Five years between the tape and the shop. The Florida quartet that recorded an entire debut album in 1986, with Mike Browning drumming and singing, and then shelved it when he left the band was Morbid Angel. Long before Earache disinterred that session and pressed it as Abominations of Desolation that September, bootleggers had already gutted traded cassettes for the songs and stamped them into unlicensed picture discs and coloured vinyl, so that some of the earliest copies anyone could buy were counterfeits of a record that did not officially exist.
Nobody was paying for the music. Nobody ever has.
The men who dug fresh corpses out of British churchyards in the early nineteenth century and sold them by night to the anatomy schools were the resurrection men, and they worked by one strict rule: the body went into the sack and the shroud went back into the grave. A corpse, under English law of the day, belonged to nobody, so taking it was a lesser offence, while the linen wrapped around it was somebody's property, and stealing that was theft. The market in death metal vinyl records runs on the same law turned inside out. The songs are the body, and nobody owns a body. You pay for the shroud: the sleeve, the letters scratched into the dead wax, the lyric sheet folded inside, the country that pressed it and the year it left the plant.
The painters, the tape traders and the photocopied fanzines that made these objects worth wanting in the first place belong to this part of the history. The dealer's price list is a colder document. It knows nothing about the riffs, and it prices every thread of the shroud in the same flat hand.
Two shrouds for the same body
The Buffalo five who put Vince Locke's paintings on the front of their first three albums were Cannibal Corpse, and those three sleeves are why a single record from that catalogue can come wrapped two different ways. Recorded at Morrisound in Tampa with Scott Burns and released by Metal Blade on 1 July 1991, Butchered at Birth went out in Locke's watercolour to the shops that would rack it, and from that record onward the label printed a second, tamer front for the shops that would not, so the same songs reached the counter in two different skins.
Then Germany took a knife to both. The authorities there pulled Eaten Back to Life, Butchered at Birth and Tomb of the Mutilated off the shelves and barred the band from playing a note of any of them on a German stage, a ban that held until 2006. For the collector that turned the tamer front from a lesser cloth into a document of its own, the shroud a censor had stitched, and the serious buyers of these records now want both skins on the shelf, side by side, the painting and the thing that was printed to hide it.
The German authorities were never asking why Death Metal Album Art Is So Graphic. They were asking who could be allowed to see it. The dealer asks a third question, and it is the only one with a price attached: which front, which pressing, which country. I keep both fronts of one of those records on my own shelf. I have never played either of them.
The songs are the body, and nobody owns a body. You pay for the shroud.
The death mask in the dead wax
Every copy of every record carries a smooth band of vinyl between the last groove and the label, and the letters scratched into it are what a dealer reads before looking at anything else. A stamper is a death mask. Cut into lacquer on a lathe, silvered, then lowered into a nickel bath until metal grows over its face, the original disc is usually wrecked when that metal shell is torn away from it, so every copy in a pressing carries the features of a face that did not survive its own casting, together with the matrix number and the engineer's initials that name the room where it happened.
A worn stamper means a new mask, and a label that orders another run gets another face. That is why the dead wax outranks the sleeve. The Swedish five who made exactly one album before scattering into other bands were Carnage, and in 1990 the Earache sublabel Necrosis, run by Bill Steer and Jeff Walker of Carcass, put Dark Recollections onto one compact disc alongside Hallucinating Anxiety by the Norwegians Cadaver, while on vinyl the two records went out separately, NECRO 3 for the Swedes and NECRO 4 for the Norwegians. One body in one format. Two in the other. The number in the runout tells you which grave you have opened.
Resurrection men with a pressing plant
Death metal gave the bootleggers more to dig up than almost any music its size, because so much of its best early material lay in the ground for years as tape before any label came near it, and the bootleg is the exhumation done at night, with no licence and no witnesses, the body carted off to whoever was paying before the family had even ordered a headstone.
Abominations of Desolation is the textbook grave. Taped in 1986 with Browning at the kit, Richard Brunelle and Trey Azagthoth on guitars, John Ortega on bass and a young David Vincent behind the desk, the session went round the trading network while the band went on to make Altars of Madness with Vincent singing, and by the time Earache pressed the official edition, catalogue MOSH 48, the legitimate record was arriving as the second copy of itself. The first pressing carries the label's stamp and the band's consent. The unofficial discs carry the date the songs escaped. A careful dealer prices the first and files the rest under curiosities, and a careful buyer asks to see the runout before paying for either.
The Flint four who recorded in June 1986 in the basement studio of the engineer Larry Hennessy, in three or four days and for three hundred dollars, and then broke up that September, were Repulsion. The tape circulated for three years as Slaughter of the Innocent before Necrosis put it out properly as Horrified in 1989. Same songs, new name, new shroud. Three years of tape trading had already carried the body through every mailbox on the network, and the Necrosis LP was the first copy that came with a name on the headstone.
The graves dug before the album
The group John McEntee assembled in 1989 after leaving Revenant was Incantation, and its first vinyl was Entrantment of Evil, a seven inch issued in August 1990 by Seraphic Decay, catalogue SCAM-003, a small American label that built its catalogue out of exactly this kind of disc. The same label pressed a seven inch for the Finnish band Abhorrence, which had already come apart before the disc reached shops in 1991, so it is most of what the band left above ground. That is the whole economics of the small disc. The record outlived the band, and the band's later fame, where it came, dug the record back up.
Then the compact disc tore the LP racks out of the chain stores. Relapse Records began in August 1990 in Matthew Jacobson's parents' basement in Aurora, Colorado, with two seven inch singles, and within a year it was pressing compact discs, so the window in which a death metal band's first appearance on record was a piece of vinyl shut almost as soon as it had opened, and whatever was pressed inside it is now the marrow of the dealer's list.
So read the shroud before you pay. The sleeve tells you where a record was allowed to be sold, the letters in the dead wax tell you which room made it and roughly when, and the paper folded inside tells you whether it reached you whole or was picked over on the way. None of it says a word about the riffs. Those are the same on the 1991 first pressing, on a disc struck from somebody's dubbed cassette and on the file on your phone, and they will still be the same when every one of those copies has gone to the charnel house of the discount crate. The body was always free. It is the linen that costs.
