THE RISE AND RISE OF INDEPENDENT METAL

If you stroll through the American metal carnival for too long, life can become one bedeviling House of Mirrors. Here we have our old pal HM—nasty, dirty, loud, offensive, fun. Turn the corner and there he is grinning back at you—nice, twee, polished, flabby gloop. Here we've got Pat Benatar trilling we are young! There we've got Billy Joel and Jackson Browne wearing leather jackets! Over there's Styx saying they'll save rock 'n' roll! Now here's Rex Smith claiming his next album will be a return to his Heavy Metal roots! MAJOR DISTORTION!

But outside, the carousel keeps turning. A few of the big boys are slipping off— not selling out, not touring so much, breaking up. A few new ones are riding high, and there's a lot more waiting in the queue to get on. Some of them glorious freakshow material—eating worms onstage, chucking raw meat at their fans, whipping each other, singing about werewolves, guitar-soloing on cheese-graters, dribbling blood. A lot more of them aren't that much different from the big boys. Except in terms of numbers. Important numbers. Like 1 7, 18, 19, 20, the best age for spandex and leather in anyone's eyes.

Who knows why? Maybe the new generation of HM fans got sick of trying to upset their parents with bands the very same parents made out to. Maybe the punks learned to play. Maybe it's something in the water. Whatever, metal's come around again—more to the point it's drawing attention to itself again—and enough of it is young and reckless and deranged and stupid and dynamic and energetic and over-the-top enough to get true HM fans everywhere beaming like perverts in a junior high school lavatory.

The new wave of heavy metal. Not such a strange phrase as it seems. Over the past few years the reactionary HM followed the same sort of path as the unreactionary new wave/punk—getting a grass roots local following, saying to hell with the record companies, releasing albums cheaply on their own independent labels. We all know what happened with new wave—you couldn't see for dust as men in satin jackets tore out of their skyscrapers to sign anything with a narrow tie, synthesizer or female bass player. And similar things are happening with metal—the execs are snapping to attention, sniffing the air for Flex Net and leather and hoofing it in the other direction. It's hard getting around the metal circuit these days without slipping in some record company drool. Look how well Motley Crue are doing; wasn't that an independent? Look at Quiet Riot's sales; weren't they just a local band? Why are we pushing the Cure? Where's our Def Leppard?

The more the independent metallists get signed and get big, the more other HM bands are going to put out metal albums and wait their turn, and so on and so on. If you piled up all the tiny-label metal out there right now, it'd be bigger than Dave Lee Roth's ego. You name it, they got it. Sophisticated Satan rock. Sleaze. Punky Meadows clones. Sabbath copyists. Classy, mainstream productions. Stuff that sounds like it was produced in a food processor. And a lot of it—probably most of it—by American bands. "There was a time, I think, the only new American act in the Billboard charts throughout '82 was the Go-Gos," says Alan Niven, manager of just-signed heavy rock band Great White. "All the major labels were paranoid and constipated. The only thing that they were picking up was overseas acts that had already had some proven sales—that's when we had so many damn Canadians and Australians coming in— and nobody was bothering to look at the local talent." American metal bands like Twisted Sister were going to Britain to make it on the independent scene before getting contracts in the States. The British bands were invading again. And now it's turned around. Bands like Motley Crue and Quiet Riot are American phenomena. "For once in a blue moon," says Tom Zutaut, the man who signed Motley Crue to Elektra, "I think American bands will happen in Europe again instead of happening there and coming back here."

There's 50 percent less independent metal coming out of England these days than, say, two years ago. The scene is "at a standstill," according to British fanzine Metal Forces. "I think the only place not putting out a whole lot is England," agrees head of US Metal Blade Records, Brian Slagel. "I think they drained all their musical people out about a year ago. There were so many bands that the market was flooded. There's a few things coming out of England, but there's more stuff coming out of Europe, Sweden, Holland and Belgium, and a lot of stuff coming out of America." Affirms Malcolm Dome of Britain's fortnightly HM encylopedia Kerrang: "I think the best new heavy rock bands are coming partly from Europe but mainly from America." (A brief aside: Scandinavia's topping the metal market with fab bands like Mercyful Fate, Pretty Maids, Axewitch and Witchcross. Germany's independents are marching along. And even France has got a half-decent HM indie in Vulcain, the Frog Motorhead.)

The whole independent HM businesspretty much like the whole independent punk and new wave business—did start in England, staggering out of the pubs in the summer of '79. Bands like Iron Maiden down south and Def Leppard up north coudn't interest major labels, so put out independent three-song singles—Maiden on Rock Hard, the Leps on Bludgeon Riffola— which sold so well that the labels bit like piranhas. For a while, countless HM bands got signed, and when they weren't as instantly popular, dropped by the wayside. "It's become more difficult again," says Kerrang's Dome, "because trends over here have shifted away from heavy rock, in the last year or so," so bands are still using independents for their records: "they'll put it out with anyone who will have it." There's labels like Ebony and Neat, Roadrunner, Bullet, Music For Nations and Heavy Metal Records. All except the first two make a lot of money selling American indie imports.

As for the Americans, the Big Four are Shrapnel, Metal Blade, Megaforce and Mongol Horde—two in the west, two in the east—with Enigma's Liquid Flame following up the rear,and countless oneoff labels, a band putting out its own record and using a label name. Just as the labels can be divided into two types, so can the music: stuff competitive with anything the majors put out, and shit. There's another subdivision: some bands went the independent route before getting signed—Motley Crue, Queensryche, Riot, Black and Blue, Ratt, Great White, Armored Saint to name a handful—and some went the independent route after getting dropped (Randy Hansen, the Rods, Manowar, all major label casualties) and a handful more (Bitch, Cirith Ungol) stay with an independent label much in the same way a band will be contracted to Slash. The bands and their labels are all across the States, with strongholds in Los Angeles, San Francisco (as Metal Forces put it, "SF seems to be pushing more HM bands than the entire British Isles"), New York, Seattle, Chicago and Texas.

Most of the independents started because one person decided the major labels weren't releasing any records they liked. Metal Blade is run by HM fan Brian Slagel, 23, from a garage in the back of his mum's house in the Valley.

"There were all these great bands playing around L.A., playing the Troubadour in front of 50 people, and they were really good —like Ratt, Steeler, Bitch, Metallica, all those bands. So I decided none of these bands were getting any exposure. At the time it was all new wave and none of the labels or anybody was paying attention to these bands." He had a job in a record store at the time, "So I'd dealt with all the independent producers. And I said hey, if I put together a compilation album of L.A. heavy metal bands, would you guys be interested? And they said yeah. The first pressing was only 2,500, but I had to press up 2,000 more right away because of the demand for it. I just figured hey, nobody else is going to do it, so I might as well.'' That was Metal Massacre Vol I. We're now up to Volume IV.

Before Slagel's compilation came out, Mike Varney—a San Francisco guitarist and producer, ex-member of punk group the Nuns and collaborator with Marty Balin on the Rock Justice rock operareleased his own compilation on Shrapnel Records, US Metal.

"I started my company in 1980 basically because I've always been a real fan of the guitar, and I felt that heavy metal was the best framework for guitar solos, at least to my taste, and there were all these guitarists out there being ignored. At the time I started there wasn't another independent HM label going in the States—I was 22 when I started Shrapnel, and I started it because my love of HM guitar was so strong; and because being a marketing major in college I knew that if I started my company based on a cult market I could eventually widen the market."

Getting the bands was easy. There was nowhere else for them to go. Varney finances all the bands on his label. "My album costs anywhere between five and ten grand to do." So does Enigma's custom metal label Liquid Flame. Bands on Metal Blade generally pay to make their own albums. "I don't have a whole lot of money to play around with. The bands generally go in and do it themselves with their money—you can do a fairly decentsounding album for about $2-3,000," though the situation might change if a deal with more affluent British label Roadrunner goes through.

"I think the best new heavy rock bands are coming from America." —Malcolm Dome

To get on one of these independent labels, you send them a demo tapenothing fancy, maybe fouror eight-track, four or five songs so they get the idea— and if it's what they like—Slagel, for example, is more into loud-and-lunatic leather-and-studs Gothic metal; Varney is

"not nearly so dark or on the Satanic side as my competitors. I prefer to lean towards the musical side of things"—they'll put it out.

Getting hold of the records once they're out is a different matter. Distributors like Greenworld, Dutch East India, Important and Jem put them out, but they rarely seem to turn up in other than specialist record stores. Fans find out about them through local underground fanzines.

"There's about 100 metal fanzines in Europe and the States," says Varney, "maybe 40 in the States. All kinds of them. Most of them are short-lived. A lot of them are done on typewriters and exist just to send them out to companies like myself and get the new releases—spend about five bucks on a Xerox machine and get a good 1,500 albums. But I don't care. I get a lot of press in underground mags, and if they've got that much ingenuity, they deserve as many albums as I have!"

. "It seems," says Wes Hein from Enigma, "like HM has spawned a new type of record buyer. It's almost like the people who buy HM now go back to the people who were buying records in the mid-'70s, who wanted to be the first people to discover a new band. If you were in Texas and you read about a record in a fanzine—not a review, just a blurb saying a new record's coming out—and if the cover looked interesting, people are willing to experiment. Because if it's good, the pay-off isn't just having a good record, it's being able to turn your friends onto this thing. It's a totally different philosophy of record buying. They're not looking for a safe bet. It's not 'I know half the songs from the radio." They're looking for the thrill of finding something new. And the new HM bands offer that." The same line I got from HM fans I spoke to—they'll go to a shop like Moby Disc, see what new HM independent is in—one or two new ones a month get out here—look at track titles, the cover, the name of the band, and if it looks half decent they buy it, because in a month it won't be there and they'll have lost their chance to find something new and impressive. So much for the record business's lament that kids aren't getting the gift of music. A lot of HM-ers are passing up on the mainstream metal acts because, according to Slagel, "the mainstream acts are getting boring. They've done so many albums, they're just rehashing the old stuff. The stuff we're putting out is a lot newer, a lot fresher. It's like the second generation of HM. It may not be as commercial but I think it's just as good, and it's a newer type of sound as opposed to the robot-oriented Quiet Riot type of stuff."

Backlash already! But Quiet Riot— though they were one of L.A.'s new wave of metal bands—didn't put out an independent record. These people did:

Ratt—who're signed to Atlantic with an album due any minute—slogged the circuit, to no major label avail, then put out a wonderful mini album on their own Time Coast Records, produced by Liam Sternberg. It got them radio airplay and a visit from Ahmet Ertegun. "We were at a point where we couldn't go on," they said. "We needed to put something out, and nobody else was offering."

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Twisted Sister—also on Atlantic. "The people of America were ready for us." said Dee Snider, "if they could have seen us. But there was no way we could afford to play all over the country. The record companies and the press were the ones who refused to recognize the band, the ones who needed the stamp of approval from England—not the people. New York City has never been the capital of HM to begin with, and England has that feel about it that embraces bands that are hardcore, the bad child, from a lot of different countries."

Queensryche—whose debut EP, released on 206 Records up in Washington, has been re-released on EMI. "We were really looking past just being a local band, so we worked on getting together a record which we could distribute to various other markets and become more than just the best local band."

Motley Crue—who released Too Fast For Love, their debut, on Leathur Records before getting signed to Elektra and going gold with their follow-up. "We did a lot of things that people scoffed at and said we could never do. We put out an album of good quality, we got national distribution, we came up with an album cover that I think can compete with anything the majors put out...It gets stagnant, you know. You can't get any bigger staying in L.A."

Black And Blue—who moved to L.A. from Portland, Oregon and were about to release their demo as an independent EP—great, hefty songs like "Violent Kid" and "Chains Around Heaven"—when Geffen signed them.

Great White—a mighty, classic rock band who were signed to EMI after releasing an EP on audiophile vinyl on their own Agean label. "We didn't want to hang around and play the club scene, because we'd been doing that for so long; we decided 'let's get a record out.' Because I think the time was perfect and because we wanted to get signed to a major label. You can only go so far, so there's nothing left to do but put a record out. We were tired of sending demo tapes to record companies and having them end up in a box." (As for the audiophile quality."Our music is important to us and our fans are important to us.")

Great White are a good example of how an independent release can help a HM band. "With local distribution and a local following and if you keep your overheads down," says manager Niven, "it's very easy to break even on records, and if you're breaking even on a record and it's not too bad, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't put it out and give the band a chance. At least they can go through the learning experience of what it actually takes to make a record, and what it's like once they've got it in their hands and they listen to it. It wakes them up to a few things."

One point to make about Great White's record is that it did establish a first for Los Angeles. "It was the first one that KMET [a massively popular FM rock station] picked up and played, which started the whole thing. It went into hard rotation in about a week. And once the door was down, Ratt got in after us."

Confirms Wes Hein: "A great deal of growth of HM independents has been the fact that major radio stations across the country have allowed independent heavy metal records to go into heavy rotation, and allowed them into their formats. Queensryche—before it was picked up by EMI—is a good example. It would be played between AC/DC and Scorpions. People who listened to it didn't even know it was an independent record."

Among the other independents poised to sign: Martial Law (ex-Shrapnel Records) to Capitol, Armored Saint (ex-Metal Blade Records) to Chrysalis, Warlord (Metal Blade) to Japanese biggie (they've got top HM Nips Loudness and Bow Wow) S.M.S. And the list goes on. And so do the independents.

"The most exciting thing about HM," says Hein, "is the same thing that was exciting about punk five or six years before that. Somebody or a group of people can go into a studio or go into a garage, they don't have to have $50,000, $100,000, $250,000. They can put out a piece of product that can compete with major releases and somewhat embarrass them with their popularity. Motley Crue did it. Ratt are doing it. And these are bands that are going out and doing it themselves and getting a success that sometimes equals the success that bands are having on major labels.

"In a few years it will be interesting to see what happens. Because if HM continues the way it is, it may be difficult in three or four years for a band to put out their own record and compete against a hundred or so major labels that are doing it with big recording funds. And that may be the death of independent metal, after all the hysteria on a major label level. That's where there'll probably be a shift in music and something else will come out where the unknown musician can go out and compete and be successful."