Blowing Up Glen Benton
The unbelievable story of Deicide's rise and the night when a bomb went boom
This piece originally ran on Mike Teal's Instagram in 2019. I reran an updated version on the Metal From Home blog in 2020. As Glen Benton is back in the news, I'm publishing it for the third time in The Stacks with a fresh edit, annotations, and new information.
Someone wanted to blow up Glen Benton.
That's how the story goes, anyway. On November 25 at the Stockholm, Sweden, leg of Deicide's 1992 European tour with Atrocity and Gorefest, an explosive device was detonated. No matter who tells the tale, that part of the story remains consistent. The rest is, well, up for interpretation.
"I think it was animal activists or something," Benton, Deicide's bassist and singer, told Mark Prindle in 2004. "It wasn't really much of a bomb. I do more damage in the morning to my toilet. All it did was knock the fuckin' door off its hinge. And they make it sound like someone detonated a small nuclear device or a dirty bomb or something."
As for why "they" blew the blast out of proportion, Benton had this to say during an impromptu Q&A with fans at a 2009 concert: "It was just a record company hype." Benton then mimes a jack-off motion. "Record companies love to hype shit."
It's not just record companies, Glen. If one story can sum up the extreme metal hype cycle in the early '90s, perhaps it's this one. Not only does it feature an all-star cast of unreliable narrators unexpectedly crossing paths, but it also shines a spotlight on one of the industry's entrenched hallmarks: a supremely carny approach to button-pushing marketing.
Indeed, when it comes to early '90s metal, disinformation reigned, with dodgy labels and print-anything zines setting and inflating the legitimacy baseline for two embryonic scenes. Like Deicide's early exploits, a lot of the mythos centers on prankish bullshit and conservative-rustling kayfabe. That said, the metalheads Glen Benton would run into on Deicide's European tour had no issue escalating the mayhem until it boiled over into actual violence. But let's back up.
Deicide exploded out of the same Tampa Bay, Florida, death metal scene that reared Obituary, Morbid Angel, and Death and would later adopt Cannibal Corpse. Drummer Steve Asheim and the guitar-shredding Hoffman brothers, Eric and Brian, originally ripped it up in a Slayer disciple called Carnage. Wanting to fill out their sound, Brian answered an ad placed by bassist/vocalist Benton. Amon was born. The year? 1987. And the scene was expanding fast.
"Obituary, Morbid Angel, and Atheist were playing Masquerade in Tampa in 1987 or 1988, and it was the first time we had all played since we got our record deals. And people were flying all the way over from Europe just to see it," Atheist's Kelly Shaefer told Revolver. "We still just considered it our scene, but that was the first sign to me that it was international. And it just really grew from there."
Amon was part of the wave that pushed the boundaries of death metal, upping the extreme qualities of the music while exploring the sulfuric bottom of blasphemy during the hey-day of the Satanic Panic. The band, by all accounts, had a live show that matched the material.
"Back then I really liked filling mannequins up with raw meat," Benton recalled when asked by Revolver. "I packed one teenage mannequin full of $60 worth of chitlins and beef livers and brought it onstage. And this wasn't fresh meat. I left that shit outside in the sun to rot. A few of my friends attacked it while we were playing. Next thing you know, there was a slaughterfest of meat going everywhere. One girl started screaming, 'You're killing him!' She thought it was actually a person. The next day, the sheriff's department was in there taking samples and checking to see if they were human remains."
You can't beat the buzz sparked by shenanigans that lead to a call from the fuzz. Soon, the name Amon was creating for itself culminated in a contract from Roadrunner Records, the negotiation of which was famously recounted in Albert Mudrian's Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal & Grindcore. According to A&R guy Monte Conner, Benton barged into Conner's office with demo in hand and bellowed, "Sign us, you fucking asshole!"
Whether that's accurate or not — and Benton remembers it differently these days — it makes for a great story. It also adheres to a recognizable PR template, one the band and the label would be comfortable pursuing, turning everyone involved into press-baiting, larger-than-life figures. In that respect, Deicide and Roadrunner weren't alone in the metal world. A crew of young people who congregated at a record shop in Norway were also hard at work defining a scene, engaging in a similar brand of legend creation and theatrical tactics.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Amon changed its name at the behest of Roadrunner so the quartet wouldn't be confused with "'Amon' Belongs to 'Them'," a track off King Diamond's 1989 album Conspiracy. Deicide, the newly christened group's self-titled 1990 debut, was a monster in the realm of death metal, eventually clearing 100,000 units sold, according to a 2003 Blabbermouth tidbit on Soundscan. Legion, Deicide's follow-up and artistic high point, hit the streets on March 1, 1992.
1992 was a big year for Glen Benton, perhaps when the intimidating frontman's profile reached peak public recognition. His exposure was increased by evangelical-needling, stunt-y endeavors, such as his gonzo radio show debates with Christian opportunist Bob Larson. Justin M. Norton described these calls in Invisible Oranges as Benton doing "his best to sound like a possessed Regan in The Exorcist."
Benton found a true calling playing the Christian boogeyman. If he's known for anything outside of metal, it's for repeatedly branding an upside-down cross in the middle of his forehead. It's also frequently claimed Benton planned to kill himself at 33, purportedly as a galaxy brain bit to own Jesus. This enduring legend seems to be a conflation of Deicide's "Sacrificial Suicide" and an off-hand remark in an early profile.
"Here's the deal, man," Benton wrote in a Q&A that ran on the Earache Records website.1 "We all met with the writer and photographer for a magazine called Raw from England at their hotel in Tampa to do photos and pictures. After the photo shoot, we hit the bar to do the story. We were all talking about hypotheticals, and I mentioned that I had premonitions of dying at 33. Why did I say it? Who knows?! Did I believe that to be the outcome for myself? No. Was I drinking? Yes. Did I think that such an off-the-wall comment would last so long in the minds of people like yourself? No."
Nevertheless, Benton, ever the giddy antagonist and committed contrarian, seemed to take particular pleasure in firing off zingers that munched on the minds of many. That zeal to poke and probe taboos effortlessly freaked out the religious right, turning Benton into a death metal deity in the process. It wouldn't be the last group that he'd provoke.
Either as a way to stoke the hype fires or an instance of another poor-taste punchline taken out of context, it has been alleged that Benton engaged in animal sacrifices. This is likely a bit, but it culminated in a notorious NME interview where Benton supposedly alludes to killing a squirrel with a pellet gun. At least, that's what people remember. Curiously, the interview in question hasn't made its way to the internet.2 Still, Benton offers a stand-your-ground defense when asked about it in subsequent interviews.
"They were chewing the foam installation off my Freon line for my air conditioners," Benton explained years later. "So, all my pipes were sweating up in the attic and leaving stains on the ceilings. I got up there, got the nest down, let the babies mature and shit, let the fuckin' things get out of the house and then I blocked the hole. But there was one fuckin' squirrel in there and I couldn't get his ass out."
Benton added more context in a 1997 Terrorizer interview in a section demystifying some long-standing "tabloid journalism kinda shit:"
I remember how all that started up. I was living out in the country at the time, and where I lived we had a problem with squirrels. The squirrels here are probably different from what you're used to. They will get into your attic and will chew all the insulation off the air conditioning lines and really make a mess. They can chew right through the electrical wires in your attic and burn your f***in' house down! These squirrels were really wreaking havoc, and keeping them out was a real f***in' chore because there were so many places they could get in. Well, there was this one left, man, that was a real nuisance. All the others had moved off into other parts of the neighbourhood or whatever, but there was this one that kept getting into the f***in' house. So I'm doing a f***in' interview, and there - lo and behold! - out from my f***in' attic comes Mr f***in' Squirrel. He comes down and I'm sitting there talking to this guy and one of the guys from the record company and up comes this squirrel. I've been trying to put it into this motherf***er for goddamn f***in' years, okay, and I'm sitting there doing this interview and the squirrel comes down and sits like three feet away lookin' at me. I'm like 'Hold on a second, man' and I went and got the pellet gun and came out and I f***in' capped his ass. They were just totally appalled. Like, 'Ooowooowooowooo!' It's like shooting a f***in' rat to me, okay? Some people think 'Aw, poor mister squirrel...' Come on, guy. If you had vicious f***in' rat living in your attic, you'd go up and kill the f***in' thing. But people got all bent out of shape about it and took it completely the wrong way. I'd appreciate it if you print this the right way so that some of these animal activists out there don't think I'm some crazed f***in' animal mutilator. My dog just had f***in' puppies. You know what kinda dog I got? A dachshund, a miniature dachshund! People think that I've got this big f***in' cold heart and I'm out killing wildlife all the time. That's bullshit.
Needless to say, the way Benton's squirrel sniper mission was reported didn't exactly endear the man to animal rights activists, who openly hassled Deicide during its European tour in Germany and a run of UK dates in December 1992. On December 16, at the International 2 in Manchester, there was a…you guessed it…bomb threat, forcing Deicide to hit the stage late after a very Origin of the Feces-esque evacuation. Undeterred, the band still played a full set. You can watch it on YouTube.
But animal rights activists weren't the only people that Benton's persona pissed off. At some point, most likely simply for existing, Deicide was caught in Euronymous's crosshairs. Yep, that Euronymous: Øystein Aarseth, co-founder of the band Mayhem and proprietor of Deathlike Silence Productions.
Euronymous also owned a little Norwegian record store named Helvete, the 1991 opening of which one fanzine writer said was "the creation of the whole Norwegian Black Metal scene." By June 1992, churches were burning across Norway. And everything kept accelerating. On August 10, 1993, Euronymous was murdered, stabbed to death by bandmate Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes, he of Burzum/white supremacy/table-top RPG/general idiocy infamy. When Vikernes was arrested nine days later, authorities found, among other things, a fairly large cache of explosives. Compared to pellet guns and meat-stuffed mannequins, things were, uh, a little different in Norway.
Ah, but that was all to come. When Euronymous was still alive and grimacing, his PR shtick was shit-talking everything. One of his favorite pastimes was citing death metallers as falses. "These stupid people must fear black metal!" he was quoted as saying in Kerrang! "But instead, they love shitty bands like Deicide, Benediction, Napalm Death, Sepultura and all that shit." See also his final interview with Kill Yourself! Magazine in 1993, in which he offered this anecdotal ratio in order to expose poseurdom: "And we have maybe 30 die-hard black metal fans and 700-1000 of those bastards who listen to commercial black metal such as Deicide."
Somehow, in an instance of cosmic schadenfreude, Benton and Euronymous, two of the era's most enormous egos, ended up talking. They met in Oslo, Norway, likely during Deicide's tour stop on November 24, 1992. Here's Benton's side, spinning the yarn to Revolver in 2008:
This is how out of the loop I was. I met [Euronymous] and he kind of reminded me of Squiggy from ‘Laverne and Shirley’. Because I met him when I was a kid, too, at a baseball game. I met him and I was like, ‘Wow, fuckin’ Squiggy.’ Anyway, I meet the guy and he’s carrying a mace, but it looks like he stole the table leg off his mom’s kitchen table and put, like, nails through it and shit. And he was wearing this $1.99 cape that you’d buy at the dollar store during Halloween. They brought me backstage and they said, ‘Uranus, or whatever, from MAYHEM is there and wants to meet you.’ So, I went out there and met him. And in his broken English, he said [in robotic, foreign accent] ‘I did not have problem with you, but this band GORGUTS. They are not true death metal/black metal band.’ And I was just sitting there with a big shit-eating grin on my face like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, man.’ And I really didn’t know the importance of the guy. To me he looked like another goofball fan.
Emperor drummer Faust, who would spend nine years in jail for murdering Magne Andreassen in a hate crime, claimed he was present and remembered the tête-à-tête differently. To Blabbermouth:
We were at the venue [in Norway where DEICIDE was performing that night] selling the ‘Kill the Christians’ shirts which were famous at the time. Eric Hoffman [then-DEICIDE guitarist] approached me after their soundcheck asking what the shirts said in English. I explained [to] him and he suggested me and Euronymous come with him to meet the band. We went back backstage and met the band and had a conversation with Glen Benton who was polite and friendly all the way. Anyway, at some point Benton started trying to impress us or whatever. He claimed he and his ‘gang’ had ‘burned hundreds of churches’ in the U.S. (direct quote). He had already heard about the few burnings in Norway apparently. Euronymous never mentioned GORGUTS or any other band but it’s true that Euronymous wanted to express that he thought DEICIDE was an honest and true death metal band.
You can sleep soundly, Luc Lemay. As for burning "hundreds of churches," Benton told Terrorizer, "I guess if you ask me a stupid question you get a stupid answer."
While not exactly the Vienna summit, it would appear that Benton and Euronymous buried the hatchet. The détente lasted that one Norwegian night, at least; naturally, Euronymous still badmouthed Deicide to whatever zine wanted to listen. As every Swedeath band can attest, that was very much on brand for the beef-lusting dork.3 But, still, it seems like Deicide survived the Oslo scene, one with its share of arsonists and murderers. Or…did they? The next stop for the tour? November 25 at Stockholm's Fryshuset. Boom.
So, those are our suspects. Let's play Clue: Who tried to blow up Glen Benton?
Was it the animal rights activists? Metal Hammer backs this up in a listicle on doomed tours: "Death threats quickly poured in from pro-critter terrorist group Animal Militia; following a minor bomb blast at a gig in Stockholm, a missive bragged 'Not even Satan himself will protect you once you set foot in England.'"
I think Metal Hammer means the "Animal Rights Militia," a group that might have splintered off from the Animal Liberation Front due to the latter not embracing violence. ARM reached a level of notoriety in the early '80s for mailing letter bombs to Margaret Thatcher, exercising the group's believed right to "extensional self-defense." Be that as it may, the Benton bombing doesn't appear on the Wikipedia page cataloging its greatest hits.
Was it the black metallers? Well, this is a little more conspiratorial, but take a trip down the rabbit hole with me, won't you? There's an intriguing detail hiding in the Setlist.fm billing of that fated November 25 show.
Sweden's Therion, then still a death metal band, appeared to have played a set, which is corroborated by the dateline on a YouTube upload of an early concert. Who hated Therion? Euronymous. Here's Euronymous to Close-Up Magazine: "And the matter of THERION, who is the worst of all Swedish bands, we have a special message to them. If they dare to came to Norway and play LIFE METAL, we are going to kill them." Oh, and Suuvi Mariotta Puurunen, Vikernes's maybe-girlfriend, tried to burn Therion founder Christofer Johnsson's house down. I guess that's worth mentioning. But Therion's history has its own inconsistencies.4 Still, is it possible that Glen Benton wasn't the only target?
Like everything else in this story, there's no clear answer to that question, but at least we now have another side from someone who was actually there. In 2021, YouTube user unsane, not to be confused with the noise rock band of the same name, posted a video titled "Deicide Sweden 1992 Incident." They introduce themselves as Gregg, who, based on other videos on the account, is likely Gregg Mandigo, a mixer with credits on a False Prophet EP and a 2019 Massacre live album. Mandigo says he was with Deicide during the European tour and has pictures and video to prove it.
"The boom-boom is what caught us off guard," Mandigo said. That night, he was performing mixing duties for all three touring bands. During Gorefest's set, an explosion rattled the venue. "Boom, there it goes. I thought I blew up the sound system."
But after twiddling the mixing knobs to ensure they weren't at fault, Mandigo smelled gunpowder. "I was familiar with that because I was an artillery guy in the army."
After the show, everyone, including the local authorities, surveyed the damage in a back room. "We were like, 'Damn, what happened to this thing," Mandigo said while reviewing a video of the blast's damage to a heavy door that led to an emergency escape staircase.
Leaning on his artillery knowledge, Mandigo disputed Glen Benton's assessment that the explosion was caused by a smaller device that the Deicide frontman often calls an M-80. "I think it was a couple steps above," Mandigo guessed. "Maybe a small pipe bomb." Whatever the ordnance, it was enough to cancel Atrocity's appearance. Deicide, on the other hand, was allowed to proceed, playing a truncated set of "five to six songs."5
As for the culprits, Mandigo has some ideas. "Now, did Glen blame the Norwegian black metal guys? He got into an argument or disagreement with them the night before in Oslo at the Alaska club." The disagreement, per Mandigo, was whether Gorefest was evil enough because of its "political-style lyrics." "They wanted to kill them," he said of the black metallers who made it out to the show, "and Glen's like, 'No.'" While there was dissension, Mandigo asserted that there weren't any fights. In his estimation, that link seems like a nothingburger.
For Mandigo, the allegations against the other oft-cited suspects hold more water. "At some point, we got a fax. A letter was sent to the record company claiming responsibility, that, 'Hey, we're the ones who did this. You need to learn your lesson. We're going to do it again, and we're going to make sure that we get you next time. Sincerely, the Animal Liberation Front.' And we were like, 'What the hell is wrong with these people?' Because we had a protest in Cologne, Germany. And because German is my second language, they were carrying signs that translated to 'first animals, tomorrow us.'"
Mandigo surmised that Benton's desire to aggravate and inflame probably incited the bombing. "Knowing Glen, how he was back then — I haven't talked to the guy in years; maybe he's calmed down — but [at the time], he had to push somebody's buttons. He had to find out if you were going to be sensitive about a subject or not."
The other contributing factor might've been Benton's thirst for the spotlight. "He loved the attention," Mandigo recalled. "When the protests in Cologne, Germany, happened. [The protesters] were out there chanting 'erste tiere, morgen wir' — 'first animals, tomorrow us' — and then in English, 'Glen Benton, go to hell.' He goes out and meets them. As long as that TV camera is filming him. And he's just standing there [with his arms crossed], and then at some point he says, 'I will burn in hell!' That was kind of funny. He had no problem going out there and meeting those people face-to-face."
Mandigo remembered the other bombing on that tour, too. "At the International II [in Manchester, England], something happened again. In the middle of the Atrocity set, we had to evacuate the building. Our tour manager, Adam, comes up to us [and says], 'There's a bomb in the building. Everyone get out.'... The authorities come and do their thing. If it were a real bomb — a fake or a mistake — I don't know. But we had to stand out in that weather. It was drizzling. [We] go back in and have the show, have a good time. [We] do one more show at the Astoria Theater in London without incident. And then we all come back home, flying back to Florida."
In closing, Mandigo has found some levity in how the internet has stretched the event. "If you weren't there, you weren't there. The funniest thing right now is that a lot of people arguing about what happened at that show that I've run into weren't even born [yet when it happened]."
Where does that leave us? Well, regarding the "reporting" and young message board gossipers, the entire tale is par for the course in metal: smoke is generated by PR bluster, and few, if any, journalists are around to investigate whether there's a fire. That quirk of metal writing isn't an accident. It's the point. Music writing is access driven. Many writers don't hold artists' feet to the fire because they want to talk to the artists and their labels again.
There's also the difficulty of challenging killer quotes. In "My Time With Kurt Cobain," a 2021 remembrance by Michael Azerrad published in the New Yorker,6 the Our Band Could Be Your Life author contends with his complicity in aiding and abetting Cobain's canny myth-making. If the quotes are too good, and a reporter is too inexperienced to fact-check them, why would they ever spike potential pull quotes?
The other complicating factor is what happens when those myths are aggregated by second- and third-hand entities who only care about compelling content. There's a reason why sensationalists tend to dig themselves out of the underground, and that's because a good story will always sell. As evidenced by the bevy of mainstream outlets that will still breathlessly summarize the Norwegian black metal scene's escapades, hot gossip, especially in a true crime context, will reliably land with an audience even if said audience has zero interest in the music. That is to say, sensationalism will always transcend, granting fables a foothold in the mainstream's imagination. Craven provocateurs or crass business people can weaponize that human craving for the forbidden to help goose sales and expose artists to a wider audience. Remember what Benton said: "Record companies love to hype shit."
Benton loves it, too. When it comes to creating sensationalist lore, Benton was a top-notch spinner. He has spent the rest of his career courting controversy due to the fact that he'll dependably name names and lay down some choice quotes. A lot of that stuff is extremely embarrassing and cancellable. Some of it is hilarious. A tiny slice of it is even…kind of wise in its own twisted way. Glen Benton has never backed down from being Glen Benton, whoever the hell that might really be.
For what it's worth, Benton is a little more circumspect these days. He said this to Revolver in 2018:
We all do stupid shit when we’re kids and people at record companies made more out of it than was there. Yeah, it was sensationalized, stupid stuff. And I just played into it like I was being asked. As far as the animal guts I threw into the crowd and everything, yeah, we did that shit in the early days. When you’re young and you’re a kid, all you think is just, “Let’s be as sick as fuckin’ possible!” But you’re not thinking about all the people you might harm in the fuckin’ process. And then when you get a little older you go, “Wow, man. That was really fuckin’ stupid of me to throw all that shit on fuckin’ people. It could have made some of them really sick.” So, you grow up. We all grow up.
Has Glen Benton grown up? That's his story if you want to believe it.
In that same Q&A, Benton commented on Jon Nödveidt's suicide: "We all made asinine remarks as children. Mine was no different, I don't find any honor in suicide and only cowards and losers choose that option instead of living with one's responsibility or the actions that landed that person in jail to begin with. Do I feel sorry for him? NO. The person he murdered was someone's child and being a responsible father of two, I would have been waiting for him to get out of jail…as to finish him off before he had the option of taking his own life."
If you have a scan of it, send it to me.
As I love to point out, Euronymous once sat outside Conrad Schnitzler's house until the kosmische Musik pioneer made him go away by offering him "Silvester Anfang," the instrumental that opens 1987's Deathcrush. If you want more instances of this world class goof being a hall of fame goof, we did a whole podcast about it.
This intro continues to be the only thing people know me for.
Setlist.fm lists four but I'm not going to take that as gospel.
It's a shame this is paywalled.