In one of the old issues of All Access Magazine I noticed an article on Eighties thrash metal band Death Angel. I have a funny story to tell concerning Death Angel, well, it’s not really funny to me, but you might think it is. In the Eighties I published PaperCuts, The Illustrated Lyrics Magazine. PaperCuts featured rock song lyrics illustrated in comic book form and included two songs on a Flexi-Disc Soundsheet insert. Essentially, a 45 single pressed on a very thin sheet of vinyl that was included in each issue. The rest of the issue were Mad Magazine style parodies of rock & roll culture. PaperCuts was sold in newsstands, comic book stores and record shops and Kurt Loder featured it on an edition of the MTV News. PaperCuts was an attempt to start a multimedia record label which has since evolved into Unsigned Records Multimedia. We did get lots of calls from other record labels wanting us to include their bands in an issue. Of course, they never wanted to pay for it and we were really only interested in promoting our own acts, but one label made an interesting offer. They were a well established heavy metal record label and they had a new thrash metal act called Death Angel that was going to release an album and a national tour. The label wouldn’t pay us to include Death Angel’s song, Welcome To The Thirteenth Floor, in PaperCuts but the band’s management would want to buy a few thousand copies to take with them on the road for their fans. Feeling we were guaranteed a few thousand sales and that Death Angel would attract more newsstand buyers than our regular bands, we agreed.
Underground comix artist and winner of the Gold Plaque in Music Video at the Chicago International Film Festival for Womanizer’s animated Mass Murder Man video, Corey Harris, designed the comic for the Death Angel tune and the issue went to press. Here’s the funny part. In the three weeks the magazine was at the printers, Death Angel left their heavy metal label for one of the majors. Suddenly, the record company that was behind the idea of us including Death Angel in PaperCuts didn’t want anything to do with them, they were deserters. The band, their management and their new label didn’t want to have anything to do with the record they had just recorded for their old label and actually had the nerve to suggest to us that we include Death Angel’s new new record in our next issue. We felt screwed royally, although Death Angel did have their fans and that issue sold quite well. We had the rights to put out the record in which neither the new label nor the former label had any interest. The Death Angel issue is now a collector’s item on Ebay.
Underground comix artist and winner of the Gold Plaque in Music Video at the Chicago International Film Festival for Womanizer’s animated Mass Murder Man video, Corey Harris, designed the comic for the Death Angel tune and the issue went to press. Here’s the funny part. In the three weeks the magazine was at the printers, Death Angel left their heavy metal label for one of the majors. Suddenly, the record company that was behind the idea of us including Death Angel in PaperCuts didn’t want anything to do with them, they were deserters. The band, their management and their new label didn’t want to have anything to do with the record they had just recorded for their old label and actually had the nerve to suggest to us that we include Death Angel’s new new record in our next issue. We felt screwed royally, although Death Angel did have their fans and that issue sold quite well. We had the rights to put out the record in which neither the new label nor the former label had any interest. The Death Angel issue is now a collector’s item on Ebay.
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