Forbidden
Sense of Impending Doom

05.12.2010

Californian thrashers Forbidden seem to never be able to realize their potential in full. They released their first album in 1988, when thrash metal was still at its peak, but the decline of the genre was only a couple of years ahead. In the 1990s the band went through an identity crisis, trying to find its own way amidst the audience’s fascination with grunge. The new millennium brought thrash metal back to the top of the game, but Forbidden seem to be late again – the wave of reunions and fans’ interest in old time heroes are again on their way down. Guitarist Craig Locicero is here to tell us about the band’s new album, its influence on a younger generation of musicians and the meaning of Omega Wave…

The band reunited in 2008, but releases a new album only now. Why did this happen? Were you waiting for the right moment, or did you initially plan to get back together for a few concerts only?

The original idea was for us to get back together only for a few shows. That’s actually how I was looking at it. A couple of guys in the band were interested in making a record, Russ (Anderson, vocals) being the main one, but initially I didn’t wanna hurry anything along. We did two shows in the Bay Area, we had Gene Hoglan (former drummer of Death and Dark Angel, now with Fear Factory – ed.) playing with us, and they went great, it was fun. Before we even booked those shows, we had shows set up in Europe, and Gene wasn’t able to do that. We got a great drummer to sit in with us, he was perfect for us. We weren’t really set as a band yet, we had another guitar player with us, Glen (Alvelais), but we went to Europe and did these shows, and somewhere in the midst of that, that was the moment when I first got the idea, “OK, I could do this again. I could write music like this, but I need to go home and work on it”. The writing of the album didn’t really start until the last couple of months of 2008, and there’s not an old riff on the album, everything’s all new. Everything on this record is a new idea, a new feeling, there’s newness to the whole thing.
As far as the record deal goes, we had offers from numerous labels, but obviously Nuclear Blast knows what to do with a band like us better than anybody else. We refused to sign the record deal until the last song was written, that was another one of my points. I didn’t want any labels to be expecting the album before it was done. It all worked out perfectly because we finished the last song, we contacted Nuclear Blast saying we gotta make changes to the contract, they agreed on the changes, and we were in the studio the next week. It all happened back in March.

Please, tell me the story of the reunion – who came up with this idea? Did the other accept this idea readily?

If you go backwards all the way to the beginning of putting the band back together, that was something that I wanted to do with Matt Camacho, our bass player. At that time I was doing other stuff, I was working on heavy rock stuff, not quite metal. Matt was out of music, Tim Calvert (ex-guitarist) had become a pilot, he’s with United Airlines, and Russ had a really good job. That was the core of what we wanted to do, but to get everyone together wasn’t very easy. Once we realized Tim couldn’t do it, then it wasn’t the line-up we really wanted, but we got hold of Glen, and that was the Forbidden Evil line-up, he was in the band for about a year back in 1988. As soon as we agreed to go do these shows, Paul (Bostaph, drummer) got a phone call from Testament, and they asked him to do a new album. He was like, “I can do both!”, and I was like, “No, you can’t! It’s totally cool, Paul, that you’re gonna be busy, but we just can’t wait”. Anyway, he hadn’t played with the band since 1991, so if we didn’t have him, it wasn’t a huge setback. But everybody wanted to do it, and Paul still wanted to do it, but he’s in Testament, and there was no way for him to get away and do this kind of stuff. But if you speak about the person responsible for putting the band together, making phone calls and arranging stuff, that would be me. I knew that it’s gonna be a ton of work, no one else is gonna do the work that I do, no one else is gonna get that extra shit done. It takes a lot out of me to do it. But this time it was pretty much a pleasure, because the combination of guys we ended up with is really un, and it has been the easiest record to write. It’s bizarre, but it’s true.

You mentioned that you didn’t sign a contract with Nuclear Blast until the record was finished. Were you concerned that they might interfere in the creative process?

(laughs) I don’t think Nuclear Blast would have ever done that. Even if they sign a band and if they’re not quite sure what they’re gonna come up with, they let the band be themselves and just hope that it turns out like they wanted to. They never got involved in the process, I never sent them any songs, except for the tunes that we demoed and that are up on our MySpace page. Those are just demos that we did for “Adapt Or Die” and “Hopenosis”, and those got a lot of attention. They knew it was gonna be in that vein, but they had no idea what we were really gonna come up with. They didn’t hear anything until after we recorded it, then I started sending them some mixes, and that was when their enthusiasm really started pouring out. They were really happy about it, and now we’re ecstatic, because we see the reviews and have the feeling everyone’s getting it, it’s really positive, it’s a huge honor. We are pretty humbled by it, because all we did was trying to be ourselves this time and really not worry about anything else, and it worked. It was nice not to have a label that tells you what you’re supposed to do, only to do what you want to do.

Why did you choose the songs “Adapt Or Die” and “Hopenosis” as the first ones to be streamed? Do you think they represent your new album in the best way?

No, not necessarily, but they were the first two we finished. We literally recorded them right when we finished them. I’m a very proactive person. If you know anything about Forbidden, you know that a lot of these decisions are made when I come out and I say it can work. The other guys are not gonna do it, even though they all help with the ideas. Those two songs were the first two things that I had written, and I wanted to make sure that we recorded everything in order. It turned out that we only needed a demo of those two songs - they did fine and certainly didn’t get any real negative responses. I’m sure there are people who hated it, but no one has told us about it.

You said that Omega Wave is a black wave of negative energy that exists to billions of people. How do you think – what is the reason of such negative energy? Maybe it’s the accelerating tempo of our life?

It’s a really good question, I’m glad you ask things like that, because those are the type of things I’m really interested in. I believe that for generations before us people have been gradually beaten down to a certain level of dominance. They accept things, they believe what they’re told – you need to take history the way it is, you cannot do anything about it. It’s really become a world where everything else does your thinking for you, and you don’t have to think. Especially since technology has taken over, everyone’s been preoccupied with what they have – the things that they have, how are they gonna keep them? People have this preconceived impending doom, this 2012 thing is not really not new, it’s thousands of years old. There’s gonna be more of the things that happen, and we brought much of these natural and unnatural disasters upon ourselves by not treating our planet with respect. There’s one thing they talk about nowadays is that the sun’s gonna grow massive solar flares, and we don’t have enough of our atmosphere in those layers that can do with it anymore. If that’s true that the sun is gonna grow massive solar flares, and we had had our atmosphere and we wouldn’t have destroyed most of it, then it wouldn’t be that bad. These are things that humans have done to themselves, it is just a massive wave of negative bullshit that we brought upon ourselves. I just used the symbol of Omega Wave, that’s my way of saying that things like that are about to crash down. People are gonna let it crash.

Omega Wave sounds like a scientific term. Does it really exist in science?

It does exist. It was probably subconscious, I’d heard it, I mean, omega – that’s a whole another story. There are all kinds of omegas, but the omega I’m thinking of is: alpha – the beginning, omega – the end. It has more to do with beginning and ending. It’s a real play on words: “massive rise of omega waves” – “the big end”.

Your second guitarist Steve Smyth described the song “Swine” as “doomy”. What did he mean? Does this song sound in the vein of Candlemass?

No, not at all. In fact, there’s a real sense of doom in everything we write. We’re just taking the pulse of the time. Hopefully people get what I try to convey with this, the rationale why I wrote this stuff. We’re just really trying to sum up the way people feel about a lot of different things, and put that in a story. What we try to express is this crazy, out of control, paranoid shit going on at one time forming this big soup of chaos. We’re just trying to reflect the things that are happening. I don’t think doom metal is what we’re after, it’s just the sense of impending doom that people bring upon themselves, that’s what we’re trying to say. It may not be that bad if everyone changed their mind tomorrow and decided, “we’re all gonna do the right things”, turn off the pollution, stop the wars and all that Utopian bullshit that no one thinks is possible. It’s actually possible if we get the entire mankind engaged in that process, but that would take a mass of changes, and all of a sudden you turn off the light, and there’s no cooperation. This is an interesting time.

When you described the cover artwork for “Omega Wave”, you said that such things as cover artwork used to matter more in the past than they do now. What other developments in the present-day music business do you regard as negative?

What I was alluding to is that back then an album was an album, it was a record, and a cover was supposed to look cool as a poster, you could put it on your wall. That part is gone, people don’t really care, there’s not really any preliminary posters anymore to put album covers on them. That had more to do with the artistic part of music than with business. The music business obviously has changed with the time. People are downloading a lot, that hurts in a way, that especially hurts if bands don’t put out really good records. I believe if your record is really strong, people might not buy your album, but they will come to your shows, buy your merchandise, pay to see you. There are other ways to go after the cash thing apart from selling the actual record – T-shirts, tickets, posters, other things that Nuclear Blast will do. There are ways to get around. The music business in general is in the state of emergency because people don’t really know how to connect to the fans and make them put their money out. That’s the problem that everybody’s got.

This year you have released a lot of stuff – with Forbidden, with SpiralArms, and also with Demonica. Please tell me about your cooperation with Hank Shermann.

Hank got a hold of me about three years ago, before I even thought about doing Forbidden seriously, and asked me if I’d be interested in playing on a thrash metal record. I thought, “Wow, thrash metal and Hank Shermann – this doesn’t make sense!” I mean, he was the fireball of heavy riffs on early Mercyful Fate albums, he’s one of my heroes! But I was interested, I said, “Yes, send me something”, and he sent it to me, and I thought it sounded pretty cool. It wasn’t complete, it was just demos, but I liked it, I said, “Yeah, I’m interested, but I have a band, I’ve got Mark (Hernandez) in there as a drummer”. Once Hank saw him in Copenhagen, he said, “It was fucking great, well, we can have him.” He got Mark in there, then he got his other friend from Colorado, Mark Grabowski, he’s a fantastic bass player. Hank and Klaus (Hyr, vocals) were the ones who started it, they wrote all the stuff, and I just played my part and did my solos. It was really fun and easy for me to play and to do it. Maybe we’ll write the next record together, but this is really Hank’s baby.

And what you can say about AC/DZ?

(interrupts) I’m not in that, I just played a solo on their record. Everybody’s playing on that record. Zet (Steve “Zetro” Souza, vocals) is a great friend of mine, he’s got everybody playing a solo, that’s not even news-worthy. (laughs) SpiralArms is really my other band.

Yes, yes, I know. What I wanted to ask is what do you think about such tribute bands?

Oh, it’s cool. It’s not something that I would do, I’m not much of a cover guy, I haven’t played many copies. I’ve always been my own songwriter. Some people write their own songs, because they get tired of copying others, but I haven’t really done that. I can’t sit there and play you every Led Zeppelin song, though I love Led Zeppelin, or any AC/DC song, though I love AC/DC. It’s cool if Steve wants to do it, it’s gratifying if a band wants to be like rock stars, play a bunch of AC/DC songs, and see everybody’s all gonna go nuts. But I’m bored by that aspect; it’s a lot of fun, but it’s just not for me.

There is a bootleg recording of your performance at Graspop festival in 2008 floating around. Do you have any plans to release an official live album?

An official live album? Yeah. But I don’t think anything we’ve done so far is good enough. For instance, you saw Graspop, that was our 14th show in a row, and when I say “in a row”, I mean “every day”. It had been 12 years since we played live before that, and it was really hard on Russ, so after the sixth or seventh show he was like, “Fuck!” He was getting crushed. For the biggest show of all his voice was completely gone, he was never really happy with that show. The band played great, everybody had fun, even he had fun, but he was like, “My voice is fucking gone.” He was always a great singer, but he wasn’t in a touring shape. Anything we record in the future is gonna be when we’re on the road or when we’re finally getting to that kind of level of performance night after night. Anything we’ve recorded in the past, I wouldn’t wanna release it. They were one-off shows or we were just getting back together, but now I think we gotta become a real band again – in a live setting. We came together for the record, that’s different. It takes playing together night after night. We will of course record live stuff, there’s no way Nuclear Blast wouldn’t have it, they would make us do it.

This year brought a lot of sad moments, and one of them is Debbie Abono’s death. It’s well known that her management efforts were a great contribution to development of the Bay Area thrash metal scene. Please tell me about her. How substantial was her contribution to the success of Forbidden?

I think she was really substantial for getting our foot to the door quicker. She didn’t write songs for us, but she was making them heard by the right people. She was responsible for a lot people in the Bay Area, she was looking after people like a mom, she cared about the band, when you got to know her you knew she was a good person very quickly. I kept in good contact with her, especially for the last five or six years. It’s not like she created the scene, but she kept its stability, and she kept it very family-like, and a lot of great things came out of her. She was huge, and she should never be forgotten.

Let’s speak more about past times. The band had a four-year break between the second and the third album. I heard that it was related to the problems with Combat Records. Can you say what kind of problems you had with this label?

It wasn’t just Combat Records, it was the music industry. This story’s been told a thousand times by other bands, too. In 1991-1992 music changed dramatically as far as the perception of what people wanted to hear is concerned. I was the one that was cool with it, that was affecting my career, but I was like, “Cool, man! Let’s change things up musically”. I felt like all the metal was getting way too safe, it was starting to sound really too commercial. I felt that even Forbidden started doing it, we were very watered-down as compared to what we should have been doing. Everybody was trying to get bigger, more accessible, trying to get radio play, a video and all that crap. The industry has changed, too. After that happened, we demanded our way off our label. It took us eight or nine months before we finally found a way to shake off the label. Then we had a major – MAJOR – record deal with RCA on the table, ready to go, who were offering us a lot of money for that time. But Paul quit and joined Slayer. You can’t blame Paul, but we sure held it there. (laughs) That was a big blow to us, and then people stopped caring about Forbidden. All of a sudden everything changed, and it took us a while to find a label that actually cared a nob. G.U.N. tried with “Distortion”, they did try, but the music industry was tough on them, too. That’s really what took so long. We demoed a shitload, we finally came up with the “Distortion” demo (1993), and then the label got really excited. I remember passing that demo out when I was on tour with Death in Europe, and people were really excited about it. That was the beginning of the rebirth of Forbidden at that time, but still our heads were far from clear. We didn’t have a clear picture of what we were anymore, or how to get to be what we wanted to be. The same applies to “Green”. It’s a good album that fell short of being great.

As you said, you joined Death for a tour in 1993. What are your brightest memories about Chuck Schuldiner?

I have wonderful memories of Chuck, I’m one of the people that never ever had a problem with him. As he’s dead now no one has a problem with him – “Oh yeah I love Chuck!” – but he had issues with people. He was very protective and dedicated to doing his thing, and if you betrayed him in his eyes, he would really start hating you. So I guess I never betrayed him. We were cool all the way off to the end. I knew Gene before, but I got to be great friends with him on that tour, and I’ve been really close to Gene ever since. The same thing is with Steve DiGiorgio. Any one of those guys will tell you that it was probably the best band to get along on tour, there was no drama with anybody, nobody was drinking alcohol, too, there was just a lot of smoking pot, and everybody had the same goal in mind. It was really a nice time. At the end of the tour they asked me if I joined to be a permanent member - which no one is in Death, I knew that at the time – but I said, “No, thank you, I gotta finish what I started with Forbidden”. That’s why I didn’t go that way.

Don’t you feel any regret that you didn’t stay in Death for studio recordings?

No, I literally had no regrets. I’m the person who believes that the choices that you have to make in life come to you for a reason. I needed to finish the Forbidden thing. It might not have been successful as much as I wanted, but it got me to where I am today. I’ve done some amazing things since then, met some incredible people, and I guess all these experiences are useful. Playing with Death was fantastic, but I don’t regret it. Even Chuck didn’t wanna have to scream like that every night, he was very much wanting a real singer, the way he wanted to go with Control Denied. And I had Russ, he was one of the best in the world, why would I wanna leave?

What do you think about the album “Green” now? When it was released there were very different responses on it – from good to very bad. And now it seems that a lot of young bands use ideas from this album in their own music.

They do, it’s funny that you should say it. It’s a huge compliment. I’m running into guys with the big bands – Lamb Of God, Slipknot and what not – and “Green” is a huge influence, they tell me so. It’s mind-blowing just to know that when no one gave a shit about that album at that time, somebody actually did give a shit about it, and those guys ended up being in a band and using it. It’s not like they steal it, but it was an influence, you could really hear that in the first and second Slipknot albums, there’s a lot of “Green” on that. And it’s really fucking cool. But at that time we were so angry, that album was made out of anger, we wanted it to be a sort of “caveman” version of us - simpler, not quite as melodic, more brutal. It wasn’t the same kind of record as the other one, so we were a little off the market that way. But I don’t think we had a clear view of ourselves, that’s what we do now. I like it, but I don’t love it; I feel that way about pretty much all the old records – I like them, but I don’t love them. And I finally have a Forbidden record that I love, it’s this one, although I can understand how everybody else feels, why they love those albums.

Would you say that “Green” was ahead of its time?

Yes, probably about four or five years. We definitely tried to do it our own way, that was the whole idea. But as I said, I think it sounds a little alluded, it was just angry, it wasn’t as melodic as it should have been, and Russ didn’t sing as much as he should. I’m glad we did it, I don’t regret it, as I said, I don’t regret anything, but I think it was a little off.

I read that in the late 80s you were close friends with the band The Horde Of Torment. What can you say about these guys?

Oh, they’re great guys. I still talk to them now, it’s quite easy to track all these guys with all those social networks in place – we all friend each other. I played with Ahrue (Luster, Horde Of Torment guitarist, later a member of Machine Head) later in Manmade God when it first started, when I first left Forbidden. They were really cool. Thinking about them, they could have probably done a lot of stuff but Ahrue will tell you they kind of chose to follow what everybody else was doing, but they probably missed it a little bit, and they had to make sure they fit in instead of doing their own thing. They had integrity and talent and definitely a lot of other things. They used to open every fucking show, partially because we helped to put them on the show and because everybody else did. They’re cool guys, I had a lot of fun and a lot of great times with these guys.

This year there was a big buzz around the shows of the so called “Big Four” of thrash – Metallica, Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeth. Don’t you think that it’s incorrect to select only these four bands and glorify them while there are a lot of other bands which made a big contribution to the development of thrash metal?

Well, there are two ways of looking at that. A smaller car company can be making a better car, so how come big marks are so popular? Because we’re talking bigger car companies. It’s the same as what we’re talking about. The Big Four are the marks, they’re important icons of the genre, they’re originators. You may like them now or not, but I personally don’t have any objections to what they’re doing, I think it’s great. What’s also very cool is that they’re all getting along – Megadeth with Metallica, Megadeth with Slayer, so everybody’s buddies, it’s pretty fucking amazing. I know money’s got to do with it, but there’s a lot more than money. I’m all for it. The same thing may happen with our genre, maybe we’ll put together something really big for that. There will be a lot of planning and it wouldn’t be quite as big as that, maybe a fraction of it, but it will still be fucking big. Testament, Exodus, us and Death Angel on the same bill – that would be pretty amazing.

Please say a few words for your Russian fans

Well, since I’ve never got to meet you all face to face, I cannot wait to come to Russia and play. I know we’re gonna get out there, it’s just upcoming. In 2011 you’ll finally get to see Forbidden, and Forbidden will finally get to see you.

Forbidden on the Internet: http://www.forbiddenmetal.com

Special thanks to Yury “Surgeon” (Irond Records) for arranging this interview

Konstanin “Hirax” Chilikin
September 5, 2010
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