Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (3 page)

GENE SIMMONS (KISS):
What I started [before Dio] involved the thumb outstretched. Check our first poster in 1974. I started doing it because of comic book artist Steve Ditko, who created both Spiderman and Dr. Strange, who both used the same hand sign. Spiderman used it upside down when he shot out webbing, and Dr. Strange used it as a magic incantation. I was paying homage. Later, I was told it meant “I love you” in sign language.

DAVE MUSTAINE (ex-Metallica, Megadeth):
Most people do it wrong, and I’m not talking about outstretching the thumb. For the real devil’s horns, when used as a Satanic symbol, you don’t close your middle two fingers and wrap your thumb around them. You leave the middle two fingers outstretched and place the thumb between them so it resembles the snout of a jackal.

BIFF BYFORD:
Obviously, now, it is the rock and roll, metal salute. It’s lost all the devil connotations. It’s just a great salute, isn’t it? We’re all here, we all like one music. Even models on the catwalk, they’ll give the sign—“rock and roll.”

ROBB FLYNN (Machine Head, ex–Vio-Lence, ex-Forbidden):
In high school, we didn’t fit in with the jocks or the nerds. We were the outcasts. We had long hair. We were the nonconformists and we didn’t have a choice. But we found a community through heavy metal. We met other people who liked the same music and suddenly we were like, “We are not alone!”

RONNIE JAMES DIO:
Heavy metal is an underdog form of music because of the way you dress, how you act, what you listen to. So you’re always being put down. It’s this fringe music and because it pigeonholes the bands and the fans, together we feel strength with each other and become one big pigeon.

JOE ELLIOTT (Def Leppard):
It’s everything mimicked in
Spinal Tap
. There is an elitist [attitude] among some of us, and I think I put myself in that group. Sometimes heavy metal gets regarded as dumb, and some of us don’t like to be regarded as dumb, so we try to distance ourselves from it.

PENELOPE SPHEERIS (Filmmaker,
Decline of Western Civilization II
):
I was approached by Harry Shearer and a producer named David Jablin [to direct
Spinal Tap
]. It didn’t work out because I felt like it was making fun of metal, and I loved the music so much I didn’t think I should do it. Rob [Reiner] kicked ass, though.

LEMMY KILMISTER:
For me, it needs to be big and it needs to be loud. In a club, you can have conversations over bands that are playing jazz or pop music. Nobody can ever have a conversation over my kind of music. With my kind of music, [once] we start, you listen or you leave.

1

KICK OUT THE JAMS: PROTO METAL, 1964–1970

H
eavy metal was never officially “born.” It came together in bits and pieces between the mid-sixties and early seventies, and stemmed from a desire to rebel, shock, and create a level of intensity that did not then exist in pop music.

Strangely, it was British Invasion band the Kinks that captured the earliest sound of metal in 1964 with their third single “You Really Got Me.” The band played blunt, repetitive power-chord guitar riffs that they coupled with a primitive style of distortion—guitarist Dave Davies, taking a cue from surf guitarist Link Wray, used a razor blade to cut slits in his speaker cone to achieve the sound. From there, technological improvements allowed guitarists to use effect pedals to make their instruments buzz like swarming bees, or spiral as if caught in the eye of a tornado.

With louder amps, crazier effects, and plenty of social and political turmoil to inspire them, artists like Jimi Hendrix and bands like Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin, MC5, Blue Cheer, the Stooges, and, of course, Black Sabbath set out to change people’s perceptions of just how heavy music could be and what was possible with a bit of creativity and a lot of volume.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
The first time I ever experienced the feeling I get from my own music was when I heard “You Really Got Me.” I got that tickling up my back, and that’s what I always go for when I write.

JIMMY PAGE (ex-Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin):
A turning point in effects came when Roger Mayer began making his distortion boxes. I [was] playing this gig in the early sixties when Roger came up to me and said he worked at the British Admiralty in the experimental department, adding that he could probably build any electronic gadget that I wanted. He went away and came up with the first real good fuzz box.

WAYNE KRAMER (MC5):
Jeff Beck was one of the pillars of pushing the guitar tone. And then there was [Pete] Townshend with [the Who], Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and what I was trying to do with the MC5. We were all trying to push the guitar so we didn’t just play the guitar, we played the amplifier as well. It was about getting that overtone sustain out of the amplifier. That was at the beginning of the invention of stomp boxes—fuzz tones and overdrives.

Flamboyant Seattle-born musician Jimi Hendrix developed some of the most inventive early uses for the distortion box, contorting traditional electric blues into flailing, contentious torrents of sound. That he was just as adept at performing beautiful emotional and psychedelic rock songs is a testament to his brilliance as a musician. Tragically, Hendrix died in 1970 at age twenty-seven after consuming sleeping pills and red wine and asphyxiating on his vomit. Yet in four short years he redefined the rock lexicon with three astonishing albums—1967’s
Are You Experienced
and
Axis: Bold as Love
, and 1968’s
Electric Ladyland
.

RITCHIE BLACKMORE (ex-Rainbow, ex–Deep Purple):
I liked [Hendrix’s] direct approach, his snarling guitar. He said a lot in one note. Before then, I was very impressed with people who could run up and down the fingerboard. But Jimi was just holding a note sustained, playing with a lot more feeling. His stage presence was unbelievable. He was like a spaceman.

LEMMY KILMISTER:
What fans want is somebody that comes down from another planet that you will never possibly visit, and touches you, and goes away again. That’s what a real good rock show is like. Aliens from another world come and kick you in the teeth and fuck off quick, you know? Hendrix was like that. He was really a quiet guy, a gentleman. He played the fucking Chitlin’ Circuit for years. But by the time he got to where he was going, he was the fucking best. You’ll never see a guitar player like him, ever. Van Halen and all them guys don’t even get close. The man would do a double somersault and come up playing. I learned a lot about performing working as a roadie for Hendrix. And that’s where I learned how to function on five hits of acid. He handed it out like dolly mixtures [British candy], and I used to go score it for him, too. That was part of my job—getting drugs for Jimi.

ACE FREHLEY (ex-KISS):
I was sixteen when I heard
Are You Experienced
. I walked around with it all the time and brought it to school with me to show everybody. I brought it to band rehearsals. I lived with that album until someone ripped it off at a party. Of course, I went right out and bought another one. My guitar style was modeled in part after Hendrix. What really influenced me was his attitude—the way he dressed, the way he looked. He was so antiestablishment and nobody wrote music like him. He wrote about LSD, he wrote about sex and drugs and rock and roll. It was all about rebellion, and he was so radical and ahead of his time it ended up swallowing him up.

CARMINE APPICE (Vanilla Fudge, Beck, Bogart & Appice):
Jimi Hendrix. Was he heavy metal? Yeah, he was heavy metal, then. But the drums weren’t heavy, the drums were light. I think what makes heavy metal heavy is the sound of your drums. That heavy drum sound is what Vanilla Fudge and Sabbath had.

As difficult as it is to define heavy metal, it’s even harder to pinpoint the band that started it all. Some cite Led Zeppelin, the eclectic, majestic group that formed out of the collapse of the Yardbirds. The band featured seasoned session musician and Yardbirds alum Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones, vocalist Robert Plant, and his Band of Joy bandmate John Bonham, a forceful, stylistic drummer whose beats were often a hair behind the rest of the rhythm, giving the music a perpetually lunging feel. Although none of the members of Zeppelin ever called their music metal, they had a major influence on countless metal bands, including Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Deep Purple.

JOHN PAUL JONES (Led Zeppelin, Them Crooked Vultures):
When Zeppelin started, I listened to blues and jazz. The only rock I listened to was Jimi Hendrix.

RUDOLF SCHENKER (Scorpions):
I was in the Star Club in Hamburg expecting Spooky Tooth to play, and the DJ was playing an album. I told one of my friends to ask the DJ what the album was; it was Led Zeppelin. It immediately kicked me like the first album by Jimi Hendrix. From then on, I watched Led Zeppelin carefully. Everything they did was a masterpiece.

MARTIN POPOFF (author, journalist):
Jimmy [Page] and Robert [Plant] detest being called “heavy metal.” It tells you that their heads weren’t in that space, and I think when people’s heads are not in that space, they shouldn’t be rewarded for having invented that thing.

GLENN HUGHES (Black Country Communion, ex–Deep Purple, ex–Black Sabbath):
I’ve spoken to Jimmy Page about [whether Zeppelin is metal]. It’s like, there are moments in [Deep] Purple that you would call metal. And there are moments in Zeppelin.

The influence of Led Zeppelin on hard rock and metal is unparalleled (just listen to early Judas Priest, Whitesnake, Guns N’ Roses, Soundgarden, and Jane’s Addiction). But there are a number of unsung (at least in metal circles) American bands that also took volume and rage to new heights—especially Detroit’s Motor City Five (better known as MC5), the Stooges, and San Francisco’s Blue Cheer, all of whom performed with frenetic energy and brazen sexuality that defined the otherness of the counterculture.

DICKIE PETERSON (1946–2009) (Blue Cheer):
What we were playing was anti-music to a lot of people. They were saying we can’t play that loud, and we were saying, “Yes you can. All you have to do is turn up the amplifier, you idiot.” There was a time we went out and people weren’t kind to us at all. They didn’t know how to take what we were doing because we were one of the first bands knocking on the doors of volume. In 1968 we played with Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 at [Detroit’s] Grande Ballroom, and I honestly think to this day it was really the first metal show ever.

IGGY POP (The Stooges):
[In 1967], we were a bunch of misfits livin’ together in a house saying, “Yeah, we’re a
band
!” But we had not played anywhere. We
couldn’t
play. I was trying to figure out like, “What’s the
key
?” What could
we
do? I didn’t want to just go out and be a cover band, because I knew that was death. I knew that, to take it to where I wanted to go, [there] had to be something really creative—something you couldn’t get anywhere else. At first, we didn’t know what to do, so [we] ended up hanging around the house taking lots of drugs.

WAYNE KRAMER:
We would play the kinds of gigs that were available to us—teen dances and record hops. So we’d play what they expected, these tidy three-minute songs—and then for the last song we’d play [the feedback-saturated] “Black to Comm”—our
real
music. We noticed we could empty a room with it. People would be dancing all night, having a ball, and then we’d break into “Black to Comm” and the fucking room would be deserted. The people fled. We came to the conclusion that what we were doing was very powerful, and if the kids were just educated to appreciate and understand what it was all about, then that same power that forced them out of the room would force them into the room. And it did.

IGGY POP:
We found a sound based very much on the MC5. They pointed the way—a pneumatic, industrial, valid, corporate jet mixed in with free jazz—Velvets, the Who, the Stones, Hendrix, Muddy Waters, and William Burroughs.

WAYNE KRAMER:
We were part of a community with the Stooges. In our time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we lived close to each other and hung out a lot. We both loved loud, distorted guitars, and the Stooges and the MC5 were equally crazy, equally aberrant—each in our own way. We were friendly and collegial with our fellows, but I never got the sense that many of them really grabbed hold of what we were talking about. We played at the [1968] Democratic Convention and the Chicago police were standing by. The minute we finished, the kids turned on the police, the police turned on the kids, and the rampage was on.

IGGY POP:
These guys flew in from New York, saw me, and went, “We don’t know what he’s doin’ but he’s weird. People
like
weird things. We’re gonna sign him!” So they sign me. And then they left, and I stayed in my little Midwestern town [Ypsilanti, Michigan]. They called me to New York a few months later, and I made a record [1969’s
Stooges
], then went back home.