SERPENT FROM EDEN, the the much-acclaimed California metal trio featuring guitarist John “Gumby” Goodwin (Ozzy Osbourne, Ringo Starr, George Clinton), are little more than a week away from the May 22 release of their new album. Serpent From Eden featuring Nick Menza, as its title suggests, is the band’s tribute to the late Nick Menzes, the Megadeth drummer with whom Gumby worked since they met back when they were teenagers.
The album was conceived almost by accident, as Gumby was playing through some of his old tapes looking for material that the band could record in its own right. Suddenly, he says, he discovered he had an entire album’s worth of unreleased music, all of it featuring Nick. A whole new project suddenly emerged.
Nick does not merely play on the album, however. His life and dreams also hang heavy over it, and nowhere so much as the band’s latest single and video, the epic “Atomic Disintegrator.”
Gumby explains, “Nick talked about a comic book character called The Atomic Disintegrator on and off for years. I have turned those descriptions into a comic book super hero character with the traits he mentioned, and traits he had himself, because of course, The Atomic Disintegrator is Nick!”
For a long time, Gumby was uncertain how to bring the Atomic Disintegrator to life. “I’ve had this comic book format idea for years and pitched it to several people who thought I was crazy, but since I couldn’t draw the characters myself, I was stuck with a real and vivid concept, and no way to execute it!
“Now, with AI and digital video tools, I believe I have created a totally original hybrid format of video story telling, using multiple digital platforms, apps, and creative tools as well as real time video of real humans. For me, the live video, the automatic page turning and the lyrics in the talk bubbles were clearly stand out innovations that will be my trademark!
“I am calling this a Multimedia Graphic Novel! Nick Menza’s life story is simply a perfect subject to present in this style and he would totally love it,”
He continues, ”The Atomic Disintegrator video is a hard assessment of real life events dramatized for comic book effect, but a needed purge of truth that will be understood in detail by all that know the players involved and rock fans everywhere! You don’t need to know all the details of the back story to be entertained by the song and video, but the more times you watch…the more inside moments will appear to those that know Nick’s real history!”
SINGLE: https://orcd.co/serpentfromeden_theatomicdisintegrator
And it’s one helluva history. Friends since childhood, Gumby and Ballard met Nick while in their teens, when their band Emeralde were soundchecking at the Santa Monica College Amphitheater at the time.
“We set up,” says Gumby, “and I blasted out a few riffs on my guitar to sound check my rig, and after I put my guitar down and started walking backstage, I heard a thunderous explosive sound and the most articulated heavy rock drumming ever from someone not named John Bonham!”
It was a student that their regular drummer had brought along – “he’s Steve’s drum roadie,” a passer-by told Gumby. “ “No he’s not,” the guitarist responded. “He’s our new drummer!”
Over the years that followed, the trio recorded 10 albums together, beginning in 1985 when they teamed up with Randy Rhoads’s brother Kelle in the band Rhoads. Others followed, by Emeralde, The Green, Von Skeletor, Soma and Freaktricity! Nick received his copy of their latest album, the all instrumental Freaktricity 5, just four days before his death in May 2016.
In the midst of so much activity, too, Nick leaped aboard the crazy train that is Megadeth, and what Gumby describes as “a ten year run of success seldom seen in the rock world.”
Unfortunately, he continues, “that same success lead to jealousy and unfair treatment from bandleader and strong-boss Dave Mustaine…” tensions which led not only to Nick’s “dismissal and banishment from the Megadeth universe,” but are also captured in the lyrics of the album’s opening track, “Promises, Conspiracies, and Lies.”
Elsewhere on the album, special guests Chris Poland and fellow Medadeth-er David Ellefson contribute stellar performances (including Poland’s stand-out performance on “The Atomic Disintegrator:), while producer Max Norman then distilled everything into this collection of songs. The result is a stand out collection of powerful, dynamic, and melodic hard rock music that will be impossible to pigeon hole as one style but it is still highly cohesive as a whole, all bound together by just one intention – to honor Nick Menza in the way he would want to be honored, with an uncompromising, heavy musical statement, encompassing his wide range of musical tastes but always his ever insatiable need for musical power!
And, if you’re around, don’t miss the album’s live launch at The Boardwalk in Sacramento, also on May 22. It’s going to be mega.
–DIGITAL: https://orcd.co/serpentfromedenfeatnickmenza
–CD/VINYL: https://cleorecs.com/search?q=serpent+from+eden
Track listing
- Promises, Conspiracies, and Lies
- The Atomic Disintegrator
- Let It Go
- The Kachillian
- Killing Time
- America is a Gun [CD ONLY]
- Dude Skywatcher
- Message From The Visitors
- Cydonia
- Atlantis
- Tomorrow Never Knows
