Bloody Kisses [Top Shelf Edition]

One day in the early 1990s, Peter Steele crammed his monstrous frame into a New York City Parks Department truck and set out for the Hamilton Avenue Marine Transfer Station. Located on the banks of the Gowanus Canal, it was a holding ground for thousands of tons of trash before the trash was ferried to Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. He was hauling 40 cubic yards of human waste, and there was a backup at the station, a line of garbage trucks stopped along the road. He liked the job—it paid $40,000 a year—and it gave the Type O Negative bassist and lead singer time to write.

Steele looked like a more Nordic Undertaker, or Glenn Danzig but a foot taller. He was an archetype for the brooding, hypermasculine metalhead that crawled out of the primordial ooze. And for three hours, while sitting in traffic waiting to unload a truckful of excrement, he composed a song in his head. It was, he later told an interviewer for the deluxe reissue of his band Type O Negative’s landmark third album, Bloody Kisses, about “the ultimate goth girl” who was “in love with herself.”

The vampire of South Brooklyn, who shoveled shit between band practices, cut both a relatable and controversial figure. “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is a send-up of the goth-girl archetype (”She’s got a date at midnight with Nosferatu/Oh, baby, Lily Munster ain’t got nothing on you”), the title referring to the only thing a Little Miss Scare-All could ever truly fear: the roots of her hair showing. But Steele made an industry of synthesizing the ironic with the sublimely earnest. In that same interview, he reveals that the song has some verisimilitude: “It’s about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over,” a reference to his 1989 suicide attempt.

Goth metal, then still in its infancy, was made popular in the early ’90s by “The Peaceville Three,” which included My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema, all from Northern England. The genre was a self-serious mashup of death metal and doom that left little room for outsized personalities like Steele. But Steele didn’t care about the death metal part; he just wanted the doom. Coming out of the 1980s as an all-star in the New York City thrash metal world—a scene that bred bands like Anthrax, Overkill, and Nuclear Assault—he entered the next decade with that same brash attitude, but with an urge to slow things down. In creating Bloody Kisses, Steele re-invented goth metal by grasping on to influences like Black Sabbath and the Beatles, and creating a lane for mainstream goth-influenced bands from Finland’s HIM to Evanescence. Never again would Steele make an album that straddled these two worlds, with one foot in a mud-flecked work boot, the other in pristine black leather.

Steele hinted at Type O Negative’s style back in 1987, the same year he started in the Parks Department and released his thrash band Carnivore’s second and final album, Retaliation. Glancing merely at the tracklist, Retaliation anticipates most Type O Negative albums: a joke opener (“Jack Daniel’s and Pizza”), classic rock cover halfway through (Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”), and a smattering of offensive song titles (honestly, take your pick). The album is good, if musically unremarkable, crossover thrash.

What Steele became infamous for in the mid-’80s, though, was his racist and misogynistic lyrics—written off by fans and hagiographers as “sarcastic”—and by extension, his perceived worldview. He penned the words for fellow New York hardcore band Agnostic Front on their 1986 song “Public Assistance,” a racist screed against so-called welfare queens. He’d repeat this theme on Type O Negative’s debut, Slow, Deep and Hard, in the lyrics to the song “Der Untermensch,” and in interviews throughout his career.

Originally called Repulsion, Type O Negative emerged in 1990 after the grindcore pioneers with the same name enlisted a lawyer. Steele, along with childhood friends guitarist Kenny Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver, and drummer Sal Abruscato, settled on naming their gothic doom project Type O Negative—after a short stint as Sub-Zero, also taken—because “it didn’t sound too metal.” According to Silver, the band preferred ambiguity, so that “you couldn’t tell what kind of band, what type of music it would be.” Steele had a reputation from his time in Carnivore, and the band didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another thrash act, a genre that broke into the mainstream that year with landmark albums from Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, and Suicidal Tendencies.

The first two Type O Negative albums, though, were indications that Steele wasn’t quite ready to leave the past behind. They were still being booked at Carnivore’s old stomping grounds, in the East Village at The Ritz and in Brooklyn at L’Amour. And his crude sense of humor carried over from the ’80s. The cover of 1991’s Slow, Deep and Hard featured a blurred image of a penis (maybe Steele’s) and the follow-up, a “live” album—versions of songs from their first LP with fictionalized stage banter and a fabricated booing crowd overdubbed—released the following year, The Origin of the Feces, is famous mostly for the cover depiction of his anus (definitely Steele’s). Carnivore’s speedy thrash riffs and howling vocals have survived, but midway through, songs slow to a crawl, infused with foreboding synthesizers and mournful church organs. Both records are mixed bags, as if the band is a chimera struggling to become something not entirely unsettling.

Type O Negative found their true form when they retreated to Silver’s home studio in Brooklyn to record demos of what would become Bloody Kisses. Roadrunner, Carnivore’s label, stuck with Steele after he formed Type O Negative, and when VP of A&R Monte Conner heard what the band had come up with, he was blown away, recalling that it sounded like “nothing before and nothing after.” The tape contained the majority of what would eventually become Bloody Kisses, including a complete version of “Christian Woman,” which crystalized their new musical identity. Instead of a tossed-off hardcore song with slow parts thrown in, Conner heard Sisters of Mercy gloom, Sabbath riffs, and Beatles harmonies underneath Steele’s new baritone delivery, which weaves together sexual and divine themes.

With four tracks over seven minutes long and four instrumental interludes, Conner heard a cinematic epic, importantly, one that would cross over to fans in multiple genres: goth kids, metalheads, maybe even soft-rock fans, who would get a doom-laden cover of Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze.” Roadrunner sent the demo to Jim Steinman, a producer on Sisters of Mercy’s 1987 album Floodland, who remarked, “There’s nothing I can add to this.” The label never again insisted on a producer for the band. Once they could reinvent a genre whole cloth by themselves, they never again had to answer to a label.

While “Black No. 1” is the band’s trademark song, the 11-minute, organ-drenched dirge “Bloody Kisses (A Death in the Family)” is the album’s emotional centerpiece. Ostensibly about a woman who died by suicide, it’s actually a veiled tribute to Steele’s elderly cat Venus, who died while he was writing the album. It’s also Steele’s first stab at describing emotional pain without couching it in humor or veiled misogyny—a heartbreaking ode to a creature he adored, one who used to sit on his chest while he did bench presses. “No one wants to hear a guy who’s six-foot-eight with long black hair and fangs crying about his fuckin’ cat,” Steele said, “so I had to make it extremely metaphorical.” The title track is a characterization of Steele as a person to this point in his life: deeply emotional and sentimental, struggling to convey his humanity. For the first time, fans were exposed to how raw Steele could be when he really tried.

However, this is not the case throughout the album. Steele would still hedge his real misanthropy and pain with tongue-in-cheek New York brashness. Even the cover of the album, a pair of goth women, with parted bloodied lips and closed eyes in apparent ecstasy, is difficult to take seriously, especially knowing the two album covers that preceded Bloody Kisses. Is Steele skewering goth girls, as he does on “Black No. 1”? Did he tire of producing albums that would be judged, quite harshly, by their covers? Steele never gave a definitive answer, and the band later complained that they hated the finished product. Steele, obsessed with the color green, complained that the particular shade of green was all wrong, after spending hours rifling through color swatches that designers use.

It was also around this time that Steele began to employ a type of vampiric affect in his vocal delivery. In the first verse of “Black No. 1,” he stresses final consonants in “dark,” and “milk,” trilling the “t’s” on the phrase “trick or treat,” sucking air through his fangs before cooing, “Happy Halloween, baby.” Left to their own devices, Silver and Steele purposefully added a layer of sensuality to the vocals, putting Steele front-and-center. Silver added more compression than usual to the microphone, which is, according to Conner, “why you can hear every time Peter smacks his lips.” The intended effect was to go a step beyond what forebears like Sisters of Mercy were doing in creating a sense of mystique and sexuality—and it worked. “It’s like you’re inside his mouth,” Conner said. “It’s all so immediate.”

Doing press for the Bloody Kisses tour, Steele was asked about this vocal transformation, and in typical fashion, he couldn’t describe his art in a straightforward or neutral manner. “I’ve really gotten sick and tired of all these male vocalists with low testosterone levels that sound like little girls having their feet tickled,” Steele said. “I think men should sound like men.” This is a hill Steele would die on. From his time in the New York hardcore and thrash scenes through Bloody Kisses, and even near the end of his life, he spoke in a heteronormative, gender-biased tongue. In his final interview, in 2010, he said, “I admit, I am a sexist,” before throwing off another one-liner about being sexist against men only, but there is truth in humor. He didn’t appear to care that people thought of him this way either, which, in addition to the publicity these interviews would create—without any truly negative consequences—is why he kept giving them.

Metal and punk bands are rightfully called to account by fans, critics, and artists in these subcultures for a fraction of what Steele has said into a microphone or tape recorder. Part of the reason Steele has gotten a pass is a longstanding narrative that frames him as a wan, unreliable narrator who is maybe-maybe-not just stirring the pot. After all, his recipe for most things was half-sincere, half-ironic, as if he could never really commit fully to one genre. The closer, “Can’t Lose You,” is a sitar-laden dirge that features Steele crooning “I can’t lose you” repeatedly. It appears as an unironic plea to a lost love for five minutes, until fading out with the so-called Bensonhoist Lesbian Choir—e.g. his bandmates and friends from Brooklyn who would hang out in the studio—chanting, barely audible, “Everybody smokes pot/Monte Conner sucks cock.” (Conner would later brush the intended insult off, saying, “It wasn’t meant to be mean.”)

Type O Negative would evolve further into the goth rock side of gothic metal. Though the music would never be better than it was on Bloody Kisses, the band eventually took (overt) homophobia and misogyny off the records. For what it’s worth, Steele tried to walk back some of his words in that final interview, speaking of “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else,” from Slow, Deep and Hard: “When I used the words ‘slut,’ ‘whore,’ and, ‘cunt’… I’m not proud of that language.”

After Bloody Kisses was released in August 1993, Type O Negative, by association, became both a beneficiary—and a casualty—of the 1990s goth and nu-metal subculture, no doubt reinvigorated by the films of Tim Burton, the rise of Marilyn Manson, and the ubiquitousness of Hot Topic, which specialized in merchandise depicting the films of Tim Burton and the music of Marilyn Manson. Type O Negative also shared bills with labelmates Coal Chamber, Fear Factory, and Spineshank as Roadrunner shifted its focus to nu-metal near the end of the decade. They no doubt made converts out of fans of their sleeker industrial and nu-metal openers, but along the way became lumped in with the black JNCOs set.

And that’s despite Type O Negative hitting on a mid-90s pop-culture trifecta in the wake of Bloody Kisses. Beavis and Butthead, watching the “Black No. 1” video, gave a rare favorable review, calling the sound, “A cross between Danzig and Megadeth.” Steele appeared on a 1995 The Jerry Springer Show episode called “Sexy Groupie Girls Tell All!” where a woman with a crude tattoo of the Type O logo on her shoulder calls him “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen.” And, infamously, eager goths opened that year’s August issue of Playgirl to see a fully nude Steele unfurl from the centerfold.

Today, you can still buy a Bloody Kisses T-shirt at Hot Topic, just as you can purchase an officially licensed Jack Skellington oven mitt. But you can also find numerous editions of obscure Type O Negative designs from any number of bootleg T-shirt makers on Instagram alongside ones for well-regarded metal bands like Bolt Thrower and Obituary. On Halloween 2017, I sipped bourbon at an Austin dive bar as metalheads chanted the chorus from “Christian Woman” as if at a revival church. The Type O Negative logo—a negative symbol inside a circle, both green—is newly iconic, like the Crass cross or the Black Flag bars. It has become a token of both goth and metal culture, not just because of its austere radioactive design, but because Bloody Kisses remains a unifier of goth and metal, an uncut gem stuck between the dump and the landfill.

When Peter Steele died from sepsis on April 14, 2010, the most revealing tribute for Steele came from Julius Spiegel, Brooklyn Commissioner of Parks: