He was a giant, in the truest sense of the word. Two meters tall, stinging green eyes. Muscular, with a voice that sounds as if the day out, day in archaic grabs. Then the aesthetics: part goth, part vampire, part porn, part grave shovel – and also this boyish, this, which is often typical for New Yorker, slightly sarcastic streak. Catholicism was also included in the mix, the blame, the atonement – but also the Dionysian, the desire to frenzy and the search for ecstasy.
Peter Steele: childhood and beginnings
Peter Steele was born on January 4, 1962 in Red Hook, Brooklyn as Peter Thomas Ratajczyk. “Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, at 3:45 a.m.. I was 60 centimeters long – my mother said it was like she had born a pumpkin,” he recalled in his last big interview with the “Metal hammer“.
Steele was the youngest of six children and grew up with five older sisters. “If I did something wrong, I had five additional mothers,” he said. “They called me ‘Oops’.” As a child, he developed a penchant for macabre staging. “I told my sisters that rats nest in high heels. Then I mixed red food coloring with potato porridge and pins, filled the mass into their shoes and warmed them. The shouting was incredible.”
His childhood was also shaped by the Catholic faith-which later shaped him later, albeit in a different way: “I used to be atheist, but was brought up as Roman Catholic,” he said. “I go to church every Saturday and argue with the priest – because the Bible is simply a damn metaphor.”
First musical attempts and founding of Type O negative
Steele’s first band called itself Fallout – a short -lived formation between Metal and Hardcore. Later he founded Carnivore, a band that made attentive to provocative texts. In 1985 the self -titled debut appeared, two years later the follow -up album retaliation. “Nobody understood what Carnivore was really about,” said Steele later in an interview. “‘Jesus Hitler’ – that was a comparison between organized religion and totalitarianism. Two souls in one body.”
Carnivore dissolved in 1987. Steele worked for the New York’s municipal green area office, initially as a driver of a wagon, and later he was promoted Paraufseher. In 1989 he founded the band Type o negative together with Sal Abruscato, Josh Silver and Kenny Hickey.
The rise of Type O negative
After the first demos under the name Repulsion, the group signed at the renowned metal label Roadrunner Records. In 1991 the debut album Slow, Deep and Hard. Steele Association Doom with lovesickness, but also caused controversy with his texts. Above all, the song “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else” brought Steele the allegation of misogynia – allegations that Steele later rejected as a grotesque.
“I was fooled by a woman whose name I would not name. If I had done her what she did to me, she would shout around: ‘Schwanzlutscher, wanker’. So when I used words like ‘bitch’, ‘whore’ or ‘cunt’ … I am not proud of this language, but it is not better that I have a song like ‘I know you fucking some fucking Else ‘write to appear with her with a pick -up hoe and kill her? “
In 1993 the breakthrough followed for Type O and Peter Steele. With “Bloody Kisses”, published on Roadrunner, the band celebrated its world success and also found their shape: dark but extremely catchy songs between despair and eroticism, guilt and sacrilege. After Bloody Kisses’s mega success, the album October Rust followed in 1996, which is one of the best works in the band for many. With songs like “Love You To Death” or “Be My Druidess” Peter Steele relied on a sophisticated theatrical.
Three years later, World Coming Down – a collection of lamentations about death, was published. Songs such as “Everyone I Love Is Dead” and “Everything Dies” show Pete Steele’s despair about death. “I have problems with love and I have problems with loss,” said Steele. “The whole thing runs through my whole life.” Type o released a total of negative seven albums. The band’s last work was published in 2007 and was called “Dead Again”.
Peter Steele: The legendary Playgirl-cover
In 1995 Peter Steele was photographed for the Playgirl magazine – and played with the image of a porn star. Later he said that he had only promised on the condition that the shoot could be as explicitly as possible. The magazine responsible asked him if he really trusted himself – which he replied dryly when she adopted her part, he also holds his.
Whether this actually took place remains open – the published pictures show a lot, but not everything. Steele later saw the shoot very critically. Ultimately, he only got involved in the campaign because he was on publicity. “In retrospect it was stupid – I made myself fool,” he said.
When the magazine appeared, his sisters found it in a newspaper kiosk and took it home. His mother only commented dryly: “That’s why I called him Peter.”
Carnivore reunion
In 2006, after the death of his mother and a longer creative crisis, Steele surprised with a reunion of his old Thrash band Carnivore. He explained this in an interview with Louder Sound: “The other boys in Type O are married. I am not married and – at least I think that – no children. I didn’t want to sit down and do nothing, so I asked a few old friends if they are in the mood for Carnivore – for a little money, whereby the fun is in the foreground.”
For Steele it also had to have another valve for his anger: “I have an a-personality. I keep everything in me and when someone steps on my foot, I will hit a concrete block on his head.” The anger had to get out – musically. “It was as if I was 25 again a tonal valve.”
The fact that he reactivated Carnivore and not Type O was also due to his disappointment about the course of his life: “I am really angry that I am 45. It’s like the last damn tantrum of an old man.” The revival of the band became an act of self-assurance-a way to feel itself, detached from the Gothic pathos of his main band. “Whenever we have time, we play. And then go home with $ 20 in his pocket. Okay, I’m lying – 25.”
Drug addiction and depression
The 2000s were a very difficult decade for Peter Steele. He got more and more into a downward spiral. In particular, the loss of his mother in 2005 tore him into a deep hole: “The death of my mother was probably the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said in 2007 in an interview with Metal magazine. “For a year my motto was: why should I do anything at all – eat, rehearse, play?”
Steele looked for comfort in alcohol and cocaine. “I wrested myself until I thought I was the Pope,” he recalled in the same interview. “I walked around in Soviet and Nazi uniforms, put a sign in front of the door: ‘Burglars’, left the door open and waited with night vision device under the bed. But nobody came.”
In retrospect, he regretted his decisions. “I started taking cocaine at 35. What kind of a damned idiot does that do? I was in good shape, I trained – I should have known better.” He also felt the effects in his later years. “Prozac helped me a lot. But I have to honestly say: I miss myself. I miss the person I once was,” he told metal hammer.
Peter Steele spoke openly about his mental constitution several times. Opposite the portal “Blabbermouth“He explained shortly before the album was released Dead Again: “I have always been a very depressive person, but that’s just one side of me. It helps me if I can express my depression, my anger, my frustration through music. Sonic therapy. What makes me really happy is to make people happy that I love. This is real happiness.”
In the same interview, he also explained not to be quite clean: “Well, I am not a hundred percent – after all, alcohol is also a liquid drug. I was pretty deep in the cocaine for a few years. I don’t want to say that I am an angel or completely clean – sometimes I get how I get weak again.”
Peter Steele: His death
On April 14, 2010, Peter Steele died at the age of 48. First of all, heart failure was suspected, and later it was made public that untreated diverticulitis was the reason with sepsis. His state of health had increasingly deteriorated in recent years. He was buried at the St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York. Peter Steele had no officially known children.