That’s Not Metal!

David Lee Beowülf

About a hundred years ago Richard Strauss wrote the theme to 2001:A Space Odyssey and Tchaikovsky wrote The Nutcracker and Americans were digging “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain.” Between 1900 and 1950 we’d passed through Ravel’s Bolero , Disney’s Fantasia , jazz, big band, swing, and some of the most wretched pop music imaginable.

That wretched pop music came right around the time rock and roll was beginning to make its mark. I’m talking about all those pop singers from (go ahead and condemn me) Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland to, to all of them! Can you believe anyone even listened to that crap? You think I’m out of my mind? Put on a couple of records of that slow, monotonous, uninteresting crooning on your turntable. No beat, no zing, no hooks, nada, zippo. A dentist’s drill has more of an edge than that crap.

No wonder rock and roll took over the world. I can’t imagine a teenager in the Fifties getting stoked about some dork singing lullabies when Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, and gosh, Elvis were coming to town. See ya later crooners; don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out…

Since fifty years ago, the world has been living in both the Age of the H-Bomb and the Age of Rock. Both will rock your world.

“screwed”

For some strange reason, lately I’ve been involved in conversations with music types concerning heavy metal and its influence/history/place in rock and roll. I’ve always been on the defensive in these conversations, and that bugs me. It bugs me so much that I think I’ll write about it and no one can stop me in mid-thought!

I saw legendary surf guitarist Dick Dale perform a couple of years ago in Hoboken, New Jersey at the legendary (and sometimes closed down) Maxwell’s. It’s the proverbial “small club,” a place where the band can get up close and personal with the fans. So Dick Dale plays his awesome surf guitar songs and maybe tries hitting on the young ladies, but most of all, keeps telling the audience that he invented heavy metal. Though he didn’t put a date on it, I’d guess the invention took place between 1963 and 1965, at the peak of the Frankie and Annette beach movie craze and right before the Vietnam war invented heavy metal.

A few months ago, I was listening to my favorite radio station, WFMU (that always deserves a gratuitous plug!), at four AM –actually, I’m one of those people who sleeps with the radio on (prevents me from being “startled” if something else goes bump in the night) – and here’s this DJ playing an hour’s worth of Blue Cheer and explaining that they invented heavy metal around 1967. Maybe, but the Who were pretty darn heavy back then (still are).

Six months ago, I was in an e-conversation with a coworker who remarked “…Dave, I understand you’re a rocker… Are you going to get the new Bruce album?” I replied flat-out: “Bruce? That’s not metal!” “METAL?!” he replied, adding the usual “…how can you listen to that stuff, etc.” I frequently get from the various and sundry music racists out there in la-la land. I fired back with a “how old are you, Fred?” (His name is Fred.) Fred mentioned, after finding out my age, that he was tens of years older than I. OK, I hit him hard with: “well, Mister ‘if it’s too loud, you’re too old.’ I’ll have you know that when you were sixteen, back in the dark ages of 1969, some dude named Jimi Hendrix and a few others were blasting eardrums with raging electric guitar. AND, Mister Old Phart, when you were seventeen, unless you were a NERD, Black Sabbath released their first album. Did you listen to Cream, Fred? Were you a nerd, Fred?” “Right said,” said Fred, “I forgot I used to be a headbanger, but Aerosmith was about as fast as I went.” Fair enough. I didn’t add that Aerosmith has sucked moose wang for the last twenty-three or so years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, there are a few more choice tidbits.

Every now and then, a newspaper or webzine will write an uninformed article about the punk/hardcore scene describing hardcore as some sort of “…faster-tempo heavy metal.” It’s nothing of the kind, but try explaining anything to The New York Times . But I’ll go on record as saying Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana” is a metal song!

Over a New Year’s breakfast this year, a somewhat confused, but nevertheless extremely decent woman argued that Fleetwood Mac was a heavy metal band. Excuse me? Yes, they were, at first. “Green Manalishi” proves it. One song? Nonsense! OK, when Judas Priest covered it, then it was metal. But they also covered Joan Baez’s “Diamond and Rust” (so did S.O.D. – sort of) and the only metal in Joan is the plate in her skull through which she still receives transmissions from Moscow. Granted, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac was pretty heavy, but they strictly played electric blues, which isn’t metal. Yet she persisted and insisted that Fleetwood Mac was a metal band. OK, so Fleetwood Mac is a metal band, great, so does that mean I’ll find a dog-eared copy of the first Witchfinder General album in her collection? Who? Right…

Finally, just a few weeks ago I was “doing lunch” with a couple of publicists, both of whom pretty much dig heavy metal. One, however, had some serious credentials as a metal radio director at an Ivy League school in the early 1990’s, and later on became famous as a professional metal promoter/publicist. I was impressed, but kind of put off at her referring to the members of GWAR by their first names (that is, out-of-character Christian names), which kind of irks me the same way as people who “know” Iggy Pop refer to him as “Jim.” Hey, I’m not listening to James Osterberg, I’m listening to Iggy Pop, thank you very much. Anyway, besides the fact that she’d just sold all her death metal CDs, a genre of metal I genuinely like, I was bugged at her insistence that Nirvana was a metal band.

Repeat: Nirvana was metal. Perhaps they’d like to go toe-to-toe with Manowar?

Flashback to the summer of 1992, when I hooked up with my pals the Thrashippies. Me: “Guys, I watched as Nirvana climbed the metal charts, proving their commercial viability, from which they were unleashed onto the pop scene.” Them: “Nirvana’s not metal!”

I agreed, but reiterated that Nirvana, chart-wise, made a name for themselves in the college metal charts before their all-of-a-sudden takeover of the pop world. Again: “Nirvana’s not metal!”

Back to 1999: I repeated my story to her, and she replied with “…volume, attitude, angst; it’s all there…” implying that the presence of such criteria equated Nirvana with metal.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’ve never been a fan of Nirvana, not even when WFIT got the band’s first seven-inch a million years ago. Snce a lot of respectable critics and artists (like Charlotte Coffey and Exene Cervenka) have told me to my face that the whole reason they got back into recording and performing was Nirvana and Nirvana’s “energy,” this indicates that I missed out on something.

Is Nirvana metal? I say no. Why? Well, listen to it. Is that metal? No! And don’t try the “Kurt Cobain said that his biggest influence was Black Sabbath” on me. It ain’t metal. Punk? I suppose, but in quotes. And as far as the “…volume, attitude, angst” goes, the Ramones have those three wrapped up, and they’re not metal.

Attitude? Well, the attitude of a metal band is, rightly so, diametrically opposed to that of a punk band: metal is all about performance, glitz (in one form or another), enormous crowds, fame, fortune, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Hitting it big is damned important to metal bands. With punk bands, “hitting it big” is nice, but the corporateness necessary to hit it big is anathema.

Ask KISS about rejecting the corporate rock attitude. Then ask Metallica…

At this year’s Ozzfest, someone (Sharon Osbourne?) had the amazing insight to put Primus on the main stage, right before Fear Factory and Slayer. Is Primus metal? Hell no, but it didn’t matter, they were insane and clearly a crowd favorite. I hope Primus goes double platinum with the new album thanks to this tour, they deserve it.

Why, though, are people insisting that non-metal bands are metal? One reason is that many publicists are noticing that more and more “kids” are going to see genuine metal acts. Ozzfest is just one example. That “stoner rock” bands (and they’re metal) are racking up sales figures with virtually zero airplay is another. Also, I suspect that the grunge/rap/”metal” hybrids like Rage Against the Machine, Korn, et al., which I think is worse than the worst of the worst grunge bands, are losing their appeal (why did they have any?)

I suspect it has something to do with the actual success of the “hair” bands coming back and selling out large venues and seeing boosts in the sales of their catalogs. I base this all on the fact that a promoter hasn’t tried to trick me into seeing a boring bunch of whiny Seattle shoegazers in more than six months. The trick used to go like this: “if you like Soundgarden, you should come out and see them.” Hey, Soundgarden, the best of the “grunge” bands and a great metal band – when they wanted to be – is heavy company. I’ll go see a Soundgarden sound-alike anytime. Of course, none of these bands has ever sounded like Soundgarden; what they sound like is Pearl Jam (not metal) covering Neil Diamond – and trying to sound as much like Neil Diamond as possible for a band that knows only two chords!

The anti-metal establishment has one final trick up their sleeves, though. In the last year or so, they’ve created a new genre called “loud rock.” I suppose it’s different than “hard rock.” I guess the change was needed because there haven’t been any original “hard rock” bands since “alternative” took over. “Loud rock,” a strange category since rock and roll is supposed to be played loud, right?, I suspect is a repository of everything from industrial to extreme metal. And since the charts only have so many slots, they will attempt to exclude the true forces of metal in favor of giving the bad bands with a buzz one last shot before dumping their contracts. To those of you involved in reporting: reject loud rock! Tell the publicists you play heavy metal and they can shove “loud rock” up their asses!

Getting around full circle, a hundred years from now, or even one year ago! (e.g., Stairway to Hell : The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, 2nd Ed. by Chuck Eddy), “history” books will bump real metal bands off the lists in favor of the Fleetwood Macs, the Nirvanas, the Dick Dales, the Osmonds (op. cit.), etc. as shining (I excrement you not) examples of heavy metal bands. I swear, it’s got to be a conspiracy to continually keep metal as underground as possible. Normally, I’d like to artistically sign off with a hearty “Death to False Metal,” but this stuff isn’t even false metal! What can we do? Will we constantly see the powers-that-be try to label their new “safe” acts under some metal hybrid moniker just to get them exposed? This has to stop! ◼