I had this archived on the same interview tape I did with my other recent interviews I’ve been posting here, so I decided to give it a listen. And it was actually pretty good! Over 20 minutes with Stacy Anderson and Tommy Stewart, founding members of Hallows Eve. This was recorded on April 25th, 1988 while doing promotion for their “Monument” LP which had just been released on Metal Blade. Hallows Eve was a great metal band from Atlanta who I had been following from their days trading demos on the tape trading scene.
I don’t remember too much about it other than I was at the KSDT studios and this was done over the phone while Tommy & Stacy were at Metal Blade. I highly doubt I got either one’s names correct on the transcript all the way through. Amateur move on my part not to get them to state their own names in the intro. But this was a fun interview. I liked it. I also really liked these guys. They seemed like real good people to hang around with. Transcription is below the audio youtube clip.
Ted: This is Ted from KSDT and we’re speaking to Stacy and Tommy, right? From Hallows Eve. What’s up you guys?
Stacy: Not too much man, just come out here and talk to you guys. Do some interviews.
Ted: Okay you guys just put out an album. A new one and it’s your third one. It’s called “Monument”. And how come it took so long for this album to come out?
Stacy: Well, we try to do a lot of shows after “Death and Insanity” for a long time. And after we got through doing that, we were playing so much we really didn’t have time to work on any new material. So then we started into that and that took a little longer than it could have, had we already had the material written. So then we had some bad luck. Then like two days before we go into the studio, our drummer has a problem. He pulls off this gas thing and rips his asshole open. It’s supposed to be or something. So that’s the end of his career. Then we get another drummer for about two weeks and he learns all the material and disappears. And then we get an another drummer (laughs). He stays with us. We just wanted to get him for the album. He was real good and we just took him to the album.
Tommy: We just wanted to get it recorded. He could learn the material real fast. That was the main thing we needed. By this time it was getting to be desperate.
Ted: How come he didn’t stay in the band?
Stacy: He was a little bit young for us and we were a lot older than him. He was a real good drummer but he was just a little too young.
Ted: Was this for playing over 21 clubs or just too young anyway?
Stacy: No, he was like 16 years old. He just didn’t fit in. We’re in our early or mid 20s.
Ted: So you guys are old men, huh?
Stacy: Well, we’re not old farts quite yet.
Tommy: It’s kind of hard like I can… You know, you got to live with these guys. It’s kind of hard to deal with a guy that’s 16 years old if you’re like, say 27 or so. You got to be involved with the same type of thing very much.
Ted: Okay, so where did you guys play about? You didn’t come over here, did you? In California?
Stacy: No, not last year but we will this year.
Tommy: We’re going to get over here this year for sure.
Stacy: We’ve got some massive booking going on now.
Ted: With who? FBI?
Tommy: GTI.
Ted: Are you going to tour with anybody?
Stacy: Well, we’ve got some shows. There’s quite a few shows that are headlining. And then there’s off and on shows with other people. We’re doing a few shows with a (unintelligable) and a few shows with some other people and like that.
Tommy: We’re doing something with Nasty Savage, I believe.
Stacy: Yeah, they’re going to be opening for us like in the Northeast. And then we’re going to run out to the Northwest, I think. The whole month of May is just the Northeast. They’re doing June, we’re going to start moving west and come in a big circle. Hopefully down the west coast and then across Texas.
Tommy: We’re hoping to get out here around June or July, hopefully. Or maybe a little later.
Stacy: Yeah, they told us we booked through like July. We just don’t really know where. We just said book it. They told us we’ve got four off days the next three months starting May 5th.
Tommy: Just book it, we’ll play it.
Ted: Okay, alright. About time you guys are going to come out here.
Tommy: Really. We’ve been waiting to get out here. I can’t wait to play out here.
Ted: Tell me about the new album. It’s called “Monument”. There are little meaning behind that, perhaps?
Stacy: That’s Tommy’s thing.
Tommy: I guess I came up with that. So I got to explain myself. Or maybe I don’t have to. But the reason the album is named that is not really because of the song. We felt like we had really found our own little corner. We felt like we had gotten a definitive Hallow’s Eve type of…
Stacy: The way we’re going to stay pretty much.
Tommy: Yeah, the first time was we were kind of like getting in the… “Okay, where are we going to be here?” We thought this is more like what you would see for the next album. You’ll probably see something closer to this than the first two. So we felt like this was a big turning point for us. We had a membership change with the drummer and took a lot of time on it. We wanted to make sure we made a real good… The best record we could make for what time we had to do it and stuff like that. That’s why it was “Monument”. Now the song “Monument to Nothing” was more or less like a… It really kind of gets old like taking… Everybody takes institutions so serious to everything. Music business so serious to everything. It’s just not that serious. We’re serious about our music but it’s just music. It’s not like the creation of the earth or something. I believe in my music all the way. I take it serious but it’s like taking your fun serious. It’s not like “let’s be depressed” or something. It doesn’t really matter what we say. I was just thinking about the beginning of time to the end of time. What does this one song really mean in all that? Really, it was quite an abstract thought.
Ted: You also do a Queen song, “Sheer Heart Attack”. What made you guys decide to do that one?
Stacy: This friend of mine. I went over to his house one day and he was listening to Queen. He said, man this is the song for you guys to do. He was like a big music buff and he’s got like 300 CDs. He says, I had asked him a week or two before that. I said, man cover tune can we do if we ever did one? He said, something that kind of fit our style. He said, “this is the song for you guys to do man. Check it out.” He played “Sheer Heart Attack” and I told the guys about it. I said, yeah man.
Tommy: That’s pretty heavy. That’s a little weird for us but it’s something we tried to add on a couple of audiences at the end of tour last year for an encore. Everybody really got off on it. We were really flammed and he said, yeah. We said, well maybe it’s not such bad. It was fun to play and stuff.
Stacy: It was kind of an obscure song when it was out. It wasn’t one of their big hits or anything. But it was one that everybody remembers.
Ted: Have you experimented with other cover songs or no?
Stacy: No. We might be doing a couple of cover songs just for our encore. For fun. We come out and be this serious Hallow’s Eve for an hour and a half and then it’s like, if everybody wants us back to do an encore, we’re just going to come out and have fun with it. We’ll do “Sheer Heart Attack” and probably another cover tune or something.
Tommy: We’ve got a cool cover that we’re thinking about doing and everybody will like it.
Ted: What is it? Come on, tell me.
Tommy: uhh…I don’t know. We’ve been toying with this moshy version of “Riff Raff” by AC/DC. We’re just looking at the old 70s metal songs. You know some of them, if you update them and everything, they could be pretty cool.
Ted: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Tommy: You change some of riff’s, add a little fat, little speedier. You could take out some of them, even the main riff and just throw in something totally different.
Ted: So what song by AC/DC did you just say?
Tommy: “Riff Raff”. Oh, okay, yeah.
Ted: What’s your favorite AC/DC album? It’s a question I ask everybody.
Stacy: Yeah, “If You Want Blood, You Got It”. That’s both of ours. Yeah, because it’s like, that was really the essence of it. A lot of live albums are better than anything anyway.
Ted: Oh yeah, definitely.
Stacy: We grew up on ACDC and Queen and stuff like that.
Ted: Tell me about some of the other songs on the new album. Are there any stories behind any of them?
Stacy: There’s a story behind “Speed Freak”. A real cool story.
Ted: Is it about drugs or just driving fast?
Stacy: Actually, it’s about Tommy.
Ted: Okay, Tommy, go.
Tommy: It’s like about…
Stacy: I wrote it about Tommy. It’s like on our first tour, when we were just, we didn’t even have hardly a road crew. And we were like, the whole band in a van with about one guy and we were like…, what “Speed Freak” is about is like trying to make it to the shows on time and running behind. And it seemed like every time I’d look over at Tommy, he would, his eyes would be bulging out and he’d be smoking one pack of cigarettes after another and drinking cokes and he always drove.
Tommy: Always drove. I said, “I’ll get us there”. And I guess faster than you ever.
Stacy: Like whatever we’re going over 100, we call it riding with a driver and we do that a lot. That’s what “Speed Freak” is about.
Ted: And let’s see, the “Righteous Ones” are a big attack on the PTL and stuff.
Tommy: Yeah, right. I’ve seen it kind of like getting what they deserve now. So I’ve wrote about some of that.
Ted: Okay, and here I got some other questions here. Now on the first album, you have two songs with drumming by Tym Helton, right? Now, how come he was just on two tracks? Was this just something from the demo that you just put on album or what?
Stacy: Well, it’s from the demo. Actually, song two of that was our demo.
Ted: Oh, really? I thought there were only two songs on the demo.
Stacy: No, well, actually the four songs, but they’re, you know, “Valley of the Dolls” was the instrumental, then there was “Metal Merchants”. The “Hallow’s Eve (Including Routine)”, “Routine” was a separate song from Hallow’s Eve. It just so happens it’s right in the middle of the song “Hallow’s Eve”.
Tommy: It really is four songs. It was a 12 minute demo. But we just play things up weird sometimes, you know, but what happens is like Tym, once again, he is constantly damaging himself.
Ted: So he’s the guy that you were talking about earlier that…
Stacy: Yeah, the same guy, you know. Okay, he does the demo and then he has an accident. He gets run over by a van. Tym’s real big. They had to tow the van off. He totalled it. His body totalled it. And he was laying on the sidewalk with his leg broken. The police came up and made him sign a ticket for jay walking.
Ted: No way.
Stacy: I swear! And, uh, they had finally… Okay, then we had to get another drummer to finish the album, right? That drummer, like… He was from here in LA.
Tommy: Yeah, and he got real homesick. He hated Georgia.
Stacy: Oh, he hated it. He was actually in LA. Oh, yeah, so he went back home and so we went back to him and said, Are you ready to play again? He said, yes. It’s like, you know, so Tym, more or less, I mean, like, you know, like, he was with us for like three years, but like, it was… How many times did he quit?
Tommy: Once or twice, I’m not sure.
Stacy: He kept being damaged and not being able to do things. So I think he was kind of getting old with it anyway. He wasn’t really into what… The other three of us were definitely, you know, very serious about what we did.
Tommy: He was just kind of like tagging along all the time for the fun or whatever. And I think, like, the last accident was his way of gracefully bowing out, you know? We’re all friends with him and stuff
Stacy: Oh I played with the guy for like a few years before Hallow’s Eve ever even started. So, you know, we’re still on real good terms there.
Tommy: I think he wanted to quit and he just didn’t know how to tell us. I think he wanted to quit, like, for about a year and he was just being cool because we were his friends and he didn’t want to fuck us up, you know.
Ted: Uh-huh. Okay, now on the first album we have five members and now ever since then we have four members. Now, why’d you lose a member and…
Stacy: Well, why not? (laughs)
Ted: Yeah, but aren’t you losing sound live?
Stacy: No, not now. Because we like, we like, um, me and David both run in stereo and we double everything live and we’ve gone through great pains to like… We sound like we got three guitars all the time. David’s got like, on his guitar set, he’s running in stereo, he’s got like different delays on each channel. It’s like listening to three different guitars, he’s got an octaver which, you know, he can hit that and he can sound like the whole band by himself.
Tommy: It sounds much more full now than we used to. We really kind of figured out how to fill up the space.
Stacy: Yeah, David’s even got it rigged up to where he can like duplicate his leads live, even the harmony ones. By himself. So he’s really a wizard about stuff like that. So it’s kind of where it’s really unnecessary to have two.
Tommy: I didn’t even want two in the beginning, The only reason we had two (guitars) in the beginning was because Stacy wanted two. It’s just the guy flaked out, you know, it my turn to have my way for a while.
Stacy: At least I let it go, let it go.
Tommy: It’s less heads to deal with anyway.
Ted: Okay, now who’s Skullator and how come he didn’t use his real name when everyone else did on the first album?
Stacy: (laughs) Should we slander him? (laughs) I don’t know, man, we didn’t get it either. we were glad he left.
Tommy: We were tired of hearing about him. He never even played with us live. He just did the few cuts, you know, he was out.
Stacy: It’s like every interview we do everybody goes “Who’s Skullator?”. We’re like, oh man, you know.
Ted: So he was the other guitarist who left, right?
Stacy: Right, yeah.
Ted: And he played on the whole album?
Tommy: He played on the first album.
Ted: Yeah, on the first one, that’s what I mean.
Stacy: Yeah, he just did that and it was like…
Tommy: He never even played live.
Stacy: The week after we got out of the studio from doing that was… he quit.
Tommy: Because he said we weren’t heavy.
Ted: Oh no way.
Stacy: What are you thinking? I don’t know.
Tommy: He was more into the makeup and the death thing, you know, more so than the new…
Ted: Death, death metal stuff?
Tommy: I don’t know what you’re gonna call it, it’s like, you know, more like noise death metal rather than like a musicianship.
Ted: Yeah. You know. How would you classify Hallow’s Eve?
Tommy: We’re a rock band.
Stacy: We’re a rock band. I get sick of being a metal band. I’ve been doing, we’ve been writing, we’ve been doing these same songs and playing the, and writing exactly the same way as stuff since, at least I, I’ve been doing like this since 1977 and a couple of these songs that we’re doing today, we had back then, I mean, we haven’t ever done anything different.
Tommy: The band Motorhead, they’re a rock band.
Stacy: We’re a rock band. They didn’t call us a hardcore metal band back in 1978 when I started out. And I was doing the “there are no rules” back then. You know, they just said, oh, there’s a rock band, you know? Then as the time went by, it was like, well now they’re a punk band and then pretty soon it became, now we’re a metal band, now we’re a hardcore metal band or whatever. Yeah. Or a rock band.
Tommy: You know, it’s like, I suppose in 1995 we’ll be called something like fish, gumby metal or something. They got to make up something.
Ted: So what are your live shows like? Anything special in them? Or are you just…
Stacy: We’re realy boring. (laughs)
Ted: Shut up.
Tommy: We don’t allow smoking. And we hate big amps and loud noises. (laughter) No, we just, we try to see like how loud we can get, you know.
Stacy: As loud as it’ll go, that’s how loud we play.
Tommy: Soundmen hate us, man, because we’re always loud. “Man, you guys always play it loud” and we’re going, man, we’re just tuning, man.
Stacy: We’re a soundman’s nightmare. Except for our soundman.
Tommy: You know, yeah, we like to, you know, have a lot of fun when we’re playing. I mean, it’s hard to even remember to play sometimes. We’re running around so hard we don’t pay any attention. We bash right into each other. Head on collisions.
Stacy: We like it when the crowd gets really nuts.
Tommy: Yeah, we’ll be as good, you know… We’re as good as the crowd.
Stacy: Yeah, we get off on the crowd.
Tommy: We’ll give them the best we can give them, whether 70 people or 700 or whatever. But I mean, like, there’s a certain little earth you get, you know, when you’ve got like 2,000 people going “YEAH!”, you know, you can’t get when you’ve got like 1,000 people going, “oh”.
Ted: Have you ever played in front of 2,000 people?
Tommy: Oh, yeah.
Ted: What’s the largest show you’ve played at?
Tommy: Montreal.
Stacy: Maybe the Milwaukee Metal Festival.
Tommy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was probably the biggest show.
Stacy: Yeah, last year that’s right. Yeah, that was like 5,000 or so.
Ted: How’d that go down?
Stacy: Pretty good! We’re going to do it again this year.
Tommy: It’s like 15 bands and we’re like co-headlining. We’re going to be the next last band.
Ted: Wow, that’s great!
Stacy: I think, I think, this is all rumor and heresay right now. I think Fate’s Warning is going to headline. It’s just sort of like what I heard. I don’t know that.
Tommy: That’s the line we’ve got on it right now.
Stacy: We can’t wait because it was so cool last year. 15 bands. I mean, to see 15 bands that you, you know, in one day was great.
Ted: Yeah that must have been incredible!
Tommy: It’s hard to watch it. I mean, it’s like all you can do… there’s a lot of cool bands, too, you know? I was just walking in and watching like half of each person show and then leaving again because I, you know, I mean, you’re talking about like 20 hours of solid metal, you know?
Ted: What more could you ask for?
Stacy: That’s great.
Tommy: Well, it’s great, you know, but you got to go take a leak now and then.
Ted: Yeah, that’s true. So you guys were on the River’s Edge soundtrack. How’d that come about? Any story behind that?
Stacy: Metal Blade.
Tommy: I guess they called up one day and say, “hey, you know this (soundtrack)”…, we were “wow, cool.”
Ted: Were you in the movie at all or no?
Stacy: No. It was just a spot, but it was a good thing, you know, for us because it was like the guy just, like, killed his girlfriend, he gets in the car and he puts in a tape and it’s “Lethal Tendencies” by Hallow’s Eve. Like, that’s what inspired him or something.
Ted: Wow.
Tommy: Not that we want to inspire THAT, but, you know, that was his deal.
Stacy: You know, in the movies. It was pretty cool. What was cooler for us, really, was that we were the first song, on side 1 for the soundtrack. That was pretty neat for us.
Ted: Yeah, a lot of people around here like that.
Tommy: It was a good soundtrack too, I like it.
Ted: Yeah, a lot of people like that.
Stacy: It’s got Slayer. Four Slayer songs on it. Fates Warning, of course.
Ted: Now, you were mentioning that, you know, the guy did it like almost as if it was as he was influenced by the song. Do you believe a band has, you know… A lot of people look up to people in bands and stuff. Do you think a band has a certain responsibility to the people so, you know, not to make it too violent so they go out killing people or something or, you know what I’m saying?
Stacy: No, but I’ll tell you, if you start writing songs about people like saying, first some rock, then fired my gun, actually you’re the one that better be worried about it because somebody is going to say, oh, “let’s see you shoot him.” Okay, he’s going to shoot him. I can’t really think about that. I go, you know, we used to write songs about people shooting people and shit, this is.. They say, “oh, okay, I mean”, can you imagine looking at night and seeing some guy level a gun at you, about the 15th row?
Tommy: That definitely would be some shit. Yeah. Now, that’s the only thing I worry about. As far as somebody else, I mean, like, I’m sure that, like, we’re really inspiring somebody to kill us so there’s something, you know what I mean? I’m sure they’re like a Sunday school teacher that has three degrees from college or something and all of a sudden, heard Hallow’s Eve and said, “whoa, hey, I better kill myself.” I think people like that are kind of fucked up from the start. They shouldn’t even be in public anyway.
Ted: Exactly. Oh, okay, you guys plan to market anything in videos, either a video for MTV or…
Stacy: We’d like to, but you know, we kind of, we’ve held off on that until we could do a pretty good one, you know?
Ted: Well, can’t you do one with this album or what?
Stacy: I don’t know. I kind of like to start with that one. We might look for one with the next album album.
Tommy: It depends. We might, you know, we might still end up doing something, you know?
Stacy: We might. Maybe “Sheer Heart Attack” or something.
Tommy: We don’t know right now.
Stacy: It’s coming up to the company. We’re like taking their advice from that and then, you know. We don’t want to just throw something together. We want to do something, you know, decent.
Tommy: I want to do something really quality. We always try to do everything with, you know, as much class as a classless bunch of idiots. We try to have some intelligence, you know, and it’s like, we just don’t want to throw a bunch of shit out there for people to waste their time looking at. I can’t stand it when something comes up and it just, you know, looks really low budget.
Stacy: Well, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, like, we both like low budget stuff sometimes, but, well…
Tommy: Like the Metallica thing was great.
Ted: Yeah.
Tommy: But as long as it’s interesting, that’s the thing, you know. Some stuff just comes out of this like, it’s not even interesting. It’s not really a matter of budget. It’s like Fred down the road with his handheld camera.
Stacy: Yeah. Came down and shot it.
Tommy: Just go down to Fred’s bank and produce and buy some cameras, take some snapshots and we’re like, every 2 seconds you’ll see another snapshot, you know, across the sound track or something.
Stacy: We don’t want anything like that.
Tommy: No, you know, we need to put some thought into it and stuff.
Ted: You guys watch a lot of wrestling at the Omni?
Stacy: No, I like GLOW though.
Tommy: Yeah, yeah. That’s pretty ridiculous. I like it. I got like tapes of that stuff.
Ted: Yeah, I watched that all the time.
Tommy: We got a giant poster of, what’s her name? Mountain Fuji.
Ted: Oh, wow. Yeah, she’s hot.
Tommy: She goes “I am the painkiller” in our rehearsal room.
Ted: Yeah, she’s pretty hot. Yeah. So what’s the metal scene like in Georgia? Is it pretty happening or what?
Tommy: Well, it’s looking up.
Stacy: It’s okay. It’s about, it’s about… it’s there, you know, but it’s… it’s not there much.
Ted: Sounds like San Diego.
Stacy: Motorhead played there about a month ago and drew a whole 800 people if that gives you any idea.
Ted: Uh-huh. Yeah, kind of like here.
Stacy: I’m just thinking that that’s.. this is the same way we like to say Megadeth or something, but you know, a good metal band is pretty popular with just about, you know, anybody that’s in a metal scene of a city is going to go to that concert. They’re going to have a hard time even selling out that 800 seats, you know. Even if they’re pretty big.
Tommy: It’s nothing like the North or the West Coast. The North, East, and West coast is like really kicking.
Stacy: Yeah.
Ted: Okay, well, I’d like to thank you for your time!
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