Band bio below pics!
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Type O Negative’s OLD Bio…
What A Long Range Trip It’s Been…
1989: After two records and great frustration with musical direction and the
inability to find good tailors for their custom-designed loincloths, thrash-core
future primitives Carnivore disband. Bassist Peter Steele pursues a career
at the New York City Parks Dept, where he learns a variety of skills including
how to pick up human waste with a rake and new metaphors for maggots
(“dancing rice”).
1990: Steele’s longtime friend Sal Abruscato asks him if he wants to start a
band. Steele wants to do something that won’t be as strictly defined as the
grind-and-grumble Carnivore, so he agrees. Abruscato enlists guitarist
Kenny Hickey. Steele commandeers keyboardist Josh Silver. Steele
unwinds by pursuing his favorite hobby: reading the phone book. Arriving at
page 136, he sees an ad for a blood bank who is paying top dollar for a
particular blood type: O negative…
1991: The quartet hunker down at Systems Two studios for six weeks and
give birth to the debut Type O Negative album, Slow, Deep And Hard. The
album tempers aggressive and dirge-rock tempos with Hickey’s razor-sharp
harmonics, Steele’s heavily processed bass (described by band members
as “a baritone guitar”) and Silver’s array of keyboard textures.
“Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty Of Infidelity” (a.k.a. – “I
Know You’re Fucking Someone Else”) reflected homicidal anger over a
relationship that was so deep, Steele attempted suicide over it. It wasn’t too
long until Steele played Jonathan Swift to the confederacy of rock dunces
everywhere: Politically correct trust-fund owners decried Steele with such
knee-jerk epithets as “misogynist scumbag” and “Nazi bastard,” despite the
fact that the singer actually had the nerve to be in a family with five sisters
and demand that a nice Jewish boy like Josh Silver be in his band.
Such oversimplifications of the band’s raison d’etre robbed SD&H from
reaching a wider audience. But so what? Everyone was listening to Nirvana
back then, anyway…
November 1991: Type O Negative hit the road on a package tour
sandwiched between Biohazard and British cartoon punks, the Exploited.
The pairing of Type O and the Exploited was cited by one rockcrit rocket
scientist as “Slayer opening for the Banana Splits.” Soon after the cartoon
credits roll, Type O heads off to Europe where the Nazi-rumor mill was in full
swing. The maraschino cherry topping on their shit sundae was when an
angry protester smashed a jar of acid (not that kind, raver-boy) on the door
to a German venue.
1992: Roadrunner tells Steele that Type O must ride the waves of the bad
press, and the best way to do that is to rush release a live album. The band
decide to fake a live album by playing their set poorly under one
microphone in the studio, while overdubbing pseudo-crowd noises
generated by neighborhood. The record, Origin Of The Feces, was initially
released with a cover photo of a lamprey, but once K-mart staffers
inspected the cover more closely, it was in reality, a close-up of Steele’s
anus. Piles of fun for everyone!
1993: Type O Negative record their second studio LP, Bloody Kisses. The
dirges are cloaked in swirling atmospheres that make the girls swoon and
the boys club each other like a Neanderthal Anachronistic Society. The
sexy and sinister “Black No. 1″ and the arcane “Christian Woman” picked
up steam in the underground. TON focused their explorations into the
worlds of dark sexuality and gothic imagery (‘gothic’ as in Wuthering
Heights, not Beetlejuice), and the music reflected that without losing any
resonance.
Ironically, Steele wasn’t sure if he wanted to carry on with Type O Negative.
Steele’s waffling about touring behind Kisses became a source of
frustration to the Abruscato, and in response, Sal resigned from Type O to
join hardcore merchants Life of Agony.
Summer 1993: Type O Negative celebrate the release of Bloody Kisses by
going out on tour. Johnny Kelly, longtime drum tech, van driver and
occasional psychic baggage porter, was recruited for the drum chair. The
tour lasts around the two-year mark, with TON sharing stages with bands as
diverse as Danzig, Queensryche, Godflesh, Nine Inch Nails, Pantera and
Mötley Crüe.
1994: Type O become the gothadelic industrimetal equivalent to James
Brown as the hardest working Brooklyn dirtboxes in show biz. They
accepted an invitation to appear on the Black Sabbath tribute album,
Nativity In Black (covering “Black Sabbath”) and 3 years later, ended up
sharing a stage with rock chairman Ozzy Osbourne during the year’s
OzzFest.
Roadrunner then asked Steele to remix and oversee new artwork for a
special digipak edition of the album. Steele decided to make sonic changes
as well, replacing the Al Sharpton-inspired tracks “Kill All The White People”
and “We Hate Everyone” with the moodier “Suspended In Dusk.” The
payoff: Bloody Kisses became TON’s first gold album. Roadrunner also
reissued Origin Of The Feces with artwork devoid of centerfolds from
Proctology Today. In sharp contrast to Kisses, Origin has since gone
linoleum.
1995: Steele – whose rugged sexuality has not gone unnoticed by scores
of black-PVC-clad porn-stars and sexually frustrated housewives – takes up
an offer to show his ladder-rung of love in the pages of Playgirl magazine.
The band members laugh themselves into pant-pissing seizures after
Hickey finds out through his publishing world contacts that 23% of the
magazine’s subscribers are female.
Soon afterwards, Steele puts on his pants to prepare a version of TON’s
“Blood and Fire” for the soundtrack to TVT’s Mortal Kombat. Much of this
year is taken up, writing, recording and making Kelly the brunt of all their
cruel jokes.
1996: Roadrunner abandons its plans for a Saturday morning kids show
starring King Diamond to release Type O Negative’s third album, October
Rust. The record is launched with the release of the metallic big-O single,
“My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend,” which is further propelled by a provocative video
lensed by twisted NYC filmmaker Richard Kern (Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch).
More extensive touring preceded and followed the release of Rust,
including dates with Ozzy and Sepultura, and a show in Cleveland where
Marilyn Manson was in the audience admiring the band’s use of onstage
snow to simulate nuclear winter. Manson spent thousands of dollars
copping the idea, much to the hysterical laughter of Type O, who merely
bought a case of expired cornflakes and made Silver paint each one
individually with typewriter correction fluid.
1997: After another bout of touring, the men of TON infiltrate the world of
movie soundtracks. The band covered Status Quo’s biggest hit, “Pictures
Of Matchstick Men,” for Howard Stern’s Private Parts bio-pic. TON’s
motor-oil saturated cover of ’70s footnote hippies Seals And Crofts’
“Summer Breeze” found its way on the soundtrack to the Jennifer
Love-Hewitt thespian-vehicle, I Know What You Did Last Summer.
1998: Babes In Toyland founder Kat Bjelland puts together a concept
album based upon the Top Cow comic series Witchblade, enlisting Steele
to be the voice of Ian Nottingham. Steele’s vocal prowess on “Go To
Sleep” makes even the heads of longtime Type O detractors swivel.
The other members of TON pursue assorted activities including auto
mechanics, scanning satellite dish networks for reruns of Punky Brewster
and going through rehab. Steele also ends up attending the funerals of
relatives and friends, an activity which will manifest itself on the album the
members are now writing.
1999: The flagship feature-film The Blair Witch Project takes America by
storm, and Type O Negative are stowaways in the ship’s bow when their
track “Haunted” is used for the film’s not-quite-soundtrack album. The band
also contribute tracks for the soundtracks to Carrie 2: The Rage (“Die With
Me”) and Bride Of Chucky (“Love You To Death”). But none of these
projects adequately prepares the record-buying universe for World Coming
Down, the band’s fourth and most punishing album. Steele’s treatises on
addiction, loss and Armageddon were bathed in sheets of Hickey’s
caterwauling feedback, Silver’s harrowing soundscapes, migraine-inducing
beats and wounded, yet seething lyrical invective.
2000: The band embarks on a tour featuring labelmates Coal Chamber and
new-school metallers Full Devil Jacket and the Deadlights. That summer,
October Rust reaches gold status. Ever the card, Steele complains that he
now owns “a pair of gold albums to serve food on, even though they don’t
match my apartment.” Drummer Kelly, always fascinated with how things
work, smashes his gold record out of the frame and actually plays it. He
learns that it’s actually a spray-painted copy of forgotten ’80s metal-disco
act Sly Fox’s only album, Let’s Go All The Way.
Roadrunner shoots down Steele’s proposal to fund a table-dancer finishing
school in his name, and the label instead compiles The Least Worst Of
Type O Negative, a remarkably cohesive overview of the band’s career.
Classic TON songs as “Unsuccessfully Coping…” “Black No. 1″ and
“Everything Dies” appear along such previously unreleased tracks as “Stay
Out Of My Dreams,” “12 Black Rainbows,” “It’s Never Enough” and a studio
version of “Hey Pete,” to satisfy both hardcore fans and armchair
needle-dicks who sold their previous TON discs
A longform home video, After Dark, was also released this year, which
featured the band’s video output, 8mm footage of transglobal shenanigans
(which includes Silver’s unusual approaches to personal hygiene and
bathroom interviewing) and staged “personal” moments.
So then, any regrets? “I regret everything,” says Josh Silver. “If you have
no regrets, it means you never accomplished anything in the first place.”
Here’s to ten more years for none more negative.
**NOTE: If I knew all that stuff…I would have written it myself. 
~ Carrie
