DOA’s original bassist ‘didn’t do anything easy’
Randy Rampage was a true louder-than-life figure.
As the original bassist for Vancouver punk legends DOA, Rampage was one of the founding fathers of Vancouver’s alternative music scene. With his peroxide blond hair and ever-present black leather jacket, he was a riveting onstage presence, prone to leaping into the air and doing the splits in the middle of a song.
“He was one of those guys who’d do something crazy on stage and bring excitement to the crowd, and people would go nuts,” DOA guitarist Joe Keithley said. “He really knew the right time to throw it in, which is a skill, too.”
Rampage had as big a presence offstage. He was funny as hell and a world-class partier, a person who lights up a room, or trashes it.
But playing with bands like DOA and thrash-metal standard-bearer Annihilator brought him fame but no fortune, so he paid the bills as a longshoreman.
On Tuesday he did a shift at the Lynnterm Terminal in North Vancouver, came home and plopped down in his favourite chair. After suffering a heart attack, he died early Tuesday evening. He was 58.
“It looked as though he was just watching a South Park DVD, resting,” said his partner, Susanne Tabata. “It happened early last evening when I was out running an errand. I just talked to him before I left.”
Rampage recently returned to work after breaking his hip after being hit by a forklift.
It was his second nasty work accident — a couple of decades ago his leg was crushed when a co-worker driving a forklift knocked a roll of paper on him.
“You want to talk about getting slayed by the press — I got run over by a 7,000-pound roll of newsprint,” he said in 2008. “It was a great day. It was like, ‘All right, I got an early day, I’ve got a $1,500 cheque in my pocket, let’s go party!’ Next thing I wake up I’m looking at the ceiling and I look down at my leg and it’s twisted around oneand-a-half times, not just upside down. Bones poking out here and there.”
His co-worker thought he had killed Rampage, so he parked the forklift and left, not wanting to get into trouble. Fortunately, Rampage had a cellphone. But when the 911 operator heard his deep croak of a voice, they thought it was a prank call.
“And they hung up on me,” Rampage said. “They told me, ‘This isn’t a joke, sir, this is not a joke. Don’t phone us!’ And they hung up on me.”
The second time he called they believed him and sent help. But the accident left him in constant pain.
“It triggered 22 years of pain management, and some pretty heavy pain-management problems,” said Tabata.
“He’d try to lay down and sleep and be like aching,” Keithley said. “Whenever I was with him he’d be self-medicating, unfortunately.”
Randall Desmond Archibald was born on Feb. 21, 1960, at St. Paul’s Hospital and grew up in North Vancouver. Originally a drummer, in high school he sometimes jammed with schoolmate Bryan Adams. But his musical tastes made a sharp left when his friend Tony Bardach turned him on to punk rock.
One day he auditioned for a group being put together by Keithley.
“It was weird — when DOA started I was a drummer, Randy was a drummer and Chuck was a drummer,” Keithley said. “It turned out Chuck was a 10-times-better drummer than me and Randy put together. So I taught (Randy) to play bass, and he picked it up and ran with it.”
The original DOA lineup was a fairly combustible crew, and Rampage left after a New Year’s Eve gig in 1981-82. He would return to the fold twice and record four albums with the group, including the punk classics Something Better Change and Hardcore ’81.
“If you listen to his stuff on Hardcore ’81, he had really cool bass runs, the tempo and the feel between him and Chuck was (great), they were at their peak at that point,” Keithley said.
Rampage joined Annihilator in 1988, appearing on their debut album Alice in Hell. He left the band after a couple of years, returned in 1999 for another album, then left again. In recent years he fronted his own band, Rampage, which has a new album in the can.
Rampage is the seventh former member of DOA to die, after Simon Wild, Ken (Dimwit) Montgomery, Ken Jensen, Dave Gregg, Brian (Wimpy) Goble and Brad Kent.
As sad as they were about his death, his friends had to laugh telling stories about him, because he was such a great character.
“We were in Italy (about 2001 or 2002), playing this big outdoor show in Rome, on a flatbed trailer type thing,” Keithley recounted. “Me and (drummer) Baldini were playing away and all of a sudden it’s like there’s no bass sound. Somehow Randy had missed the edge of the stage (while cavorting around) and flown off this flatbed trailer into the crowd.
“As he was flying down he realized what was happening and flipped around and landed on his tailbone. He really hurt his tailbone, really bad, landed on the dirt in this field. Of course the Italian punks instead of catching him all got out of the way. This is what a trooper he was. There wasn’t much coming out of his amp, but he was still playing, going (imitates a bass) bump-bump-de-bump. A couple of notes here and there.
“The two road crew guys ran down, picked him up and brought him back onstage. He was dazed, shell-shocked, and we did a 10-minute version of Folsom Prison Blues waitin’ for him to get back ready to play. The Italian tour manager came by the next day. We were all having breakfast and Randy, of course, can barely move. He goes, ‘Randy! I hear you have medical problem with your ass!’
“Like tailbone translated into ass in Italian. We just about (wet) ourselves laughing. Randy, too. He could dish it out pretty good, and he could take it as well. Which is the mark of a trooper, if you ask me.”
“He really was one of a kind,” Tabata said. “He certainly sailed in his own ship. He didn’t do anything easy, and he asked nothing of no one.”
“He was a wild man,” said Keithley, “and like you say, a force.”