Sound Off: Give Pete A Chance
It is with sadness and a sense of nostalgia that I write this Sound Off article. An instrumental part of my angst filled teenage years passed away on April 14th, 2010. His name was Peter Steele.
Peter Steele was born Petrus T. Ratajczyk in Brooklyn, New York in 1962 and would eventually help create a mass market for what many have come to call ‘Gothic Metal’. Peter was the lead vocalist, bassist and composer for the band Type O Negative. Prior to forming T.O.N. in 1989 Peter was in the Brooklyn based heavy metal band ‘Fallout’ and the thrash metal band ‘Carnivore’. I’m not sure if you can always hear it in his music but Pete (for the rest of this article I will be referring to him as Pete) always said that when composing, his greatest musical influences were The Beatles and Black Sabbath. Ironically, Ronnie Dio, formerly of Black Sabbath, died almost exactly a month after Pete did.
Type O Negative…..well, mostly Pete….gained mainstream media attention in 1995 after a self confessed ‘publicity stunt’ spread in Playgirl. Pete was hoping to promote their upcoming album ‘October Rust’ but gained attention for something completely different (if you get my drift). For those of you that don’t know who Pete Steele was or what he looked like, I will try to paint a picture. He was quite a manly man, standing at 6’6” and built to the hills. He had long, black, beautiful hair and if you looked closely enough when he spoke you would see that his teeth had actually been filed to resembled fangs. His voice was so deep that it probably made inanimate objects vibrate and his eyes were a piercing green. Pete’s ‘uniform’ at concerts, in video’s and most public appearances was a form fitting dark green shirt, black pants and boots. Someone at Roadrunner Records, T.O.N.’s first record label, described him as being ‘completely committed to the color green’. He is often referred to as ‘The Green Man’ due to that very commitment as well as the song of the same name off of the hit album ‘October Rust’.
Pete was famous for his shocking lyrics, some of which I cringe at now, but that definitely made T.O.N. what it is today. A sufferer of clinical depression and bi-polar disorder, he was able to take his insanely brilliant mind and his sometimes off the chart emotions and make musical masterpieces for the masses. I understand that not everyone likes this style of music, and to be honest it’s not really my cup of tea anymore either but this man didn’t just create ‘music’, he made poetry. When I listen to some of his songs, or even read the lyrics, I can for a moment almost feel where he was when he was writing it. I really think that when Pete was writing about werewolves and vampires and the darker things in his music he was using metaphors for where he was in his life. I think this is why I and so many other people connected with his music. We were all facing the same types of demons he was singing about and it was nice to know we weren’t going through it alone.
Life was not easy for The Green Man but I’m sure it was always interesting. If you were to read or watch any of his interviews you might be a little surprised at how incredibly funny he was. He said some of the most off the wall, crazy things out of the middle of nowhere and you may think he was on drugs but it was just how Pete rolled. He told you what he thought and he always told the truth. On the T.O.N. website band mate Kenny Hickey said ‘Peter Steele was one of the most brilliant and funny personalities in music and it was for real. Half the time people thought he was joking but he was actually telling the truth’ which made me think back to an interview he gave at a rock festival in the Netherlands where he talked very seriously about having a pet Bobcat on the tour bus. Everyone else laughed it off like he was joking but now I wonder. It was millions of quirky moments like that which made him so special.
There were many life changing moments during Pete’s career, the loss of his mother and father, the feuding that took place between he and his sisters when they had him committed, drug and alcohol abuse and love that came and went. Another big change was Pete’s view on eternity. Many fans had come to know Mr. Steele as a devout atheist. Although raised Roman-Catholic he wanted nothing to do with God or religion and made it very clear in his lyrics and in his interviews. But Pete grew through his loss and realized that something bigger and better had to be out there and in 2007 made the announcement that he had embraced Christianity. In an interview with Decibel magazine he said “There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and I was a foxhole atheist for a long time. But after going through a midlife crisis and having many things change very quickly, it made me realize my mortality. And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what’s after it. And then you start hoping there is a God. For me, it’s a frightening thought to go nowhere. I also can’t believe that people like Stalin and Hitler are gonna go to the same place as Mother Teresa”.
Pete was 48 years old when he died of heart failure. He had been sober for quite some time and was going to start working on the next Type O Negative album in the coming months. The title of this article came from an interview where Pete said he had thought about writing a book filled with stories of his misadventures and he would call the book ‘Give Pete a Chance’. There is so much more that could be said about this man that was so touchingly human, so emotionally vulnerable, so incredibly brilliant, but there just isn’t enough space on a page. I think if anything Pete’s story and life inspires me to want to be better. To not look back and wish I did something but passed the opportunity by. To be creative and to touch people with that creativity so they can maybe, if just for a second, feel more alive.
See you on the other side Pete……
‘I’m not an extremely suicidal or sad person. Yes, there are times when I get extremely depressed and how I sublimate those feelings is through music. Instead of slashing my wrists, I just write a bunch of really crummy songs.’ -Peter Steele
Written by: Michelle Brockman for RhythmScene.com
Leave a Reply