Testamentin Eric Peterson muistelee yhtyeen ikävimpiä aikoja: ”Kaiken sen jälkeenkin jaksoimme jatkaa”

Yhdysvaltalaisen thrash metal -veteraani Testamentin kitaristi Eric Petersen on muistellut Guitar Worldin haastattelussa muun jutustelun ohessa yhtyeensä pitkän uran synkimpiä aikakausia. Petersen muistelee  ”The Ritual” -albumin aikoja, joka julkaistiin vuonna 1992. Tuolloin yhtyeen levyt eivät myyneet niin paljon kuin odotettiin, yhtyeessä käytiin läpi kokoonpanomuutoksia ja myös yhtyeen manageriporras lähti. Tämän jälkeen yhtye perusti oman levy-yhtiön ja paranteli business-asioidensa hoitamista. Petersen nostaa esiin myös vuosituhannen vaihteen, jolloin yhtyeen laulaja Chuck Billy sairastui harvinaiseen itusolusyöpään.

“It was probably around the time of ’The Ritual’. I remember Atlantic Records telling us that we had only sold around 250 000 records that year — which would be amazing now — and we were down about that.

We lost our management around that time, Alex told us that this was going to be his last tour with TESTAMENT, and Lou left — so everything was kind of falling apart around then, but we were still hopeful.

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So we changed some things around, changed how we did business and formed our own record company and things like that — and just when it seemed that we had gotten a hold of things again, that was when Chuck got sick.

But even after all that, we kept it going, and we got heavy again, and I think that was the start of the new TESTAMENT. We developed a more modern sound and had more of a black and death metal influence, even though we were still very much a thrash band. We just weren’t trying to be politically correct with our lyrics and all that — I mean, come on, we put out a record called ’Demonic’.

By that point, we had gone through a couple of different guitar players, a lot of drummers, we were having problems with our original bass player  — and we weren’t really sure what we were going to do. So we ended up doing a record called ’First Strike Still Deadly’ [2001], which contained re-recorded versions of some of our older songs.

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When I go back and listen to ’The Legacy’ or ’The New Order’, I’m not blown away by the production, but the songs sound modern when we play them today — they sound great, and that was what we were going for with ’First Strike Still Deadly’.”