STUCK IN THE METAL WITH YOU: THE "EVOLUTION” OF SHRIEK MUSIK

STUCK IN THE METAL WITH YOU: THE "EVOLUTION” OF SHRIEK MUSIK

Richard Riegel

“Metal is where you find it,” as the sage who runs my friendly neighborhood junkyard once told me, just after he made that uncalled-for remark about my foot straying on the scale. This guy knows his rock ’n’ roll as well as he does his aluminum can futures, as heavy metal’s obviously getting more important to The Music by the day. Some fanatics are already claiming that heavy metal and rock ’n’ roll have become totally identical, and I wouldn’t necessarily give ’em an argument, not if they’re wearing studded wristbands anyhow.

Oh yeah, oldster that I am (I’m homing in on the big three eight as I type this), I had resisted the idea that the heavy metal Visigoths had risen from their illburied late-’70s graves to sack the cranial monasteries of the general public all over again. It was obvious that these screechers from the dark ages had been leaping off my TV screen to threaten me with their stuffed inseams for months already, but then that’s why these fat burners strut their mascara all over my family room.

Maybe I was even glued too close to the rube tube, as I missed a couple events that loomed even more ominously for the comeback of metal. For one, my fave used-record store added a “heavy metal” bin right next to the “new wave” specialist rack I’ve always checked first when I’ve gone to the place. Then, my adolescence-happy daughter (Hiya, Sarah!) confronted me with the nonnegotiable manifesto, “/ like heavy metal even if you and Mom don’t!” To rub her resolve to lead a consumer life apart from the old folks’ carefully-cultivated prejudices, she then went out & bought the cassette of Pyromania\ So much for promo-goodie scraps from Dad’s groaning table.

Until Sarah’s outburst, I hadn’t realized how negative I felt toward metal. I don’t think it was my casual remark that Twisted Sister in full regalia remind me of the time our rabbit had ear mites and we had to go down and Q-tip out the pus daily. And it couldn’t have been the time I commented that Loverboy had decreased the U.S.’s need for domestic rendering-plant byproducts by 37 percent. It must have been some remark more flagrant than those. Still, you never know about today’s generation of teenyboppers, they get all jittery from having to go to bed every night with their consuming fear that Alex Trebek may be given a network show at any time.

Anyhow, I decided to re-examine my own relationship to metal music, especially as I had been something of a partisan of same in my apprentice rockcrit days in the early 1970s. Age has its advantages. Even though I’m still a couple years short of qualifying for a Golden Buckeye Card, the Bob Evans waitresses are already refilling my coffee cup without asking (“Pops looks like he’s about to doze again.”), plus, I’ve got priceless perspective to offer all the rocking puppies out there at the embattled record racks.

Like lots of other natural phenomena, heavy metal’s dominance of the pop charts occurs in cycles as relentless in their periodic return as the annual Nile flood in the basement of Rick Johnson’s Macomb hovel. Metal reached its first peak in the early ’70s, when a bunch of bands, mostly British and American, carried their ’60s-inculcated ideals of pumphandle powerchording and ladies’halfsizes shrieking to new heights of tunnel vision. Metal got some of the wind knocked out of its collective beer belly in the late ’70s—when punk and new wave offered free cheek-piercing with the purchase of two pairs of gold-filled safety pins—but that rebel scene slowly withered away when radio wouldn’t touch it. By the early ’80s, not only were most of the old metal bands back in the biz, but also there were dozens of new metaleers who looked and sounded more like the earlier groups than the ancients themselves did. And the whole timesharecondominium gang of ’em quickly became more popular than a whoopeemaxipad vendor at a retired clown’s convention.

Speaking of elder statesmen devolved from the show business world, the thing that really intrigues me about these cycles of metal popularity is that both the big ones have occurred during the U.S. presidencies of conservative Republicans. Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Slade et al. did their first round of bionic can-crushing during Nixon’s alsoavailable-on-cassette term as Chief in the early 1970s, while Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Slade etc. are once again high on the charts during Reagan’s current win-a-helicopter-ride-with-Santa tour of duty. And just where were all these dinosaurs-in-law while Jimmy Carter was Prez? Probably back in Merrie Olde, using the Clash’s latest agitprop 45 sleeve to wipe the gold-plated dipsticks of their Jag XJs.

You tell me. I’m neither political nor paranoiac enough to construct an elaborate theory as to why heavy metal prospers during G.O.P. administrations; I’ll let some grad student with terminal pocket-protectoritis figure that one out. However, I do have a vague idea that the record companies are probably happier about the resurgence of metal than they are about Ronnie’s general kowtowing to smoke-filled capitalism. Heavy metal groups are absolutely the safest investment any record company can make, as they’re hugely popular and commercial, and yet the start-up and maintenance costs are minimal. These bands’ve inevitably paid a couple eons of vanbondage dues before they ever get signed, and they already have their cute logo, their threatening costumes, and 597 interchangeable songs before they ever reach the recording booths. After these metalmongers finally get established, they continue to put out DNA-identical albums on a semi-annual basis for the rest of their unnatural lives.

And these metal moholes are perfectly happy with this arrangement. They never break up, even when members bite the big bazooka, they never try to cross over into fusion or film noir, they never add females to the lineup; they’re more than satisfied (as 99 percent of these orgone accumulators have been quoted at one time or another) “Just to play some rock ’n’ roll, mannn!”

You watch, someday RCA is really gonna take a bath when Daryl Hall decides that plain old the-keys-to-Nipper’s-privatewashroom superstardom just ain’t good enough anymore. He’s gonna get the religion of Art and demand 1) that he immediately be given his own custom label, “Rocky Road”; 2) that RR’s first release will be a 58-minute drone recording of Daryl switching his hair dryer from the “warm” to the “hot” mode and back again; and 3) that John Oates be banned from all future videos unless he agrees to wear a Smurf suit.

Whereas Elektra meanwhile will be schlepping in the shekels from their wiseowl investment in Motley Crue way back when. Besides the routine recording, pressing, and distributing costs, the biggest expense the Crue will add on to Atlantic’s tab will be when the company finally has to buy full upper & lower dentures for Nikki Sixx, ca. 2003 A.D.

Okay, now that I’ve conclusively established that heavy metal muzik is the safest investment since velcro rolling papers, how did it get that way? Well, that’s the other blockbuster truth I’ve come to in my recent musings on the subject. Metal just happens to be the most basic form of rock ’n’ roll, if you define metal as the PURE-NOISE mountain that every style of rock has to mine (to some degree) to make its own brand of alloys. Ducktail elitists like the Stray Cats have always erroneously assumed that rockabilly is the most basic form of rock ’n’ roll, just because it came first chronologically, whereas structurally, ’billy sounds positively rococo when you put it next to the Troggs’ “Wild Thing.”

Even in the ’50s, unsung pioneers like Link Wray & his sten-gun guitar were cutting ever deeper into the pure-noisemountain essence of rock ’n’ roll. The precious-metal discoveries of the ’60s and the strip-mined metal of the 70s weren’t far off once Bo Diddley heard the noise void oblivion out there in his loudass guitar strings. Heck, you can even find this pure-noise element in the periodic tables of pop forms older than rock. Just check out jazz (Buddy Rich), swing (Artie Shaw), or even country (Roy Acuff) for the Judas Priest eardrum stompers of their day.

Unfortunately though, atom-splitting rockcritical theories like the one above are only as good as the funnel-dot protection us hack scribes can erect around ’em. The Tragedy Of Metal is that too many fans of metal as such won’t recognize the pure-noise music that’s all around them, theirs for the taking. By my broad-as-Ed-McMahon’s-trousers definition, everything from the Sex Pistols to the Plastic Ono Band to MX-80 Sound to the Ramones (fer crissake!) qualifies as metal of the highest caliber in the purenoise sweepstakes. But tragically, most metal fans worth their kerrangl-shaped tattoos won’t clue into the pure noise on most records unless it’s already dressed up in certain tried & true fetish garb, which John Mendelssohn has long since detailed in these glossy pages.

Suffice to say that hardcore metal (strictly defined as male screechers from Hairball City who look even more like David Lee Roth than yoo do) is a narrow path to tread. Those black T-shirted hordes out there are actually more conservative than Norman Rockwell’s opthamologist, and they’ll drop a band like a shot if it weakens and lets gurls vote for bassist-of-the-year in the reader’s poll or any of that sissy stuff.

Speaking of rigid traditions, I’ve also noted that a lot of the most successful metal bands of 1985 have almost exact doubles among the big-cheese metal hoofers of 19 & 75. We’ve already run through easy-mark recognitions like the fact that Deep Purple is the new Deep Purple, or that the current Slade look almost exactly like their namesakes from the early 70s. For your eternal edification, here’s a few more challenging budgies-of-a-feather I’ve plucked from the dry ice mists of heavy metal:

EARLY 70s BAND

AEROSMITH

APRIL WINE

MOUNTAIN

BULL ANGUS

MAGMA

JUKIN’ BONE

PARTRIDGE FAMILY

SCORPIONS

ALICE COOPER

LUCIFER’S FRIEND

URIAH HEEP

BLUE OYSTER CULT

TEN YEARS AFTER GRAND FUNK RAILROAD

NAZARETH

FREE

BAD CO.

TED NUGENT

DAVID LEE ROTH

EARLY ’80s EQUIVALENT

RATT

DEF LEPPARD

QUIET RIOT

ARMORED SAINT

KROKUS

TWISTED SISTER

SCORPIONS

DEAD KENNEDYS

VAN HALEN (same label)

SAXON (around the eyes) FASTWAY

....... v ( + 2 minor-leaguers

MADAM X t0 be named later)

NINA BLACKWOOD

any commercial with a toll-free number

JOBETH WILLIAMS and GLENN CLOSE

MIAMI VICE +2 AIRWOLF reruns

does not compute

Triple cheese with mustard, catsup, pickles, & onions on a multi-grained bun, large fries, and a large Coke, to go

So that’s all there is to it. With real-insider tips like these, you TOO can plug into the growing home-computed heavy metal market, and get yer own sleazy pictures in this very mag one of these days.