A song influenced by the final words of Taiwanese political prisoners.
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When the Misfits split two days before Halloween 1983, the world barely noticed. The New Jersey horror-punks were the missing link between the Ramones and Boris Karloff, a bunch of B-movie fixated kids who worshipped Ed Wood, underground comics and Elvis. But they were way too strange for mainstream acceptance, even if they’d wanted it. They would get a posthumous boost from a cusp-of-stardom Metallica, who wore their T-shirts and covered their songs, but too most people they were little more than a logo.
That’s all future Journey singer Jeff Scott Soto knew of them when he got a call in 1988 from a music industry match-maker he knew. She told him that some of the guys from the Misfits were putting together a new project, and was he interested in working with them?
“I knew nothing about them,” Soto told Classic Rock in 2025. “I’d heard the name and seen the logo, but that was all. I hadn’t heard the music. I couldn’t have told you the name of any of their songs. But she was, like, ‘They’ve got a new band going on, are you interested in singing for them?’”
The LA-born Soto had made a name for himself singing on the first two albums by Swedish guitar wizard Yngwie Malmsteen, only to butt heads with his boss once too often. By the time he got the call asking if he was interested in working with the guys from the Misfits, he was out of Yngwie’s band and in need of a little cash.
“My son had just been born, so I needed money to make sure we could afford diapers,” Soto told Classic Rock. “So I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll take their call.’”
After the Misfits imploded, frontman Glenn Danzig formed a new, more occult-themed band, Samhain, who would eventually mutate into the more successful Danzig. By contrast, founding bassist Jerry Only and his hulking, guitar-player brother Doyle, spent the middle of the decade in the musical wilderness. They had originally intended to continue the Misfits with a new singer, but ended up tangled in a lawsuit over the band name with their former bandmate.
“The Misfits name was locked down in court, and we couldn’t really get much done,” Jerry told Maximum Rock N Roll in 1995. “So what Doyle and I did, we sat back and wrote an album that was musically a step above [the Misfits]. It had a lot of riffs in it, and a lot of good drum cuts. It was kind of like Iron Maiden meets the Misfits through Motörhead’s amps.”
Except there was even more to it than that. Jerry and Doyle planned to launch a new band called Kryst The Conqueror – pronounced ‘Christ’. The songs album they were writing centred around a quasi-religious sci-fi concept, and there was talk of a comic book too. Jerry started calling himself Mocavious Kryst, later changed to Mo The Great, and shots of the pair from time show them shorn of their signature devilocks and proto-corpse paint make-up, instead kitted out in Manowar-style sleeveless leather tops.
“With the Misfits, we were seen as this dark, evil band,” Jerry told Metal Hammer in 2012. “We wanted to do something that was positive instead. It was as far away from the Misfits as you could get. We wanted Bruce Dickinson to sing for it.”
Sadly for Jerry and Doyle, Bruce was otherwise engaged. They looked elsewhere. “We went out and hired a singer that had a real Viking-type, godly voice,” Jerry told Maximum Rock And Roll. “We were trying to form ourselves in the image of the Lord.”
That godly Viking was Jeff Scott Soto, whose lack of knowledge of the pair’s previous band was outweighed by his need to put food on the table. He flew to New Jersey to meet Jerry and Doyle. “Those guys were just so nice,” Soto told Classic Rock. “I knew they wanted to go in a completely different direction and get away from Misfits territory.”
Together with drummer The Murp (aka Jim Murphy), they spent just under two weeks laying down 13 songs at House Of Music studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Tracks such as Thunder Thruster and In God We Trust were riffier, heavier than the Misfits had ever been, sitting somewhere between thrash metal and Manowar. One song, the Maiden-inspired March Of The Mega-mites, was a primitive prog metal mini-epic. “That was six minutes and 58 seconds long and it never played the same thing twice,” Jerry told Metal Hammer.
They roped in a friend-of-a-friend from New Jersey, Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo, to play lead guitar on a couple of the songs. Snake had his own up-and-coming band, Skid Row, but he was happy to help out, reputedly playing on the songs Trial Of The Soul and Spellbound, although his contract with his main group meant he couldn’t be credited for his appearance.
Soto himself would be credited as the titular Kryst The Conqueror – not because he was still under contract to Yngwie Malmsteen (he wasn’t), but because it fitted in with the comic book storyline Only had in his head. “Everybody was supposed to have comic book names, so they gave the lead vocalist that character name,” he told Brave Words.
If Kryst The Conqueror’s music was at right angles to the Misfits, the concept was the polar opposite . The band name and several of their song titles suggested there was a heavy religious bent to it that bordered on Christian metal. “We don’t want people to come out and say, ‘They were great, but they’re into that devil shit,’” Only told Yeszista zine at the time. “That’s not it, all of our songs are about going out and chasing the son of a bitch. That’s what it’s all about… if I made Kryst with a ‘C,’ people are gonna say, ‘He’s making fun of God.’ We’ve come in His name to do the job.”
Whether they’d gone the full Stryper or it was a schtick wasn’t clear, though Jerry was certainly more godly than his former bandmate Danzig. “Well, I grew up [with religion] very much so,” he told Metal Hammer. “I’ve had experiences where I feel you kind of touch the other side and realise that it’s there. Look, I don’t push it on anybody. God’s different for everyone. That’s the beauty of God.”
It turned out that Kryst The Conqueror could have done with a little divine intervention. Despite hitting it off with Jerry and Doyle on a personal level, Jeff Scott Soto wasn’t sold on the project. “I was a total gun for hire,” he told Classic Rock. “I think they thought: ‘Let’s get him down here, once he sings these songs, he’s going to be convinced to actually want to continue. I had a great camaraderie with the guys, but musically it just wasn’t what I was looking for, nor was it something I would have actually left everything else that I was doing at the time to stop and do with them.”
It was a blow, but Jerry and Doyle weren’t giving up on their passion project. In January 1990, they put out five of the tracks they’d recorded with Soto as the Deliver Us From Evil EP on their own Cyclopean Music Inc. label. Featuring a cheeseball cover featuring an angelic sword whose hilt makes the letter ‘K’, suspended in a stormy celestial sky, it wasn’t well received by the few people who heard it.
Ultimately, the odds were stacked against Jerry and Doyle. As well as not having a singer, the comic book idea proved too costly. As the 80s turned into the 1990s, Kryst The Conqueror languished in Pugatory.
Jerry and Doyle’s prayers were finally answered in the mid-90s, when the legal issues with Danzig were finally settled. The pair secured the rights to the Misfits name, and assembled a new incarnation of the band fronted by singer Michale Graves. A handful of Kryst The Conqueror riffs were recycled in some of the songs they were writing, and at least one track, Dr Phibes Rises Again, was recorded by this latest line-up (the new version was exhumed on the 2001 compilation, Cuts From The Crypt).
And that insane idea for a sci-fi-Jesus concept album with its own comic book? That was firmly shoved to the back of a dusty drawer, where it’s languished in semi-obscurity ever since, give or take the odd bootleg release of the full Jeff Scott Soto session. With Jerry and Doyle now reunited with onetime adversary Danzig and playing sporadic, money-spinning reunion shows, it’s unlikely the pair are going to revisit it any time soon. The same goes for Jeff Scott Soto, whose long career has included a mid-2000s stint with Journey.
“I haven’t heard it in decades.,” Jeff Scott Soto. told Classic Rock of the forgotten quasi-Christian metal experiment he was fleetingly involved in. “If I listened back to it, it’ll probably all come back to me, but I couldn’t even sing you a melody from it because it’s been so long.”
