Possessed 40th Anniversary Seven Churches Australian Tour
Tickets & Info: http://www.hardlinemedia.net
Possessed emerged from a time in music when a stylistic approach that embraced extreme speed and aggression was well beyond the generally accepted genre bounds of music consumption. The impact was immediate, from the young band, who arguably inadvertently launched an entire genre within metal, known as death metal. Their debut album, Seven Churches remains a landmark measuring stick within metal circles, and they were certainly noticed on various tours with Bay Area Thrash Metal bands who put a definitive stamp on a worldwide genre that continues to flourish today, in various mutations.
Early on, Seven Churches, Beyond the Gates were largely lauded, and their subsequent EP The Eyes of Horror, produced by the ubiquitous guitar guru Joe Satriani, who also taught future Primus guitarist Larry LaLonde, cemented their reputation before they inevitably split. A lifetime of events transpired, some of which were debilitating for frontman Jeff Becerra, before their 2019 reformation with a crushing new line-up released Revelations of Oblivion, hitting all and sundry like the proverbial tonne of bricks. So, with their tour to Australia finally happening, we caught up with Becerra to discuss all things Possessed.
Jeff Becerra: Hey, how’s it going? Sorry for the delays but we’ve been in and out of the hospital because my Mum’s got late-stage dementia. So, we’re just back and forth and they keep drugging her up.
Oh man, they lose the ability to do normal functions. I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve dealt with a similar thing. It’s tough, it’s the worst and you can only manage it.
JB: I’m preaching to the choir then. We’re kind of kindred spirits on that. So, I’m here with my Dad, to take care of my Mum, and we fought the good fight. We’re just taking it one day at a time, you know.
Indeed. On a different note, and all things going to plan you should be touring here soon.
JB: Yeah, we’re going to go out there.
What are your recollections of Seven Churches? It is such a seminal album. Presumably you did not realise how big it was going to be, at the time when you did it.
JB: Well, we were kids and of course, when you’re a kid or a teenager and your whole life is music, then everything is big. Everything is the end of the world when you’re 16. Everything is like life or death. You’re already full of testosterone and life so everything was big back then. It felt like every decision mattered, and it’s always felt like that to me. But back then, we were also just super crazy. We were wild and so, it’s just a combination of that wild, everything mattering and, you know, hail Satan.
Before you were signed you toured with Exodus and Metallica. Were bands like that looking at you as if to say, ‘Oh, that’s just a little bit too extreme?’
JB: We were a novelty to people like Metallica. We were like those crazy kids, you know. Kirk [Hammett – Metallica guitarist] lived right around the corner from me. I used to ride my skateboard to his house, just hoping to play music with Kirk, or hang out. But, yeah, we weren’t that far off age wise, but it seemed like they were older, even though they were maybe just a few years older. They were just rock stars from the beginning, even when they were in the clubs, you know. But it was fun. Yeah, I think that they were always on our shows. You know, you got the audience, and Metallica would definitely be there.
So, did the producers at the time show helpfulness or were they just being the grown-ups saying, ‘Ee know what we’re doing, just listen to us?’
JB: I don’t think they ever saw us as kids. I don’t know, they just came in. They’re very serious. Randy Burns [Seven Churches producer], from the beginning, he came in and had already worked for others, but he’d never seen anything like this, I’m sure. But he dove right into it, and it was a new thing – it didn’t sound like the other bands, and it was obvious. It was the way we approached it. He said, ‘Well, I did this with that, but for you guys, I’ll go this way,’ and we just started working from there, went in and did Seven Churches much like a live album. So, yeah, we’re not cutting in, we’re just playing back to front, going at it.
You also had Satriani at the helm, for an EP that was a less overtly Satan themed lyrically.
JB: Yeah, I think that’s just generally how it turned out because, you know, he takes it in a direction, you know, just like Burns takes that direction, and I can just play. We hope for the best in a lot of ways but, you know, we were not there for the final mix down. I think that from now on, you know what, nobody’s ever there for the final mix down, but you’re really at the mercy of what you can either approve it or not approve it. For Revelations of Oblivion, I think we went through 46 or was it 63 mixes? We were into so many mixes on a mix, but we didn’t do that with those albums. I think you either love Eyes of Horror or, thought it was really nice. A lot of people don’t like it, but I’m not an ‘everybody loves it’ type. The fans love it. But when you get to a producer, they’re like, ‘We don’t want to do that,’ and I can understand that because we’re going heavier again and it’s just a back and forth all the time. It’s hard to explain sound. You might say, ‘Oh, I want to sound like this,’ but then when it comes back, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, we have to do this, we need a little more Trouble,’ and it’s just a process, man. You can’t get mired in that process. I think with Seven Churches and Beyond the Gates, it was, ‘Here you go. I hope it works.’
How strict was Satriani on the musical theory side of it, because his own career was starting to come up then. He could have been saying to Larry, ‘This is in the wrong key.’
JB: No, no, Larry was already taking lessons from him. So, at that time, Joe was Larry’s teacher. So, they worked very well together. We weren’t really even talking about it. I mean I barely even saw those guys in there. I came and did my parts, and Larry was there for sure. I mean, we went in, I had a great time, and it was wonderful. We were booked time between Night Ranger and Diana Ross, and Joe said, ‘They have better bass drum microphones,’ and so we snuck over there and we borrowed them, but we put them on tape and then afterwards, we carefully put the gear back. So, Joe could be sneaky and, he’s, like, dancing and just into his coffee. We weren’t partying at all, which was also an odd thing because during Seven Churches we were just going for both.
If you look at Revelations of Oblivion, your 2019 album, by comparison to earlier material, how does that sit with you these days?
JB: Well, I mean, to me, I think Revelations of Oblivion is one of the best albums. I mean, I like them all, of course, but the sound worked, it’s got good sound, and the guitars are solid. Everything’s solid, there’s no complaints, which I couldn’t say for any of the other ones.
Yeah, fair point. Well, that brings me to the guitarists that you’ve got who’ve been with you for a good decade. They’re intense players. Daniel Gonzalez is from Gruesome, right?
JB: Yeah, Dan is from Gruesome. You know, we’re friends with all those guys. Initially we were doing auditions for weeks, and I couldn’t find anybody. Most people that showed up were fans. They were just wanting to meet me, or they could play rhythm but not solos. I was friends with this girl Lindsay, and she said, ‘my boyfriend’s a really great guitarist.’ I was going to give up, but she goes, ‘No, no, he’s really good. Just give him a try, he really does Possessed and we’ll go from there.’ Yeah, in my mind, I’ll do this as a favour to Lindsay and her friends. So, I flew down, and he nailed everything perfectly like he was immediately in charge of the room and directed the other people coming in to try out. It was like he was already in that night, and you can kind of tell when you’re doing try-outs who’s going to work. He came in, took charge of that back and forth, stood there and didn’t go anywhere, and then helped with the rest of them; phenomenal.
That’s cool. You got a newer drummer, comparatively, in Chris Aguirre, replacing Emilio Márquez How long does it take to meld in with a newer rhythm section? Is it a lot of work?
JB: Yeah, you just learn in some songs. We come where he hears it a few times and we play the show, you know, and that’s fair enough. That’s how it works. You cannot use a hanger-on, you can’t. We’ll go to members you know, as you always ‘hang’, that’s just how art is, and death metal is like aerobics or even a sprint marathon. It’s tough, and the only way you can stay in it is if you can basically do it, and eventually you can tell that. In extreme metal there is an end for us all, but we all hope that it’s more later than soon, you know.
Definitely, and the blast beats are something else for drummers.
JB: Yeah, the blast features helped a lot, but we used to call them cheats. You know, on the high hat, you had one on the snare, one snare, and so on. The blast is just snare, one snare. You go in between, like you’re switching hands, essentially, so you’re saving a hit, you know, with your high hat so you can go faster. Maybe it’s not a break because you’re kind of doubling the speed at the same time, but you’re not having it to do the massive extent.
How would you say your singing technique has changed over the years? Are you screaming or growling more?
JB: I think there’s less overall, just blur, you know, and I think I wanted it. I wanted the lyrics to be understood, you know, and kind of deal with the times because I just wanted to reach more people or have people actually understand what I’m writing, rather than just write my heart out. People just have to read everything, which some people never really do. I guess I just feel Possessed ended up doing it anyway. But I wanted my lyrics to be heard. I wanted to try to sing a little bit more. I can’t really sing and still growl, and I wanted the music to feel more complex, more artistic and, just better. I wanted to be better, you know, always wanted to be better. I want everything to be better with each album because as you get older, you want things to be better.
So, getting that articulation and better enunciation clarity does that. In hindsight, do you then see yourself as being more influential on, say, Morbid Angel than say Obituary?
JB: I can’t speak of them as far as my influence, you know, but I think that nobody was doing that before me, and I think that it was kind of cool. It was very cool. I remember thinking, ‘People are going to hate this,’ and sure enough they did. We cleared a concert hall fast, man, it was, ‘We’re going to burst people,’ and imagine taking your heaviest death metal band or whatever and just throwing it out there when most music is glam. You’d hear a lot of the thrash that was just souped up glam, you know, toughed up glam. So many styles were, to me, the antithesis of what it is to be a singer.
You were attributed as coining the term ‘death metal’.
JB: At the time, nobody was calling themselves death metal. Possessed was the only death metal band for five years or more. We were doing that and because others branded themselves, such as, ‘Now, that’s Metallica,’ and then people wanted to be death metal. Well, we went through of a few names; the sort of scholarship of death metal, and that way people would say, ‘Possessed, that’s the death metal band.’ So, you know, naively I thought when you picked out one death metal band and people said, ‘That’s Possessed, for death metal bands,’ and we agreed on that in Mike’s [Torrão – founding guitarist] driveway, you know, and we said, ‘Yeah, we’ll just roll with that.’ We put out the “Death Metal” metal demo and I wrote the song “Death Metal” to triple stamp it, so, so it’s clear. Then it just spread, that I think we did seventy odd demos, and we dubbed them on our parents’ stereos, made them all in silver and gold, and these things spread like wildfire. People were in Europe within a week and saying, ‘Death now!’ and it was a trip for a 16-year-old. It’s pretty wild, you know, to see that kind of thing; it was very nice.
Did you cop any grief because of the lyrics at the time?
JB: Yeah, people see me as an easy target. You know, a lot of people love me, a lot of people hate me, and yeah, I see like people always throwing at me like I am Teflon though. They’d get dirtier and dirtier, as my life got worse. But all of them, you know, they can’t do it. So, they just run their mouth.
What can we expect from the set list? Some bands tend to play the full album, from start to finish. Or do you sort of divvy it up, moving tracks around amongst other songs?
JB: We also throw some other songs in from the other albums to kind of cook it up. We need to have more flavours for Possessed, you know, so we can switch around. It’s really weird to do the entire album. It’s exhausting and it’s also very fun, you know. So those songs are hard live, but they really work.
Given that you’re wheelchair bound, how do you approach vocals for earlier songs?
JB: I usually lean forward because for some reason it’s very hard to sit up and breathe. I can barely sit up and breathe even now. But what I do is lean over and just like kind of get at my diaphragm like a trumpet. So, you can come back there but I can’t use my stomach muscles. Everything’s cut to here [taps middle chest area], so I have to do everything between there and my head area. Yeah, it’s tough. But you know, you get to a rhythm and then it’s fun, you know. So, once you get into the rhythm, everything’s cool. Get into that rhythm making sure your throat doesn’t blow out. The tough part is keeping your voice, even throwing it rehearsing.
How do you look after your voice?
JB: I quit smoking, and I don’t party at home. I don’t want to drink at home or anything like that. Yeah, when we go on tour we’ll have some beers even. But yeah, basically you just, you know, stay sober. Honey lemon doesn’t work for me. Honey tea; non-caffeinated tea for some reason, and chocolate milks work for me. I don’t know why. I have a go to though. I’ll get piping hot French onion soup. You eat that and have an hour of respite and then I go. It’ll give you a throat for an hour. I told Glenn Danzig that on one on tour and every night we were both ordering soup, as it was a rough tour. Whatever it is, the heat spices work. Somebody actually told me about it on the road on that Danzig tour.
Are there any plans for another Possessed album?
JB: Yeah, I’m almost done. I have close to three songs left. Lately it’s been pretty cool, maybe just because I’m getting older, but I’m not reaching out as much and so yeah, I’ll finish it. But this time, I really like to be in the mood when I write, because I don’t want to force it out there. I like to be in a good state of mind when I write, and when I record. I found that the best process is to just yell, and if it works, I’ll just keep it on the recording. I’m writing my yelling, you know.
Has your songwriting approach matured, if you want to use that term?
JB: Yeah, but I don’t have an approach. It’s all over the place. I used to write the lyrics and then didn’t sing from the sheet. I guess it’s that you get more in your arsenal, you know, like, you want to pull on, like, ‘Oh, I can do this kind of part there.’ You have different methods. It becomes like a trade.
Finally, what was it like for you when you were starting out to see your album in a shop on vinyl and hold it in your hand?
JB: Oh, it’s a trip. I still do that all the time. I would tell Larry, ‘This is so cool, we’re one of those people that has a record on the shelf.’ All I wanted to do then was be a rock star, to be up on stage. I wanted to be making music for people since it felt good. I mean, it’s weird because on one half of me is up against world, but the other half of me likes the recognition; I like the love, you know. Still, when you see that album, you know that you’re going to have to deal with the haters but people like me, Larry and the other guys, ran towards it instead of away.
There must have been a great sense of achievement when you had the fold out sleeve art for Beyond the Gates?
JB: Yeah, you put it all into it and it’s maybe like a movie or a book. I guess if you’re doing that, you put everything in, and it is life encompassing. There’s so much work, but then when you do it, it’s a bit anticlimactic because you see the album, and you’ll think, ‘What next?’ I’ve been so wrapped up in this work and what is that going to look like? Do I need to do all that over again, you know? When you get into it, you forget about it. You forget how brutal it is; that’s a brutal trade. It just never stops, dude, and you’ve got love it. You got to be built for it because most people are not and that’s why most people leave. That’s why you don’t see as many new original bands. People can’t hack it, man. You’ve just got to keep going.
Yeah, sounds like it. We will see you here very soon, so thank you for having a chat.
JB: Oh yeah, thank you so much Paul, it was enjoyable. It’s been great. Thank you so much.