Late 1992.
Peter Steele's stuck in traffic. Driving a garbage truck.
The glamorous life of an NYC Parks & Recreation employee.
He looks at the scars on his wrists. Faded after three years.
And starts humming.
"I went looking for trouble
And boy, I found her"
Later, he told journalist J. Bennett exactly what happened:
"I was waiting in line for three hours to dump 40 cubic yards of human waste at the Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station, and I wrote the song in my head. I actually lost the original lyrics, so I had to rewrite them. It's about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over. She was the ultimate goth girl, and I was poking fun at her because she was in love with herself."
The Bloodiest of Kisses
A few years earlier, on October 15th, 1989, Peter Steele slashed his wrists:
“All I can say is that I fell in love with the wrong person.”
He survived and kept his Parks Department job. But he spent the next three years writing songs about this woman.
The debut album, Slow, Deep and Hard (1991), opened with “Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity”:
“You went to L'amour Saturday night
Red nails, lipstick, dressed two sizes two tight
His tongue down your throat
His hand up your skirt
Yeah I'm a man
But it still hurts”
On Type O Negative’s second album, The Origin of the Feces (1992), they re-recorded this song and renamed it to the not-so-subtle, “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else” in which he screams: “you make me hate myself!”
This woman became Steele’s anti-muse:
He was still obsessed with her during the recording of album number three, Bloody Kisses (1993).
Most especially on the third track,
“Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)”
“Black No. 1” was written as a satire of the goth subculture. But at the same time, it cemented the band’s status as goth icons.
The song title refers to the darkest hair dye – the one favoured by goths. The dye reference is brought to great satirical lengths:
“Yeah, you wanna go out cause it's raining and blowing
You can't go out cause your roots are showing
Dye 'em black
Ooh, dye 'em black”
These lines might be one of the most brutal criticisms of the entire gothic scene.
You cannot venture forth into the howling night when the treasonous roots of your hair could expose your – literal – true colours. The performance must be upheld at all times.
It’s one of those jokes that seems purposefully dragged out too long.
“Black, black, black, black number one
(She dyes 'em black)”
Unrelated finding, ahem, after searching “Black No. 1” on Google.
Credit @ Orphea, YouTube.
This song is at times revenge, at times therapy.
His insistence that “she dyes 'em black” exposes her, again and again.
“Every Day is Halloween”
The song contains musical nods to Vic Mizzy’s The Addams Family theme. It also makes lyrical references to Nosferatu (1922) and 1960s US sitcom The Munsters:
“She's got a date at midnight
With Nosferatu
Oh baby, Lily Munster
Ain't got nothing on you”
The Munsters was built around one joke: a family of classic horror monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula) living in suburban America. Lily was the vampire wife – a “goth” who was oblivious to her vampiric appearance. “Every day is Halloween”, literally. Not that the Munsters were ever aware.
Lily Munster
Steele's target is the opposite.
She’s insufferable because of her hyper-conscious performance:
“She's in love with herself
She likes the dark
On her milk-white neck
The Devil's mark”
She's so aware of her own image that she can't stop performing it for a single moment, not even during the most intimate ones:
“It's an ode to a Goth girl who was so into herself that she once held a mirror over my face so she could see herself climax.”
He nearly ended his life over a self-absorbed woman who spends her life playing dead – who presents herself as a corpse.
He says it explicitly. And often:
“Loving you was like loving the dead
Loving you was like loving the dead
Loving you was like loving the dead
Was like loving the dead
Was like loving the dead
Was like loving the dead”
The way that he continuously drags out the joke makes her even more unreal.
The humour is in part a coping mechanism, in part a vehicle for him to take back power.
Steele's almost gleeful whisper, “it was like fucking the dead”, is the most ominous line in the song.
Tongue-in-cheek lyrics downplay a more sinister notion: the invocation of necrophilia.
Her “wolf-skin boots” and deathly perfume give her the appearance of an “erotic funeral” mourner. She finds death “sexy”. No wonder Steele’s obsession with her drove him to atttempt suicide.
She already dressed the part. All he had to do was fulfill his part of the deal. One quick human sacrifice to complete the cycle and free her back into the night.
Finally, away from their relationship, he still feels tainted, cursed. As if his participation in their romance had left him stained. Not that she cares
“Well, when I called her evil
She just laughed”
This explains the chanting, repetitive lyrics throughout “Black No. 1”. And the deep mockery.
Steele wrote the song as an incantation to release himself from the spell he was under.
“Well, cast that spell on me”
Greg Mackintosh, guitarist for gothic metal band Paradise Lost, met a girl one night in New York.
She was, by Mackintosh's description, the stereotypical goth. Exactly his type.
As he left the next morning, she told him about her “on and off” boyfriend.
Peter Steele.
About six months later, Mackintosh found himself dispatched to interview Steele for MTV's Headbanger's Ball.
Steele leered over Mackintosh and wrapped his massive arm around him.
“Ah, Mr. Mackintosh. I believe we need to talk about Black No. 1.”
Mackintosh thought he was about to get flattened by a 6'8" man who'd already slashed his wrists over this woman.
But Steele was only winding him up. They talked about it and laughed.
By now the spell had been broken.
Bloody Kisses had been a hit. The album would soon achieve Gold, then Platinum status – becoming the first album on Roadrunner Records to sell more than 1 million copies.
Little Miss Scare-All had moved on to haunt other victims.
In 2010, Steele died of sepsis. He was 48.
I sometimes wonder…
Was there a woman in attendance at his funeral, smoking clove cigarettes and smelling of burning leaves?
That’s it for this week’s Chug.
Horns up 🤘
Shane
Editor-In-Chief
The Chug Media
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