The death of
Rozz Williams, on April 1, 1998, robbed the American gothic/darkwave
scene
of perhaps its most legendary, and certainly its most influential
figurehead.
Roger "Rozz
Williams" Painter was 16 when he first emerged onto America's nascent
Gothic
scene at the helm of Christian Death, but he had been imbibing the
imagery
for years before that. Raised in Pomona, southern California, within a
stern Southern Baptist family, he confessed, "I have a lot of strange
memories
of that place. It was an unusual place to grow up in, kind of like
growing
up in one of those out of the way places you read about in the World
Weekly
News, where someone's being sacrificed every other night by some
satanic
cult thatthe Sheriff and the Mayor are a part of."
Of course,
the adolescent Rozz played his own part in the city sublife, although
as
he frequently counselled, "there's been so many rumors that I'm not
even
sure anymore which ones may have been true and which ones not." What
was
certain was that in a city where the bizarre burgeoned on the inside,
Rozz
wore his weirdness in mile high sky waiting.
In 1979, Rozz
set about forming Christian Death, a band whose stance was apparent
from
the moment they settled upon a name. He built initially on the punk
promise
that anyone could just put together a group and make it work, "but then
it became a little more detailed after I realized that it was something
serious, not just a one-off situation. I had to put a lot more into it,
but I also took a lot out of myself, things that had been put there
while
I was growing up in my family. A sort of exercising of demons."
The original
line-up of Rozz, James McGearty on bass, Jay on guitar and George
Belanger
on drums "just kind of worked small shows around town, rehearsing in
the
garage": with Rikk Agnew replacing Jay, the band graduated to cutting
the
succession of demos, including the 1981 take on "Romeo's Distress"
included
here.
They cut a
weird shape in the clubs and bars of Pomona, though. "When we first
started
playing out, almost never a show went by without hecklers or something
being thrown at us - Who's the fag in the dress?' "Pardon me?'".
Visually a
sexually surreal combination of satanism, drugs and cross-dressing;
musically,
the iconoclastic offspring of vintage David Bowie and Christopher
Isherwood's
"Cabaret"; lyrically, Christian Death were cataclysmic, a roar of
inverse
religious iconography slammed through the blashemous wringer which,
regardless
of whether or not Rozz truly believed in it, was sufficient to arouse
the
wrath of every right-thinking God-botherer in the land.
Within weeks
of Christian Death's debut album, "Only Theatre of Pain," hitting the
streets
in 1982, Rozz was overjoyed to see it being discussed on television,
"on
a religious television programme that my parents used to watch. They
did
a special on Satanic influences in music; they had the record on and
broke
it. That rather impressed me, I thought if these people knew of it and
have such a strong feeling about it, I'm sure other people are doing
the
same."
The very nature
of Christian Death was to shock; it was inevitable, then, that the
group's
first album should also be their last. Nothing so brittle, so
demanding,
and so purposefully painful as Death could have survived any longer,
not
without becoming a cliche or, as Rozz saw it, worse. "We went through a
lot of personal changes. People I can't even remember were there - I
can't
remember, because there was so many people drifting in and out. I just
saw the whole structure crumbling, and I just thought that this should
end."
But it didn't.
New blood entered the band, a new line-up coalescing, however, not
around
the increasingly distanced Rozz, but around another band entirely,
local
shock rockers Pompeii 99. Two albums later, and Rozz was out of the
picture
for good. "I wanted to move into a more experimental situation and they
wanted to stay in a musical format."
He would never
leave Christian Death behind, however - particularly after his
successors
in the band announced that he was dead. "It was kind of odd. There were
some shows where people didn't believe who I was." Rozz responded by
piecing
together his own Christian Death outfit, and taking the conflict onto
the
road.
It dodn't last;
Rozz and former Superheroines leader Eva O had already formed a new
group,
Shadow Project, "and that was more in the forefront at the time. The
Christian
Death thing was more to lt people know that I wasn't dead." But of
course
the existence of one band did not preclude the continuation of others,
and through the early mid 1990's Rozz fired off a string of new
Christian
Death projects, both recording new material and remixing old, and
building
up one of the most dynamic canons in modern rock.
Indeed, some
of Rozz's finest work dates from this period, albums like "The Iron
Mask,"
rerecording nine past Death masterpieces to scintilating effect. "The
Path
of Sorrows" highlighted here by its devasting title track; "Death Mix,"
featuring Spahn Ranch's spinechilling revision of "Cervex Couch" and
Laibach's
assault on "Angels." And the room he allowed for those remixers to
manouvre
in only enlarged his own vision even further.
"My interest
in music has a lot to do with the freedom it allows," Rozz elaborated
in
1994. "People tell me I'm an influence... but I don't want to take too
much responsibility. Now, it's so strange. Goth has become a way of
life
for so many people. If that's makung them happy, then I guess it'sa
good
way for them to live, but I never imagined it being where it is now.
"It's kind
of baffling in a way. But the only time it really gets bad, is when
people
get stuck just in that, not just that, anything, where thay can't go
outside
of that. Where it's so strict with so many rules. Life is about
experiencing
different things. Sometimes I'... be trying out new material, and
people
will be screaming out for 'Romeo's Distress', and I think, 'go home,
play
the record, and don't come, please.' God forbid I end up going on a
Sound
and Vision tour like David Bowie."
Of course,
he didn't. Indeed, at the time of his death, Rozz was working as
consistently,
and coherently, as he had in some years. A new Shadow Project album was
just one of several new recordings he had completed in recent months,
while
further recogntion was filtering through from the platinum - selling
excesses
of a new generation of musical monsters. The likes of Ministry, Nine
Inch
Nails, Marilyn Manson, all apparently learned their personal truths at
the altars of Rozz Williams' greatest excesses.
But his death
robbed the world of more than the template for the outrage of sundry
lesser
talents. Though Rozz's best (and best known) work, with Christian Death
and Shadow Project, remains intrinsic to the soul of modern
"alternative"
music, it also stand amongst the most distant musical frontiers which
rock
has yet aspired to.
And though
other talents may emerge to step into Rozz's shoes, this collection of
songs - drawn from every corner of Christian Death's career - proves
that
few will ever travel so far, or make the journey with such wide eyed
curiosity
as he did.
Dave
Thompson
This
collection
is dedicated to the memory of Rozz Williams
