Death Angel (Vintage 1987)
To try out my new scanner I pulled this old picture out of a photo album I had lying around.
The year was 1987. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area so the farthest I ever had to travel to a concert was about 30 miles. But in 1987 I was living in Utah and decent shows were few and far between. A buddy of mine and I hatched a plan to drive 800+ miles (each way) to see a band virtually no one had heard of but we loved, Death Angel. Their first CD (yes CDs were out in 1987), The Ultra-Violence, had recently been released and we couldn’t get enough of it.
I’m not positive of the date, but I know we listened to the Twins win the World Series on the car radio on our way back to Utah so the concert was probably on October 23 or 24 (notice the jack-o-lantern on the riser next to the drum kit). The venue was the old Mountain View Theater, which, until earlier in the same year, had been a movie theater for its first 61 years.
I did not know what the members of Death Angel looked like. I only knew that I loved their sound and that they were all younger than I. I was 19. The drummer, Andy Galeon, for instance, was only 15 at the time. So it was with great embarrassment that I struck up a conversation with Mark Osegueda, the lead singer, in the bathroom before the show while not knowing it was him. He had on a The Legacy (pre-Testament) t-shirt as you can sort of see in this photo. We were peeing next to each other, and I commented on his t-shirt. He said something like, “You like them too?” I told him I went to high school with the former drummer, Mike Ronchette, which when I saw him walk out on stage 15 minutes later and realized who I had been speaking with caused me to think I had said something really stupid.
Anyway, to make a long story shorter, the show was fantastic, and I’ve been waiting decades since for the chance to see them again. That may happen this summer when I will be in Copenhagen, and they will be playing in Sweden. It may be time for another road trip.
