The History

“Riding out of Dallas like a tornado, spitting out guitar splinters, came sick-sounding early thrashers Rotting Corpse.”

That’s Ian Christe — author of Sound of the Beast and founder of Bazillion Points — writing about the band in 2025. He’s describing a group that formed in the Dallas–Arlington–Fort Worth metroplex in 1985, when there was no thrash scene there to join. Walt Trachsler had been carrying the idea around since somewhere between 1982 and 1984. He was guitar tech for Darrell Abbott — still billed as “Diamond” then, still playing Keel and Cinderella covers in Pantera — and his fellow Pantera roadie Jim “Moe” Mulqueen was in on it from the start.

Finding anyone else took over a year. John Perez had spent most of 1984 looking for the same thing from the other direction, hunting for musicians who knew what Exciter and Venom and early Slayer were. In the fall of 1984 he was ready to give up. Then Trachsler called him off an old card at a local music store and read out a list of favourite bands — Savatage, Exciter, Metallica.

“As soon as we met we had a chemistry that really ignited the whole Rotting Corpse concept. We were both totally dedicated to the heavy thrash metal cause and the energy we had was INTENSE!” — John Perez

Drummer Dave Gryder came in the same way anything happened in Arlington in 1985: he met Moe Mulqueen at a club called Savvy’s, found they liked the same records, and they set up a rehearsal. Rotting Corpse played its first show at Rascals in Arlington on Friday, December 6th, 1985. The flyer — hand-drawn, photocopied, “total death thrash speed hardcore metal, no posers will live” — is still in the photo archive.

The First Tape, And What It Did

The debut demo was cut at Pantego Sound Studio in spring 1986. The tape credits the engineer as “The Elder” — that’s Jerry Abbott, Darrell and Vinnie Paul’s father, who recorded Pantera’s first four albums in the same room and knew Mulqueen and Trachsler from their road-crew days. Trachsler played guitar and bass on it, Perez played the leads, Gryder drummed, and Mulqueen sang.

It landed harder than anyone expected. Perez, who mailed out as many copies as he could make: “#1 we were tight and well rehearsed and it showed on the recording and #2 the production and sound quality was the best yet from any Texas demo band.” Gryder put it more bluntly — “Shockingly positive. We were constantly selling out of the demos.” Tapes went to Europe, to Asia, to correspondents in Poland and Russia who couldn’t afford to buy them. One European fanzine editor panned it as an Exodus rip, which Perez enjoyed enormously.

1987: Everything Changes At Once

Steve Murphy joined on bass in early 1987. He’d been playing in Eldritch Rite, had first seen Rotting Corpse at Rascals in 1985 and been flattened by it, and walked into a band that had already burned through several bassists — Marty Griffen, Jim Cleaver, and Randy “Gribb” Cook, who’d moved off bass and onto the drum kit.

That spring the founding lineup came apart in a matter of weeks. Trachsler made a lineup call on his own; Perez, who wanted a say and wanted a different kind of music besides, left immediately. In his own words:

“I just felt that after 2½ years of playing this style I had done all I needed to do with it as a musician. Walter wanted to lean in a more ‘punk’ inspired thrash direction and while I was very much into the early punk scene and attitude, I did not want to play music in this direction.”

He went off and founded Solitude Aeturnus, and Texas doom metal exists because of it. Cook headed back to Michigan the same year. Louie Carrisalez came over from San Antonio’s Helldogs to play drums, and Roger Gallardo of Hellpreacher came down to cover second guitar.

Trachsler took over lead vocals, and the new three-piece cut the second demo — F*ck It, It’s Only Thrash — at Pantego that summer, with Vinnie Paul engineering. They’d been playing together about a month.

That was also the year of the Dark Angel dates, a short Texas run bankrolled by Trachsler’s father. The band lost money on it and broke down repeatedly on the way home. It was, by every account, a hell of a time. Somewhere in this stretch Megaforce came sniffing around; nothing was signed. Murphy’s reading, twenty years later: Rotting Corpse was red hot in 1986 and 1987 and didn’t want to get burned by a label, and by the time they were willing to shop a tape, in 1990, thrash had cooled.

The Boat

The third demo has the best story and the worst tape. Vinnie Paul wanted a boat. Trachsler’s father had an old one sitting out in the country. They dragged it to him and traded it for studio time.

“I remember Walt’s dad bringing that old red boat to Walt’s house and we gave it to Vinnie for studio time. I think Vinnie liked it until it sunk in the middle of a local lake.” — Steve Murphy

What they got for it was about four hours in the room with Trachsler on guitar and vocals, Cook — back from Michigan — playing both drums and bass, and Luke Brewer adding leads. It was never mixed and never meant to come out. Most of it is gone. Two songs were salvaged off a rough cassette years later. Around the band it’s known simply as Walt’s sinking boat tape.

The Last Demo, And The Record That Never Came

In January 1990 the band went to Elephant Track Studios in San Antonio and spent two days — January 13th and 14th — making the record most of them still rate highest. Eugene Ng engineered. Trachsler sang and played guitar, Murphy played bass, Gryder was back on drums, and Scott Shelby of Gammacide came in to play the leads without ever attending a practice or a show.

It was supposed to be a release, and there are two accounts of how it wasn’t. Rodney Dunsmore of Devastation planned to press 500 copies on vinyl; Steve Murphy has asked him since why it didn’t happen and neither of them can remember. Dave Gryder’s recollection is different — that the record was scheduled for a French label called Cemetery, and that the label ran out of money before it came out. Either way the tape circulated, and that was that.

Rotting Corpse played its last show of the original run on Valentine’s Day 1990 in San Antonio, stripped to a three-piece — Trachsler, Murphy and Gryder — with Dunsmore climbing up to sing “War on Drugs.” Nobody announced anything. Trachsler got busy running sound and playing guitar for Death; Murphy went off into other bands; grunge arrived. In four and a half years the band had never once played outside Texas, and never released a record.

Fourteen Years, Then A Wedding

It restarted by accident. In July 2004 Trachsler came to Murphy’s wedding and stuck around long enough afterwards to play. Murphy had already put up a website that spring, after a note about Trachsler appeared on Blabbermouth, and old fans had started surfacing.

“Who would guess we’d play over a dozen shows the next year and release The Demos?” — Steve Murphy

Murphy drove the rest of it. All four original demos, including the two Vinnie Paul cut, were remastered by Allen Crider and released on CD for the first time in 2005 as The Demos, on the band’s own F**k It Records — hand-numbered, signed, capped at 100 copies, and gone. He printed 300 in total and kept none. The Memorial Day Massacre tour ran Corpus Christi, Houston, Arlington and Austin that May; the Arlington homecoming at Division One brought John Perez up for a song and Moe Mulqueen back to the microphone. In October, Blabbermouth named them Artist of the Month.

What followed surprised everyone in it: shows with the reformed Rigor Mortis and Gammacide, a twentieth-anniversary night at Division One in December 2005, a benefit at the Granada that was their first Dallas show since spring 1987, appearances on Robb’s MetalWorks in San Antonio, and a 2008 documentary, Circus of Fools, named after a bad night in a box van on the way to Corpus Christi in 1989.

Now

The band resurfaced again in 2021, and in October 2025 vicRecords in the Netherlands put out Thrash in Pain or Die Insane — sixteen remastered tracks, all four demos, on one release. Thirty-five years after a French label and a Texas vinyl press both fell through, the songs finally came out properly.

Walt Trachsler, Steve Murphy and Randy Cook are all still in it. See the current lineup →

Full year-by-year timeline →  ·  The rooms they played →  ·  The photo archive →  ·  Every lyric →