was opening. And Mick somehow got backstage and he talked to Glenn. And I remember getting a phone call. I think I'd gone home after the gig. It was 10, 11 o'clock at night. And Mick said, “Hey, Glenn and the boys are going to come over to the warehouse”. So I wasn't far away and drove back to the warehouse. Sure enough, there were 50 people there. Glenn came to the place and Paul Chapman from UFO showed up. And we jammed. It was really funny that we knew a whole bunch of Judas Priest songs because we had jammed them and played them. So we said, hey, let's play some Priest. And Glenn was going, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Anything but the Priest. Let's play anything”. He wanted to play Chuck Berry and all that stuff. But because we could play the Priest stuff really good, we wanted to show that to him.
Insane story for a teenager who met his heroes and they says, ”Yeah, we will come to your place and jam".
Well, I have an addendum to that story in that. Years later when we were in Malice, we were touring and we were in Berlin and we had a translator who traveled with us. His name was Rolf. Never forget him. Super nice guy. Spoke English, German so that he went around. He came back to make an eye at the end of the show in Berlin and said, “I have some friends who want to go to their studio and they want you to come over and maybe jam and stuff like that”. And we looked at each other, “Remember Priest? Remember Glenn Tipton coming over to play? Let's do it”. So they put us in a car and we drove through Berlin and we were going, “Holy shit, if they're kidnapping us, we're never going to find out how to get back because we don’t know where we are!” And they drive us to this huge building and we go up like the fifth, sixth floor or something like that. We went there, these big concrete rooms. And we go in this place and there's probably 50 people there and all this musical equipment set up. They had a keg of beer and stuff. And they were all just as excited as we were when Priest came over. So it was really fun. We walk out there and the translator says that they wanted to play for us. They played some Malice songs. We were going, “Wow, that's really fun to hear that”. And they said, “Well, let's play some Malice songs”. And Mick and I are going, “No, no, no, no Malice songs! Anything but Malice songs. Let's play some Priest songs”. When we left that night, we were going, “How funny is that?” That came full circle, that we were the kids and then and we were rock stars.
Was it at the time when you accidentally crossed the border between West Berlin and East Berlin?
Yeah. Before that we played in Frankfurt, I guess, because it was a long drive in our travel. I was sleeping in the van and as were most of us, it was probably four or five o'clock in the morning. And I remember coming in and the tour manager, Rob Joyce, was in the front seat and he said, “I think we're in the wrong area”. And I'm going, “Wrong area?” So we're looking out and I'm going, “Wow, it does look really archaic”. It looked like we flashed back to a World War II black and white movie or something. Everything was gray and black and white and the cars looked way more foreign than they did in West Germany. And sure enough, we come up and look at the maps going, “Oh no, we took a wrong turn somewhere and we're going in East Berlin”. So we fight down some police officers, and then they said to follow them which we did. It was crazy because in the East German side they had us get out of the vehicle and our crew manager's going, “No funny stuff. Don't make any jokes. Don't do anything, just obey what they said”. And these guys had automatic weapons and the big German shepherd dogs, and they looked mean and they looked like they were ready for something if we were going to do anything. So we got out and they had us pull out all our baggage and they were looking for, I don't know, drugs or whatever. And we said, “We're just on the wrong side of the border, sorry”. They didn't like the fact that we didn't speak German either. Boy, they were very angry about that. We stood there for a while, they took our passports and went, and it was scary. It was six o'clock in the morning. We're just sitting there, you know, with our hair and our leather gear on. After about a half hour they let us back in the van and said, “Okay, keep going”. So we go through the border, and about, I don't know, 100 meters or so, there's another border, the West German border, right? Same thing, not quite as mean, but they pull everybody out of the car, put your suitcases out. Oh my God! So we go through this whole thing again, back in the car, we drive by another 100 meters and this big old jolly American goes, “You guys made a wrong turn, didn't you?” Then we finally went to our hotel.
Insane story! But let’s return to the days of Jade. This band somehow morphed into Malice. 
Jade
There were a couple of stops in between there. Jade had played for a while. I would say for a year or so we played around the Oregon, Washington area. We had a management company. Jay Reynolds would come up and jam with us every once in a while. He was another local guitar player that I knew of through Mick, I think. And then as Jade kind of wore down a bit, we were kind of done with the project. I don't remember. There wasn't any specific instance that stopped it. I got an offer to play with Fire Eye. They were a local band that was gigging regularly and they needed a new bass player. So I jumped in on that. I really liked those guys. And we were making money. That was the big thing, because all the other bands had to work a job and then play music. With Fire Eye, we were playing five nights a week in the clubs and getting paid for it. So it went pretty well for that time. I mean, the expenses were low. I was renting an apartment, it was cheap. And so making money as a musician was like, wow, this is fantastic. And I was only 18 or 19 years old. So I was playing clubs and you weren't supposed to be in the clubs unless you were 21. So that was kind of a funny thing. A couple of years later, when I had my 21st birthday and the club owner came up and said, “You've been playing here for two years and you haven't been legal?” They could lose their license, if they had underage people there. But I didn't drink, so it was no big deal. I was a performer there. I played in Fire Eye for about three years. And Pete Laufmann came over from Jade. We had a different drummer when I first joined Fire Eye. And it was kind of limiting. And Pete Laufmann was a good drummer. And so I said, “Why don't we bring in Pete”? And the guys accepted that. And then FireEye had a good run. We were playing Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana. And we would just do this huge circuit. And we got to kind of the big fish in the little pond, you know, we were drawing big crowds and playing five nights a week. So it was it was a lot of fun. And we started writing our own songs in FireEye, too. That's where, the songs that came over from FireEye and Malice was “Air Attack”, which I had written.
Yes, that's one of my all-time favorite songs. Not only from Malice, but overall.
What's funny is that the recording of that was first done with Michael Wagner. And then later on we did it with Ashley Howe. And then we had the whole debacle of the first album. The point I'm making is that the song was never recorded to its fullest fidelity, you know. Now, we played it live in the early days of Malice. That song was beautiful. I mean, it could just rock the arena. You had that really great uptempo movement, and James just sung the crap out of it. It was such a great song to play it live. And I always wished we could have captured that sonic value because it was a big boomy song. You know, when you listen to it on the album, it sounds small to me, because I heard it live and it was a big sounding song. Like “Stellar Masters” was another one. “Stellar Masters” was a really heavy song live, because we tuned down to a D, a low D, so that and the whole arena would just shake, and you go, wow, that's a powerful song. So anyway, back to in FireEye, we had written our own music and “Air Attack” being one of them. Also “Christine”, which was called “City of Roses”. We rewrote it in Malice, but “Christine” was another song that was originated in FireEye. And during the FireEye period, Mick and Jay had moved to Los Angeles. I'd kept in touch with Mick all through this time. He said that they had met Brian Slagel and they had some songs that they had recorded with some other guys. I think Matt McCourt was one of them. And they had recorded some songs and they wanted to redo them and make them appropriate for the “Metal Massacre” first release. So they called Pete and I and said, “Hey, can you guys do bass and drums on these two songs, “Kick You Down” and “Captive of Light”? And so he sent me the songs that I was listening to. And I'm going, “Wow, that singer's good. That singer's really good”. And so I said, yeah, we'll do it. We'll do it. So I worked up my part. Pete and I played together. We jammed on that stuff. And then one day, Mick and Jay came up to Portland and we went into a studio. I don't recall the name of the studio, but we went and recorded bass and drum parts. So as I'm leaving probably about five o'clock and that was the first time I met James. And I go, “Wow, you're that guy with that unbelievable voice”. And then I left. A couple of months later, Mick goes, “Hey, I got some albums for you. And he comes up and we went to my house and put on the record”. I was excited, because i had a record with my name on it. And we had two songs on there. That was the other thing. You know, these other bands, they only had one song. Well, I think Black and Blue was on there and Ratt and Pandemonium. And some of those bands we were playing with up there, Pandemonium played with us, Armored Saint. You know, we did a whole bunch of gigs with all those guys. But anyway, so we went back, then I went back after we recorded. Mick came up, played us the stuff and said, “Listen, if you guys come down there, we can put this band together and we can play all of the places”. FireEye had kind of run its course, so to speak. We had a good three year run playing, playing a lot of places. And I was going, “Where is this going to go? We are a band from Portland, we're not getting signed by major labels”. So when Mick offered to join him in Malice, this was a complete life change. We were going to leave everything we knew and everything we built and go to a new place and start over. It was a bit scary and uncertain, but we made the move.
You mentioned “Air Attack” and “Christine”. Some gentleman called Jeff Christian is credited as a co-writer for them. Was he a member of Fire Eye?
Yeah, he was one of the guitar players in Fire Eye and he's actually my best friend. We're still buds. He's a really good guitar player. He still has a studio in Portland that he'll send me tracks and I'll track bass stuff to it here in my studio and then send it back to him. And it's kind of cool. He's got a project called Lean West. So back then we found ourselves writing songs together. I think that “Air Attack” first came about that. I had that first lick and then he just had these nice chordal patterns he was playing over it, which Mick listened to and then kind of converted into his own style. Both Mick and Jay played the song heavier than we used to do it. But yeah, I'd written a song with kind of the intent of a double intent, that would be about a military air attack, and also an air attack with the radio waves, the sonic frequencies going through, penetrating buildings and stuff like that. So it was a fun concept that I thought would be to put together. As a bass player you put your idea down with bass only, it's not too interesting. You got to put some guitar with it, then you put the drums and then it becomes more interesting. I just had the initial idea. And then we kind of compiled it together with Jeff. So when it came time for credits, he deserved it, of course. And “Christine” was another song. I remember that I gave James Neal the title. I said, “Why don't you call it “Christine” or something like that”? He said, “OK, I'll write it about the Stephen King story”. Many times in Malice we would give James an idea for the title and then he'd write the song around it. For instance, “Sinister Double”. We wrote it in about 15 minutes. That's a whole other story. But when it came time that we were playing it instrumentally, James goes, “Oh, man, I really like that”. I spit out this term “Sinister Double” that we had heard from Jay Leno.
Let’s talk a bit about your move to Los Angeles. I found some info that you lived in a place called Malice Palace. So could you share some stories about that place and maybe some parties which you had there? 
Malice with Michael Wagener
Yeah. That place was called the Malice Palace or the Condo in Redondo. They're both applicable. I was really thankful for that place with a condominium in Redondo Beach, about one block from the beach. And it was a really nice place. It was almost a four bedroom condo. It was big. So the whole band could live there, which today is completely unacceptable. Back then it was just fine. We all had our own rooms and, there were bathrooms and stuff like that. But it was it was interesting. I was really thankful for that because I was living in Portland, Oregon and moving down here, you know, so unknown about what life in California was going to be like. And there were so many places that we could have moved, which would have been made sense, like up in the Northern Valley area in Granada Hills, where Mick and Jay used to live. But, you know, it would have been a real shock to me because the temperatures are 105 degrees during the summer. And it's in the middle of the valley, which at that time wasn't too interesting. It's changed a lot now. But we moved to Redondo Beach, which was fantastic. I mean, Portland was an okay place, but Redondo Beach was phenomenal. You know, beautiful girls, and the California beaches, and it was just sunshine all the time, really nice. And where we lived, we had a music studio called Music Works. We shared a studio place with Motley Crue and Ratt. And then we all had our gear in these rooms. Jay and Mick were very outgoing and very sociable. So they made friends with all these guys. We'd be at our condo, and all of a sudden Bobby Blotzer from Ratt would come over. I remember one day when Bobby said, “We just got signed by Atlantic Records”. And we're going, wow, incredible. And all of a sudden they moved out of the studio and then Dokken moved in. That's how we linked up with Michael Wagner. We were rehearsing there and Dokken was doing a project with Michael. I think he was doing an album for them. Michael offered to do a demo tape for us. He heard some of our cassette tapes that we had recorded in that little studio and said, “Well, we'll do a better recording, and then you can present it”. So we went in and recorded shortly thereafter in the condo. We recorded with “Stellar Masters”, “Rockin' With You”, “Tarot Dealer”, “Gods of Thunder”.
There was a song called “Dues Paid in Hell”
Yeah, that one was a funny one.
And a song called “Cry Out for the Gods”, which later became “Death or Glory”.
Yeah, right. Those just didn't make the cut. Compared to those other four I mentioned, they sounded like early songs we wrote, not very good, so we recorded the better songs. So, with Michael, that was a really great experience. All of a sudden our cheap little tapes we were making sounded like professional because Michael was so good. He really knew what he was doing. When we went and did things with him, it was really a step up.
And how was it to live in Los Angeles at that time? I believe you had to find some odd jobs here and there to survive, to pay your bills.
Well, yeah, we had to pay rent because we were living there and we weren't being paid. I did a couple odd jobs. I did a courier service where I was driving all over Los Angeles, delivering packages or picking up packages, and then I would send them to Vancouver or Toronto. I did that for a year or so, and I also did a little bit of a warehouse work. I worked for a sports company, inventorying things and stuff like that. But then that quickly changed when we got signed with management. They said, “Well, you guys need to stop working regular jobs and focus on being musicians”. So we did, we did that and got signed shortly after and I'm jumping ahead, but that's the odd jobs that we did was that. Mick would install glass in big buildings. And interesting little side story on that. Mick was working downtown, installing a glass at a place called the Sheraton Hotel, downtown Los Angeles. I took him to work one day so I could use his van and drive around and do some stuff. So I went to pick him up later in the day, parked the van — I was early. So I parked the van and I just walked around and there was a hotel down, the name escapes me right now. And there was a company filming a movie? I didn't know anything about the industry then, but I walked in through the hotel and I come to this big ballroom and there's amps set up and everything, just like a full rock show. And the banner on the back says Spinal Tap. And I'm in the middle of the rock world. I know every band and everything. I said, “I've never heard of Spinal Tap. And they got the whole marshals and everything, the drum riser, and they're in between shots”. There's nobody in there. I'm thinking, “Who the hell is this, man?” So I'm walking around and I see their setups and stuff. And when the movie came out a year later or so, that's when it hit me, “Oh my God, that was at the hotel downtown”. That was a funny bit. And of course, one of the best movies of all times.
Yeah, that's a funny story. So after a while, Pete Laufmann returned to Portland, or maybe, to Canada where he is from.
Yeah, he was originally from Canada. I met him in Portland and we played in multiple bands there and then Jade and then FireEye. And then he came down with me to Malice. We were getting a little bit frustrated with him because he really wasn't pulling his weight as we were all working to try to make sure we could pay. And he didn't do that. He was not a go-getter that way. And so we just kind of had some differences and it came time and Mick and Jay said, “Hey, listen, we gotta get a new drummer. And because he's your friend, you gotta tell him”. So I had to tell him that we were gonna move on and such. We started auditioning drummers and we had auditioned drummers for about a week or so. And many different good players came about, but it was frustrating. Auditioning people is always tough because everybody comes in and they really want the gig. And sometimes within the first couple of bars, you can tell, “That ain't gonna work”. But you gotta go through it because they learn three songs and they're gonna come in and play the three songs. So anyway, Cliff Carruthers was a standout. His meter was really good. And also his consistency with his kick drum, it was just solid on. And producers, I've come to learn this later, the producers want that. They don't want a guy who barely hits the drum and then sometimes he hits it harder and sometimes he hits it softer. And Pete Laufmann kind of suffered from that. Sometimes his meter was a bit fluctuant and other times, just the consistency of the attack wasn't the same. So Cliff was really good at this. He was very good with his meter. His attack was very consistent. So he was a dream. The band sounded all of a sudden heavier and bigger. So Cliff joined and then we went on from there.
And what happened to Pete after that? Have you ever met him?
Yeah, I kept in touch with him when he was still in California and then he moved back up into the Oregon area. And I would just hear through other people every once in a while, but I haven't seen him since he'd been back up there. What I've heard from friends and some of the writings that he has a little different perspective on what happened and what went down there. So I'll leave it at that. It's in different people's opinions and however that happened.
Okay. And were there some well-known drummers who auditioned for Malice?
There was a guy named Kelly, he was the drummer for Rail, a band in Seattle. I forgot his last name. There was a couple of really good guys, but nobody who rose to prominence after.
Well, this was very early on. We played that show without any stage clothes. It was jeans and t-shirts. From what I remember, they were loud and a bit sloppy, not the refined Metallica you think of today. It was earlier, and we were all a little loose with our structures. But I don't remember much about it other than they were very, it was the early parts of thrash metal. And I was into a bit more organized compositions. So I didn't really pay much attention to it. In fact, I don't remember how we played that night either. Probably not very good. But the place was packed, as crowded as can be. It was very warm that day. It was Thanksgiving day and it was really hot. And I grew up in Oregon where on Thanksgiving, it's rainy and cold. And so that I remember about it. Later on, I remember we played up in San Francisco and Lars came and saw us play. We played with a band called Zebra. And Lars was up there. So we've run into them occasionally.
You already told me the story about Michael Wagner and those demos. I know that from 1982 to 1984, you recorded maybe four different demos. So did you sell them at gigs? Or were they used only for promotional purposes for club owners or labels?
Yes, the latter is correct. We used them to shop for the deal. We didn't sell them at shows, which we probably should have. In retrospect, as you look back on the history of how it all went down, we were offered very early on by Metal Blade Records. Brian Slagel said, “Why don't you do an EP or an album with us?” Our management at the time wanted to go for the big fish. They wanted a big major label deal. And we were still just kids and they were selling us saying, “Wouldn't you rather have Warner Brothers or Epic Records, or Atlantic Records or any of these big record companies?” We were like, “Wow, that's way more impressive than these little record companies from that perspective”. But now looking back on it, we should have gone the route that Motley did, which was really smart. They put out their own little EP and sold 200,000 records. And then every record company was gonna pay whatever they could for Motley. And so then they went up to Elektra and they got the big deal. We had this great tape that got a lot of attention, especially in Europe. But even here, there were two rock stations, KMET and KLOS. And on Friday nights, they would play local bands, us and Armored Saint and other bands that were unsigned. It was unbelievable. Well, “Gods of Thunder” made the cut and they were playing that every Friday. And that was pretty cool because we didn't have a record deal and our stuff was on the radio. So in retrospect, we should have just released it right away because that was 1982, 1983, there was a big wave of heavy metal happening here. And because we were shopping for a big deal, things weren't happening fast enough. And then we would go, “Oh, well, next month you have an audition with Artesia Records”. So we'd go up the studio, all the gear be set up and there's two people would walk in and they'd sit there in the middle of the room and we'd play four songs and they talk to management and leave. We wasted a lot of time waiting for the big fish. And I regret that now, but we didn't know, we were just kids and listening to our management.
Was it Robbie Randall?
Well, Robbie Randall was our first manager. And he was instrumental in a lot of things that happened for us. He brought in Barry Levine, our art director, and he worked a lot with photographs.He worked a lot with stage performance and getting us honed in to be a more professional act, professional looking act on stage, the pacing of things. So that was really good. Robbie also made a lot of inroads on the big record companies. But as it all fell apart, that was all the business end of it, which I wasn't much focused on at the time. But Rob Joyce was our tour manager and he ended up taking over the management after we let Robbie go.
You’ve mentioned showcases for big labels. How was it to play a full show in front of just two or three guys?
That's where it felt like a poser because you're trying to play with the same enthusiasm that you would do for a crowd and there's no crowd. So, I mean, part of a professional is you have to be able to work that up and bring that same energy, but it didn't feel right. And after we did it multiple times, I guess we got better at it. This is where Barry Levine came in because he was very good at the presentation of the show and making sure that we looked great. And then as we did it more and more, it became more familiar, but there was a weirdness to it for sure. Because like I said, there'd be two two people sitting. And you're supposed to be playing like you're playing to a raucous crowd and it was challenging.
And usually those people had no interest in heavy metal. They had no knowledge of that. They were just businessmen who were trying to figure out how much copies you would sell.
Yeah, very true. But again, we were young and we were told that these guys were coming in, they were gonna analyze us and maybe sign us if they wanted. And so we would do the best we could to make the best impression. Sometimes they would stick around and meet us. Other times they would just disappear after they talked to management. So it was an odd exercise that I don't know. When I look back on it, I think it was a time kill because we needed to get going sooner. Waiting for this big record company to take us on, we just wasted so much time.
And speaking about live shows in Los Angeles, you shared stage with a lot of bands of that time like Odin, Bitch, Abattoir, Savage Grace, and some English bands like Raven Girls School. So how was that?
For the most part, we were pretty insulated. We heard about struggles between management for things, but again, we were pretty insulated as the artists. We didn't have to confront anybody directly. I remember we played in the Roxy with Girlschool. And the place was so crowded that we had to climb in through the back window to get into the dressing room, which was just a crazy thing. We all arrived as a band together in a van and it was just wall-to-wall people everywhere. It was so crowded. I've never seen the Roxy so crowded. And we had to crawl in through the back window. That was pretty impressive. We were going, “Wow, things are going good when it's that crowded”. We played two nights with them there. When you ask about a point of contention, W.A.S.P. had this thing, that they would not give the opening act all the lights or all the sound system. And we were told by management that they're gonna take out the sub-blows, so that you sound like a transistor radio. I know a lot of bands did that. I heard Van Halen did that to all their opening acts. When we played with Alice Cooper and Nazareth, Queensryche, Motorhead, all those bands had none of those problems. We got all the lights, we got all the PA. And that was really professional. What I remember so fondly about them, is nobody had those hangups about, “Oh, we're gonna make you sound small so that we sound big”. They didn't have that problem. So it was always wonderful to play with professional, good acts like all those that I mentioned.
Yes, I understand what you're talking about. There is a video, a full show of Malice and Nazareth on YouTube. And you sounded probably better than Nazareth did at that show.
Yeah, yeah. That show was interesting because the producers of the movie, “Vice Versa”, were there. Nazareth knew the producers were gonna be there. So they said, “Let's make sure your show goes really well because if you get this gig, then you get to do this movie”. We got a sound check that night. Sometimes we didn't get a sound check because we didn't have enough time. Nazareth had a sound check, then our gear would get set up. And they'd say, “Well, you don't have time for sound check”. That particular night, we got a full sound check. So everything was dialed in from the very start. And the producers were there and they came back and said, “Oh yeah, we're gonna write you guys into this movie”. So that's how that went.
They were real gentlemen.
Yeah, I couldn't speak more highly about those guys. They were such a great group of guys. And going through their own thing at the time too, because Nazareth had been flying that ladder and they were huge. They had their own plane and they were headlining stadiums and stuff. And then when we were with them, they were doing pretty big halls still, 5,000 seaters, 3,000 seaters. But they didn't have any ego hangups. They were like, “Hey, we're just out here playing”. So they're really genuine guys. Tough thing for them that I had never seen before was they had some new music they had just written, a new album that they were touring on. And they would come out and play these songs. And I would go, “Wow, these are great songs. These are fantastic. They're just as good as the old songs they had”. And people would just kind of sit there and like, but as soon as they played “Love Hurts”, as soon as they played “Hair of the Dog”, the place would go bananas like it was the Beatles playing, you know? So these poor guys, they knew it. They go, “Wow, as good as our new stuff is, people don't want to hear it. They want to hear the hits”, you know?
And what about Motörhead? I know that Lemmy was a real gentleman to opening acts, and he could provide beer from his dressing room, and cheer guys from opening band and stuff like that.
Yeah, Lemmy was a nice enough guy, and the whole band was. They were good to tour with. Again, they didn't have any hangups about trying to outshine anybody. They were who they were, and that's what they did. The main thing, a funny thing I remember about Lemmy is he had some drinks before he'd play, and they got pretty lit a few times. One time we were playing, I think, in New York on Long Island. We had just finished playing, and we were in our dressing room, and Lemmy comes into our dressing room, and all he's wearing is his underwear. He's got his underwear. He's got a drink, or he's got a bottle of Jack Daniels, whatever it was. He has a drink, and he stands there, and we're looking at him going, “What are we supposed to say”? And Mick goes, “Oh, Lemmy, you're all dressed up, and no place to go”, and Lemmy just started laughing. He didn't have anything to say. It was just a funny thing.
Yeah, that was on New Year's Eve, I wanna say. I wanna say it was 1983. Maybe 1984. There was a party, I think, at Don Dokken's house, which wasn't far from where we lived in the condo in Redondo. James had gone over there. It was well known that if James had too many drinks, he got very, you know, belligerent, rude. He kind of went blackout. He didn't remember the next day, that kind of thing. Well, we dealt with a lot of it. But this particular night, I was doing something else. I came home to the Redondo condo and got back around 10 o'clock or so. Mick and Jay were out partying somewhere. James went to Don Dockken's house for the part for that party. So apparently Jack Russell was there. This is the way I heard the story. And Jack played some of the new Great White album for a bunch of people sitting around. James was one of the people sitting around. And apparently James goes, “Ah, that sucks. That sounds like shit”. And Jack was pretty offended by it. So I guess a little bit later, Jack invited James outside and then just punched him and I guess really beat the crap out of him. So people break it up. They send James home, back to the condo in Redondo. About a half hour later, Mick and Jay show up to the party at Dokken's place. Unbeknownst to them, they had no idea what happened. Well, everybody sees Mick and Jay coming. And people are thinking Mick and Jay are going in to do some justice here. Mick and Jay are like, “Why is everybody acting so weird”? And so then they tell them that James and Jack got in a fight. And meanwhile, I'm in my bed. I think it was about after midnight. James comes home and he is furious. And I hear stuff breaking downstairs. I was almost asleep. And I'm going, “Oh, I don't want to go down there and deal with a drunk James”. Then Mick and Jay come home. And I hear them down there yelling and screaming. And everybody's fighting. It was chaos. I didn't go down there. But the morning I went down, there was broken glass and shit all over the place. And apparently Mick was going to beat up James for destroying the place. James was angry that none of us were there to protect him or something like that. Next morning, he woke up all hungover and didn't remember, couldn't tell us what happened or anything and stuff. But I heard that Jack Russell cheap shot at him. I don't know if that's true or not. James was pretty beat up. We had pictures for a while there: two black eyes, a little bloody lip. It looked like more than one person beat him up. But when James was drunk, he said a lot of really rude things. There were times we were holding Mick back from James because James would egg Mick on and say, “Come on, go ahead and kick my ass”.
Was he like that all the time when he was in the band?
You know, we were pretty dysfunctional. We really were. There were many factions going all different ways. And we were young, confused and angry. And James was a loose cannon, very tough to control. And he didn't want to be controlled. In fact, he said that many times “Don't try to control me”. And, you know, within the band we tried to keep it going the same direction and all for one, one for all. But like I said, we were dysfunctional and it was hard to agree a lot of times, a lot of politicking.
OK, I see. And speaking about fractions within the band, I think you and Mick were really nice partners in songwriting. You wrote a lot of songs together while Jay wrote his songs alone. Was it really like that?
Mick, Jay and I were the three main songwriters. James would interpret our musical compositions and put his lyrics to it. He did that pretty eloquently, and we were happy for that. But what would happen is I would have an idea, I would usually bring it to Mick because he was such a competent guitar player. Cliff was more instrumental in writing, too. He was very good at taking our initial ideas and being patient while we worked through them, because we'd say, “Oh, no, change this, move this”. And Cliff would be there for that. And then there'd be ideas that Mick would have and he'd bring it to me and say, “Let's work the structure together”. So usually when we credited the songs for who wrote them, it was like who brought the initial idea. If I helped Mick write the song like “Tarot Dealer”, I would be second on the list of writing. He had the original. Jay, he was more solo that way. I mean, he had some other songwriters that he played with and he would bring songs to them and they would help him put maybe some structure together and then he would bring it to the band. Then there were some ideas that Jay would come in with just an idea and we would jam it out. And, you know, Mick would put a solo section together for it. But it was Jay's song. So we just kind of kept it that.
And now let's talk for a while about your first album “In the beginning...” Why did you decide to record it with Ashley Howe? Was it your label's idea to to bring Ashley?
Yeah, that's totally what it was. Apparently, there was some kind of rift between Atlantic Records and Michael Wagner, where he had done a project for them and they hadn't paid him. And so he held back the project until they paid him. And so they were mad about that. Go figure, you know. We found out about that later. But our idea was if we got the deal based on the demo tapes, Michael's going to do the whole album. And this is where our management should have been stronger because they should have said, “No, no, no, we're going to use Michael Wagner and that's what's going to happen”. But they caved to the pressure of Atlantic saying, “Oh, no, we want to bring in this unknown guy who never did anything close to heavy metal and never did anything after that. So what a mistake. That was one that was probably one of the first mistakes. We made about every mistake you can make on that first album. I think we had one hundred and twenty thousand dollars to do that album. That's a lot of money to have it sound like that. It should sound like God, you know. But we made a lot of mistakes. We started recording at Pasha Studios where Quiet Riot had recorded all their stuff. We should have recorded at Total Access where we had done the demos. That would have kept the continuity, I think, a lot better. We recorded the songs with Ashley and he really wanted to alter some things about the composition of the songs that was really just wrong. I have copies of Ashley Howe's versions and then the album versions and some of the songs he just didn't do them service right. Then we had an engineer named Duane Baron I think he did some Quiet Riot stuff before that. He had this great drum sound right. So sonically when we started with Ashley, it sounded better because the engineer was Duane Baron and he was a good engineer. I don't know if he was as good as Michael, but it sounded good and we proceeded with it. But Ashley wanted to change the songs. It didn't have the same power that it had with Michael. And then the rawness of the band came out. Ashley tried to refine it really too much and keep us from being the crazy, you know, he hard hitting laser-beam type band that we were. So that was frustrating, you know, having that happen. And we turned it into Atlantic and they were going, “Well, this isn't the band that we signed. We signed this friggin hard hitting thing”. So we went back and put the Michael songs on the album and then crossed the line and then brought Michael in to fix the thing. It was just like we made every mistake you could possibly make. The record company didn't like it. And so then we're going, “Well, what the hell? This album was supposed to be out a year ago and we're still trying to fix it”. We had to wait for Michael's schedule and we go into the studio with Michael and he says, “Well, you know, I got these two versions, the stuff I did and the stuff that they did. And we got to make it sound the same”. So that's why the whole album sounds like this. It sounds way overproduced and overprocessed and they just didn't do it justice. From the rearview mirror from now, I say, we made every mistake we could make and we should have held our guns and said, “ Michael's going to record it. We're going to do it that way”. But if you go back further, we should have gone to Brian Slagle and said, “ Michael Wagner is going to produce the album for us. We'll do it here”. We would have had an album out two years before it finally came out.
There was a photo shoot that we did for the first album that had this egg on this platform and the egg was breaking open and stuff. You know, that was one of the concepts. And apparently the record company didn't like that. So the star field came about, which is very spinal tappish. Barry Levine, who was credited with our stage performance and many other things too, is also credited with the choices on the front and back of the album covers, both of them. So we were following. We had our art director, Barry Levine, and he was he was the professional. So let him do it. And the first album cover is a kind of a who cares thing. The second one, I've heard both sides. Some people love it. Some people, like you, just say it’s not really that great. When I first saw it with Cliff, it looked like a Hare Krishna. You know what a Hare Krishna is? It's a religious group here and they shave their heads and they're usually at the airports asking for donations. That's what Cliff and I both said about the cover, “Hare Krishna with an axe”. How does that relate to “License to Kill”? You know, whatever. Once again, hindsight. Even for the latest thing, “New Breed of Godz” we hired a German artist to put that together and he did a great job. I mean, that album looks better than the other stuff.
Is it true that you sold 100,000 copies of “In the Beginning”?
We never got any kind of confirmation on numbers. Mick and Jay in the early 2000s went to an attorney and said, “Listen, we think we've sold a lot more albums than they say we have”. And the attorney looked into it and he said, “Well, you're right. You guys have sold a lot more records than they're saying you have, which was around 100,000”. But he said, in order to go sue them and pursue this, it'll cost us so much money, tens of thousands of dollars. And Mick and Jay approached me and said, “How much do you want to pay to go in”? I said, “Look, it's water under the bridge. I don't want to throw a bunch of money at this and then go, “Oh, their attorneys are way too good”. You can't get through. You're not going to find out. And plus, they could bury things. These are all old records. Before computerized things in the 80s and 90s, they probably wrote it down, and just threw this away. And so the records don't exist, you know. So I wasn't willing to pursue that. And I think Mick and Jay lost interest also. Just another way that another artist got ripped off.
I know that there was no proper touring support for “In the Beginning”, but you managed to play concerts here and there. You also visited San Francisco that was at the time all into thrash metal. Didn't they see you as a poser band?
You know, I don't remember anything of the sort. The shows we played in San Francisco were pretty well attended. And it didn't feel negative at all. As far as the poser thing, I don't know. I think it's funny. Some people will say, “Oh, God, it was Malice, a hair band...” Hair bands were like Poison and Warrant. But, you know, as far as the posing thing, you know, I knew that the band could play, and a lot of poser bands couldn't play. They just went up there and posed. We didn't come from that poser mentality or anything of the sort. And so we were never treated that way. You know, that term never really came up. It probably was a little bit during the tour with Slayer. That was the toughest contradiction, where we weren't in that group of the thrash metal that Slayer was playing. And so we looked like a really light version of that, even as heavy as we were. But we played with Alice Cooper, we sounded like the heaviest band. We played with Nazareth and “Gods of Thunder” or “Hellrider” sounded super heavy compared to Nazareth.
OK, I have some questions abiut that tour with Slayer, but let’s talk for a while about “License to Kill”. What lessons did you learn after the first album?
Well, what we learned from the first album and all those mistakes probably made it a better album the second time. So we said we wanted Max Norman and they said, “Well, maybe not”. We said, “We want Max Norman”. And they go, “Well, maybe”. We said “We want Max Norman”. “OK, Max Norman”. Why didn't we do that with the first album? So Max came in and he was just spot on with what we needed. First of all, we respected him tremendously because of his Ozzy stuff and everything he had done. And he came in and he was just so well prepared. He had been sending demo tapes of many of the songs and he had had the notes and time signatures and all this kind of stuff. So when he came in, he was just very comprehensive and very intelligent. This is the guy you want to steer your ship. And it was just a great experience from the very beginning. I wished he had done the first album. First of all, it sounded better. Second of all, it had more continuity because Max was so good with sonic value as well as arrangements. He was really good at helping us, take it to the next extra level. We had these raw ideas and he'd say, “Just bring me the raw ideas. We'll structure them”. And so that interaction was really great. We all liked working with Max and he had such a high level of performance, too. His ear is so good. You play something, and he says, “I think you can do it better than that”. And you play it again. You know, you brought that out of all of us.
In one interview Max said that you recorded “License to Kills” at night shifts. Wasn't it exhausting for you or were you pretty much used to that nightlife?
You know, we did. One of the great things we did on the on the pre-production of the album is we rented a studio, a big studio, and it was like some of the bigger halls we played. So it sounded the same. We went in there and set up all the gear and we would go in at night and play the same time we would play our shows. And so we would rehearse from like 7 p.m. to midnight or so. And the room sounded like the halls we played. So the music we were writing was appropriate. We started realizing that you don't have to just play fast stuff, because it gets all washed out in a big arena. If you play slower stuff, a song like “Vigilante”, in a big hall, the whole thing moves like that. So it worked that we were working at the same time. It didn't bother us. And of course, Max, he was a friggin' vampire. I would come in and do bass parts. I come in and do bass parts for like five hours until my hands were just like ripped apart. And then he would go right in the guitar parts and he would do five, ten hours of guitar parts. You think, “How does this guy even sleep? How does he do this?” You know, my ears are wasted after that much time. But Max was really good at this. His endurance was incredible and taught us that. But the rehearsal part of pre-production was fantastic. And then we got into the studio to record. And then again, Max was really proficient about how we did things. And that's why it's so much more professional.
On “License to Kill”, you used two songs from the early demos...
It was “Murder” and “Circle of Fire”, I think.
Why didn't you use them on the first album? Did you think they were out of the whole vibe of that record?
Yeah, we did. “Murder” was a song we played live throughout the whole time, but it just didn't make the cut on the first album. I think I actually didn't like it but Max liked it. Max said, “We can make this song work”. And so that happened that way.
Did your label try to push on you to write more commercial type stuff?
You know, that was always in there. That probably went from record company to management, and then management diffused it a bit before it came to us. Because, you know, as with all artists, it's not going to settle well. That's what all artists go through: Black Sabbath, Rush, they all went through it. Like the record company comes in and says, “Hey, you're going to need to write stuff that's going to be played on the radio”. And we all know it's a stupid idea to try to write something for the radio. You have to write what's in your heart and what's in your head and do it to the best of your ability. You don't conceive what somebody might like. You write what you like. So we didn't get that directly from the record company. I think it might have come in in some channels from management. They might have said, “You guys got anything lighter, not quite so heavy?” They might have said that, but it just went by us. “Well, no, we write what we write”.
Max Norman also mentioned some technical issues with the recording machine that he had to fight a bit with it. Do you remember anything like that?
Yes, there was a problem with the tape machine. One of the motors was behaving inconsistently. And I don't recall exactly the physics of what it was. But when you were to record on the two-inch tape, it was recorded at a different speed at the beginning than it did at the end. So consequently, that changed the tone because the tone would tune down as it slowed down, right? So we had to tune the guitars accordingly. So if you were in a flat to match what had happened earlier, it could have been an absolute disaster if somebody as smart as Max wasn't handling it. He figured it out and kept his cool. I remember he got really pissed when he found it at first. But then he said, “Well, we have to fix it. We're already this far and we can't start over”. So he fixed it. But that's why if you listen to some parts of the album and you play to it, you go, oh, the tuning is a little bit off of A440. I don't know if it made the album sound better. Maybe it sounded a little strange because it's tuned down just a quarter step. Who knows?
And how did you get two Dave's from Megadeth and the guys from Black N’ Blue to record back vocals?
The two Daves, we had run into them many times before and they'd always been super friendly, good guys. Jay knew them better than all of us. But anytime I was with Dave Ellipton, we'd talk bass and stuff like that. I think he had a BC Rich endorsement also, which was a guitar company that I also had an endorsement with. So Jay got those two guys to come over and then I think I got a hold of Jamie and Tommy Thayer also. I'm trying to think if Woop (Jeff Warner) came from Black N’ Blue. I don't remember. There was a picture of all of us at one time. What I remember about that session was that, Dave and Dave came in and then the guys from Black N’ Blue and Max was playing “License to Kill” and it sounded unbelievable. We were in the studio and all had headphones on. We were singing the backing vocals and those guys were all looking at us going, “Oh my God, you guys have a good album here”. These guys that I respected so much just say, “Holy shit, this sounds like unbelievable. You got a really good album”. And we knew it. We felt it, but we hadn't played it for anybody. We were just going, oh, I think we got a good album here. And Mustaine was so impressed that he said, “Max, you're doing our next album”. So that's how that went down. And he did.
A bit unfair question, but how do you rate Malice albums these days? To me they both are great, but I know a lot of people who say that “In the beginning…” is an essential Malice album, while “License to Kill” is a weaker one, It's more commercial.
Yeah, I would probably side with your opinion that they're both to me special because they're in my heart. But sonically, “License to Kill” was such a better sounding album. And I always find myself wishing that “In the beginning…”. There would be times where I would be driving in my car and I would tune the stereo so it sounds better, like pump up the bass and take the volume way up and stuff. If that album sounded as good as “License to Kill”, those songs would be even more powerful.
And of course, I can't avoid the question about the tour with Slayer, which you did in 1987. How did this idea come about?
Well, we were on the East Coast, and we were presented with a tour with Manowar. I think they're also an Atlantic band, if I'm not mistaken. But they said, “You and Manowar are going to go over and hit Europe”. And they had some of the same dates, but the places we were playing were smaller clubs. And we were going, “Eh, Manowar, is that really a good lineup for us?” And then the possibility of Slayer came up. Well, I didn't know much about Slayer at all. I knew they were from here, San Bernardino area. And I'd heard a couple things, but didn't know much about them. But when we looked over their itinerary, we were like, “Oh, shit, we're playing 10,000-seat halls, 12,000-seat halls, 15,000-seat halls”. We said, “Let's just go play the bigger places”. Manowar looked like a club tour. Slayer looked like a concert tour. And that was our main prerogative. Playing 15,000 people is better than playing to 200 people, right? So that's the way we took it. And you know what? It wasn't the best pairing. And of course, we realized that gig one, we're going, “Holy shit”. Because in England, especially, fans were pretty rude, they were spiting on us. And it was pretty chaotic. And we weren't quite ready for that on gig one. But we got used to it. After every gig, it made us a lot meaner. We got a lot meaner after that. We got angry. And we were ready to fight. After about three gigs, we said, “Enough of that!” Because once we left England, they didn't spit. We went to Scotland. People were as friendly as could be. Also, every show, there was plenty of Malice fans out there. We'd finish the song and there'd be a huge cheer. It was just way back there? because those people weren't willing to fight to get up in front with all these ogres that were down front. They wanted to have the mosh pit and the whole thing. And of course, when Slayer came on, it was just chaos. We'd finish, then we'd go back up in the back stands and watch the show that Slayer had put on. We're going, “Oh my god, it's like a fourth level of hell or something down there”. I can't imagine being out in the audience. It was so loud, so violent, everything. Fights happening all over the place, or it looked like fights. I guess they were just running into each other. But I'm glad we did it. It made us tougher.
Yeah, we had talked about that before we went over. And so Mick had picked up a couple of squirt guns and we didn't really initiate it until about the 4th or 5th gig. I think it was Nottingham, I don't know exactly. It was a big club, but the stage was only about two feet high, and the crowd was right there. And from the front of the stage to the front of the amps was probably about 10 feet. Not very big, not much room at all. So they could spit at and hit you from the front easily. We were done with the spitting thing. The security were a bunch of bouncers, these big English guys, shaved heads, biker guys, you know, big guys. Our crew manager said, “Hey, look, nobody spits. If they spit out, they go”. So we go out there to play. And these guys, these big English brutes are about three, four or five rows back? And they're all standing there, just waiting. And so when we just start playing, all of a sudden, kids are up there. And as soon as they would, you'd see this big hand come up and grab the hair. And the other kids would look around going, “Oh, shit, we better not do this”. And so they stopped. So there's not much spitting at all. And we're going, “Good, they got the message”. Well, we had put the squirt guns on the stage on the drum riser for James because he was the one that was up front. We were doing, I think, “License to Kill”, which we didn't play very often on that tour. James was up front, and then the kids were spitting on him. And he walks back, takes this squirt gun and goes, “I just start hitting these guys up in front”. They're all into it until it hits their mouth. And then you can see the horror on their faces as they as the salty liquid sinks in and they realize that's urine. And I remember looking at it going, “Holy shit!” We won, and they turned around and ran away. Oh, my God, it's hilarious. So we never use the gun again. Never before. Never after. It was that that one night. And then the spitting stopped because we went to bigger places like Hammersmith Odeon. You know, there was no spitting in London. And then in Germany and Belgium, it was good crowds and no spitting.
Did you complete the tour with Slayer or did you have to abort it at some point?
We were supposed to go to Italy and France and James lost his voice. He was not taking care of himself. I think he had some issues with the crowds being big and he preferred the smaller places, more intimate. He just tend to seem to shy away from it when we were having greater success. And his voice, he wasn't taking care of himself. So he would finish the show and he would go out and drink. And he'd be outside. It's freaking cold outside. And he's out there in a sweaty T-shirt. I think when we played in Belgium and he was just out of his mind and he went on stage, couldn't sing and he was furious. So he's throwing equipment around. Well, the people are pissed. The technicians are pissed that he's throwing microphones and stomping on the speakers and stuff like that. And so he's getting reprimanded for that. So he goes back and drinks and gets himself hammered. So we just went, oh, we got to jump off this tour. He couldn't do it. And management said he's done. So we headed back to L.A.
And after that, you fired James?
We did a few shows here in L.A. and then it was just time. We just knew it. And we just were looking at each other going, “This guy, he's on a spiral like this. He doesn't enjoy this success we're having. He’s on a very self-destructive path”. You know, while we were touring, we were working on other songs and getting ready for the next album. We'd already done the movie, and the band was just falling apart. So it we knew it was time to replace James.
By that time Jay also quit.
Yeah, we heard, that he was going to join Megadeth. And we're like, “OK, now what do we do”? Mick and I and Cliff thought, well, we just get another singer and keep going. And so we auditioned a bunch of singers and that was not a lot of fun. But we did find Mark Weitz, who was really, really good. He could do the Malice stuff spot on. In fact, better than James, because he was younger and his voice was just really good. But I don't think he had the writing capabilities that James did. We knew that we were going to have challenges there. But that was so short lived. Mark was in the band for a few months and then the whole thing came apart. We thought that we would be able to pick Malice up again and go. But the record company wasn't quite so sure about that. And they were like, if it's not the original Malice, we're not really interested in that new Malice thing. So that was an education for us.
Could you explain the situation with the film Vice Versa and with the EP “Crazy in the Night”? Because in the movie “Vice Versa” it is James who sings, but on the EP it’s Pau Sabu.
Paul sang the song “Vice Versa”. And that was because we wrote it for the movie. You know, we wrote and recorded “Crazy in the Night” partly on the road. And then I told you about that Nazareth show, that's where producers said, “OK, we're going to do it”. So after that, we did a couple more shows and we flew back to L.A. to record the “Crazy in the Night” and “Vice Versa”. And then we went back out on tour and we went to Chicago and filmed us doing “Crazy in the Night”. And it was James singing there. He didn't do “Vice Versa” because we were just trying something different. We knew it was for the movie. It wasn't for an album. So we just had Paul Sabu come in and sing on it. And that EP came out in 1989. That was just somebody trying to make the deal. It wasn't so much as a huge demand for it. I think we just had some extra songs in the can and, you know, I wasn't really much involved with that at all. There were some other forces out there that were trying to capitalize on some songs that we had done.
Okay, I see. And that was basically the end of Malice at that period? 
Rattleshack a.k.a. Monster
That was the end of Malice. And then Cliff and Mick and I continued to play and write for a while. And then we kind of realized that it was going nowhere. And Mick and I wanted to do something different. Black N’ Blue had just split up and Pete Holmes, who was my old buddy, was available. He said, “Why don't we get together and jam some stuff out, see how it goes, see how it plays?” We got in a rehearsal studio and started playing. It's so easy to play with him. We really hadn't come up with a name yet, but that was the beginning of Monster. I think we called it Rattleshack at first. We rehearsed and wrote a bunch of songs, and it just felt really good. It was really fresh and new, it was something different than Malice. We weren't restricted to try to write things in that vein. So we could open up a little bit more and we could play some different ideas. It still felt heavy. It just wasn't as heavy as Malice. But to us, it was a new direction. We had Jeff Scott Soto come in and sing some of the parts with us. We had three songs and we really liked him. He just brought the energy we wanted. So Jeff came in and we had some rehearsal tapes. We sent them to Max who said, “Holy shit, you guys got something here. Let's go in and record it”. So we went in and did three song demo with Jeff and then shopped it around to try to get a deal. And I think the grunge thing was starting to happen. All of a sudden what we were doing wasn't that interesting. Everybody's looking for the next grunge band and you're not from Seattle and you're not playing grunge. So get out of here. So that, you know, we wanted Jeff to join the band. And he had a bunch of other projects going. He was used to being coming in and joining Yngwie and doing a couple albums and going off doing something else. So he just was not ready to commit. And we were heartbroken that he didn't want to go with us because we thought we really had something there. We started auditioning singers and that again was not fun auditioning guys. But we had Mark Weitz for a bit. He was also good, but that just didn't seem like it was going anywhere. And then we heard some tapes of Mark Isom, and he was a good singer, good writer. So he came in and we knew we had the right singer at that time. So we went down that road. We wrote many, many songs. We recorded the rest of them and then shopped it around. And it was frustrating to have all these songs that we thought were perfect. And once again, “You're not from Seattle, you're not grunge, not interested”. And so we just kind of set it down and said, “OK, well, we tried”. We had a good four years that we played together, a lot of fun, but everybody wanted to go off and do their own thing. So everybody did. And then I got contacted by Long Island Records in Germany. They said, “We got this demo tape of you guys and we really like it and we'd like to release it. So got the guys back together and said, hey, we had to add a couple songs because to fill this album out. And so we got back together, recorded the album with Max. We released it and then we licensed it in Japan and all over the place, once again, everybody stealing the music and never paying us for it. Long Island paid for their part, but other entities did not.
I know that you played a couple of shows with Monster, but wasn't there a proper tour?
Well, it was just L.A. based. Even when we had a record, it was released in Germany and it wasn't like we could just roll out and go to Arizona as it was too expensive. Plus, at that time, we were all started working, you know, we had to join the workforce again because our professional musicianship days were behind us. The record company wasn't paying us a salary anymore. Mick and I and Cliff were all working in the film industry. We were making good money and it wasn't like you were going to just pick up and go on tour where you're not making any money. We were kind of to the point where, we wanted to see what happens with that album. If it gets big enough, sure, we'll go tour on it. So we played some L.A. shows that were really good. We played a show in The Roxy, which I videotaped. And it still stands up. A couple of years ago I watched it and I went, “Oh, it's still good”. You know, that was a good band.
Don't you want to re-release this album nowadays with maybe some bonus tracks and stuff like that?
Well, there were a couple of guys that were looking to re-release the Monster album with the Jeff Scott Soto inclusion. I said, “Well, first of all, I have to contact Jeff and find out if it's OK to release those songs”, because Jeff is still a working musician. If he does give his permission, I would then want to go to Max and say, “Max, you need to remix this to make it sound like the rest of the album”, because we had just done demo tapes with Jeff. So I told the guys, “Look, it's going to take some time for me to get approval from Jeff. If he approves it, we've got to have Max go in and remix it and remaster it, because if you're going to re-release this thing, it's got to sound better than the original”. It can't just be the same and then have three demo songs on it. It's got to sound better. And they were saying, “Well, I'm not sure how much is that going to cost”. The problem was I was just too busy at the time to even deal with it. They stopped asking me about it. Maybe I'll never come back.
Could you tell me a bit about the period after Monster and before the reunion of Malice?
I did a project with Pete Holmes and an old friend from Portland and we called it Smash Palace. We didn't know there was a band called Smash Palace. I think Tommy Thayer actually said, “Good name for a band, Smash Palace”. So we called the band Smash Palace. I'll just refer to it as SPD for now, because later on we found out there was a band called Smash Palace that released an album back in the 80s and then in 2010 or something like that. So we stopped calling it that. But during the time we were doing the project with Marty McCray, who's a guitar player, and Pete Holmes and myself. We had a vocalist named Rick Monroe and a keyboard player named Mark Zimmerman. And so we went into the studio and did a bunch of Marty's songs and it was just the greatest time. We did a total of seven or eight songs. Pat Regan was the producer on that. He did Mr. Big, Deep Purple and other things. We did that project for a few years in 1994—1997. We shopped those tapes around trying to get a deal. Everybody said, “Oh, my God, it's really good music”. But nobody wanted to commit. We had a lot of fun doing it. Then during that time, Pat Regan, the producer, was doing Deep Purple live. So my wife was a flight attendant. She flew for an American company and she flew over to Germany for some event. She said, “I'm going to be in Munich for six days. Why don't you come over?? I looked at my calendar and said, “I can do that”. Well, Pat Regan was in Switzerland recording Deep Purple. So I told Pat, that I was going to go over to Germany. He said, “You should come over to Zurich and come see me. I'm going to be recording Deep Purple”. So I fly over to Germany and spend some time in Munich. And then we rent a car and drive up to Zurich and stay the night there. We go to this gigantic hall and it's like 12,000 people and it's packed. And I'm thinking, “When Deep Purple come here in the States, they play the House of Blues, 500 seat place, and over there it’s 12,000 people!” So we watched Purple play there and we went back to the hotel and they were staying in the same place. We hung out with them and Pat Regan, of course. Then fast forward, come back to the States and Pat says, “Ian wants to do a solo project. I want you and Pete to play bass and drums on it. And then we're gonna get Tommy Thayer to play guitar”. We Irehearsed for about a week or so and recorded some songs. And we were thinking. ”it's going to be some power driving stuff, we're going to write songs or whatever”. But Ian had a bunch of songs he had written and he wanted to do them. And they were kind of, I would say, Irish folk kind of movements. You get to play with Ian Gillan, you just do whatever you want, wherever you need to. So it was a lot of fun. And I can't respect Ian Gillan more. After doing the project with him, he was just such a pro. So many times witnessing him work, and talking with him, and hanging with him when we all got to dinner. It was so much fun. And he's such a good guy. But that project, you know, I don't know whatever became of it. We recorded the parts and then Ian went on with his life. But me and Pete always laugh about the fact that for about two weeks our singer was Ian Gillan. We went to the Rainbow one night which is a famous bar down in Sunset Strip. Lemmy used to hang there all the time. They get us a table in the corner, best seat in the place. It's my wife, my girlfriend at the time, Pete Holmes, Tommy Thayer, Ian Gillan, his manager, Pat Regan and myself all sit at this table. We're ordering drinks and stuff and having a great time laughing and talking. And slowly people start realizing that Ian Gillan is sitting at this table. So as the night gets on, the club gets packed, more and more crowded. You see this line of guys that are just lining up and getting close to the table. And these people are asking Ian one question: “Hey, my favorite song is “Smoke on the Water”. Where'd you write that”? And he would answer the question. And we're all rolling our eyes. “Oh, my God, why would you ask him that question”? You know, it's Ian Gillan, for God's sakes, leave him alone. But he was so gracious. He would sign autographs. It was just really another exercise in professionalism that this guy was so congenial to his fans. He's such a nice guy. And then his talent is beyond belief. There were times when we'd be in the studio, and he would have his guitar. And he goes, “I got this idea”. and he starts strumming his guitar. And also he starts singing. And I'm looking around thinking, “What the hell is this? Is it amplified”? Because his control of his voice and the way he could fill up the room was, I had never heard anybody do that before. It was really a wonderful experience to be able to share the life with him for a couple of weeks.
Just wow! Now let’s discuss Malice’s reunion in 2007. You played some shows, started demoing new songs, but it took like four years to come up with “New Breed of the Godz” that had just four new tracks.
Yeah, it wasn't a tremendous amount of effort going into it. Jay was really the spearhead of the 2007 reunion. And we had Brian Allen who did the vocals. And there was talk about taking that out on the road or doing another album or something like that. It was fun. But to me, it felt like we were behind it so much. Malice was a young guys’ music, and we weren't so young anymore. We had good jobs and it wasn't like you're ready to leave your good job and go out and see what happens. So there wasn't a lot of energy towards it. We played a show here and it was OK. That was fun. And especially with Pete, because Pete's such a great drummer. And it was so fun to play those songs again. But the quality of the vocals wasn’t the same that it used to be. It was a compromise. Then a couple of years go by and we got this invitation to play some festivals, one in Germany and one in Switzerland. And Jay was, again, the spearhead, he really wanted to do this. And Pete was like, “Oh, I'll go if you're going to go”. I had a studio down in Culver City. We went down there and worked up the songs. But at some point I realized that I couldn’t do it. So the guys said, “Would you be OK having a different bass player come in”? I said, “Fine, absolutely. Go ahead. Tour it and play it. I don't care. As long as you guys are happy, we're all good”. So Bobby (Robert Gonzalez) came aboard. We would rehearse and then we went over to Germany and did the show, the festival and those two places. That was that was really fun experience. We actually got paid, made money on it, came back. And then that's when the whole “New Breed of the Godz” concept came about. It was decided that we're going to record old stuff and then four new songsf. Well, I'd written bass parts on two songs in there. And they said, “Well, we want to turn on this thing. So how do you want to do it?” And I said, “I'll record all the songs that I wrote, the old stuff and the four new songs have Bobby record them. Bobby's not trying to play my old parts and I'm not going to write down parts that Bobby is going to play. Let him write his own thing”. That's the way we did it.
I know that you tried to approach James Neal for that reunion and he refused because he's in a different state of mind nowadays. But did you try to approach Cliff for this reunion?
We didn't, mostly because we all felt comfortable with Pete. And, you know, once we made that movement already, it was just so natural because we had played with Pete through Monster and then I had done the Smash Palace and the Ian Gillam thing. So Pete was my guy. He was my drummer. I hadn't reunited with Cliff since we kind of parted ways off the Malice disintegration. Although I stayed friends with Cliff and I saw him at Mick's memorial, but we keep in touch on an annual basis.
How do you see “New Breed of the Godz”? Is it a good testament to the Malice legacy? 
Malice in 2012
I think it's a different version, but it does hold true. Replaying the song 20 plus years later, how does it hold up? I don't know. I let somebody else be the judge of it. I know, it was fun to re-record those songs with Pete because, once again, I think he's such a great player. I'm a better player now than I used to be back then. However, when it came time to work up for the reunion, I had to practice every day and work those Malice songs again because they're so busy. And I kind of became a different player after that, playing different styles and different things. And fast and hard wasn't the way I was playing. So when we were reworking those Malice songs, I had to really work hard to get my fingers up to speed to be able to play it and play it better. But I feel I did because I'm a better player, a more knowledgeable player now than I was back then.
You know, the main problem with this album for me is the vocals. I like James Rivera and his work with Helstar. I think that's where he sounds the best. But comparing to James Neal, his voice doesn't fit, I would say.
Yeah. And, you know, when we were working the songs up to that project, that was in the back of my head all the time. I was going, “Well, it doesn't sound the same”.There was talk about having different singers come out and do it. But this wasn't a highly financed gig. James’ name came about between Jay and Mick, “Why don't we bring him in to do the tour or the redo of Malice”? Like I said, the “New Breed of Godz” was just another version of Malice with some of the original players. As far as a testament to it, it was fun to do and I didn't really think much about it. I wished the guys well if they were going to go out and tour it. I was hoping they could tour for a long time, but there's not a huge draw for it.
And what about James Neal? Are you in touch with him?
I haven't been in touch with James for quite some time. I emailed him a few times years and years ago, 20 years ago or more, and he was happy in his life. That's what I got from it. He lives on the East Coast somewhere, works in a company where he's the technician of their communications department. He's a smart guy and he was a huge talent, I think, back in the day. Last time I talked to him again, I have no idea. I haven't even talked to him since Mick passed away. I'm sure he has heard of that Mick passed, but I don't know anybody that's talked to him.
I have read a couple of interviews with James and I had a feeling that the band didn't matter to him anymore.
Yeah, I can understand that, because that was a tumultuous part of his life. And, you know, things were moving fast and I think maybe too fast for him. We were right on the cusp of becoming a big band and we didn't. I remember talking to him about this within five or six years after we had split up and hearing him describe his version of why things didn't go our way was funny to me. It was comical. I was like, wow, different lens, different perspective. That's the way people are. They see it from different perspectives.
May I ask what his version was?
Well, a lot of it was that we got screwed over. We got screwed over by management, by record companies. There were some other factors, too, that I said I felt comical, but it escapes me as to exactly what it was. I think he thought Mick or myself or both of us were trying to control the project too much. Like I said, I've forgotten the details of that conversation. All I remember is walking away going, “Wow, he sees that from a completely different perspective than I see it from”. But that kind of sheds a light on how different we all were in the band. But that's part of the thing that made us write so well. I think that's why we played this aggressive music, because we were always fighting.
To round up this interview, could you say a few words about Mick Zane and how you want to remember him?
I miss him tremendously because he was like a brother to me. We shared a lot of thoughts and ideas and successes and pains. I know him from so many different generations. I knew him as a kid. I knew him as a teen, knew him as an adult. And I knew him as a rock star.I knew him as a father. I miss him all the time. It's a tough reality. He had cancer. Mick was a big guy, and he was strong and both mentally and physically. And to watch that disease take down such a strong guy was painful. I remember so many things about him creatively. And as a fellow musician, he was the kind of guy you could always count on, as far as live performances. He was meticulous about playing correctly, playing accurately, redoing the part exactly the way that he written it. He was very good at that as a co-writer. I could trust him because when you bring an idea, you have this idea in your head, “I really think this is good. And then you're going to give it to somebody else. And if that somebody else says that's not such a good idea, you go, “Oh, God, just kill me”. So when I could bring these ideas that were so fragile to him, he would take the idea and interpret it just the way I would hope that he would. He always expected the best of himself. “Good enough” — that wasn't really in his vocabulary. He wanted to excel, to be the best. And then he had a gentle side, too. You know, he was a very, very gentle man. His lovely wife, Michelle, and his two kids are very great people. And he was very gentle with them. I remember him as a good friend, a great bandmate and somebody that you definitely want to have a beer with because he could tell some stories and he was a funny dude, man. We laughed very, very hard sometimes. At all phases, whether it be playing live or rehearsals. The last time I saw Mick was with Max Norman. Max had flown in from New York too, because Mick's wife, Michelle, told me, “You guys need to come say goodbye because he's this far”. And each time I went to see him, which was about every other week, you could see his condition was degrading gradually, consistently. But when I went there, Max was there. It was great to see Max. We both were there when Mick wasn't even conscious at the time, he was comatose and they had him on morphine or something to kill the pain. We said our goodbyes and I think it was a couple of days later that he passed.
I'm so sorry.
Seeing people and especially brothers, friends fading away, that hurts. It's not fair, is it? But, you know, I learned a lot of lessons from it. You learn that you have to treat every day special. You just don't know when the last breath you're taking is going to be. So don't take it for granted.
That's something I learned from the death of another musician, Mark Shelton of Manila Road. When he passed away, that hit me so hard that.
Yeah, it can be real depressing, especially early on. Neil Peart was a very big hero of mine. I met him a couple of times when I was younger and I've always respected him. So to hear of his death was just awful. You know, you thought, “Oh, no, how can that be?”
I'm finally out of questions. Thank you so much for taking your time for such a detailed, long interview.
Well, I wanted to hear your passion and your love for the band because, you know, we did that in part to have hopefully reach people that way. It feels like a past life for me because I am not in that world anymore. So it's fun to hear somebody that's enthusiastic about it.
Listen to Mark Behn, Pete Holmes and Marty McCray playing Black Sabbath's "Into the Void" here.
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