Metal Health

Whenever anyone asked Mean Dean Edington, host of KJHK 90.7’s metal show “Malicious Intent” and unofficial hype man for several local heavy acts, about his ultimate career goal, he’d always say “the radio gig at Relapse Records.” Not that he expected to attain that position. Relapse, the Pennsylvania-based home to all varieties of extreme hard rock, isn’t the type of label that experiences a lot of turnover. People don’t join its staff as a stepping stone to jobs at Sony or Warner Brothers — they come aboard because of their passion for bands such as Pig Destroyer and Cephalic Carnage. But when one metalhead departed for California in a relationship-related move, the subsequent shuffle left Mean Dean’s dream position available. About three weeks ago, he received what minor-league baseball players know as “The Call.”

“I thought he was kidding,” Edington recalls. “Because I was always joking with them, saying, ‘When are you guys gonna give me a job, huh?'” Upon receiving confirmation that the offer was serious, Edington had a weekend to ponder his next move. The decision to leave Lawrence wasn’t an easy one, and, in true death-metal fashion, he invokes both blood and mortality in expressing his affection for the locale. “Lawrence will always be in my blood,” he vows. “I love it, and I will go to Lawrence to die.”

Still, Edington decided that he’d done all that he could for the Lawrence scene — by hosting “Malicious Intent” for four years, by booking extreme-metal bands that had passed over the region in the past for shows and by actively promoting local groups such as the Esoteric and Relapse-signees Origin. He squeaked by on income from a part-time job at the Bottleneck, devoting much of his time to these projects unpaid. “I had to decide whether to hang out in Kansas on a $500 budget or to make a larger difference,” he says. “The best thing I can really do for Lawrence is to move into a global position of influence.”

So now he’s learning on the fly about the other side of radio promotion. To anyone not plugged into the brutal-music underground, Edington’s task might seem akin to the life of a lonely, perennially rejected telemarketer hawking an unpopular, offensive product: “Hello, might I interest you in working Gorelord‘s ‘Force Fed on Human Flesh’ into your rotation? No? Okay, how about Regurgitate‘s ‘Ruptured Remains in a Doggybag’ or ‘Festering Embryonic Vomit’? Or Blood Duster‘s ‘Raping the Elderly’? Hello?”

But surprisingly, Edington says it’s not too much of a challenge to get Relapse’s roster of demonic growlers onto the airwaves. He cites CMJ’s loud-music airplay chart, which lists both Gorelord and Blood Duster in its most recent Top 100. “There are [shows like ‘Malicious Intent’] everywhere, and there are 98.9-sized stations that feature a four-hour extreme-metal show,” he says. “That’s a pretty large trend in the industry that Kansas City hasn’t caught on to, putting extreme-metal on a 100,000-watt station with DJs that take it seriously. [Such stations] believe in the extreme stuff, and every chance they get, they’ll play it instead of Puddle of Mudd, Taproot, Incubus, shit like that.”

That’s not to say that Edington finds room on the radio for all Relapse’s hellspawn. Getting progressive-thinking DJs to acknowledge art-sludge powerhouse Neurosis is a cinch; getting gore-splattered grindcore artists in the door is another matter entirely. And then there’s the language issue. Though it’s difficult to understand the lupine howls, spitting-snake hisses and gasoline-guzzling belches of death-metal’s array of vocalists, there’s no getting around announcing a song named, say, “Funeral Fuck” (Exhumed). “I can bypass that by thoroughly researching the record first, finding the glaringly obvious bad words and marking those songs as DNPs [do not plays],” Edington assures.

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Fortunately (given that it’s unwise to rile this particular audience), “Malicious Intent” listeners won’t find all their gory favorites suddenly marked DNP in Edington’s absence. New cohosts Alex Kupfer and Brandon “The Rhino” Hubbard will continue to serve up Soilent Green and other morbid treats. Hubbard says the pair will look into booking the type of bands that Edington routed to the area, assuaging the fear that Lawrence will fade from the metal map.

“Mean Dean did a lot for the scene as far as keeping it promoted, keeping people informed and booking shows that other promoters wouldn’t do,” Hubbard says.

“People might say that I’m responsible [for the current strength of Lawrence’s heavy-music scene], but I can’t agree to that,” Edington says. “I was the loudmouth who made people sit up and pay attention. If there weren’t good bands to do that for, I would have been screaming for no reason. But now there’s more of a sense of community as an extreme-music scene. It’s less me, me, me and more us, us, us. For a long time, these groups were scoffed at and ignored because they played metal in an indie-rock town. But the lines have started to blur a bit, especially when James Dewees [of Relapse’s recently reunited Coalesce] joined the Get Up Kids.

“The one thing that I accomplished was broadening the general music taste of the scene as a whole,” Edington continues. “Now that they’ve been exposed to it, hardcore kids can appreciate technical grind bands, and death-metal dudes can get into melodic hardcore. That’s all I really did, was scream a lot and expose people to stuff. From there, people took it and ran with it.”

In one final attempt to introduce heavy-music enthusiasts to the broad spectrum of metal’s possibilities, Edington has assembled an eclectic collection of hard-hitting regional attractions for his fourth annual birthday bash at the Bottleneck on Saturday, December 15. The lineup for this ten-band, all-ages affair includes Relapse’s Origin and Cephalic Carnage; Lawrence veterans Wormwood and newcomers Salt the Earth; Converge and American Nightmare, who were added to the bill at the last minute after coincidentally calling House of Blues in search of a show on that date; the Esoteric (Edington’s pick as “the most technically proficient, formidable heavy force in the Midwest”); Saved by Grace (“the epitome of great melodic hardcore”), Not Waving but Drowning and Season to Risk, a seemingly unusual pick (though it won the inaugural Best Heavy Metal/Hardcore Klammy) about which Mean Dean feels strongly.

“Too often, Season to Risk gets lumped in with experimental indie rock,” Edington rants. “Bow down and respect Season to Risk, for fuck’s sake. Their new record is so phenomenal, and they never get to play in front of hardcore kids. I want to let them know that this isn’t your older brother’s irrelevant band. They’re here, and they’re going to crush you.”

As evidenced by his rabid fan-level support of each of these groups, Edington is a natural at touting the musical merits of his favorite acts, making him an ideal “frequency-contamination advisor,” as his e-mail signature dubs his occupation. Given that all his enthusiasm stems from honest appreciation, he might not be able to convincingly peddle airtime for groups that don’t get his metal machine running. That shouldn’t be a problem at Relapse, where, he raves, “the defining band — the best of the best, the originators — of just every genre of extreme music resides.” But now that he’s settled into this position, are there any other goals to pursue? What does he answer now when people ask about his long-term plans?

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Edington ponders this briefly. “Really, for me, is there a better job out there? I don’t think so. I couldn’t possibly be happier anywhere else.”