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Per
· May 21, 2024
Photos by J Donovan Malley
At the end of their current tour, Cirith Ungol will walk away from the live stage, more than 50 years after their first show and almost a decade since their first reunion. It won’t be their first retirement, but when they called it quits in 1991, there was no farewell tour. It’s possible that no one would have shown up if there had been. The thunderous, grandiose metal of the Ventura, California band was out of step with everything else going on in heavy music at the time, from the hair metal scene of the Sunset Strip still reigning downhill to Seattle’s nascent grunge boom. In their initial act, Cirith Ungol had to settle for being the ultimate cult heavy metal band – known to a select few, loved by even fewer.
“Back in the day, nobody wanted to hear what we were doing,” says lead singer Tim Baker. We recorded four albums, really, without any progress. The records were out, and a certain small group of people heard about us and liked them.”
Those four records—especially the ones from 1981 Frost and Fire and in 1984 King of the dead— are widely considered classics today. With their sophisticated melodies, dark atmosphere, sword and sorcery lyrics and album covers painted by Michael Whelan, Cirith Ungol were the early progenitors of the subgenre that would become known as epic heavy metal. This put them on a style island, especially in America. “We were outcasts, in a way,” says Baker. “We were too extreme for people. Basically, it was my fault.”
Baker’s idiosyncratic vocals serve as Cirith Ungol’s calling card and are truly an acquired taste. He is not a conventionally gifted singer, like Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden or Rob Halford of Judas Priest. However, what he lacks in technique, he makes up for with an excess of personality. His voice in his head is constantly strained by the rush of helium, and his deeper range seems murky and harsh. He likes to end lines with an upalk-y inflection: “Let’s RIDE / The black ma-CHINE!“Baker’s voice is the first thing that jumps out when listening to Cirith Ungol, and for many less adventurous metalheads, it was a problem. But it has a way of sneaking up on you.
“When we shut down Frost and Fire, we would sit there every night and read our fan mail,” drummer Robert Garven recalls. “One guy wrote: ‘I just hate your singer, man. I like your band, but I hate your singer. It’s just horrible.’ And then the next week we got another letter from him: ‘I still hate your singer, but it’s not so bad now’. And then, finally, he wrote a letter that said, ‘You are my favorite band of all time.’ I think you can listen to some music immediately and fall in love with it. Our music, and we understand that, we put out stuff that’s a little harder for people to consume. We had no illusions that we were doing something different.”
Cirith Ungol never achieved commercial success in the 80s, and after its release in 1991. lost paradise, all but Baker and Garven left the band. Not long after that they formally broke up. Baker retired to family life and regular work; Garven bought a Ferrari. (“I also worked a regular job, to support Ferrari,” he says with a laugh.) Neither of them continued to pursue music, not even privately. They would occasionally be asked about getting the band back together, but would always politely decline. Garven likens it to asking a retired athlete to compete again: “If you’re an Olympic swimmer in your 50s and someone says, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about swimming in the Olympics again?’ That ship has already sailed.”
It took the persuasion of a fellow Ventura resident for Cirith Ungol to seriously consider reuniting. Jarvis Leatherby, co-founder of old-school metal revivalists Night Demon, grew up in the same Southern California community as Baker and Garven. “They were a generation or two ahead of us,” he says. “It’s funny, the first album, Frost and Fire, they pressed each other. It goes for at least $100 on eBay. When I was growing up, they were in the dollar bin at every thrift store in town.”
Leatherby was a late-blooming fan of Cirith Ungol — he says the vocals were too weird for him as a kid — but they became a source of civic pride when he took Night Demon on tour in Europe. “I’ve traveled the world and seen how many people actually love Cirith Ungol. It was crazy – he says. He started sending messages back home to Ventura, trying to get Baker and Garven to think: “It was e-mails, texts, phone calls, pictures of people with tattoos, merchandise, all that stuff, saying, ‘Hey, look, there’s an audience here.'”
The first steps have been attempted. Baker, Garven, guitarist Greg Lindstrom and bassist Michael “Flint” Vujea signed autographs at Leatherby’s 2015 Ventura festival, affectionately called Frost and Fire. (Manilla Road, perhaps Cirith Ungol’s only true U.S. contemporary in the early days, headlined the festival.) “We did this meet-and-greet thing, and people brought albums and memorabilia and photos and stuff,” says Garven. “I’m not sure how long we signed for. An hour, maybe two hours. It just blew us away.”
That signing session was the proof of concept Baker and Garven needed to get Cirith Ungol’s wheels slowly turning again. It started with a series of relaxed, impromptu jam sessions in Night Demon’s rehearsal space. It took Garven time to recover after nearly 25 years of putting drumsticks away; Leatherby charitably describes casually listening to his initial attempts at playing old songs as “like listening to Animal from The Muppets.” Guitarist Jim Barrazza, who played on lost paradise, returned to the circle. Vujea couldn’t get the logistics going, so Leatherby stepped in on bass. (He also became their manager.) Baker stood in the corner of the room, watching the band reinterpret the Cirith Ungol catalog as instrumental music.
“Every time we’d play, Tim would come over, but he wouldn’t sing,” recalls Leatherby. “He would say, ‘I’m not going to do it. I’m just hanging out (and) having a good time watching you guys.’ One day we were playing ‘Fire and Ice’ and we couldn’t see him. And he just started singing. And we said, ‘Shit,’ because the voice was there.”
Cirith Ungol played their first show since breaking up in 1991 at the 2016 edition of Frost and Fire, playing a sweeping set that covered all four of their classic albums. It was especially important for the band to return to Ventura, a hometown that didn’t know what to do with them all those years. A short run of festival dates in the US and Europe followed in 2017.
“We thought we’d play a few gigs and that would be it,” says Garven. “Just a fun thing, a little gathering. But then, when we started playing shows — We are musicians, right?”
Plenty of band reunions offer a few nostalgic live sets and a little more. If a new album materializes, it often fails to bring back the magic of the old stuff. Fortunately (albeit unexpectedly), Cirith Ungol’s second performance yielded some of their best tracks—the solo single “Witch’s Game,” Half Past Human EP, and a couple of full-lengths, Forever black and A dark parade.
“I love everything we’ve done, but I’m still really impressed with the latest stuff we’ve done because we’re the senior citizens of heavy metal,” says Garven. “If you’re going to do new material, it has to sit side by side with your earlier material. And I think we surpassed that.”
Forever black and A dark parade they are also the darkest, most damning albums in Cirith Ungol’s discography. There is still plenty of sword and sorcery material, inspired by authors such as Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But there’s also an increasingly urgent undercurrent of social critique and apocalyptic warning – perhaps unsurprising for a band that played one of its first gigs at an anti-Vietnam War protest, which was broken up by riot police.
“I don’t know if you ever watch the news, but we’re going down a cliff, environmentally, politically, socially,” Garven says. “We’re not heading for a beautiful sunset where everyone is dancing and happy. So a lot of our music, especially the lyrics that Tim writes, are really dark. I think we wish we could write more cheerful songs, but we are a product of the environment we live in.”
The impending collapse of civilization aside, the Cirith Ungol reunion era was the busiest and happiest stretch of their careers. A robust trad-metal ecosystem has emerged in the past decade, with a new surge of old-school style festivals selling huge numbers of tickets across North America and Europe. Cirith Ungol helped build that ecosystem, spearheading nearly all of those festivals in the years since their return. But with the core members getting closer and closer to their 70s, they decided it was time to hang it up again. “We’re getting older and some of us have health issues, so this is our last year of touring,” confirms Garven. This time, fans will have a chance to say goodbye.
I caught Cirith Ungol’s farewell tour in March, at the Hell’s Heroes festival in Houston. They played in the middle of the day under the blazing sun, which only enhanced the sweaty physicality of songs like “Atom Smasher” and “I’m Alive”. As the set went on, I found myself getting unusually emotional. The Hell’s Heroes lineup is dotted with bands that probably wouldn’t exist without Cirith Ungol’s influence, and here they were, playing with the same eccentricity and intensity that made them renegades in the 80s. Here, now, they can play to thousands of people who worship them like gods. Through patience, persistence and a bit of luck, Cirith Ungol are the conquering metal heroes they should have been four decades ago. When they played their heartwarming rendition of “Join the Legion” to end the set, I realized I wasn’t ready for it to end. I now plan to watch as many Cirith Ungol shows as possible.
I’ll have plenty of opportunities. This year’s tour schedule is the most intense in Cirith Ungol’s long history. “To be honest, I think I’ll probably burn them,” Leatherby says. “Many things are happening that they have never experienced before. It’s a lot of travel, a lot of back-to-back meetings, and they’ve never done that in their career.”
Garven accepts that this is the last year Cirith Ungol will be able to do a full, pedal-to-the-metal tour. It’s goodbye, but he insists it’s goodbye with an asterisk. He wants to leave the door open for the occasional one-off gig. He especially hopes that the band can continue to create new music.
“This is our last year of touring, and like what we’re doing now, we’re playing a lot of shows in a row,” he says. “At our age, we are nearing the end. But boy, if you listen A dark parade, I think it’s the best album we’ve ever made. The team feels the same way, and we recently resolved that. And there is no doubt that we could do another one like that, or even harder.”
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