DAVE MUSTAINE: There was a period where I kept thinking, “Hey, it’s cool to be crazy and drunk and on drugs. Ozzy does it, look how popular he is.” It wasn’t really a great approach for me to take because it gave me a reputation for being a loose cannon for a long time. I thought, “Shit, the guy pisses on the Alamo, he bites the head off a bat, he’s out of his mind, and people love that. He’s always in and out of insane asylums professing to be mad. Then I realized that the world isn’t fucking insane. Just some people are.
Ozzy and Pantera were peaking at the same time that Ozzy’s peer and Pantera’s hero—Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford—was growing weary of singing with the metal titans. He would record one more album with the band, 1990’s Painkiller, before quitting the group for more than a decade to pursue other metallic avenues with Fight, 2wo (with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor), and Halford (which featured future Damageplan vocalist Pat Lachman). His exit from Judas Priest was hardly civil and his last stage appearance with Priest in the nineties could have been his last show ever.
K.K. DOWNING: Rob got his head knocked off in Toronto. When he came onstage on his motorcycle, metal stairs rose up and Rob would drive underneath the stairs. On this particular occasion, the intro tape started but everyone but Rob was late to the stage, so the guy who started to lift the stairs up in all the smoke brought the stairs back down because we weren’t ready to start the show. Rob was already riding the bike toward the stairs and they were halfway down, so he literally drove into them and was knocked unconscious. We’d started “Hell Bent for Leather,” and, of course, there were no vocals. We didn’t know where Rob was. He was actually on the stage and so was the bike, but it was underneath all the dry ice and smoke. We played the whole song with no vocals, but he came around and managed to do the show. Afterwards, he went to the hospital and that was the last time I saw him for a long time because after that—it wasn’t because of that incident—but that was when he actually quit the band.
VINNIE PAUL: After Cowboys from Hell came out, Pantera did a European tour with Judas Priest. Apparently, Rob was a huge fan. We heard later that was around the point when he was thinking of leaving Priest and was going to put together Fight. I think he kind of modeled Fight after Pantera, his favorite, heaviest band at the time.
ROB HALFORD: There was supposed to be a time where I could be in Judas Priest and do stuff outside of the band, and go back and forth. That’s when confusion started, because I had to send what is commonly known as a “leaving member document,” which would have effectively removed me from Judas Priest on paper in the world of lawyers, but let me stay in the band. That’s when Priest went, “Well, hang on. What does this mean? You’re gonna leave?” One thing led to another, and it got very bitter. There was a lot of screaming and yelling, which I don’t like. So I just started sending faxes as opposed to trying to communicate via the phone or in person. The big Grand Canyon of disruption started to happen, and suddenly that was it, I was out of Priest. Initially, I was apprehensive because I wondered, “Is this suicidal?”
IAN HILL: We had no argument whatsoever with him going to do a solo album, but he said he wanted three years, which is a long time for a band like Judas Priest to stay dormant. We were going to take a year off anyway. For the previous twenty years we’d done an album and tour every year, but three years was just a bit too long. As it turned out, we were out for quite a bit longer than that.
ROB HALFORD: In the world of metal, there’s this fierce, loyal, devoted, almost conservative approach from the fans that will not accept you doing anything more or less than what they love you for. It’s that Sylvester Stallone syndrome. We only want him to be Rocky. We won’t give him the chance to be anybody else. So Fight might not have been as successful as it could have been because people only wanted to hear me in Judas Priest. But for my personal sanity, I had to explore these other areas before I could return to the mighty Priest.
From 1990’s Cowboys from Hell tour until its 2000 swan song Reinventing the Steel, Pantera was unstoppable. Not only did the band proudly support metal after others abandoned or corrupted the musical form, they engaged in so many antics and practical jokes that they were able to release three VHS videos of shenanigans filmed by Dimebag and his best friend, Bobby Tongs. The material was rereleased in 1999 as the Vulgar Videos From Hell DVD. According to Dime’s girlfriend, Rita Haney, the Pantera videos inspired pro skateboarder Bam Margera and his demented friends Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and Ryan Dunn to launch their cringe-inducing reality show, Jackass, which debuted on MTV in 2002. Despite Pantera’s constant revelry, the nineties were almost as unkind to thrash metal as to hair metal. To be considered relevant in an age of grunge and alternative rock, many bands were forced to rethink their sonic approach. Of the Big Four, only Slayer stayed the course. Even when they changed drummers, as they did several times through the nineties, their core sound and controversial subject matter remained consistent. But the members discovered that there are sometimes consequences to writing songs about death, the devil, and devastation.
TOM ARAYA: Because we speak our minds and don’t try to say things nicely, we get blamed for all the stupid shit that other people do. In late 1995, some guy killed a girl and blamed it on us. Apparently, he had a black metal band and he fashioned it after us. They wanted to sacrifice a virgin, but they messed up because they fucked her and then they killed her. It’s like, obviously everyone knows who did it; what more do you need, and why blame it on someone else when it’s clearly your fault?
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San Luis Obispo Tribune, April 14, 2010: On the evening of July 22, 1995, 15-year-old Elyse Pahler left her home to hang out with three teenage boys, who had promised her drugs. Later that evening, the three, aged 14, 15 and 16, held her down, stabbed her and later had sex with her dead body. . . . One of the boys, Royce Casey [later] led authorities to her badly decomposed body. The three boys pleaded no contest and were sentenced to 26 years to life in prison. . . . The case garnered national attention after Pahler’s parents filed a lawsuit against the band Slayer, [whose music they claimed] incited the murder. In 2001 . . . a judge said lyrics written by the heavy metal band may have been offensive, but they did not incite three teens to murder. “Slayer lyrics are repulsive and profane,” [Judge Jeffrey] Burke wrote in his 14-page decision. “But they do not direct or instruct listeners to commit the acts that resulted in the vicious torture-murder of Elyse Pahler. . . .”
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BRIAN COGAN (professor, author): The connection between certain kinds of metal and violence is nebulous in terms of influence. Did thrash lead to more aggression? Sure. But to try to say that violence is connected to music is a stretch at best. The Swedish and Norwegian black metal scenes did have their share of grotesque violence and murder, but that was mostly some fairly twisted individuals using racist and dubious neo-pagan ideology in order to justify their actions. For most other metal heads, a pentagram necklace or a “metal up your ass” poster was as likely to be the source of any kind of violence as a Bee Gees poster. However, if the fan is an asshole to begin with, all bets are off.
KERRY KING: It’s funny how quick somebody points a finger at a band rather than the fucking bingeing of drugs that was going on at the same time. Things like that and Columbine have happened before and they’re gonna happen again. It’s the result of not taking responsibility for what you do, then trying to pass the blame. When you leave your kids to be brought up by MTV and Jerry Springer, you’re asking for trouble. Parents today are fucking idiots. And maybe some crazy fucker says he was set off by movies or music, but if you’re raised with no values and no sense of right and wrong, anything can set you off. Don’t blame the fucking entertainment industry.
The Pahlers weren’t the first to put metal on trial. In the mid-eighties, in two widely publicized cases, other parents blamed rock stars for their sons’ suicides. In 1984, depressed California teenager John McCollum held a loaded .22-caliber handgun to his head and pulled the t
rigger while listening to songs by Ozzy Osbourne. His parents filed a lawsuit in a California civil court against Osbourne and CBS Records, alleging that the song “Suicide Solution” encouraged their son to end his life. In 1986, an appeals court dismissed the case, claiming Osbourne’s First Amendment right to free expression exonerated him from blame. Then, in 1985, two teens in Reno, Nevada, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, were smoking pot and drinking beer while listening to Judas Priest’s 1978 album, Stained Class, which features a cover of the Spooky Tooth song “Better by You, Better Than Me.” The teens later attempted a dual suicide in a church playground.
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San Francisco Examiner, September 29, 1989: . . . Near dusk, the two went to the playground of a local church with Raymond’s sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun. Raymond Belknap, seated on a merry-go-round, placed the end of the shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger, killing himself. A few minutes later, James pointed the same gun at his chin and fired. Somehow, the blast missed his brain and he lived. [Vance died in 1988 from medical complications.] Four months later, Raymond Belknap’s mother went to attorneys with James Vance’s letter connecting the death pact to heavy metal music. Reno attorneys Ken McKenna and Tim Post began to examine the music, lyrics and album cover for suicidal messages. They say they found references to blood, killing and the implications of suicide in the lyrics, but no explicit directives to take one’s life. Those they claim to have found in the music and album cover’s subliminal messages. [The case went to trial in 1990 and after a bizarre hearing involving all five band members, an aggressive prosecutor, and supposed audio experts, the case was dismissed.]
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IAN HILL: With all due respect to the families involved, we treated it as an immense joke until we were actually sitting there in court. The use of backwards masking is protected by the Constitution. So they came up with this weird idea of subliminal messages. They play you a song, and you go, “Well, I can’t hear anything.” They say, “Well, that’s because it’s subliminal.” Then it’s up to you to prove that the message isn’t there. It was absurd. There was a sound on there that was a combination of a high-hat cymbal and Rob exhaling, and it sounded like “Do it!” But anybody that actually wants to go out and murder their own clientele has got to have some commercial death wish.
ROB HALFORD: It was a very sad experience. We’ve never been a band that has or ever will make music that will hurt people, and we were enraged that we were being accused of something we didn’t do. It caught the public’s attention. It was like a very bad Jerry Springer episode. But it was very serious. We couldn’t just make it go away. It was a very important and sobering reflection on some of the things that happen in families where kids aren’t given the right love, care, and attention, and they go off the rails. The irony was those two boys loved Judas Priest. So we couldn’t figure it out until we got to the courtroom, and within the first couple of days we went, “Oh, we know what this is about. This is about making a fast buck on something that’s so tragic.”
As Pantera was enjoying the success of Cowboys From Hell, the members’ pals in Anthrax entered their third phase as a band. With the departure of Joey Belladonna after 1990’s Persistence of Time, Anthrax hired Armored Saint vocalist John Bush. The timing was peculiar. Anthrax was coming off the momentum of having played the legendary 1991 Clash of the Titans festival with Megadeth, Slayer, and Alice in Chains, Persistence of Time had gone gold, and Anthrax had just inked a lucrative deal with Elektra Records. Moreover, the band had broken boundaries by collaborating with Public Enemy front man Chuck D for a cover of the hit “Bring the Noise” and touring with their hip-hop heroes—moves that helped set the stage for the evolution of nu metal a few years later.
SCOTT IAN: Public Enemy had never gotten groupies before, and our crew guys would always have chicks on the bus getting naked, and they’d take pictures of these girls. [Public Enemy rapper] Flavor Flav was out of his fucking mind for that. He couldn’t get on our bus fast enough to see what was going on because that didn’t happen on Public Enemy’s bus. But it was a weird time for us. Everything seemed great from the outside looking in, but inside we were miserable because we didn’t even know how we were gonna write another record. We just couldn’t move forward with Joey [Belladonna] because he didn’t represent us musically anymore. It wasn’t personal. Creatively, we felt like we were going somewhere else, and his voice wasn’t going to work.
JOEY BELLADONNA (Anthrax): I wasn’t ready to go anywhere. I thought I was doing fine, and I think I could have continued with them even when they changed the style of their music. But it’s like being in a relationship. If someone wants to move on you can beg them not to leave, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.
SCOTT IAN: Changing lineups sucks. It’s a horrible thing to deal with, but any time we’ve ever done it, we did it to move forward, whether or not the fans liked it or it helped us commercially. It was what we had to do in order to continue.
JOHN BUSH: At first, I was thinking, “I don’t know if I want to replace Joey Belladonna.” He did so much with the band, and fans associated his voice with the Anthrax they loved. When I joined Anthrax, my attitude was, “Once I’m in, let’s go for it.” The guys always embraced me and I never got much negativity from the crowd. Maybe the people that weren’t into it just stopped listening. But the thing that bummed me out the most is that the [four studio] records I did with Anthrax will probably never get the fair shake they deserve because we went through a bunch of management changes and label debacles, and all of that took over how people saw the music. Those records were really unfairly looked at in comparison to the success that Anthrax had in the eighties.
SCOTT IAN: We signed a deal with Elektra, and we had a team of people working with us all the way from the head of the label, Bob Krasnow, down to people in the mailroom. But between ’93 and ’95 there was a huge corporate shake-up and everyone we worked with was let go, and they brought in Sylvia Rhone to run the label. The first meeting our manager had with Sylvia, she put our contract on the table and said, “I never would have done this deal. I wouldn’t even have signed this band. What do you want me to do for this next record?” That was the attitude from the label on Stomp 442. That record sold about 150,000 copies, and I’m surprised it even did that well. They did nothing. They put it out and we toured our asses off, but at that point in time, if you didn’t have someone fighting for you as a metal band, you were fucked in the face of the grunge world. Look at Pantera in ’95. EastWest [Records] was going to bat for them. We were basically thrown out in the trash.
JOHN BUSH: The band’s sound did change a little, but it needed to change. Times were changing and we were changing with it. I hear Sound of White Noise and I think of the influence it had on so many bands. I listen to a band like Godsmack, and so much of it sounds like it was influenced by Sound of White Noise.
In 1991, Metallica also reinvented itself by writing a batch of new songs that eschewed the amphetamine-freak tempos and complex rhythms that were the hallmark of earlier albums. The eponymous record—which became widely known as The Black Album because of its black cover—was produced by studio veteran Bob Rock (Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe), and featured simple, heavy songs filled with strong melodies and instantly memorable hooks. There were even two fairly traditional but well-written ballads, “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters.” Old-school followers were divided on the record, but The Black Album garnered the band millions of new, loyal fans and spawned five hit singles. By November 2009, The Black Album had sold more than fifteen million copies in the United States.
LARS ULRICH: . . . And Justice for All was on the thin side in terms of its lyrics and its sound, so we decided to track down this Bob Rock guy who had made this Mötley Crüe album which really sounds beefy and see what his story is. The first thing that he told me was that he felt that we had never made a record that was up to his standards. That was a bit of a battle cry. We had never
been challenged before, and nobody ever really said, “Well you can also do it this way, and you can also try it in a different key, or why don’t you try this kind of drum fill.” [We were like], “Why don’t you go fuck yourself and stop telling us what to do. Just get us that bass sound like the Mötley Crüe album.” But as the process wore on we very reluctantly realized that maybe this guy had some relevant suggestions, and he won us over.
KIRK HAMMETT: We gave Bob a bunch of gray hairs. There’s a twitch in his eye that won’t go away. But Bob, what did Mötley Crüe give you? We gave you gray hair and a twitch! They’ll stay with you forever.
LARS ULRICH: Me and Bob almost came to blows on that record. All of a sudden he’s saying, “If you want to come across sounding lively, you have to start playing like a band, acting like a band, being more like a band,” because it was very much the James and Lars show up til then. Me and James used to guard it like the fucking crown jewels. We would tell everyone, “Yes, it is a band,” but I think everyone knew that me and James were pretty much taking care of everything.
BOB ROCK (producer): I think what makes these guys what they are is the fact they weren’t content with just making another Justice. They said, “Okay, that’s fine, but now let’s go on. Let’s make something new.” That, to me, is the sign of a really great artist. It would have been so simple for them to have just done what they had already done.
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 33