"Crime scene teams tested the entrails - they thought they were human." How Florida became the world death metal capital in the 90s

Scott Burns remembers the first time he saw Deicide play live. The exact date has been lost to time but it was sometime the late 80s, and Scott was the engineer at Morrisound Studios in Tampa, Florida – the nexus of the state’s emerging death metal scene.

Deicide were still called Amon at the time, and were an unknown quantity, hence the fact that they were opening for local heroes Morbid Angel and Nocturnus.

“Nobody knew too much about them,” Scott says now. “They come out wearing spikes and armour, they’ve hung up these effigies of the Virgin Mary, then [singer/bassist] Glen Benton smashes them and they’re full of guts and blood and stuff. That was something to see!”

They were animal guts, but if ever something could be defined by viscera and blasphemy, it’s the Florida death metal scene. Before the late 80s, the state was most famous for long beaches, retirement villages and Disneyworld. But as the thrashers who had redefined metal in terms of speed and viciousness earlier in the decade began easing their feet off the gas, a growing pack of bands from Florida were snapping at their backs like horde of rabid zombies, bloodied entrails trailing in their wake.

“We were like, ‘Slayer brought their intensity level down, here’s a place where we can step in and next-level that,’” remembers Deicide drummer Steve Asheim. “Morbid Angel were around, Death, Obituary, Atheist - we weren’t the only people thinking it.”

In the late 80s and early 90s, the Florida death metal scene pushed music to new levels of extremity, gore and blasphemy, reshaping metal in the process. A musical bloodthirst needed sating, and the Sunshine State was sitting on gallons of the red stuff.

The phrase ‘Death Metal’ had been coined as a nifty song and demo title by far-sighted teenage San Francisco thrashers Possessed in 1984. Down in Orlando, Florida, it caught the imagination of teenage Possessed superfan Chuck Schuldiner, who soon changed the names of his bedroom project Mantas to Death.

Chuck immersed himself in the underground tape-trading circuit, sending and receiving home-dubbed cassettes of rough-edged live shows and demos – including his own – to like-minded fans around the world. He wasn’t on his own. Tampa had produced Morbid Angel, already distinguished by precocious guitar necromancer Trey Azagthoth (born George Emmanuel III).

From the same town came Celtic Frost-worshipping schoolkids Xecutioner, later to become Obituary. Sarasota had R.A.V.A.G.E., who would change their name to Atheist and bring a progressive, jazz-infused complexity to this gore-splattered form. In each case, the music they were making was raw and brutal, informed by a love of video nasties, the occult or both. 1987 would see the release of Death’s landmark debut album, Scream Bloody Gore – the record that truly announced the arrival of this mutant new strain of metal.

Chuck had relocated to California to make it, but it wasn’t long before he returned to his home state. Florida was rapidly becoming the spiritual home of this brutal new scene. The ace up its sleeve? Morrisound Studios.

Opened in 1981, this humble facility located on Tampa’s North 56th Street, between the Rhapsody Ballroom and the Trax Credit Union, had recorded virtually every style of musical genre, but by the mid-80s it was a magnet for Florida metal bands such as Savatage and Crimson Glory.

“We were like, ‘Holy shit, all this crazy shit is going on over in Tampa!’” recalls Steve Asheim, who co-founded Deicide (originally Carnage, then Amon) in nearby Clearwater in 1987. “Morrisound was already the place to go. All this heavy metal infrastructure was in place: studio, clubs, rehearsal spaces, music stores. Without that, I don’t think it could have.”

Scott Burns had been working at Morrisound Studios since 1984, but in 1988 he was asked to work on an album that would turn him into death metal’s go-to producer. Having returned from the West Coast, Chuck Schuldiner assembled a new Death line-up featuring members of OG Tampa crew Massacre.

The record they made, Leprosy, found Chuck already pushing the boundaries of the genre he’d help build. Scott Burns captured a sound as clear as it was heavy - a game-changing combination at a time when few studios understood how to make extreme metal comprehensible.

“Most people thought, ‘These guys bark like dogs and play fast, so it’s meant to sound like shit,’” reckons Scott. “From early on the death metal bands had a great sense of musicianship and technicality. We made sure the records sounded clean, because why should it sound like shit?”

No one was confusing Death with Bon Jovi or Def Leppard, but Leprosy served notice that death metal was here and it was as serious as an autopsy.

The 1980s were the era of the so-called Satanic Panic, when a self-imposed moral majority spearheaded by the PMRC decreed that metal was corrupting America’s youth. Gigs by supposedly ‘Satanic’ bands were picketed by religious protesters and stickers were plastered on the front of albums warning of profanity and sexual content. The death metal scene clearly didn’t get the memo.

While Death were already moving on from their primitive beginnings, Obituary and Morbid Angel were offering splatter movie-inspired brutality and provocative blasphemy respectively with their debut albums Slowly We Rot and Altars Of Madness, both released in 1989. But a dedication to brutality and controversy aside, all of these bands were coming at things from different angles.

“Listen to any of those first records, everybody sounded different,” attests David Vincent, who joined Morbid Angel as singer and bassist in 1986, making his debut on Altars Of Madness. Scott Burns’ work on Morbid Angel and Obituary’s debuts, cemented Morrisound’s reputation as the studio for death metal.

The run of killer first albums continued into 1990, with Atheist’s Piece Of Time and Nocturnus’s The Key adding technical, progressive dynamics and, in the case of the latter, even keyboards. Less experimental but even more astonishing, Deicide’s fiery debut confirmed that a portal to Hell had broken open in Tampa. Even at this early stage, each recording radiated a wholly distinctive force of personality.

“They were all pretty normal,” says Scott Burns of the musicians who made up the scene. “I don’t remember anybody that was like a criminal bad dude. Some were scarier than others, but I’d bring them all back to my house and have dinner with them.”

Not that there was any real camaraderie among the bands.

“We all knew each other, but it wasn’t so much about the social aspect of it,” says David Vincent. “We were really introverted. We just kept our nose to the grindstone."

Thanks to the tape-trading network, underground metal fans around the world were clued in on what was happening in Florida, and labels were quick to catch on. Death had signed to New York punk/metal label Combat for Scream Bloody Gore, while Morbid Angel had been picked up by Earache in the UK, and Obituary and Deicide had both inked deals with Roadrunner.

Inevitably, the rest of the world wanted a piece of what was happening down in Tampa. In 1990, Buffalo, New York gore merchants Cannibal Corpse made the trip south to record their impressively provocative debut album, Eaten Back To Life, returning so many times they eventually relocated to Florida.

Another Buffalo band, Malevolent Creation, had already moved to the Sunshine State. After recording 1989’s Beneath The Remains with Scott Burns in Rio De Janeiro, Sepultura made the trip up to Morrisound for 1991’s follow-up, Arise. Even grindcore trailblazers Napalm Death made the pilgrimage from Birmingham to Tampa for 1990’s death metal-indebted Harmony Corruption.

“I remember when Napalm came over, that was a good time,” says Steve Asheim. “Scott called us up, said Napalm’s coming in, they wanna hang with us. It was all about the metal, that’s what mattered. It was like a kinship, it was very cool, and the studio kind of enabled all of that.”

For all the chumminess, death metal was still shocking to the outside world. Deicide caused a venue to be shut down for a week when police suspected that ritual sacrifice had occurred during their show due to the animal guts that had been left onstage.

“Crime scene teams picked up the entrails and had them tested - they thought they were human,” laughs Steve Asheim. “Scaring the shit out of people was what we were trying to do, so we achieved that!”

By 1990, Deicide were rapidly becoming the most notorious band to emerge from the Florida scene, and Glen Benton was the provocateur-in-chief. As befits the frontman of a band whose name means ‘the killing of god’, he branded an inverted cross into his forehead.

And it wasn’t just Christians he riled. During an interview with the NME at home in Florida, he said: “I like burning rodents, burning their fucking hair off while they’re still alive”, while attempting to shoot squirrels from nearby trees.

He received death threats from radical anti-vivisection groups for his troubles, while one Deicide gig in Stockholm was abandoned after a bomb was detonated in the venue during support band Gorefest’s set (no one was hurt, and no one claimed responsibility for the bomb).

“Glen was great at that,” says Steve Asheim with no small understatement. “He knew how to wind people up for sure.”

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While the controversy was entertaining, it never quite overshadowed the music. Chuck Schuldiner, who had helped draw up the death metal blueprint in the first place, continued to push the boundaries of technical ingenuity with each successive Death album, refining it with more elegant, progressive forms. Morbid Angel, Deicide and Obituary all continued to release strong albums, while a Scott Burns production credit was still the stamp of approval for any self-respecting death metal band.

By 1993, another provocative regional scene was gathering pace in Scandinavia: black metal. This new movement, centred around bands such as Mayhem, Darkthrone and Emperor, emphasised a rawer, uglier, darker aesthetic.

These kids had grown up listening to death metal, and Trey Azagthoth’s onstage self-mutilation and Glen Benton’s confrontational Satanism undoubtedly pointed the way for black metal’s full-throated occultism and antisocial extremity, but this new scene drew a line in the sand.

Mayhem guitarist Euronymous even designed an insignia around a picture of Scott Burns with a line through it. The message was clear: death metal was yesterday’s news.

“Maybe Euronymous was onto something, perhaps the scene had become stale,” reflects Scott. “You could see with newer bands coming out: there’s the Obituary riff, there’s the Morbid Angel riff. So there was a point to what they were saying.”

If anything, the black metal scene went even further than death metal bands had, spiralling into a criminal one-upmanship that culminated in arson, assault and even murder, as these misguided misanthropes attempted to prove their ‘evil’ credentials. Steve Asheim has a theory as to why that never happened in Tampa.

“Florida is a death penalty state,” he says simply. “The law don’t fuck around in town.”

By the mid-90s, the Florida scene’s time in the spotlight had passed, but it infiltrated metal’s mainstream in subtler ways. The percussive barrage of Slipknot’s early albums bear the scene’s DNA.

“Most of my style comes straight from death metal,” late Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison once said. And where Slipknot led, countless 21st-century metal bands have followed without realising where much of the original inspiration came from.

The fortunes of the Sunshine State’s big beasts have varied since. Having left his death metal roots behind, Chuck Schuldiner put Death on ice following 1998’s progressive death metal opus The Sound Of Perseverance to focus on his other, less-deathly, band Control Denied. He passed away in 2001 aged 34 after being diagnosed with brain cancer.

Obituary broke up in 1998 (they reformed in 2003), and while Morbid Angel and Deicide have both continued to release albums, they’ve never recaptured the shock-and-awe potency of their early days. They’ve been joined by an army of soundalikes, such as Gruesome and Skeletal Remains.

Today, Steve Asheim provides a paradoxically wholesome view of the movement that spawned it all more than 35 years ago.

“Today when I run into these guys, it feels like a high school reunion,” he says. “It’s good to remember those times with those guys. It makes me feel like we had a real special thing together.”