Him's Rage
A Completely Different Chapter
Hector Camacho places Him's Rage around 1983 and roughly through the remainder of his high-school years. It was not a continuation of Faded Black. This was another circle of musicians, another part of town and another role for Hector. In Faded Black he had been behind the drums. In Him's Rage, he became the singer.
The full lineup is still being reconstructed, and the archive will not guess at names that Hector or surviving evidence has not firmly locked down. What is clear is that this band became one of the important steps between Hector's seventies-influenced beginnings and the heavier Arizona scene he would later move through.
A Party, a Puppy and an Empty Microphone
Hector did not answer an ad or walk into a formal audition. He went to a party with a puppy because he had nowhere else to leave the dog, met a girl, and somehow ended up spending the night at a house where a band was hanging out. By the next day the musicians wanted to play, but their singer was missing.
Hector knew far more of the band's material than they expected. He remembers singing several songs before the existing singer finally arrived. What happened next is exactly the kind of Arizona band-history moment that never makes it into a record-company biography.
That is where this website version stops the story. The complete version belongs in the book.
Heavy Metal Before the Valley Changed Again
Him's Rage was largely a cover band. Hector remembers material from Metal Church, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath as part of the set, music that fit the heavier direction young Phoenix musicians were moving toward as the 1980s took shape.
The band worked the world that existed outside the better-documented club circuit: house parties, neighborhood gatherings and all-ages opportunities where younger musicians could actually play in front of people. Hector remembers doing a lot of parties with the group, meeting people through the band and becoming more deeply connected to the local scene.
An All-Ages Room and a Desert Party
Hector remembers an all-ages, non-alcoholic venue around Seventh Avenue and Camelback as one of the band's later steps toward playing outside the house-party world. He also remembers a large desert-party event connected with that venue's closing.
Those details matter because the Arizona scene was not built only in famous clubs. It was built in houses, makeshift rooms, all-ages spaces and desert gatherings, places that often disappeared without leaving behind much more than the memories of the people who were there.
A Band That Could Have Vanished Completely
Him's Rage never left behind the kind of public archive that makes historical research easy. Hector remembers the group eventually fading as the members' lives moved in different directions, and he says he did not see most of those musicians in the scene again.
That is exactly why the band belongs here. The Arizona story is not only the groups that signed contracts or pressed records. It is also the bands that filled living rooms, rehearsed across town, played all-ages rooms, changed somebody's direction as a musician and then nearly disappeared from the record.
This Is Only the Trailer
The website preserves the outline. The book keeps the complete story: the fuller party sequence, what happened when the original singer arrived, the people surrounding the band, the house-party culture, how Him's Rage eventually came apart and where this chapter fits inside Hector Camacho's much larger Arizona history. That material is being preserved in The Death of Local Music — Volume II: Arizona Legacy Bands.