Some musicians and personalities live for the passion of their art. That’s the case with King Fowley. Immediately you can hear his motormouth thoughts delivered in multiple mediums online, through interviews, or in person if you’ve ever had the opportunity to be face to face with the man. Deceased has been his longest running outfit, releasing a new studio record for Children of the Morgue that once again encapsulates a style that is just as much about heavy metal as it is deadly, deathly, and savage. They burst through the underground on their own terms – and continue to do so even forty years later.
Prepare for a whirlwind conversation with King, where the topics range from the making of the record, the significance of pacing the album almost like a movie soundtrack, how early family tragedies have shaped his views on death, plus plenty of talk about the underground metal scene, favorite shows, bucket list items, and so much more.
Dead Rhetoric: Children of the Morgue is the latest Deceased studio album. What fueled the musical and lyrical themes this time around – and where do you see this album sitting in the vast catalog of records for the band?
King Fowley: The theme has been steadily building. I’ve been having the last few records… Surreal Overdose had the “Dying in Analog” track, and then “A Palpitation’s Warning” from Ghostly White, things like that. You can trace those types of tracks back to when I was having my stroke issues. It’s been building, and I wanted to take it to the limit this time. I’ve been telling a lot of people, death metal to me isn’t spooky, everybody just thinks that death metal is just ‘grrrr’, down tuned guitars, you think Entombed, you think Incantation, you think all of that, and that’s great for what it is and all that. I wanted to do something that put a chill in your bone, or make you think a little more about things that you really don’t want to think about. I’m a happy go lucky dude, I love life, I love smiling, I love fart jokes.
There is a dark side, and I know it has to do with my dad dying when I was five years old, him being 27. Me losing my mom on a whim, my son’s mom on a whim in her mid-30s. They get sick and they just die, my stepfather also. It is what it is, we are getting older too. A lot of us are in our 50s now, so that got to the theme. I wanted to go full on into death – all the arteries of death. From the person dying, to the person by their side watching them die, to where is this woman or man going to go when they die, is there an afterlife – and what is the purpose of life? “Children of the Morgue”, the song, I look at it as similar to Iron Maiden – as soon as you are born, you are dying. What are we here for? Unfortunately, in my mind, I feel like when you die the lights just kind of go out, and you aren’t going to see your mom and dad again. I hope I’m wrong, I won’t know until I get there. Every person when you are done reading this interview, when you are done with it, you are going to die one day. Nothing will change there.
Music-wise, it’s the same old, same old. We are not afraid one minute to say we love Nihilist and then the next second say we love Queensrÿche. Or say the next moment we love Kiss and then we love Voivod. Whatever feels right. We need to just put out what we can. Every record is a few more years of experience, we get a little more talented. I hate to say the word mature because I still feel like a little kid at heart. That’s where we are at. We wanted to play the best we could, we wanted to arrange things the best we could, that’s every record though.
Dead Rhetoric: Which songs on this record do you think took on the greatest transformation from the initial idea/ concept to what comes out in the final format?
Fowley: I would say “Fed to Mother Earth”, definitely is the one. I had a lot of early ideas for that one, and we did write this album in order. That was the sixth song on the record – I wanted to stretch things out, have a weird middle where I used what I called hovering voices, it all fell into place eventually. Luckily with this record, everything that was supposed to happen with the songs in my mind, the ideas, the sound, the riffs, came together nicely. I can’t say it was exactly how it was supposed to be, very much close to that. I’m proud of everybody on the record, Amos this is his first record, we don’t get a lot of time to practice with each other. It’s a lot of homework and just be prepared when we go in there, and everybody was. That took the most time to put together, and if I had to pick a second song I would say “Farewell” the last song. It took a while to get that middle section where we wanted it to be, it was the final song written so it had the least amount of time spent on it. We spent time on all of them, but it was the closest time to the recording date. I taught Amos a thing or two. What does the King’s-Ryche part really mean? It reminds me of “Spreading the Disease” from Queensrÿche, so I called it the King’s-Ryche part.
Dead Rhetoric: As you said previously, you had to come to terms with death early on in life. How did that shape and influence you as a person – I’d imagine dealing with that at a younger age isn’t as easy as it is when we get older…
Fowley: I don’t know if it’s a good thing or bad that my father passed away when I was so young. I do remember things about him. I remember him taking me to the dentist when my mom was pregnant with my sister. We were very poor, and lived in very ghetto-oriented, poor apartments. We would go walking to get mom some pickles. I don’t know if it bothered me then. The maturity factor of it all, I was kicked out of school in the ninth grade. I had served the jail term from pre-school until then. I really had wished I had gone to high school, I really wish I had went to the prom.
As to the death terms, when my mother died it really fucked me up. She was fine, we went to play some shows with October 31 and Deceased over a weekend, came back she was flu-ish. Within three days she was in a coma and within two weeks she passed away. It can be our pet, our cat, our hamster, we had a hamster two years ago and we watched him pass away, I was in tears. It put the hammer down. I was watching documentaries on organ-donors with assisted suicides, Frontline PBS things on developmentally disabled children born that way, brain damaged and dying at four years old with the parents having to bury their children. It’s awful man. That’s what I’m saying about the death metal. I went that deep. Some people think I went crazy, because I have dead kids on the front cover of the record. It’s not meant like that. I tried to find some crossroads on that. I’m morbid but I’m not ignorant.
Dead Rhetoric: When laying out the track listing and atmosphere for an album, do you take into consideration the flow and dynamics, almost as if you are setting the listener up for a journey or movie soundtrack-oriented experience? That seems especially evident on this record for instance…
Fowley: Absolutely. Those little intro and outro pieces, whether they be spoken pieces or little acoustic parts, something off kilter. It’s all segues, getting to the next piece of the puzzle or as I like to call it, turning the page. It was definitely set up like that on purpose, I had it in my mind how I wanted it to be. Mike writes most of the stuff, and I’ll go to him like with “Skull with the Vacant Stare”, I told him not to worry about what we were going to do there. The only thing we didn’t write in order were those in between elements, those would come in after. I told him, do you remember watching Faces of Death growing up? You’d watch the scene with the monkey brains, you’d kind of chuckle, this isn’t real – then they would go to some real footage of some tribe somewhere in a foreign country, where they are raising the dead or mourning the dead, but they would have some weird sounds playing. I said, remember that? He would say sort of… and I told him, that’s what I want (laughs). He wrote that acoustic piece, he asked me if I wanted to build off of this, and this is what I wanted. It’s lonely, folky, sitting on the hill by yourself thinking about life atmosphere. It touched me emotionally.
That’s one of the things I wanted to do on this record. A lot of melodies help you get there. It’s nice to have twenty-year-old kids at shows banging their heads and moshing it up, but we both know we are older now and people can feel that inside the music.
Dead Rhetoric: How would you describe the friendships and relationships you’ve built through Deceased, considering many of the members have been with you since the late 80s/early 90s?
Fowley: Love them dearly, they are all brothers. We have some sisters in there too. Jillan, Mike’s daughter who does the mother earth on the record, I love them all. Truthfully, we are at 40 years now, but we are going to go as 1985 when we changed to Deceased. We were doing this shit literally in late 1983, but that’s another topic, another day. I don’t know how many credits you’ve seen for the record, Mark Adams plays on the record too, Mike Bossier, who’s the engineer, he does a lead on the record. That’s a long time coming. We were not far from the Maryland Deathfest – we were discussing how we met at a Queensrÿche show with Twisted Sister. Then we met up at Exciter / Mercyful Fate on a Sunday. Here we are, still doing this. Mike did the CIA thing, Mark had gotten out of the country to find himself as he was on drugs, I had to find myself too. I had my stroke, and here we still are. Anthrax still sucks after Fistful of Metal. Everybody is loved, including the younger guys like Matt Ibach, Walter White, ten plus years, Shane coming up on twenty. Without them, we can’t do it. We’ve had to use different guys for live shows, we will need them from time to time because other people have to work, you can’t get everyone for all these tours sometimes.
A lot of people think this is all about King Fowley. We have a running joke – you guys carry the amps; I’ll carry the band. That’s been a running joke for years. Without all of us, there’s nothing.
Dead Rhetoric: You would think in today’s society people understand with day jobs, families and such, it’s tough to keep a steady lineup together for that many years because of obligations…
Fowley: Rent, mortgages, kids, wives, divorce, weddings, pets, and everything in between.
Dead Rhetoric: Being a long-time admirer, consumer, and musician living and breathing for the metal genre – where do you see some of the greatest differences between the movement as you were going through the evolution in your teenage years through your twenties into what exists today?
Fowley: It’s a wild ride. When I was a kid, before I even got to hear metal, all I wanted to do was hear music. I didn’t have the money for it, I remember having to settle for whatever one dollar would get me in 1978-79. What it would get me back then was 88 cent eight-tracks in Woolworths. I was turned onto UFO, Jethro Tull, Nektar, Thin Lizzy and that stuff. Then I got into the aggressive and heavy stuff. I know a lot of people play this stuff and say they never listened to things like… “Shadow Dancing” by Andy Gibb, that has a great chorus. Casey Kasem Top 40, it could be ABBA, it could be “Cat Scratch Fever”, which was heavy metal back on the radio. You get into the 80s, you realize there are underground records, you want to purchase more stuff but how do you get the money as a kid? You beg your mother for a $10 bill to buy the Metal Massacre series, trading tapes. You learn that, you make a demo of your own with a band, then you trade demos with other bands. Now you have a bouillon, it goes on there from that. Fanzines covering underground stuff that Creem, Hit Parader, and Circus magazine wouldn’t cover. You are soaking your stamps to get them back; you start meeting people overseas that are into metal too. It’s a big conglomeration and it takes a lot to do it.
Now today, I can pop the laptop, be on Google, and learn everything and anything like that. That’s the difference now. A lot of things in the world, there is no attention span anymore. And I’m a hyperactive guy, as I watch everything it’s harder. Some people do it, they defy the odds, but it’s harder for people to cherish anything. Because it’s here today, gone tomorrow. It happens. There were always posers, there were always people in it for the moment. The internet changed things the most. You can get a Cutty Sark seven inch that you were praying previously to find in a store – we would travel out of state to go to New York to get these records. Now you can have a mom to get things for you on a credit card, order it and have it shipped to your home without leaving the couch.
You have to have the passion; you have to have the desire. And that goes for anything that is a part of this, whether you are in a band, a collector that listens to music ferociously or as a hobby. For me, I still love this – I’ve had strokes, I’ve had blood clots, I used to drink, drugs for close to 40 years. It’s just a passion, music is my drug of choice. I still love doing this. I love driving to the studio, I love hearing what we’ve come up with. I love talking with the guys, listening to other people talk about music. I just want bands to keep going for it, whoever is next in line.
Dead Rhetoric: Where do you think younger bands evolving through the current underground maybe get things wrong – and what should they be doing to right the ship so to speak?
Fowley: Everybody is worried about everything but the music. The music goes last. I see all these bands that say they have 14 music videos out. And not one song! Not one hook, not one chorus. And I think a lot of people too pick one formula that they like and what they are going for, and they stick to it too much. I’ve never been the guy to say don’t go outside the box. Bands like Voivod they have gone in different directions. People have tried to throw rap into stuff, and I don’t think that should be a part of metal in my opinion. If all you care about is making videos and views on YouTube, then that’s the real you. I do miss the day of the musician. I will talk about the two versions of Sodom’s Obsessed by Cruelty, and that you have to own both of them. I want bands and people to believe in themselves. Your first shot doesn’t have to be the only one. There’s more to things than just a logo, a neat name, and a video. It’s called music.
Dead Rhetoric: If you had to name the top three shows that Deceased has ever done throughout your career – US or abroad, club venues or house parties to festival appearances, what would be those most memorable shows that will never leave your brain/body until you pass from this earth?
Fowley: There are a lot of shows, and it’s really gotten going over the last decade. The first one that meant a lot to me was the Luck of the Corpse album release show. Because we had an album out, we had already built up the local club scene, we sold the place out, this is where we had seen all our idols, Kreator, D.R.I., etc. That was the place to be, we went in there and sold it out. Besides that, I’d say the Bayou in Washington D.C. which was the crazier place to get into. They ended up calling us, we broke the house record for local bands. All these musical bands that love Genesis, Rush, to them we are shit. We were young kids, determined to do it, we sold the place out one time and the lady called us to say, we could have any night we want. At first, it’s a Sunday, see what you’ve got. Then it’s a weekday, then a Saturday. We booked our buddies in Abominog, we booked our buddies in Morbius, we did it on our own thing like Iron Maiden. We got out there and did it. The third one for me – that’s a hard one but probably going to Wacken. That was the big stage, they treat you like you are in Kiss for a day. I’d already been there with October 31 the previous year, but I was so happy for Deceased with Mike and Mark and Les and Dave. Both years I sang with October 31 out front there, and then with Deceased there. Dave’s first time playing drums for both bands were there. I love all the shows – even the bad shows, there are memories there. It’s all a part of life.
Dead Rhetoric: What’s left on the personal King Fowley bucket list to accomplish? Either when it comes to music endeavors, or something you’d like to do personally.
Fowley: One thing we are trying to get on the bucket list next year is there are about nine states we haven’t played in the United States. We would like to get those done, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota. For some reason New Hampshire, that’s the only New England state we haven’t played. We’ve been to Prague, Peru, Mexico, but not New Hampshire with Deceased. Mike and I, we talk about doing a one song record – a fifty-minute song. To make it memorable and neat, that’s something I’d like to do. Play out to Japan, England, Australia would be nice. That took a while to get there. I want to keep making more records, and always do what Deceased set out there to do, be ourselves. We are not in this for popularity or be the Hit Parader magazine centerfold of the month. I’ll be happy with that, never slow down on stage. You give it your all, go nuts. The angst will always be there.
Dead Rhetoric: How did you feel being a part of that D.C./Virginia music documentary Underground Civilization, and all these musicians giving praise to the impact Deceased made building that scene?
Fowley: It was great. I knew Matt and Andy who did the documentary, they did a great job. Luckily, we had a lot of that old footage to provide, Jim Hunter had a lot of videos from those shows. In some ways I cheered, in others it was a downfall as we all got too caught up in the drinking and the drugs – that fallout in the movie I talked about. It separated who was going to be in it for the long run and who wasn’t. We are all pals. I went and saw it when they did the premiere in D.C. in the movie theater. Someone was waiting for what I would say about it, I said ‘let’s see the death metal hand!’. We were the ones that brought death metal to Virginia. At War was in the south, and there was punk rock too, but there was nothing but these house parties. Parents that were doctors and lawyers, their kids were rebelling against their parents. We played in these fields that could have literally held 10,000 people. It was really cool.
Dead Rhetoric: How do you see the next twelve months shaping up for anything related to Deceased, October 31, or any other musical projects / endeavors?
Fowley: Quick side note on October 31. Sadly, it’s done. Brian has severe Parkinson’s Disease. He and I have not talked in over a year. I let him do his thing. We made a deal, do you want to do a couple of shows before things go away, do one more album, just play the leads as Matt can do all the rhythms. Yeah, that sounds good. I let people know what was happening. After that, it came a few months, and he said he didn’t want to do the record now. I know he doesn’t feel good – you are talking to a guy that was in the stroke ward when he was 36. I would never embarrass him and put him on the spot. He didn’t want to do it, and he disappeared. I know he’s going through a lot, so I left him alone. We called it a day.
I’m turning up the Deceased fire. When we lost Dave in late 2018 and Amos came into the band, he’s a booking agent. He has us on the road for some great stuff – Vio-lence, Bulldozer tour, got into Canada. I always used to be the guy to book it, get the money, get us there, get the songs ready, the merchandise. I enjoyed it, so it was nice when Amos took that over and I didn’t have to call everyone to book shows. Some of these guys are great, but they want to give you punk rock prices. Amos would say, we need to make money because we will be playing mid-week to get to New York for a Friday show.
Going forward, next year is the 40th anniversary. There will be a double CD called March of the Cadavers. A history of the band, one or two tracks from everything we’ve ever done. Our first ever Black Sabbath cover, which will be “Die Young” – Mike wanted that. The second cover will be “Lady Lust” from Venom. Two exclusive songs we will write for it. We will redo a couple of old songs too. We will play our asses off. Working on stuff in December, a short run on the East Coast. Another run in March into Canada, and May a bucket list thing that I talked about earlier to hit those other states. We are already thinking about the next record – Mike is retired now, and lives in Virginia. He’s no longer living in Jordan and coming to America four times a year. That’s why the last few records took so long to get going – he wasn’t living in America. We are enjoying life.