Book Report – The Scott Burns Sessions

A life in death metal 1987-1997

By David E. Gehlke

Death metal was rock’s first truly underground cultural artefact. One only has to look at the way it crumbled and fragmented whenever it sniffed the bright lights and fanfare of “mainstream” attention. Look at heavy metal by contrast. Perfectly comfortable with a little big budget theatre. In retaining an unhealthy affection for its rockist holdovers, its earliest adopters were able to shapeshift into stadium rock outfits with relatively little friction by the mid-80s. Even thrash metal was able to flirt with pop success and maintain some structural integrity. Its frustratingly porous borders inoculating it against the harms of groovy hooks and balladeering, all of which found their way onto primetime MTV by means fair and foul in the early 90s. Although commercially rewarding for some and lamented by many, these pernicious means allowed thrash metal to weather the turbulent vibeshift that saw an excessively sincere 80s transition into a drippingly ironic 90s, before thrash was finally put out to pasture on the quiet uplands of pastiche. 

Death metal’s flirtation with pop culture by contrast, were conspicuously risible even to the most casual observer. It should be noted however, that as far as mainstream acceptance is concerned, death metal was given two bites of the cherry. One in 1994, and another in the 2010s. History repeats, first as shibboleth then as farce. Much like black metal, and unlike the preceding waves of radio friendly heavy and thrash metal, the more recent and amicable accord between death metal and mainstream attention pivots not on music but vibe. As the engine room of counterculture shifted from a pre-digital informal network of voluntary labour and petit bourgeois business ventures to the production of memes, death metal worked its way into the collective psyche by functioning as a touchstone of extremity, a yardstick of violence and vulgarity. “Normal” culture is free to use its signifiers – both musical and aesthetic – to contextualise itself. Delegates of pop culture take endless joy in humorously testing their boundaries against the genre that can always be relied upon to go too far. 

The indignities visited upon death metal are in part self-inflicted (the scene has tolerated Cannibal Corpse well past the initial punchline after all), in part imposed by the unforgiving 80s to 90s vibeshift, attaching an unforgiving irony clause to any cultural consumption, things anathema to metal’s unconditional love for itself. MTV, Ace Ventura, BBC kids’ shows, Napalm Death, the beginnings of an alternative music fandom favouring eclecticism over subcultural allegiance, albeit on the most conditional, ironically detached terms. These harbingers of the hegemonically sarcastic 90s all led death metal to becoming a known if highly misunderstood phenomena by the turn of the century. A shift accompanied by the total disintegration of the infrastructure sustaining death metal, as Roadrunner seemingly couldn’t shed its death metal roster fast enough to make way for industrial and nu metal, or the disappearance of the precious little financial support bands did garner into the mass adoption of early file sharing. The new blood that did arrive insisted on aping old, who in turn were unable or unwilling to sustain this monstrous vision they helped create into another century.

Witness and unwitting instigator to all of this, was one Scott Burns. A man whose name carries more currency than most in death metal despite having never graced the stage. Indeed, so much currency that Decibel Books (and Cult Never Dies servicing European distribution) commissioned one David E. Gehlke to write a “book” about the man. Book is in scare quotes because – as with the majority of Decibel/CND publications – this is another lavishly packaged collection of interviews, anecdotes, and archives. Gehlke plays the role not of author – although his voice can be found at the top of each chapter – but of networker, interviewer, compiler, and editor, the majority of text coming from interviews with Burns and the various known and unknown names he worked with from 1987 to 1997.

The decision to explore Burns’s career release by release is a double-edged sword. Gehlke sequences the book in order of release. A choice that occasionally jumbles the chronology, as we are forced to jump back in time for any album that had a delayed release. But the appearance of repeat characters – Suffocation, Cannibal Corpse, Death, Deicide, Obituary etc. – and the role Burns played in their evolution at the granular EP/album level is narratively engaging, even for artists one cares little for.

Despite the temptation to feel shortchanged by this stylistic sleight of hand, and the even greater temptation to skip over chapters on less familiar or relevant releases, the book must be read cover to cover. Within the bowels of each chapter, the interviews with Burns conceal many insights into his recording processes, workflow, the culture of his Morrisound base camp, and of course the larger than life characters he had to contend with on a regular basis. One comes away with a greater insight into the foundational documents of death metal, how the scene-behind-the-scenes functioned; recording budgets, demands for progress updates from Roadrunner’s A&R man Monte Connor, the lengths musicians went to for the holy grail of guitar tones, and how to edit a duff take before Pro Tools (requiring impeccable timing and a steady hand).

But the meta narrative arising from the many voices in this book is the Faustian bargain death metal made when the tendrils of Morrisound’s professionalism polished off its rougher edges and presented this pimpled, awkward, greasy child to the bipolar and deeply fickle care of a music industry at the height of its powers in the late 1980s. That’s not to attribute any malice on the part of Burns. Or indeed the owners of Morrisound in Jim and Tom Morris (who between them also have their names attached to some of death metal’s finest in Monstrosity, Morbid Angel, and Nocturnus).

No, the growth of death metal from an accident of evolution in the mid-80s to a slick, precision timed production line by 1991, and finally into a pre-internet meme by the mid-90s was almost inevitable given the state of the music industry and pop culture surrounding its inception. This is especially true given how industrious someone like Burns was, pulling long hours, working seven day weeks, and in the early days studying electrical engineering at the University of South Florida at the behest of the Morris brothers, whom he attributes much of his early knowledge in recording and producing to. Such entrepreneurial graft going unrewarded for so long could perhaps only have occurred in the land of American dreams.

The key to death metal’s fast-tracking into the mainstream is in part attributable to the Morris brothers – whose Morrisound facility was cutting edge and equipped for a broad range of music genres – taking Burns under their wing, first as an assistant engineer, then as a producer. Burns’s famed people skills – something celebrated at length in the book – allowed him to mediate the younger names emerging in death metal – Obituary, R.A.V.A.G.E/Atheist, Amon/Deicide – in a professional studio setting, making them feel at ease and getting the best performances out of them, whilst reassuring the “grownups” – the Morris brothers and later Roadrunner’s Monte Connor – that projects would be delivered on time and within budget.

Watershed moments for both Burns and death metal as whole being ‘Slowly we Rot’ and ‘Beneath the Remains’, largely through Burns’s ability to capture the drums (‘Leprosy’ being a notoriously polarising early prototype), prioritising them as the engine room of all good death metal. This prompted a plethora of bands to seek the Burns treatment, leading to the Roadrunner deal > Dan Seagrave artwork > Morrisound career pipeline for a whole host of bands, with death metal turning just enough profit to keep label bosses happy whilst remaining enough of an afterthought for bands and Burns to retain significant creative freedom.

Sepltura’s ‘Arise’ proved to be a canary in the coalmine however. Monte Connor eventually took the project off Burns following disagreements over the snare sound. Sepultura would never again receive the Burns treatment, and given the trajectory of their career from that time, it’s clear they had not only outgrown the scene orbiting Morrisound, but death metal entirely. ‘Arise’ was farmed out to one Andy Wallace, fresh off recording ‘Seasons in the Abyss’ and whose next project included some album called ‘Nevermind’. 

Despite the relationships with Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, and Death clearly being important to Burns (Burns finally cutting ties with Chuck Schuldiner prior to the recording of ‘Symbolic’ leads to a harrowing account of how he never patched things up prior to his death), it’s clear that by 1993 burnout had set in. Roadrunner had bigger fish to fry. In light of the excessive toll taken by thankless recording sessions such as Cynic’s bloated ‘Focus’ (an album dismissed at the time by label bosses and public alike), Cannibal Corpse’s lineup exploding, Glen Benton’s repeated spats with the Hoffman brothers, Burns did precisely what much of death metal was attempting to do by the mid-90s, get the hell out.

Despite trying to shed the reputation for being the “death metal guy”, he was repeatedly turned down for other work, overlooked when Roadrunner’s intake of nu metal bands began appearing, and what non-death metal projects he was given (a KMFDM remix and a Jason Rawhead album) were largely ignored following their release (through no fault of Burns’s work it should be noted).

Having worked so hard to graduate death metal into the big leagues, turning it into a viable, listenable, professional artform, a music loving public, if they weren’t outright rejecting it, were treating it as early meme fodder whose proper place was on Beavis and Butthead. Its vibes appropriated by a new generation of alt metal, Burns, like many of the bands he produced, left the scene.

Perhaps counter intuitively, death metal was just too fragile for the cold clarity of the music industry at the height of its powers in this era. Unable to survive in the open save in meme form, unable to reconcile itself to the fact that the one thing it craves – legitimacy and acceptance – is the one thing that will destroy it. Whether it’s Burns’s chunky and multifaceted recordings living rent free in the minds of (by now) millions of fans, or the technical and progressive gymnastics many of its early adopters underwent to prove their worth, it was only ever a novelty prospect for the tastemakers of Gen X, a reliable if modest revenue stream, easily dropped when it became clear it was never going to break in the same way as grunge.

Metal likes to pride itself on its durability and dedicated fanbase. But it’s easy to forget that both commercially and artistically it had a near death experience by the late 90s. Existing on life support throughout the early 2000s, it was only resurrected by a flurry of grassroots activity from a newer generation. One who discovered it via the very thing that poisoned it in the first place, namely nu/grunge/alt metal, whose popularity endured well into the early 2000s. Whatever your take on the quality/quantity ratio of contemporary death metal, there’s no denying its renewed popularity, even if it remains mediated on purely meme and vibe based terms. Other nodes of the old school canon – Burns’s informal nemesis Collin Richardson, responsible for the majority of Earache’s classic roster, and Tomas Skogsberg of Sunlight Studios behind the entire Northern European “sound” – were able to adapt and move with the times. But through poor luck and burnout, the man who, at times, appeared to have been holding the entire Tampa scene together through his mediation of bands’ antics, Roadrunner’s bottom line, and the Hoffman brothers’ guitar tone, left music entirely to focus on a career in computer engineering. In the process losing touch with the rapidly changing technology that swamped music production over the next two decades. Perhaps no other single individual can lay claim to having such an influence over a vast chunk of metal releases from the 2010s onwards. Albums produced, rather ironically, by digital natives attempting to imitate him with technology that rendered his unique skills all but obsolete.