Rozz Williams - Biography
Goth icon Rozz Williams, best known as the original singer of Christian Death, was born Roger Alan Painter in Pomona, California on November 6, 1963. Growing up, Williams was first drawn to English glam rock and then to punk. He inverted the Southern Baptist doctrine of his parents: among other gestures toward the occult, he took his nom de rock from a tombstone in a cemetary he haunted as a teenager. He and bassist Jill Emery, later of Hole and Williams’s band Shadow Project, played together in their teenage punk band the Asexuals. Williams, guitarist Jay (a/k/a Wrecking Crew author John Albert), bassist James McGearty and drummer George Belanger formed Christian Death late in 1979. Christian Death played in Southern California until early 1981, when the band broke up for a short time.
During this hiatus, Williams and performance artist Ron Athey formed the noise group Premature Ejaculation. Rozzwilliams.com reports that, at one of Premature Ejaculation’s early shows, “Ron started eating, and regurgitating, a dead cat.” Christian Death reunited in 1981 with the Adolescents’ lead guitarist, Rikk Agnew, taking Jay’s place. This lineup of the band recorded Only Theatre of Pain (1982 Frontier) and broke up before the end of 1982. The following year, Williams and the band Pompeii 99 formed a new Christian Death to tour Europe and record for the French label L’Invitation au Suicide.
Williams left Christian Death in 1985. Against Williams’s wishes, guitarist Valor Kand continued to use the name Christian Death. Williams and Chuck Collison restarted the extreme music/performance group Premature Ejaculation, releasing noise cassettes through Collison’s Happiest Tapes on Earth label. In 1987, guitarist and vocalist Eva O. (Ortiz)—a longtime collaborator of Williams’s and occasional member of Christian Death during the band’s early days—and Williams moved to San Francisco, where they were married. The following year, Williams, Eva O. and Rikk Agnew reunited Christian Death with a new rhythm section for a series of live performances that extended into 1990. During this period, Williams also inaugurated the noise project Heltir with two cassettes on Happiest Tapes on Earth.
Jill Emery reunited with Williams in his and Eva’s new band, Shadow Project, which released two studio albums on Triple X Records in the early 90s as well as the live In Tuned Out Live ’93 (1994 Triple X). Every King A Bastard Son (1992 Cleopatra), the first Rozz Williams solo album, was contemporaneous with The Iron Mask (1992 Cleopatra), an album of early Christian Death songs re-recorded by the reunion band. Williams’s Christian Death—as distinct from Valor Kand’s, which has continued to the present day—then asserted its right to the name on two new albums, The Path of Sorrows (1993 Cleopatra) and The Rage of Angels (1994 Cleopatra), and Heltir released the album Neue Sachlichkeit (1994 Triple X). Williams and Erik Christides also recorded together as 1334, a number that apparently held a totemic significance for Williams (“the year of the plague,” he enigmatically told an interviewer from exclaim!).
Williams collaborated with his former Christian Death bandmate and Valor Kand’s former lover, Gitane Demone, on Dream Home Heartache (1995 Triple X), which opens and closes with a cover of Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home A Heartache.” The solo LP The Whorse’s Mouth (1996 Hollows Hill Sound Recordings) followed, and Williams played bass on EXP’s self-titled debut (1996 Hollows Hill Sound Recordings). He wrote the story and the soundtrack to Pig (1998), a short film he and Nico B. co-directed in which Williams plays a killer.
Williams’s roommate found him dead in their West Hollywood apartment on April 1, 1998. He had hung himself at the age of 34. His last album was Shadow Project’s From The Heart (1998 Hollows Hill Sound Recordings), released shortly after his death. Nico B. edited the posthumous book The Art of Rozz Williams: from Christian Death to Death (1999 Last Gasp).