• Home
• Subscribe
• Store
• Service/FAQ

---

All Pages |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4 

In preparing for our 20th Anniversary issue (coming out this July), we’ve been doing one historical perspective article per issue for the last year. We decided to choose seven seminal bands that helped define the hard music scene we now cover. We started off in our July/August 2004 issue with an article on Larry Norman. This was followed in the next issue with Resurrection Band. This was followed by Stryper; King’s X; and now the Crucified. I write all of these from my heart and head, but I was running into some questions concerning dates on their releases, so I gave Mark Salomon a call. The conversation kept going on and on, so I figured we’d share some of these fun memories here online (on the Crucified’s history).

I thought I’d get ahold of you to get some years and dates from the Crucified history…
The demos came out in ’86. We did Take Up Your Cross in ’86. It might have been ’87. In ’87 Take Up Your Cross was done. In ’88 we did Nailed, and in ’89 we did the self-titled album.

And Greg Sostrum put you guys up in The Casbah? Or is that something you guys chose?
Nope. Greg did The Casbah. A lot of great old punk rock bands recorded there.

Did Pillars of Humanity come out in 1991?
Pillars of Humanity? Yeah, ’91.

Some of the details I’ve been able to find out from your book (Simplicity) was that Kids in God’s Blessing existed maybe… Well, that you played and practiced for about two years before you ever played a real show?
Yeah, Kid’s in God’s Blessings, before I joined the band – they weren’t even called that. They were just called KGB. They didn’t have a… There were no words associated with the letters. So, we changed it to Kids In God’s Blessing, loosely based on a passage in Romans. I can’t even remember it now… It might’ve been (chapter) 7 or 8. It basically was about, ‘…if we are sons, we are then heirs.’ What else? We were that name for about six months. We played one show as Kids in God’s Blessing, with the original bass player. He didn’t actually play bass. He played a bass keyboard. It wasn’t even a show. It was just in an office at some building. I joined the band in ’85. We changed the name to The Crucified in ’86 and we started writing songs for the first demo. The guys had been writing really since the beginning. I think only one, maybe, of the Kids In God’s Blessings songs made it to the album. I don’t even remember what the heck the name of that song was.

But you said on the phone (voicemail), ‘the band I want to forget…’ I don’t want to forget the Crucified at all. I just don’t want to play those songs at our shows.

I kind of assumed that attitude from different things that were said in year’s past…
My biggest problem wasn’t that I wanted to forget the band. It was that I wanted people to stop asking us to play those songs. We wanted to do something different – better.

Looking back, what’s your perspective on how special or not the band was and the music and just overall memories?
It was very special. It was definitely… It felt like the right thing to do, you know? I liken it to when I met my wife. I knew that it was what I was supposed to be doing at that time. There’s a lot of comfort that comes with that, you know? Just like I knew I didn’t want to do it when I was in Stavesacre. I had no desire to play that stuff or try to, like, re-live any of that or anything. I just wanted to try something… When I say ‘better,’ I should say I mean better to me…more… The music was… in the Crucified stopped being very personal after that first album. Even on the second album… There was a lot of personal pride to it, but the music was definitely going in a direction that wasn’t as fun for me.

How would you describe that direction?
The Crucified? It was definitely going more towards that Pantera and Slayer and all that kind of stuff. The Slayer stuff I could really get into. I was just never a big fan of Pantera at all. We were trying to do more. We were trying to branch out. I could’ve handled it if it would have been more like… I don’t know, a little more broad of a spectrum. After you write two full demos and two albums of songs where you’re trying to come up with a theme that matches the intensity of the music, ya know? The music was real hard and fast and all that, but it wasn’t… There is kind of only one emotion you can convey with that, you know what I mean? If you were to just write about something that you weren’t as passionate about, you probably wouldn’t do as good a job, you know what I mean? Whereas, when you get to write about what you really are feeling, you can really pour yourself into it. We were like this… I don’t know. It just wasn’t really… I wasn’t really feeling that good. Everybody was kind of starting to go their own way anyway. The vehicle was definitely actively into the band. Greg was definitely getting into classic rock and stuff like that. We were trying to do something new and take it up another notch and we weren’t all on the same page. It was hard to write songs that made everyone happy. On the spiritual side of things, I could say towards the end of the Crucified I didn’t have that same confidence that I was in the right place – doing what I was supposed to be doing. I didn’t want to admit it at the time.

Looking back, what are your favorite songs and memories and why?
Uh, I’d say I really liked “Mindbender.” That was a fun song to play; and I liked it because I felt like it was indicative of what we could do, ya know? It was something that could make everyone in the band happy and everyone in the band could attack it with the same kind of intensity and the same kind of passion. I’ll always remember playing that. Those last two years – ’91 and ’92 at Cornerstone were huge performances for me, man. Those were a lot of fun.

NEXT PAGE
All Pages |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4 

Return to Internet Exclusives

---