by Ian Christe
Yet for Lars Ulrich, seeing Napster raise hundreds of millions of dollars from its intended IPO of Napster.com stock was unthinkable. Aside from Napster’s file-sharing software, the company’s only valuable asset was its user base and name brand—both built on an immense library of free music. There was broad-sighted righteousness in this claim that was lost, however, as Ulrich testified before the U.S. Congress on July 11, 2000, in support of greater industry control of copyrights. Former colleagues stood aghast. Ulrich did not distinguish between the company, Napster, and its millions of users, the Metallica fans. In his unwise protestations about “controlling the music,” Lars Ulrich simply appeared to be a greedy rock star piqued at the idea of losing a few dollars after building a multimillion-dollar fortune—in short, a shill for the RIAA.
Pranksters in May 2000 launched an Internet auction for Metal-lica’s integrity—"slightly used"—which reached $10 million before being canceled by eBay.com administrators. Lars Ulrich saw no reason to second-guess his position and did little to dispel negative opinion. He chose to play the lead in facing down Napster, and ultimately he prevailed, as the service was moribund by the end of the year. Even Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, who had taken $1.8 million from Napster to play a free tour promoting the service, eventually sided with the RIAA. As always, it was difficult to question Lars Ulrich’s headstrong assurances. “For the doubters out there, Metallica will carry on for the next twenty years,” Ulrich said during an hourlong Internet chat explaining the band’s position. “Whether you’re around for the ride or not, that’s your problem, not ours.”
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Reenthroned Emperors:
It’s a Headbanding World
December 4, 1997: First original Black Sabbath reunion in Birmingham, England
April 1999: Metallica joins the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in Berkeley, California
August 5, 2000: Iron Maiden and Halford sellout Madison Square Garden in two hours
May 2, 2002: Nielsen reports The Osbournestop-rated cable show, with more than 6 million viewers.
“It was back to the beginning last month in Birmingham for the members of Black Sabbath. Where the Reunion tour began December 4, 1997, it ended on a high note December 21 and 22, 1999, with two scintillating shows which proved that, although the legend was being put to rest, its tale will be spun for generations to come. Both nights saw the four legends, energized and emotional, draped in black, the deafening roar of Birmingham’s favorite sons washing over fans in the NEC Arena in a tidal wave of history in the making. ‘Black Sabbath,’ ‘Iron Man,’ ‘Children of the Grave,’ ‘N.I.B.’—the canon of classics were trumpeted one last time in the company of the hometown Sabbath congregation. Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward—we may never see their like again.”
—Birmingham, England, news report
As heavy metal was frenzied by new influences and technology, Ozzfest reverted to an undisputedly heavy center when it presented the return of Black Sabbath in 1999. The original quartet had previously played three songs together at the Live Aid benefit concert in July 1985, then briefly reunited in November 1992 for a pair of gigs in Costa Mesa, California, with Rob Halford of Judas Priest handling most of the vocals. This return of the original lineup at the close of the 1990s, however, had a higher, preordained feeling. “It’s like putting on old shoes,” Ozzy told VH1. “It fits.”
Fully thirty years after four lads from Birmingham formed the band and twenty years after parting ways, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward were reunited. “I think it’s kind of agreed that metal all started with Sabbath, then there was Priest, then Maiden, and so on,” says Rob Halford. “By the truest definitions of what we call heavy metal, at least, Sabbath were the godfathers. They were a major inspiration to countless new artists. Even today all the new bands on the block cite this great band Sabbath as a major influence.”
Returning with the platinum-selling Reunion double CD, recorded on an ecstatic night in Birmingham in 1997, the band headlined Ozzfest in 1999 to gleeful cross-generational crowds. Regaling audiences with “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” and “Children of the Grave” for the first time in many fans’ lives the band added forgotten gems like “Dirty Women” and “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” cloaking three decades of heavy metal in a celebratory mood. Thus marked the return of the solid gravitational core that metal fans had lacked since the mainstreaming of Metallica.
Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, heavy metal architect (Deborah Laws/Metalflakes.com)
There were setbacks. Ozzy and the members of Sabbath had been at odds for years over personal rebuffs and unrepaid loans made by Ozzy to the others. Then, when they did get back together, Bill Ward suffered a heart attack. Ward also admitted that after many years of debilitating alcoholism, he could not immediately remember exactly what to do when he sat down at his drums. With these potential hazards in mind, Sabbath kept another former drummer, Vinnie Appice, waiting in the wings in case anything happened to Ward. Nothing did.
For certain, the reinstitution of Ozzy Osbourne to his proper place at the helm of Sabbath revealed the forty-nine-year-old singer’s shaky state—antipsychotic medication had transformed him into nearly a virtual rendering of his fiery younger self. Yet the return to form was magical. When reports of Ozzy Osbourne’s using an onstage TelePrompTer called into question the singer’s mental condition, radio host Howard Stern defended this natural wonder: “What would you rather have, this Ozzy, who’s way out there, or no Ozzy at all?”
After singing for the band during the early 1980s, Ronnie James Dio had briefly rejoined Black Sabbath for the 1992 album Dehuman-izer. Despite those contributions he respectfully declined to cause friction by joining the reunion and competing with Ozzy. “I had a great time what I consider helping that band get back into reality again and making them successful again,” says Dio. “Sabbath was my favorite band to be in, and those are my favorite people to write with. Heaven and Hell will always be my favorite album. Tony Iommi is the ultimate riff master; he’s got so many of them.”
The defiant statements of Sabbath’s early albums had become nothing less than modern folklore, and the band on its thirtieth anniversary still defined heavy metal—an incredible feat of longevity. Among other revelations, the reunion confirmed that Black Sabbath had created a new essential repertoire and that Tony Iommi’s riffs were the bedrock of heavy metal. “Today it seems like heavy metal replaced what the blues was then,” Geezer Butler told Guitar. “Everybody gets up and does ‘Paranoid’… instead of the old blues stuff.”
Not surprisingly given the band’s vast sphere of influence, the reunion of Black Sabbath’s original lineup was the highest-grossing rock tour of 1999. Billboard reported that Ozzfest was the top-grossing-per-show summer concert event in both 1997 and 1998, and bringing Black Sabbath aboard only bumped up the festival’s bandwidth. For true metal and nu metal alike, Black Sabbath was a shared idol that every phase and flavor of metalhead could honor and adore. The moment augured fertility for the next evolution of heavy metal and promised its permanent survival. As Ozzy flashed peace signs and shouted, “We love you all!” into the night for the four thousandth time, the divisions across generations were mended, and heavy metal once again came surging to the fore.
COMEBACKS
Returns to the fold by Dio, Bruce Dickinson, and the mighty Black Sabbath were a welcome surprise to the metal boom of 2001, but Virgin Steele and Necrophagia? Yes, as the twentieth anniversary of Metal Massacre came, even the metal underground found room for nostalgia in its perpetual-energy machine. Fortunately for death metal, most of the musicians were so young the first time around that they remain creatively vital—slightly more experienced and just barely reaching into their thirties. In other cases bands like Destruction that were stylistic innovators are able to explore their inventions fully, delivering complex versions of their initial blasts. “When you can make money, you will reform,” observes metal lifer Ron Quintana.<
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The Return
Artillery, B.A.C.K. (1999)
Black Sabbath, Reunion (1998)
Destruction, All Hell Breaks Loose (2000)
Dio, Magica (2000)
Exodus, Another Lesson in Violence (1997)
Halford, Live Insurrection (2001)
Necrophagia, Holocausto de la Morte (1999)
Testament, First Strike Still Deadly (2001)
With Black Sabbath crowning a new heavy metal millennium, metal of every conceivable kind soon became again more publicly visible than ever before. In 1999, Billboard reported that after a decade of decline, there were more than 500 specialty metal radio shows in the United States, nearly three times more than in 1989, metal’s previous heyday. When metal reigned in the 1980s, the audience grew increasingly fractured—at the end of the 1990s it was larger than ever and increasingly unified. Even as they enjoyed changing trends, fans continued to educate themselves in the headbanger classics. “I meet these people who enthusiastically say, ‘I still listen to Nuclear Assault’s Game Over and Anthrax’s Fistful of Metal and S.O.D.’s Speak English or Die every day,’ “ says Dan Lilker, the bassist on all three albums. “That stuff definitely had an impact. You realize now how many people really got into that stuff and how much it meant to them.”
Godfathers like Motörhead and Iron Maiden returned to prominence with a vengeance. Iron Maiden reunited with longtime singer Bruce Dickinson and sold out New York’s Madison Square Garden on August 5, 2000, with Queensryche and former Judas Priest singer Halford supporting. “That was mind-blowing,” recalls Rob Halford. “It was just amazing, even though it was a blur. It was a thrill to be back in the Garden, simply because it’s a landmark venue. Those walls carry so much history. Whenever I play the Garden, it’s just one of the most special feelings you can ever get as a musician.”
Biff Byford of Saxon reconquers America
Overnight, it seemed every major band from every era of heavy metal was returning for a triumphant curtain call. From the 1970s came Bang, Captain Beyond, and UFO, and from the NWOBHM resurfaced Savage, Sweet Savage, Holocaust, and Raven. From the mid-1980s came a storming torrent of returns to power metal madness by Anvil, Mercyful Fate, Virgin Steele, Exciter, Celtic Frost, Destruction, Hirax, and Whiplash. The fist-shaking glam bands Hanoi Rocks, Ratt, Stryper, and Poison also toured successfully, though wisely without benefit of hair spray.
Some groups re-formed after learning of their enduring popularity via Internet fan sites—a more accurate barometer of public opinion than glossy music magazines. Other musicians driven to disillusionment during earlier pushes for success began playing again for the love of music. After a momentary drought in the mid-1990s, there now seemed to be enough money and enthusiasm for everybody. “I’m not in any position to be retiring, so I do have to think about that,” comments John Bush on the subject of Armored Saint’s return after an eight-year absence.
Even little-known underground bands reunited, finding that many of their members were no older than thirty. In the case of Necrophagia, which regrouped with Pantera’s Phil Anselmo playing guitar under the pseudonym Anton Crowley, the magnificent garage gore of the reunion matched and surpassed what the band had accomplished as a 1980s tape-trader favorite. With no chance of Tom Warrior’s ever resurrecting his childishly simplistic Hellhammer, the German trio Warhammer gamely took up the task of emulating the Swiss band’s aesthetic on The Winter of Our Discontent and Deathchrist CDs—like a dark descendant of a Beatlemania-style revival.
The new millennium even brought a few blips of recognition to the long-lived doom metal scene, a world so retrograde and entrenched in primitivism that it barely recognized any metal milestones beyond the first Black Sabbath album. Hugely bolstered by the return of Sabbath and heavily in debt to Tony Iommi’s mythic riffs, doom metal was a long-lived culture of shadow dwellers that tuned far below even the masters in search of salvation. Beginning with the overlooked Lucifer’s Friend and Necromandus in the early 1970s, doom crawled through the 1980s with Trouble, Witchfinder General, the Obsessed, Candlemass, Pentagram, and Saint Vitus, then into the 1990s with Cathedral, Sleep, and Burning Witch. Their plaintive dirges had developed underground from the very dawn of metal, reacting to metallic excess with excursions into deeper, soulful truth.
Swimming against the current—whether that meant the speed of thrash metal or the high technology of nu metal—doom metal searched for the slowest, most emotionally compelling sounds. Throughout every era there were doom metal counterparts to prevailing trends. Chicago’s majestic Trouble, for example, were doom preachers whose biblical lyrics served as a counterpoint to Slayer in the 1980s. As doom metal’s overlooked figures were finally recognized, they became heroes who had shepherded heavy metal’s essence through the meanest environments. Formed in the late 1970s, Saint Vitus was a misfit sludge outfit thrust upon unfriendly Los Angeles punk audiences as an opening act for Black Flag. The members of Saint Vitus were so unpretentious they admitted to writing songs while listening to Iron Maiden on headphones. After several albums the band recruited vocalist Scott Weinrich, aka Wino, to make the brilliantly defiant Born Too Late in 1986. From its anthemic title track to “Thirsty and Miserable” (a Black Flag cover twice as long as the original), the album was a victorious tortoise to the misplaced hyperactivity of the frantic Hollywood hair bands.
Doom gods Saint Vitus (SST Records)
Wino was an authentic throwback with one foot planted deep in the first wave of heavy metal, and his music rang with essential truth. “I saw Sabbath on my twelfth birthday, in 1972,” he told Seconds magazine. “That was my second concert ever, and I wasn’t even really smoking pot yet, but that show made a lifelong impression on me. The power of Sabbath on the Paranoid tour in 1972, with all the old gear—the huge walls of Laney—it was just unbelievable. For me, being that young, it was unreal.” After the demise of Saint Vitus, Wino reformed his previous outfit, the Obsessed, and released several albums, leading to a deal with Sony/Columbia at the same time as Napalm Death’s—again threading through the netherworlds of metal happenings. By the late 1990s he was taking Iommi-style guitar to places even Sabbath could no longer reach.
Formed in the shadows of Trouble and Saint Vitus, a new range of bands arose in the 1990s with members not even born in 1972. The young California quartet Sleep released two albums shamelessly interpolated from between the grooves of the first Black Sabbath album. Coining the sound “stoner rock,” Sleep unleashed a fleet of imitators like Orange Goblin and Electric Wizard, who in turn flourished on their own music festivals and “stoner doom” record labels. Finding major backing with London Records in 1995, Sleep meditated on marijuana and the Old Testament to summon Jerusalem, a fifty-three-minute single-song slab of career suicide. Apparently not having tested the limits of its major-label benefactors to its own satisfaction, the band promptly announced it would not tour to support this one-song wonder. London dropped the group in 1998, tape traders frantically duplicated rare advance copies of the disc, and Sleep soon broke up—two of its members retreating to monasteries.
Joe Preston is the Thrones (Vicky Baron)
Slowed to an extreme atmospheric crawl, pure doom could occasionally transcend the guidelines laid down by Black Sabbath. While he was the bassist of the Melvins, Joe Preston had released a solo album featuring “The Eagle Has Landed,” a twenty-minute suite of cascading guitar slabs named after a Saxon live LP. Along with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Preston also belonged to Earth, a droning, feedback-laden Seattle troupe led by Dylan Carlson. Its Earth 2 Special Low Frequency Version in 1993 was a brooding vista of dense, time-stretched bass rumble. With similar intentions Preston later created the Thrones, whose microchip-assisted, low, seeping bass and laser blasts sounded like a bionic version of heaviness. “I want to hear big things that move at weird speeds,” says Preston.
Tying together all shreds of doom, gloom, and stoner rock, Cathedral was led by cockeyed cackler Lee Dorrian, yet another for
mer Napalm Death singer. Cathedral defended a citadel of awkward musical exceptions, attacking the unfinished business of Black Sabbath around the time of the threatening denseness of Sabotage. Following ten years of releases experimenting with every variation from noise to funk to disco, the band on the Endtyme CD in 2001 swayed with charming sleaze while still honoring its original commitment to crushing and suffocating the universe. After a decade-long apprenticeship, Cathedral became castle-crushing masters, enshrining heavy metal with powerful, perpetual poise, in utter defiance of an ephemeral, pitter-patter society.
On the brink of the year 2000 the world of metal paused to admire its own spectacle and saw a metallized planet staring back eagerly. The new millennium found spiked belts, leather pants, and vintage Iron Maiden and Dio shirts once again on the cutting edge of cool. In culture capitals like New York and Los Angeles, designers turned old tour shirts into haute couture, and art galleries were filled with conceptual takes on heavy metal mannerisms by blue-chip artists like Matthew Barney—who made nonlinear films starring former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo and Morbid Angel singer Steve Tucker.
Although survival during a previous decade of media disrepair was sweet, the victory was not merely financial—the entire culture, beliefs, and interests of heavy metal had infiltrated the mainstream without abandoning heart. There was finally a place for heavy metal in the mainstream—integrity and uncomfortable truths intact. With its emphasis on fan involvement, Metallica had been narrowcasting and viral marketing for a decade before those practices became corporate buzz-words. Even the gritty realism of … And Justice for All became standard reality television, as documentary channels and countless hours of dirty laundry urged viewers to judge society for themselves.