But these are simply the givens of the genre—the shared traits that give any pop style its claim to singularity or separateness. Within the kingdom of speed-metal, each band is singular unto itself, but there is probably none that is more inspiriting than Anthrax. Like Slayer or any other number of bands, Anthrax often deals with questions of rage and despair. But in contrast to these other bands, Anthrax wants to know where those dark feelings come from, and how they affect the lives of the people in the group’s audience. If speed-metal can lay claim to its own Clash or Who—a band that tries to make sense of its audience’s moment in history and how that moment can be transformed into the basis for community—then clearly, that band is Anthrax.
In part, Anthrax’s commitment to the ideals of community owes as much to the band’s interest in punk as to its roots in metal. Like most of the other musicians on this tour, the members of Anthrax first developed their passion for heavy metal in the middle and late 1970s, when artists like Kiss, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC were defining the frontier of rock & roll bravado. But in 1976, all that changed. Punk groups like New York’s the Ramones and England’s Sex Pistols took heavy metal’s style and stripped it of its excesses—its overreliance on flashy lead guitars and pretty-boy cock-rock—and transformed it into something that was at once both more primitive and more radical. Indeed, punk bands drew new stylistic, generational, and political lines across the breadth of rock & roll, and they declared that if you did not stand on punk’s side of the line, then you did not stand anywhere that counted. As a result, the punk and metal factions didn’t get along very well, despite a common interest in passionate, guitar-and-drums-driven rock & roll.
But Scott Ian, who was a heavy metal fan attending high school in Jamaica, Queens, New York, when punk was at its peak, couldn’t see the reason for all the division and antipathy. “To me,” he says, “Iron Maiden was every bit as underground—and every bit as valid—as the Ramones or Sex Pistols.”
In 1981, when Ian and a couple of other friends co-founded Anthrax, he envisioned the group as drawing from metal’s style but punk’s spirit. At first not much came of the idea; others in the group were happy to stick with metal’s familiar styles and fans. But on Sundays, when the band wasn’t playing or rehearsing, Ian and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante started hanging out at Manhattan’s legendary punk club, CBGBs, and making friends with members of the local hardcore scene. For a brief while, they even formed a side band—the legendary Stormtroopers of Death, regarded by many as a key punk-metal crossover group. In time, many of the hardcore kids started coming to Anthrax’s shows, and they brought with them some of their scene’s more colorful rites—like stage-diving and slam-dancing. The mingling of the two audiences made for some tense alliances at first; punks thought the metalheads had wretched fashion sense and bad politics, and the headbangers didn’t dig the punks’ violence. But by the mid-1980s, the punk scene had lost most of its stylistic inventiveness and some of its cultural clout, and the emerging thrash and speed-metal bands simply appropriated punk’s rhythmic intensity and its radical zeal as well.
These days, Anthrax can pretty much be exactly what it wants to be—a heavy metal band with a punk-informed conscience. Over the course of the group’s last four albums, Anthrax has become increasingly politically savvy and activist-minded, yielding some of the smartest songs about the social and emotional conditions of modern-day youth culture that rock & roll has produced in the last decade. But sometimes the band’s progressivism hasn’t set well with parts of its audience. In 1989, when the members of Anthrax appeared on the cover of heavy metal magazine RIP with their friends in Living Colour, a black metal band, the magazine received some ugly responses from several readers. Angered by the incident, and by the killing of black youth Yusef Hawkins in New York’s Bensonhurst area, Ian wrote “Keep It in the Family” and “H8Red,” a pair of scathing songs about race hatred that appeared on Persistence of Time.
Says Ian: “I think there’s a pretty good percentage of our audience—you know, white middle-to-lower-class kids—that hates black music and probably hates blacks as well. Why they hate blacks, they probably don’t know; it’s a prejudice that they’ve never questioned. I’m exposed to it all the time. People see me wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt, and they ask me, ’Why do you like that nigger music?’ I can’t really talk to somebody like that, you know? I don’t care if they’ve bought every one of our albums, I’m just not going to waste my time talking to somebody like that, and I’m certainly not going to condone their attitude just because they’re an Anthrax fan. They can like us or not, but I still think they’re an asshole.”
Ian pauses for a moment and shakes his head. “I wish there were a way to reach those people,” he says after a bit. “Maybe for some of them the music does make a difference. Maybe they can hear a song like “H8Red’ and understand that it’s a song about being hated just because of the way you look—whether it’s because you have long hair or you’re a skinhead or you’re black.
“I mean, I think for a lot of our fans who are into this music, things aren’t easy. Some of them are working jobs they can’t stand, and they aren’t sure who to blame for their lives, and so some of them end up getting drunk all the time or turning to drugs. I think what we try to say to them is: ’Hey, we’ve all gone through some of the same shit, but, you know, you can find a place in your life where you can make it. You know, you may hate your parents and hate your job and hate your life, but it’s your life, and you just got to fucking do what you got to do to make yourself and your world better.’ I think if Anthrax has any message, that’s it: Make yourself and your world better.”
A short while later, Scott Ian and the other members of Anthrax—singer Joe Belladonna, drummer Charlie Benante, bassist Frank Bello, and guitarist Dan Spitz—are onstage in Houston, spreading that message the best way they know how: by playing brilliant and enlivening rock & roll. It’s debatable, of course, whether the audience completely understands or agrees with what the band is saying in its music; maybe for many of those here the sheer visceral impact of the band’s performances is the only real meaning that matters. Still, there is something heartening about watching Joe Belladonna deliver a song like “Keep It in the Family”—which admonishes the band’s fans not to fall into the easy traps of their parents’ legacies of racism—and witnessing the audience flailing and thrashing to the words, as if this were a declaration worth raising a ruckus over.
A little later, though, when the band gets around to “Antisocial,” there’s no question that everybody knows what is being talked about. On record, the song is a rousing attack on a man who uses law and order and wealth to beat down the people he doesn’t understand. But in concert, it becomes something else. “You’re anti, you’re antisocial, yowls the band, pointing its fingers at the audience, and the audience stands up on its chairs and roars back the same line—”You’re anti, you’re antisocial”—pointing back at the band. Finally the band and the audience are yelling the same refrain to each other at the same moment, over and over, until the voices rise into the thousands. In that moment, both the crowd and the band are taking a term that has been used for years as a method of branding young people as outcasts and they turn that epithet into both a mutual accusation and a mutual affirmation. They are telling one another that they know exactly how the world views them, and that they are proud to be known by those terms. In that moment, Anthrax and its audience are forging a bond of community that, quite likely, they rarely find outside the society of heavy metal music. It is a way of saying: “We are here for each other. Whatever the rest of the world might say about us, we are here for each other.”
In the world that heavy metal and its fans are consigned to live in, that isn’t such a bad promise.
PART 5
lone voices
randy newman: songs of the promised land
Coming over the pass, you can see the whole valley spread below. On a clear morning, when it lies broad
and colored under a white sky, with the mountains standing far back on either side, you can imagine it’s the promised land.
ROSS MACDONALD
THE WYCHERLY WOMAN
Trouble in Paradise, Randy Newman’s first pop album since 1979’s Born Again, is perhaps the most forceful, full-formed statement about life in Los Angeles that popular music has yet produced. In it, Newman regards the city’s infamous frivolity and relentless, pacific gloss with humor, affection, fury, and bite—and he affirms them as worthy images (and even worthier ends) for a city with an incurable fixation on surface appearances. Newman also acknowledges that beneath such surfaces (and perhaps because of the broken confidence and swift hatred that those surfaces can also breed—particularly for those buried under those surfaces) there lurks an inevitable undertow of disillusionment and fear. Disillusionment that can turn quick fun into quicker meanness, especially when arrogance and indulgence become common ways to attain pleasure.
Trouble in Paradise is only partly about Los Angeles, but it’s those parts that give the record such resonance and depth. And by and large, it’s the city’s sheen and exuberance that compel Newman here. In the surging, boastful, “I Love L.A.,” Newman barrels along in a sleek convertible, a “big nasty redhead” beside him, and calls out the names of the city’s most familiar symbols of opportunity and escape. In a rousing, challenging voice he shouts: “Century Boulevard!” And a boisterous chorus roars back: “We love it!” “Victory Boulevard!” “We love it!” “Santa Monica Boulevard!” “We LOVE it!” “Sixth Street!” “WE LOVE IT!”
Some critics regard “I Love L.A.” as an ironic pose rather than a heartfelt anthem, as if what Newman says in the song is that this city is all quick surfaces and images. Well, he is saying that, but if you think he says it with cynicism or disdain, think again. Newman means what he purports here: He does love L.A.—in no small part because it’s the place he calls his home, but also because he’s fascinated by its knack for promoting veneer as its own distinction. Which isn’t to say Newman is oblivious to the empty-headedness the city cultivates. In “My Life Is Good,” an obnoxious nouveau riche songwriter declares to his son’s schoolteacher that wealth and position guarantee a claim to license and the servitude of others; by song’s end, Newman has deflated the haughtiness and sense of privilege that many in this city brandish as unassailable rights. At the same time, Newman isn’t so sure that the shallowness L.A. fosters belies its claim as the last American promised land. After all, a promised land is as good as a land of last hope. And when last hopes are gone, what often emerges is a place whose people are resentful of its culture and of one another, and who verge on ethical (not to mention aesthetic) desperation. The displacement born of this desperation is what has always made L.A. such an alluring place to write about—and an increasingly risky place to live.
Newman’s advocacy of L.A. is an interesting position for anyone to stake out in early-1980s pop music. Since the pop explosion of the 1960s (when Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Lou Adler, and the Byrds created versions of L.A. sound that set new standards in rock fun and studio art), and throughout the 1970s (when such artists as the Eagles and Jackson Browne forced those conceptions of fun to accommodate a new, heavily idealized ethos), Los Angeles has stood for a measured, bright-toned sound, espousing certain romanticized truths. The city’s music has also depended upon mass popularity (meaning accessibility) to assure its validity.
But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, L.A. became the setting for a revealing conflict of pop styles. Though the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Toto, and other well-bred L.A. acts continued to command a mass audience, a sharp-tempered and persistent underground movement also rose, spawning bands like X, the Germs, the Go-Go’s, Black Flag, and Fear—all of whom sought to give as much definition to the sound and ideals of modern L.A. as any of the bands that came before them. There’s a part of me that would like to think Newman’s Trouble in Paradise is a record that’s smart and expansive enough to contain both versions of L.A. (Warren Zevon’s records, too, might be seen as working this trick, though Zevon perhaps too strongly represents personal concerns as an exemplar of cultural style.) Certainly at its best, Randy Newman’s lyricism is as acerbic as that of, say, X, and obviously a lot wittier and more adept at parody than the tiresome punk burlesque of Fear.
Even the best and brightest of today’s punk-derived artists could learn an invaluable lesson from the way Newman wields point of view, and the way he inhabits and animates a song. The character in “There’s a Party at My House,” who winds up what began as an innocent saturnalia with an implied vision of rape (maybe even sportive sex murder), isn’t repugnant merely because of his dangerous impulses, but because he speaks to us in a way that can arouse our own desire to join the party. As a result, the song is more powerful than the anti-misogynist rock of Gang of Four, or for that matter, the pro-misogynist rock of Fear.
Yet what clearly separates Newman from the punks isn’t so much his idea of intelligence or viewpoint as it is his particular allegiance to sound. To be sure, Paradise is, in places, an assaultive, even bombastic record—in fact, Newman’s most physical sounding rock & roll since “Gone Dead Train” on 1970’s Performance soundtrack. But it is also a meticulously crafted, professionally realized work—a work that asserts precision and control as clear-cut aesthetic choices. “I Love L.A.” may roar and careen like a fine, fast, heady ride down the Imperial Highway, but there isn’t a reckless turn or offhand moment on the whole track, or anywhere else on the album.
In effect, Newman’s attention to artifice amounts to something of a recasting of his former sound. Though elaborate arrangements often graced the music of 12 Songs, Sail Away, and Good Old Boys, they almost never determined the actual form or temper of Newman’s Tin Pan Alley- and blues-infused songwriting. But on Paradise, the arrangements—the very outward show and force of some of the songs—are often as much a part of the songs’ meanings as the characters and wordplay that make up their textual detail. This may be Newman’s way of saying that he stands for (and stands up for) that exacting refinement which so many critics identify with the L.A. sound. Newman has as much as said so in recent interviews: The good values, he asserts, are not the guileful intelligence that a songwriter like Elvis Costello employs, or the social-minded bravura of the Clash, but rather the stylish dourness of Don Henley and the fastidious musicianship of Toto. To underscore his point, Newman rounded up several Los Angeles signature performers (including Henley, Rickie Lee Jones, Christine McVie, and Linda Ronstadt) as a way of reaffirming that, at its best, the L.A. sound was always more the result of shared community than cliquishness.
Which all means that Newman’s championing of that sound is much like his backhanded advocacy of L.A. as a culture of veneer: Either one can accept the city (and its music) for its surfaces, or one can accept it for the variety of truths those surfaces conceal, even nurture.
In some ways, this is where Paradise achieves its greatest literary effect. Both the sound and the meaning of its songs contain a vision of fun that does not end in mere fun, and a darker vision which is too complex to give in to rote notions of L.A. as a vast, sprawling network of desperation. According to Newman, desperation alone isn’t any more notable as a version of truth than fun is. In a sense, such recent L.A. bands as the Go-Go’s and X approach a similar conclusion, though from differing angles. Each band represents a contrary truth about this city—quick fun, or desperate action. But neither can fully convey the idea that to find the truth of this city, you must first penetrate those poses of fun and trouble and examine the way the search for fun (and the inability to capture it for very long) creates trouble and despair. (Neither do X or the Go-Go’s reveal enough about how trouble can enrich the idea of fun, or at least make its invention necessary.)
So what does Randy Newman say when cruising down the fabled mean streets that have fed the dark ruminations of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Charles Bukowski, a
nd Joan Didion? He says: “Roll down the window/Put down the top/Crank up the Beach Boys, baby/Don’t let the music stop.”
Trouble in Paradise so often weaves fun with darkness and gentleness with meanness that they begin to seem interchangeable, and then they seem inseparable. It tells us that hard truths wouldn’t matter much—wouldn’t be endurable—without the chance to hit the highway, where the wind can cleanse us of thoughts and the radio can fill the gaps in our feeling the way it fills the shiny, dirty sky around us.
It’s the way we’ve learned to ride out hell, in the City of Angels.
al green: sensuality in the service of the lord
When Al Green takes a stage, both miracle and mystery attend his arrival. Miracle, because the man sings heartfelt, revealing praises to his idea of God, in a wonder-working voice. Mystery, because the man has willfully—pointedly—abdicated the massive pop audience he could so easily command (and still actively merits) at the same time he has raised his performing talents to new pinnacles. Quite simply, when we witness Green, we are witnessing our greatest living soul singer—witnessing him stare down the vista of a self-willed, commercially barren future, smiling at the promise of boundless riches at the end.
But whether Green commands a substantial audience is beside the point, at least in his own mind. At L.A.’s Greek Theater one night in August 1983, where he played to a perhaps half-capacity crowd, he dismissed the importance of popular acclaim, exhorting the crowd, “Clap your hands and give the praise to God. That’s a fittingly deferential gesture for a performing Christian (though I can hardly picture Bob Dylan or Jerry Lee Lewis offering similar directives), but the piety of it is also beside the point. This is a knotty issue, but it’s only fair to offer my own prejudices up front: I enjoy many religious performers (not only gospel vocalists, but also sufferin’ rockers like Van Morrison and Pete Townshend) for much the same reason I can enjoy angry eccentrics like Bob Dylan and Johnny Rotten: because the conceit of their conviction manages to fuel their jeering conception of modern life as a loathsome hellhole, and because that conviction gives order and purpose to the unruly limits of their pain. It doesn’t matter, in terms of their art, whether their beliefs amount to “truth” or not; it suffices that theirs is a self-sustaining vision that informs and shapes their regeneration.
Night Beat Page 38