THE  BANDS  OF  HEAVY  ARTILLERY

Whoever has heard of the Heavy Artillery sampler from  Auburn Records knows that this collection presented the best music in a power metal compilation. The interesting thing about it is that nearly all of the 20 bands come from the greater Cleveland area and only but a few had previously recorded any albums. Bigger bands like Breaker, Titan Force and Purgatory were already presented by us in past interviews, but lesser known bands have also deserved to be once more brought out into the public light. This edition introduces former Sacred Heart guitarist Byron Nemeth, whom we met with at his recording studio for an in depth interview.

The beginning of Sacred Heart was set around 85/86. Our first and only demo was made in 89/90. I was 21 or 22 at that time. I found the band with the drummer and another guitarist, we wanted to play metal in the style which at that time was coming from Europe and Germany specifically, we tried to imitate this style rather faithfully. We had called ourselves Sacred Heart because we wanted a positive name that people could easily identify with. We played a lot of live shows in cities all around Ohio and the mid-west. We also played the big Heavy Artillery concert for the Auburn Records compilation release of the same name. This was organized by Bill Peters, owner of Auburn Records at the time and promoter for this show. It was at the Phantasy Theater (Cleveland Area) with most of the bands on the compilation tape playing this big show, just some of the bands that played were Breaker, Chemikill, Real Steel, Purgatory, Torment, Hatrix, Wretch, Severe Warning, Attaxe and us, their were definitely 10 to 15 bands as far as I can remember. Every band played about 30 to 45 minutes, their must have been about 800 to 900 people for sure, it was a grandiose concert in Cleveland that was a tremendous success for Bill and Auburn records. We also did other shows with Shok Paris, they were wild and crazy shows, they were totally nice with us gave us soundchecks and everything, I still see Eric every once in a while and we mostly talk about the good old days.

I had heard on Bill's radio show that he was going to do this so I gave him a few practice tapes from our rehearsal studio. He came out to see us play live and then decided to include us in the compilation album, "Time After Time" was everybody's favorite song so that was the one that we went with for the compilation.

We had a lot more song's but we did not have enough money to do a whole album, at that time I did not have my own studio like I do now. If we had done a whole album it would have been great at the time.

No, I have never been in a coverband in my life. I was always in all original bands and I value that artistically very much. It is very hard to have large success and bar bands are a dime a dozen, I rather go down in flames of glory that to play someone else's music and not be a REAL artist.

We made a 1000 units and had them all sold in the space of that summer, 150 to 200 units were used as promotional material and now I have only about 100 units left. For a demo in was a real successes.

Because bands are stupid, quarrel and break up. They don't see this as a real business and are not prepared to make the commitments necessary to make it a business success. Way to many musicians that don't see huge success right away immediately start to get discourage and just wind up getting regular jobs, get married or whatever, and before they know it their not as passionate about their instrument let alone their band and just give up music in life. This is very sad artistically, and you have to wonder were the true love of music as a composer and performer went to.

Yes, Absolutely !

I founded a new band called Amon-Ra, It lasted almost a year. We made a CD named "In The Company Of The Gods". I wrote some songs by myself and the other were co-written. Like before we had 1000 CD printed sold almost all of them and had 100 for promotional material that went to all of the radio stations. This CD is little known to the European collector, the reason why is that with Sacred Heart we had Auburn as a label to promote the cassette, with Amon-Ra we did not have a label with contacts in Europe, had I known of you guys I would have sent you copies.

They were our Alter Ego's ! (ha, ha, ha,) They were all based on Egyptian mythology. We wanted the band to have a binding theme. It should have been explored even more into the career of the band with the release of the second CD that we had planned, but the band broke up before that was to happen, maybe on the second CD we could have had a totally different concept, Iron Maiden did something totally different after "Powerslave".

Yes, but naturally much less. We had an Egyptian made drum-kit and backdrops, it looked very cool for the people that got to see our live shows.

The keyboardist and me were making a lot of progress with our writing, after the band ended we started a new band, we decided to call it Prodigy and record a three-song demo tape, this was before the techno band Prodigy came out, when they came out we changed the name to Voices, had a few personnel changes again and Electro-Motive-Force was born, this was my first instrumental band. Both bands lasted about a year and a half.

I'm definitely not a singer, I'm not that brave. I am a guitarist, songwriter, producer and I can play keyboards a little bit. I think that somebody who wants to be considered a real lead vocalist needs to have it naturally from birth and needs to be continually working at it just like any other serious instrumentalist. I have played the guitar all my life and have written songs and worked in all types of studios with all types of musician's and thee hardest things is trying to find great singer that could constantly sing on key and in pitch and who could interpret the art of music in a band that I would be happy to be in. There are vocal bands that I like a lot like UFO & Dream Theater, If I were to do a vocal band it would be in that style, an artistic version of both of those bands. If the right singer comes along I'm totally open to explore that area musically.

Yes, I believe that it has changed, I have grown a lot as a musician by listening to a lot of non-rock music that I love just as much like Classical and Jazz music. In these fields only the truly great instrumentalists can survive. You can't find bad players in these kinds of music, your either great in the orchestra or your not in it. These concepts have been influencing me a lot lately in the rock'n roll I've been playing lately, If I could find a great singer that I could work with I would consider going back to mainstream vocal rock music with a progressive flair. Until that happens I'm going to continue to play technically demanding instrumental music.

Thank You Martin, hopefully I'll be able to come to Europe and tour soon! Talk to you soon.