Few bands have the power to change the history of rock. All would agree, however, that Törso Messiäh was probably pretty close.

In tribute to legendary metal band Törso Messiäh's upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary, Ballast Books is releasing a commemorative biography of the band, entitled Törso Messiäh: Sorcerers From Valhalla. Unparalleled in its depth and knowledge, Sorcerers has been hailed by critics as both the best and the only Törso Messiäh biography in existence. Excerpts from the upcoming biography were graciously given to us by the publisher, and it is with considerable excitement that we print them here...

...The year was 1976. Heavy metal music, long an underground movement, had burst into the limelight with a sudden intensity that shocked parents and rocked their children. That year, Black Sabbath sold their soul for rock and roll, and then released said rock and roll in a listenable format. KISS's "Detroit Rock City" could be heard from many radios of the time. Even Judas Priest had arrived in America, bringing several rock songs with him. And from every desktop and wall, calendars screamed the numbers "1976" — as if to confirm, in their own way, that this was in fact the year. Whatever the calendars' methods, they were effective: the year was and would remain 1976 as late as that December, and some would argue until the following May.

It was fortunate that is was 1976; for this was the year that a sixteen year old Gill Herbers would first pick up a guitar — taking the first tentative steps in what would eventually be an enormous leather-bepanted, zucchini-stuffed stride through the annals of rock. In May of that year, Gill's father David Herbers was eager to get his son interested in a hobby of some kind. Lately, Gill's pursuits had turned to self-gratification, and his near hourly bouts of sweaty cockplay were ruining the upholstery in the elder Herbers' den. Anxious for a pursuit that would keep Gill's hands busy, his father bought him his first guitar: a plastic Mexicoso Conquistador. Gill was overjoyed at the gift, and immediately embraced it to his chest as he ran out to pawn it. Gill wisely invested the fifty dollar earnings in pot, which he mixed with oregano and lawn trimmings to sell to his neighborhood friends at a substantial profit.

However, fate soon intervened. One friend, a tall blonde boy named Gerald Kalikutty, was unable to pay Gill for the substantial amount of pot, oregano and Gill's yard that he had purchased on credit. One admittedly shameful slapfight later, Gill was the owner of Gerald's father's '66 Fender Stratocaster.

Guitar playing did not come naturally to Gill; though he tried learning a few songs, the fretboard's mysteries would remain elusive to him. By June, he was convinced the instrument was useless; and, after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to incorporate it into his self-gratification sessions, he decided to discard the guitar forever.

Had he been successful, of course, rock's history would have taken an entirely different course. What happened instead was this: Gill left his house with the intention of dumping the guitar into a garbage bin behind the supermarket. However, on the way there, with guitar in hand, he had sex three consecutive times. Within minutes, when Gill finished, his stance on guitar playing had changed forever. Though he would never take the time to learn how to properly play the instrument, the necessary groundwork had indeed been laid: Gill would start a rock band.

As luck would have it, Gerald Kalikutty showed up at Gill's doorstep the next day with his father, who angrily demanded to get his guitar back. The Stratocaster was quickly handed over; but the effect of the guitar on Gill's psyche, and the eventual songwriting/slapfighting partnership between Gill and Gerald, would last a lifetime...

...1977 saw Gill and Gerald playing many different clubs against the backdrop of the bustling underground Iowa metal scene. The band — tentatively titled FuckShitCuntPiss — was slowly gaining a small but loyal cult following among the several people who attended their shows. Gigs were scarce, however, and the young band gained a firsthand lesson in the dark underbelly of the club circuit. Some nights they would only be paid in free beer for the duration of their show. Other nights, they would only get beaten senseless and viciously sodomized for their hard work. The band would learn to avoid these places; but the first ten or eleven times were a harsh lesson in the realities of life.

By July 1977, the band consisted of Gill on lead guitar and Gerald on vocals. A drummer and bass player were soon found to fill out a sound that was quickly becoming both signature and recognized. Tommy "Skins" Borgonia took on the daunting task of playing drums to the untamed savage attack of Gill's guitar-hitting; morbidly obese Clay Fertnig took the bass reigns, giving FuckShitCuntPiss their trademark fat sound; local eighth grader Louis Corman played chimes. The band became a mainstay at the notorious biker bar Stabbings, where their shows quickly became the stuff of legend. Though they were still sodomized routinely, Gill and Gerald would, while there, begin to see a profit for the first time. The music of FuckShitCuntPiss was starting to catch on. They would celebrate with drugs.

By March 1978 FuckShitCuntPiss's star was on the rise. Rumors of their wild stage antics began to spread. It was said that Gerald, lost in the music, would sometimes bite the head off of a live dove, just like Ozzy Osbourne. Only one year old, the band had already begun to show a facility for plagiarism that would later become their trademark. Graffiti began to appear more and more frequently, with the slogan: Gerald is Glod. It would later be corrected to the proper spelling, which only served to quadruple the band's following.

FuckShitCuntPiss soon realized that they had gone as far as they could in Iowa. Completely out of ideas as to what to do next, they disbanded amidst fighting, shrieking and substantial hitting. Had fate not once again intervened, this would have marked the end of Gill and Gerald's meteoric rise to the rock pantheon. However, as luck would have it, one of their tapes made it to the desk of local music producer Mitch Matchkin. As history records it, Mitch threw on the tape "as a lark." He was immediately floored by what he heard.

"The fucking shits had stolen all my songs," Matchkin later related, referring to tracks recorded with his seminal early seventies band Bloated Nipples. He immediately sued the band; the subsequent trial gained FuckShitCuntPiss the publicity they needed to be signed to a major label...

...It is unfortunate that we can never be a fly on the wall during that historic first meeting of the members of FuckShitCuntPiss and Cliff Calloway, President of Then And Now Records. What we do know of that first meeting is sketchy at best, and riddled with contradictions. Says Gill of the first encounter: "Cliff was a fat fucking retard. Loved our songs, though." Cliff on that fateful first encounter: "They were talentless hacks, and their music was awful. If I wasn't such a fat fucking retard, I never would have signed them."

Though we will never know the complete story, we do know that the corpulent, Down's Syndrome-afflicted Calloway signed the band on the spot, giving them a $50,000 advance for their first album. His only stipulation was that they change their name. FuckShitCuntPiss, it seemed, was ... in the words of Calloway ... "not marketable" and "incredibly stupid."

The band was left alone in Calloway's office. Within minutes, they had come up with the name that has since become synonymous with hard rocking: Törso Messiäh's. Within ten minutes, they had pilfered Calloway's desk of its belongings.

In a 1987 interview, Gill expands on that historic renaming: "We were all in Calloway's office, and we had something like five minutes to think of a new name. We needed something evil-sounding, satanic... plump with menace. Gerald immediately said, with no hesitation, 'Torso Messiah.' Naturally we laughed and called him stupid. But five minutes went by and we couldn't think of anything better, so... Torso Messiah."

Many diacritics were tried, including the cedilla, the accent egu, and the circumflex; it was unanimously agreed, however, that the umlaut was the most satanic-looking of all of them. Thus did Torso Messiah become Törso Messiäh's, and not the second place contender, T rso Messi¥h.

Gerald, Gill, Clay, Louis and Tommy "Skins" Borgonia left with the cash advance, which was squandered in a record five-hour period. Soon after, they returned to Tommy "Skins" Borgonia's basement, where they began recording their album with the help of an eight-track player and Clay's father's hearing aid, which was rewired into a microphone. Within five weeks, Törso Messiäh's self-titled debut hit record shops everywhere, and forever changed the face of rock...

...By February 1981 tensions had mounted between Gill (renamed Flex Fellatio) and Gerard (Kox Koxkin). The nonstop touring in support of their latest album Seduce The Leopard (1980) was taking its toll on everyone in the band. Clay (Beef Baddlannds) had begun experimenting with over-the-counter sinus medicine in increasingly dangerous amounts. Louis (Thrust Meatnozzle), now seventeen, was becoming slowly addicted to painkillers and hooker-sex. Tommy "Skins" Borgonia (Tommy "Skins" Borgonia) became obsessed with learning how to properly play his instrument.

Never was the band's increasingly tumultuous relationship more pronounced, however, than with Flex and Kox. Their songwriting abilities had matured at an astounding rate since their first attempts in 1976. Where before they would attempt to steal songs from Uriah Heep and Budgie, they were now plagiarizing such leviathans as KISS, Styx, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

Their tortuous touring schedule (often playing fifteen shows in one night), combined with an increased sense of competition and jealousy, had begun to poison the band. Flex began to notice that Kox, as the lead singer, was getting the lion's share of the attention. Kox, in turn, began to notice that Flex was short and stupid, and told him ... often going so far as to write songs about it, as with the hit single "Flex is Short and Stupid", off the album Sexcrazy (1981). The song would only increase the growing divide between the two musical leviathans...

...By 1985, increased drug use had ravaged Törso Messiäh's. On many occasions, Flex was seen backstage to inject heroin directly into his forehead, then jam speed capsules into his urethra. Says Flex of that restless year, in a 1992 interview: "I was worried that the band had grown creatively stagnant. I was pushing towards an all free-form jazz album, with some Indian influences, like Lakshmi Shankar. I felt it would get us out of the 'Törso Messiäh's' sound we'd gotten pigeonholed with. Kox thought I was just high. And I was. But still... free-form Indian jazz. When you think about it, I... I guess it is pretty stupid. Keep in mind I was immensely high."

The band continued to drift apart. But their musical creativity, coupled with their enduring ability to steal songs from other artists, resulted in what would be the high water mark for Törso Messiäh's: 1985's Destructo Maximusicon, an album hailed by fans and critics alike as "the only good thing Törso Messiäh's ever did."

Maximusicon was the result of bitter infighting in the studio, as tensions came to a head with Kox and Flex. "The two of them were always pulling these pranks on each other," remembers Tommy "Skins" Borgonia. "Like, this one time Kox put broken glass in Flex's salad, and Flex had to go to the hospital, and when he was gone, Kox erased all of his guitar tracks. It was just silly kid stuff. All that might sound a little excessive now, but I look back on those times as the happiest in my life. I was never happier than that time Flex went to the hospital with glass in his stomach."

Though the atmosphere was destructive, it would produce their greatest songs ever: the crunching 'Bell Tolls For Destruction'; the sweet, mournful 'The Sorcerer Cries'; and the thumping country honk of 'She Wants My Cock In Her Vagina'. The first single off Maximusicon, 'Blackjack in Hell', stayed on the charts for five straight weeks. While not terribly impressive in and of itself, this marked a huge leap forward for the band's fame. Destructo Maximuxicon had finally put Törso Messiäh's on the map. Sadly, the album would also be their swan song...

...By 1987 Törso Messiäh's had fully self-destructed. Flex would check himself into a drug rehabilitation clinic by year's end. "I was hoping to rehabilitate myself to the point where I could take drugs again," he explains. "Of course, that isn't really how that works. But they didn't tell me that until I was already there. Luckily I'd worn my heroin pants." Flex refers to his famous pair of custom-made pants made completely out of heroin.

While Flex recuperated, Kox kept busy in the studio. January 1988 saw the release of his solo debut, called Isn't Flex an Asshole? I think So. Some argued that the album was proof of the ongoing rivalry between Kox and his old bandmate, with such song titles as 'I Hate Flex', 'I Carried Törso Messiäh's' and 'Flex Fellatio Can Eat My Shit In Hell'. Kox maintained that he was singing "about a different Flex." Either way, the album did remarkably poorly, even for an album as bad as it most certainly was. Kox later blamed poor marketing on the flop, though others were quick to point out that the album was the worst thing ever made. The truth no doubt lies somewhere in between...

...By 1998, Tðrso MessiØh was reunited and back on the road. Following a tearful reunion on MTV, Flex and Kox made up live on television. They then got into a bitter argument, which escalated to a knock-down slapfight watched by over ten million viewers. The publicity garnered convinced the remaining members (Clay had passed on in 1995 of a hamburger-related illness) to reunite for a world tour. The next month, the Blackjack Across The Nation tour commenced, appeared in three cities, and then crumbled amidst in-fighting.

But is Tðrso MessiØh really, as many critics have vocally prayed, gone for good? Flex disagrees. "A band as landmark as Tðrso MessiØh will never really disappear. Will we ever get back together? Hey, you never know. My chain of fajita pizza restaurants isn't doing so well financially, and Kox just had another divorce. Who's to say next year we won't really need the money?"

Who's to say indeed? Fans the world over wait patiently for the possible reunion of their metal heroes. And until then, in the words of Kox Koxskin: