Eighteen guest singers, twenty songs, one band and a single night on a theatre stage.
Announced from the stage of California Metalfest at the NOS Events Center in San Bernardino on 24 November 2012, played at the Fox Theater in Pomona on 21 December with a new voice up front on nearly every song and the four remaining members of the band hammering their own breakdowns through the floorboards of a 1931 movie palace behind each one, then pressed by Century Media onto disc fourteen months later, the concert that the Southern California deathcore circuit put together in under four weeks was Ending Is the Beginning: The Mitch Lucker Memorial Show.
Singers who had shared tour buses, split bills and festival side stages with Suicide Silence since the MySpace years queued in the wings, grabbed the microphone for three or four minutes apiece and tore through songs they knew from the records, while the kick drum knocked the dust out of the stage boards under their feet. You could count the guests on the poster and come up short, because some of them were never announced. Three of the twenty songs were covers.
The show was the scene's answer to the Mitch Lucker death. Lucker had sung for Suicide Silence since 2003. He died on 1 November 2012, at the age of 28, after a motorcycle crash in Huntington Beach, California, the previous evening.
The Mitch Lucker death in the first reports
The Huntington Beach Police Department issued a press release at 11:30 in the morning on 1 November 2012. It said officers had been called at about 8:55 the previous evening to a collision on Main Street at 13th Street. It said Lucker had been taken to UCI Medical Center and had died of his injuries on 1 November. It said the occupants of the other vehicle involved, a pickup truck, and nearby pedestrians were not injured. It said the department's accident reconstruction officers had begun an investigation into the cause, which was ongoing.
The OC Weekly reported the death on 1 November 2012. The same post announced a candlelight vigil in Huntington Beach for 8 pm that evening, and by 6 November Metal Underground was referring to footage of the vigil.
A fund for his daughter
By 6 November 2012 Suicide Silence had set up an official education fund for Lucker's daughter, as Metal Underground reported that afternoon. A donation of twenty dollars or more brought a commemorative t-shirt. A donation of five dollars or more put the donor's name on a tribute page the band was building on SuicideSilence.net. The band asked fans to share the official link, so that the money went to the fund and not to unauthorised sellers.
The fund used the merchandise the scene already ran on.
The concert was announced from somebody else's stage. On 24 November 2012, at the sixth annual California Metalfest in San Bernardino, Mark Heylmun of Suicide Silence took the microphone between sets and told the crowd the band was putting together a show with a different singer on every song. The band posted a clip of the announcement on its own channel. The proceeds, he said, would go to the education of Lucker's daughter.
Eighteen voices, one band, the Fox Theater
Tickets went on sale on 4 December 2012. The names came out in rounds. The opening round, reported by Blabbermouth on 8 December, put Chad Gray of Hellyeah and Mudvayne, Tim Lambesis of As I Lay Dying and Eddie Hermida of All Shall Perish on the bill, and the second, reported by Blabbermouth on 17 December, added Phil Bozeman of Whitechapel, Austin Carlile of Of Mice & Men, Ricky Hoover, formerly of Suffokate, and Cameron Argon of Disfiguring the Goddess, a muster of voices from metalcore, deathcore and slam that no booking agent could have put on one poster for money.
What the night ran on was one fixed machine and a line of people taking turns at it. Picture the high striker a promoter rents for the parking lot of a summer hardcore fest: one rubber-headed mallet passed down a queue of kids, every swing thrown differently, from the shoulder, from the hips, two-handed over the head, and every swing driving the puck up the same steel rail into the same bell, until by the last swing of the night the bell is hanging off its bracket and the base plate is dented to the shape of the mallet. That was the arrangement on stage. The songs did not change. The swing did.
Suicide Silence was the rail, the breakdown was the bell, and eighteen singers stood in the queue.
The Arizona singer whose band had opened the MySpace years with the Doom EP in late 2005 went first, on Destruction of a Statue from Suicide Silence's first EP, and he was Jonny Davy of Job for a Cowboy. Brook Reeves of Impending Doom took the third song, the one that gave the night its name. The opening three songs, all from that first EP, were played with players from the band's early line-up sitting in, among them the EP's drummer, Josh Goddard.
The Knoxville singer who took Unanswered, track five, from The Cleansing of 2007, was Phil Bozeman of Whitechapel, and Century Media later put that performance out as one of the release's official clips. After him came a succession of singers from every corner of the bill: Myke Terry of Volumes on Girl of Glass, Danny Worsnop of Asking Alexandria on The Price of Beauty, Johnny Plague of Winds of Plague on No Pity for a Coward, Anthony Notarmaso of After the Burial on Smoke, and Hermida on Slaves to Substance, from The Black Crown.
The surprises came at the end. Robb Flynn of Machine Head sat down with an acoustic guitar for Die Young, a Black Sabbath song from Heaven and Hell, and then Max Cavalera walked out for Roots Bloody Roots and the Sepultura riff went through the old Fox like a popcorn kettle left on full heat with its lid clamped down, the glass cabinet blowing out across the lobby carpet in one bang.
The Virginia singer who closed the night was Randy Blythe of Lamb of God, on You Only Live Once, from The Black Crown. Its breakdown was the last salvo of the evening, and it came down on the Fox like a full ice chest dragged out from behind the bar and tipped over the drum riser, a hundred pounds of ice and cans breaking across the kit at once. Then the house lights came up.
Ending Is the Beginning on disc
Filmed by a crew directed by Jeremy Schott of MentalSuplex Productions and Zafer Ulkucu of Backseat Conceptions, running to twenty tracks and about 84 minutes, and issued by Century Media on 18 February 2014 in North America and on 17 March 2014 in Europe as a CD with a DVD or a CD with a Blu-ray, the record of that night is Ending Is the Beginning: The Mitch Lucker Memorial Show. It moves from the first EP through The Cleansing and No Time to Bleed to The Black Crown.
One song on the disc carries Lucker's own voice. For Engine No. 9, a Deftones song from Adrenaline, the track is credited to Lucker himself, his voice coming from an earlier recording.
Put next to everything else the band released in the 2010s, the disc is an odd object. It has no new song on it and no studio production, and the band is the only constant across twenty songs. Seen from the 2010s as a whole, it is also the one Suicide Silence record on which the guests outnumber the members by more than four to one, a snapshot of who shared the band's stages between 2005 and 2012 and turned up when asked.
Suicide Silence will continue
The decision to go on was made in public and in steps. The first step was the Pomona show itself, which the four remaining members of the band played in full.
Then the band showed its hand. By 3 October 2013, as Music Feeds reported, it had posted a short video of You Only Live Once with the original vocal track replaced by a new, unnamed singer, and fans were arguing over whose voice it was. On 7 October 2013 the band ended the guessing with a statement naming Eddie Hermida as its new vocalist, as Music Feeds reported that day.
The statement gave its reasons plainly. The band said its friendship with Hermida went back to the Spreading Disease Tour of 2006, the band's first headlining run in the United States. It said Lucker and Hermida had been friends for a long time, and that Lucker would have wanted someone he knew and respected. It closed on a single sentence: "Suicide Silence will continue."
That sentence had been tested once already, on the stage in Pomona. The singer who had waited in the wings of the Fox for his turn on Slaves to Substance became the band's own. Eddie Hermida had fronted All Shall Perish on The Price of Existence and played the same clubs and halls since 2006. The first album with him, You Can't Stop Me, came out on Nuclear Blast in July 2014.
That put Suicide Silence back on the road among the 2010s deathcore bands with a new singer and the same catalogue. Among the 2010s deathcore bands, the ones that formed after 2012 came up in a scene where one question already had a public answer, given in a single statement: a band can go on with a new singer.
Seen in the big picture, the response of November and December 2012 is the clearest record there is of how this scene organises itself after losing a member. A fund ran through the merch table. A concert came together through phone calls between bands that had toured together. The live record kept the night. The band stayed together, and it chose its next singer from the people who had shown up.
