by Jake Brennan
There was no coming back from it for Shawn. Jerry Lee no longer needed to worry about high school sweethearts busting up his hillbilly hamlet or messing with the emotional cocktail he’d been nursing since his days as a child back in Ferriday, sitting in fear of the Lord, in fear of what he felt brewing inside him. It was a cocktail Jerry Lee would nurse his whole life; an emotional speedball, really. It traded on equal parts self-confidence, God-given talent, fear of your maker, and the shame of being a mere mortal. With Shawn’s death, shame and jealousy were on the run, and pride was once again creeping up the back stretch.
In the days after Shawn’s death, Jerry Lee kept himself jacked on Talwin and thus speeding ahead of the hellfire spreading inside of him. The funeral was tough. Jerry Lee barely made it through. Being around Shawn’s parents was too much. He said little, but somehow everything was still about him at the funeral. The prayers, the hymns, and even the people who got up to speak, they just spoke about Jerry Lee and the challenges he faced. Shawn’s mother was outraged. Wasn’t anybody going to eulogize her daughter?
That night, with the darkness closing in, Jerry Lee decided to call Shawn’s sister, Denise. She picked up. Surprised to hear from her dead sister’s husband, whose speech was slurred. He was clearly on one.
“Jesus Christ, Jerry Lee, what happened?”
“Denise…sissers daid an she uz a bad girl.”
“What? What do you mean, Jerry? What do you mean?”
“Sheuzza badgirl…an she daid…”
Jerry Lee hung up. Passed out and woke up to another day in DeSoto County with seemingly endless possibilities. He wasted no time. That night, Jerry Lee was right back at it. Running from that hellfire. He was at Hernando’s, his favorite bucket of blood, where there was always a seat open at the piano for him and where the spotlight always made him look ten feet tall and without a doubt more attractive than Elvis. It was at Hernando’s piano where Jerry Lee made up a dirty little ditty on the spot and sang it with two beautiful women on the stool at his side: “I told her when she left me / I’d have another in her bed…”
The girls seemed to like it. Why wouldn’t they? He was Jerry Lee Fucking Lewis! The Killer!!! He finished the song, got up off the piano bench, nodded to the band, and wobbled offstage down to his booth.
He was free. Free from guilt and free from suspicion. Despite the fact that one of the attending EMTs from the day Shawn’s body was recovered filed a report stating that Jerry Lee had said, “We need to find out who killed–—how she died.” But Jerry Lee wasn’t too interested in finding out how Shawn died or who might have killed her. The case was closed. The grand jury had decided no crime had occurred. Dr. Francisco, the private medical examiner okayed by Sheriff Sowell and paid for by Jerry Lee, determined there was no foul play. Finding drugs in her body after the autopsy’s drug scans, he further determined that Shawn died from fluid in the lungs, a result of too much methadone. Eventually, the Detroit Free Press found itself up against too many sets of tight lips in DeSoto County and stopped pursuing Shawn’s death as a crime—and the whole incident just went away.
The band picked up with a familiar Bo Diddley beat. “Who Do You Love?” The drummer put his backbone into it. Oh yeah! Jerry tapped his foot, but out of time with the beat. He was wasted. He thought to himself how he always loved Bo.
Bo beat Jerry Lee and Elvis to the devil’s workshop by a couple of years. Yeah, Bo was one of the originals. Like Jerry Lee, he was a bad, bad man. Jerry Lee laughed to himself thinking of Bo’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Bo slayed. But backstage, Sullivan, epic prick that he was, raged at Bo for playing his signature “Bo Diddley” song instead of his version of “Sixteen Tons,” which they’d apparently agreed upon in preproduction. Sullivan was pissed. Bo, in interviews over the years, never hid his disdain for Sullivan but he always couched the truth. Bo always said Ed called him a double-crossing “black boy,” but word around the early rock ’n’ roll circuit back in the day was that what Ed called Bo was something far worse and that Bo had to be restrained from tearing Sullivan apart. Ed Sullivan! Sheeeeit. Bo never appeared on his show again. He was his own man. Did his own thing and rocked harder than most. Jerry Lee could appreciate that. Shit, maybe Bo had that hellfire? Maybe Bo was touched, too? The band played on:
I rode a lion to town, use a rattlesnake whip
Take it easy, Arlene don’t you give me no lip.
Who do you love? Who do you love?
Good question. Jerry Lee had no idea. He set his head on his forearm on top of Hernando’s beer-soaked table and passed out.
Chapter 3
Dead, Euronymous, and Varg
Per Ohlin was riveted. He was eighteen years old, sitting on his mom’s sofa, staring at the television. This movie had been on before. The movie about the big black man from America who had that weird box of a guitar and played that old-style music his dad liked. Being a local product, the movie, a Swedish documentary, entitled Bo Diddley, the Locomotor: I Don’t Sound Like Nobody, was constantly repeated on Swedish TV. Per couldn’t have avoided it if he tried. And he did. Try to avoid it, that is. Because the music and the man making it couldn’t have been less interesting to him. But today, when he’d awoken on his living room couch from his after-school nap, the television had been on and of course, the Bo Diddley movie was playing, and this time something different caught Per’s eye. It was an interview with the artist, subtitled in Swedish, but Bo’s laid-back Chicago drawl was slow enough for Per to understand anyway. And despite the language barrier and the fact that Per had difficulty relating to anybody at all, he began to feel like he could deeply understand the foreign man talking to him through the television.
Off the stage and freed from the stale, out-of-date, unexciting traditional music tropes that his rabid Swedish audience relied upon him to deliver, Bo Diddley was actually an interesting guy. He was big. Big head. Big black hat. Big glasses. Big shoulders and big hands. And his speaking voice was infinitely more interesting to Per than his singing voice. His speaking voice had a casual menace to it as he recounted where he’d found inspiration for his most famous song, a song Per had heard a million times but never thought twice of, “Who Do You Love?”
Given context, the song suddenly had meaning for Per: The young eccentric, delicate blond Swedish boy who’d been bullied mercilessly at school. Diddley was explaining what the kids in his neighborhood back in Chicago called, “signifying.” A game of verbal insults where one kid would call another a name and then the other would respond upping the ante with an even harsher insult until either hilarity or a beating ensued. Per could identify with this. As of late, he’d been called unthinkable names at school: skitstövel (translated literally as “a boot full of shit” or “poop boot”) and bog (Swedish for “fag”), or dra åt skogen, which translates to “Go to the forest,” but should be taken more as “Go to hell,” and for Per, this would prove to be a welcome destination.
Bo went on to explain that one day, while he himself was just a teenager and in search of music to express himself—music to ride out of his ghetto reality on—he sat, guitar in his lap, up in his apartment on the South Side of Chicago waiting on a song. His windows were open, and he heard some younger kids outside signifying—in Bo’s words, “talking about each other like dogs.” Yo Mama jokes. Sister jokes. Grandma jokes. Nothing was off-limits. At first, Bo thought it funny but as he listened more closely, he noticed there was a pattern to the way the kids spoke out these insults: back and forth to each other. They were sing-songing them. A rhythm had developed. And a melody:
Dah dum, dat, dat dah da dat dah da da
Dah da da da-dada da da dat dah
Do do do do…who do you love…
And the words…the insults…
Kid no. 1: “Yo mama’s got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind.”
Kid no. 2: “Yeah, well, yo mama’s just twenty-two and her pussy’s all mine.”
THAT WAS IT! Bo had it. His song. Of course the ly
rics would need to be cleaned up a bit, but it was all there. Right outside his window. And now, for young Per Ohlin the once stale traditional, old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll song had meaning:
I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra snake for a necktie,
I got a brand-new house on the roadside,
Made from rattlesnake hide.
I got a brand-new chimney made on top,
Made out of a human skull.
Now come on take a walk with me, Arlene,
And tell me, who do you love?
Jesus Christ, Per thought. This shit sounded mean. By now, well into his adolescence and beginning his teenage rebellion, Per began channeling his own meanness into music. It was an instinctual reaction to the bullying. And it was cathartic. As the frontman for the Swedish band Morbid, he was honing his stagecraft, fucked-up as it was. He was hell-bent on making his own mark by stapling obituaries from the newspaper to his T-shirt, outfitting the stage with candles and borrowed coffins and doing whatever he could to shock his would-be audience and prove to the world that he belonged and that he was evil as fuck. So here, now, in front of his television, this Bo Diddley hoodoo shit really got him.
Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” was released in 1956 in America, into a country reeling from the shock waves of rock ’n’ roll. Parents, teachers, and squares everywhere warned of the new music’s influence on the clean-cut youth of Eisenhower’s postwar, conformist America. Surely this rebellious-sounding noise would cause kids to grow their hair, smoke reefer, have sex in public, worship Satan, and die. The squares were right. That was exactly what happened.
A decade later, kids were uniformly long-haired, smoking copious amounts of dope, and taking the pill. By 1969 they were sympathizing with the devil at Altamont, by the ’70s they were burning their bras in Times Square. And by the ’80s, cocaine, crack, and AIDS would claim countless young lives. Finally, by the ’90s—1991, to be exact—a heavy metal musician from Norway would go Bo Diddley one better, but it wouldn’t be a chimney he’d make out of a human skull: It would be a necklace, made out of the skull of a Swedish boy with a morbid curiosity and one-time obsession with Bo Diddley.
Now come on take a walk with me, Arlene
And tell me, who do you love?
Bo Diddley’s lyric may sound tame now, but it took a mere thirty-five years before its influence was brought to life in horrific fashion. Rebellion is metastatic. One generation’s rebellion is another generation’s norm. The line in the sand of what is and isn’t acceptable gets redrawn with each new generation.
Bo Diddley was a descendent of bluesman Robert Johnson, who, hack rock journalists will eagerly tell you, sold his soul to the devil. And Diddley’s voodoo-esque braggadocio went on to inspire countless classic rockers, including Satanic sympathizers Led Zeppelin, whose unabashed admiration for known Satanist Aleister Crowley and melding of steroidal Delta blues and Viking rock made it rain royalty checks. In 1974, even Elvis Presley, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, had to acknowledge, “Well, I may not be Led Zeppelin but I can still pack ’em in.” Later that year, the King would find himself face-to-face with the mighty Led Zeppelin in his hotel suite. Zeppelin had attended one of his schmaltzy late-career Vegas shows, and the boys in the band were eager to meet their hero. When they did, Elvis asked them for their autographs! It was supposedly for his daughter, but still, the boys were freaked out. Where had they arrived? Where had we all arrived as a culture with Elvis Presley bowing to Led Zeppelin?
But the mutual lovefest wouldn’t last. Within no time, a chill overtook Elvis’s hotel suite when his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, entered. He surveyed the room and got wind of what was going on; his star attraction was prostrating himself to a bunch of longhairs. What in God’s hell? The Colonel shook his head, rolled his eyes, and ushered the longhairs out the door before the King humbled himself any further to his heirs apparent.
Led Zeppelin’s ascent was inspiring to not only Elvis and his daughter but to countless young bands. Their flirtation with Crowley and the dark arts in particular inspired another band from England, named Venom, to take it all one step further: to full-on devil worship. With song titles like, “In League with Satan,” “Leave Me in Hell,” and “1,000 Days in Sodom,” Venom went on to influence an entirely new generation of metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Testament until finally inspiring a completely new subgenre of heavy metal called black metal.
Black metal was started by Norwegian teenagers unable to stand the strains of conformity, boredom, anonymity, and long, dark winters. Norway, a small constitutional monarchy, went through a brief Viking phase during its adolescence, flirted with fascism in its young adulthood, and eventually settled lazily into a type of democratic socialism during middle age. Though small, it’s one of the world’s richest countries. The state takes care of its own: Government bureaucracy employs 30 percent of the country. Disability pensions for the unemployed are easy to come by. There’s not a lot of poverty. There’s not a lot of income disparity. The crime rate is low, and punishments for the crimes that people do commit are lenient. The country’s greatest cultural export is frozen fish. Historically, there’s not a lot to get pissed off about, because there’s not a lot that goes on in Norway. Norway is kind of like Europe’s answer to an American flyover state. In short, if you’re a Norwegian teenager you’re probably bored. And even worse than that, you’re probably bored without a whole lot to rebel against.
If there’s one indisputable truth in the Holy Bible, you’ll probably find it in Proverbs 16:27: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
Without overt societal injustice, Norwegian teenagers looked to their heritage for something to rebel against. Inspired by Venom, Bathory, and a growing group of Satanic-influenced heavy metal bands in the 1980s, Norwegian teenagers saw their country’s Christian heritage as a reason to rebel.
In a moralistic Christian society, worshiping Satan is just about the strongest form of rebellion one can take. Mix in nihilism, Nazism, ancient Norse Viking mythology, paganism, blistering blast beats, and speaker-shredding power chords, and you’ve got a powerful elixir of teenage angst.
Black metal became a tangible and legitimate force on August 16, 1987, with the release of the Deathcrush demo by the Norwegian band Mayhem. Critics may point to Mayhem’s officially released first full-length album, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, as black metal’s genre-defining record, but it has none of the charm of the earlier Deathcrush demo. Deathcrush sounds less like a band trying to make something and more like a bunch of extremely pent-up kids bashing shit around in their basement in front of crappy microphones that just happen to be pointed toward their half-broken amplifiers. Mayhem’s demo—with its lo-fi, high-energy metal recording—doesn’t sound like anything that came before it. It sounds bleak, and primitive. It sounds, in a word, cold. Deathcrush is inspired and inspiring. It was the landmark black metal recording that would compel hordes of bands to come.
Per Ohlin was doing his best to warm his feet over Satan’s burning embers back in Sweden. But he was frustrated. His Morbid bandmates weren’t as committed to a lifestyle that was “morbid” in every fashion. So, upon hearing the Deathcrush demo, Per developed a sort of crush himself. A band crush, but a crush nonetheless. These guys got it, he thought.
Bleed down to the fucking core
You’re going down for fucking more.
This is what Per was talking about. He vibed on the lyrics to “Chainsaw Gutfuck,” from Mayhem’s Deathcrush, and thought of the tall boys at school with the broad shoulders, short hair, and impeccable complexions who tortured him with daily insults for, well, just being him; long-haired and into music. Fuck them, Per thought. He longed to see them bleed out. And he was sure the dudes in Mayhem would agree with him.
As obsessed underground music fans did in the days before the internet, Per began to correspond with his new favorite band, Mayhem, by mail. Per was eager to make a connection and to show
them that he wasn’t just some ordinary fanboy, so he mailed them a cassette of him singing with Morbid. This way they’d know he had talent. And to prove that he wasn’t fucking around, that he was truly evil like they were, Per included, along with the cassette, a mouse he crucified. The members of Mayhem were sufficiently impressed. So at the age of nineteen, Per moved from Sweden to Norway to sing in Mayhem. He wasn’t the band’s original singer, but he would prove to be its most legendary.
The bullying that Per Ohlin experienced as a child produced in him a darkness. He fed that darkness by obsessing over death. Ohlin was so obsessed with death that he changed his name, unequivocally, to “Dead.” He claimed he’d wanted to die ever since he was three years old. Once he became a full member of Mayhem, Dead committed to the role in a way that would make most method actors feel inadequate. To prepare for Mayhem gigs, Dead would bury his clothes in the ground so that when he eventually wore them onstage, they’d have the stench of the earth on them, just as a corpse would. Before shows he’d walk around inhaling the rotting carcass of a crow he carried with him in a bag because he wanted the smell of death in his nostrils when he performed. And during Mayhem gigs, he’d ghoulishly display pigs’ heads on stakes at the foot of the stage.
While performing, Dead would cut himself, dousing bandmates, himself, and the remaining audience members with his blood. He wore all black, and like most metalheads, he had a taste for denim, leather, studs, and spikes. He painted his face white and blackened the area around his eyes to look more like a corpse. Not in a theatrical Alice Cooper or KISS way, but in a “scary as All Hallows’ Eve” way.
With Dead fronting Mayhem, the band’s reputation and influence expanded, and Norway’s black metal scene grew wings. Its pilot was Dead’s bandmate and Mayhem’s founding guitarist, Øystein Aarseth. Aarseth was the charismatic leader of the Norwegian black metal scene. Before founding Mayhem and Deathlike Silence Productions, the record label that released Mayhem’s records, Aarseth changed his name to “Euronymous” to complete his transformation from polite upper-middle-class Norwegian boy into full-blown black metal king.