OVERKILL TRIVIA
Trivia
The Japanese edition of The Grinding Wheel (2017) adds a cover of Iron Maiden's "Sanctuary" as a bonus for Japan alone, and its limited first pressing came with a DVD of the band's set at Thrash Domination 2015, which Ward Records, their Japanese label, secured by negotiating with the band at length. Of "Sanctuary", Ellsworth says they like to remember where they came from: as a covers band in the early eighties they played much of Iron Maiden's first two albums.
Overkill first came to Japan in 1990, and Ellsworth says he knew the Japanese radio host Masa Ito from early on through his show, and has long been friends with him. On every visit the band make time to see temples, shop for their families and catch up with old friends. Japanese audiences, he says, are very quiet until a show begins and then as crazy as any in South America, and that is what he loves about them.
Ellsworth's nickname comes from Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys. In more than forty years six drummers have held the seat — Rat Skates, Bobby "Sid" Falck, Tim Mallare, Ron Lipnicki, Jason Bittner and Jeramie Kling — while Ellsworth and bassist D.D. Verni have been in the band since the start. Ellsworth puts that down to their having had the same upbringing, so that they understand each other.
Each of the first three albums ends with a song named after the band: "Overkill" on the debut Feel the Fire, "Overkill II (The Nightmare Continues)" on Taking Over and "Overkill III (Under the Influence)" on Under the Influence. Immortalis (2007) also closes with one, "Overkill V... The Brand".
The Wings of War (2019) entered the official German chart at number five, the best chart result Overkill have ever had in Germany. "And Chaly flies high!" said Ellsworth: "The highest he has flown in Deutschland!" In the United States their best is White Devil Armory (2014), which sold about 8,400 copies in its first week and entered the Billboard 200 at number 31.
The band took its name from Motörhead's 1979 album Overkill. Ellsworth tells how, at the last show of a 2008 European tour with Motörhead, in Germany, Lemmy asked him to sing "Overkill" with him that night. Ellsworth wrote the first word of each verse on his forearm; Lemmy caught him in the middle of the song and yelled "Cheat notes!" into his microphone in front of 10,000 Motörhead fans in Berlin.
D.D. Verni and Rat Skates had played together in a punk band, the Lubricunts. When it broke up they formed Virgin Killer, started playing with a local friend, Bobby "Blitz" Ellsworth, and eventually called themselves Overkill. Ellsworth remembers the day he met the two: he was rehearsing with a guitarist, Rob Pisarek, in Pisarek's parents' basement when they walked in on a ninety-degree summer day in leather jackets and leather trousers. They added punk to the traditional metal and New Wave of British Heavy Metal he was playing, he says, and somewhere between the two, Overkill came out.
The winged, horned skull on so many Overkill covers is called Chaly. On Under the Influence (1988) he fires lasers from his eyes at a man crawling out of a sewer; more than twenty years later he is locked up for his crimes on Ironbound and sentenced to the electric chair on The Electric Age. For Scorched (2023) Travis Smith painted two of him, as serpents. The news posts on the band's official site are signed by Chaly, and the site's contact page is called "Contact Chaly".
For The Years of Decay (1989) the band skipped another trip to Pyramid Studios, where the first three albums were made, and recorded with the then-new producer Terry Date at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut. When the main songwriters, Bobby Gustafson and D.D. Verni, had eight songs ready, "Elimination" was still unfinished; it was completed at Carriage House. Heavy rotation on MTV's Headbangers Ball made it the band's most famous song, and Ellsworth says it was prompted by the scare of the AIDS epidemic. The album was inducted into Decibel magazine's Hall of Fame as number 85.
Immortalis (2007) came out on Bodog Music, where Jon (Jonny) and Marsha Zazula, the former owners of Megaforce Records, who had issued the 1985 debut, now worked, so the band found themselves with the couple who had signed them twenty years earlier. "Whoever said you can't go home again?" was Ellsworth's comment: whoever it was, he said, they were wrong, because this reunited Overkill with their first and biggest supporters.
On "Skull and Bones" from Immortalis, Randy Blythe of Lamb of God shares the vocals with Ellsworth. In an update from the sessions Ellsworth wrote that Blythe had stepped in to give the track the ultimate hellish vocal duet vibe, and described the album as another self-produced project from the bowels of a dark New Jersey studio.
On 16 April 2016 at Turbinenhalle 2 in Oberhausen, Germany, the band played Horrorscope in full for its twenty-fifth anniversary and then Feel the Fire in full for its thirtieth. Their regular drummer, Ron Lipnicki, had to stay home for family reasons, so their soundman, Eddy Garcia, who also plays in the El Paso, Texas band Pissing Razors, took his place. The night was filmed and released in 2018 as Live in Overhausen.
The Wings of War got its title after the cover was painted. The artwork shows five figures who seem to be discussing something important at a meeting, and Ellsworth overheard Dave Linsk and D.D. Verni saying it looked like a council of war; the title grew from there. It was the last thing decided — two weeks before the master was due at Nuclear Blast the album still had only a working title — which is why there is no title track.
The "Garden State" of "Welcome to the Garden State" is the nickname of New Jersey, the band's home state. Ellsworth says they took the two things they are proudest of, punk rock and New Jersey, and made a fun, simple song everyone can sing along to. Only the very end is a small tribute to Bruce Springsteen, and even that, he says, is a tribute to New Jersey more than to Springsteen.
In their early years Overkill were the house band at L'Amour in Brooklyn, New York, and were managed by two of the club's owners. Ellsworth says the club's legal capacity was about 1,200, but an average Overkill show there held about 1,750 — and an average Metallica show 2,200.
The title White Devil Armory (2014) came from D.D. Verni's fixation on the word "Armory", in front of which Ellsworth put "White Devil". In an interview Ellsworth said he had the phone bill he had written it on right there, with "White Devil" in front of the word "Armory". The song title "King of the Rat Bastards" is something he saw on the internet one day.
In 1984 Ellsworth had just bought a car, and he, D.D. Verni and two friends drove it from New Jersey to Montreal with two cases of beer to see a show called World War III — their first chance to see Destruction. Verni saw them. Ellsworth met a girl on Saint Catherine Street, and Verni's verdict was simply, "You missed the gig!"