OBITUARY: Interview with John Tardy

Obituary, one of the most recognizable and legendary Death Metal acts hailing from Florida is once again back with their 9th studio release, “Inked in Blood”. Against Magazine had a great chat with legendary singer John Tardy and gathered some relevant advice on how to fund your records, how to keep singing in Death Metal style at a high level for 25 years, and an insight on the secret for the longevity of all the early ‘90s Florida Death Metal veterans. In between, we also got to know more about a new Morrisound studios documentary, the roles of new members Terry Butler and Kenny Andrews and some specific details about the making of what’s a sure to stir up some controversy album cover…

Photo by Ester Segarra

“Inked in Blood” sounds like you guys recovered the early vibe of your first two records “Slowly We Rot” and “Cause for Death”. How do you perceive “Inked in Blood”, looking back in comparison with the rest of your discography?
Well, I mean, it’s just impossible to put those things together, It’s been so many years between those two things…When I look back at where we were and what we were doing for “Slowly We Rot”, we were still back in high school and we were just messin’ around. There’s a lot that’s changed between now and then, but in lot of ways it stayed the same. We obviously don’t like to change very much what we’re doing, but it’s tough to compare the two. I think some of the new songs do show a little maturity in some of the songwriting stuff that we’ve done. But we kinda came a long way after all these years for sure.

Since you guys got back together, it usually took you two years between records. So the question here is, your last album “Darkest Day” was released five years ago. What made the completion of this record much longer than the others?
I think that, other than “Slowly We Rot” and “Cause of Death”, those were done pretty quick, but even like before “Frozen in Time”, or actually before “Back from the Dead”, it was five, six years and before “Frozen in Time” it was like eight years. So, it’s not uncommon for us to step back and not write if we don’t feel like it. Now, with this new album, we were actually hoping to get this thing out a couple of years ago and it’s just now getting done. A couple of things happened to back it up a little bit and it didn’t bother us, we kind of work at our own speed anyway, it’s no big deal to us. But we got busy, we’ve been asked to play this classic setlist that we’ve been doing and we went and did that in Europe and after that people kind of kept asking us to do it, so we went to the stage with it, we banged around in South America over in the far east with it and stuff like that, and it kept pulling us away from the writing. I know that at one point in time, we set some months apart to do some writing and ended up doing more fishing than anything, just because we felt like it, but like I’ve said that’s ok with us, and then we probably spent a good year planning on and trying to figure out how to release this album on our own, which is something that we really wanted to do ever since we left Roadrunner. We’ve been thinking about it and before we settled on Candlelight, we kinda started kicking [the idea] around, thinking about it, and it got to be too much work. But this time around we’ve put out a lot of time, like a year’s worth of time making phone calls and contacts to distribution companies, marketing people, just all kinds of people, trying to put a team together to see how we could release this thing on our own. We’ve had a couple of other projects that we’ve got busy with, the Morrisound documentary that we did and that we’re going to be putting together. We also set up this live pay-per-view thing that we did. We didn’t really do it to make money, we did it to see if we could do it, we’ve actually set the production, the cameras and a separate sound system to broadcast that thing over the Internet, and I thought it came out really cool. But anyway, we had all these projects set aside and we were talking with some friends of ours that have been involved in some of these Kickstarter campaign things, and they were like “Why don’t you guys try to do a Kickstarter campaign?”, and I was like, I never even heard about it before. But they’ve showed us some of the bands like Sepultura who tried to do it, and obviously a lot of people tried to do it. So they kind talked us into doing it, we did it, and low behold, 900 really dedicated fans spent their good hard earned money to try to buy some of the crazy stuff that we were offering. There was a lot of cool stuff really that you couldn’t really get anywhere else, it was kind of fun. It was a lot of work, but during the course of this we got introduced to the guys in Relapse by a mutual friend and those guys were so cool from the first time we met them, they kinda came to us and said “You know what? If you guys want some help with any little part of this thing, we’d be willing to give you a hand”, and we kinda formulated this thing that worked out pretty good for us and we maintained rights to all the music. We call all the shots and we get to go ahead and use Relapse’s marketing and distribution engines that are already in place, and we just couldn’t be happier, I mean, going back and looking at the contracts we’ve signed with Roadrunner, obviously the worst things you can sign…I can’t do anything with that music right now if I wanted to, there’s nothing I can do with it. But we’ve learned a lot over the years. With Century Media, we signed a licensing agreement with them and now we kind of took one step even further where we got to just use the marketing and distribution engines that are already in place, but we maintained the rights to all of our music, we kinda call all the shots. It used to be…you had an album coming out and as soon as you would set the masters off, you felt like you were out of the picture. You couldn’t do anything anymore, we felt powerless and that’s so far from the truth right now… It’s cool to have this kind of power and control over your music, but still get a good job done with the distribution and marketing campaign that they been helping us with, so it’s been awesome.

I was about to ask you about the crowdfunding campaign. You guys asked for contributions from your fans and the results were really nothing short of amazing really. 925 backers made you go 50.000 dollars beyond your initial request for 10.000, which can only be considered a great success really. How did you guys felt when the campaign ended and saw the final results?
The Kickstarter campaign, I didn’t know anything about it, so the people we were working with did know how to use it, and when you look at someone like Sepultura, they tried to do a funding campaign for some video they were working on, and of course they’ve started their goal out at like 100,000 dollars, and the way Kickstarter works is…if you don’t hit your goal, all the money goes back to you, and we came up with the idea, “Look…for ten grand, we can at least get our masters done, and if we get the masters in our hand, we’re going to have a lot of power to do a lot of what we want to do”. You know, for ten grand, it would be kind of hard to think that we could distribute an album worldwide and do proper marketing for all that, which is kind of why we went in steps, and as long as people were out there willing to still get in, the more control we could have, and the more we were able to offer back to these guys, a lot of cool stuff, so it’s kind of what’s been taking us a lot of time now. If you imagine contacting and talking with 900 people and now putting together 900 packages of about half a dozen different varieties of stuff, it is a lot of work, let me tell ya. We’ve been out in the studio, it’s an absolute disaster out there…boxes full of CD’s and t-shirts and stickers and posters and…I mean…it’s a disaster out there at our hands (laughs)…We’re digging deep. Bottom line is…I really don’t think I would do it again, although it was very interesting and very cool to see the fans’ response. So, we’re sucking it up and we’re going to get this thing done, but I think that if we were to do it again, I don’t think I would (laughs).

Since you’ve gone through this crowdfunding experience, do you feel that this way of financing records might be a norm in the future for Death Metal bands, or let’s say for any other kinds of bands as well?
I guess. You can obviously see the popularity that Kickstarter has been getting with people doing all types of crazy stuff, so certainly for a younger band, the only advice I would give you is just choose your packages carefully and make sure it’s something easy to keep track of, because you’re eventually due to fulfill all of that. You know, we kinda went on crazy, and now we’ve got a bit of a mess on our hands as just far as how much work it’s going to take us, but we’re okay, we’ll get through it, but I think that a better way to do it, is just lean to your pre-sales. You get the information out there and you got the stuff ready early enough, maybe just kind of lean on your fans to try to pre-order the album nice and early for you, so you can get some of that money to get the recording done and stuff, because it’s tough. There are too many bands out there, but with the exception of the most popular bands around obviously, for all the bands like Obituary and thereabouts and smaller, I mean, record labels are just not giving you money to go do stuff anymore, so it’s tough, it really leaves it in your pocket to have the time to write the stuff and pay to go record it. It’s not cheap and it takes a lot of time and they’re just not willing to give you money like we used to get back in the day. A lot of stuff has changed.

Going back to the record, what do you think are the finest moments on “Inked in Blood”?
Wow, it’s a good time to be talking about it because, you know, I don’t listen to a whole lot of our old records. Once we get into songwriting, I mean, we’ve been working on this thing for five years, so between the songwriting and the practising, we sometimes record some stuff early, just kind of scratch it around to hear it and play around and mess with it, but this time, we recorded it, and engineered it and mixed it all ourselves, so I’ve listened to these songs a lot, and now is a good time because now that it’s all done, I do sit around and listen to it a lot. I think that one of the coolest things about the album is that, some of the songs were already written about three years ago, and some of the songs were only written about a year ago, so because some time elapsed in there, I think it there’s a good kind of feel and different styles in the songs, which I think make listening to the album fun. You don’t feel like you’re listening to a lot of the same kind of songs, I think that’s cool. When you listen to a song like “Visions in My Head”, that song to me contains all the key elements a super well written song would contain. I don’t think a lot of Death Metal bands put that much style differences in the flow of a song like that. To me it’s such a well written song, it goes through so many motions in one song, by the time it ends you’re just ready to hit replay and listen to it again. We had a little bit of acoustic guitar thrown in there. I don’t know many Death Metal records that have one there (laughs), and there’s a couple of fast songs that I did a lot of singing for, lots and lots of fast singing which is kind of fun for me. It’s real hard, especially in the studio, to keep your rhythm going, the air in your lungs going and do all that singing, it’s a challenge for me, but it’s kind of fun.

Your voice is probably the most distinctive one in the whole of Florida’s Death Metal scene, so I imagine that it might not be easy to keep delivering in that register, especially in this kind of heavy music, but you’ve been doing it for 25 years and you’re still maintaining that trademark growl, the “John Tardy” trademark growl. What are the tricks and techniques you’ve used along these years to maintain your voice?
I appreciate that and I guess I’ve always been fortunate because my voice has held up pretty good for me over the years. I thought it came out pretty good on the new record. I mean, for some reason I think you can hear a lot more of what I’m singing on this album, it seems like I pronounciated things a little bit more than usual, so it’s a little bit different from that angle, but I think that during the course of the years, when you take those few years off between albums here and there as opposed to constantly touring, as far as my voice holding up, that’s gotta help. You learn a lot on the road and there’s no easy way if you’re playing forty-five shows in a matter of fifty days through Europe. That’s a lot of work, no matter who you are and what you’re singing and let alone singing as extreme as I am expected to do. So, it does get tricky there and there’s not much you can do per se…You kinda go out there and really prepare beforehand to get yourself slowly into singing and then during the day you just gotta keep quiet as much as you can and save as much of your voice as you can for the show and that’s kind of all you can do. Stay away from interviews on the road and things like that. But there’s not any super big secret to be honest with you. You kinda learn how your voice works and just treat it right I guess.

Useful tips for our singer readers!
Yeah, and here’s another one, play guitar, drums or something because this thing is too hard (laughs). Actually…forget the drums, that’s a pain in the ass and you’ve got too much shit to carry around. If you’re the bass player you choose it the best because you just kind of lay back and just play bass…

And enjoy the show…
…enjoy the show and just jam it out! Yeah! (laughs)

So, about the new members in Obituary, Terry Butler and Kenny Andrews. It’s Terry’s first record with you guys and he already has a proven track record with bands like Death, Massacre and Six Feet Under. How’s it been with Terry and Kenny so far, what did they brought in to the new record?
Yeah, this is great man, I can’t tell ya…we’re so excited. First of all, we’ve known Terry since before we were even in a band and about the same time we were starting Xecutioner [pre-Obituary name], he was starting the old Massacre stuff with Allen West actually. We’ve known him for that long, so, to now have him in the band it almost just feels like’s he’s been with us the entire time…He’s so much just like us, he lives right here just next to us and he couldn’t be a nicer guy, super great. His bass style fits us perfectly, his attitude and who he is, everything about Terry just feels right. Feels like he’s been with us forever and you really can’t say much more than that, other than the fact that he’s also a bit of an encyclopedia of music when you’re around, so if you ever run across any question about music, if he doesn’t know it, it’s pretty obscure information, that’s for sure! I’ll be sitting in a room doing an interview, he might be sitting over there on a table or something, and I’m just sitting there and talking, and someone ask me “You know…back in 2004 you did a tour with…huh…who was that?” and I’m “Dude…I don’t have any idea…” and Terry will be like, “Oh yeah, you guys toured with so and so and so in June of this…” and I’m like “Wow, thanks Terry, you weren’t even around and you know more than I do” (laughs). It’s that cool to be around him. Kenny Andrews is another dude who’s a Florida kid that’s been around and we’ve known him for a long, long time. He’s been in a few bands here and there, nothing super popular or anything like that. He did some guitar tech-ing before for us, so we just obviously loved him from the get go, because he’s such a nice guy to be around. We loved taking him on the road and guitar tech for us and he actually filled in on bass for us for a couple of runs in Europe when Frank [Watkins] wasn’t around, so that’s when we got him over here to learn the songs and we jammed with him and just got to be around him. So, when it came time for us, where we just knew that the Ralph [Santolla] thing was over, Allen wasn’t coming back and the whole nine yards, he was pretty much the first and only name that came up. It really wasn’t even a question, it was just kinda like “Hey Kenny, we need a guitar player” and he was like “Ok” and that was that…


Yeah, you already knew him…
Yeah, we already knew him. We did not do a whole lot of writing or did like a lot of him playing leads on stuff, but we just knew enough of him. Donald [Tardy] jammed with him in the Andrew W.K. thing for a while, so we know he’s a good guitar player, but I guess what we really did expect was his style to be, maybe not as technical as James [Murphy] or Ralph, but technical enough to make it sound fun and interesting. Whereas Ralph would do almost no [whammy] bar work, Kenny’s not afraid to do some bar work, and maybe not as much as Allen, but enough to make it Death Metal, which let’s face it, we kinda have to have some work like that in my opinion. As it turns out, his combination of bar work and technical ability and his feel…he loves Obituary to start with, and I just think his style on the new album just fits in absolutely perfect.

Is Kenny playing all the leads on the new record?
Yeah! He plays all the leads and it was fun working with him. We do all the recording here in our own studio, so I got to sit down with him and track the music and he’s super cool about A) saying “You’ve got any ideas of where you want some stuff?” or B), saying “I kinda was thinking this, this and this” and if we all looked at it and said that we didn’t like it, he was just like “that’s totally cool with me”. He was just so easy to work with and it was just really unbelievable how good this line up is for us. Everything’s coming across great and I think live, he have just been killin’ it, we really have just been crushing it live. We’ve been feeling and sounding tight. It’s been awesome.

Great man! One thing I wanted to talk with you about is the cover for “Inked in Blood” with the chopped torso. That will surely make an impression! My early reaction was “wow”…I haven’t seen something like this in a while. Last time I’ve got that feeling was on Cannibal Corpse’s “Tomb of The Mutilated”. Where did the idea came from and who designed it?
(Laughs) Well, I mean…it’s a little bit of an interesting story. I can tell you about the first time I saw Andreas’ sketch of that, I was just thinking “wow”, that’s kind of cool but it’s not something that we’ve never done anything quite like that. So, as we were working on this album and we started to have songs written and we had a couple of song titles, we started to think about artwork and what we were going to do and this and that, so we kinda took our time with it to the point where we were like “Alright, we really need to get something done and moving here” because the music was getting close to getting done, and we really didn’t have any idea of what we were doing [with the artwork]. So we got Andreas Marshall on the phone again and he’s obviously done a handful of our things and we had an idea for a painting, we talked to him about it and he did a painting and when we got it, we were kinda like…you know…we didn’t fall in love with it, and it looked a little too much like some of our other album covers, it was just like that. What we originally wanted to use was “Inked in Blood”. We did like that for a title track, but it didn’t fit the artwork at all. So we said that to Andreas, we’ve done a lot of work with him and he’s super cool to work with, but we told him “You know what? This painting, we’re not really diggin’ this”. At the time I don’t know if we even mentioned to him the “Inked in Blood” title that came about after, so we were talking with him, and we mentioned all the song titles we were thinking about and as soon as we said “Inked in Blood”, he was just like, “Wow…wait a minute, I’ve got a great idea” and we were like “Ok, go ahead, go for it!” and that was it, just hung up and said “Go for it!”. So then he sends us this sketch and of course it’s the torso with what you see and some of the guys liked the sketch, and some of the guys didn’t frankly. I was just like “Maybe that’s a little bit much for us…a little graphic”, even though it’s very Death Metal, that’s for sure!” (laughs). But anyway, at least we all kinda liked it enough to at least let him do the painting, if anything it would make for a cool t-shirt. But when we got the artwork back and just the detail and the shading, everything he did with the painting it was just shocking enough for us to say “Wow…you know what? That does fit the title track ‘Inked in Blood’, that is really cool looking!”. We actually just said at the last minute “We’re changing…that’s what’s it’s going to be”. So we’ve put it in there, and a lot of people do like it. It’s a little striking, it might be a little too much for some people, but it is funny…we’re starting to get the first t-shirts coming in, and you got that big torso blown up in the shirt…it’s actually kinda funny when you see it go walking by. (laughs)

Going back to something you’ve talked previously and let me curious about, which was the documentary about Morrisound studios. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Yeah! The Kickstarter people are obviously gonna get their first shot of it, so there’s going to be a handful of stuff, but what we did is, we invited a bunch of friends down to Morrisound, people like Kelly [Shaeffer] from Atheist, Jon Oliva showed up, Ben Myers from Savatage, some of the Deicide guys and a handful of friends. Morrisound has one of its big rooms, a main room, pretty big room to set up in, and we set up our equipment in there and played songs off the first three albums, about five or six of them from the first three albums only and we played them live in the studio with all our friends hangin’ out in there. We had a barbecue going outside, we had big coolers with beer, people walking around, just drinking and talking as we’re going through all these old songs and remembering things, because a lot of that stuff was originally recorded down there at Morrisound. Well, all of it was actually, the first three albums were done there, but so did those guys, Nasty Savage, Savatage, Atheist and Deicide, they all recorded down there. So we cornered them and asked them some questions about their experiences, about Morrisound, the Florida scene and things like that. That’s been a whole heck of a big project to go back and put all this footage together and all these interviews and stuff. We’re all still working on that, but I think it’s gonna be pretty cool once it’s done, because it’s us in a studio with a bunch of friends jamming some old Obituary songs.

When is it coming out?
Well, I’m not sure. The Kickstarter people will be the first to have a good taste of it. We’re gettin’ them a handful of songs and a couple of little interviews, but we will eventually, when we have the time, put it all together with all the interviews and all the songs and everything and maybe make a little DVD and somehow release that.

Really waiting to see that!
Yeah, it was fun! It will be a little bit of work for us, but we’ll get it done sooner or later.

So, now that you’re talking about all these bands, it’s been 25 years since you guys appeared with that initial generation that defined and influenced Death Metal as we know it today. I’m talking about Deicide and also Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel among others. What do you think were the key factors that made all of you guys still being here nowadays producing top quality records, while other bands that came along in the way just eventually split? What is the secret to your longevity?
I guess the first thing is…those bands like Deicide and Cannibal, Morbid and those guys, they’re all good friends of ours and I have to say that I’m kind of proud of the fact that all those key bands are still around and doing stuff at a high level. I think that’s kinda cool and I think back how long ago was in the early nineties when we all first started, and it kinda made that immediate splash of that whole Florida Death Metal scene and when all those bands came out, it was really shocking and there was just a lot of crazy stuff going on. It was not like there wasn’t any heavy music around, but there was something kind of new and different about it, and to have everybody still around to this day, I think it’s pretty cool and a pretty good testament that it wasn’t just like a one hit kind of deal back in the early nineties and everybody is still able to do pretty good at it nowadays. But the weird part too is that, I don’t think any of us sound alike. I mean, all the bands sound so differently. Maybe Deicide and Cannibal Corpse were sometimes running a little bit close, but Morbid Angel, specially the early stuff, I mean their new stuff it is what it is …but they kind of carved out an interesting sound and Obituary, we were just fortunate enough to find between Donald, Trevor [Peres] and I, that unique, original sound. That’s the key to any good band that’s been around, like AC/DC, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, they’re as big as they are, because nobody sounds like them. You hear them…you know…AC/DC, you get one note of a guitar, and you already know who it is. You can hear one second of it like, name that tune, one note, and you’re like “Oh that’s AC/DC” (laughs)…But, you can’t go find the greatest musicians in the world, throw them in a room and think that that’s gonna happen. It doesn’t always happen. It’s just one of those things where you kinda get lucky or whatever it might be, you can’t work at it too much, it’s just one of the things that occurs naturally when a certain group of musicians get together and bond the way it happens.

Last question John…What’s next in line for Obituary in the following months or years? Well, first of all we got a lot of touring comin’ up. We’re hitting the road in America in just a couple of weeks actually. We take off and we’re playing one festival over at Mexico with Guns N’ Roses and Kiss and something like that, it’s really crazy. When we leave Mexico, we’re heading right to the first show of a US tour with Carcass, which is gonna be awesome. We met those guys doing some festivals here and there and we seemed to hit it off. They’re so cool to hang out with, we were all having a good time, so when they asked us if we wanted to do some shows, we were just like “Oh hell yeah!”. That tour actually starts the same day the album’s coming out, so it worked out perfectly and that tour runs right into a Death to All tour, so, we’re gonna go ahead and do shows with that and the whole thing lasts about six weeks, both with Carcass and then with Death to All. Then we’ll be home just for a little bit in December and then we can hit the road back over in Europe in January and do a run in Europe to promote the new record. We’re obviously gettin’ some festivals for the next year already. I don’t anticipate our festival schedule being as busy as it was this year because we’ve hit so many of them. Next year’s gonna be a little bit thinner for us, but we are hittin’ a couple of big ones like With Full Force and Wacken, which are both huge. Those will be fun, and then obviously we’re gonna start setting up stuff to hit all corners of the globe, go out to Japan, Australia, get down to South America and do some bangin’ around here and there, so…busy year of touring for sure!

Great man, it’s gonna be awesome to see you guys on the road!
Yeah, looking forward to play more and more of the new songs live, so we’re gonna have a good time!

Originally published on Against Magazine, October 21, 2014.