Some of these songs were dropped when Chuck joined and were not included on Predator album. Mostly, it was just because we were developing stronger material by then. Some evolved into different songs. The instrumental KGB is very similar to FTW, which did end up on Predator.

Lose Control is one I wrote, with heavy Deep Purple influences. It was considered too rock and not enough metal to make the cut, but listening to it now, its a good song. I also contributed the harmony leads on that one. This track includes a bonus ending, probably another take that was erased over (and contains a lot more high end, maybe because the tape hadn't been re-recorded on as much?).

Hellrazor/Cry Havoc was a medley of two shorter songs. I brought my half back and padded it out with an instrumental section for the Malicious Intent album.

Fear No Man is an interesting oddity in that it didn't make the final album, even though I remember we were very high on this song and thought it was one of the early ones we wrote that was very good. I think because it was written with Dave on drums and used double bass, and when Chuck joined he didn't play double bass (he didn't even have a double bass kit) and we felt the song needed it to really work, although Chuck's version sounds fine to me now.

What does not sound fine to me are the vocals. I have no idea who I was trying to emulate here, but it sounds like I recorded most of these in the bathroom while taking a shit. These make the Predator vocals, execrable as they are, sound positively wonderful in comparison. I can only be glad they were so much better on Malicious Intent and better yet on Bad Crazy. I completely changed my style of singing by then to the point I was actually singing instead of grunting, yelling and screaming.

The last song is a one for which Mike wrote a chord pattern, then I added a monster mash of all the guitar effects you can work out of a cheap non-tunable harmonizer that only plays parallel harmonies. The tape ran out at the end of the song. Dave is on drums. Mike was not playing in any band at the time, but didn't want to join the band right then. He was usually around though and we did a lot of projects together, this is just one thing we did one weekend for fun.

As was often the case, I would tape us live in rehearsal playing a new song once the arrangement was hashed out, then tape my vocals over it experimenting with melodies and vocal ideas.

I even put some backing vocals on this. You can see the evolution of the song, even though the quality of the tape is not worth repeated listens. I only include it as an interesting artifact of the writing process.

Also here we have very early versions of Latter Days and Alone, recorded live in the studio once we had a semblance of an arrangement. I would typically use these tracks to write lyrics and melodies. These were simply recorded with 1 mike somewhere in the room where it would pick up everyone.

This was probably one of the last things we did before Curt found out he had to move to Alabama, because we had been sceduled to begin pre-production on these 3 songs and maybe a couple of my old ones, enough to make it worth a drum session.

You can hear Curt teaching me the lick and trying to work out the 3/4 drum part with Chuck.

He does the lead solos and most of the rhythm guitar on these. I've left off Blood Money/Judas because I played all the guitars on those and they remained essentially the same in the final versions.

Mark has an interesting angle on these, his solos are more technical flash and less compositional skill than Curt, in my opinion, and its a way to go, but I have to say I much prefer the final versions. In fact, this was a major reason Mark left the band, the difference in opinion about the sound and the tenor of the project.

I wanted solos that more complemented the composition, Mark, as a lead guitarist, naturally looked at a solo as an end unto itself. I also felt the fill work he was doing didn't fit the mood or the compositions and interfered with the vocals in some places. Lastly, Mark was unhappy with the amount of guitar I was doing, especially my stacked guitar stuff, which he felt competed with his work.

Since I was a bass player, this is probably valid, but I had been doing this kind of stuff since before we started recording seriously and I felt I had something to add.

In fact, it was main of the main factors in the Vengeance sound, I felt. Some of Mark's rhythm guitar work does remain on the final version. You can hear, for instance, the very end of Murder is identical on both versions, and it would have been difficult to exactly match that delay/echo/attack with a different take.

On other tracks, however, notably Whipped, I can definately tell Mike re-cut the rhythm track, its both fatter and tighter, Mike played a less wide-open style of rhythm than Mark and deadened the strings more and left less ring. The rhythm on this version of Whipped, particularly, is not very tight for a final version. It does have an ass-kicking solo, however.

Things might have fared differently had Mike been in the band at the time, he was also always a moderating influence among the other strong and volatile personalities involved.

I also notice Cry Havoc sounds very dead and empty rhythmically, and there are some missed hits here and there. The rhythm on Carnivore sounds like the final version, albeit with less flange, its possible either way. The melody on the verse intro guitar is basically the same, I can't remember if Curt wrote that, as this was a song he'd originated before he left, but I don't think we'd taken it that far, but it seems odd Curt would keep a lead melody Mark had written.

Maybe we were all so used to hearing it we wanted to keep it. I hear Mike's voice in the vocals, so he was doing backing vocals with me even then, months before he formally joined.

He didn't even play on near as many songs as Mark had done, and played virtually no rhythm. His lead guitar, where he's playing "parts" rather than solos is very weak and not tight at all. His straight rhythm playing was just hopeless, not only was it not in time, the technique was all wrong. He played full chords with no "heel of the hand" deadening.

During this time I finally talked Mike in rejoining, and he took pity on us and joined, I think partly because he could see also that Nick would be hopeless live, there would be no rhythm, and also because Nick had so little frame of reference of metal, he didn't even know how to take Mike's playing. Mike used to play dive-bombs and crazy shit at practice just to freak Nick out, but seriously, Nick just had no concept on how to play heavy metal rhythm guitar. It's something you have to have ingrained in you from listening and playing with a thousand metal songs, and Mike had done that, and Nick never had.

I can tell that Curt must have re-done a track of rhythm, because the stuff here that is mine and Mike's replacement of Mark's rhythm is really Rockman heavy and too smooth. Curt's part added some edge.

Something that Nick was good at though, and that we did keep, is on Reign of Terror, the acoustic part. Nick was a guitar teacher at Thoroughbred in Sarasota, and was very good at classical guitar technique. He doubled all Mark's acoustic parts on nylon string classical guitar and it added a really nice tone to the sound and fattened it up and gave it a different tint than the steel strings. We had talked about him adding a classical guitar lead part on there, but never got around to it. It doesn't matter anyway because Curt's head was absolutely where ours was on that type of thing, he had listened to the same music we had and what he did was wonderful and perfect and I can't imagine it any other way. It's very Michael Schenker-ish, the lead he added.

It's Not Over is faster and has a different feel, but Curt had composed his solo and pretty much stuck with it for the final. The backing vocals in some cases are not as big, and I did some of these myself, while teaming up with Mike for the finals.

The running order was even set already. Basically, it seems like we did a run-through of all the songs, then reheased a bit, then ran through the same basic arrangements and versions. The finals are a bit cleaner and tighter. Also, the drum sound is much better in on the actual album.

If there is a down-side, the finals may be more constrained. Curt does some interesting fills on Bad Crazy that aren't on the final. Also, there are some "ooos" we elected to leave out of the last version. The horns and strings are a bit loud on this take, but I like the roto-tom fills on this one.

Meltdown, The Gates and Chase aren't on these tapes because they were written at the time of these demos, but all the other tunes are here in more or less their finished form. The vocals on Damned are kind of rough here, they improved quite a bit on the final.

Since the project was so tightly rehearsed and recorded, there aren't any out-take songs that didn't make it onto the album, only these alternate versions. However, I consider this by far our best collection of songs, so I think the organization was a good thing for the final product, even if it did not yield any oddities or interesting artifacts.

The stacked guitar melody on '89 is simpler and moves in a different direction. Also, the acoustic comes in on the stop breaks in the bridge instead of Curt's electric.

Chuck's beat on Beijing is a little cleaner and more compact. I think he opened it up a little on the final. Curt improved his outro fills on the final.

The kick on The Beast is half-time in the first half of every verse, an interesting idea, but coming in immediately with double-kick is probably more effective. Mike's double lead is here, in fact it was written as one of the first parts of the song and shaped the rhythm for the solo, not vice versa.

The "ahhs" are louder in this mix. We did a 6/9 chord for the vocal pad, but I don't think its evident because I mixed it so far back in the final.

The Rollin' link is here, showing how calculated our ad-lib stuff was. That was supposed to be a studio drop-in, as if it were a segment of a larger piece of me rehearsing or writing the song, but this early version shows it to be faux studio verite.

As I've said elsewhere, this project sat for months, then was finished up in a rush at the end, so everything was not done perfectly, just quickly.

This version of The Light is one exception, its an acoustic, unplugged version I did to test the vocal idea.

The other 3 true demos, which I would typically do with a drum machine so the rest of the band could learn the song or add their own part, are Just One Night, Only One and That's Not. You can see that I did almost a complete production even on the demo, adding all the harmony guitars, stacked vocals and keys.