RAVEN Trivia — 30 Entries
30 sourced facts about RAVEN.
Trivia
Raven first played Japan in 1995, at Club Citta in Kawasaki. Ward Records' own copy describes it as a show both the band and their audience had waited a long time for, and it produced the live album Destroy All Monsters – Live In Japan. Gallagher has since mentioned that he had a throat inflammation when it was recorded.
The origin of the name is unromantic. Asked about it in 2023, John Gallagher said the band had kept a list of possible names as kids and Raven was simply the one that annoyed them least. He also drew the angular logo himself, around the time they signed to Neat.
The phrase Raven have been described by for four decades — "athletic rock" — has two competing origin stories, and both are on the record. The band's own website and the copy on their labels' artist pages present it as a name Raven gave their own music. John Gallagher does not. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2015 he credited it to David Wood, who ran Neat Records, and said the first time the band saw it was in a Neat advertisement reading "Athletic rock from Neat". Either way they took it up, closing 1983's All For One with a song of the same name.
Rock Until You Drop was not recorded in a block. It was made a day at a time over a long stretch, and producer Steve Thompson has since admitted why: he told Neat's Dave Wood he could only take the band one day at a time, because they were so wild. Gallagher says you can hear the group changing across the record as a result — "Hell Patrol" and "Don't Need Your Money" are among the earliest things on it, the Sweet medley "Hellraiser/Action" and "For The Future" among the last.
The wrecked-gear photograph on the front of Rock Until You Drop was carefully staged in an underground car park. Neat sent down a photographer Gallagher describes as a wedding photographer, and by his account the man's jaw hit the floor when he walked in.
The Wiped Out album and the companion Crash Bang Wallop EP were recorded and mixed together in six days flat. Gallagher explains the tempos as a response to what the band had been watching from the stage: crowds reacted hardest to the faster material, so they pushed it.
The title and idea of "Faster Than The Speed Of Light" came out of a stack of physics books Gallagher was reading at the time, about whether anything can travel faster than light. His reasoning was simple enough: a fast song needed a fast idea.
The support act on Raven's first North American tour, in 1983, was an unknown Metallica. When Megaforce's Jon Zazula pitched them as "the biggest band in San Francisco", Raven assumed he meant Y&T — they had never heard the name. Gallagher's first impression of the music was that it sounded like Motörhead played at the wrong speed, and that was what sold him. The run is remembered by the name the two album titles made between them: the Kill 'Em All For One tour.
Getting the 1983 tour around America was, in Gallagher's own word, guerrilla warfare. Both bands, three Raven roadies, Metallica's crew, a soundman, a lighting man and a tour manager were crammed into a six-berth Winnebago and two trucks.
Gallagher's favourite story about 1984's Live At The Inferno concerns the photograph on the back cover. Manager Jon Zazula haggled with the photographer, whose usual fee was a thousand dollars, and kept offering three hundred. Told he would have to pay more than that, Zazula sent a cheque for $300.01 and used the picture anyway.
The sleeve of Live At The Inferno boasts that there are no studio fixes on it, and that is not the same claim as one night. Gallagher has since said the album was assembled from several dates, New York and Chicago among them. The Raven live album that really is a single evening start to finish is 2019's Screaming Murder Death From Above.
The Atlantic deal carried its own mismatch from the start. By Gallagher's account the man who signed Raven was Larry Yasgar, the label's dance and disco A&R, brought in because the rock A&R man was unavailable — and he reckons that set the tone for a company that never worked out what to do with them.
"On And On", from the Atlantic-era Stay Hard, is one of the hardest things Raven ever had to record. Mark's guitar had bad intonation and the song is full of suspended chords; he finally threw the guitar across the room and walked out to the bar. John, meanwhile, stacked something like eighteen to twenty vocal tracks on it himself, three-part harmony built up the old-fashioned way by doubling and tripling — far longer than anything else on the record took.
Eddie Kramer produced The Pack Is Back — a man whose gift was catching a band playing together. What happened instead was that the drummer insisted on recording to a click with nobody else playing, and since he sat behind the beat anyway, Gallagher says the record came out leaden. The lesson Raven drew was procedural and permanent: never record to a click again, never spend eight or ten weeks in a studio again. Since then they put the weeks into pre-production and cut the album live in five or six days.
The sleeve of The Pack Is Back was meant to show the band as crazed American footballers. Gallagher's verdict is that they came out looking like crazed hairdressers instead.
There was a plan for a music video made with NFL Films. The band got as far as visiting the company's New Jersey facility and working up ideas before Atlantic declined to pay for it. Gallagher maintains the budget asked for was not outrageous, and reckons the refusal sank the whole campaign.
"Die For Allah", on Nothing Exceeds Like Excess, arrived rather than got written. Gallagher says Mark sat down during the writing sessions and played the whole thing start to finish off the top of his head — roughly seven minutes of stream of consciousness — and that a tape recorder happened to be running at the time.
Showplace Studios in Dover, New Jersey, where Glow was recorded in 1994, has an odd history for the band: it shares a building with a strip club Raven had played years earlier. Gallagher says a door off the tape room opens straight into it.
The injury Mark Gallagher suffered in 2001 stopped the band for close to four years. By John's account Mark was already bruised from a car crash at a T-junction when, visiting a friend on a building site, he chased a wind-blown cap and a long, deep wall came down on him. Both of his feet were dislocated and one calf was torn away from the leg. John credits his brother's fitness and stubbornness for the fact that he survived and eventually walked again. Mark was still in a wheelchair when Raven started playing again.
"Malice In Geordieland", the bonus track on ExtermiNation, is sung entirely in Geordie dialect — at drummer Joe Hasselvander's suggestion, not the brothers'. The lyric name-checks the Mayfair Ballroom and other Newcastle haunts of their youth.
"Thunder Down Under", also on ExtermiNation, is a deliberate tribute to Bon Scott. Gallagher had met him, along with Angus and Malcolm Young, after an AC/DC show at the Newcastle Mayfair.
The recording of ExtermiNation was paid for in part by a Kickstarter campaign the band launched in October 2014 with a $15,000 target; it took more than $27,000. The reward for backers was Party Killers, a covers album cut on a whim during the same sessions.
The 2019 live album Screaming Murder Death From Above exists because of a tape the band did not know was running. After a show at Skråen in Aalborg, Denmark at the end of November 2017, the venue's sound engineer handed drummer Mike Heller a memory stick. Heller left it in his pocket and forgot about it for roughly six months, until Raven needed something to release.
Michael Wagener came to work on Metal City by accident. Raven ran into him on a rock cruise and asked him on the spot to mix the record. Mike Heller's own studio was not finished in time, so Wagener offered his room in Nashville and engineered bass, guitar and vocals there over about two weeks.
The comic-book artwork on Metal City started as a T-shirt idea from Mike Heller — a drawing of the three of them running. After a fight with an artist who kept getting the brothers' faces wrong, Heller suggested treating the whole package as a comic instead: separate art for every song, and a thank-you page laid out like an old Marvel ad.
Raven take running orders seriously, and there is a reason. Gallagher told KMUW that on Life's A Bitch somebody else swapped the opening tracks of the two sides against the band's intention.
Marty Friedman turned up as a special guest at the Kichijoji CLUB SEATA show on 14 March 2019. Young Guitar printed the setlist, and his name is against two songs: "Fire Power" and "Wiped Out". Gallagher said the choice followed Friedman telling them he could play anything off the first two albums, and Mark added that it had been ten years since they last played together.
In 2014 Raven opened for Metallica at a São Paulo stadium show — the reverse of the arrangement thirty-one years earlier. When the schedule ran late, Raven filled the gap by stretching "Break The Chain" out to something like twelve minutes. Gallagher's memory of it is that James Hetfield spent the time filming them from the side of the stage, headbanging and high-fiving.
Rob "Wacko" Hunter, Raven's drummer from the settling of the trio line-up, left in 1987 and went a long way in another direction. He is now a Grammy-winning jazz producer whose credits include Harry Connick Jr.
There is a commercial reason the 2025 anniversary EP Can't Take Away The Fire runs to eight tracks rather than the five new songs. Gallagher explains that distributors dislike EPs and have to price them lower, so the band padded it out with live material. What that produced, almost by accident, is three recordings from 1984, 1991 and 2022 — one for each of three different Raven drummers.