by Ian Christe
In metal there was also incredible money to be made beyond CD sales. Great business flowed from Roadrunner to manufacturers of blood-colored ink, as the label’s merchandising operation offered fans dozens of gory T-shirt variations for each band. “Let’s face it, merchandising is an incredible thing,” says Conner. “You can make more money selling T-shirts than you can selling records. We recognized that and decided to get into that business from the start.” Not at all unusual among metal labels, a typical Roadrunner contract was an omnibus deal that assigned merchandise rights to Blue Grape and song publishing to The All Blacks, both sister companies of Roadrunner.
If not exactly living up to Metallica’s sales precedent, death metal remained profitable into the mid-1990s. Still, after operating on an underground level for almost ten years, many metal indies wanted out of the niche. Metal Blade’s eyes were widened by the success of its signing of the bar-rocking Goo Goo Dolls, and Megaforce languished as a label while its owners focused on managing the tumultuous career of Ministry. Monte Conner claims that Roadrunner was easily able to sell 100,000 copies of any death metal record, but breaking beyond that ceiling was frustrating. “With Obituary, whether we spent twenty thousand dollars promoting something or two hundred thousand dollars, we’d sell the same amount of records.” They were ready to give metal back to the tape traders.
The mail-order company Relapse Records added up the numbers in a different way, assembling thousands of unknown bands into a bewildering force without counting on gold albums. Founded by two tape traders in Colorado in 1990, Relapse was both a record company and a distribution source. The company assailed shelves with an international array of artists, acting like a superpower tape trader that offered specialized music for sale instead of trade. It was a pure product of the underground and thus completely in tune with its audience. Besides direct sales to fans via mail order and the Internet, the organization sold directly to about a hundred mom-and-pop stores. It was a lifeline. “Ohio, California, Texas, and New York are really big for death metal,” says Relapse cofounder Bill Yurkiewicz. “But our catalogs have made it over to every obscure country in the world. It’s mind-blowing.”
With the entire world as a marketplace, Relapse was a success of limitless supply years before the launch of Amazon.com. Its staggering mail-order catalog presented thousand of items from every phase of metal’s long, illustrious history—and then some. Besides profane grindcore artifacts, the catalog shifted headbanger tastes toward the esoteric, incorporating Indonesian field recordings, voice poet Ken Nordine, and protoambient psychedelic bands Amon Duul and Popul Vuh—even Ella Fitzgerald, for those who preferred torch songs to power ballads. As the largest of a giant network of similar operations, Relapse proved there was a self-sustaining strength and richness in underground metal in the mid-1990s that barely needed the outside world or even the mainstream music industry to prosper. The metal milieu was now an entrenched network of regional scenes that refuted all recognized musical limits and often discarded social constraints to a shocking degree.
XV
World metal:
The Globalisation of Heavy
August 1984: Iron Maiden’s Powerslave tour visits Eastern Europe
1986: Sepultura releases Morbid Visions in Brazil
April 10, 1993: Rioting at Metallica shows in Indonesia prompts ban on foreign bands
October 19, 2000: Sepultura Chaos a.D. goes gold in the United States
April 2001: Brujeria’s Brujerizmo nominated for Best Rock Album at Billboard Latin Music Awards
Beyond Grammy winners and other morbid millionaires, there remained thousands of bands that seemingly existed solely for the sheer joys of extremist expression. Throughout the global metal diaspora, heavy metal outposts remained in constant contact via always lively international channels. Metalheads of all kinds were banging on guitars, typing fanzine articles, and scribbling each other notes from every nook and cranny of the earth. Between map points flowed a never-ending stream of touring bands. If rap music in the 1990s was, as Chuck D once said, the CNN of black America, metal was an unflinching broadcast of international affairs.
Whether living in Ohio or Oslo, headbangers had a more accurate awareness of life in Third World countries than did the majority of Westerners. “I know not to believe what you see on TV, that’s for fucking sure,” snorts Napalm Death’s singer, Barney Greenway. “The different levels of class around the world are quite noticeable, the way different societies treat their citizens. I find Americans so fucking strange. I find them very twee. Then, going to Russia, people walk with their heads down. It’s like they’re just walking in circles because they’ve never known anything different.”
Join the party: official heavy metal union pin from communist Poland.
Heavy metal had established itself early as an international voice. Iron Maiden’s film, Iron Maiden Behind the Iron Curtain, documented the band’s 1984 tour through Poland. There, heavy metal of any kind had previously been contraband, thus necessarily underground and tightly cherished. As the English group and its touring armada entered Warsaw, Polish metalheads swarmed over public buildings, deluging the band with homemade gifts— offering a joyous reception to the country’s first British invasion.
Even among American bands there was a huge metal immigrant population, starting with the Van Halen brothers from Holland and Lars Ulrich from Denmark. Rudi Sarzo of Quiet Riot and Ozzy Os-bourne’s band came from Cuba. Tom Araya and Dave Lombardo of Slayer were both born in South America. Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe was Greek—the son of a nationally known beauty queen. Along with countless others, these foreign-born musicians came to America as children. The grandiose expressions of heavy metal probably helped reconcile their experiences in life among an adopted culture—it was something big enough to bridge the gap. In any case, heavy metal brought opportunity.
Though Metallica’s music was no longer at the cutting edge of development in the mid-1990s, the band’s incredible touring regime reached out to every country with a soccer stadium. As the good ship Metallica sailed around the world to promote the Black Album, the band played more than three hundred shows in thirty-seven countries, most performances lasting longer than three hours. In North America excitement over heavy metal was measured by showers of money. In less affluent parts of the world, where troubled youth sought salvation in vociferous discontent, there could be havoc. At a free outdoor show at Moscow’s Tushino Airfield in September 1991, a small city of half a million, Metallica fans were beaten down by moonlighting Russian army soldiers. These were unseasoned security guards who panicked at the first sight of thrashing and wild slam dancing, and their methods of crowd control led to eleven deaths.
Then, on April 10, 1993, over a hundred people were arrested after a Metallica show in Jakarta, Indonesia. According to UPI reports, rioting broke out between the ticket-holding haves and the less fortunate have-nots, causing a regional melee that left thirteen people hospitalized, thirty-eight others injured, eight cars and a number of palm trees burned, and several houses damaged. “Indonesia was the first date of a three-week tour,” says Lars Ulrich. “We played Singapore and the Philippines for the next couple weeks. Everywhere we went, we were the big bad Western satanic metal band from hell, causing riots and disturbing the peace. The media followed us around, writing front-page headlines like HERE COME THE RIOT-INDUCERS METALLICA! There we were, just four friendly guys.”
In America and Europe rock and roll had become largely safe, professional, and controlled. In Jakarta government officials denounced Metallica and vowed to crack down on permits for all future rock concerts. Heavy metal served as a spontaneous expression of instant liberty, dangerous in areas with very different cultural climates from those in London or Los Angeles. “I’ve seen the aggression of music bring people to the point where they understand the struggle against the powers that be,” says spokesrapper Chuck D of Public Enemy. “Worldwide I think people are more aware of how the music is being put do
wn than I guess the people in America give them credit for.”
The global response to underground heavy metal was enthusiastic, coming from audiences who related to bands as blessed peers. Anywhere young people lived without illumination, Napalm Death’s corrosive metal ate into musical consciousness. Like Iron Maiden and Metallica before it, the band toured until British-bred singer Barney Greenway reckoned he felt more at home in Tel Aviv than in Tennessee. In 1992 the band hosted 9,000 people in Czechoslovakia and a combined total of 15,000 over two days in Moscow. “We’re playing places that we never thought in a million years we would,” says guitarist Mitch Harris.
These were musicians at long last—Westerners, no less—who understood systemic conflict and lifelong frustration. Increasingly the harsh messages and typically gory illustrations of death metal were seen on the black T-shirts of disenchanted teens in cultural war zones like Poland, Puerto Rico, and Thailand—as well as the back streets of New York, Miami, and San Antonio. The language was often as indecipherable as graffiti, but the meaning to outsiders was clear: “Stay away—I hate your lying, hypocritical world.”
Outside of America metal bands were often motivated by values other than riches or fame. In Russia, Napalm Death was supported by Korrozia Metalla, an outrageous Motörhead-inspired performance-art revue whose act included seminude women, wooden barricades, and automobiles for clobbering with hammers and setting ablaze. Highlights among the band’s repertoire included “I’m President,” “Russian Vodka,” and “Trash Around Kremlin.” Vocalist Sergei “Spider” Troitsky’s strange shockpolitik was clearly an attack on the country’s post-Soviet cultural vacuum and was unheard music to Western ears.
DIY in the Third World
Though black-market sales were shady and impossible to track, heavy metal appeared to totally dominate youth culture in the Eastern Bloc during and after the fall of the Soviet Union. “Dio played Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Estonia, and I loved all those places,” says Ronnie James Dio. “Those kids know more about metal than anybody I’ve ever heard. These kids had to hold the stuff really dear, because the laws a lot of times said that if you get caught with a record, it’s prison, pal. That’s brave, and it’s somebody that really cares a lot about music. I don’t think I would have done that.”
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—coinciding with the early peak of metal’s mainstream popularity—the former communist countries joined the rest of Europe in exporting metal to the global vortex. Earache Records signed the Polish death metal band Vader in 1992, while the cult black metal band Behemoth charred their heels with a series of demos. In the 1990s strange, homegrown metal flourished in every pocket of every continent where civilization and its discontents were possible.
The middle of the decade brought the spread of intense metal across the Far East, to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Japan had participated in heavy metal’s evolution with relish since the start, offering the huge fan support evidenced on 1970s live albums by Judas Priest and Scorpions, and periodically exporting key bands like heavy metal act Loudness and grindcore group S.O.B. Now the extreme act Impiety joined a black metal revival in the Pacific Rim, sparring in Hellhammer-style atrocities with Australia’s Sadistik Execution and Destroyer 666 despite threats from Islamic mufti holy leaders in nearby Malaysia.
The metal underground provided a conduit from countries where little rock music had previously escaped. Greece, home to Rotting Christ and Varathron, saw the rise of dozens of doom-inflected black metal bands and thriving record labels. Even in Turkey bands like Zig-gurat and also Pentagram—later called Mezarkabul—combined heavy metal tradition with the unique inflections of Mesopotamia.
Along with European classical music, the Middle East had been a popular source of ideas since the 1980s, when Mercyful Fate recorded “Curse of the Pharaohs” and Iron Maiden titled an Egyptian-themed album Powerslave. In the 1990s the Mediterranean produced its own metal, imbued with the rich accents of the region. In Tel Aviv, Israel, the five lads in Orphaned Land wove romantic dark metal forms elaborated by Middle Eastern modalities, instrumentation, and devotional singing styles. An odd group called People combined grindcore with Israel’s other famous musical export, disco, to create a sound that mixed Morbid Angel with Miami Sound Machine. Meanwhile, the eccentric Israeli band Rabies Caste, signed to Earache in the late 1990s, consisted of refugees from Russia who were refused asylum in America as children, thus rerouted to a life in exile in Israel, like the fabled strangers in a strange land.
From the other side of Jerusalem came Arallu, an Arabic black metal band that took pride in the similarities between the origins of the Necronomicon—the mystical book of the dead and a favorite heavy metal literary source—and the beliefs of a group of ancient pre-Islamic magicians called the Muqarribun. As told on The War on the Wailing Wall—accompanied by photographs of the band feigning a defilement of the holy ancient West Wall of Jerusalem—the band’s satanic attack on Christianity and Judaism had a much more tangible dimension than the fantastical devil semiology of Florida death metal bands.
Neither was Africa’s metal scene limited to Westernized countries. Lagos, Nigeria, hosted a small metal cluster spread by the children of foreign diplomats. Though gory imagery remained a constant, the level of sedition in each country’s metal scene was highly relative. “Our metal scene is made up almost entirely of whites,” says guitarist Shukri Adams of the South African grindcore band Cauterized. “Nonwhite people do come to gigs, and there isn’t any obvious racial friction, but people keep to their own groups. I am the only nonwhite metal band member I know of in this country. I’ve had two white vocalists in the band, but while we’re friends, they don’t really share my enthusiasm for lyrics that lambaste racist South Africans.”
A sophisticated network of metal cells tied all of these disparate entities into one global web. Each country had specialty labels and distributors, like Relapse Records in America, Cogumelo in Brazil, and Siam Pacific in Thailand. It became possible for a band from India to share promotion with a band in Islamabad, Pakistan, then have its music released by a Brazilian label for sale in America and Europe. Internet contact hastened the process of networking and publicity. The bootstraps approach of Metal Massacre was happening a thousand times over as metal become borderless folk culture, the first voice of dissent and disaffection.
While American and European death metal acts went adventuring in the world, Brazil’s brilliant Sepultura came from a cultural backwoods to become the international metal success story of the 1990s. On 1989’s Arise, its fourth record, the teenage members of Sepultura combined the snarling aggression of Slayer with the powerful multi-layered composition of Master of Puppets—era Metallica. Even while developing an activist message on later albums, the band remained unpretentious and approachable. Following a brief feud between the two parties, Sepultura was the one death metal act that Slayer deemed worthy of having influenced. “In the beginning they were Slayer babies,” says Kerry King. “They just had the lower voice. There was some serious Slayer influence. Then, around Chaos A.D., they got their own direction, and they were good at it.”
Sepultura 1987 (left to right): Paolo Jr. (wearing calculator watch), Max Cavalera, Igor Cavalera, Andreas Kisser (Roadrunner Records)
Sepultura threw deathly thrash back at the Europeans while keeping its South American identity. Even the satanic character of early albums like Morbid Visions, recorded when the members were fourteen years old, responded to the realities of their Third World environment. “In Belo Horizonte, where we lived,” explains singer/guitarist Massimiliano Cavalera, aka Max, “almost everybody that’s born there goes to church and starts praying and is a Catholic already. Like I used to be, until I really started to understand things and found out it’s just a bunch of shit. Everything is just unreal. They were so rich in the church, and they were doing nothing to help people, really. There’s more churches than houses there.”
As close to death
metal as any other gold-selling record before it, Chaos A.D. stripped down Sepultura’s sound into a coarse metallic loop. The CD sold half a million copies, and alongside Pantera the band forged a streetwise, death-derived groove metal that inspired an upcoming generation of mavens in the 1990s. “One thing I love about Max Cavalera of Sepultura,” says Shawn Crahan of Slipknot, “he plays with three or four strings on his guitar, because he has no need for two of them. I love that philosophy.”
Not merely a metal success story, Sepultura was the most popular rock band ever to embark from Brazil, a country with a vast musical landscape. As it toured the Northern Hemisphere, the group brought its hometown roadies and soccer balls, retaining a distinctly familial Brazilian atmosphere. On the acoustic protest hymn “Itsari” the band recruited native Amazon drummers from the troubled Xavantes rainforest tribe. The marriage of Max Cavalera to the band’s manager, Gloria Bujnowski, was a paparazzo event in Brazil compared by one guest to the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Yet Sepultura’s vision remained focused on the impoverished Brazil portrayed in “Kaiowas,” a raging memorial to an Amazonian tribe that committed mass suicide rather than Westernize.
The members of Sepultura visit their home fan club (Katherine Ludwig)
Fans repaid Sepultura with devotion, especially in South America, Mexico, Spain, and Portugal—all regions with rampant metal scenes. Though Brazilians speak Portuguese as a remnant of their colonial heritage, Sepultura considered all Hispanic fans “the same Latin American kind of blood, the same kind of people,” according to guitarist Andreas Kisser. “It’s the same kind of feeling when you play in Mexico and Brazil. The people are really hungry to see shows. They kind of identify with us, because we are from Brazil, in South America.”