Keeper Saga
In November 25th, 1986 studio work on the new album began. They wanted to change the musical style, because Walls Of Jericho had sold only 110.000 copies. So they wouldn’t do something like that again. They though they would serve a very limited fan-base only, because those partly just were people who came to their concerts to start brawling in the first row, so the blood splattered across the stage. Hansen himself had said that he didn’t want to make music for people like that and that was the reason, why they changed their musical style.
Weikath have an idea to do more melodic power metal and wrote a long songs. So it was separately between two of the main songwriter. That’s why in the first part most songs were Hansen’s because it was closer to Walls Of Jericho, while Weikath did the second, because they said that it was a big step.
They brought new producer Tommy Newton and Tommy Hansen into the camp. They ‘cleaned’ up the sounds and so. They did the right thing at the right moment and with a little luck, because they did something that no one did before and it was like extreme metal without brutal vocals. It was heavy metal that you could sing easily, but it was also powerful and aggressive together.
It was the song “Halloween” that had to do with their name, so it had to be something different. It was something Hansen worked with Ingo for the album, Hansen had the riffs and they worked it together. Hansen created a lot of songs together with Ingo in the rehearsal room, sitting down with Ingo and he was drumming and Hansen was playing and checking out things, and that was a good process of that time. There were song from Kiske while he was in Ill-Prophecy called “A Little Time” and also “You Always Walk Alone” which recorded for the part 2.
February 16th, 1987 Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 1 released. The band then wanted to record a double album but Noise records refused, so the band recorded their landmark release Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part 1. The album gave them worldwide success and did well in the United States while charting well in other countries as well as several magazines giving it praise. The album made such a huge impact that Helloween was invited to tour the United States on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball Tour. The band opened up for Armored Saint and Grim Reaper.
Noise would give RCA the American distribution rights and declare Helloween its top-selling act and priority. Helloween would hit America with RCA’s other hot metal act Grim Reaper, as well as Chrysalis’ Armored Saint. To further promote the band and album, the label edited the 13-minute song “Halloween” to four and shot a video for it which was given airplay on MTV.
Yeah, there was a key experience I had at the office of RCA in New York, and I’d been getting kind of aggressive about things at the time because of the advertising they were doing trying to promote Helloween in the States. One of the slogans was,
“I want out—the outcry of a generation.”
“Then they wanted to put us on tour with Slayer. We refused. We wanted to go on the road with something that was a little more positive. I don’t care what different generations are up to, dammit. It was a good slogan, it was just was misplaced. They didn’t know where to put us. It was mixed up. I said, “Why do you want to put us on that antisocial, aggressive level like Megadeth or Slayer?” I thought they could just come up with something more decent—we have our own fucking identity. We have a very real band called Helloween, and I thought they should have just promoted us the way we were rather than inflicting something upon the public to make them realize what we are not.” – Michael Weikath -
April 3rd, 1987 A big European tour started together with Overkill.
After the Keeper 1 tour, Hansen was bummed out and he got sick and he felt bad and he was not feeling so well and he told the guys that he did not want to tour for a long time for awhile at least but they wouldn’t support him to that which is not wrong so this represented the bad internal structure.
Things were going downhill because Helloween was split into two groups at that time. One consisted of Weikath and Kiske and the other of the old gang – Markus, Ingo and Hansen. There were differences about their musical direction. They leaned more towards what they had done before. Hansen was open for experiments as long as it was metal. And they kept saying, “Do you want to stick to this metal thing forever? We should look into what the Beatles did more…”
The band had three strong and very individual personalities: Kai Hansen, Michael Weikath and Michael Kiske. And relations between all of them got so bad that it wasn’t fun anymore.
September 1st, 1987 – “Future World” single.
End of 1987 – “Halloween” video single
Part 2 Making:
Weikath took the major role as songwriter. He wrote the phenomenal song that became the title of these double masterpieces, “Keeper of the Seven Keys”. Michael wrote two songs for this album “You Always Walk Alone” & “We Got The Right” and two songs for singles called “Savage” & “Don’t Run For Cover”.
During recording sessions, when Weikath wanted an orchestrated part on the intro for “Keeper of the Seven Keys”, Kiske said he didn’t want it because it was something classical, then they cut it off. They had the same problem with “Eagle Fly Free” and “We Got The Right”. Kiske wanted to orchestrate “We Gor The Right”, although Kiske knew for over an year that Weikath wanted to orchestrate “Eagle Fly Free”. Then Kiske said to Weikath that he shouldn’t get upset just because he was thinking about doing it with his song. Weikath wanted to orchestrate both, because he had his song for over and year and that would upset nobody. At that time, Weikath wanted to kick Kiske out of the band for a long time, for the way he was behaving. Kiske and Weikath are fighting each other. Just how it was. The whole situation internally in the band and we were not a union anymore. There were fronts in the band and argued and discussed more about the music than playing it. The band hadn’t stability and balance because Hansen, Ingo and Markus were together for a long time and they were a team so Weikath and Kiske was like the other side.
Hansen felt he had no ground left in Helloween because he found Weikath and Kiske had many different opinions about the musics and that was stressful to him. He also felt that the promo stuff they had to do really pissed him off because he would like to have a less stressful go at things in general. He sat with the guys and told them, he wanted this and that, to change some things like not going on tour for a year or something else. But, the others were interested in success and not for the problems.
Beginning of 1988 – “Dr. Stein” single
June 1988, Keeper Of The Seven Keys, Part 2 released.
After a successful tour in 1988, they released the second part of Keeper Of The Seven Keys, one of the best metal albums in history. It was the first album to be labeled “Power Metal” or “German Metal”. With this album, they had their biggest success which enabled them to play in the biggest festival of the time Monsters Of Rock. There they played alongside bands like Iron Maiden, Kiss, Megadeth, & Skid Row.
With Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II they found themselves playing in Italy and Spain to kids who didn’t know any of the new songs in their sets because they found it difficult to obtain the album, because Noise’s distribution wasn’t up to the same standard it was in Germany.
In fact, Helloween was later picked up by Iron Maiden’s management. The band’s second Seven Keys would enter the UK Top 40. The Germans were invited to tour America by MTV and opened for Anthrax and Exodus. This line-ups live exploits was soon immortalized through the Live In The UK album. The band’s pumpkin head logo was everywhere and album and merchandise sales hit an all-time high.
In the end they got ripped off by management and they were living on very little money and they had to ask them how to spend their money and everyone but the band made money off of their records. Thats not the way it should be so he got sick of this. It took him one year to finally make the final decision to quit after he first thought about it. Afterall he wrote this situation in “I Want Out” song.
Summer 1988 – Helloween played at “Monsters Of Rock” festival
Weikath called Roland Grapow (ex-Rampage) in August 1988. It was the day before Roland’s birthday and he had this musician’s magazine in front of him and Helloween was on the cover in big letters. And he was like:
“Great, man! You ask me to play guitar in your band? Which guy are you from this picture?” and he told me and I was like “Oh, my goodness! He looks wild!”.
Then they met each other a day later and Weikath played all of the songs to him and Roland was really interested but the problem was that he had not played in a band for three years even though he was a very well known amateur from Hamburg. Roland was 29 and he felt that he was getting too old for this band thing. The other point was that Kai Hansen was still in the band and they went on tour for three months and Weikath told Roland after three months that he should join the band.
Roland worked on that, went to the USA for vacation so he had a couple of Helloween shirts and he was sitting in Los Angeles in a bar and they did “I Want Out” and he was so proud to be asked into this band.
Autumn 1988, they began “Pumpkins Fly Free” European tour. During their first headling tour in 1988, which was dubbed the “Pumpkins Fly Free tour”, the Scotland show was recorded for a live album. It was released under three different titles:
Live In the U.K. (Europe), Keepers Live (Japan), and I Want Out Live (USA). All had the same tracklist with the exception of the US release which didn’t have the song “Rise And Fall”.
September 21st, 1988 – “Dr. Stein” single was released in Japan
Autumn 1988 – “I Want Out” video single
So after the tour Weikath came to Roland and asked if he was still interested and Roland said yes. However Weikath said that Hansen was thinking of not leaving the band after all, and Weikath told him to wait a couple of days and then Hansen ended up after all and then Roland joined the band on Christmas in 1988 and he finished the “Keeper 2″ tour with them in 1989.
January 1st, 1989, finally Kai Hansen left Helloween.
Ingo had problems when Hansen left the band and Hansen didn’t wan’t to convince Ingo to come with him because he would have done it. He had problems the period that they had frozen because of the problems with the company. He was running around to play but he couldn’t because at that time Helloween didn’t existed.
He tried some projects but he wasn’t satisfied and that really fucked him. When Kai left, Michael distanced from Weikath a bit because he realized that not everything looked that rosy – particularly because Michael felt Weikath used him to strengthen his position towards Kai. Weikath was just jealous to death of Kai, and had success using Michael for a while, because Michael simply didn’t see things correctly as they happened. Kiske was a greenhorn after all.
As soon as Roland got into the band, suddenly it’s getting worse. Kiske went on vacation then and tried to switch off, to gain distance – that’s the reason there were no interviews during that time.
When Roland joined the band, there was no friendship anymore, there was a lot of fights and big discussions, and for those guys destroyed Helloween. And one thing is for sure: There will never be a reunion with the Helloween members, not even for a lot of money.
Helloween wanted to go to a bigger label, and that label was EMI Records and the Sanctuary group management headed by Rod Smallwood that helped bring the rise to Iron Maiden. Helloween signed with EMI but Noise Records filed suit that the band had broken their contract with them and therefore Helloween could not release anything outside of Germany, the U.K., or Japan. This left many fans (especially in America) wondering what happened to Helloween. Markus, Kai and even Weikath said that the reason they broke their contract was because everyone but the band was making any money. The band was also sued by Noise Records supposedly for breaching its contract and a premature departure from the Berlin-based label. Noise would also issue a Helloween compilation.
January 21st, 1989 – “Keeper Of The Seven keys, Part 2″ went gold
January 1989 – Helloween left Noise and signed with EMI
“Well that was a complete mess up but this didn’t inflict the trouble onto the band it was just like the different characters we have and they wouldn’t fit. Well the other thing with Noise records came to them as a natural thing because my parents were always at court ever since I could think. So some people in the band were afraid because they didnt like the thought of being in court with anyone and for me it was natural and I just wanted to get out of the contract you know…..”
- Michael Weikath -
They sold like a million records and never made anything out of it. They had like 2,700 DMs to live and this is what you make when you sell clothes in a store. Then Sanctuary got in there and they checked everything and found out we got screwed completely.
They had big problems with Noise. And the thing is that Weikath didn’t even want them in the first place. It’s a funny situation that not many musicians have that they actually contacted him. It was not Weikath asking for a deal, it was they’re actually talking to a friend of him, Sebastian Vollmer who’s doing a lot of things for him. They were contacting Vollmer that they would be very interested. And in the first place Weikath didn’t want to. He had such bad memories with them, they only screwed the band and treat them bad, but then Weikath found out that not one single person that used to be on that label were still there. They’re all completely new people. The guy who used to own this company had nothing to do with it and nowadays Rod Smallwood from Sanctuary Music that used to be their manager owns this label. So, in the end it’s just the name that remained, so Weikath said okay and talked to them. And he just liked them so much from the personal level, so he said okay to make a deal.
Then they went to court and they had a bunch of trials and EMI records backed them up and they lost in the end. The band had won three levels of court that we normally have. Then they had a 4th won and then Noise won. There was also a lot of stuff going on and they had like 17 different trials and they had to like run to every courtroom. They just wanted to make EMI settle with them and in the end they worked it out. Not sure whether Noise made money on the new Helloween records (Master of the Rings) but he still made money out of Chameleon and Pink Bubbles Go Ape.
March 1st, 1989 – “I Want Out” single
April 1st, 1989 – “Live In The U.K.” live album
April 14th, 1989 – “Live In The U.K.” was released in USA named as “I Want Out Live”. Its presentation took place in Dallas, Texas.
1990 – “Pumpkin Tracks” compilation
