A studio at Columbia in New York, 1975. In the room: four young players from the Washington area, background vocals the singer did not like and about two hours left on the clock, studio time arranged by Murray Krugman, who with Sandy Pearlman produced and managed Blue Öyster Cult. The singer wanted the background vocals redone. Krugman, telling the story to Please Kill Me in February 2021, said those two hours had to go on the mix, and when the singer would not move on he walked out. No contract followed. The band was Pentagram, and ten more years would pass before it had an album in the shops.
The first rehearsals in 1971, around Alexandria, Virginia, had Geof O'Keefe on guitar and Vincent McAllister on bass. Rehearsing from Christmas Day 1971 with Bobby Liebling singing, McAllister now on guitar, Greg Mayne on bass and O'Keefe on drums, the quartet that tried out Macabre, Virgin Death and Wicked Angel as names before returning for good to the five-pointed star wrote a large repertoire of original songs and released almost none of it, "Be Forewarned" as Macabre in 1972, "Hurricane" in 1973, a cover of "Under My Thumb" in 1974. What the first Pentagram left was not a discography. It was a songbook. Our account of Birmingham and what followed sets the band at the root of doom; this page follows Pentagram itself across fifty-five years.
Every guitarist who has stood beside Bobby Liebling since 1971 has left. The songs have not.
The lost seventies
Doors kept opening the width of a hand and closing again. The Washington rock journalist Gordon Fletcher, one of several managers the band went through, brought Pearlman and Krugman to a rehearsal in April 1975. After the Columbia session fell apart, Liebling was arrested in December 1975, the other three spent much of 1976 auditioning other singers without success, and by 1977 the original line-up had broken up. A second Pentagram, with the drummer Joe Hasselvander, lasted from late 1978 into 1979 and left one single on High Voltage, "Livin' in a Ram's Head".
What stayed behind was tape. On 22 March 1973 at Bias Recording Studios the original four had recorded "Forever My Queen", "When the Screams Come", "Walk in the Blue Light", "Review Your Choices" and "20 Buck Spin", songs Julian Cope, writing at his Head Heritage site in March 2004, heard as melodic proto-metal with hooks strong enough to have gone mainstream had the band's first LP ever been released. It was not. The reels went into boxes and waited twenty-eight years for an authorised release.
Death Row takes the name, 1980 to 1990
The band that finally carried the name onto a record came up from Tennessee. Formed in Knoxville in 1980 by the guitarist Victor Griffin and the bassist Lee Abney, the doom band called Death Row took on Hasselvander at the drums and Liebling at the microphone, cut the demo All Your Sins in 1982 and took the older band's name along the way, so that by the time Stuart Rose took over the drums from Hasselvander in the mid-eighties, Pentagram was a Death Row line-up marching under a banner raised in a Virginia rehearsal room in 1971.
The first album, titled simply Pentagram, came out in 1985 on the band's own Pentagram Records, the 1981 and 1982 sessions remixed and partly re-recorded in 1984. Griffin wrote "Relentless" and "Death Row", Liebling brought "Sign of the Wolf" and one song carried up from 1973, "20 Buck Spin". In Eduardo Rivadavia's reading at AllMusic it is raw, untainted doom by a guitarist schooled on Tony Iommi, and Chris Chantler, writing for Metal Hammer in 2016, found its take on Black Sabbath out of its time on arrival. Griffin lays the riffs down like sheets of lead across a cellar floor, each weighted onto the last until the floor itself seems to subside, and Liebling's voice walks across the top of them. Whether that record or the 1972 single marks the start of the genre is the dispute taken up in who Invented Doom Metal.
Day of Reckoning followed in 1987 on Napalm Records, an American heavy metal imprint of the independent distributor Dutch East India Trading, unrelated to the Austrian company of that name founded in 1992, with Rose drumming on everything except the nine-minute "Burning Savior", which kept a Hasselvander take. Liebling reached back for "When the Screams Come", the B-side of that "Under My Thumb" single. Then the band came apart. Griffin left in 1988, and a 1989 version with Mayne and Randy Palmer back in the ranks split in 1990.
Peaceville, Black Widow and the opened cellar, 1993 to 2008
The Death Row line-up with Griffin and Hasselvander reformed in 1993, and the English label Peaceville reissued the debut as Relentless, along with Day of Reckoning. Be Forewarned, released in 1994, opened with "Live Free and Burn" and closed on a seven-minute version of the Macabre single from twenty-two years earlier. From 1996 Pentagram was mostly two men. Stripping the band down to Hasselvander at every instrument and Liebling at every vocal, the duo made Review Your Choices in 1999 and Sub-Basement in 2001 for the Italian label Black Widow, the first reaching back to 1973 for "Forever My Queen".
Then the cellar was opened. In 2001 the Pennsylvania label Relapse issued twelve of the seventies recordings as First Daze Here, and Consequence later wrote that the heavy underground rediscovered the band through it. The songbook of Pentagram is a candle lit in a rehearsal basement in 1971 and carried down the cellar steps by every line-up that came after, shielded behind one cupped hand while the hands around it changed, never bright enough to light a hall and never once allowed to gutter out: "Be Forewarned" relit in 1994, "Forever My Queen" in 1999, "Starlady" and "Last Days Here" in 2004, when three members of the Maryland doom band Internal Void recorded Show 'Em How with Liebling, seven old songs beside three new ones.
| Song | First taped or released | Brought back on |
|---|---|---|
| "Be Forewarned" | 1972, Macabre single | Be Forewarned, 1994 |
| "20 Buck Spin" | 1973 studio session | Pentagram, 1985 |
| "When the Screams Come" | 1973 session, 1974 single | Day of Reckoning, 1987 |
| "Forever My Queen" | 1973 studio session | Review Your Choices, 1999 |
| "Last Days Here" | 1974 rehearsal tape | Show 'Em How, 2004 |
| "Walk in the Blue Light" | 1973 studio session | Last Rites, 2011 |
| "Earth Flight" | 1973 single B-side | Curious Volume, 2015 |
Last Days Here, Last Rites and Curious Volume, 2008 to 2016
Pentagram was inactive from 2005 until a new line-up was announced in August 2008. The documentary Last Days Here, filmed by Don Argott and Demian Fenton between 2006 and 2010 and premiered at the South by Southwest festival on 14 March 2011, follows Liebling in his fifties, living in his parents' basement and addicted to drugs, and his friend and manager Sean "Pellet" Pelletier, who works to get him clean and back on a stage. It ends in 2010 with the band playing again and Liebling sober and married.
Griffin had rejoined in May 2010 and stayed nearly three years. Last Rites, produced by Travis Wyrick and released by the Californian label Metal Blade on 12 April 2011, was his first studio work with the band since 1994 and Spin reported that month that it was the first Pentagram record Liebling had sung on sober. "Into the Ground" and "Nothing Left" were reworked from rehearsals of the first line-up, and "Walk in the Blue Light" reached a studio album thirty-eight years after its first take.
Griffin left at the end of 2012 and returned in January 2014. With the drummer Pete Campbell the band recorded Curious Volume in January 2015 with the producer Mattias Nilsson, and Peaceville released it on 21 August 2015. Griffin wrote or co-wrote six of its eleven songs, and Liebling brought "Lay Down and Die" and "Earth Flight", first heard on the B-side of the "Hurricane" single forty-two years earlier. Consequence graded the album B minus.
A new line-up, 2017 to 2026
In spring 2017 Liebling was arrested in Maryland and charged with first-degree assault and abuse of a vulnerable adult. On 23 October 2017 MetalSucks, reporting from court documents, wrote that under a plea agreement he had pleaded guilty to abuse and neglect of a vulnerable adult and not guilty to the first-degree assault charge, and that earlier that month a judge had sentenced him to 18 months in the Montgomery County Detention Center, minus time already served, followed by three years of probation. Loudwire reported the same sentence that day. Both outlets reported that the victim was believed to be his mother, then 87. On 18 July 2025 the promoter Hardline Media put the band's first tour of Australia and New Zealand on hiatus. Rolling Stone Australia reported the decision that day and restated that Liebling maintained his innocence on the assault charge, and the news site Metal Stop reported that it followed an online campaign against the shows by the Australian journalist Sherele Moody.
Liebling returned to the band in January 2019, and Griffin came back once more in 2023. On 27 June 2024 the band announced a line-up in which nobody but the singer had played in any earlier Pentagram: Tony Reed and Scooter Haslip of Mos Generator on guitar and bass, and Henry Vasquez of Saint Vitus on drums. Lightning in a Bottle, released on 31 January 2025 by the Italian label Heavy Psych Sounds, was the first Pentagram album in nearly ten years, and the critics split. Metal Injection gave it 9 out of 10; Angry Metal Guy gave it 2.5 out of 5, hearing in "I Spoke to Death" a looping doom riff that could have come off Day of Reckoning and in much of the rest a bluesy rock that had moved away from doom.
A European run fell through too. Dates in the United Kingdom and Ireland, postponed in July 2025 and moved to February 2026, were cancelled on 5 December 2025 by the promoter Route One Booking, which cited ongoing complications and said there were no plans to reschedule them. On 31 July 2026 The Limit, a band in which Liebling, now 72, sings beside the punk guitarist Sonny Vincent, released its album Another Drop. Fifty-five years after that Christmas rehearsal, every musician around the singer is new. Where the rest of the genre went is told in the KaosMetal doom overview.
