Old Grandad "Vol. 666 / OGD EP": Bleeding Priest's Bay Area Metal Spotlight 12
- Bleeding Priest
- Jun 1
- 5 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
What’s up, metalheads, and welcome to a brand new edition of Bleeding Priest’s Bay Area Metal Spotlight. For this one, I’m going to be covering a band that’s a huge part of my musical and personal history. This band creeps back into my life every few years — and that band is Old Grandad.
This right here is a reissue of our first album, which originally came out in 1995, Vol. 666, along with our first EP, OGD EP, which was released in 1997. The reissue is out now on Hectic Records, and you can get your copy at hectic.com. Plenty of copies are still available, heh heh.
I have fond memories of making this album and being in this band. Great times — we were going strong from mid-’94 to about 2000. Then we went on hiatus for a year or two, put out a few more albums, and it’s been back and forth with the hiatuses ever since.
When Vol. 666 came out, we were an active band, playing all the time. We recorded it in Menlo Park with Guy Higbey, who recorded all five of our albums. We tracked it at his house — he had a studio downstairs — and it was really quick and easy. Not too many overdubs or production tricks. What you hear is what actually happened.
We were all pretty green as lead vocalists at the time. I had only done backup vocals in my previous bands. At Warfare DC rehearsals, if we didn’t have vocals or lyrics yet, I’d mush something into the mic to shape the structure. But I had never really done live or recorded lead vocals before. Neither had Eric or Max — well, maybe Max did in his previous band Shagwagon, but I’m not sure.
You can definitely tell we were new to it. I remember Max doing the vocals for Don’t Call Me a Dead Head. He kept coming in too early — like: “Don’t… call… me.” It was so funny. Eventually we told him, “Dude, just shorten it and go ‘Don’t!’” I wish we had a recording of that — it was entertaining.
I love this album. It was surprisingly well-received when it came out in 1995. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in the San Francisco metal scene at the time, so maybe the timing was just right. If it came out today, I don’t know how it would be received. But back then, I think people were hungry for something heavy and different.
We played a ridiculous number of shows during that era — sometimes three times a week, just in San Francisco. Weeknight shows, weekend gigs. Wild times. A lot of fun. A lot of drugs. For how primitive the recording process was, I think it turned out great. The drums still sound cool. I used my brother’s kit — a CB700… or maybe it was an MX1000? Never seen one since. It was a little four-piece kit we set up and miked in an hour, and I started tracking.
Now, this right here is the OGD EP, which followed the first full-length. It was a bit more evolved. I used my own kit for this one, and we had a ton of songs written. We recorded everything in one stretch — not in a single day, but over a few months. It was too much for one album, so we picked the five strongest tracks for this EP. The rest became The Last Upper, which came out in 1999.
It was frustrating sitting on those other tracks for so long — we didn’t write much new stuff because we already had so much recorded. That delay might’ve been one of the straws that broke the camel’s back and led to our 2000 hiatus.
I love this EP. Of all our releases, I think this is the most consistent — the songs flow into each other, they link well, and it just works. It’s not my favorite, but it’s the strongest front-to-back listen. We even won a Bay Guardian award for this one.
I used a piccolo snare on both OGD EP and The Last Upper. In hindsight… I don’t know why. Piccolo snares don’t really hold up in metal. But in ’97, they were everywhere. I liked the crack and the attack. But let’s be real — I hit hard enough already. I didn’t need a piccolo snare.
Anyway, I’m super proud of both these records. If you’re not familiar with them, go to hectic.com and pick up your copy today. Great packaging, lyrics inside, all that good stuff.
Fun times, fun times. Check it out — and I’ll see you next week. Goodbye.
–Bleeding Priest
Footnote: The Cover of Old Grandad’s Vol. 666
And a quick footnote on the first album, Vol. 666—I meant to talk about the album cover and totally spaced on it.
This cover’s pretty interesting. When it first came out, we loved it. Thought it was the best thing ever. On a small CD format, it looked cool. But when Dave reissued it on vinyl and it was blown up to full size... it's honestly a pretty ugly album cover. If this record dropped in 2025, I don’t know how well it would go over. It’s definitely weird. But we had fun making it.
Each character on the cover represents a band member, and we each designed our own. That’s Eric’s guy right there: a translucent, morphing humanoid. His head is turning into a green bong we called the Emerald City. It was a three-chamber beast that Eric, Max, and Dave had at their old apartment on Oak Street. We partied there a lot. Great times.
Naturally, we wrote a song about it, The Emerald City. You’ll find that on the record. If you look closely at Eric’s character, his chin is morphing into a pot that’s boiling Satan’s head—yep, that’s from the song Urine Angel. The lyric is: “My sweet boiling Satan, digest the hellspawn.”
Then there’s Max’s guy—this jellyfish-brain creature with ice cubes for eyes.
And my guy? When it was my turn, I told artist Tom Wilson—who also did The Last Upper and our most recent Old Grandad self-titled cover—that I wanted someone who looked like they’d been up on speed for a week. Real greasy and slimy, maybe possessed by the devil, with a bunch of needles in his arm, holding a crackpipe, and with a third eye on his forehead. That last part has no deeper meaning—I just think a third eye looks creepy.
Tom nailed it. He took that whole mess and made it look exactly how I pictured it. Not sure if "beautiful" is the right word, but he did a killer job.
The bar we’re all sitting at on the cover? That was the actual bar from Eric, Dave, and Max’s old apartment. And it’s the bar I’m sitting at right now. That cover photo was taken in their old living room—just us drinking and laughing like we always did.
So yeah—just wanted to share some backstory on this bizarre cover. You can find Vol. 666 in record stores now. I wonder what people think when they see it in the metal section… It doesn’t exactly scream “metal album.” If I didn’t know us, I’d be like: What the hell is this? Old Grandad? Who knows?
Anyway, thanks for watching. Catch you next time.
–Bleeding Priest
