We all rewrite our past to suit our present, and I m no different. I like to tell the story of my youth as an uninterrupted flow of music beginning with the Beatles at a tender age and proceeding directly through the best rock and jazz. I conveniently leave out one major pothole on that highway to musical Valhalla.
Yes, I was a teenage metalhead. The wonderful folks at Rhino seem to know about my dirty little secret. Why else would they send me this hilariously packaged set, The Heavy Metal Box, encased in a mockup of a Marshall amplifier with a functioning volume button that goes, naturally, all the way up to 11?
(That s one louder, innit?) Yes, Rhino has made me feel like the character in Edgar Allan Poe s The Tell Tale Heart, the impossible-to-ignore thump of my once metalloving ticker giving voice to my shame. Oh, make it stop!
I m an adult now! All right, I ll sign the confession, if you promise to give me peace and leave me to my humiliated solitude. I once wore Spandex pants!
And they were turquoise! On stage! In front of people!
Wow. That s a load off. Sorry to treat you all as the priest in the confessional box, but my fragile facade as a person claiming a certain modicum of taste and decency has grown increasingly shaky.
The cracks have been showing for some time now. My first-ever gig was with a band called, sadly, Charlotte, after a character in an Iron Maiden song. Clearly, we were a confused lot of teens, as we dressed in the order of the day like Motley Crue, but with more acne and played a form of metal that had nothing to do with that Los Angeles brand of glam-slam stuff.
In fact, we pretty much dedicated ourselves to the new wave of British heavy metal. The Rhino four-disc box has made all of this ridiculous carrying on seem like it took place only yesterday, and really, I m crawling out of my skin. Why didn t anyone stop me?
Where were my real friends? Oh, that s right they were dressed like surrealist drag queens, hoisting oddly shaped guitars right there next to me on stage. Oy!
The best metal has aged much better than the fashion that often went along with it, of course. And the Rhino folks have gotten the story mostly right here. Licensing issues mean that there are mostly WEA bands Warner, Elektra, Atlantic collected here.
There are plenty of points to quibble over No Ozzy-era Sabbtah? For shame! Quiet Riot s Metal Health ?
Ouch! but by and large, the box covers the arc of metal s journey from its hard-blues beginnings to its inevitable fall beneath the sickle of grunge a quarter-century later. It all starts, properly, with Iron Butterfly s In-A-Gadda- Da-Vida, one of the dumbest and most self-indulgent slabs of molten lava ever to be laid to tape.
Right off the bat, the problem of defining exactly what heavy metal is becomes apparent. Blue Cheer s cover of Eddie Cochran s Summertime Blues is really hard rock, and Deep Purple was (and remains) a genre-def y i n g blend of blues, rock n roll and classical themes, often with a nod to swing music, believe it or not. Hawkwind s Lost Johnny is really psychedelic hard rock that sounds like it was written and recorded while its principal s were indulging in something of a lysergic nature.
Alice Cooper s Billion Dollar Babies is too clever, ironic and selfaware to share this company. That said, it all flows together rather nicely, this first disc of seminal metal-ish stuff, even if the decidedly sub-par Angel Witch gets to claim space far too close to Iron Maiden s Phantom of the Opera and Dio-era Black Sabbath s brilliant sludge-o-rama Neon Knights for the comfort of a true metal afficionado. Disc two is the one, capturing as it does the prime era of early 80s metal, beginning with Motorhead s timeless Ace of Spades and proceeding through some impressive guitar heroics from Michael Schenker and Messrs.
Tipton and Downing of Judas Priest, covering metal s highest point in Maiden s The Number of the Beast, and throwing in some of its most vulgar excesses, a la WASP s Animal, and Metallica s skull-crushing Whiplash. This is actually what it was really like back then. Metal s heyday was brief, spanning roughly 1979-83, though the best bands from that period carried on through the 80s and 90s, a few of them still making a decent racket today.
(That d be Maiden, principally, the band that still sets the bar for metal, in my humble opinion.) By the time the likes of Dokken, Ratt, Whitesnake, Poison and Faster Pussycat showed up all of whom are granted space on discs three and four metal had become a bad joke. With a handful of very significant exceptions, my love affair with metal lasted only two years.
College came and opened me up to a world of music my premetal Beatles fanatacism had fully prepared me for. Still, pictures of me holding a Flying V and wearing highheeled boots of white (!) leather, while cranking out terrible covers of Where Eagles Dare and Flight of Icarus are still out there somewhere.
My copies are buried in the attic, where they belong, but who knows what the other guys did with their copies? For your own good, I pray you never stumble across them.
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