exclusive: decibel columnists

PILLARS OF THE

A look back at the rogues’ gallery of columnists that have informed ’s personality over the years

BY ANDREW BONAZELLI

olumns are essential components of any foundation worth a damn. Be they deceptively plain or jaw-droppingly intricate, the most memorable appeal to—even challenge—our aesthetic sensibilities while still bearing weight. It’s no different in the magazine biz (insofar as such a “biz” exists in 2021). Between all those bitchin’ Hall of Fames, Flexi Discs and cover stories, Decibel has given you a smorgasbord of opinionated, inventive, perhaps even clinically insane columnists to adore or deplore. ¶ Not necessarily from the first issue, mind you, which paradoxically offered only the blink-and-you-missed-it Bring Me the Head of Iann Robinson (featuring musings from the turn-of-the-century MTV personality) and loooooong-running experimental back page staple South Pole Dispatch, courtesy of Mountain Goats mainman John Darnielle. The latter was a particularly bold move, establishing the magazine’s irreverence from the jump by giving a decidedly not extremely extreme musician carte blanche in prime real estate. It gels with editor-in-chief Albert Mudrian’s claim that he wasn’t looking to replicate anything from dB’s predecessors (despite great affection for Borivoj Krgin’s Firing Squad demo column in Metal Maniacs). “If anything,” Mudrian hints, “some of the earlier ideas were pilfered and reshaped from reading non-metal magazines.” (We can all breathe a retrospective sigh of relief that he wasn’t a Penthouse Forum subscriber.) ¶ Despite a few delightful installments of Ask Jeff Walker (we had to give him something to do while he was wandering Carcass Cuntry), it wasn’t until issue 7 (May 2005) that Decibel added another enduring fixture in the form of J. Bennett’s Cry Now, Cry Later. The eventual Ides of Gemini axeman channeled—and decapitated—the gonzo spirit of Hunter S. Thompson with a “steady stream of fantasy headaches, ill-informed hot takes and drug-induced non-sequiturs.” And yes, he means the latter literally. “The weirdest part is that while I was doing Cry Now, another magazine had me write a column

where I took drugs and reviewed records,” our man remembers. “Little did they know I usually did that anyway. The short answer, though? I was fucked up the entire time.”

Given the small page count commensurate with many fledgling periodicals, dB’s early columns were rarely more than a half-page, including Psyopus madman Chris Arp’s axe tutorial Dr. Opus, PhD and day-one contributor Kevin Stewart-Panko’s Frankensteinian mixtape compendium Will Consider Trades (KSP would eventually find a permanent home in the reviews section with his creatively-themed demo column Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone, alongside Shane Mehling’s wryly caustic vinyl breakdown Needle Exchange.) Bearing these baby steps in mind, it should be no surprise it took us over two years to even launch a tour diary. Luckily, we found a hilarious and fearless (occasionally to his own detriment) field reporter in the form of then-Genghis Tron frontman Mookie Singerman, who documented his band’s misadventures in Smile, You’re Traveling.

“One of my final columns was about my mom finding a video on YouTube where I drunkenly said onstage that she gave great head,” Singerman remembers. “I went to great lengths to apologize and repair our relationship, which I documented in the column—but telling the story again in a national publication kind of defeated the purpose and pissed her off all over

again. Come to think of it, I shouldn’t be talking about any of this. Fuck.”

When Genghis Tron tours slowed down and SYT naturally followed suit, we filled the void longterm with not only a living legend’s quasi-tour diary (“life in a van [that] obviously ... evolved into something closer to therapy,” Brutal Truth frontman Kevin Sharp muses of Grinding It Out), but Adem Tepedelen’s (coincidentally) nominally related Brewtal Truth, our only column to date to metastasize into an honest-to-goodness book: 2013’s Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers: An AllExcess Pass to Brewing’s Outer Limits. Trappist’s Chris Dodge would pick up the boozy slack with his stillactive “beer tourism”-centric No Corporate Beer, and you should eventually flip backward a few pages to read his exchange with predecessor Tepedelen.

At this point, the floodgates were wide open for more “lifestyle” content (with an eye on not devolving into GQ: Corpsepaint). Repulsion guitarist Matt Olivo cleverly referenced his band’s 1989 classic Horrified with monthly guitar/bass/ amps breakdown Gearified, which would have “branch[ed] out into recording/mix hardware and software, as well as synthesizers. Had that happened, I may have lost a few readers… or gained some. Who knows?”

And then there were staffers Etan Rosenbloom and Anthony Bartkewicz. Thanks to his day job in the marketing department at ASCAP, the former conceived Killing Is My Business, offering an insider’s invaluable business advice to metal musicians. (“Coming up with a conceit each month was no problem. Distilling huge topics like music publishing, sync licensing, corporate branding, mechanical royalties, etc., into a 500word piece for music biz greenhorns was the hard part”), and the latter delivered astute parenting council via Spawn of Decibel. (Interestingly, Justin Norton would take the opposite tack, founding the as-cute-as-this-magazine-will-everget Metal Muthas in 2010, graciously ceding the reins to yours truly a few years ago.)

Bartkewicz also penned the irreverent back-ofbook Kvlt Status in 2007, focusing on “cult movies I thought would appeal to extreme metal fans aesthetically or thematically—a pretentious way to say movies with metalheads, Satanists, punks, annoying church types getting killed, etc.,” which (un)naturally paved the way for Richard Christy’s Horrorscope. The former Death drummer/ current Howard Stern Show personality gushed about his faaaaaaavorite horror flicks, impressing cult horror host Svengoolie to the point where Christy was featured on the show’s “Cards and Letters” segment. (“I haven’t officially heard that the column has ended,” Christy laughs, “so fingers crossed that my Joe Bob Briggs Horrorscope will see the light of day.”)

None of the aforementioned have stirred shit as successfully as Low Culture, a monthly anything-goes airing of grievances from Krieg frontman Neill Jameson, whose blunt force candor draws polarized reactions on social media. “There are definitely months [where] my depression and anxiety are more difficult to handle, but I have a few deep wells to drink from: nostalgia, an absurd life and scanning my Facebook feed for 10 minutes,” Jameson quips. “I’m under no illusion that I have at least a thousand people who follow me because they despise me and want to be there when I trip up, but those are the ones that make what I do a lot easier, so hails, I guess.”

Funny (well, “funny”) that Jameson mentions the effects of depression and anxiety. This abbreviated history begs the question of what’s left for a Decibel op-ed to tackle that hasn’t been tackled, ground into the turf and curb-stomped over the first 200 installments. The answer makes sense given the magazine’s unyielding emphasis on evolution and topicality. “I’d like to talk about mental health a bit more in the magazine,” Mudrian confirms. “It’s definitely something that the pandemic has drawn into sharper focus for me. Or maybe I just don’t wanna spend my own money on a therapist.”