Bassist Duke Erickson feels Metal Church should have stuck with producer Terry Date for every album

Bassist Duke Erickson feels Metal Church should have stuck with producer Terry Date for every album

Former Metal Church bassist Duke Erickson was recently interviewed by Andrew Daly for Vinyl Writer Music. Erickson was in Metal Church for the band’s first six studio albums consisting of Metal Church (1984), The Dark (1986), Blessing In Disguise (1989), The Human Factor (1991), Hanging In the Balance (1993) and Masterpeace (1999).

Erickson was asked about producer Terry Date‘s in studio approach for Metal Church‘s debut self-titled album to which he replied: “That was Terry’s first album, too, so he hadn’t really developed any particular approach yet, as far as I can remember. His approach was to record the stuff that we played. As far as the overall sound, we loved it. Since everything we did after that involved some sort of outside influences that altered things, I’d say that the first album, as is often the case, is the one that’s just purely us.”

Metal Church‘s second album The Dark was released via the major record label Elektra. Erickson was asked whether having major label support from Elektra had a big impact for Metal Church to which he stated: “Yeah, it did impact things. We had way more budget. [Laughs]. Micheal Alago was our A&R guy at Elektra, and he was great and always super supportive. Love that guy! But we had Mark Dodson as our producer on The Dark, and I think that was maybe too much of a change in some ways. Love that guy, too, but we should have just done what we did on the first record and kept it super simple. In retrospect, we should have just stuck with our guy Terry for every record. One other regrettable thing that we tended to do is listen to those outside the band’s influences too much. We should have stood up and said, “No,” more often and done things the way we wanted to. Our album covers are a great example of that.”

Metal Church‘s debut self-titled album was produced by Date along with the band with Willie McKay credited as executive producer. Dodson was the producer for Metal Church‘s sophomore album The Dark before Date returned for the next record Blessing In Disguise. Dodson was back for album number four (The Human Factor).  The next record Hanging In The Balance was produced by Thom Panunzio, Kenny Laguna and Paul O’Neill. Masterpeace was produced by Mark Greer and Metal Church guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof.

You can read the rest of the interview with Duke Erickson at Vinyl Writer Music‘s website.

Metal Church‘s “Watch The Children Pray” video (from The Dark album):

Metal Church‘s “Badlands” video (from Blessing In Disguise album):