In a new interview with Soundterror, Kam Lee, who was a member of an early version of DEATH as well as the pre-DEATH band MANTAS alongside guitarist/vocalist Chuck Schuldiner and guitarist Rick Rozz, was asked what it was like working with Chuck in the early 1980s. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We were kids, so I only knew him as a teenager. So, I can’t really expand on him as an adult. I can only tell you that we were teenagers, we were 15-, 16-year-olds just having fun playing music in the garage. We never thought it was gonna become what it did, what it’s become.”
Asked why he left DEATH, Kam said: “Why did I leave DEATH? [Chuck] kicked me out because I tried to get him to go out with a girl.”
After the interviewer noted that many people consider the early MANTAS and DEATH demos “the birthplace of death metal growling”, Kam said: “Well, in DEATH and MANTAS, when we started in DEATH, I basically just started kind of mimicking a lot of what we were taking influences from, which was… We were tape trading for one. I was a tape trader, so I was getting a lot of stuff from all over the place. So you’d get tapes from like POSSESSED, of course, was a big influence. There was stuff from SACRIFICE coming out of Canada. There was stuff from Paul Speckmann [DEATH STRIKE, MASTER] coming out of Chicago, and there was stuff overseas like early HELLHAMMER. There was stuff like VENOM. It was a big influence on MANTAS in the beginning. So it was kind of like a combination of trying to like combine all that stuff. Plus being underage and 16, you’re just kind of screaming and you have all this angst and anger, and I come from the punk world, so I just wanted to kind of like express it that way. Plus I was playing drums at the same time. So it was a lot of trying to do that. But then when I found the growl, it really wasn’t until MASSACRE that I really started… I changed it because earlier, prior to that was more screechy-type vocals, and Chuck started to sing as well, and he took it more in a more of his influence from [POSSESSED‘s] Jeff Becerra and was trying to sound more like Jeff, where I was, like, ‘I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna sound like somebody else.’ So I tried to come up with my own thing. And I thought, what was the most primal thing that I could think of? A lot of people will always say, oh, well, there was demonic movies like ‘The Exorcist’, or stuff like that. But to me, it was more or less about being primal, being natural. And to me, the most natural thing that was hair-raising is — I was raised around a lot of large dogs, like rottweilers and pitbulls, and I knew that the scariest thing that I ever felt as a 14-year-old was being between four or five rottweilers during feeding time, where you had to go out and give them food. And if you’ve ever been around large dogs, when you bring out a bowl of food, they all begin to growl this low growl because one wants to be the alpha, wants to be dominant, and it’s kind of hair-raising. And I thought, that’s what I wanna do with vocals. I wanna do something that’s hair raising. I want to do something that sounds primal, sounds raw, sounds natural. And I started to mimic dogs. That’s literally how I got the growl.”
Lee went on to say that he didn’t know anybody else at the time who had adopted quite the same style of death metal growling. But he clarified: “I took phonetic enunciation influences from Tom G. Warrior, only because I heard the HELLHAMMER demo and I really liked how he phonetically spoke, even though at the time I didn’t realize it was ’cause he was from Switzerland and English wasn’t his natural language. I just liked the way that he phonetically said things. So I took that, and there’s a lot of his nuances, like his little ‘ooh’ and his ‘hey’, and I just took that and I expanded it. Instead of just going, ‘Hey,’ I went, ‘Heeeey.’ I kind of brought it out more. So there was that influence. And just the general influence of everything coming out in that late ’80s time. Like I said, everything from VENOM to Lemmy from MOTÖRHEAD, just anything that was really raspy and raw I was attracted to. So I tried to kind of take all of those influences all together and put ’em all together.”
Asked what the reaction was from other people to the kind of music he, Chuck and Rick were making at the time, Kam said: “Chuck and I and Freddie [Frederick ‘Rick Rozz’ DeLillo] at the time, we knew we were doing something that was completely different, and everybody hated it. Everybody hated it. I remember people would say, ‘This is shit. This will never last. This will never catch on. This is garbage.’ And look — 40-something years later, it’s one of the biggest influential music in metal today. We didn’t realize we were doing something that was going to have this much impact, but we knew at the time we were doing something different because everything that was popular at the time was hair metal, everything like MÖTLEY CRÜE and that kind of stuff, and we just wanted to be the completely polar opposite of that. So we just gravitated to more underground music, and that’s literally… We did our own thing. My influences, especially lyrically, came from horror movies ’cause I’m a big horror movie fan. So I loved the Lucio Fulci films and stuff like that. And Chuck too — a lot of the stuff on [DEATH‘s debut album] ‘Scream Bloody Gore’ literally comes from our love of Lucio Fulci and ‘Evil Dead’ and all those ’80s films that just came out during that timeframe.”
Back in August 2022, Kam once again weighed in on the never-ending debate on who can lay claim to being the first “true” death metal band: DEATH or POSSESSED. He said: “POSSESSED came first, because we all heard the POSSESSED demo in the tape trading. We were tape trading and we got the POSSESSED demo. And there’s where you can hear the change, because we were sounding different — we were sounding very much like VENOM in the first MANTAS demo; very, veryVENOM cloning. As soon as we heard that POSSESSED demo… It was two bands, actually, that literally changed everything in DEATH — the POSSESSED demo and SLAYER‘s ‘Show No Mercy’. Those two things right there changed everything. Because once we heard SLAYER‘s ‘Show No Mercy’, as far as the speed and aggression, and we heard POSSESSED, as far as the technicality of the guitars and the way that Jeff was singing, that’s when we changed. We said, ‘Okay, we need to be a combination of all three of these — we need to be a combination of the rawness of VENOM, the fast energy of SLAYER and that just evil, screechy and guitar ripping ways of POSSESSED. That literally was it. There’s the three bands that are the blueprint of death metal, as far as I’m concerned.”
A little over a month earlier, Kam was asked to elaborate on his comment during an appearance on “That Metal Interview” podcast that “Chuck ripped off POSSESSED. “I guess that was actually a bad choice of wording,” Kam admitted to VWMusic. “Saying ‘ripped off’ makes it sound bad. I guess the proper wording should be ‘took heavy influence from.’ Although you could say that I ripped off HELLHAMMER and Tom G. Warrior, and I’m not going to get butthurt about it. I won’t because it’s fact. Yet some people don’t care about facts. They just want to keep believing the fiction they bought into because it fits the messianic mold their ‘hero-worshipping’ icons have been fitted for. It disrupts their ideology and topples the tower when they hear their gods might not be as almighty as they once believed. It’s that same sunken feeling when a kid for the first time is discovering that just maybe Santa Claus is not real. It hurts their feelings. Worse yet are those others out there manipulating those people who are hurt. Some people are just trying to jump on the pity party bandwagon with that one.”
He continued: “I got a lot of hate from that statement, though it wasn’t intended to downplay Chuck‘s influence on music, but rather to end the debate of who came first, DEATH or POSSESSED. Sadly, morons spun it to change the narrative, to fit their agenda, and to further instigate and cause strife.”
Lee added: “Do I feel Chuck‘s influence is overstated? Let me put it this way — for the ‘product and commodity,’ his legacy became post mortem. In order to keep reselling and repressing albums, it’s exactly what it’s being marketed as. No, it’s actually exactly what one should expect from a product sales pitch. I mean, you’ve got to make sure that your product is the people’s choice, right? It’s Coca-Cola vs Pepsi. McDonald’s vs Burger King. Starbucks vs Dunkin Donuts. In the end, the company with the better commercial is always going to win over the masses.”
