Motivational Differences
Every time Ron Jarzombek saw Watchtower live, his jaw hit the floor. It was the mid-80s and the guitarist’s band, San Antonio speed-metallers SA Slayer, regularly shared bills with their compadres from 80 miles up the road in Austin, Texas. Both outfits traded in the same kind of high-velocity, razor-edged noise, but next to Jarzombek’s own crew, Watchtower were way out there on their own.
“I was blown away by them,” says Jarzombek, who ended up joining Watchtower in 1986, a year after they released their cult classic debut album Energetic Disassembly. “It was kind of proggy, which was just unheard of back then. My band did some basic technical metal things, but nothing like they were doing. The technicality of it was like a combination of Rush and Metallica. There wasn’t anything else like them around at that time.”
Watchtower truly were an anomaly within the melee that was the 80s metal scene: a bunch of longhairs in white hi-tops and cut-off T-shirts who fused the technical ambition of prog’s great visionaries with the exhilaration of post-Metallica thrash.
That debut album, , is one of the foundation stones on which modern progressive metal is built. Their second (and possibly final) album, 1989’s, stands as a genre masterpiece. Yet the band themselves remain a marginal concern in the grand scheme of things, cited as a huge influence by those in the know but granted barely a sliver of the recognition afforded to contemporaries such as Voivod and Dream Theater.
