POLARIS are primed to return to Australian stages, today announcing a massive regional tour this June …
Extreme temperatures spawn extreme music – and Florida’s death metal OGs Obituary is another case in point.
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Close to the Arctic circle? You get church-burning black metal. Down in the Bayou of Louisiana? Wild and crazy sludge metal emerges from swamps as if willed up by voodoo. If you lived in Florida near the legendary Morrisound Studios during the 80s, you would have seen the still-rotten-gore-birth of death metal. Fellow Dolphins fans (we assume) Morbid Angel, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, and Chuck Schuldiner’s (RIP) pioneering Death. Since 1984, the Tardy brothers (John on vocals, Donald on drums) were belting out death metal songs before the world at large knew what death metal properly was. Returing to Australia next January on the back of their eleventh record Dying of Everything, Hysteria probe a fit and happy John Tardy in his Florida home on the upcoming tour, being a teenage death metal pioneer, and whether he’s ever had to throttle Donald, as brothers do.
Hysteria: You’re coming back to Australia for the first time post-pandemic. Obituary was kind of the last in, first out.
John: We actually were one of the last bands on the road that Covid stuff was hitting. I mean, we landed in LA and people were handing out masks and stuff. It was strange. So yeah, it was kind of exploding while we were there last and fortunate to get out of there and get home and then obviously suffered through the whole pandemic.
What does a touring band do when they’re told they can’t really tour or be a band for a while?
John: We are obviously not the only ones in the world. I mean all touring musicians were certainly hit hard. I mean, everything just got shut down all the way. So we made use of our time. We did do a few live streams to try and generate little income and kind of play around and mess with what we do, but we took the time and finished writing the last record that we did and the studio and just did a lot of hanging out kind of thing. So we did some productive stuff and just kind of hung out a little bit and took some time off and just did what we did.
Eleven albums down now. You release Slowly We Rot in ’89 when you’re still in your teens. Did you ever think almost 40 years later you’d be in this place?
Yeah, you know what? I remember when me and Don and Trevor [Peres, rhythm guitars] just started jamming. I mean, we were literally so happy with just coming home, getting off the [school] bus, coming in. We’d go right into the “studio” – my mom’s garage.
I mean, we were just so happy just sitting out there and just jamming that we never really thought about, “Hey, let’s do a gig down the street or let’s try and play here or there.” I mean, we were just happy with just didn’t play every chord on the boombox and just recording whatever mess we were doing and just having fun with it. And so it was weird because Roadrunner [Records] came to us and asked us if we wanted to do a record, and it was just kind of like, “Wow, you want us to do a record?” It was strange. Before you know it we’re in the studio for the first time and then Slowly We Rot came out. Obviously we never did any touring or anything like that. We were just all too young and just didn’t really know anything about anything. It seemed like Cause of Death came out before we knew it, and a lot of those songs were kind of done also. We just had to add a few more songs to it. But no, I mean we didn’t expect to do that first record and we certainly, I don’t think anybody would expect to this much 40 years later to still be doing what we do.
I remember we were going to play a show with Nasty Savage at this old dirt bar called Ruby’s Pub and literally had my Dad who drove us there. We pulled in the parking lot and they took one look at us and they were like, “you guys ain’t coming in here.” We were just too young. Just too young.
[ John Tardy ]
What’s fascinating to me is that it all sort of came up in that Florida scene. I can’t imagine being an underage kid going up to a bar or venue and the owner is like “What’s that you say, you’re playing death metal? What the hell is that?” I can’t imagine booking gigs was easy.
John: Well, it was bands like Nasty Savage and Savatage. It’s really what made us want to start jamming. I remember we were going to play a show with Nasty Savage at this old dirt bar called Ruby’s Pub and literally had my Dad who drove us there. We pulled in the parking lot and they took one look at us and they were like, “you guys ain’t coming in here.” We were just too young. Just too young. But at the same time, you say, because Deicide was coming out. Morbid Angel, too. It was that big explosion of everything was Satanic at the time, the Satanic Panic. We never sung about any of that, but it was gruesome enough where it just kind of got rolled into it. But I remember all those early newspaper ads that would come out, things like that, and it was just immediately that tag of being “Satanic” all that gets thrown at you, but it was a different time before the Internet. So it was crazy to think about how that went through.
What was in the water in Florida? Was it because of Morrisound Studios? Why so many death metal bands at the same time?
Like I was saying, it was Nasty Savage and Savatage that got us into wanting to jam all together. And obviously they’re not necessarily death metal bands, but they’re heavy bands nonetheless. But I think it was more or less the hearing that early Hellhammer and Celtic Frost with the things that really kind of got us looking at the music we wanted to go with. And those guys were all coming out. I mean Morbid Angel were around, and even Massacre and stuff. So we would go out and you would see some of these bands and clubs and see what they’re doing, but it really wasn’t where we necessarily drew influence from. Maybe it’s good competition to hear other bands doing what they do, but I think it was more or less along the lines that sludgy Hellhammer and Celtic Frost stuff was what we enjoyed.
Was there a healthy rivalry there? As young men I can imagine there would be a bit of a competitive streak among you all. “I want to be heavier than that band.”
Yeah, I guess just naturally anything that you do, regardless of what you’re doing, if you like to ride motorcycles on a dirt track and there’s somebody else there riding, I guess it’s just kind of natural to want to go and try and go faster than that person. I guess that’s just good healthy competition, but it’s always been friendly. We get along with all those guys to this day. We’re great friends with Glen [Benton, vocalist] from Deicide and [ex-Massacre, Six Feet Under] Terry Butler’s in our band nowadays. It is just crazy how long we’ve known Terry. We’ve known him since before we even started playing music. And then when we were both in the early bands that we were in, be it Massacre and in Executioner [Obituary’s former name], and it is just great to have him. He just feel like he’s been around us forever. But I think that’s good for anybody. Maybe that’s how scenes kind of get going. In Seattle, that scene hit, so those grunge bands all started coming out at the same time and in the same area, so maybe they were watching each other, and it just kind of naturally goes that way.
Fast forward to today, and you have entire death metal festival bills, like here in Australia with Into The Fall, saying we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Obituary. What’s that like when you hear it?
We did a bunch of shows with the Gatecreeper guys and they’re super cool, super heavy, great fans, and it’s a good position for us. We love taking younger bands on the road with us and showing ’em how we do things and how things go. And that’s a great thing. The Power Trip guys we did a tour with and they were big Obituary fans and we love that role of hanging out and doing that. I never thought much about that as far as what Obituary means to the scene and whatever. And it really wasn’t until we came out with Frozen In Time because Frozen In Time was one of those albums where we had five or six years off between albums. We took a step back and we stayed away from the scene for a while.
And when we came out with that thing, we started meeting some of the guys in bands like Slipknot. Those guys were like, “oh dude, we’re huge obituary fans, blah, blah, blah.” Meet the guys in Pantera and Phil Anselmo. And he was saying how he liked Obituary. We started running to these really huge bands that said that they liked Obituary That was really the first time that I had ever even really thought about the career that we’ve had, some of the stuff that we’ve done. And that’s awesome. There’s no better compliment to getting to hear that, especially from the bands as big as some of those bands that I mentioned. So it’s a good thing and it’s a good thing to see the young kids, the younger bands out there and carrying that flag and come up with some good music.
Out of all the touring you’ve done and records you’ve released, have you ever just wanted to throttle your brother at some point? I can’t imagine being in a band with a sibling being smooth sailing.
[laughs] Has that happened? No, no. But we argue on a daily basis. The studio’s here at my house, he doesn’t live far and he’s here almost every day. He loves playing his drums, so whether we’re doing anything or not, he’s usually out there messing around. We also handle a lot of the business. So he comes over, we go through this, and we argue about that half the time, blah, blah, blah. Then we turn things off, we go turn this PA on and we start jamming and it’s all good again. But it’s great having a brother in the band. Yes, we argue, a lot, but it’s good stuff. At the end of the conversation, we’re right back to where we were and we start jamming again and doing whatever we do.What can Aussie fans expect from the show next year?
I don’t think we stray very much from what we do and what we like to do. We’re pretty personable and pretty laid back on stage especially. But we’re going to play a lot of new songs. What we always do when we have a new album out, I know a lot of people and me, myself included, go see Slayer for example. I’m the first one yelling, Chemical Warfare! and Raining Blood! I get it. You want to hear the classics, and so do I. But we really enjoy the new music. I think there’s a lot of good songs, and so we’ll play a bunch of new stuff, but we’ll certainly rifle through some classics too. Fantastic!
OBITUARY ‘BARELY ALIVE’ AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2024
with special guests Black Lava and Psycroptic
Jan 11th // Hobart, Altar
Jan 12th // Melbourne, The Croxton
Jan 13th // Sydney, Manning Bar
Jan 16th // Brisbane, The Triffid
Jan 18th // Adelaide, Lion Arts Factory*
Jan 19th // Perth, Magnet House*
*Psycroptic not appearing
Tickets available through Oztix and Moshtix
