Steele, along with childhood friends guitarist Kenny Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver, and drummer Sal Abruscato, settled on naming their gothic doom project Type O Negative-after a short stint as Sub-Zero, also taken-because “it didn’t sound too metal.” According to Silver, the band preferred ambiguity, so that “you couldn’t tell what kind of band, what type of music it would be.” Steele had a reputation from his time in Carnivore, and the band didn’t want to be pigeonholed as just another thrash act, a genre that broke into the mainstream that year with landmark albums from Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, and Suicidal Tendencies. Originally called Repulsion, Type O Negative emerged in 1990 after the grindcore pioneers with the same name enlisted a lawyer. He’d repeat this theme on Type O Negative’s debut, Slow, Deep and Hard, in the lyrics to the song “Der Untermensch,” and in interviews throughout his career. He penned the words for fellow New York hardcore band Agnostic Front on their 1986 song “Public Assistance,” a racist screed against so-called welfare queens. What Steele became infamous for in the mid-’80s, though, was his racist and misogynistic lyrics-written off by fans and hagiographers as “sarcastic”-and by extension, his perceived worldview. The album is good, if musically unremarkable, crossover thrash. Glancing merely at the tracklist, Retaliation anticipates most Type O Negative albums: a joke opener (“Jack Daniel’s and Pizza”), classic rock cover halfway through (Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”), and a smattering of offensive song titles ( honestly, take your pick). Steele hinted at Type O Negative’s style back in 1987, the same year he started in the Parks Department and released his thrash band Carnivore’s second and final album, Retaliation.
Never again would Steele make an album that straddled these two worlds, with one foot in a mud-flecked work boot, the other in pristine black leather. In creating Bloody Kisses, Steele re-invented goth metal by grasping on to influences like Black Sabbath and the Beatles, and creating a lane for mainstream goth-influenced bands from Finland’s HIM to Evanescence. Coming out of the 1980s as an all-star in the New York City thrash metal world-a scene that bred bands like Anthrax, Overkill, and Nuclear Assault-he entered the next decade with that same brash attitude, but with an urge to slow things down. But Steele didn’t care about the death metal part he just wanted the doom. The genre was a self-serious mashup of death metal and doom that left little room for outsized personalities like Steele. Goth metal, then still in its infancy, was made popular in the early ’90s by “The Peaceville Three,” which included My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema, all from Northern England. In that same interview, he reveals that the song has some verisimilitude: “It’s about the girl I fucking slashed my wrists over,” a reference to his 1989 suicide attempt. But Steele made an industry of synthesizing the ironic with the sublimely earnest.
1 (Little Miss Scare-All)” is a send-up of the goth-girl archetype (”She’s got a date at midnight with Nosferatu/Oh, baby, Lily Munster ain’t got nothing on you”), the title referring to the only thing a Little Miss Scare-All could ever truly fear: the roots of her hair showing. The vampire of South Brooklyn, who shoveled shit between band practices, cut both a relatable and controversial figure. It was, he later told an interviewer for the deluxe reissue of his band Type O Negative’s landmark third album, Bloody Kisses, about “the ultimate goth girl” who was “in love with herself.” And for three hours, while sitting in traffic waiting to unload a truckful of excrement, he composed a song in his head. He was an archetype for the brooding, hypermasculine metalhead that crawled out of the primordial ooze.
Steele looked like a more Nordic Undertaker, or Glenn Danzig but a foot taller.
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