On November 9, 1995, Kind O Damaging’s Bloody Kisses become the primary album launched by way of Roadrunner Information to reach gold certification in the United States. Launched two years previous, the album’s fusion of doom steel, goth and hardcore had became the band into stars of the 90s steel scene, and their six-foot-eight frontman, Peter Steele, used to be cemented as a talismanic icon. However their fortunes wouldn’t remaining. “We all the time had an excessively unfavourable tint on the whole thing,” shrugs guitarist Kenny Hickey. “We by no means patted ourselves at the again and there weren’t phrases of encouragement. Each time we got here off excursion it felt like, ‘Smartly, that’s it – higher get a role.’”
Despite the fact that they’d all the time maintained an air of pervasive pessimism – proudly adopting the nickname ‘The Drab 4’ – Kind O’s 5th album, International Coming Down, used to be particularly bleak. Its lyrical narratives of drug dependancy and familial loss had been taken without delay from Peter Steele’s studies on the finish of the 90s. “A lot of my contemporary time’s been taken up by way of funerals,” Peter published to Hammer on the time. In some other interview, he quipped that “everybody else’s circle of relatives is rising – mine’s shrinking”, responding to the interviewer’s well mannered congratulations that Kenny had just lately welcomed his first kid.
Despite the fact that flippant, Peter’s feedback hinted at deeper trauma he used to be attempting to conquer. As he became to medicine for aid, the problems compounded. “International Coming Down would possibly were our bleakest document, however Lifestyles Is Killing Me used to be our bleakest length,” says drummer Johnny Kelly, who joined the band after the discharge of Bloody Kisses and remained in the back of the equipment till their eventual break up in 2010. “Between ladies, medicine and an entourage he’d carry far and wide, Pete used to be out of his thoughts greater than at another level.”
However in standard Kind O Damaging style, the band replied to adversity with pitch-black humour. As they started writing their 6th album – in the beginning titled ‘The Dream Is Lifeless’, sooner or later launched as Lifestyles Is Killing Me – they made up our minds to reinject a way of playfulness that were absent from International Coming Down. “Peter in particular sought after us to have much more humour for Lifestyles Is Killing Me”, Johnny recollects. Now not all ‘jokes’ had been preferred, on the other hand. Peter Steele had lengthy courted controversy together with his lyrics, the likes of Jesus Hitler and Der Untermensch seeing Kind O dogged with rumours of Nazism of their early days. In reaction, the band wrote tongue-in-cheek Bloody Kisses monitor We Hate Everybody and defined the accusations away as a false impression about their humour. However Lifestyles Is Killing Me music I Like Goils as soon as once more skirted too just about the threshold. Anecdotally penned as a jokey reaction to the higher consideration Peter had gained from males after posing nude in a 1995 factor of Playgirl, the music’s lyrics veered into direct homophobia that has come below higher scrutiny within the years since its unencumber.
“Peter appreciated to poke the undergo like that,” Johnny says flippantly, admitting that whilst he can’t discuss for precisely what his bandmate used to be considering, he didn’t suppose he used to be homophobic. “You all the time needed to take Peter’s lyrics as one thing tongue-in-cheek. He used to be by no means seeking to make a remark, as opposed to to start out shit!”
This combative nature got here out in alternative ways too. Peter would argue together with his bandmates all the way through rehearsals and recording periods, lengthy drives out to their house in New York’s Rockaway Seashore once in a while finishing with the band piling again into the van and riding house with out taking part in a notice. “We’d section techniques and at, like, one within the morning, the telephone would cross and there’s Pete, calling Johnny like, ‘I need to battle you on the street, presently’,” coming to us with those 14-minute opuses!” Kenny recollects. “He got here up with I Don’t Wanna Be Me, this truly cool punk rock anthem.”
The lead unmarried and opening monitor correct on Lifestyles Is Killing Me – after doomy instrumental opener Thir13teen – I Don’t Wanna Be Me nonetheless crept previous 5 mins. However, the music recaptured the band’s hardcore roots, albeit with a gothic, new wave twist as Peter playfully became his self-loathing right into a bouncy singalong. It set the tone for a document that, by way of Kenny and Johnny’s reckoning, used to be “everywhere”, however to fanatics captured their genre-blurring buffet of types. “There have been some songs to me that validated the place it sits within the catalogue,” Johnny concedes. “Anesthesia on my own makes all of it value it for me. Nettie is truly cool, I Don’t Wanna Be Me is truly in the market and other from what we had been doing, in order that used to be cool. The band wanted that selection and humour.”
I Don’t Wanna Be Me used to be in the end the one unmarried to be launched from Lifestyles Is Killing Me. Regardless of that, the band had been ready to shoot a video for the monitor, actor and comic Dan Fogler donning numerous costumes in entrance of a purple theatrical curtain, pretending to be everybody from Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson to Britney Spears, Eminem and Peter Steele himself. “Dan used to be this kind of humorous man, we had numerous amusing with that shoot,” Johnny recollects fondly.
Launched on June 17, 2003, Lifestyles Is Killing Me proved Kind O Damaging nonetheless had industrial attraction, although the venues they had been taking part in had shriveled. Breaking into the Most sensible 40 of the United States Billboard 200 at No.39, the album matched the chart place that they had completed on International Coming Down 4 years previous. However whilst the goth aesthetic used to be making a large comeback in the United States – propelled by way of the likes of Him and Evanescence – Kind O weren’t ready to scale the heights that they had loved the former decade, at the same time as they went on excursion with Lacuna Coil and Cradle Of Dust. “We made some lifelong pals with the ones folks,” Johnny says. “There have been all the time laughs – even within the worst scenarios lets in finding one thing humorous. Someone else’s misfortune or distress used to be a just right set-up for a punchline.”
Kind O Damaging would handiest unencumber yet another document – 2007’s Lifeless Once more
– as on April 14, 2010, Peter Steele kicked the bucket from middle failure. With out their towering frontman, the band made up our minds to name it quits. However for the entire doom and strife they skilled through the years, each Johnny and Kenny glance again with a way of fondness and rue for what would possibly were. “My intestine feeling used to be that the band by no means hit their attainable,” Johnny admits. “As far as Peter’s songwriting skills and no matter, there used to be all the time a way that there used to be one thing extra in there.”
“As a result of he all the time interfered!” Kenny exclaims. “It’s exhausting to care for one thing on that wavelength that the band ran on. To be certain and hit your attainable, you’d if truth be told must have some hope!” “Peter had optimism… proper prior to he died,” Johnny says, deadpan. “He used to be constructive and truly occupied with creating a document sober, realising he hadn’t carried out himself as he must have in later years. Our highest document almost certainly would’ve been the following one.”
“He used to be all the time a past due bloomer, in the whole thing,” Kenny has the same opinion. “Our worst enemy used to be our bleak outlook. It’s exhausting to transport ahead and feature power in the event you don’t have some roughly positivity. Should you have a look at The Beatles, Lennon used to be the darkish one and McCartney used to be the sunshine one. We had been a band of Lennons. However… I want I had him again and we nonetheless had that going.”
I Don’t Wanna Be Me stays one in all their maximum enduring anthems, a testomony that even if the whole thing used to be falling aside, Kind O Damaging had been a novel ingenious power. Within the years since Peter’s loss of life, a large number of bands have stated Kind O’s affect, from the likes of Code Orange and Oceans Of Shut eye, to Trivium and Pallbearer. No one has been extra stunned by way of this than the previous participants themselves.
“On the time, a music like I Don’t Wanna Be Me truly didn’t have the affect or endurance that it has now,” Johnny admits. “It’s handiest truly so much later whilst you get started getting bands quilt it that it kind of feels to have constructed up and revitalised it.” “It used to be a sleeper hit, like a kind of songs that takes a couple of years to truly get fashionable – Dream On, Bohemian Rhapsody, that form of factor,” Kenny nods. “Kind O had been a sleeper hit all spherical, then!” Johnny provides with a snort.
