Hail Yourself! (2017-2020)
This is a long post featuring multiple disciplines. jump ahead to my contributions in…
Upon finishing the album for one of my old bands in 2017, we booked our release show at an Elk’s Lodge-type place that usually held pancake breakfasts for the community. There, I met Krystal Otis, who was in process of creating the kind of extreme metal fanzine commonplace in the early years of death metal, only her magazine aimed to highlight artists on California’s Central Coast. As a long time fan of metal music and local to the area, I was beyond excited to find like-minded individuals in my small hometown, San Luis Obispo. She was on a mission to solidify our area’s tiny music scene, and to find a venue that would take a chance to give that scene a home.
After talking to her more about the inaugural issue’s forthcoming release, I offered my design and layout services, resulting in a rapid production cycle to complete the project within her tight deadline. While working within pre-established branding guidelines and aesthetics determined by the Krystal, the editor-in-chief. I spent a week creating 20 pages worth of layouts for the interviews, photos, music reviews, and ad placements she had been collecting over the previous while.
A small collective — consisting of Krystal, Patrick, and I — emerged from this relationship to help promote the local metal community’s growth by connecting its members, finding locations for their bands’ concerts, and generally acting as a focal point for the niche community found scattered throughout our county. The encapsulation of these efforts is Hail Yourself!, an independently produced magazine that highlights talents both locally and globally, showcasing what San Luis Obispo had to offer in terms of alternative arts and entertainment.
In the time I worked for Hail Yourself, I designed 3 issues of the magazine, a series of concert posters, handbills, social media banners, and generally any other marketing materials Krystal needed to push the metal agenda. It was a relief not having to chase down artist interviews and photos like I had done for earlier projects — Krystal and Patrick did all of that legwork. Together, they traveled around the world, gathering interviews from metal bands small and large, taking amazing photos, and generally connecting with the metal community at large.
After releasing the first issue, work with Hail Yourself expanded its services in connecting the local community by setting up and promoting concerts for bands across the west coast. We partnered with local restaurants, bars, lodges, and any other business that would allow us to hold (loud) all ages shows. Events required connecting and working with local partners beyond those providing space for live performances, including ticket vendors, record stores, and pretty much anyone else that would tolerate us in our conservative county.
Events required a lot of each of Krystal, Patrick, and I, each of us often having to juggle responsibilities throughout any given event. Managing artists, live sound engineering, and stage direction were some of the main shared responsibilities that left us rolling audio cables and lugging our live sound system back to Patrick’s van at 3am.
One of my favorite challenges around designing death metal concert posters is effectively communicating the band’s names clearly, when their logos are generally illegible. Death metal logos are a bit like their own language, taking years of study to be able to easily decipher. Having designed a handful of death metal logos, myself, I had the upper hand. For a lot of these posters, I ended up simply adding ‘subtitles’ to each band, along with their respective subgenres. Friends and fans of the concert series often joked about appreciating the clarification. It felt like a way of remedying the old internet meme of how death metal logos look like a pile of branches.
To promote all the events and bands in the area, Krystal and Patrick had the idea to start a Hail Yourself-adjacent podcast — Slaytanic Carnage — the namesake being adopted from the death metal radio show that I co-hosted at KCPR, back in the early 2000s. It felt like a great way to pass the torch from one group of local metal heads to another, of which I was a shared member. Using the credibility we had been developing over the years, we enlisted Matt Harvey of notorious metal band, Exhumed, to host the show. I was shocked when he agreed to host the podcast for us, and couldn’t think of a better fit… I had been fortunate enough to work alongside many of my creative inspirations over the past couple decades, and this opportunity was no exception.
Slaytanic Carnge was recorded as the four of us regularly sat around in Krystal and Patrick’s garage, sharing our love of metal music, local shows, and pretty much anything in between. It felt like a natural way to capture the feel of the collective, each of us having spent time in our youths doing the same exact thing. The garage was on a property in rural Paso Robles, a retired almond farm filled with barren almond trees. When I designed the key art for the podcast episodes, I took this into account. I hand-illustrated the logo and designed it to match the logo I had designed for the Mid-State Metal Fest, for cohesive branding between various Hail Yourself endeavors.
The podcasts were recorded by Patrick using Logic Pro X while I took on the role as a behind-the-scenes producer, making sure that we had a coherent conversation flowing (or that I could at least edit it into one later that week before release). This podcast required a lot of post production that I did in Adobe Audition including mixing vocals, adding music tracks, and editing sections of the conversation to be more fluid and overall more engaging to our dedicated audience. I created the podcast’s audio collage intro while directing Matt and his intense vocal abilities to create a chaotic blend of harshly layered vocals, like only a professional death metal musician could do, as heard in one of my favorite clips from the entire run of the podcast, above.
Our concert series peaked when organizing the San Luis Obispo’s first-ever Mid-State Metal Fest, in July of 2019. Hail Yourself brought more than a dozen bands from all over California, Oregon, and Washington together for two nights of brutal celebration. It was exciting to see our efforts being appreciated by the hundreds of fans that purchased tickets for the event, some traveling hundreds of miles to attend. Artists were impressed when we showed them the event we had organized for them, additionally showcasing other independent visual artists and metal merchants outside the doors of the venues. Our tiny scene in San Luis Obispo began to make national and international connections, raising awareness of the hard work we had been pouring into our labor of love.
By late 2019, our search for a home for our metal scene had gratefully resulted in a handful of bars and restaurants that would periodically host us, creating a rotating venue for our events. While we had technically met our overarching goal with Hail Yourself, it often felt like venue owners were just putting up with the crowds, even though nightly attendances rose by at least 10 fold. We were confused that local businesses didn’t want to pull in more money by additional events as larger performers began to reach out for promotion. As a result Krystal, Patrick, and I decided to explore the idea of opening our own venue in the area.
The search for the perfect spot ended up being in Atascadero, CA. It was a halfway point for the cities in our county and previously home to an independent venue, a decade earlier. We brought in help from a local architect to draw up remodeling plans, and started preproduction on a crowdfunding campaign, drawing from my extensive experience with raising money for past projects via Kickstarter. Ultimately, we were outbid by a corporate brewery, an industry San Luis Obispo county has become renowned for over the past couple of decades.
After some deserved sulking, we eventually rallied in a final DIY push at creating our own music space for all the weirdos in our county that wanted to experience something other than white guys playing reggae. A couple months later, Patrick and I hand-built our own outdoor amphitheater on the same retired almond farm we had been recording Slaytanic Carnage on. We borrowed tractors to level ground, hand assembled a stage, hung lighting, and started booking shows at The Fallows.
It wasn’t long after when the COVID pandemic began in 2020, putting what we thought would be a temporary hold on our plans when the world’s live music industry collapsed. Life had other plans for humanity, leading to lockdown, family emergencies, and ultimately being pushed out of the area by wealthy landowners. When looking back, Hail Yourself was a huge success, in my book. We spent years making something out of nothing, bringing people together over their love of extreme music, and making our own fun. Not only did Hail Yourself lead me to spending time with great people, but is also truly one of the most beloved chapters of my life thus far. Pretty much the entire time we were doing Hail Yourself, we were told by people that it was insane to even try to make a metal scene in SLO happen, since everyone who had tried before had never made it work. My response was usually a shrug. I had worked on so many awesome projects at this point in my life, and Hail Yourself would be an impossible job to not love.
Editor-in-chief, Producer, Photography, Event Coordinator: Krystal Otis
Producer, Lead Audio Engineer, Stage Production: Patrick Spain
Slaytanic Carnage Host: Matt Harvey