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'Black Metal' RAY WALLACE: A Heavy Metal Life Filled With Love

January 8, 2008

Marc Weisblott of Toronto's Eye Weekly reports: Ray Wallace, who died on Nov. 27, 2007, from complications arising from a brain aneurysm at age 45, was defying stereotypes for as long as anyone on the local heavy metal scene knew him.

For one, he was as friendly as the music he lived for is generally perceived as not. And as a band manager, club booker and magazine publisher, he was a leader in a community where misfits could fit right in.

"We used to see this black guy all the time, and he had these awesome packages on his jean jacket and looked like he was into metal," recalls Joe Rico, who played guitar in the thrash band SACRIFICE, which emerged from Scarborough in the mid-'80s. "We wrote a lot of our songs at Ray's house. It was great for us because he was centrally located between our places. I'm still unsure why they let us do that, but I spoke to his mom just recently and she said that once we were gone from there she really missed us."

Wallace was the manager of SACRIFICE for the better part of a decade, and a fixture at just about every other metal gathering around the city, too. He gave himself the moniker "Black Metal," after an album by the band VENOM, appropriating a Satanic reference as fodder for self-deprecation. And it stuck.

Read the entire article at www.eyeweekly.com (scroll down).

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