METALSHOP: THE ONE-SENSE SALE IS HERE!

METALSHOP: THE ONE-SENSE SALE IS HERE!

FEATURES

John Neilson

This may come as a surprise to a lot of CREEM readers in Detroit and elsewhere, but there are places in this country where there is very little metal on the radio!

Now some of you may be shocked by this, some may not have heard me through the cotton in your ears, and some of you may be on your way to the bus station already, but if you’ve just started packing—stop! For even in the most (or least) civilized parts of this country, there is really no escape from the fangs of metal. Not while there is a Metalshop.

Billed as “The First Show With Teeth,” Metalshop is headbanger heaven—60 minutes of screams, powerchords, fretboard frenzy and chest-thumping histrionics—as subtle as The A-Team and as timeless as testosterone. For over a year now, the show has been broadcast weekly on almost a hundred stations from Maine to Hawaii, an island of noize in a sea of passing trends.

Metalshop is the brainchild of ex-rockcrit Dave Schulps (Trouser Press, Circus, Cashbox) and Josh Feigenbaum of MJI Broadcasting, a syndication company. Your friendly CREEM hack met with its Vice President of Production—Schulps— in MJI’s offices in midtown Manhattan (at 666 Fifth Avenue, no less!), where we talked about radio, Metalshop, and of course—The Music That Would Not Die—heavy metal.

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How did Metalshop come about? Schulps: ’’What really happened was I kept going to concerts and (gets misty eyed) seeing all these kids who were so incredibly into the music and realizing that there was nothing for them on the radio. It just seemed like this big gap.”

Being from the Midwest, I’m amazed. Do you really feel there is a shortage of metal on radio?

Schulps: (no hesitation) “Yeah! Ask any metal fan and they’ll tell you there’s a lack of metal on the radio. Take Judas Priest, for example: with the exception of perhaps ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Coming’ and maybe ‘Some Heads Are Gonna Roll,’ they never really had any runaway radio songs that were picked up across the board nationally, and that’s the sort of thing that we found strange when we started the show. There’s a lot of hard rock, but not much heavy metal...”

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This might not seem like much of a distinction to some, but Metalshop is exclusively about metal—a mutation of rock with myths, customs, cliches and idiosyncrasies all its own. The show itself is departmentalized, to touch as many of these bases as possible in any given hour.

“ ‘Fathers of Heavy Metal,”’ Schulps explains, is about “people who were in business—and let us call a spade a spade, it is a business—before 1975.” Overlooking Richard Wagner (whose contributions to the genre have never been fully appreciated), this might include such old faves as Deep Purple and Blue Cheer.

“Fresh Metal” is a spin through a couple of tracks by an up-and-coming act (like Deep Purple or Blue Cheer), while “Road Warrior” is the segment where bands tell you how much fun they’re having on the road with your ticket money. While the emphasis is on playing as much music as possible, interview segments are interspersed through the show, including the ever-popular “Audience Question,” where Joe Headbangers get to ask the questions themselves.

Each week a feature artist gets to list their five all-time favorite songs—the #1 tune gets played, metal or not, which has led to some surprises—while “Top Tracks” counts down the three top metal tracks of the week based on charts and airplay, and once again brings up a question central to Metalshop.

“The definitions are hard,” Schulps admits. “I think one of the hardest parts of producing the show is where do you draw the line between ‘real metal’ and what Ross The Boss (of Manowar) would call ‘False Metal.’ It is tough. Are Slade metal? There are loads of bands that are right in between. For the hard-core metal audience, anyone who has a hit is im-mediately not metal anymore-Quiet Riot are THE perfect example, and I think the reaction against Quiet Riot by a lot of the metal audience was so strong that we've really eased up on Quiet Riot."

The existence of Metalshop suggests that you don't expect the music to go out of fashion in the near future.

Schulps: "The things you feel when you're a teenager-I mean it's an ag-gressive period, it's when you go out and you wanna party and you don't wanna think about school-loud music is just something that people want, and they’re not really ready for or even interested in stuff that’s very subtle. I mean I’m 30 now, and when I was 17 I loved to go out to concerts and stand with my head in front of the speakers and play air guitar. I don’t do it anymore, although I still go out to concerts and stand farther back

and play air guitar.

"My musical tastes have broadened in the last however-many years, but there's no reason that you necessarily lose your appreciation of heavy metal either. A lot of people do drop off at a certain point, but that's their loss-there's some good metal, like there's good everything else, in my opinion. There's something about

it that you ve really gotta have when you’re a teenager—what you do after that is really up to personal quirks. God, I NEEDED that noise, and I still like it.

Instead of growing out of it, many peo pie just grow farther into it.

Schulps: “Good. I think it’s neat when anybody gets really into something like that. I don’t think it’s harmful. I’m not with Jerry Falwell on this, I m sorry. I don’t think metal leads people to any particular ly destructive...! don’t really want to get into that whole business. You know, I think it can be just as constructive as destructive, just like anything else Religion can be destructive, and it can be constructive.

We try to cater to everybody. I do have trouble playing Mercyful Fate on the show, and I haven’t yet. There’s just too much that too many people would object to—lyrically—and it’s hard to find any songs that are not really satanic, devil worship shit, and I just don’t wanna get involved in it. Personally, I don t really care if they do it or not, but I just think we have too much to lose as a company by supporting it.

So what about your address? Pretty ominous, huh?

Schulps: “Yeah, urn, well that is what s known as a coincidence. I think it s wonderful when the bands come up here we’ve gotten some really great reac tions: ‘Do you know what building you guys are in?’ ‘Yeah, we know, we know.

How would you explain metal’s over

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“A lot of it really is tongue in cheek, in one way or the other. I think that’s one of the fun parts, there’s a lot of fun in it. Some of it’s good clean fun, and some of it’s not so clean—and probably not so good—but again, I don’t think you can really censor stuff that heavily—there’s just no point in it. People are going to experience stuff in this society, which is very open—the images you see on your television set are a lot worse than anybody hears on Metalshop. If you’re really into violence and misogyny and stuff like that, there’s a lot more of it available on your TV.”

Metal seems pretty set in its ways. Do you see it developing at all?

Schulps: “I think the big thing—I think a lot of what 10 years ago was called glitter rock, which American audiences— other than CREEM readers—never really picked up on or gave the thumbs-down is now accepted as the mainstream side of metal. Everybody’s covering Sweet songs, everybody’s covering Slade songs. That stuff is now metal, and it wasn’t back then.

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Probably there’ll be metal synthesizer bands eventually—they can really put out a wicked noise if they’re turned up loud enough. But the problem with synthesizers is that they’re a boring experience in concert, for the most part. I mean, you’re just too active—too hyper when you’re 16 to, like, be into some band standing there playing synthesizers and drum machines. You can’t boogie to it. I guess people will make better stage shows with them eventually, but it still can’t compare visually with guys grunting and sticking their crotches out!”

Have you noticed the distinctions blurring between hardcore nunk and thrash metal?

Schulps: ‘‘Yeah, it’s close. Especially a lot of the stuff that’s coming out of Europe now—all those Mausoleum label albums. They’re different from hardcore, but there are a lot of similarities as well. They’re all fast, they’re all noisy, (under his breath) they’re all terrible. I would think twice about playing a lot of thrash— you can throw one in every once in a while, but it’s so extreme.”

Has Metalshop ever gotten in trouble with stations for what you've programmed?

Schulps: “If we’ve been dropped from a certain station, the reason is usually that the station is undergoing format changes or this or that. They’re getting softer— that’s the major thing we hear. Nobody’s ever said ‘You played a track that was so awful that we’re gonna have to drop the show.’

“As far as metal goes, I’d say we were middle-of-the-road metal. We’ll play hard stuff, we’ll play a lot of pop metal. But I’d say its gotta be hard-edged to be on the show. If some metal band has a hit with a ballad, and it’s 90 percent acoustic guitars, I don’t think the people who are listening are probably gonna want to hear it.”

After an hour of Metalshop, the question is not whether they want to hear it, but rather whether they can hear at all. Grinning and drooling, the deaf shall inherit the Earth.