It’s Tuesday, May 10. After fighting a nasty bug on and off for the better part of two weeks, I’m now sitting behind a computer screen, awaiting the arrival of one of American metal’s finest voices with full blown COVID. My throat hurts, my head is pounding, and I’m running a fever of 101, but I can’t let that show. After all, this isn’t just any old metal singer. It’s Harry “The Tyrant” Conklin of Jag Panzer, or as he reminds me for this interview, Leviathan Thasiren of Satan’s Host. Conklin’s “Harder than Steel” attitude powered me through the 30 minute conversation, which touches Satan’s Host latest album, This Legacy Never Dies, the futures of Jag Panzer and Titan Force, and even his brief stint in the legendary Riot. “Headbangers, one and all”, this interview is “aiming to please”!
Greetings Harry and welcome to Defenders of the Faith! How are you doing today?
Harry “The Tyrant” Conklin: I’m doing well! And I’m also known as, Leviathan Thisiren *screams* *laughs*!
I guess we’ll start there! I know everyone in Satan’s Host has an alias and alter ego. How was Leviathan Thasiren born?
HC: I was doing the “Strongest of the Night” scream for the Metal from Hell album a long time ago. My voice was really tired. It was the end of the day, but they said, “Man, we know you still got a couple of screams in there. All you gotta do now on the album is scream.” That’s the worst thing to do when your voice is tired *laughs*. So I did this scream that glissés, but my voice cracked into this weird Mariah Carey squeal. Then, for some reason, I just relaxed it and I brought it down, so it ended like that. Everybody was like, “What the hell was that?!” I was like, “Dude, I’ll probably never replicate that again in my life.” It was an accident that happened. There was a whistle in my voice. My vocal cords were stressed so bad that they just collapsed and turned into a whistle.
So that’s where that came from. “You sounded like a siren! You’ll be Leviathan Thasiren!” At first I was, “Thesiren”, t-h-e siren. But then I was like, “Nah, let’s turn it into something darker and give it some mysticism. Let’s call it t-h-a siren.” So instead of Thesiren, it became Thasiren. That’s where it came from, the siren scream on “Strongest of the Night” on Metal from Hell. That was 198…*laughs* way back in the day!
And the rest is history! I’d like to start by congratulating you on the latest album, This Legacy Never Dies. Satan’s Host has been consistently releasing new music ever since you rejoined the band in 2009. How did this most recent effort come about?
HC: This was supposed to be recorded and released five years ago. What happened was I moved to Greece and then the pandemic happened, so it stalled the project quite a bit. Our sound engineer that was recording the project and engineering it has an immune deficiency, so he was deathly afraid of people coming to his house, masked or not masked. He didn’t even go out, so we were down for a long period of time. I had just cut my vocals, but didn’t realize that I cut my vocals to unedited drum tracks.
So when my vocals were down, I always sing them to a click track, along with the drums that are recorded and the guitars that’s recorded. Usually it’s a scratch rhythm guitar because all I need is pitch. What happened was that after they edited the drums, they slid this a little and slid that a little, and slowed down some parts actually to give it a greater, maybe Black Sabbathy, lower, doomy feel. When they did that, now my vocals, recorded to a different click track, no longer fit. But it was too expensive to fly me out from Greece back to the States to record maybe 10 hours of vocals.
We ended up throwing a couple of songs out. “Lady in the Flame” didn’t even make it at all. The vocals were so bad out of time. It wasn’t just out of time by a second or a second and a half. It jumped around. That’s what made it so difficult, even though it was digitally recorded and the vocals were on digital platforms. You could cut pieces and slide them into perfect times and get it to fit, but some of these pieces were in the middle of phrases. I’d have to recut the vocals completely. They just couldn’t be slid around. You couldn’t just slide the chorus back a second and a half, or the verse up a second and a half. It was in between phrases that the timing was off.
So we had to ditch “Lady in the Flame” completely. That may come on the next album. There were a couple of timing issues. I don’t know if anyone that’s not in the band can tell, but there’s a couple of vocal timing issues in the beginning of one of the songs. I’m not gonna say which one it is because I don’t want everybody saying, “Oh wow! I didn’t think that was a timing issue!” because it jazzes up the part. To me, when you lay something down and know how it goes, and then you hear it post-production and it’s not the way you envisioned because of other certain things, you just gotta go, “It’s the best it can be.”
Which is what this album is. I think it’s the best of our abilities so far. I’m using voices that I’ve never used before. I’m layering death metal voices that I’ve never layered before. My choirs are bigger and richer. They’re more classically oriented, choir patches. There are parts of the guitars and the rhythm guitars that are places that he’s (Patrick Evil) never gone before. Some of these epic 7 minute songs really have to be 7 minutes. Like a Rush song, there’s 5 or 6 different entities to it. But yeah, this thing should’ve been done years ago, but the pandemic drastically slowed it down, so it turned into a project that was originally a year and a half to almost 5 to 6 years before it was finally released.
When it came time to record the album, had it been written for a while?
HC: Yeah, all this stuff had been written. Actually, we had been playing some of the songs at some of our live local events. When we’d play a bar, we’d add “Dead Man’s Walk”, which originally was called “13 Knots”. We came up with that “Dead man’s walk!” in the chorus, so we figured we’d just rename it. We had been playing some of these, like “Mysticum”, live for a year and a half, until we finally said we need to either shit or get off the pot. We need to seriously need to think about recording this.
We had recorded our previous albums with Dave Otero from Flatline Studio, but Dave was pretty busy at that time with other bands. He was doing a new Cattle Decapitation album, so we didn’t know how we’d be able to fit into it. Dave, at that time, hadn’t recorded a lot of clean vocals. I had been around a lot of engineers that knew how to record clean vocals. They gave it a certain edge. Dave would always smooth my vocals over. They sounded great, but they didn’t have that edge. That Chris Cornell, Ronnie James Dio, Rob Halford edge to it; this brightness, this shrillness.
I wanted to capture that, so we went with this other guy who had the gear and knew how to capture that on my vocals. Originally, they were set to record all the music with Dave, I would record my vocals at a different studio, and we’d put it together. But it didn’t work out that way because this new guy wanted to record the whole thing. Then the pandemic slowed it down, and instead of being released, it just drug on forever.
When it comes to writing a Satan’s Host album, who handles what in terms of music, lyrics, arrangements, etc.?
HC: Well usually it’s Pat who comes up with all the guitar riffs and he’ll compose the whole song. Since we’re a jam band, we always jam all the time, or at least we used to before I moved to Greece a couple years ago. We’d get together and we’d just jam, so sometimes during a jam, he would put together something he was working on and it would turn into a song. Then we would formulate all the drum parts and vocal parts. I’d do some scat thing, but usually it all stems from Pat.
Lyrically, it will start with Pat, but sometimes Pat says, “I don’t want this to be a real demonic song. I want it to be more mainstream.”, so he’ll ask me to do the lyrics on it. I did all the lyrics to “Dichotomy”, “Fallen Angel”. If something is more mainstream, he’ll hand it to me, but mainly all the lyrics are done between Pat and Anthony Lopez (Evil Hobbit). They really have a deep knowledge of dark magic.
Considering the chaotic global events of recent years, is it easy for the band to find inspiration for new music these days?
HC: Oh yeah *laughs*! Anything that’s politically nasty in the world or is brought down in the world is everything that’s brought up in Satan’s Host. We like to make fun of the downplay of what’s happening in the world, so yeah, it fueled a lot of our energy.
We mentioned it a bit earlier, but the cool thing about Satan’s Host is that it showcases your full vocal range in ways other projects wouldn’t, from operatic screams to harsh gutturals. Do you have a preference between the two styles?
HC: Not really because I’m a singer that molds myself to whatever project I’m working with. I’ll listen to the music that’s given to me and I’ll just sing something out. Usually with Jag Panzer, I have a certain persona with that band because of the music that’s created. Same thing with Titan Force. Musically, it’s more progressive, so I’ll have a cleaner, thinner tone to my voice. With Satan’s Host, it goes so many different directions, even in one song.
We’ll start out the song kind of mellow. Then it’ll go into something heavy. Then it’ll go into blastbeats. Then it’ll go into doom. I need to make myself flexible to basically have multiple personalities within one song. Satan’s Host allows me to go new places, and challenge me too! A lot of these voices I’ve never done before. I was like, “Let’s try this and see if it works.” Some do, some don’t. But most of the time, everything I do seems to work really well.
We’ll do super, super deep growl vocals, but then I’ll do a mid, and then I’ll do a high, and then I might even do a clean vocal over that, all at the same time, so you’ve got all these layers of vocals that I’ve built through the years; through Satan’s Host being such a great band and the musicianship being so awesome and top notch. I can let my vocals soar to places I’ve never been before.
What led to you rejoining the band? Was it a matter of feeling things didn’t end properly in the 80s?
HC: Yes and no. We had a label fallout. The label that was supporting the band fell out. We also had band member changes. The drummer at the time (D. Lucifer Stele) was having family problems and battling alcoholism, so the band wasn’t really growing. It was a two year period where we really hadn’t written anything. It took us a long time, but we completed an album (Midnight Wind), but never released it. The label went down, so since we were having problems, we said let’s take a hiatus.
We never really thought of breaking up the band, but then at the same time, I was always in touch with my other friends. I’d go back into Titan Force and do stuff for them, while waiting for Satan’s Host to do something. Then I got solid into Titan Force and they were touring. Pat made Psychonaut with his band. Then he turned Psychonaut back into Satan’s Host with Eli Elixir. That was the time I was back in Jag Panzer with the resurgence of The Fourth Judgement (1997), Thane to the Throne (2000), Mechanized Warfare (2001), Casting the Stones (2004), and that whole era.
Usually when there’s massive downtime in between bands, or big songwriting lapses, I’ll keep myself busy and call up these other bands and say, “Hey! What do you got going on? Any new songs? Any new material I can help out with?” Most of the time that turns into an album, but sometimes it actually turns into a career move.
Speaking of those other bands, I’ve heard reports that Jag Panzer is busy at work on a new album. How far is the band into it and when can we expect a release?
HC: Well we just finished the demo on the complete album. It’s gonna be a concept album. What we did this time was we finished the demo completely. Any segues in between songs, any musical pieces in between songs, any narration, all that is done. Now we have the complete album done and mapped out. All we need to do is go back in and record it properly. We did all that digitally and we’re gonna go back in and record it analog, so it will have a larger sound.
Everything’s done. We’re waiting for just the drums to be recorded next month. Then I’ll fly to Colorado to record my vocals all the month of July. If I’m done early with my vocals, I’ll probably revisit the guys in Satan’s Host and see what they’re doing. Maybe we’ll even set up a show or a release party for the album that just came out. Then I’ll fly back here and get ready to probably tour and support the album. But yeah, it’s all ready to be recorded.
It’s also been almost a decade since you rejoined Titan Force. Since reforming, has there ever been talk of new music with them?
HC: Yeah, there was. We were working on new music. Then all of a sudden it just halted. There was a lot of family deaths and problems that caused a lot of ill feelings, and people need time to get over these feelings of loss. Losing your dog, losing your mom, losing your cousin, it’s terrible. A couple other members of Titan Force are actually jazz musicians in their local town, so it’s rough for them to take off any long time to record an album, or to even write material, when they’re gigging all the time, three, four, five days out of the week.
We had about 7 songs, 5 with vocals and two that were ready. Then it just stopped. I had no communication with anybody in the band for almost a year. I had to move on, so that’s when I started recording with Satan’s Host, and still nothing yet. We’ve got a Titan Force show coming up in Athens here in about a month and a half. I’m gonna be seeing the guys again. We’re gonna do one new song that we played before at Up the Hammers about 3 and a half, 4 years ago, and that’s it. So I’ll ask the guys, “Are we gonna move forward with something?” The Jag Panzer album will be done then. Maybe there’ll be another Satan’s Host album in the works, but we’ll see. We don’t like to push it too hard. We like the album to get out there and sell a little bit before we throw another one out.
Does it ever amaze you to have been part of so many amazing bands for so long? In the case of Jag Panzer, it’s been over 40 years now and you’re still touring and recording stronger than ever. Did you ever imagine back then that you’d be singing this far into your career?
HC: Back then and in the Ample Destruction days, I thought by the time I hit 55 I’d be dead *laughs*! I saw myself as a big time rockstar. That was my goal and vision. I wanted to go, go, go and do, do, do, but some of the other guys didn’t for other reasons. So you had to say “no” to gigs and “no” to tours and “no” to this and “no” to that. Back then, when you said “no” too much, they grabbed somebody that was willing to say yes. Most of my career has been making albums and doing little short tours, but it’s never been the really long tours.
With Iced Earth, we’d do 21 days and they’d ask, “Can you do the second leg?” A couple members of the band would say, “No, we can’t do it.” So there was some missed opportunities. Or we’d go out with Satan’s Host. They’d say, “Hey, we have a chance for you to get on this tour.” Back then, it was with any band *laughs*. Anthrax was really big. We’d do a few dates with Anthrax and then they’d ask, “Can you continue on the leg?” A couple members would say, “No, my daytime job only gave me this certain amount of time. I can’t afford to lose my daytime job. I can’t pursue my career.”
Those types of things pulled you back in a sense, but I’ve always been creative. The guys in all these bands, I grew up with them. The guys in Satan’s Host used to come down to the Jag Panzer gigs in Colorado Springs because they lived up in Denver an hour away. They used to always come down with the gigs and party with me after, or drag me back up and have me write songs like “King of Terror” and “Metal from Hell”. Now it’s been a lifelong thing with all these bands. Like I said, I thought I’d be dead. Now here I am at 60 and I’m still able to sing. As long as I can go and my voice doesn’t start crapping out, then I’m gonna keep going. As long as I can still produce what I need to produce. Once I get to that point where I can’t do things that I need to do, then that’s when I’ll force myself into retirement.
I hate it when I see other people that I really love and they accidentally put on a bad performance. For this reason or that reason, these guys are people that I looked up to. If I see them and say, “Ah, they had a rough night.” Then I see them again and yeah, that WAS just a rough night. But if you see them again and again and it doesn’t seem to get better, and it’s continuing on, I don’t want to be that guy. I want to be the type of a guy that goes out with a bang, that leads the people to the best of his ability and just says, “Hey, I’m 70! *laughs* I just can’t hit those *screams* anymore.”
I want to ask you about your brief involvement with Riot. How did you end up getting that gig and why ultimately did it not last?
HC: I was a fan of Don Van Stavern and Mark Reale. They really liked what I was doing with Jag Panzer. They had a few songs where they didn’t have a singer at the time and they had a few songs that they wanted to write. I said, “If you can get me on a flight up to New York, I can spend a week with you and see if these songs pan out. If you and your engineer like me later on, we can try and get together for a tour.” So that’s what happened. I went up to his (Mark Reale’s) parents house. I spent a week with them.
We went to Greene Street Studios and ended up just doing two songs. One song was “Magic Maker”, that Rhett Forrester did earlier, and then “Medicine Man” which was a new one. He wanted to adopt a third and fourth song, but we just didn’t have time to get those songs together. The studio was in the heart of New York, so it cost us money to get there, parking and all that stuff. Plus, we had 2 or 3 hours a day that was slotted out that he could get free studio time from this guy. Greene Street Studios is a famed studio, so they wanted to keep the business going. This guy says, “I can fit you in from 10 to midnight. It’ll be free of charge, but anything else we need to charge you.”
So that’s what we did. We went to the studio about 4, 5 days and crammed these two songs in. I thought they were great. Everybody thought they were great, but a lot of time went by, almost two years, before anything happened. Then he called me up and I was doing a show with Jag Panzer, or I had set up a show with Jag Panzer. He said, “Can I fly you out to San Antonio, Texas? We’ll meet with the guys, see what’s going on, you can learn some songs, and we’ll do a couple shows.” I said, “Great!” So we did a couple shows and everybody liked us. They liked what I did and what I could bring to the band. I was starting to learn the repertoire. I had about 8 songs under my belt, but I was learning more.
Then all of a sudden, I said, “I need to fly back for this Jag Panzer gig on the 28th.” They said, “We’ll get you back, no problem.” Then something happened. They couldn’t get me back, and I couldn’t get myself back because I wasn’t getting paid from these gigs and I was staying at somebody’s house. I call up the guys in Jag Panzer, “I can’t make it back for this gig. I don’t even know if I’m gonna make it back at all. I’m in the dark. I’m stuck here in San Antonio!” They’re like, “Fuck you man!” So they got this other guy just to sit in, who really was a guitarist, just to get the gig through. He wasn’t even a singer, but he was a good friend of the band. He dressed like me and acted like me, but everyone knew it wasn’t me. That’s when they got Bob Parduba in the band to do Chain of Command.
During that time, we did a couple of shows, but the manager never really liked me. Mark Reale and I would do these blues numbers onstage. Mark was totally into playing the blues on his guitar, so I’d just start making up lyrics. We had this “Big Titty Woman” song, and another called “Rockin’ the Brew” song. It was just made up on the fly! She (Riot’s manager) fucking hated it. There was something about me that reminded her of David Lee Roth, my personality or something, and she hated that guy. She hated me!
So I wasn’t getting paid for the gigs, and I couldn’t stay with the guys. They made me stay in San Bernardino, California, which was almost a 45 minute drive, which sometimes could be a 3 hour drive, from S.I.R. Studios. They’d tell me a week beforehand, “Hey, we’re gonna be at this studio. You gotta get yourself down here.” I’m like, “How?!” I don’t have a motorcycle. I don’t have a car. A couple of times I was late to the studio by 2 hours, trying to get a ride or taxi or something. She didn’t like that either. So I only did a couple of shows with them and then I was like, “Fuck this. If I’m not getting paid, fuck it.”
I started drinking after the shows. One time I got really drunk and they said, “We got this show in two days!” I said, “Why didn’t you tell me about it? I wouldn’t have gotten plastered the night before!” It was the night at the Whisky. I made it through the show. My voice was kind of crappy, but I made it through the show. Everybody was happy. We got tons of applause. I said, “I can’t do this. I’m done. I hate this.” Mark and Donnie were great. Sandy Slavin was great, but his wife was a total bitch. I hated her. I couldn’t do it. So I headed back to Colorado Springs and called it quits.
A lot of the press came out because Sandy’s wife was the promoter and whatnot. They depicted me as this alcoholic who couldn’t do the shows, whose voice was cutting out. There’s no video proof of that. To this day, whenever Riot V comes to gigs and we meet up, I’m always, “Hey Donnie! What’s going on?” They always ask me up onstage. They recently just played here in Thessaloniki last year. They got my wife in free, my daughter in free. We got her up onstage. We did “Medicine Man” and “Magic Maker”. I came up again for “Swords and Tequila”.
We all love the guys and it’s a great thing, but it was kind of an accident because they were fans of me and I was fans of them since the Narita days. It didn’t work out because of bad management. They had it in for me. When you do these gigs and you’re expecting to get paid and you don’t get paid anything and you’re sleeping over at peoples houses, only to pack up your stuff and go to somebody else’s house the next night, you feel like you’re being mistreated. That’s what happened.
Were there any other bands you almost sang for that didn’t pan out for whatever reason or another?
HC: I was asked to sing for Fifth Angel about three years ago. That’s just because the guy has a great voice and he sounds a lot like Dio. He writes all the material, but he doesn’t like his voice live. He feel that he doesn’t have enough stamina to do it live, so he asked me if I could do this. I started with the project, but then Satan’s Host had another album coming out. I said, “I can’t do this. I’m dedicated to this other band.” At the time, we were contracted for the album, which was Pre-dating God, which turned out to be two albums. I told them, “I can’t pursue this. I’m sorry.” He was like, “Can you cover for me when we play live?” I said, “Sure! Let me know when you’re playing live gigs and I’ll cover for you live.”
Well, he built up his stamina someway and he decided he’d be the singer of the band. That’s the only other band I was asked to sing for. I’ve done other stuff, like at the KIT festivals. I’d get up onstage and do tributes to people. I did a Midnight tribute and sang “Lonely” from Crimson Glory. But yeah, I’ve never been asked to sing for anyone else. I’ve asked out of respect for Jag Panzer, Satan’s Host, and Titan Force. They don’t want to see their bands get flushed down the toilet *laughs* because I’m singing for somebody else. Maybe that’s it.
I have done some project work for other people. Till (Oberboßel) from Elvenpath, I’ve done some stuff for him. I’ve done guest vocals and lead vocals on some of their songs. The Three Tremors turned out to be a project which actually turned into a second album. They’re well respected by all my bands. We make sure we don’t step on each other’s feet.
I know you mentioned the upcoming Titan Force show and new Jag Panzer album. What else does 2022 hold for you? Are there any more shows planned for the euro circuit or perhaps here in the States?
HC: We had a chance to do some festivals here in place of another band through Dragon Management, but those dates happened to be the time we’re recording and mixing down the album for Jag Panzer. We had to let those go, but as soon as we get through this album, Satan’s Host is gonna support their album. They have plans on getting out. Jag Panzer had plans on doing a tour before this pandemic shut us down. We’ve got fans that are crying and promoters that are dying to have us. As soon as we can get this album out of the way, if we have time to hit these festivals and do tours, we’ll do it. That’s our main focus, to get out on the road and start playing in front of people again.
The new Satan’s Host album, This Legacy Never Dies, is available now on Moribund Records. For more information on Satan’s Host, visit www.satanshost.com. For more information on Jag Panzer, visit www.jagpanzer.com. For more information on Titan Force, visit www.facebook.com/TitanForceOfficial.