Billy “Eye” Harper: The Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein of Nigel Benjamin and Trey Loren
A review of the rock ‘n roll horror film ‘Rocktober Blood’ and the career of Mott and London’s late singer, Nigel Benjamin
Once upon a time there was a film genre out of Italy in the 1970s, one that was quickly knocked off by Spanish cinema: a cycle of horror film known as “Giallo.” Those films were born out the 1940s black and white film noir-inspired, yellow-cover bound paperback pulp novels proliferating Italy’s bookstores in the 1950s and 1960s; pages rife with sex, deception, and mayhem: If the put-upon protagonist didn’t die in the end: they were gaslighted into the nuthouse by a black-gloved supernatural or sexually-confused antagonist.
It was those was those yellow-bound books that inspired the spaghetti-horror, aka pasta-horror, cycle spearheaded by Mario Bava with 1971’s Twitch of the Death Nerve, aka Bay of Blood, and Dario Argento, who became the maestro of Italian Gialli with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
Then, jump to the 1980s and watch John Carpenter’s Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, and Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill — and compare to Bava’s and Argento’s work: The similarities of Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve vs. Friday the 13th, are striking.
As those direct-to-video “boobs and blades” knock offs started flying off the video store shelves, a new form of heavy metal birthed in Britain in the late 1970s— dubbed by Sounds magazine as “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWoBHM). Featuring the violent, religious mania and bloody lyrics composed by the likes of Venom and Iron Maiden, complete with the requisite Satanic imagery on the album covers, slasher films and heavy metal music were a match made in hell. That unholy union birthed the “Metalsploitation” genre: blood soaked tales rife with metal music showcasing the exploitive titles of Black Roses, Shock ’em Dead, Terror on Tour, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, and Rock ’n’ Roll Zombies.
That leads us to the subject of this article: the “career” of an emotionally damaged faux heavy-metal rock god known to the metal-loving world as Billy “Eye” Harper. The Michael Myers-inspired rocker was the brainchild of screenwriter Beverly Sebastian for what was to become a direct-to-home video Metalsploitation classic: Rocktober Blood — directed by her husband, Ferd Sebastian, and starring their son, Trey Loren (aka Tracy Loren Sebastian).
As with the more renowned John Carpenter and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Martin), the Sebastians knew how to squeeze a film’s budget to get the most bang for their bucks. Their earliest films, such as Flash and the Firecat (a Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry-inspired car chase adventure) and Gator Bait (a swampy revenge movie inspired by the Burt Reynolds’ classic Gator), like Carpenter’s and Romero’s, were each produced for less than Carpenter’s Halloween-budget and would consistently earn double-digital millions in drive-in box office returns — profits later compounded by their film’s rebirths on the home video market. As result of Sebastian International Films’ financially successful reputation in producing cost-effective films that garnered substantial returns, Paramount Studios, a major Hollywood studio that wanted to get into the financially-beneficial home-video market, contracted Ferd and Beverly to produce a series of action films in the late eighties featuring lots of bar fights, well-endowed babes, and the requisite motorcycle gangs.
While the glut of video-direct heavy-metal horror films varied in script, acting, and production-value quality, some with greater financial resources than the Sebastians, there is a unique quality to the Sebastian’s vision of Rocktober Blood that the others don’t possess: unlike their celluloid brethren, which grafted the preexisting song catalogs of King Kobra, Lizzy Borden, Michael Angelo Batio, the Names, Thor, Paul Sabu, and Fastway to double for their film’s faux-rock stars, the soundtrack for Rocktober Blood featured all-original tunes that reflected and drove the film’s plot.
Those fan-worshiped original tunes of “Killer on the Loose,” “Rainbow Eyes,” and “I’m Back” were penned by Sorcery (who also starred in the film as Billy’s band “Headmistress”), a metal band that cut their teeth on L.A’s Sunset Strip alongside Mammoth/Wolfgang — the nascent version of Van Halen that opened Sorcery’s earliest shows. Sorcery, with then frontman David Glenn Isley, received their first taste of national recognition with their appearance on a Dick Clark-produced Halloween television special, and honed their acting and soundtrack chops in 1978’s Stunt Rock. (Another band sharing L.A stages with Van Halen and Sorcery was Rockicks; be sure to read about them here, on Medium.)
Neil Benjamin Becomes the “Voice” of Billy Eye Harper
Prior to filming and recording the music for Rocktober Blood, in which Isley would have appeared as the “vocals” of Billy “Eye” Harper, Isley joined ex-Angel keyboardist-founder Greg Guiffria’s eponymous band that scored a 1984 MTV video and U.S Top 40 radio hit with “A Call to Your Heart.”
Stepping in for Isley was a singer who, to make ends meet as he scratched by with his rock ’n’ roll dreams, took up acting as his “day job.” Like Rick Springfield (for U.S television series), Kim Milford (Song of the Succubus, Laserblast, Corvette Summer), and Lane Caudell (Goodbye, Franklin High and Hanging on a Star) before him, Nigel Benjamin, while waiting for that big hit record, got his first acting job as “Chris” — Billy “Eye” Harper’s manager and producer.
As with Springfield (who recorded and toured with Australia’s Zoot), Kim Milford (who replaced Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group), and Lane Caudell (several singles-only deals as a solo artist; fronted Player precursors Skyband), Nigel Benjamin’s rock ’n’ roll pedigree was his replacing Ian Hunter in Mott the Hoople from 1975 to 1976 for two albums as the truncated Mott and touring the world with REO Speedwagon, Thin Lizzy, Humble Pie, Kiss, and Judas Priest.
Benjamin’s first bands in the early seventies were the London Southend-based glam-groups Grot and Fancy; after issuing their 1973 single “Starlord,” Fancy transformed into the Billion Dollar Band, and then Royce. After Mott’s demise (to become British Lions with Ray Major on lead vocals) Benjamin formed English Assassin; signed to Arista Records, they recorded a still unreleased album. The one English Assassin “album” that did see a release was Just for the Record, a 1978 solo album by famed British motorcycle and film stuntman Eddie Kidd — an album that English Assassin backed and Benjamin produced.
After relocating from England to Los Angeles, the city’s nascent hair-metal scene adopted Benjamin and he fronted the infamous London — a band with an ever-evolving roster that, while never scoring a deal of their own, served as a rock ’n’ roll boot camp for musicians who joined the more commercially successful bands of W.A.S.P, Guns N’ Roses, and Cinderella.
Then, one day, Nigel Benjamin’s ex-London bandmate, bassist Nikki Sixx (who also went through the ranks of Circus Circus alongside Blackie Lawless, later of W.A.S.P), was forming his next band: Motley Crue. Benjamin, in interviews over the years, expressed there was no love lost between him and Sixx. So when Sixx asked Nigel to join the “new band” as lead vocalist, Nigel turned him down. Sixx and his drummer, Tommy Lee, went to a rock club and saw a cover band, Rock Candy, with a tall lean, blonde-belter named Vince Neil. Motley Crue was born. (At the time, Nigel was dating the sister of Tommy Lee’s future wife, actress Heather Locklear; the Locklear sisters and Benjamin shared a home.)
Nigel Benjamin was then hired for his first acting job as “Chris” in Rocktober Blood for a non-singing role. While some web-Intel indicated Benjamin was reluctantly drafted — after being hired as an actor — to become the “vocals” of Billy “Eye” Harper, what really happened: Benjamin came onto the film as a production assistant, then stepped in to handle the vocals for Billy Eye, and then was given a part in the film. According to Benjamin, regardless of the band’s onset bragging about their “career,” Benjamin claims he never heard of Sorcery until meeting them on the film set. And while Sorcery believed Benjamin “joined” the band, Benjamin insists he never joined and wanted no part of the band. (Another person Benjamin met for the first time on the Rocktober Blood set was Motley Crue’s future drummer, Tommy Lee, brought to the set by a visiting Nikki Sixx.)
So, why didn’t Nigel Benjamin change acting roles and portray Billy “Eye” Harper in the film instead of having another actor lip-sync his vocals?
Well, Sebastian International Pictures was a family affair. While their son, Benjamin, worked behind the scenes on their film’s business and technical aspects and took on occasional, small support roles, their younger son, Tracy, always appeared in the family’s films as a co-star or lead actor. Making his early-teens debut in Flash and the Firecat, Tracy had his first leading man role in the Sebastians’ other rock ’n’ roll flick: On the Air Live with Captain Midnight, a film best known to the over-50 crowd from its incessant early-Eighties airings on the USA Cable Network’s weekend-night rock video programming block, Night Flight. (Other oft repeated rock movies on the program were Rocktober Blood, the Ramones’ Rock ’n’ Roll High School, and Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains.)
For many years the fans of Rocktober Blood — those unaware of Nigel Benjamin’s musical past — believed Tracy Sebastian, who starred in the film under his stage name of Trey Loren, sang the vocals and the ersatz-band “Headmistress” was a real band. Exasperating the confusion as to who composed and performed the film’s songs: the film’s scant opening titles sequence and end credits failed to properly credit the musicians.
The names of Sorcery’s guitarists Richard Taylor and Lou Cohen, bassist Richie King and drummer Perry Morris appear — without a reference to their band; the same holds true for the uncredited vocals for Donna Scoggins’ “Lynn Starling” character by Susie Rose Major — which fans believe were done by Scoggins.
In addition: some minor, incidental tunes heard throughout the film in the background of various scenes (appearing in-full on the subsequent vinyl-only soundtrack) were recorded by Susie’s band Facedown — with Susie and her fellow band members of Paul Bennett, Michael Zionch, and Barry Brandt (ex-Angel drummer) receiving no credits and, as result of the way the credits read in the film, for many years fans were lead to believe the members of Sorcery wrote and performed the tunes that Facedown contributed to the soundtrack.
During an interview with the online publication Full In Bloom, Nigel Benjamin had this to say about his Rocktober Blood experience:
“[There’s] nothing to tell. They [Sorcery] asked me to sing the songs for Tracy Sebastian to lip-sync to, [and] then somehow thought that I had joined them! [Then,] when I got asked to star in the movie, they [Sorcery] wouldn’t pay me to finish singing because I was being paid to act! I stopped singing, [and] they [Sorcery] lost the gig. I finished the soundtrack with Pat Regan, my then keyboard player [which was the band Eyes]. I didn’t know who Sorcery was. Nobody I knew did either. According to [the guys in Sorcery] they were huge . . . go figure. Some of the guys were cool, though.”
And from Just a Buzz, a Mott the Hoople fansite, Benjamin had this to say about the film:
“If it had been a little bit worse, it would have been a cult classic. It was just not quite bad enough to be bad. I’ll tell you something very strange about it, though. I acted in it, I was a production assistant in it, I sang some of the soundtrack, and I wrote some of the music — but I still did not know the story until I went to the screening. I never saw a script for more than twenty minutes before I was supposed to do it, and any script they gave me the night before changed to a completely different scene the next morning. I went to the movie screening and I had no idea what the movie was about until it was all finished!”
Benjamin’s insights seem to explain how Susie Rose Major’s Las Vegas-based Facedown came to contribute “Watch Me Rock,” “Would You Let Me Touch You,” “You Can’t Kill Rock ’n’ Roll,” and “High School Boys”: Sorcery was fired from the film and the Sebastians needed songs to fill out their proposed — and poorly distributed — film soundtrack.
And with that, our analog-celluloid years faded into video snow and vinyl static. Then, years later, the digitally-aged versions of our teenaged selves began to search for the “parts” of our beloved Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein online. Where is and how can we find the album or any other music from Trey Loren and his band Headmistress? Back in the pre-Internet epoch of a teenager’s high school years in the eighties, your weekend’s and after-homework-was-done entertainment revolved around your local video store’s 5 Videos-5 Days-5 Bucks cinematic honey hole. Then some video outlets came up with the idea to “rent” out record albums; then vintage vinyl shops began to provide album, as well as video rentals. Sadly, the soundtrack to Rocktober Blood — one of the most sought after movie-inspired albums by the fans of slasher films and metal music, its acquisition rivaled only by the obscure soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s 1978 movie debut, Over the Edge (which featured the first appearances of Cheap Trick, the Ramones, Van Halen, and the Cars) — could never be located for home taping.
So, we young, analog-drunk metal heads did the next best thing: popping VHS-rented copies of Rocktober Blood into the VCR and, with our little G/E portable tape recorders, we taped the films’ majestic theme song of “I’m Back” from the film’s opening recording studio scene and the Giallo-inspired crescendo featuring Billy “Eye” Harper going out in a blaze of blood ’n’ gory in the film’s closing concert sequence featuring “Killer on the Loose,” “Rainbow Eyes,” and a reprise of “I’m Back.” And thanks to our dual cassette decks we dubbed copies for our fellow rockers; those tunes became a permanent fixture in our car’s cassette decks as “Headmistress” ended up on mix tapes alongside our beloved Iron Maiden, Raven, Venom, and Ronnie James Dio-era Black Sabbath. For us metal lovin’-slasher film connoisseurs, Headmistress was the coolest Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein to bloody a heavy-metal horror flick. They were a Giallo-soaked lab experiment that rivaled anything rock ’n’ horror luminaries such as Alice Cooper or Dio and Iron Maiden or Venom could cook up in their electronic laboratories.
On the above video boxes, notice the Italian Giallo-inferred title of 7 note di Terrore/Seven Notes of Terror—notice its similarity to the 1970s Giallo titles of 4 mosche di velluto grigio/Four Files on Grey Velvet; Il gatto a nove code/The Cat o’ Nine Tails; Sette note in nero/Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes; La dama rossa uccide sette volte/The Red Queen Kills Seven Times; Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso/Seven Blood-Stained Notes; La morte negli occhi del gatto/Seven Death’s in the Cat’s Eye.
So Where are the Members of “Headmistress” Now?
Riba Meryl, who co-wrote the faux-rock epic “Rainbow Eyes” with Sorcery’s Richard Taylor, became an actress and portrayed “Janis Joplin” in the speculative 1984 rock ’n’ roll conspiracy flick Down on Us (released to video in 1989 as Beyond the Doors to cash-in on the film’s Jim Morrison connection) and on a 1987 episode of the rock ’n’ roll U.S television series Throb. After her lone, non-Janis character acting role in 1987’s Banzai Runner, Meryl concentrated on television and film session work and contributed the song “Brand New Start” to a 1987 cop-murder drama, The Jigsaw Murders. Sadly, Riba passed away in 2007 at the age of 52 from breast cancer. (Why didn’t Riba Meryl provide the vocals for the song she wrote? We may never know.)
Donna Scoggins, who made her only acting appearance as “Lynn Starling,” went onto a highly successful international modeling career, and then became an equally successful copywriter in corporate advertising.
As for the voice behind Lynn Starling: Susie Rose Major is still rocking in 2019. Most recently, Susie provided guest-lead vocals for the cleverly-named Quint (remember 1975’s Jaws?) that recorded several original tunes (“Great White Skies,” “Bad Asser,” “Hell on Wheels” and “Brand New You”) for the SyFy Channel’s Sharknado film series. (Quint is led by Robbie Rist, best known to the over-50 crowd as “Cousin Oliver” from the early-Seventies American TV-comedy series The Brady Bunch.)
After his stint with Mott, Nigel Benjamin formed the band Satyr with bassist Chuck Wright (ex-Rough Cutt, Quiet Riot, Greg Guiffria’s House of Lords), then Eyes (Satyr without Wright; along with Bob Steffan, guitars; John Telsco, bass; Pat Reagan, keyboards; Richard Onri, drums — they appear on the Rocktober Blood soundtrack), and then gave up the rock ’n’ roll dream and retired from the music business. Working behind the scenes as a session musician, Benjamin found success in designing and building recording studios; he came out of hiding in 2003 to appear as an expert car builder and TV personality alongside Jesse James (Sandra Bullock’s ex) on Monster Garage, one of U.S television’s earliest reality series. Benjamin’s since returned to making music with the digital-only albums Buffalo, In the Absence of God, and Relentless Hammer of Dreams.
As for the physical embodiment of our cinematic rock god Billy “Eye” Harper: Tracy Sebastian and the rest of the Sebastian clan retired from the movie business. While Tracy forged a career in the hospitality industry and managed his own specialty barbeque restaurant on Central Florida’s Gulf Coast, his brother, Benjamin, formed Panama Films to reissue lost drive-in favorites of the 1970s to the home video market; their parents, Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, started The National Greyhound Association, a non-profit organization to save and shelter greyhound racing dogs. In 2016 an online campaign was initiated to raise funds to film a proposed sequel: Rocktober Blood 2: Billy’s Revenge; those plans crumbled in the midst of a fan-controversial DVD/Blue Ray-disc reissue of Rocktober Blood. (The tale of the reissue is chronicled in epic detail by The Analog Archivist, Blue Ray.com, and Horror Digital.)
As for the members of Sorcery: they went onto successful careers as session musicians in the television and film industry; inspired by his band’s newly acquired Internet fan base, drummer Perry King continues to market Sorcery’s music and movie catalog in the digital realm. And while Nigel Benjamin claimed to never hearing of Sorcery before their meeting via Rocktober Blood, it turned out that horror film director Eli Roth did — and was a fan: he used two of Sorcery’s Stunt Rock-era tunes, “Talking to the Devil” and “Sacrifice,” in 2015’s Knock Knock and 2018’s Death Wish.
And thanks to the digital realm that hosts the You Tube video-sharing platform and a plethora of vanity sites designed by horror film aficionados, Rocktober Blood never left our metalhead conscious. Almost forty years later, fans are discovering the film and its music for the very first time and they love it — in a Tommy Wiseau’s The Room fandom style. Hey, it’s a heavy-metal horror film thing our parents just don’t understand. Nor should they ever understand. Let ’em watch their Billy Haley and the Comets in Don’t Knock the Rock and Joey Dee and the Starlighters doing the “Peppermint Twist” in Let’s Twist. We’ll keep flashin’ our Ronnie James Dio-horns for Billy Eye!
So raise a cold one for Nigel Benjamin and Tracy Sebastian and the guys from Sorcery. Cheers to Riba Meryl, Susie Rose Major, and Donna Scoggins. You may not have become the rock stars or famous actors that you wanted to become; you didn’t receive the recognition or money you deserved for your hard work and dedication to your respective crafts.
But know this: You’re the “parts” of our beloved Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein — Billy “Eye” Harper and Headmistress. You rocked us and gifted us with one of our most cherished teenaged memories from the bouncy ’n’ bloody heavy metal ’80s. We still remember you, talk about you, watch you, and listen to you. And, believe it or not, fans of music and film obscurities are still — to this very day as this writer enters these words into a word processing program — discovering you for the first time and feeling the same joy this writer experienced all those years ago as a wee-teen rocker haunting video and vintage vinyl stores.
As Billy “Eye” Harper — by way of Tracy Sebastian, Nigel Benjamin, and Sorcery — opined in the lyrics of “I’m Back”: there is always hell to pay . . . in this business we call “rock ’n’ roll.”
And we’re glad you paid that hell for us lovers of Metalsploitation films.
Rocktober Blood’s Alternate Titles in Foreign Markets
Argentina — Concierto de sangre — Concert of blood
Belgium — Rockill
Brazil — Concerto d o Horror — Horror Concert
Italy — 7 note di Terrore — Seven Notes of Terror
Mexico — El fantasma del rock — The Ghost of Rock
Soviet Union/Russian — Семь ночей ужаса — Seven Nights of Horror
Spain (video) — Terror En El Concierto — Terror in the Concert
Spain (theatrical) — Concierto de sangre — Concert of Blood
END
— R.D Francis is the writer of The Ghosts of Jim Morrison, the Phantom of Detroit, and the Fates of Rock ’n’ Roll and Tales from a Wizard: The Oral History of Walpurgis, both which explore the life and times of the musician responsible for the mysterious 1974 Jim Morrison “solo album,” Phantom’s Divine Comedy: Part 1 — and came to replace Jim Morrison in the Doors.
You learn about those books and his other fiction works on his Medium home page.
