Saint Vitus

His mother used to call it funeral music.

Everyone else would call it doom metal, eventually, and guitarist Dave Chandler thinks it's a fitting enough tag for a genre he helped create, considering its pulse-slowing characteristics: guitars that lumber by like livestock trudging through wet cement; clean, sonorous vocals full of yearning, suggestive of someone mourning the death of a loved one; lyrics largely centered around addiction and loss, war and mortality.

If a rainy day could be rendered a strain of doleful hard rock, it would inevitably sound a lot like Saint Vitus.

Chandler's band, which was founded in '79, was ahead of its time, playing slow when the trend was to go faster and faster as thrash metal was starting to take off.

And so even though Vitus played a large role in catalyzing a movement that would later become its own underground subculture and give rise to fast growing scenes like the similarly riff-centric, Black Sabbath-derived stoner rock circles, for Chandler, it never paid much to be a pioneer.

"It's not very lucrative," he says with a chuckle, reflecting on his band's hand-to-mouth, hard-knock career.

But while Vitus never got a lot of love during its '80s heyday, in recent years, the band's influence has become more and more pronounced as a variety of cult favorites from the past decade, bands such as Eyehategod, Gates of Slumber, Sleep, Sunn O))), and dozens more, have gained prominence.

And so suddenly, Saint Vitus is a bigger name than it ever was back in the day, causing the band to reconvene in 2008 for festival gigs after years of dormancy, save for a couple of shows in 2003.

Nowadays, Vitus is playing in front of its biggest audiences yet.

"What's happened is that a lot of our fans, from, say, 20 years ago, now they're like 35 and their kids are coming to the shows because they want to see the band that their parents listen to all the time," Chandler says. "So that's given us a whole new audience out of nowhere, pretty much. Our fans have had a couple of kids each, and it's just kind of multiplied."

It's fitting that these dudes have finally found a niche for themselves, because from the beginning, they never seemed to fit in with any one crowd. The band was well aware of this, as evidenced by one of its most seminal tunes, "Born Too Late." "I know I don't belong, and there's nothing that I can do," singer Scott "Wino" Weinrich lamented. "I was born too late, and I'll never be like you."

Vitus came of age in L.A. during the '80s hair metal era, and could not have been more out of place there. And so the band embraced its outsider status, signing with SST Records, the label run by hardcore greats Black Flag, who were looking for a crossover act to appeal to more than just the punk crowd.

Even though the group had nothing in common soundwise with the punk bands of their day, that's who Vitus ended up playing with, much to the antagonism of audiences nationwide.

"When we first started doing shows with Black Flag, of course the audiences hated us and completely trashed us at pretty much every show," Chandler recalls. "But we were the band that didn't stop our set because of that. We didn't cry and go home. We would just give them crap back. So the next time we would come around in the same town, the people who were giving us crap respected us then. They didn't necessarily like us, but they respected the fact that we stuck to our guns and did what we wanted to do in their faces."

These were small victories for a band with such a big sound. Though it struggled to develop much of a following in America, Vitus found favor in Europe, where the band toured exclusively beginning in the late '80s.

Nowadays, the group is able to play America like never before, including landing its first Vegas show.

It's been a long time coming for Chandler, who will be taking a honeymoon with his wife while here.

Time has finally caught up with his band, and Chandler's happy, and more than a bit surprised, to be perched upon a recognized branch of the heavy metal family tree, at long last.

"Histories of heavy metal books started coming out, and we were in them, and I was like, 'Weird,' " he says. "My wife got this one, she used to work at a big bookstore chain, and it was called 'The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal.' She goes, 'Check this out,' and there's this giant picture of me. I was like, 'Whoa!' I would never have thought that would ever happen in a million years."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.