This has been an intense and gratifying year with the album finally coming out. Bedemon is on hold during this time as we consider the possibilities and logistics of both recording another album and putting a live version of the band together to perform some gigs in 2013.
I’ve read the band’s biography and it seems a miracle that you’re going strong today! You started Bedemon in 70s and then disbanded in 1986 leaving only one tape and then bang! Bedemon is reborn 15 years later under really mysterious circumstances. Why was Bedemon disbanded? Where have you been all this time?
The single most misunderstood fact about Bedemon is that it was never a band in the conventional sense; it was strictly a recording project. Randy Palmer was a big fan of Pentagram and also good friends of both vocalist Bobby Liebling and myself. Randy would sit home with his guitar and write these Black Sabbath-influenced, doomy, original songs, and in 1973, he asked if Bobby and I would play on them (along with his friend bassist Mike Matthews) and if I could record them.
We would meet at the warehouse where Pentagram rehearsed, and in a few hours, we’d record two or three new songs. This would only happen maybe once or twice a year, and between 1973 and 1979, we'd recorded a total of fifteen songs. So, we really only got together as "Bedemon" maybe five or six times over a six-year period. There was never any talk of playing gigs or rehearsing, as it was never considered a band in the way Pentagram was (and it should be mentioned that Randy himself joined Pentagram for two brief periods in 1974 playing rhythm guitar and appears on some of the Pentagram studio recordings of that time). After years of being bootlegged and passed around by fans, all fifteen of the Bedemon tracks were released in December 2005 as Child of Darkness: From the Original Master Tapes.
There were no more recordings until 1986. Mike had moved away, and so former Pentagram bassist Greg Mayne and guitarist Norman Lawson (who was also briefly in Pentagram) got together with Randy and myself at Greg's house where he had a basement studio. We recorded five songs, including two takes of a new track of Randy's called "Night of the Demon." We never added vocals to any of these recordings — I don't remember why — and that was the last Bedemon recording session until 2002.
So, the band didn't "disband" in 1986 because, well, we weren't a band to begin with! There is also an incorrect belief that we officially released these 1986 songs, which as I mentioned, didn't even have vocals. We never, repeat, never released them or anything else until the 2005 Child of Darkness collection; anything else that was around on CD or vinyl before that was a bootleg that we had nothing to do with and saw no money from.
In 1988, I moved to California, Randy eventually moved to his mother's in North Carolina and Mike wound up in Arizona.
What motivated you to regroup under this title and what was your line-up after the reunion?
In 2001, a writer named Perry Grayson (also a guitarist in the band Falcon) was writing an article on Pentagram but wanted to focus largely on Bedemon. He interviewed Randy, Mike and myself and the article appeared in Metal Maniacs. Randy was surprised to find out online that there was such interest in Bedemon, and this inspired us to decide to record a "proper" real album. We spent 2001 working on demos and shared them with each other to decide what songs to record, and in April 2002, Randy and Mike travelled to my place where we recorded the basic tracks and most of the guitar solos over a six-day period.
What we didn't have was a singer. Randy considered working with Pentagram vocalist Bobby Liebling again but he was reluctant for two reasons: first, he thought his vocal style had changed over the years based on recent Pentagram releases, and Randy also knew if he was working closely with Bobby, he would be tempted to fall back into using the hard drugs he was trying to stay away from.
Shawn Hafley, the engineer who recorded the vocals on the new album and mixed this project was working at a local indie record shop called Boo Boo's Records in San Luis Obispo. He mentioned that the manager of their other location was a great singer and that I should check him out, so I met Craig Junghandel for the first time on June 14, 2002. He played me tapes of him with cover bands singing Sabbath, Priest and so on, and he was great. I sent the samples off to Randy and Mike; we agreed Craig was the perfect vocalist for this project. Sadly, Randy died before Craig ever got to even speak with him on the phone, much less meet him in person.
You recorded a solid full-length version of “Symphony of Shadows” in 2002 and yet waited ten years for it to be published! What slowed down the process of making this album?
Three months after we recorded the basic tracks, Randy was involved in a bad auto accident on July 31, 2002. He died one week later on August 8. Mike and I decided the very next day that we would finish the recordings, both as a tribute to him and also because we knew how strong the material was. It took a few years to begin to re-focus, both emotionally and musically, and there were numerous things going on in our own lives that delayed getting back to work on the sessions. Recording the vocals, adding some guitar parts, mixing, mastering, getting the artwork, writing the lengthy liner notes together—all of this took time in between things going on in our regular lives, and Shawn had other projects booked into his studio so we had to work around those as well.
Yet you released “Child of Darkness: From the Original Master Tapes” in 2005, and it was the first official release from Bedemon. Did you really keep all these tracks somewhere in a cellar, waiting to see the light of day?
Yes, the original recordings are on a 7" tape reel. Randy gave it to me after I transferred it to cassette for him back in the 80s.
You were at the very roots of the American Doom scene in 70s. Did you keep track of the scene over time? Do you like modern styles of Doom and do you feel that your music is still relevant after all these years?
With Bedemon not really being a band, I'd have to answer this from my five-year experience with Pentagram. Yes, we felt quite relevant in the music we were writing and recording as
