Sound of the Beast Read online

  Following Angus Young onto the cover of Kerrang! were crowd-working leather daddy Rob Halford of Judas Priest and Peter Byford, aka Biff, of Saxon—singers who defined the role of heavy metal front man with crystal-shattering vocal cords and skillful crowd management. Witnessed on Saxon’s masterful 1982 live release, The Eagle Has Landed, Byford could easily turn a heavy metal concert into an interactive hootenanny, directed by his trademark whistling. With call-and-response patterns taken from English soccer chants, the singer pitted balcony against floor in sing-along contests. He appeared as comfortable onstage in shining white stretch pants, microphone in hand, as if he were still in his backyard sipping tea and telling war stories.

  Saxon’s speedy songs “Strong Arm of the Law” and “Wheels of Steel” were melodic and rousing, like breezier siblings of Motörhead numbers. Heavier Saxon tracks like “Machine Gun” relied on relentless, pounding two-guitar rhythms, laying down patterns that presaged speed metal several years later. Unusual in Saxon’s repertoire was the stirring “Dallas 1 PM” from Strong Arm of the Law, which included original radio tapes of the John F. Kennedy assassination. More typically, Saxon’s lyrics plainly voiced the outlook of an everyday head-banger—a character immortalized in “Denim and Leather,” the band’s great metalhead anthem: “Where were you in ‘79 when the dam began to burst? Did you check us out down at the local show? Were you wearing denim, wearing leather? Did you run down to the front? Did you queue for your ticket through the ice and snow?”

  Heavy metal had a short legacy working on its behalf by 1981, but there was no rest for the wicked. Where punk faded as a fashion statement and hard rock tottered along as nine-to-five business as usual, heavy metal offered perpetually reinvented thrills ravenously to integrate other styles into its forward push. Alongside the better-known heavy riff factories came the boogie-woogie-influenced Spider, the unabashed Sabbath copycats Witchfinder General, and the brazen Angel Witch—who synthesized the flagrant vocals of metal with the manic

  NWOBHM

  Though the “old wave” of British heavy metal had existed mostly in the imaginations of hard rock fans, there was something catchy about the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” that allowed the clunky moniker to stick. Musically, the NWOBHM cut 1970s hard rock into punk-size pieces, producing a highly focused form of guitar energy. Inspired by the self-actualizing elements of punk, many of the early efforts by Iron Maiden and Diamond Head were self-released or issued by bedroom labels such as Neat and Heavy Metal Records. Fans were clustered across England and Europe, wearing black leather jackets with denim vests covered in patches and pins promoting their favorite acts. By 1980 the movement was fully realized, with hundreds of 45s in print and a handful of landmark long-players by Motörhead, Saxon, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest. Though they were still very much London acts on the rise, these bands would dominate heavy metal for the next decade on the strength of their serious live capabilities.

  Discography

  AC/DC, Highway to Hell (1979)

  Angel Witch, Angel Witch (1981)

  Def Leppard, On Through the Night (1980)

  Diamond Head, Lightning to the Nations (1980)

  Girlschool, Hit and Run (1981)

  Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden (1980)

  Iron Maiden, Killers (1981)

  Judas Priest, British Steel(1980)

  Motörhead, Ace of Spades (1980)

  Motörhead, Overkill (1979)

  Raven, Wiped Out (1982)

  Saxon, Wheels of Steel (1980)

  Tank, Filth Hounds of Hades (1982)

  Various Artists, Metal for Muthas (1980)

  rhythms of punk, espousing a peculiar anxiety over the timely topic of women’s rights.

  In a scene as diverse as the NWOBHM, there had to be a place where all the despised grit and filth collected. That was unlikely Kerrang! darling Venom, who catered to more aggressive appetites with militant Satanism and a “They want bad? We’ll give them bad!” philosophy. Indebted to Kiss for inspiration and to deviant Roman emperor Caligula for execution, Venom played fast, distorted muck for the sake of speed, then sprinkled on occult imagery to scare off critics. Venom’s 1981 debut, Welcome to Hell, and its 1982 successor, Black Metal, had covers encrusted with gold and silver pentagrams, goat’s heads, and satanic gibberish. Bassist/singer Conrad Lant, aka Cronos; guitarist Jeff Dunn, aka Mantas; and drummer Tony Bray, aka Abaddon, were pictured wielding weapons and looking slimy as newborn devils. They made Motörhead appear civilized and the Sex Pistols seem like a friendly gang of children.

  Though it was inconceivable at the time, Venom would become one of the NWOBHM’s most influential bands. Their comically evil act was routinely discounted by writers and fellow musicians, but they fascinated fans. Venom could not keep a consistent tempo, their mixes were drenched in reverb and distortion to hide the ineptitude, and songs like “Poison” and “Live Like an Angel, Die Like a Devil” dissolved into howling noise by the finish. In other words, Venom was a brilliant breakthrough that threw all notions of rock’s preciousness out on its ass, to be replaced by a thrilling chaotic vortex.

  As Cronos told The 7 Gates of Hell, the mayhem started in a quaint English chapel: “We used to practice in the Methodist church in Newcastle, which we’d rent for five pounds every single Saturday. And every time Abaddon would take with him some small bits of explosives and detonate them during the rehearsals. We were rehearsing, and he was setting off these fucking pyro things! Once a neighbor called the fucking fire brigade because large red clouds of smoke were billowing out of the church. It was an ideal venue, and I believe it had a great atmosphere for writing Satan’s love songs!”

  There was a less-than-friendly rivalry between Venom and their Newcastle neighbors and labelmates Raven. “We don’t like Raven,” says Venom drummer Abaddon. “The thing is, we didn’t do things the hard way. First you had to be clubbing for twenty years, and then you could have a breakthrough. We were really screwed by Neat Records. We were bringing in shitloads of money, but all of it was used to promote Raven and Tygers of Pan Tang. We like them as bands, but somehow everything went wrong.” Regarded as a joke by peers, Venom weathered condescension with arrogance, opening a divide between upwardly mobile traditional heavy metal and the unholy black metal born several years later from Venom’s fiery bellows.

  As heavy metal culture fast became a fixture in England, the new shared goal was the conquest of a hundred cities the size of London. After the recording rush of 1980, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, and Motörhead all enlisted in a life of heavy touring abroad. NWOBHM veterans Raven hired a truck and drove south through Belgium into Europe, bringing unheard music to audiences ready for excitement. “It was real culture shock,” says John Gallagher. “We’d only been to Spain when we were kids. It was amazing. People were going apeshit. They tore down a partition in the club in Milan—it was like a divider you’d see in a school lunchroom. After the show we were inundated by people wanting autographs and women who put across that they wanted to do certain things, which never happened to us before. We loved it.”

  Kerrang!’s competition from abroad: Aardschok

  The international export of Kerrang! oriented floods of foreigners toward England, each adding individual refinements to NWOBHM formulas. Germany’s Accept played to the growing metal market with a derivative approach that favored crisp, pounding rhythms. Likewise, Japan’s Loudness, New York’s Riot and Manowar, and Canada’s Anvil unveiled thicker riffs and niftier costumes than dubiously named Brits like Split Beaver and Bitches Sin. At the same time, London head-bangers felt abandoned by a rapidly “Americanized” Def Leppard and were willing to shop for imports.

  Surviving the NWOBHM required a band have persistence and luck to match its musical ability and striped trousers. “There were second-tier and third-tier bands trying to hop on the bandwagon,” says John Gallagher of Raven, speaking of the likes of Brooklyn, Crucifixion, Fist, and Tytan. “All the bands were different, which you don’t
see too often. It wasn’t so homogenized. As usual, one or two had the connections, or had a good look, or met the right people, and a lot of others fell by the wayside. We were really lucky, and we tried as hard as possible to get people interested.”

  The nearest miss of the NWOBHM era was Diamond Head. Its landmark Lightning to the Nations was recorded in 1980 and released in a plain white sleeve decorated only with the four band members’ autographs. The songs were also clean and modern, jammed with a fast, antiseptic heaviness that fled the dark alleys of Iron Maiden for the gleaming skyscrapers and groceries of the unborn New Britain. Though they helped define the NWOBHM with their power chords and optimism, they became disembodied observers of their own doomed career. Diamond Head was like an ethereal ghost, damned by Led Zeppelin comparisons and incapable of discovering salvation.

  In the unfinished rooms of Diamond Head’s estates, however, younger musicians imagined the presence of metal beyond Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. The eager Diamond Head followers in Metallica later recorded cover versions of four of the seven songs on Lightning to the Nations (as well as other NWOBHM selections by Savage, Holocaust, Sweet Savage, and Blitzkreig). Says Dave Mustaine, who played in Metallica for a pivotal fourteen months before founding Megadeth, “I keep turning back to Diamond Head. When I was drinking and hanging out with [Metallica guitarist] James Hetfield, we would listen to Venom and Motörhead and Raven and Tank and Mercyful Fate and Diamond Head and Angel Witch and Witchfinder General and stuff like that.”

  Yet international success demanded that a band take fate into its own hands. Despite the rock-star dreams of Diamond Head’s “It’s Electric"—"I’m gonna be a rock and roll star, gotta groove from night to day"—history can credit the superior songcraft and work ethic of Iron Maiden for leaving records like Lightning to the Nations trapped in the starting gates of the British metal era. Iron Maiden fully realized the creative potential of the NWOBHM, melting together its streetwise image, horror lyric concept, and highly evolved dual-guitar musical chops—then tirelessly worked with their equally ambitious management to overcome any obstacles.

  Iron Maiden’s terrifying second album, Killers, cracked the U.S. Billboard chart at number sixty and sold 200,000 copies during 1981. This escalating popularity led to problems with its singer during the world tour that followed. Paul Di’Anno was a product of the clubs, but Iron Maiden was no longer a club act. The decision was made to sack Di’Anno before his behavior interfered with the band’s best professional efforts. In September 1981 singer Bruce Dickinson, aka Bruce Bruce, shaved his enormous mustache and left Samson to front Iron Maiden, beginning a powerful ten-year partnership. The physical and theatrical Dickinson, a fencing enthusiast, entered just as Maiden was testing stadiums for the first time, and his larger-than-life arm movements and siren voice were designed, as in opera, to impress all the way back to the cheap seats.

  Steve Harris, mastermind of Iron Maiden

  (Todd Nakamine)

  Released in April 1982, Dickinson’s debut with Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast, was a masterfully defining moment. “After the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, that record really proved that Maiden was going to be a global force,” says Rob Halford of Judas Priest. “The title’s great, and it really showed a different side of metal that was coming out of the UK. It’s really important for defining that British movement at the time. There are pockets in metal— like in lots of music—that are important, and this one was pretty important.”

  Though mocked by the Kansas City Star as a “humorless” novelty during 1978 U.S. appearances with Kiss, the mesmerizing Judas Priest was now selling out small coliseums in Texas and Pennsylvania, bringing Iron Maiden along for a first taste of major venues. “These were the days of really slow communication,” says Rob Halford. “You just really had to go out on the road and stay on the road. All those years I was with Priest, it was literally like twenty years on the road together, with very few breaks. It was just nonstop. You had no MTV, you had no Internet, you had no street-level thing with magazines. It was just extremely primitive and in its infancy.”

  In response, such was the loyalty inspired by Judas Priest that impressionable new bands from abroad chose their names from every song but one on the masterful 1979 live album Unleashed in the East—Exciter, Running Wild, Sinner, Ripper, Green Manalishi, Victim of Changes, Genocide, and Tyrant. Only “Diamonds and Rust,” a Joan Baez cover, did not inspire a namesake. For this fledgling armada of bands and hundreds yet unnamed, the first ten years of heavy metal were still just the beginning. Great Britain had conceived and created the classic heavy metal style—but in Europe, Asia, and America the future was up for grabs.

  III

  1980: The American

  Wasteland Awaits

  October 13, 1980: AC/DC’s Back in Black goes platinum in the United States

  January 1982: Ozzy Osbourne chews head off a bat thrown onstage in Iowa

  March 1982: Guitarist Randy Rhoads killed in airplane crash

  June 14, 1982: Metal Blade Records releases Metal Massacre

  August 20, 1982: Elektra reissue of Motley Crüeaa’s Too Fast for Love hits Billboard at number 157

  While England’s heavy metal factories pressed ahead, America in 1980 was awakening from a disco dream. After dancing away the troubles of the previous decade, few American rock fans were aware of the charms of Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Judas Priest, let alone the lesser-known Diamond Head or Angel Witch. “Disco tormented the people who were into hard rock into a corner for five years,” says Ron Quintana, a San Francisco DJ and record collector. “You were like rats scurrying around underfoot—trying to find each other and tell each other about these new metal bands coming out of the woodwork.”

  Like heavy metal, disco had diva vocalists, and both were energetic, communal experiences. But for kids too young to trip the light fantastic, the disco nightlife was just another indulgence of the self-obsessed “me” generation. Twisted Sister, a club band popular in the suburbs around New York, rallied the dissenting vote with the majestic “Rock and Roll Saviors,” whose lyrics bluntly boasted “Disco is dead!” “It was something to focus youthful hatred on,” says the band’s singer, Dee Snider. “Disco was so predominant that it was difficult for a rock band to find work. Disco was just completely out of control. In retrospect, it was a lifestyle issue. The music represented more than just a sound that we didn’t like—it represented a certain part of the population. The disco kids were one group, and heavy metal kids were another.”

  There was untapped enthusiasm from many avenues in America for an ugly end to the disco daze. Audacious, reviled, and ready to ruin the twenty-first century, the Plasmatics were an apocalyptic punk rock freak show spawned from New York’s seedy Times Square. They rejoiced in sound as a razor-wire barricade. Dressed onstage in shaving cream and strategic strips of black tape, singer Wendy O. Williams chain-sawed guitars in half and attacked junk cars with a sledgehammer. It was an over-the-top cartoon, celebrating the destruction of American icons for the purpose of sensationalism. “We created chaos and mayhem,” says guitarist Richie Stotts. “It was dangerous sometimes, but we had a good time. Some people came after us, but they didn’t get it. They were judging the band by what they thought a band should be. We didn’t even say we were a band!”

  Yet as the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan ended the free-flowing 1970s with a resounding conservative clap, punk’s charge on mainstream America was already bankrupt. Like the London punk implosion, the Los Angeles scene created by X and the Germs burned out on drugs and destruction—its dangerous edge soon shaped by the music industry into the disco-influenced angles of new wave. When the sight of Germs singer Darby Crash carving his skin in the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization reached suburban shopping mall cineplexes, the antiauthoritarian posture stuck, but not the noxious sound. Stripped of its protest, punk music was commercialized and regurgitated as the teen movie soundtrack pabulum of Wall of Voodoo, Oingo Boingo
, and the Knack. As TV teen misfit Slash from the high school sitcom Square Pegs protested, “I’m not punk, I’m new wave—it’s a totally different head.” Cue laugh track.

  Beneath disco’s glitter and the ruins of punk, the metal revolution gestated. “In Hollywood there was a regular swap meet in the Capitol Records parking lot,” says Brian Slagel, founder of Metal Blade Records. “It was all music, and they sold anything from rare records to old 45s, and they sold a lot of bootlegs. I bought from there, and once I became friends with the people that worked at the record stores and they knew I was into metal like Kiss and AC/DC, they’d say ‘Oh, you, here’s a tape of another band you should check out. They’re cool too.’”

  Elsewhere, heavy metal fans formed cliques within the hard rock scene. The “rats underfoot” scratched signals to one another through the classified sections of collector magazines like Goldmine and Record Trader or spotted each other at major rock events. “We saw Exodus singer Paul Baloff at all the Yesterday and Today [later called Y&T] shows,” says Ron Quintana about the San Francisco scene. “That was the heaviest thing we had going. You’d see people over and over at the cool shows, and Baloff was one of them. Y&T initiated a lot of Bay Area people into hard rock, which was good.”