Sound of the Beast Read online

  Black Sabbath rejoined the metal campaign with a formidable new front man in Ronnie James Dio. He reverently refurbished and reinvented the band’s stately doom with grandiose concepts. Staying with Sabbath for two studio albums, Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, Dio found a fertile fantasy framework for the big Sabbath themes of madness and desolation—his “Children of the Sea” bemoaned environmental decline through the eyes of a dying ocean planet.

  Since his early 1970s band Elf, Dio had written quintessential fantasy lyrics. In Rainbow those included “Man on the Silver Mountain” and the parable “Stargazer"—about a wizard who cripples civilization by attempting to build a stone tower to the stars. “I grew up reading Sir Walter Scott and Arthurian tales,” says Dio. “Then I got really interested in science fiction, which also seemed to cloak characters in words and costumes that were very medieval. These were people, I realized, that were telling me the future. You read an Arthur Clarke book, or Isaac Asimov, and when they told you something’s going to happen in ten years, they were right. They were just so brilliant, and they allowed me to use my imagination. When I became a songwriter, I thought what better thing to do than do what no one else is doing—to tell fantasy tales. Smartest thing I ever did.”

  After leaving Sabbath and launching a solo career, Dio simplified his stories substantially for a younger heavy metal audience. The 1983 debut Holy Diver by his band, Dio, reduced lush moral landscapes to simple good-versus-evil conflicts, using the lyrical duality of “Rainbow in the Dark” and “Holy Diver” to raise questions about deceit and hypocrisy in romance and religion. In the sharp contrasts of Dio’s imagery, there was always a built-in contradiction that fed adolescent revolt: a black side to every white light and a hidden secret behind every loud proclamation of truth. In a similar way, Dio’s music balanced torrents of rage with brief acoustic interludes.

  Even as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden mounted their twentieth-century westward expansion into America, the lyrical messages remained much pricklier than commercial radio fodder. Iron Maiden’s screeching “Run to the Hills” from Number of the Beast decried the European conquest of a wild and free America: “White man came across the sea / Brought us pain and misery.” The exact theme was treated by Judas Priest on Stained Class in 1978, where “Savage” chastised European colonists, “You poisoned my tribe with civilized progress / Baptizing our blood with disease / You christened our bodies with sadness and suffering / Saying then that your god is well pleased.”

  These finger-pointing history lessons were not typical rock topics, but audiences appeared to appreciate the forceful fables. “I was never a tits-and-ass lyricist,” says Rob Halford. “I could never write ‘The Thong Song,’ but I could write ‘Breakin’ the Law.’ At the end of the day, music is about having a fuckin’ good time, but if you can put in something a bit more than that, it’s just more satisfying. I’m not a guy with a message by any standards, but I’d like to feel that the things that I write about are important issues that not only affect me but affect everybody else.”

  While radio stuck to the feathered-hair light rock of Journey, Foreigner, and Asia, heavy metal bands ignored playlists and thrived in a separate sphere, the concert hall. Now a national draw, Ronnie James Dio acted out the dramas of his modern madrigals on the spacious stages of sports arenas. “I began getting big stages together soon after I saw the first Alice Cooper concert,” says Dio. “I saw the first show where they hung him. The next show I saw with Alice, they electrocuted him. At the next one they chopped his head off. I was so impressed as a member of the audience that I was getting much more than I bargained for. I wasn’t getting just music, I was getting this kind of Disneyland.”

  This visual flair and flash matched the scale of coliseum venues, and heavy metal acts connected like a winning team at the box office. First touring America with Judas Priest in 1981, Iron Maiden had already played in sold-out 8,000-seat venues. During the summer of 1983, Maiden returned as a headliner with the enormous Piece of Mind show, complete with World War II films and mock brain surgery on an eight-foot-high zombie. Two NWOBHM veterans came in tow: Fastway, formed by ex-members of Motörhead and UFO; and Saxon, whose new Power & the Glory LP was a million-selling career pinnacle. The laws of physics applied nothing but upward motion to Iron Maiden—the band’s subsequent Powerslave tour in 1985 advanced to a whopping twenty-five countries, accompanied by a mammoth Egyptian-themed set worthy of Broadway, requiring a rig

  CLASSIC HEAVY METAL

  This is the definition of heavy metal with a capital HM—bands that were the cream of the NWOBHM, along with whoever else could carry a tune the size of Mount Olympus. Bold statements were delivered via massive, rolling waves of tour buses hauling ass across America to take over the lives of teenagers. They had computers, they had video games, and they had stacks of exploding cassette tapes in their Walkman tape players blasting futuristic sounds at warp speeds. While AC/DC and Black Sabbath remained primal, dark, and brilliant, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, and Judas Priest turned twin-guitar harmonies into rocket science, creating a gigantic new vocabulary for heavy metal. The songs were about real-life scary things, and the players were strictly business, tossing aside their fringed leather jackets for sharp, fitted, synthetic costumes decorated with metal spikes and studs. Somewhere underneath it all were a few rock riffs, but by 1984 heavy metal was past the point of departure.

  Bang Your Head

  AC/DC, Back in Black (1981)

  AC/DC, For Those About to Rock, We Salute You (1981)

  Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell (1980)

  Black Sabbath, Mob Rules (1981)

  Def Leppard, High V Dry (1982)

  Dio, Holy Diver (1983)

  Iron Maiden, Number of the Beast (1982)

  Iron Maiden, Piece of Mind (1983)

  Judas Priest, Screaming for Vengeance (1982)

  Judas Priest, Defenders of the Faith (1984)

  Queensryche, Queensryche EP (1983)

  Saxon, Power & the Glory (1983)

  Scorpions, Blackout (1982)

  of over seven hundred lights.

  Bruce Dickinson and Eddie of Iron Maiden

  (Todd Nakamine)

  At the height of popularity during his Sacred Heart tour in 1986, Ronnie James Dio created a castle stage set. The band began each night with Dio’s image projected onto a giant crystal ball floating over the crowd. Toward the end of the show, Dio battled a dragon with a glowing laser sword. This production required six semi trucks, a fleet of buses, and a small army of fifty crew members—including four laser technicians and a dragon handler—all of which undertook a two-year expedition around the globe. “It became quite a traveling circus,” says Dio. “It was just giving something more to the kids. We gave them a dragon, we gave them a fantasy for two hours, and we gave them a chance to escape. We thought that was important.”

  Working with elaborate set pieces was expensive, and travel was exhausting, but radio promotion was also costly, and free airplay remained scarce for heavy music. Touring bands soaked up the cost of their lights and lasers with extensive merchandising, like tour programs, scarves, and the ever-present official black concert T-shirts with tour dates printed on the back. Compared to revenue from record sales, bands took home a larger percentage of these profits—and the authentic aura of concert artifacts gave fans a kind of heavy metal costume. As Larry Lalonde of Possessed remembers junior high in suburban California, “I had to have my Iron Maiden shirt on the first day of school in seventh grade.”

  Lavishly printed tour T-shirts were fantastic promotion, ushering the imagery of heavy metal out of record stores and onto the streets. The leader in product design, by 1982 Iron Maiden was already one of the top three merchandising acts in America. That same year Long Island graphic-arts student Carlton Ridenhour, aka Chuck D, formed the influential rap group Public Enemy. He recalls being struck by Maiden’s artwork. “Public Enemy’s whole thing of building concept records actually came off of myself and producer Hank
Shocklee just being amazed at groups like Iron Maiden being able to run a series of concepts on their album covers and how they relied on graphics.”

  The Iron Maiden logo was itself designed by bassist Steve Harris, a trained draftsman, and it headlined hundreds of LPs, singles, and T-shirts. Almost all were simultaneously adorned with paintings of Maiden’s widely recognized mascot, “Eddie” (an affectionate term for “headbanger”), the creation of artist Derek Riggs. “Eddie was designed about one and a half years before I met Iron Maiden, before they even had a recording contract,” says Riggs. “It was during the English punk movement of the late seventies and early eighties. I was experimenting with putting symbolism into pictures so that they could be read like a narrative. I was thinking about the philosophy of the time and the idea that the youth of the day was being wasted by society. I took this ‘wasted youth’ idea and personified it as Eddie.”

  A bouquet of Eddies: Iron Maiden’s alter ego

  (Castle Records)

  This ghoulish icon of decay first stared from lidless eyes on the cover of 1980’s Iron Maiden, appearing as a teen slasher standing under electric streetlamps. “He was initially designed as a punk album cover, so his hair was short, orange, and went straight up in the air,” Riggs says. “The image itself was taken from a photograph I had of a dried and decaying head which had been stuck onto a tank and used as propaganda in both the Second World War and the Vietnam War. I took this image and dressed it in a T-shirt and then placed it into a city environment because I wanted it to live in the street—just around the corner, not a million miles away. The band asked me to give it a bit more hair to make it fit with the heavy metal scene a bit better, and this picture became Iron Maiden’s first cover.”

  Eddie evolved over dozens of appearances into an all-purpose mascot, an immortal beacon of good luck for the long-lived Iron Maiden. Later paintings took him off the street and into the action of songs as a flag-waving English redcoat for “The Trooper,” a dog-fighting World War II pilot for “Aces High,” and an Egyptian sphinxlike edifice for “Powerslave.” The iconic force of Eddie inspired a battalion of heavy metal mascots, not limited to Y&T’s spaceman, Voivod’s the Voivod, S.O.D.’s Sargeant D. Sacred Reich’s gas-masked mutant, Flotsam & Jetsam’s Flossie the sea monster, and Megadeth’s Vic Rattlehead. Indeed, a band alter ego was one of the few tricks that Metallica did not later adopt from Iron Maiden’s resourceful path.

  As Iron Maiden later replaced its brief heavy metal blasts with ornate, tumultuous instrumentals, its album covers depicted settings that looked like the psychedelic dreamscapes of 1970s art rock. Eddie’s reassuring presence doubtlessly helped Iron Maiden sell this long-winding transformation to listeners. As merchandise sales and the proliferation of imitations attested, Eddie became part of the folk fabric—like an undead Mickey Mouse. “Someone in England made a huge cutout Eddie out of wood,” says creator Derek Riggs, “and put it above their house so it loomed over the rooftop with its arm outstretched. It was Eddie from the Number of the Beast album and stood about fifty feet tall. I have also seen him on people’s car bonnets, arm tattoos, a fairground haunted house ride, and there was a Spanish rock band who just copied the Number of the Beast cover and used it on their album. They got in a lot of trouble from Maiden.”

  Accompanying the T-shirts passed down directly from the bands, a few other general-purpose adornments prepared fans for the metal adventure. “You gotta have a spiked belt—it’s a spirit thing,” says lanky metal bassist Dan Lilker. “I guess around 1982 I started seeing lots of pictures of Iron Maiden, Priest, and Venom. I went to Butterfly, on West Eighth Street [in New York], and for what seemed like the princely sum of thirty-five dollars bought a spiked belt. Boy, was I proud of it. You never wanted to tuck your shirt in, but I was almost tempted—just to show it off.”

  While heavy metal prospered slightly on the periphery of the public eye, heavy metal garb and gear were an expedient means for metalheads to identify other true believers. For instance, Celtic Frost hailed from the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. “Those were a bunch of really small farm villages,” says founder Tom Warrior. “You basically knew the teenagers from the other villages. There were only so many heavy metal fans, so we stuck out like sore thumbs. There was an instant bond, because we were standing alone against thousands of people laughing at us.”

  Musicians endorsed the lively heavy metal vision by dressing in aggressive accoutrements. A living temple of spikes and leather, Judas Priest singer Rob Halford expanded his burgeoning heavy metal image in 1978 to include a whip, which he liked to crack on the shoulders of fans in the front row—once costing the band a censure from Britain’s Top of the Pops television show. As Priest’s popularity soared, Halford’s tough-guy image blossomed to full fruition in nightly onstage motorcycle rides. His wardrobe was often copied and wildly exaggerated—not only by adulatory metal extremists like Venom and Exciter. Struggling to compete in the new era, many 1970s rockers began to don black leather in order to cash in on metal chic. Ted Nugent, famous for dressing only in a loincloth, appeared in black leather on his 1981 solo album, Nugent. Even Thin Lizzy, the aging idols of Iron Maiden and Motörhead, dressed in matching studded black leather gauntlets in a 1983 publicity photo.

  Outsiders found the choice of garments strange, intriguing, or even threatening. For most heavy metal fans, the gear’s significance began and ended with powerful music, but it was an aggressive layer of protective clothing in the battle against complacency. Eugene Klein, aka Gene Simmons—the fire-breathing demon of Kiss, wore leather and spikes in the early 1970s and claims to have been oblivious to the gear’s history in sex bondage. “We lived in New York, but in some ways we were very sheltered,” he says. “When we decided to wear studs on leather, whether it was on a crotch or on a guitar strap, we thought it looked cool. We never picked up on the underground S&M thing.”

  Weird guitar shapes were also instrumental in heavy metal’s visual lexicon. The Gibson Flying V symbolized the ultramodern styles of players like Michael Schenker, K. K. Downing of Judas Priest, and later Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield of Metallica. Though its spacecraft shape seemed very timely, the Flying V dated to 1957, when, in response to taunts from rival Leo Fender that his guitar designs were stale, Gibson president Ted McCarty crafted the unconventional instrument along with the equally metal-ready Gibson Explorer. Though middle-aged by 1983, the angular axes became weapons of choice for heavy metal, aerodynamic props for a new range of choreographed onstage moves, like magic wands for unlocking the power of a mighty wall of Marshall amps.

  In the lower-budget echelon, struggling new bands had similar fanciful ideas but could sometimes barely afford more than a bag of makeup to create a show. Seeking to establish a name as the ultimate band for die-hard heavy metal fans, the ultrametal quartet Manowar crafted Conan-like togs from animal fur. Already renowned for smashing into each other like crazy onstage, Raven took to wearing lacrosse pads. They earned the tag “athletic rock” after drummer Rob “Wacko” Hunter started wearing a hockey helmet in 1982, protecting his head while he used it to smash cymbals. “We were in New York, and Rob went into a store and saw the ice-hockey helmet,” says Raven’s John Gallagher. “He was putting a character together. It was like worldwide wrestling, but he looked more like something from Tron than anything else.”

  John Bush of Armored Saint

  (Todd Nakamine)

  The Los Angeles venue the Country Club—located in a Reseda strip mall and previously used as a set for the punk episode of the cop show CHiPs—often presented Metal Blade Records discoveries like Armored Saint and the kinky female-fronted Bitch. Even at the semipro level they knew the importance and power of heavy metal imagery—Armored Saint performed in convincing homemade battle regalia, while Bitch singer Betsy dressed in a dominatrix costume and wielded a bullwhip. Their attempts at pageantry clashed with the realities of a shoestring operation. “It was a pain in the ass to put all that stuff on,” says Armored Sai
nt singer John Bush. “Our wardrobe case used to smell so bad. It was worse in the winter. You’d have to put on this huge thing, and it was cold, and still wet, and it smelled. I look back and laugh, but at the time it was cool. Like when you’re a little boy and you have a bad haircut.”

  The extent of heavy metal’s ascendancy became dramatically apparent the final scorching weekend of May 1983 at the U.S. Festival, a televised four-day outdoor music fest in San Bernardino, California, altruistically funded by Apple Computer inventor Steve Wozniak. Crowds nearing 300,000 on Saturday watched new wavers INXS, Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, and the Clash, and a similar multitude assembled Monday for performances by U2, the Pretenders, and David Bowie. These were the darlings of radio, the industry-endorsed outgrowths of punk—yet it was the heavy metal lineup on Sunday that drew an unexpected teeming throng of more than 600,000, turning heads and stealing thunder from traditional rock fare.

  Apple inventor Steve Wozniak with the Van Halens

  (Dan Sokol)

  Beginning at noon on Sunday, the club band Quiet Riot played, followed by little-known Mötley Crüe, clad in black leather and studs in the sweltering heat. Early afternoon brought Ozzy Osbourne in an ornate, feathered witch doctor’s headdress, playing a mix of Black Sabbath and solo-era hits with the help of new guitarist Jake E. Lee. Then came the unrelenting Judas Priest, whose singer took the stage by driving a motorcycle through a wall of Marshall guitar amps. “That day was a highlight,” says Rob Halford. “That was like the climax of the sensational tour that Priest had for Screaming for Vengeance beginning in 1981. The album had gone platinum, and the U.S. Festival was just an absolutely incredible moment. To finish with that particular show at the end of that record and touring cycle was just a real validating moment. Of course, it created more stress. We were like, ‘Oh, God, now we have to top this!"’