Most people in the North Texas scene got into thrash through Metallica or Slayer records. Randy Cook got into it through Rotting Corpse. He grew up outside Detroit — he’d seen Slayer at Blondie’s up there — and when he landed in Arlington, the band itself was his introduction to the whole style. Not long after, he was in it.
Bass First, Then The Kit
Cook started on bass in 1986, at a point when the band could not keep a bassist for more than a few months. When the drum seat opened up later that year, he moved behind the kit and stayed there. His first gig on drums was in San Antonio in 1987, with dates already on the books before he’d had much chance to learn the songs.
He left that summer for reasons that had nothing to do with the band. “I decided to move back home to Michigan,” he said years later. “Actually I was living in a single room apartment and someone stole my jeans out of the washing machine and that pretty much sealed it for me.”
The Sinking Boat Tape
Cook was back by 1988, and he’s all over the band’s strangest recording. The third demo was Walt Trachsler, Cook, and Vinnie Paul at the board — studio time the band had paid for with an old boat. Cook played drums and bass on it. The whole session lasted about four hours and was never mixed or finished; two songs were pulled off a rough cassette years later for The Demos.
“That demo was Walt, myself and Vinnie Paul engineering. One day, no bass guitar, no other guitar tracks and a rough vocal track. Total time in the studio was maybe four hours.”
He Named The Circus
The phrase that ended up on a documentary cover and a stage backdrop came out of Cook’s mouth on a bad night on the highway. In 1989, on the way to Corpus Christi, four of them were crammed into the front cab of a box van — Steve Murphy on Cook’s lap, Luke Brewer wedged between the seats, Walt driving — stopping every fifteen minutes in freezing rain to clean the fuel filter.
“Basically I dubbed the trip Circus of Fools and it stuck from there on out.”
The name stuck to the whole 1988–1990 era, then to the 2008 documentary, then to the backdrop hanging behind the band at the twentieth anniversary show. See it in the photo archive →
What The Band Was, And Wasn’t
Asked why Rotting Corpse never followed the late-’80s drift toward satanic death metal, Cook gave the shortest answer of anyone in the band: “None of us where really death metal. We were more into fast and heavy and hard than gloom and doom lyrics.” On the Texas scene that made the band possible, he was just as plain: “Around Texas everyone seemed to want to help other underground bands that were not getting the attention of main stream bands. A good network of bands prior to computers, email and webpages stayed connected via mail or phone. It was similar to the early punk scene.”
Still Playing
After 1990 Cook kept drumming steadily in North Texas bands — among them ScumScunge, who shared bills with Rotting Corpse through the reunion years — while raising two boys. He was there for the 2004 jam that restarted everything, played the whole 2005–2009 run, and has been back behind the kit since 2021.
“I still love to play music but it’s a little harder on our stamina and the fact we have to be in bed by nine.”
Asked whether he had any regrets about the way it all went, he named exactly one: “That we never took it to the next level and recorded a full length album.” Thirty-six years after the last demo, Thrash in Pain or Die Insane put all sixteen of those songs on one record. See the discography →
