In a new interview with Soundterror, Kam Lee, who was a member of an early version of DEATH as well as the pre-DEATH band MANTAS alongside guitarist/vocalist Chuck Schuldiner and guitarist Rick Rozz, was asked what it was like working with Chuck in the early 1980s. He responded: “We were kids, so I only knew him as a teenager. So, I can’t really expand on him as an adult. I can only tell you that we were teenagers, we were 15-, 16-year-olds just having fun playing music in the garage. We never thought it was gonna become what it did, what it’s become.”

Asked why he left DEATH, Kam said: “Why did I leave DEATH? Chuck kicked me out because I tried to get him to go out with a girl.”

After the interviewer noted that many people consider the early MANTAS and DEATH demos “the birthplace of death metal growling”, Kam said: “Well, in DEATH and MANTAS, when we started in DEATH, I basically just started kind of mimicking a lot of what we were taking influences from, which was… We were tape trading for one. I was a tape trader, so I was getting a lot of stuff from all over the place. So you’d get tapes from like POSSESSED, of course, was a big influence. There was stuff from SACRIFICE coming out of Canada. There was stuff from Paul Speckmann (DEATH STRIKE, MASTER) coming out of Chicago, and there was stuff overseas like early HELLHAMMER. There was stuff like VENOM. It was a big influence on MANTAS in the beginning. So it was kind of like a combination of trying to like combine all that stuff. Plus being underage and 16, you’re just kind of screaming and you have all this angst and anger, and I come from the punk world, so I just wanted to kind of like express it that way. Plus I was playing drums at the same time. So it was a lot of trying to do that. But then when I found the growl, it really wasn’t until MASSACRE that I really started… I changed it because earlier, prior to that was more screechy-type vocals, and Chuck started to sing as well, and he took it more in a more of his influence from (POSSESSED‘s) Jeff Becerra and was trying to sound more like Jeff, where I was, like, ‘I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna sound like somebody else.’ So I tried to come up with my own thing. And I thought, what was the most primal thing that I could think of? A lot of people will always say, oh, well, there was demonic movies like ‘The Exorcist’, or stuff like that. But to me, it was more or less about being primal, being natural. And to me, the most natural thing that was hair-raising is — I was raised around a lot of large dogs, like rottweilers and pitbulls, and I knew that the scariest thing that I ever felt as a 14-year-old was being between four or five rottweilers during feeding time, where you had to go out and give them food. And if you’ve ever been around large dogs, when you bring out a bowl of food, they all begin to growl this low growl because one wants to be the alpha, wants to be dominant, and it’s kind of hair-raising. And I thought, that’s what I wanna do with vocals. I wanna do something that’s hair raising. I want to do something that sounds primal, sounds raw, sounds natural. And I started to mimic dogs. That’s literally how I got the growl.”

Lee went on to say that he didn’t know anybody else at the time who had adopted quite the same style of death metal growling. But he clarified: “I took phonetic enunciation influences from Tom G. Warrior, only because I heard the HELLHAMMER demo and I really liked how he phonetically spoke, even though at the time I didn’t realize it was ’cause he was from Switzerland and English wasn’t his natural language. I just liked the way that he phonetically said things. So I took that, and there’s a lot of his nuances, like his little ‘ooh’ and his ‘hey’, and I just took that and I expanded it. Instead of just going, ‘Hey,’ I went, ‘Heeeey.’ I kind of brought it out more. So there was that influence. And just the general influence of everything coming out in that late ’80s time. Like I said, everything from VENOM to Lemmy from MOTÖRHEAD, just anything that was really raspy and raw I was attracted to. So I tried to kind of take all of those influences all together and put ’em all together.”

Asked what the reaction was from other people to the kind of music he, Chuck and Rick were making at the time, Kam said: “Chuck and I and Freddie (Frederick ‘Rick Rozz’ DeLillo) at the time, we knew we were doing something that was completely different, and everybody hated it. Everybody hated it. I remember people would say, ‘This is shit. This will never last. This will never catch on. This is garbage.’ And look — 40-something years later, it’s one of the biggest influential music in metal today. We didn’t realize we were doing something that was going to have this much impact, but we knew at the time we were doing something different because everything that was popular at the time was hair metal, everything like MÖTLEY CRÜE and that kind of stuff, and we just wanted to be the completely polar opposite of that. So we just gravitated to more underground music, and that’s literally… We did our own thing. My influences, especially lyrically, came from horror movies ’cause I’m a big horror movie fan. So I loved the Lucio Fulci films and stuff like that. And Chuck too — a lot of the stuff on (DEATH‘s debut album) ‘Scream Bloody Gore’ literally comes from our love of Lucio Fulci and ‘Evil Dead’ and all those ’80s films that just came out during that timeframe.”