Hammerhead Demoz + Battleaxe Echoez

Jeff Ulmer was hard to miss at Point Grey Secondary in Vancouver's Kerrisdale neighbourhood. He wore long hair, cowboy boots and a lumberjack coat, rode a bright white fold-up bike, and talked the school administration into letting him play records over the loudspeakers on Friday mornings, so students arrived for class to Motörhead and Judas Priest. At home he painted stars and planets across the ceiling of his bedroom rehearsal space and wrapped the walls in a landscape of palm trees and cacti. His parents started him on violin, which he hated, and then piano. He made drums from plastic ice-cream pails, built a guitar at eight, and spent his teens opening up guitars to swap pickups and rewire them.

Jeff started the band in 1978, while he was still in high school. Will Rascan met bassist Tony Moser in the Vancouver College school band, where guitars and bass played basketball games and assemblies alongside the clarinets and trombones, and Tony introduced him to Jeff. Weekends disappeared in Jeff's basement near Dunbar, playing the same records over and over, arguing about tone and riffs, and walking to 7-Eleven for burritos and a brand of nacho chips they called bags of feet. Getting a gig meant playing covers, so they learned The Cars, Boston and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and once played D.O.A.'s 'Disco Sucks' at a Catholic school dance. They called themselves Battleaxe.

Drummers came and went until Paul Davis joined in the spring of 1981. Paul had grown up on Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Rush, and his taste for dynamics and long songs suited what Jeff was writing. Jeff and Will worked out the guitar parts first, Tony and Paul built the rhythm underneath, and Jeff added the vocal lines, turning up to nearly every rehearsal with new lyrics or a new riff. His subjects moved from burning witches to black holes and fallen civilizations, and as early as 1978 he had started a science-fiction epic for a second album, with a novel to go with it, that grew into The Seven Moonz Of Xercez. Jeff had already designed cover art for a Battleaxe album when he learned another band had released a record under that name. He kept Blade as a nod to the axe, Paul offered Sacred, and the axe stayed hidden in the logo.

Jeff recorded rehearsals in his bedroom by dubbing back and forth between two cassette decks, tape noise and all. The 1979-80 Battleaxe tapes held 'Battleaxe Overture', 'Rock & Roll Lover', which was the first original song he ever played live, 'Wasteland', and a version of 'Moon' that still had lyrics. In 1981 he made the Tarathane Tape on his own, singing and playing guitar and drums on songs including 'Under The Ice'. A 1982 home tape of 'The Alien', 'Hammerhead', 'Crystal' and 'Salem' followed.

Paul forgot for more than forty years that the band played the Point Grey Secondary auditorium before anywhere else, until photographs turned up of his red-and-white double-kick kit on that stage. On Friday, August 13, 1982, Sacred Blade played the basement of St. James Church on the Downtown Eastside to a small crowd, and Jeff made up the chorus of 'Salem' on the spot.

Studio time was out of reach, so the band helped build a studio. In exchange for labour on Ocean Sound, framing thick walls from cork board, plywood and Styrofoam, they got recording hours late at night when the paying clients had gone home. Jeff produced the first official demo there in December 1982 on the studio's 24-track: 'Salem', 'Crystal' and 'Hammerhead'. The second followed in January 1983 with 'The Enlightenment / Master Of The Sun' and 'Moon'. Short hours meant some parts went down in a single take. 'Hammerhead' asked so much of Paul's double kick that he later credited his job as a bicycle courier for the stamina.

The tapes moved through the international tape-trading underground, and fan mail came back from Sweden, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and Japan. Jeff organized the fans as Moonwatch Command and wrote its newsletter, the Moonwatch Commandscript, himself. Copies of the 1982 home tape ran faster than the original, with the vocals sounding like the Chipmunks, and Metal Church's Craig Wells told Jeff that version of 'Hammerhead' was the fastest song he had ever heard. One copy reached Metal Blade's Brian Slagel, who asked for 'The Alien' to open Metal Massacre IV, the compilation series that introduced Metallica and Slayer.

By then Tony Moser had left. James Channing had met Will in a guitar class at Eric Hamber Secondary, and Will asked him to switch to bass. James rented a Rickenbacker, played it through his Marshall guitar amp and learned about twenty songs almost at once. His first studio session was at Ocean Sound, replacing Tony's bass on 'The Alien' while Jeff recut his guitar, for the version released on Metal Massacre IV in 1983. James would not meet Tony until the band reunited decades later. Both versions of 'The Alien' are on this release.

Vancouver had no circuit for original metal, so the band rented halls, promoted their own shows and hauled their own gear. On November 18, 1983 they drove to Lake Hills near Seattle to open for Metallica, found Metallica had cancelled, and headlined under a marquee calling them Canada's hottest band. Metal Church came to the show and the two bands became friends. At home Sacred Blade opened for Raven, where Jeff reworked the 'Salem' chorus onstage, and for Saxon, Exciter and Exodus. James's first show was opening for Kradle in New Westminster, and a night supporting D.O.A. in Richmond won over a hall full of punks and was filmed by local television.

In 1984 the Channing family garage became headquarters, with a couch, a raised stage and a drum riser that gave Paul a commanding view. A rented mixing board could not get studio-quality recordings out of the garage, so the band traded labour again, framing, insulating and caulking Grapevine Studios with owner Wayne Chase, and recorded bed tracks there for the first album and half of the second. In September 1984 they went back to Ocean Sound to record their debut under a five-year contract offer from Roadrunner Records. The sessions ran into the summer of 1985 before equipment trouble and a fight over the cover stopped them. The label wanted something like a skull and crossbones, the band wanted Jeff's art in a gatefold, and they cancelled the deal.

In the autumn of 1985 they cut a third demo of newer songs, 'Of The Sun + Moon', 'In Light Of The Moon', 'Fieldz The Sunshrine' and 'Legacy', and an outtake of 'The Pressing' survives from the album sessions. They also rebuilt the Orclarze, a sixteen-foot spaceship that doubled as Paul's drum riser, for their first Canadian headlining show at the York Theatre, where the dry ice pouring from Paul's space helmet swallowed his kit.

Black Dragon Records of France signed the band, and the final guitar tracks were held up because the band decided they were not heavy enough. Of The Sun + Moon came out in 1986 in the gatefold they had fought for, with Jeff's painted cover and a forest photograph of the band arriving beside their ship. Rock Hard, Metal Forces and Enfer reviewed it, and in Vancouver, The Province's Tom Harrison called the sound astral alloy.

Paul left soon after the album came out. In 1987 Ted Zawadzki took over the drums and Randy Robertson joined on guitar. Jeff produced The Seven Moonz Of Xercez himself at Fiasco Brothers in New Westminster, built around a seventeen-part title track drawing on songs written as far back as 1982, but it was never released. The band also opened for Sanctuary and Alice In Chains. In 2005 Jeff returned to Sacred Blade material on Beyond Into The Night Of Day under the name Othyrworld. He died on March 16, 2013, after a stroke. Ted died in 2020.

Supreme Echo, Jason Flower's label in Victoria, returned Of The Sun + Moon to vinyl in 2024, remastered by Brad Boatright from Jeff's master tapes, and the reissue brought the surviving members back together. In April 2025 they played Keep It True in Lauda-Königshofen, Germany, as a tribute to Jeff, with James on vocals and bass, Will and Randy on guitar, Paul on drums and vocals, Tony on bass, and Jeff's sister Jennifer Ulmer Hewitt singing the high parts. In August 2026 they played The Cobalt in Vancouver.

Hammerhead Demoz + Battleaxe Echoez gathers the three official demos Sacred Blade recorded before the album, both versions of 'The Alien', the outtake of 'The Pressing', and 'Under The Ice' and 'Wasteland' from Jeff's early home tapes, remastered by Brad Boatright, with an eight-page booklet of the band's own recollections, photographs, artwork and lyrics.

-Robert Williston