This is an old interview I did with Doug Long, a maniac from Kentucky who played bass on one of my favorite albums, HELLNATION "Your Chaos Days Are Numbered", and is also responsible for all the bands under the Backwoods Butcher Recs label.
Originally published in Scatology Magazine #2 in 2021.
Hi, Doug! How have you been, dude? Welcome to the pages of Scatology! Serve yourself some coffee and let's go.
Gracias! I’ve been peachy here. Enjoying a little solitude and currently sipping the hottest and blackest coffee you’d ever wanna try. The beans are illegally imported from the Congo and sold only at nefarious backstreet markets where you can also get black tar heroin, Chinese bat meat and an unschedueled walk-in abortion with no appointment needed.
What record are you playing as we speak?
I just put on “Esthetik Of A Corpse” by ATRAX MORGUE. It’s great mood music for occasions such as this. What about you?
Saint Vitus “C.O.D.” sounds here. Why did you decide to get into this underground rock n’ roll abortion we love n’ hate so much?
Boredom! Entertainment options were very limited when I was a kid growing up in rural Ohio. You could either go to church, become a cop or commit suicide. I’ve always been a bit socially awkward and wasn’t much into child molestation or date rape so I got into punk rock instead.
In my opinion, Backwoods Butcher Records is one of the last bastions of real underground record labels. How do you survive in these stupid times without any pressence at internet social media?
The secret is to not give a shit, embrace failure and just enjoy the process! Still love creating and discovering weird new music but most of what goes on in the supposedly underground music scene tends to be blatant grovelling for validation. “You kiss my ass and I’ll kiss yours”. Starting a band so that you’ll have content for your social media page? That shit sucks! Those clowns should probably stick to posting selfies holding up limited edition diehard picture disc 12” they bought online. Who cares? Fuck your face.
Being an active participant in underground music has always meant spending way too much time sifting through turds in search of the occasional glorious gem. At this point, I probably have enough gems to last me for the rest of my stupid life. Social media makes the morbid narcissism and self-obsession more obvious but it’s always been there to some degree; following the template has just become totally effortless and the results are so fucking boring.
How many releases have you excreted over the world until now? Which one is your fave?
My first band released our own 7” EP circa 1991 and I’ve never slowed down much since then. Never tried to tally it up before but I’m sure the damage is extensive. Way too much crap! Success in underground music can only be qualified in how happy you are with the results, right? My favorite release is the ERECTILE DEMENTIA “Rock N’ Roll Abortion” LP. Everything about the music just ended up working well and Morbid Mark’s cover artwork is outstanding! Also very proud of the GAMMA-GERÄT and RARE FORM demo tapes. A very rare but satisfying occasion when everything turns out perfect.
One of the things that I really enjoy about your records are the song titles! Sarcasm and cynicism at maximum overdrive, especially with Erectile Dementia where I think you've been over the top.
Thanks for noticing! Instead of vomiting out more long-winded lyrics like I did in BRODY’S MILITIA, I tried to express everything I wanted to get across in ERECTILE DEMENTIA with just the song titles. Most fans of extreme music seem to be illiterate with the attention span of a retarded chipmunk so ExDx was my attempt at concise communication! Also tried to candy-coat my suicidal geezer nihilism with some cheesy jokes. Keep things light and slip the venom in unnoticed, you know? Let it slowly waft out like a dead rat rotting in the walls! I find it much more of a challenge to pull off effective humor than to just keep cranking out full-on pissed off gibberish.
But you told me Erectile Dementia is over now?
Aside from the first demo, the entire recorded output of ERECTILE DEMENTIA is fairly cohesive with everything getting a bit more ridiculous with each subsequent release. Didn’t think I could top the “Festering Future Endeavors” 7” EP so I put it to rest before it became too rudundant. I have more fun working on one-off recordings under different stupid band names with no thematic obligations so I can go off in whatever direction makes sense in the moment. It’s all the same crap in the end because I can’t really play anything else.
Always awesome artworks. I really dig Morbid Mark. Please introduce that guy to the readers.
Yes! Getting to work with Morbid Mark was a real honor. He’s always been a top tier underground artist in my distorted worldview. His classic stuff has an authentically gross vibe; definitely gave me the feeling that something awful was going on. You could always be relatively sure that Pushead was working in a well-lit studio with proper ventilation but I always got the feeling that Morbid Mark might have been lapping up infant blood while huffing human remains from inside an abandoned asylum. His work for MAN IS THE BASTARD, SATANIC MALFUNCTIONS and NEANDERTHAL was especially brutal. I just assumed he’d been arrested for cannibalism at some point in the early nineties as he just seemed to disappear for many years. Years alter while I was working on the “Rock N’ Roll Abortion” album and having zero success finding the right artist for the cover, I got a letter from Morbid Mark out of the blue. I’d never had any previous contact with him and here he was sending me some cash for ExDx records! Unfortunately, it doesn’t end with me becoming furniture upholstery or anything exciting; he’s the sweetest dude you’d ever wanna meet and has become very prolific again in recent years!
Since some years most of your projects are just yourself playing everything or working in the distance with some other hermits, don't you get bored of playing alone? Do you miss real band practises?
Had a blast being in a band with other people in the past but I don’t really miss it. My favorite part of the process has always been writing and recording. Don’t need anyone else for that. The very rare exception is SPASTIC AMOEBAS. I could never come up with that quality of madness by myself and it’s a fucking blast working together with those two genius mutants!
When can we expect some black metal in the vein of early IMMORTAL made in Backwoods Butcher?
Never? FUNERARY BOX is the closest thing to traditional metal that I’ve had a hand in creating but that’s still endless frozen eons away from IMMORTAL. I do enjoy prowling the midnight forest under a howling werewolf moon while clad in nothing but my spiked arm attachments. You’ve seen the security camera footage!
Are you still loyal to Marshall amplification? JCM 800 or JCM 900?
Haven’t played a live gig in over ten years but I’ll probably never get rid of my beloved Marshall JCM-800 full stack. Total overkill at this point, of course! I also have a little single speaker Fender 15 watt tube amp that I use for recording. Both have their places but sometimes you need to abuse what’s left of your ruined ears in the name of Satan!
I heard your old band PRAPARATION-H is about to reissue some old stuff and some unreleased songs too?
Yeah! We recorded a bunch of new tunes with most of the original members getting involved. The whole mess will be released on cassette along with some old unreleased relics from the vault. One of the new songs called “Shameless Nostalgia Gimmick Of Ultimate Uselessness” will appear on a tribute compilation to Slap-A-Ham records. That sums up the whole thing very well.
Tell me a dumb story from your days as bass player for HELLNATION.
There had been some Relapse Records package tour called “Extreme The Dojo” go through Japan right before one of our tours over there and we kept laughing at how dumb that name was so we started using the phrase as a euphemism for taking a huge bombastic shit. So you got sloppy drunk, accidentally ate an uncooked block of tofu with squid semen sauce and were about to commit a war crime on a pristine Tokyo subway toilet? Time to extreme the dojo! By the way, I’m now listening to The Cure’s “Three Imaginary Boys”.
Do you miss the nineties U.S. Power Violence scene?
I was living in the middle of nowhere at the time and didn’t have much of a personal connection to it. Definitely still enjoy some of the bands; both CROM albums are incredible! We played shows with a lot of those bands and met a lot of really cool people from that scene but only had direct contact when we went out to California to play “Fiesta Grande” or crossed paths with one of those bands on tour. We spent a month driving across the USA with CAPITALIST CASUALTIES in the late nineties and that was a big blur of crazy freaks and weirdos playing fucked up music every single night. All those rigidly-defined genre specifications weren’t super important back then. Meanwhile, the local scene here was basically non-existent so I never felt like I was a part of anything.
Ok, so let's talk a little about one of our fave bands ever - LED ZEPPELIN! I've recently been revisiting all their discography. Holy shit, dude! Can't find a bad album there!
Yeah, I love ZEPPELIN. They were the first band to really sink the hooks in my brain and I’ve never outgrown them. Anyone that remembers “In Through The Out Door” as anything less than brilliant needs to clean the dicks out of their ears, go back and listen again!
Which album is your fave? It's hard to choose but I think they reached perfection with IV.
My favorite album changes from year to year but I firmly believe “Houses Of The Holy” would have been the single greatest hard rock album in the history of human civilization had they replaced the song “D’yer Mak’er” with the originally intended title track. Maybe that goofy reggae song was put there to avoid causing the universe to collapse under the sheer cosmic weight of that record? I also really love “Physical Graffiti”.
One of the things I like the most about that band is they knew exactly when to say goodbye and quit without problem. Now it looks like no more bands know how to finish what they started without falling in the absolute pathetic self-parody.
Yeah! They knew the true source of their power wasn’t just in cocaine and Satan. Thankfully they were classy enough to bow out gracefully after he died. Most modern bands start off as a pathetic self-parody with no dignity so why not go ahead and run everything into the fucking ground? Who cares? Fuck all that shit. A few long-running bands that I would say have always maintained their power and honor are BLUE OYSTER CULT, TETSU ARRAY and AUTOPSY. I’m very lucky to have seen all three live. Not at the same show. Wouldn’t that be a fucking tour, eh? Holy shit.
Do you think bands that keep on going - or even worse, coming back - with only one original member are totally fake and a fraud?
In the case of something really special where all the members contribute equally then it’s definitely best to fold the band rather than slog on without passion. But then you have bands like MOTORHEAD where a single member is the obvious driving force! The early stuff is almost always going to be the best but there’s still plenty of interesting variations on the original theme to explore. A lot of current bands are just watered-down tribute clones that have only ever excelled at passing off plagiarism as homage. Most bands should probably only play live gigs but not bother recording music.
I guess that the peak of talented rock n’ roll music was in the 70’s or what the hell?
That tends to be my personal favorite kind of music but there have been plenty fantastic bands to come along in the years since, of course! I’ve likely stopped noticing new stuff because I’m old and stupid. Can’t think of the most recent band I would consider truly innovative in my ears. PAINTBOX from Japan? That said, I still get a charge of inspirational fury seeing a killer live set or hearing a blown out demo recording by some new band of young maniacs playing an exciting freaky flavor of grindcore, death metal or whatever. Absolutely fucking hate modern bands trying to play straight up “70’s rock”. Nothing is worse! Dudes born in the 90’s wearing bell bottoms jeans and well-groomed beards trying to sound like BLACK SABBATH will always suck infinitely more than anything else! I’d rather listen to nothing but drum machine gore grind with pitch-shifted diarrhea vocals for the rest of my life than hear another patchouli doom rock band.
Civilization has obviously been crumbling down for years but do you think 2020 was so terrible? Maybe people forgot about the years between 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. Anyway how was the year for the label, did you notice anything different?
I definitely had better sales during The Great War than I do now. The gas masks looked a lot more brutal back then as well.
Tell us about your future plans! Some more records coming out or just sitting at the barn to watch the woods on fire?
Doug: Mainly setting the barn on fire but I’ve also got a new demo tape called TELEKINETIC DECAPITATION that should be out by the time this interview becomes a printed reality. What does it sound like? Unlike anything you’ve ever imagined in your life, of course! Your brain will burst into searing black flames and your teeth will melt down the back of your throat. That’s a money-back guarantee, folks!
Right on dude! Thanks a lot for answering all this stupid babbling. Cheers!
Thank you so much for giving a shit about my good ol’ fashioned down home rock n’ roll arts n’ crafts, my man! Crush the fucking Christians and leave their desecrated corpses to rot under the brightly-shining sun of a hopeful new day.
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