(Image Credit: Jenaro Pérez Villaamil, Explosión de una locomotora. Ca. 1843.)
This originally ran on Mike Teal’s Instagram. Check that out for his design. I’m re-running this here with a fresh edit and a new coat of paint.
Someone wanted to blow up Glen Benton.
That’s how the story goes, anyway. At the Stockholm, Sweden, leg of Deicide’s 1992 European tour with Atrocity and Gorefest, an explosive device was discovered. No matter who tells the tale, that remains consistent. The rest is, well, up for interpretation.
“I think it was animal activists or something,” Benton, Deicide’s bassist and singer, told Mark Prindle in 2004. “It wasn’t really much of a bomb. I do more damage in the morning to my toilet. All it did was knock the fuckin’ door off its hinge. And they make it sound like someone detonated a small nuclear device or a dirty bomb or something.”
As for why “they” blew the blast out of proportion, Benton had this to say during an impromptu Q&A with fans at a 2009 concert: “It was just a record company hype.” Benton then mimes a jack-off motion. “Record companies love to hype shit.”
Benton is right. If one story can sum up the extreme metal hype-cycle in the early ‘90s, perhaps it’s this one. Not only does it feature an all-star cast of unreliable narrators unexpectedly crossing paths, but it shines a spotlight on one of the industry’s old hallmarks: a supremely carny approach to PR.
Indeed, when it comes to early ’90s metal, disinformation reigned, with dodgy labels and print-anything zines setting and inflating the legitimacy baseline for two embryonic scenes. Like Deicide’s early exploits, a lot of the mythos centers on prankish bullshit and conservative-rustling kayfabe. That said, the players that Glen Benton would run into on Deicide’s European tour had no issue escalating the intensity until it boiled over. But, let’s back up.
Deicide exploded out of the same Tampa Bay, Florida, death metal scene that reared Obituary, Morbid Angel, and Death and would later adopt Cannibal Corpse. Drummer Steve Asheim and the guitar-shredding Hoffman brothers, Eric and Brian, originally ripped it up in a Slayer-disciple named Carnage. Wanting to fill out their sound, Brian answered an ad placed by bassist/vocalist Benton. Amon was born. The year? 1987. And the scene was expanding fast.
“Obituary, Morbid Angel, and Atheist were playing Masquerade in Tampa in 1987 or 1988, and it was the first time we had all played since we got our record deals. And people were flying all the way over from Europe just to see it,” Atheist’s Kelly Shaefer told Revolver. “We still just considered it our scene, but that was the first sign to me that it was international. And it just really grew from there.”
Amon was part of the wave that pushed the boundaries of death metal, upping the extremity of the music while exploring the murkiest circles of blasphemy during the hey-day of the Satanic Panic. The band, by all accounts, had a live show that matched the material.
“Back then I really liked filling mannequins up with raw meat,” Benton recalled when asked by Revolver. “I packed one teenage mannequin full of $60 worth of chitlins and beef livers and brought it onstage. And this wasn’t fresh meat. I left that shit outside in the sun to rot. A few of my friends attacked it while we were playing. Next thing you know, there was a slaughterfest of meat going everywhere. One girl started screaming, ‘You’re killing him!’ She thought it was actually a person. The next day, the sheriff’s department was in there taking samples and checking to see if they were human remains.”
That sort of buzz soon culminated in a contract from Roadrunner Records, the negotiation of which was famously recounted in Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore. According to A&R guy Monte Conner, Benton barged into Conner’s office with demo in hand and bellowed, “Sign us, you fucking asshole!”
Whether that’s accurate or not, and these days Benton remembers it differently, it makes for a great story. It’s the kind of mythmaking that both band and label would be comfortable pursuing. In that respect, Deicide and Roadrunner weren’t alone in the metal world. A cadre of young people who congregated at a record shop in Norway were also hard at work defining a scene, engaging in a similar brand of legend creation and theatrical tactics. Their efforts, though, would get much more real.
Meanwhile, Amon changed its name at the behest of Roadrunner so the quartet wouldn’t be confused with “’Amon’ Belongs to ‘Them’,” a track off of King Diamond’s 1989 album Conspiracy. Deicide, the newly christened group’s self-titled 1990 debut, was a monster in the realm of death metal, eventually clearing 100,000 units sold according to a 2003 Blabbermouth tidbit on Soundscan. Legion, Deicide’s follow-up and artistic highpoint, hit the street’s on March 1, 1992.
1992 was a big year for Glen Benton, perhaps when the intimidating frontman reached peak recognizability in the public sphere. His exposure was increased by evangelical-baiting, stunt-y endeavors, such as his gonzo radio show debates with Christian opportunist Bob Larson. Justin M. Norton described these calls in Invisible Oranges as Benton doing “his best to sound like a possessed Regan in The Exorcist.”
Benton found a true calling playing the Christian boogeyman. If he’s known for anything outside of metal, it’s for repeatedly branding an upside-down cross in the middle of his forehead. He also claimed that he would kill himself at 33 to, like, roast Jesus…or something. Whatever the intent of that galaxy brain bit was supposed to be, it efficiently freaked out the religious right, turning Benton into a death metal deity in the process. It wouldn’t be the last group that he’d provoke.
To stoke the hype fires, it has been alleged that Benton engaged in animal sacrifices. This is likely a bit, much like how Dave Vincent’s entire life is a bit, but it culminated in a notorious NME interview where Benton killed a squirrel with a pellet gun. At least, that’s what people remember. Curiously, the interview in question hasn’t made its way to the internet. Still, Benton offers a stand-your-ground defense when asked about it in subsequent interviews.
“They were chewing the foam installation off my Freon line for my air conditioners,” Benton explained years later. “So, all my pipes were sweating up in the attic and leaving stains on the ceilings. I got up there, got the nest down, let the babies mature and shit, let the fuckin’ things get out of the house and then I blocked the hole. But there was one fuckin’ squirrel in there and I couldn’t get his ass out.”
Needless to say, the way Benton’s squirrel sniper mission was reported didn’t exactly endear the man to animal rights activists, who hassled Deicide during its run of UK dates in December 1992. On December 16, at the International 2 in Manchester, there was a…you guessed it…bomb threat, forcing Deicide to hit the stage late after a very Origin of the Feces-esque evacuation. Undeterred, the band still played a full set. You can watch it on YouTube.
But animal rights activists weren’t the only people that Benton’s persona pissed off. At some point, most likely simply for existing, Deicide was caught in Euronymous’s crosshairs. Yep, that Euronymous: Øystein Aarseth, co-founder of Mayhem and proprietor of Deathlike Silence Productions.
Euronymous also owned a little Norwegian record store named Helvete, the 1991 opening of which one fanzine writer said was “the creation of the whole Norwegian Black Metal scene.” By June 1992, churches were burning across Norway. And on August 10, 1993, Euronymous was murdered, stabbed to death by bandmate Varg “Count Grishnackh” Vikernes, he of Burzum/white supremacy/table-top RPG infamy. When Vikernes was arrested nine days later, authorities found, among other things, a fairly large cache of explosives. Things were, uh, a little different in Norway.
Ah, but that was all to come. When Euronymous was still alive and grimacing, his PR schtick was shit-talking everything. One of his favorite pastimes was citing death metallers as falses. “These stupid people must fear black metal!” the man was quoted as saying in Kerrang! “But instead, they love shitty bands like Deicide, Benediction, Napalm Death, Sepultura and all that shit.” See also his final interview with Kill Yourself! Magazine in 1993, in which he offered this anecdotal ratio in order to pwn poseurdom: “And we have maybe 30 die hard black metal fans and 700-1000 of those bastards who listen to commercial black metal such as Deicide.”
Somehow, due in part to no small amount of cosmic schadenfreude, Benton and Euronymous, two of the era’s biggest egos, ended up talking. They met in Oslo, Norway, likely during Deicide’s tour stop there on November 24, 1992. Here’s Benton’s side, spinning the yarn to Revolver in 2008:
This is how out of the loop I was. I met [Euronymous] and he kind of reminded me of Squiggy from ‘Laverne and Shirley’. Because I met him when I was a kid, too, at a baseball game. I met him and I was like, ‘Wow, fuckin’ Squiggy.’ Anyway, I meet the guy and he’s carrying a mace, but it looks like he stole the table leg off his mom’s kitchen table and put, like, nails through it and shit. And he was wearing this $1.99 cape that you’d buy at the dollar store during Halloween. They brought me backstage and they said, ‘Uranus, or whatever, from MAYHEM is there and wants to meet you.’ So, I went out there and met him. And in his broken English, he said [in robotic, foreign accent] ‘I did not have problem with you, but this band GORGUTS. They are not true death metal/black metal band.’ And I was just sitting there with a big shit-eating grin on my face like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, man.’ And I really didn’t know the importance of the guy. To me he looked like another goofball fan.
Emperor drummer Faust, who would spend nine years in jail for murdering Magne Andreassen, claims he was present and remembers the tête-à-tête differently. To Blabbermouth:
We were at the venue [in Norway where DEICIDE was performing that night] selling the ‘Kill the Christians’ shirts which were famous at the time. Eric Hoffman [then-DEICIDE guitarist] approached me after their soundcheck asking what the shirts said in English. I explained [to] him and he suggested me and Euronymous come with him to meet the band. We went back backstage and met the band and had a conversation with Glen Benton who was polite and friendly all the way. Anyway, at some point Benton started trying to impress us or whatever. He claimed he and his ‘gang’ had ‘burned hundreds of churches’ in the U.S. (direct quote). He had already heard about the few burnings in Norway apparently. Euronymous never mentioned GORGUTS or any other band but it’s true that Euronymous wanted to express that he thought DEICIDE was an honest and true death metal band.
You can sleep soundly, Luc Lemay.
While not exactly the Vienna summit, it would appear from both accounts that Benton and Euronymous buried the hatchet. Naturally, Euronymous still badmouthed Deicide to whatever zine was listening. That, as every Swedeath band can attest, was very much on brand. But, still, it seems like Deicide survived the Oslo scene, one with its share of future arsonists and murderers. Or…did they? The next stop for the tour? November 25: Stockholm. Yeah. Boom.
So, 27 years on, let’s play Clue: Who tried to blow up Glen Benton?
Was it the animal rights activists? Metal Hammer backs this up in a recently published listicle on doomed tours: “Death threats quickly poured in from pro-critter terrorist group Animal Militia; following a minor bomb blast at a gig in Stockholm, a missive bragged ‘Not even Satan himself will protect you once you set foot in England.’” I think Metal Hammer means the “Animal Rights Militia,” a group that splintered off from the Animal Liberation Front due to the latter not embracing violence. ARM reached a level of notoriety in the early ‘80s for mailing letter bombs to Margaret Thatcher, exercising the group’s believed right to “extensional self-defense.” Be that as it may, the Benton bombing doesn’t appear on the Wikipedia page cataloging its greatest hits.
Was it the black metallers? Well, this is a little more conspiratorial, but take a trip down the rabbit hole with me, won’t you? There’s an intriguing detail hiding in the Setlist.fm billing of that fated November 25 show.
It would appear that Sweden’s Therion, then still a death metal band, played a set. Who hated Therion? Euronymous. Here’s Euronymous to Close-Up Magazine: “And the matter of THERION, who is the worst of all Swedish bands, we have a special message to them. If they dare to came to Norway and play LIFE METAL, we are going to kill them.” Oh, and yeah, Suuvi Mariotta Puurunen, Vikernes maybe-girlfriend, tried to burn Therion founder Christofer Johnsson’s house down. I guess that’s worth mentioning. But, Therion’s history, as intimated in a Stereogum piece published in 2018, has its own…inconsistencies. Still, is it possible that Glen Benton wasn’t the only target?
Who knows. This is par for the course in metal: smoke is generated by PR bluster and few, if any, journalists are around to investigate whether there’s a fire. This isn’t an accident, it’s the point. There’s a reason why sensationalists tend to dig themselves out of the underground. It’s because their larger-than-life legends gain them a foothold in the mainstream’s imagination, providing their otherwise bewildering music an irresistible true crime-esque context. Record companies love to hype shit.
When it comes to creating sensational lore, Benton was a top-notch spinner. He has spent the rest of his career courting controversy due to the fact that he’ll dependably lay down some choice quotes. A lot of that stuff is extremely cringey and cancellable. Some of it is hilarious. A tiny slice of it is even…kind of wise in its own twisted way. Glen Benton has never backed down from being Glen Benton, whoever the hell that might really be.
For what it’s worth, Benton is a little more circumspect these days. He said this to Revolver in 2018:
We all do stupid shit when we’re kids and people at record companies made more out of it than was there. Yeah, it was sensationalized, stupid stuff. And I just played into it like I was being asked. As far as the animal guts I threw into the crowd and everything, yeah, we did that shit in the early days. When you’re young and you’re a kid, all you think is just, “Let’s be as sick as fuckin’ possible!” But you’re not thinking about all the people you might harm in the fuckin’ process. And then when you get a little older you go, “Wow, man. That was really fuckin’ stupid of me to throw all that shit on fuckin’ people. It could have made some of them really sick.” So, you grow up. We all grow up.
That’s how the story goes. For some, anyway.
– Wolf Rambatz
Plague Rages 
