Directly across the street from the Triton Museum was Executioner's rehearsal space, an empty bedroom in singer Dave Burk's house, where the five band members read the newspaper article, shrugged their shoulders, and promptly went back to what they were doing minutes before...running through a setlist filled with songs about nuclear attack and the angst of living in President Ronald Reagan's cold war circus.

In retrospect it might seem slightly odd that a group of kids from the suburbs in Northern California would be singing about atomic blasts and the horrors of war, but on closer inspection it makes more sense. These guys grew up watching cartoons on T.V. in the morning and Vietnam body count reports on the evening news. They were too young to vote in an era of unprecedented atomic weapon proliferation, the perceived threat of attack from Russia and Libya, and the chest-puffing of President Ronnie whose cabinet buddies proclaimed belief in imminent Biblical Armageddon to anyone listening.

So they cast their ballots with their guitars and voices instead. Their music was hard, fast, tight and loud. It contained "taboo" extended guitar solos and stop-on-a-dime tempo changes. They sounded like nobody else. A mix of hardcore west coast punk rock, speed metal (before there WAS such a thing) and the larynx-shredding assault of Burk's vocal missives, their music commanded attention. And they got it. Their single "Fix Me/Hellbound" was the number one requested cut on the legendary underground station KFJC for the entire year 1983. It was the number two most requested song on San Francisco's mainstream station KQAK (The Quake) the following year, sandwiched in between Depeche Mode and Culture Club, two groups they had absolutely NOTHING in common with.

But by that time they had called it quits, the "victims" of their own teenage attention spans, the then-current punk rock ethos of slackerdom, and perhaps a few too many encounters with illicit substances. The album they had recorded sat unreleased for over two decades, kept alive only by the 4th and 5th generation cassette dubs that kept on making the rounds among kids in California in the following years. It's a shame, really. It could have been a contender...and for awhile it was.

Recent interest in Executioner and their contemporaries in the early 80's San Jose punk scene has led to a hugely successful reunion gig, a couple of indie label offers, and now Slackertone Records wise decision to release the full CD properly.