THE HEAVY METAL DRESS CODE WEAR IT OR ELSE!

THE HEAVY METAL DRESS CODE WEAR IT OR ELSE!

JOHN MENDELSSOHN

It's interesting to recall—and, for the younger reader, astonishing to find out—that the founding jimmies of heavy metal liked to dress up as women—or, if not liked to, at least agreed to when their managers, most of whom were raging homosexuals (this long before gays went in for the ruggedly masculine and collegiate looks they favor today) urged them to. Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Jim E. Clapton, Jim Pete Townshend—they all wore frilly lace blouses, and lots of them got perms as well.

Now you may say, "But, Jim John, Jimmy Jeff Beck didn't," and you'd be right, but how about the singer in the group-of-his-own J.J. formed after leaving the Yardbirds? Yes, how about Rod Stewart, no Jim he, who took the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California in the summer of 1968 in a flimsy black see-through blouse of the sort a middleaged fellow might ask his missus to wear at bedtime in hopes of getting little elvis to stand at attention? And how, too, for that matter, about the back of Led Zeppelin, on which Robert Plant looks like a homophobe's nightmare come to life in his Shirley Temple hairdo, effeminate blouson, and prissy mouth?

So much for the '60s.

Since Kiss took the horror-moviemeets-sadomasochism visual imagery of '70s heavy metal to its logical limit— and then several light years past it—a decade ago, so little of consequence has happened in heavy metal fashion that one's almost tempted to devote all of the column inches allotted him to the sort of hysterical vituperation that fill those at the end. Indeed, I can think of only three groups who've come up with interesting variations on the theme.

Angel wanted to be to heavy metal what the cover of Cosmopolitan is to American womanhood (the quintessence of idealized glamour), and consequently spent their nights almost exclusively in white satin and make-up. It worked as long as you looked no farther than the guitarist, who, if memory serves, called himself something along the lines of Punky Meadows. Punky wore make-up as well as any of Duran Duran do today and had the sort of hair you might see on a package of expensive conditioner. But then the singer had to go and look exactly like Kevin DuBrow with one uninterrupted eyebrow. And there went the whole...concept.

The chap in Judas Priest who "sings" has short hair, and has had for years and years, if memory serves. If he weren't an obnoxious boor in every other way, you might really have trouble disdaining him.

And Motley Crue dresses up as the sort of girl they hope to meet backstage after the show. The guitarist might be the first pop musician (and I use the word only with the greatest reluc...No, I won't use it! Strike it and substitute "performer") since David Bowie to shave off his eyebrows for his art.

Where, speaking of the endlessly self-proclaimed bad boys of heavy metal, is it written that you have to be a perfect misogynistic brat asshole to play raucous, aggressive music? At the same age, Elvis had more talent and sexual charisma under the nail of the ring toe of his left foot than Motley Crue would have between them if they annexed Kiss. And Elvis was both polite to strangers and unashamedly devoted to his mother. I'm a high-strung person in my 30s. I may not have that much longer (we never know about these things) to live. I don't want to spend what time I have remaining in a world in which even one American teenager thinks there's anything cute or admirable about Motley Crue. Once more I call for the advent of the heavy metal good boy!

But enough of superstars. Now let's talk about you. It's easy to dress heavy metal. Wear denim, leather, or animal skin print spandex trousers of sufficient tightness to make the contours of your sexual organs visible from 10 paces in dim light. Let your hair grow very long, dye it platinum blonde or jet black, and then go to an accredited stylist and tell him or her, "Pretend it's 1971." Rat it mercilessly and then spray it so it stands up in spikey tufts. Or, following the lead of the Scorpions, Ronnie Dio, and the lead singer in Quiet Riot, get your hairline to recede, leaving naught in front but a handful of what looks like overgrown pubic hair.

Wear a leather jacket with lots of zippers over a black sleeveless 50% cotton/50% polyester T-shirt on which is reproduced the hideous comicbookish cover art of your favorite band's latest album, or a black fishnet top with big rips in it. Wear a bandana around either your neck, your thigh, or your knee, and studded or spiked bracelets around your wrists. Drape chains from your four-inch-wide studded or spiked belt.

Have crud under your fingernails and a chip on your shoulder. Wear a nearly-empty Jack Daniels bottle in one hand and a Marlboro in the other.

Shop for your accessories at a hardware store. Wear lots of skull rings and razor blades or miniature stilleto earrings, never in groups of less than two. Have a fatalistic pronouncement ("Born To Be Bad" is a perennial favorite), an occult symbol, or the name of your favorite group tattooed on your person. Wear little white Capezio shoes or thigh-high daggertoed dominatrix boots from England. Be one tough motherfucker.

Be one tough motherfucker who grunts, "All fuckin' right!" a lot, and "Let's fuckin' party!" Have crud between your ears. Appear to have spent too much time in your van with your cassette deck cranked up past the pain threshold. Say, "Huh?" a lot. If you're a boy, refer to girls as bitches, slits, or cracks. Reaffirm the innate superiority of the male sex by doing so. Enjoy listening to songs about how treacherous, deceitful, and generally contemptible women are. Enjoy listening to them at a volume that makes nearby vegetation wilt. Think of being able to play 32nd-note blues scales at and beyond the 14th fret of an electric guitar as the supreme musical accomplishment.

Be one tough motherfucker who don't take no shit off nobody. Except, of course, the band you listen to, who get rich off your desperate need to be perceived as (a) one tough motherfucker who don't take no shit from nobody, and (b) belonging to something...anything. Howl like a baboon with delight when some lower form of life like David Lee Roth tells you how righteously wasted he is. Show your parents just how tough a motherfucker you are: take drugs, get drunk, throw up on your own shoes. And buy another souvenir T-shirt on the way out.