How to go
Who: Spike Opera
When: 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with openers The Defendants and Brain Leak Friday; Vicious Grave and The Defendants on Saturday.
Where: Club Panama, 951 James St.
Cost: $5
SPRINGFIELD — Earlier this year, a kid walked into his third-grade classroom at Lincoln Elementary sporting a Spike Opera shirt.
It might have gone unnoticed except for the fact that the kid’s teacher knew a thing or two about Spike Opera — her son, Troy Cromwell, had co-founded the Springfield band back in 1984 at a time when metal was getting faster, heavier and more nihilistic.
“She asked, ‘Where did you get that shirt?’ ” Cromwell said. “He said, ‘I got it from my dad. It’s his favorite band.’ ”
Talk about an awesome Father’s Day present then — Spike Opera is back together, and will play its first shows in nearly 16 years this weekend.
“None of us look a day over 27 under stage lights,” Cromwell joked.
All dads themselves now, the quartet of guitarists Cromwell and Doug Brown, bassist Steve Truman and drummer Kenny Wells has a familiar story.
Basically, they should’ve been bigger than they were.
Called to action by the ’83 release of Metallica’s “Kill ’Em All,” Spike Opera bashed its way to local notoriety as arguably Springfield’s first and most popular thrash-metal band, a subgenre that might best be described as an unholy union of punk and prog-rock.
Virtuosity with attitude.
“We didn’t know music was a business,” Cromwell, now 43, confessed. “It was an outlet and a party.”
Of course, now close to 30 years after they formed, they know better — and there’s plenty of ground to make up.
“We’re hungry,” Cromwell said.
“We don’t look hungry,” he added, much to the amusement of his bandmates.
“I think I weighed about 98 pounds when we started,” Truman, 45, marveled.
But it’s not just their metabolism that has changed.
Admittedly, they once wrote things to shock — which is probably a fair assessment when you consider such old song titles as “Blood Spray,” “Encourage Destruction” and “Necrobiosis.”
“I was an angry young man,” Cromwell said.
They’ll still hammer through all the old originals, but they also look forward to writing and recording new material in the coming years.
“Is there a market for 43-year-old guys playing metal?” Cromwell asked.
“Look at Slayer, Exodus,” Truman added.
“They’re still kicking it,” Cromwell said.
Indeed.
Dwelling on Spike Opera’s age is like questioning a B-52’s ability to still incinerate life as we know it with a thermonuclear payload just because it, too, is considered old by some.
Eyes will bleed and skin will melt — and that’s just from Spike Opera.
“We all have our health,” Cromwell said, “which is probably hard to believe considering some of the life choices we all made.”
There’s also a reason that Wells is far and away the skinniest of the four — hook the man and his drums into the grid and Springfield could have a renewable source of clean energy.
“I’m super-ecstatic to be back with these guys,” Cromwell said. “It feels like we took a week’s vacation.”
Ride the lightning
The story of Spike Opera is practically the story of metal itself.
By the time the band grew apart in the fall of 1995, the members were listening to the likes of Jane’s Addiction and R.E.M.
But prior to that, being in a metal band circa 1984 meant that you probably wore something zebra-striped and spandex, along with your mom’s rouge and your girlfriend’s lip gloss.
“I didn’t want to wear Ace Frehley spacesuits on stage,” Truman said of his decision that year to leave War Minister, a local band that dealt just as much in Motley Crue covers as it did Iron Maiden tunes. “I just wanted to wear my ripped-up jeans and jam.”
He left to join forces with Cromwell and Brown, two guys who had met at Shawnee High School and had once auditioned for War Minister.
Cromwell and Brown discovered Wells at the Clark County Fair as he drummed with the Northwestern High band.
“This dude,” Cromwell recalled, “had a spiked wristband and fingerless leather gloves.”
They’d found their drummer.
“We used to claim to be Springfield’s loudest, fastest megathrashers,” Truman said.
Shaun Valentine initially sang lead before skipping out on a gig, thereby leaving Truman to both play bass and sing.
“We were before our time,” said Truman, who used to paint jean jackets for local kids with the Spike-O logo.
The “big four” of thrash — Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax — might very well have been the “big five” with the right kind of production and management.
Life events also took the band members down different paths.
“I was 19 and changing diapers,” Cromwell said. “My life got reprioritized real quickly.”
Two self-produced, cassette-only releases, including 1987’s “Welcome to the Spike-O-Ward,” picked up underground buzz in zines from New York clear to Poland.
“They say we’re legendary on the Internet,” Truman said.
When Metallica bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a 1986 tour bus crash, Truman sent a demo tape of himself in hopes of landing an audition.
While Metallica already had tapped Jason Newsted for the job, James Hetfield was impressed enough to send back Truman a hand-written letter.
Those old Spike-O tracks have been slightly remastered — “what we could do from cassette,” Brown said — and put on CD for the first time.
The CD, along with DVDs of vintage gigs, will be available for sale at this weekend’s shows.
“Lucky for us,” Truman said, “our music is still relevant.”
When he growls, “If I die before I wake ... I won’t care,” it no longer seems like just the stuff of teen angst.
Layoffs and foreclosures have hit the region’s grown-ups hard.
“There are two things keeping me in this town,” Cromwell said, “this band and a mortgage payment.”
Contact this reporter at amcginn@coxohio.com.
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