Chad Bowar: How did you get started writing about heavy metal?
Kevin Stewart-Panko: I was 15, and had an ad in Metal Forces magazine looking for tape traders. Some dude from Vancouver Island in British Columbia got in touch with me and we traded tapes back and forth for about a year. We became pretty good friends. He was starting a zine and asked me if I wanted to contribute to it. I said sure. I did a couple reviews, and then I did an interview with this band from Arizona. I still remember this, because they were called Pedophile. They were a thrash band with a singer who had a ridiculously high piercing voice. But I was 15 and the band sent me a free demo so I loved it. So I did an interview with this band. They were called Pedophile, but they were very anti-pedophile. I did the interview, and when it turned up in print, the guy screwed it up, and basically wrote that they weren’t anti-pedophile. Why I am I putting my name on other people’s mistakes? If I’m going to make mistakes, I might as well do them myself. So from that point on I decided to do my own zine.
What was your zine called?
It was called Keelhaul for about two issues. This was when I was about 16 or 17. It was a local thing. I interviewed a couple bands coming through town. I did it all myself on a typewriter in my parents’ living room late at night. Through that same tape trader ad in Metal Forces I met a guy who lived in downtown Toronto. I lived in the suburbs. He was about 4 or 5 years older than me. We became best friends for a couple of years. He started a zine and had already done an issue. We decided to do one zine together. My zine was called Keelhaul and his was called Scrolls Of Doom. So we combined the names into Doomhauled.
Together we did 4 or 5 issues. We would go to every show in Toronto selling zines and interviewing everybody we could. We were getting tons of promo cassettes. A lot of people knew the name, so I’m assuming it was at least a minor deal in the underground metal scene of Toronto. This guy kind of went nuts after a couple of years. He got heavily into right-wing Christianity. He also got into white power, which is strange because I’m half black. It happened overnight. I didn’t see it coming. He went off and did his own thing. So I took the name Doomhauled and ran with it. I did it by myself for a while and ran into a friend I had interviewed for my old magazine. He was going to school for graphic design and was looking for something to do. He got in on it and was my art director, so to speak. Doomhauled took on this new life. We went out of our way to make ourselves laugh and put in whatever we found offensive or hilarious, not worrying about who we offended.
How old were you at this time?
This was around the time I graduated from University and was in grad school. I took this bizarre program where I went directly from undergrad to a Phd. without getting a masters, which was a big mistake. It was audiology and the psychology of music. I got into it, but I didn’t like the politics of academia and I failed a couple of exams. I ended up dropping out the same day they were going to kick me out of the program anyway. I was lost as to what I was going to do. I ended up signing up for a journalism course. It was cool in that I got a practical, professional idea of how things work, but I could do it on my own.
So I decided to push Doomhauled to the limit. We were doing 10,000 free copies four times a year. We would go to shows and I would pull my car up and have boxes of these things. We would hand out zines to everybody. The record store HMV would have autograph sessions and we would go down there and there would be a line of metalheads down the street. We would give out zines to everybody. It was crazy. We had nothing to do with ourselves. We were playing music and doing this zine. I was only working part time. We were having fun.
How did you get started writing for other publications?
One day I was at home reading a copy of Terrorizer. There was a tiny ad in the back of the issue that said they were looking for writers. I sent them some stuff. Four months later I came home. I was living with my parents at the time. My mom was talking on the phone to some British guy. She handed me the phone and it was Nick Terry from Terrorizer. He said they wanted to bring me on. That’s how that started. There’s something about the Terrorizer story that I just found out about a couple weeks ago. A friend of mine who used to work at Relapse Records that I do a radio show with here just told me the story. When he was working at Relapse, his boss was pushing the guys at Terrorizer to bring me on. I didn’t know any of this was going on.
For Metal Maniacs, I knew Liz, the editor, for years. That was a matter of approaching her because I knew her. I still had to wait several months for her to take me on. Unrestrained! was different because those dudes are from Toronto and I’m from Toronto. I used to see those guys at shows going back to the early ‘90s. That was more like me going up to a friend and asking to do something for their magazine.
