In this excerpt from Ep. 1, Jacoby Kingston recalls his first band, meeting Erik Lindmark, forming Deeds of Flesh, and recording their 1995 EP, Gradually Melted.
Jacoby Kingston (4:36): All right, I’ll go first.
I was like 14, and we were listening to Bay Area thrash metal, and that’s what we wanted to do: me and my buddies, we wanted to start a band doing thrash metal. So, four of us got together [and] we wrote a few riffs.
None of us knew any music; none of us knew any notes or anything like that. We just, you know: one friend grabbed a guitar, the other friend played some drums, and i grabbed the easiest thing i could find, which was the bass because i was just lazy. And we started writing tunes; we were just kids and we started a garage band…
We played a ton of shows, but they were just, like parties and stuff and it was fun. And we were almost leaning towards death metal, but it was thrashy death metal really; it wasn’t even really death metal, but we had a few blast beats in it…
And then, one day this guy, Greg Gard, he’s like this infamous drummer from where i live, he was always a super death metal guy. He gave me Obituary, Slowly We Rot, and that’s when my mind just kind of turned…
I was like, “Dude, that’s some sick stuff right there – that’s what i want to do right there.” And ever since I heard that album, my musical taste kind of darkened…
And I kind of looked at that first band as kind of a, “Well you know, this is fun, but it’s not really what i want to do.” And then i met Eric, because he was in another band called Charlie Christ.
And they weren’t really death metal either; they were kind of thrashy as well. They were more like Kreator, I would say. And then he and I just started hanging out and listening to stuff…
He would show me Gorguts, and then i showed up with like Suffocation or something. And we would just be like geeking out on these old bands that were just super sick at the time. And we were just sitting around going, “Dude, this is what i want to play.” [Eric] looks at me one day, he’s like, “Well dude, you got a fast drummer – let’s get him over and let’s jam. I’m like, “Yeah totally, let’s do that.”
And so we got… all our stuff together, got in his garage, and wrote Three Minute Crawl Space in one session, which is crazy.
Anthony T: …Sick…
Jacoby K (6:52): And right then we knew: “Okay, we got to do this, we got to quit what we’re doing. We can’t make this a side project, we got to go all in.” And that’s kind of how it happened: one song [in] the first rehearsal. I think we jammed for like four hours straight, and it felt like an hour, you know what i mean?
…
(8:00): We wrote the four songs [on] Gradually Melted; I think there [were] actually six songs, but we ended up tossing two of them out and just recorded the four songs, because the label that was kind of interested in us, Wild Rags down in East LA, they were telling us, ”No, just four songs, that’s all we want.” And so we went into this place called Ed Sandor’s studio, and recorded the four songs, one take, all the way through. There was no splicing back then. And, it came out on Wild Rags as a cassette tape.
We were doing the whole snail mail thing with Internal Bleeding, Dying Fetus, and all the guys that were around at that time, doing the snail mail thing. And we just started getting our name out through the snail mail channels, and started playing shows down in LA. And it just grew from there.
I remember playing our first show with Disgorge, and i was outside of the Showcase Theater, just sitting out there, smoking a cigarette or something. And i heard this – I heard them come on. I was like, ”Holy crap what is that?” and i just turned around and saw Matty’s whirlwind going. I was like, “Dang dude, those guys are sick!” And I immediately went in and watched their whole set. And at the end I ran right up to Matty. I was like, “Dude here’s our demo tape,” you know, and he’s like ”Oh dude I know who you guys are, you guys are sick!” And it was like instant friendship after that. I’d even go down to San Diego and hang out with them dudes and stuff, it was pretty cool, but..
It’s just weird, it’s almost like a brotherhood, you know, when you get into this. It’s like, death metal dudes are the coolest dudes i know because they get all their aggression out in the music…
Cali Death Blog 