by Ian Christe
Metal Blade wanted major distribution for its records, but it did not need mandated morality from a corporate baby-sitter. “We went to [label executives] Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker,” says Slagel, “and we told them if it was going to be a continuing problem, we didn’t think it was going to work for us. I’m not going to tell bands to take songs off the records. We worked out a deal. The Goo Goo Dolls stayed at Warner Bros. and have obviously gone on to some success— and we went back to independent distribution, which has been a blessing.” Indeed, without major-label backing, Cannibal Corpse soon became the first death metal band to debut in Billboard’s album chart.
The government’s intervention and efforts to influence the music business in the Ice-T case was an example of the third, and most heinous, facet of organized attacks on heavy metal: direct government attempts to censor or restrict the sale of metal albums. The spirit of these complaints against heavy metal had been discredited by prior court cases, but sometimes the political currency of having shocking music simply appear in court was more important than the outcome. From circular logic again came a familiar self-propagating conclusion: If there were parental-advisory warning stickers—themselves the product of government meddling—there must also be inherent danger and a need for further regulation.
With its explicitly obscene album covers and lyrical blasphemies, it was inevitable that Jim Carrey’s favorite band, Cannibal Corpse, would become a target for political posturing. At the end of 1997 Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut chided the band during a renewed congressional attack on the entertainment industry, also citing other diverse signs of cultural decay, such as Fox Television’s When Animals Attack, the computer game Postal, and Calvin Klein’s “heroin chic” ad campaigns. In a statement titled The Social Impact of Music Violence, he testified, “Consider the vile work of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse, distributed through a Sony subsidiary, which recorded one song describing the rape of a woman with a knife and another describing the act of masturbating with a dead woman’s head. This is extremely awful, disgusting stuff that kids are listening to.”
Cannibal Corpse could not have asked for a more precious authentication of its shock value. The more the inhuman image of such bands was taken at face value by politicians, the more curious new fans sought out the band’s sensationalized CDs. Both Lieberman and the group saw their careers advance—the senator’s profile was raised, and he was tapped as Al Gore’s vice-presidential running mate in 2000. Meanwhile, hapless headbangers were caught in the crossfire back in their hometowns, where rhetoric could turn into police warrants and court dates.
Government intervention continued to intimidate people and inhibit sales at small metal specialty stores in Florida, where district attorneys facing reelection threatened to arrest clerks who sold stickered records to minors. At least six states during the 1990s sought to enact legislation that would criminalize sales to minors of CDs bearing the supposedly voluntary stickers. On the verge of giving up their courtroom assaults, heavy metal’s opponents were suddenly recharged to attack with the help of lawmakers.
In September 2001 those going after heavy metal for philosophical reasons or financial gain in the United States were buttressed by a Department of Justice report that charged negligence not on the part of artists themselves but on the part of the distribution companies that sold objectionable material to minors. This federal report reopened the doors to a dormant 1995 wrongful-death case against Slayer and its record label. A new legal strategy was formulated that attempted, instead of targeting the creation of the music, to frame the widespread marketing of Slayer CDs as the illegal sale of a dangerous substance. Thus the misguided attempts at moral cleansing continued.
Government crackdowns on heavy metal were to be expected in police states like North Korea and the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. In Malaysia the government even barred heavy metal outright from radio and television in 2001 and sought to block performances by Megadeth and Scorpions on the basis of “black metal cults” they claimed were sacrificing small animals and burning the Koran in secret forest rituals. Primitive and antidemocratic as such crackdowns seemed, the same approaches were used in attempts to control heavy metal in America—only the gloves were softer.
XVIII
The Antimetal Tra:
Haircuts & Hew Roots
1995: Headbangers Ball canceled by MTV
April 10, 1996: Metallica appears with haircuts at Alice in Chains’ MTV Unplugged taping
June 27, 1996: Metallica, Ramones, and Soundgarden launch Lollapalooza ‘96
Death metal raged, black metal burned, and good old-fashioned heavy metal continued to sell tens of millions of CDs during the 1990s—yet the public spotlight moved elsewhere. In the dull eyes of the mainstream, metal was dead. Popular culture in the Prozac-gobbling era of Bill Clinton could scarcely have been less committed to anything. Attitudes in this prosperous and gentle time tended toward moderation and self-restraint—two of metal’s admitted weaknesses. Though metal still reigned in Europe, Americans were lulled into thinking they no longer had need of dissent. “People are getting a little too much into political correctness now,” Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman told Tales from the Pit. “That may be why people like to say metal is dead, because metal is about freedom and saying what’s on your mind—not curbing your thoughts.”
The cancellation of the long-running Headbangers Ball video show in 1995 was a crushing blow to heavy metal—even Nirvana had made their MTV debut on the program. Already the Poison-fueled glam metal party had faded like a bad hangover. In its place romped Green Day and the Offspring, leaders of the squeaky-clean wing of the still-active hardcore punk scene. Stepping up to represent several generations of dyed hair, Green Day’s child-safe Dookie sold a whopping 8 million copies by 1995 and dominated magazine and newspaper music coverage for more than two years. Punk’s importance to rock and roll was finally being acknowledged, though the music was now being delivered by sterile new messengers. “I hope they took that money and invested it,” says Richie Stotts of the Plasmatics, “because they had some good hits. I had no problem with it. Green Day wrote pop songs. Were they trying to be anything more than what they were? It was like the Knack—it was fun!”
With aggression and frustration conveniently excised, this was over-the-counter counterculture—not the confrontational, scary music that excited metalheads. Punk had become a Southern California lifestyle product, settled in a subdivision of the entertainment industry. “For me, punk always represented sociopolitical lyrics and some kind of an edge,” says Alycia Morgan, an editor of Metal Maniacs. “Some kind of angst made it different. Those Berkeley bands that sing about masturbating on the couch and [about] girls are safe. They’re not threatening to the status quo at all. Nirvana to me was more threatening—they had real angst and real seriousness to their lyrics that these bands don’t have.”
Yet heavy metal had lost its mandate, and its values were being cast aside in many ways. Very different from graduates of the heavy metal school, the happy punks and their older siblings the alternative rock bands were cautious not to appear too friendly to the system. While Quiet Riot had capitalized on the overnight success of Metal Health in 1984 by instantly jumping aboard a Black Sabbath tour, platinum punks the Offspring turned down arena gigs with Metallica and Stone Temple Pilots in 1994. “It just really didn’t seem like the right thing to do,” says Offspring’s singer, Bryan Holland. “I still like the club thing, even if it’s a big club. I like Stone Temple Pilots—it’s not like we’re saying we’re too punk for that.”
Never entirely comfortable with heavy metal, the music press soon lost interest in headbangers. Instead they courted alternative rock bands who believed they had outsmarted the record industry by affecting a critical attitude toward career advancement. Rather than deliver musical landmarks like Master of Puppets and Reign in Blood, bands like Sebadoh passed off musical monotony as ironic disaffection. “Someone came up with the idea that it’s
uncool to try and entertain the audience, so those shows are so boring,” says Rob Zombie. “Liz Phair and all that stuff—who cares?” The alternative rock band Pavement satirized the changed music world in “Cut Your Hair,” an ode to the increasingly desperate world of musicians’ classifieds— once the lifeblood of the Hollywood metal scene.
While the media ignored metal’s continued vitality, the numbers told a different story. The dirty little secret: When it came to record sales, the pop machine could not destroy something it had not created in the first place. While Spin feasted on the fall from grace of Skid Row and Poison, it was never more obvious that heavy metal did not judge its success by the burn rate of monthly magazines. For instance, the starting point for all MTV metal, Quiet Riot’s Metal Health, sold 2 million copies during the 1990s. Motley’s Crüe’s sleazy Dr. Feelgood— as raunchy a celebration of crotchless underwear as ever emanated from Hollywood—after 1991 continued to rack up triple-, quadruple-, quintuple-, and ultimately sextuple-platinum sales, measuring 4 million records sold after the alleged housecleaning of glam. In comparison, though seemingly ubiquitous during the 1990s, the Doggystyle CD by L.A. rapper Snoop Dogg sold only 4 million copies total.
Even with its pretty flowers clipped, the dirty roots of metal remained to reach out to new audiences. Black Sabbath’s Paranoid crossed the 4 million mark in January 1995. Slayer rode a commercial high in 1994 as Divine Intervention went gold in six weeks, the evil band’s fourth gold record since 1992. Afterward Pantera, now an undeniable force, returned ever heavier with its own Billboard Top 10 album. The very traditional Youthanasia CD by Megadeth went platinum in early 1995, complete with piles of guitar solos and billowing volumes of hair. Even Ozzmosis, released by the indefatiguable Ozzy Osbourne in 1995, sold 3 million copies within one year.
Nonetheless, Tower Records put its spiked wristbands on clearance sale, oblivious to how extreme acts, like Morbid Angel, Emperor, and Deicide, were still strapping on their leather and selling millions of CDs. As always, the black T-shirts on the street told the true story of metal’s durability, “Looking at MTV, I get pretty disgusted,” says Relapse Records’ Matt Jacobson. “What can you do? You’re always going to have a lot of people who are just going to listen to whatever is accepted by mass culture. There’s no way you can change that, so all I can say is I feel bad for them. When the mainstream media killed cock rock, people thought metal was dead. It wasn’t. We’ve always been in touch with it and involved with it, and consequently we’ll always grow.”
Once again, fans became rats scurrying underfoot. While metal suffered in the public eye, Metallica helped matters very little. For years they put the heavy metal world first. Now jumping uncharacteristically into the limelight at every television awards show and video opportunity, the band traveled with alternative acts Hole and Veruca Salt in September 1995 to perform at a publicity festival for Molson Ice beer in the Arctic hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk. The band that had refused for more than seven years even to make a video was now accepting promotional engagements.
The Black Album cleverly calmed the overkill of Metallica while remaining heavy metal at its essence. With its successor, released five years later in June 1996, the band broke its trademark crunching sound down completely, crashing through the stained-glass ceiling and leaving heavy metal behind. Beckoning pejorative puns with its title, Load featured a respectably meaty production, yet classical European metal songcraft was abandoned in favor of simple blues-based riffs. This conversion earned widespread radio play that had always eluded heavy metal, but it was a lazy victory. “I felt a little betrayed,” recalls Ronnie James Dio—whose band, Dio, was derailed in the late 1980s in part by the juggernaut of a hungrier Metallica. “I thought they started sounding like they wanted to be Deep Purple, and that wasn’t the Metallica that I remembered and really cared for.”
In the thirteen years since Kill Em All, Metallica’s early head-banger accoutrements—jean jackets, Saxon pins, and the pubescent mustache on Lars Ulrich’s face—had given way to a uniform of matching black jeans and shirts. Now, in one fell swoop, Metallica’s members cropped their long locks—the traditional signifier of a metaller’s commitment to the cause. With sideburns shaved high into freakish Mohawks, Jason Newsted and James Hetfield had been halfway shorn since 1992. In Newsted’s case the final, complete cut was typically practical. “I was busted for possession of psychedelic mushrooms,” he told Melody Maker, “and I spent Saturday night in the West Hollywood sheriff’s jail. I paid a thousand dollars bail, cut my hair, went to court, case was dismissed.”
Shorn: James Hetfield at Lollapalooza (Stew Milne)
After years of impassive anti-image, Load presented dozens of photos of Metallica dressed up in a bizarre fashion show of costumes. The group presented itself alternately as errand runners for the Cuban mob, Canadian hairdressers, tourists in Times Square, or simply Metallica wearing eyeliner. Metallica was finally dressing to suit its bank account. “I haven’t worn underpants for the last fifteen years,” Lars Ulrich told Melody Maker, “but about nine months ago I decided I was never going to wear jeans again. Because I’m not circumcised, unlike most Americans, there’d be a considerable amount of urine splashed over my expensive non-jean pants caused by my excessive consumption of alcohol. So my wife suggested I wear underwear so I wouldn’t piss in my nice expensive designer-label pants all the time.”
This affluent metalhead mind-set caught longtime fans in a struggle between lingering affection and apathy. “I understand all the new hairstyles and trends, but Metallica’s one band that didn’t need to do any of that shit,” says longtime friend and fan Katon W. DePena ruefully. “But I guess they figure if they’re going to sell out, they might as well do it rad.” Even upgrading the price range of its artwork, Metallica relegated on-call illustrator Pushead to merchandise design, and for Loaod’s CD cover reproduced the expensive photograph Blood and Semen III by Andres Serrano, a collectible New York artist notorious for suspending a crucifix in a jar of his urine.
Though its music was lighter, on the plus side the lyrics on Load were more personally revealing than anything previous, as James Het-field worked through his anger at his parents carefully instead of simply lashing out with fury. The metal gods were mellowing into mortal human beings. “Going back listening to the Black record, it sounds so tight and so constricted,” James Hetfield told Addicted to Noise. “We thought, ‘Boy, that’s the loosest, livest-sounding thing we’ve done.’ Compared to this one, it’s like anal.”
Put simply—after dealing with exhausting lyrical subjects, the death of Cliff Burton, years of touring, and bearing the weight of metal credibility while opening commercial opportunities for heavy music, the band finally allowed itself to relax publicly. Fifteen years was long enough for James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich to scowl—in many eyes the members of Metallica deserved to enjoy their hard-earned rock-star retirement. “Metallica can do whatever they want,” says Shawn Crahan of the band Slipknot. “They won. They earned the right to do what they want today.”
Among the strange changes of the mid-1990s, Metallica’s cutting its hair and opting for a normal life nearly paled in comparison to the odd saga of Judas Priest. Singer Rob Halford departed Judas Priest in the early 1990s and formed the leaner, Pantera-themed project called Fight. While debating Halford’s replacement, Judas Priest discovered Tim Owens, aka Ripper, nicknamed after one of their own signature songs. Incredibly, the twenty-eight-year-old Ohio resident had “played” Rob Halford in a Judas Priest cover band called British Steel and had exactly patterned his natural range after Halford’s. “It’s a one-of-a-kind story,” explains Ripper. “I was in a Judas Priest tribute band. Some girl from Rochester, New York, shot video footage of my next-to-last performance with them in Erie, Pennsylvania, and forwarded it to Priest. I don’t think anyone that’s ever been in a tribute band ever made it to the band that was being tributed.”
Giving the strange situation a further turn for the peculiar, on the
same day that Judas Priest announced plans to introduce its new singer to fans through a world tour, Rob Halford upstaged his old crew by holding a press conference to blow the cover from his thinly veiled homosexuality. Halford had dressed like an S&M leather daddy since the mid-1970s, and his coming out was small surprise to anyone who had seen the man wield a riding crop. Still, after twenty years of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” it was astonishing to hear a definitive answer to one of the great unanswered questions of metal.
Early Judas Priest concept videos had alluded to Halford’s gay-ness by placing the singer in a variety of homoerotic roles—in “Hot Rockin’” he was pushed aside by his sweaty bandmates as they entered a room of scantily clad women without him. The titles of Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance and Ram It Down took on new meaning, as did the urgent delivery of many classic songs. In particular the band’s 1980 hit, “Breaking the Law,” was written while what was then called “buggery” was still illegal throughout most of the United Kingdom and the subject of political debate. Certainly the words of the 1976 anthem “Genocide” assumed prophetic new meaning following the AIDS epidemic: “Sin after sin, I have endured. Yet the wounds I bear are the wounds of love.”
As the legacy of Judas Priest was cast in a new light, the biggest surprise was how the tougher-than-leather metal community took the news in stride. Halford told the Boston Phoenix in April 1998 that he did not consider heavy metal a homophobic genre of music. “I think it would be unfair to pin it down exclusively to the world of heavy metal,” he said. “I think that metal is still perceived by most people as being a very macho, straight, male, drinking-and-chicks kind of environment, so people make assumptions about it.”
Halford’s iconic status remained firm—to deny him would mean repressing a huge portion of heavy metal’s sound and imagery. “Maybe because of who I am and what I’ve shared with people,” Hal-ford said, “a majority of people have been able to handle it in the metal community.” Needless to say, the announcement did not start a wave of heavy metal unclosetings. If other flamboyant front men were also eking out a secretive life, they held their tongues. The complex drama of this story led to a lengthy GQ article examining Ripper’s unusual role in Judas Priest, which in turn inspired a screenplay titled Metal God—released later as Rock Star.