Vio-lence

Explore the band's historical lineups, musicians, and studio albums.

Active1 formation3 studio albums

Formation chronology

Newest first

Formation 1 of 1

1987 – 1992

Members

  • Sean Killian
    Vocals
  • Phil Demmel
    Guitar
  • Robb Flynn
    Guitar
  • Deen Dell
    Bass
  • Perry Strickland
    Drums

Formation facts

  • After their first gig, a keg party, Perry Strickland told the rest of Death Penalty that the band was going to be called Violence. He said they saw it everywhere, on the news and around them. Phil Demmel had just joined in the last weeks of high school. He went along because it sounded less like another band with Death in the name.
  • Sean Killian was a friend of Deen Dell's who came to rehearsals with a bottle of vodka and orange juice. Phil Demmel says it was obvious Killian had never sung. The band tried him, took their old singer back when that singer returned from Minnesota, then lost him again. Killian was still there, so he got the job.
  • Sean Killian wanted a logo that would fill a flyer. Phil Demmel says every other band's mark looked like Metallica's, with little tails on the ends. Killian had a brick logo drawn and put a hyphen in the name. Demmel says the hyphen does not make sense, and that it does not have to.
  • Before Robb Flynn joined Vio-lence, he wrote music that ended up in Forbidden's Chalice of Blood. Vio-lence tried to keep that music and put new Sean Killian lyrics on it. Phil Demmel says they dropped the idea because it was not really working, and those lyrics became Calling in the Coroner. On Eternal Nightmare, Flynn's music for that song went out without his name on it.
  • After Robb Flynn left Forbidden Evil for Vio-lence, the two bands kept smiling and bumping fists while treating everything as a contest. Debbie Abono ended up managing both and trying to keep the attention even. Phil Demmel says he and Forbidden's Craig Locicero nearly fought at a party because one of them was a Raiders fan and the other was a 49ers fan.
  • Mechanic's Steve Sinclair wanted Vio-lence in silver tuxedos, with shaved eyebrows, makeup, and Phil Demmel's hair pinned up. Demmel says Sinclair sat in his office rewriting their lyrics because the label needed its own Guns N' Roses. The band refused. A friend at Megaforce, Maria Ferrero, got them an offer there instead.
  • Before Megaforce signed Vio-lence, Jonny and Marsha Zazula came to a practice in the band's storage shed. Phil Demmel remembers them calling it a wall of sound. Marsha's note was that a wall could work, if that was what the band wanted.
  • Mechanic printed the Eternal Nightmare lyrics on the back of the LP so stores would not see a warning sticker. Stores then refused to carry the record because the lyrics were on the back. Phil Demmel's line in 1991 was that they could not win.
  • Eternal Nightmare was Phil Demmel's idea of a nightmare you cannot get out of. A Nightmare on Elm Street had just come out. He was not writing about Freddy. Sean Killian took the title and ran. Phobophobia started because Killian saw the word on Jeopardy.
  • Vio-lence left Paraplegic off the albums. Phil Demmel says the lyric, from before Sean Killian tried to write more carefully, took a shot at disabled people. With the trouble they were already in, he did not want that song hanging over them.
  • Torture Tactics was pressed on the original Oppressing the Masses CDs. Atlantic objected to the lyrics, those copies were pulled, and the song disappeared from the album most people could buy. It stayed on the Japanese CD and on advance cassettes, and Vio-lence put it out in 1991 on the Torture Tactics EP.
  • The Torture Tactics EP calls one version of Officer Nice live. The live part is an introduction taken from a 1988 Florida show and edited onto the song.
  • Vio-lence finished Nothing to Gain in August 1990 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, with the same five musicians who had made the first two albums. The record did not come out until late 1993. By then Robb Flynn was already gone. Sean Killian later said that as grunge was coming in, people around the band were telling them what to change, and then the label did not put the record out.
  • Robb Flynn says he quit Vio-lence in 1992 because he was ready for something else, and that Machine Head started while he was still in the band. Phil Demmel remembers it the other way around. Flynn asked if he could do both bands. The others said no. He left.
  • On 11 August 2001, Vio-lence played Thrash of the Titans in San Francisco, a benefit for Testament's Chuck Billy and Death's Chuck Schuldiner, both sick with cancer. Robb Flynn did not play. The night of the show, Sean Killian told a reporter they would have to talk about doing it again. He later said the crowd response is what got them to keep going.
  • The early-2000s reunion wrote three songs and played two of them at the last show before Phil Demmel joined Machine Head. He still meant to record a Vio-lence album. Once he was in Machine Head, he was told he could not. That ended the reunion.
  • At a January 2018 benefit, Phil Demmel saw Sean Killian in stage-four liver cirrhosis and did not know if he would see his friend again. Killian's brother-in-law, Kevin Rivero, was the donor for a transplant that March. Early in 2019, Killian called about putting Vio-lence back onstage. Demmel's first thought was that there was no way he could mean it.
  • The 13 April 2019 show at the Oakland Metro sold out in hours, so Vio-lence added the next day, and that one sold out in minutes. They played Eternal Nightmare from the first song to the last, which Phil Demmel says they had never done. No barricade, half stacks, jeans and T-shirts. He said it felt like Ruthie's Inn in 1986.
  • For the 2019 shows, Phil Demmel says Robb Flynn was never an option. Flynn had left. The band agreed Ray Vegas was the guitarist.
  • Vio-lence opened for Overkill in 1989, and Perry Strickland stayed in touch with Bobby Gustafson. Demmel says that when Strickland left in the early 1990s, he and Gustafson were even planning a band with Billy Milano. In 2020, people suggested local guitarists the band had known for years. Demmel did not want a player with no identity of his own. Strickland recommended Gustafson, and that was enough.
  • Christian Olde Wolbers was first called for shows Deen Dell could not make. Then the pandemic wiped the calendar. Dell could not give the band the time it needed, and Olde Wolbers stayed. Sean Killian says Olde Wolbers had been a Vio-lence fan as a teenager in Belgium, listening to Oppressing the Masses.
  • Phil Demmel tried to revive songs he had written for Vio-lence around 2001. They sounded like that year, tuned down and stuck in the groove-metal moment, so he threw them out and started over. Let the World Burn stopped at five songs. He wanted a handful of fast punches rather than a 70-minute album. Perry Strickland had not made a thrash record in a long time, and Demmel says the nerves showed until the takes were down.

Studio albums

  • Nothing to Gain (Nov 1993)
  • Oppressing the Masses (Jul 1990)
  • Eternal Nightmare (Jun 1988)

Historical memberships, formation facts, and studio-album associations follow the published Headbangear archive. Studio albums are linked to formations via curated association — not inferred from release dates alone.