In the spring of 1987 Rotting Corpse lost most of itself in a matter of weeks. John Perez left, Jim Mulqueen left, Randy Cook went back to Michigan. What Walt Trachsler had, almost immediately, was Louie Carrisalez.
Carrisalez came up from San Antonio, where he’d been playing with Helldogs and around the Death Tripper circle. Steve Murphy, who had just joined on bass, remembers how little runway they had:
“Walt, Louie and I did that demo. And we had only been jamming together maybe a month when we went into the studio and did it.”
That demo is F*ck It, It’s Only Thrash, cut at Pantego Sound in the summer of 1987 with Vinnie Paul engineering — the first Rotting Corpse recording with Trachsler singing, and a three-piece that had barely met. It is not a tentative record.
The Dark Angel Dates
Carrisalez played the short Texas run with Dark Angel that summer, the band’s biggest shows to that point, with Roger Gallardo of Hellpreacher brought in on second guitar. A photograph in the band’s archive shows Trachsler, Carrisalez and Murphy outside the Arlington practice space just before that tour. See it →
Devastation, And Fronting Death
He moved on to Devastation, fellow Texas thrashers the band traded members with more than once. Then came the strangest line on his record, and one that ties back to Rotting Corpse.
In 1990, Death were committed to a European tour that Chuck Schuldiner opted out of. Rather than cancel, the rest of the band went anyway — with Walt Trachsler on guitar and Louie Carrisalez singing. Two men who had been a Texas thrash rhythm section three years earlier were now carrying a death metal tour on the other side of the world, playing someone else’s album.
“When Walt did the Death tour in Europe and Chuck didn’t want to do it, Walt played guitar and Louie did the vocals.” — Steve Murphy
It is, by some distance, the most improbable thing to come out of a lineup change in Arlington in 1987.
