DB HOF NO. 16

The making of Eyehategod’s “Take as Needed for Pain”

released: 1993

label: Century Media

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Drugs, disease, crime, abuse, poverty, paranoia, drugs, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol: Such are the cornerstones of Eyehategod’s time-honored New Orleans aesthetic. The band’s first album, In the Name of Suffering—a lo-fi, doom-ridden disturbance bashed out on a broken drum kit and cheap guitars with missing strings—was originally released on the French label Intellectual Convulsion in 1990. When Century Media re-released it two years later, they also commissioned Eyehategod to make what would arguably become the band’s defining album. A series of buzzing, lurching dirges steeped in feedback and contempt, Take as Needed for Pain was released in 1993, spawning countless imitators as vocalist Mike Williams, drummer Joey LaCaze, guitarist Jimmy Bower (also of Down and Superjoint Ritual), guitarist Brian Patton (also of Soilent Green), and then-bassist Marc Schultz lashed a Sabbathian groove to the muck-ridden undertow of the Melvins’ Gluey Porch Treatments, drowned the whole vicious slab in disorienting noise, and proceeded to give everybody the finger. Song titles like “Sister Fucker” (parts one and two), “White Nigger,” and “Kill Your Boss” may have launched the band headlong into a shitstorm of cultural controversy and confusion that follows them to this day, but then again, that was always kind of the idea.

—J. Bennett

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