Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal

by Jon Wiederhorn

  DAVE MUSTAINE (ex-Metallica, Megadeth): Most people do it wrong, and I’m not talking about outstretching the thumb. For the real devil’s horns, when used as a Satanic symbol, you don’t close your middle two fingers and wrap your thumb around them. You leave the middle two fingers outstretched and place the thumb between them so it resembles the snout of a jackal.

  BIFF BYFORD: Obviously, now, it is the rock and roll, metal salute. It’s lost all the devil connotations. It’s just a great salute, isn’t it? We’re all here, we all like one music. Even models on the catwalk, they’ll give the sign—“rock and roll.”

  ROBB FLYNN (Machine Head, ex–Vio-Lence, ex-Forbidden): In high school, we didn’t fit in with the jocks or the nerds. We were the outcasts. We had long hair. We were the nonconformists and we didn’t have a choice. But we found a community through heavy metal. We met other people who liked the same music and suddenly we were like, “We are not alone!”

  RONNIE JAMES DIO: Heavy metal is an underdog form of music because of the way you dress, how you act, what you listen to. So you’re always being put down. It’s this fringe music and because it pigeonholes the bands and the fans, together we feel strength with each other and become one big pigeon.

  JOE ELLIOTT (Def Leppard): It’s everything mimicked in Spinal Tap. There is an elitist [attitude] among some of us, and I think I put myself in that group. Sometimes heavy metal gets regarded as dumb, and some of us don’t like to be regarded as dumb, so we try to distance ourselves from it.

  PENELOPE SPHEERIS (Filmmaker, Decline of Western Civilization II): I was approached by Harry Shearer and a producer named David Jablin [to direct Spinal Tap]. It didn’t work out because I felt like it was making fun of metal, and I loved the music so much I didn’t think I should do it. Rob [Reiner] kicked ass, though.

  LEMMY KILMISTER: For me, it needs to be big and it needs to be loud. In a club, you can have conversations over bands that are playing jazz or pop music. Nobody can ever have a conversation over my kind of music. With my kind of music, [once] we start, you listen or you leave.

  1

  KICK OUT THE JAMS: PROTO METAL, 1964–1970

  Heavy metal was never officially “born.” It came together in bits and pieces between the mid-sixties and early seventies, and stemmed from a desire to rebel, shock, and create a level of intensity that did not then exist in pop music.

  Strangely, it was British Invasion band the Kinks that captured the earliest sound of metal in 1964 with their third single “You Really Got Me.” The band played blunt, repetitive power-chord guitar riffs that they coupled with a primitive style of distortion—guitarist Dave Davies, taking a cue from surf guitarist Link Wray, used a razor blade to cut slits in his speaker cone to achieve the sound. From there, technological improvements allowed guitarists to use effect pedals to make their instruments buzz like swarming bees, or spiral as if caught in the eye of a tornado.

  With louder amps, crazier effects, and plenty of social and political turmoil to inspire them, artists like Jimi Hendrix and bands like Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin, MC5, Blue Cheer, the Stooges, and, of course, Black Sabbath set out to change people’s perceptions of just how heavy music could be and what was possible with a bit of creativity and a lot of volume.

  OZZY OSBOURNE: The first time I ever experienced the feeling I get from my own music was when I heard “You Really Got Me.” I got that tickling up my back, and that’s what I always go for when I write.

  JIMMY PAGE (ex-Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin): A turning point in effects came when Roger Mayer began making his distortion boxes. I [was] playing this gig in the early sixties when Roger came up to me and said he worked at the British Admiralty in the experimental department, adding that he could probably build any electronic gadget that I wanted. He went away and came up with the first real good fuzz box.

  WAYNE KRAMER (MC5): Jeff Beck was one of the pillars of pushing the guitar tone. And then there was [Pete] Townshend with [the Who], Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and what I was trying to do with the MC5. We were all trying to push the guitar so we didn’t just play the guitar, we played the amplifier as well. It was about getting that overtone sustain out of the amplifier. That was at the beginning of the invention of stomp boxes—fuzz tones and overdrives.

  Flamboyant Seattle-born musician Jimi Hendrix developed some of the most inventive early uses for the distortion box, contorting traditional electric blues into flailing, contentious torrents of sound. That he was just as adept at performing beautiful emotional and psychedelic rock songs is a testament to his brilliance as a musician. Tragically, Hendrix died in 1970 at age twenty-seven after consuming sleeping pills and red wine and asphyxiating on his vomit. Yet in four short years he redefined the rock lexicon with three astonishing albums—1967’s Are You Experienced and Axis: Bold as Love, and 1968’s Electric Ladyland.

  RITCHIE BLACKMORE (ex-Rainbow, ex–Deep Purple): I liked [Hendrix’s] direct approach, his snarling guitar. He said a lot in one note. Before then, I was very impressed with people who could run up and down the fingerboard. But Jimi was just holding a note sustained, playing with a lot more feeling. His stage presence was unbelievable. He was like a spaceman.

  LEMMY KILMISTER: What fans want is somebody that comes down from another planet that you will never possibly visit, and touches you, and goes away again. That’s what a real good rock show is like. Aliens from another world come and kick you in the teeth and fuck off quick, you know? Hendrix was like that. He was really a quiet guy, a gentleman. He played the fucking Chitlin’ Circuit for years. But by the time he got to where he was going, he was the fucking best. You’ll never see a guitar player like him, ever. Van Halen and all them guys don’t even get close. The man would do a double somersault and come up playing. I learned a lot about performing working as a roadie for Hendrix. And that’s where I learned how to function on five hits of acid. He handed it out like dolly mixtures [British candy], and I used to go score it for him, too. That was part of my job—getting drugs for Jimi.

  ACE FREHLEY (ex-KISS): I was sixteen when I heard Are You Experienced. I walked around with it all the time and brought it to school with me to show everybody. I brought it to band rehearsals. I lived with that album until someone ripped it off at a party. Of course, I went right out and bought another one. My guitar style was modeled in part after Hendrix. What really influenced me was his attitude—the way he dressed, the way he looked. He was so antiestablishment and nobody wrote music like him. He wrote about LSD, he wrote about sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was all about rebellion, and he was so radical and ahead of his time it ended up swallowing him up.

  CARMINE APPICE (Vanilla Fudge, Beck, Bogart & Appice): Jimi Hendrix. Was he heavy metal? Yeah, he was heavy metal, then. But the drums weren’t heavy, the drums were light. I think what makes heavy metal heavy is the sound of your drums. That heavy drum sound is what Vanilla Fudge and Sabbath had.

  As difficult as it is to define heavy metal, it’s even harder to pinpoint the band that started it all. Some cite Led Zeppelin, the eclectic, majestic group that formed out of the collapse of the Yardbirds. The band featured seasoned session musician and Yardbirds alum Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, vocalist Robert Plant, and his Band of Joy bandmate John Bonham, a forceful, stylistic drummer whose beats were often a hair behind the rest of the rhythm, giving the music a perpetually lunging feel. Although none of the members of Zeppelin ever called their music metal, they had a major influence on countless metal bands, including Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Deep Purple.

  JOHN PAUL JONES (Led Zeppelin, Them Crooked Vultures): When Zeppelin started, I listened to blues and jazz. The only rock I listened to was Jimi Hendrix.

  RUDOLF SCHENKER (Scorpions): I was in the Star Club in Hamburg expecting Spooky Tooth to play, and the DJ was playing an album. I told one of my friends to ask the DJ what the album was; it was Led Zeppelin. It immediately kicked me like the first album by Jimi Hendrix. From then on, I watched Led Zeppelin carefully. Everything they
did was a masterpiece.

  MARTIN POPOFF (author, journalist): Jimmy [Page] and Robert [Plant] detest being called “heavy metal.” It tells you that their heads weren’t in that space, and I think when people’s heads are not in that space, they shouldn’t be rewarded for having invented that thing.

  GLENN HUGHES (Black Country Communion, ex–Deep Purple, ex–Black Sabbath): I’ve spoken to Jimmy Page about [whether Zeppelin is metal]. It’s like, there are moments in [Deep] Purple that you would call metal. And there are moments in Zeppelin.

  The influence of Led Zeppelin on hard rock and metal is unparalleled (just listen to early Judas Priest, Whitesnake, Guns N’ Roses, Soundgarden, and Jane’s Addiction). But there are a number of unsung (at least in metal circles) American bands that also took volume and rage to new heights—especially Detroit’s Motor City Five (better known as MC5), the Stooges, and San Francisco’s Blue Cheer, all of whom performed with frenetic energy and brazen sexuality that defined the otherness of the counterculture.

  DICKIE PETERSON (1946–2009) (Blue Cheer): What we were playing was anti-music to a lot of people. They were saying we can’t play that loud, and we were saying, “Yes you can. All you have to do is turn up the amplifier, you idiot.” There was a time we went out and people weren’t kind to us at all. They didn’t know how to take what we were doing because we were one of the first bands knocking on the doors of volume. In 1968 we played with Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 at [Detroit’s] Grande Ballroom, and I honestly think to this day it was really the first metal show ever.

  IGGY POP (The Stooges): [In 1967], we were a bunch of misfits livin’ together in a house saying, “Yeah, we’re a band!” But we had not played anywhere. We couldn’t play. I was trying to figure out like, “What’s the key?” What could we do? I didn’t want to just go out and be a cover band, because I knew that was death. I knew that, to take it to where I wanted to go, [there] had to be something really creative—something you couldn’t get anywhere else. At first, we didn’t know what to do, so [we] ended up hanging around the house taking lots of drugs.

  WAYNE KRAMER: We would play the kinds of gigs that were available to us—teen dances and record hops. So we’d play what they expected, these tidy three-minute songs—and then for the last song we’d play [the feedback-saturated] “Black to Comm”—our real music. We noticed we could empty a room with it. People would be dancing all night, having a ball, and then we’d break into “Black to Comm” and the fucking room would be deserted. The people fled. We came to the conclusion that what we were doing was very powerful, and if the kids were just educated to appreciate and understand what it was all about, then that same power that forced them out of the room would force them into the room. And it did.

  IGGY POP: We found a sound based very much on the MC5. They pointed the way—a pneumatic, industrial, valid, corporate jet mixed in with free jazz—Velvets, the Who, the Stones, Hendrix, Muddy Waters, and William Burroughs.

  WAYNE KRAMER: We were part of a community with the Stooges. In our time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we lived close to each other and hung out a lot. We both loved loud, distorted guitars, and the Stooges and the MC5 were equally crazy, equally aberrant—each in our own way. We were friendly and collegial with our fellows, but I never got the sense that many of them really grabbed hold of what we were talking about. We played at the [1968] Democratic Convention and the Chicago police were standing by. The minute we finished, the kids turned on the police, the police turned on the kids, and the rampage was on.

  IGGY POP: These guys flew in from New York, saw me, and went, “We don’t know what he’s doin’ but he’s weird. People like weird things. We’re gonna sign him!” So they sign me. And then they left, and I stayed in my little Midwestern town [Ypsilanti, Michigan]. They called me to New York a few months later, and I made a record [1969’s Stooges], then went back home.

  STEFFAN CHIRAZI (journalist): The Stooges were absolutely vital for the development of metal. They had true raw emotion in spades. [1970’s] Fun House is such a violent record. When I listen to that first song, “Down on the Street,” it makes me want to go down the street and smash windows because it really is a “fuck you” song.

  IGGY POP: You have this leap from The Stooges to Funhouse to Raw Power. It’s very rare that you hear a band that grows that quickly and with that intensity and complexity in three years. It tends to be something more like, “Oh, that’s Sabbath, and that’s another Sabbath, and that’s a little different Sabbath. I was doing something based on the logical progressions and extensions of the way we live—of architecture, art, sociology, anthropology, fashion, crime, porno. There was a lot going on there before anyone else paid attention to that shit.

  STEFFAN CHIRAZI: I love that famous quote from Iggy that went something like, “I wanted the guy in the front row to want to fuck me, not the girl.” It’s such an outrageously obnoxious, flip comment. But he didn’t care. He wore makeup but would piss on your head at the same time. He was musically very important as well because a lot of the bluesy riffs were given this thoroughly metallic, androidy crunch.

  IGGY POP: [We did] “I Got a Right,” which is a really intense, up-tempo song. It was thrash before anybody was doing thrash. [But when we played it], not one person would move. They’d just sit there and fuckin’ stare at us, like “What the fuck is this?” When we played, the room would become like a cardboard cutout. After a while, it got uncomfortable; I was putting this stuff out and it wasn’t coming back.

  JAMES WILLIAMSON (The Stooges): At [the New York club] Max’s Kansas City, Iggy cut himself in the chest with a broken martini glass. But we had seen it all at that point. He’s dripped hot wax on himself, and he’s been so stoned he couldn’t stand up, and people thought it was part of the act. The band was kind of desensitized to stuff like that. He wasn’t in any grave danger. It was just flesh wounds. But he got a couple stitches.

  BOBBY LIEBLING (Pentagram): Iggy Pop was my hands-down idol. When I was using a lot of coke and heroin I was into the shenanigans that Iggy used to do in the Raw Power days. One night I made a big cross on my torso with this spiked bracelet I was wearing. I took it from breast to breast, and then from neck to belly button, and took my stomach and ripped myself wide open crosswise and just stood there looking at the people and bleeding all over the floor, and kept singing just for shock value.

  IGGY POP: Stooges tours didn’t exist. Nobody wanted to tour the Stooges. People would say, “Don’t ever come back here!” And then we did one actual tour, which was our death tour, which Metallic K.O. was recorded from. Everywhere we went there was some sort of major disaster. Clubs closed, theaters would arrest us. We played Memphis and [on] the front page of the newspaper was a big picture of me and it said, “Vice squad to attend concert.” They came to the concert—five uniformed cops, two plainclothes, all with guns. They let me see their guns and said, “You pull any shit, you’re going to jail.” [So] I just got drunk and fell down a lot.

  He never created an album that’s entirely or characteristically metal, yet Alice Cooper is essential to the look and mood of the genre. Vincent Damon Furnier dubbed his band Alice Cooper in 1968 and soon after conceived a mesmerizing theatrical stage show that was equal parts Hammer horror film and French Grand Guignol. He allegedly came up with the “Alice” moniker after using a Ouija board to communicate with a seventeenth-century witch of the same name; he changed his legal name to Alice Cooper in 1974. Hendrix may have electrified the flower child, but as Alice says, “I drove a stake through the heart of the love generation.” At the same time, other gender-bending frontmen—such as David Bowie and hell-and-hair-fire man Arthur Brown—impacted the antics of future stars, including Marilyn Manson and the members of Mötley Crüe.

  ALICE COOPER: I was a fan of Hendrix and a lot of bands, but I knew I didn’t want to be anything like them. For instance, I love Paul McCartney, but I can’t compete with Paul McCartney on his level. So I thought, “Let me create a character that he can’t com
pete with.” I loved drama and I loved horror, and I said, “Well, nobody’s doing that in rock and roll. Rock doesn’t have a villain. Rock has a lot of heroes, but it doesn’t have that one villain.”

  KING DIAMOND (ex–Mercyful Fate): I was totally inspired by the makeup of Alice Cooper. It’s not that much makeup, but it totally changes his look and the way he came across to an audience. It felt like he was not of this world. If I had reached up over the stage and touched a boot, he’d probably just vanish in thin air. Right there in my mind I went, “If I’m ever going to be in a band I’m going to use makeup” because of what a strong feel it put across.

  ALICE COOPER: When the Beatles walked into a room, everybody wanted to be near them. I always said, “When Alice Cooper walks into a room, I want everyone to take a step backwards.” So we created this villainous character. I went to see Barbarella. The Black Queen, she had all the leather on and switchblades coming out of her hands. I went, “Oh, that’s what Alice should look like. There should be a real dangerous sleekness to him.” Then I saw Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and there was this old woman trying to look like she’s five years old again with the smeared makeup and all the wrinkles. I went, “Oh, that’s Alice, too.” So if you combine the two you get something that’s really creepy and just unearthly.

  RITCHIE BLACKMORE: From the beginning, I thought theatrics were really important to this music. I started incorporating pyro into the show in 1968. At the California Jam [in 1974], I wanted to do something sensational. People had blown the guitar up. So I said, “I’ll blow the amp up.” I told my roadie, “Just pile some petrol on the dummy amplifier and throw a match to it when I point to you.” So he did that, and put too much petrol on there, and, of course, not only did we blow a hole in the stage, one of the cameramen went temporarily deaf. [Drummer] Ian Paice’s glasses blew off and half the stage caught fire. It looked great—like it was well in control—but it wasn’t. The police came after me, and I had to jump into a helicopter to be rushed out of the area.