Death dealers
Friday, 14 September 2007
With a bit more phantasy I could have filed this LP under my Elvis-section, because of the painting of Elvis that is used on the cover. But the painting is made by John Wayne Gacy and with a title like Death dealers I think Elvis would not like this LP on my Elvis shelve.
In between the eight songs on this compilation LP are fragments of spoken word, featuring the voices of John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Ed Kempur and Jeff Dahmer. In case you don’t know these names, three of them have admitted killing several people. In the eighties I was for a while fascinated by serial killers. I could not understand these people, and I still don’t. After reading several books and interviews, I gave up trying to understand this. It made me sick and I felt there were more interesting subjects to waste my time upon.
In that period I shared my interest for serial killers with Marcel Ruyters. He went much deeper into this phenomenon than I did. He made a beautiful booklet with portraits of 31 serial killers. I knew some of the faces from picture, but many I had never seen before. I saw pictures of many of these people later, and than I always remembered the drawings that Marcel had made of them; he really captured the essence of these persons.
Some of the songs on this LP are pretty scary too. Like Eddie Noack, who whose two songs on this LP show a deep insight in these dark matters. Both Dolores and Psycho are psychological masterpieces. That cannot be said of Red River Dave’s California hippie murders, which is a tasteless exploitation of the phenomenon, and funny because of that.
The rest of the songs cover the whole spectrum in between these two extremes, but it is all weird. And fascinating! Among the many strange compilation LP’s in my Wall of Records Death dealers is one of the strangest.
Here is Eddie Noack with Psycho: