Axes / Buy / Contact
/ Home / Music / News / Photos / The
Seventh
Power / Menchen / Rev Seven / Redeemer
/ Final
Axe / Titanic
Read
A Review Of Beyond Hells Gate
Read
A Review Of The Axe Of The
Apostles
In
1989, a band
called Final Axe was
born. Bill had become
aquainted with Keith by playing one of Keith's
festivals he put on.
Keith didn't have a band at the time, but was selling
T-Shirts for
Final Axe. He
already had a concept and he sold shirts like crazy.
A few months later
Bill was sitting at home with no band, and
wanted to do a new project,
but
had no particular direction in mind.
He
couldn't think of
anyone to play with and didn't know Keith well,
but had his phone
number from playing at one of his festivals. So he
called up Keith and
the
person
who answered the phone said,
"Just a minute". A minute went by and Bill
was told Keith would call
him back in a few hours. Bill thought, "Well,
he's
not interested."
Two hours later, Keith slides out from under a car he
was
working
on and asks, "What did you say?" "I said Bill Menchen called".
"Why
didn't you tell me he called?" "I did!"
Keith
returned Bill's call,
and they got together and talked about
some ideas. Bill
threw a song
together real fast on a 4 track and
played it for Keith. Keith came
back
later with some words and
sang it. It was called "Prodigal Son". A few
days went by and Keith
put a new set of words to it. The song became
"Baptized
in
Blood".
That was the beggining of a new song writing chemistry.
In
about a month or so, they
had enough songs to make a studio
recording. They called Rod Reasner
from "DTS", to borrow a bass
on the first day of recording. Rod
asked if he could come along and
watch, and joined the band on the way
to the studio, since he was
no longer in DTS.
Rod called drummer Chris Lattimer a few days
later, also ex-DTS, and he
joined the group. They did Beyond Hell's
Gate very fast
and had no money. It wasn't everything they wanted,
but they didn't
want to
wait for a year to save more money. They
wanted to get going while they
had
fresh inspiration. The band
started very basic, but the music and live
shows began to expand quickly.
In 1990, Chris Reth joined the
group on drums. Later that same
year,
the group made it's final apearance at Metal Midnight IV with
Bill's
cousin Bruce Menchen on bass guitar, and Tim Palmatier on drums.
A second album was recorded in
1990' but never finished, or released.
Then, in 2005, Retroactive Records had Robert Sweet to
play the
drums
on the unfinished album. The album is now available on
Retroact
Records. "The axe of the apostles".
7