Dan Lilker is one of those rare figures whose career traverses the entirety of extreme metal. As a founding member of Anthrax, he helped usher in the thrash explosion of the ’80s. A few years later, he’d pioneer crossover with S.O.D. and Nuclear Assault. Come the early ’90s, he’d find himself in the depths of deathgrind, dominating the decade with Brutal Truth. And we haven’t even mentioned Exit-13, The Ravenous, Extra Hot Sauce…hell, it’d be easier to list the bands Lilker hasn’t played with. Taking on the Herculean task of chronicling such a storied career is author Dave Hofer, who encapsulated 40 years of extreme metal history in the book Perpetual Conversion. We sat down with Lilker and Hofer to discuss the making of this book, old school zines, and the punk vs. metal schism.
Greetings Dan and Dave! welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing tonight?
Dan Lilker: Hello! I’m good. It’s funny when people list the whole repertoire of my stuff because with most bands it’s like, “Kerry King from Slayer”! I usually get a lot of commas. It’s great *laughs*.
Dave Hofer: I’m good, thanks. I appreciate it.
I appreciate both of you taking the time to do this interview. Dan, I must start with a bit of a personal story. Are you familiar with a newer death metal band by the name of Molder?
DL: Molder? Is it spelled like the X Files chick or something?
No, it’s “M-o-l-d-e-r”.
DL: That makes more sense in a death metal way. Honestly, I can’t say I am.
The only reason I ask is because their singer/guitarist, Aaren Pantke, is one of my best friends. When he was 16, he smoked an ounce of weed with you outside Reggies when Nuclear Assault played there about 10 years ago. He wanted me to let you know it was a formative experience and that you’re awesome.
DL: Wow! Well, that’s cool. Even better that he remembered that day because I certainly don’t *laughs*. An ounce? I’m sure we had some help then, because I don’t think I could’ve gone onstage unless I was one of many people in some circle. Yeah, thanks dude! I remember…kind of.
DH: I know Aaren and the Molder guys. We’re all Chicago buds.
I’m in Chicago too!
DH: Oh! How about that? See you soon!
Dan said we were gonna go on a Chicago tangent, but we’ll save that for later. Ten years since its initial publication, Perpetual Conversion, is receiving a much anticipated second edition. Dan and Dave, how did you two first meet and what events took place that led to the making of this book?
DL: Do you wanna take that one?
DH: Sure *laughs*. Long story short, I ended up going out with the reformed Brutal Truth on tour as their merch guy in 2007. In 2008, I suggested, “If you had a book, Dan Lilker, I would read that book.” I had some writing experience under my belt for Metal Maniacs and some other publications. I pitched the idea and six years later, it got published by Handshake Inc.
From what I’m aware, the book has been out of print for about five years now?
DH: Something like that.
Dan, considering the reputation of “rockstar” autobiographies and biographies in general, did you have any apprehension towards having a book of your own?
DL: Not really. I didn’t think that people would think that because I had a biography that I thought that my shit didn’t stink or I was someone special because I think people know I’m not like that. Now, of course, I’ve known a lot of people who’ve put out books. People have different reputations for different reasons and everything like that. The only apprehension I had was, “Oh no, now everyone’s gonna be talking about me.”, like we’re fucking doing right now *laughs*. Yeah, that’s really it.
Seriously, no. I didn’t say, “Uh oh, people are gonna get the wrong idea and think that I’m special.” A lot of people, and I’ve seen reviews, have had a positive spin on it. A lot of people who will not be named, or other people who have put out books like red headed guitar players in groups that are in the Big Four who said, “I like your book better Danny because there’s less derision.” *laughs*
What’s unique about Perpetual Conversion is the way it is formatted in the manner of an old school zine. Dan and Dave, what were your favorite zines back in the day?
DL: First of all, I was only kidding Dave (Mustaine). Not you, the other Dave that was mentioned. Well, back when I started getting into metal, I had to get into punk rock to see what qualified as a zine, because otherwise I was just seeing stuff at news stands like Creem and Hit Parader. This is before the age of Metal Maniacs and Pit Magazine and stuff like that. It made sense for the music I was listening to because if I wanted to read an article about KISS in 1977, I could by just going to the news stand.
As far as proper zines that had a lot more fierce dedication and an underground aesthetic, that would’ve started with Maximum Rocknroll and hardcore zines. Even if some of them were opinionated to the point of being annoying, at least they stood firm in their beliefs. Then, metal got to the point where there was tons of underground, and really old ones too, like Kick-Ass Monthly and all that stuff that was around for ages. I should include those, the old staple in the corner ones. Shit like that, too much to mention. I could go through shoe boxes of ’em now and go, “I should’ve thought of that one.”
DH: I second the Maximum Rocknroll thing. I’m a little bit younger, so there was Pit and Metal Maniacs. Metal Maniacs you could find on some regular news stands sometimes depending on your location. Maybe because I was in the Chicago suburbs, there was wider distribution or something? I don’t know. I pretty much worshipped Metal Maniacs, then got to write for them for the last couple years of their existence, which was very special to me.
Maximum Rocknroll was the big one. I would get those through my sister and it was very eye opening. That’s when I was first buying things from Action Records in Boston, Anal Cunt 7 inches and various Psycho related bands. Shit like that, when you would buy things based off of the names. I’ll give a shoutout to the local Chicago zines that were also more punk oriented at the time. My friend Mike did a zine called Spontaneous Combustion, which is where I got my start writing. There was a record label and collective called Underdog Records. They did a zine called Underdog Zine that my sister wrote for. Those were all special to me too.
That brings up an interesting point, which is this idea of “crossover”. We look at a band like S.O.D. being early progenitors of the movement. Dan, when you were getting zines like Maximum Rocknroll, was it “taboo”, and by that do I mean was there a rift between the punk and metal communities? Dave, you too, what was your view of the punk vs. metal dynamic in your scene?
DL: I don’t think on the metal side of things they had anything against punk people. On the other side, I just think some of the people in the hardcore scene were a little suspicious at first. They were worried about it getting exploited or something like, “You’re not really into the message behind it. You just want to run in a circle.” With some people, that was true! Hey, we’re from New Jersey *laughs*! That’s an east coast joke.
The more you kept going to CBGB’s and checking out the bands every week, the more the people realized that you were obviously genuinely into it by then and weren’t just going there to look cool or anything like that. Of course, that was before the age of selfies anyway. What are you gonna do? Have a disposable camera? *laughs* Anyway, by the time Nuclear Assault ended up playing CBGB’s with hardcore bands, everybody was just like, “Oh, that’s Danny and John’s (Connelly) band.” As far as any animosity between the punk and metal scenes, no. There could be a particular asshole on either side, but there’s assholes everywhere. That’s all.
DH: Again, I’m a little bit younger and come from the Midwest, which is a little bit more of a melting pot. By the time I was starting to get into underground music in the early to mid ’90s, things were already melded by that point. Maybe not to the point that they are now or continued to be through the ’90s, but it never crossed my mind once that it would be weird to listen to Naked Raygun and Deicide. Who gives a fuck?
I couldn’t agree more. Naked Raygun, hometown boys!
DH: Oh yeah!
Dave, what is the most surprising thing you learned about Dan when assembling this book? Dan, are there any particular memories or stories you may have forgotten about until this book came together?
DH: From my perspective, I was essentially a stranger to all of these guys, Danny included. I knew Kevin (Sharp) a little bit from Chicago, but not really. It kind of dawned on me the first time I went out with them, I don’t know, probably 70 seconds away from meeting Dan for the first time, “Oh, this is the same guy from the S.O.D. Live at Budokan video that I watched every fucking day after school for a six month period.”
DL: That’s why you failed.
DH: *laughs* We watched those interview segments like crazy, so I felt like I kind of had an idea personality-wise what Dan was like, but then I guess I just wasn’t really surprised. What you see is what you get. He’s very funny, a great musician. I feel like there were a few things, I don’t wanna say we bonded over, but we had in common. We’re both cat owners. We both love Macabre from Chicago. That was revealed. Stupid shit like that. Same sense of humor, dark and silly.
DL: Was there anything I forgot to mention when we did all the interviews? I don’t know man. This updated version of the book is mostly updated graphically, if you will, like when I played with Anthrax in the spring, there’s a picture onstage from Chile. There was a festival in Finland that was called Lilker Fest that I went and did. There’s a full page picture of that, but the first time edition of the book, when everything that Dave and I did to set it up, which was basically he’d fly out to Rochester from Chicago for extended weekends and just scrub my brain for four days, I think we were pretty thorough.
Anything that had happened since then, that’s the good thing about the internet. If you were really gonna fucking worry about updating stuff, then you can have a companion website and go, “Oh, Danny’s not in Blurring anymore.”, or whatever. Most of my musical endeavors wrapped up when Nuclear Assault stopped doing stuff in 2022. Even then, that was just occasional shows. I didn’t think it was necessary, “Well, now it’s ten years later.” Then, you have to start years before that if you want to be thorough about it. To me, it would’ve been enough for another half chapter? I don’t know. I think we got shit covered.
A lot has happened in the past decade since the initial release of Perpetual Conversion. Perhaps most noteworthy was the splits of both Brutal Truth and Nuclear Assault. At this point, do you see any avenues in which either band could reunite, or are you content with the legacy both created?
DL: I would say the latter, for sure. It would be…first of all, logistics would be a nightmare to make that kind of shit work anyway. Sometimes, it’s good to just say, “Well, it’s better to go out like we did.” I don’t see any realistic avenue for either of those bands to ever do a show again with whatever lineup, and I think that’s just fine. I know that there’s people who would love to see that stuff live again and people who weren’t around in 1989 or whatever like that. I apologize to them. You’re gonna have to do with YouTube and a big sound bar I guess *laughs*. That’s pretty much where that is.
Well, Nuclear Assault and Mercyful Fate were the reason I flew out to Psycho Las Vegas a couple years ago, and it was well worth the voyage. It was brutal.
DL: Yeah, that was the fucking pool stage. That was brutal.
Yeah, I just remember being against the barrier, people in their swimsuits crowd surfing above me and diving into the pool behind me. It was a once in a lifetime experience.
DL: Yeah, that’s when I drank daiquiris onstage because your craft beer is just gonna get warm as piss, but what happened with the daiquiri is just all the blended stuff fucking melted *laughs*. It was a violently alcoholic fruit punch that was also quenching in its own pleasing way. That was great. I remember going, “Huh, it’s still kind of good! I guess it’s room temperature, even if it’s 90!” *laughs*
It was a scorcher! Amongst the new features in this second edition is a foreword from At the Gates vocalist, Tomas Lindberg. Dan, when did you first cross paths with Tomas? Dave, why Tomas to pen the forward?
DL: I probably would’ve first met him on a tour that Brutal Truth did in Europe with Pungent Stench and a certain band from Chicago called Macabre, which would’ve been May, ’94. We played in Gothenburg. I think I probably met him for the first time then, so that’s 30 years ago. Obviously, I’ve done a couple of tours when Tomas was singing for Lock Up and Shane (Embury) couldn’t make it, so I’ve shared the stage with him a bunch of times too. It was great that he wrote the foreword because he understands me.
DH: The last time I was in Rochester, whatever year ago, I had suggested, if we want to update this book but not have to *laughs* not to sound lazy, but like what Danny was saying. I didn’t feel the need or desire to do more interviews and then integrate those. That adds a whole level of design work and blah blah. I was just like, “What if we put some new stuff at the beginning and the end?” We wanted somebody that was friends with Dan or important to Dan for whatever reason. That would make sense in terms of his career.
We bandied about some names and Tomas was amenable to it, very much so. There was also the side thing where he was aware of the book, but there was one Lock Up show in Chicago where Dan and Tomas and Nick Barker all ended up coming over to my wife and I’s then apartment, just to catch a shower or hang out. They got to Reggies super early or something like that. I don’t know. We had met and were friendly. It all just seemed to make sense.
This book also features contributions from extreme metal staples like Fenriz, Ross Dolan, and more. Looking back on it, thrash metal became very big, very fast. By the late ’80s, even Nuclear Assault were receiving MTV airplay. Was this rampant commercialization of the music part of what subsequently attracted you to more extreme subgenres like black metal, death metal, and grindcore come the ’90s?
DL: I think I just would’ve gotten into that stuff anyway because it was how my tastes were evolving. I was always searching for something more extreme. As far as the popularity of thrash metal, Nuclear Assault, we already hit our ceiling. If you’re gonna have songs like “Hang the Pope”, you’re not gonna be Metallica. We knew that. We knew that we were on a more intense side of thrash metal that mixed a lot of hardcore in, which made sense when you saw what I pursued after that.
It just happens with any genre. It kind of gets real big and then what happens is bands, I hate to say it because I don’t want to burst peoples bubbles. I know people look up to me and form bands after that, but what happens is it ends up becoming diluted because when it first comes out, every band sounds different and unique. It’s hard to do that 25 years later. Sometimes bands just sound like an amalgamation of all the bands that they listen to. Some bands will proudly tell you that. Municipal Waste will be like, “Yep, if Nuclear Assault and D.R.I. had a love child, that would be us.” They’re totally fine with that, which I appreciate because they’re great, but yeah. I guess it got to a point where it just bored me in the late ’80s.
Dave, are there any other underground metal musicians you’d like to tackle in a book of this manner in the future? If so, who and why?
DH: Oh God. The first one that comes to mind, which would be quite an undertaking, I think, is Trey (Azagthoth) from Morbid Angel. They’re my favorite death metal band.
DL: That would be quite an undertaking.
DH: *laughs* Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. If we’re talking pure fantasy here, he’s somebody whose brain I’d love to pick and completely punish. I don’t know how receptive he would be to that. I did give him a copy of the first edition outside of the Metro, whenever they were first playing with Steve Tucker again. I had a couple copies left and was like, if nothing else, I want Trey Azagthoth to have this and receive it. Even if he was like, “I don’t want it.”, at least he saw it and took it, which was very nice.
DL: That’s cool. I’m not even sure I knew that. You might’ve told me.
DH: Oh, well, I can share with you *laughs*. I would say the other person that I would love to work on a book with is not even a metal guy, but Ben Weasel who was in a band from Chicago called Screeching Weasel. They were another complete formative years band for me. He had a column in Maximum Rocknroll and was this legendary curmudgeon. He was friends with my sister and has not written an autobiography or had a biography written about him so that’s somebody who, if nothing else, I’d love to sit down with and interview him. I don’t see that ever happening because he’s just being grumpy up in Madison, Wisconsin these days.
Stranger things have happened! Dan, you’ve managed to keep busy with a plethora of bands and projects over the years. Are there any upcoming endeavors the fans should look forward to as we approach the new year?
DL: Nothing concrete, but there’s concepts. I’m talking with Eric Burke, a good friend of mine who played guitar in the reunion Brutal Truth and Nuclear Assault stuff since the turn of the century, who’s a very talented guitarist and drummer. In this capacity, he’d be the guitar player, and a very good drummer who played in Nokturnal Hellstorm, the black metal band I played in up here, Joe (Liotni), we’re just talking about, maybe just for fun, we’d still have to get a vocalist to do something along the lines of early, primitive Napalm Death. Very simple, basic, but gut punching grindcore. Not setting the world on fire in any way, but just doing something that would be fun. Especially after having played extremely insane complex Brutal Truth grindcore, which is like backwards physics, it would be nice just to do the old 1-3-4, 1-3-4 *crash*, you know? *laughs*
In closing, in honor of Paul Di’Anno, I must ask: Iron Maiden or Killers and why?
DL: I’m gonna go with Iron Maiden, just because it has more of the necro quality and it’s the first record. Killers is still an amazing record, but they matured just to the point where it just wasn’t as dark and grim as the first record. “Phantom of the Opera” and that’s stuff, it had more of a haunting theme going on, but nothing against Killers, which is also an awesome record. If I had to pick one, absolutely the first one.
DH: I’m gonna reveal myself to be who I am. Everybody will see this as being a complete poser, but I completely missed the boat on Iron Maiden during my formative years. I don’t know. I went straight into the deep end. It was like listening to whatever was on the radio and then Deicide’s Legion. There was never any buildup. It just sort of happened that way.
DL: That’s the deep end of the pool, dude!
DH: *laughs* That’s just how it worked out, so I can’t really say with any certainty, but I will say that I did see them live and that made me understand Iron Maiden finally, years later. I’ve seen them twice now. They are a live act to behold, so that’s pretty much all I can say on that front.
The second edition of Perpetual Conversion is available now. For more information on Dave Hofer, visit www.davehofer.com.
Leave a Reply