October Obituaries: Category VII – Per ”Dead” Yngve Ohlin

Dead Man Walking

A musing in the memory of Per ”Dead” Yngve Ohlin

16 January 1969 – 8 April 1991

“Diabolic shapes float by
Out from the dark
I remember it was here I died
By following the freezing moon”

- Mayhem – The Freezing Moon

Mayhem. Say the name aloud in a crowded metal pub and even the most fledgling corpse-painted juve will have heard and hold an opinion about the band that defined Norwegian black metal. If not for the deaths of Per “Dead” Ohlin and Øystein “Euronymus” Aarseth the band may well have remained a small and obscure parenthesis in musical history. However, the winds of fate deemed otherwise and today the band holds a special place in the minds and hearts of all those who have heard the call of the freezing moon.

Per Ohlin was born and raised in Stockholm not too far from the nest in which I currently dwell, and in his early life he suffered from sleep apnea and according to his brother he was bullied by the kids at school. This led to an accident one winter where he suffered a ruptured spleen during an ice-skating session. Per was rushed to a hospital and was for a time clinically dead during the operation. This short visit to the threshold of death altered Per and he became obsessed with death and the afterlife, he took on the pseudonym Dead and his personality was warped ever after. In 1984 he founded the death metal act Morbid and released the demo album December Moon a few years later, however he was never satisfied with the band’s approach and decided to spread his blackened wings elsewhere. According to Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud Dead sent him one of Morbid’s demo tapes together with a crucified mouse that had started to decay.

Said and done, Dead moved to Norway in the year 1988 and lived on social security payouts while practicing with the rest of the band that now consisted of Necrobutcher on bass, Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg on drums as well as Euronymus on lead guitar. Dead started to write all the band’s lyrics as well as handling the growling vocals. According to Necrobutcher Dead was a deep thinker, but also an introverted loner that spent a lot of time in the woods drawing, one of his favourite motifs was apparently gnarly old trees. A lot of other black metal musicians who had the opportunity to meet Dead described him as not quite there, like an undying ghast moving around in the skin of a man. The drummer in the Norwegian black metal band Emperor, Bård ‘Faust’ Eithun, said:

“He [Dead] wasn’t a guy you could know very well. I think even the other guys in Mayhem didn’t know him very well. He was hard to get close to. I met him two weeks before he died. I’d met him maybe six to eight times, in all. He had lots of weird ideas. I remember Aarseth was talking about him and said he did not have any humour. He did, but it was very obscure. Honestly, I don’t think he was enjoying living in this world, which of course resulted in the suicide.”

Even Euronymus who lived with Per during his last days on earth proclaimed that Dead must be clinically insane. He said that no sane individual would have stopped eating to get starvation wounds while dressing in a t-shirt with his own funeral announcement. While Dead was an introverted loner privately his performances on stage were legendary even before his demise. He dressed in clothes that he had buried before the concert to get the scent of death and decay and painted himself in black and white paint to emulate the visage of the dead. Hellhammer even claimed that Dead was the first black metal musician to use this so-called corpse paint. Before one of the shows he had found a dead crow by the road, he put the bird into a plastic bag and kept it in his pocket so that he could bring it out and inhale death while performing live. He also cut himself during some shows showering the gathered crowd in his blood in an almost trancelike way.

While many of Dead’s friends tried to stop him from his constant self-harm and suicidal tendencies, Euronymus actually encouraged the young musician in his quest for death. The first drummer of Mayhem, Manheim, said: “I don’t know if Øystein did it out of pure evil or if he was just fooling around.” The band gained greater fame and bought a house in Kråkstad near Oslo to have somewhere to gather and rehearse. Dead and Euronymus lived there together for some time while the other members of the band dwelled elsewhere. On the 8^th of April while being alone in the house Dead cut open both his wrists as well as his throat, he walked around bleeding for a while only to end his life with a shotgun wound to the head. What happened after this is all part of the myths and legend of Mayhem but according to Euronymus he arrived to the house only to find it locked and since he had no keys on him he phoned Necrobutcher asking if Dead was with him. The conversation ended with Euronymus presumably joking about how Dead was probably “hanging” in his room. Euronymus climbed into a window and found the lifeless body of Dead lying in a pool of blood. His first action was not to call the police; instead he went to the nearest grocery to buy a disposable camera and rearranged the scene of Dead’s demise while taking pictures. Legend then foretells how Euronymus picked up pieces of Dead’s skull to craft amulets that he sent to other members of the black metal scene and Euronymus also claimed that he ate parts of Dead’s brain to be able to call himself a cannibal.

The acts of Euronymus disgusted the other members of the band and Necrobutcher quit shortly after. Dead left a legacy behind him and even to this day his is celebrated as one of the founding fathers of black metal. A lot of voices were raised against Euronymus as a fuel to the cause to the death of Dead. He was, after all, the closest thing to a friend Dead got in Norway and Necrobutcher claimed that he could easily have dissuaded Dead from ending his life if only he wanted to. Euronymus told the rest of the band that he would destroy the pictures of Dead’s suicide but kept them anyway in a red envelope at his shop Helvete in Oslo. One way or another one of the picture found its way to the owner of Warmaster records in Colombia and thus Dawn of the Black Hearts was born with its gory cover of Dead, dead in the bed.

The death of Dead is a legendary tale in itself but proved to be only the beginning of the carnage that would ensue. During the early 1990s churches all over Norway were set on fire and in August 1993 Varg Vikernes of Burzum fame stabbed Euronymus to death in his apartment presumably arguing over a contract. While Mayhem today is far from the band that kickstarted Norwegian Black Metal, Dead’s legacy lives on and today he is arguably one of the most renowned black metal vocalists. Ironically enough the death of Dead was both a boon and a tragedy for the black metal scene. His geniality and unique presence during shows are spoken of with reverence to this day and few are the vocalists that come close to the soulless wailing that Dead summoned from the depth of his heart. Perhaps he really was claimed by death that unfortunate day in his youth and maybe he found peace at last in the embrace of Morrigan. I actually visited his grave late one September evening just to make sure he had existed at all, this mythical being, this death incarnate. He was a thinker, a loner and an amazing poet. On the Live in Leipzig cover Dead wrote:

Jag är inte en människa.

Det här är bara en dröm, och snart vaknar jag.

Det var för kallt och blodet levrades hela tiden.

It roughly translates from swedish into “I am not a human. This is just a dream and soon I will wake up. It was too cold and the blood kept clotting all the time.”. One thing is for sure, the black metal scene today has nothing of the darkness that lingers in the air around everything that is Dead. While strong bands and musicians come and go, no-one has been even close to the power of the void that was Per Ohlin. I believe Dead himself said it best: “A human destiny, but nothing human inside. What’ll be left of me when I’m dead, there was nothing when I lived.”. And so I raise my glass to Per “Dead” Ohlin this bleak and cold October, although we share different fates we are all siblings in the end when death claims us.

References:

Rydehed Stefan (2008). Pure Fucking Mayhem (motion picture). Index Verlag.
Moynihan Michael; Søderlind Didrik (1998). Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Feral House’
Aites Aaron (director, producer), Ewell Audrey (director, producer) (2009). Until the Light Takes Us (motion picture). Variance Films.
Klingberg Jon Jefferson, Johannesson Ika (2011). Blod Eld Död: En svensk metalhistoria. Alfabeta Förlag.

Discography:

Morbid Rehearsal Morbid 7 August 1987 Demo album
December Moon Morbid 25 December 1987 Demo album
Dawn of the Black Hearts Mayhem 28 February 1990 Bootleg live recording
Freezing Moon/Carnage Mayhem April 1990 Studio recording
Live in Leipzig Mayhem 26 November 1990 Live performance
Out from the Dark Mayhem Early 1991 Demo album
De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Mayhem May 1994 Full-length
(Only lyrics)
Live in Stockholm Morbid 2000 Live album
Year of the Goat Morbid 4 April 2011 Compilation album

Final thoughts:
Due to respect for the family and friends of Per I have decided not to post the cover of Dawn of the Black Hearts. If you feel a sick need to see the picture I’m sure you can find it floating in the webways ready for your pleasure.