Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (2 page)

All through junior high and into high school I gravitated toward like-minded people, and we were the little clique that all wore leather jackets and had long hair. By that time my parents had gotten divorced and I was living in Queens. Bayside High School had almost three thousand students, and the core of our group was about ten people. With the periphery kids who would kind of hang out with us, we had maybe two dozen people that were into hard rock and heavy metal. Others were just into disco or pop. In 1978 in Queens, you didn’t have a lot of people listening to Rainbow. But we were into all this British and European hard rock; it wasn’t even really called metal back in 1978.

At lunchtime, my friends and I had a little boom box and we would listen to cassettes and put these hard rock surveys together. We’d have a page and we’d write down the names Ace Frehley, Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Joe Perry. Then we’d walk around the lunchroom and try to get people to rate them one to ten and then try to figure out who’s the best lead guitar player. This is how fucking nerdy we were at age fifteen! Everything was about music. And there was always the quest to find the next band. You always wanted to be the guy in the group to come in with something that no one had heard yet that was going to blow them away. One day this kid David Karibian came in with the first Van Halen record in his boom box at lunch time. He said, “Listen to this,” and put on “Eruption,” and we all sat there with our fucking jaws dropping. We had never heard anything like that before. I remember the first time I heard AC/DC. Another time, my friend Golden brought in
If You Want Blood
, and it was the first time I ever heard Bon Scott. Holy shit. We were on a constant quest, looking for the next cool band or the next heavier band—whoever was playing something harder, faster, more intense.

I bought the first Iron Maiden record at the Music Box, which was this record store in Queens, around 1980. I didn’t know anything about the band. I had never even heard of them. I bought it strictly based on the album cover because Eddie looked so fucking cool. And then I put it on and heard “Prowler” and lost my fucking mind, and went in the next day and said, “Oh my God, have you guys heard Iron Maiden?” And, like, four dudes went, “Duh, we got that last month.”

We thought we were cool, but we were like the fucking plague when it came to girls. I didn’t date one girl all through high school who went to my high school. I didn’t go to my prom. As a kid in a leather jacket, ripped Levis, Chuck Taylors, and long hair, you weren’t getting hot high school chicks. We were the burnouts. That’s what the jocks would call us. They never fucked with us or tried to fight us or anything because I think even they understood we were no challenge at all. You could literally blow on even the biggest one of us burnouts and we’d fall over. None of us were fighters. All we cared about was playing guitar.

But the music made us feel strong, and being with other people who were into the same thing made you feel like you weren’t alone or crazy. There’s a reason I had Ted Nugent, KISS, and Zeppelin posters hanging all over my room. I’m not just some fuckin’ weirdo. Look, there’s a whole bunch of other dudes just like me.

By ’80 or ’81, we had already started getting into heavier, more extreme European metal stuff like Venom, Raven, and Mercyful Fate, and it could never get loud enough. At the same time American hardcore punk bands like Black Flag, Fear, and Circle Jerks were emerging. And all of it was starting to cross over because if you hung out at record stores as much as we did, you would pick up anything in the hopes that you were going to find something cool. To me, there were no genres and there were no categories. It was either good or it wasn’t.

Then we got into the British stuff like GBH, Exploited, and Discharge because it was the next most extreme thing out at the time. When I first listened to Discharge’s
Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing
, it sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. There was an intensity and brutality to that record and that band that I had never experienced in any other music. I didn’t realize it at the time, but years later I recognized, “Okay. That’s hardcore. That’s sheer fucking brutality.”

A pivotal point in my life was when I met Danny Lilker around ’79. He was a sophomore and I was a junior, and we would walk to school together every day and we started jamming because he also played guitar. Danny was in a band called White Heat, which actually played in the city. In 1980, the idea that you were playing in Manhattan at Great Gildersleeves was amazing! I was totally jealous. We would jam all the time. We hooked up with these other friends and got rehearsal time at the Brewery, which was a rehearsal studio at a shopping center across from our houses. I would tell him all the time, “When White Heat breaks up, you and I are gonna start a band.” He would be like, “Huh? We’re not breaking up. Why would we break up?” Eventually White Heat broke up.

It was July 28 in the summer of ’81. We rehearsed with this kid Paul Kahn on bass. Danny was on guitar then and Dave Weiss was on drums. John Connelly, who went on to become the singer of Nuclear Assault, was on vocals. It went so well and sounded so good; right then we decided we were going to form a band and call it Anthrax because Danny had learned about anthrax at school.

Thirty years later, Anthrax is still a band. Metal has gone through as many changes as we have band members, but it’s still as addictive, as important, and as exciting to me as it was when I was a nerdy kid in the school lunchroom. As the ultimate fan, I’ve voraciously read biographies of my favorite bands, watched metal documentaries, and combed store racks for metal mags.

So I’m excited that
Louder Than Hell
strives to tell the definitive story of metal through the musicians’ own—often dirty and grammatically messed-up—words. Some credit Frank Zappa with the anti-rock-crit quip, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” But Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman approached their book with true objectivity, letting the musicians do the talking. And there are few better qualified for such a massive task. I remember when Katherine sat behind me and vocalist John Bush on a plane from LA to New York for John’s first tryouts and rehearsals in Anthrax. She didn’t spill the beans or try to eavesdrop (she told me later!) as the info certainly wasn’t out in the press yet, and she’d known John since his early Armored Saint days. Then, we were all at Pantera’s New York gig that week. And Jon, who I first interviewed with in the mid-eighties for the now defunct
Power Metal
, has been with us nearly every year since, whether for
Rolling Stone, Guitar, Guitar World, Revolver
, MTV, or AOL. We have a mutual respect that comes out of years of journalistic excellence. Jon’s critical eye and technical knowledge is only matched by his ability to relate to an artist like a friend, sharing the triumphs and empathizing with the frustrations.

Stories in this book about forty-plus years of metal—some of which I lived through, others of which are new to me—give me the same kind of teenage excited-dork feeling I get when I’m onstage, looking out at the audience and seeing that they feel it too, whether they’re fourteen or forty-five, moshing in the pit, hands reaching out for a pick, screaming the words to “Among the Living.” That’s what makes metal special—no matter how old you get, you never outgrow it—and that’s what makes
Louder Than Hell
timeless. It’s a living history you can tap into whenever you want. Anthrax sang it first back in 1984, and we’ll stand by it forever: “We’re soldiers of metal, and we rule the night.”

HEAVY METAL THUNDER

A
ccording to scientists the world over, heavy metals are highly dense chemical elements that are poisonous at low concentrations. Since 1869, when Russian scientist Dmitry Mendeleyev published the first Periodic Table of the Elements, twenty-three metals have been deemed “brutally” heavy. Some have even inspired bands to adopt their names, including arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, thallium, and vanadium.

As with their musical namesake, heavy metals can be healthy: copper, selenium, and zinc are necessary for metabolism and present in many multivitamins. Similarly, Metallica is ideal for waking up on sleepy mornings, Guns N’ Roses hits the spot when driving long distances at questionably safe speeds, and Black Sabbath helps anaesthetize the brain when it’s time to unwind.

Counterculture hero and writer William Burroughs made the first literary reference to heavy metal in his groundbreaking 1959 novel
Naked Lunch
. He liked the term so much he used it again two years later in
The Soft Machine
.

“I felt that heavy metal was sort of the ultimate expression of addiction, that there’s something actually metallic in addiction,” Burroughs said later.

“There was a guy in our road crew named Peter Wagner, who referred to us as the Heavy Metal Kids,” said the late Dickie Peterson, front man for the pioneering sixties hard rock/metal band Blue Cheer. “But I think he did that because the heavy metal kids were the junkies in William Burroughs’s books. I don’t think he was talking about our music.”

Ed Sanders, cofounder of sixties underground folk band the Fugs, called his music publishing company Heavy Metal Music in 1965, in homage to Burroughs. The term
heavy metal
was first used in an actual song in 1968, when Mars Bonfire wrote “Born to Be Wild” for Steppenwolf, but again, the term wasn’t meant to label the band.

“I used the phrase ‘heavy metal thunder’ in ‘Born to Be Wild’ to help capture the experience of driving a car or motorcycle on the desert highway of California,” Bonfire said.

In 1968,
Rolling Stone
writer Barry Gifford used the term in a record review to describe Electric Flag’s “A Long Time Comin’.”

“I made it up,” he insists. “I was just describing the sound of the band, who, of course, bore no resemblance to what later became popularly known as heavy metal.”

Even Black Sabbath, who, to most fans, epitomize heavy metal, initially didn’t like the term.

GEEZER BUTLER (Black Sabbath, GZR, Heaven & Hell):
Someone called us “heavy metal” as an insult in some review. It said, “This isn’t music. It sounds like a load of heavy metal crashing to the floor.” Somebody in England picked up on that phrase, everyone started using it, and we had no say.

OZZY OSBOURNE (Black Sabbath):
In Black Sabbath, we didn’t care about what we were called. We were backstreet kids and we went on that stage with a fucking mission—to play music to de-ball any fucker—and we could. In the early stages of Sabbath, there wasn’t nobody to fucking touch us.

ALICE COOPER:
The first time I ever heard music referred to as heavy metal was in
Rolling Stone
—referring to
us
. I thought, “‘
Heavy metal
.’ What a weird term that is.” But I understood what they meant. I think it was referring to our attitude more than our sound. But we were also a very loud band.

ROB HALFORD (Judas Priest, Halford, ex-2wo, ex-Fight):
I dare say we were probably the first to start calling
ourselves
a heavy metal band. Word goes around. I think it’s fair to say it really started with Priest and Sabbath.

RONNIE JAMES DIO (1942–2010) (Heaven & Hell, ex–Black Sabbath, ex-Rainbow):
Once I became part of a heavy metal band, I was as proud as anyone to be that. It’s the kind of music I love. The heavier, the better.

EDDIE TRUNK (DJ, Host of “That Metal Show”):
The first Black Sabbath record, [1970’s
Black Sabbath
], that’s where heavy metal was born—with that album and that song [“Black Sabbath”]. People will say Blue Cheer and Iron Butterfly [were metal], but Sabbath were the first band to embody everything that became heavy metal.

ALICE COOPER:
We looked at what the Who did on “My Generation” as one of the first heavy metal songs. That, or [Iron Butterfly’s] “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida.” If that came out and Metallica did it, everyone would go, “Oh, yeah, that’s metal.”

LESLIE WEST (Mountain):
To me, heavy metal is like pornography. I couldn’t tell you what it is, but when I see it, I know it.

LEMMY KILMISTER (Motörhead, ex-Hawkwind):
Metal is the bastard son of rock and roll. If Eddie Cochran was playing today, he’d probably be in a garage playing with a metal band.

JOSE MANGIN (Sirius Satellite Radio):
Metal is a lifestyle that includes the music, the fashion, the credo. It doesn’t matter what bands you like, it’s how you live—how you walk, how you move at a concert, how you talk to people, how you get excited about hearing distorted riffs. It’s a motivator. It’s therapy. Metal is community and it’s a group with no doors.

BOB LEFSETZ (Author of “The Lefsetz Letter”):
Heavy metal is not made for Wall Street. It’s not intellectual—it’s something you feel. It electrifies your body, truly plugs you into the socket and makes you thrust your body forward and throw your hands in the air.

BIFF BYFORD (Saxon):
When I first met Ronnie James Dio, we talked about the way he uses the heavy metal sign. This is how he explained it to me: in the deaf sign language, the two fingers and the thumb is “I love you.” I think that was the first one he used. The thumb went down later on.

RONNIE JAMES DIO:
I’m of Italian extraction; my grandmother and grandfather on both my mother’s and father’s side came to America from Italy, and they had superstitions. I would see my grandmother, when I was a little kid, holding her hand, walking down the street, she would see someone and [make the devil’s horns]. I learned it was called the
malocchio
. Someone was giving us the evil eye, so [with the horns, my grandmother] was giving us protection from the evil eye. So [did I] invent it? No, but [did I] perfect it and make it important? Yes, because I did it so much, especially within the confines of Sabbath. Because I’ve been lucky enough to have done it so much, it’s been more equated with me than anyone else, although Gene Simmons will tell you he invented it, but then again Gene invented breathing and shoes.