Piggy (Voivod) est mort

Oh fuck that's horrible. Damn. great great great musician great band.

Nothingface "blew my mind" when I heard it back in the day. Fuck.

This sucks.

That's horrible, it was just the other day that the band announced he was sick.

Of all the guitarists from 80s metal bands, Pigy was one of the most irreplaceable. Maybe it had something to do with the fact they came from a town as isolated as Jonquiere, but from the first track on War and Pain, his guitar work was nothing like anything that was being done at the time. Dimension Hatross and Nothingface remain towering achievements to this day.

Grotesquely sad. Didn't Chuck make an observation/joke in Stairway about how the town they came from was a factory town with a whole lotta shit in the air that upped cancer rates? I wonder if this was that legacy come to pass.

Time to throw on Dimension Hatröss in honor.

Quote from Blacky via Blabbermouth (I see Ian's already been there via comments):

"Life does not always turn out the way you expect. Mine and the lives of many of my friends from Jonquiere were certainly influenced by one specific person, Denis D'Amour. He was a mentor and a hero for many of us. He was my best friend.

"I have dreaded the arrival of this day for a while now. My old bandmate is gone. He passed away last night at peace with himself and without pain. Until the very end he was both a sweetheart and a real rocker, without compromise.

"I am so grateful that I had the chance to let him know how much he meant to me and how much I loved him. Denis did not live to see his last artistic effort released but the rest of us will appreciate it all the more.

"Long live Denis D'Amour. Long live Piggy."

terrible loss. if i recall he had already beaten cancer once before, it's tragic that this had to happen to him.

I'm just remembering now that a promo I worked on for a metal show at KLA at UCLA in 1990 or so -- I didn't DJ it, was just helping with some production -- had at its core the first hyperspeed section of "Tribal Convictions." And for damned good reason.

Fuck, I loved these guys.

Normally, I don't venerate those canned major label promo interview sampler records, but somehow I was able to get a hold of the Nothingface-era MCA promo sampler interview album.. and I just remember really enjoying what the band had to say. Normally those things aren't enjoyable at all.. I mean, I'm a huuuge XTC fan and the Skylarking one is just forgettable, in spite of Andy Partridge's wit. I just loved the rather cold yet very down to earth tone that Voivod delivered in that interview. I really wish I heard or seen the band interview in a less edited fashion (and without that announcer guy!) I don't remember if Denis himself spoke in the interview.. but I guess I'm trying to underscore the degree of high regard I hold Voivod with just one of many examples, though I wanted to choose the most personal sounding one I could muster.

This news saddens me greatly. I, too, had heard just the other day that he was in the hospital.. and I just didn't expect this news so soon, if at all.

:(

xpost Ned: there was a feature, I think in Voice,don't remember who wrote it, back around Hatross, which described their home town, on an island, where everybody lived in the company's prefabricated housing, and worked in the same plant, and I'm pretty sure Piggy was being treated for some form of cancer by the time Hatross came out. (At the time, I had the notion that some songs were written in reaction to this, maybe on earlier albums too?)

Fuck. They almost justified thrash metal's existence. One of my favorite metal bands of the past 20 years, and Piggy was one of the main reasons why. Back in the '80s I interviewed Snake (or Away? one of them), asked them whether Piggy was named after the Lord of the Flies character, and was told. "Eet has nuzzing do do wiss Lord of zee Flies. We call heem Peegy because he is short and fat like a peeg." A couple months ago, the Navajo Code Takers, who are Voivod's friends in Quebec, told me he had been hospitalized. That made me sad, and this makes me a lot sadder. RIP.

"One of my favorite metal bands of the past 20 years"

No doubt. Possibly my very favorite.

RIP

And somehow, for some stupid reason, I had forgotten they ended Dimension with the Batman theme. God bless yer, Piggy.

Oh fuck, really really bad news. AMAZING guitarist, IMO the most individual player in the metal scene. Killing Technology, Dimension Hatross, Nothingface, Angel Rat - he was always inventive and dissonant without sounding in any way ostentatious about it. This, Luc Ferrari and Bob Moog all in the same week!

seriously one of a kind.

This is the most fucked up thing ever. No joke, seriously weird. A good buddy of mine just asked me to contribute something for his zine and I wrote about Voivod. This was about two days ago.

In tribute, I'll post it here. I don't think Ben would mind. (I think he lurks ILM anyway...)

RIP Piggy you rule

Remembering Psychic Vacuum
by Jame$ Jacks0n T0+h

Summer of 89 was a great time for me. I was just a few months shy of 11 years old, and going to day camp for the first time. I was already a pretty serious metalhead at this point and every family picture taken from this era proves this. I was really into King Diamond and was naively looking for friends at camp who liked King Diamond, too.

On my bus that first morning, I met a CIT (that's counselor-in-training) named Scott. Scott was 13, and had long hair, and was wearing a Slayer T shirt. We became friends right away. He was into King Diamond, but was also really into vandalism, pussy, and pot. He was the first friend I ever had who smoked cigarettes. A bad kid.

My new older friend made me immediately cool and dismissive of any friends my age I would have made at camp that year. "Fuck you" was my attitude then and now as the gaggle of zitfaces and geeks watched with envy as Scott and I plotted the forming of our band. Even the few kids who didn't care for metal either way (these were different times, you understand) were jealous because I was hanging out with a CIT and that was heavy currency. Like the totem pole that stood at Camp Pouch's entrance, camp, itself little more than a collection of mere children, necessitated a hierarchy, and I was on top.

Scott and I spent every day together, talking about metal, eating something called Marshmallow Munchies, and hanging out with our counselor, Ron. Ron was also a headbanger, and, though he must have only been about 18 or so, at the time he seemed ageless, like a wise mystic who sits perched atop a mountain smoking from a skull-shaped hookah. Ron looked liked he could have been in Kyuss. His favorite band was Rush, who I figured must be pretty evil, based on their logo (note to self: check out Rush), but he knew every Iron Maiden lyric and taught us all how to play Dungeons and Dragons. Scott and I never got too into Dungeons and Dragons, but we did start a band (despite the fact that I wouldn't have a bass until six months later, when Santa would finally come through).

My friendship with Scott was a long and complicated one. As luck would have it, he lived only a block and a half away, so our friendship spilled over from camp into 'real life,' and continued for several years. He huffed paint, fought, and dated metal chicks. I was usually pretty content to just read Metal Maniacs magazine and accompany my dad to the mall, where I'd usually goad him into buying me a Deicide album or something.

There was a great local video store near our house called Video Circuit, which stocked everything from porn to Faces of Death to weird, 80s B-movies like Fat Ethel Part Two and Microwave Massacre. Scott and I would rent this series of videos known as Hard N Heavy. Hard N Heavy was a low budget video magazine that featured a bunch of metal bands. The bands would be interviewed, and then they'd showed a short video clip. It was through Hard N Heavy that we once procured The Great Kat's home phone number, and pranked her mercilessly for days on end. It was where we could actually hear the bands we'd only read about in our magazines, because while I was on a first name basis with every metal band in the world, from Annihilator to Xentrix, in the days before downloading, the only other way you could hear this stuff was if you bought it.

We were watching Hard N Heavy and there was a piece on the band Voivod. I always thought Voivod looked dorky in the press photos I'd seen, but remained open minded.

"What do you think of Voivod?" I asked Scott through a mouthful of Marshmallow Munchie.

"Oh, they suck, man," he said, hinting that he'd heard them before. "Their lyrics are stupid. They're just a bunch of acid heads."

Acid heads, I mulled. I liked the sound of that. But I quietly nodded in agreement, not looking to get into an argument over the merits of a band I was sure was lame, but was inexplicably intrigued by nonetheless.

Scott then went on a tirade, joking about Voivod's lyrics and coming up with his own version of stream-of-consciousness babble:

"Then I went to the stairs / then I fell down the stairs / then I ate some bread."

He illustrated this by bounding about the room in a sort of mock-trance. We both laughed. It was ridiculous. But that wasn't what the singer of Voivod was singing. He was singing "Still twisting / and suggesting / some passengers / play with my nerves" He was, however, flailing around on a staircase in the video as he sang it, from what I can recall. But it didn't look stupid, like when Scott imitated it. It looked cool.

The lyrics stuck with me the next day at camp. "Still twisting / and suggesting / some passengers / play with my nerves." That was way better than "Living monstrosity / freak for life he'll always be / never knowing love or hate / only pain that death creates" like the lyrics of another band we liked a lot at the time. I found Voivod fascinating.

The guys in Voivod had cool, punk rock named like "Piggy" and "Snake." That was way cooler than calling yourself "Eric Hoffman" or "Chuck Schuldiner" or "Alex Scolinik." Their cover art was totally metal, but with a vaguely sci-fi bent that I found rather agreeable.

I asked Ron about them. Upon the mention of their name, his eyes ignited like long-dormant road flares that someone had carelessly left over a live pilot light. "Oh, yeah, man, Voivod is great," he'd say. I recited the lyrics to him and he immediately identified the song as "Psychic Vacuum," from the album Dimension Hatross. I told Scott that the next time we went to the mall I was buying that album. He sniffed a dismissal but I didn't care. At least we wouldn't fight over it (like we did over Obituary's Slowly We Rot cassette, which was an honest-to-goodness grappling match earlier in the summer that ended in actual boy-tears from both of us).

In the days before I could actually own that record (we only went to the mall on Saturdays), I romanticized the song. It was only a snippet that I'd heard, but all during camp, I would imagine it's greatness, mentally filling in the parts that I didn't know and had never heard, composing the whole album myself, using the only lyrics I knew as a springboard. I hummed fictional, complicated parts in fevered anticipation. I couldn't wait to hear "Psychic Vacuum" again. Voivod. Acid heads. Cool. That's what I wanted to be. One of them.

My dad bought me Dimension Hatross at the Woodbridge Mall in New Jersey a few weeks later. It was everything I wanted it to be and more.

"Psychic Vacuum" is still my favorite song on it, but "Tribal Convictions" and "Chaosmongers" rule too.

I was a pretty big Voivod fan for awhile.

Inevitably, I got older.

I bought every Voivod album that came out until I didn't any more.

I haven't bought one now since 1991's Angel Rat. But I remember it being pretty good.

* * * * * *

He rocked the free world when I saw them in Montreal a few years ago. I don't know if it was an effect of the acoustics or the amps or what but there were some seriously surprising sounds coming out of that one guitar. Nothingface must be one of the best rock albums ever. RIP.

the times I saw them play live I always focused intently on Piggy's fingers, trying to figure out how he made those weird chords and other sounds on the records.

RIP to a great one.

Oh yeah, I want to add, to anybody who wonders, that they were STILL making good records. The self-titled one from two years ago was excellent. And even way back on Dimension Hatross and Killing Technology and Rrroooaaarrr, there was something just really *good-natured* about their music. Something *warm.* Rare in their genre then, rare now. There are very few rock and even fewer metal bands I'd say this about, but something in Voivod's music always convinced me they were good people. And smart people, too. Not to mention people who learned a lot from old Rudimentary Peni and Egg records. (And what was that other super obscure '70s prog band they used to talk about? Birth, maybe? Never heard them; probably getting the name wrong.) I just heard word last week of a Voivod live DVD coming out; this is going to be one of the rare DVDs I will probably watch all the way through. And I plan to schedule a gastroenterologist checkup soon, too; Piggy was my age. He didn't deserve this. And I can't imagine Voivod will be able to replace him.

ps) I thought the Quebec town they were from was called Algonquin -- or maybe that's where the aluminum factory is? I'd have to go back and check my old notes. (My joke didn't have to do with cancer, though I doubt living near the factory helped. I think I wrote that they grew up near North America's biggest aluminum factory, and they *sounded* like North America's biggest aluminum factory. Something like that, anyway...)

The 2003 album was indeed great...I thought it was their best since Nothingface.

ps) I thought the Quebec town they were from was called Algonquin -- or maybe that's where the aluminum factory is?

They're from Jonquiere, way out on the Saguenay River. The aluminum smelting factory is run by a massive corporation called Alcan.

Uggh. RIP. Sad sad sad indeed.

That's by design -- they do come from a tiny town hundreds of miles north of Montreal. All those drippy, creaky drawings by Voivod's drummer Away represent what he imagined as a boy was inside the factories bumping and grinding all night.

I think Piggy survived thyroid cancer in the late 1980s, so in a way he was 15 years lucky.

Mauro Liberatore, the guy who made Voivod's custom jagged guitars, has reportedly said something like "God just blinked."

I just feel grief.

Yeah, I think it was thyroid cancer originally. And before I heard about that, noticed like in "still twisting, suggesting some passengers play with my nerves" the theme of dealing with feelings of helplessness, like making a song of it, and an album (Hatross the Viking or whatever who throws an axe? And goes hurtling through bizarre, chaotic-seeming consequences, like the universe is a machine/factory/spaceship/life sprung along some obtuse angle)

"Ravenous Medicine" from KILLING TECHNOLOGY, 1987

Another emergency truck keeps rolling fast
Two lane highway and they run on the wrong track
You still don't know that you're never going back
You're going to the science hospital
You guess that your body is still alive
They estimate you're in pretty good health
Good shape for some of our sadistic tests
Doctor said you must stay in bed
Surgical scourge on you
Surgical scourge on you
Electric shock through you
Electric shock through you
Feel the scalpel they cut you with
Going into the experimental room
How much radiation can your body stand?
You did very well, you'll feel better soon
The red cross is turning black
Wake up in another department
You see the nurse with blood on her clothes
They got another experience for today
Maybe the worst of them
Diagnosing the pain, the ravenous medicine
Discovering the cure, the ravenous medicine
Died through illness, the ravenous medicine
Don't care how many organs you gave
Injecting the drugs
'Till you become the slave
Turn off the machine that keeps your heart beating
They're gonna do it to you !!

voivod opened my ears to so much. nothingface blew me away completely. before that I was stuck in a thrash metal/hardcore punk rock ghetto. it ranks alongside double nickels on the dime as one of the longest enduring records in my collection. I still dig it out a lot more than any other "metal" record.
rip.

Nothingface must be one of the best rock albums ever. RIP.
-- Sundar (sundar_subramanian200...), August 27th, 2005

And even way back on Dimension Hatross and Killing Technology and Rrroooaaarrr, there was something just really *good-natured* about their music. Something *warm.* Rare in their genre then, rare now. There are very few rock and even fewer metal bands I'd say this about, but something in Voivod's music always convinced me they were good people. And smart people, too.
-- xhuxk (xedd...), August 27th, 2005.

Sundar and Chuck on the money.

i ditto rogers statements...i got those first two in th late 80s early 90s and couldnt believe what i had been missing out on listening to ted nugent and aerosmith..it ripped in th way i wanted to be ripped,,,open and rusty and bloody and awful and beautiful..poor piggs..
ihttp://www.crushermagazine.com/images/Piggy%202.jpg

ihttp://www.voivodfan.com/img4/vacarmes/Voivod86.jpg

I always respected Voivod more than I actually liked them, but the live album Voivod Lives, from five years ago or so, stayed in my collection for a lot longer than I thought it would when I first got it in the mail. I'll probably play catch-up over the next month or so.

Here in Canada, "Voivod" and "Ripping Headaches" were played over and over again on Much Music in 1984-85, and based on both songs, I dodn't go for their stuff at all. Then came "Tribal Convictions" in '88, and it totally blew my mind. When the band previewed Nothingface on a live TV performance in 1989 (which is going to appear on the upcoming DVD, by the way), I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I knew right then it was going to be my 1989 album of the year.

Angel Rat kind of lost me, and I didn't go for their more brutal stuff with the different singer, but man, did they ever redeem themselves with the album with Newsted.

The deluxe edition of War and Pain that Metal Blade did a year ago is excellent, and it really hammered home just how unique a band Voivod were, right from the start. "Nuclear War" is spectacular (dig that weird ascending riff!), the heaviest thing I've ever heard them do.

I read somewhere a while back that Piggy made his own guitars, hence his completely unique sound.

http://www.rockdiscography.com/picsmu/MetalKO/voivod_bridgehmjh.jpg http://www.music-lab-berlin.de/HISTORY/Foto-Album/Voivod/ml-voivod.jpg http://metalrefuge.com/images/bands/of03vov/vov10.jpg

Aw shit, man, that's sad - doubly sad, considering "Piggy"'d survived cancer once before. I lost touch with 'em in the Eric Forrest era, but still have no doubt that Voivod were the finest thrash-metal (and way beyond) band ever, not to mention maybe the most creative Canadians evah. (Made this one-factory Northern Ontario industrial-town native proud to be same!) I first heard RRRÖÖÖAAARRR! and Trout Mask Replica around the same time and those two tough-love ugly mutts reminded me of each other: atonal, way-skewed rhythmically, seemingly from another planet and apparently inept beyond belief, until two or three further listens reveal musicians FAR from inept. And yeah, Piggy was the biggest part of that, and really truly sounded like no-one else I'd ever heard. (Like Stormy, I too found myself studying his fretting hand when I saw 'em live.)

Reading/contributing to this thread makes me regret largely ignoring them for most of the decade (didn't know Snake was back!). And if that self-titled '03 release is as good as Chuck says, I can only regret it more.

RIP

I am a little different in that I have never really listened to the band although I have been into rock/metal for over 25 years now. However any loss from this genre of music saddens me and this loss saddens is no different. I was at the Christmas on Speed metal festival around 1988 - 89 or so and was looking forward to seeing Voivod as they were on the bill however due to a customs problem Mille from Kreator anounced that they would not be able to play and dedicated a song to the band. I only wish I had seen them.
Condolences
J. Murray