ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION
Music in America Imprint
Michael P. Roth
and Sukey Garcetti
have endowed this
imprint to honor the
memory of their parents,
Julia and Harry Roth,
whose deep love of music
they wish to share
with others.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous contribution to this book provided
by the Music in America Endowment Fund of
the University of California Press Foundation,
which is supported by a major gift from Sukey
and Gil Garcetti, Michael Roth, and the Roth
Family Foundation.
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges
the generous contribution to this book
provided by Smith College.
THIS AIN’T THE SUMMER OF LOVE
This Ain’t the Summer of Love
Conflict and Crossover
in Heavy Metal and Punk
STEVE WAKSMAN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most
distinguished university presses in the United States,
enriches lives around the world by advancing
scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and
natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC
Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions
from individuals and institutions. For more
information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2009 by The Regents of the University of California
Portions of chapter 1 appeared in Listen Again: A
Momentary History of Pop Music, ed. Eric Weisbard
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 157–71.
An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in ECHO:
a music-centered journal 6, no. 2 (Fall 2004). Portions of
chapters 6 and 7 appeared in Social Studies of Science
34, no. 5 (October 2004): 675–702.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waksman, Steve.
This ain’t the summer of love : conflict and crossover in
heavy metal and punk / Steve Waksman.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references, discography and
index.
isbn 978–0-520-25310-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978–0-520-25717-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Heavy metal (Music)—History and criticism.
2. Punk rock music—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3534.W26 2009
781.66—dc22
2008025957
Manufactured in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
10
09
This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains
30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Illustrations / vii
Acknowledgments / ix
Introduction: The Metal/Punk Continuum / 1
1
Staging the Seventies:
Arena Rock, Punk Rock / 19
2
Death Trip: Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop,
and Rock Theatricality / 70
3
The Teenage Rock ’n’ Roll Ideal:
The Dictators and the Runaways / 104
4
Metal, Punk, and Motörhead:
The Genesis of Crossover / 146
5
Time Warp: The New Wave
of British Heavy Metal / 172
6
Metal/Punk Reformation:
Three Independent Labels / 210
7
Louder, Faster, Slow It Down!
Metal, Punk, and Musical Aesthetics / 256
Conclusion: Metal, Punk, and Mass Culture / 299
Notes / 309
Bibliography / 349
Discography / 369
Index / 377
Illustrations
1. Grand Funk Railroad in performance, circa 1970
2. The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1965
3. Crowd shot of Grand Funk Railroad at Hyde Park,
London, 1971
4. Alice Cooper at the guillotine
5. Alice Cooper at the gallows
6. Iggy Pop bends over backward
7. Iggy Pop stands atop the crowd in Cincinnati, 1970
8. Cover of The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!:
Handsome Dick Manitoba
9. The Runaways with Kim Fowley
10. Cherie Currie
11. Motörhead
12. Cover of Iron Maiden, “Sanctuary”
13. Joe Elliott sports the Union Jack onstage
14. Cover of Black Flag, My War
15. SST catalogue, circa 1984
16. Metal Massacre, the inaugural release of Metal
Blade Records
17. Cover of Slayer, Show No Mercy
18. Nirvana at the University of Washington, 1989
19. Eddie Van Halen displays his virtuosity
20. Steve Turner and Mark Arm on the cover
of Mudhoney, Superfuzz Bigmuff
21. Greg Ginn of Black Flag
20
26
43
71
87
91
101
120
133
141
154
196
206
226
227
232
237
249
260
271
282
Acknowledgments
Writing a second book is a peculiar thing, especially for an academic
writer. My first book was published out of my dissertation, which was
supervised by a stalwart committee of faculty members at the University
of Minnesota. Relatively speaking, this second book has seemed like a
solo turn. And as we all know, going solo can be both exhilarating and
pretty damn scary.
Fortunately, I haven’t been left entirely in the wilderness during the
years I wrote this book. First and foremost, I have to thank many of my
fellow travelers in the world of academic popular music studies, especially those I have met through the International Association for the
Study of Popular Music. IASPM has been my academic home away from
home for years, and though it feels a bit less homey now than in the
past, its imprint is still strongly present in the pages that follow. Special
shout-outs go to Anahid Kassabian, Norma Coates, David Shumway,
Robert Walser, Theo Cateforis, Bernard Gendron, David Brackett, Keir
Keightley, Murray Forman, Reebee Garofalo, and David Sanjek. Big
props also go to Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers, longtime organizers of
the annual Pop Conference held at Seattle’s Experience Music Project
museum, a wonderful forum for connecting with popular music writers
of various stripes.
Since fall 2001, I’ve had the good fortune to work in the Department
of Music and the Program in American Studies at Smith College. The completion of this book was greatly facilitated by a one-semester sabbatical
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
awarded by the college and supported by the Jean Picker Fellowship,
several travel grants, and a much-valued publication subvention grant.
Just as important, in its way, has been the counsel and friendship of
many colleagues, including Dan Horowitz, Helen Horowitz, Ruth Solie,
Richard Sherr, Margaret Sarkissian, Peter Bloom, Rick Millington,
Marc Steinberg, Frazer Ward, Alex Keller, Kevin Rozario, Michael
Thurston, and Floyd Cheung—the last four my band mates in the much
heralded, now defunct (?) Distractions. The students in the three versions of my “Metal and Punk” course at Smith were remarkably patient
with my efforts to bring my ideas about this project into the classroom
and gave me much to think about. Jennifer Gabrielle provided much
needed help during the year she worked with me as a Stride scholar and
research assistant.
I’ve also been fortunate to connect with a lively group of scholars
through the Five College Ethnomusicology Group, especially David
Samuels, Rebecca Miller, David Reck, and Jeffers Englehardt.
Thanks to audiences at the University of Memphis, at the Department
of Musicology at UCLA, and at the Musicology Department at Boston
University, who all heard me present various parts of this project while
it was in progress. Special thanks to Barbara Ching in Memphis,
Thomas Peattie in Boston, and the graduate students at UCLA for their
invitations and their hospitality.
Trevor Pinch of Cornell University and Karin Bijsterveld of the
University of Maastricht in the Netherlands organized a wonderful symposium on music and technology, “Sound Matters,” at which I presented some of the research that evolved into parts of chapters 6 and 7.
I was very pleased to be invited to participate in the symposium and had
a great time sharing perspectives with the other participants in the comfortable confines of Maastricht: Paul Théberge, Timothy Taylor, Susan
Schmidt Horning, Thomas Porcello, Marc Perlman, Emily Thompson,
Michael Bull, Tia DeNora, and Hans-Joachim Braun.
Research for this book was conducted in various quarters. Thanks to
the staffs at the Bowling Green State University Music Library, the New
York Public Library, the British Library, and the Suzzallo-Allen Library
at the University of Washington, as well as those at the Josten Performing
Arts Library and Neilson Library at Smith and the helpful folks in the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, microfilm room.
Proof that some connections don’t die easy: cheers to Richard Leppert,
Maria Damon, Carol Mason, and Ilana Nash for providing some continuity during my years of academic wandering.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
My editor at the University of California Press, Mary Francis, has been
incredibly helpful and encouraging through the later stages of getting
this book ready for publication.
Finally, my biggest and most heartfelt thanks go to two likely parties.
First, to my parents, now eminently relieved that I’m a fully employed
“grown-up,” and still a vital source of all varieties of support. Second,
to Holly Mott, my companion in affairs of the heart, and her daughter,
Devon Kelley-Mott, for reminding me that there is life outside of books
and music, and for all the love they bring.
Introduction
The Metal/Punk Continuum
A
t the close of the 1970s, a battle of words broke out in the pages of
Creem magazine. The battle concerned the relative merits of heavy
metal and punk, two rock music genres that, for all intents and
purposes, had arisen during the past decade and had defined some of
the most significant, well-traveled avenues in rock’s recent history.
Though some would date the emergence of metal to the late 1960s, the
genre assumed some sort of coherence only in the early 1970s, when
bands such as Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Grand Funk Railroad
were alternately seen to embody a rejuvenation of rock’s energies or a
new cynicism in the music designed to exploit the unformed tastes of
the young. Punk too saw its first stirrings in these years, but became a
more identifiable phenomenon in the middle of the decade, when the
Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and scores of others waged their
own war on the weight of rock-and-roll tradition, as well as on the
development of a large-scale rock-industrial complex with which metal
had become intimately aligned. As punk assumed prominence in
England and, to a lesser extent, in the United States during the late
1970s, metal seemed almost to have dissipated; by 1978 bands and performers who represented the height of rock stardom only a year or two
earlier, such as Kiss, Aerosmith, and Ted Nugent, entered a phase of
1
2 INTRODUCTION
steady decline in fortune that would last well into the next decade. Yet
the commercial momentum of punk was to remain stillborn, especially
in the United States, where the leading commercial radio outlets
responded to punk with almost universal rejection.
Metal and punk, then, were both at something of a crossroads when,
in the October 1979 issue of Creem, Rick Johnson, a regular contributor, asked in a cover story, “Is Heavy Metal Dead?” The survey of contemporary metal that followed emphasized the number of older bands
whose creativity had withered and the paucity of newer bands to take
their place. By Johnson’s logic, heavy metal had in effect been swept
away by disco and the new wave, the latter having become the catchall
for punk and its offshoots by the late 1970s.1 Not all Creem readers
were so quick to agree. Come 1980, a growing debate over the vitality
of metal as opposed to that of punk or new wave frequently dominated
the letters column of the magazine. Some readers were perfectly happy
to accept Johnson’s funeral rites. “Joe Blow” from Ohio (Creem conferred creative pseudonyms on the readers who contributed to the letters column) fired back in a February 1980 letter, “Heavy Metal dead?
You bet if only it was buried already. You guys are the only guys who
realize that dinosaur bizarro thud rock has gone the way of the carrier
pigeon.”2 But a few issues later appears a letter from “Real Rock Fan”
of Tacoma, Washington, who criticizes Creem for printing “ridiculous
letters praising faggots like Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols,
the Ramones, and so on. . . . I grew up listening to real Rock that is still
being played by any respectable FM station in the country more than
any of this New Wave bullshit, and by real performers who know what
the hell they’re doing, and after 10 or 15 years, can still sell more records
and tickets than any New Wave assholes alive.”3
As the exchange mounted, homophobic rhetoric became commonplace on both sides of the metal/punk divide. While “TWO FUCKIN
DEDICATED ROCK FANS” asserted that the “Sex Pistols were so fucking gay, it’s a wonder how they ever became a group,” B. Lee from Ewan,
New Jersey, countered with a poem directed at “all you god-damned
Zeppelinites” that included the following couplets: “Punk rockers are
really great / Zeppelin fans ejaculate / Punk rockers receive good
head / From the bloody fuckers that listen to Led / Johnny Rotten can
always sing better / Than Robert Plant, the faggot bed-wetter / Steve Jones
can always outplay / Gay Jimmy Page on any day.”4 This trend became so
pronounced that a few readers took it upon themselves to criticize the
antigay bias of the “heavy metal/new wave” furor. Most eloquent in this
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 3
regard was Kodi from San Jose, California, who proclaimed, “No doubt
the proportion of gay/bi/straight people in Heavy Metal is the same as it
is in Punk is the same as it is in the general population, and what bloody
difference does it make anyway? There seems to be a notion that if a
musician is gay, his music must be wimpy or weak. Anyone who still
clings to the antiquated notion that all gays are limp-wristed fairies
should stop by any leather bar in San Francisco sometime. Some of these
guys could rip you to shreds, and probably will.”5
Despite such reasoned interjections, the debate raged on, gaining
force in midyear following extensive back-to-back features on the Clash
(in June) and Van Halen (in July).6 The subtitle for the July article, “If
You Hate Van Halen, You’re Wrong,” prompted particularly heated
replies from punk fans, one of whom responded, “I HATE VAN
HALEN AND I’M RIGHT!”7 Things came to a head in the October
1980 issue, when one pro-metal fan suggested that all punks and new
wavers “grow their hair long like Edward Van Halen or Geddy Lee, cut
out the slick shit, and play music. And by music, I mean heavy metal,”
while one punk fan expressed fear of a heavy metal comeback and
posited a theory about heavy metal audiences: “My pet theory is that
over 85% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 18 do not own
record players. They simply buy an album by a group named after a
state, take it home, and trade them with their friends like baseball
cards. . . . Heavy metal is dead, and the majority of teens today are
necrophiliacs. Otherwise, living, breathing bands such as the Ramones
would be selling millions of records.”8 Meanwhile, Creem’s editors,
exhausted by the escalating bile of the exchange, parodied the situation
with a manufactured debate between a Clash fan (named “Janie Jones”)
and a Led Zeppelin fan (named, sardonically, “Geddy Lee Roth”).
While “Janie” railed against the tendency of metal fans to valorize music
that enhanced their sense of potency, “Geddy Lee” accused his counterpart of elitism in the rejection of music popular among a mass audience. Moving between hyperbolic parody and fleeting moments of
analysis, the mock debate ended with Geddy Lee collapsing into a druginduced coma and Janie Jones jumping from a window screaming,
“What if he was right?” suggesting that both sides had become reliant
on futile gestures.9
However futile much of the rhetoric of the metal-punk exchange may
have been in this instance, the sheer energy that readers brought to the
proceedings raises some serious questions about how genre informs the
4 INTRODUCTION
ways that audiences participate in popular music. What was at stake for
these readers, besides the opportunity to see their letter in a national
magazine of rock opinion? And why did the metal/punk opposition
engender such heated debate? Based on the contents of the letters
column, four issues seem to have defined the exchange. First, there is the
question of aesthetic value, the basic question “Which one is better
music?” that Simon Frith has shown to be fundamental to modes of
popular listening.10 For Frith, drawing on the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, such matters of value are tied to the processes whereby popular music listeners assert a sort of “distinction” for themselves relative
to other listeners. Arguing in a similar vein, Sarah Thornton coined the
useful term “subcultural capital” to address the extent to which the participants in youth-based music subcultures struggle for distinction not
only relative to dominant or “mainstream” culture, but also relative to
other subcultures and to each other.11 The metal/punk debate held in
the pages of Creem was clearly an instance of struggle over subcultural
capital. When punk fans declared themselves more intelligent than
metal fans and accused the latter of being unthinking fascists, and when
metal fans claimed their music was the “real” rock and that punks were
devoid of talent, each side was seeking to confirm its superior taste and
demonstrate the malformed judgment of its opponent.
Closely aligned with this line of debate was the second defining issue,
which had to do with public visibility and access to the channels that
defined success. However one characterized the relative social or aesthetic merits of metal and punk, it was hard to overlook the fact that
metal, whether or not it was in decline, was by far the more commercially prominent form, whose leading performers enjoyed far greater
publicity. Given the presumed antipathy between punk and the cultural
mainstream that has informed so much commentary on the genre, one
might expect to find punk advocates using this discrepancy to their
advantage, claiming that their preference for less popular artists was a
sign of their more informed taste. Among the Creem letter writers,
though, one finds little evidence of such attitudes. Instead, many of the
punk fans writing to the magazine bemoaned the lack of success of their
favorite artists and lobbied to have their favorite performers featured
more visibly. Typical was a letter from Alyssa D., who challenged the
editors, “Have you ever put ANY punk or even ‘New Wave’ groups on
your cover in an other than microscopic picture? Mais non! Lead Blimp,
yes, but no Pistols or even Ramones!”12 Complementing this plea was a
strategy best exemplified by the letter cited earlier, in which the author
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 5
described his “pet theory” for the continued popularity of heavy metal:
if heavy metal is so successful, it is because its fans have no capacity for
discrimination; they like what they like because they are supposed to
like it, not because it is good. And so metal could be deemed to enjoy an
inauthentic sort of popularity.
The third issue that defined the debate is the matter of gender, and
specifically of masculinity. Whereas the common sense surrounding
punk and metal might lead us to assume that the two genres present
competing versions of manhood, with metal representing the more conventionally “macho,”13 here we find instead that the claim to genre
superiority on each side tends to be articulated through a supporting
claim of “authentic” masculinity counterposed against suggestions of
effeminacy or homosexual desire in the other. A particularly divisive
figure in the Creem exchange was the Van Halen singer David Lee Roth.
Blonde, tan, and swaggeringly virile almost to the point of parody, Roth
even offended some of the pro-metal contingent, one of whom wrote in
response to a beefcake photograph of the singer, “For someone who
thinks himself so sexy and ‘macho’ and masculine, he is about the queerest, gayest thing I’ve ever seen.”14 Yet the coarser remarks issued from
the pro-punk contingent, many of whom took the popularity of Roth as
a sign not just of the degeneracy of the singer but of the low standards
of Creem readers. In a well-worn maneuver in struggles over cultural
distinction, Roth was deemed beneath consideration because he seemed
to appeal to girls; those girls, in turn, epitomized bad taste.15 So did
Creem reader Jeff Martin proclaim, “I think the girls who read your
magazine are sluts! All they ever write about is how they’d like to fuck
Steve Tyler or get stoned with David Lee Roth. . . . Why don’t girls go for
guys like Stiv Bators or Joey Ramone anymore? They’re the real men left
in rock.”16 For Martin and many other participants in the debate, musical choices and sexual choices went hand in hand, and those choices
were best when they affirmed a particular model of being a man.
Fourth is the issue of history. Metal fans in the debate stake many of
their claims of superiority on the fact that their musical preference is of
longer standing. This is the position taken by “Real Rock Fan” above,
for whom the accumulated experience of his favorite performers was
one of their primary virtues, and for whom music was best when it had
stood the test of time. Punk fans, by contrast, typically valued novelty
over durability, and indeed were more likely to equate the latter quality
with obsolescence. The term “new wave” assumed particular salience in
this light. Though one certainly finds many letter writers distinguishing
6 INTRODUCTION
punk from new wave, with the latter pegged as the less offensive, more
commercially viable offshoot, the two shared an underlying concern
with music representative of the current moment rather than the past.
Ouida Montague thus asked her heavy metal counterparts, “Why does
the New Wave threaten you? Old doesn’t mean better, or maybe you’re
one of the missing links who still thinks the world is flat.”17
One other aspect of the metal/punk debate warrants attention. A distinct minority of letter writers questioned the tendency to place music
into such strictly defined categories. For these Creem readers, the terms
“heavy metal” and “punk” lost any validity they might have if they were
used to foster exclusivity. Lew from Trenton, New Jersey, suggested that
“rigid barriers . . . breed needless conflict between various cults” and
celebrated the fact that “while many Creem readers insist on putting up
rock and roll barricades between styles, at least some artists go right
ahead with fusions of various musics.” Lew reserved particular praise
for bands such as the Scorpions and Def Leppard, whom he “commended for producing heavy metal that bears a New Wave influence.”18
Meanwhile, John Keane took a different approach. A declared partisan
of more punk-inspired fare such as Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders’
Heartbreakers, Keane rather shamefacedly admitted a taste for Led
Zeppelin and “(only SOMETIMES) Rush.” Having thus outed himself,
he proceeded to outline a rather different system of classification from
that suggested by metal and punk. For Keane the operative terms were
“rock” and “shlock.” Under the former category he included punk stalwarts such as the Clash, Sex Pistols, Dead Boys, and Heartbreakers; the
metal bands Zeppelin, UFO, Thin Lizzy, and Deep Purple; and some
who fit neither category, such as Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling
Stones. Under the shlock category he placed bands that leaned toward
heavier rock but with a more pop orientation, such as Kiss, Van Halen,
Boston, Foreigner, and Bad Company, as well as a few stray progressive
rock bands (Yes, Styx, Moody Blues) and a token Bee Gees reference to
admit dislike of disco.19 Whereas Lew from Trenton promoted stylistic
fusion, John Keane posited instead that good rock cuts across categories. For both, metal and punk were applied less strictly than they
were for the majority of participants in the months-long exchange.
This is a book about heavy metal and punk, two genres that arguably
represent the most significant developments in rock music after 1970.
The debate recounted above is representative of the range of issues and
tendencies that can be located in the relationship between the two
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 7
genres at a particular moment in time and that have run through their
respective histories. Often considered in oppositional terms, metal and
punk have crossed into one another as often as they have been starkly
differentiated. In studying the two genres together, I am as interested in
the terms of opposition as in the terms of recombination. I have not, in
other words, simply tried to write a history of metal/punk “crossover,”
though that phenomenon certainly figures into the story that follows.
Rather, by casting the relationship between metal and punk as something like a continuum, I am asserting a degree of interconnectedness
between them that has often been acknowledged, especially by nonacademic observers, but rarely analyzed. Metal and punk have enjoyed a
particularly charged, at times even intimate sort of relationship that has
informed the two genres in terms of sound, image, and discourse. That
relationship can be traced back to the emergent moment of the early
1970s, when metal first became codified and punk arose as a dream
shared by a small coterie of critical voices concerning what rock should
be and could become. Following the interrelated paths of metal and
punk from the 1970s to the 1990s, from the rise of arena rock to the fall
of grunge, I seek to tell a new sort of story about the way genre works
in rock and in popular music, and in so doing to revise presiding interpretations of metal and punk and their place in rock history.
Genre, in its most basic formulation, refers to a system of classification through which categories of music (or film or literature) are differentiated from one another. As such, genre matters to popular music in a
number of ways: it informs the performance practice of musicians, the
marketing efforts of record companies, the aesthetic judgments of rock
critics, and the listening habits and consumption patterns of music audiences. The best writing on popular music genres—whether the broad
theoretical insights of Franco Fabbri, Simon Frith, and Jason Toynbee,
or the more focused case studies of Robert Walser and Keith Negus—
has sought to capture some of this multiplicity of meanings and functions.20 Fabbri’s groundbreaking 1981 article made a compelling, if
overly schematic case for there being five principal sorts of rules that
figure in the making of music genres: formal and technical rules, having
to do with the way music is composed, structured, and performed; semiotic rules, relating to what music is perceived to mean or represent;
behavioral rules, concerning the ways performers and audiences are
expected to act; social and ideological rules, which involve the forms of
community to which music gives rise and the values it is believed to portray; and economic and juridical rules, having to do with how music is
8 INTRODUCTION
produced, distributed, consumed, and regulated.21 Note that of Fabbri’s
categories, only one clearly has to do with “the music itself.” Although
genres are often popularly understood in terms of their musical difference from each other, formal musical elements are but a part of genre’s
overall significance.22 Indeed, genre is such a potentially powerful tool
for understanding popular music because it stands at the nexus of musical form, social organization, and cultural identity.
Given the emphasis on genre rules in the work of Fabbri and many
others, one might expect to find in any single genre songs and performers marked by a high degree of consistency and similarity. Yet while consistency is necessary for a genre to have any kind of coherence, genres
do not work by simply reproducing the same patterns over and over;
such repetitive logic would likely have little appeal to popular music
audiences. Drawing on the study of film genres, Jason Toynbee has made
the important observation that genre is a system for controlling the
interplay between repetition and difference, similarity and variation, in
popular music.23 Performers may want to sound like their most treasured influences, and audiences may want to hear new songs that sound
like their established favorites, but sounding like does not mean sounding the same as. Genre establishes a set of expectations, what some writers have termed a generic contract, wherein certain shared qualities
create an immediate sense of familiarity that in turn allows a degree of
novelty or even innovation.24
This quality, the role of musical “newness” within the workings of
genre, has not been as well studied as the ways genre rules serve to
codify popular music. Keith Negus is right when he observes that “there
is perhaps no developed theoretical approach to genre as transformative.”25 Genres are continually changing from within, giving rise to new
formations that retain some connection to established rules but seem to
stretch those rules to their limits. One need only consider the range of
performers who might be said to belong to the genre of heavy metal to
note this tendency. Bands such as Black Sabbath and Poison, Metallica
and Bon Jovi, Kiss and Pantera, and Korn and Dream Theater have as
many differences as similarities. Over time, the recognition of such differences within the metal genre has given rise to a host of offshoots or
subgenres, such as glam metal, thrash metal, progressive metal, black
metal, death metal, and nü metal. Robert Walser showed so well in
Running with the Devil that the variability of metal is as important to
the definition of the genre as the kinship that metal artists, and metal
audiences, might feel toward one another. Heavy metal, Walser argues,
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 9
“is a term that is constantly debated and contested, primarily among
fans but also in dialogue with musicians, commercial marketing strategists, and outside critics and censors. . . . ‘That’s not heavy metal’ is the
most damning music criticism a fan can inflict, for that genre name has
great prestige among fans. But genre boundaries are not solid or clear;
they are conceptual sites of struggles over the meanings and prestige of
social signs.”26 As with metal, so with punk, which has shown a comparable tendency toward differentiation from within and has given rise
to similar forms of contestation over what counts as punk. To take one
example, the emergence of hardcore in the United States and Canada
during the years 1979 to 1982 involved considerable struggle over the
meaning of punk, the effects of which have continued to reverberate
throughout the genre’s subsequent history.27
The contested nature of music genres also informs the relationship
between one genre and another, as the metal/punk debate in Creem
amply demonstrates. However, there is no work on popular music that
analyzes genre-to-genre relationships in a sustained fashion. Although
some studies, such as Walser’s, have admitted a considerable amount of
flexibility in the way genre works, the rule has been to analyze a single
genre in isolation or else to posit the mechanisms through which genre
operates in more broadly theoretical terms. Pursuing these approaches,
a few writers have gestured toward the importance of thinking about
how genres interact with each other. Fabbri, for instance, put forth a
valuable formulation that has remained largely unexamined, at least in
English-language writing: “Genres offer an extremely useful instrument
for the researcher’s analysis—just as they do for the practice of the singer
and the songwriter—precisely when they are tested along the boundaries and in the intersections of a misty no man’s land that exists
between one genre and another.”28 Meanwhile, some of the most illuminating comments in this regard have come from outside the sphere of
popular music studies. The literary scholar Heather Dubrow concludes
a brief monograph on genre by recognizing that two genres may have a
dynamic relationship with each other, in which one acts as a “countergenre” to the other, working according to a set of norms that are implicitly or explicitly drawn from and at times opposed to the other. Building
on this observation, she asks a set of questions that have great relevance
for my own inquiry: “Why do the two forms in question sometimes
encourage each other’s survival by providing a cross-current, an alternative to values in the other form that might seem totally unacceptable
were they not somehow counterbalanced, and sometimes instead
10 INTRODUCTION
threaten each other’s existence . . . by their harsh mutual criticisms?
When and why, in other words, does symbiosis turn to sabotage?”29 To
consider the metal/punk continuum is to examine this dynamic between
genre and countergenre. It is to stress the transformative qualities that
exist between one genre and another as an extension of similar qualities
that reside within individual genres. Through the metal/punk continuum, generic boundaries have been continually tested, sometimes to be
remapped and at other times to be reinforced.
In the midst of his 1981 essay on musical genres, Fabbri made another
observation of key importance to my exploration of the metal/punk continuum. Discussing the semiotic rules that play into the definition of
genres, Fabbri notes the significance of space, of where music is heard
and by how many people, and of the nature of the events in which music
is experienced. “Each genre has its own space set out in a particular
way,” he claims. “The distance between musicians and audience,
between spectator and spectator, the overall dimensions of the event are
often fundamental elements to the definition of a genre, and often guide
the participants . . . in determining what they should expect about other
rules of genre.”30 This Ain’t the Summer of Love therefore begins not
with the release of a particular record or the origin of a sound, but with
the rise of a new sort of concert phenomenon: arena rock, which effectively emerged alongside the genre of heavy metal in the first years of the
1970s. As I explain in chapter 1, arena rock was never the exclusive property of heavy metal, but metal enjoyed a particularly close connection to
the new, expansive style of rock concert that took shape in arenas and
stadiums. More to the point, it was largely through its connection to the
arena that metal was defined as a distinct entity, as a category unto itself
with a significance that set it apart from other forms of rock. While many
have traced the origins of metal back to the 1960s, to isolated tracks such
as the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” or to the hyperdistorted sound of
bands such as Blue Cheer, I contend that one cannot talk about metal as
a genre before 1970, before it was aligned with the concert form that
provided a suitable setting for such an oversized sound.
With the simultaneous rise of arena rock and the emergence of heavy
metal, rock’s capacity as a mass medium assumed newly tangible dimensions. The largest rock festivals of the 1960s dwarfed the average arena
rock concert, but with arena rock, crowds of thousands, or tens of thousands, became the norm rather than the exception, a standardized
aspect of the rock economy and the concertgoing experience.31 What
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 11
this new economy of scale, and its accompanying social and cultural
elements, meant for rock became one of the most debated issues of the
next two decades, and nowhere more so than in the context of the
metal/punk continuum. The sheer size of the arena, and of the crowds it
could hold, gave rise to new desires and fantasies of what rock-and-roll
success could be and created new forms of belonging among rock fans.
For many, though, the scale of arena rock marked a corruption of the
desires that went into the making of rock and represented an artificial
form of community that was based solely on the capacity for profit.
Broadly speaking, one could say that heavy metal has been more
inclined toward the first of these formulations, and punk more to the
second. Yet the position of neither genre has been entirely fixed on this
matter, especially with the proliferation of subgenres shaped by
metal/punk cross-fertilization during the 1980s and 1990s. Rather than
view arena rock as a polarizing issue where metal and punk are concerned, it is better to consider it a defining issue in the fluctuating relationship that has developed between metal and punk over time.
Some suggestion of how arena rock has served in this way can be
drawn from a brief article in the debut issue of the San Francisco–based
punk fanzine Search and Destroy, issued in the year often taken as punk
ground zero, 1977. In the first installment of what would be an ongoing
column, “Politics of Punk,” Nico Ordway offered a number of general
reflections on how punk might be considered political. After drawing
some broad comparisons between U.S. punk and U.K. punk, he
explained an element of punk particular to the United States. Ordway
attributed to Bill Graham, the San Francisco–based concert promoter,
the belief that the U.S. Northeast was the “potentially richest rock ’n’
roll market in the country,” but that big concerts were all but impossible to hold there because of the difficulties of crowd control. This refusal
to organize large-scale events was for Ordway one of the motivations for
punk, as he explained: “Realizing they have no hope as mass performers in a place where industry powers will not encourage mass audiences,
some Eastern bands have taken the opportunity to push their public
faces as far as possible in the direction of the bizarre, since an entertainment industry unable to satisfy musicians’ needs and fantasies by
maintaining mass audiences cannot expect to hold onto musicians’ aesthetic loyalties.”32 Ordway’s charges against Graham and his explanation for the absence of large-scale concerts on the East Coast may not
have been entirely factual. But the veracity of his account matters little
to its value as a theory of why punk was necessary. Rock and roll for
12 INTRODUCTION
Ordway was rightly the province of needs and fantasies that could be
met only by the maintenance of a mass audience. The problem was not
that the concertgoing crowd had become too large, but that the rock
industry felt too great a need to control the crowd, to keep it under surveillance and make sure it did not become too disorderly. In the face of
this will to control, punk promoted the value of bizarre and disorderly
conduct, but in this instance at least did not relinquish the notion that
an audience of thousands was still desirable.
Seventeen years later, the imagery Kurt Cobain chose to use in his
suicide note gave evidence of just how powerfully entrenched these concerns remained in the metal and punk imaginary. Often cast as the figure
who brought punk rock kicking and screaming into the mainstream of
U.S. popular music, Cobain and his band, Nirvana, created a sound that
was steeped in the alternating currents of punk and metal. Yet Cobain
had internalized a distrust of mass success and the audience that came
with it that he attributed to the “warnings of punk rock 101 courses
over the years.”33 Explaining his suicide as though addressing his fans,
he claimed to have lost the “excitement of listening to as well as creating music” that had once driven him; part of this loss came through in
the lack of excitement he felt when standing in front of an audience.
“When we’re backstage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the
crowd begins,” he wrote, “it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did
for Freddie Mercury who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd. Which is something I totally admire and envy.”34
This last sentence is crucial: as despondent as Cobain clearly was when
he wrote this, as much as he felt crushed by the weight of the crowds
that came to see him, he could not bring himself in the end to repudiate
the crowd, to blame it for his misery. Instead, he was moved to note his
admiration for Freddie Mercury, figurehead of the pomp-metal band
Queen, whose flamboyance in the face of the crowd remained intact
until his own untimely death from AIDS in 1991. Whether or not these
pressures were the genuine motivation for Cobain’s suicide, they
remained unresolved contradictions running through his career and the
scene from whence he came, which was itself an outgrowth of the
metal/punk continuum.
I was a child of arena rock, born in 1967 in the Southern California
suburb of Simi Valley. At the age of eight I bought my first record, Kiss’s
Alive, with money made from a family garage sale. Before I hit my
teenage years, I was the proud owner of a budding record collection that
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 13
was steeped in 1970s hard rock and metal, in which multiple Kiss
albums existed alongside releases by Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Ted
Nugent, Black Sabbath, Boston, and Foreigner. My tastes slowly broadened but remained largely consistent throughout my teens. When I was
fifteen I attended my first concert, by the Police, while on vacation visiting family in Detroit. Like several of my subsequent early concertgoing
ventures, it was an arena show, but not metal. Starting in 1984, though,
that would change. Between 1984 and 1986, my main high school years,
I attended almost nothing but metal shows, getting driven from Simi
Valley to “the city,” as we called Los Angeles, by my parents, parents of
my friends, and eventually by my friends (I am a mutant strain of
Southern Californian who never learned to drive). During those years I
saw the following bands, in no particular order: Van Halen, the
Scorpions, Judas Priest, Kiss (without makeup), AC/DC, Iron Maiden,
Twisted Sister, Lita Ford, Bon Jovi, Queensrÿche, Yngwie Malmsteen,
Deep Purple, Great White, Ratt, Loudness, Y & T, Sound Barrier,
W.A.S.P., Krokus, Helix, Talas, Whitesnake, and Dio. Almost all of
these concerts were held at either the Los Angeles Forum or the Long
Beach Arena, a bit farther south, both of which had capacities of about
fifteen thousand; the smallest venue I patronized in these years was the
Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard, which held a couple thousand. Although I lived only about a forty-five-minute drive from
Hollywood, I never patronized the clubs on Sunset Strip, the fabled hair
metal stomping ground. Partly this was because I was too young, but it
was also because as a teenager I had no interest in seeing shows or hanging out in clubs. I was into heavy metal concerts, not heavy metal clubs,
and concerts happened in arenas.
Punk entered slowly into this scenario. My first punk-related memories are of watching the Sex Pistols on the evening news during their first
and only tour of the United States. I was ten and already a dedicated
rock fan; I had no idea who the Pistols were, but they seemed dangerous as portrayed on the news, too dangerous for my taste at the time. A
couple years later, the Clash appeared less dangerous, and somehow I
was led to buy a copy of London Calling at the age of thirteen; it was
the first punk album I owned and would be the only one for some time.
What really stirred my interest in punk, though, was a movie, The
Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris’s documentary of the
L.A. punk scene circa 1979–80. Not long after its 1981 release, the film
was playing on a local cable channel, ON-TV, to which my parents subscribed. I stayed up late to watch it one night, captivated and somewhat
14 INTRODUCTION
freaked by the aggression of early Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, the all
too apparent self-destructiveness of Darby Crash, and the crowd-baiting
hostility of Fear.
Through it all, X was the one band featured in the film that seemed
approachable. They were weird, but seemed less alien; their music had
anger and passion and intelligence. When their next album was released,
Under the Big Black Sun, I bought it, and liked it. Within another couple
of years, buoyed by my attention to the entertainment section of the Los
Angeles Times, I was listening more and more to the punk-inspired indie
rock of the mid-1980s. The Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements,
and Black Flag all stretched my musical comfort zone in different ways,
and particularly challenged my heavy metal–informed taste for a particular breed of guitar virtuosity. D. Boon hit enough “wrong” notes to make
Yngwie Malmsteen wince a thousand times over, but the more I listened
to the Minutemen, the more those notes sounded right to me. For all that
my tastes were morphing, never did I attend a punk show in those years.
The Southern California punk scene was a major stimulus, but at a
remove. I listened to punk but went to metal concerts and wore metal Tshirts to school. And I never cut my hair unless my parents forced me.
Then I started college at the University of California, Berkeley, in the
fall of 1986. One of my freshman roommates was a punk from Orange
County whose affinity for Black Flag, Circle Jerks, T.S.O.L., Agent
Orange, and Social Distortion was unchecked by any countervailing
taste for metal. The first day I met him I was wearing my Judas Priest
concert shirt; a few weeks later, I took him and another punk in my
dorm by surprise when they found me listening to Black Flag’s My War,
an album in my own collection. Soon we were going to shows together.
My first small club show, at Berkeley Square down University Avenue,
featured the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There was a small slam-dancing pit
close to the stage (we weren’t yet calling it “moshing”), and though I did
not join in, I stood beside it, bouncing against the slammers as they
veered to the edge of the pit.
During the next few years such shows became the norm rather than
the exception for me. I went to one arena show that semester, David Lee
Roth at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, and it was the last such show
I would attend for years. After so many years of sitting at a remove from
the action onstage, I had developed a fondness for standing as close to
the stage as I could, even if it meant having to continually shove people
away from me as they slam-danced out of control or jockeyed for position to take away my spot. Yes, such action could distract from the
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 15
music, but something about the contact that happened between fans at
these shows compensated for the lack of spectacle and provided a different sort of pleasure. Meanwhile, my roommate took something from
my tastes as well. He did not take to metal the way that I was taking to
punk and its offshoots, but he could appreciate some of the faster, more
punk-inflected varieties of metal purveyed by the likes of Venom and
Megadeth. A particular metal-punk bonding experience came when we
went to see Motörhead, Megadeth, and the New York crossover band
the Cro-Mags at the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland. It was a pounding,
relentless evening of heavy rock, and Motörhead—whose role as pioneers of the metal/punk crossover is detailed in chapter 4—was the loudest band either of us had heard.
My musical coming of age, then, involved moving among and
between the genres of metal and punk but was also structured by those
genres. Being into metal did not prevent me from taking an interest in
punk, but in so doing I was very conscious of crossing a boundary. I initially approached punk with caution for the basic reason that, as a metal
fan, certain of its qualities seemed “other” to me. Furthermore, I was
aware that crossing over meant stepping into contested terrain. At the
same time, allowing my tastes to cross over to punk was symptomatic of
the time in which I lived. By the mid-1980s metal and punk were intersecting in myriad ways, and bands from Suicidal Tendencies to Metallica
to D.R.I. to Slayer were putting into musical form the impulses that
shaped my shifting allegiances. While some who lived through this era
bemoaned the loss of musical purity, I was energized by the degree of
cross-fertilization that was taking place.
The history that follows is not a personal one, but this book is definitely
an outgrowth of my own experiences with metal and punk. Those experiences have led me to think hard about the respective appeal of the two
genres and about the reasons why they have so often, over the past
thirty-five years, seemed to enjoy such a distinctly charged relationship
with one another. My personal investment in the metal/punk continuum
has also caused me to question the roles that have been assigned to the
two genres in the writing of rock history. Regarding heavy metal, Robert
Duncan’s description of the form as “the paradigm of the counterculture
into the mainstream,” written in the mid-1980s, remains representative
of a dominant strain of thought.35 Although several recent works have
challenged this view of the genre, the emergence of metal has never been
treated as a historically significant event to the extent that it deserves, at
16 INTRODUCTION
least not outside the sphere of a collection of well-researched but celebratory genre histories.36 By contrast, few eras have been invested with
as much weight as the punk explosion that had the years 1976 to 1977
at its epicenter. In the narrative of rock history written by Greil Marcus,
Jon Savage, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, and many others, 1977 is
the year that marks the clear distinction between “before” and “after,”
in the wake of which rock could never quite mean what it had before.37
Such central elements of rock culture as the mystique of the rock-androll star, the value placed on virtuosity in rock performance, and the
sense that the rock audience could be construed as a unified community
were effectively demystified by the punk assault, which brought to rock
a new degree of self-consciousness and an unprecedented impulse to
reconstruct the dominant premises of the music from within.
In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus offers perhaps the most powerful
version of this argument. Studying the Sex Pistols as part of a “secret
history” that runs through the twentieth century and includes prior
political and aesthetic movements such as Dada and Situationism,
Marcus also connects punk to a series of earlier shifts and transitions in
rock history. For Marcus, the emergence of punk in the 1970s was the
third—and apparently last—of what he terms “pop explosions,” following the British musician and critic George Melly.38 Pop explosions as
defined by Marcus are moments when rock history changes course inalterably through a mix of musical and cultural factors that combine to
affect the music and the lives of the people who listen to it in profound
ways and on a mass scale. Elvis Presley and his rockabilly peers represented the first such explosion; the Beatles initiated the second with
their 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Describing the effects
of the second event from personal memory, Marcus recalled, “People
looked at the faces (and the hair) of John, Paul, George and Ringo and
said Yes. . . . They heard the Beatles’ sound and said Yes to that too.”39
By contrast, when the Sex Pistols made their presence felt on the British
listening public some twelve or thirteen years later, the effects were less
affirmative.
Seeking a way to explain the impact of the band and the sound they
created, Marcus looks back to Bascam Lamar Lunsford’s 1924 recording of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” and Elvis Presley’s 1955
recording of “Mystery Train.” Both songs, he claims, were marked by a
“peculiar mix of fatalism and desire, acceptance and rage” regarding
life’s circumstances, though Elvis’s recording enacted a key shift in tone:
“In that founding statement [Elvis] tipped the balance to affirmation,
THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM 17
concealing the negative but never dissolving it, maintaining the negative
as the principle of tension, of friction, which always gave the yes of rock
’n’ roll its kick—and that was the history of rock ’n’ roll, up to October
1977, when the Sex Pistols happened upon the impulse to destruction
coded in the form, turned that impulse back upon the form, and blew it
up.”40 Whereas the pop explosion had earlier been motivated by a mass
audience saying an overwhelming “Yes” to the experiences at hand,
with punk rock the explosion was set off by more negative impulses. For
Marcus these impulses can be found most potently in the voice of
Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, “a voice that denied all social facts,
and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.”41 In songs
such as “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Bodies,” and “Holidays in the Sun,”
Rotten applied that voice to words that played on images of destruction,
violence, and totalitarian horror and pushed those words well beyond
the realm of sheer sense-making. In “Anarchy in the U.K.” he rolled his
r’s so that “it sounded as if his teeth had been ground down to points”;
in “Holidays in the Sun,” a song that portrays the dystopian scenario of
Nazi concentration camps converted into tourist sites, “the shifts in
Johnny Rotten’s voice are lunatic: he can barely say a word before it
explodes in his mouth.”42 This voice was dangerously immediate, but
also carried impulses steeped in the larger courses of rock music and of
twentieth-century culture, according to Marcus, who is also driven to
assert that the negation of the Sex Pistols carried a strong affirmative
cast as well. Johnny Rotten’s voice, after all, issued a denial that
“affirmed that everything was possible,” or, as Marcus put it elsewhere,
“The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then
again a yes.”43 But it was the negation underlying the music of the Sex
Pistols, more than the affirmation it promoted, that set the band’s
impact apart from previous pop explosions, and that negation was
directed first and foremost at rock music itself, which it sought to
expose as an empty form even as it renewed the possibilities for expression within the medium.
Marcus’s explanation of punk as a pop explosion is compelling for
the way it connects punk to the larger scheme of rock history. No writer
has made such grand claims on behalf of heavy metal, and it is not my
intention to do so here, at least not in any straightforward fashion. My
goal instead is to recast existing accounts of post-1970 rock as a story
of metal and punk in dialogue. Underlying this objective is a desire to
question some of the assumptions that have led to the canonization of
punk as the last great moment of rock history. Yet the larger purpose of
18 INTRODUCTION
my project is to consider how history might be differently conceived if
sounds, attitudes, and other developments typically considered separate
are combined in a single narrative. In this I have been motivated by an
observation made by Simon Frith in his book Performing Rites.
Considering the relationship between musical genres and social life,
Frith posits, “Genre analysis must be, by aesthetic necessity, narrative
analysis. It must refer to an implied community, to an implied romance,
to an implied plot.”44 For Frith the narrative qualities of genre are most
importantly connected to matters of everyday sociability, to the sort of
ordinary pleasures and person-to-person social bonds that popular
music makes possible. I think his insight also has significant value for
assessing the historical narratives that are constructed around popular
music and for rethinking historiographic assumptions about the music
and its development. Metal and punk both arose from shifts in the structures and meanings that defined rock after 1970, and in fundamental
ways both can be viewed as responses to those shifts, efforts to reinvest
rock with meaning after the perceived demise of the 1960s counterculture. The transformations that metal and punk have undergone, separately and in combination, have been decisive for the overall shape of rock
since those years. This book is about the transformations—stemming
from processes of intersection or opposition, from feelings of sympathy
or antagonism—that have constituted the metal/punk continuum.
1
Staging the Seventies
Arena Rock, Punk Rock
SIZE MATTERS
Grand Funk Railroad advertised the release of its first album, On Time,
in the December 1969 issue of Circus by drawing attention to a series of
successful appearances at large rock festivals and concerts around the
United States. The group was “born” at a rock ’n’ roll revival in Detroit
(near their home location of Flint, Michigan); they showed 125,000 in
Atlanta that “it’s not how big it is, it’s how you use it”; they helped the
people in Cincinnati to “get off”; they “thunder[ed] through” a crowd
of 30,000 in Nashville; in Texas they got all of what 180,000 had to
give; and in L.A. the band and the audience “came.”
Leaving aside the crude sexual innuendo, two things fascinate me
about this ad. First is the geography of it: the band creates a symbolic
touring circuit for itself, starting in the Midwest and heading south,
before winding up in the Golden State. Notably absent is New York or
any other location in the Northeast: Grand Funk is a band for the Sun
Belt and the Rust Belt, at least to start. More important, Grand Funk
uses its success at playing to large crowds to legitimate its commercial
appeal. One can take this as the first measure of the band’s effort to sell
itself as a “people’s band,” in opposition to critics and “hip” tastemakers. I think it can also be taken as a measure of the shift that was under
19
20 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Figure 1. Arena rock in action: Grand Funk Railroad in performance, circa 1970.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
way in the staging of live rock as the 1960s came to a close. I cannot say
definitively, but I believe this to be the first time a band was sold on the
basis of the size of the audiences for which it performed (as opposed to
the number of people who bought its records, lest we forget that 50 million Elvis fans couldn’t have been wrong in the 1950s). The crowd was
becoming a commodity in popular music to an unprecedented degree,
and the large-scale concert was in the process of becoming a standardized element of the rock industry, a process that would come to fruition
in the emergence of arena rock over the next few years. Accompanying
this change in mode of production was a change in the meaning of live
rock performance, which no American band at the dawn of the 1970s
symbolized more potently than Grand Funk Railroad (figure 1).
When Grand Funk Railroad became the first band since the Beatles
to sell out New York’s Shea Stadium, or even have the audacity to stage
such an event, it seemed as though a threshold was being crossed: a
threshold between the 1960s and the 1970s, between one version of
the rock-and-roll community and another. History has since rendered
the event little more than a footnote, as it has the career of Grand Funk
more generally, which is currently recalled—if it is recalled at all—
through the popularity of their 1973 hit, “We’re an American Band,” a
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 21
song released almost two years after the concert at Shea. Yet if Grand
Funk could be said to have had a heyday, it coincided with the earliest
years of the 1970s, when the band’s popularity seemed for many
observers to stand for a sort of defiantly lowbrow stance on the part of
the rock-and-roll audience. At a time when tastes were considered to
be maturing, to be moving away from the harder side of 1960s psychedelia and “acid rock,” Grand Funk demonstrated the persistence and,
indeed, the growing demand for a heavier brand of rock that was only
beginning to be termed “heavy metal.” Although other groups such as
Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath over time came more to represent the
new genre, Grand Funk was very much present at the creation. At least
in the American context Grand Funk forcefully represented “the interlocking themes of the rise of heavy metal, the decline of the 1960s, and
the capacity of rock’s young audience to continually renew its sense of
purpose.”1
Heavy metal and arena rock were not fully interchangeable. The
Rolling Stones were as integral to the early history of arena rock as were
any of the bands that fell under the metal category, and when the phenomenon grew over the course of the 1970s, decidedly nonmetal attractions such as Elton John and Peter Frampton figured prominently.
Nonetheless, there seemed to be a distinctive degree of interconnection
between the emergent genre of heavy metal and the emerging concert
form of arena rock. The critic Robert Duncan was one observer who
noted as much in his book on 1970s rock, The Noise. Characterizing
heavy metal as a distillation of the impulse toward “loudness” that took
hold in rock of the 1960s, Duncan described the genre in terms that
fuse sound with economics: “Loudest is not only the best and most
important part of the heavy metal style, loudest is also why this style
was so suited to the cavernous, sound-devouring arena and so to the
economy of scale that would be the linchpin of mass production rock ’n’
roll.”2 The sound of metal, by Duncan’s account, was well suited to the
new dimensions of rock performance; indeed, that sound, which pushed
the machinery of rock to its fullest capacity, may have been a precondition for the accompanying expansion of the rock concert. Just as important, the arena became the paradigmatic live setting for the heavy metal
concert. With the possible exception of progressive rock, no other genre
of the period assumed so much of its definition from the mass qualities
of the arena gathering and the ritualized displays of power enacted
within that space.3 In this regard, heavy metal arguably dramatized the
status of rock as a mass medium more powerfully than any other form
22 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
of the music in the early 1970s, raising both fears and possibilities concerning the gathering of the crowd.
These same years saw another development, much smaller in scale, that
also reverberated through the 1970s. Here the key event was not a live
concert but an album release. In 1972 the critic, collector, and budding
musician Lenny Kaye compiled a two-record anthology of what he considered lost classics from a recently bygone era. Nuggets assembled
roughly two dozen songs from the years 1964 to 1968, a rock-and-roll
era in which rough three-chord simplicity was just beginning to merge
with a nascent psychedelia. Termed “garage rock” by some, the music
on Nuggets was also the first music to draw the appellation “punk.” For
critics such as Kaye, Greg Shaw, and Lester Bangs, the music of the mid1960s was worth celebrating and recovering precisely because it lacked
some of the self-conscious complexity that rock music would assume
later in the decade. This music was also, for these critics, emblematic of
an era marked by a certain innocence, a time when the record industry
had not so fully co-opted the motives and drives behind rock and roll.
Although the music on Nuggets was resolutely commercial—many of the
songs had been minor radio and sales hits, reaching the lower tier of the
Top 40—it was also seen to have arisen from a grassroots level of rockand-roll activity led by a generation of teens who were discovering en
masse the pleasures of newly accessible electric guitar distortion. As
such, this music was cast not merely as an alternative but as an antidote
to some of the less savory aspects of early 1970s rock: the seriousness,
self-importance, and complacency that were seen to accompany the
monumental growth of the rock-industrial complex.
The growth of arena rock and the first stirrings of punk would seem
to be antithetical occurrences that ushered in the 1970s, and in many
ways they were. Yet the two phenomena also intersected in strange and
curious ways. Punk, in this early guise, was about stripping rock music
down to its most basic components. Support for stripped-down music
did not necessarily entail support for a stripped-down audience, however. Celebrants of punk in the early 1970s were reacting against many
of the trappings of rock, but they still held out hope that rock could
work as a genuinely mass medium, a medium created by and for the
masses rather than merely imposed upon them. An idealized vision of
the rock-and-roll audience drove the critical construction of punk in the
early 1970s, which hinged on the untapped energies of “white male
teens caught up with the frustrations of sex,” for whom rock and roll
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 23
was cast as the only legitimate outlet.4 Within the terms of this vision,
the monumental success of Grand Funk was as much cause for optimism as it was a source of concern. Grand Funk represented the expansionist tendencies of rock in their most unfettered form, but the band
also could be understood to symbolize the governing urge of the teenage
audience to retain a hold over the one cultural form that was authentically “theirs.” Not that Grand Funk was ever discussed as punk rock—
other contemporary bands such as the Stooges, the MC5, and the
Flamin’ Groovies were to figure more significantly in the search for
standing groups that embodied the best tendencies of the new decade.
Rather, Grand Funk stood at the juncture where early metal and early
punk found a certain measure of common ground.
GATHERING THE CROWD
The emergence of arena rock was a crucial moment of transition in rock
history, for at this moment the meaning of “the crowd,” the collectivity
that was assembled through rock, shifted in important ways. Thus, before
moving into a more thorough discussion of the impulses that coursed
through the phenomenon some broader consideration of the crowd is in
order. Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, first published in 1962, remains
the most provocative interpretation of the cultural and political significance of crowds.5 Canetti describes the crowd in broad strokes, creating
category upon category to account for the range of crowd behaviors and
the different types of crowds that might assemble toward different sorts of
ends. At root, though, he suggests that the crowd is the cultural location
in which the individual feels most powerfully connected to the collective,
to the point where he gives up some of the boundaries that define his individuality: “As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he
ceases to fear its touch.”6 This sense of unified action gives the crowd its
power but also makes it a potential threat to social order, for an assembled crowd of particular force may choose to live by its own rules rather
than those governing the society at large.
Within his taxonomy of crowds, Canetti discusses “the crowd as a
ring,” his term for a crowd that is uniquely closed.7 Significantly, his consideration of this type of crowd concentrates on a crowd assembled in an
arena: “An arena contains a crowd that is doubly closed.” He further
explains the limitations that define the crowd formed within such a space.8
The arena has a fixed number of seats, so the density of the crowd there
constituted has a necessary threshold. Moreover, arenas tend to have
24 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
seats that arrange the crowd into a sort of order; the physical proximity
between its constituents that characterizes a more spontaneous crowd is
here at least partly contained. Within this enclosed and arranged space,
spectators are given license to abandon many of the strictures of everyday
life: “They have left behind all their associations, rules and habits . . . and
their excitement has been promised them. But only under one definite
condition: the discharge must take place inside the arena.”9 Canetti draws
attention to another detail of the arena crowd: that its circular shape (the
“ring”) allows spectators to observe each other as they observe the main
event. For Canetti this quality reinforces the enclosure of the arena crowd
and creates what he calls a strange homogeneity about it.
Alluding to Canetti’s assessment of the crowd, the journalist Ellen
Willis recently offered a more concrete reflection on crowds in rock and
roll. Shifting the terms of Canetti’s title from “crowds and power” to
“crowds and freedom,” Willis begins by noting that “the power of rock
’n’ roll as a musical and social force has always been intimately connected with the paradoxical possibilities of mass freedom or collective
individuality.”10 For Willis, this paradox begins to take shape not in live
performance but through the collectivity created out of mass-mediated
cultural forms such as radio, records, and television. Popular media
brought rock and roll into the everyday lives of its audience and were
consumed in a way that laid bare the contradictions of mass freedom: a
shared repertoire of sounds and images was the common currency of a
heterogeneous and dispersed population, who “integrated the music
into [their] lives or [their] lives into the music in [their] own way.”11 Live
crowds, by contrast, “functioned largely as a confirmation of the existence of the community,” a function that Willis suggests was particularly strong for arena or festival crowds.12 Rock concerts, in other
words, brought together a community that was already conscious of its
interconnectedness through the effects of mass media. Yet some concerts had more weight than others as events where community was confirmed and consolidated. Woodstock, in Willis’s estimation, dramatized
the possibilities of mass freedom as well as the fragility dwelling within
that term; Altamont was “the countermyth that could no longer be
denied,” after which the idea that the crowd could be a source of freedom largely receded from the ideological edifice of rock and roll.13
The post-Altamont moment in U.S. rock history is the moment when
arena rock starts to become the prevailing form of live rock performance. It is a moment “after the fall,” after the decline of possibility that
she associates with the 1960s counterculture, and Willis largely glosses
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 25
over it except to note that the subsequent leading styles of popular
music—heavy metal, punk, and rap—were founded on a surface rejection of the notion that rock could generate freedom on a mass scale.
Where heavy metal is concerned, Robert Duncan essentially affirms this
perspective in his work on rock in the 1970s. Seeking to extrapolate the
effects of heavy metal on its audience, Duncan reaches a conclusion
similar to that of Willis: that the shift to the arena is a shift away from
freedom. Although he notes the association between heavy metal’s fascination with volume and certain strongly held passions rooted in “the
pent anger of the age,” he places more emphasis on the potential for
loudness to overwhelm passion, to deaden the senses through an excessive commitment to the “technological phallus.” Thus he concludes,
“With heavy metal, there is no acting out, just the being acted upon.”14
Duncan’s dystopic view of the arena rock audience is overstated, to
be sure. Considered alongside the perspectives of Canetti and Willis,
though, he confirms the extent to which arena rock was perceived to
have created a unique sort of rock-and-roll crowd. Following Canetti’s
observations, we can locate part of that difference in the space of the
arena itself (and its larger corollary, the stadium), a space whose clearly
bounded nature contrasts with the more open crowd formations of the
rock festival. The enclosure of the arena was no doubt key to its economic function as delineated by Duncan: it was much easier to regulate
the flow of the crowd into and out of the arena, and thus easier to set a
price on the right of access to the concert space. Canetti’s emphasis on
the arena as a location set apart from everyday life sheds light on the
power of arena rock as a mode of entertainment. While the isolation of
the arena might lead to accusations of escapism, it was precisely the
ability to enter such a space that likely proved appealing to masses of
rock spectators. The desire for such temporary removal may have
marked a shift away from the visions of freedom that had motivated the
crowds of the 1960s, as Willis and Duncan suggest. Yet the explanation
for what took the place of these earlier visions leaves much to be desired
in their writings, as it does in most of the available literature on rock.
Arena rock cannot be explained strictly in terms of an abandonment of
countercultural idealism; it also reconstituted the rock audience as a
community during a pivotal shift in the music’s history.
That shift, in a sense, had its roots in 1965, when the Beatles played the
first of two engagements at Shea Stadium in New York (figure 2). The
Monterey Pop Festival was still two years away, and such large assemblies
26 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Figure 2. The Beatles at Shea Stadium, 1965: a landmark event in the growth of the rock
crowd. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
did not yet have a routine place in the world of rock. In 1965, a concert
at Shea Stadium was testimony to the mass phenomenon that was the
success of the Beatles, which exceeded the bounds of rock and roll
proper. Contemplating the event only a few years later, the critic
Richard Meltzer focused on a moment that laid bare a fundamental
quality of the gathering. It was a moment of sheer expectation, preceding the performance, that involved the appearance of a helicopter above
the stadium. Those watching presumed that the airborne vehicle contained the “precious cargo” of the band members, and so the helicopter
became an object of intense scrutiny, a symbol of the event waiting to
happen and of the audience’s desire to immerse themselves in the event.
Yet it proved to be a false signal. The helicopter housed only a television
camera, and it soon flew away, with the Beatles still nowhere in sight.
This small episode contained elements of both the “awesome and the
trivial” that Meltzer claimed was at the heart of the Beatles’ appearance
at Shea Stadium. Subsequently, the crowd responded to the mere suggestion that the band would be taking the stage with “an uproar that
was unending and in fact prevented all participating in the audience
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 27
from hearing a single word actually sung by the Beatles” once the band
appeared.15 Further reflection led Meltzer to observe the basic, but for
him remarkable fact that “the Beatles do not have to be seen or heard to
produce an audience reaction of awesome magnitude. This represents
the growth of true ‘inauthentic’ experience.”16 Why did this experience
lack authenticity for Meltzer? It was inauthentic because the concert
experience was supposed to hinge on the reaction of audience to performer and because performance, for Meltzer, was a matter of presence
and of action, not of absent suggestion.
A year later, the Beatles would play Shea Stadium again. Less than one
week after that second show they would retire from public performance
with a concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Their decision to
withdraw from the concert stage has to rank as one of the most important turning points in the history of 1960s rock, though its meaning was
and remains far from clear. The rock historian James Miller recently
explained the Beatles’ move as a reaction to the growing “vacuity” of the
live rock concert, drawing support from a statement by John Lennon: “I
reckon we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves . . . and
that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with
music, any more. They’re just bloody tribal rituals.”17 From this perspective it would seem that Lennon and the rest of the Beatles responded
to the same lack of authenticity that Meltzer had observed in the audience reaction to the first Shea Stadium show. The Beatles wanted their
performance to matter; if it no longer did, if the gathering of the crowd
was its own justification, then the band would retreat from the crowd to
concentrate on crafting their sound in the recording studio.
One could also say, though, that the Beatles’ withdrawal from concert
performance arose from the band members’ growing fear of the touch of
the crowd. It happened, in other words, because of a fundamental change
in how the band imagined its relationship to its audience, not because
the audience itself had so fundamentally changed. In 1966, according to
the Beatles scholar Devin McKinney, the band entered a period of substantial transformation in which they sought to engage their audience in
new and more challenging ways and revealed a dark undercurrent that
was shaped by the more threatening dimensions of their success. Their
1966 world tour, which began with a series of concerts in Germany,
brought the band into some peculiarly perilous circumstances, with the
Beatles becoming embroiled in controversy over a purported snub of
First Lady Imelda Marcos in the Philippines and anti-Beatles protests
arising in Japan and in the southern United States. Throughout the tour
28 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
the fantasy of mass belonging that had surrounded the Beatles’ success
since 1964—the result of the “pop explosion” generated by the band, in
Greil Marcus’s terms—began gradually to erode, making the band’s final
concert at Candlestick Park seem like an anticlimax. As opposed to the
ecstasy that had typically surrounded Beatles concerts, the performance
at Candlestick had an air of tragedy, evident in the unusually casual and
almost intimate tenor of a show so large in scale. McKinney suggests
that even the fans sensed that something was coming to an end. But the
Beatles knew what was ending: “The Beatles were hip to the inevitable
death of mass romance.”18
More than three years before the infamous events at Altamont, then,
the status of live performance in rock had reached something of an apotheosis. McKinney tried to deny that the end of the Beatles’ concert career
was truly momentous: “To the extent that the Beatles exist in sound and
fantasy and symbol, in dream and history, Candlestick Park isn’t an
ending at all.”19 Certainly the band’s career did not stall as a result of their
decision; if anything, their status grew following their withdrawal from
the live arena, with the release of the Sgt. Pepper’s album having an aura
of event surrounding it that few concert events have ever had.
Nonetheless, one does not have to fully subscribe to a romantic notion of
the rock community to conclude that the Beatles committed a major act
of disappearance in the decision to end their concert career, and that such
an act had dramatic implications for the relationship between artist and
audience. For one thing, fans could not take for granted that their favorite
artists would appear in concert. More pointedly, the concert crowd was
deemed an unnecessary supplement to the furthering of the Beatles’
career and, by extension, to the production of rock itself. Recording had
arguably been assigned aesthetic priority over live performance in rock
and roll since the earliest years of the music, but no performers had previously defined themselves so thoroughly as recording artists before this
point. Finally, there is the lingering suggestion in the Beatles’ withdrawal
from live performance that where the rock-and-roll concert was concerned, there was such a thing as “too big,” especially when it seemed as
though scaling down was not an option. The desire of Beatles’ fans for
even the mere illusion of contact was, or at least appeared to be, too vast
to allow smaller events to occur. But the vastness of a given Beatles crowd
threatened to swallow the band whole.
The irony, of course, is that it was only after the Beatles’ retirement from
the concert stage that what many would consider a sort of golden age of
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 29
live rock truly began. In this connection, it was oddly appropriate that
the Beatles would play their final concert in San Francisco, for that city
would figure prominently in the reformation of the live rock medium
that occurred in the last years of the 1960s. San Francisco produced one
of the first functioning rock scenes in the contemporary sense of the
term, in which local performers were supported by an infrastructure of
radio stations and performance venues. In this setting the notion that a
rock concert was a potent reflection of, and even a means of producing,
a more broadly felt sense of community took hold with distinctive force.
Moreover, while particular bands such as Jefferson Airplane, the
Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company clearly rose
to the status of stars within the scene, and later outside of it, the scene
itself was as much the basis for this sense of community as was devotion
to any given group of performers, something that marked the phenomenon of live music in San Francisco as something rather different from a
Beatles concert.
Just as important, the rock concert became a new sort of commodity
in San Francisco, largely through the influence of the promoter Bill
Graham and the status held by his home venue, the Fillmore
Auditorium, which began operation in 1966. In terms of scale, the
Fillmore was not at all comparable to Shea Stadium and Candlestick
Park. The legal capacity of the hall was nine hundred, though, according to the auditorium’s manager, Paul Baratta, it was common for fourteen
or fifteen hundred to be in attendance on any given night during its
heyday.20 What distinguished the Fillmore was the guarantee of regular,
high-quality rock entertainment night after night, featuring a mix of
local and national acts. The club was further shaped by two competing
tendencies that Graham, as a veritable live music auteur, brought to
bear on the site. Graham went about the business of staging concerts
with a degree of organization and a demand for structure that seemed
at odds with the free-form ethos of the surrounding psychedelic scene.
Whereas other promoters were more likely to see themselves as providing a form of community service, which might also create a source of
profit, Graham operated out of a basic recognition that there was a new
cultural market waiting to be tapped. At the same time, this intensely
capitalistic drive made Graham strive to create the most hospitable and
most sensory-stimulating venue he could imagine. His memoir is full of
assertions to this effect. After one of his first events at the Fillmore, a
benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, he reprimanded someone
for turning on the house lights too abruptly after the show. Subsequently
30 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
he procured a mirror ball and showed slides of “flowers and animals
with soft, soft music going in the background so people could land without a crash.” Other details soon followed, such as balloons on the floor,
free apples in a barrel at the door, and news clippings lining the
entranceway, all part of Graham’s effort to “make the place more
haimish. I wanted to ease people in and then back out again so the experience wouldn’t be jarring.”21
This concentration on creating the right environment in which to
experience music fostered a new mode of rock spectatorship. The style
of psychedelic rock emerging in San Francisco at such events as Ken
Kesey’s famed acid tests stretched the formal boundaries of rock considerably, especially in the amount of time dedicated to the soloist. In the
acid tests, the improvisational looseness of early Grateful Dead performances became a part of the environment, not a necessary focus of
attention but one of many points of stimulation meant to facilitate a
good trip. The Fillmore borrowed some of the trappings of acid test festivities, such as the light show, but on the whole made psychedelic music
much more the center of the event. When musical style meshed with performance venue and with the growing Bay Area drug culture, concertgoers in turn assumed a more attentive, tuned-in form of listening. Pete
Townshend called this phenomenon “the electric ballroom syndrome”
and credited it with making live rock into “listenable music,” a point
also made by Eric Clapton: “The first time I went to San Francisco, I
experienced the kind of more introverted or serious or introspective attitude toward our music which seemed to go hand-in-hand with hallucinogenic drugs or grass or whatever. It was more into a ‘head’ thing, you
know? I was encouraged to get outside of the format. I was encouraged
to experiment.”22 Changes in audience demeanor and changes in musicianship mutually reinforced each other to produce the phenomenon of
psychedelic rock. Both tendencies found support in the concert environment that Bill Graham worked to cultivate at the Fillmore.
Over the next several years Graham would build a live music empire.
For a time that empire was based on his ownership and management of
performance spaces, which expanded to include the Fillmore East in
New York City and then the larger Winterland Ballroom in San
Francisco. Yet the live music landscape was undergoing significant
changes, and by 1971 only Winterland was left standing. By Graham’s
own account, he at first vigilantly resisted the turn to arena rock.
Tellingly, at the moment that bands such as the Rolling Stones were first
turning to Madison Square Garden for their New York concerts,
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 31
Graham was seeking to turn the Metropolitan Opera House into a rockand-roll venue.23 For Graham a concert was meant to be an elevating
experience on some level, and he saw no room for elevation in a space
like the Garden. Financially, though, the point came when he just could
not compete with the monetary guarantees available to touring bands
willing to play the larger capacity venues. It was with bitterness, then,
that Graham offered his own assessment of the turn to arenas and stadiums that dominated the 1970s:
Rock and roll had started in the clubs and the streets and the parks. Then it
became a game of supply and demand. As the market price went up, the
negotiations got heavier. It wasn’t just who had the better amps or piano or
stage crew. It got to the point where bands were earning money beyond
their wildest dreams. Musicians realized, “God, I have a second car. I can
have a home in the country. I can have a sailboat. I can have everything I
want.” What else did they need? The time to enjoy all these things. Because
the road was always the same, the conclusion they reached was, “I want to
make more money in less time.” Result? Stadiums.24
And yet it was not that simple, even for Graham. Recounting the decision to close the Fillmore East in 1971, one of Graham’s close associates, John Ford Noonan, noted that the economic competition was
accompanied by a less tangible change in attitude and atmosphere that
was especially evident in the scene that developed outside the theater
during shows. Noonan recalled a general unpleasantness and a rising
tendency toward violence among the people loitering on the street. In
his characterization, “The spirit of the place changed.” Rather than the
communal vibe that had accompanied performers such as Santana and
Janis Joplin, “it became reds and wine and Grand Funk Railroad.”25
If Bill Graham and his associates experienced this scenario in terms of
cultural decline, for others it had more the feeling of ascension. Steven
Tyler was one such figure. In 1969, the future singer of Aerosmith had
played in a number of New England–based rock ensembles and achieved
a good measure of regional notoriety but had not yet made the break to
larger scale success. He received a taste of what that success would be
like, though, when Led Zeppelin came through the Northeast on their
1969 tour. Tyler had an “in” with the British rockers: his friend Henry
Smith had joined Zeppelin’s road crew. In Boston he caught the band at
the Tea Party, Boston’s version of a rock-and-roll ballroom, where he
claims he was moved to tears by the middle section of “Dazed and
Confused.” When Zeppelin played New York City some weeks later,
32 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
though, it was not at the comparably sized Fillmore East but at Madison
Square Garden. Along with the Stones, Led Zeppelin was one of the first
bands to take to the arena. Indeed, it would become one of the dominant
arena and stadium attractions of the coming decade. Through his friendship with Smith, Tyler gained admittance to the Garden during sound
check, and the sight of the empty arena provoked a vision: “When I got
there, the road crew and the union people were all eating and the band
hadn’t arrived. The stage was empty and so were the 19,000 seats. The
silence was deafening. I walked out to the stage and lay down, with my
head hanging backward off the edge. I was overwhelmed by instant delusions of rock and roll grandeur, imagining that I was roaming the land,
raping and pillaging, disguised as an ambassador of rock. And I said to
myself, Someday a band of mine is gonna fill this fuckin’ place.”26
One can read into Tyler’s reverie the worst excesses of 1970s rock: the
unabashed narcissism of the rock-and-roll star and the accompanying,
unremitting sexism, with its attendant caste system structured around
the relationship between male stars and female groupies. For my purposes, though, the passage reveals one matter above all: that the space
of the arena was invested with profound meaning in itself and figured
prominently in the broader set of cultural fantasies promoted by rock—
perhaps especially hard rock and heavy metal—during that decade.
Against Bill Graham’s characterization that the turn to arena rock was
motivated by the desire of the most successful acts to reorganize their
touring schedule, Tyler’s response to the spectacle of an empty Madison
Square Garden suggests that the arena was an icon of success in its own
right, and the possibility of drawing an arena-size crowd stood for an
intensely coveted form of rock-and-roll grandeur.
GRAND FUNK LIVE
Grand Funk Railroad embraced this new economy of scale with
unabashed enthusiasm. Casting them along with Led Zeppelin as one of
two “Super Heroes of the Seventies” in 1971, the critic and scene maker
Richard Robinson queried the group and its manager, Terry Knight,
about their path to success. Noting their Flint, Michigan, origins,
Robinson wondered about the band’s connection to the Detroit scene,
home to such prominent acts as the MC5, the Stooges, Mitch Ryder,
and Bob Seger. Knight replied emphatically that Detroit had played little
part in the band’s success, and that in fact the band was just preparing
to play its first proper Detroit engagement on a bill with fellow “super
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 33
heroes” Led Zeppelin.27 He explained to Robinson, “As opposed to a
lot of Detroit groups who are just big in Detroit and can’t get outside of
Detroit, this group got the national recognition first and now they’re
going into Detroit as a national headliner.” Provoked by Knight’s
remarks, Robinson stepped away from the interview and inserted his
own assessment of the band’s “dark secret”: “THEY TOOK THEIR
MUSIC TO THE PEOPLE WITHOUT ASKING ANYONE’S PERMISSION. They didn’t wait for the rock critics and journalists to discover
them. . . . Just as they didn’t wait for radio stations to start playing their
records. The Grand Funk Railroad just started playing their music for
their people.”28 Rock festivals rather than clubs or ballrooms were
Grand Funk’s proving ground, affording them access to crowds of
thousands without having to bear the burden of headliner status. Terry
Knight’s talent for exploiting this situation was twofold: through his
publicity efforts he was able to exploit GFR’s rise as an underdog success story driven by the spontaneous acclaim of the rock-and-roll
masses, and he was able to turn Grand Funk’s festival successes into evidence that the band had a deceptively large following.
When Richard Robinson follows this account with an even more
resounding endorsement, proclaiming Grand Funk Railroad to be
“THE FINEST BAND IN THE LAND,” the claim seems exaggerated,
almost disingenuous. Yet 1971, the year Robinson’s words were published, was the year rock critics decided they had to reevaluate this
group. Until that time, word on the band tended toward the harshest
sort of dismissal, characterized by Dave Marsh’s review of their 1970
release Live Album: “Are they as slow and doped out of their wits as
their audiences? Are they THAT naive and unsophisticated? . . . I really
tried to listen to the music but, halfway through, I had to shut it off.”29
Marsh and many other critics deemed the music of Grand Funk
Railroad an unsatisfying simplification of the power trio format that
had been popularized by the late 1960s ensembles Cream and the Jimi
Hendrix Experience. As Robinson pointed out, however, critical drubbings had little impact on Grand Funk Railroad’s ability to build an
audience. Between 1969 and 1974 the band scored ten gold records, at
a time when a gold record was awarded for sales of over one million
units, and played a steady stream of concerts to arena- and festival-size
crowds. When the band’s success continued to escalate despite critical
hostility, Grand Funk Railroad became a problem for critics to resolve:
How could a group with such obvious lack of musical merit gain such a
strong hold over the rock audience? This was the central question
34 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
surrounding the band in 1971, the year they released two albums that
were deemed marked improvements over their earlier material, Survival
and E Pluribus Funk. That year they played over eighty concerts, in
locations as far afield as Paris, Rome, and Japan, with their July 9
appearance at Shea Stadium representing a clear high point in publicity
and sense of achievement.30
The Shea Stadium concert was the culmination of a determined move to
mass success engineered by the members of Grand Funk Railroad—
Mark Farner, Don Brewer, and Mel Schacher—and their manager, Terry
Knight. During the early years of their success, Knight was the band’s
public mouthpiece and publicity mastermind. His relationship with the
members of the group dated back to the mid-1960s. A native of Flint,
Knight began his music career as a radio disc jockey, working at a series
of Top 40 stations in Flint, Detroit, and Windsor, Canada. Even in those
early years, he displayed a talent for promotion and a willingness to go
to considerable lengths to draw an audience. One of his fellow Flint DJs,
Peter Cavanaugh, recalled a 1964 event for which Knight rented an
auditorium and advertised a show featuring the “sounds” of Chuck
Berry, Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys, and a host of others, “all for just
three dollars.” On the day of the show, two thousand people came and
paid three dollars a head to hear Terry Knight spin records by the artists
named. Several hundred of the attendees were upset at the misleading
advertisement and asked for a refund, which Knight duly provided. But
the vast majority stayed, giving Knight a payday of several thousand dollars
and, more important, teaching him a fundamental lesson: “Crowds
always keep crowds.”31
In 1965 Knight decided on a change of course. He wanted to leave
radio and take to the microphone in a more visible way as the front man
for a rock-and-roll band. Although he was not the most talented singer,
his notoriety and connections made him a desirable addition to a local
Flint band named the Jazz Masters, whose members included drummer
Don Brewer. Soon after Knight joined, the Jazz Masters changed their
name to the Pack, and then to Terry Knight and the Pack, the new singer
wanting no doubts as to who was setting the group’s direction.
Meanwhile, in late 1965, Pack bassist Herm Jackson was drafted into
the army and was replaced by Mark Farner, who had to switch from the
guitar and vocals role he had previously filled in a trio of local groups.
Over the next several months, Terry Knight and the Pack became a
notable regional attraction, and even broke onto the national charts in
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 35
summer 1966 with a remake of the pathos-laden Ben E. King song “I
(Who Have Nothing).” Stylistically, the band was in the vein of scores
of others that arose in Michigan and other regional scenes in the mid1960s, playing a form of rock and roll inflected with rhythm and blues
that was deeply influenced by British invasion bands such as the Rolling
Stones and the Yardbirds. The Pack, in other words, was a prototypical
mid-1960s garage band of the sort that would later be so central to the
coterie of critics and record collectors who would begin to define punk
rock in the early 1970s.32
Soon after their appearance on the charts, the lineup of Terry Knight
and the Pack began to fluctuate. Farner left the band in that same
summer of 1966 to allow Herm Jackson to resume his bass-playing role
after he was medically discharged from the army. Farner would join
forces with another rising regional band, the Bossmen, fronted by guitarist Dick Wagner. When that band broke up only a matter of months
later, Farner returned to the Pack, a move that precipitated the temporary end of the group’s relationship with Knight, whose singing and
songwriting abilities were no longer deemed adequate for the band’s
rising ambitions. Following Knight’s departure, Farner for the first time
took over lead vocals of the group. Although Farner was no doubt a
stronger vocalist than Knight, the Pack’s career began to founder after
Knight left. What Knight lacked as a singer he made up as someone who
knew how to draw attention, hustle gigs, and detect upcoming trends in
the world of rock.
When the Pack was stranded on Cape Cod in February 1969, having
been abandoned by their manager and with no gigs for the foreseeable
future, Don Brewer placed a call to Knight, asking for his assistance.
Shortly thereafter, Grand Funk Railroad formed around the duo of
Farner and Brewer, joined by bassist Mel Schacher, who had previously
played with another pivotal mid-1960s Michigan garage band,
Question Mark and the Mysterians. Knight was to be the new group’s
manager, a decision formalized by an elaborate contract that would
later become a major source of conflict between the two parties. At the
time, though, it seemed like a promising partnership. As Brewer
recalled, “The whole thing was planned on making it. . . . That’s what
we wanted. We’d had it with playing bars.”33
Grand Funk Railroad emerged as a band with big ambitions that set its
sights on playing to the largest possible audiences. The sheer pace of
their activity over the first twenty months of their existence as a band is
36 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
a testament to their objectives. Between May 1969 and December 1970,
GFR released three studio albums and one double live set and played
close to 150 concerts across the United States. “Are You Ready,” the
opening song from their debut album, On Time, quickly assumed the
lead position in the band’s live sets as well, exemplified by its status as
the first cut on Live Album, which was assembled from tapes of three
Grand Funk concerts held in summer 1970. At three and a half minutes,
“Are You Ready” was a rather compact call to arms, designed to energize an audience. The song is built around the alternation between a
condensed three-chord riff (E–F-sharp–G), which starts the track and
repeats between verses, and a one-chord vamp in E that is held in place
for the duration of each verse. While the vamp has a clear rhythm-andblues inflection, the riff is much more rhythmically “straight,” more in
line with the sort of device that would play a definitive role in early
heavy metal. The lyrics of “Are You Ready” are about as simple as rock
lyrics can get, each line of the verse starting with a chant of the title
phrase (sometimes slightly altered to “Well you’re ready” or “Now
you’re ready”), followed by a series of injunctions to the listener that
have the vague air of a sexual come-on. The real heart of the piece,
though, is the final minute, during which Don Brewer’s drums assume a
more frenzied, up-tempo drive, and Mark Farner solos with a tone far
more heavily distorted than in any previous portion of the song.
In a shortened form, “Are You Ready” was representative of a musical strategy that characterized much of Grand Funk Railroad’s early
output, which could best be termed progressive intensification. A relatively laid-back groove would open a given song, often maintained for
some time, but would eventually give way to a quickened pace combined with a far more dense and distorted musical texture. Any vocals
that accompanied these shifts would also register the change, becoming
markedly more strained and coarse in tone. Most often, though, these
intensified passages provided the underpinning for an extended guitar
solo by Farner. Several of the band’s studio recordings serve as examples
of this approach, but it was a particular linchpin of their live repertoire.
Like many of the era’s heavier rock bands, Grand Funk Railroad had a
tendency in concert to extend the length of their songs by several minutes. Live Album provides several examples of such. The album’s four
sides contain only nine songs, three of which extend past the ten-minute
mark (another clocks in at nine minutes, fifty seconds).
Indeed, side 4 had but one song, “Into the Sun,” the more than twelve
minutes of which thoroughly embody the intensification principle. In
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 37
this case, the main riff of the song is itself far from low-key, centered
around a stuttering funk chord played with full sonic force. But after
two verses, the song nonetheless grows markedly heavier in tone, a
change signaled most emphatically by Mel Schacher’s fuzzed-out bass
sound. Following one more verse, Schacher’s bass lays the foundation
for even greater intensification, with Farner attacking his guitar, issuing
sound clusters and bits of feedback that have little melodic content, then
falling into a more standard guitar solo notable for its sustained notes
and crashing chords. On the record the crowd noise reaches levels that
match and even exceed that of the band, coming to a head as the song
reaches its climax after several minutes of repetitive, high-energy
motion. As Metal Mike Saunders observed in an early critical reevaluation of the band’s work, “Into the Sun” “possesses the frenzy and rage
that you imagine a group like this must have had to convert so many
people through their early live performances.”34
Whether Live Album itself had such powers of conversion is difficult
to assess, but the album was the band’s fastest selling up to that point
and took only one week to be certified gold following its November
1970 release.35 Its success consolidated Grand Funk Railroad’s rapid
ascent to stardom. More broadly, it also set the stage for the stream of
double-live albums that were issued throughout the following decade
and that were a particular staple of the hard rock and heavy metal
genres. Often derided by critics, live albums confirmed the crucial connection between the experience of the arena rock concert and the distinctive pleasures offered by heavy metal to its listening audience. They
also stood as an important gesture of authentication in a rock genre
that placed priority on the live event and the capacity of musicians to
“put out” in performance. Live albums fulfilled this function in two
ways. They certified that a band could in fact command the attention of
an audience of thousands and provided aural evidence of that audience’s
enthusiasm, and they documented the ability of a band to successfully
reproduce, or even extend, the sounds and structures of their recorded
work. That live albums were also recordings was a paradox that bands
and record companies sought to efface by stressing the documentary
qualities of the work. Although these were hardly field recordings, the
success of a live rock album depended in large part on the record’s
capacity to convey a sense of presence in an ostensibly less mediated
form than a studio recording. This point was not lost on Terry Knight,
who included on the cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s Live Album a pronouncement that the record was a “true historical documentation of
38 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
this group in person. . . . All events are presented here exactly as they
occurred.”36
That pronouncement was but one example of the tirelessness with
which Knight went about the task of promoting Grand Funk Railroad.
A grander example came earlier in 1970. To advertise the impending
release of the band’s third album, Closer to Home, Knight purchased a
billboard in Times Square, at the heart of New York City. The billboard,
which featured renderings of each of the three band members reproduced from the album cover artwork, took up a full city block and cost
the princely sum of $100,000. This huge expenditure yielded unforeseen dividends. A strike by the workers in charge of changing billboard
advertisements in New York allowed the image to remain in place for
three months, even though Knight had paid for just one. For Knight,
such measures were justified by the band’s lack of radio play and the
general attitude of critical hostility that the group encountered in their
early career. Acting as the band’s spokesperson in many an interview,
Knight routinely characterized Grand Funk Railroad as the ultimate
antiestablishment band, standing for the people against the power of
government and media. This portrait was particularly in evidence the
following year, 1971, as the Shea Stadium concert was approaching.
In his efforts to publicize the concert, Knight organized what was
meant to be a large press conference suitable to the grandeur of the
event. When only a handful of journalists attended the conference,
Knight went on the offensive. Making a comparison between the status
of Grand Funk Railroad and that of the Beatles, whose breakup was still
very fresh in the minds of the pop music public, Knight declared that the
media feared GFR, whose popularity represented a threat to the established order in a way that the Beatles never did. As he proclaimed in an
interview following the aborted press conference, “The media is worried about our power. Anybody that can draw 55,000 people together
at one time has got some kind of power. . . . Back when the Beatles were
famous 55,000 people just meant a lot of screaming girls. Now, 55,000
people to them maybe means the possibility of a Mark Farner standing
on stage and saying, ‘now brothers and sisters take that city down!’”37
Feminizing the rock audience of the preceding decade by way of disparaging it, Knight drew a distinction between the Beatles and Grand
Funk Railroad that was politically groundless—the Beatles were far more
political than Knight here suggests, and GFR were not so radical—
but rhetorically powerful. It was not just that Grand Funk Railroad
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 39
symbolized the shift from the 1960s to the 1970s in rock, but that
Knight portrayed them as the principal representatives of this shift as a
means of building their appeal. In so doing, he also put forth a construction of the audience to go along with his definition of the band, as
a group of people who were young but not too young, who were not
“just” girls but a collection of “brothers and sisters” whose attraction
to rock and roll made them automatic rebels ready for action.
Interviewing Knight, the journalist Kenny Kerner became exasperated by such rhetoric. “Why do you keep using those words? Our
people? Your people? Brothers. Sisters. That’s such garbage. . . . How
can you bring everybody together if you first separate them?” Knight
defended himself on political grounds, declaring that when “they” are
promoting Vietnam, lines of separation are necessary. But Kerner
pushed his point, and in so doing laid bare some of the stakes involved
in Grand Funk’s success: “The reason for the Beatles’ great popularity
was that they had universal appeal. . . . Grand Funk is coming on to the
music scene and saying that these people are the ones we’re playing for. . . .
The Beatles didn’t separate. . . . Grand Funk is taking their people out of
the entire population and catering exclusively to them.”38 This unusual
exchange, in which an interviewer genuinely challenges his subject,
reveals the tensions emerging in the early 1970s around the mass appeal
of rock. Although Beatles concerts were by no means devoid of conflict,
in the aftermath of their breakup the Beatles were construed as figures
who held the rock audience together and broadened the music’s reach.
Grand Funk Railroad, by contrast, had the capacity to draw larger
crowds than just about any other band of the early 1970s, but their
appeal nonetheless seemed exclusive. By their very popularity they had
driven a wedge in the perceived ability of rock to represent its audience
in a unified and unifying way.
Greil Marcus elaborated on this conception of the meaning of GFR’s
success in the midst of an extensive rumination on the state of rock,
“Rock-a-Hula Clarified,” published in the June 1971 issue of Creem (the
month preceding the band’s Shea Stadium appearance). Discussing the
changes that overcame rock during the late 1960s, Marcus asserted that
a once “secret” medium had become assimilated and that “mainstream
assimilation has brought not power but dissipation.”39 In this moment
of fragmentation, he observed, “it’s certainly possible that the only place
in rock and roll . . . that still moves with the excitement and that still has
the power to maintain the values of exclusive possession that have made
this music matter for fifteen years is the place now occupied by Grand
40 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Funk Railroad.”40 Further noting that GFR had achieved such prominence despite a number of limiting factors (lack of radio play, hostile
critical response, indifference to the band among many diehard rock
fans), Marcus went so far as to suggest that “Grand Funk is not merely
fragmenting the audience, like most everyone else; they may be dividing
it.” Yet the group’s ultimate importance for Marcus was, paradoxically,
not in the divisiveness of their impact but in the apparent connection
they had with a newly constituted wing of the rock audience, a younger
wing that rejected some of the standards and assumptions of the critic
and his peers. To this audience, Grand Funk seemed able to speak
directly, even if their message might seem inarticulate to those not
attuned to the band. Grand Funk Railroad concerts dramatized and
consolidated this bond in the strongest terms, in Marcus’s description:
“A Grand Funk concert sets up, defines, invites and entertains a community which forms itself around that event. The ‘goal’ is to get off—
and in the mystery of the rock, you get off on what’s yours. A Grand
Funk concert is exclusive. Only certain people want to get in. They
know who they are, too. Fuck that critic shit, man, siddown. This is the
best thing going, and not only that, this is the biggest group in the world,
and I . . . am in the same room.”41
The construction of Grand Funk’s audience that we find in Marcus’s
comments, and with a different inflection in Terry Knight’s efforts to sell
the band, contains a strange residue of one of the terms that assumed
currency at the end of the 1960s to explain the changing political tides:
the silent majority. In making this parallel, I do not want to suggest that
the arena rock crowd that formed around Grand Funk Railroad represented a move toward political conservatism on the part of the rock audience; Knight’s continual desire to represent the group in oppositional
terms would make such a claim hard to support. Rather, the way the
band was perceived to have mobilized a growing sense of division within
rock, and to have energized a segment of the rock audience who were
marginal and inarticulate within the dominant terms of rock discourse,
can be compared to the strategy pursued by Richard Nixon in driving a
wedge through the electorate. In the words of the historian David Farber,
Nixon “understood how a great many Americans in the postwar era
were roughly divided and divided themselves into two separate castes
(classes?)—those who speak and those who are silent.”42 Working with
a rather different agenda, Terry Knight nonetheless seemed to operate
with a similar understanding that the authority of speech was increasingly perceived to be the province of a privileged few in the world of
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 41
rock, which left thousands upon thousands of “silent” fans looking to
be represented. It was these fans that, by Greil Marcus’s account, gravitated to Grand Funk, delighting as they did so in the resulting confusion
and hostility from the most audible rulers of rock discourse, the critics.
Of course, Marcus’s article was evidence that some of the critics were
coming around. Further evidence came from Lester Bangs, who
reviewed the GFR album Survival for Rolling Stone. Bangs began his
review by noting what seemed to be the prevailing thought: “It seems
that we are all going to have to come to terms with Grand Funk. They
may well be the most popular band in the world, in spite of the fact that
they’ve been almost universally panned by the rock press and other supposed molders of taste.” He proceeded to describe the band’s relationship to its audience in terms remarkably similar to those used by
Marcus, claiming that Grand Funk was “one of the very few groups
rising recently that do reflect the aspirations and attitudes of their audience in the most basic way,” which they have achieved “not only
through hype but because they are that audience, are the rallying point
for any sense of mass identity and community in Teenage America circa
1971.”43 Only after spending the first half of the review on the Grand
Funk phenomenon does Bangs get around to the album at hand. When
he does, it is to observe that Survival is by far the best of the band’s
albums to date, not least because it is “the first Grand Funk album to be
structured around a sort of theme,” which he says is evident in song
titles such as “Comfort Me,” “I Want Freedom,” and the band’s cover
of the Rolling Stones song “Gimme Shelter.” That theme, however nebulously described, was the basis of the band’s sense of connection with
its audience, according to Bangs. Drawing a connection between Grand
Funk and Black Sabbath, whom he believed represented complementary
sides of the same youth-oriented musical movement, the critic posited
that “if Black Sabbath’s music is about disjuncture and disorientation,
Grand Funk’s is a direct expression of warmth, reaching for the vast
befuddled teen audience and saying: ‘Look, our confusions and yearnings are the same, and we need you as much as you need us.’”44
This mutual dependence between band and audience was further in
evidence, at least for some observers, during the concert tour on which
GFR embarked in support of Survival. Although the band played dozens
of shows in the first months of 1971, before the new album’s release, the
Survival tour proper occurred during the summer of that year and was
clearly designed to demonstrate the range of the group’s new influence
42 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
and popularity. Of the fourteen dates on the Survival tour, the Shea
Stadium concert was one of only two held in the continental United
States. The remaining appearances took the band to Germany, Holland,
France, Italy, and England in the weeks prior to Shea Stadium, and then
to Hawaii and Japan in the days following that concert. Grand Funk
Railroad returned to the United States to conclude the tour with a show
at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut.45
Immediately preceding the Shea Stadium concert was a free, festivalstyle performance in London’s Hyde Park (figure 3). Out of step with the
rest of the band’s touring schedule, the Hyde Park show seemed almost
an attempt by the band to revisit the festival-based origins of their
ascent, albeit on new ground. It was an especially incongruous affair in
that it was Grand Funk’s first concert appearance in England. They
managed to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands, but the concert ultimately demonstrated that in the United Kingdom at least, the band was
no match for the likes of the Rolling Stones. Reviewing the performance
in Melody Maker, the veteran critic Chris Welch showed that he was far
less ready than some of his U.S. counterparts to concede that the success
of Grand Funk Railroad represented some significant changing of the
rock-and-roll guard. Welch’s assessment of the performance was rather
unsparing: “Although it was a free concert . . . the cost in terms of vitality, credibility and image to rock music can be accounted as substantial.”46 Even Welch had to acknowledge that the enthusiasm of many
gathered to hear the band was notable, and he mused at length on the
right of the younger generation to derive their inspiration from
whomever they saw fit. Overall, though, his review indicated that, in
this instance, Terry Knight had overreached in trying to demonstrate the
global nature of Grand Funk’s appeal.
The concert at Shea Stadium may have been held on something more
like home turf, but it made a far more convincing case for the expansive
scope of Grand Funk’s success. Not that the verdict was entirely unanimous; some observers remained skeptical that the concert at Shea had a
genuine air of significance surrounding it. At the very least, though, by the
time they played at Shea the band had become a well-oiled arena rock
machine. Indicative of their approach was the gesture with which they
opened their concerts during the year. Rising from the massive sound
system carried by the band to introduce each show were the opening
strains of Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” which by 1971 had
assumed a secondary designation as the musical theme from Stanley
Kubrick’s mind-expanding 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 43
Figure 3. Crowd shot of Grand Funk Railroad at Hyde Park, London, 1971. Photo: Michael
Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
Odyssey. The pounding tympani and famous crescendo of the composition’s opening measures provided a potent frame for the concert experience to come, as well as giving structure to the sense of expectation that
accompanied the beginning of a Grand Funk concert. When Terry Knight
came on stage to announce the band, the audience was poised for the
release provided by the band’s initial song, the energetic “Are You Ready.”
Three reviews, appearing in the weeks and months after the Shea
Stadium concert, captured the contradictory grandeur of the event. That
44 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
the concert was reviewed at such length in three nationally circulating
magazines—Rolling Stone, Harper’s, and Creem—was itself a sign of
the weight that it was seen to carry. Although concert reviews were
common in two of these publications, rarely did they occupy more than
a page of commentary. Grand Funk Railroad’s concert at Shea, on the
other hand, was treated as feature article material and became an occasion for three of the country’s most respected critics—Timothy Ferris,
Richard Goldstein, and Lenny Kaye—to offer their impressions not just
of the concert, but of the Grand Funk phenomenon.
Ferris’s Rolling Stone review was the first to see print and was the
most ambivalent of the three in its judgment of the band’s significance.
Rolling Stone had recently run Lester Bangs’s favorable review of Grand
Funk’s latest album, but the magazine had typically looked on the band
and the associated heavy metal genre with a dubious eye. Ferris’s take
on the Shea Stadium concert was in keeping with that stance. He was by
no means entirely unsympathetic to the band, in the manner of Chris
Welch, but he emerged from the concert far from fully convinced of
Grand Funk’s power in either musical or cultural terms. That said,
Rolling Stone ran Ferris’s review as a front-page item, granting it status
as the most newsworthy story of the issue and the story most likely to
grab attention on the newsstand.
Setting up the review of the concert, Ferris provided a concise version
of the band’s story to date. Theirs was clearly a story of success, made all
the more compelling by the group’s origins in the “workingman’s town”
of Flint. And the story of Grand Funk Railroad’s success, for Ferris as for
so many other observers, had at its center Terry Knight and his remarkable ambition. Ferris included excerpts from a typical interview with the
band’s manager, in which Knight offered one of his characteristic pronouncements on the nature of Grand Funk’s appeal. Claiming that the
group’s music was a secondary consideration, Knight explained, “What
the audience is hearing and seeing is Mark holding his guitar over his
head and saying, ‘You see this, Brothers and Sisters, you see me? I’m free.
I own this stage. It’s mine and it’s yours, and we’re free and you can be
free.’”47 The other band members similarly embodied freedom in this
way; the key point for Knight was that they made this freedom seem possible for the band’s audience as well. In effect, Knight was showing his
Michigan roots here. The rhetoric was clearly borrowed from that of
another regional band, the incendiary MC5; Knight was styling himself
as a refashioned version of that band’s original manager and political
visionary, John Sinclair. However, whereas for Sinclair and the Five the
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 45
politics existed inside the music, taking shape as a politics of noise, for
Knight it was the symbolism of the musicians more than the music itself
that transmitted the most powerful message.48
Watching Grand Funk Railroad at Shea Stadium, Ferris did not partake in the sense of liberation of which Knight spoke. Although there
were certain musical moments that impressed him, such as a passage in
one of the band’s best-known songs, “I’m Your Captain,” on the whole
he was struck by the relative sameness of Grand Funk’s repertoire. This
quality was exaggerated by a sound system that, to his ears, was
“pushed to such distortion that everything sounded as if it were being
played full blast on the world’s biggest car radio.”49 However, he was
also impressed by their ability to motivate a crowd in such a capacious
setting, and by the end of the show was at least willing to grant that
Grand Funk Railroad came across far better in concert than in recordings. Drawing his conclusions about the concert and the band, Ferris
was left with the impression that “there really isn’t much mystery to
Grand Funk.” He was further drawn to distinguish the band from “the
great groups of the Sixties.” The latter “managed to combine the raw
force of rock ’n’ roll with the complexity of their own backgrounds.”
Grand Funk, by contrast, was all raw force, and was thus indicative of a
polarization between the “cerebral and the shake-ass” that had beset
rock music in the new decade.50
Writing in the non-rock-oriented venue of Harper’s, Richard
Goldstein was far more impressed than Ferris with the import of Grand
Funk Railroad, if not with the particulars of their music. Like Ferris and
so many other commentators on the band, Goldstein gave requisite
attention to Terry Knight and his promotional savvy. His main concern,
though, was closer to that of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs: Who was
Grand Funk’s audience, and why did they so attach themselves to this
band? The answer, for Goldstein as for Marcus, was that Grand Funk
Railroad appealed to the younger set of rock fans, to “people between
the ages of fourteen and eighteen,” whom he described as a “hidden
source of energy, precisely because they have no vested interest in popular culture, except as it reflects their immediate needs.” From his vantage point in the midst of Shea Stadium Goldstein elaborated: “The people
who come out to see Grand Funk perform are the lumpen young . . .
who have no sense of the Sixties, and therefore no equipment for experiencing rock.”51 This was an audience who was not prepared to gauge
rock according to the norms of an earlier era. For Goldstein, Grand
Funk Railroad was in a position to provide new coordinates.
46 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
The band’s most important feature in this regard was its accessibility,
a quality that came through in the relative amateurishness of its performance. Amateurishness carried a promise of connection between
band and audience even in the inflated dimensions of Shea Stadium; it
connoted that the members of Grand Funk were a new kind of rock
star, less “shaman” than “pal,” less elevated than approachable. How
Grand Funk Railroad carried themselves as stars, in turn, was connected
to the undifferentiated quality of the sound they generated at Shea and
the way that sound required a new style of listening to be fully appreciated. Goldstein’s comments on this point constitute one of the most illuminating statements on the unique aesthetics of arena and stadium rock:
If you listen close and tight, the way you’ve trained yourself to hear Jerry
Garcia of The Grateful Dead, there is virtually nothing to grab onto. . . .
Grand Funk’s music is flat and bright. . . . You have to pull away before its
force begins to show. Only when you have established your own willingness
to be casual, when you have opened your ears to include the whole stadium, does the power of Grand Funk Railroad become manifest. It is the
power of an engine: impersonal, mechanical, and with sharp edges of
Lucite and gears of polished steel. . . . The stadium shakes with every beat;
my seat vibrates under me; a jet plane flying low is silenced by the chords.52
Timothy Ferris was not able to hear these dimensions of Grand Funk.
He was listening for fidelity and clarity of a sort that could not exist in
the acoustic environment of Shea Stadium. And when he did not find it,
he complained of the distracting amount of distortion. Goldstein, by
contrast, realized that the music in such a setting was bound to communicate as much by feel as by sound. What mattered was not whether
one could hear all the finer points of the band’s music—this was not
music in which the finer points were meant to draw attention. It was
instead music designed to generate a total effect, which was further
amplified by the dimensions of Shea. Unlike the Beatles’ performance
six years earlier, no screaming fans or low-flying planes were going to
drown out the sound of Grand Funk Railroad. This was the sound of
heavy metal finding a new place to play.
Lenny Kaye was also attuned to this new sound and its accompanying environment. His review in Creem, the last of the three to appear,
was the longest and most detailed account of Grand Funk’s performance. Unlike the other writers, Kaye gave a clear indication that this was
not his first experience with the band. Thus he based his impressions
not only on the novelty of the event but on his existing sense of the
group in concert, evident when he observed of their sound, “They’re
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 47
loud, much louder than the other times I’ve seen them, but also richer,
not as ear-splitting and trebly. A volume you can live with, can thrive on,
just over the threshold of distortion.”53 Kaye was also more attentive to
the band’s stage presence, for, as he noted, “Grand Funk are a show
band, first and foremost.” When burly front man Mark Farner shed his
shirt, the writer recognized it as part of the band’s ritual, a sign that
Grand Funk was truly ready to get down; he noticed when the audience,
almost as if on cue, reacted to Farner with intense, audible enthusiasm.
As a seasoned Grand Funk observer, Kaye was struck less by the responsiveness of the crowd than by the power of the band’s music, which
sounded to him far improved from his earlier encounters. Don Brewer
and Mel Schacher laid a solid foundation for Farner, whose guitar playing stressed “back-up chords” rather than full-scale solos. Combined,
the trio proved a “peculiarly powerful mixture” for Kaye, creating “a
totality of drive, and as they move from song to song, you can feel them
easing into the experience of playing at Shea . . . building from it in a
natural rise that never loses their rapt command over the audience.”54
Grand Funk appeared very much in command of the concert. But
throughout the bulk of the show, according to Kaye, the response of the
audience was no more intense than at any other performance by the
band. As the concert proceeded, Kaye was compelled to admit, “There’s
a definite lack of hysteria in the air, a feeling that the whole night has still
not passed beyond the bounds of control.”55 That was about to change.
Farner paused for effect, quieting the audience so he could dedicate the
next song to the recently departed Jim Morrison. The song was “Inside
Looking Out,” characterized by Kaye as “the universally acclaimed alltime fav-o-rite of Grand Funk live performances.” Like “Into the Sun,”
“Inside Looking Out” was one of the songs the band stretched out considerably in concert. Featuring a lyric that elliptically referred to being
high on marijuana, “Inside Looking Out” contained one of Farner’s most
extroverted and extended guitar solos and also included one of the central bits of audience participation in the group’s set.
This participatory quality assumed a new dimension at Shea. Farner
addressed the crowd directly, complimenting their good vibe, asking if
they felt all right, then enjoining them to clap their hands. “The kids are
in their glory,” wrote Kaye, who seemed to be participating in the
moment even as he was reflecting on it, “up on the chairs, leaning over
the fences, joining in for all their worth.” Just then the stadium lights
went on to illuminate the night-time assembly, “a million little suns
erupting into glory, all focused on fifty five thousand who are rippling
48 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
along like so many seas, a huge mirror reflecting the suddenly-small
three people on stage, a true notion of where the party has been all
along.”56 The crowd is displayed to itself, made conscious of itself as a
crowd at the climax of the evening in a gesture that demonstrates Grand
Funk’s power over the audience and the extent to which the band is
beholden to the assembled mass. Kaye here described a moment analogous to what Elias Canetti called the “discharge,” a moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. . . . It is for the sake of this
blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that
people become a crowd.”57
Kaye considered the remainder of the show to have been an afterthought. Yet Grand Funk’s choice of closing song, a cover of the Rolling
Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” was certainly of consequence under the circumstances. The song had appeared on the band’s most recent album,
Survival, but here took on a new connotation, signaled by Mark Farner’s
introduction of it as “our generation’s national anthem.” For all the talk
about the Beatles surrounding Grand Funk’s appearance at Shea, it is
striking that they ended their set paying tribute to the Stones—all the
more so given how fresh Altamont was in the minds of many rock fans.
Indeed, the film Gimme Shelter that documented the Stones’ performance at Altamont was even more recently released; as Robert Duncan
has argued, it was that film by Albert and David Maysles that truly made
the event stand for the mythic end of the sixties, culminating in footage
of a young African American being stabbed to death by one of the Hells
Angels members hired to provide “security.”58 It was no coincidence that
the same filmmakers were hired by Grand Funk to film the Shea Stadium
concert, shooting footage that remains unreleased.
However much Grand Funk might have evoked Altamont in bringing
their own concert to a close, Lenny Kaye was left with a very different
vision of rock and roll as he reflected on the band and their performance.
He classified the group as “moralistic,” preaching a simple set of values
that revolved around the dictum “Do anything you want, as long as you
don’t do anyone else harm in the process.” Moreover, Kaye suggested
that the members of Grand Funk seemed to genuinely believe the articles
of faith they expounded, “not because Terry Knight told them to, but
because they’re the living embodiment.” As such, the group stood for a
key strain of rock-and-roll mythology, which Kaye summarized:
Rock ’n’ roll is built on a myth. That being a guitar flash or a wizard drummer or a laid-back bass player is better than being anything on this earth.
That the American Dream didn’t fade away when we ran out of West to
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 49
conquer. That it doesn’t take brains, or money, or position, or anything,
really, to have that golden chance to go all the way. . . .
Grand Funk knows all this, and if they’re not totally aware of their position in the myth, they certainly sense it subconsciously. Their strength doesn’t lie on the stage, in their instruments, in their 8,000 watts of power.
Their strength lies with their audience, who’ll stay with them . . . as long as
the group reflects a part of where they want to be, and then will split at the
first sign of betrayal. . . .
Grand Funk isn’t a rock ’n’ roll band.
They’re a big fan club. The best fuckin’ fan club in the world.59
For Kaye, Grand Funk Railroad personified the hopes of the rock
audience as it had been reconstituted in the 1970s. Against the suggestions of Willis and Duncan, who linked the end of the 1960s with the
end of the myth of mass freedom in rock, Kaye found some measure of
idealism intact. He also posited, in a move that foreshadowed the thesis
of Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, that the prevailing mythos of rock was
congruent with the mythos of “America” at large. Similar to Marcus,
what seemed at stake for Kaye was a set of values related to “the
American meaning of the word democracy,” in which the individual
pursuit of opportunity was set against the promise and the pitfalls of
mass belonging, of joining the crowd.60
In rock and roll, “opportunity” represented a potent mix of creative
freedom and financial reward, and the most successful rock stars of the
late 1960s and early 1970s fused these elements into a lifestyle of
bohemian luxury that was as much a part of the allure of rock as the
music itself. Grand Funk Railroad achieved a version of this lifestyle,
but joined it to an image that was Terry Knight’s finest creation. As
much as the band clearly strived for the higher echelons of rock stardom, they still seemed within reach of their audience. Sure, they were
stars, but they were not necessarily star material; by some accounts they
could hardly even play their instruments properly. In the moral world
that Knight constructed around the group, their very ordinariness made
them into such powerful representatives of the people for whom they
performed. If that notion was a hype, it was a hype that resonated
within the terms of rock as they existed in the first years of the 1970s,
when too many stars held themselves too far aloft in the firmament, and
when the rock-and-roll industry was learning how to dramatically
expand its reach. For critics such as Kaye, Lester Bangs, Richard
Robinson, Richard Goldstein, and Greil Marcus, who viewed Grand
Funk with a more sympathetic eye, the band answered the need for evidence that something like spontaneity was still possible as rock was
50 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
growing into its new economy of scale. Terry Knight may have managed
the rise of Grand Funk Railroad with the most careful attention to the
desires of the crowd, but the enthusiasm displayed by that crowd at Shea
Stadium, and at hundreds of other shows in arenas around the United
States, suggested that far more than marketing acumen was afoot. The
1960s were over, and a new, young audience had found a reason to raise
its collective voice.
THIS IS PUNK
Greg Shaw was another critic of the moment looking for signs of spontaneous life. Since the mid-1960s Shaw had been pursuing his own
proto-DIY vision of rock-and-roll participation. Living in San
Francisco, he had created Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News, a shortlived but significant early rock magazine that had some influence on
Jann Wenner, another Bay Area resident, who would later found Rolling
Stone.61 After moving to Los Angeles, Shaw began a more successful
venture, Who Put the Bomp, perhaps the first rock publication to bill
itself as a “fanzine” and a pivotal venue for the critical and aesthetic
perspectives associated with the early rise of punk. He also freelanced,
writing commentary and reviews for a number of other magazines,
including what by the early 1970s were the big three of rock journalism:
Rolling Stone, Creem, and Crawdaddy. In whatever forum, Shaw had
the aura of a crusader, arguing for the value of a sort of rock-and-roll
purism that he hoped would be reclaimed in the current moment.
Along with Lester Bangs, Lenny Kaye, and a small group of others,
Shaw was among the first to develop the term punk in connection with
rock music. Bernard Gendron, in his recent study, Between Montmartre
and the Mudd Club, has perceptively assessed the work of these critics,
making a convincing case for the influence of the aesthetic values they
established. Describing the early punk aesthetic as a distinctive fusion of
pop and avant-garde impulses, Gendron claims, “There is perhaps no
comparable instance in the history of rock ’n’ roll where a preexisting
discursive formation had such an impact on the formation and constitution of a musical genre.”62 Central to this early punk aesthetic was the
valorization of a body of music from the mid-1960s characterized by
early stirrings of psychedelia, a musical rawness that came from the
untutored approach of the young musicians who were involved, and a
general adherence to the concise two- to three-minute format of the
standard pop song. One other feature of this music was also key: most
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 51
of the songs, and the groups who performed them, had fallen into
obscurity by the early 1970s and had created only minor stirs at the time
they were recorded. In its first formulation, then, punk rock was in large
part an act of historical reclamation, bringing to light music that was on
the verge of being forgotten. Reviving the past was not the exclusive goal,
however, for the music called “punk” was also perceived to embody a set
of values that had been lost through the subsequent development of rock
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that was in need of resuscitation.
In a definitive and paradoxical gesture, the early critical advocates of
punk sought to reassert the overarching importance of rock as the music
of the young, using as their model a body of music that was on the whole
entirely unfamiliar to the current crop of young rock fans.
It was in this light that Grand Funk Railroad came to matter to many
of these critics, at least for a time, and it was no accident that the critics
who were most involved in formulating the nascent punk aesthetic were
among those who judged Grand Funk’s success with the greatest sense
of optimism. We have already seen the views of Bangs and Kaye in this
regard. Greg Shaw’s principal Grand Funk moment came in the midst of
one of his most thorough statements of purpose, written not for his own
Bomp but for the September 1972 issue of Crawdaddy. “The Ultimate
Significance of ‘Rockin’ Robin’” was prompted by the unlikely success
of the young Michael Jackson’s reworking of “Rockin’ Robin,” a song
first recorded in 1958. Shaw was none too impressed by Jackson’s version, but the song was merely a starting point for an extensive rumination on the importance of old rock-and-roll songs in the contemporary
scene, and ultimately on the larger meaning of rock and its history.
Shaw’s piece shared these thematic preoccupations with two other critical works that figured prominently in the early articulation of a punk
aesthetic: Lester Bangs’s extended essay “James Taylor Marked for
Death” and Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets, a pivotal 1972 anthology of music
from the previous decade that gave aural shape to the ideas associated
with punk rock in this formative stage. Collectively, these critics and
their works occupied a place where confusion over the meaning of rock
led to a struggle over the music’s definition, and where early punk and
early metal intersected and at times converged.
Shaw’s “Rockin’ Robin” essay revolved around the premise that the
birth of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s also entailed the birth of the
“teenager” and of youth culture as we know it. A generation was bound
together by its commitment to the music, and the music in turn affirmed
52 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
the distinctive identity of youth in a way that no form of popular culture
had previously done. At the core of this generational uprising was the
implicit belief that “ignorance glorified through repetition was nothing
to be appalled at—on the contrary, because people and especially
teenagers are largely ignorant, it was the music’s greatest virtue.” Shaw
further observed that the most devoted rock-and-roll fans of the 1950s
“were not intellectuals, they were street punks,” whose visceral attachment to the music was a necessary part of the era’s vitality.63 Following
a key tenet of the rock historical narrative, Shaw asserted that the years
1959 to 1963 saw a withering of this vitality in the face of a “gutless”
trivialization of youth-oriented music. The energy of rock ’n’ roll was
revived, though, in the British Merseybeat boom that gave rise to the
Beatles and dozens of other groups, “well over 50 percent” of whom,
by Shaw’s account, rerecorded songs from the 1950s as a means of
laying claim to the true character of the music.64 This eruption of
untapped and untarnished rock-and-roll energy prefigured what was,
for Shaw, the golden age to come: the years 1964 to 1966, which were
devoted to “pure pleasure,” and during which the excitement of 1950s
rock ’n’ roll was used as the touchstone for a sound that cut to the heart
of contemporary youth. In those years, Shaw and his cohort “set about
discovering the limits of our potential as teenage rock & roll pleasure
punks. It was a utopia, of a sort.”65 And like all utopias, it was not
meant to last.
After 1967, Shaw pronounces with great melodrama, “we blew the
whole thing.” The problem was the incursion of “Art (with a capitol
[sic] ‘A,’ the kind of art you find on pedestals and in museums)” into
the world of rock. Artistic values and aspirations made rock into a
decidedly more cerebral sort of pleasure, which engendered a less
immediate response. Compounding the shift was the new prevalence of
drug use among the rock audience, which in Shaw’s judgment contributed to a more introspective approach to the music. Drugs and Art,
in combination, opened the way for a new degree of complexity in
rock, of the sort that Bill Graham’s ballrooms were designed to house.
But they also made rock into something other than pop. For Shaw, pop
“is not self-conscious, doesn’t think about itself. It can’t. It is what it is
because of what it does, not because of what it thinks it is.”66 Pop was
rock and roll, as opposed to rock, and pop was what made the music
such a powerful medium for the expression of attitudes and pleasures
specific to the experience of youth. Whatever rock had gained through
its new sophistication, it lost the ability to represent youthful desires in
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 53
such a direct way. Shaw found cause for hope, however, in the “popularity of groups like Grand Funk and Black Sabbath,” about which he
observed, “The loud, heavy groups of today are in part a reaction
against the dullness of most rock. . . . I believe the Grand Funk phenomenon to be part of a trend that is leading toward the possibility of
another pop explosion.”67 Grand Funk did not lay claim to earlier
styles of rock and roll so much as they revived some of the energy contained in those styles and adapted it to the needs of the rock audience
in the 1970s. As such, they joined Alice Cooper, the Stooges, the
Flamin’ Groovies, and T. Rex as signs that rock, for all its apparent
exhaustion, was not entirely moribund.
The importance of Shaw’s “Rockin’ Robin” piece does not lie in its
discussion of Grand Funk Railroad, which largely echoes that put forth
by other critics of the time. It lies instead in the way he connects Grand
Funk and other current trends to an account of rock history that was
deeply informed by the punk aesthetic. His references to 1950s rockand-roll fans as “street punks” and to his own generation of 1960s fans
as “pleasure punks” were only the most literal indication of the punk
critical sensibility in which his “Rockin’ Robin” essay was steeped.
Three other qualities would recur in his writings as well as those of
Bangs, Kaye, and others. The first, already made manifest, was that rock
was most valid and authentic when it connected with the consciousness
and desires of teenagers. As Shaw would write two years later, “Rock &
roll is not 1955–58; it’s 12–17.”68 Second, rock should not be measured
according to the values of “Art,” at least insofar as those values entail
the elevation of the artistic work as an object of contemplation. Its
power resided in its ability to provoke pleasure without the need for
reflection; thus does Shaw celebrate the value of “ignorance glorified
through repetition” in his account of 1950s rock and roll. Third, certain
eras in the rock-and-roll past were aesthetic and cultural high points
and models for what rock should mean in the present. Shaw’s perspective in this regard was avowedly nostalgic, and also quite narcissistic in
its emphasis on a certain generational experience of rock as the norm
against which others were to be measured. Taken in connection with his
emphasis on the youth-based nature of the medium, though, his vision
assumes more complexity. Nostalgia for the excitement of youth was the
weapon Shaw used against those who insisted that rock should itself be
“growing up.” Underlying this position was his belief that the passions
of youth remain consistent over time, as long as they are allowed to go
unchecked. The teenage audience would always be drawn to the most
54 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
raw, exciting forms of rock and roll, and the music would always be the
better for it.
One of the more trenchant proclamations in support of this aesthetic
vision appeared a year earlier, in that pivotal year 1971, in the pages of
Shaw’s Who Put the Bomp. If any rock critic had a flair for writing
manifesto-like statements on the significance of the music it was Lester
Bangs, and his essay “James Taylor Marked for Death” was one of his
more notorious and influential such gestures. The piece is perhaps best
remembered for its title and the accompanying vivid description of a
characteristic Bangs fantasy in which he imagines himself killing the
singer-songwriter with a broken bottle of Ripple wine. “James Taylor
Marked for Death” ultimately has little to do with James Taylor,
however—said fantasy occupies a single paragraph in a very long article that has two primary goals. The first half of the article finds Bangs
trying to make a case for the mid-1960s British rock band the Troggs as
one of the great unheralded acts in rock. Following his Troggs commentary, Bangs broadens his frame of reference, arguing in a manner similar
to Shaw’s “Rockin’ Robin” article that the Troggs stood for a set of
rock-and-roll values that had been lost in the current moment. Where
Bangs’s piece stands out is in his diagnosis of the contemporary scene,
which is at once more unhinged than Shaw’s and more articulate regarding the factors that caused rock to lose some of its most essential features.
The Troggs were quintessential musical primitives, in Bangs’s estimation, as was conveyed by their name—shortened from the prehistoric troglodyte—and their best-known song, the three-chord rave-up
“Wild Thing.” Bangs most prized the “sidewalk directness and absolute
sincerity” with which the band addressed their main preoccupation:
sex, or more precisely, sexual lust and desire. Not just “Wild Thing,”
but several other of the band’s songs gave voice to these impulses in a
language unfettered by sentiment, supported by a raw rock-and-roll
sound notable for its “consistent sense of structure and economy.”
Bangs elaborated, “I don’t think any of their songs ran over four minutes,
the solos were short but always slashingly pertinent, and the vocals were
not to be believed,” singer Reg Presley sporting “one of the most leering, sneering punk snarls of all time.”69 Form and content were perfectly wedded in this music, as Bangs insists through his account of the
lesser known Troggs songs “I Want You” and “I Can’t Control Myself.”
Yet Bangs was no strict formalist, and he quickly turned his attention
away from the details of song-craft to a more luridly personal account
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 55
of the desires that, for him, lay at the heart of the Troggs’ brand of rock
and roll.
What comes next throws the reader for a loop, because all of a
sudden Bangs doesn’t seem to be talking about the Troggs or about
music at all anymore. Instead, he’s caught up in a memory of his own
adolescent lust. It’s 1962, and Bangs is sitting in his ninth-grade math
class, a seat ahead of “old mousy, plain Judy Bistodeau.” When the
young Bangs finds Judy’s foot beneath his own chair, he makes the daring
move of allowing his arm to swing just low enough to brush the surface
of her shoe. The pleasure of the maneuver was more in the crossing of a
boundary than in any goal achieved, but once past that initial moment
of contact Bangs was driven to explore how much farther he could go.
He did not aim for any other body parts, though, but kept his attention
focused on that shoe and the foot within it, then “venturing out that
crucial extra fraction of an inch to actually touch the slight stretch of
foot above the rim of the shoe and under her ankles.” Only when he lost
restraint and made a grab for the whole shoe did Judy register any notice
of her schoolmate’s efforts, at which point she abruptly pulled her feet
“back to the defantasized zone under her own desk,” and Bangs was left
feeling “not as nonplussed as you might think.”70
Bangs’s account of his lustful grab for Judy Bistodeau’s shoe, an
apparent digression, had everything to do with what the music of the
Troggs and other likeminded 1960s punks meant for him. This music
gave voice to that stage of development at which sexual urges were all
the more powerful for the fact that they were destined to remain unfulfilled. Bangs thus followed his narrative by referring to it as “the part of
the essay entitled WHAT I DID BEFORE I BEGAN TO GET
BALLED.”71 Meanwhile, a sentimental undercurrent entered his reflections when he embarked on a digression within the digression, in which
he remembered another juvenile encounter with a girl named Sandra
Wyatt, with whom he petted on several occasions but never kissed.
Wistfully describing his feelings for Wyatt, Bangs came to a jarring point
of pathos, making it clear that this recollection of past desires was also
a remembrance of things no longer attainable: “I’ve loved her ever since.
She died last year from an overdose of downers.”72
This pathos, as much as Bangs’s id-inspired ravings, set the tone for
the next section of the essay, where he turned his attention away from
crypto-autobiography to consider the importance, indeed necessity, of a
song such as “Wild Thing” in 1971. Like Shaw, Bangs feared that the
rock audience had lost its capacity for immediacy and that the music
56 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
was in danger of turning into “chamber art . . . or at the very least a
system of Environments.”73 He differed from Shaw in his diagnosis of
the problem, though. If the creation of a song such as “Wild Thing” was
no longer possible, the reason went beyond the spread of “art” ideals in
rock, or the unduly heightened self-consciousness of a generation drawn
into introspection through LSD. The real problem, for Bangs, was “the
superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and
flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks
out or get ‘em up dancin’.”74 Both Shaw and Bangs hoped that young
rock kids would reclaim the enthusiasm and commitment of an earlier
era, but it was Bangs who saw more clearly how the impulses of the
rock audience were being subordinated to the power of the rock apparatus. The superstar embodied that power, symbolizing heightened separation and hierarchy between performer and audience in the sphere of
rock, which in turn impeded the basic and necessary goal of provoking
mass enjoyment, or what Bangs referred to as “the Party.”
What was the Party? At the most basic level, it was a dedication to
pleasure above all, and thus an antidote to the hyper-self-consciousness
that Bangs and Shaw detected in so much music of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. But the Party assumed other layers of meaning as Bangs
continued. For one thing, the Party was counterpoised against rockand-roll “tradition worship,” which kept such bands as Creedence
Clearwater Revival from realizing their full potential. Here Bangs’s purported hedonism and anti-art tendencies joined with an avant-gardist
call for musical progress and innovation, a combination that Bernard
Gendron has described so well. Referring to Jack Kerouac’s celebration
of bebop as the product of a musical accident, Bangs defined his own
aesthetic program: “It always begins in that glorious ‘mistake,’ the crazy
unexpected note kicking out sideways to let us loose again no matter
what you call it. It reappears periodically every few years. . . . And
whenever it does it will have about as much respect for all those old
farts from the sixties as most of the kids who first awoke to the Stones
and Yardbird raveups have for those beboppers of Kerouac’s nostalgias
or for most of the titans from the fifties for that matter!”75
The Party, then, was not merely the most ready path to fun, but was
connected to a distinctly aesthetic sort of pleasure, the pleasure that
comes from wallowing in an expressive form that seems so new, so
attuned to the moment in which one is living. And the real challenge, for
Bangs, the defining tension in his program, was to fully commit to the
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 57
resuscitation and maintenance of the Party without taking it so seriously
as to deaden its energies. Fearing that his own self-consciousness was
making him sound like “James Taylor with a typewriter,” he came to a
sort of climax: “While I mean every word I say or most of them anyhoo
and intend 75% of this kidney pie in total seriousness and passion that’s
not in the least feigned, I also take it with absolutely no seriousness at all.
That is, I believe in rock ’n’ roll but I don’t believe in Rock ’n’ Roll . . . and
I believe in the Party as an exhilarating alternative to the boredom and
bitter indifference of life in the ‘Nothing is true; everything is permitted’
era, just as it provided alternatives in the form of momentary release
from the repression and moral absolutism of the fifties.”76
Here were the cultural politics of early 1970s punk in a nutshell. For
Bangs, as for Shaw, rock and roll was an article of faith, a source of
potentially unlimited vitality that depended, in turn, on a combination
of factors that were difficult to distill and perhaps even more difficult to
preserve. Economy of form, brash sexuality, a musical approach in
which expressiveness was not overwhelmed by technique—all were crucial to Bangs’s definition of a punk aesthetic. But what stood out above
all was the pleasure of discovery. This pleasure was the thing that connected Bangs’s fond fondling of his classmate’s shoe with the musical
ravings of the Troggs and tied them both to his definition of the Party as
the symbol of the most righteous dimensions of the music. That it was
a highly gendered, self-consciously masculine form of exploration was
of no small consequence; to the extent that the sensibility articulated in
“James Taylor Marked for Death” infused subsequent developments in
1970s rock, it also set some of the terms whereby rock remained, to no
small degree, gender-exclusive terrain.77 Indeed, at one point Bangs even
referred appreciatively to the “male chauvinism” of the Troggs, which
he saw as an important indication of their disregard for niceties.78
Bangs’s vision was flawed but powerful. In conjunction with a limited
few of his peers, he tried to imagine into existence a form of rock that
would arise from untrammeled id energy, an artless approach that could
be taken as a form of artfulness, and a thrill of exploration that emerged
from the stunted desires of adolescence.
SONIC DREAMS
The punk aesthetic was as much a fantasy of what rock and roll could
be as it was a recollection of how it used to be. Nuggets put this combination of fantasy and memory into aural form. Over its four sides and
58 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
twenty-seven songs, it made the most convincing case yet that there was
something worth recovering from the recently bygone era of the mid1960s. Its appeal was hardly limited to its documentary value, however.
Collecting a wide range of relatively obscure songs from a rich transitional phase in American rock, Nuggets not only provoked interest in
the past but stoked new desires akin to those the compiler Lenny Kaye
attributed to the bands he chose to represent. Interviewed in 1996, Kaye
said of the project, “The thing I like most about the Nuggets bands . . .
is the sense of desire they embody, the feeling of ‘I want to be in a rockand-roll band.’ . . . I like the sense of yearning I hear in those bands.”79
Nuggets transmitted such desires through its sonic representation of the
past. As such, it bears comparison with another landmark collection,
the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by Harry
Smith and released in 1952. Although not on a par with the Folkways
Anthology as an act of historical reclamation, Nuggets was similar in its
construction of an aural dream world that stirred the imagination of
contemporary listeners, playing on a sense of things lost to the past to
awaken a sense of possibility in the present.80
That Nuggets was a sort of dream world was conveyed by its opening
track, “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night” by the Electric Prunes.
Starting with an oscillating electronic whirl, “Too Much to Dream”
immediately made it evident that the listener was entering an alternative
sphere of sound. This was clearly a species of psychedelia, as was
announced in the collection’s subtitle, Original Artyfacts from the First
Psychedelic Era. In “Too Much to Dream,” as in many of the songs on
Nuggets, newly available technologies of sound amplification and
manipulation were put in the service of evoking, if often clumsily,
altered states of consciousness. Yet this was not the more fully formed
psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix or the Grateful Dead, in which the
alteration of the mind was joined with an expansive form of instrumental improvisation. Guitar and organ solos abound on Nuggets, but
rarely are they the true centerpiece of the songs. Instead, the songs on
Nuggets stress a more holistic, group-oriented sort of musical freak-out
that remains encased within the conventional three-minute pop and
rock song format. Kaye described these qualities in his liner notes to the
collection, in which he stressed the transitional quality of the period it
covered: “Much of the era relied on older ways of thinking—the emphasis on hit singles to make or break a group, for instance, or the submergence of instrumental displays to the needs of the song at hand—but
much clearly pointed forward: the fascination with feedback electronics,
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 59
caged references to the drug experience along with more ‘worldly’ concerns, and a sense that, somehow, things were going to be a lot different
from this point on.”81
“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,” a two-minute, fifty-second
audio hallucination, neatly encapsulates this mix of qualities. After the
opening burst of electronic noise, the song’s first verse covers familiar
pop song territory. Singer Jim Lowe describes a gentle encounter with a
shadowy presence, seemingly a lover from the past possessed of golden
hair and sweet perfume, over a soft progression laden with minor
chords. The end of the verse brings a brief silence, soon filled with a
powerful crashing sound followed by massive, echoing drumbeats.
Comfortable reverie gives way to something much harsher in tone. The
bridge that follows features a jarring shift in key as the singer realizes
that the object of his affection is now gone; the music becomes more
dense in texture, with one track of guitar playing a piercing fuzz riff
around the vocal melody and another fluttering around the melody with
brief, heavily processed solo lines. Another dramatic pause precedes the
chorus, in which the dense sonic textures continue as Lowe exclaims
that he “had too much to dream last night,” the final chord progression
lending an almost flamenco-like air to the song.
Kaye described the Electric Prunes as a “calculatedly commercial
organization” in his track notes for “I Had Too Much to Dream Last
Night”; indeed, the song was one of the more successful on Nuggets,
having reached as high as number 11 on the national charts in 1967.82
Only one of the Nuggets tracks achieved a top-ten chart position
(“Psychotic Reaction” by the Count Five, which reached number 5 in
1966), with another handful having reached the top twenty, and another
still the top forty. Seventeen of the twenty-seven songs on the album either
remained on the lower rungs of the national charts or never made the
charts at all, a fact that contributed to the sense of obscurity, and the aura
of rediscovery, that shrouded the music on Nuggets. At the same time,
obscurity was clearly not a virtue in itself for Kaye, who was sure to
point out when one of the bands represented in the collection had a
claim to fame, even when that claim was based on rumor—as was the
case with the Barbarians, whose musicians were rumored to be the
Hawks, Bob Dylan’s mid-1960s backing band, who by 1972 had
achieved a certain reputation as the Band.
If there was an overriding logic to the selection of groups on Nuggets,
beyond the shared time period and similarities in sound, it did not have
to do with the relative notoriety of the songs or performers. Rather, the
60 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
most notable feature was the range of different scenes and locations
from which the various groups derived. Bands on Nuggets hailed from
Seattle (the Electric Prunes), Austin (Mouse, 13th Floor Elevators),
Minneapolis (Castaways), Boston (the Barbarians and the Remains),
Chicago (Shadows of Knight, Michael and the Messengers, Cryan
Shames), San Jose (Count Five, Chocolate Watch Band), Detroit
(Amboy Dukes), Philadelphia (the Nazz), and Bergenfield, New Jersey
(the Knickerbockers), as well as the more common Los Angeles and
New York. Even for the New York bands the Magicians, the Blues
Magoos, and the Vagrants, Kaye stressed their connection to the
“scene” of the 1960s, emphasizing in his track notes the clubs at which
the bands performed, such as the Night Owl Cafe and Cafe Wha? in the
Village and the Action House on Long Island.
Although several of these bands had songs that reached the national
charts, they were almost to a band best described as regional attractions
and stood for another key element of the punk mythos as it was developed in the early 1970s. Greg Shaw best explained the importance of
such bands in a 1974 editorial in Bomp: “One group in an area finds a
successful sound, others imitate it, the whole thing is refined, and then,
sometimes, it breaks out.”83 More often than not, the breakout did not
happen, or if it did it was short-lived. Whether or not the energy of a
regional scene remained self-contained, for critics such as Shaw, Bangs,
and Kaye these scenes were creative laboratories where the rules of rock
were applied, tested, and occasionally even stretched. Bangs thus asserted
in “James Taylor Marked for Death,” “About the only places where I
could foresee the emergence of a truly vital rock ’n’ roll band at present
would be the most out of the way places in America . . . some nowhere
right-wing cowboy town where it’s usually too hot even to drink the beer
or do anything much but dodge your parents and the neighbors and the
Man and grumble a lot.”84 For Kaye, this regional quality had an important connection to another quality of so many of the Nuggets groups:
their amateurishness. As he explained in his liner notes, “Most of these
groups . . . were young, decidedly unprofessional, seemingly more at
home practicing for a teen dance than going out on national tour.”
Significantly, it was in association with this combination of localism and
amateurishness that Kaye made his only reference to “punk rock,” a term
he says “has been unofficially coined” for such groups, and one that
“seems particularly fitting in this case, for if nothing else they exemplified
the berserk pleasure that comes with being onstage outrageous. . . . And
as these were kids who more often than not could’ve lived up the street,
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 61
or at least in the same town, there was no question what even localized
success could mean in terms of universal attraction.”85
Among these various scenes, the San Jose groups offered two of the
most compelling pieces of mid-1960s punk. By Shaw’s account, San Jose
had the liveliest California rock scene north of L.A. By 1965 San
Francisco bands had begun to devote themselves to their distinctive
brand of extended improvisational form. San Jose, by contrast, as “the
biggest bedroom community in Northern California,” was ready for
punk to take hold, with a growing community of teenagers looking for
something to do and enough distance from San Francisco to ensure that
the psychedelic influence would encroach only so far.86 “Psychotic
Reaction” by the Count Five was the biggest song to emerge from this
scene. It was, moreover, a song famously celebrated by Lester Bangs as
one of the best and most typical examples of a species of “punk bands . . .
who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds’ sound and
reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter.”87
Fuzz was indeed a defining feature of “Psychotic Reaction,” as it was
for so many of the pieces on Nuggets.88 The opening riff is a rather
stock pentatonic figure in F-sharp, played in the lower midrange of the
guitar, that derives its propulsion from the sharp, treble-laden quality of
the fuzz. In this regard, it bore a certain similarity to “I Had Too Much
to Dream Last Night” and also, more fundamentally, to “Satisfaction”
by the Rolling Stones, released the previous year, 1965. Although the
riff from “Psychotic Reaction” had little resemblance to that of
“Satisfaction,” the quality of the fuzztone that drove the song was
wholly indebted to the latter. Clearly this had something to do with the
technological capacities of the available equipment, as fuzz boxes were
only beginning to be mass-produced in the middle of the 1960s. Yet it
was just as clearly a matter of aesthetic preference. The fuzztone featured in “Satisfaction” and “Psychotic Reaction” was of a markedly different character than the more full-bodied distortion used by Eric
Clapton in his playing on John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album, also from
1965, and was just as different from that employed by Pete Townshend
in his mid-1960s recordings with the Who. Clapton and Townshend
both relied more squarely on the power of their Marshall amplifiers,
and as a result produced a brand of distortion better tailored to the
range of the guitar’s tonal properties. Relying on an appended fuzz box
for their tone, Keith Richards and Count Five guitarist John Michalsky
generated something that sounded much more like an effect, more piercing and more single-mindedly fuzzy.
62 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Also as with “Satisfaction,” the fuzz-dominated lead riff of
“Psychotic Reaction” gives way to a less abrasive two-chord progression during the verses. The lyric of the song concerns the prototypical
garage rock theme of frustrated male desire, singer Sean Byrne bemoaning the loss of “the best girl I ever had” and claiming that he now “can’t
get no love, can’t get no attraction,” a condition that provokes the psychotic reaction of the song’s title. And that reaction, when announced
by Byrne, leads to a fissure in the song’s fabric. “And it feels like this,”
Byrne shouts, as the Count Five enter into their musical rendition of the
psychotic episode. Here was the musical freak-out that was early punk’s
native form of psychedelia, a maneuver indebted less to the Stones than
to the Yardbirds, a band that took unique pleasure in the electronic
capabilities of amplification. A Yardbirds-like combination of lead
guitar and harmonica assume center stage, surrounded by a mounting
surge of percussion effects, making the song seem as though it has temporarily lapsed into some sort of primitive rite. The episode has a timeless quality, the instruments departing from the rigidly metered structure
of the verse, but it lasts a mere forty-five seconds. At that point, a climactic drumroll brings the band to a second verse that reiterates the
singer’s unsatisfied longings. As the second verse reaches its close, the
lead riff makes a momentary return, its fuzzed-out parameters setting
the stage for a second, abbreviated freak-out that fades just as the song
hits the three-minute mark.
Chocolate Watch Band, the other San Jose group featured on
Nuggets, is more resolutely Stones-like with its contribution. “Let’s Talk
about Girls,” released in 1967, is also one of the most lecherous examples of mid-1960s rock, of a piece with the lustfulness that Bangs so
heartily praised in the sound of the Troggs. A deceptively understated
guitar figure, shrouded in echo, gives way to a charging rhythm, the
song quickly assuming the form of a sort of blues on overdrive. The guitars are thick in texture, with one playing heavy, Chuck Berry–style
chords, and the other playing a lead figure that repeats throughout the
verse. What truly dominates the track, though, are the leering vocals
of Don Bennett, whose tough baritone sings the praises of girl watching and girl getting. Addressed to a lover wondering why he “can’t be
true,” Bennett sings that the problem isn’t with her—he just needs
more than one girl at a time. Rarely had rock celebrated the power of
the male gaze with such abandon: “See that little girl there just walking
by / Turns me on when she gives me the eye.” The abandon increases
dramatically after the second verse, when Bennett and one of the other
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 63
Band members exchange variations on the line “talk about girls,” the
lead singer’s tone growing more frantic with each repetition until, just
past the two-minute mark, he loses steam, having spent his energies.
The song seems poised to end, but the guitars continue to drone at
reduced capacity for an additional thirty seconds, as though winding
down slowly from the overstimulation that had come before. A burst of
high-pitched feedback rises from the drone, pleasure in the mechanics
of sound having supplanted the pleasures of the flesh, and then “Let’s
Talk about Girls” fades away.
Together, “Psychotic Reaction” and “Let’s Talk about Girls” typified
the most “punk” aspects of the music on Nuggets: short songs bursting
with youthful male energy, basic rock-and-roll structures blended with
traces of experimentation, derivative and innovative in almost equal
measure. Two other songs warrant attention for the ways they stretched
the musical boundaries of Nuggets. “Baby Please Don’t Go” by the
Amboy Dukes and “Open My Eyes” by the Nazz are songs that move in
markedly different aesthetic directions, relative to each other and to the
other music on the collection. The former, a cover of a tough R & B
song previously recorded by Van Morrison’s Them, seems less to complement the punk ideals celebrated by Kaye and his critical cohort than
to prefigure that other genre in the making, heavy metal. At almost six
minutes in duration, it is by far the longest track on Nuggets. More
notable than sheer length is that almost half the song is given over to an
extended solo by lead guitarist Ted Nugent. Playing in a loosely bluesderived fashion, in keeping with the governing norms of 1960s virtuosity, Nugent’s solo contains its share of fleet-fingered single-note lines but
is dominated by the guitarist’s aggressive exploitation of the sound of
his amplified guitar. Fuzz and feedback are, as we have seen, far from
rare properties on Nuggets, but in Nugent’s hands they assume a much
heavier cast. His distortion contrasts strongly with the thin, trebly fuzz
heard in the lead riff of “Psychotic Reaction.” It is a sound meant to
take up more space, and also a sound reflective of a post-Hendrix
approach to guitar distortion, the Dukes track having been released in
early 1968. Nugent’s indebtedness to Hendrix is made plain at one point
in his solo, when he quotes the melody line from one of Hendrix’s own
most far-flung experiments with noise, “Third Stone from the Sun.” His
most definitive gesture in “Baby Please Don’t Go,” though, is a maneuver in which he holds down a note high on the neck on the lowest string
of the guitar, emitting a sound like an animal cry, deep and wavering
and ready to bleed into feedback.
64 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
“Open My Eyes” by the Nazz is psychedelic pop taken to a new level
of sophistication. It too was a 1968 creation, thus residing at the outer
edge of Nuggets in both chronology and artistry, a point acknowledged
by Kaye in his notes for the song.89 The first strains of “Open My Eyes”
evoke the beginning of the Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” Robert “Stewkey”
Antoni’s keyboard substituting for Pete Townshend’s guitar, playing the
distinctive three-chord combination with off-beat accents. Todd
Rundgren’s guitar is not far behind, but when it enters it is not to double
the harmony. Instead, Rundgren plays an elaborately constructed,
thickly distorted, low-end riff. Almost heavy metal in texture, the riff
has a pop-derived sense of harmonic tension and forward momentum,
highlighted by the brief pauses between every three notes of the ninenote progression (F-sharp–G–G-sharp, pause, A–A-sharp–B, pause,
etc.). Contrasting with this riff, the song’s verses are less guitar-heavy
and sound more like bouncing, up-tempo rhythm and blues. Yet the
sonic creativity of “Open My Eyes” comes back into focus in the chorus,
where Rundgren’s guitar returns to the foreground shaped by a pronounced phasing effect, making it seem as though the sound has become
slightly out of joint. In the second chorus, the rich vocal harmonies continue repeating the tag line “Can’t see a thing ’til you open my eyes”
until, on the fourth repetition, the line ascends skyward, rising dramatically in pitch. The song ends with a final wave of vocal harmonies as
the overall sound becomes remarkably dense, the phasing effect growing in prominence and washing through the instruments, the song
ending in a veritable ocean of sonic effects within which the melodic
content remains strong, never fully devolving into sheer noise. “Open
My Eyes” is power pop of a high order, reflective of the music on
Nuggets in its combination of pop song-craft and a quasi-psychedelic
approach to sound, but removed from the amateurishness that characterizes the collection’s more punkish items.
The dream world portrayed on Nuggets is far from one-dimensional, as
the above examples attest. Indeed, part of the continuing allure of the
collection is the multiplicity of stories and sounds contained within it.
Some of these stories border on the ridiculous, like that of the song
“Moulty” by the Barbarians, a pathos-laden autobiographical song by
the band’s one-armed drummer. Some point to layers of diversity in mid1960s rock that remain all too obscure, like that of the Premiers, performers of the collection’s penultimate track, “Farmer John,” whom Kaye
describes in his track notes as “one of the flurry of Mexican-American
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 65
artists that took root [in California] in late 1964, along with Cannibal
and the Headhunters and Thee Midnighters.”90 Many of the songs
demonstrate the power of creative imitation in rock and roll, as the
sound of the Stones and the Yardbirds, the Beatles and Bob Dylan reverberate throughout the anthology, often in barely disguised fashion.
Ultimately, though, two stories ring throughout Nuggets most powerfully. One centers on the bands that made this music. For all their disparate backgrounds and disparate styles, the groups on Nuggets could
be made to stand for a singular story of rock music in the decade just
passed. This was a story of young musicians discovering the capacity to
make noise, at first for their own enjoyment and then, to greater or
lesser degrees, for the enjoyment of others. It was, moreover, a distinctly
American story, in which the transmission of rock and roll across the
circuits of mass culture opened the way to regionally based forms of
incorporation, imitation, and stylization in which the novelty of the
music existed in continual tension with its status as a standardized product. Kaye told this story well in his liner notes to Nuggets, but arguably
told it even better in a 1971 article on the offbeat San Francisco rock
band the Flamin’ Groovies. Connecting the Groovies’ affinity for
straight-up rock and roll to the impulses of a bygone era, Kaye wrote:
At precisely the same time as the Groovies first started getting things
together, there were thousands of other groups all across the country who
were doing much the same thing, piecing in members, gathering in family
basements with a minimum of one and a maximum of two amplifiers, jamming on songs that were Just Like The Record renditions of traditional
members of the rock ’n’ roll hall of fame. . . . It was as if the “band” aspect
of rock had finally filtered down to the people who had always been previously on the listening end. . . . Groups sprang out of nowhere, played a few
jobs, broke up, started again. They all sounded alike, and they all made
mistakes, and it didn’t matter. Stars are born, not made.91
This story was the core of the dream that Nuggets represented.
However, the dream could not exist without the dreamers. The second
primary story concerned the tellers of the narrative, the critics and collectors whose passion for mid-1960s rock arose out of a mix of nostalgia, narcissism, resentment, and rebellion. Nuggets, and the critical
perspectives that led to and framed its release, resulted from the efforts
of a small but vocal minority to revitalize the present by reclaiming the
past. As Ben Edmonds wrote in a review of the collection for Creem,
“The cultural atmosphere even a year ago would not have been suited
for the release of this album. The recently increasing interest in ‘punk
66 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
rock’ and consequent depletion of bargain bin refuges are indicative of
an impending shift in at least part of the mainstream musical direction,
as the end of one cycle forces us to look to our heritage for stop-over
comfort.”92 It told a story about the 1960s, but Nuggets is very much a
story of the 1970s. The music it compiled may have been a source of
comfort for some who felt out of touch with the times, but the terms
through which that music was reclaimed suggested that much more was
at work. Nuggets embodied the search for a way to channel the most
unleashed qualities of rock in new aesthetic directions and the desire to
counteract the growing hierarchies—economic and artistic—that had
developed around the music during the past half-decade.
THE DREAM IS NOT OVER
Writing in late 1977, after punk had exploded in New York and London,
Lester Bangs saw little evidence that heavy metal remained a viable
genre, and made the resounding claim: “I submit that there was no such
thing as heavy metal after the year 1972.” His proof was the career of
Grand Funk, who after a highly publicized break with their manager,
Terry Knight, made “a series of slickly respectable and totally forgettable albums . . . losing legions more fans with every dollop of proficiency they gained.”93 Grand Funk as a band had indeed run its course;
by the time they broke up in late 1976 they had suffered that worst of
rock-and-roll fates: coming to seem an anachronism. Yet Bangs was not
just writing about Grand Funk. As usual, there was a larger aesthetic
point to be made, voiced when he proclaimed, “Grand Funk were only
any good when they sounded like shit and played to the squalor of the
‘brothers and sisters’ in their audience.”94 Later bands said to represent
heavy metal, such as Aerosmith and Kiss, lacked this squalor, and, more
important for Bangs, they were too much concerned with fostering their
own stardom. Popular as Grand Funk were, they never fully came across
as stars; in Bangs’s estimation their success and that of other early 1970s
bands such as Black Sabbath rested in part on their relative anonymity,
their lack of the flash that would govern rock performance later in the
decade. Grand Funk, in their heyday, “never needed Aerosmith’s scarves
and tinsel. They just came out and decimated you.”95
In 1971 such arguments became almost commonplace for a time.
That they still had some relevance in 1977 says something about the
unique qualities of that early 1970s moment. Another critic, Gene
Sculatti, put the matter well. Commenting on the general importance of
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 67
rock in the 1970s in the pages of Greg Shaw’s Bomp fanzine, Sculatti
observed, “By stripping hard rock to its primal blues roots . . . one interesting stylistic stream was discovered and, for about 18 months, worked
energetically: Heavy Metal. Regardless of its often inhuman decibel
level, Metal, as practiced by Zep, early Alice Cooper, Deep Purple,
Black Sabbath and Grand Funk, had its moments. (As a subgenre, its
proximity to minimal punkrock can’t be overestimated, i.e. Stooges,
MC5, Shadows of Knight and any number of Velvets-Doors-Standellsinfluenced groups.)”96 From this perspective, it was no accident that
Lenny Kaye, the curator of 1960s punk who would later become one of
the leading musical figures of 1970s punk, wrote one of the most cogent
and profound defenses of Grand Funk Railroad, or that Lester Bangs,
who did so much to “theorize” a punk aesthetic, wrote more about
heavy metal than any other leading critic of the 1970s. Early metal and
early punk were, to no small degree, convergent rather than divergent
occurrences. They converged at the point where rock was believed to be
moving away from the governing values of the late 1960s, or where it
was believed that rock should be moving away from those values: where
the spontaneity of rock had given way to self-conscious artistry, where
the capacity of rock to unleash listener desires had been displaced by a
tendency toward sublimation, where the potential of rock as a democratic form of popular art had been overtaken by new forms of status
hierarchy. Whether or not rock had ever existed in the untarnished state
that was claimed by so many of the critics discussed in this chapter is,
on some level, beside the point. What mattered was that many believed
it to have been so. And that belief would be integral to the construction
of metal and punk as distinct categories of rock.
Where metal was concerned, and especially in the case of Grand
Funk Railroad, these notions regarding the meaning of rock took shape
most forcefully in the sphere of live performance. Not that the medium
of recording did not matter to heavy metal. The sound of metal was no
doubt consolidated more through the circulation of recordings than
through concert performances, and many of the metal albums released
in the years 1970 and 1971 remain definitive: Black Sabbath’s self-titled
debut and two follow-ups, Paranoid and Master of Reality; Led
Zeppelin III and the pivotal, untitled fourth album; Deep Purple in
Rock and its follow-up, the transitional Fireball; Alice Cooper’s Love It
to Death and Killer; not to mention albums that exist on the outer edge
of hard rock and metal, such as the Stooges’ Fun House and MC5’s
High Time.
68 STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Grand Funk Railroad released no fewer than four albums over this
two-year period, with Live Album perhaps having the most impact on
the subsequent shape of the metal genre. That album indicated the
extent to which the band’s success hinged on its reputation for live performance. It also stood for something that the Shea Stadium concert
especially dramatized: that heavy metal was a category of rock that
would be defined as much by its power to draw a crowd as by its sound.
When Terry Knight proclaimed that a Grand Funk crowd had an oppositional force markedly more pronounced than a Beatles crowd, he
engaged in a sort of promotional posturing, but also demonstrated his
awareness of how charged a symbol the crowd remained in the context
of rock. Greil Marcus, Richard Goldstein, Lenny Kaye, and Lester Bangs
may not have agreed with the substance of Knight’s observations, but
they shared this underlying awareness. In their way all recognized that
Grand Funk’s capacity to move an audience—especially a young audience—
needed to be taken seriously, that the vitality of the band’s concerts
could be dismissed only at the peril of those concerned with the continued viability of rock as an expressive form. In a sense, it was precisely
because Grand Funk was not the Beatles that the Shea Stadium concert
was deemed so important. It demonstrated, in a way that the Beatles
had not, that the rock concert—not a Beatles concert, not a Stones concert, but a rock concert—was a genuinely mass event and could succeed
if packaged and produced as such. The lessons and the implications of
that development would have a profound impact on the rest of the
decade and up to the present day.
Over the course of the 1970s, as punk changed from an idea to a
movement, it would come to define itself more and more against the
massiveness of the rock-industrial complex. During this nascent phase
at the dawn of the decade, a rather different perspective was in place.
Critics such as Bangs and Shaw were certainly skeptical of the way rock
entered mainstream culture, but they did not want it to remain a subcultural province. Punk rock, in its first formulation, was meant to
restore rock’s status as genuine mass culture, culture produced by the
music’s core constituency as well as consumed by them. It was this turn
of logic that led Bangs to be so critical of the incursion of the superstar
syndrome into rock and at the same time depict the Party as an instance
of mass euphoria and subtitle his epic review of the Stooges “A Program
for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review.” Yet as much as
this was the case, punk rock as defined by the critical cadre portrayed
herein was grounded in that most cultist of pastimes: record collecting.
ARENA ROCK, PUNK ROCK 69
This is why Nuggets—a collection of “artyfacts” from the previous
decade—is the ultimate artifact of this early stage of punk, and also
why, for all the rhetoric of rock-and-roll revitalization, the presiding
sentiment that comes through so much of the punk-related writing of
these years is nostalgia. The punk aesthetic may well have been geared
toward “using the past to revitalize the present,” as Bernard Gendron
observed, but in the beginning the lure of the past remained paramount.97
What these writers sought in the past, beyond a reservoir of obscure
but inspiring sounds, was evidence of the unchained passions of youth,
which they believed had run fervently unleashed in the middle of the preceding decade, and which they hoped would one day soon be similarly
let loose.
2
Death Trip
Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, and Rock Theatricality
SHOCK TACTICS
“I Love the Dead,” the closing song of Alice Cooper’s 1973 album,
Billion Dollar Babies, is a somber but tongue-in-cheek, barely veiled
ode to necrophilia. On the mammoth concert tour undertaken to promote the album, it was used as the climax to the onstage drama that
Cooper’s shows had become.1 For the first minute, the singer serenades
a female mannequin comprised only of head and torso, which stands for
his dead object of desire. In the midst of the second verse, still serenading his dismembered counterpart, Cooper moves center stage and pulls
away a drape to reveal a full-sized guillotine manned by a masked executioner. As his band enters into the guitar solo section of the song, he
lays the mannequin on the instrument of death, intimating that her head
will soon go the way of her amputated limbs. However, as the song progresses Cooper’s own head takes the place of that of the already dead
dummy (figure 4). Locked in place by the executioner, he begins to sing
the last verse until the band halts abruptly on a dissonant note. Cooper,
with his scraggly black hair and black eye paint lending him a quality of
cartoon ghoulishness, casts down his head as the blade of the guillotine
makes its rapid descent. In a flash, it appears as though he has been
beheaded. The executioner peers into a basket in front of the guillotine,
70
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 71
Figure 4. Alice Cooper at the guillotine: death as the ultimate in rock spectacle.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
pulls out a well-crafted replica of Cooper’s head covered in bright red
mock blood, and places it on the stage for all in the audience to see.
A year later, the Stooges play in support of what would be their last
album, Raw Power. Always an unpredictable presence onstage, singer
Iggy Pop is even more unleashed than in the past, driven to exhibit his
self-destructiveness as though each performance could be his last.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a series of shows at the fabled
club Max’s Kansas City, the longtime meeting ground for New York’s
artistic bohemia that had recently begun a more aggressive policy of
booking music into its upstairs space. Scheduled for a week’s worth of
midnight shows, the Stooges come out strong, with new guitarist James
Williamson matching Iggy’s extroversion with his needle-sharp riffs and
leads. By the third night of the engagement, though, it seems as though
Iggy might have reached his limit. The stage is littered with broken glass.
Angered that no one has made a motion to clear the refuse, the singer
throws himself to the floor, beating the glass into his chest, drawing first
trickles and then an alarming stream of blood, the appearance of which
was floridly described by Lenny Kaye in a Rock Scene concert report:
“angry red marks that blossom like miniature fireworks, running in
rivers and tributaries down his body, gathering strength, spattering the
floor as a painter’s brush, a film of red reflected into every eye, every
72 DEATH TRIP
hidden nerve.”2 Stubbornly Iggy continues to perform, playing all the
way through the set and even an encore, a newly written piece appropriately titled “Open Up and Bleed.”3 Yet the injuries prove to be too
deep, and the remaining shows at Max’s have to be canceled.
These two occasions in the careers of Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop
exemplify two distinct modes of performance. One is geared toward the
production of large-scale spectacle; the other is tailored to a more intimate space. The first relies on the illusion of bodily harm enacted on its
protagonist—indeed, the executioner in Cooper’s scenario was the professional illusionist the Amazing Randi, who spent considerable time
training Cooper and his entourage in how to create a convincing image
of the artist’s death. In the second episode, the harm done to Iggy’s body
is no illusion; the blood is real, as is the pain experienced by the singer,
one assumes. That Iggy’s pain is self-inflicted only increases the connotations of realism and authenticity surrounding the event; Iggy has not
only really hurt himself, but has chosen to do so. This is no accident, or
at least not only an accident. It is an extreme instance of the immediacy
and spontaneity that attend any given Stooges show.
Alongside these contrasting impulses, though, there exists an underlying similarity in the performances of Cooper and Pop. Both artists
played on their own victimization, punishment, even death. In so doing,
they ventured toward limits of rock performance hitherto unexplored.
Rock stars seemed to be dying in multitudes at the end of the 1960s and
the beginning of the 1970s, and with each individual death, rock as a
medium was widely portrayed as possibly approaching its own demise.4
The stench of death was strong around rock in the early 1970s, but few
performers incorporated the spectacle of death, or its possibility, into
their stagecraft more insistently than Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. That
they did so while playing by the creative terms of the metal/punk continuum was no idle coincidence, for metal and punk were the two genres
most implicated in the notion that rock was, if not dead, at least mutating into something different from what it had been.
Alice and Iggy were further joined by the ways they toyed with the
terms of masculinity. In this too they were representative of their era.
The early 1970s was a time when the roles open to male rock performers assumed a new fluidity under the banner of glam or glitter rock,
making explicit qualities of gender ambiguity and homoeroticism that
had long resided beneath the surface of rock performance. First arising
to some kind of prominence in the late 1960s, both Cooper and Pop
predated glam and prefigured its enactment of atypical masculine roles.
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 73
Of the two, Cooper and his band were the more forthright in their adoption of a sort of transvestism in keeping with the main tenets of glam
style. As a group led by a male singer named Alice, the Alice Cooper
band promoted a distinctive brand of gender confusion in which gender
and sexual desire became entangled with the larger set of illusions that
defined their act. Iggy’s mode of gender performance was less oriented
toward outright androgyny. Indeed, his sinewy body, often stripped to
the waist, could seem like the most normative sort of masculinity, signifying qualities of hardness, aggression, and impenetrability long associated with male dominance. Yet Iggy’s hardness was often put to uncanny
uses, and what appeared conventional in one context could appear distorted or even perverse in another. In a sense, Iggy’s very potency gave
him considerable power to unsettle the conventional trappings of rockand-roll manhood, and at times was open to some suggestively queer
readings as well.
Connected to glam through their respective styles of gender and
sexual display, Cooper and Pop also demonstrate that glam rock was
about more than putting on androgyny. Arguably, the aspect of glam that
had the broadest impact, and that most often spilled over into the genres
of metal and punk, was the element of role-playing, or what was widely
described as its “theatrical” character. The performance theorist Philip
Auslander recently offered a sophisticated analysis of glam theatricality
that revolves around the concept of persona: “I see the performer in popular music as defined by three layers: the real person (the performer as
human being), the performance persona (the performer’s self-presentation), and the character (a figure portrayed in the song text).”5 This
threefold division is not specifically limited to glam; however, it was
during the glam era that rock performers began to foreground more
explicitly a tendency toward role-playing that went against common
assumptions regarding the self-expressive qualities of the music.
Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, in their distinct ways, both upset the
presiding belief that the identity presented on stage or on the recording
matched that of the performer in any clear, consistent manner. In this
they were hardly alone. David Bowie, Marc Bolan, David Johansen,
and scores of others engaged in similar feats of role-playing in the first
years of the 1970s. They created personae and sometimes full-fledged
characters that flaunted their artificiality and in the process turned
rock into a giant guessing game in which the true self was always
obscured, as one mask would be dropped to reveal another. Cooper
and Pop distinguished themselves in this context with the motives
74 DEATH TRIP
behind their respective pursuits. Fabricating personae was not an end in
itself for either Alice Cooper or Iggy Pop, but was the means to achieve
a certain style of confrontation between audience and performer. That
confrontation, in turn, could have a paradoxical set of effects. It could
be a way of enforcing the audience’s subordination, of putting them in
their place. Or it could open a path to a more reciprocal relationship in
which the audience was pushed into an active participatory role. Either
way, the personae of Cooper and Pop brought into stark relief the power
relations inherent in the act of rock performance and further dramatized the tenuous connection between the individualized performer—
swollen to larger-than-life proportions in the expanding culture of rock
celebrity—and the undifferentiated crowd.
PERSONALITY CRISIS
Whether Alice Cooper or Iggy Pop should be considered part of the
larger glam rock phenomenon is no straightforward matter. Both performers began their careers before glam rock assumed any sort of currency. By the time glam became a recognized phenomenon around
1972, they had already achieved a significant amount of notoriety, and
Cooper was well on his way to becoming one of the biggest concert
attractions of the 1970s. If anything, the two figures contributed to the
making of glam rock, but once it was made, glam informed their careers
and shaped their reception. Alice Cooper went so far as to market a
brand of mascara, called Whiplash, to capitalize on the vogue for
androgyny that he had helped to promote and that had grown in association with the broader glam movement.6 Meanwhile, Iggy Pop
famously became associated with perhaps the leading glam artist, David
Bowie, who produced the final Stooges album, Raw Power, at the height
of his own success with his alter ego Ziggy Stardust.
Then again, glam itself was no straightforward matter. Philip
Auslander’s recent study of the phenomenon makes the most convincing
case yet that glam rock was a genre unto itself, defined less by its consistency of musical style than by its emphasis on the priority of visual
style and by the value it placed on artifice and performance.7 However,
another glam scholar, Van Cagle, argued that glam was an “antigenre”
lacking the kind of internal coherence that we tend to associate with
such categories as heavy metal and punk.8 Although I do not entirely
agree with Cagle’s terminology, neither am I interested in analyzing
glam as a self-contained genre. To my mind, it can best be viewed as a
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 75
constellation of practices and styles that significantly overlapped with
other genres already in existence or coming into formation. Any survey
of metal or punk history shows that glam is routinely included as a part
of both genres, either as a precursor or early influence or as a subgenre
within the larger category (i.e., glam metal). Indeed, it is due to this
adaptability of glam that I find it such a crucial and revealing part of the
larger history of the metal/punk continuum. The slipperiness of glam
rock as a category also suits the two figures at the center of this chapter,
for Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop are performers who fit no ready classification. Both have been alternately described as metal or punk, proto-metal
or proto-punk, or some variation thereof. Stressing their association
with glam does not negate their affiliation with either metal or punk, but
instead draws attention to the degree to which these terms were all implicated with one another in the early 1970s and subsequently.
Like both metal and punk, glam arose out of the perception that rock
music in the 1970s had come to mean something fundamentally different from what it had meant in the 1960s. Of these three terms, glam was
the one most openly tied to a sense of decadence or decline. The effeminacy and, even more, the queerness of glam made it appear to some
observers to mark the disavowal of some of the core values that had
characterized rock up to that time. With glam, rock had lost its moorings and was adrift in a sea of ambivalence. This attitude characterized
a provocative scene report filed by the British journalist Miles from the
Mercer Arts Center in New York, where the New York Dolls made their
reputation:
The audience could well have been in the group, a woman with black lipstick looked dead, very weird scene, many men wore full drag, a man near
me with a full beard also desported [sic] a floor length red ball gown and
ethereal smile. Some couples wore uni-sex makeup and were hard to distinguish from each other in the welter of day-glo, lurex, tinsel, glitter dust on
flesh, and clothes, studs, satin, silk and leather. . . . The total effect was
quite sinister after London which still tends more towards the warmth and
friendliness of lace and velvet . . . whereas NY is cold and distant in silk
and satin, the faces remote in dead white makeup like wandering ghosts of
a lost humanity.9
At the same time, the very decadence of glam seemed to hold out the
promise of renewal or revitalization. Rejecting or at least questioning
the usual terms according to which rock was invested with value and
authenticity, glam performers opened the way for a new set of values to
take hold. These new values had at their core the proposition that rock
76 DEATH TRIP
was a medium of transformation in which the possibilities for selffashioning and reinvention appeared almost unlimited.
The man who would become Alice Cooper and his band mates
grasped this notion at an earlier stage than most. Alice Cooper began
not as the name of a singer but as the name of a band that emerged in
the late 1960s out of Phoenix. According to Mike Bruce, guitarist for
the group, singer Vince Furnier was not the initial spearhead for the
band’s formation, nor was he the ruling creative figure in its early years.
Alice Cooper was formed around a collection of strong personalities,
one of the key connections between them being that many had concentrated on art in their high school studies, which Bruce suggests was a key
factor in the group’s later use of “artistic and theatrical ideas” in a rock
band setting.10 Complementing these theatrical tendencies was a developing taste for unusual and often androgynous fashion that was facilitated by their association with Cindy Smith, the sister of drummer Neal
and a seamstress who ran a clothing boutique and designed many of the
band’s outfits.11 Androgyny was also, of course, embedded in the choice
of the band’s name, which came only after a number of earlier incarnations as the Earwigs, the Spiders, and the Nazz (not to be confused with
the group of the same name led by Todd Rundgren) and was reportedly
chosen after consultation with a Ouija board.
As told in Cooper’s mid-1970s autobiography, the members of the
Nazz convened one night at the home of Alice Paxton, a woman said to
possess powers of clairvoyance. Sitting around Paxton’s Ouija board,
they asked whether there was a spirit in the room. The board replied in
the affirmative and proceeded to spell the spirit’s name, which was none
other than Alice Cooper. Further inquiry led to the creation of a backstory for Cooper, which the singer revised and elaborated over the years.
Alice Cooper was born on Vince Furnier’s birthday, February 4, in the
year 1623. She exhibited an unusual capacity to hear voices no one else
heard and learned magic from her older sister, Christine, who was
believed to be a witch and was burned at the stake by local villagers
when Alice was thirteen. A week later, Alice herself died.12 Although the
whole group helped to fabricate the story of Alice Cooper, Furnier most
strongly identified with her and even claimed to have convinced himself
that he was Alice after surviving a violent car accident that happened
when the band was driving to Los Angeles to further their career.13
After a time, the band collectively decided to transfer the name Alice
Cooper to its singer in recognition of Furnier’s skill as front man and
spokesman. With the change came the cultivation of a new persona
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 77
called Alice, not the centuries-old girl who died in the glow of witchcraft but an alter ego through which Furnier “could get away with more
outrageous comments than he could have merely as the band’s singer.”
Moreover, claims Bruce, “as the Alice character took over, the whole
philosophy of the band shifted” away from the more obscure directions
imagined by second guitarist Dennis Dunaway, whose affinities with the
avant-garde had been an initial stimulus for the group.14 As “Alice”
became the figurehead, so Alice Cooper as a band sought a more immediate if still provocative effect on its audience, dedicating more of its
energy to generating a sense of shock and disorientation.
The potential for Cooper’s role-playing to generate a kind of unsettling energy truly came into focus with the release of the band’s 1971
album, Love It to Death. That record marked the start of the group’s
collaboration with the producer Bob Ezrin, who had a considerable
impact on the musicality of the band’s sound. More crucially, Love It to
Death was the first Alice Cooper album to feature songs that were
clearly designed to be set pieces for the band’s live show. Of these, “The
Ballad of Dwight Fry” was the most striking. The song is a mock-dramatic depiction of mental illness from the inside out in which Cooper
personifies the figure of an insane man just released from an asylum.
The name of the song’s protagonist was taken from the actor who played
Renfield in the Bela Lugosi film version of Dracula, Dwight Frey. Cooper
was captivated by Frey’s performance in the film, which captured the
integral connection between terror and insanity; as the singer put it,
“Scary to me means crazy,” and Frey’s turn as Renfield was both.15
Composing “The Ballad of Dwight Fry,” Cooper did not seek to tell
Frey’s story, but rather sought to use the emotional core of his performance as its basis. The resulting song combined horror show theatrics
with a contemporary sense of neurosis that seemed indebted to Ken
Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
In his autobiography, Cooper stressed the importance of “Dwight
Fry” as a piece in which the Alice character assumed new definition and
a new aura of danger, with a helping hand from Ezrin. On the recording the song starts with a preface in which a simple, childlike melody
played on piano underpins the voice of a small child asking about
“Daddy,” who’s been gone so long. The child’s question “Do you think
he’ll ever come home?” provides a sly note of mystery that prepares the
listener for the proper start of the song, signaled by a shift from piano
to acoustic guitar and the accompanying change into the adult voice of
Alice, singing in character as the presumed Daddy who has been away.
78 DEATH TRIP
Such contrasts and juxtapositions occur throughout “The Ballad of
Dwight Fry,” marking the effort of singer, group, and producer to simulate the disturbing discontinuities of the lead character’s outlook.
Cooper, for his part, performs the song with a well-honed sense of instability. At first his singing voice is tentative, almost shy; he nearly whispers the first verse, as though afraid of the sound of his own words. In
the second verse he raises his voice but still with caution. Only in the
chorus does he move to a full-fledged scream, which is further enhanced
by a significant increase in the volume of the whole band, which moves
from acoustic to electric sounds as he implores his listeners, “See my
lonely life unfold / I see it every day / See my only mind explode / Since
I’ve gone away.”
The real set piece of “Dwight Fry” comes after the second chorus.
Musically, the dominant sound changes back from guitar to piano, which
now plays a spidery melody that teeters between the mood of a merrygo-round and a monster movie. Over this melody, Alice/Dwight begins
to intone, “I wanna get out of here,” in a hushed, pleading voice. Soon
his plea becomes a demand, however: he does not just want to get out,
he has to, and his voice reflects the increasing mania of his request, as he
shouts, stutters, and repeats his words as though losing control more
completely with each utterance. An abrupt transition brings another iteration of the chorus that ends with the sound of an explosion, making literal the suggestion that the narrator’s mind has blown up.
Playing the song in concert, Cooper and the band made the scenario
described by the song even more literal. Here, more so than on the
recording, it was clear that Cooper was playing a part, and not just the
part of Alice Cooper. This was a role twice removed from the “real”
singer, dramatized by the use of props and even supporting characters.
Most notably, the concert version of “Dwight Fry” featured an interlude
during which a young woman dressed in a nurse’s outfit came onto the
stage, escorting Cooper away, only to bring him back moments later
encased in a straitjacket, an object invoked in one of the lines from the
song: “Sleepin’ don’t come very easy / In a straight white vest.” Thus
bound, Cooper sang of his further descent into insanity while straining
to break free, which he does at the song’s conclusion, throwing the loosened jacket into the audience.16 This moment encapsulated a dynamic
also at work in Cooper’s death rites, in which scenes of the singer’s victimization would be followed by instances of resurrection or transcendence. Such oscillation between entrapment and freedom, self-immolation
and empowerment formed the crux of the Alice Cooper persona and
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 79
proved a significant mechanism through which the singer sought to produce a specific series of effects and experiences for his audience.
Interviewed in 1970, Alice Cooper linked the visual dimensions of his
performance style to that of another contemporary performer: “We’re
dealing with music and theatrics as a totality. . . . Iggy Stooge is using
his music and theatrics as a totality too. . . . No one considers that the
music behind him is the whole backbone of Iggy.”17 Like Alice Cooper,
Iggy Pop was a persona developed over time to suit the unique demands
of a Stooges performance. That Cooper refers to his counterpart here as
Iggy Stooge suggests the extent to which Iggy too was both an individual
and a group creation. Jim Osterberg, a native of Ann Arbor, assumed
the nickname Iggy some years before his involvement with the Stooges.
It was derived from his high school band, the Iguanas, in which
Osterberg played drums and emerged as the leading personality. The
Iguanas formed in 1964; Iggy left the band in 1965 to join another local
group, the Prime Movers. Two years later he would combine forces with
brothers Ron and Scott Asheton to form the Stooges.
According to Pop’s biographer, Paul Trynka, the creation of the
Stooges and the creation of Iggy Pop went hand in hand. Still, the new
name and persona did not immediately arise upon the band’s formation,
nor were any ghosts or spirits consulted for its invention. “Pop” was
added to Osterberg’s list of nicknames after a 1968 incident in which he
shaved his eyebrows, reportedly making him look like a local character
named Popp.18 Perhaps due to the mundane origins of the name, Iggy did
not begin to use it regularly until some time later. On the first Stooges
album, released in 1969, his name appears as “Iggy Stooge.” Fun House
(1970), the second Stooges album, lists him as Iggy Pop. By that time, the
name Pop no longer bore the mark of a strange local in-joke. It was a wry
comment on the band’s abrasive, not very popular music, and also lent
itself to association with the still-current Pop Art movement, whose leading figure, Andy Warhol, exerted a considerable influence on the social
and artistic milieu out of which glam rock came.19
Iggy Pop was more than a name, though. The persona linked to the
singer was shaped by the early experiences of the Stooges on stage, in
which the band’s intense, experimental approach to psychedelic improvisation left audiences feeling confused and battered. Trynka identifies an
April 1968 performance at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit as the first
show in which Iggy’s definitive characteristics began to cohere. On the
bill that night with the Stooges was the James Gang, though missing was
80 DEATH TRIP
the British supergroup Cream, who canceled their scheduled appearance. The Stooges supplemented their usual lineup that night with a
large oil tank positioned at the head of the stage. Unfortunately, the
group’s more standard tools, their amplifiers, were not working well due
to a problem with the club’s power. When the audience voiced their disapproval with the chant “We want the Cream!” Iggy faced them down,
standing on top of the oil tank “just to be a lightning rod for this
hatred.”20 Until that night Iggy had sought to challenge his audience but
ultimately wanted their approval and appreciation. After that show,
however, Iggy’s onstage demeanor grew increasingly antagonistic. As the
Stooges explored the outer limits of amplified sound, Iggy pushed his
own physical limits in order to push his audience past the comfort zone.
This interpenetration of Stooges sound and singer’s persona was best
captured by Pop himself. In his autobiography he describes what he calls
a deep love for “the apparatus itself . . . especially the way a very large
amplifier with an instrument plugged into it will push air. . . . That’s basically what amps do, they push the air and push me too.”21 Pushed by
sound in this way, Iggy drew energy from the surrounding din. His body
responded as though plugged in, as though he was not separate from the
effects of amplification but was produced by its effects: “I feel so umbilically connected to the thing itself. . . . It is the proximity of the electric
hum in the background and just the tremendous feeling of buoyancy and
power, you know. When you start being in the presence of this power,
you also become its witness. When guitars are played properly, hitting
the same sound at the same time, a joyful thing happens; that’s good
backing. You are dangerously abandoned.”22 Exposed to such power,
subjecting himself to this sense of abandonment, Pop took an instrumental approach to his role onstage: “I was really determined to use the
noises on myself, as if I were a scientist experimenting on himself, like
Dr. Jekyll or the Hulk.”23 Amplification was ultimately of value for Iggy
not for what it did to the audience, nor for the ways it allowed his band
to cohere, but for the room it gave him to escape into himself, to inhabit
a sphere of intense sensation in which he could test his own bodily limits
and assume the charged confrontational persona of Iggy Pop.
IS IT MY BODY?
Performers like Cooper and Pop posed a fundamental challenge to conventional notions of self-expression in rock through the personae they
fashioned for themselves. Central to that challenge, and to the roles they
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 81
inhabited onstage, were various strategies for reconstructing the terms
of gender performance. The blurring of gender and sexual boundaries is
the best-remembered aspect of the glam era. At the time, the prevalence
of transvestism went hand in hand with a new openness toward homosexuality, or at least bisexuality, in rock, made explicit with David
Bowie’s notorious admission of his own purported bisexuality in the
pages of Melody Maker.24 Historians of glam have drawn similar conclusions, arguing that glam was a moment of sexual radicalism, even a “genderless utopia” in which masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and
homosexuality, could be changed and recombined almost at will.25 Alice
Cooper and Iggy Pop were emblematic of glam in their manipulation of
these qualities. Transvestism and homoeroticism were among the elements that informed their performances and figured prominently in their
respective styles of self-fashioning. Yet as much as they reflected the new
sexual openness, they also drew attention to some of sexuality’s darker
tendencies. Gender ambiguity became the means to stir a kind of sexual
confusion with openly aggressive undertones, in keeping with the overall
aura of provocation both performers sought to cultivate.
At times Alice and Iggy reveled in the power attached to masculinity.
Yet they also presented themselves as objects rather than subjects of that
power, as victims rather than punishers whose bodies bore visible marks
of vulnerability. Embodying such contradictory aspects of masculinity,
they paralleled another performer of the era, not a musician but an
artist. The body artist Vito Acconci, in his works of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, similarly made his body into a focus of his viewers’ attention, subjecting himself to various forms of physical abuse even as he
exerted considerable control over the situations in which he exhibited
himself. Acconci consistently played on the power dynamics at work in
the acts of watching and being watched and listening and being heard.
In his most notorious work, Seedbed, he masturbated while hidden
beneath a surface, his voice amplified so that he could announce his fantasies to the spectators who walked atop him. About such tactics, the
performance scholar Amelia Jones observed that Acconci exploited the
potentially feminizing effects of theatricality to destabilize the authority
usually ascribed to masculinity. He further assumed “both sadistic and
masochistic roles in rapid oscillation or simultaneously” in a way that
undermined such polarities as “S/M, masculine/feminine, self/other.”26
Cooper and Pop too troubled these dualisms as they occupied roles
defined by an ambivalent sort of power that remained tied to the trappings of masculinity.
82 DEATH TRIP
The more sensational aspects of Alice Cooper’s approach to androgyny were on display at a pair of 1970 performances reviewed by the
Rolling Stone critic Elaine Gross. Gross encountered the band during an
engagement in New York, where they played one night at Max’s and
another in the more suburban surroundings of the Action House on
Long Island. At Max’s Alice came across like a “Supreme Bitch Drag
Queen” sporting “silver-striped leather heart-on-crotch pants”; at the
Action House he made the audience genuinely nervous by sporting a
“metal pronged stake” that he stuck into the hair of his band mates.
When a Long Island audience member shouted, “You suck,” Alice
responded by agreeing with the charge, “Yes, I do,” and then repeating
into the microphone, “Suck, Suck, Suck.”27 This outrageousness carried
into an interview with Gross conducted after the shows, in which
Cooper also displayed considerable reflection concerning the purpose
behind his performance. Asked about the traces of sexual confusion
surrounding the group, he observed, “Everyone is part man and part
woman, and you’ve got to accept both parts if your head is together,”
and stated an interest in playing in support of Women’s Liberation and
Gay Liberation. Closing the interview, Cooper mused on the difference
between his group and the leading bands of years past, embracing a
descriptive that had been used by some music writers to denote the
music of a new decade: “third generation” rock. According to the singer,
the band’s main audience was young, a post-1960s audience in their
early teens who were “a lot heavier” than the kids of a few years earlier.
“They’re fourteen and fucking. I was eighteen before I fucked,” noted
Cooper approvingly, while also asserting that these young fans “know
how to react” to the band’s show.28
Looking back fourteen years later, the critic Robert Duncan remembered the impact Cooper had on him as one of those young fans who
knew how to react. Duncan’s introduction to Cooper came not from a
concert but from a record cover: the cover to the band’s second album,
Easy Action (1970). Easy Action is widely regarded as a minor work
even by the singer’s fans, but knowing nothing about the group, the
young Duncan was entranced when he found it at his high school bookstore. Lined up on the front cover were five long-haired figures photographed from behind. Duncan’s attention was quickly caught by the
central detail: “Asses . . . five sequined and microskirted asses all in a
heartstopping row.”29 Duly aroused, he also began to discern that something was amiss, that the album’s alluring appearance was deceiving:
“As it turned out, the girl on the left of the line wasn’t a girl at all—and
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 83
he proved it by twisting from the hips to leer back at the camera. I mean,
it was girls’ legs and asses—but this one here was a guy. But they weren’t
all guys, surely. . . . ‘Alice Cooper,’ of whom I was uninformed, read the
name over the photo. . . . I seized the cover from the rack and flipped it
over. A front shot: leering, laughing, mocking. Indeed, all guys—and
ugly to boot!”30 Rather than recoiling, Duncan kept looking, trying to
figure out whether it made any difference that those asses, in the end,
belonged to men. “I was seventeen,” he recalled, “and I liked it. . . . But
not like that, or not exactly. Granted, a good ass is a good ass is a good
ass. But in the end I liked these because I laughed. . . . It wasn’t really a
nice laugh. I liked Easy Action because I liked the fuck you of it. And I
meant fuck you both ways, either way: sex or violence.”31
Duncan’s insight into the underlying “gender fuck” of Alice Cooper’s
image articulates something essential about the singer: Cooper was the
glam-era performer who most blurred the line between sex and violence.
As such he symbolized a more general truism about glam: that it was
often less preoccupied with the stimulation of sexual desire than with
something more akin to sexual assault. The point, in other words, was
not simply to “turn on” an audience but to leave them wondering what
hit them. In Duncan’s anecdote, we get a limited but significant glimpse
into how the audience might have responded to such gestures. The initial jolt of arousal in the unsuspecting seventeen-year-old is offset by the
recognition that he is being fucked with, that his sense of sexual propriety has been violated. Yet once he is in on the joke, he begins to relish
his own confusion. Most notably, he senses an underlying violence
behind the effect, which generates a different, uneasy form of pleasure.
Duncan might not have liked the row of asses on the cover of Easy
Action “like that,” but he liked the momentary flirtation with gay desire
and, by extension, the sense of risk it entailed, the brush against homosexuality that could be the basis for violence rather than curiosity were
the context different. Who, we might ask, was fucking with whom?
Conjoining sex and violence was not the whole of Cooper’s purpose.
To these unruly impulses he added the element of youth. His comments
to Elaine Gross showed that he had internalized much of the rhetoric of
early 1970s rock criticism, especially those tendencies most associated
with the punk perspective outlined by Lester Bangs, Lenny Kaye, and
others. For Cooper, as for the punk critics, rock was a medium at its
best when it spoke most directly to the needs of the teenage audience;
that audience, in turn, was not driven by the search for “meaning” in
rock, but was motivated by a more base set of desires. While media
84 DEATH TRIP
commentators expressed concern about, if not outright condemnation
for, the way Cooper seemed to exploit his young audience, the singer
responded that he was not corrupting young minds so much as he was
expressing the fundamental sensibilities of young America.32 In keeping
with this notion, adolescent sexuality was one of the primary points of
reference for Cooper’s lyrical and visual persona. His assumption of a
teenage audience led Cooper to exhibit a version of sexuality that was
made of equal parts desire and disgust, on display in a piece like “I Love
the Dead,” which opened this chapter. Some contemporary youth may
have been “fourteen and fucking,” but Cooper also recognized that for
many teens sex was still an area of mystery and bewilderment, and so he
played to those fears even as he sought to awaken adolescent longings.
The specter of adolescence hung over Cooper’s persona in other ways
as well. Child versus adult became another opposition, like masculine
versus feminine, heterosexual versus homosexual, and sanity versus
insanity (in “The Ballad of Dwight Fry”), to be challenged and exploited
in his theatrical endeavors. The key work here was another song from
Cooper’s 1971 album, Love It to Death. “I’m Eighteen” portrayed teenhood as a state of existential in-betweenness. Not since Chuck Berry,
perhaps, had a songwriter so sharply captured the moment poised
between youth and adulthood. Audiences responded enthusiastically,
making the song Cooper’s first successful single. Played in the key of E
minor, “I’m Eighteen” has an air of melancholy that is enhanced by the
almost ballad-like tenor of the verses. The song opens in a more sonically aggressive mode, the initial E minor chord laced with distortion; a
brief metallic guitar solo precedes the singer’s entry into the mix.
Guitars settle into a hushed set of arpeggios as Cooper’s ragged voice
sings the first line: “Lines form on my face and hands.” Only eighteen,
and the song’s protagonist is already concerned with the physical signs
of age, signs that mark not the rush of puberty but something more like
decay.
In Cooper’s hands the age of eighteen is a time of terminal confusion
in which the only truth is the need to escape. “I’m eighteen / And I don’t
know what I want,” he sings in the chorus, as the guitars swell once
again to a state of distortion, while a dramatic key change from E minor
to A underlies his proclamation, “I gotta get out of this place / I’ll go
runnin’ in outer space (oh yeah).” Central to the song is Cooper’s continual reference to being “in the middle,” a line that appears in each of
the three verses, alternately connoting a place between boyhood and
manhood, a condition of uncertainty (“in the middle of doubt”), and a
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 85
point in the “middle of life.” After three verses filled with lament and
disorientation, the final chorus turns the presiding sentiment of the song
around. No longer does the singer need to “get away.” Instead, he
exclaims with a mixture of pride and anger “I’m eighteen and I like it!”
over an accelerating swirl of power chords and soloing guitars, in the
end affirming the power of teenage experience in the face of awkwardness, confusion, and self-pity.
A televised performance of “Eighteen,” captured for a 1972 episode
of the German music show Beat Club, finds the Alice Cooper band linking the song’s evocation of youth to the supposedly foundering state of
early 1970s rock to stirring effect. Compared to the recording of the
song, this version is fiercer in sound and execution. Only in the opening
passages does anything like the melancholy of the single hold sway.
Otherwise, Cooper snarls the lyrics and the band responds in kind,
playing with a thick distorted fury that displaces lament with focused
aggression. Alice begins the performance almost prostrate on the floor
of the stage, a whiskey bottle at his side; by the time he is shouting the
final affirmative lines, “I’m eighteen and I like it,” he is on his feet,
sporting his trademark black eye makeup and a Wonder Woman T-shirt
that is the most explicit suggestion of androgyny and a mark of his
indebtedness to the larger sweep of popular culture.
The twist of the song comes in these final moments. Alternating
between “I like it” and “I love it” to exclaim his affinity for being eighteen,
Cooper further confirms his youthful stature by proclaiming what he is
not: “I ain’t twenty-one / I ain’t twenty-two,” and on, until the age of
twenty-five. At this point the singer switches registers, not of sound but
of signification. “I ain’t twenty-five” morphs into “I ain’t no American
Pie”; with this shift, Cooper begins to riff on the popular song of the
same name. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry,”
intones Cooper, while his band maintains the same charging intensity it
has displayed throughout. Cooper may be incorporating Don McLean’s
wistful words into his song, but the band makes no concession to the
stark acoustic guitar–based sound of “American Pie.” Cooper’s gesture
therefore comes across as parody, but what is the object of the parody?
I would suggest that it is not merely the soft-spoken nostalgia of
McLean’s lyric, but the deeper suggestion put forth in the song: that
rock and roll is dead. Mocking the song that mourns “the day the
music died,” Cooper gives evidence of the form’s vitality. More pointedly, he offers the suggestion that if rock is dead, he and his growing
throng of teenage fans are happy to keep having their way with its
86 DEATH TRIP
corpse. Such necrophilic sentiments were very much in keeping with the
direction in which Cooper and his band were moving.
Amid the polarities that coursed through Cooper’s early 1970s
career, none was more charged than the distinction between life and
death. In the nightly death rites that became a part of his concerts,
Cooper’s body and his manhood were portrayed in a manner that went
powerfully against the grain of the standard male rock star pose. “I
Love the Dead” epitomized the complex role-playing at work in this
scenario. When Cooper places a female mannequin on the guillotine, he
momentarily inhabits a disturbing but familiar role as the male aggressor preparing to exert his power over a (fake) woman’s body in the most
graphic way. Yet the singer quickly turns the tables when he removes the
mannequin and substitutes himself. Sadism turns suddenly into
masochism, and Cooper’s body becomes subject to a highly choreographed species of sacrifice in which he willingly submits to his executioner, the Amazing Randi.
Cooper and his band took great pains to orchestrate the singer’s
execution. It was the act, and the concept, around which the band’s
stage show revolved from its introduction in 1971. Cooper’s onstage
death was also attached to the singer’s ongoing reinvention of his persona. When he first staged his demise on the tour for Love It to Death,
the central prop was an electric chair. On the next tour, it became a
hangman’s gallows, and the guillotine entered the fold on the Billion
Dollar Babies tour in 1973. By that time Cooper viewed his concerts
as morality plays in which his death came as punishment for the bad
deeds he committed earlier in the show. Yet his staged execution was
ultimately more significant as spectacle than as the resolution to any
moral or narrative conflict. It bespoke the singer’s basic desire to put
on the most extravagant show possible, to transcend any limits on
what the audience thought it might see or experience in the context of
a rock concert.
On a deeper level, Cooper’s nightly death ritual dramatized two sets
of conflicts that were fundamental to rock in the early 1970s. The first,
between masculine and feminine, has already been noted. Cast as a
victim in a drama of his own making, Cooper showed strains of
masochism at odds with the usual sort of mastery exhibited by male
rock performers, and this masochism served to exaggerate the feminine
connotations contained in his name and his body language (figure 5).
Second was the conflict between star and audience. The execution of the
singer could be seen as the ultimate self-effacing gesture, a sign of how
far Alice was willing to go to keep his fans entertained. While critics
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 87
Figure 5. Alice Cooper at the gallows: the male star as victim. Photo: Michael Ochs
Archives/Getty Images.
such as Lester Bangs called for the end of the rock-and-roll star system,
here was Alice enacting the death of the star in a way that likely left his
audience feeling at least temporarily empowered, as though they somehow had control over the singer’s fate. Of course, Alice ultimately controlled his own fate, at least in this context, a fact he stressed in
interviews in which he described the careful design and planning that
went into the illusion of his death, and that he dramatized in concert by
resurrecting himself each night just as surely as he let himself be killed.
The audience might enjoy the momentary spectacle of his demise, but he
always had the last laugh and was left standing in the end.
A whole bunch of us drove down just to see Iggy. I had
heard about his jumping into the audience and taking
off his clothes, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it happen.
His body animations are hypnotizing, and when he
was lying down on the stage with the guitars playing
by themselves . . . it looked like he was going to die.33
Next to the Max’s Kansas City incident recounted earlier, Iggy Pop’s most
fabled moment of onstage self-endangerment came during the infamous
final show of the Stooges, played on February 9, 1974, in Detroit. At the
show immediately prior to that night’s performance, an enormous
88 DEATH TRIP
red-headed biker continually harassed Iggy throughout the show, throwing eggs at the stage during the group’s set. Standing his ground, the singer
called out his burly counterpart, who proceeded to knock him to the
floor with a single punch to the face. The next day, Pop made an appearance on radio in which he challenged the biker’s whole gang, named the
Scorpians, to come to his next show and “do their worst.”34 Whether or
not any Scorpians accepted Iggy’s challenge is unknown, but the following Stooges show was an exercise in chaos, the results captured on tape
and subsequently released as one of the most stirring bits of audio verité
in rock history, the posthumous Stooges album Metallic KO.35
A bootleg-quality release in terms of its sound, Metallic KO features
only the barest aural traces of that night’s distinctly unruly audience.
What the recording does capture is Iggy’s manner of conducting himself
in the midst of a maelstrom. While the biker-heavy crowd continually
lobs eggs and other objects at Iggy and the other members of the
Stooges, the singer does not so much fend them off as match their antagonism with verbal jousts of his own. At times his banter sinks to its own
form of ugliness, as with the casual anti-Semitism evident when he dedicates the song “Rich Bitch” to “all you Hebrew ladies in the audience.”
More characteristic are his taunts as the same song begins: “I don’t care
if you throw all the ice in the world. You’re paying five bucks and I’m
making ten thousand, baby, so screw ya.” Setting up the song in this
way, he turns a crude piece of musical misogyny into a statement targeted at the standing of the rough-hewn men in the crowd, a point further demonstrated seven minutes into the piece, when he announces
during a lull in the music, “You can throw your goddamn cats if I don’t
care. You pricks can throw every goddamn thing in the world and your
girlfriend will still love me . . . you jealous cocksuckers.”
After a charged version of the none too subtle ode to manhood
“Cock in My Pocket,” Pop enters his longest monologue of the set. To
one member of the crowd he tosses the aside, “I won’t fuck you when
I’m working.” This is immediately followed by a call for more items to
be tossed at the stage: “Anybody with any more ice cubes, jelly beans,
grenades, eggs they want to throw at the stage, come on. You paid your
money so you takes your choice, you know.” More eggs are thrown at the
stage, and Iggy assumes the persona of a crazed auctioneer, asking,
“What am I bid for a dozen eggs?” and then turns around and denigrates
his attackers: “I’ve been egged by better than you.” Another moment
passes, then “lightbulbs too, and paper cups.” The sound of glass comes
to the foreground and the singer exclaims, “Oh my we’re getting violent.”
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 89
Rather than leave the stage in a reasonable act of self-preservation, Iggy
threatens the audience with a “fifty-five minute version of ‘Louie
Louie,’” a song he has been announcing throughout the set. Sure
enough, guitarist James Williamson breaks into those familiar three
chords, and Iggy proceeds to sing one of the most openly obscene sets
of lyrics ever put to this garage rock classic known for its veiled explicitness. As the song wraps up—just over three minutes later, not fiftyfive—Pop says into the mic, “They threw a Stroh’s,” and concludes the
set by thanking the person “who threw this glass bottle at my head. It
nearly killed me but you missed again, then keep trying next week.”
This utterance triggers one last burst of shattered glass before the
recording abruptly comes to its end.
Whether the violence done upon Iggy Pop’s body was potential or
actual, whether it was committed by his hand or intended by the hands
of others, the performer occupied the stage as a body under siege, a
body in possible or real pain. Iggy’s stature in this regard is not unconnected to that assumed by Alice Cooper in his own onstage death rites.
Like Cooper, Iggy cast himself as both victim and victimizer, alternately
and sometimes simultaneously, and thus confused the usual relationships between dominance and submission and masculine and feminine
roles that tend to structure sex- and gender-based power dynamics.
However, as was noted earlier, there was less sense of illusion, less distance between the pain the audience witnessed and the pain Iggy’s body
seemed to endure. Iggy’s body and his persona therefore more closely
correspond to the insights of the literary scholar Elaine Scarry, who has
written of the cultural and philosophical significance of pain, torture,
and violence. Describing a phenomenon she calls “analogical substantiation,” Scarry observed that “at particular moments when there is
within a society a crisis of belief . . . the sheer material factualness of the
human body will be borrowed to lend that cultural construct the aura
of ‘realness’ and ‘certainty.’”36 The realness of Iggy’s pain may have
stood in the early 1970s for the certainty that men and their bodies
could overcome any threats cast their way, or may have stood for the
realness of rock performance itself, the authenticity of which was called
into question by the very theatricality that Cooper and others had
brought to the medium. Either way, what mattered was that Iggy’s pain
was, or at least appeared to be, very real, and that he experienced it
willfully rather than as a mere victim of circumstance.
The photographer Tom Copi snapped a series of pictures of Iggy Pop
that display the singer’s uncanny physical presence.37 In these photos,
90 DEATH TRIP
Iggy is safely ensconced on a stage, not breaking into the audience or
being hailed with thrown objects. His body alone carries the weight of
the moment. We first see the singer lying on his back on the floor of the
stage, immediately in front of drummer Scott Asheton’s set. Banks of
amplifiers flank the drums on either side; bassist Dave Alexander and
guitarist Ron Asheton stand at a distance from the prone singer on
opposite sides of the stage. The next image moves closer to the body of
Iggy, who remains lying down, now with his arms stretched above his
head and his legs raised a bit from the first photo. Ron Asheton is the
only one of the other Stooges visible in this and the remaining pictures;
from the position of his hands about the guitar, he is clearly caught in
the act of playing, creating the sound that stimulates Iggy’s motions. In
the third photo Iggy’s body assumes a different cast. He is still lying
down, but now his legs are bent back underneath him and his torso is
hunched in an upward arc over the floor while his head and arms remain
in place. In the fourth image his body is arched much more radically
above the stage. He seems almost to be levitating into an upright position, his body forming a triangle with his legs as the base and the middle
of his torso at the uppermost point. By the fifth photograph the singer is
on his feet, having raised himself by sheer physical force (figure 6). His
legs are bent at the knees, arms clutched at his chest, and his body is
bent backward at the waist. With his back to the audience, he leans
rearward so that his eyes maintain contact with whatever crowd may be
gathered to watch the band. The expression on his face is strained, eyes
wide open, mouth open but clenched into a disconcerting grimace.
Finally, in the last image Iggy is on his knees, back on the ground, but
this time facing forward and looking far more relaxed, the microphone
in hand and drawn close to his mouth as Ron Asheton, pictured to his
left (and to the viewer’s right), continues playing, his foot poised atop
his wah-wah pedal.
The act captured in these photos might seem mild compared to some
of Iggy Pop’s more fabled episodes of self-laceration. His most extreme
acts were integral to his persona, but can too easily overshadow the
more fundamental bodily fluidity that he exhibited with such unsettling
grace. Unlike Alice Cooper, who relied on a series of props, costume
changes, and extensively designed stage sets for his effects, Iggy Pop
relied first and foremost on his own body, typically naked above the
waist, sheathed in tight-fitting pants below. His body rarely projected
any clearly marked sense of effeminacy, but sheer exposure combined
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 91
Figure 6. Iggy Pop bends over backward, demonstrating his unusual bodily fluidity.
Photo: Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
with the restlessly metamorphosing configurations that he assumed
conferred on his body a sense of ambiguity that was of a piece with the
sexually confusing impulses of glam.
Nowhere was this better captured than in a dialogue between two
drag queens, Rita Redd and the Warhol “superstar” Jackie Curtis, following a 1970 performance by the Stooges at Ungano’s in New York.
Iggy’s masculinity was the subject of the dialogue from the opening
salvo by Redd: “He wasn’t there for the audience’s benefit; the audience
was there for his benefit, and he told them so. He commanded the audience exactly like the master would have done in an S and M situation,”
an observation punctuated by Curtis’s brief reply, “That’s gay.”38 Redd
portrayed Pop as engaged in a struggle for power with his audience in
which the singer was firmly in control and wielded a form of influence
that was unquestionably sexual.
Moreover, the challenge that Iggy posed to his audience was thoroughly grounded in the terms of masculinity. When Curtis asked how
the male segment of the audience responded to the singer, Redd claimed
that “Iggy was insulting their masculinity by throwing it in their faces,
reminding them of the role they play.” She subsequently observed that
92 DEATH TRIP
his gestures to the audience “were past the sexual point; they were
insulting.”39 Yet this stance had the effect for Redd not of alienating the
audience, male or female, but of drawing them farther into the singer’s
orbit. Admitting that Iggy had turned him on, Redd asserted, “A masculine figure doing a masculine thing is attractive . . . to anyone.” Curtis
inquired in turn, “Well, what about a feminine figure doing a feminine
thing?” to which Redd answered with a view that was hopelessly sexist
but nonetheless telling: “Femininity tends to be quiet and elusive.
Masculinity is an open statement.” After some brief repartee in which
Curtis and Redd consider the relative attraction and femininity of
Raquel Welch (“There isn’t a feminine thing about her”), Curtis surmised, “Iggy was both masculine and feminine. You know, Yin and
Yang,” which sent Redd onto another stream of thought: “A conflict of
opposites has always been extremely appealing, especially contained in
one heaving body. I just hope Iggy isn’t pushed into a category, because
his type of individual with all that mystique and power should be
allowed to go a step further and that would be something to see.”40
One could well observe that the lens through which Redd and Curtis
viewed Iggy is far from representative and reveals more about the perspective of two drag queens existing at the margins of the early 1970s
rock scene than about the singer himself. What to make, then, of the
fact that, as reported by Dave Marsh in Creem, Iggy believed this piece
to have been “the best thing he ever saw on himself,” and that Marsh
cited several passages from the dialogue between Redd and Curtis in his
own 1970 profile of the Stooges? For Marsh, the key point was what he
perceived to be the defining indeterminacy of the Stooges circa 1970,
whom he believed to be at a “transient stage” of their career.41 More
generally, the encounter between Iggy and the transvestite sensibility of
Redd and Curtis represented a rich moment at which distinct cultural
strategies intermingled with one another. The Stooges were not of a
piece with the subcultural style of the two queens, and Iggy, for all that
he may have confused some of the presiding categories of the time, was
not a camp figure. In a sense, he was an eminently naturalistic presence
onstage, stripped down as he was. He lacked the commitment to artifice
that drove so much glam performance. Translated into the brewing cultural setting of New York, though, he could be made into camp. His
cocksure approach could be construed as a pose rather than taken for
unfettered manhood, and his blend of mastery and self-effacement
could be turned into a play of “masculine” and “feminine” traits that
existed in an uneasy synthesis.42
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 93
UNSETTLING THE CROWD
Theatricality in rock had to do with putting on an identity, but also putting on a show. We saw in the previous chapter that the scale and the
meaning of rock concerts underwent important changes in the early
1970s. Live performance remained a crucial way to transmit and reinforce a sense of shared identity and solidarity, but many questioned the
extent to which the massive crowds that gathered in arenas and stadiums could be said to represent the “rock audience” as a whole, or
whether those crowds stood for anything beyond their role as paying
customers. The shifting, conflicted status of the rock-and-roll crowd
powerfully informed the careers and performances of Alice Cooper and
Iggy Pop. An Alice Cooper concert was a markedly different phenomenon from a Grand Funk Railroad show, designed to produce a distinct
sort of experience. Cooper and his collaborators—band mates, stage
designers, management—did not want the audience to experience a
common sense of freedom, but wanted them to recognize their common,
primal impulses: lust, greed, even the thirst for blood. Compared to
Cooper and Grand Funk, Iggy and the Stooges were far less oriented
toward rock as a mass medium. Most Stooges concerts were played to
audiences of hundreds, not thousands. In these smaller venues the most
jarring elements of Iggy’s persona assumed an almost intimate cast.
When faced with a larger setting, Iggy demonstrated an unparalleled
talent for working against the crowd’s most homogenizing tendencies
while preserving his place at the top.
When Steven Tyler sat on the stage of an empty Madison Square Garden
he saw visions of rock-and-roll grandeur. When Vince Furnier found
himself back in his hometown of Phoenix, trying to evade the draft so he
could continue singing with his rock band, he spelled out a different sort
of fantasy. Furnier’s band had just come back from a sojourn to Los
Angeles, where they had tried and failed to build an audience or gain the
attention of the music industry. Upon returning home, he and his band
mates all received notice from the local draft board. Despite his apparent physical unfitness Furnier was classified 1A in his initial examination, fully eligible and ready to be drafted into duty. After two months of
petitioning he was finally allowed to plead his case to the board psychiatrist, who quizzed him about his occupation and his goals. The singer’s
reply was elaborate and disconcerting: “I told him I wanted to put an
audience in a concert hall, bolt and lock the doors, shut the lights and
94 DEATH TRIP
shock them with electricity. . . . Then, when everything was the most
intense, you let monkey semen out of the ventilation system. . . . Then,
you blind everyone with the flash of quartz lamps. At that point you suggest an action. For instance, ‘fuck’ or ‘dance.’ Mass hypnotism.”43
This graphic vision, by Alice Cooper’s account, got him out of military service. As such, it is clearly not to be taken at face value. Yet as a
story the artist chose to tell in the midst of his autobiography, it is just
as clearly an indication of one way he wanted to portray himself and his
relationship to an audience. An Alice Cooper concert was not meant to
generate good vibes; it was not about a quasi-spiritual communion
between a performer and his people. Vince Furnier, and later Alice
Cooper, wanted to disturb an audience while he stimulated it. He
wanted to control its members as he gave them license to do, or see, the
forbidden.
Cooper’s elaborately designed concerts were guided by the general
plan to add elements of drama, terror, and comedy to his performances.
The set designer for the Billion Dollar Babies tour, Joe Gannon, would
later explain that the goal was to adapt “a Broadway stage to the context of a sports arena.”44 Such objectives marked a significant change in
the concept of the arena rock show. While other heavy metal bands such
as Grand Funk and Led Zeppelin held the attention of their audiences
through sheer physical exertion or through the force of their virtuosic
musicianship, Cooper joined the likes of David Bowie in bringing a new
style of acting and stagecraft into the arena, thereby creating an expansionist form of rock theater. For Cooper as for Bowie, each song marked
an opportunity to assume a new role or to place himself in a new situation. Gannon’s job, along with that of Cooper’s touring crew, was to
ensure that the transitions from set piece to set piece occurred without
undue interruption, and that the pacing of the show allowed the proper
buildup of tension so that the climax—Alice’s staged execution—carried
an appropriately cathartic jolt.
If Broadway was one point of reference for Cooper’s version of theatricality, another was the electronic media, especially television. Lester
Bangs noted the importance of television to Cooper’s onstage aesthetic
when reviewing a 1971 concert. In his estimation, the cartoonish blend
of sex and violence in Cooper’s persona and his performance style
derived not from some hidden enclave of subterranean culture but from
that most mass-oriented popular medium. Cooper collaborated with
Bangs in this interpretation of his work, offering an explanation of influences that departed dramatically and self-consciously from the usual
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 95
mechanisms through which rock performers had laid claim to a sort of
authenticity:
Blues and blues-based music never really figured at all in any part of our
development. . . . I was way more influenced in the whole thing, my personality, my attitudes, even my approach to music, by all those late-50’s TV private-eye shows like Peter Gunn and Richard Diamond and 77 Sunset Strip
and Johnny Staccato with John Cassavetes and all the beatniks in Greenwich
Village—remember that one? . . . Almost every week in TV Guide there’d be
a character listed for it that was just called “Wierdo” [sic], and they were all
different guys. . . . All that kind of stuff was much more important and influential to us in our formative years, than any kind of specialized musical
trips. We listened to Elvis and Chuck Berry and whatever was on the radio
and mixed it up with 77 Sunset Strip and got Alice Cooper.45
In the previous chapter I related Ellen Willis’s explanation of the cultivation of the rock “crowd” as an outgrowth of the youth-oriented media
culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Here we have an adaptation of the same
argument applied to the development of Cooper’s persona and his
appeal to youth. According to Bangs, Alice Cooper and other performers of the early 1970s turned the rock concert into a series of spectacular moments and effects that did not, as many critics have argued, render
the audience passive so much as expose them to a range of impulses,
from antagonism to carnality to shock to greed, many of which had
been repressed in previous forms of rock performance. The potentially
unruly nature of these impulses was rendered controllable by their
familiarity from other pop culture forms and from the intertextual
nature of Cooper’s theatrical approach.46
Cooper’s effort to stir his audience’s desires and his mastery of the
fine art of crowd control were most evident in an episode that happened
toward the end of his concerts. During the encore, after he had been
revived from his ostensible death, the singer would goad the crowd:
“You know what? I think you’re crazier than I am!” To prove it, he made
an offering to those gathered in the rows near the stage, throwing a
bushel of posters at them, and then savoring the sight of watching members of his audience struggle with each other for one of the coveted
prizes. Cooper would repeat the gesture, at times throwing a single
poster, at other times several at once, and even encouraged those sitting
in the seats farther away to enjoy the spectacle. This was Cooper at his
most openly manipulative, turning the members of the crowd against
one another for his own pleasure and that of others in his audience.
Bangs compared the incident, in avowedly sexist terms, to watching
96 DEATH TRIP
“housewives at an hour-long shoe sale.” He also recounted a related
time in which Cooper went the offering one better by tossing money
into the crowd, issuing dollar bills “with absolute puppeteer precision”
until the assembly stormed the stage, at which point he flung the whole
wad of cash into the air, to be met by a congregation of scuffling bodies
on the floor.47 At such moments, Cooper turned his victimization
around: having been symbolically put to death for the satisfaction of his
audience, he ended his shows with a perverted gesture of goodwill that
demonstrated his primary goal: to play on the most basic appetites of a
generation weaned on consumerism.
Another leading critic, Charles Shaar Murray, drew a complementary set of conclusions when he reviewed a 1973 Cooper show at
Madison Square Garden. For Murray, Cooper’s uniqueness lay in his
dedication to “hype” and its ability to generate cold, hard profit. In this,
Cooper contrasted with other rock performers, not in his motives but in
the transparent methods with which he pursued his goals. “Most
bands,” noted Murray, “use all the bullshit flummery of the rock sales
machine to get them dollars rolling over the counter, but you, my boy”—
addressing Alice directly—“use music to sell the kids the hype . . .
and it’s that which leads me to believe that Alice Cooper is the finest
flowering of American show business.”48 All of which would ordinarily
be grounds for the harshest sort of critical dismissal in the sphere of
rock-and-roll ethics, but Murray would have it otherwise. Surveying the
same poster-throwing ritual that had so captivated Bangs, Murray was
stirred by the responsiveness of the crowd and the crassness of Cooper’s
approach, and was moved to offer the singer some backhanded praise of
his own: “By being fake all the way from his battered top hat to his
scuffed platform boots,” Cooper managed to reveal an underside of
rock’s status as mass culture, a side where the status of the rock concert
and the performer himself as commodities were brought to the surface
with a certain measure of conflict but no accompanying idealism.49
Cooper may have shamelessly celebrated his monetary pursuits, but he
did not rip off his audience. Rather, he gave them their money’s worth
precisely by conning them, for the con was integral to Cooper’s ability
to successfully refract their collective fears and fantasies.
For all that Cooper tested the limits of his audience and played on their
passions, he still required a carefully defined degree of separation from
them to feel safe. Iggy Pop required no such separation during his career
with the Stooges and often directly assaulted the audience in a manner
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 97
best captured by Lester Bangs, in a pivotal piece of rock critical observation: “Iggy is like a matador baiting the vast dark hydra sitting afront
him—he enters the audience frequently to see what’s what and even
from the stage his eyes reach out searchingly, sweeping the joint and singling out startled strangers who’re seldom able to stare him down. It’s
your stage as well as his and if you can take it away from him, why, welcome to it. But the King of the Mountain must maintain the pace, and
the authority, and few can. In this sense Ig is a true star of the rarest
kind—he has won that stage, and nothing but the force of his own presence entitles him to it.”50
In the ongoing effort to define the boundary between stage and
gallery, performer and audience, Iggy Pop raised the stakes. During his
career with the Stooges, that boundary was ever permeable. Crucially,
though, by Bangs’s account, entering the audience was not a means
through which Pop gave up his claim to the stage, but instead was paradoxically the means through which he asserted his claim. Those inclined
to romanticize Pop’s manner of provocation and to cast him as a leading
force for the democratization of the rock performance act often lose
sight of this point. Iggy Pop posed a decisive challenge to the symbolic
armor, the sense of untouchability, constructed around the figure of the
rock star in the early 1970s. His confrontational stage presence did not
undo the hierarchy of rock, however, so much as it made that hierarchy
a matter of contestation. Similarly, the rough, intense, antivirtuosic
noise of the Stooges’ music did not undermine the sense of power that
inhered in the sound of heavy rock, but did unsettle the means by which
that power was achieved. Musical mastery was subordinated to the will
of the machine, the technological tools that lay at the heart of rock performance at the dawn of the 1970s. Yet the human presence remained
forcefully evident in the body of Iggy, which acted onstage like a virtual
conductor of electricity.
Both Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs, in extensive features on the
Stooges, noted the key role played by “electricity” in the band’s music.
Marsh associated the electric qualities of the band principally with the
style of guitarist Ron Asheton, whom he characterized as a musician
who took advantage of the “whole wide open field of feedback” without applying too much of the technical “fancy stuff” that made so many
guitarists of the time sound similar to one another. “What may have
sounded primitive in traditional terms,” argued Marsh, “is actually
pointing in a progressive direction through the unrestrained assault on
the barriers of guitar technology.”51 Bangs’s emphasis was similar, but
98 DEATH TRIP
he explained the sources of the Stooges’ electric orientation with a more
broadly attuned ear. In his characterization, the Stooges arose out of
“the peculiar machinations of rock ’n’ roll history from about 1965
on,” which involved a greater concentration on the uses of noise for
artistic purposes, evident in distinct ways in the efforts of the Velvet
Underground, the skewed garage rock of Question Mark and the
Mysterians, and the nonrock experiments of avant-garde jazz.52 Tying
these disparate strands together, Bangs portrayed the Stooges as “the
first young American group to acknowledge the influence of the Velvet
Underground,” evident in their construction of complex sonic layers
atop the most simple rock-and-roll bases. More crucially, their music
was “an illiterate chaos gradually taking shape as a uniquely personal
style,” created by “probably the first name group to actually form
before they even knew how to play.”53 The last point was exaggerated
but established a key theme in punk mythology: that the lack of musical
technique could itself be the path to greater expressivity. In a parallel
vein, Bangs described the “noise” of the Stooges as having the capacity
to rearrange the listener’s ear, “because properly conceived and handled
noise is not noise at all, but music whose textures just happen to be a
little thicker and more involved than usual.”54
“TV Eye,” the third song from the Stooges’ second album, Fun
House, captured the band’s commitment to sound as such. Iggy uses the
microphone in a way that parallels Ron Asheton’s aggressive exploitation of guitar distortion, so it is no accident that the two begin the song
unaccompanied by the rhythm section. First comes Iggy’s voice, issuing
a cry of “Looord” in a gruff yowl that extends for several seconds, until
Asheton’s guitar takes over with a tone overloaded with reverb and a
very trebly distortion, playing the main riff: a pounding open A string
punctuated by partial barre chords at the fifth and seventh frets. The
harmonic movement is roughly G–A–C–D–C–A, but to call this a “progression” would be to overstate the case. For one thing, the open A
string pounds through the whole sequence, adding layers of monotony
and ambiguity as well as overtones that enhance the overall air of electricity. Furthermore, the sequence never alters or varies; it repeats
throughout the song, during both verse and chorus, although when Ron
Asheton solos it is left to Dave Alexander’s bass and Scott Asheton’s
drums to keep the repetitive thrust in motion.
The song’s lyric is similarly repetitive, each of the four verses featuring references to a “cat” that the singer is watching and who is watching the singer as well, with a “TV eye” trained on him.55 Assuming the
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 99
role of both subject and object of the gaze, Iggy embodies a strange sort
of lust in the song, as desire is reduced to the consciousness of being
watched. Only at one point does the band break the spell of the TV eye
and alter the song’s momentum. Following Ron Asheton’s solo, the pace
slows somewhat and the riff is supplanted by an even more singleminded throb. Iggy breaks through the redundancy with several shouts
of “Brothers,” each of which is accompanied by a sharp, raspy chord
from Asheton’s guitar. At the last of these shouts, the band comes to a
sudden halt that reveals itself after several beats of silence to be a false
ending. The guitar once again launches into the main riff, sounding even
more relentless after the brief silence. Scott Asheton’s drumbeat soon
joins his brother’s guitar, and then Iggy sings one last verse about the cat
with the TV eye, the song concluding with a final overdriven burst of
guitar, Ron Asheton soloing outside the bounds of the song as though
the noise cannot be contained.
When the STOOGES played the Cincinnati pop festival in June, IGGY was dancing on people’s hands
and they were just holding him up. . . . I should have
a picture for all of you soon. It’s the most killer picture of any rock star taken yet. . . . The look on the
kids’ faces is what Townshend must have had in
mind when he wrote TOMMY.56
“TV Eye” was part of the soundtrack to what was perhaps the Stooges’
most widely publicized and widely recollected moment, their appearance at the 1970 Cincinnati Pop Festival, part of which was aired in a
nationally syndicated television broadcast.57 The broadcast was itself
indicative of the unusual position occupied by rock as a mass medium
in the early 1970s, existing within the larger media apparatus but
still not fully assimilable, something that the Stooges’ performance further dramatized. Bootleg footage of the show begins with two announcers conversing about the event as though they are attending some
unfamiliar rite.58 The trappings are those of a conventional sports broadcast, all the more so because the festival is held at Cincinnati’s Riverfront
Stadium. But no sporting event would have drawn such quasi-anthropological observations as those made by the announcer Bob Waller, who
discusses the way crowd behavior varies depending on where one stands
relative to the stage. Waller’s explanatory efforts are fortunately interrupted by the appearance of the Stooges, to whom the camera abruptly
100 DEATH TRIP
cuts as they are in the midst of playing “TV Eye,” Iggy commanding
attention by strutting about the stage while his band mates remain
rather firmly in their set positions. After a minute or so, Iggy leaps into
the audience, apparently unconcerned that this was not a crowd of hundreds to which the band usually played but one of thousands. Somehow,
the director of the broadcast decides that this would be an opportune
time for a commercial break, and so the footage is temporarily interrupted.
When the broadcast resumes, the Stooges have moved on to playing
“1970,” another song from Fun House, and the announcer informs us
that since the break Iggy had leaped into the audience three separate
times. Needless to say, a fourth time is not long in coming. Most fascinating is the way Iggy’s decision to be in the crowd confounds the televised demand to highlight his presence as the “star.” Although at first
visible alongside the fans gathered at the foot of the stage, the singer
quickly submerges himself, apparently falling to the ground. The
announcer notes, “We’ve lost him,” and the camera crew retrieves a
floodlight that they shine into the audience in search of Iggy, who
remains out of sight for several seconds longer. In his place we see the
members of the crowd who have surrounded the singer in a circle, their
heads down as they watch what has now become a strangely localized
performance despite its mass character. Iggy soon bursts back through
the crowd, however, and reasserts his presence. Assisted by several
members of the audience, he is elevated above them, literally standing
on a sea of hands. As he poses for the crowd, relishing his renewed visibility, the broadcast shifts perspective from the rather tight shot that
depicted Iggy’s elevation to a long shot that better emphasizes his position as a lone figure surfing atop a mass of bodies. Almost as though
aware of the change in view, Iggy stands more erect and, in an especially
charged gesture, points outward at the distant fans (figure 7). The fans
that surround him, meanwhile, all have their arms extended as though
hoping for contact or waiting for him to move in their direction and
require their support. And then, as if to puncture the notion that Iggy
the “star” had risen to his rightful place above the crowd, someone
hands the singer a jar of peanut butter, some of which he proceeds to
smear onto his chest and some of which he tosses in handfuls into the
audience. The act complete, Iggy descends and makes his way to the
stage, the band having reached a sort of climax to the song, with saxophonist Steve McKay’s free-form blowing having led the charge. As we
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 101
Figure 7. Iggy Pop stands atop the crowd at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, 1970. Photo: Tom
Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
see an outstretched arm help Iggy onto the stage, the segment comes to
a quick stop.
Iggy Pop did not view the rock audience as an organic whole. He was
motivated to break through the typically guarded rock-and-roll proscenium by a refusal to view his audience strictly as a mass. “Mass recognition is not what’s important to me, what’s important is individual
recognition,” he told Dave Marsh in a phrase that could be construed as
mere posturing. More illuminating was the way he described to Marsh
his impressions of encountering the audience from the stage: “Well, for
me on stage it’s like, if you could imagine yourself, imagine yourself walking into a room and meeting a strange girl and never once, like in a room
you’d never been into before, right, and never once talking to her, never
once opening your mouth, never once really touching her and just
maybe . . . well, anything could happen with her. Except for a direct and
specific communication.”59 A sense of possibility, of “anything could
happen,” betrayed by an underlying fatalism driven by recognition of the
ultimate failure of communication: this was Iggy Pop’s notion of what it
meant to perform. As such, his bodily acts, combined with the sonic
102 DEATH TRIP
assault of the Stooges’ music, could be taken as an attempt to embody
the incoherence of the performance act, to make an impression without
conveying a message, perhaps taken as well as a gesture of resistance to the
mass-oriented circumstances of early 1970s rock and roll. Iggy and
the Stooges were also implicated in those circumstances, however, and
the theatrical effectiveness of his act at the Cincinnati Pop Festival was in
a sense dependent on the mass character of the event, which resulted
from the size of the assembled crowd and the televised broadcast that
allowed for even wider circulation. Iggy Pop was not a televisual figure in
the manner of Alice Cooper, but he created a near-perfect televisual
moment that magnified his stature as someone who, during his career
with the Stooges, continually played at the juncture between the individual and the crowd, seeking to valorize the former and fracture the latter.
UNDEAD
“Even while rock has celebrated youth,” writes the cultural critic Kevin
Dettmar, “it has exhibited a morbid fascination with death.”60
Surveying the idea that “rock is dead”—an idea that can be traced back
to the very moment of the music’s emergence—Dettmar establishes that
claims of rock’s death can fulfill a number of purposes: they can be used
to shock or titillate an audience, to mourn the passing of particular performers or particular styles, to argue that one form of rock is better
than others, to express fear about the ways the music and its meaning
are changing at a given point in time, or to depict a certain style of
nihilism in which rock’s existence is made to seem of little consequence.
The writers who laid the groundwork for the punk aesthetic, surveyed
in the previous chapter, were steeped in these discursive tendencies. For
Bangs and Shaw in particular, rock was dead in the sense that its
progress had removed it from its defining principles of youthfulness,
spontaneity, lack of pretense, and immediacy of impact. Claiming that
rock was dead, in turn, paradoxically became a way to insist on the
need for its revitalization. Rock is dead, they seemed to say, but it could
be made undead. And this revived corpse could be even more powerful
for having had life breathed back into it.
No performers personified the revived corpse of rock as explicitly as
Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. Suggestions of death or self-destruction circulated around both figures. Such suggestions often enhanced their
inborn narcissism, their desire to maximize their own status as spectacular figures. However self-centered their respective sacrificial rites may
ALICE COOPER, IGGY POP, AND ROCK THEATRICALITY 103
have been, though, Cooper and Pop also dramatized broader social currents concerning the meaning of rock. Both performers worked to
achieve shock effects on their audiences, to provide “the frisson set up
when young singers bring their audiences into a brush with death,”
though on a different scale and through different means.61 Both as well
embodied a style of nihilism that assumed much of its charge from the
way it contrasted with the perceived idealism of an earlier rock historical moment. While others in the early 1970s may have mourned the passing of the preceding decade, Cooper and Pop repudiated that sense of
mourning, sometimes through parody—as with Cooper’s mocking quotation of Don McLean’s “American Pie”—and sometimes through sheer
aggression, as though suggesting that death was not something to be
feared so much as embraced. Cooper and Pop evoked a potent mix of
cynicism and hopefulness. Enacting real or symbolic harm on their own
bodies, they also flaunted their “self-made” qualities, inhabiting personae carefully crafted to achieve the desired dynamic between the star
and the crowd. Doing so, they forged ahead with a stylized take on rock
that upped the music’s expressive range and ferocity as it confounded
established expectations about the realness of what happened onstage.
3
The Teenage Rock ’n’ Roll Ideal
The Dictators and the Runaways
KIDS IN HATE
A certain class of popular song is preoccupied with the idea of being too
late. In these songs it’s too late for love, or too late to say good-bye. The
references change, but the basic idea stays the same: you had a chance for
something but you missed it, and now it’s gone. Such is the premise of
“Little Sister,” the song that opens the third studio album by the
Runaways, Waitin’ for the Night, released in 1977. “Little Sister” plays
on the “too late for love” variation in this group of songs, but adds a
twist. The sister of the song’s title is addressed in the second person by a
more seasoned voice that warns her not to wait or hesitate or she will
miss her chance. That this voice of experience is sung, and was partly
written, by Joan Jett—all of seventeen years old at the time—only heightens the principal message: that youth passes quickly and must be seized
upon before it is lost.1 It seems that Little Sister is already too late when
the song starts. In the first verse she missed a date; in the second she lost
the opportunity to be a “playmate.” Only in the third and final verse is
there still some chance of fulfillment, but even it will be gone if Sister hesitates, and the chorus makes it sound as though she has already waited
too long. “It’s too late to be a kid in love,” shouts Jett, repeating the line
for emphasis. Her response is no longer solely addressed to Little Sister
104
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 105
but includes her listeners and herself, a generation of kids whose collective cause for hope has been erased: “We’re the kids in hate.”
The “kids in hate” of whom the Runaways sang were the kids to whom
Grand Funk Railroad, Alice Cooper, and Iggy Pop all seemed to appeal.
They were not hippies, at least not in the way that hippies were understood in the 1960s. Indeed, “kids in hate” is one of those quintessential
phrases of the 1970s marking a shift in the presiding structure of feeling
that informed the era’s youth culture. As distant as the 1960s may have
felt to these kids, however, they still lived in the decade’s shadow. Many
habits of the counterculture remained a part of the way that young
people related to each other, and arguably even expanded their reach,
including recreational drug use, the relatively free pursuit of sexual
pleasure, and the enjoyment of rock music. Meanwhile, adult reaction
against these habits also gained ground. In a manner that paralleled the
fears over teenage delinquency that had shaped U.S. culture in the
1950s, youth of the 1970s were routinely cast as agents of social and
moral decline, a position sharpened by the presiding backlash against
the perceived excesses of the preceding decade. This authoritarian
revival of youth’s negative image no doubt contributed to the way behaviors once linked to countercultural ideals became divorced from them
and associated with a more nihilistic outlook. As Pagan Kennedy
observed in her chronicle of the American 1970s, “The Seventies fulfillment of the Sixties revolution was unattractive blue-collar teenagers
puking Quaaludes at the Grand Funk Railroad concert.”2 This change
was due not to cultural decline but to the economic and political pressures experienced by contemporary youth.
Partly a reflection of sociological reality, the kids in hate were also a
fabrication, or at least an exaggeration, built on that reality. No less
than the theatrical character of Alice Cooper, the kid in hate was a role
to be inhabited by the aspiring rock-and-roller that played on popular
fears and desires: a kid in hate was an image of the teenager in a state of
pure disaffection, untempered by youthful innocence or a dedication to
communitarian values. Which is not to say that the kid in hate had no
capacity to have a good time. The flip side of the cynical kid in hate was
the teenager as diehard hedonist living for the perpetuation of the Party.
Rather than existing at opposite poles, the teenager-as-cynic and the
teenager-as-hedonist went hand in hand in the 1970s. Viewed with trepidation in the culture at large, the hard-partying kids in hate occupied a
rather different status in certain quarters of rock and roll. As we saw in
106 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
the previous chapter, rock’s purported death opened the way for its revitalization; the kids in hate represented a similar paradox: their very lack
of redeeming qualities made them into a potential source of redemption. Out of their dissatisfaction and hunger for new forms of excitement would come the necessary energy that would rejuvenate the music.
The Runaways was one of two groups to most potently embody the
teenage currents running through 1970s rock; the other was the
Dictators. Both bands comprised musicians who were notable for their
youthfulness, the Runaways having been formed when the band’s members were still in their teens, the Dictators when they were just on the far
side of their teen years. More to the point, both bands exhibited a preoccupation with the trappings of youth that informed all aspects of their
being, from lyrics and music to image to the audience they pursued. The
Dictators and the Runaways put forth a portrait of youth that was a
peculiar composite of the nostalgic and the contemporary; they mined
the history of postwar youth cultures to present an image as current as
it was referential.3 This quality was partly due to the influence exerted
over each band by an older mentor, Sandy Pearlman in the case of the
Dictators, Kim Fowley in the case of the Runaways. It was also something that connected them to broader currents in 1970s culture, when
nostalgia for certain styles and time periods—especially the 1950s—
was prevalent.
For all the parallels between the Dictators and the Runaways, there
were two important differences between them. First, and most obvious,
was the difference in the gender composition of the two bands. The
Dictators was an all-male band, and explicitly so: its version of youth
gone wild was overtly, self-consciously masculine, at times playfully so,
at times marked by a more angst-ridden preoccupation with achieving
and maintaining manhood. The Runaways, by contrast, was an allfemale band, which—as any close follower of rock knows—is an
entirely more rare phenomenon. The Runaways sang about their femininity, but their status as girls was also something that was continually
scrutinized. That so much of their career and their media image were
filtered through the management of Fowley further complicated matters: it was all too easy to cast them as young female puppets who had
little real agency over their music. Such was not the case, but the story
of the Runaways is in many ways the story of their struggle to define
themselves in relation to the expectations held by audiences, critics,
and Fowley himself of what an all-female teenage hard rock band
should be.
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 107
Alongside the basic but fundamental difference in gender existed a
difference in geography. The Dictators was a New York band; the
Runaways were from Los Angeles. For each band, local references were
a crucial component of the teenage lives they portrayed. Those different
locations, in turn, gave a distinct inflection to their respective depictions
of youth. From the East Coast, the Dictators were more “ethnic” (several
members were Jewish) and more ironic in a “smartass” sort of way. From
the West Coast, the Runaways were a touch more glamorous, and whatever edge they had was shaped and perhaps softened by the broadly perceived reputation of California as the “golden state” and its young
population as “golden youth.”4 Beyond these more symbolic connotations, the two bands were connected to two of the most significant U.S.
music scenes of the mid- to late 1970s, and their versions of teenage rock
and roll assumed further importance in relation to the larger network of
local clubs, bands, and other institutions found in New York and L.A.
More specifically, the Dictators and the Runaways were among the
first bands in their respective scenes to be fitted with the term “punk
rock.” For the first half of the 1970s, “punk” circulated as a rather loose
designation that referred more to an ideal of what rock should be, or
what it had been, than to the music of any current bands. By the middle
of the decade it began to be applied with more consistency to a particular sort of contemporary band: young, aggressive, cynical, with music
that marked a return to basics and yet pushed those basic elements in
extreme directions. As many a history has recounted, New York quickly
emerged as the leading punk scene in the United States, while L.A. followed suit and soon had a highly active scene of its own. The Dictators
and the Runaways figured prominently in these developments. However,
neither band fit neatly into the emerging definition of punk that was
beginning to crystallize. The Dictators had arena rock aspirations, a defiantly lowbrow sensibility, and a sense of musical dynamics too deeply
indebted to the prevailing conventions of heavy metal to fit snugly into
the larger New York punk scene. Similarly, the Runaways were split by
their metal and punk tendencies, which came to the fore in the growing
tension between rhythm guitarist Joan Jett—whose attachment to the
nascent L.A. punk scene became deeper and deeper over the course of
the band’s brief history—and lead guitarist Lita Ford, who aspired to
emulate her heavy metal heroes, Ritchie Blackmore and Tony Iommi.
Notable punk progenitors that they were, the Dictators and the
Runaways were ultimately more significant for the ways they played on
the boundary between metal and punk at a pivotal historical moment.
108 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
COMING OF AGE
On the back cover of the self-titled debut album by the Runaways is the
usual collection of band photos. Each member has her own picture, and
the individual photos are laid out one in each corner: drummer Sandy
West top left, lead guitarist Lita Ford top right, rhythm guitarist and
vocalist Joan Jett bottom right, bassist Jackie Fox bottom right, with
singer Cherie Currie in the middle. All appear caught in the act of performance, as though to connote that these are not just glamour shots,
these girls can really play. One feature of the layout stands out above all.
Listed beside the name of each band member is her age. Four of them
are sixteen; the oldest member, Lita Ford, is seventeen. Alice Cooper
may have sung about the trials of being eighteen, but everyone knew he
was older than that. Here, we are told, is a group of real teenagers, and
teenage girls at that.
The youth of the Runaways was a mark of their authenticity, but it
was also a mark of their exploitability. Otherwise, why draw attention
to it? Listeners may well have been excited by the prospect of a group of
sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls playing rock with energy and conviction. Then again, many in the Runaways’ target audience were as
likely to be excited merely by the prospect of a group of sixteen- and
seventeen-year-old girls. At the very least, one can conclude that the
ages of the various Runaways were absolutely central to the marketing
of the band. Yet it is hard not to look at the combination of name, age,
and photo on that back cover without a sense that something unseemly
is being proposed by placing such a strong accent on the band’s combination of youthfulness and femininity.
Uneasy contradictions like these have circulated around images of
youth for at least the past six decades. From the 1950s forward, the
teenager gained consistency as an idea and as a category of lived experience. Not coincidentally, these patterns dovetailed with the period
when rock and roll emerged and established itself as one of the leading
forms of the burgeoning youth culture of the period. For many observers
throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, rock and roll and then rock
was youth music. However, the meaning of “youth,” and “rock” for
that matter, were highly contested during this stretch of time and far
from stable or unchanging. Making youth so much the focus of their
energies, both the Dictators and the Runaways mined past constructions of teenhood and recast them for the present. They also embodied
a set of long-standing conflicts: Is rock unalterably connected to teen
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 109
delinquency? As a form of youth culture, does rock represent the real
desires of young people, or the manufactured desires of those cultural
producers seeking to tap the growing youth market? Before examining
the careers of the Dictators and the Runaways in more detail as they
relate to these issues, I want to survey some of the history on which they
drew to better understand how ideas about youth projected through the
metal/punk continuum connect to the larger development of youth cultures in the decades after the Second World War.
A number of interrelated historical factors combined to make the years
after World War II a time of dramatic transformation in the history of
American youth. The most commonly acknowledged occurrence, of
course, is the baby boom, through which the nation’s generational
demographics were powerfully altered. Sheer growth in the young population was only part of the story, though. As Grace Palladino wrote in
her study, Teenagers: An American History, “The evolution of teenage
culture over the past fifty years is a story of institution building, market
expansion, racial desegregation, and family restructuring.”5 Institutionally, one of the most important changes was the increasing scope of
American public education and the conversion of high school into a
mandatory part of teenage life. The first public high school in the United
States opened in Boston in 1821, but only in the 1930s did a majority
of high school–age youth enroll.6 High school provided a place where
teenage youth came together and interacted as teens, creating the basis
for shared experience apart from either family or work environments,
the dimensions of which would grow significantly as the numbers of
youth swelled in the postwar era. Rock ’n’ roll, for its part, confirmed
the centrality of school to the construction of teenage identities with
Chuck Berry’s “School Day,” its memorable call of “Hail, Hail, Rock
and Roll” casting the music as the ultimate vehicle of escape from the
institution’s scheduled routine.
Compounding the effects of high school were the increasingly targeted efforts of the American culture industry and of the consumer-based
economy more generally. Here, the pioneers were Helen Valentine,
founding editor of Seventeen magazine, and Eugene Gilbert, a market
researcher. Beginning publication in 1944, Seventeen found quick success with young female readers and equally quick success drawing advertisers to buy space in its pages. Early in her tenure, Valentine conducted
a broad survey of her readers’ tastes and buying habits, which she effectively used to convince advertisers that her magazine reached a new and
110 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
largely untapped market.7 Gilbert made a similar pitch to American
business leaders, but on a bigger scale. Like Valentine, he conducted
extensive market research on teenage consumption patterns, premised
on the notion that young consumers had distinctive desires and interests. This idea, that a separate “youth culture” existed that manufacturers needed to study, understand, and cater to, became the basis of
Gilbert’s successful career as an advertising consultant and a journalistic commentator on the character of youth.8
The growing visibility of teenage habits and lifestyles was accompanied by the increased perception that youth culture was fundamentally
different from adult dispositions. This recognition gave rise to another,
more disturbing possibility: that youth culture was a sphere of activity
beyond adult control. Anxieties regarding the potential autonomy of
teenagers in this new cultural environment manifested in the figure of
the juvenile delinquent. While children and teenagers had greater access
to a wealth of materials that were made specifically for their consumption, public officials and intellectuals worried about the influence of
films, comic books, and music. In his 1954 book, Seduction of the
Innocent, the social psychologist Frederick Wertham charged that comic
books in particular were a cultural form with no redeeming value that
had a pernicious affect on young readers, desensitizing them to violence
and thus promoting antisocial and even criminal juvenile behavior. The
arguments of Wertham and others who made similar claims found popular acceptance because of the relatively simple equation they articulated between delinquency and mass culture, thus displacing blame from
parents, schools, and other figures of authority.9 However simplistic
such arguments were, they had deep consequences. Law enforcement
officials made delinquent youth more a focus of attention, members of
the U.S. Congress held special hearings to assess the problem of contemporary juvenile behavior, and different interest groups placed pressure on the various wings of the culture industry to be mindful of their
capacity for moral suasion.
Teen delinquency did not only generate a species of moral panic, however. The delinquent proved to be capable of provoking fear and fascination in equal measure. Marlon Brando’s 1953 turn in The Wild One
foreshadowed a tendency in American cinema that, by the late 1950s,
would give rise to an entire subgenre of youth-oriented exploitation film
focused on the persona of the delinquent. As described by the film
scholar Thomas Doherty, delinquent films of the 1950s came in “soft”
and “hard” varieties. The former took a more liberal, tolerant attitude
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 111
toward delinquency that stressed the social causes of juvenile misbehavior; the latter focused more on the deviance of the delinquent and the
consequent need for punishment.10 Both types of film played on the
public preoccupation with delinquency and sought to strike a balance
between condemnation and celebration of their central characters.
Delinquent films were one of the primary genres through which lowbudget Hollywood producers laid claim to the teenage audience and
skewed overall film production toward teenage tastes. While they often
exploited adult anxieties, they were built around the assumption that
young viewers would be drawn to delinquent protagonists as representative emblems of youthful self-definition and defiance of adult regulation.
By the turn of the decade the specter of delinquent youth no longer
carried so much weight. The American culture industry continued its
efforts to maximize the appeal of its products to young audiences, but
the prevailing image of youth underwent a notable change to a less confrontational archetype, evident in such diverse phenomena as the Mickey
Mouse Club television show, the Gidget films and subsequent television
series, the technically polished, well-harmonized sound of West Coast
surf music, and the wave of “beach party” movies made in the first half
of the 1960s. That these forms of entertainment were all set in California
and largely revolved around the association between youth, recreation,
and the pleasures of the beach was no idle coincidence, for this was the
period in which California grew to prominence as the primary icon of
the postwar suburban frontier. The personae of the Beach Boys and the
iconography of the beach party films were created around an equation
between the sparkling environment of California and the healthy, sunbleached status of the young people who came of age there.11 In this
image of teenage life, causing trouble meant staying out with the car
after curfew or allowing boyfriend problems to get in the way of schoolwork, so that delinquent criminality was displaced by a more innocent,
and more socially acceptable, sort of mischief.
Chronicles of rock history have typically cast this shift away from
images of delinquency and toward an emphasis on the health and innocence of youth as an instance when the music lost its founding integrity.
This is the moment when Pat Boone triumphs over Chuck Berry, when
Elvis Presley goes into the army and returns without his initial aura of
danger. It is the moment, in other words, when commerce triumphs over
creativity, as the record industry figured out how to appropriate the
youthful appeal of the music while excluding those elements that made
it a threat to the social order. Such oppositions, tempting though they
112 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
are, simplify the processes at work in the making of rock ’n’ roll and
youth culture more broadly. The delinquent, icon of trouble, and the
beach kid, icon of radiant optimism, both made their way into wider
circulation through the mechanisms of mass culture, and one was not
clearly more attuned to the imperatives of social control than the other.
Youth culture was from the start a commercial proposition, but in its
commercial form had the potential to awaken impulses that could not
simply be channeled into the realm of consumer choice.
In this vein, the youth-based counterculture that grew in the second
half of the 1960s was as much a fulfillment of post–World War II consumerism as a reaction against it. The counterculture was precipitated
by the mid-1960s “pop explosion” generated by the Beatles, which
marked a new stage in the joint formation of rock music and youth
identity. As defined by Greil Marcus in his essay on the Beatles, a pop
explosion is “an irresistible cultural upheaval that cuts across lines of
class and race (in terms of sources, if not allegiance), and, most crucially, divides society itself by age.” Although generated by mass culture, the pop explosion has the capacity to create more expressly political
forms of affiliation due to the manner in which it “attaches the individual to a group—the fan to an audience, the solitary to a generation—
in essence, forms a group and creates new loyalties.”12 Young people
were already predisposed to view themselves as a group due to the developments of the preceding decade, but the Beatles struck at a time when
larger historical forces had accumulated in a way that gave the sense of
generational affiliation more cultural and political salience. Combined
with the burgeoning student movement, the intensified struggle for civil
rights, and growing resistance to the Vietnam War, rock music in the
1960s helped to consolidate the status of youth as a discrete, oppositional identity.
Countercultural lifestyles and youth-based political activism engendered widespread fears of social disorder, which ultimately contributed
to the conservative backlash of the late 1960s and early 1970s codified
by the 1968 election of Richard Nixon to the presidency. Overall, however, the popular image of youth in the 1960s remained largely positive.
Youth rebellion became associated with the values of progress, vitality,
and renewal in ways that could be applied to individuals and to society
as a whole. In the “culture of rejuvenation” that took hold in these
years, processes of self-definition, refashioning, and role-playing linked
to the counterculture assumed broad currency.13 Crucially, this culture
of rejuvenation was not open only to those under twenty-one. Through
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 113
its influence youth became a set of transferable properties that could be
acquired by anyone with the right frame of mind and, when necessary,
sufficient purchasing power. Hip capitalism certainly targeted young
people with its products—think of Bill Graham’s various endeavors in
the staging and marketing of live rock music—but also set its sights on
a larger constituency. Advertisers throughout the American business
world used strategies derived from the counterculture to stage their own
rebellion against the overly rationalized, conformist-driven strategies of
the preceding decade.14 In this way, youth was transformed from a
demographic target group into a cornerstone of marketing ideology,
and the longing to think young or to appear young became one of the
most powerful driving forces in American consumer culture.
At the dawn of the 1970s social attitudes toward youth were marked
by a growing dichotomy: youthfulness was broadly coveted, but young
people were just as broadly held in disrepute. The May 1970 shooting
and consequent death of several Kent State University students by members of the Ohio National Guard established early in the new decade
that official tolerance for youth-based political protest had reached its
limit and consolidated a message that had been gathering momentum
since the violent response to protesters at the 1968 Chicago Democratic
Convention. Meanwhile, the most valorized popular images of youth
became those most shrouded in nostalgia. George Lucas’s 1973 film,
American Graffiti, was an especially important document of this latter
impulse. The film’s portrayal of young people coming of age in an environment dominated by cruising cars and rock ’n’ roll radio during the
early 1960s struck a major chord with movie audiences, who made it
one of the top-grossing American films in history at the time of its
release. Describing his objectives in making the film, Lucas said, “I
wanted to preserve what a certain generation of Americans thought
being a teenager was really about—from about 1945 to 1962.”15 A
major detail of Lucas’s depiction of teenage life is that almost all the
action happens outside the home. The young characters in American
Graffiti live not at home with parents but out in the world of popular
youth culture, fondly cast as a world apart from adults as long as it
remained safely ensconced in the past.16
The Nuggets anthology and the critical ideas surrounding it could be
seen as another instance of this tendency to uphold the youth culture of
the past as a gilded moment. However, as much as Nuggets can be construed as an exercise in nostalgia, it was also a concerted effort to craft
a counterhistory of rock that placed a polemically designed concept of
114 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
youth squarely at its center. Recall Greg Shaw’s blunt definition of the
essence of the music: “Rock & roll is not 1955–58; it’s 12–17.” In the
early 1970s, Shaw, Lenny Kaye, and Lester Bangs were searching desperately for signs of unhinged teen desire in contemporary rock; not finding
it in nearly as ready a supply as they wished, they revived music of the
recent past to stir similar drives in the present. By the middle of the 1970s,
the Dictators and the Runaways went a step further, giving the critical
equation between teens and rock a sort of musical realization. Doing so
made them exemplars of the musical movement called punk that had been
foreshadowed by currents in rock criticism and was just beginning to
assume coherence.17 As we will see, though, the matter was not so
straightforward, for that other major form of youth-oriented rock, heavy
metal, remained integral to each band’s ambitions and creative vision.
MASTER RACE ROCK
The story of the Dictators starts on the New Paltz campus of the State
University of New York. It was there that a young undergraduate named
Andy Shernoff distracted himself from the pursuit of his degree by publishing a short-lived rock fanzine called Teenage Wasteland Gazette.
Shernoff’s zine occupied terrain similar to Greg Shaw’s Who Put the
Bomp, but the young scribe was less committed than Shaw to the
archival aspects of record collecting and carefully documenting different periods of rock history. Instead, as Shernoff explains in his current
MySpace profile, “I reviewed fake concerts and wrote about cars, girls,
surfin and beer.”18 The tone of Teenage Wasteland Gazette was strongly
informed by another notable rock critic of the era, Richard Meltzer,
whose writing contained a mix of irreverence and philosophical striving
that could be disconcerting to the unsuspecting reader. Meltzer
assaulted the subject matter of rock with a style of verbal aggression
akin to that practiced by Lester Bangs, but he lacked Bangs’s romanticism; for him rock was pure nonsense, and therein, paradoxically, lay
the source of any significance it might be seen to have.19 A Meltzer
record review could become a Dadaist digression on nothing in particular, least of all the music in question. Similarly, Teenage Wasteland
Gazette used rock as a pretext for commentary on the ridiculousness of
American culture at large, and the postteenage foibles of Shernoff and
his co-conspirators in particular.
One such article, written by Meltzer himself, concerned a party
thrown by Shernoff’s friend Richard Blum, also known as Handsome
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 115
Dick Manitoba.20 The music at the party included cuts by Rod Stewart,
the Who, the Velvet Underground, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Doors—
but “no Bowie or any of that s[hit] was played. . . . The teenos at this
frolic were not the kind you read about in Creem or the Decadence
Monthly.”21 Soon, though, rather than playing records, Manitoba was
smashing them on the floor. Later in the evening he fell onto the record
player and broke it, as he would four lamps, an ugly sculpture that
Meltzer said “deserved to die,” and basically everything else in the
house.22 All told, the affair involved a lot of open sex, the consumption of
copious amounts of Quaaludes and beer, several hundred dollars’ worth
of stolen jewelry, Meltzer scrawling “Fuck you, asshole” across the walls,
and Manitoba having to contend with the cops while dressed in “a jock
strap with red lipstick swastikas drawn all over [his] body.”23 Interviewed
years later, Manitoba explained such excesses in almost philosophical
terms: “I had said to [my parents], ‘I’m gonna have one party in this
house.’ Better than ten shitty parties, right, I’m gonna have one party that
people are gonna remember forever—a legendary party.”24
Handsome Dick’s legendary party, and Meltzer’s recounting of it,
present a microcosm of the sensibility inhabited by the Dictators. The
world of the Dictators was a world of young people on the loose, engaging in behavior that could be construed as “delinquent” but that often
happened in the safe confines of the suburban home or the college dorm
room. Significantly, looking back at his experiences, Manitoba does
not characterize them as an act of rebellion against his parents or any
other figures of authority. He had the party for one basic reason:
because he felt like it, because partying is what he and his friends,
young people of the 1970s, did. Years before the Beastie Boys proclaimed with tongues firmly in collective cheeks, “You’ve got to fight
for your right to party,” the Dictators embodied the same sentiment,
and so embodied one of the primary tenets of post-1960s youth culture. For this reason their producer, Sandy Pearlman, said of the band’s
first album, The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! (1975), “It’s a perfect expression of a certain consciousness—teenage American consciousness in
1973, when sopor taking reached its apex, and the main concerns in life
were taking sopors, getting your father’s car for the weekend, and getting
laid.”25 And yet as much as the Dictators were a product of their time,
their portrayal of youth also owed much to the history of youth culture;
indeed, in certain regards this made them even more emblematic of their
time, given the prevalence of nostalgia in 1970s representations of
teenage life. In the case of the Dictators, references to the past made
116 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
their depiction of youth less ordinary and more iconic; teenage life
became all but inseparable from teen mythology. At the same time, the
band countered the seeming innocence of past representations with
their own brand of punkish irreverence.
A case in point is the band’s cover of “California Sun,” included on
Go Girl Crazy!, a song from the mid-1960s steeped in that era’s glowing idealization of the West Coast.26 The 1964 hit recording by the
Rivieras was built around an exuberant mix of a heavy tom drumbeat,
a spidery surf-style Fender guitar riff, and the relentless sound of a
Farfisa organ, and it featured a lyric that described the singer’s desire to
go out west to a land where the “pretty little chicks” do little but walk,
twist, shimmy, and fly. In effect, “California Sun” was a garage rock
counterpart to the more famous Beach Boys song “California Girls,”
but sung by someone for whom California was a remote fantasy location (the Rivieras were from Indiana). As New Yorkers, the Dictators
could likely relate to this fanciful construction of California fun.
Remaking the song in 1975, they increased the heaviness of the sound
and played up the hedonism, and the sheer silliness, of the lyric.
Musically, the most prominent change wrought by the Dictators was the
replacement of the organ with a second track of guitar. Scott Kempner
and Ross “The Boss” Funichello—his name itself another allusion to
that same pre-1965 moment in the mass marketing of California
youth—play call and response with the main guitar riff and add further
heft by transposing it down two octaves from the Rivieras’ version and
considerably increasing the level of distortion.
The more important change comes in the lyrics and the style of vocal
delivery. In the Rivieras’ recording, the chorus repeats three times, and
each chorus describes the same litany of fun-and-sun-soaked activities.
The Dictators repeat the chorus four times, and each chorus presents a
new litany of such activities sung with growing levels of wide-eyed
enthusiasm by lead singer Andy Shernoff (billed as “Adny” in the album
credits) and a ragged choir of his band mates’ voices that responds to
his every call. Chorus 1 comes closest to replicating the Rivieras’ version. Walk, twist, shimmy, and fly become walk, run, fly, and boogaloo;
the latter remains the climax of each Dictators chorus until the last, and
Shernoff seems to take particular pleasure in singing it. Chorus 2 varies
the list more thoroughly, adding jerk, monkey, and groove to the familiar boogaloo. At this point one detects a method to the Dictators’ mix
of nostalgia and revisionism: they appear to be crossing “California
Sun” with another landmark of early 1960s rock, “Land of a Thousand
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 117
Dances,” adding a pocket catalogue of past dance crazes to the more
obvious surface evocation of West Coast youth.
Chorus 3, which follows a short but action-packed guitar solo by
Ross the Boss, adds another variation, this one predicated on the insistent internal repetition of the word shake. “And I shake,” sings
Shernoff, and his band mates respond in kind: “And I shake . . . And I
shake.” When they finally break the pattern with a climactic return to
“boogaloo” it carries an extra sense of release maximized by the way
Shernoff pauses over his articulation of the word, so it comes out “BOOga-LOOOOO.” For the fourth and last chorus, the band once again
varies the terms of enjoyment. Shernoff now seems bent not only on
recalling the past but on inventing new crazes of his own. Only the twist
is readily familiar from a bygone era; otherwise, there’s the mouse, the
robot, and, at last, the “SHIKTAPOOBAH.” This final descent into
nonsense leaves even the other Dictators confused, as they shout back,
“And I’d WHAT?” It is the point at which the Dictators’ nostalgia for
youth cultures of the past is overtaken by the more immediate, inarticulate pleasures of the moment.
The past does not get left behind entirely, however. “(I Live for) Cars
and Girls,” the closing song on Go Girl Crazy!, is equally immersed in
the sound of mid-1960s surf pop. In this case, the song is not a cover but
borrows elements of the music of that period, especially the Beach Boys,
in its sound and lyrics. “Cars and Girls” is about what its title suggests:
the joys of being a young male, cruising cars and cruising women. This
image of young people taking an erotic sort of pleasure in automobility
has been a staple of rock and roll since the time of Chuck Berry and was
extended into the 1960s by such Beach Boys songs as “Little Deuce
Coupe” and “I Get Around.” The Dictators craft their own song within
the terms of this tradition, but are less coy and more emphatic in stating
their wishes; “Cars and Girls” culminates with the unsubtle chant
“Cars, girls, surfin’, beer / Nothin’ else matters here.” Like “California
Sun,” the song also evokes California as a distant land and desired destination, Shernoff singing at one point to an imagined companion,
“We’ll take a trip out to the west/’Cause the coast’s the most ’cause the
surfin’s the best.” Yet the most striking sign of Beach Boys influence is
more purely aural, a perfectly harmonized, falsetto vocal hook that
winds around the words of the chorus, lifted almost exactly from a similar gesture in “I Get Around.”
From where did this preoccupation with California sun and surf arise
among this group of born-and-bred New Yorkers? On one level the
118 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Dictators seem to have partaken in a form of Nuggets-style reverence
for the mid-1960s as a sort of golden age of youth culture, when new
freedoms were experienced to their fullest but were not invested with
outsized notions of social or artistic importance.27 The rock critic and
youth culture specialist Donna Gaines has described a more specific
form that such interests took in writing her own memoir of the 1960s.
Coming of age on Long Island, Gaines recalls the pervasiveness of surf
music and its attendant imagery among the teens of the New York suburbs. Although California was the main source of these trends, Long
Island gave rise to its own version of surf culture at Rockaway Beach, at
the outer edge of the Island. Gaines recalls that “where family, religion,
school, and community inculcated fear and hatred of the other, surfing,
like music, sex, and drugs, ultimately unified all the youth of the Belle
Harbor,” the town where she lived. Surf music, in turn, entered into the
common lexicon of New York rock and roll, such that “every New York
kid with a guitar would torment friends with covers of ‘Wipe Out’ by
the Surfaris, and ‘Walk—Don’t Run’ by the Ventures.”28 The individual
members of the Dictators were not from Long Island, but musically at
least they shared this broader enthusiasm for surf among New York
youth. Gaines points out how common were signs of this enthusiasm in
the music of the late 1970s New York punk scene. Johnny Thunders
routinely played a version of the Chantays’ “Pipeline” in concert and
used the song to open his 1977 solo album, So Alone. Meanwhile, the
Ramones included several surf-era tunes in their repertoire and penned
a tribute to the oceanic passions of Long Island youth with their song
“Rockaway Beach.”
Most significant to the present discussion, the Ramones recorded
their own version of “California Sun,” featured on their second album,
Leave Home (1977). This was no idle coincidence; the shared preoccupation with mid-1960s surf pop indicated a larger connection between
the Dictators and the Ramones. Both bands played a refashioned style
of hard rock that distinguished them from the more cerebral side of
New York punk heard in the music of Patti Smith and Television; both
demonstrated an overarching lyrical concern with the contours of
teenage experience, which they approached with a mix of lightheartedness and aggression. At the same time, a comparison of their respective
renderings of “California Sun” shows the degree to which the Ramones
and the Dictators were not completely of a piece. The Ramones’ version
is at once more and less true to the 1964 Rivieras recording than the
Dictators’. Unlike the Dictators, the Ramones leave the original lyric
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 119
intact and add little in the way of vocal elaboration. They enact a pronounced transformation on the sound of the song, however. From the
opening bars, “California Sun” becomes subject to the Ramones’ distinctive brand of musical minimalism paired with sonic excess. The
chords go by in a blur of distortion; the drums and bass kick at seemingly
twice the speed of the Rivieras. In effect, while the Dictators changed the
song by elaborating on it with new words, new passages, and added
layers of guitar, the Ramones reduce the song to its component parts and
then supersaturate those parts to suit their own aesthetic ends.
More generally, the Ramones’ music is at once more stripped down
and more assaultive than the Dictators’. On Go Girl Crazy!, the
Dictators parody the power of rock even as they strive to approximate
it. The Ramones, by contrast, strive for a more basic pop form beneath
the waves of distortion that drive their music. Influentially ridding rock
music of some of its signature features, such as guitar solos and
extended song structures, the Ramones established the model for a
brand of punk that was marked by a defiant purity of purpose.
Describing the difference between the two bands, Andy Shernoff
observed, “Ramones made it very clear about what they were doing. We
had solos, we did harmonies, we did fast punk rock songs, we did heavy
songs. We varied ourselves a little more. There was just no question
about what the Ramones were doing and it has more impact.”29 If the
Ramones’ style became recognized as more quintessentially punk,
though, it was the Dictators’ lack of purity that made them such a distinctive presence among the bands that contributed to the mid-1970s
New York scene.
Go Girl Crazy! had signs of impurity at every turn, starting with the
album’s cover. In stark contrast to the black-and-white urban realism of
the photo that graces the cover of the first Ramones album, Go Girl
Crazy! features a full-color photograph of Handsome Dick Manitoba
(figure 8). At the time Manitoba was not a full-fledged performing
member of the band. He was a roadie, party buddy, and occasional
vocalist, who was also brought onstage during Dictators shows to
wreak havoc and generate excitement through such antics as throwing
food at the audience. In the album credits he is listed as the Dictators’
“secret weapon.” On the cover, he stands alone in a locker room sporting a black wrestling leotard with the word “Handsome” imprinted in
white letters on one leg. With a giant afro atop his head and a large
flashy grin on his face, Manitoba strikes an arrogant pose, his stocky
chest projecting forth and his elbows protruding on either side of his
120 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Figure 8. Cover of The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!: “secret weapon” Handsome Dick Manitoba
strikes a pose. Photo by David Gahr. Courtesy of SONY BMG Music Entertainment.
body, while his fists rest on his hips. On the wall behind him is a blackand-white poster featuring the members of the band, and hanging on
the door of a locker to his left is a gaudy, sequined red jacket that bears
his moniker in large white letters. To the rock revivalism of “California
Sun” and “Cars and Girls,” then, the Dictators added reference to that
most theatrical of all sports, professional wrestling, as though to draw
attention to the artifice of their chosen roles.30
The songs on Go Girl Crazy! added further layers to the Dictators’
hybrid sensibility. The opening track, “Next Big Thing,” sounds at first
like stock heavy metal, with an electric guitar soloing over minor-chord
arpeggios, followed by a crunching power chord progression as the song
hits its stride. With lyrics parodying the band’s own yearning for massive fame, however, “Next Big Thing” hardly comes across as standard
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 121
heavy rock fare—and even less so when followed by a satirical take on
Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” that features Handsome Dick and
Adny Shernoff trading vocal lines in the manner of the 1960s duo.
“Back to Africa,” the next selection, even mingles heavy rock trappings
with touches of reggae in its unusual, borderline-offensive tale of interracial love. Amid this disparate assortment of stylistic and cultural points
of reference, Go Girl Crazy! is held together by three primary features:
the unrelenting humor and irony of the band’s original songs, all of which
are credited to Adny Shernoff; the energetic and, indeed, virtuosic guitar
playing of Ross the Boss, which is showcased on nearly every track and
which provides the most ready proof of the group’s connection to heavy
metal; and the studied effort to represent the terms of adolescent experience as understood by a band of pop culture–obsessed young males.
These features come together most powerfully on the album’s fourth
song, “Master Race Rock,” about which Richard Meltzer wrote with characteristic bravado, “If [this] ain’t THE REAL ‘MY GENERATION’ . . .
then once again my name is whatever it was the last time I brought it
up.”31 “Master Race Rock” is at once the heaviest song on Go Girl
Crazy! and the punkest. It starts with a crunching three-chord riff played
at an accelerated pace. The speed is reminiscent of the Stooges or the
New York Dolls, but the Dictators play cleaner than either of those
bands; theirs is a more polished sort of energy. For the verses, the tempo
slows a bit, so the power chords are given more room to sustain and
Shernoff’s vocals have more room to breathe. The words to “Master
Race Rock” find the band spreading its net of sarcasm widely. Shernoff’s
lyrics depict hippies as “squares with long hair,” refer to the anxiety
stirred by the early 1970s energy crisis (“Gasoline shortage won’t stop
me now, oh no!”), and portray the members of the band as representatives of a “master race” most notable for its lack of middle-class decorum. During the song’s three bridges and choruses, the band speeds up
the tempo again, while the words are sung collectively in chant-like
fashion to emphasize the solidarity of these “fucked up Bronx
teenagers.”32 The third verse, with the accompanying bridge and
chorus, stands as the band’s ultimate statement of (anti-)purpose:
My favorite part of growing up
Is when I’m sick and throwing up
It’s the dues you’ve got to pay
For eating burgers every day
Take my vitamin C
Know what’s good for me
122 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Life can take its toll
When you’re living rock ’n’ roll!
We’re the members of the master race
Got no tact, and we got no taste
First you put your sneakers on
Going outside to have some fun
Then, to cap it off, a final admonition of “Don’t forget to wipe your ass”
leads into the song’s rousing conclusion in which a frenetic bout of soloing from Ross the Boss spirals its way around the various voices of the
band shouting “Let’s go” in unison. “Master Race Rock” finds the
Dictators wallowing in the most ordinary sort of teenage pleasures—
hamburgers, sports, toilet humor, and, of course, rock and roll—while
continually poking fun at themselves and the world around them. As
such, it is among the finest rock-and-roll assaults on the hierarchies that
exist around high and low culture, good and bad taste, and adult and
teen sensibilities.
Despite having been labeled “the first true punk-rockers of the ’70s” in
the Village Voice as early as 1974, the Dictators were never fully
embraced by the scene that arose around CBGB and Max’s in the mid1970s.33 Establishing their live reputation at the Coventry bar in
Queens, it was only in 1976 that the band began playing regularly at the
lower Manhattan epicenter of punk. Prior to that moment, the Punk
magazine founders Legs McNeil and John Holmstrom had already
taken to the band in a major way. Indeed, as recounted by McNeil in his
oral history of the New York scene, Please Kill Me, the summer that he
and Holmstrom decided to create Punk was spent listening to Go Girl
Crazy! While the initial impetus for the zine came from Holmstrom, it
was McNeil who bestowed the name, which arose from his notion that
the magazine would be “a Dictators album come to life.”34 Yet the Punk
magazine version of punk wasn’t observed that loyally by the entire
scene. When the Dictators entered the orbit of CBGB and Max’s they
were seen by some to represent a more hard-edged, macho, politically
and sexually conservative strand of punk that was also represented by
Cleveland’s Dead Boys and Johnny Thunders’ post-Dolls group, the
Heartbreakers.35
The Dictators became especially perceived in this light after a notorious incident that took place between Handsome Dick Manitoba and
a longtime New York scene stalwart, Wayne County. County was a
holdover from the glam era and a singular presence in the scene as a gay
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 123
male transvestite known for his outrageous, sexually provocative performances. Having survived the transition from glam to punk more successfully than most, in the mid-1970s he held the DJ post at Max’s
Kansas City and remained a regular performer in the downtown clubs
where punk took hold. Competition between Max’s and CBGB was
rather fierce, so when County took the stage at CBGB for a March 1976
performance it was like stepping into enemy territory, and tensions were
correspondingly high. To work up his nerve, County took a healthy profusion of Black Beauty amphetamines before beginning his set. As
County moved through his songs, Manitoba continually sparred with
the performer verbally, hurling epithets of “Queer! Queer! Aaaaah, ya
fuckin’ drag queen!”36 Not knowing who was verbally assaulting him,
and having his faculties unsettled by the chemicals running through his
system, County was left to interpret the remarks as hostile, homophobic,
and potentially setting the stage for some other kind of violence. When
Manitoba approached the stage to get to the bathroom, County saw the
move as an aggressive one and responded in kind; taking the stand from
his microphone, he raised it and swung it at Manitoba’s shoulder, breaking his collar bone and sending him flying back into the tables.
This action—Wayne County, a rock-and-roll queen, called to
defense by the homophobic catcalls of a man named Handsome Dick—
temporarily split the New York scene into factions, some claiming that
Manitoba had been wronged, others asserting that County had been
fully justified. A Max’s employee, Maria Del Greco, recalling the incident, observed that Wayne County’s presence went against the grain of
a rising “gender phobia” that had taken hold in some segments of the
punk scene, particularly among those who published Punk magazine.37
Legs McNeil partly corroborates this characterization in Please Kill Me,
suggesting that in the aftermath of gay liberation it was suddenly “cool
to be gay” in New York, a notion against which his magazine countered,
“No, being gay does not make you cool. Being cool makes you cool.”
McNeil adds, “People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said,
‘Fuck you, you faggots.’”38 Punk put its support soundly behind
Manitoba and the Dictators, but many others stood behind County,
who spent a night in jail after the episode. The photographer Bob
Gruen, for one, remembered, “I felt that it was kind of a turning point,
that all these guys had to ’fess up and say that Wayne’s our friend. And
we stand up for him and it’s not okay to come into a club and call a guy
a queer.”39
124 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Striking a balance between these polarized positions was the Village
Voice columnist James Wolcott, who turned a review of the first
Dictators concert since the incident into an illuminating commentary
on the band and its contradictions. As reported by Wolcott, Handsome
Dick Manitoba appeared on stage for the show wearing a black shirt
with silver lettering on the back that read “I AM RIGHT.” Manitoba’s
arrogance and unabashed machismo rubbed Wolcott the wrong way,
even more so in combination with the “fag-baiting” that seemed to have
accompanied his verbal assault on County. He refused to dismiss
Manitoba or the band as a whole on that account, though. Wolcott
described their show as a “rowdy, bottle-smashing night,” and asserted,
“The Dictators generate excitement like no band I’ve seen recently. . . .
They stir up turbulent pleasure which serves as a counterforce to the
emotionlessness that is currently so chic . . . and unlike, say, Kiss . . .
their showmanship carries real conviction.”40 If Wolcott remained
uneasy about the Dictators, it was not because of Manitoba’s run-in
with County, but because the band’s “celebration of mass-culture and
mass-culture appetites” had the air of “slumming,” of a band full of
intelligence allowing its more base impulses to take control, so that they
came across as “willfully low-minded.”41
When Wolcott calls the Dictators “the smartest heavy-metal band
I’ve ever heard,” there is an air of backhanded compliment about the
phrase, but also an indication of how the band sent some decidedly
mixed musical signals. For instance, while Wolcott drew a contrast
between the Dictators and Kiss, praising the former for having “conviction” that was lacking in the latter, some members of the Dictators saw
Kiss as a model for the kind of energy and enthusiasm they hoped to
generate in their audiences. Arising out of the last days of the New York
glam scene, Kiss restyled the confrontational aesthetic of the New York
Dolls into a choreographed, high-energy rock-and-roll spectacle, developing a literally explosive stage show that was tailored for the arena
even while the band was still slogging its way through the New York
club circuit. The Dictators’ rhythm guitarist, Scott Kempner, recalled
that Kiss was “the first band to come by in years whose shows were
simply exciting! I realized that excitement was something I had been
missing in rock ’n’ roll.”42 Although their allegiances ultimately shifted
more in the direction of “new wave” bands such as the Ramones, the
Dictators never fully abandoned a more hard rock– or metal-oriented
notion of what “rock and roll excitement” meant, as Andy Shernoff
explained when asked what he preferred as a fan of the music: “The
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 125
band’s gotta cook, gotta have personality, guitar solos. . . . I mean, I love
the Ramones and all, but I still like screaming guitars and a band that
looks good on stage.” Moreover, heavy metal represented for Shernoff
not just a desired aesthetic direction but also a more ready audience,
what he called a “heavy metal grapevine”: “They get a good hard rock
record, they play it in their cars and at parties and the word gets out.”43
This, for Shernoff, was the audience for whom the Dictators should be
striving, rather than the more select crowd that patronized subcultural
spaces like CBGB.
Manifest Destiny, the second Dictators album, released in 1977, was
the band’s calculated effort to branch out in such a way. In the interim
since Go Girl Crazy! the Dictators had undergone some significant
lineup changes, adding a new rhythm section with bassist Mark “the
Animal” Mendoza and drummer Richie Teeter. Shernoff moved from
bass to keyboards—a new feature for the group—and also bequeathed
the bulk of the lead vocal duties to Handsome Dick. The changes in the
band’s sound and approach between the two records were hardly just a
matter of new membership, however. Manifest Destiny presented a
group whose songs were less resolutely heavy than those on Go Girl
Crazy! and relied far less on humor as their main affect. Shernoff, bitterly disappointed at the commercial failure of the band’s debut, was
convinced that the offbeat, highly referential humor of their earlier
material had alienated potential fans. As he explained to the British
weekly Sounds shortly after the release of Manifest Destiny, “I feel I had
misguided integrity in the past. What I thought was cool was what my
little circle of friends thought was cool—the rock critic’s circle. What’s
cool is really what’s going to turn on the 14-year-old kid who doesn’t
know about the history of rock ’n’ roll.”44
For all that he idealized the archetypal teenager, though, many of the
songs on Manifest Destiny replaced the skewed teen persona of Go Girl
Crazy! with a more “mature” sound and lyrical perspective.
“Exposed,” the lead track from the album, is indicative of this new
move toward maturity. Built around a melodic guitar hook by Ross the
Boss, the song tells the story of a prominent married man whose “other
woman” has revealed a secret that has embroiled him in controversy.
Finding himself on the news and awaiting a court date, he sounds most
worried about what will happen when his wife hears of his troubles:
“Then I wouldn’t bet a nickel on my life.” The song is not without
humor; a particularly choice turn of phrase comes during a bridge when
the song’s protagonist imagines his escape: “I’ll get away/I don’t want to
126 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
meet my maker/I’ll get away/I think I’ll become a Quaker.” In this case,
however, humor plays a decidedly subordinate role to the song’s story
and Shernoff’s effort to depict the anxieties of a man caught in a compromising situation—a situation that, in the moral universe of Go Girl
Crazy!, would likely have been shrugged off without a second thought.
Not that the energy and sensibility of the earlier album were forever
lost. Manifest Destiny ends with a three-song blast of loud, fast rock
and roll, at the center of which is “Young, Fast, Scientific,” a stirring
mix of autobiography and self-mythology. The song opens with the
fastest Dictators riff to date, a riff that recalls the Stooges’ “TV Eye” in
pitting the open fifth string (A) against a set of barre chords that create
a light dissonance made more pronounced by the primal buzz of the
guitar’s tone. During the verses, more sturdy power chords take over (D,
then G), but that riff continues to return between each phrase. Against
this riff, Shernoff’s lyrics use select songs from Go Girl Crazy! as points
of reference for singer Handsome Dick to tell a version of his storied
commitment to rock and roll. “I was young, I took the pledge we call
the Two-Tub Man,” sings Manitoba at the song’s outset, echoing the title
of a tune from the first record that was itself a tribute to his own largerthan-life persona. The second verse starts with the question “Have you
heard, they said that I could be the Next Big Thing?” now referencing
the lead song from the debut. This strategy suggests a range of possible
meanings, all of which the Dictators appear to be playing on, deliberately or not. Drawing on their recorded history, they take control of it
and allow the promise of their career to remain alive despite the disappointment attached to Go Girl Crazy! At the same time, they seem to be
putting the past behind them. Manitoba was young once upon a time,
but he’s older now, so the song’s phrasing would suggest. Even as the
song approximates the spirit and energy of their earlier music, it also
measures the distance they’ve come. The song’s chorus only enhances
this message, as Manitoba proclaims, “Rock-and-roll made a man out of
me.” Thus does “Young, Fast, Scientific” link the Dictators’ struggle for
success to their coming of age, with Manitoba embodying the awkwardness of making the transition from youth to manhood.
Maturity is a relative term, of course. When Manifest Destiny was
released the members of the Dictators were still only in their mid-twenties,
and their music still had its fair share of crassness and immaturity, to its
benefit. What the band lost was its ability to put itself forward, convincingly and almost single-mindedly, as representatives of youth
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 127
culture in the way they had on Go Girl Crazy! This loss can almost certainly be attributed to the commercial failure of the first album. Shernoff
wrote the songs on Go Girl Crazy! confident in his ability to portray the
voice of American youth, past and present. When those same young
people did not respond to the album with the enthusiasm that Shernoff
and his band mates and supporters had hoped, that confidence was
shaken. As a result he changed his objectives; he was no longer singing
as youth but singing to youth, while trying to guess what it was that
American teens wanted to hear.
Caught between youth and maturity, between metal and punk,
between “old wave” and “new wave” impulses, the Dictators thumbed
their noses at the terms of rock-and-roll success but still continued to
struggle mightily for it. Ultimately, they could be said to have disintegrated amid their own internal contradictions, for they made only one
more album as a regular working band before effectively dissolving by
the end of the 1970s. But their contradictions were not only internal.
The conflicts they faced were also the conflicts of a moment in time
when the larger meaning of rock-and-roll success was increasingly being
questioned. Reflecting on his band’s failed ambitions, Andy Shernoff
offered a critique of the broader circumstances of rock and roll that was
echoed throughout the discourse of the era: “We thought [arena rock]
was the state and the future of rock, but the bands that play arenas
aren’t providing the best sound or the best atmosphere for rock ’n’ roll.
Anyone who plays in a bad atmosphere doesn’t give a shit about the music.
They care about making money.”45 Gone was the Grand Funk–style
optimism that a massive crowd of young people represented a cultural
movement, not just a large collection of paying customers. So disillusioned, the band was ready to embrace punk with new enthusiasm—
Bloodbrothers, their final record of the 1970s, was widely portrayed as
a return to punk46—but they had missed their moment, and the scene
they had helped to spawn soon left them behind.
QUEENS OF NOISE
In 1957 Chuck Berry released “School Day,” his classic rock-and-roll
statement enumerating the dullness of the teenager’s daily routine.
Twenty years later, the Runaways issued “School Days.” Written by
Joan Jett and the Runaways’ manager, Kim Fowley, “School Days”
mixed Berry’s sensitivity to the constraints placed on young people’s
lives with an Alice Cooper–like consciousness regarding the fluid
128 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
boundary between youth and adulthood. In marked contrast to Berry’s
song, which addressed its listeners in the second person, “School Days”
took a more subjective first-person approach. As she so often did, vocalist Joan Jett assumed a nostalgic pose toward her youth even though her
persona in the song is only eighteen. Jett was no model student, she tells
us. She hated homework, hated class, hated rules. Unsurprisingly, she
never made the honor roll and was always looking for the next opportunity for fun and escape. Now, though, school is over and she is at a
crossroads. She is eighteen and ready to move ahead with her life. She’s
seen a lot and she has her dreams. But her new freedom is almost overwhelming, and so she sings in one of the song’s last lines, “It’s a dangerous scene/when you’re eighteen.”
“School Days” shows the Runaways wearing their youth on their
proverbial sleeves in characteristic fashion. Just as important, it finds
the band—like their counterparts, the Dictators—projecting an image
of teenage identity that draws heavily on past representations. That Jett
herself, as vocalist and colyricist, is looking backward at her just-passed
school days only enhances this element of the song. It is almost as
though, in the 1970s, youth could not be treated directly without also
facing its history. For the Runaways, that meant seeking to appropriate
an arsenal of delinquent representations that had been in place for more
than two decades, the more positive or desirable aspects of which had
typically been reserved for boys and young men. It also meant having to
deal with the mixed legacy of the girl-group era of the late 1950s and
early 1960s, which had brought young women into the center of popular music but often left them appearing as pawns in a game run by men
behind the scenes of the music industry. That the Runaways were produced and managed by a holdover from that era, Kim Fowley, heightened the likelihood that they would be perceived in like terms. However,
as an all-female band who played all their own instruments, wrote or
cowrote most of the songs they recorded and performed, and played
unabashedly hard rock at a time when most female performers were still
shying away from the full potential of electricity, the Runaways had few
real peers. Suzi Quatro may have created the image of the leather-clad
female hard rocker, but the Runaways established the sound to accompany the image.
Although they came from California, the Runaways’ version of
teenage life owed little to the fun-in-the-sun image associated with the
state, which held such attraction for the Dictators. Even “California
Paradise,” the group’s most explicit musical celebration of its home
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 129
state, devoted only one of its verses to the beach and had little of the
lighthearted energy associated with surf music. The Runaways were
children of the night, and the youthful pleasures of which they sang
were mainly in a hard partying after-hours lifestyle with a dark, almost
noirish undercurrent. Teenagers in Runaways songs were more often
than not portrayed as wasted youth, acting in ways they were too young
to understand, their emotions hovering between hedonism and regret, a
tension captured well in one of the band’s most elaborate song titles,
“Neon Angels on the Road to Ruin.”
Hollywood was the setting for most of the band’s lyrical adventures,
its mix of glamour, decadence, and downright seediness providing a
valued metaphor for the confusing stir of impulses at play in the
Runaways’ songs. Not coincidentally, Hollywood was also home to the
club where the idea for the Runaways was born. Rodney’s English Disco
was an Anglophilic Hollywood club that was ground zero for the decidedly marginal L.A. glam rock scene in the early 1970s. “Rodney” was
Rodney Bingenheimer, a diminutive figure who presided over the space
and served as its DJ and whose enthusiasm for the latest currents in
British rock was matched by his desire to cater to the most notorious
excesses of the 1970s rock elite. A long-time presence on the L.A. scene,
Bingenheimer was a genuine pop figure with a talent for adapting to
coming musical trends. In later years he would host one of the most
innovative radio shows in Southern California on KROQ, where he
became one of the few high-profile DJs in the United States to regularly
feature punk rock. At the English Disco he played a steady stream of the
latest British hits by Slade, the Sweet, Gary Glitter, David Bowie, Suzi
Quatro, and a host of others, many of which would make scant impression on U.S. listeners. He also hosted a congregation of very young rockand-roll enthusiasts, many of them female, many of them budding
groupies who would be urged to service the visiting rock stars who
passed through the club. Observing the scene at Rodney’s in late 1974,
the British author and musician Mick Farren noted the existence of a
rather elaborate sexual barter system in the club: while older rockers
enjoyed Rodney’s as a “ready made meat market of juvenile nookie,”
the younger patrons viewed it as “the gold gateway to the Wonerful [sic]
World of Big Time Rock.”47
Any female hanging out at Rodney’s would have been suspected of
being a groupie.48 Not all of the club’s attendees were there to participate in the sexual economy, though. Some were more fundamentally
fans of the music Bingenheimer featured. One of those fans was Joan
130 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Jett, who described Rodney’s in 1976 as “a place . . . where the kids
could go and you could do anything and it was really fun. You know,
like they never played that kind of music in America. It was the only
place you could hear it.”49 The scene at Rodney’s stood for Jett as a
model of total commitment to rock ’n’ roll that she would continually
try to transmit throughout her career with the Runaways and after. Just
as strongly drawn to the club and its attractions was Cherie Currie, who
would become the lead singer for the Runaways. Currie recalled
Rodney’s as a “m-a-g-i-c-a-l” place where “you could dress any way you
wanted to and no-one would stare.”50 When asked by the New Musical
Express writer Chris Salewicz whether they had been involved in the
groupie scene at Rodney’s, Jett, Currie, and the other members of the
Runaways all responded with an emphatic no. From the perspective of
the band, groupies were a separate category of girlhood whom they
regarded with a disdain that was reciprocated. The girls who joined the
Runaways were not on the scene to offer their services or their company
to male performers. They were there to become performers themselves.
Occupying the other end of the age spectrum at Rodney’s was Kim
Fowley. A fixture on the L.A. scene since the late 1950s, Fowley was one
of Bingenheimer’s closest friends and associates. Once an associate of
the famed producer Phil Spector, Fowley was a musical scavenger who
had managed to attach himself in one way or another to many of the
major trends and performers of the previous two decades, though often
in a less prominent capacity than his own accounts would admit. His
earliest significant success had been as coproducer and writer of the
1961 hit single “Alley Oop,” recorded by a group called the Hollywood
Argyles that was essentially fabricated in the studio. Fowley’s account of
how he went about marketing “Alley Oop” offers a choice bit of insight
into his aggressive promotional skills and his talent for spinning stories
that stretch the boundaries of credibility: “26 different road bands capitalised on the hit; they organised a black band, an Italian band, a punk
kid band, a Puerto Rican band, a Jewish band, etc. . . . This was the era
of little independent labels and groups without faces—so bands could
easily masquerade as the originals. So, high school audiences in 26 different cities could see the Hollywood Argyles on stage simultaneously.”51 Fowley was a hustler who lived by his wits and his capacity for
exploitation. He was also an idea man, always looking for the next concept that could break the pop market open. Some of his ideas worked;
the vast majority did not. But no single failure ever halted his ability to
hustle himself onto the next endeavor.
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 131
In 1974, Fowley placed an ad in Greg Shaw’s Bomp fanzine:
“Wanted: Four Girls. Stardom! Hit Records! $$$! Fame! We’re looking
for girls who will take up where Suzi Quatro and Fanny leave off, the
kind of girls who always dreamed they were in a Phil Spector group,
girls with the desire and ability to carve out a place for women in ’70s
rock as significant as that they held in the ’60s. Girls who can bring hysteria, magic, beauty and teen authority to the stage. Girls with youth,
energy, dedication, wildness, discipline, dedication and style.”52 The
language of the ad reveals the different layers of youth culture at work
in his initial concept for an all-female band. By calling for girls who
would follow in the footsteps of Suzi Quatro and Fanny, he announced
his interest in girls who were instrumentalists as well as vocalists. At the
same time, by calling for girls who imagined themselves in a Spectorstyle group, he harked back to a model of female musicianship in which
the producer rather than the performer would be the most authoritative
presence.53 Like the producers and managers of the girl-group era,
Fowley was ready to capitalize on the youthfulness and femininity of the
girls he recruited and to exploit their status as girls playing in a medium
dominated by boys. Furthermore, his group was to be a group of girls,
not women, whose age would confer the desired mix of innocence and
hunger for experience.
As one of the older predatory males who inhabited the English Disco
scene, Fowley’s effort to create an updated girl group was no doubt
fueled in part by his own fantasies of teen girlhood unleashed. The reallife girls he encountered in assembling the band were by no means as
pliable as such fantasies would suggest, however. Kari Krome, a precocious thirteen-year-old songwriter whom Fowley first encountered at a
birthday party for Alice Cooper—where she was brought as the guest of
Rodney Bingenheimer—played a crucial role in the formation of the
band. Her efforts as lyricist inspired Fowley’s recognition that a teen girl
band should exist. More tangibly, she introduced Fowley to the East
Coast transplant Joan Jett, with the suggestion that the young guitarist
would be perfect for the group Fowley was imagining. Fowley then facilitated an encounter between Jett and drummer Sandy West, through
which the musical foundation of the Runaways was laid. West later
recalled:
I walked up to [Kim] and said, “My name’s Sandy West, and I’m a drummer.” And his eyes lit up and he said, “Oh, really? Well, I know this girl
who knows some girl in the Valley who plays electric guitar.” . . . Kim
called me the next day to give me Joan’s number. She took about three
132 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
buses down here [from Canoga Park to West’s home in Huntington
Beach]. . . . Joan walked in, and I said, “Here’s a fuckin’ Marshall stack,
what do you know how to play?” And she said, “The only thing I know is
Suzi Quatro . . . that’s how I learned how to play guitar.” . . . We jammed
on some song by Suzi and she had perfect rhythm. . . . I told Kim, “This
girl’s got perfect time.” And his eyes just exploded out of his head. A fifteen-year-old girl with perfect timing? He said, “If there’s two of you who
can play well together, there’s gotta be more.”54
From that point, the initiative of the girls who joined the Runaways was
as important as Fowley’s governing hand (figure 9). Indeed, Fowley’s
dominance was as often as not an obstacle to holding the band together.
For instance, an early version of the band quickly gelled when singer
and bassist Michael Steele was added to the guitar-drums duo of Jett
and West. Also brought in was Lita Ford, a sixteen-year-old discovery
from Long Beach who was initially considered for the bassist position
but talked her way into the role of lead guitarist. Soon, though, Ford left
the band out of frustration with Fowley’s managerial harassment. The
Runaways thus debuted as a trio at a party hosted by “Phast Phreddie”
Patterson, a local scene maker who founded the pivotal L.A. zine Back
Door Man.55 After a short time Ford rejoined, but now it was Steele
who was driven from the band, by her account due to the pressure
caused by Fowley’s unwanted sexual advances.56 Steele would eventually
reenter L.A. rock as a member of the Bangles. The Runaways reconstituted themselves by adding two new members, bassist Jackie Fox and
singer Cherie Currie. This quintet would hang together through the
recording of the band’s first two albums, but the power struggles
between Fowley and the Runaways would be a constant, infusing the
group with an aura of sexual and generational tension that contributed
to their internal dynamic and their external mystique.
Adding to the layers of conflict that surrounded the Runaways was a
more strictly musical point of concern, this one centered around the
competing affinities of guitarists Jett and Ford. Whereas Jett had a clear
preference for the pop-oriented British glam rock that had held sway at
the English Disco, Ford was far more partial to the heavier sounds of
Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and other like bands. Prior to her entry in
the band, she had gone to see such groups at the Long Beach Arena near
her home; as she later recalled, it was Fowley’s promise that the
Runaways would be her path to headlining the Arena that sealed her
decision to join the group.57 Soon after joining, though, she found herself frustrated by the musical leanings of her fellow Runaways, leanings
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 133
Figure 9. The Runaways with Kim Fowley in an early group photo from 1975. From left to
right are Joan Jett (rhythm guitar and vocals), Peggy Foster (bass; soon to be replaced by
Jackie Fox), Sandy West (drums), Cherie Currie (vocals), and Lita Ford (lead guitar). Fowley,
seated, looks appropriately gurulike. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
endorsed by Fowley. According to Phast Phreddie, Ford’s musical frustration had as much to do with her early decision to leave the group as
her dislike of Fowley: “Lita was afraid that her friends in Long Beach
(a notable stronghold for Heavy Metal and stompdown Boogie!!!—
Aerosmith, Z.Z. Top, B.O.C., and Black Sabbath find their most loyal
fans at the Long Beach arena) would laugh at her if they heard her play
‘this shit.’”58 When Ford reentered the Runaways fold, it was because she
feared that they would attain her cherished goal of playing the Long
Beach Arena without her.59 She remained a key member of the Runaways
until the group’s dissolution in 1979, but her heavy metal leanings, which
were shared by drummer West, were never fully integrated with the preferences of the songwriting core of Jett, Fowley, and Krome and would
become a greater source of division after Jett began to invest more
strongly in the developing punk movement in L.A. and abroad.
Once the Runaways were formed, a considerable chunk of their repertoire revolved around songs that portrayed them as girls gone bad. This
preoccupation stemmed largely from Fowley’s design to cast the band as
134 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
a “tough” girl group along the lines of forerunners the Ronettes and the
Shangri-Las, who had injected a streetwise sensibility into the sphere of
mid-1960s pop. The members of the Runaways seem to have relished
playing this role as well, and fully collaborated with Fowley in the
assumption of their delinquent guise. As such, Fowley and the Runaways
harked back to the more general youth culture of an earlier era, following in the footsteps of the 1950s delinquent films in which the misadventures of youth were turned into the stuff of sensational
entertainment. What set the Runaways apart from these earlier portrayals was that their personae as delinquent girls took center stage. Girlgroup songs such as “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las, released
in 1964, represented the presiding terms of the past. The song’s protagonist falls for a rebel boy who connotes danger by his involvement with
motorcycles. Her parents object to her love for him; she sadly obeys
their wishes, only to be left with even stronger grief when he dies in an
accident. This strategy of female rebellion in which the boy remained
the figurative “leader” offered significant potential for alternative fantasies and desires in its time, but still ultimately placed the girl in a subordinate role.60
The Runaways, by contrast, needed no boys to lead them down the
path of delinquency. Boys were at most supporting figures in the bulk of
their songs, and at times were barely acknowledged as the band
recounted its own misadventures. In “Born to Be Bad,” for instance, one
of the earliest Runaways compositions, the source of trouble is not boys
but rock music itself.61 An early power ballad, the song is directed at
parents and other authorities who seek to keep the singer from acting on
her bad nature. Following the second verse and chorus, Joan Jett delivers
a rousing monologue in which she recounts how she called her mother
from Hollywood to tell her that she had joined a rock-and-roll band and
wouldn’t be coming home again. Her mother cries at the news, which she
then relays to Jett’s imagined father, who replies with resignation,
“There ain’t a damn thing we can do, that’s just the way she is/She was
just born to be bad.” To reinforce the sentiment, at that moment Lita
Ford erupts into a fierce heavy metal–style guitar solo laden with reverb
and marked by squealing picked harmonics, using a blues rhetoric to
reflect the pathos of the preceding exchange but in the end sending the
message that the noise of these girls cannot be easily contained.
Another teenage girl embracing her bad side took full note of the
uniqueness of the Runaways in one of the first published appreciations of
the band. Lisa Fancher began writing for Bomp in 1975 as a representative
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 135
of the “new breed” of teens taking an interest in rock. Her first article
for the magazine bemoaned the current state of rock and noted the particular absence of any artists who gave voice to the concerns of Fancher
and her teenage peers.62 One issue later she continued with this theme,
declaring her wish to hear the “teenage disc fantastic,” the record that
played back all the confusion, excitement, boredom, lust, and rebellion
of being young. Sorting through records by early 1970s glamsters the
Sweet and the New York Dolls did not quite do the trick; even the
Dictators failed to hit the mark, because as a young woman Fancher
“couldn’t tell if I was being put down” by the band’s assertive expression
of manhood. Frustrated, she began to doubt if such a record as she
desired had even been made yet. Then, three weeks later, Fancher “saw
that record onstage at the Whiskey a Go Go,” the famed Hollywood
rock club, in the form of the Runaways.63
Immediately infatuated, Fancher described the Runaways in suitably
abrupt language: “Average age: sixteen. The sound: violence by proxy.”
More expansively, she claimed, “The Runaways are going to give rock
’n’ roll back its bad name, and not a second too soon.”64 For Fancher,
this was the sound of teenage girls living their own version of the rockand-roll lifestyle. As such, the band was punk in the most “real” sense
of the term, by her definition: “The Runaways are as real as getting beat
up after school. Their songs are about juvenile delinquent wrecks, sex,
pressure, and anything incidental like drugs and parties. Sometimes the
reflections on these are good, often bad, but there’s always the underlying, understood agreement that the state of Teenage is what it’s all
about.”65 Fowley’s influence on the group may have led Fancher to qualify her observations. However, although she noted the clear presence of
his managerial hand, she refused to give him primary credit for their
achievement. Joan Jett and Kari Krome were responsible for many of
the band’s songs, and the Runaways brought those songs to life onstage
through their combined musicianship. That the band’s members had all
been regular club dwellers even before Fowley brought them together
only lent them further credibility, something Fancher recognized due to
her own regular presence on the scene. Above all, though, the Runaways
set themselves apart by projecting their preoccupation with “the state of
Teenage” through their perspective as teenage girls, allowing them to
articulate desires and impulses rarely heard so openly in rock.
Fancher’s enthusiasm, compelling though it was, did not tell the
whole story of the Runaways, for there was a strong whiff of male fantasy around the group. Donning their bad girl poses with such a lack of
136 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
ambivalence, the Runaways mixed innocence and sexual availability in
a way that has characterized popular representations of teenage girls at
least since the time of Nabokov’s Lolita, another influential product of
the American 1950s. “Cherry Bomb,” the lead track from the
Runaways’ 1976 debut album, made these sexual tensions come alive.
The story of the song’s composition was itself a study in the band’s
power dynamics. “Cherry Bomb” was written by Jett and Fowley during
singer Cherie Currie’s audition to join the group. According to Currie,
she was instructed by Fowley to learn a Suzi Quatro song for her audition, but her choice, “Fever”—a Quatro cover of the classic popularized
by Peggy Lee—was met with resounding disfavor by the members of the
band for being too slow.66 Rather than spend time picking an alternate,
Jett and Fowley stole away, returning only minutes later with a song
shaped around their first impressions of the singer. Currie’s look—
blond, thin, and wide-eyed, with a Bowie shag haircut and an extroverted glam-induced sense of style—provided the inspiration, and
around that look Fowley and Jett collaborated to craft an image of
young female sexuality on the cusp and ready to explode.
Born from such circumstances, “Cherry Bomb” objectifies its young
protagonist at the same time as it gives voice to her sexual agency. The
song’s lyrics combine the celebration of teen rebellion and youthful energies akin to the Dictators with a come-hither stance that plays on the
underage desirability of the group’s members. Alternately described as
the “girl next door” and the “fox you’ve been waiting for,” Currie
addresses the bulk of the song to a young street boy to whom she is
making none-too-subtle advances. In her most explicit moment, she
promises to give him something to cure his dissatisfaction, to “have
ya / grab ya / till you’re sore.” Something more than a simple come-on
seems to be at work, though, at the end of the second verse, when the
perspective changes to address the girls in the audience, suffering from
their own form of teenage blues. Currie encourages them to “get down
ladies/you’ve got nothing to lose.” Her sexual availability may be highlighted principally for the benefit of her male listeners, but in this
moment Currie and the Runaways also project the notion that women
have something to gain from the open enjoyment of sexuality, and they
provide a model for female assertiveness of the sort that listeners like
Lisa Fancher found appealing and convincing. These competing tendencies come to a head in the chorus, which consists of two basic but
evocative phrases. When Currie sings, “Hello Daddy, Hello Mom /
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherry Bomb,” she reminds us that this is not just
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 137
any female singer but a teenage girl; though her youth might make her
especially subject to exploitation, sexuality is also a means by which she
can lay some claim of control over her bodily feelings and desires. Yet
her assertiveness has a double edge. It may show Currie as a girl who is
active rather than passive in matters of the flesh, but it is also too much,
dangerous, threatening. Female sexuality always runs the risk of appearing excessive in a culture that continues to apply the sexual double standard, and teen female sexuality even more so. From this perspective, the
girl whose desire is ready to explode is a girl whose desire needs to be
contained, brought under control.67
While the lyrics of “Cherry Bomb” move between sexual freedom
and sexual constraint, the music to which those lyrics are set moves
between metal and punk. The Runaways were not so eclectic and wideranging as were the Dictators in the range of musical styles and references they included in their songs, but they existed in a similar state of
being musically in between. “Cherry Bomb” starts with a prototypical
hard rock riff, the chugging pulse of the C tonic setting the pace, to be
punctuated during the verses by a single power chord in the flatted III
position (E-flat). For the rock critic Ben Edmonds, writing retrospectively about the song in Mojo, the repetitive throb and tense, slightlyfaster-than-midtempo pace of the riff reminded him of nothing so much
as the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK,” which was released about three
months later in 1976.68 To my ears the riff is equally evocative of Black
Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” another midtempo song with a chugging repetitive pulse periodically punctured by power chords, and a likely influence given Lita Ford’s heavy metal leanings. That is to say, “Cherry
Bomb” is a song that looks forward and backward at once, keeping the
trappings of one established style (heavy metal) while leading the way to
another on the verge of emergence (punk).
One other feature of the song deserves mention: the guitar solo by
Ford. Runaways songs commonly featured solos; as with the Dictators,
Ford’s playing was the most consistent and overt link to the genre rules
of metal, though her playing was not as flashily virtuosic as that of Ross
the Boss. If Ford’s solos were fairly routine in the world of metal, however, they were far less so in the history of women’s rock performance.
Ford was one of a handful of female lead guitarists to appear during the
1970s, and the first to arise in the sphere of hard rock, where the position of lead guitarist is so closely tied to the performance of a spectacular form of masculinity.69 In this light, her guitar solo in “Cherry Bomb”
is notable less for its strictly musical content—which is characterized by
138 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
a mix of pentatonic phrases, bent notes, and a couple of quickly played
hammer-on effects reminiscent of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi—
than for the way it is accompanied by some highly eroticized, mockorgasmic moaning sounds by Currie. The combination of the soloing
guitar and the moaning female voice plays on the conventional status of
the guitar solo as a moment of musical release and raises the question:
Is it the solo that is provoking Currie’s pleasure, or is the solo the musical analogue to her pleasure? In either case, the phallocentric character
of the typical hard rock solo is here at least partly recast. As Suzi Quatro
did with her bass guitar, but even more explicitly, Lita Ford assumes the
stance of “cock rocker” without any ironic or self-mocking intent, and
thus takes on a sort of female masculinity, enjoying the freedom and
virility usually reserved for male performers while remaining unabashedly
a girl.70
An album full of mixed messages along the lines of “Cherry Bomb,” the
Runaways’ self-titled debut was met with a suitably mixed reception
upon its release. Two reviews from two of the leading U.S. rock publications give some sense of the scope of opinion surrounding the record.
The Creem critic Robot A. Hull, in one of the earliest reviews to see
print, celebrated the album in terms similar to those of Lisa Fancher, as
a classic statement of teenage consciousness and a founding statement
in the new wave of punk rock then gathering momentum. On this latter
score, Hull’s review appeared under the boldfaced headline “Punk Rock
Rises Again!!” alongside separate reviews of the first Ramones record
and the debut by the Jonathan Richman–led Modern Lovers.71 The nearsimultaneous release of all three records was a sign for Creem that rock
was on its way to a much-needed revival of energy of the sort that critics had been forecasting or hoping for since the dawn of the decade.
Hull’s tone, exclamatory and full of hyperbole, made it seem as though
the vision of Nuggets was once and for all finding musical realization:
“Punk nouveau is hot as blazes, spreading fast, groping even into Iowa,
and very, very soon . . . punk rock is going to start hips shaking on every
street corner. . . . That’s the Punk Rock Revival II, meaning no more
clean-cut pop and lotsa dirty, badass rock ’n’ roll. Kim Fowley knows it’s
coming. Patti Smith and the Ramones are perpetrating it. And damn, the
Runaways have grasped IT!”72 For Hull, as for Fancher, the “IT” that the
Runaways had grasped had to do with the sense of reckless teenage abandon that the group conveyed. That the band comprised five teenage girls
was on some level of secondary consequence; so did he note at one point,
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 139
“This is a band, not just a band of girls, which embraces the frantic
energy of being teenage in much the same way as the Dictators.” Yet the
fact of the Runaways’ girlhood was ultimately not something Hull could
overlook. He declared them to be “the first all girl band not at the mercy
of some manipulative male producer,” a claim that rings with irony in
light of Fowley’s influence. And he concluded with a summation of punk
that highlighted the singularity of the band: “Punk rock represents
teenage liberation quite economically: those off-key, out-of-tune, primitive screams and hyena gyrations still remain the purest form for
expressing teenage desire and arrogance. . . . The Runaways exist still in
that tradition, but with a difference: they’re younger, snottier, wilder,
and more depraved, PLUS they’re GIRLS. In their exuberance and their
passionate screams, the Runaways will stand.”73
In marked contrast to Hull’s review was one that appeared a month
later in Circus. The author, Georgia Christgau, set the tone by observing that contrary to the raves that the Runaways had generated in some
quarters, “their record is more complicated than it is great.”74 For
Christgau, the album’s complications revolved around their status as
teenage girls, a fact that was far more at the forefront of her review than
it was of Hull’s. Trying to decipher the group’s portrait of teen girlhood,
she made an unlikely comparison between the Runaways and Hayley
Mills, the actress who embodied a wholesome archetype of young
female innocence during the previous decade. Mills, according to
Christgau, managed to inject a measure of humanity into even the most
clichéd roles. The Runaways, on the other hand, occupied their roles
with a distinct lack of personality. “A line like, ‘Hello daddy, hello
mom/I’m your cherry bomb’ is pretty funny,” noted Christgau, “but on
plastic, it sounds serious, as if it were the opening remark on sexual
oppression at a women’s liberation meeting.” Christgau proceeded to
wonder about the extent to which the perspective of the album represented the band members’ own view of themselves or that of their notorious manager. She further blamed the misplaced seriousness of their
approach on the musical style they employed, “because heavy metal . . .
has become deadpan and serious, too.”75 For Christgau, the Runaways
were not forerunners of a punk rock revival, but bearers of heavy metal
convention, and those conventions placed undue limits on the sort of
femininity they were able to project.
Divided opinion continued to follow the Runaways as they embarked
on a taxing, ambitious touring schedule that took them across the
United States and overseas to the United Kingdom and, eventually,
140 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Japan. On tour, even more so than with their albums, the Runaways
found that they were being evaluated as much for their manner of
gender performance as for their musical skills. The band played a muchhyped show at the New York punk stronghold CBGB in fall 1976 that
elicited a chilly review from tastemaker Lisa Robinson, who took
offense at the way they played to the “ogling males” in the audience and
at the disrespect they had shown toward Patti Smith, a figurehead of the
New York scene, in a recent interview.76 Better received was a series of
engagements in the United Kingdom. In London, local reviewers quickly
connected the Runaways to the mounting tide of punk rock activity.
Only a week prior to the Runaways’ October appearance at the
Roundhouse, the 100 Club had hosted a Punk Rock Festival that featured the Sex Pistols and the Damned among a host of others. It was a
defining moment in the cohesion of London punk but was marked by
unfortunate violence when a thrown glass led to a serious eye injury for
one onlooker who happened to be the girlfriend of Damned singer Dave
Vanian. Discussing the Runaways’ concert in New Musical Express,
Tony Parsons drew a comparison between the recent punk-related violence and the climax of the band’s show, which featured Cherie Currie
playing the role of an embattled juvenile prison inmate who receives a
vivid mock beating at the hands of her band mates. By Parsons’ account,
the spectacle of the bloodied Currie could not help but strike a chord of
recognition in those in the audience “who had seen the scene played for
real at a lot of punk-rock gigs in London over the past few weeks.”77
Jonh Ingham, writing in Sounds, also appreciated elements of the band’s
performance but expressed his disappointment that the music and
image of the Runaways was too much like the “dinosaur-rock” that
punk was meant to wipe away. Nonetheless, Ingham held out hope for
the group, wishing that they would take home “the sartorial and musical elements the various Clash and Sex Pistols members and fans were
exposing them to at the party afterwards. Because,” he concluded, “it
would be great to see five women drag American rock into the 70s.”78
All of the Runaways were subjected to considerable scrutiny during
their tours, but vocalist Currie drew the lion’s share of attention. She
also bore the brunt of Fowley’s efforts to cast an aura of titillation
around the group. “Cherry Bomb,” her namesake song, was the focal
point in this regard. In concert, to personify the lyrical portrait of teen
girl sexuality on the verge of explosion, Currie would change into a
white corset and black stockings (figure 10). Responding to such
unabashed objectification, the Melody Maker critic Harry Doherty
Figure 10. Cherie Currie in lingerie: Cherry Bomb. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/
Getty Images.
142 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
observed that the main asset of the Runaways “is most definitely their
promiscuity.”79 Currie, for her part, initially assumed her appointed
role with trepidation, but soon settled into it. Looking back on her
experience with the Runaways, she claimed, “The bad girl jailbait aspect
of Kim’s hype never bothered me, to be honest. It was accurate. We were
so incredibly young. At the time I was really rebellious. . . . That’s why
‘Cherry Bomb’ was the perfect song for me.”80
However, when Currie left the Runaways in 1977, the position of
“Cherry Bomb” as the band’s signature tune became a contentious
matter. Her departure came about largely because of the resentment felt
by the other Runaways regarding Currie’s status as the public face of the
band, a status that was consolidated on the cover of the debut album,
which featured her lone figure. As Joan Jett stated after Currie’s departure, “She wanted to be Cherie Currie and her back up band. If she had
her way the four of us would be sitting here with masks over our faces
so you couldn’t tell who the fuck we were.”81 Yet the issue at hand was
not only that Currie got too much of the attention, but that she did so
with an image that was not helpful to the band as a whole. Thus did Jett
observe when asked why the Runaways were not taken seriously, “It
was that whole ‘Cherry Bomb With The Corset’ thing with Cherie.”82
The efforts of the remaining Runaways to redefine themselves, and
the accompanying difficulties, can be garnered from a review of one of
their British concerts in late 1977 that appeared in Sounds. Phil
Sutcliffe, the reviewer, began by announcing his sexual arousal at the
sight of the group, which he portrayed in markedly self-conscious terms:
“If the Runaways don’t have to apologise for being girls I don’t have to
apologise for being turned on, right: there is a difference between sexy
and sexist.”83 The contrast he draws is a strategic one, for, as he proceeded to report, the concert was interrupted after nine songs by a chant
among a portion of the audience calling for the band to “get them off”
(referring to their clothes). Stating his disapproval of such coarseness—
this bit having crossed the line into “sexist”—Sutcliffe noted that it
nonetheless set the stage for something of a victory for the band. The
next three songs—“I Love Playin’ with Fire,” “School Days,” and
“American Nights”—managed to recapture and energize the audience,
who showed their approval with a preponderance of headbanging and a
bit of pogoing to boot. After leaving the stage, they returned for a twosong encore, and then ended the show in the following manner: “Joan,
to the chagrin of one and all, announced ‘We didn’t bring our corsets’
and they were through. No ‘Cherry Bomb.’”84
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 143
Taking stock of the night’s events, Sutcliffe ended by reflecting on the
larger situation of the Runaways: “Heavy music pulls blokes. When the
musicians are, as usual, male they are a macho mirror to their fans. . . .
But when the musicians are female, it’s no mirror, it’s the real thing, the
challenge of a relationship rather than a solo jerk-off—so the Runaways
don’t get any shadow boxing, they are in for a championship every time
they go on stage.”85 Sutcliffe’s strained metaphors, whereby the “challenge of a relationship” becomes synonymous with a boxing match,
manage to convey two important insights: that the Runaways faced a
continual struggle to overcome the impulse of at least a part of their
audience to reduce them to a quick spectacle and that a large portion of
their audience was threatened by the band’s presence on stage. However
much the Runaways might have opened a space for testing and expanding the limits of rock ’n’ roll femininity, they still faced significant pressure to remain in their place, where the lines between tease and
seduction, assertion and refusal were continually being redrawn.
If the pressures of femininity often bore down upon the members of
the Runaways, however, it was the musical divisions aligned with “heavy
metal” and “punk” that ultimately led to the band’s dissolution.
Following the departure of Currie and bassist Jackie Fox, the band
reconstituted itself as a quartet, with Vicki Blue brought in to replace
Fox and Joan Jett assuming the lead vocal duties along with continuing
her role as rhythm guitarist. Among the Runaways, it was Jett who most
fulfilled the hope behind Jonh Ingham’s admonition to the band to do
more to absorb the influence of British counterparts such as the Pistols
and the Clash. She aligned herself with punk more and more decisively
after the group’s first visit to England and participated heartily in the
growing scene back home in L.A. Jett’s Hollywood apartment became a
favored gathering place for young punks who could not gain admittance
to the surrounding bars, and she became a mentor to the pioneering
Southern California punk band the Germs to the extent that she produced their lone album, GI, released in 1979.86 When the Runaways
were breaking up in 1979, Jett went into the studio with former Sex
Pistols Steve Jones and Paul Cook to lay down three tracks, one of which
was a rough version of a song that would become her biggest hit three
years later, “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.” A song written by Jones, “Black
Leather,” would appear on the final Runaways album, And Now . . .
The Runaways.
Others in the band were less ready to identify themselves with punk.
Interviewed in 1979, drummer Sandy West noted that her listening
144 THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
tastes were broad enough to include the Ramones and Sex Pistols as
well as Led Zeppelin and Queen. She strenuously resisted the suggestion
that the Runaways themselves were punk, however. To her mind, the
band was “more like a rock ’n’ roll band but in the new wave era, too. . . .
We started before all that started happening, it was really weird. People
didn’t know what to call us, and everything started coming out, so they
just labeled us ‘punk rock.’” Asked whether such a classification bothered her, West asserted, “Yeah, because we’re not [punk]. . . . I don’t
wear safety pins through my nose and spit blood. It’s a name somebody
came up with, but when you start classifying it, what do you say?”87
And then, of course, there was Lita Ford, whose commitment to
developing and exhibiting her guitar virtuosity only expanded over the
course of the group’s career. After Currie’s departure, the dynamic of the
Runaways was more starkly defined by the tension between Jett’s popand punk-inflected songwriting style and Ford’s metal guitar leanings.
Waiting for the Night, the first Runaways album recorded without
Currie, managed to strike a balance between these tendencies, but by
the time of the band’s final album, And Now . . . The Runaways, one can
hear the group dissolving amid irreconcilable elements. Interviewed in
New Musical Express between the releases of these two records, Jett
commented on the growing musical gulf between her and her lead guitar
counterpart: “[Lita] says my songs are too easy to play, and she don’t
like it when I write slow melodic songs.” Above all, said Jett, “she don’t
like punk! How can she not like punk?” Regarding her own tastes, Jett
countered, “Me, I hate all those guitar solos, just like Rainbow, who
[Lita] loves.”88 Ford, for her part, kept a low profile for several years
after the 1979 breakup of the band, only to resurface in 1983 as a fullfledged heavy metal diva on her solo record, Out for Blood. Even that
album carried a trace of her ambiguous musical past, though, for on the
back cover she appears wearing a torn black shirt emblazoned with the
pointed phrase “Punk You!”
THE NOISE OF YOUTH
Similarly straddling the ill-defined boundary between metal and punk,
the Dictators and the Runaways had myriad other parallels between
them. Both bands started in a mid-1970s moment when glam rock was
slowly receding but no trend had clearly arisen to take its place at the
head of rock fashion and ideology. Both ended after punk had emerged
as a clear successor to glam, continuing some of the earlier style’s
THE DICTATORS AND THE RUNAWAYS 145
tenets—in particular, the fascination with artifice and role-playing—but
to a significant extent turning those tenets against rock as a musical
form and a social practice and questioning the ideals and the hierarchies
that had grown up around it. Although members of each band enjoyed
success in the wake of their respective breakups, neither survived intact
into the 1980s. The Dictators and the Runaways were too strongly
rooted in the moment of their emergence, too thoroughly defined by the
contradictions that ran through rock in the 1970s, to have successfully
continued into the following decade. Those contradictions were evident
in the musical style of the two groups, where stripped-down simplicity
mixed with aspirations to virtuosity; in their broader ambitions, which
were split between the allure of the arena rock masses and the pull of
more specific scenes and subcultures; and in sensibilities that took a
playful, quasi-theatrical approach to identity alongside efforts to portray authentic forms of “teenage consciousness.”
What was the real difference, in the end, between Alice Cooper and
the Dictators, Kiss and the Runaways? Did one set of performers more
truly represent the wishes and desires of rock’s young audience than the
other? If so, did their success in doing so have to do with qualities inherent in their music and performance, or was it to be found more in the
reception with which they were met? Did the more than ten thousand
teens (and preteens) who attended the average Kiss show make them the
most significant teen-oriented act of the era, or did it make them a sign
of the degree to which teen impulses and sensibilities had been absorbed
and rendered harmless by the mass market? Neither the Dictators nor
the Runaways had any ready answers to these questions. Each band created its own version of teenhood with at least two apparent goals in
mind: to connect with a teenage audience that seemed the most ready
path to rock-and-roll success in the 1970s and to connect with a history
of American youth cultures that gave them a ready vocabulary for defining themselves alternately as rebellious, delinquent, hedonistic, confused, frustrated, and full of longings that demanded immediate
fulfillment. Underlying the specific qualities of youth personified by the
Dictators and the Runaways was a fundamental assumption: that rock
should be youth music or, more precisely, should remain youth music,
much as it had been at its inception. In this light, the two bands embody
one of the essential historical connections between heavy metal and
punk, two genres that arose and crystallized at different points in the
1970s to address a shared conundrum: how to keep rock young.
4
Metal, Punk, and Motörhead
The Genesis of Crossover
CROSSING OVER
Reviewing Motörhead’s second album, Overkill, for the music weekly
Sounds, the journalist Geoff Barton took on the satirical persona of a
morally offended British citizen. Under the pseudonym “Brigadier
Godfrey Barton-Ffynch-Carstairs (Retired),” Barton characterized the
contents of the album as “witless degeneracy” and proceeded to detail
the many objectionable qualities of the band’s music and its members.
Motörhead was a dirty band with no sense of values or heritage; their
music was so raucous, loud, and disorderly that, “playing this LP on my
Bang and Olufsen with the volume turned down, even the so-called
‘silent’ grooves between the tracks register 90 dbs on my noise meter!”
The band represented an assault on the qualities that made Britain
great, and so Barton-Ffynch-Carstairs had banded together with members of his neighborhood residents’ association to persuade several
record shops not to stock or sell their record. Somehow, in the midst of
all this parodic bluster, Barton managed to squeeze in one essential
observation, albeit one still voiced—precariously—in character. His
respectable brigadier noted, “I’ve heard talk of this album being the first
true HM/punk crossover”; to preserve some shred of the review’s pretense, he added, “whatever that means.”1
146
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 147
What did Barton mean with this turn of phrase? To start with an
obvious point, his review of Overkill, however satirical, was strongly
positive, even glowing. The regular Sounds reader would have easily
detected as much even if the review wasn’t headed by a sterling five-star
rating, the highest given in the paper’s review section. Barton was the
publication’s foremost fan of heavy metal, a lover of pulverizingly loud
music who regularly wrote about groups such as Kiss and AC/DC. He
was also a keen follower of trends, as any good music journalist needs
to be. In just a few short months after his Overkill review, he would generalize his detection of heavy metal/punk crossover into coverage of a
full-fledged movement, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or
NWOBHM, in which metal and punk merged more widely if not seamlessly. Barton’s review of Overkill foreshadowed this later critical turn,
but also echoed developments of the recent past, when punk provoked
a moral panic in England that generated scores of offended responses of
the sort parodied by the writer. This moral opprobrium, not
Motörhead’s music, was the true object of Barton’s satire. Motörhead’s
music, in turn, was laudable precisely because it had the capacity to
offend such polite sensibilities. The music and the band had all the qualities described in Barton’s review: they were loud, ragged, aggressive,
unpolished, degenerate even. Contrary to the scorn of Brigadier BartonFfynch-Carstairs, that’s what made them good.
Did those same qualities make Motörhead a heavy metal/punk
crossover? Maybe. On this point, though, Barton gives his readers few
clues. The way he phrases his central observation is telling. Barton has
“heard talk” of this album being an instance of metal/punk crossover;
he is merely reporting this talk, not explaining it. Indeed, he was hardly
the first to characterize Motörhead in such terms. The band had been
generating this sort of talk for some time, but until the release of
Overkill few had been listening, outside of a small core of devoted followers. Overkill would change that. It initiated the short-lived phase
during which Motörhead would rise to be one of the most popular rock
bands in all of England. In 1977, when the band’s first self-titled album
was released, metal/punk crossover was detectable but far from desirable. British punk at the time was too much of an all-or-nothing proposition, and metal was its adversary, or at least its other; punk was the
new wave, metal was the old. In 1979, metal/punk crossover was on the
ascent, forming out of the ashes of what many have termed the “punk
explosion” and ultimately leaving punk in its wake. Motörhead was on
the leading edge of this development. As the rock theorist Joe Carducci
148 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
would later write, with appropriate overstatement, “I think the new
wave knew the jig was up when the first Motörhead album was released.
The swastikas were on the wall; their skinny tie dream would die a
bloody death.”2
All of which still leaves unanswered the central question: What did
metal/punk crossover mean in the context of Motörhead’s career, and in
the late 1970s moment when that career first began to take shape? This
chapter sets out to answer that question. Doing so, I want to stress the
importance of generic crossover as a phenomenon that can lead us to
reexamine our understanding of how music genres work and to rethink
the way that certain periods of rock history have been classified. As discussed in the introduction to this book, I view heavy metal and punk as
categories that have a peculiarly charged relationship best described by
the literary scholar Heather Dubrow’s terms “genre” and “countergenre.” This relationship is not one of sustained opposition and mutual
exclusion, but one in which the boundaries between the two genres are
continually fluctuating, redrawn, and reconfigured. We have already
seen in the Dictators and the Runaways examples of bands that fused
many qualities of metal and punk and might also be considered
“crossover” bands. However, neither band was discussed as such during
their careers. Signs of generic confusion existed in the way each band
was alternately characterized as metal or punk, not in the claim that
they significantly combined the two. Motörhead may not have been the
first metal/punk crossover band in absolute terms, then, but they were
the first band to be so described. They represent a crucial instance of
generic convergence, all the more so because they led the way to a
broader synthesis between the two genres that would take British metal
into the 1980s.
Motörhead’s foundational fusion of metal and punk is also important
in relation to the era in which they formed and found their earliest success. The late 1970s was a period of enormous consequence in the history of British punk, and British rock more generally. More so than in
the United States, the crystallization of punk in England was widely
received as a moment of anxiety and rupture that created moral panic
in the society at large and a stark sense of “before” and “after” in the
more enclosed world of rock. Greil Marcus’s description of the era as
the third great “pop explosion” to transform the cultural fabric of rock
is among the most articulate efforts to capture the sense of cataclysm
that arose in these years, but is far from isolated.3 Accounts such as
Dick Hebdige’s pivotal late 1970s work, Subculture, and Jon Savage’s
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 149
more recent, near-definitive England’s Dreaming have reinforced this
interpretation of punk’s impact in the United Kingdom.4 These works
tend to overlook or downplay that British punk, for all its influence at
the time, did not wipe the historical slate clean. Some genres, most
notably progressive rock, may well have been rendered ineffective in the
face of punk. This was not the case with heavy metal. Although exponents of punk treated metal as an anachronism, the genre proved
remarkably persistent, and indeed seemed to be reinforced by its
encounter with punk. The full scope of these events is explored in the
next chapter, on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. In this chapter,
I aim to recast the story of British punk’s epochal emergence into a story
of metal and punk in dialogue by viewing the period through the career
and music of Motörhead.
TANGLED ROOTS
The roots of British punk have been located in many sources. Dick
Hebdige’s Subculture connects the movement to a wide range of prior
youth cultures that arose in England during the 1960s and 1970s. These
include the Mods, middle-class toughs with a passion for Motown and
American soul music, a taste for fashion, and a preference for motor
scooters as their means of getting around; Teddy Boys, or Rockers,
working-class adversaries of the Mods, who favored 1950s rock ’n’ roll
and a leather-and-jeans appearance modeled on icons such as James
Dean and Eddie Cochran; skinheads, another working-class subculture
that, in its earliest incarnation, was the most prominent white constituency for the ska and reggae music brought to London by West
Indian immigrants; and glam rockers, less class-bound, defined instead
by an interest in an androgynous style of dress and an overarching
attraction to artifice and theatricality as modes of expression.5 In
Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus adds to this genealogy a “secret history”
of underground artistic and political movements stemming from the creation of Dadaism in the years surrounding World War I and the rise of
French Situationism after World War II. To this already multilayered set
of influences one could add, at the least, the pub rock movement of the
early and mid-1970s in England, a reaction against the polish of glam
and the technical wizardry of progressive rock in which bands such as
Dr. Feelgood, the 101ers, and Kilburn and the High Road created
stripped-down, R & B–infused rock which they played in the unassuming atmosphere of the pub.
150 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
When compared to punk, British metal is said to have derived from a
far less varied background. The single most important source, and often
the only source given any real weight in historical explanations of the
genre, is the blues-rock style that dominated the late 1960s British
scene. From this perspective, heavy metal is understood as an extension
of the music made by such performers as Cream, the Yardbirds, the Jimi
Hendrix Experience, and the early Kinks, all of whom have sometimes
been classified as early examples of the genre. That one of metal’s most
influential and enduring bands, Led Zeppelin, formed out of the ashes
of the Yardbirds lends weight to this interpretation, as does the genesis
of other major bands in the blues-rock mode, notably Black Sabbath,
who began life in their native Birmingham as a more blues-oriented
ensemble called Earth. Next to blues-rock, progressive rock is the most
oft-cited tributary from which metal emerged. Its traces are especially
evident in the early output of another canonized group, Deep Purple,
whose 1969 collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was
one of the most overt instances of the progressive impulse to elevate
rock through the incorporation of classical music.
It is fitting that, as a group that combined features of both punk and
metal, Motörhead is a group whose own genealogy confounds these
generic histories. In terms of lineage, Motörhead arose most directly
from none of the aforementioned sources, but instead came out of the
darker side of the British psychedelic underground. The band’s founder
and central member, vocalist and bassist Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, was
already a ten-year veteran of the British rock scene when he formed
Motörhead in 1975. He joined his first band of note, the Rocking
Vicars, in 1965, at the height of the British beat music phenomenon. In
the years that followed, he played for a more psychedelically oriented
ensemble headed by a South Asian named Sam Gopal and had a fabled
tenure working on the road crew of Jimi Hendrix. During these years
his involvement with London’s drug culture deepened. Although he had
an appreciation for LSD, Lemmy became one of the most visible speed
users on the scene. He also became part of an extended circle of freaks
occupying London’s West Side, where a more hard-bitten version of the
counterculture had taken root. Mick Farren, a writer and musician who
headed one of the more confrontational British bands of the late 1960s,
the Deviants, was another part of this circle; Farren would go on to
cowrite a handful of songs with Lemmy and would emerge as a leading
rock journalist in the 1970s through his work with the New Musical
Express.6 From the dissolution of the Deviants would arise the Pink
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 151
Fairies, a band that began life as the Pink Fairies Motorcycle Gang and
Drinking Club, dedicated, by Farren’s account, to “the most raucous
after-hours fun we could devise.”7
In 1971, Lemmy was invited to join Hawkwind, a band that determinedly brought psychedelic music into the seventies. Lemmy entered
Hawkwind through his connection with Dikmik, a member of the band
who specialized in generating unusual sound effects with a range of
electronic instruments. Like Lemmy, Dikmik was into speed, and the
two bonded in their mutual affinity for sleep deprivation. Previously a
guitarist, Lemmy began to play bass only when he entered the
Hawkwind fold, a fact that no doubt accounts for his extroverted
approach to the instrument. During the next four years, he would figure
prominently in Hawkwind as the group’s own fortunes rose significantly.
Known as a group that would never pass up a chance to play at a free
festival or underground political event, Hawkwind nonetheless carried
its odd mix of science fiction lyrics, electronic effects, and heavy metal
textures into the British charts with the single “Silver Machine” and
also developed one of the most extravagant stage shows then running.
Lemmy offers a rich description of a Hawkwind concert in his autobiography: “Hawkwind wasn’t one of those hippie-drippy, peace-and-love
outfits—we were a black nightmare! Although we had all these intense,
coloured lights, the band was mostly in darkness. Above us we had a
huge light show—eighteen screens showing things like melting oil, war
and political scenes, odd mottoes, animation. The music would just
come blaring out, with dancers writhing around onstage and Dikmik
shaking up the audience with the audio generator.”8 Hawkwind was
hardly the average “hippie” band. Their sound was wildly noisy and
also decidedly heavy, at many times coming across far more like Black
Sabbath than Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead.
Lemmy’s own image was more biker-outlaw than psychedelic explorer.
During his tenure with Hawkwind, the bassist attracted attention as one
of the band’s key personalities. A 1975 profile in New Musical Express,
printed just prior to his departure from Hawkwind, presented Lemmy as
a figure who dedicated his energy to personifying a stereotype of the
rock-and-roll outlaw. The journalist Tony Tyler was dubious of Lemmy’s
commitment to such an image, not because of any doubts regarding
Lemmy’s conviction but because he deemed the image itself to be
exhausted. By Tyler’s account, Lemmy regarded the street outlaw as a
“Romantic Figure—and you can tell RFs by the way they dress most of
all. Hence the leathers and the Iron Cross and the long lank hair and the
152 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
prized relationship with the Hell’s Angels.”9 Sure enough, the photograph accompanying the article pictured Lemmy in said leather outfit
astride a Harley Davidson that, according to Tyler, was borrowed from a
friend. Such were the lengths to which Lemmy would go, said Tyler, to
ensure that his image matched the romantic ideal to which he aspired.
These outlaw trappings, however romanticized, clashed with the
demeanor of his band mates, and soon Lemmy would be forced out of
Hawkwind following a drug bust during a tour of Canada.10
So liberated, Lemmy quickly reconstituted a new band around himself, this time one patterned after his own image. That band was
Motörhead. His initial choice of band mates ensured a good measure of
continuity with his past. Drummer Lucas Fox was an unknown quantity, but guitarist Larry Wallis came to the group after a two-year tenure
with the Pink Fairies, the same band Lemmy’s partner in crime, Mick
Farren, had a hand in forming several years earlier. Making the matter
even more incestuous, Wallis had initially entered the Fairies as a
replacement for guitarist Paul Rudolph, who in 1975 replaced Lemmy
as the bassist for Hawkwind. Such musical chairs was hardly surprising
given the tight relationship between the Fairies and the ‘Wind, which
was succinctly described by the British rock historian Pete Frame:
“During the early seventies, both Hawkwind and the Pink Fairies developed their reputations as bona-fide hippie house bands. . . . When the
two bands played regular gigs together there was invariably a Pinkwind
set . . . a big din session at the end of the evening bashed out by those
still able to stand up!”11 As similar as the two bands were in performance, though, the Fairies had been a tighter unit in recordings, at least
on the sole album they had made with Wallis on hand. Kings of Oblivion
was a powerhouse album of early 1970s hard rock, with few psychedelic trappings. Driven by the guitar-bass-drums trio of Wallis, Duncan
Sanderson, and Russell Hunter, it was closer in sound and conception
to what Motörhead would become than the bulk of the music that
Lemmy had recorded with Hawkwind. One of its songs, “City Kids,”
would become a key feature of Motörhead’s early playlist.
BORN TO LOSE
Integral as Larry Wallis was to the early sound of the band, neither he
nor Lucas Fox were long for the group. The first months of Motörhead’s
existence, from late 1975 into the middle of 1976, were far from auspicious. On the live front, one of their earliest gigs opening for Blue Öyster
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 153
Cult drew some resoundingly negative reviews and put a stamp on the
band that lingered for some time to come. Picking the band as one to
watch for 1976, the Sounds writer Geoff Barton noted that Motörhead
had been tagged “worst band in the world” on the basis of that show,
though he tried to make the case that the band was not in fact that bad.
Briefly interviewed by Barton, Lemmy offered a provocative early
description of the band as “a horribly mutated cross between the music
of the MC5, Hawkwind and Grand Funk Railroad”; the Michigan
brand of heavy rock was clearly a significant point of reference for his
ambitions for the group.12 Meanwhile, getting their mutated sound on
record proved a challenge. Motörhead was quickly ushered into the
studio by United Artists, the label for which Hawkwind had recorded.
They recorded a full album’s worth of material with two producers and
changed drummers in the midst of the sessions, with Phil Taylor replacing Lucas Fox. The resulting album was a stillborn affair, though.
United Artists refused to release it, and Motörhead was left to spin its
wheels. Shortly thereafter, Wallis would quit the band following an
audition by guitarist Eddie Clarke, who was intended to join Wallis as a
second guitarist. As Lemmy recalled the event, “We carried on as a
three-piece until we found Eddie Clarke . . . and wound up carrying on
as a three-piece anyhow.”13 No wonder, then, that when Mick Farren,
in his guise as rock journalist, penned a profile of Motörhead for a book
illustrating the rock concert and its place in the growing rock industry,
he portrayed the band as representative of “the poverty trail,” the lower
echelon of the music business, where the promise of success was
dimmed by years of hard work on the road.14
The early career misfortune faced by Motörhead was far from
encouraging, but it did contribute to a key tenet of the band’s mythology: its association with the archetypal “loser.” An extension of
Lemmy’s fascination with the romanticism of the outlaw, the loser stood
for the bassist as a terminal outsider, always at the bottom of the social
hierarchy, always fighting against the odds for any success he might
achieve. Like his sartorial preference for leather, denim, and Iron
Crosses, Lemmy’s attraction to the loser bespoke the influence of the
biker subculture that was a growing presence among American and
British working-class men in the 1960s and 1970s. In Paul Willis’s classic study of British motorcycle club members, the values attached to the
loser come through in the bikers’ stark, fatalistic view of themselves and
their place in the world, revealed in their preoccupation with the possibility of death on the motorbike.15 Hunter S. Thompson captured these
154 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
Figure 11. Leather clad and born to lose: Motörhead in 1977. From left to right: Phil Taylor
(drums), Lemmy Kilmister (bass and vocals), Fast Eddie Clarke (guitar). Photo: Hulton
Archive/Getty Images.
same values more eloquently in his mid-1960s account of the most influential biker gang in the United States or England, the Hell’s Angels:
“There is an important difference between the words ‘loser’ and
‘outlaw.’ One is passive and the other is active. . . . The Angels don’t like
being called losers, but they have learned to live with it. ‘Yeah, I guess I
am,’ said one. ‘But you’re looking at one loser who’s going to make a
hell of a scene on the way out.’”16 Where Motörhead was concerned,
“Born to Lose / Live to Win” became a veritable motto for the band
from its earliest days, signifying its own mixed sense of being downtrodden but defiant, beaten but still willing to fight (figure 11).
Explaining the symbolism behind the title of their 1980 release, Ace of
Spades, for instance, Lemmy said it referred to “the loser thing again.
Born to lose. It just defines us really—take something as a loser as your
motif then it can’t get any worse!”17 That these remarks were made
when Motörhead’s career was at a high point says much about how such
sentiments struck to the core of the band’s beliefs.
The prevalent biker influence on the group persona of Motörhead is
one of the clearest points of congruence between the band and the genre
of heavy metal. Along with Judas Priest, another band that arose in the
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 155
same mid-1970s moment, Motörhead made certain biker appurtenances almost synonymous with heavy metal style.18 However, whereas
Priest’s attraction to motorcycles, leather, and chains seemed to arise
from a fascination with the way such items connoted forms of power
and mastery commonly celebrated in the genre as a whole, Motörhead
suggested a different sort of ethos in their identification with the loser.
Against the grain of so much heavy metal, Motörhead’s perspective was
tempered by something almost like humility, or perhaps a sense of the
ordinary that made the band seem far more grounded than many of its
contemporaries. This dimension of the band resonated with some of the
impulses at work in the burgeoning British punk scene, where ordinariness was elevated above the extraordinary. Caroline Coon described
this element of punk in the first of her groundbreaking series of articles
for Melody Maker reporting on the emerging phenomenon, where she
proclaimed that new groups like the Sex Pistols attacked the “elitist pretensions” of established rock heroes, such that “there is the feeling, the
exhilarating buzz, that it’s possible to be and play like the bands on
stage.”19 Stuck on the poverty trail, assuming the aura of the loser to
mark its sense of being socially marginal, Motörhead was poised to
draw sympathy from many punk adherents even as its image resonated
with the codes of heavy metal.
MAKING TRACKS
The hard-luck status of Motörhead also led the band to rely on some of
the growing network of British independent labels to release its music
for the first several years of the band’s career. Given that the motivation
for such reliance was a failed deal with the established United Artists
label, it is safe to say that Motörhead went to the independents more
out of opportunism than principle. When Lemmy and his band mates
finally signed a deal with Sony in 1990, there was little sense of compromise, only a sense that after fifteen years the band had moved a coveted notch higher on the music industry totem pole. Nonetheless, the
group’s early history of releases offers a snapshot of the function played
by independent labels during the late 1970s, as well as the range of
labels then working to produce new music. Putting its music out via
these independent labels was another way Motörhead entered the orbit
of punk as that musical movement began to explode.
Assessing the state of independently released rock music in 1979,
Paul Morley and Adrian Thrills made a claim for the importance of the
156 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
Manchester punk band the Buzzcocks and their first self-released EP of
three years’ previous, Spiral Scratch. By their account, Spiral Scratch
exerted a far more “practical” effect on the shape of British rock than
the more celebrated efforts of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, demonstrating not only that one could successfully promote and distribute a
record through independent means, but also that “small” labels were
the best vehicle for music on the leading edge of rock.20 Challenging the
nostalgia that had already grown around the punk moment of 1976, the
two writers called that earlier phase a “false start” and asserted almost
dogmatically that, “the true concerted, subversive revolution . . . happened in late ’78, early ’79 . . . and is still happening.”21 This “true”
revolution involved the broadening of access to the means of musical
production among figures that were involved as much with the passion
and creativity behind the music as with the business of making records.
It also involved the further demystification of the role played by record
labels and their intermediaries and a diminishing belief among many
adherents of punk that the larger corporate labels could be effectively
used to further their own ends.
In 1976 few associated with punk would have put forth such a stringent statement in favor of independent companies. Of course, in 1976
there were also hardly any punk records about which to be stringent,
at least in England. American punk groups had not put particular stock
in following an “independent” path where making records was concerned; leading New York performers such as the Dictators, the
Ramones, and Patti Smith may all have pursued artistic visions that
highlighted their individuality, but they hoped to bring their visions
into the wider marketplace with all the assistance they could gather.
Many of the early British punks felt similarly. Despite their confrontational rhetoric, the Sex Pistols showed little hesitation in signing with
the various labels under which they recorded, including the corporate
behemoth EMI.22 The Clash, meanwhile, struck a deal with CBS
records that they would be driven to defend repeatedly as the matter of
releasing records independently became a more politicized matter.
Indeed, it was the example of the Clash that perhaps most figured, in a
negative way, into the construction of an ideological framework that
cast the independent label as a linchpin of punk praxis. For many, the
band’s political vision, predicated on a strong critique of the British
social and economic system, suggested a path of resistance to dominant structures that was partly undermined by its willingness to work
under the auspices of a large corporate concern. Members of the Clash,
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 157
in turn, argued that independent labels did not have sufficient reach,
and that to record for one of the smaller labels that had emerged in
connection with British punk would have been to limit their audience
and their message to the already converted.23
While the two most prominent bands of British punk tested the
prospects of working with larger, more established labels, it was left to
the Damned to release the first full album associated with the music in
early 1977 on the independent Stiff. Damned Damned Damned was a
raw if uneven burst of Stooges-inspired rock and roll, produced in a suitably close-to-the-bone fashion by the pub rock luminary Nick Lowe. In
the heady days of 1976 and 1977, Stiff was perhaps the most punk-identified label then running, due as much to the attitude with which they
went about the business of making records as to the music they issued.
Typical of the Stiff approach was an advertisement run in the May 14,
1977, issue of New Musical Express promoting a series of shows by the
label’s artists the Damned and the Adverts. “The Damned can now play
three chords,” proclaimed the copy, and “the Adverts can play one”—
this latter bit an obvious reference to the Adverts’ song “One Chord
Wonders,” then available as a single from Stiff. Readers were encouraged
to “hear all four of them [chords, that is]” by catching the two bands on
tour.24 Evoking the influential injunction first carried in the punk fanzine
Sideburns—“This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form
a band.”25—Stiff portrayed its groups’ lack of musical technique with
humor but also with the conviction that this lack was an appealing feature marking punk’s departure from widely held ideas concerning the
value of expertise in the sphere of rock performance.
Stiff was the first label to release—as opposed to produce—a record by
Motörhead. “White Line Fever,” backed with a cover of the HollandDozier-Holland song “Leaving Here,” was issued as a single in the first
months of 1977. “Fever” was also included on a compilation assembled
by the label, A Bunch of Stiffs, which brought the song and the band to
wider notice. Reviewed in New Musical Express by the young punk scribe
Tony Parsons, A Bunch of Stiffs largely served as an occasion for the
writer to note changes that had taken hold at Stiff, which had recently
signed a distribution deal with Island Records, thus impinging on the
label’s “independent” status. When he got around to commenting on the
music, Parsons found it much to his satisfaction and praised Motörhead’s
contribution as a “straight-ahead rocker . . . with a great Lemmy production” and lyrics that played on the ambiguity of “white lines” as a
metaphor for drug use and for being on the road.26 Further consolidating
158 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
their connection to the punk side of Stiff’s recording roster, Motörhead
would also play a show with the Damned in April of that year, beginning
a long-standing affiliation between the two groups that would at one
point even involve Lemmy filling their bass position for a while.27
The association between Motörhead and the Damned would far outlast that between Motörhead and Stiff; they had signed to the label to
record only a single. Another British independent, Chiswick, would
take up the responsibility of releasing the first Motörhead album. Not
quite as squarely identified with punk as was Stiff, Chiswick was
nonetheless one of the pathbreaking labels of the era. Started by Ted
Carroll, a record collector and record shop proprietor, and his partner,
Roger Armstrong, Chiswick was initially formed to capitalize on the
momentum of the British pub rock scene. Among the first records produced by the label was a single by the 101ers, a key pub rock group
fronted by Joe Strummer, soon of the Clash. Carroll was a dedicated
maverick who perceived his operation as providing a much needed alternative to major label channels, arguing in a 1976 interview, “The first
shoe-string label to score a hit will scare the shit out of the majors. You
see, we’re straight off the streets and are more in touch with what’s happening than all those expense-account A&R men.”28 Such convictions
may have underestimated the capacity of the major labels to co-opt the
efforts of their smaller counterparts, but they contributed to the aura of
Chiswick as a label that took its independence seriously. One mark of
Chiswick’s credibility appeared in the final issue of the pivotal British
punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, which included a celebratory three-page
survey of the label’s release history by the zine’s founder, Mark P.29
In that piece the writer acclaimed Motörhead’s eponymous album in
unqualified terms: “The best 12 inch ever released and the most relevant
ever released.” This opinion was reiterated in less inflated terms by
Danny Baker in the same issue: “Motörhead IS POWERFUL. Headshaking madness, heavy, loud, we all love Motörhead, don’t we.”30 The
Motörhead album released by Chiswick was effectively a reworking of
the album they had recorded for United Artists. Roger Armstrong
remembered, “Lemmy had an acetate of the album that they had made
with Dave Edmunds and that UA had decided not to release. He played
it for Ted and then came over to the Soho market stall and played it to
me. Ted and I agreed that UA were right.”31 Feeling that neither the production nor the performances on the UA tracks properly captured the
group, Carroll and Armstrong arranged for two days of studio time
with producer Speedy Keen. Intending to produce a single, Motörhead
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 159
instead tore through the backing tracks for eleven songs and convinced
Carroll that they should proceed with making a full album. The finished
result largely duplicated the track listing of UA material, with three
songs carried over from Lemmy’s tenure with Hawkwind, most notably
the band’s namesake song.
In their vitriolic overview of punk, “The Boy Looked at Johnny,” Tony
Parsons and Julie Burchill devote a chapter to the connection between
drugs and rock music. Toward most drugs they have a wholly dismissive
attitude, but one substance draws their approval: speed, or amphetamine, “the only drug that makes you sit up and ask questions rather
than lie down and lap up answers.” Speed was a “useful” drug, a
“threatening” drug, and above all an “essentially proletarian drug,” as
was evident by the central role it played among Mods in the 1960s and
among punks a decade later.32 “Motorhead,” a song that Lemmy wrote
during the final phase of his tenure with Hawkwind and from which he
had taken his new band’s name, is perhaps the ultimate rock-and-roll
ode to speed. Indeed, the very term is “American slang for speedfreak,”
as Lemmy noted.33 Fittingly, it is the opening track of the Chiswick
album and sets the pace for the music to come.
“Motorhead” opens with six bars of Lemmy playing unaccompanied
bass, a gesture he would repeat many times over the course of his band’s
career. The tone of his instrument is brittle, harsh, and heavily distorted;
former band mate Bob Calvert’s observation that Lemmy “played his
bass like a rhythm guitar” is here very much in evidence.34 He strikes a
musical figure that centers on the key of E, the booming note of the
bass’s bottom string alternating with its higher octave, which briefly
gives way to a D–D-sharp–E sequence that adds a touch of tension but
maintains the insistence and rapid tempo of the throbbing E. Phil
Taylor’s drums enter in bar 3 as light tapping but assume greater volume
and presence up to the last bit of Lemmy’s intro, at which point the two
are joined by Eddie Clarke’s guitar, which follows the pattern set by the
bass and fills out the sound to even greater levels of distortion. Lemmy’s
use of a distorted bass tone in tandem with Clarke’s overdriven guitar
was a key to the band’s distinctive sound; to a significant degree it
effaced the sonic distinction between the two instruments and heightened the overall impact of their attack, making it seem as though the
band was always operating at maximum output.
The verses of “Motorhead” relinquish the chromatic pattern of
Lemmy’s opening bass riff for a more basic two-chord shift between D
160 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
and E. Another chromatic move occurs during the bridge, however,
where the bass and guitar quickly move up the neck from C to B to Bflat to A beneath two lines of lyric; a third line of the bridge cuts the
sequence in half, involving only C and B, which sets the stage for the
chorus, where the presiding E is reasserted. The bridge, where the song’s
harmonic structure is most unstable, is also where Lemmy’s lyrics most
address the effects of the amphetamine rush. For bridge 1, he “can’t get
enough/and you know it’s righteous stuff,” while in the second bridge
he offers, “Have another stick of gum,” a reference to the teeth grinding
that so often accompanies a dose of speed. In the final bridge, the singer
announces, “I should be tired, but all I am is wired”—this last word
shouted—before concluding, “I ain’t felt this good for an hour.”
Between verses 2 and 3 “Fast” Eddie Clarke issues a guitar solo that
eschews elaborate melodic invention in favor of pentatonic runs that
remain tightly hemmed in by the song’s compressed harmonic structure.
Midway through the solo Clarke strikes his low E string and then apparently scrapes the strings of his guitar against a microphone stand, creating an effect of sheer noise that carries into the rest of the solo, which is
marked by thick chord textures and double-stops that are as much
rhythmic as melodic devices. Through the combined effect of music and
lyrics, “Motorhead” issued an unrelenting torrent of sounds and verbal
images that effectively captured the extreme psychic state of the song’s
subject. As heavy music played with uncommon rhythmic momentum
and pronounced sonic unruliness, it also bore the marks of Motörhead’s
complex musical lineage, and along with the other material on their
eponymous debut album laid the groundwork for recognition of the
group’s crossover capabilities.
A MIXED RECEPTION
Reviewing Motörhead in Sounds, Pete Makowski not only raved, but he
threw down the gauntlet in assessing the album’s significance. Calling
the album “vinyl’s answer to the neutron bomb,” he further asserted,
“THIS IS THE REAL THING,” a distillation of riffs and volume with
no melodic subtleties or keyboards to get in the way. He continued,
“Stripped away of all the frills, the band have that stance that people
like Rotten are always talking about. Let’s face it, you couldn’t see
Lemmy sitting behind a desk working regular hours, this guy’s a natural
road clone.”35 The suggestion that Motörhead significantly overlapped
with the punk phenomenon carried into subsequent features on the
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 161
band. Geoff Barton, another Sounds writer, treated Motörhead principally as a representative of his favored genre, heavy metal. After all, not
only did they have a pronounced affinity for volume and distortion, but
the band’s members all sported long hair, leather, and denim, clear stylistic markers of the metal crowd. “So howcum,” Barton asked, “they
have a strong, fashion-conscious punk following?”36
In the early phase of Motörhead’s career, the motley nature of their
audience, more than any single feature, led writers to observe that the
band mixed metal and punk tendencies. To understand why the band’s
audience drew such a comment, consider the brief history of the Roxy,
a club that opened in December 1976 and made a deep impression on
the British punk scene until it closed just a few months later. Created by
Andy Czezowski, a punk entrepreneur affiliated with Stiff Records, the
Roxy was a small space located near Covent Garden and billed as
London’s only club devoted exclusively to punk rock. In its early days
the Roxy was a place where the British punk scene came to an important moment of self-recognition, where it assumed new coherence as a
movement, and where many a first—and maybe only—gig was played
by bands who appeared to be arising spontaneously out of the audience,
their energy and enthusiasm spilling off the stage. By March 1977,
though, attitudes toward the club began to turn. What seemed like
coherence only a month earlier now looked like conformity; the subcultural style that punks had assembled through a deconstructive patchwork of appropriated materials from the surrounding culture started to
become overly codified. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill captured this
turn in the club’s atmosphere in a biting piece of reportage in which they
described, among other things, a rigid status hierarchy wherein “positions change hourly and a sudden coup d’etat could plummet you right
down there with the crater-faced plebs in the Relegation Zone.”37 Two
months later the Roxy was gone, its legacy summarized in summer 1977
by Jon Savage, who unsentimentally declared, “So no false nostalgia for
the Roxy please—it had its 15 minutes and served its purpose—for
better or worse the new wave has moved on.”38
Against this backdrop, Motörhead’s capacity to draw an audience
that could not be easily described according to the dominant subcultural camps of the moment presented an appealing alternative to some
observers. Perhaps the most vocal celebrant of the band in this era was
Kris Needs, the young editor of Zig Zag who had turned the long-running
fanzine’s attention away from the 1960s and toward the new wave. In
the first of several profiles he would write on the band, Needs
162 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
observed, “It isn’t really COOL to like Motörhead. . . . They ain’t Punk
Rockers (Roxy stance definition). . . . I s’pose if Heavy Metal Rock’s got
a definition Motörhead play it—how it should be played (at headbangin’ overkill level).”39 For Needs, then, Motörhead was a quintessential heavy metal unit; like Pete Makowski he was drawn to the way
the band stripped the genre down to its basic elements and played those
elements for all they were worth. But like Geoff Barton, his perception
shifted slightly when confronted with the composition of the group’s
audience, which he termed a “veritable crossover.” Interviewed by
Needs, Lemmy confirmed this sense that the band drew an unusually
broad assortment of types to their shows: “We get everyone, disillusioned Hawkwind people in plimsolls and greatcoats, a few punks, . . .
it’s good you know. If somebody gets off I don’t care if he’s got a bald
head and a bolt going through it.” Needs, in turn, affirmed Lemmy’s
acceptance of stylistic heterogeneity, noting his own weariness with
“punk gigs where everyone has to wear their little uniform and you get
frowned on cos you ain’t got one too.”40 For Needs, Motörhead was an
antidote to the musical partisanship that seemed to have taken hold
over the scene. They were a crossover, a band whose own stylistic premises were more open than most.
Along with the mixed character of their audience, another feature of
Motörhead that drew considerable comment was their aggressive use of
noise, in the form of volume and distortion, the effects of which were
heightened by the fast tempos at which the band played. Anyone who
has paid attention to the genres of heavy metal or punk knows how
much both rely on forms of sonic disturbance, and how often that
reliance has made them subject to bitter criticism for their deviation
from certain received standards of “good music.”41 Motörhead was a
band uniquely subject to either devotion or derision on the basis of the
noise it generated. Reviewing one of the group’s concerts in late 1977,
Paul Sutcliffe captured something of the way excessive volume in particular figured into the band’s impact. Sutcliffe himself was overwhelmed
by the sound of Motörhead, to the point of discomfort. When the band
began its set his first response was, “It was very loud”; as the set progressed he noted that the it continued to get louder with each song, to
the point where he judged the band “as loud as the First World War if
they’d crammed the whole thing together and held it in a telephone
booth. In fact,” he finally had to admit, “IT WAS TOO BLEEDIN’
LOUD!” For Sutcliffe, the volume obliterated all other features of the
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 163
band’s music. Yet what he found truly confounding about the experience
was the response of the audience, members of which routinely complained aloud, “It’s not loud enough,” prompting Lemmy and company
to continually increase their level of output. Concluding his review,
Sutcliffe stated his admiration for Lemmy’s “unpretentious” onstage
manner and for the band’s capacity to energize a crowd, but was left to
observe that “the vibe between Motörhead and their audience is all
about being loud to the point where you wonder whether hearing aids
just became this week’s chic.”42
Similar perspectives on Motörhead were to surface repeatedly over
the years, though the value attached to the band’s preoccupation with
volume above all would fluctuate considerably from one commentator
to the next. On the negative side, Deanne Pearson’s 1979 review of a
Motörhead show was representative; she described them as “three heavies who pulverise their instruments with the volume full-up trying to
disguise that they’re . . . regurgitating meaningless, empty guitar hammering and drum-bashing.”43 Meanwhile, reviewing a show some
months earlier, in late 1978, Neil Norman assessed Motörhead with a
sort of ambivalence more in keeping with the views of Paul Sutcliffe. For
Norman, a Motörhead concert was a sort of showdown between what
he termed “Everypunter” and the band, who shared a penchant for long
hair and denim but were separated by the band’s capacity for using decibels to devastating effect. Breaking into their namesake song was termed
a “below the belt” gesture by the critic, who observed, “After that there
is no contest. The audience, which has doubled by now is quickly
brought to its knees and finally stomped over.” Such sonic excess was
clearly not to Norman’s taste, but he was moved to acknowledge a
grudging respect for the band’s approach: “Nothing can stop them and
for that at least I admire them. Dinosaurs they may be, but right now
they’re unique, they know it and they’re not going to go away.”44 The
musical extremes that Motörhead pursued were for Norman thus representative of the band’s tenaciousness; almost like cockroaches in their
ability to survive, they weathered whatever resistance they faced from
critics or audiences and continued playing as loudly as possible.
Volume was no doubt the main musical reason that Motörhead was
so readily classified as heavy metal. One might recall Robert Duncan’s
claims regarding the “loudestness” of metal as a defining feature of the
genre, claims on which Robert Walser has expanded to illuminating
effect. Walser’s discussion of volume in connection with metal also can
help to shed light on why Motörhead’s use of volume went a bit against
164 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
the grain of the genre’s conventions as they existed in the 1970s and
might have aligned the band with certain features of punk. According to
Walser, “Loudness mediates between the power enacted by the music
and the listener’s experience of power. . . . The music is felt within as
much as without, and the body is seemingly hailed directly.”45 Such a
characterization goes some way toward explaining how volume worked
to seal the bond between Motörhead and its audience, for whom the
band’s willingness to continually “turn it up” conveyed its commitment
to a particularly extreme sort of rock-and-roll experience.
Of course, the pleasures of loudness are very much part of the punk
aesthetic as well. The shared affinity for extreme volume, especially
drenched in waves of guitar distortion, is one of the things that most
connects the genres of metal and punk and that has formed the basis for
much of the crossover activity that has occurred between them. If there
is a distinction to be drawn between the two genres where volume is
concerned, it is less in the tendency toward volume as such than in the
meanings attached to loud sounds. Heavy metal has typically valorized
volume for its ability to project and transmit a sense of overwhelming
power that can be inhabited at once by the individual performer, the
small collective of individual band members, and the larger collective of
the metal audience. In punk, volume is more commonly attached to
making “noise,” creating a kind of sound that is designed to disturb
sonic conventions and defamiliarize what may otherwise be standard
song structures. Often punk’s noise is meant to undercut the very sense
of power that metal’s volume is designed to portray. Vic Godard of the
British band Subway Sect thus explained his band’s approach: “We never
used ordinary guitars, a Gibson or a Strat; we used Fender Mustangs
because they have a trebly, scratchy sound. We became quite purist. Our
guitarist refused to allow any macho, Rock’n’Roll attitudes on stage.”46
In their dedication to loudness, Motörhead managed to strike a balance between the metal idea that loudness equals power and the punk
notion that loudness equals noise. To understand how the band did so,
we need to examine how volume worked in the band’s music in combination with other aural qualities. Walser notes that metal uses of amplification often rely not only on volume as such but on volume in
association with elements such as echo and reverb that create a sense of
expanding aural space, “making the music’s power seem to extend infinitely.”47 This point is one on which Motörhead deviated from the practice established by such bands as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, the
latter of whom were roughly contemporary with the band. Not that
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 165
Motörhead completely eschewed echo or reverb. But the pace of their
music, the rapid tempos that forged well ahead of those pursued by the
metal bands of the era, inhibited the sense of vastness opened by their
sound. The basic rhythmic and harmonic tool of heavy metal, the power
chord, relies not only on elements of timbre and volume but also, in a
crucial sense, on time and tempo; power chords often sound most powerful when they are allowed to sustain, to remain suspended in time,
and it is these moments of sustained power that create some of the most
readily identifiable generic effects of heavy metal. Motörhead’s music
had few such moments. The chords they played were steeped in sonic
power, but those chords were played at a pace that made them seem
more to crash into one another than to build infinite layers of echoing
power. Lemmy’s distinctively distortion-laden bass sound also comes
into play here, for the illusion of space created by heavy metal relies in
large part on a sense of depth in the music that arises from the contrast
between the jagged, trebly timbre of the guitar and the throbbing, relatively clean sound of the bass. Eliding the sonic difference between bass
and guitar, Motörhead collapsed the space between the two instruments
to a considerable degree. Their music was all rushing distorted surface,
and the power generated by the music was not so much undermined by
the band’s speed as continually threatening to outpace itself.
Supplementing these qualities was another alluded to in the foregoing reviews, especially that by Deanne Pearson: the band’s supposed
lack of technical skill, which made their music sound not just loud but
painfully loud, cacophonous, lacking in melodic or harmonic distinction. The members of Motörhead often vigorously contested such
charges, with Lemmy in particular always ready to defend the capabilities of himself and his band mates. Yet the song structures and guitar
solos that marked the band’s music were not designed to showcase virtuosity in the manner of other late 1970s hard rock and metal bands
such as UFO, Rainbow, and Thin Lizzy. In this the band could be compared to many of the punk bands of the time, who did not so much
refuse the acquisition of musical technique as question the uses to which
that technique was put. Motörhead had one key distinction from its
punk counterparts in this regard, however. Especially in England, for
many punk bands the questioning of musical technique was attached to
the relative youth and inexperience of the musicians; the “uncooked”
sounds of punk were meant to signify a generational act of reclamation,
as young bands asserted their right to play over the valorization of virtuosic technique that had taken hold in various spheres of rock since the
166 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
late 1960s. More seasoned musicians, the members of Motörhead did
not pursue their brand of noise with such an age-based agenda. They
were not rebelling against the rock-and-roll past so much as bringing
some of its buried elements to the surface. As such, in the words of the
metal critic Martin Popoff, they could be considered “the first grunge
rockers, being the first who could actually play, but chose to stink up the
place” as a deliberate gesture.48
Overkill, Motörhead’s second album, distilled the band’s elements with
new focus and consistency. Released in early 1979, the album came out
at a time when British punk had entered something of a hangover period
following the initial rush of possibilities. British metal, in turn, was on
the verge of a period of renewal that was shaped in part by the growing
interchange between metal and punk. Heavy metal had not been fully
washed away during the height of enthusiasm for punk, but it had been
put on the defensive, at least in print. Judas Priest, arguably the most
influential metal band to emerge during the punk era, was the object of
some attention and no small degree of ridicule during these years. The
members of Priest were typically diplomatic in their appraisals of the
surrounding punk phenomenon, though they also took a line that
became standard in metal appraisals of punk over the next decade.
Priest singer Rob Halford made a characteristic comment in a 1977
interview: “Punk to me is rock. . . . I saw the Sex Pistols and I got something from the band when I saw them. . . . If anything I would say that . . .
our music is like an advancement of their music, because their rock is
basic and so much more direct.”49 Noting his appreciation for the punk
attitude, Halford expressed condescension toward punk musical abilities, relying on an opposition between the technical challenge of metal
and the more simple technique of punk that Motörhead itself would do
much to upset.
For critics who had devoted themselves to the transformative ideologies of punk, assessing a band like Judas Priest was like entering into an
alien sphere. Such was the attitude of the writers Paul Morley and Jon
Savage, two of the more astute and stringent advocates of punk, who
each took up the challenge of reviewing Priest with considerable hesitation and skepticism. Morley portrayed attendance at a Judas Priest concert as an experience akin to being “an atheist amongst fervent
believers. . . . It is all very religious. . . . It’s a bewildering ritual of call
and mass response.”50 For Savage, it was the Priest album Killing
Machine that posed the conundrum of how to get past his own critical
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 167
biases. Admitting that the codes of Priest’s music were unknown to him,
Savage spent much of his review musing on the band’s apparent leather
fetish, which brought “gay biker associations” to the surface that
required the members of Priest “to be even straighter than usual” to
avoid the wrong message. Savage was hardly the first critic to note traces
of homoeroticism running through Priest’s image, but his accompanying
refusal to give their music due attention was indicative of the ideological divide that metal provoked. His only way to escape wholesale dismissal of the band was to make it the basis of a rather stock problem:
“Do ‘the people’ want what they get, or will they accept more than
they’re usually given?”51
Most pointedly, for critics convinced that punk was the sound of the
moment and maybe the wave of the future, heavy metal was typically
cast as a relic of the past. Jon Savage took such a tack against
Motörhead. Reviewing a show in which they played with the Damned,
Savage called them “the last sour remnants of the hippy dream,” effectively saying they were too old—and too old-fashioned—to be convincingly up to date.52 Paul Morley went much further in his review of the
Judas Priest concert, cited earlier, in which he cast the event as an almost
premodern form of ritual grounded in articles of unquestioned faith. In
both cases, metal was posited as one paradigmatic version of the “old
wave” against which punk’s “new wave” impulses were defined and
measured. From such a perspective, the persistence of metal was treated
as a mystery or an annoyance; the tone of critical comment often had an
underlying attitude of “Why won’t this stuff just go away?” But metal
did not go away, and the sheer durability of the form was after a point
considered a noteworthy matter. Paul Morley remarked on this quality
in his review of the Judas Priest album Stained Class, which began,
“Heavy metal is astonishingly and a little embarrassingly—God, it just
won’t lie down—very much alive.”53 Writing shortly thereafter, in a profile of Van Halen, Paul Rambali offered a similar opinion, suggesting that
the previous three years had been marked by “a slow realisation that the
hard rock fan is the most rabid, devoted, insatiable creature there is,
willing to join tens of thousands of his fellow worshippers at the flash
bomb alter at the drop of a tour schedule.”54
These attitudes toward metal had hardly gone away by 1979, but
with punk’s momentum receding, bands like Judas Priest and
Motörhead were to be cast less as throwbacks than as standard-bearers.
In this transitional context, Motörhead’s crossover tendencies regarding
the genres of metal and punk would become paradigmatic, and Overkill
168 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
would solidify the group’s boundary-crossing reputation. The release of
the album was overseen by yet another record label, Bronze, with whom
Motörhead would stay for the next several years. Founded by Gerry
Bron, an industry veteran, Bronze was an independent label with a less
well-defined image than Stiff or Chiswick but with a decided track
record in marketing heavy metal through Bron’s long-standing association with genre stalwarts Uriah Heep. Meanwhile, the producer of
Overkill, Jimmy Miller, was a rock-and-roll veteran of a different stripe,
having famously collaborated with the Rolling Stones on a celebrated
string of albums during the late 1960s and early 1970s that culminated
in the 1972 release of Exile on Main Street. On that album the Stones
sank into the murky, stirring depths of their blues influences with a
lo-fi ambience that conveyed the tone of a convincingly unsteady drug
trip. With Overkill, by contrast, Miller fleshed out Motörhead’s sound
with impressive clarity and maximized the band’s rhythmic propulsion
while capturing a sense of dynamics from the group lacking on their
previous recorded work.
As on their debut album, the opening track of Overkill, also titled
“Overkill,” was a genuine pacesetter. The song opened with a remarkable burst of drumming from Phil Taylor, giving the lie to the notion
that this was a band lacking in technical mastery. Taylor’s drum riff at
the opening and throughout the song makes use of a double bass drum,
which produces a pounding bottom end played at a tempo that well
exceeded anything on Motörhead’s debut.55 After a couple bars of unaccompanied drumming, Taylor is joined by Lemmy’s buzzing distorted
bass, which has much of the character displayed in the opening to
“Motorhead” but is played much higher on the neck to better separate
itself from the bottom-heavy approach of the drums. As was becoming
customary, Eddie Clarke enters the song last, establishing that unlike
many heavy rock bands, Motörhead was a group ruled by its rhythm
section.
“Overkill” was also in keeping with the established style of
Motörhead in that it was structured around minimal chord changes.
Rather than three-chord rock, Motörhead specialized in two-chord
rock; their harmonically confined structures were made to intensify
their songs’ rhythmic effects. Clarke and Lemmy build interlocking twochord patterns throughout the verses of “Overkill,” turning the basic
musical gesture of moving from one chord to another and back again into
a fulcrum of sonic tension. This highly concentrated set of riffs is in keeping with the song’s lyrical content. Where “Motorhead” had portrayed
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 169
the rushing intensity of speed, “Overkill” depicted a comparable sort of
experience achieved through the onslaught of the band’s music. In the
manner of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams,” “Overkill” is an explosive
piece of rock and roll about the explosive physical impact of rock and
roll. Lemmy’s lyrics are concise but descriptive: “On your feet you feel
the beat, it goes straight to your spine / Shake your head you must be
dead if it don’t make you fly.” The song’s chorus, which involves the repetition of the title word, is the one moment at which a bit of release is
offered from the churning velocity; the band eases (relatively speaking)
into a set of more standard chord changes, and Taylor’s drumming temporarily assumes a less unrelenting cast. But following the last of its
three choruses “Overkill” goes into overdrive, with Eddie Clarke playing a frenetic solo as Taylor and Lemmy lock into a merciless groove.
Seeming to end on a final decaying power chord, Taylor restarts his
drums and Lemmy repeats his introductory bass riff not once but twice,
leading to two false endings and two more thirty-second iterations of
distorted flurry before “Overkill” at last releases its grip.
On the strength of such material, Overkill became the first Motörhead
release to enjoy any significant chart success, reaching as high as
number 24 on the British record charts. No longer relegated to the
poverty trail, Lemmy and company held firmly to their “Born to
Lose/Live to Win” ethos, which would come even more to the fore of
the band’s image on subsequent records. Meanwhile, many critics
viewed Overkill as an album that led the way to a new degree of interchange between punk and metal. We have already seen Geoff Barton’s
proclamation that it was the “first true HM/punk crossover.” Joining
Barton in this judgment was John Hamblett, whose New Musical
Express review deemed Overkill “the definitive Heavy Metal album,”
but went on to proclaim that “the only things that stop this being on par
with Never Mind the Bollocks are a few rather misguided slow moments
and the indisputable fact that at least two thirds of Motörhead are older
and uglier than the Pistols were.”56 Motörhead did not wage war with
the mythology of rock on a par with the Pistols; rather, the band was
steeped in a version of that mythology, evident in Lemmy’s continuing
infatuation with the outlaw stance. As a strictly sonic phenomenon,
however, Motörhead upended some of rock’s prevailing conventions as
effectively as any of their peers. Fusing residual psychedelia with rhythmic drive and excessive volume, forsaking virtuosity for sonic density,
Motörhead created a heavy rock aesthetic that was to wield considerable influence in the ensuing decade.
170 METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
THE NEW OLD WAVE
Summing up his study of music genres and their impact on the business
of popular music, Keith Negus observed, “Moving within or across
musical genres is more than a musical act; it is a social act. . . . Crossing
genre worlds and bringing new genre cultures into being is not only an
act of musical creation, it is also an act of social creation.”57 Negus’s
valuable insight resonates with the ideas of Franco Fabbri and Simon
Frith, whose own work on popular music genres stresses their combined
social and musical character. In popular music, genres influence not
only how music sounds and how it is played, but also what that music
is believed to signify, what values it is heard to transmit, and what codes
of style best suit the sonic codes that mark the difference between one
genre and another. To recognize the eminently social character of music
genres is not to claim that the audience of one genre, such as heavy
metal, is inalterably different from the audience for another, such as
punk, any more than it is to say that the two genres are completely distinct in strictly musical terms.58 It is to acknowledge, though, that when
genres come into contact with one another, more is at stake than the
matter of whether or not there are guitar solos, or whether the musicians wear their hair long, cut it short, or prefer it spiked and dyed an
iridescent orange.
What was at stake in the metal/punk crossover of Motörhead? One
can point to various isolated features that, taken together, demonstrate
Negus’s maxim that movement between genres has both musical and
social dimensions. Motörhead’s music was sub–garage band two- or
three-chord rock mingled with strains of psychedelic guitar, fueled by
Lemmy’s speed habit and laid atop some of the most fiercely driving
tempos and drum riffs found in rock of the time. Above all, the sound
of Motörhead was defined by a commitment to volume. In sheer loudness, their sound was indebted to heavy metal, the genre more than any
other that had established volume as a raison d’être. But the band’s musicianship bespoke a rather different aesthetic from that found in leading
metal bands of the period such as Rainbow, Judas Priest, and UFO.
Whereas those bands imposed order on volume through the exercise of
virtuosic technical precision, Motörhead pursued a more musically
rough path in which volume was valued for its ability to generate sensory
overload of the sort described in the lyrics to “Overkill.” Motörhead’s
music thus displayed a paradoxical set of effects, dramatizing power
THE GENESIS OF CROSSOVER 171
through unrelenting volume in the manner of much heavy metal, but
organizing their performance of sonic power around a noisy, nonvirtuosic, collective approach more in keeping with the musical aesthetic of
punk. In their music and apart from it, Motörhead cultivated an aura of
being a people’s band. Their “Born to Lose / Live to Win” ethos effectively emphasized the band members’ commonality at the same time as
it conferred on the group the aura of romantic outsiders constitutionally
unfit for mainstream society, all the more so for their evocation of
British and American biker subcultures.
In themselves, these qualities may seem unremarkable. Considered in
context, though, the things that made Motörhead into the first
metal/punk crossover band, or at least the first band to be described as
such, assume more importance. At a moment when journalists such as
Caroline Coon were drawing thick lines in the sand, describing the existence of a “B.S.P. / A.S.P. syndrome” (before Sex Pistols / after Sex
Pistols);59 at a moment when the Clash famously sang in their song
“1977,” “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones”—at that same moment
Motörhead emanated from the recent past of British rock and moved
like a burrowing termite from inauspicious beginnings to build a motley
audience that went against the grain of fashion by its very heterogeneity.
This was the act of social creation to which Negus referred and was
Motörhead’s principal achievement in the years 1977 to 1979: the
demonstration that British punk was not an all-or-nothing proposition,
that it was not the end of rock as we knew it, but could instead could be
the source for breathing new life into a genre many thought exhausted.
5
Time Warp
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal
JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON
A heavy metal disco? Sounds like a contradiction in terms—which is
why DJ Neal Kay decided to call his regular gatherings at the Kingsbury
Bandwagon pub a soundhouse. The Bandwagon was a place where
heavy metal fans could feel at home a few nights a week at a moment
when enthusiasm for the New Wave was still dominating British clubs
and music papers. Kay had an almost messianic quality as a keeper of
the hard rock flame, spinning tracks spanning the 1970s but always
seeking to incorporate current material. The currency of the scene at the
Bandwagon is what most impressed the journalist Geoff Barton, who
covered Kay’s soundhouse for the weekly Sounds in summer 1978. He
entered the pub expecting a “time warp,” a celebration of past musical
glories that would be completely out of step with the present. Such were
the connotations of heavy metal in the midst of the New Wave, and
those connotations were fully evident in Neal Kay’s persona as a selfdescribed product of the “flower power age” with flowing blond hair.
After his experience at the soundhouse, though, Barton asserted that it
was “very much a present day reality” marked by a refreshing atmosphere of congeniality. Photographs accompanying the story highlighted
the loose atmosphere of the event, depicting young male fans in denim
172
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 173
jackets and rock T-shirts milling about, mooning the camera and, most
notably, playing air guitar, a favored practice of heavy metal musical
appreciation.1
If the heavy metal soundhouse was no time warp, it was a place where
rock music history was held in high esteem. Neal Kay made a regular
practice of recounting the stories of certain favored bands “in both
music and words.” Among the bands featured were Led Zeppelin, Deep
Purple, Free and Bad Company, Thin Lizzy, Status Quo, and Pink
Floyd—a veritable canon of late 1960s and early 1970s British hard
rock. Kay also regularly polled the Bandwagon audience about their
favorite songs from week to week, and his audience poll became the
basis for the Sounds heavy metal chart, which the paper had started to
publish the previous week. Absent from the chart, and from the soundhouse playlist, was any trace of the New Wave; as Kay explained, “An
awful lot of bikers frequent the place . . . and there’s no way that they’re
even vaguely sympathetic to the punk cause.”2
Unsympathetic to punk as Kay’s biker patrons might have been, the British
heavy metal scene was on the cusp of a reformation that would be shaped
in part by punk’s influence. Geoff Barton would popularize a phrase
meant to denote and promote a self-consciously new era in the music: the
“New Wave of British Heavy Metal.” First used in a May 1979 Sounds
article, less than a year after Barton’s initial visit to the Bandwagon, the
phrase itself was a hybrid that appropriated the capacity of “New Wave”
to embody the cutting edge and applied it to a genre seen to be anything
but the state of the art at the moment. The New Wave of British Heavy
Metal, or NWOBHM, as it would soon be abbreviated, was not only an
instance of resourceful semantics, however. Prompted by his editor, Alan
Lewis, Barton’s initial use of the term might have been on the order of a
catchphrase, but by no small coincidence the years 1979 to 1983 saw the
heavy metal scene in England flourish in ways that irremediably changed
the meaning of the genre.3 As a journalist, Barton himself remained a key
figure throughout these years and beyond, first in his position at Sounds
and, after 1981, as founding editor of the first mass-circulation music
publication devoted to heavy metal, Kerrang!. Barton’s run of articles documenting the New Wave of British Heavy Metal are valuable sources in
their own right and offer a useful vantage point for tracking the fortunes
of the movement in its formative stages.
Perhaps the most important shift that occurred during the
NWOBHM era was the gradual emergence of distinct underground and
174 TIME WARP
mainstream components of heavy metal. The leading metal scholars
Robert Walser and Deena Weinstein note that such tendencies developed later in the 1980s with the concurrent rise of thrash metal and the
popularization of a more commercially minded metal sound via MTV.4
Both branches can be traced back to NWOBHM, through the influence
of bands such as Venom, Raven, and Diamond Head on the one hand,
and Def Leppard on the other. As significant as the stylistic categories
that began to take hold in British heavy metal were the changes in metal
economics. Following the model established by punk, British heavy
metal bands became increasingly reliant on a new array of independent
labels, the most prominent of which was Neat Records in the northeastern town of Wallsend, outside of Newcastle. For most bands an
independent release was a stepping-stone to a larger career and contract
with a major label; as was true in the case of Motörhead, independent production was not an end in itself and did not yet carry significant ideological weight. Yet the structure of the music industry guaranteed that
only a fraction of the bands formed at the height of British enthusiasm
for heavy metal would gain a wider hearing. In this setting, independent
labels played an important role, as explained by former Tygers of Pan
Tang vocalist Jess Cox in a recent recollection: “The whole ethos of doit-yourself record companies created the movement . . . Heavy Metal
Records, Ebony Records, Music for Nations, and so on. Neat Records
is one big example. Neat . . . could not compete with the major labels,
but then all of a sudden it was cool to be independent and small.”5 Neat
and other independents helped to foster the sheer proliferation of bands
during the NWOBHM years, which gave the movement a powerful
grassroots base.
Even among those who openly courted success on a wider scale, certain types of success were deemed more suspect than others. Specifically,
success in the United States carried a peculiar burden for bands associated with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. In this regard, the
“Britishness” of NWOBHM was as crucial as its novelty. The careers of
the two leading bands of the movement, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard,
were very much shaped by such concerns. Iron Maiden rose rapidly in
England, and by the 1982 release of their third album, Number of the
Beast, was beginning to take hold of American audiences in a major
way, playing a stream of arena shows and achieving platinum record
sales. Through this transition, the band worked hard to maintain an
image of British loyalty that was supported by media depictions of the
group that upheld their continued ties to their working-class East End
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 175
roots. By contrast, Def Leppard faced accusations of unduly playing to
the American audience almost as soon as their own profile began to rise.
Although lead singer Joe Elliott routinely wore a shirt displaying the
Union Jack in concert, Leppard confronted continual resentment among
British commentators, and their record sales in England were never
commensurate with their remarkable success in the United States. In the
end, Def Leppard’s association with America was taken to reflect not
only the scale of their ambition but the extent to which they played a
different sort of metal from that associated with NWOBHM bands.
THE BARTON FILES
Writing in her influential study of dance music cultures, Club Cultures,
Sarah Thornton charges that music writers, academic and otherwise,
too often take the existence of genres for granted, assuming that they
emerge organically through shifts in musical style and taste. Countering
this tendency, she observes the role of various forms of media in creating and reinforcing generic distinctions and definitions: “While flyers
and listings tend to deal in crowds, and tabloids handle the sweeping
and scandalous impact of movements, consumer magazines operate in
subcultures.” Thornton continues: “[These magazines] categorize social
groups, arrange sounds, itemize attire and label everything. They baptize scenes and generate the self-consciousness required to maintain cultural distinctions. They give definition to vague cultural formations, pull
together and reify the disparate materials which become subcultural
homologies. The music and style press are crucial to our conceptions of
British youth; they do not just cover subcultures, they help construct
them.”6 The staff of the British music weekly Sounds—particularly
Geoff Barton, but also a host of others—fulfilled these purposes during
the time of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Indeed, one could
cynically claim that NWOBHM was little more than hype designed to
boost the paper’s circulation. Barton’s editor at Sounds, Alan Lewis, first
coined the phrase “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” to recognize an
audience of fans and potential readers who were not being well served
by the editorial perspectives at the other leading British music weeklies,
Melody Maker and New Musical Express. Thornton rightly notes, however, that the writers and photographers at such publications rarely
work along strictly exploitive lines; they often bring a sense of subcultural participation and enthusiasm to their work, which only helps to
more effectively promote the scenes that they portray. Such was the case
176 TIME WARP
with Geoff Barton, who took Lewis’s suggestion and turned it into a
series of articles that essentially created the sense of a musical movement coming to fruition.7
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal provides a telling case study
for the role of media in the production of music subcultures. It further
offers a compelling instance of different, competing subcultures coming
into contact with one another. Motörhead set the terms according to
which metal/punk crossover became an identifiable phenomenon, but
with NWOBHM it assumed much wider recognition and arguably
became one of the defining features of the immediate postpunk era in
British popular music. We saw in the previous chapter that with the rise
of punk in England, heavy metal was cast as something outmoded, a
relic of the past. Applying the term “New Wave” to the genre was a way
of conferring more currency on metal, but also drew sharp attention to
the way that the divide between metal and punk was a matter of time.
The media theorist Will Straw’s observations about the role of temporality in the making of music scenes are especially applicable to the distinction between metal and punk: “Different cultural spaces are marked
by the sorts of temporalities to be found within them—by the prominence of activities of canonization, or by the values accruing to novelty
and currency, longevity and ‘timelessness.’ In this respect, the ‘logic’ of
particular musical culture[s] is a function of the way in which value is
constructed within them relative to the passing of time.”8 In this light,
the New Wave of British Heavy Metal mattered because it was not an
old wave. The youth and energy found among many newly emerging
heavy metal groups and their audiences seemed to provide ample evidence that the genre was far from moribund. Yet the specter of historical regression was never far away. As NWOBHM assumed definition,
questions of time, of the music’s relationship to past and present, were
of considerable importance, as were questions of the relationship of
heavy metal to older and younger segments of the rock audience.
These issues coursed through the first article to feature the “New Wave
of British Heavy Metal” tag, which appeared in the May 19, 1979, issue
of Sounds. Neal Kay, the focal point of Barton’s earlier article on the
heavy metal soundhouse, was again the center of attention. Now, almost
a year later, Kay expanded his entrepreneurial activities to organize a
concert showcasing some of the more promising new metal bands.
Angel Witch, Iron Maiden, and Samson were the three bands to perform, and the concert was held not in the familiar confines of the
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 177
Bandwagon but at the Music Machine, a well-known rock club in the
heart of London. Observing the show, Barton’s concerns about the timeliness of the concert and of metal in general were quick to surface. Angel
Witch, first on the bill, was too reminiscent of the earlier 1970s, too
indebted to Black Sabbath, to hold Barton’s attention; using a turn of
phrase carried over from his account of the scene at the Bandwagon, he
dubbed the band “instant time warp.”9 Iron Maiden, the second band
to play, was much more to his liking. Although he found the set to be
uneven, he was duly roused by the best numbers, such as “Wrathchild”
and “Phantom of the Opera,” the latter of which found the band receiving “the ultimate accolade” when a guy in the audience playing air
guitar on a cardboard cutout demonstrated his appreciation for the
band.10 Closing the show was Samson, whom Barton found musically
unexceptional but a visual delight due to its excess of stage effects: flash
bombs, dry ice fog, confetti, and a drummer wearing a leopard-skin
body suit and an unsettling face mask evocative of the Cambridge rapist.
To conclude the article, Barton turned to Neal Kay, who deemed the
event a success against certain odds. At the beginning of the evening Kay
had been worried by some “heavy vibes” caused by the preponderance
of punks on the Music Machine dance floor. The heavy metal fans that
were Kay’s target audience arrived slowly, but the show proceeded without a hitch. Proclaiming a sort of victory, Kay announced that by the
end of the night “the punks were coming right up to me and asking me
to play Van Halen, Sabbath and even Hendrix tracks.”11 Whereas the
heavy metal soundhouse that Kay ran at the Bandwagon was a fairly
exclusive subcultural space, at the Music Machine Kay and the bands
had to deal with an intermingling of audiences. The presence of punks
provoked a certain measure of anxiety but in the end also conferred a
heightened sense of satisfaction. More notably, the approval of the
punks in the audience cut two ways: it showed that punks were not so
ready to leave the musical past behind as they were often portrayed, and
that heavy metal retained a vital degree of currency amid the social divisions that defined the British music scene.
Even at Sounds many commentators remained unconvinced by this
last claim. The week following Barton’s opening NWOBHM gambit,
Sandy Robertson, a Sounds staffer, was assigned to cover the German
heavy metal band the Scorpions. Having finished his requisite interview
with the band, Robertson decided to chat with some of their fans, waiting outside for the evening’s show. He made note of their age, for they
were all quite young, one being only fourteen. Given their youth, he
178 TIME WARP
wondered whether the Scorpions, who had been recording since the
early 1970s, weren’t too old for them. One youth responded, “No. . . . I
play guitar in a group and I probably won’t be any good till I’m about 30.”
Robertson, partial to punk’s more amateurish aesthetic, drew a quick
conclusion from the young man’s reply: “There does not speak a Clash
fan: the split between the old and new waves of the rock world defined
in one little sentence.”12 Barton be damned: for Robertson, heavy metal
remained “old wave” because its valorization of musical proficiency
perpetuated a hierarchy between musicians and fans even when those
fans were themselves musicians. That the fans were so young did not
contradict the “old wave” charge. If anything, it amplified Robertson’s
shock to see young fans feel so disempowered about their own capacity
to follow in the footsteps of their favorite performers.
When Barton wrote about the rising young band Def Leppard for the
next “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” installment, Robertson’s
remarks loomed over his conversation with the group. Emerging from
Sheffield, Def Leppard had just recorded a three-song EP, the centerpiece
of which was a blast of energy called “Getcha Rocks Off” that would
soon be making its way up the Sounds heavy metal chart. Significantly,
the EP was self-released by the band on their own cleverly named
Bludgeon Riffola label. Barton took the release as “irrefutable evidence
that HM is not an old man’s game” and was further heartened by his
impression of Def Leppard in concert, where he noticed “not a single
pair of time warp Angel Witch–style loon pants” being worn by members of the group.13 That the group members were so young, all still in
their teens, further confirmed his impressions, but also left the critic with
a question: “I wondered why, as the average age of the band is seventeenand-a-half, Def Leppard don’t play punk rock.” Singer Joe Elliott
responded curtly, “Because we don’t like it,” but bassist Rick Savage
elaborated: “We’re not into punk. We were all heavy rock fans before we
formed this band. I mean, I can listen to punk, I thought the Pistols were
brilliant, it’s just that we all grew up on heavy rock and we’re anxious to
keep it going. Plus the fact that if we did play punk we might disappear
without a trace, because everybody’s doing it, aren’t they?”14 Other band
members proceeded to expand on their choice to play heavy metal. Joe
Elliott stressed that young fans required their own generation of heavy
metal groups, since the music’s early 1970s heyday was too much in the
past for them to remember. Guitarist Steve Clark claimed that the enthusiasm for the New Wave had more or less been a fad, noting that it “was
new in ’76 and ’77, but now there’s as many young kids into heavy
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 179
rock—probably more—as there are into punk.” Rick Savage observed,
“Basically, it’s just down to the fact that we’re all fucking posers. We all
want to go out onstage, pose, wear dinky white boots, tight trousers and
have all the girls looking at our bollocks.”15 As ambitious young musicians, the members of Def Leppard saw heavy metal as a means of going
against the tide of new wave enthusiasm, while also allowing them to put
on a “show” in concert in a way that had become unfashionable but that
many young fans still found compelling.
Live music, or alternatively, the gathering of fans to listen to genrespecific records as occurred at Neal Kay’s soundhouse, was crucial to
the growing momentum of heavy metal and to the way Geoff Barton
represented the NWOBHM phenomenon. In part this was a matter of
necessity, as the newest crop of heavy metal bands had very little
recorded product. Yet the emphasis on live music also conveyed an
important message about the nature of the scene. One need only recall
the importance of the Roxy to the mounting self-consciousness of
British punk as a space where new bands could get onstage with no
experience and play to an audience who were defining themselves
according to a set of subcultural norms that were forming and reforming from night to night. Barton sought to project a similar kind of formative energy on the British heavy metal scene, to capture a sort of
synergy between the music, the bands, and the audience that would have
been observable only in a public setting.
Concert reviews, then, were the principal medium through which
NWOBHM came to public attention in its earliest phase. Watching new
metal bands in performance, Barton concentrated as much on the larger
environment for live metal as he did on the bands themselves. Typical
was his review of the group Sledgehammer, who achieved only fleeting
notoriety as a NWOBHM attraction. Barton’s review of the band’s concert was favorable, but he was much more impressed by the setting in
which they played, a pub called the Red Lion in Hounslow that housed
a scene akin to the Bandwagon. Captured by the image of heavy metal
fans dancing to the epic “Lights Out” by UFO as though it were a bona
fide disco tune, Barton saw fit to observe, “The Metal Revival is not a
figment of Sounds’ imagination,” and moreover that it was “probably
the most honest, vital, hypeless and downright grassroots music movement in the whole of the UK.”16
Grassroots as NWOBHM might have been as a larger movement, by
the end of 1979 some of its leading figures were already beginning to
outgrow the scene’s modest confines. Iron Maiden’s success had grown
180 TIME WARP
significantly since Barton had profiled them earlier in the year. Back in
May they were one of three bands under review and were placed in the
middle of a three-band bill. Now, in October, they were headliners at a
special Bandwagon concert who rated their own feature. In what was
becoming a pattern, the band drew considerable attention on the basis
of a self-released cassette of demo recordings that circulated under the
name “Soundhouse Tapes,” in tribute to Neal Kay’s role in popularizing
the group by playing their unreleased songs at the Bandwagon.
Accompanying Iron Maiden’s rising profile was a developing story about
their path to success that emphasized the band’s origins in the heart of the
punk era, facing an uphill battle to draw attention to themselves as they
fended off the temptation to “turn punk” that was placed before them by
more than one record company scout. Interviewed by Barton, bassist
Steve Harris, who had initially assembled the group and wrote much of
its material, responded to the now requisite question of why he had
formed a heavy metal band by declaring, “I couldn’t have started a punk
band . . . that would have been against my religion.”17 Speculating on the
further success of the band, singer Paul Di’anno expressed his own hope
that the members of Maiden wouldn’t take their career so seriously that
they would lose contact with their audience. Di’anno referred to AC/DC
as a rock band that had become highly successful but “still managed to
remain honest, regular sort of guys. . . . Like us, they’re down to earth.
And I’m going to make sure that we stay that way.”18 Whereas Harris
drew a stark line between Maiden and punk, Di’anno’s salt-of-the-earth
ethos carried a trace of punk-inflected class politics that would be further highlighted in subsequent coverage of the band.
With 1979 drawing to a close, Sounds included a special feature that
marked a culmination of the year in metal, an extensive thirteen-page
insert under the heading “KER-ANNG!” The magazine of the same
name would not be started for over a year, but the set of articles included
in this first incarnation was like a minifanzine unto itself.19 Geoff Barton
seized the occasion to further codify the notion that NWOBHM had
progressed greatly in recent months. Samson, the feature’s lead attraction, was another holdover from the critic’s first NWOBHM article. In
the intervening months, the band had acquired a new vocalist, Bruce
Bruce (aka Bruce Dickinson), and like Iron Maiden had seen their popularity swell. Also like Maiden, Samson had been plugging away for some
years; as such, guitarist and namesake Paul Samson felt no particular
sense of belonging where the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was concerned. “I’ve been playing on the circuit since 1974 . . . there’s nothing
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 181
really ‘new’ about me. Samson played 230 gigs at the height of punk in
1977, but did we get any mentions in the press then? Did we fuck.”
Undeterred by this momentary indication of backlash, Barton reiterated
his conviction that the New Wave of metal was a genuine movement and
asserted that “for every dues-playing [sic] guitarist like himself there’re
two or three youngsters who’ve sprung up from nowhere.”20
Fittingly, the next article in “KER-ANNG!” was an update on the
state of the British metal scene. Eight bands were featured, most of them
familiar from previous NWOBHM installments, including Iron Maiden,
Def Leppard, Sledgehammer, Saxon, and Angel Witch. Barton reported
that Def Leppard had acquired a record contract with the major label
Phonogram, for which he took a certain measure of credit. Of the
remaining bands, Tygers of Pan Tang was highlighted as a leading band
in the burgeoning heavy metal scene in the northeastern region of
England, and Diamond Head was described as an exciting group with
an average age of nineteen. Witchfynde was deemed notable for its preoccupation with Satanic themes, and Praying Mantis had a track on the
forthcoming Metal for Muthas compilation of young heavy metal bands
put together by Neal Kay.21
Finally, there was the list, the Heavy Metal Top 100, meant to represent the best in heavy metal history. Neal Kay assembled the list based
on a poll of his Bandwagon audience. As such, it was skewed in the
direction of songs that Kay favored on his soundhouse playlist. Topping
the list was “Space Station No. 5” from the debut album by Montrose,
released in 1973. Moving down the list, though, one finds more contemporary tracks, including a few by new bands who had been featured as part of the NWOBHM phenomenon and who had rather slim
recording histories. Iron Maiden’s namesake song, taken from their
demo tape, placed highest among such titles, at number 12, and a track
by Praying Mantis, “Captured City,” was close behind it at number 15.
Each band had another song farther down the list, and Def Leppard’s
“Getcha Rocks Off” and Saxon’s “Stallions of the Highway” both
placed admirably around the middle.22 Such lists were to become a semiregular feature when Kerrang! began regular publication in 1981; they
showed that even when metal was being cast as a “new wave,” the
impulse toward canon building and paying tribute to the past remained
strong.23 The Heavy Metal Top 100 depicted emerging British metal
bands making their way into the tastes of the heavy metal audience, but
in measured steps, and portrayed metal past and metal present as snugly
aligned.
182 TIME WARP
METAL FOR MUTHAS
Like so much of its metal coverage, the Sounds list of top metal songs
was the product of a continuing promotional alliance between the magazine and Neal Kay that worked to the benefit of NWOBHM bands.
That alliance was to become shaky upon the early 1980 release of Metal
for Muthas, a compilation issued by the major label EMI with liner
notes by Kay, who also had a hand in selecting the groups for inclusion.
Featuring ten songs by nine different groups—Iron Maiden was the only
band to have two of its songs included—Metal for Muthas could be
viewed several ways: as an introduction to the current British metal
scene; as an attempt by EMI to capitalize on a rising commercial musical opportunity; and as Neal Kay’s attempt to codify his own influence
as heavy metal tastemaker. In his liner notes to the record, Kay mentioned the “new wave of heavy metal,” but placed greater emphasis on
the album as a response to the “recent two-year crisis,” which one
assumes refers to the flourishing of punk. For Kay, heavy metal was
above all underdog music, having struggled through hard times when
fashion had obscured the virtues of “real talent.” It was also music of
“emotion, heart-felt and sincerely delivered,” which required such a
compilation as this for exposure because of general media ignorance.24
Designed to bring new exposure to metal as a genre, Metal for Muthas
also displayed some of the conflicts that arose when the New Wave of
British Heavy Metal became a more broadly salable item.
Musically, Metal for Muthas can best be described as a provisional
record, balanced unevenly between the energy of certain new wave
metal groups and the more diffuse approach of bands who seemed to
bring little that was new to the genre in terms of either energy or stylistic invention. To the extent that NWOBHM was “both a movement and
a musical style,” Iron Maiden was arguably the only band on the album
to represent the new wave shift to “faster, shorter, less bass-heavy numbers.”25 Their two tracks—the opening “Sanctuary” and “Wrathchild,”
which was placed in the middle of side 2—were short and fast and produced with a sound that left a lot of the band’s rough edges in the mix.
Of particular note was singer Paul Di’anno’s voice, which came across as
an angry snarl amid the typically more temperate vocal styles evident
elsewhere. “Sanctuary” especially captured the band’s competing tendencies to powerful effect. A song about the singer’s flight from the
police after witnessing a murder, “Sanctuary” is built around a sharp
riff marked by rapid alternation between the central D chord and its
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 183
seventh, C. The pace of the riff conveys the speed of the main lyrical
action, and the confined harmonic motion portrays some of the claustrophobia attached to the singer’s fear of being caught. Around the riff
and between the verses, guitarists Dave Murray and Dennis Stratton
spin harmonized melody lines that are elaborately structured but unusually economical; the song is rich with guitar sounds but has little in the
way of soloist excess. Nearing its climax, “Sanctuary” features one especially choice moment: after the last verse, the band pauses for a few
beats excepting feedback from the guitars, at the end of which Di’anno
calls them back to action with a vocal lead-in that drips with ire: (unaccompanied) “So give me” (band enters) “Sanctuary from the law.”
If Iron Maiden presented the state of the art, Angel Witch turned in
what was probably the heaviest track on Metal for Muthas with their
song, “Baphomet.” Opening with a dirge-like, bottom-heavy descending riff played over a storm of feedback, “Baphomet” morphs into a
much more briskly paced performance with the entry of the first verse,
structured around a turbulent set of chromatic, ascending-thendescending chord changes. At the chorus, the harmonic structure
becomes far more open as singer Kevin Heybourne calls out to the
song’s subject that he is “Satan’s chosen son.” After just one verse and
chorus statement, the song changes dramatically yet again, with a brief
flourish of harmonized guitars giving way to an ominous driving riff
covered by waves of feedback and notes bent out of shape by the tremolo
bar of Heybourne’s guitar. Yet another riff emerges from the chaos, a
more standard heavy rock riff over which Heybourne breaks into a
guitar solo filled with rapid hammer-on patterns and quasi-classical
triplet figures, at the end of which the chord sequence from the song’s
only verse returns, Heybourne issuing a high-pitched vocal wail over
each repetition of the chromatic figure until the song melts into a final
echo of guitar noise. With its condensed multipart compositional framework and its references to the underworld, “Baphomet” carries strong
echoes of such metal forebears as Black Sabbath into NWOBHM, but
does so with a sense of conviction that makes their sound come across
as more than nostalgia.
None of the remaining tracks on Metal for Muthas was quite so cataclysmic, but the album did have other strong points, with the E.F.
Band’s “Fighting for Rock and Roll” a solid blast of basic hard rock,
and Samson’s “Tomorrow or Yesterday” offering a welcome shift in
mood with a keyboard-heavy, wistful semiballad marred only by lyrics
that strain a bit too much for profundity. Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Blues
184 TIME WARP
in A,” on the other hand, was a decided low point, a mediocre blues performance that lacked even the distorted guitar excess that gives bluesinflected metal its principal appeal. The uneven quality of the
performances made the most pronounced impression on Geoff Barton,
who declared Metal for Muthas a severe disappointment in his review for
Sounds. Barton’s opening line stated the case in unqualified terms: “For
something that’s supposed to act as standard-bearer for the New Wave of
British Heavy Metal, this Metal for Muthas disc is a joke. And a not very
funny one either.” Barton’s main charge was that the compilation seemed
too much like an effort to “cash-in on the UK’s much-vaunted metal
revival.” He acknowledged the strength of Maiden’s two songs, calling
them “raucous HM/punk crossovers,” but dismissed the rest for lack of
invention (Toad the Wet Sprocket), weakness of sound (Praying Mantis’s
“Captured City), or amateurishness (Angel Witch, never a favorite of the
critic). He even criticized Kay’s liner notes as “clumsily written” and
overly bigoted toward the cause of heavy metal. Summing up his assessment, Barton termed Metal for Muthas “a good idea abysmally executed” that did a disservice to the genre it was meant to promote.26
Metal for Muthas was a flawed representation of the British metal
scene circa early 1980. Many subsequent commentators have noted the
odd selection of bands and the exclusion of groups such as Def Leppard
and Saxon who would have represented the music in a stronger light. In
a sense, though, the very inconsistency of the collection revealed the
extent to which NWOBHM was both subject to multiple definitions and
a movement still in its formative phase, especially with regard to its
status on record. Neal Kay was far less sanguine than Geoff Barton
about the prospect of a metal/punk fusion, and thus both his liner notes
and the track selection emphasized metal as an isolated genre, an item
of defense against the tyranny of punk fashion. Barton, for his part,
seemed to have protested too much about the album’s lack of worth. In
part this was because he judged it from the position of a subcultural
insider, assuming that those buying the album would already be familiar with the contours of NWOBHM. One can’t help but wonder if he
was not also guarding his own position of authority, as a reader accused
him of doing in an angry letter responding to his review: “I do think
that a snide swipe at the sleeve notes by Neal Kay was totally unnecessary. Maybe someone dared to encroach upon Mr. Barton’s divine exclusive rights to promote HM to the masses?”27
In the different terms according to which Kay and Barton described
and promoted heavy metal can be discerned a deeper clash over the
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 185
nature and meaning of the genre. The sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris
makes a useful distinction between two competing forms of subcultural
capital, mundane and transgressive. According to Kahn-Harris, mundane subcultural capital accrues in association with acts and practices
that help a given music scene or genre to sustain itself. Transgressive
subcultural capital, by contrast, involves a critique of existing institutions or generic practices and tends to valorize innovation and individual achievement over stability and collective belonging.28 Casting heavy
metal as a repository of waning values needing defense against the punk
scourge, Neal Kay was clearly on the mundane side. He did not seek to
move heavy metal forward so much as to help it maintain its prominence
and its integrity as a form. Geoff Barton, by contrast, was just as clearly
on the side of transgression. His support of metal/punk crossover,
whether attached to a longer standing entity such as Motörhead or a
group of younger upstarts such as Iron Maiden, had as its goal not the
preservation of metal as it was but the promotion of a form of metal
infused with new life by virtue of its absorption of punk elements—
punk remaining a potent sign of musical transgression in England in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Metal for Muthas was caught between
these mundane and transgressive impulses, though it was ultimately
defined more by Kay’s mundane agenda due to his role in assembling
the compilation.
NEAT NEAT NEAT
Despite Barton’s protestations, Metal for Muthas still attained the
number 16 position on the British record charts.29 The album drew considerable visibility by virtue of its release by EMI, the largest recording
concern in England, and it incontestably announced that 1980 was the
year that heavy metal would be making its presence felt on vinyl. In the
first months of the year Def Leppard and Iron Maiden released their
debut albums, and Saxon issued a second record deemed a marked
improvement from its debut of the preceding year. Girlschool, Angel
Witch, Diamond Head, and Tygers of Pan Tang were among the other
notable new groups who issued their first albums before the year was
over. Many of these bands chose to record with major labels. After
releasing the three-song “The Soundhouse Tapes” using their own
resources, Iron Maiden moved to EMI for their self-titled album; Def
Leppard similarly signed to Phonogram after the success of their selfreleased EP. For these groups and several others, punk had taught the
186 TIME WARP
lesson that a band didn’t need to wait for a record contract in order to
distribute its music. However, their goal was not to create a self-sustaining method of independent production or distribution. The independent release was a means to the end of gaining wider recognition
and securing a contract with a label that could guarantee broad distribution, including the potentially lucrative American market.
Although most groups did not value a deal with an independent label
in its own right, several entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to create
labels that would thrive on the energy of a growing crop of young bands
trying to reach a heavy metal audience that was on the lookout for new
groups. On this score, there was an important distinction in the
NWOBHM movement between recorded product that bands released
themselves and recordings that were issued by independent labels not
associated with a specific group. The former such releases tended to be
one-offs, the result of transient organizations that bands created for the
purposes of self-promotion. No artist-run independents emerged from
NWOBHM on the order of SST records in California or Dischord in
Washington, DC, and of the main bands associated with the movement
only Diamond Head would produce and distribute a full album of material with its own resources, as opposed to a single or mini-album. Yet
the NWOBHM era did see the rise of a number of independent record
labels devoted largely if not exclusively to heavy metal. Collectively,
these labels laid the groundwork for a more decentralized infrastructure
around the music that would allow bands from regional scenes to gain
a hearing without relocating to the capital. They also helped to foster
the development of more extreme metal styles and subgenres that were
not geared toward mass accessibility, and therefore created the basis for
a growing heavy metal underground.
Kerrang! quickly recognized the degree to which NWOBHM opened
new space for the successful operation of small-scale independent labels
devoted to heavy metal. Writing in the magazine’s eighth issue, in
February 1982, the journalist Howard Johnson surveyed some of the
more thriving metal labels then in operation. Some of the labels discussed by Johnson (Chiswick, Gull) were long-standing ventures that
started before NWOBHM was running that had lost a substantial measure of their momentum in recent years. Others, such as Jive Records,
were part of much larger concerns with a hand in music publishing and
management as well as record production. Then there were “the ‘we’re
heavier than you are and if you argue we’ll bite your head off’ labels,”
Neat and Heavy Metal Records.30 Both had started in the midst of
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 187
NWOBHM, Neat on the early end in 1979, Heavy Metal in mid-1980,
after the phenomenon had assumed prominence; both were dedicated
to some of the more extreme forms of heavy music then being played.
Paul Birch of Heavy Metal described the position of his label relative to
the major concerns: “There’s a huge HM market, but majors aren’t
geared to it. We use them for our own needs at what they do best, as we
master records at CBS and have them manufactured at Polygram. There’s
nothing particularly good about being independent in heavy rock,
because fans don’t just buy a record because it’s independent.”31 Heavy
Metal Records was kept running by Birch’s commitment to the genre
and the groups that he signed, of which the most notable were
Witchfinder General and Jaguar. His jaundiced view of the potential for
financial success, and of the limited appeal of “independence” as such
for heavy metal fans, shaped the conclusions drawn by Johnson in
assessing the state of independent metal labels. According to Johnson,
these labels ultimately played a limited role, channeling a few select
bands to major label contracts while allowing scores of others to fulfill
the ambition of producing a record “before fading back to join the ranks
of fans.”32
Neat Records fulfilled both of these purposes quite handily. The label
served as a virtual pipeline for MCA, which signed to contract several
groups that first recorded through Neat. Yet Neat was perhaps more
important for having recorded dozens of groups that would never
ascend to a major label contract, the majority of which were tied to a
regional scene in the Northeast of England that achieved considerable
internal momentum. With its support of such a localized regional scene,
Neat embodied a third function as an independent label, one that eluded
Johnson but that was noticed by other observers of NWOBHM. An
independent record label that was responsive to unsigned local talent
could do as much as a venue for live music or a regional fanzine to
confer coherence upon a given scene, to make its participants feel as
though they were part of something that was more or less unified. It
could also cultivate awareness of the scene outside of its own boundaries, since all but the smallest labels would make a point of distributing to London and other parts farther afield. Regionalism, in turn, was
a key aspect of the distinctive character of the NWOBHM phenomenon,
as the existence of strong local support networks created a stimulus for
new bands to emerge and also created a circuit of locations around
which bands could tour when their appeal began to grow beyond that
of the immediate scene out of which they sprang.
188 TIME WARP
Wallsend, the location of Neat Records, is a rather unassuming town
that was not itself the center of the northeastern regional scene. That
honor would have gone to nearby Newcastle, a much larger city that is
more generally regarded as the dominant economic and cultural location of the area. Neat emerged in Wallsend from the Impulse recording
studio, which the label’s founder, Dave Wood, had operated since the
1960s. Unlike Paul Birch, Wood saw Neat primarily as a business proposition. He did not have a particular affinity for heavy metal music, but
he noticed the popularity of the genre among the region’s audiences and
decided to pursue the opportunity. Describing the market for independent heavy metal releases, Wood echoed Birch’s explanation of the relatively limited scale of sales to be expected, but also outlined a carefully
calculated system according to which Neat issued material to minimize
losses: “Our basic premise has always been to put out a single to test the
market reaction and if that proves there’s a genuine interest in the band
then we’ll start working to establish them and help them progress. . . .
The real market for Heavy Rock is in albums, of course. We only release
the singles as a tester to get the fans interested enough in the band to
make an album a viable proposition.”33 Following such a cautious
policy, Neat had produced only four albums in its three years of operation at the time of the interview (October 1982). Wood described a new
distribution deal that he hoped would allow the label to reach national
record stores more effectively but acknowledged that he would never be
able to fully compete with the larger labels; his rather modest goal was
for Neat to be able to top twenty thousand in British sales for its most
successful releases.
The record that initiated Neat’s dedication to heavy metal was an EP
by Tygers of Pan Tang featuring the song “Don’t Touch Me There,”
issued by the label in late 1979. A brash, three-minute burst of sexual
come-on sung by the gruff-voiced Jess Cox, “Don’t Touch Me There”
found immediate favor with heavy metal record buyers and drew attention to both the band and Neat. Tygers were profiled by Sounds in
February 1980 and in May were included in an extensive Sounds feature
by Ian Ravendale centered around Neat Records and the northeastern
metal scene, which was dubbed “NENWOBHM” (for North East New
Wave of British Heavy Metal).34 However, a dispute over royalty payments between the Tygers and Dave Wood led the band to leave Neat
behind, and the first Tygers of Pan Tang album, Wild Cat, was released
under the auspices of MCA, whose promotional strength pushed it into
the top 20 of the British record charts.
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 189
Other groups on the Neat roster showed much greater loyalty to the
label. Two of the longer running Neat bands were also groups that definitively represented the more aggressive sound of NWOBHM, playing at
the limits of heavy metal convention. Raven released its first Neat single
in 1980 and maintained an arrangement with the label until 1984.
Venom began its recording career for Neat in 1981 and would stay with the
label until 1986. The two bands were often cast as rivals, something that
Venom in particular would highlight during its early career. Despite
their personal differences and their decided contrast in image and attitude, Raven and Venom would do most among NWOBHM bands to
further the legacy of Motörhead, pushing heavy metal into punkinspired musical terrain and creating the groundwork for the subgenre
styles of speed, thrash, and black metal. Both groups also helped to
stimulate a change in the values surrounding heavy metal, presenting
the extreme styles they practiced as more real and true, less beholden to
outside tastes, than the rest. With Raven, Venom, and many of the lesser
known bands recorded by Neat, metal was no longer striving to be
music for the masses. It was, first and foremost, music for metalheads.
The cover of Raven’s 1981 debut album, Rock Until You Drop,
announced the skewed, chaotic nature of the band’s take on heavy metal.
Set in a rather drab-looking room with yellowing brick walls, the photograph shows the expanse of the room, across which musical equipment is strewn about in an overwhelming clutter. In the foreground is a
guitar case with the word “Raven” spray-painted on its surface, topped
by a cymbal and stand fallen on its side. As the wreckage works its way
to the back of the room, we see amplifiers, instrument stands, guitar
effects pedals, drumsticks (many of them broken), and the remnants of
old concert set lists magic-markered onto scraps of paper, among other
items. Cowering at the back of the image are the three band members.
Bassist and singer John Gallagher is on the left side, clutching an amplifier cabinet and peering out from behind a speaker cone that has been
pierced by two drumsticks, which rests beside his head. His brother,
Mark, is on the right, only his head visible from behind a drum shell, his
face bearing a look of (clearly feigned ) bewilderment, as though he
were taken by surprise at the crush of musical debris. In the center is
drummer Rob “Wacko” Hunter, blond mane peering out from behind
another amplifier, directly in front of which—and more visible than any
of the musicians—are a Big Muff distortion pedal, the red body of a bass
guitar, and the white body of a Fender Stratocaster covered by an array
190 TIME WARP
of X patterns made with electrical tape. At the top of the cover, the name
of the band is cast in angular red letters, with a lightning bolt shooting
into the “v.” Just below is the album title, which seems to describe what
Raven had done in the time before shooting the photograph.
Like Samson and Iron Maiden, Raven had been together as a band in
one form or another for several years by the time of their first album.
They did not form in response to NWOBHM, but NWOBHM gave
them the opportunity to break beyond the Newcastle workingmen’s
clubs that had been their primary habitat as the 1970s drew to a close.35
In Ian Ravendale’s article on the northeastern scene, Raven received the
most enthusiastic comments of the several bands featured, although the
group at that time had yet to release a record. There, Ravendale claimed
that Raven were “what you might truly call a New Wave heavy metal
band” whose speed and intensity of delivery in concert made them come
across as much like the Ramones as Motörhead.36 Unlike the Ramones,
though, Raven’s sound was not all power-chord blur. Guitarist Mark
Gallagher had a propensity for extracting off-kilter solos full of tremolobar squeals and bends from his instrument, and John Gallagher had a
voice that stood in marked contrast to his counterpart Joey Ramone (or
Lemmy, for that matter), a high-pitched sound that alternated fluidly
between a sneer and a scream.
Gallagher’s sneer was most evident on “Don’t Need Your Money,” a
song first released as the band’s debut single in 1980 and subsequently
included on Rock Until You Drop. “Don’t Need Your Money” begins
with a riff by Mark Gallagher played in A-flat, first struck on the fourth
fret of the guitar’s bottom string. Gallagher repeats the note an octave
higher on the fourth string, and then plays a quick turnaround combination of F and F-sharp before landing back on the root (the rhythmic
pattern is BADA-bada-ba-da-ba-da-BA). The bass and drums accent the
first note of the riff, which Gallagher otherwise plays unaccompanied;
on the fourth repetition, the whole band enters and the song assumes
full force. Over a Chuck Berry–on-amphetamines rhythm fixed exclusively on an E-flat barre chord, John Gallagher intones a biting lyric
about his refusal of generosity from an older authority figure. At the end
of each line the band repeats the opening riff; the prolonged repetition
of a single chord during the lines of the verse confers upon the riff a
powerful sense of release compounded by the fact that it marks a shift
from dominant to tonic. The chorus works within the range of the subdominant; power chords at B and C-sharp underline the continuing
bitter lyric, though the central riff returns as John Gallagher sings the
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 191
title line, drawing out “money” so that it sounds like “m-honey.” This
pattern is repeated twice; the third time around, the power chords do
not resolve back to the A-flat tonic but move to points of further harmonic instability, extending to E-flat and then to F, at which point the
band comes to a halt and John Gallagher proclaims the song’s main sentiment sans accompaniment: “Don’t want no rich fat daddy trying to
change my life when I just want to relax.” A slacker anthem with an
anti-authoritarian spin, “Don’t Need Your Money” showed Raven
mixing down-to-earth aggression with a brand of musical force that
was at once tightly controlled and loosely held together. John
Gallagher’s voice and Mark Gallagher’s guitar regularly burst from the
expected—Mark issues a stream of picked harmonics and other unruly
sounds throughout and plays a dramatically arranged solo during which
the band’s attack increases in velocity—but the song as a whole remains
a compact statement.
On the strength of such material, Geoff Barton asserted that Rock
Until You Drop was “the best LP to emerge out of the NWOBHM since
Saxon’s Wheels of Steel,” which had come out well over a year earlier.37
At the time that he reviewed the album, Barton had already made an
effort to disavow the entire NWOBHM phenomenon out of frustration
at the ease with which record labels were exploiting enthusiasm for heavy
metal.38 Despite past reservations, Barton believed NWOBHM was even
stronger in late 1981 than it had been in its “Maiden/Leppard/Saxon
heyday.” The proof, he noted, was in the quality of the demo tapes that
he received weekly from aspiring heavy metal bands hoping to be featured in Kerrang!’s “Armed and Ready” column, which spotlighted
unknown groups. This constant flow of new music reinforced a claim
that had driven Barton’s writing about NWOBHM since the start: that
England’s current breed of heavy metal was driven by a strong “grassroots” element. It was a point also made evident for Barton by Raven’s
debut album, which showed that “heavy metal can move on, develop
and most importantly take up a positive place in the Eighties.”39
For their part, Raven portrayed themselves in interviews as steadfast
proponents of the metal cause. A survey of song titles by the band conveys the almost single-minded commitment to playing over-the-top rock
and roll: “Crash, Bang, Wallop,” “Fire Power,” “Faster than the Speed
of Light,” “Mind Over Metal,” “Sledgehammer Rock,” “Athletic
Rock,” and, of course, “Rock Until You Drop.” Lyrical sophistication
was, by John Gallagher’s own account, far subordinate to pushing at
musical extremes.40 By 1983, anticipating the release of their third—and
192 TIME WARP
some would say best—album, All for One, the members of Raven were
quick to criticize other heavy metal groups who were changing their
sound in a more “polished-chrome” direction. As the band levied
charges of “sellout” on groups such as Judas Priest, the Kerrang! writer
Neil Jeffries observed that Raven themselves had pursued “a course of
pure HM,” signified in part by their loyalty to Neat, with whom the
group remained satisfied.41 The claim of purity should cause some
raised eyebrows, and not only out of the sort of knee-jerk suspicion of
authenticity that has become standard in writing on popular music. If
Raven was the exemplar of “pure” metal by 1983, then the standard of
purity can be said to have changed quite dramatically in a short span of
time; music of such speed and unruly force would have fit far less comfortably into the genre in 1978. Moreover, the characterization of pure
heavy metal itself would have been unlikely prior to NWOBHM. Issues
of “selling out” and “staying true” were nothing new, but in previous
years the true music would more likely have been cast as rock writ large,
rather than heavy metal specifically. Under the influence of Raven and
other NWOBHM bands, combined with the way those bands were covered in the British music media, heavy metal had an authenticity it could
call its own.
The first sound you hear is a shrill midrange buzz, sheer noise that
pierces your attention and makes you hope it will soon go away. After
several seconds, a storm cloud of distortion begins to make itself audible, first at low volume but gradually rising until it overtakes the buzz.
The song moves full steam ahead as soon as maximum volume is
reached. Murky, reverb-soaked production confers a distinctive cast to
the fast-paced, bottom-heavy chromatic progression made all the more
cavernous by the detuning of the guitar’s lowest string down to D. Vocals
come forth in a coarse, grunting style, singing a reflexive lyric about
playing “metal for maniacs pure,” but with the twist that this is metal
somehow deriving from the depths of Hell, moved by Satan’s presence.
During the chorus, the midrange of the guitar becomes audible over the
continuing rumble of the bass and drums, playing a series of chord
fragments on the third and fourth strings marked by subtle tonal ambiguity, just enough to leave the listener uneasy. Meanwhile, the singer
chants the title line of the song with an assertive-bordering-onanguished yowl, “BLACK METAL,” after four repetitions of which the
band comes to a halt and the vocalist issues a command: “Lay down
your soul to the gods rock and roll!”
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 193
Discussion of the link between heavy metal and Satanic imagery, if
not Satanic practice, has been almost requisite in works that have sought
to take the genre seriously. The three principal scholarly books on
metal—those by Robert Walser, Deena Weinstein, and Donna Gaines—
all consider the topic extensively, seeking to controvert the alarmist
claims made by right-wing critics that have led at times to metal-related
moral panics in the United States.42 Strikingly, none of these authors
pays more than passing attention to Venom, the band whose influence
was such that the title of their song “Black Metal” was transformed in
the decade after its 1982 release into the name of a significant metal
subgenre that dwelled on Satanic themes with increasing single-mindedness. Unlike earlier groups such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin,
whose references to Satan and the occult were couched in terms that
were either strangely moralistic or strongly mystical, Venom made
recourse to Satanic references and imagery out of a more coarsely transgressive impulse.43 Hedonism rather than mysticism seemed to be at the
core of Venom’s approach, though the band also strove at times for the
sort of shock effect that one might get from a low-budget horror film.
Donna Gaines best explained the appeal of such material: “If partying
was sinful, the flesh, the drink, the desire to be fully human could only
be expressed by embracing the very evil you were condemned to. And if
you were a kid, with no power and no voice in the social world that regulated you, Satan could help.”44
As much as Venom’s image relied on Satanic references, the band’s
sound was a phenomenon unto itself. Like their label mates Raven,
Venom added considerable velocity to heavy metal musical style, and
the two groups also shared an affinity for sonic excess. But whereas
Raven’s sound was decidedly pitched toward the high end of the musical
spectrum, led by John Gallagher’s screech of a voice, Venom stayed resolutely at the low end. Bass, drums, and guitar were barely separated in
the typical Venom mix, and the overall effect was rather sludge-like.
Combined with their lyrical perspective, Venom’s music gave the impression of emanating from the depths, if not of Hell, at least of the Impulse
Studios where they recorded their albums for Neat.
When asked to explain their interest in Satan, Venom vacillated about
the seriousness of their intentions. In their first major interview in
Sounds, bassist and singer Cronos said that the band took their Satanism
“very seriously,” and drummer Abaddon added that they had been much
influenced by Anton LaVey’s book of Satanic practices and beliefs, The
Satanic Bible.45 They partially retrenched from such pronouncements,
194 TIME WARP
though, when Sounds readers expressed outrage at the group’s sacrilegious stance, prompting Venom’s spokesman Stan to reply, “We are not ridiculing Christianity, we are not holding up Satan as the supreme being. . . .
We are here to play heavy metal!”46 In a subsequent interview in
Kerrang!, Cronos further clarified the band’s perspective, explaining that
“Satan is power and Venom is power so we write about Satan,” and
admitting that Venom’s depiction of the dark prince was mainly geared
toward “what the kids want to hear. They want to hear that fokkin’
Satan will rip yer head off and pull the bones out of yer face.”47 Other
bands that employed Satanic themes in the early 1980s, most notably
Mercyful Fate, put forth a more philosophical dedication to Satanism.
For Venom, by contrast, Satan was mainly appealing as a symbol with
built-in fascination, the power of which the band could use in ways that
were sometimes unsettling but just as often were purely playful.
References to Satan and the occult, which dominated Venom’s song
lyrics, album covers, and offstage rhetoric, may have placed the band in
a musical lineage obviously linked to heavy metal. Other qualities of
Venom made them seem a more mixed proposition, however. Their
commitment to a deliberately sloppy style of musicianship and their
pursuit of “total noise,” in which harmonic and melodic content struggled to be heard over the sheer din of distortion, placed them in league
with the crossover tendencies of NWOBHM. The Sounds writer Garry
Bushell, a vocal proponent of young British punk groups such as the
Cockney Rejects and the 4-Skins, saw Venom fitting snugly into his
notion that the more extreme forms of punk and metal were blurring
into one another. When he submitted this idea to the band, the members of Venom were largely agreeable. Abaddon noted his distaste for
the singing style featured by most punk bands, but suggested, “Our attitudes are pretty punk. We just believe in going in the studio and banging it out, the messier the better.”48
Association with punk was far more acceptable to the members of
Venom than association with groups classified as “heavy metal” that
were deemed unworthy of the tag. Like Raven, Venom portrayed themselves as purveyors of “real” metal. Heavy metal had become too “technical,” in the words of Abaddon; Venom wanted to infuse the genre
with a different sort of power grounded less in virtuosity than in sheer
force of sound.49 That Venom expressed such criticisms while claiming
space within the genre is further evidence of the extent to which metal
genre rules were expanding through NWOBHM. Punk had issued a
challenge to virtuosity from without, and with bands like Venom that
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 195
challenge was now being drawn into heavy metal, albeit ambivalently.
Venom were very much at the margins of metal practice, and perhaps
out of acknowledgment of their position they were as likely to announce
their exclusion from the genre as claim to be its ultimate purveyors. Thus
did Cronos exclaim at one stage, “We’ve decided not to call ourselves
Heavy Metal any more. If people think the likes of Foreigner are Heavy
Metal then we don’t want to be associated with it at all. Our music is
Power Metal, Venom Metal, Black Metal, not Heavy Metal ‘cos that’s for
chicks.”50 Cronos was not unique in using reactionary gender values to
profess his sense of what mattered musically.51 Far more innovative was
the way he articulated an early sense of the generic subdivisions that
would come increasingly to define heavy metal over the course of the
next decade. Whereas many bands sought to renounce their association
with metal so as to claim inclusion in some broader categorization (rock,
pop), Venom may have been the first band to deliberately seek a more
limiting classification for itself. With this gesture, emphasizing narrowness rather than breadth of appeal, exclusivity rather than inclusiveness,
the seeds of an underground metal sensibility were planted.
EAST ENDERS
A dead body lies on the ground. Not just any body, but that of the honorable prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She was apparently caught in
the act of tearing down a poster from the side of a building. Remnants
of the poster remain attached to the wall, announcing an upcoming
“live” event. The nature of the event is obscure from what remains on
the building, but another part of the torn poster is strewn across
Thatcher’s prone body, the words “Iron Maiden” clearly visible.52
Meanwhile, lurking above her is the killer. Rather than running from
the scene of the crime, he lingers defiantly, with a gaze directed straight
at whoever might view the scene. He is in a crouch, his body thin, wiry,
and tense, clothed in denim jeans, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt.
Announcing his deviance is his face: a skull with withering skin, teeth
bared, eyes that are shining white dots set in dark cranial crevices, while
atop is a disheveled mane of long stringy hair. Left arm outstretched for
balance, he brandishes in his right hand his weapon, a long shimmering
blade still wet with blood.
The year was 1980, and this graphic is the cover of Iron Maiden’s
“Sanctuary” single (figure 12), released in a newly recorded version
from its previous appearance on the Metal for Muthas album. Maiden’s
196 TIME WARP
Figure 12. Punk-inflected violence makes its way into heavy metal: Iron Maiden’s Eddie kills
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the cover of the band’s “Sanctuary.” Illustration by
Derek Riggs. Courtesy of Iron Maiden Holdings Ltd.
gesture demonstrated that NWOBHM bands could poke holes in the
British power structure; the cover image contained reverberations of the
Sex Pistols recording “God Save the Queen,” sung by Johnny Rotten
three years earlier with all the bitter sarcasm he could muster as he
denounced the queen and her “fascist regime” in the midst of HRH’s
silver jubilee. In fact, the homicidal graphic was punk-inspired, at least
on the part of the man who drew it. Derek Riggs initially designed
Eddie, the skeleton-like figure portrayed as Thatcher’s killer, under the
influence of punk. By Riggs’s account, Eddie began as a sketch that was
supposed to be “this sort of brain-damaged punk. I was very influenced
by the punk idea of wasted youth, this whole generation that had just
been thrown in the bin, no future and all that.”53 Through a coincidental set of connections, Riggs’s artwork came to the attention of Iron
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 197
Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood, who immediately tagged Eddie as
an appropriate symbol for the band. “The only change we asked Derek
to make,” said Smallwood later, “was to make the hair a bit longer, so
it was less obviously like a punk.”54 Hair appropriate, Eddie appeared
on all Iron Maiden record covers thenceforth, drawn in most instances
by Riggs, and would also become integral to the Maiden stage show.
Cast as the ultimate headbanger, a marginal figure wholly dedicated to
the Maiden cause, Eddie is also a key emblem of metal/punk crossover
in the NWOBHM years.
Whether Maiden as a band was also indicative of metal/punk
crossover is a matter of some contention. Malc Macmillan refers dismissively to any such claims in his NWOBHM Encyclopedia, noting
that the association of Iron Maiden with punk was little more than a
fabrication by certain members of the music press, and the band members themselves had always tried to distance themselves from punk.55
Mick Wall, Iron Maiden’s biographer and a long-time metal journalist,
takes the connection to punk more seriously in his authorized account
of the band’s career, Run to the Hills. For Wall, Maiden embodies certain punk principles even though the band was never clearly aligned
with the genre. Specifically, the band comprised a collection of young
working-class men whose rough background fit certain key elements of
punk mythology concerning the connection between musical aggression and social marginality.
Discussing Maiden’s position in NWOBHM, Wall makes the metalpunk connection explicit: “Punk wanted to wipe the past out and start
again, but in its hurry to tear down the edifice, it had overlooked the
obvious—that, at its foundations, hard rock and heavy metal weren’t so
different from what the best punk rock imagined itself to be: raw, alive,
unafraid to offend, unafraid to be ridiculed and spat on for the clothes
it wore and the life it chose to lead.”56 Criticizing punk with one hand
while laying claim to some of its values with the other, Wall writes out
of recognition that punk has a powerful capacity to represent authenticity in current rock discourse but also remains stigmatized among segments of the metal audience at whom his book is targeted. His
vacillation is also indicative of the ways Maiden’s own position on these
matters shifted rather dramatically over time. Whatever one might say
about Iron Maiden circa 1980, it would be rather hard to insist on
the band’s punkish credibility in light of their two decades as a globetrotting heavy metal touring machine whose music has veered closer
and closer to punk’s truly radical other, prog rock.
198 TIME WARP
Which is why it is valuable to look back at the moment when Maiden
was perceived as a metal band with punk overtones: doing so allows one
to see just how much NWOBHM was predicated on a relationship of
dialogue between the two genres that did not necessarily inform the
work of NWOBHM-associated bands in subsequent years. As usual,
Geoff Barton was a key conduit of this dialogue. Despite bassist Steve
Harris’s announced resistance to punk in his first interview with Barton,
the critic declared their debut album to be “HM for the eighties. . . . A
safety pin/loon pant hybrid? In many ways, yes.”57 Covering the band as
they toured across Europe for the first time, Barton was even more
emphatic after witnessing Maiden in concert. Struck by the group’s speed
of execution as a live unit, Barton was moved to exclaim, “The punk/HM
crossover begins here, folks; your old early Seventies hard rock albums
have been made redundant by the freshly-forged, still-scalding speediness of the Iron Maiden sound.”58 The issue for Barton, as in so much of
his NWOBHM commentary, was to guard against retrogression, to
ensure that metal remained a genre moving forward rather than looking
backward, and throughout 1980 Maiden was for him the band that provided the strongest guarantee of the genre’s currency.
Ultimately, another Sounds writer, Garry Bushell, most championed
the metal/punk implications of Iron Maiden. Bushell was best known
for his association with Oi, a new phase of British punk that arose concurrently with NWOBHM. Key elements of Oi included the rejection
of any sort of star system, a defiant celebration of working-class ordinariness, a homosocial emphasis on manly virtue, and a form of outspoken British patriotism that at times shaded into racism. Framing
these qualities was a conviction that the promise of the earlier punk
moment had gone unfulfilled because its participants had unduly prioritized style over value and sought integration into the mainstream
British pop market. In an Oi roundtable discussion chaired by Bushell,
Lee Wilson of the group Infa-Riot succinctly articulated this sense of
removal from the punk of just a few years before: “In ’77 to be a punk
you had to be a freak, but now punk’s about ordinary geezers. Punks,
skins, bootboys. It ain’t about safety pins, zips and rainbow hair.”59
This desire to normalize punk drew considerable criticism from figures
who remained loyal to the more vanguard character of the late 1970s
punk era. Yet Oi marked a crucial stage in the changing meaning and
definition of British punk and was a major part of the musical and cultural environment in which metal and punk were seen to be informing
each other in the early 1980s.
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 199
Bushell brought his Oi-inflected sensibility squarely to the center of
his journalistic encounters with Maiden, the first of which appeared in
February 1980. Making it sound as though he was covering heavy metal
only grudgingly, given his punk allegiance, Bushell was nonetheless
heartened when he learned that Maiden vocalist Paul Di’anno shared
his affinity for a formative Oi band, the Cockney Rejects, whom Bushell
in fact managed for a time. Although Di’anno’s stated interest in punk
crossed generic lines, it made sense to Bushell in other ways; as he
observed, “Like the Rejects the Maiden are all East End boys and proud
of it.”60 Di’anno confirmed Bushell’s assertion with pro-punk remarks
of his own, proclaiming at another point, “I reckon we’re the only real
New Wave HM band. . . . ’Cos we’re the only ones who don’t give a
monkeys. We’re an HM band with punk attitudes.” When Bushell put the
question of Maiden’s punk leanings to Steve Harris, though, he got a more
diffident, if not entirely negative, response: “I know what Geoff’s getting
at [referring to Barton’s comments about punk/metal crossover]. . . .
Because our music’s fast and hard. But the structure of the songs is a lot
different. The crossover is more off stage. . . . I think the speed and
aggression’s more to do with our age than anything.”61 In the end,
Bushell came away enthusiastic about Iron Maiden but noncommittal
regarding their connection to punk and somewhat skeptical about the
degree to which the “new wave” of British metal was really so different
from the old.
Despite his reservations, Bushell remained on the band’s beat. His
next feature on Maiden appeared almost exactly one year later, in
February 1981, and if anything drew even more attention to the group’s
punk connections. Under the banner “Cockney Crossroads,” Bushell
submitted a two-sided report. On one side was an update on the band
in light of the release of their second album, Killers, which had been
given a lukewarm review in Sounds by the staff writer Robbi Millar just
a few weeks earlier.62 On the other was an article on the Cockney
Rejects, presented as the punk counterpart to Maiden’s metal/punk
crossover. By Bushell’s account, the Rejects were moving more in the
direction of heavy metal in their music, as evinced by a cover of
Motörhead’s eponymous song recorded for an upcoming EP release.
Vince Riordan of the Rejects defended the band against charges of
“going metal.” In a line of argument that would become familiar to
punk fans throughout the 1980s, Riordan claimed that they had merely
improved as musicians and thus were playing with a more straightforward sort of power. Bushell would not let the matter die so easily,
200 TIME WARP
however; he continued to challenge the band, though in doing so he
revealed his own concerns more clearly. He did not care so much if the
Rejects decided to play heavy metal, but he did worry that such a decision would alienate the band’s established fan base, which could be quite
territorial about preserving punk as a distinct form.63
Iron Maiden was in no particular danger of going punk, but the topic
of punk circulated through much of Bushell’s conversation with the
band. A particularly revealing exchange occurred when the critic
pressed the band about the lack of social relevance in their lyrics and
encouraged them to sing more about “where you come from,” the working-class East End background that they shared with so many of their
punk counterparts. Maiden band members Harris and Di’anno rejected
Bushell’s suggestion with equal vehemence. “Loads of bands sing about
where they come from, you’ve got the [Angelic] Upstarts and the Rejects
for that,” observed Harris, “but we don’t conform, we write about different things, like torture instruments.” Di’anno put the matter more
suggestively: “You slag us about the lyrics, but why? We take our background for granted, it’s the thing we wanna get away from.”64 If punk
was still held at arm’s length by the members of Iron Maiden, the group
was no more eager to proclaim their allegiance to NWOBHM. Making
a particular comparison with their heavy metal counterparts Saxon,
Harris insisted that the only real point of similarity was that both bands
had spent years “slogging” their way around the British bar circuit as
real “working bands.” Di’anno noted that their hard work distinguished
them from so many of the punk bands that had arisen: “Punk was
s’posed to be working class . . . but most of the people in it were middle
class. . . . We’d never fit in with them ’cos we don’t put on false airs.”65
In his classic study of the British school system, Learning to Labor, Paul
Willis described the formation of what he termed a working-class
“counter-school culture,” an intensely masculine sphere in which young
men assumed the role of “lads” who refused to conform to the regulated
nature of the educational institution. According to Willis, this lad culture
was an extension of the masculine space of the shop floor inhabited by
the fathers of working-class British youth. As such it provided a crucial
sense of intergenerational continuity and allowed young men to imaginatively perform their differentiation from a system and set of social
rules that were ultimately designed to keep them in their place. For
Willis, though, the lad culture was itself part of what kept these boys in
their place, what ensured that they would follow the working-class
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 201
course that had been laid out for them. Celebrating the virtues of masculine self-regulation, demonstrable physical prowess, and “living for the
moment,” lad culture was a self-perpetuating structure, and a jealous
one at that: the effort to escape, to strive for a sort of social mobility, was
deemed a form of betrayal and of conformity to social norms.66
Oi was a clear offshoot of lad culture, embracing an open and selfconscious working-class identity that was both oppositional and largely
conservative—conservative not in the sense that all Oi bands were
Thatcherites, let alone right-wing extremists, but in the sense that allegiance to Oi required allegiance to a core set of values concerning class,
masculinity, and, less uniformly, nationhood that were fiercely guarded.
Like many heavy metal bands, Iron Maiden had as much claim to a similar sort of working-class identity as the bulk of Oi’s participants. In the
comments by Harris and Di’anno, however, it becomes apparent that
class was simultaneously a point of connection and of conflict between
metal and punk during the NWOBHM years. Di’anno in particular held
to a strong working-class identification, but both he and Harris made it
clear that the working class was where the band came from but not
where they wanted to stay. The members of Maiden might regularly
return to their old stomping grounds in the East End, but in the meantime they were looking to break out well beyond its boundaries. They
had already begun to do so quite dramatically, having recently returned
from a tour of Japan prior to their second interview with Bushell.67
That Di’anno would himself soon depart Iron Maiden, largely due to
his own conflicts over the scale of the band’s success, indicates that such
tensions were not merely external to the band but part of its inner
dynamic. Once former Samson vocalist Bruce Dickinson joined the
band, Iron Maiden was rarely discussed in terms of metal/punk
crossover. In part this was because the band’s rising success made such
discussion less credible. But it was also because Dickinson stabilized the
band’s generic identity, not by virtue of his social class but by virtue of
his voice. Paul Di’anno’s singing style had grounded Iron Maiden’s
music. While the band’s complex instrumental interplay had always been
shaped by a high degree of metal virtuosity, Di’anno sang in a gruff,
atypical snarl that lent a certain menace to the group’s sound and made
the violent personae of songs such as “Killers” more convincing than
they otherwise would have been. Dickinson, by contrast, had a considerably broader vocal range and sang with more sheer force than
Di’anno, but also more closely resembled other prominent metal singers
such as Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan and Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. Robert
202 TIME WARP
Walser’s discussion of vocal timbre in heavy metal music can far more
readily be applied to Dickinson than to Di’anno; whereas Dickinson
projected “brightness and power” that was often conveyed through
“long sustained notes,” Di’anno more often made the listener feel
trapped within the song’s narrative, with escape afforded only by the
free-flowing movement of the guitars.68 Bruce Dickinson may have been
rightfully dubbed the “air raid siren,” but Di’anno issued a different
sort of warning to the band’s audience, and he carried much of what
gave Iron Maiden a punk-inflected aura away with him when he left.
HELLO AMERICA
“Def Leppard vs. Iron Maiden: Who Rules the Metal Empire?” So asked
the U.S.-based Hit Parader magazine in September 1983. By that time
the vast majority of NWOBHM bands had faded back into the obscurity from which they came, but Leppard and Maiden had become star
performers on an international level. Def Leppard was at a particular
high point. Their third album, Pyromania, had been released earlier in
the year and soared up the U.S. record charts, having been kept from
reaching the number 1 position only by the unstoppable sales juggernaut that was Michael Jackson’s Thriller. In England Leppard also
enjoyed success, but on a considerably more modest scale; Pyromania
made it into the top 20.69 This imbalance in their relative success in the
United States and the United Kingdom was reflected in the Hit Parader
article, which explained that Def Leppard had long been subject to
doubts of their homeland loyalty among British audiences. Iron Maiden
had avoided such doubts by making a show of playing in England as
often as their touring schedule would allow. By contrast, Def Leppard
was portrayed as having committed disproportionate energy to success
in the American market; the sheer scale of their popularity with U.S.
audiences was taken as evidence of their unbalanced efforts. Guitarist
Steve Clark expressed his frustration at the situation, asking of British
audiences, “What would everyone have us do? We did play a 10-date
British tour before coming over to America. That covered most of the
major markets. The States are so much bigger than England that we
know to tour here properly will take about six months.”70
Did Def Leppard “sell out” to the American market? The question is
largely irrelevant. British rock bands had been targeting the United
States since the time of the “British Invasion,” often with great fanfare.
Even the Sex Pistols realized the importance of the American market for
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 203
any British band that hoped to expand its influence, though their effort
to tour the United States was a failure. Yet the degree to which Def
Leppard was so closely scrutinized for its appeal to American audiences
connotes something significant about the band, and about NWOBHM
as a broader phenomenon: British heavy metal was construed as being
the “true” form of metal; American metal was cast as being less genuinely “heavy.”71 To cater to American audiences, then, was not only to
abandon fans at home, it was to court the favor of a base of listeners
who were perceived to be demanding a lighter shade of metal.
Def Leppard became subject to such charges before their first album
was even released, and the reason had much to do with the song chosen
as their first single after they signed their deal with Phonogram. “Hello
America” was a virtual calling card to the former colonies and was
musically a template for the sort of pop-oriented metal that would make
Leppard one of the best-selling rock bands of the 1980s. The song
begins a cappella, with shimmering vocal harmonies of a sort that one
rarely found in music classified as heavy metal, singing the title phrase
with a melody that would repeat during the chorus and would form the
song’s main hook. When the instruments enter they do so with force, a
bursting A power chord leading the charge; this was not, strictly speaking, “lite metal” of the sort that the band would later purvey.72 During
the verses the sound is quite conventionally heavy, with the guitars playing a single note riff in the instrument’s lower register. A key change
during the bridge from I to V (A to E) lightens the tone and heightens
the song’s sense of momentum; the chorus, sung over a much more highpitched set of chords centered around the key of G, confers that sense of
release common to the best pop choruses with an explosion of treble
and high vocal harmonies. Lyrically the song conflates “America” with
“California” in a way that could be done only by someone whose image
of the United States is derived entirely from popular culture. All the
place-names referenced in the song are California locations, with
Hollywood and “Frisco” placed alongside the more unusual San Pedro
Bay. Music and lyrics intersect most intriguingly in a break after the
guitar solo, when all the instruments drop out but the drums, which
keep a heavy tom-tom beat reminiscent of the beat used in many a
1960s surf song, while singer Joe Elliott leads another round of harmonies that repeat the song’s first verse. On the line “Takin’ me a trip
I’m goin’ down to California,” Elliott stretches the last word to sound
like “Califor-ni-ayyy,” seeming at once to emulate and parody the vocal
inflection of 1960s West Coast surf pop.
204 TIME WARP
Commenting on “Hello America” as Def Leppard finished its first
tour of the United States, Elliott explained that the song was based on
fantasy and asked rhetorically, “Coming from Sheffield what was I supposed to write about—spoon factories!”73 For a young working-class
Briton, America could stand as a place that captured the imagination.74
Geoff Barton, himself holding no small fascination for the United States,
nonetheless deemed “Hello America” a sign that Leppard’s priorities
were shifting in ways that he found worrying, and that the band put too
much of their trust in the corporate “wisdom” of Phonogram. In the
critic’s words, “The frontrunners of the New Wave of heavy metal seem
quite content to make the same mistakes as their BOF [boring old fart]
predecessors.”75 Given the opportunity to defend the group, Elliott suggested that Barton’s concerns were largely the result of his having viewed
the band’s rise from the ground up; Barton had played a role in bringing
the group wider exposure and now felt conflicted that Leppard’s record
company was making such a concerted push to expose them so much
more broadly. Yet the singer also emphasized that Def Leppard was in
no position to unduly challenge the decisions made by Phonogram. The
band may have preferred that another song be released rather than
“Hello America”—Elliott stated his preference for “Rock Brigade,”
which would be the opening track of Leppard’s first album—but they
did not want to risk alienating the label over such a disagreement.
Barton was mildly chastened by the exchange, but still concluded on a
note of pessimism. He was looking forward to the release of Leppard’s
album, but, he said, “I wish to God that it was coming out on Bludgeon
Riffola records. Don’t you?”76
America thus stood at this early stage for the corporatization of
NWOBHM, anxieties over which Barton had previously voiced in his
response to Metal for Muthas. In ensuing articles, the journalist would
seek to atone for his harsh assessment of Def Leppard’s direction,
though he would not entirely retract his judgment. Reviewing On
through the Night, the band’s debut, he recounted a conversation with
Judas Priest guitarist K. K. Downing, who counseled Barton that he
should be supporting a young band like Def Leppard at such a sensitive
phase in the band’s career. “You’ve got to give and take in this business,”
said Downing; Leppard was only learning the process of compromise
necessary for success.77 Barton sympathized with such a position, and
over time his support for the band became less qualified. Yet the specter
of his initial charges against Def Leppard would linger, not least in the
memory of singer Joe Elliott. Interviewed in 1982, Elliott complained
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 205
about the grudge that British audiences seemed to hold against the band:
“40,000 people bought our first album [in England], but only 20,000
people bought High ’n’ Dry [the second album by the band], you’re not
telling me the other 20,000 didn’t buy it because they didn’t like the
album. I believe they didn’t buy it because they read the article in Sounds
saying that Leppard had changed its spots.”78 Elliott’s chronology might
be off; given that Barton’s article was printed to coincide with the release
of On through the Night, it is unlikely that it drove people away from
Leppard’s second album, issued over a year later. Nonetheless, Def
Leppard remained poised on a U.S./U.K. axis for much of the next
decade, their loyalty to both their homeland and to a more heavy sort of
metal called into question by the scale of their success in the States.
Def Leppard effectively dramatized their “in-between” position
during their tour to promote the breakthrough Pyromania. By this time,
the band had achieved a considerable degree of crossover success into
the pop market, which was reflected in the composition of their concert
audiences. In contrast to the overwhelmingly masculine character of the
usual heavy metal crowd, Def Leppard drew sizable numbers of young
female fans to their shows, such that one commentator observed with
only partial irony that the band had somehow conjoined AC/DC with
the Bay City Rollers.79 To entertain this diversifying audience, Def
Leppard designed a full-scale arena rock spectacle with Joe Elliott as the
appointed ringleader. Befitting a band that titled its album Pyromania,
the show was replete with flash bombs and other like effects that had
become the stock-in-trade of the heavy rock concert experience.
Through it all, Elliott paraded energetically from one side of the stage to
the other, wearing an item meant to convey where his true loyalties lay:
a shirt imprinted with the Union Jack (figure 13). Explaining his attire,
the singer declared, “I’m proud of being English. . . . Maybe by wearing
the Union Jack on stage people will see we’re not selling out to
America.”80 If the donning of the British flag was meant to assert the
band’s patriotism, though, the symbol took on a rather different meaning at the climax of the show. Provoking the audience with a bit of mock
striptease, Elliott removed his native Union Jack to reveal “a previously
hidden stars ’n’ stripes singlet,” a gesture portrayed by the journalist
Dante Bonutto as “a genuine tribute to the country that first squeezed a
pedestal under [Led] Zeppelin and has now followed suit with the
Lepps.”81 Association with America may have posed a challenge to Def
Leppard’s legitimacy in some circles, but playing to an arena-size U.S.
audience the band proved themselves more than willing to please the
206 TIME WARP
Figure 13. Joe Elliott of Def Leppard sports the Union Jack onstage, 1983. Leppard’s
success in the United States made their allegiance to England a matter of dispute.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
crowd, even if it meant undermining their own pledge of patriotism. As
their star continued to rise, Def Leppard did not so much change their
spots as trade them in for stars and stripes.
NO NEW WAVE
By summer of 1984, Def Leppard’s manager, Peter Mensch, at that point
one of the most powerful managers in rock, publicly noted what he perceived to be a dearth of new talent in British heavy metal. “What’s happening here?” Mensch asked in Kerrang!. “For over 20 years Britain has
consistently delivered the highest proportion of successful Heavy Metal
acts anywhere—but now there’s nothing.”82 In response, Geoff Barton
tried to make the case for the defense, initiating a new column called
“Best of British” which would draw exclusive attention to rising acts on
the British heavy metal scene. However, the need for such a column was
itself a mark of how much things had changed since 1981, when
Kerrang! first began publication. The change was not only, or even primarily, a matter of the most successful British bands having turned their
attention to the United States. Rather, American bands themselves were
now dominating the attention of heavy metal fans both at home and in
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 207
the United Kingdom. Bands such as Twisted Sister, Mötley Crüe, and
Quiet Riot had broken the heavy metal market wide open in the States,
while the American underground began to rise to the surface with the
growing prominence of Metallica and other proponents of the emergent
subgenres of speed and thrash metal. In this context, bands such as
Persian Risk, New Torpedos, Tokyo Blade, and Emerson—all featured in
the first “Best of British” column in Kerrang!—faced intense competition to get their music noticed, a situation compounded by the growing
expectation in the record industry that heavy metal bands could reach
levels of success that few would have foreseen in 1979.
Just over a year earlier it had still been possible for an American
heavy metal fan to write to Kerrang! proclaiming the absolute superiority of British heavy metal over its American counterpart and to assert
that “Kerrang! offers America a fascinating look at a music scene
thought not to exist by 98% of my fellow countrymen.”83 In 1984 such
claims rang hollow. British heavy metal was not by any means dead by
that year, but the New Wave of British Heavy Metal had clearly run its
course, and with it had passed the enthusiastic sense that British metal
defined what was most forward-thinking about the genre. On this score,
perhaps the most important change was discursive. When Geoff Barton
wrote about a “new wave” of heavy metal in 1979, the phrase connoted
a sense of progress and possibility carried over from the first wave of
British punk. By 1983, however, new wave had significantly shifted in its
connotation, referring to a brand of pop that retained some of punk’s
art school iconoclasm but made a more decisive break with the aggressive, guitar-based punk musical aesthetic as well as with the workingclass populism that had been a key link between the punk new wave and
its heavy metal counterpart. Crucially, new wave in its transformed guise
was also far more prone to gender ambiguity than heavy metal had
allowed in recent years. Among the NWOBHM bands that remained,
only Joe Elliott of Def Leppard could see fit to envision a new wave/heavy
metal exchange of substance in this new context. Characterizing the current British metal scene as one that lacked novelty, Elliott suggested in a
1983 interview, “What we really need is an audience that’ll accept a
band that looks like Duran Duran but sounds like Saxon. That’s the
next step because let’s face it, Duran Duran look amazing.”84 Elliott’s
vision would find something like its fulfillment in the next few years,
though the locus for the renewal of heavy metal’s visual appeal would be
not in England but in the United States, and specifically in the revival of
glam that took root in the Southern California metal scene.
208 TIME WARP
If NWOBHM as a whole would not sustain itself throughout the
commercial boom of 1980s heavy metal, it can certainly be given partial credit for that boom. The impact of NWOBHM can be measured
from the pages of the two leading American magazines to cover hard
rock in the late 1970s, Circus and Creem. Both publications ran cover
stories, in 1978 and 1979, respectively, questioning the continued survival of heavy metal. In Circus the threat was mainly posed by the success of disco, but also by the increased corporatization of rock, which
had eliminated much of the capacity for the sort of oppositional relationship to the mainstream on which heavy metal had ostensibly
thrived.85 For Creem the issue was more basic: heavy metal no longer
appeared to have any creative vitality, with its most established representatives having “either broken up or been reduced by middle age to
fumbling flyfarts who don’t know a power chord from a loose showerhead anymore.”86 Both magazines rescinded their concerns about the
genre’s future in 1980, however, and the principal cause for the reversal
was the British metal scene, specifically the growing profile of Def
Leppard. In June of that year, David Fricke wrote a feature on the band
in Circus accompanied by a separate story on NWOBHM in which he
referred to Geoff Barton’s coverage in Sounds and echoed Barton’s characterization of the phenomenon in terms of metal/punk crossover.87
Meanwhile, Rick Johnson, a writer for Creem, appropriated the “new
wave” appellation in his October 1980 cover story, claiming, “The ‘new
wave’ of HM is another generation or two removed from the old blues
framework and far more condensed than the earlier strains.”88 Def
Leppard headed the list of bands leading the genre’s new charge, and Iron
Maiden also merited mention amid a grab bag of new and veteran bands
from the United States and Europe. Although NWOBHM as a whole
would never have the profile in the United States that it did in England, it
had a decisive impact on the portrayal of heavy metal at a key point of
transition in the genre’s history and contributed to the sense that metal
would remain both commercially and musically viable into the 1980s.
Evaluating the historical importance of NWOBHM, the metal chronicler Ian Christe recently claimed that it reflected the culmination of a
decade of development on the British scene. “Black Sabbath had introduced heavy metal, Judas Priest gave it flash, and Motörhead fortified it
with true grit. So equipped, heavy metal swallowed punk rock and pressed
forward.”89 Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, one of NWOBHM’s most
tireless proponents, put forth a similar perspective in his liner notes to
a retrospective compilation that he assembled with the help of Geoff
THE NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL 209
Barton: “[NWOBHM] was long-hair adopting the do-it-yourself attitude and values of the punk movement that had so dominated at grass
root levels the previous few years (76–78) and ironically in many ways
had made it very difficult for the young HM bands to get the attention
they needed.”90 The relationship between metal and punk assumed new
salience during the brief period when NWOBHM flourished, but was
more conflicted than these writers admit. No question, the “new wave”
of British metal was an attempt among British music writers and musicians to come to terms with the impact of punk. As we have seen
throughout this chapter, though, even bands touted as metal/punk
crossovers such as Iron Maiden were often less than fully enthusiastic
about the implications of such an exchange, and some of the most visible figures, such as Neal Kay, were outright opposed to the incursion of
punk. These attitudes are not evidence that metal and punk had no
meaningful contact in the NWOBHM years; rather, they demonstrate
that the significance of punk to the reformation of British metal had
both a positive and a negative charge to it, that metal bands of the time
were as likely to be reacting against punk as incorporating its values and
features, and may have been doing both at the same time. Furthermore,
it was this tension between the two genres as much as growing sympathy between them that gave rise to new enthusiasm for metal among
British audiences and to new inflections in the sound and mode of production that governed British metal.
The New Wave of British Heavy Metal can best be assessed as having
had a paradoxical set of effects on the genre of heavy metal as a whole.
Through NWOBHM, metal became at once more assimilated into the
pop music marketplace and more underground. Metal music would
come to be based around shorter, tighter songs, but whether those songs
had strong melodic hooks or largely abandoned discernible melody in
favor of a new emphasis on speed and chaotic noise varied radically
from band to band. Independent record production became a crucial
new aspect of heavy metal economics, but for the vast majority of bands
remained a means to an end more than the ideological cornerstone of a
do-it-yourself ethos. At the very least, NWOBHM showed that heavy
metal could be brought back down to the grassroots level, could reassert
its connection to an audience in small-scale, local spaces that were at a
remove from the arenas and other large venues that had become the
genre’s natural habitat in the past decade.
6
Metal/Punk Reformation
Three Independent Labels
THE INDEPENDENT TURN
“What Is This Thing Called Hardcore?” asked Al Flipside in the
summer of 1982. Copublisher of the Southern California fanzine also
called Flipside, he had seen hardcore arise from its first stirrings in the
region’s suburbs to a movement that was national and even international in scope. Hardcore generated considerable anxiety in the Los
Angeles Times and other local publications due to its apparent violence,
evident in the new style of “slam dancing” to which it gave rise and to
regular clashes between local authorities and punk audiences. Flipside
acknowledged these aspects of hardcore but ultimately laid more stress
on two less sensational elements of the phenomenon. First, hardcore
was eminently local in its orientation, and thus existed in contrast to the
mass production of rock that had taken hold in the 1970s. Connected
to this localism was the second feature: hardcore was produced through
a growing network of independent record labels that had been stimulated into existence by the late 1970s rise of punk but reached a critical
mass only in the early 1980s. “The pattern has repeated itself all over
the country,” proclaimed Flipside, as though issuing a call to action.
“One band forms a label as its only means to release its own material.
210
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 211
That label then offers the opportunity for other bands to be heard.”1
Through such means a new, decentralized musical infrastructure came
into existence, the likes of which had arguably not been seen since the
mid-1960s.
A year later another L.A. writer noticed a similar trend. For the Los
Angeles Times contributor Chris Morris, though, the significant
occurrence was not the sheer proliferation of independent labels but
the sort of music they were releasing. Morris was reporting on the
rapid growth of the heavy metal scene in Southern California, the scale
of which was demonstrated by the massive success of “Heavy Metal
Day” at the recent US Festival held in nearby San Bernardino County,
which drew as many as three hundred thousand attendees by some
accounts. Three local groups took the stage that day—Van Halen,
Quiet Riot, and Mötley Crüe—and all three had deals with major
labels and were enjoying considerable success. More impressive to
Morris than the high profile of these bands was the number of local
heavy metal groups who were issuing records on independent labels,
most of them also locally run. As Morris observed, “This is an unusual
turn of events in a musical form noted for platinum sales and arenafilling concerts,” but it could be explained by the influence of the
scores of punk and new wave acts that had followed a similar path in
recent years.2
Farther up the coast, in Seattle, a transplanted music fan and writer
from the Midwest made it his business to survey these developments.
“Sub/Pop USA,” a column by Bruce Pavitt, debuted in the April 1983
issue of the local music weekly The Rocket. The column was an outgrowth of a radio show Pavitt had hosted at the Evergreen College station, KAOS, in Olympia, Washington, and a fanzine he had begun to
edit as an Evergreen student. “Subterranean Pop” was the name of
Pavitt’s show; for the fanzine he shortened the name to Sub Pop. Adding
“USA” to his column’s title indicated the expanding scope of Pavitt’s
interest. In the center of the page he explained his mission: “Sub/Pop
USA will be a regular column, focusing on a different American city with
each issue. Radio stations, record stores and publications that support
local, independent releases will be featured, as well as clubs that book
bands playing original rock, pop or soul. In the past few years, local
labels have developed and expanded—I’d like to emphasize that development by highlighting the labels as well as the artists. Besides local documentation, Sub/Pop USA will also include a Sub 10 list of local/regional
releases from around the country that deserve national/international
212 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
attention. Please send me free records.”3 True to his word, Pavitt’s
opening profile of the Portland, Oregon, rock scene put the record labels
first. Trap, Smegma, and Brainstem were among the labels he chose to
cover, all based in Portland and home to local performers such as the
Wipers, Smegma, and Sado-Nation. Meanwhile, his introductory Sub
10 list stepped outside of the exclusive local concentration to present a
list of releases that were regionally and stylistically diverse. Pavitt celebrated the merits of the “art/hardcore crossover” of Boston’s Mission of
Burma alongside the go-go sound of Washington, DC’s Trouble Funk,
the melodic hardcore of Southern California’s Descendents, and, to represent his new home location, the pop/new wave Seattle Syndrome 2
compilation.
These three accounts, published within the span of thirteen months,
offer a snapshot of the span and scope of American independent record
labels during the 1980s. Al Flipside’s piece rightly points to hardcore as
a major motivating force behind the growth of independent labels.
Within the sphere of hardcore, independent production was aligned
with the broader ethos of DIY (do it yourself), a mode of self-reliant
activity that affected a wide range of pursuits—not only record production and distribution but the creation of fanzines, the establishment of
venues for live music, even the willingness to go ahead and start a band
whether or not one had the requisite music abilities to do so. Such practices were all in place to a degree during the initial phase of punk’s emergence in the 1970s, celebrated by the likes of Caroline Coon and Mark
Perry. In the 1980s, with the growth of hardcore, they would become
even more thoroughly entrenched as defining aspects of the genre, used
to measure the commitment of a given band or individual.
Independent production was by no means limited to the province of
hardcore punk, however. New wave, go-go, and rap all received vital
support from similar networks of independent labels in these years; so
too, crucially, did heavy metal. Chris Morris’s surprise at metal’s reliance
on independent means was shaped by the commercial ascent of the
genre happening at the time. This occurrence was far less surprising
when viewed in relation to the overseas metal market. Independent
metal merchants in the United States were taking their cue not only
from hardcore punk and new wave, but also from the success of similar
independent ventures in England—those associated with NWOBHM—
and continental Europe. Indeed, Metal Blade and Megaforce, perhaps
the two most prominent independent metal labels of the era, were
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 213
started by figures who entered into the metal retail market by catering
to stateside fans eager to obtain British and European import releases.
Through their efforts, heavy metal cultivated its own version of DIY, one
that was not so ideologically loaded but that nonetheless exerted considerable impact on the genre’s development throughout the 1980s.
Both metal and punk, then, were served by the independent turn.
But the story of how independent labels affected the development of
the two genres in the 1980s does not end there. Independent labels not
only helped create and reproduce metal and punk, they also played a
key role in transforming the two genres. At the independent level, metal
and punk informed and entered into each other more so than at the
level of major label production. Through this process of mutual influence at the lower levels of the music industry, new hybrid forms began
to emerge: hardcore bands adopted stylistic qualities associated with
metal, and metal bands forged subgenres such as thrash and speed metal
that were clearly predicated on the absorption of certain hardcore traits.
That one of the new subgenres was itself termed “crossover,” in reference to the combination of metal and punk tendencies, reveals much
about the degree to which traffic between the two genres attained considerable visibility. By the end of the decade this extended process of
cross-fertilization would give rise to another hybrid creation, grunge,
which was also nurtured in the independent sphere before entering into
the larger world of musical commerce to reshape the youth culture of
the early 1990s.
The next chapter explores the more strictly musical side of these
changes, through the work of pivotal bands such as Black Flag,
Metallica, the Melvins, and Green River. This chapter examines the crucial role played by three labels active in the 1980s and 1990s that collectively laid the foundation for metal/punk reformation: SST, Metal
Blade, and Sub Pop. SST perfectly fit Al Flipside’s characterization of the
function of independent labels. Formed by Greg Ginn, guitarist for the
California hardcore outfit Black Flag, to release the band’s own music,
SST soon assumed a far broader reach both geographically and stylistically and did much to bridge the gap between local and national punk
bands and audiences. Meanwhile, the label promoted music that grew
further and further away from the rigidly defined hardcore aesthetic
over the course of the 1980s. Also based in Southern California was
Metal Blade, which was founded by Brian Slagel, an avid metal enthusiast. Beginning with the compilation Metal Massacre, Metal Blade arguably
did more than any U.S. label—with the exception of New York–based
214 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Megaforce—to cultivate a more “underground” stream of American
metal that was steeped in the influence of NWOBHM. Then came Sub
Pop, formed out of a partnership between Bruce Pavitt and another
enterprising Seattle figure, Jonathan Poneman. Together, the pair made
a concerted effort to promote Seattle rock as a package deal: sound and
image became conjoined with a fabricated mythology that inserted
Seattle into a narrative of great, local, independent rock and roll stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s. Their product, often pitched as the
Seattle Sound but more commonly termed grunge, was in many ways
the fulfillment of the tendencies toward metal/punk crossover that
assumed such momentum over the course of the 1980s. All three labels
demonstrate a central maxim concerning the unique circumstances of
independent production: association with a particular genre (hardcore,
metal, independent rock) was a principal means through which SST,
Metal Blade, and Sub Pop established their identities. But once established, each label began to challenge existing generic definitions to cultivate a distinctive aesthetic evident in musical output, album art, and
other associated media.
INTERROGATING INDEPENDENCE
The 1980s saw dramatic growth in the number of independent labels
working to produce various streams of American music, but that does
not mean the era was a golden age of independence. To come to terms
with the role played by such labels in the production and transformation of metal and punk, one first has to acknowledge the constraints
under which they operated. Holly Kruse described these constraints in
her valuable study of American independent rock. By her account, the
proliferation of independent labels coincided with growing efforts by
major record corporations to integrate these labels and the music they
produced into their structures as part of a broader path of product
diversification that came to dominate the record industry.4 Independent
labels had the capacity to target specific niche audiences that the major
labels lacked and sought to appropriate. As a result, the major labels not
only signed artists whose early careers were overseen by independent
labels, but also began to absorb the labels themselves as subsidiary elements of the larger corporation. For the smaller labels, the primary
reason to agree to such an arrangement was to gain access to avenues of
record distribution that would otherwise be closed; as Joe Carducci, a
long-time SST employee, noted, the “Sad Wings of Distribution” were
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 215
the primary factor that limited the ability of independent labels to gain
a fair share of the market or transform the workings of the record industry in some thoroughgoing manner.5
Independent labels were therefore not as distinct from their major
label counterparts as their designation would imply; as often as not,
their relationship to larger industry channels was one of interdependence. Added to this complication was another, that during the course
of the 1980s and into the 1990s “independent”—or its shortened form,
“indie”—itself assumed the status of something akin to a genre label.
British independent label Creation Records promoted this new connotation for indie rock, laying the foundation for the widespread success
of the “Britpop” phenomenon associated with such groups as Oasis,
Blur, Elastica, and Suede.6 In the United States, the success of Sub Pop
and the Seattle Sound was part of a parallel course of events, built on
the independent infrastructure that had arisen in the preceding years.
Both instances showed independent rock assuming a more specified set
of uses, such that it denoted “a set of sounds and an attitude, rather
than an aesthetic and institutional position.”7 The resulting tension
between “independence” as a mode of musical production and “indie”
as a stylistic subcategory of rock made it more difficult for independent
labels to distinguish themselves from the routine work of the music
industry, and also made independence into something that could be
exploited for its appeal to a certain body of music consumers.
Largely due to these circumstances, “independence” came to denote
a set of values and practices that many invested with considerable moral,
ethical, and political weight. To make music independently was to struggle against the many factors that encouraged or coerced musicians,
record producers, and label heads to work more cooperatively with the
mainstream music industry. That “independence” was so laden with
ambiguity—that it could be used to describe sounds without having any
reference to how those sounds were made, that it was much harder to
achieve in practice than in theory—made it something worth contesting,
debating, and defining as a governing principle of musical production.
Nowhere were the meaning and the value of independence so subjected
to scrutiny as in the context of hardcore punk, and no concept captured
the sense of importance assigned to independence in these years more
than the notion of DIY so central to hardcore’s formative ethos.
What is DIY? Stephen Duncombe, a scholar and zine publisher, provides the best short definition: “Doing it yourself is at once a critique of
the dominant mode of passive consumer culture and something far more
216 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
important: the active creation of an alternative culture.”8 Duncombe’s
emphasis on producer-consumer relationships within DIY is of key
importance. DIY is predicated on the assumption that the mainstream
music industry, and the culture industry more generally, deprive individual consumers of the capacity to make meaningful choices regarding
the music to which they listen. That music is essentially chosen for them
by industry gatekeepers whose job is to ensure that the industry’s products conform to certain standards of quality and accessibility. Rather
than accept what is produced for them, adherents of DIY promote a
form of active engagement in the creation of music and other forms of
popular culture; they believe, in a sense, that culture cannot adequately
represent the people for whom it is made unless those people have a
hand in its production. Less stringently, DIY practitioners—whether
forming and staffing record labels, publishing fanzines, or making music
themselves—see DIY activity as a form of nonalienated labor relative to
other ways of working in the culture industry. Doing it yourself means,
on this level, not only doing it by yourself but doing it for yourself; this
connotation of the term has been of particular importance for musicians seeking to maintain creative control over their work.
Where hardcore was concerned, DIY became a means of distinguishing it from both the mainstream music industry and the preceding wave
of punk. Steven Blush thus wrote, in his oral history of American hardcore, “Punk gave lip-service to ‘Do It Yourself’ (D.I.Y.) and democratization of the Rock scene, but Hardcore transcended all commercial and
corporate concerns.”9 Blush’s views were supported by Ian MacKaye,
Minor Threat’s front man and the founder of Dischord Records, who
claimed that the emergence of hardcore marked the first moment when
“Rock Music was being written by, performed by, shows being put on
by, fanzines being put out by, networks being created—all by kids, completely outside of the mainstream music business.”10 From this perspective, earlier punk bands such as the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the
Clash may have outlined a valid musical path, but they did too little to
assume control over the means of musical production. Indeed, it became
common to refer to such bands, especially the Pistols, as sellouts for
their apparent pursuit of something like mainstream success. The dogmatism of hardcore along these lines would itself become subject to criticism in later years, but at the time, the early 1980s, hardcore expressed
a critique of punk from within that had considerable persuasive force
for those who believed that punk had stopped short of the full-scale
subversion it had seemed to promise.
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 217
EVERYTHING WENT BLACK
When Greg Ginn formed SST records in 1978, hardcore had yet to arise
as a distinct offshoot of punk, and, especially in the United States, DIY
was still in a preliminary stage as a core punk principle. Thus, SST did
not enter the world embodying the ethos of a fully formed musical
movement; instead, it helped to bring that movement to fruition. It did
this, in part, by giving institutional form to changes that were taking
hold in the Southern California punk scene, which both reflected and
prefigured the larger transition from punk to hardcore occurring at the
time. Ginn, the central figure in the formation of SST and in the band
most associated with the label, Black Flag, came to punk with a background in amateur radio and electronics. He thus brought another sort
of DIY impulse into his endeavors, one that connected the hardcore preoccupation with independence to broader themes having to do with
technology, suburbia, and masculine self-reliance. Meanwhile, as the
label’s de facto head, Ginn pursued a pattern of musical release that
went against the grain of the circumscribed hardcore aesthetic that grew
in the early 1980s. By the middle of the decade, SST was home to a multifaceted roster of bands that pointed as much in the direction of a sort
of fusion of metal and punk as to the purification of punk’s musical
qualities pursued by certain strains of hardcore.
Prior to the formation of Black Flag and SST, the Southern California
punk scene was centralized in a small clutch of clubs in and around
Hollywood. In the scene’s early phase the key club was the Whisky, a
long-running venue that had enjoyed its heyday in the mid-1960s and
then shut down for some time in the early 1970s, and whose management saw the local growth of punk rock as the occasion for a potential
revival of fortune. It was there that the Runaways’ manager, Kim Fowley,
staged a notorious event in June 1977, billed as a punk rock showcase,
at which he promised any and all comers a moment in the spotlight—an
event that ended in chaos when the unruly ensemble the Germs took the
stage, made an unholy noise, and then generated a full-scale food fight
that almost got them permanently banned from the club. That same
summer, L.A. got its own version of London’s Roxy and New York’s
CBGB when a Scottish immigrant named Brendan Mullen opened the
Masque in the basement of the long-vacant Hollywood Center Building.
The Masque was almost exclusively dedicated to the presentation of
local punk and new wave acts. It was located near the heart of L.A.’s
entertainment district, but its shambolic state made it seem very much a
218 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
place apart, where a bohemian crowd could gather to share in their
sense of largely self-imposed marginality.11
The opening of the Masque roughly coincided with other developments that demonstrated the growth of a local punk scene. Two notable
punk-oriented fanzines began publication in L.A. over the course of
1977, Slash and Flipside. A handful of independent record labels dedicated to the promotion of punk also entered the fray, including Slash (an
offshoot of the fanzine), Dangerhouse, and Posh Boy. Most important, a
number of young bands emerged that drew on the sounds and styles
coming from England and New York but gave them a distinct inflection.
Along with the Germs, the most prominent L.A. groups in this early era
were the Weirdos and the Screamers. The Weirdos, like many punk
bands, were art school refugees who sought to blend propulsive music
with the compelling visuals of their self-designed wardrobes. Embracing
their Hollywood origins, the band gleefully pursued an aesthetic of artifice, describing themselves in interviews as “actors” who had little concern with the truth or falsity of their image.12 The Screamers came to
California by way of Seattle. Cofounders Tomata Du Plenty and Tommy
Gear had previously headed a campy, bubblegum-oriented proto–new
wave group called the Tupperwares. Renaming themselves the Screamers,
they styled one of the most unusual and unnerving band sounds of the
punk era based around Gear’s synthesizer, drummer K. K. Barrett’s
strong quasi-mechanical rhythms, and the psychodramatic performance
style of singer Du Plenty, the total effect of which was designed to foster
and control levels of anxiety experienced by the audience.13
Black Flag was another product of 1977, and though the band’s rise
to prominence would come later, it was on the crest of a wave of new
participants who would significantly alter the terms of punk in Southern
California. Hailing from Hermosa Beach, a coastal town in southern
Los Angeles County, Black Flag was perhaps the most important group
involved in building a base for Southern California punk outside of
Hollywood. Other groups who followed and further broadened the
boundaries of the region’s punk scene included the Minutemen, from
San Pedro; Red Cross (later Redd Kross), from Hawthorne; the
Descendents, from Manhattan Beach; T.S.O.L., from Huntington
Beach; and the Adolescents and Social Distortion, from Fullerton. These
last three groups were from even farther south, in Orange County. Taken
together, this cluster of bands and the audiences that congregated
around them represented one of the defining elements of the shift from
punk to hardcore in Southern California: the decentralization of the
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 219
regional punk scene and the move of punk from the city to the suburbs.
Accompanying this change was a growing perception that suburban
hardcore differed from its Hollywood counterpart in philosophy as well
as geography. The musician and critic Craig Lee captured this aspect of
the local city/suburb dichotomy when he wrote of the difference
between “the South Bay working-class kids and the post-glitter
Hollywood punks. . . . The new breed of suburban Punk was physically
tougher, angrier and more immediately REAL about their intention
than the original party people.”14
Amid the growing sense that there was a difference between
Hollywood punk and its suburban counterpart, the space of suburbia
itself began to change. Gathering places emerged that made the trip to
the city less of a necessity. The Fleetwood, a nightclub in Redondo Beach,
was perhaps the most visible of these locations, which gained notoriety
for the intensity of its shows. It was at the Fleetwood that slam-dancing
became the favored mode of crowd interaction among California punks.
A seemingly chaotic act wherein dancers “slammed” their bodies against
each other, bouncing from one to the next, slam-dancing was in fact a
highly ordered form of audience interaction. The crowd tended to move
in a circle around a portion of the dance floor, known as the pit; as long
as participants moved with the flow of the circle, they were likely to
avoid significant harm. Slam-dancing was one of the ways suburban
punks demonstrated their “realness.” It drew a new sort of boundary
around the scene: if you were really committed, you would enter the pit
and willfully submit yourself to the pain and aggression that were essential to participation. To the skeptical eye, however, slam-dancing
appeared emblematic of an escalating trend toward violence in the
Southern California punk scene, and it made many of the scene’s older
guard feel as though they were under siege, muscled to the side by a
group of testosterone-driven suburbanites more concerned with physical intensity than with artful articulations of subcultural identity.
Less visible than the Fleetwood but just as integral to the rising selfsufficiency of suburban punk was the Church, an abandoned church in
Hermosa Beach that demonstrated Donna Gaines’s dictum about the
lives of suburban youth: “For as long as it lasts, an abandoned anything
is a real break.”15 Famously depicted in Penelope Spheeris’s documentary of Los Angeles punk, The Decline of Western Civilization, the
Church had already been converted into an arts-and-crafts space by
local hippies when the members of Black Flag began to occupy the space
in 1979. Under the wing of Black Flag members Greg Ginn and Chuck
220 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Dukowski, the Church became a key place for suburban punks to congregate. Several bands used the Church for rehearsal space, and young
punks often gathered there for late-night parties after attending shows
(Black Flag’s then singer, Ron Reyes, lived in a small room there).
Writing about the Church in December 1979, Flipside compared it to
the Masque, saying that the Church was more “underground” and its
inhabitants more resigned to the likelihood that they would soon have
to relocate: “Where the Masque strived to be legitimate to stay open
and beat the fire laws, the Church waits out its fate. We all know it’s
coming. As the Masque rocked and partied waiting for the day it would
open, the Church rocks and parties waiting for the day that they will
smash those stained glass windows and we’ll watch as the bulldozers
tear it down.”16 The Church symbolized the difficulties faced by suburban youth who sought to gather in unofficial spaces—the demise
prophesied by Flipside did in fact happen—but also represented the
determination among suburban punks to set themselves apart from both
their immediate surroundings and the Hollywood scene. Rather than
escape to the city, they occupied the abandoned crevices of suburbia.
Along with its other functions, the Church was an early headquarters
for the SST record label founded by Ginn and his band mate Dukowski.
The 1978 creation of SST was a landmark in the cultivation of a DIY
ethos within the hardcore scene and indicative of Black Flag’s centrality
to the growth of punk’s second wave in Southern California as well as
nationally. However, Ginn’s inspiration for forming the label did not
come solely from his involvement with punk. Rather, the name SST, and
the business model used by Ginn and Dukowski, were most directly
derived from an earlier company that Ginn had formed as a teenager to
distribute electronics equipment. Examination of Ginn’s prior interest in
amateur electronics indicates that, at least in the case of SST, the
impulses that played into the establishment of the DIY impulse in hardcore have a much broader history than has typically been acknowledged.
Such examination also reinforces the notion that spaces such as the
Fleetwood and the Church, and endeavors such as SST, not only subverted the dominant norms of life in the Southern California suburbs,
but also reproduced certain tendencies at work in the twentieth-century
expansion of suburbia.
DIY as a category of activity has its roots in the spread of the suburbs
that reshaped American social life beginning in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The historian Steven Gelber cites a 1912 article from Suburban Life magazine as likely the first published usage of
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 221
the phrase “Do-It-Yourself,” in an article that encouraged readers to
paint their own home rather than turning the job over to professionals.17 One of the most widespread forms of early DIY was technological
tinkering, especially associated with amateur radio operation, through
which suburban men turned work into a form of leisure and consumption into something more akin to productive labor. With the advent of
the inexpensive crystal radio receiver in 1906, young men took to the
airwaves by the thousands, seeking out signals from faraway locations.
Writing of these radio enthusiasts, the media historian Susan Douglas
has called them a uniquely “active, committed, and participatory audience,” terms that resonate with more recent claims concerning the value
of DIY.18 She further emphasizes that listening and tinkering went hand
in hand: “In the hands of amateurs, all sorts of technological recycling
and adaptive reuse took place. Discarded photography plates were
wrapped with foil and became condensers. The brass spheres from an
old bedstead were transformed into a spark gap, and were connected to
an ordinary automobile ignition coil-cum-transmitter. Model T ignition
coils were favorites.”19 The goal of such endeavors was to increase the
ability of the radio set to receive distant signals, but the means to this
end—technological tinkering and the movement across frequencies in
search of a clear signal—were just as much a part of their appeal for
amateur operators. In this regard, radio tinkering became a model for
popular uses of media technology that were geared toward active
engagement rather than idle consumption.
Greg Ginn was just such a tinkerer, in a latter-day, updated guise. He
took to amateur radio at an early age, tinkering with radio parts well
before he developed an interest in either punk rock or guitar playing. In
his teen years Ginn earned a number of patents for his labors, most
notably for an antenna tuner; at age thirteen he began to publish a zine
for ham radio operators called The Novice.20 Around the same time, he
started SST, which in its initial incarnation was known as SST
Electronics, a distributor of equipment for radio amateurs. The name of
the company, Ginn later explained, “stood for something I didn’t end up
marketing: solid-state transmitters,” items that were instrumental to his
tinkering endeavors.21 Ginn’s initial move to a sort of DIY activity, then,
was not an act of rebellion against the music industry, but followed from
a long-standing pattern of suburban male engagement with technology.
Moreover, it was from his role as the head of SST Electronics that
Ginn became a leading figure within the suburban wing of Southern
California punk. As Jeff McDonald, a member of the band Redd Kross,
222 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
recalled, “Greg Ginn was really into getting a scene going outside of
Hollywood, and he was there for anyone who needed help—he was an
adult with a job, and he had money, which he made from his own electronics company.”22 At a moment when almost no bands on the scene
were able to make money from touring and recording, SST Electronics
provided employment for a number of local musicians, and Ginn was
also able to acquire equipment which he would loan out to other aspiring groups. In this regard, Ginn’s development of SST Electronics followed a set of values similar to that described by Susan Douglas in her
assessment of ham radio, values that seek “to cultivate the right balance
in masculine culture between rugged, competitive individualism and
cooperative, mutually beneficial teamwork.”23
The conversion of SST Electronics to SST Records happened in 1978.
Black Flag had signed a deal with Greg Shaw’s independent record label
Bomp, but business problems prevented the label from releasing the
band’s first single as planned. Ginn recalled, “We kept waiting and waiting for Bomp. Finally I decided to release [the single] myself, and that’s
where SST Records started. From SST Electronics, obviously I knew
how to set up a business. But I wasn’t looking forward to putting out
records myself, because I felt that I had my hands full between working
my business and trying to play. So it was kind of by default: ‘I can do
this, so I’ll do it.’”24 Despite his reluctance, Ginn continued to use SST
to release Black Flag’s records following that initial single. He and
Dukowski managed all business affairs while hiring a range of other
local musicians to assist with the work of getting out the label’s recordings: handling orders, placing records into sleeves, and other mundane
but essential tasks. Surrounding all of the work at SST was a strong
veneer of self-sufficiency cultivated by Ginn and Dukowski, along with
a commitment to put out the band’s work without altering it to suit any
expectations besides their own. Mike Watt, bassist with the Minutemen,
connected this manner of operation to Ginn’s earlier (and persisting)
enthusiasm for amateur radio: “Maybe it was Greg’s experience with
ham radios, but he believed that if you try, you can get things beyond
your little group. He said, ‘Fuck it, let’s sell records, let’s go on tour. Let’s
make the rowdiest music. Let’s not make mersh [commercial] records.
Let’s not hide this as a secret. Let’s get out and play.’”25 Amateur radio
functioned for Ginn as an entrepreneurial model geared toward circumventing the economy of scale that had developed around rock music
during the 1970s.
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 223
A short time later, Ginn faced a decision that would change the stakes
of his enterprise considerably. The Minutemen approached him with the
hope that SST would release their own first record. It was a logical decision for the Minutemen. They were clear allies with Black Flag, outsiders to the Hollywood punk scene who hailed from the working-class
suburb of San Pedro, and who had their first show in support of their
more established peers. Working with SST would mean working with a
known quantity, a label run by people whom the band’s members knew
and respected. Yet SST was still largely untested. Black Flag’s first
record, the “Nervous Breakdown” single, was its only release to date.
Ginn liked the music of the Minutemen but had to ponder a larger concern: “At that point I had to think about whether we were ready to take
responsibility for other people’s music as well as our own. That was a
serious point of consideration.”26 Complicating the matter was the fact
that, as much as Ginn admired the Minutemen musically, their sound
was markedly different from Black Flag’s, more angular and funky, less
dominated by the overwhelming sound of guitar distortion. By deciding
to release a record by the Minutemen, Ginn decided that SST would be
more than a label for his own band; it would be a label that was not dedicated to a single sound, or a single notion of how punk should sound.
This eclecticism became more noticeable as the label gradually added
more bands to its roster. A 1982 showcase of SST bands at the Whisky
provided the occasion for Craig Lee, writing in the Los Angeles Times,
to comment on the diversity of sounds on display. Given the association
between SST and Black Flag, Lee assumed that many in the audience
expected a night of “non-stop hard-core thrash units.” What they got
instead was a bill on which Black Flag was “the only real punk band (in
the conventional sense).” Joining Black Flag on the Whisky stage that
night were the Minutemen, whom Lee celebrated for their “split-second,
tension-release tactics”; Saccharine Trust, whose sound was closer to
straight-ahead punk but was given dimension by the dissonant guitar
lines of Joe Baiza and the unnerving stage presence of singer Jack
Brewer; and the Meat Puppets, an Arizona trio who, by Lee’s account,
were “the most off-the-wall group of the night.”27 Lee did not like everything he heard that night; he found the Meat Puppets in particular hard
to take, as their unusual hybrid of hardcore, southern boogie rock, and
chicken-scratching country guitar had not yet achieved its full strength.
Nonetheless, he was impressed with the sheer scope of sounds that were
identified with SST, and with the label’s apparently deliberate pursuit of
stylistic multiplicity.
224 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
In time, heavy metal would become part of the broad musical palette
promoted by SST. Black Flag itself was largely responsible for the label’s
growing association with a skewed, discordant hybrid of heavy metal
and punk. The incorporation of metal into the SST aesthetic predated
Black Flag’s own move to the genre, however. In 1982 SST released the
first single by Overkill, a band whose name alone—taken from the
Motörhead song—indicated its metal/punk allegiances, and whose
music the label described in a later catalogue as a “sonic marriage of
punk and metal.”28 Gesturing even further in the direction of metal was
Saint Vitus. Whereas Overkill played a style of metal that had clear, if
superficial, similarities to hardcore—relatively short songs played at a
brisk punk-inspired tempo—Saint Vitus marked a decisive break with
the hardcore preference for speed and brevity. Their 1984 debut album,
released at roughly the same time as Black Flag’s pivotal divisive record,
My War, contained only five songs over its thirty-five minutes, played at
tempos that were not so much slow as sluggish. This was music that
sounded as though it had erupted straight out of the early 1970s, dark,
ominous, and full of sonic sludge. Moreover, the band looked like they
sounded: the black-and-white photo that accompanied the album
showed four long-haired, bearded, scruffy figures, one sporting a bikerstyle leather jacket, one wearing a Motörhead T-shirt, standing in what
appears to be a graveyard beside a large stone cross.
Another L.A. Times reviewer, Chris Willman, was quick to note the
ways SST changed its image. Willman’s report on a 1985 concert of SST
bands held on the UCLA campus also showed that heavy metal
remained only part of the label’s output, and a fairly small part at that.
In this case, what struck Willman most was the hair length of the featured performers. “Way back in ’81,” he mused ironically, “just about
every self-respecting punk musician and fan kept [his hair] as short as
possible in an effort to keep a visible distance from the rock of the past.”
By contrast, among the bands and fans gathered at UCLA’s Ackerman
Ballroom, “you couldn’t tell the ex-skinheads from the ex-Deadheads
without a score card.”29 Long hair was becoming more and more associated with SST groups, but it could just as easily evoke the psychedelic
style of the 1960s as the metalhead style then more current. Similarly,
much of the music heard that night, from stand-out performers such as
Hüsker Dü and a much-improved Meat Puppets, was steeped far more
in the exploratory impulses of Grateful Dead or psychedelic-era Byrds
than in the thundering sound of Black Sabbath. Whether the point of
reference was the sixties or the seventies, psychedelia or heavy metal, the
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 225
show only confirmed that SST as a label was going against the grain of
the subculture out of which it had arisen through its promotion of an
unusual mix of styles and influences.
Despite the apparent eclecticism of SST’s output, at the height of its
influence in the early and mid-1980s the label managed to establish a
strong and consistent identity. Like other prominent labels active at the
time and after—Dischord, Touch & Go, Sub Pop—SST promoted its
bands in large part by promoting itself. It did so by developing an inhouse aesthetic that informed the packaging and merchandising of the
label’s products as much as the music chosen for release.30 Crucial to
this process was the artwork of Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon,
which graced many an SST album cover and was also used on scores of
the flyers that Black Flag and other SST bands would distribute around
Southern California to publicize their upcoming concerts. Pettibon’s
work was designed to disturb and draw attention. His subject matter
often contained intimations of violence, but also tended toward a sort of
cryptic ambiguity; it worked more by the power of suggestion than by
the portrayal of graphic content. The cover of Black Flag’s My War
album was emblematic in this regard: a hand sheathed in what looks
like a red boxing glove juts out from the lower right corner into the
center of the cover, holding a long sharp knife (figure 14). Atop the hand
sits a disembodied head, maybe that of a puppet, with exaggerated
features—elongated nose, red pupils, yellowed teeth—and a face wearing a smile that seems tinged with glee at the prospect of the violent act
about to occur. It is a striking image in large part because it leaves so
much to the imagination, but it also conveys an air of menace and
aggression that suited the identity of both Black Flag and SST.
The other medium through which SST established an identity was its
catalogue. SST releases commonly included the catalogue as an insert
along with the album and associated artwork. This was a valuable marketing technique for a label that ran on a small budget, effectively ensuring that anyone who purchased a single SST product would have
occasion to learn about the full range of its output. It was also a form
of direct marketing, since the catalogue offered SST products for purchase directly from the label itself through mail order. Yet the catalogue
was not only a promotional and marketing tool. It was the primary
mechanism through which the rather unruly list of SST releases assumed
some significant degree of unity. A one-page catalogue sheet from
1984, for instance, listed the label’s entire product line under the title
“The Merchandising Concept.” Included under the “concept” were the
226 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Figure 14. Cover of Black Flag, My War. Illustration by Raymond Pettibon. Courtesy of
SST Records.
twenty-four records SST had issued to date, along with T-shirts for
Black Flag and several other bands affiliated with the label; stickers;
buttons; books and posters of Raymond Pettibon’s artwork (which was
also featured in many of the other items for sale); and even a Black Flag
skateboard (figure 15). Diversification was a key element of SST’s marketing strategy, but that diversification, in turn, gave the label a consistency that went beyond the sum of its products.
SST diversified its offerings in another way as well. Over time the
label released music by performers from an increasingly wide range of
geographic locations. Such expansiveness was a given in the sphere of
major label record production, but in the independent realm it marked
the crossing of a threshold. Most of the independent labels created
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 227
Figure 15. SST catalogue, circa 1984, outlining the label’s “merchandising concept.”
Courtesy of SST Records.
during the 1980s were designed to reach a fairly bounded local or
regional audience, and labels selected their acts accordingly. All three of
the labels profiled in this chapter began in such a fashion. SST did not
release anything by a group from outside Southern California until their
ninth item, an album by the Meat Puppets from Arizona issued in 1982.
228 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
After that came records by the Texas punk band the Dicks and the
Minneapolis group Hüsker Dü, who would become one of the most
influential bands of the decade, on a par with Black Flag itself. The label
truly broadened its sights after the 1986 breakup of Black Flag. In the
last years of the 1980s, SST released records by bands as far afield as
New York’s Sonic Youth, Amherst, Massachusetts’ Dinosaur Jr., Seattle’s
Soundgarden, and from Washington, DC, the pioneering hardcore band
Bad Brains. That SST attracted such high-caliber bands from such a
broad assortment of places indicates how far the label’s own reputation
had extended by that time. Conversely, SST’s efforts did much to further
the process whereby the many local scenes that arose in the early and
mid-1980s came to constitute a more integrated national movement,
not to mention a more integrated market for the sort of music the label
promoted.
Ultimately, for all it achieved, SST was a far greater success culturally
than commercially. As late as 1992 Ginn claimed that the label’s topselling records by Black Flag, Bad Brains, and Soundgarden had sold
only about one hundred thousand copies each, a large amount for an
independent release but one that would be considered a failure in the
mainstream industry.31 Then again, Ginn never pursued mass-market
success for himself or the acts whose music his label produced. He was
and remains dedicated to a more small-scale, targeted approach to
record production and distribution, and has thus maintained his status
as an exemplar of the sort of DIY ethos that assumed such weight
through the hardcore movement of the early 1980s.32 Ginn’s dedication
to the mode of production favored by hardcore did not bespeak unwavering dedication to hardcore itself, however. Although the diversity of
the SST catalogue extended only so far—especially in the 1980s the
label never strayed too far from its rock-oriented base—the label did go
well beyond the musical conventions of the subculture out of which it
arose. Ginn would explain later, “Hardcore was thrash (music that
doesn’t have a groove and is just about playing fast) and to me Black
Flag was never thrash. . . . I don’t like thrash—it’s too straight, too puritanical, too white.”33 The implications of such views for Ginn’s own
music with Black Flag are explored in detail in the next chapter. Where
SST as a whole was concerned, the label considerably broadened the
aesthetic terms by which punk and independent rock were evaluated
and to a certain degree legitimated the inclusion of heavy metal in the
independent realm.
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 229
METAL MASSACRE
Heavy metal entered the SST catalogue through the back door: its presence, though notable, was only partly welcome, and it was never more
than a subsidiary part of the label’s output. It was left to another
Southern California independent label, Metal Blade, to make heavy
metal the undisputed focus of its efforts. Brian Slagel, the founder of
Metal Blade, was a diehard fan of the genre, made clear by the name he
chose for his fledgling label in 1982. At the same time, as an independent metal label Metal Blade was not equally committed to all aspects of
the genre. Slagel was dedicated to the local California metal scene, but he
was also distinctly drawn to an underground strain of metal strongly
influenced by NWOBHM bands such as Venom and Raven that placed
more emphasis on “heaviness” than on melodic hooks and anthemlike
choruses. At a time when some local bands, led by Mötley Crüe, were
beginning to find major success on a national scale, Slagel established
Metal Blade as an outlet for a sort of metal less likely to exhibit pop
appeal. With its earliest releases, Metal Blade did much to foster the
growth of thrash and speed metal, two major subgenres that furthered the
increasing perception that metal and punk were exerting a mutual influence on one another that resulted in the growth of new hybrid forms. By
the mid-1980s, the label was home to a new breed of metal/punk
crossover that made explicit such processes of cross-fertilization.
As an independent entrepreneur, Brian Slagel was less in the model
of Greg Ginn—a musician seeking to create an outlet for his own
music—and more akin to British figures such as Ted Carroll of Chiswick
and Dave Wood of Neat, nonmusicians who started their labels as an
extension of other forms of involvement with music. Carroll in particular provides a parallel case for Slagel, given the importance of his interest in record collecting and his proprietorship of a record store prior to
the formation of Chiswick. Slagel too was a dedicated collector who
first established a reputation in the L.A. area while working at Oz
records in Woodland Hills. Before he started his job at Oz, he was an
active bootlegger who would “trade [tapes of] demos and live concerts
with people around the world.”34 This tape-trading network was the
province of a small ensemble of dedicated heavy metal fans who were
dispersed around the United States, Europe, and points farther afield.
Holding these fans together was a combination of mail correspondence,
fanzines, and a few mass-market publications such as Sounds and,
230 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
slightly later, Kerrang!, which could be procured in the United States
only with a good amount of effort and inside knowledge.
Through this network, Slagel came into contact with likeminded figures such as Ron Quintana, a heavy metal collector from San Francisco
who would soon begin his own fanzine, Metal Mania. Quintana’s
account of his tape-trading efforts offers unique insight into the dimensions of this underground activity:
In 1980 [FM radio station] KSAN . . . began playing its rare library of
archival concert tapes. I recorded most of them and traded with friends to
get more rare stuff but couldn’t get enough. I’d seen little ads in Circus or
Sounds advertising concert tapes for sale, and I started sending for their
lists and buying tapes of my favorite bands. . . . I searched out more collector’s magazines, the best of which was Audio Trader, born in Berkeley in
late 1980. Editor Stuart Sweetow . . . encouraged me to write about the rise
of new metal bands for his magazine. . . . By 1981, my list and contacts had
grown overseas. I received the first Aardschok magazine from Holland, and
traded with its editors and readers. The first real underground all-metal
’zine, it showed me that I could do something similar, too.35
The overseas influence was also critical for Slagel. Tape trading brought
him into contact with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and he
became an instant devotee. Soon he found two accomplices in his devotion: John Kornarens, whom he met at the bustling Capitol Records swap
meet, where tape traders often congregated; and Lars Ulrich, a transplanted tennis player from Denmark who drew the attention of Slagel
and Kornarens by sporting a shirt from the European tour of NWOBHM
icons Saxon. Together, the three raided area record stores in search of
rare import recordings. When Slagel began his job at Oz, he ensured that
the store had a steady supply of such imports in stock. As he recalled, “I
was working at Oz and bringing in all these imports. And we started to
do really well. We had this huge clientele of people who would drive for
miles and we started this mail order thing and it became this really huge
thing.”36 While his tape-trading network put Slagel in touch with an
international heavy metal scene and stoked his interest in NWOBHM,
his post behind the counter at Oz connected him to a more localized set
of contacts and put him in a good position to take notice of an L.A.
heavy metal scene that was only beginning to assume momentum.
The New Heavy Metal Revue, the short-lived fanzine that Slagel
started in July 1981 with assistance from Kornarens, documented this
interplay of local and international interests. Issues 1 and 2 of the zine,
dated July and August–September 1981, respectively, both featured Iron
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 231
Maiden on their covers, the first in connection with a concert review,
the second with an interview conducted by Slagel. Issue 2 in particular
was a veritable tribute to NWOBHM, with features on Diamond Head
and Girlschool joining that on Maiden, and record reviews of Def
Leppard, Angel Witch, Raven, and Motörhead, among others. Issue 3
marked a departure, though. The cover announced a focus on “U.S.
Metal,” and the contents included an extensive L.A. scene report that
featured groups such as Mötley Crüe, the Lita Ford Band, Cirith Ungol,
and Bitch. NWOBHM had by no means disappeared from the zine;
Raven and Angel Witch were featured in the issue, as was a report on
the Castle Donington heavy metal festival. But Slagel’s growing concern
with helping to foster a scene in Los Angeles was quickly coming into
focus.37 Interviewed for a 1982 Sounds survey of L.A. heavy metal,
Slagel described the “disorganized” state of the local scene, but also
expressed the hope that, “with the big success in England [referring to
NWOBHM], I think there’ll be a bigger upsurge here.”38 To do his part
in promoting this upsurge, he planned to release his own compilation of
L.A. metal bands, titled Metal Massacre, which would mark the official
beginning of the Metal Blade record label.
The metal journalist David Konow recently claimed that punk was the
primary inspiration for the DIY activity that arose in the metal underground inhabited by the likes of Brian Slagel and Ron Quintana. Konow
attributes to Quintana the assertion that the idea for his fanzine, Metal
Mania, came from punk, and cites Lars Ulrich on the punk influence on
metal.39 Yet as we have seen, Quintana’s own account of the beginning
of Metal Mania assigns priority to the Danish fanzine Aardschok as a
source of inspiration. By the same token, Slagel’s fanzine and his decision to produce a compilation that represented the L.A. metal scene
were indebted more to the influence of NWOBHM than to the example
of local punk and hardcore. Explaining the release of Metal Massacre
some years later, Slagel proclaimed, “I was totally influenced by what
happened with the NWOBHM scene. Everything that happened there
had a major influence on me—the do it yourself attitude, bands and
people doing their own records. I always thought that was cool.”40
Without discounting the importance of punk, it is clear that by this
moment in the early 1980s heavy metal was developing an independent,
DIY ethos from within its own boundaries. The punk influence on
NWOBHM had been decisive, but once NWOBHM was set in motion
232 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Figure 16. Cover of Metal Massacre, the inaugural release of Metal Blade Records.
Illustration by Elaine Offers. Courtesy of Metal Blade Records.
it was there to be used as a model for other enterprising figures whose
principal affiliation was to the heavy metal genre.
Metal Massacre was, in many ways, an American counterpart to
Metal for Muthas, the compilation that Neal Kay organized to represent
the rising tide of British metal two years earlier. The key difference, of
course, was that Metal for Muthas was released by EMI and was thus
subject to criticism as a major label effort to capitalize on the growing
metal market in England. Metal Massacre, by contrast, was far more of
a small-scale endeavor conceived by Slagel as an extension of his
fanzine. Indeed, on the cover of the compilation the title is preceded by
the note “The New Heavy Metal Revue presents,” and the name Metal
Blade appears only at the bottom of the back cover (figure 16). Metal
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 233
Massacre was also distinguished by its expressly local concentration, as
nearly all the bands were drawn from the L.A. scene.
Metal Massacre did share one quality with Metal for Muthas: a
markedly uneven collection of performances.41 Material that resided at
the cutting edge of metal existed alongside music that was slavishly
genre-oriented. Tracks by little-known bands such as Demon Flight,
Malice, and Pandemonium were emblematic of this latter quality, pursuing a brand of heaviness that was wholeheartedly derived from the
likes of Judas Priest. Somewhat less derivative, in attitude if not in
sound, was Bitch, whose “Live for the Whip” was a skewed bit of sadomasochistic heavy rock driven by lead singer Betsy’s gleeful and slightly
troubling alternation between domination and submission, complete
with the sound effect of a cracking whip. More tuneful were the
midtempo rockers provided by two rising stars of the L.A. scene. Steeler
was headed by vocalist Ron Keel, later to achieve brief fame with a
group bearing his name, but the band’s entry, “Cold Day in Hell,” was
recorded before hypervirtuosic guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen had joined.
Ratt’s chosen song, “Tell the World,” would later feature on its own
independently released debut EP.
Then there was Metallica, whose “Hit the Lights” was the closing cut
of the compilation. The story of how “Hit the Lights” was rushed
together for inclusion by Ulrich and his new musical partner, James
Hetfield, has been recounted in many a history. Metallica was barely a
working unit at the time, and its ability to secure a place on Metal
Massacre was largely due to the strong association between Ulrich,
Slagel, and Kornarens (who was listed on the album as assistant producer). According to the band’s biographer, K. J. Doughton, “Hit the
Lights” was a song that Hetfield had initially performed with his previous band, Leather Charm. For the version included on Metal Massacre
Hetfield recorded rhythm guitar, bass, and vocal tracks separately onto
a four-track recorder, with drums provided by Ulrich. The original lead
guitarist, Dave Mustaine, later of Megadeth, was brought into the group
late in the process but did lay down one lead break, which was then supplemented by a second break played by Lloyd Grant, a black Jamaican
guitarist who was an associate of the band members but never officially
a member of Metallica.42 Adding to the slapdash nature of the affair was
the turn of events when Ulrich met Slagel and Kornarens at Bijou Studio
in Hollywood to master the tape. John Kornarens recounts that
Metallica was the last band to have its tape ready for mastering, but
Ulrich and Slagel were confused as to who was to cover the $50 studio
234 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
fee. Neither one had the required cash, so it was left to Kornarens to pull
all of his money from his wallet to ensure that the track was finalized.43
Musically, “Hit the Lights” was deeply indebted to the speed-freak
style of metal pursued by Motörhead and later NWOBHM bands such
as Venom. Opening with a brief roll from Ulrich and two prolonged
power chords played by Hetfield, the song churns into its main riff,
which could have been pulled from Motörhead’s Ace of Spades album:
the open A string provides the base for barre chords at the fifth and
seventh frets, then a quick single-note turnaround at those same fret
positions on the fourth and fifth strings. The most distinguishing feature
of the riff is not the progression, but the unrelenting attack that Hetfield
brings to bear upon the open A, picking it furiously between the brief
interruptions of accompanying notes and chords. This rhythmic
approach, involving speedily picked, repetitious sixteenth-note patterns
on the guitar’s lower strings, would provide the structural building block
for the emergent subgenres of speed and thrash metal. While the rest of
Metal Massacre effectively, if unevenly, captured the state of L.A. metal
circa 1982, “Hit the Lights” was the one cut on the record that pointed
the way to the future. It would also be the only song Metallica would
release bearing the Metal Blade imprint.
Metal Blade did not work in a vacuum. The label was one of three
prominent independent ventures that emerged in the years 1981 to
1983, all dedicated to heavy metal almost exclusively.44 Located in San
Francisco, Shrapnel arose just prior to Metal Blade. Its founder, Mike
Varney, was formerly the bassist with the leading San Francisco punk
ensemble the Nuns. As such, Shrapnel had a more direct connection to
the punk version of DIY than did Metal Blade. Yet Varney showed little
affinity for the punk-infused styles of metal that Brian Slagel would
come to support. The first Shrapnel release, the compilation U.S. Metal,
was something of a rejoinder to the currency of NWOBHM and was
mainly designed to showcase some particularly polished, technically
challenging heavy metal guitar virtuosity, something that would become
a specialty of the label over time.45
More akin to Metal Blade was Megaforce, formed in 1983 by the
husband-and-wife partnership of Johnny and Marsha Zazula. Like
Slagel, the Zazulas came to start their own label from their involvement
with record collecting and sales. Their shop, Rock ’N’ Roll Heaven, started
as a small booth in a New Jersey shopping mall, but within a couple of
years was attracting notice around the United States and overseas for its
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 235
stock of hard-to-find heavy metal albums by the likes of Raven and
Angel Witch. Recalled Marsha Zazula, “By the summer of ’82, Johnny
and I had pretty much established Rock ’N’ Roll Heaven as the place to
hang out for specialist Heavy Metal music on the East Coast.”46
Building on the success of the shop, the Zazulas began promoting heavy
metal shows in the area featuring NWOBHM groups such as Raven and
Venom alongside U.S. bands such as Riot and Manowar. Then, in early
1983, Johnny heard a demo tape by Metallica titled No Life ’til Leather,
which the band had assembled following their appearance on Metal
Massacre and which was making its way through the tape-trading channels. Deeming it “the most happening f**king thing I’d heard in I don’t
know how long,” Zazula immediately began making efforts to assume
management of the group.47 He set about organizing a series of shows for
Metallica on the East Coast and worked to procure a record deal. Only
when no such deal was forthcoming did the Zazulas form their own independent record label, Megaforce, the 1983 creation of which was
announced by the simultaneous release of Metallica’s debut album, Kill
’Em All, alongside albums by Raven and Manowar. For the remainder of
the 1980s Metal Blade and Megaforce would remain principal competitors whose work showed similar degrees of connection to the growing
metal underground inhabited by the practitioners of speed and thrash.
While Megaforce found its footing with the first Metallica record,
Metal Blade would achieve its first real breakthrough with another
Southern California band whose impact on the subsequent history of
the genre would be substantial. Slayer hailed from Orange County, the
area that had given rise to some of California’s most aggressive hardcore
bands. It was no coincidence, then, that they would bring a punkinformed commitment to speed to bear upon their approach to metal.
As guitarist Jeff Hanneman remembered, “When we first started
together I didn’t think we could go anywhere unless we played love
songs. . . . Then punk came along and it was totally aggressive and that’s
what I got into. But it didn’t last very long and I thought there had to be
a way to do both.”48 When Brian Slagel first encountered the band,
opening for Bitch, they had not yet assumed their full velocity and
played a set that consisted mainly of cover songs by metal stalwarts
Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Nonetheless, he was impressed enough to
invite them to contribute to the third volume of Metal Massacre,
released in summer 1983. About the band’s contribution, the track
“Aggressive Perfector”—played at a speed that exceeded what the band
had done in their music to date—singer and bassist Tom Araya claimed,
236 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
“What made us go fast was the Metal Blade Metal Massacre series.”49
In other words, in just a year’s time, Slagel’s label and his signature series
of compilations had quickly developed an identifiable aesthetic that was
beginning to affect the way young heavy metal musicians approached
the genre.50
Later that year, Metal Blade would issue the first Slayer album, Show
No Mercy. It was the eleventh item in the label’s quickly growing catalogue and represented a milestone for Slagel as the first Metal Blade
release to sell more than ten thousand units.51 Show No Mercy also
found Slagel promoting another novel feature that had gained currency
through NWOBHM: the use of Satanic content and imagery to convey
a sense of transgression and extremity. In this regard, Slayer was clearly
following in the footsteps of Venom. Like their British forerunners,
Slayer’s preoccupation with Satan did not indicate a commitment to
Satanism as a form of religious practice. Songs such as “Evil Has No
Boundaries” and “Black Magic” may have outlined a notably bleak
outlook, but they were also genre exercises of a sort in which the band
sought lyrical content that matched the intensity of their aural assault.
Slagel, for his part, showed himself fully willing to exploit the dark
appeal of these associations. The cover of Show No Mercy features an
odd, elaborately drawn figure by Lawrence Reed, at once cartoonish
and disturbing, with the body of a muscular barbarian and the head of
a goat (figure 17). To the left of the figure is a circle within which is written the band’s name in a jagged, off-kilter style of lettering, perforated
by four long swords that form the five points of a pentagram. A fifth
sword juts upward from the hand of the man-beast, ready to puncture
the band’s logo or maybe to do some other kind of violence. Metal Blade
did not have a house artist on the order of Raymond Pettibon, but Show
No Mercy would be the first of many albums released by the label to
include cover art as shocking in its way as the musical content, indicative of the label’s effort to appeal not to the broadest range of listeners,
but to those seeking music that existed at the margins of respectability.
Slayer also played a key role in another breakthrough for Metal Blade,
prompting Brian Slagel to consider adding punk to the label’s output.
Specifically, members of the group brought to Slagel’s attention a band
from San Francisco (by way of Texas) named D.R.I., or Dirty Rotten
Imbeciles. D.R.I. was essentially a hardcore band at the time. Their
songs were extremely short, some less than a minute, and were typically
played at a hyperaccelerated tempo. Yet at times they shifted into a slow
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 237
Figure 17. The devil comes to Metal Blade: cover of Slayer, Show No Mercy, a landmark
release in the history of the label and the development of thrash metal. Illustration by
Lawrence Reed. Courtesy of Metal Blade Records.
grind that suggested more thrash-oriented heavy metal. Around the
same mid-1980s moment Slagel encountered a group named Corrosion
of Conformity, a North Carolina band with a comparable mix of qualities. Slagel was intrigued by these bands and the possibilities they presented for Metal Blade to expand its reach, but he also recognized a
potential conflict. He later explained, “I thought I’d like to do something with these bands but they weren’t really metal. We started talking
to the bands and everybody was a little leery about being on Metal
Blade, the big heavy metal label; these bands were punk bands.”52
Slagel’s solution was to create a subsidiary label under the Metal Blade
imprint named Death records, which he would use to issue albums by
bands that departed too far from heavy metal convention. By summer
238 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
1985 Death was up and running, with albums by Corrosion of Conformity
and D.R.I. released in June and July, respectively, to inaugurate the new
venture.
With the creation of Death records Metal Blade assumed a leading
position in the promotion of metal/punk crossover. As we have seen in
previous chapters, the notion of crossover had been circulating around
the genres of metal and punk for some years by the mid-1980s, around
the career and music of Motörhead and the general tendencies associated with NWOBHM. Metal/punk crossover was not new in 1985, but
it began to assume a new currency and prominence at this time, especially in the United States, where it had previously drawn only a marginal amount of attention. It also began to shift in its meaning, because
punk and metal themselves had both undergone certain crucial transformations in the years since Motörhead first stimulated talk of crossfertilization between the two genres. Metal/punk crossover as it was
understood in 1985 was not just a fusion of metal and punk, it was a
combination of certain strains of metal and punk, of speed metal and
hardcore punk, for instance. In this regard, it was the outgrowth of
developments that had been encouraged by labels such as SST and Metal
Blade that were fostered predominantly within the sphere of independent music production and that deliberately cultivated an alternative
approach to the two genres.
Marking these occurrences was an article that appeared in the
February 1985 issue of Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll celebrating the rise of
what the writer and artist Brian “Pushead” Schroeder called “speedcore.” Perhaps the leading publication of the era dedicated to hardcore
punk and its attendant values, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll had often been
outspoken in its antipathy toward heavy metal, which it portrayed as
predictable, outdated, sexist, and built around a bad faith relationship
between artists and fans. Pushead notably broke with these attitudes in
his account of speedcore. “‘Speedcore’ is the crossover,” he announced
enthusiastically at the outset of his piece, “where what’s known as heavy
metal mixes in with the hardcore punk sound.” Yet he was quick to note
that the brand of metal at the heart of speedcore “is a new breed; not
the standardized heavy metal that is so imitated and miscategorized,
where performers and bands become ‘mega’ for labels to attract
sales.”53 At the head of Pushead’s list of representative speedcore bands
were Venom, Metallica, the British hardcore group Discharge, and
Slayer, whom he described as “the fastest metal band in the world.”54
Throughout the article, Pushead acknowledged that the crossover
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 239
impulses exhibited by these groups had a longer history, but he also
stressed their distinctive contemporary character: “Now the crossover
has happened and the 2 underground energies are colliding. This is
speedcore. There is still hardcore and metal, but in a general sense, the
ferocity and quickness brings a unity for those who enjoy it.”55 That
heavy metal was considered to have an underground energy of its own,
apart from its association with punk, was perhaps the greatest sign that
this notion of a metal/punk crossover was not just a reiteration of those
articulated earlier, but had a novel character in keeping with the changing contours of metal and punk.
Under the influence of this refashioned notion of a metal/punk
crossover, metal and punk did not simply coexist at labels such as Metal
Blade and Megaforce. Rather, crossover came briefly to function as
something like a subgenre unto itself, akin to the newly established categories of speed and thrash metal but wearing its punk trappings more
on the surface. At Megaforce, the key release was Speak English or Die,
the 1985 album recorded by S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death), a oneoff ensemble that included two members of the New York thrash innovators Anthrax and the rough-and-tumble singer Billy Milano.56
Meanwhile, the phenomenon reached a sort of culmination with Metal
Blade’s 1987 release of the D.R.I. album simply titled Crossover. Both
records featured cuts that explicitly addressed the fusion of metal and
punk elements. The S.O.D. track “United Forces” was something of an
early crossover manifesto, featuring the suggestive couplet “Skinheads
and bangers and punks stand as one / Crossover to a final scene.” Two
years later D.R.I. voiced similar sentiments in their song “Tear It
Down,” a more elliptical piece that nonetheless called for listeners to
“Cross over the line of / Your stubborn closed mind” and featured a
chorus that promised “Just as we watch them/Build this empire/So they
shall watch us tear it down/If not with our words then with/The power
of our sound!”
The sentiments expressed in these two songs make it clear that
crossover had more than strictly musical connotations. It was also a call
for the unification of competing subcultural camps. As Donna Gaines
recalled, for a while in the early 1980s, “wherever hardcore kids and
metalheads congregated, the scene became an instantly contested terrain.”57 Elements of style—particularly the long hair (metal) versus
short hair (punk) divide—sometimes became the basis for seemingly
arbitrary acts of aggression and figured as emblems that helped define
relationships of belonging or exclusion. In this light, crossover bands
240 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
such as D.R.I., S.O.D., and the Southern California group Suicidal
Tendencies posed an explicit challenge to existing definitions of genre
and subcultural affiliation at the same time that they created a sound
that called attention to its hybrid status. Said Mike Muir, singer for
Suicidal Tendencies, “Is it Metal? Is it Punk? Is it whatever? Well all I say
is, ‘Do you like it?’ . . . People said we couldn’t be Punks because we
played lead solos and we couldn’t be Metal because we were too fast.
Well that was fine by us because we could be Suicidal.”58 For D.R.I.
drummer Felix Griffin, those who opposed the band’s efforts at stylistic
fusion refused to acknowledge the ways metal and punk had changed: “The
punk rock kids used to feel they had a legitimate beef with Metal . . .
because it was so mainstream for a long time. But now Metal is as
underground as punk in a lot of places, so that argument’s gone out the
window.” Notably, Griffin added, “At least it’s calm now at the shows.
Everyone gets along and you don’t get beat up because you have long
hair.”59 Crossover marked an effort to ease tensions between metal and
punk at a time when boundaries were being guarded and redrawn with
equal intensity.
Where Metal Blade was concerned, crossover was valuable for reasons other than ideology. According to Brian Slagel, D.R.I. was the
label’s biggest selling artist for a time, with some albums selling as many
as 150,000 copies.60 However, as a distinct phenomenon crossover was
relatively short-lived and had largely run its course by the end of the
1980s. Metal Blade would ultimately hinge its fortunes on other emergent subgenres that had more enduring impact into the 1990s, most
notably death metal. The label’s promotion of metal/punk crossover
should not be viewed as mere opportunism, though. Crossover represented one in a series of subgenres representative of the label’s dedication to varieties of metal not well represented in the mainstream music
industry. Some of these subgenres would themselves move more toward
the mainstream, and through the success of a band like Metallica would
even influence a change in the terms according to which “mainstream”
and “underground” were applied to the metal genre. Metal Blade profited from these broader shifts in metal marketing and consumer taste
over the years, but would always remain a few steps removed from the
most commercially viable metal forms. Although the label did not
exhibit the sort of antimainstream defiance shown by Greg Ginn at SST,
it maintained a considerable degree of relative autonomy and did much
to establish the recognition that “independent metal” was not a contradiction in terms.61
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 241
THE SEATTLE SOUND
Sub Pop, the third label to be profiled in this chapter, was not so clearly
devoted to punk or heavy metal as SST and Metal Blade, respectively. If
anything, the formation and growth of Sub Pop from the mid-1980s to
the early 1990s was one of the most important instances of a process
mentioned earlier, the conversion of “independent” from a term used to
describe a way of producing music to something more akin to a genre
unto itself. Sub Pop cofounders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman
were both indebted to the network of independent punk and hardcore
labels that had proliferated during the early 1980s. However, rather
than seek to promote or reproduce the sound that issued from those
labels, they designed Sub Pop with more emphasis on place than on
genre. Sub Pop was built to capture the Seattle Sound, a sound that was
already brewing within the city’s music scene but that the label would
do much to cultivate as a distinct and recognizable phenomenon. And
yet, to the extent that the Seattle Sound was in fact a sound—a coherent
but not homogeneous ensemble of musical stylistic elements—it was
built on a metal/punk foundation. The music on which Sub Pop’s early
notoriety rested was another form of metal/punk crossover, one made
unique by the peculiar mix of elements coursing through the Seattle
rock scene of the 1980s. That this brand of crossover reached a wider
audience than that of bands like D.R.I. and S.O.D. is partly the story of
ambitious and creative marketing and partly the story of the way that
different elements of metal and punk were put into play by Pavitt,
Poneman, and the bands they signed.
Some sense of the unusual conditions under which metal and punk
coexisted in Seattle can be gleaned from the nearly simultaneous
appearance in 1983 of two new columns in the local rock music weekly
The Rocket. One month before it began to feature Bruce Pavitt’s
“Sub/Pop USA” column in March 1983, The Rocket initiated “Metal
Detector,” K. J. Doughton’s monthly report on heavy metal. Based in
Oregon, Doughton was at the time the editor of a fanzine, NW Metal,
and also headed the nascent fan club of Metallica. He earned this latter
position by being an enthusiastic participant in the same tape-trading
network that included Brian Slagel, Ron Quintana, and Lars Ulrich.62
With such a background, it was not surprising that in his column
Doughton showed a marked preference for local and independently
produced metal of the sort that had recently begun to spread in different corners of the United States. Releases by the California-based labels
242 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Shrapnel and Metal Blade were regularly featured in “Metal Detector,”
as were the happenings in the burgeoning thrash scene taking shape
around San Francisco, a city just down the coast. Doughton also
reported on metal from the Pacific Northwest. His first column had
brief items on the Oregon bands Crysys and Black ’n’ Blue, the latter of
whom had a track on Metal Massacre; his second column, in April
1983, discussed the growing profile of Queensryche, who hailed from
suburban Bellevue—east of Seattle, often referred as the Eastside—and
seemed poised to take the place of another local group, Culprit, as the
area’s reigning metal band.63
That “Sub/Pop USA” and “Metal Detector” were introduced within
a month of each other and typically appeared in proximity to one
another in the pages of The Rocket says something about the openness
of the paper’s editorial policy, but also signaled something larger about
the rock scene in Seattle. Punk, postpunk, and metal all gained a
foothold in the city during the preceding several years under less than
auspicious circumstances. Promoters for all of these genres showed
incredible resourcefulness, staging shows in a city where live venues
were at a premium. New venues often had to be created from scratch,
especially if they were to draw an audience below the legal drinking
age.64 Perhaps because of the restrictive environment, a considerable
amount of crossover between scenes occurred. The Sub Pop publicist
Nils Bernstein colorfully described the circumstances in Seattle to the
critic Gina Arnold: “It seems like everywhere else punk and metal were
such diametric opposites, and there were fights and stuff between metal
heads and punk rockers. But in Seattle they kind of coexisted all peacefully. There were a lot of punk rockers and metal heads and hippies, and
there were a lot of punk rock hippies and metal punk rockers.”65
Bruce Pavitt’s own affinities and loyalties, traceable through his
“Sub/Pop USA” column, were clearly on the punk and hardcore side of
this blurry divide.66 Nonetheless, in his very commitment to independence as a distinct mode of production, Pavitt voiced sentiments in keeping with the general amiability of the metal/punk relationship in Seattle.
In early columns, he responded positively to SST’s decision to include
such groups as Overkill and Saint Vitus on its roster and praised
Metallica’s debut record, Kill ’Em All, as the best product to emerge
from the “dramatic increase in small-label metal releases.”67 His most
substantial comment on such developments came in his January 1985
column. Looking back on the preceding year, he pegged hardcore/metal
crossover as one of the ruling trends of 1984, summarizing it in the
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 243
following manner: “Bands like Black Flag, SSD and Corrosion of
Conformity met head on with Metallica, Slayer and Voivod. The music
was raw and lead and rhythm guitarists were on an equal footing. The
primary difference between punk and metal remained in the lyrics:
‘hardcore’ songs reflect both everyday life and the extreme dynamics of
the world in which we live; ‘metal’ songs have little basis in reality,
emphasizing satanism, fantasy and mythology. But it’s all rock ’n’
roll.”68 There are clear traces of punk allegiance in the contrast Pavitt
draws between punk and metal lyrics; his own preference would seem to
lie on the side of punk realism over metal fantasy. Nonetheless, what
stands out is the ecumenical tenor of Pavitt’s approach. Like Pushead in
his celebration of speedcore, Pavitt was willing to assume an underlying
commonality between metal and punk when both were produced
through independent channels. This acceptance of the shifting genre
boundaries of the era prefigured the creative and economic path that
Pavitt would pursue at Sub Pop.
Another element of Pavitt’s outlook, and one more central to the creation of the Sub Pop label, was his preoccupation with the local or
regional basis of rock and popular music. In this he clearly paralleled
his counterparts Greg Ginn and Brian Slagel, but Pavitt was even more
emphatic in the stress he placed on localism, in a way that mirrored
changes in the broader independent rock scene of the 1980s.69 A pivotal
statement came in his July 1983 column, in which he addressed the significance of fanzines. By Pavitt’s account, fanzines were the principal
media through which the work of local independent artists could be
“heard, talked about, and debated in cities across the U.S. and around
the globe.” Supporting this assessment, he surveyed the larger history of
regional musical production. Local labels of the 1940s and 1950s laid
the groundwork for the emergence of rock ’n’ roll and created a precedent for the resurgence of such labels during the “punk/new wave rebellion of ’76–’78.” However, local independent labels by themselves could
not achieve the necessary promotional and distributive scope in the
United States, argued Pavitt, because of the sheer expanse of the market.
Thus the importance of fanzines, which allowed for the circulation of
information regarding locally based independent music to areas that
might lack a properly eclectic college radio station and to which news
of such music might otherwise not reach.70 Like Al Flipside, Pavitt
described local scenes not as isolated outposts of creativity but as sites
connected to one another by a complex and growing infrastructure that
244 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
could allow musicians and creative entrepreneurs to circumvent the
dominant structures of the music industry.
Michael Azerrad observed about the later success of Sub Pop that
Pavitt and his partner, Jonathan Poneman, “understood that virtually
every significant movement in rock music had a regional basis,” and
they made it their business to study the ways regional success could be
converted into something bigger.71 Only gradually, though, would
Pavitt’s concern with the local basis of independent music production
lead to a specific concentration on music coming from Seattle. The earliest recordings released by Pavitt, cassette compilations he assembled in
conjunction with his Sub Pop fanzine, contained a diverse assortment of
regional independent music from around the United States. He maintained this wide-ranging scope on his first vinyl compilation in 1986,
Sub Pop 100, which is generally taken to be the first proper release by
the Sub Pop record label.72 Sub Pop 100 projected some of the scope of
Pavitt’s ambition; the spine of the album reads “The new thing; the big
thing; the God thing: a mighty multinational entertainment conglomerate based in the Pacific Northwest.”73 In keeping with this accent on the
nascent label’s location, the album did include work by two Seattle
artists, the proto-grunge U-Men and the sonic experimenter Steve Fisk,
along with a track from the Wipers of nearby Portland, Oregon. Yet the
vast majority of Sub Pop 100 consisted of music by bands outside the
region, including New York’s Sonic Youth, Chicago’s Scratch Acid, and
Japan’s Shonen Knife.
Sub Pop 100 was a landmark release in the history of Sub Pop. From
the standpoint of music generated by Seattle musicians, though, the
more notable 1986 release was the Deep Six collection issued by C/Z
records. Deep Six was more expressly local in its focus than Sub Pop
100. It featured work by six bands from Seattle or points nearby, who
collectively represented the leading edge of the local scene: Green River,
Soundgarden, the Melvins, Malfunkshun, Skin Yard, and the U-Men.
For all of these groups, except Green River and the U-Men, the songs
included on Deep Six would be their first recorded work to see release.
C/Z was one of a small but growing number of independent labels that
emerged in Seattle during the first half of the 1980s. At the time of Deep
Six it was run by Chris Hanszek, a recording engineer, and his girlfriend, Tina Casale, a pair with low-key ambitions. They produced only
two thousand copies of Deep Six, and the record was so underpublicized that it took three years to sell out.74 Such details hardly denote the
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 245
stuff of legend, but Deep Six potently captured Seattle rock in a state of
becoming and was the first recorded document on which the elements
that would make up the Seattle Sound could be heard coming together.
At the time of its 1986 release, the importance of Deep Six was perceived mainly by a small group of knowing insiders. No one captured
the mood of the album as vividly as Dawn Anderson, who reviewed it
for The Rocket. Anderson was uniquely poised to appreciate the music
on Deep Six. In 1983–84, she had edited a fanzine called Backfire that
was the journalistic equivalent of metal/punk crossover. She explained
almost twenty years later, “I didn’t think anyone was covering heavy
metal, at least not very well, so that was the thing for me. I wanted to
cover heavy metal and punk. I was trying to convince people that the
two things were related, which nobody seemed to understand.”75
Anderson began her Deep Six review with the story of her zine and its
failure, claiming that since the demise of Backfire the tendencies she had
been trying to promote had come to fruition. That said, she also
acknowledged that the bands on Deep Six did not play in a style that
could be described as a basic fusion of hardcore and heavy metal. This
was not “speedcore,” observed Anderson. “The fact that none of these
bands could open for Metallica or the Exploited without suffering abuse
merely proves how thoroughly the underground’s absorbed certain
influences, resulting in music that isn’t punk-metal but a third sound distinct from either.”76
Bruce Pavitt, too, took notice. He was not so eloquent in his praise of
Deep Six as was Anderson, but he was no less enthusiastic in his brief
notice: “It’s slow SLOW and heavy HEAVY and it’s THE predominant
sound of underground Seattle in ’86. Green River, Sound Garden [sic],
The Melvins, Malfunkshun and even Skin Yard prove that you don’t
have to live in the suburbs and have a low I.Q. to do some SERIOUS
headbanging. . . . BUY THIS RECORD OR MOVE.”77 For both Pavitt
and Anderson Deep Six marked an important achievement. It captured
the current state of the art of Seattle rock but also represented something of a culmination of earlier developments and pointed the way forward. Collecting the music of a set of relatively like-minded bands, it
provided a sense of coherence and common purpose in a scene that had
previously seemed to be lacking these qualities. Moreover, the two writers heard the music on Deep Six in comparable ways. For Anderson it
was not quite punk and not quite metal but was informed by both and
constituted a unique synthesis. For Pavitt it was heavy, headbanging
246 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
music but with a difference, placing a local accent on what might otherwise seem familiar sounds.
With these remarks, localism came home for Pavitt, and an idea seems
to have been planted in his head as to what the Seattle Sound might be.
He would increasingly focus his efforts on that new sound over the next
year. During this same period, his path began to intersect with that of
another local scene maven. Jonathan Poneman was a disc jockey at
University of Washington station KCMU and the talent agent for a new
music night at the Rainbow Tavern, located near the university. At this
moment when Seattle rock was beginning to attract a new sort of attention
in the city, Poneman emerged as one of the most vocal advocates of the
native scene. Interviewed by the Seattle Weekly in February 1986, Poneman
claimed that Seattle music had reached a “real creative zenith. . . .
There’s genuine excitement, hunger for new sounds, and venues to
play.”78 Later that year, he expanded on his views in The Rocket: “The
town right now is in a musical state where there is an acknowledgment
of a certain consciousness. A lot has to do with our geographic isolation: for once that’s paying off in that the bands here are developing
with their intentions staying pure.”79 Pavitt and Poneman would soon
become business partners through the intervention of their mutual
friend, Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil. Even before their alliance
took root, the two shared a growing conviction that big things were
going to emerge from Seattle and that the local scene was worthy of
dedicated effort.
By mid-1987 the Sub Pop label, with Poneman on board, began to
establish its Seattle-centered orientation. Green River’s Dry as a Bone
EP became the first noncompilation Sub Pop release. Pavitt featured an
announcement about the album in his June 1987 column that reveals
much about the new focus of his endeavors: “The next few years will see
the ultra-heavy rock of Seattle rival the Motor City scene of the early
’70s. I believe that bands like Green River and Soundgarden are every
bit as great as the Stooges and the MC5. To prove my point, I’ve borrowed $2,000 from my Dad to help Green River put out their latest EP,
Dry as a Bone (Sub Pop). For me, songs like ‘This Town’ and ‘PCC’ are
as hard and heavy as anything I’ve ever heard. Please buy this record so
I can pay my Dad back!”80 At this stage, Sub Pop was still very much a
small-scale endeavor, but Pavitt’s stress on his own modest means here
serves a strategic purpose as well, masking his ambitions behind a cloak
of DIY rhetoric. Meanwhile, those ambitions are more apparent in the
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 247
comparison he makes between the current Seattle scene and the Detroit
scene of several years earlier. The Detroit of Pavitt’s vision was the city
and the music scene described by Lester Bangs in 1971 as the last best
hope for rock and roll, the scene many rock-and-roll observers saw as
the most powerful instance of local authenticity preserved in the face of
the homogenizing tendencies of the wider music market.81 Making a
comparison between Detroit and Seattle, Pavitt laid claim to the notion
that Seattle would soon deserve its place in the larger scheme of rock
history, and that Sub Pop would do its part to ensure that people took
notice. From this point forward, such efforts to construct a mythology
around Seattle as the next great rock scene would be central to Sub
Pop’s promotional methods and would also become a means by which
Sub Pop portrayed its own motivations as something more than strictly
economic.
Later that year another Seattle band entered the Sub Pop fold.
Soundgarden included two members, bassist Hiro Yamamoto and guitarist Kim Thayil, who had formerly been schoolmates with Bruce Pavitt
back in the Illinois suburb where they all attended high school. Yet it
was Poneman, not Pavitt, who spearheaded their connection with the
label. Poneman booked the band into the Rainbow Tavern on the advice
of a friend, knowing little about them aside from their name, which was
taken from an art installation that had been placed on the shore of Lake
Washington in the early 1980s. When he saw the band in action during
their first Rainbow show, two things in particular caught his attention:
the contrast between Thayil’s then mild-mannered appearance and his
“decidedly berserk riffage,” and the stage presence of singer Chris
Cornell, who looked “too healthy, too unashamedly physical” to be
fronting a rock band on the current Seattle scene. That physicality translated to the overall sound of the band. Hearing and seeing Soundgarden
that night, proclaimed Poneman, “singlehandedly transformed my
understanding of what rock ’n’ roll was, and what it should be. . . . The
spontaneity and menace that made rock ’n’ roll so liberating and sexy
had been bred out of it. Soundgarden brought it back to life.”82
Screaming Life, the Soundgarden EP released by Sub Pop in late
1987, was funded almost entirely by Poneman, just as Pavitt had provided the bulk of the support behind Green River’s Dry as a Bone (with
help from his dad). Together the two albums did much to define the Sub
Pop aesthetic, an aesthetic that had as much to do with a way of making
records as it did with the music those records contained. Both albums
were recorded by Jack Endino, who was also a guitarist with the band
248 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Skin Yard and who would serve as a veritable house producer for Sub
Pop throughout the first several years of the label’s operation. Working
in the Reciprocal recording studio, where he had initially divided time
with Chris Hanszek, founder of C/Z Records, Endino developed an economical approach to recording that produced a big sound with relatively modest technical resources. Like another celebrated independent
rock figure, Steve Albini, Endino considered himself more a recording
engineer than a record producer, concerned more with the details of
sound reproduction than with some of the other creative decisions in
which producers often participate, such as song arrangement.83 Yet
Endino had a clear method that he brought to his work in the studio,
evident even on those earliest Sub Pop releases. He stressed in a 1992
interview, “I like the low end on my records to have shape, rather than
just being a wash of sound. I like the low end to be this machine that
rolls over you and just crushes you. This very controlled shape, like a
bulldozer, rather than just a wash of woofy noise.”84 Such emphasis on
the low end was well suited to recording a band like Soundgarden, and
more generally contributed to the impression that the Seattle Sound, as
purveyed by Sub Pop, was a markedly “heavy” proposition.
On the cover of Screaming Life was another item soon to be a Sub
Pop trademark: a Charles Peterson photograph of a band in performance.
Peterson was to Sub Pop what Raymond Pettibon had been to SST: a
visual artist who provided the label’s records not only with a consistent
look, but with a stirring series of images that complemented and complicated the musical content. As a photographer, Peterson was drawn
to the live rock event; relatively rare were the instances in which he
asked musicians to pose outside of that setting. He specialized in a sort
of rock-and-roll action photography, producing images in which individual performers were deliberately blurred by his manipulation of
the camera shutter to indicate their uncontainable motion.85 The cover
image of Screaming Life is a quintessential Peterson work in this regard:
Soundgarden appears on a small stage, but Peterson manages to add
depth by getting intimately close to the action. He places singer Chris
Cornell so far in the foreground that he seems about to jump out of the
photographic space. Cornell appears from the waist up, his chest bare,
his back arched, and his arms bent upward, an emblem of the physicality that had so caught Jonathan Poneman off guard. Adding to this effect
are the blurs that Peterson captures around Cornell’s head and around
his hands, almost as though the sound created by the combination of
voice and microphone are powerful enough to visibly move the air. In
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 249
Figure 18. Rock-and-roll action photography: a Charles Peterson photograph of Nirvana at the
HUB East Ballroom, University of Washington, 1989. © Charles Peterson/Retna Ltd. USA.
the background, flanking Cornell on either side, guitarist Kim Thayil
and bassist Hiro Yamamoto play their instruments, their faces shrouded
by the long black hair that was a common feature.
Explaining Peterson’s importance to the creation of a Sub Pop image,
Bruce Pavitt highlighted the way the photographer captured something
essential about the live rock event. According to Pavitt, live shows were
a core aspect of the Sub Pop aesthetic. He and Poneman placed a high
priority on signing bands that were compelling in a live setting, and
they wanted their records to convey something of the power of a strong
live performance. Peterson achieved such proximity with the performers he photographed by staking out his place in the crowd, mixing it up
with those in the audience rather than standing apart (figure 18). Doing
so, he portrayed what Pavitt called “the essence of an indie rock show—
which is very different from arena rock photography. . . . Charles shot
these early shows which were performed in clubs to 50 or 100 people.
So that was a different vibe, there was always tangible communication
between the audience and the Sub Pop ‘star.’”86 Not only liveness as
such, then, but a certain conception of live rock became central to the
iconography of Sub Pop. The preferred setting was a club rather than an
arena; the boundary between star and audience was meant to appear
250 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
fluid rather than starkly defined. In effect, Sub Pop appropriated a live
rock ideal that had taken root through the influence of punk and used it
to transmit a coveted sense of intimacy, intensity, and community, all of
which came to represent the Seattle Sound as constructed through the
label’s products.
By the end of the 1980s, bands from Seattle garnered an increasing
degree of widespread media attention, and the grunge phenomenon
started to assume definition. Sub Pop’s role in promoting the value and
commercial viability of this new rock category was itself widely recognized and plainly evident in various label pursuits. The 1988 release of
Sub Pop 200 consolidated the label’s association with its home city.
Titled to denote something of a sequel to Sub Pop 100, the impressively
packaged compilation was also Sub Pop’s attempt to do its own version
of Deep Six, but in a more wide-ranging and elaborate way in keeping
with the growth of the local scene and the label’s own aspirations. Issued
as a box set containing three twelve-inch extended play vinyl discs and
a booklet of photos almost exclusively shot by Peterson, Sub Pop 200
included the work of twenty Seattle bands, some of established reputation (Soundgarden, Green River, Screaming Trees, the Fastbacks) and
some decidedly more obscure (Cat Butt, Swallow, and an up-andcoming young group named Nirvana). That several of the featured
artists regularly released material on labels other than Sub Pop—and
some, notably Soundgarden, had already left the label for other
opportunities—indicated the priorities behind the collection. Sub Pop
200 brought valuable attention to many of the label’s own artists, but
also established Sub Pop’s broader role as the primary curator of Seattle
rock, the conduit through which the local scene would become known
to the world at large.87
For all that Sub Pop played such a vital role in the media explosion
that developed around Seattle from 1989 forward, the label did not reap
the bulk of the profits made from the swelling popularity of grunge. Sub
Pop was run by two media-savvy entrepreneurs, but it was still a relatively capital-poor independent label that proved skillful at building
desire for its products but did not have the capacity to distribute them
in large quantities. As a result, main Seattle attractions such as
Soundgarden and Nirvana that earned their initial notoriety with Sub
Pop felt compelled to seek major label support once they were established. Soundgarden’s trajectory included a brief tenure with SST and
then a deal with A&M records, where they remained for the duration
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 251
of their career. Nirvana famously signed a deal with Geffen in 1990,
which set the stage for the massive success of their second album,
Nevermind.
Even more telling was the fate of Green River and the various bands
formed in its wake. One of the definitive groups associated with the
emergent grunge style, Green River was a band with a volatile membership from the start. The original lineup—singer Mark Arm, guitarists
Steve Turner and Stone Gossard, drummer Alex Vincent, and bassist
Jeff Ament—came together in 1984 and lasted barely longer than a
year, despite the fact that several members had a previous history of
musical partnership. Arm and Turner had previously played together in
two punk-oriented groups, Mr. Epp and the Calculations and the Limp
Richerds.88 Turner had gone to high school with Gossard, where they
joined forces in a decidedly amateurish ensemble called the Ducky Boys,
built around the combination of Gossard’s taste for Alice Cooper and
Kiss and Turner’s interest in Black Flag and Bad Religion.89 In Green
River, these intertwined musical histories grew into a set of competing
alliances. On one side stood Arm and Turner, who shared a commitment to the chaotic sound and independent stance of punk. On the
other stood Ament and Gossard, who favored a musical approach more
rooted in straight-ahead 1970s heavy rock, but also, and more important, sought a sort of accessibility that could lend itself to success on a
much wider scale. The polarity between these factions was not absolute,
but the discrepancy was strong enough to lead Steve Turner to leave the
group in 1985, disillusioned by his band mates’ determined pursuit of
stardom. Two years later Green River broke up after Arm left the band
due to similar dissatisfaction, just as the Seattle Sound was beginning to
achieve some wider visibility.
As a working unit, Green River marked the merging of arena rock
aspiration and punk rock defamation, but in their instability and eventual dissolution they represented the difficulty of making that merger
into a durable property. In the band’s aftermath, the two factions would
pursue separate paths that dramatized tensions within the Seattle scene
as a whole, and the limitations of Sub Pop’s capacity to market that
scene more broadly. Ament and Gossard, along with guitarist Bruce
Fairweather and singer Andrew Wood, pursued their arena rock dreams
in Mother Love Bone. That group’s late 1988 deal with the major label
Polygram preceded Soundgarden’s A&M deal by some months and was
another milestone in the widening commercial potential of the Seattle
Sound.90 When Wood died little more than a year later due to a heroin
252 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
overdose, Gossard and Ament maintained their partnership, recording
a successful tribute to the deceased singer under the name Temple of the
Dog, a collaboration with Soundgarden members Chris Cornell and
Matt Cameron. They then formed the most commercially successful
band to come from Seattle: Pearl Jam.
Meanwhile, Arm and Turner would rejoin forces to form Mudhoney
with bassist Matt Lukin and drummer Dan Peters. They would remain
loyal members of the Sub Pop roster longer than any of their contemporaries.91 “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” the first Mudhoney single issued in
1988, was one of the most catalyzing records of the era, and the EP
Superfuzz Bigmuff further documented the band’s potent synthesis of
Stooges-style minimalism, weighty guitar riffs reminiscent of Black
Sabbath, and a brand of dissonant guitar noise taken from 1960s garage
bands, all filtered through the sonic aggression and self-consciousness
of punk. On the strength of these early recordings, Mudhoney emerged
as one of the Seattle bands most likely to succeed, and as one of Sub
Pop’s greatest hopes.
Over time, Mudhoney did indeed become one of the most enduring
and representative bands to emerge from the 1980s Seattle scene, but
their status remained akin to groups such as the Melvins and the
Fastbacks, other long-standing groups with strong connections to the
scene who built a loyal, steady, but relatively modest audience base. In
early years, Arm and Turner viewed their relationship to Sub Pop more
like a partnership than a business relationship—a perspective justified
by the band members’ friendship with Poneman and especially Pavitt.92
Their views became more peppered with disappointment after the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, however, when it became clear that Sub
Pop’s business practices had not been wholly beneficial to Mudhoney.
While Pavitt claimed with some validity that Mudhoney’s 1991 album,
Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, saved Sub Pop from economic ruin,
the sheer fact that Sub Pop was on such unsteady ground at the very
moment when the Seattle Sound reached new levels of popularity indicated that the label had done a better job of building hype than building sales.93 Consequently, by 1992 Mudhoney too would see fit to
pursue a major label deal, with Warner Bros. records, consciously
exchanging the artistic freedom they’d enjoyed at Sub Pop for the hope
of greater financial stability.
Ironically, Sub Pop’s most lucrative economic move at this time was the
deal it made to sell Nirvana’s contract to Geffen. Sub Pop retained a
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 253
small royalty percentage on Nevermind, which brought the label its
greatest earnings to date, and also benefited from the increased sales of
Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach.94 Mudhoney may have helped Sub Pop
stay afloat through its loyalty, but Nirvana arguably helped the label
more with its decision to pursue a major label deal. So it was that Sub
Pop, more than SST or Metal Blade, demonstrated the interdependent
relationship that independent labels have often had with the major
record companies. Like Sam Phillips, the head of Sun Records who sold
Elvis Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1956, Sub Pop used the
money earned from the loss of a major artist to continue recording new
talent. Such deals, however compromised they might appear, are often
the best course for independent labels to follow. Promoting and distributing the work of an artist with major sales potential—one who might
sell 500,000 records as opposed to 50,000—requires a degree of capital
investment that most independent labels simply cannot afford. Selling
Nirvana’s contract allowed Sub Pop to make money on the band while
bearing no direct cost for promotion and distribution, which in turn
gave the label a new degree of solvency and allowed it to successfully
maintain operation up to the current day.
In the end, Sub Pop’s success cannot be fully measured by the economic bottom line. Pavitt and Poneman did not create the Seattle
Sound from scratch, by any means, nor were they the only ones
involved in its production. What they achieved was to bring a distinctive mix of qualities to bear on the creation and marketing of Seattle
rock. Rather than simply promote rock from Seattle, Sub Pop was led
by the recognition that localism was a phenomenon of larger significance in rock. Like early punk theorists such as Greg Shaw and Lenny
Kaye, they viewed local scenes as laboratories of musical creativity
and crucial sources of musical enthusiasm. Like the most articulate
proponents of hardcore, they perceived that local scenes were connected to each other through vital networks of economic and cultural
exchange. But they went beyond many of their peers in believing that
these networks could be used for marketing rock on a mass scale,
rather than merely linking together a series of self-sustaining, relatively autonomous entities.
This aspect of Sub Pop’s outlook was linked to another, just as important: that loud, heavy music played with power and finesse could be
joined to a vision of rock-and-roll community defined by intimacy
rather than distance, equality rather than hierarchy. To say that the Sub
Pop aesthetic melded the sound of metal with the social ideals of punk
254 METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
would be a simplification, but it suggests something of the combination
of elements at work in the label’s output. In the words of Everett True,
the British journalist who brought Sub Pop its first significant bit of
international acclaim, “John and Bruce’s stroke of marketing genius was
to push rock ’n’ roll as rebellion—an ancient credo—while allowing
people to listen to big dumb rock and retain their hipster credibility.”95
SST had credibility to burn, but its version of big rock was too skewed
to find mass acceptance. Metal Blade excelled at big rock but did not
have the same degree of subcultural capital. Only Sub Pop managed this
particular synthesis; in doing so, they made the combination of metal
and punk into the basis for a broad-based youth culture that reshaped
the rock music industry in the first half of the 1990s.
REFORMING GENRE
At the end of 1992 the Rolling Stone journalist Kim Neely offered some
pointed commentary on the year that had passed. Her main observation
was shared by many: that the commercial ascent of “alternative” rock—
typified by Seattle-based artists such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and
Soundgarden—was a contradiction in terms. Before 1992, asserted
Neely, alternative “didn’t connote a sound so much as an aesthetic” that
could be traced to the DIY ethos of early 1980s trailblazers such as
Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys.96 That began to change in the late
1980s, when offbeat groups such as Jane’s Addiction and the Red Hot
Chili Peppers built an audience from the disillusioned ranks of both
hardcore punk and hard rock fans. By the early 1990s major labels perceived the value of “alternative” as a term that could be used to sell the
idea of individuality and distinction to a broad range of young music
consumers; as a result, by 1991 “alternative was the mainstream.” At
the root of this development, for Neely, was the very different ways independent labels and major labels conducted business. “Historically, indie
labels have signed bands,” she claimed, “but major labels tend to sign
by genre.”97 Major labels, in other words, tend to pursue categories of
music that can be replicated and believe that success is the result of
strategic repetition and saturation of the market. This was the process,
according to Neely, whereby the singular style of a band like Nirvana
could become a broad-based promotional tool.
Genre may well have been one of the mechanisms whereby the unruly
terrain of alternative or independent rock was converted into something
more musically and financially manageable. Persuasive as this perspective
THREE INDEPENDENT LABELS 255
is, however, it ignores some essential features concerning the work of
independent record labels in the 1980s. Contrary to Neely, labels such
as SST, Metal Blade, and Sub Pop did not forsake genre as a tool to
achieve their ends. The existence of relatively discrete genres and their
associated fans was one of the conditions that allowed such labels to
emerge and proliferate in the first place, insofar as those fans did not
have their tastes satisfied by the output of major labels. Once these labels
were established, though, they did not merely reproduce the already
defined aesthetics of the genres with which they were associated.
Through the work of influential labels such as SST, Metal Blade, and
Sub Pop, metal and punk were updated and redefined in line with changing local conditions and the importation of new sounds from afar. These
changes led to the growth of new subgenres, such as thrash and hardcore, which intensified the terms according to which punk and metal
were produced and experienced. They also created the circumstances
within which metal and punk would enjoy a degree of contact and crossfertilization previously unknown in the United States, evident in the
avowedly hybrid phenomenon of metal/punk crossover and the more
ambivalent hybrid of grunge. How these changes were made audible in
the music of the era is examined in greater detail in the next chapter.
Musicians created the sounds that most directly embodied these occurrences, but independent record labels gave those sounds crucial support
and contributed significantly to their wider circulation and their shifting
definition.
7
Louder, Faster, Slow It Down!
Metal, Punk, and Musical Aesthetics
GOING METAL
Double Nickels on the Dime, released in 1984 by the Minutemen, was
a landmark of punk music played with creative breadth. A rare tworecord set in a genre that typically rejected such excesses, Double
Nickels contained forty-five songs, all but three of which were original
compositions by members of the band. The three covers were themselves indicative of the group’s unusual frame of reference: “Don’t Look
Now,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival; “Doctor Wu,” by Steely Dan;
and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” by Van Halen. Creedence and Steely
Dan were strong influences on the Minutemen, the former for their nofrills rock and roll shaped by a sharp working-class outlook, the latter
for their willingness to overlook musical categories and consequent creation of a stylistic stew made out of equal parts jazz, funk, and rock. To
cover songs by these bands was to pay a form of creative tribute.
Covering Van Halen, the definitive good-time heavy metal band of the
late 1970s and early 1980s, had a different sort of meaning. Explaining
their selection to the punk fanzine Flipside, bassist and singer Mike
Watt noted, “It was kind of a joke. Since so many [punk] bands have
gone hard rock we thought it would be funny if the Minutemen went
hard rock.” Lest readers miss the derision of the band’s gesture, Watt
256
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 257
described heavy metal elsewhere in the same interview as “the most
marketable rebellion I’ve ever seen.”1 While some in the punk/indie
scene of the 1980s—Pushead, Bruce Pavitt—celebrated the merger of
metal and punk, Watt expressed another view common among punk
advocates: that “going metal” was a form of selling out, and thus a
betrayal of the basic values that underlay the punk scene. In this regard,
“Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” as recorded by the Minutemen, was a quintessential hardcore gesture, a musical “Fuck you” to a band that had
done more than any other to spread the hedonistic sound and image of
Southern California heavy metal.
More telling than the basic decision to cover a Van Halen song was
the way the Minutemen played it. They compressed the almost fourminute track length of the Van Halen original to a fleet thirty-eight seconds on Double Nickels, making the Minutemen’s version short even by
their standards.2 To so dramatically abbreviate the song, the Minutemen
cut all but one of the original three verses and abandoned the chorus
entirely. They also removed much of the technical polish that characterized the earlier version. As recorded by Van Halen on the band’s 1978
debut, “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” was driven by a three-chord sequence
of arpeggios, Am–F–G. The sequence was basic enough in itself, but
when played by guitarist Eddie Van Halen assumed a sophistication that
went beyond the chord changes. Van Halen played through the arpeggiated chords while deftly muting the strings of his guitar with the palm
of his right hand, creating a distinctively percussive timbre further
accented by layers of distortion, echo, and a mild phasing effect added
to the mix. The guitarist also followed each repetition of the sequence
with a three-note turnaround (C–B–C, fretted on the third and second
frets of the guitar’s fifth string), picked in a way that produced artificial
harmonics and that provided the song’s main melodic hook.
The Minutemen reduced this ornate set of technical effects to its
most basic elements. They shrank the song’s three-chord sequence down
to two, A and G, and guitarist D. Boon played those two chords not as
arpeggios but as whole chords. Boon also retained a trace of the original’s melodic turnaround, but played it at a much higher pitch on his
guitar’s third string. This gesture removed much of the weight conveyed
by the three notes in the Van Halen version—and so did the overall
timbre of Boon’s guitar, which sounded characteristically dry and trebly,
lacking the distorted overdrive and the space-expanding echo of his
heavy metal counterpart. All told, the Minutemen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout
Love” quite radically disassembled the Van Halen recording. In so doing,
258 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
it played on one of the principal dividing lines between metal and punk:
that concerning the function of musical technique and the value
assigned to virtuosity. Not that the Minutemen lacked musical skill. All
three of the band’s members—Boon, Watt, and drummer George
Hurley—were resourceful and accomplished musicians who played
punk rock with a broad stylistic palette. Their version of “Ain’t Talkin’
’Bout Love” does not disavow the uses of technique so much as deconstruct those uses in the service of musical parody.
The Minutemen’s assault on metal virtuosity was not an isolated occurrence. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, virtuosity was one of
a range of musical features that became highly contested as the relationship between heavy metal and punk grew more knotty, as the emergence of new hybrid subgenres coexisted with efforts to differentiate
one genre from another along aesthetic and ethical lines. Virtuosity
mattered for aesthetic reasons, captured in one of the era’s most pressing conundrums: Was music better if played with extreme technical control and precision, or did such refined technique detract from essential
qualities of emotion, spontaneity, and energy? And it mattered for ethical reasons, as various observers questioned the social implications surrounding the elevation of virtuosity. Did such elevation establish an
unbridgeable, hierarchical gap between performer and audience, and
thus contradict the movement envisioned by punk and hardcore to bring
about a more inclusive, participatory form of musical communication?
What sprang from these tensions was no simple dichotomy—heavy
metal holds virtuosity in high esteem, whereas punk is suspicious of it—
but a reconfiguration of musical practice in which certain types of virtuosity lost credibility while others gained acceptance.
Along with virtuosity, the quality most implicated in the shifting
terms of the metal/punk continuum was tempo. Whether to play fast or
slow—or more to the point, whether to play faster or slower than was
common in a given branch of metal or punk—was a major choice faced
by musicians and had important implications for listeners as well.3 It
became a choice so laden with value because of the changes that metal
and punk underwent in these years, changes that were partly detailed in
the preceding chapter. While earlier punk bands such as the Ramones
and the Sex Pistols used speed to announce something of a break with
earlier rock styles, hardcore placed even more emphasis on acceleration.
The quickened pace of hardcore was the musical analogue of, even the
precondition for, the physical intensity of slam-dancing: it was attached
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 259
to the hardcore strategy to reduce rock to certain core elements, and it
was a means of demonstrating the hardcore commitment to an extreme
sound and style of performance. For similar reasons, speed became a
desirable feature in those realms of heavy metal seeking to establish
their own brand of sonic extremity and subcultural capital. Through
thrash and speed metal, playing fast became one of the principal paths
to musical innovation in 1980s heavy metal. Just as quickly as speed
was embraced, though, its value faced a challenge from performers who
set themselves against these new generic codes. While playing fast
became a means of certifying a sense of subcultural belonging in spheres
of both metal and punk by the mid-1980s, playing slow—or at least,
slower—became a means of asserting distinction from the general trend.
First met with confusion, the impulse to slow down gained considerable
momentum over the course of the decade and eventually became a key
element in the creation of grunge.
Part of the reason virtuosity and tempo became contested was that
each, in its way, bore on the relation of rock music to its past and the
direction that it might take in the future. For some commentators, virtuosic performance was the residue of an outmoded approach to rock.
So too was the inclination to play slowly, which carried associations of
early 1970s heavy bands like Led Zeppelin and especially Black
Sabbath. Yet for bands that embraced these practices, reclaiming certain
elements of the past was part of the goal. On some level this was a kind
of nostalgia shaped by the absorption of certain sounds and influences.
It could also assume the form of something more like countermemory,
appropriating aspects of the musical past that had fallen into disregard
or that carried new meaning when employed in a contemporary setting.
One song, “Swallow My Pride,” by the formative Seattle rock band
Green River, provides an especially suggestive instance of these currents, and thus provides a culmination to one of this book’s running
themes, concerning the way that rock’s past was continually reframed
through the revisionist tendencies of the metal/punk continuum.
THE NEW VIRTUOSITY
At the start was something ordinary, an A power chord drenched in
reverb and distortion. That basic gesture merely set the harmonic center
for one of the most riveting displays of guitar virtuosity ever put on
record: “Eruption,” the second track on the first Van Halen album, one
minute and forty-two seconds of Eddie Van Halen playing (mostly)
260 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
Figure 19. The new virtuosity: Eddie Van Halen displays his two-handed tapping technique.
Photo: Chris Walter/WireImage/Getty Images.
unaccompanied solo electric guitar. Following the initial power chord
came a predominantly pentatonic opening section, marked by muted
picking and an array of hammer-ons and pull-offs, capped by a wildly
mutated depression of the low E-string with Van Halen’s tremolo bar,
which led into a similarly wild tremolo-bar–driven ascent on open A.
Three more power chords announced the shift of the track’s harmonic
center to D, a shift that also found the guitarist working the upper register of his instrument through a series of rapidly picked lines that culminated in an extended quotation from a well-known Rodolphe Kreutzer
violin etude. All of which was prelude to the climactic final section in
which Van Halen showcased the technique for which he would become
best known: tapping the index finger of his right hand onto the fretboard
in tandem with the hammer-ons and pull-offs fingered by the left to produce a rapidly shifting set of arpeggios that ascended up the fretboard
and then moved back down, finally settling at a point of stasis that built
to a last burst of whammy-bar–driven distortion (figure 19).4
When “Eruption” came out in 1978, punk had already posed a significant challenge to the valorization of the guitar hero that had
become entrenched in rock during the mid-1960s and that had been a
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 261
foundational aspect of heavy metal from its inception. The British
fanzine Sideburns printed its infamous piece of antivirtuosic propaganda in late 1976, telling its readers, “This is a chord . . . This is
another . . . This is a third . . . Now form a band.”5 Punk resistance to
guitar-based virtuosity was by no means uniformly followed, but the
two most identifiable punk guitar stylists, Johnny Ramone of the
Ramones and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, famously avoided unduly
demonstrative guitar solos.6 In a sense, it was precisely this countervirtuosic backdrop that made Van Halen’s solo outburst such a dramatic
statement. Against the backdrop of punk, Van Halen appeared like a
phoenix rising from the ashes of arena rock to restore the electric guitar
to its rightful place at the pinnacle of rock achievement. Yet “Eruption”
not only revived the virtuosity of years past. It also raised the bar of
technical achievement. As Robert Walser observed in Running with the
Devil, “Eddie Van Halen revolutionized electric guitar playing, as had
Jimi Hendrix before him, in the direction of greater virtuosity.”7 Making
this claim, Walser put into scholarly terms what popular guitar magazines
such as Guitar Player and Guitar World had been saying for over a
decade.8 In the years following “Eruption” a restyled form of virtuosity
became central to the genre of heavy metal. Over time, resistance to this
new model grew as well, first through the energized sound and rhetoric of
hardcore, and then through the disorderly musicianship of grunge.
“Eruption” found Van Halen using a range of musical effects that set
his playing style apart from earlier guitarists: two-handed tapping, flamboyant tremolo bar permutations, and extreme speed and precision evident in both the staccato passages of the second section and the legato
motion of the piece’s climax. Enhancing the aura of virtuosity surrounding his playing was his recourse to a classical musical vocabulary
in his soloing. This classical influence was by no means present in all
aspects of his technique. In many ways he retained much of the melodic
and technical vocabulary of blues-based figures such as Eric Clapton
and Jimmy Page, as well as Hendrix. Moreover, Van Halen was far from
the first rock guitarist to employ classical elements. As a writer for
Guitar World magazine observed, “The classical approach [was already]
a heavy metal tradition” by the end of the 1970s, having been used in
different ways by guitarists such as Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page,
Leslie West, and German metal guitarists Michael Schenker and Ulrich
Roth.9 Nonetheless, “Eruption” deployed its classical elements—the
quotation of the Kreutzer sonata, the cascading arpeggios of the final
section—with decided force. Doing so, it consolidated a development
262 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
that had been building throughout the past decade: the incorporation of
classical music into a rock context as a means of expanding the music’s
harmonic and melodic underpinnings and elevating its perceived artistic
value.10
In the wake of “Eruption” classically informed guitar virtuosity
became more prevalent among heavy metal musicians. Randy Rhoads,
formerly the guitarist with the Los Angeles heavy metal band Quiet
Riot, accelerated the move toward classical music upon joining Ozzy
Osbourne’s newly formed group in 1980. Rhoads’s solos for Osbourne
on such tracks as “Mr. Crowley” and “Revelation (Mother Earth)”
were built around melodic lines that owed much to the harmonic structures of the Baroque era and made use of his many years studying and
teaching classical guitar at a Los Angeles music store. Pushing the trend
further was Swedish-born Yngwie Malmsteen, who generated both
acclaim and controversy for his stunning, technically demanding solos
as a member of the bands Steeler and Alcatrazz, and later as a solo
artist. Many were awestruck at the speed and bravado of Malmsteen’s
solos on songs such as “Kree Nakoorie” (recorded with Alcatrazz) and
“Far Beyond the Sun.” Others, though, including many within the heavy
metal world itself, believed that Malmsteen went too far in showcasing
his virtuosic abilities. That Malmsteen held himself above his peers and
linked his music to the higher aspirations of classical music rather than
the lower form of heavy metal only gave his critics more ammunition.11
Despite the criticism he faced, his debut solo album, Yngwie
Malmsteen’s Rising Force, set the template for many similar records to
follow, its format of almost entirely instrumental compositions giving
the guitarist free rein to pursue his passion for the complex but harmonious structures of J. S. Bach and Nicolò Paganini, both of whom he
prominently thanked on the back cover.
Malmsteen, Van Halen, and other heavy metal guitarists of the 1980s
recast received notions of virtuosity to suit new aesthetic ends. Their
impact was such that the speed-driven style of rock guitar they cultivated earned its own appellation, shred, named for the way guitarists
were prone to “tear up” the fretboard with their extreme technique. By
the second half of the decade, shred-based, classically informed, hypervirtuosic, guitar-oriented metal became a phenomenon unto itself.
Guitarists Vinnie Moore, Tony MacAlpine, Marty Friedman, and a host
of others released albums that were, at root, variations on the pattern
established by Malmsteen’s Rising Force. Virtually all of these albums,
save Malmsteen’s, were issued by Mike Varney’s Shrapnel label, one of
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 263
the pioneering independent heavy metal record labels of the 1980s.
Called “the most significant entrepreneur . . . of the new wave Guitar
Hero in America” by Kerrang!, Varney wrote the influential “Spotlight”
column for Guitar Player magazine, in which he briefly reviewed demo
tapes by three “undiscovered” guitarists each month.12 Although the
column was not an exclusive showcase for heavy metal performers,
Varney regularly featured players associated with the genre and its new
brand of virtuosity, some of which went on to make albums for
Shrapnel. As Varney told Kerrang!’s Derek Oliver, he founded Shrapnel
because of his sense that “there wasn’t anyone around prepared to take
things further than Eddie Van Halen. For me that was unacceptable, so
I decided to form my own label purely for the promotion of new undiscovered guitar talent.”13 In his dual capacity as writer and label head,
Varney made it his mission to promote the idea that guitarists needed to
continue refining their technique, expanding on past innovations to push
the envelope of technical achievement.
However much the new virtuosity strove for artistic progress, it shared
much with earlier forms of guitar heroism, including its unabashedly
masculine orientation. With the rise of the rock guitar hero in the 1960s
and 1970s, the virtuosity of the musician was enhanced and amplified
by the technological trappings of the electric guitar, which assumed the
status of what I have elsewhere termed the “technophallus,” fusing
human and technological capabilities in a way that reinforced the historical coupling of virtuosic performance and masculine potency.14
Continuing these patterns, the new virtuosity of the 1980s allowed male
performers and audience members to experience a shared sense of
empowerment that stemmed in part from the continued marginalization of female spectators and musicians.15 The affirmation of masculinity was complicated, though, by the competitive dynamic that virtuosity
put into play. Vivian Campbell, guitarist for the heavy metal band Dio,
vividly described the competition between guitarists that accompanied
the rise of shred: “To me, it’s like musical athletics. Athletics is all about
speed and the fastest and the best. . . . The trouble with guitar players
especially is that they think it’s always against the clock. Competition’s
a wonderful, healthy thing, but it can get the better of you. . . . I don’t
give a flying fuck if I don’t play as fast as Yngwie Malmsteen. Sometimes
it would be nice, but I’m a lot happier doing what I do.”16 That
Campbell was himself a guitarist of considerable technical accomplishment only makes these remarks more pointed. In the context of the new
virtuosity, even the most exceptional guitarists felt pressure to exceed
264 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
their capabilities and play to a higher standard. The goal was to continually strive to play better, faster, more precisely, and so the new virtuosity established a hierarchy in which the mastery of a few select figures
was held up as the ideal to which others aspired.
COUNTERING TECHNIQUE
This hierarchical quality, more than any other feature, made the new
virtuosity anathema to advocates of hardcore. Not that hardcore lacked
its own status hierarchies, but in hardcore, ethical commitment to certain ideals—those contained in the ideology of DIY—counted more
than the acquisition of musical technique. The elevation of virtuosity
contradicted one central tenet of the DIY outlook in particular: that the
lack of musical ability or talent should not be an impediment to becoming a participant in the scene. Of course, DIY practice offered many
routes for nonmusicians to assume active participatory roles, such as
organizing shows, managing communal spaces, contributing to
fanzines, and facilitating the production and distribution of recorded
music. But for some involved in hardcore, these roles were not enough.
At its most extreme, hardcore sought to challenge not only the value
attached to virtuosity, but the very boundary that separated musician
from nonmusician. From this perspective, anyone who fit other criteria
for inclusion in the scene, and who had the will to do so, should be
allowed to go onstage and perform music, regardless of ability.
Coupled with this philosophy of participation was an aesthetic preference in hardcore for music that was shorn of extraneous elements.
Indeed, if hardcore could be said to have had a fundamental difference
from earlier punk, that difference lay in the hardcore impulse toward
purification. Not all leading adherents of hardcore shared the same
values or targeted the same issues, but virtually all believed that the
sound of hardcore, the social networks in which they resided, and society at large needed to be purified of certain polluting tendencies.
Musically, virtuosity was generally regarded in hardcore as a form of
pollution in these terms. Whereas in heavy metal, a virtuosic guitar solo
contributed to the sense of release and empowerment conveyed by a
given song, in hardcore it was heard as a distraction, something that
diluted the streamlined intensity of the form. Steven Blush summarized
the musical preferences of hardcore well in his oral history, American
Hardcore: “Although the philosophy [of hardcore] implied ‘no rules,’
the music wasn’t avant-garde, experimental, nor did it have unlimited
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 265
possibilities. It was all about playing as fast as possible. . . . HC guitarists—
with their new-fashioned style of attack—ripped as fast as humanly
possible. Soloing represented traditional Rock bullshit and was forbidden. . . . Singers belted out words in an abrasive, aggressive manner.
Drummers played ultra-fast, in an elemental one-two-one-two. That
insistence on speed imposed limitations, which soon turned into
assets.”17 In effect, hardcore substituted one form of speed for another.
For Yngwie Malmsteen to play streams of sixty-fourth notes in fleetfingered sequence was a form of unwanted indulgence. The speed
valued by hardcore was of a more collectivist cast. Guitarists, bassists,
drummers, even singers contributed to the overall effect, producing a
sound in which the various musical components were far less differentiated, and the players less individuated, than in other forms of rock.
“Straight Edge,” from the 1981 debut single by the Washington, DC,
hardcore band Minor Threat, exemplified the nascent hardcore aesthetic. The song’s message and lyrics are among the most influential in
hardcore history, the term “straight edge” having subsequently been
adopted for a social movement in which young punks openly and outspokenly abstained from drinking, taking drugs, engaging in permissive
sex, and other activities seen to represent an undesirable loss of selfcontrol. Sung by vocalist and lyricist Ian MacKaye, “Straight Edge”
directed its two verses of anger-fueled social critique first and foremost
against rock itself, including punk rock, which had done so much to
promote a lifestyle of unchecked excess. The music accompanying
MacKaye’s vocals not only reinforced the song’s message, it provided a
sort of aural parallel. Guitarist Lyle Preslar played an unrelenting series
of distorted barre chords, shifting rapidly from one to the next, never
breaking from the chords into any single note flourishes. Bassist Brian
Baker doubled the changes played by Preslar, and drummer Jeff Nelson
kept a steady, propulsive beat, again avoiding any undue flourishes. The
song has only the briefest instrumental lead-in and no break between
verses; there is no chorus to speak of, each verse ending with MacKaye’s
assertive declaration “I’ve got the straight edge.” All told, the piece lasts
for forty-four seconds.
The British music scholar Dave Laing has written of bands such as
the Sex Pistols, “The ‘incompetence’ of punk musicians was more
rhetorical than actual.”18 I would make a similar claim about hardcore.
Regarding Minor Threat, Black Flag, and other hardcore bands of the
early 1980s, the ability of the musicians in question was less at issue
than the sound these musicians sought to create; as Steven Blush noted,
266 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
the very restrictions embedded in the hardcore aesthetic are what gave
the music much of its power. Nonetheless, those restrictions became
more subject to question as the subculture surrounding hardcore grew
and the musical form became more codified. The elimination of virtuosity and other excessive or extraneous elements proved a potent way to
invest punk with new meaning and energy at the time of hardcore’s
emergence. But was such a rigid aesthetic sufficient to permit hardcore
to sustain and revivify itself over time?
That question lay beneath another, more blunt query posed by
Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll on the cover of its April–May 1984 issue: “Does
Punk Suck???” The fanzine, by then positioned as a punk standardbearer, surveyed a range of respondents in what was effectively a broad
commentary on the state of punk circa 1984. Amid the diversity of perspectives represented, two dominant motifs emerged. Those who agreed
that punk did suck, or at least was at risk of losing its creative momentum, bemoaned the rigidity of the hardcore aesthetic, which had made
punk formulaic rather than innovative. Jack Rabid, the editor of the
New York fanzine The Big Takeover, put it thus: “For me, the question
is not whether, but why many hardcore/thrash bands have become so
generic, and why is this do [sic] discouraging?”19 Rabid placed the
blame on the limited scope by which artistic success was measured in
hardcore, such that speed and energy were sufficient grounds for elevating bands to the status of greatness, at the expense of talent, precision,
or songwriting skills. Echoing his critique, another fanzine editor,
Mykel Board, called for an embrace of elitism as the antidote to punk’s
current malaise: “Elitism means being different from the normal. It
means liking and making the fringes. . . . Stay apart, stay alone, separate
yourself from the dregs who are the rest of Podunkville. That keeps you
underground. That keeps you elite. That makes you the future.”20
For others, elitism was not the way forward; it was part of the problem, not the solution. The most articulate defenders of contemporary
punk took issue with the suggestion that musical progress should be the
full measure of the genre’s success. Barbara Anne Rice, editor of the zine
Truly Needy, acknowledged the spread of musical conformity in hardcore, but stressed that for the young fans who were among its most
enthusiastic participants, “playing an instrument is a step towards personal independence.”21 Allison Raine, editor of Savage Pink, was more
emphatic about the matter: “Fuck if I’ll be the one to tell someone they’re
not musically proficient enough to hold my interest. . . . By putting down
bands for being ‘generic,’ we are only throwing the scene into reverse
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 267
and heading back to the days of guitar heroes.”22 Here was the populist
ethos of hardcore at its most untarnished, bristling not so much at the
acquisition of musical skill as at the application of musical standards that
created a divide between those who can play and those who cannot.
Seeking a middle ground between these positions—between the vanguardism of Rabid and Board and the populism of Rice and Raine—was
Tim Yohannon, editor of Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll. An ardent champion
of DIY, Yohannon’s sympathies lay mainly with the populist outlook.
However, in his statement, he admitted that where the creative development of punk was concerned, the subordination of talent and inspiration to the more basic call for musical participation could go only so
far: “One of punk’s main thrusts was ‘anybody can do it.’ But democracy often leads to mediocrity. If many hardcore bands now sound
generic, should we be re-thinking our commitment to ‘democracy’ and
return to elitism in music, as some would like to see? Or should we say
that democratizing music was just the first stage, and now that we’ve got
‘a band in every garage,’ let’s move on to stage two: quality and imagination.”23 Yohannon, Raine, and Rice all agreed on a fundamental
point: abandoning or at least loosening the notion that technical excellence was necessary to the making of good music was a key punk principle, a cornerstone of the genre’s efforts to “democratize” musical
production and consumption. The foremost difficulty, then, was to preserve open access to the ranks of musicianship while also maintaining
an aesthetic that valued challenge, risk, and surprise, qualities that were
arguably hard to achieve for musicians who were striving for basic competence. A secondary complication concerned those musicians who had
moved beyond basic competence. Was there room in hardcore for the
deployment of refined musical skill? If so, how far could musicians push
the deliberately restrictive conventions of the form?
The dialogue spurred by Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll’s provocative question revealed the ideological divisions operating in 1980s punk. At issue
was not only the matter of whether punk musicians should adhere to an
aesthetic of calculated simplicity or seek to expand the genre’s terms
through applied technique and resourceful creativity. Something larger
was at stake, having to do with whether punk should mainly try to sustain its existing style or make room for artistic innovation of a sort that
could trouble the genre’s creative boundaries. Keith Kahn-Harris’s distinction between mundane and transgressive subcultural capital comes
into play here, as it did in association with NWOBHM and the admission of punk elements into metal. In these terms, Rabid and Board
268 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
appear to be clearly on the side of transgressive subcultural capital,
Raine and Rice on the mundane side, while Yohannon falls somewhere
in between. Yet the lines are not so absolute. Rabid and Board believe
that artistic refinement and innovation are crucial for punk to reproduce
itself; Raine and Rice believe that the critique of musical standards can
have a transformative effect, if not on punk music, then on the quality
of participation in the surrounding scene. Transgressive and mundane,
innovative and stabilizing features were all necessary, but which features
had most value was subject to debate. Respondents in the “Does Punk
Suck???” dialogue disagreed less about whether punk should change
than about whether the best measure of progress lay in the music itself
or in the social and political relations to which punk gave rise.
As a result of these conflicts, many performers who assumed a more
openly experimental or eclectic approach to their music were compelled
to announce a break with hardcore as their sound began to diversify.
Black Flag and Hüsker Dü were but two of several bands of note to
begin their musical careers in close association with hardcore but then
clashed with its norms as their sound and style started to diversify. Later
in this chapter I examine the case of Black Flag in more detail. For them,
the conflict came from a combination of the band’s incorporation of
slower tempos and the greater room given to guitarist Greg Ginn’s solo
excursions. Similarly, Hüsker Dü generated tension with their move to a
more pop-oriented approach to melody in their songwriting and the
increased prominence of the band’s neopsychedelic trappings, which
also involved guitarist Bob Mould playing more extended solo breaks.
Alongside the Minutemen’s opus Double Nickels on the Dime, Hüsker
Dü’s Zen Arcade—both double albums released in 1984 by SST—
marked the moment at which the most musically exploratory elements
of hardcore broke away from the form and were reconstituted into the
more open-ended style that came to be labeled indie rock.24
CRAFTING AN ALTERNATIVE
In grunge, as in heavy metal, the music came first, but punk and hardcore exerted a pronounced influence on the creative ethos of grunge.
Musicians associated with the Seattle Sound did not eschew virtuosity
with the same rigor as did their hardcore counterparts, but they
expressed a critical attitude toward virtuosity that bore the mark of
hardcore. Specifically, grunge performers decried the new virtuosity
that had arisen in the aftermath of Eddie Van Halen’s entrance into the
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 269
commercial hard rock world. The aesthetic contours of shred were to be
avoided by grunge guitarists, and its technical precision came to figure
as a symbol of rock shorn of spontaneity and expressive depth. Despite
the outspokenness of grunge musicians on these matters, guitarists such
as Steve Turner of Mudhoney, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Buzz Osborne
of the Melvins, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, and
Kim Thayil of Soundgarden showed impressive resourcefulness as musicians and developed technical repertoires that were distinctive and challenging in their own right. More so than hardcore, grunge replaced the
new virtuosity of shred with an alternative virtuosity based on unusual
guitar tunings and the creative use of dissonance.
Renunciation of technical proficiency became an almost ritualized
element of grunge, especially as the phenomenon grew in visibility and
mass appeal. It was one of the main ways grunge musicians set themselves in opposition to the music and the values that had dominated
mainstream rock throughout the 1980s. Steve Turner put the matter
plainly in a 1992 interview with Guitar Player: “I don’t really admire
skill . . . it just doesn’t matter to me.”25 In a similar vein, Buzz Osborne
referred disparagingly to the “Guitar Center Syndrome,” in which guitarists felt compelled to display the fastest, flashiest, and most flamboyant aspects of their technique for the sake of other guitarists and to
prove their own capabilities.26 Kurt Cobain too was open in his dismissal of what he considered virtuosity for its own sake. Interviewed by
New Musical Express in 1991, Cobain referred sardonically to Nirvana
as a “plagiaristic professional bar band. We could copy anything, practically, besides white boy metal funk—we’re not that good musicians,
thank God.”27 More telling is an entry in Cobain’s journal where he
pokes fun at one of shred’s most hallowed institutions: “Someone told
me that there are . . . Guitar Institutes of Technology where they teach
you how to be a lame un-original jukebox heroe [sic]. . . . Uh, gee I guess
what I’m trying to say is: theory is a waste of time.”28 For all of these
musicians, technical skill unto itself lacked validity; heavy metal musicians, by concentrating so resolutely on the technical aspects of musicianship, had lost sight of the larger meaning of musical creativity. From
this perspective, virtuosity gave rise to imitation rather than originality
and led guitarists to craft music that mainly spoke to other guitarists
comparably obsessed with the mythic equation between technical excellence and musical progress.
The critical attitude of grunge set the tone for a 1993 Guitar Player
cover story that asked the question “Is Shred Dead?” In the spirit of
270 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll’s “Does Punk Suck???” feature, the Guitar
Player writer James Rotondi surveyed a range of respondents, including
some, such as Yngwie Malmsteen, who had given rise to shred, and
others who were vocally disenchanted with the style. Rotondi cited several recent developments to support his claim that the new virtuosity
had lost much of its appeal and credibility, not least being the success of
Nirvana and other alternative groups who “reminded people that you
don’t have to be a great guitar player to play great songs.”29 Representing
the “alternative” perspective in the article was Soundgarden guitarist
Kim Thayil, who made some of the piece’s most pointed remarks.
Commenting on the general trend of the past decade, Thayil asserted,
“A lot of these guys stopped spinning heads and started playing what
sounded like sterile, overtrained classical stuff. That isn’t rock guitar—I
don’t see where the balls are in that.”30 Virtuosity rooted in classical
models took away from the requisite virility that Thayil associated with
rock guitar. Elsewhere, though, the guitarist claimed that shred was too
masculine—or at least too preoccupied with a certain ideal of hard masculinity—for its own good. “Oh, there’s a full connection between fast
metal guitar, Soldier of Fortune, and bikini girls,” observed Thayil. “I
remember seeing an interview on TV with a mercenary. . . . They
showed him at his home studio in Texas playing very loud, technical,
distorted guitar. They were trying to show this contrast: ‘He’s a musician, but also a killer! He creates, but he also destroys!’ I thought, ‘Fuck,
he’s destroying both ways.’”31 Hyperbolic as Thayil’s insights were, they
reinforced the larger notion that the moment for shred had passed, and
that current players and audiences both favored the quality of expression over the dexterity of execution.
While grunge paralleled hardcore in its critique of virtuosity, the musical shape of grunge was not nearly so stripped down and aggressively
simplified. Indeed, emerging in the mid- to late 1980s and assuming
sharper definition in the early 1990s, grunge reacted as much against
hardcore as against heavy metal. The slowed tempos of grunge, to be
explored shortly, were the best indication of this antihardcore impulse;
also indicative was the general style of grunge musicianship. Grunge guitarists countered both the new virtuosity of the 1980s and the antivirtuosity of hardcore by reclaiming aspects of an older, 1960s- and
1970s-style virtuosity associated with players such as Jimi Hendrix,
Jimmy Page, and Tony Iommi. In part, this meant returning to a more
blues-based harmonic and melodic vocabulary, as opposed to the
extended diatonic scales and modes favored by the purveyors of shred.
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 271
Figure 20. Cover of Mudhoney, Superfuzz Bigmuff. Guitarists Mark Arm and Steve Turner
fall over themselves in an antivirtuosic fit. Photo by Charles Peterson. Courtesy of Sub Pop
Records.
It also meant embracing and refining alternate tuning systems commonly
employed by Page and Iommi in particular. Perhaps most significant,
grunge guitarists replaced the technical precision of shred with an aesthetic variably influenced by garage rock, psychedelia, and even avantgarde jazz in which elements of dissonance often came to the foreground.
The very equipment preferred by grunge performers carried the suggestion of this orientation toward the styles and sounds of the past.
Mudhoney set the tone with the title of their 1988 EP, Superfuzz
Bigmuff (figure 20). Both terms referred to distortion pedals, or stompboxes, of an earlier era, favored devices in the creation of the Mudhoney
guitar sound. These effects provide the player with a less saturated
brand of distortion than that offered by recently designed pedals or by
the built-in circuitry of modern amplifier brands such as Marshall. Also
272 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
favored by grunge performers was another stompbox with strong overtones of the 1960s, the wah-wah pedal. Named for the way it alters the
tone of the guitar, creating extreme fluctuations between ear-piercing
treble and mud-wallowing bass, the wah-wah pedal was widely used in
the 1960s by Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and others to supplement the vocal
qualities of the guitar in ways that suited their blues-based aesthetic.
Few shred guitarists relied on the device,32 but Steve Turner, Kim Thayil,
Mike McCready, and others associated with the Seattle Sound employed it
regularly, relishing its capacity to generate a sort of controlled imprecision.
Thayil vividly explained its appeal: “I like the wah because it can make
things sharper and it really augments the noisy stuff. . . . And if I’m playing a real hectic, fast solo, the wah-wah gives it even more motion; it adds
velocity and makes things sound accelerated.”33
Effects like the Big Muff pedal and the wah-wah mainly showed the
psychedelic influence on the Seattle Sound. The use of alternate guitar
tunings, on the other hand, was one of the clearest marks of heavy metal
on grunge. Describing his own affinity for such tunings, Kim Thayil
recalled a conversation with Mark Arm of Green River and Mudhoney
and Buzz Osborne of the Melvins. One night the three musicians discussed the way the heavy metal band Kiss tuned their instruments down
a half-step, so that E-flat rather than E was the lowest note of the guitar.
This strategy was a staple of hard rock and metal guitarists, including
not just Ace Frehley and Paul Stanley of Kiss but Jimi Hendrix, Eddie
Van Halen, and Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. Tuning the whole guitar
down a half-step had two advantages over standard tuning: it loosened
the strings, making it easier to bend the individual notes, and it heightened the presence of the guitar’s low end. Seeking to emulate this aspect
of the Kiss sound, Thayil and Arm planned to similarly tune their guitars, but Osborne offered another suggestion: that they just tune the
bottom string of the guitar down a step to D.34 Using this so-called
dropped-D tuning, they would not have to retune the whole guitar but
could still get the heavier bottom-end response. Osborne said that he
learned the technique from “a metal kid” he knew in Aberdeen; that
metal kid no doubt learned it from paying attention to his old Black
Sabbath albums, such as Master of Reality (1971) and Sabbath Bloody
Sabbath (1974), on which the device is pervasive.35
Dropped-D tuning became a common feature in the music of many
Seattle bands in the ensuing years. So too did the use of tunings that
involved a more extensive reorganization of the relationship between
pitch, string, and interval on the guitar. In this practice, the main
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 273
influence was not Black Sabbath but Led Zeppelin, whose Jimmy Page
used a range of alternate tunings.36 Here the primary effect was not
simply to lower the tonal range of the guitar, but to create distinct harmonic combinations. For example, whereas the dropped-D tuning
(D–A–D–G–B–E, from low to high) lowers only the pitch of the instrument’s bottom string, an open D tuning (D–A–D–F-sharp–A–D) forms
a D chord when all of the strings are strummed in unison with no further fretting necessary. Such consonance provides guitarists with a
stable harmonic base around which they can construct unusual riffs and
chord combinations that cannot be easily played in standard tuning. It
also encourages the use of droning patterns that go against the grain of
standard diatonic harmony, and are often heard to confer a vaguely
“Eastern” quality on the resulting music.
All of the most commercially prominent bands to emerge from Seattle
during the late 1980s and early 1990s used some species of alternate
guitar tuning. Kurt Cobain routinely tuned his guitars down a half-step,
and also tuned his bottom string down to D or even lower on some
Nirvana songs. Alice in Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell showed a marked
preference for open tunings; on the band’s breakthrough 1992 album,
Dirt, the majority of the songs are played in open C (C–G–C–G–C–E,
from low to high). Similarly inclined was Stone Gossard, who began to
rely more and more on nonstandard tunings upon the formation of Pearl
Jam. As he explained about the band’s debut album, Ten, “Every new
tuning seems to lead to a new song. There are probably three or four different tunings on the record,” including dropped D, open D, and some
approximation of open A (E–A–C-sharp–F–A–E).37 Kim Thayil began
broadening his tuning palette in conjunction with Soundgarden singer
and second guitarist Chris Cornell. By the time of 1991’s Badmotorfinger,
the guitarists claimed to use as many as seven different tunings, including
one in which all the strings were tuned to E at one pitch value or
another.38 Although this unusual approach to guitar tuning had its precedents in rock, rarely had there been such a constellation of bands that
employed these methods. The use of alternate tunings among Seattle
rock guitarists was one of the features that marked their music as “alternative” within the dominant generic codes of the era, even as it connected their music to certain strands of heavy metal history.
These same guitarists, for all that they questioned the virtuosic standards of shred, hardly refrained from playing solos. Even Steve Turner,
the Seattle musician most disdainful of standard guitar technique,
played lengthy solos on several Mudhoney cuts throughout the band’s
274 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
long career. The content of Turner’s solos, though, bore little resemblance to the solos played by the likes of Van Halen or Malmsteen. For
the latter, solos were like small compositions in which the player ventured into far-flung melodic reaches only to return safely to a point of
clear resolution and closure. For Turner, solos were outbursts of a decidedly less organized form of guitar noise. Electronic feedback, notes bent
into offbeat microtonal shapes, wah-wah manipulations in which the
distorting effect of the pedal was more audible than the actual notes
being played: these were the tools used by Turner to shape his solos. On
“In ’n’ out of Grace,” a fuzzed-out, fast-paced, six-minute romp from
Superfuzz Bigmuff, Turner and coguitarist Mark Arm play simultaneous leads in a manner reminiscent of the interplay between Wayne
Kramer and Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5. Playing lines that circle
around each other like two twisted vines becoming more and more tangled, the two guitarists do not harmonize, but instead play jagged, nonlinear phrases that make the overall result far more dissonant than it
would be with a single guitar. Turner, Arm, and many other players
associated with the Seattle Sound approached the guitar solo as a time
to play with an array of sounds that seemed out of place relative to the
songs that contained them.39 Compared with their shred counterparts,
grunge guitarists showed a marked preference for sonic disturbance
over melodic and harmonic regularity and used their solos as an occasion to bring the dissonant energy buried within the musical structures
of grunge to the surface.
HEADBANGING
There was no clear either/or logic in operation in the conflicts over virtuosity that occurred throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. The
choice was not simply whether or not to employ virtuosic technique,
but also concerned how virtuosity might be used and what sort of techniques best suited a given aesthetic end. Similarly with tempo, that other
most contested element of musical practice in the metal/punk continuum, the decision to play fast or slow was not a straightforward matter.
Few groups in any of the era’s key subgenres—hardcore, thrash,
grunge—took an absolute stand on the matter; fast and slow tempos
routinely mixed, and often gained power through contrast. By the same
token, how the choice of tempo implicated other musical qualities at
work from style to style was subject to considerable variation. In hardcore, fast tempos typically went along with the effort to resist flamboyant
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 275
virtuosity. Such was decidedly not the case in thrash metal, however,
where the speed with which the leading bands played often found its
counterpart in the finely honed technique of lead guitarists such as Kirk
Hammett of Metallica, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth, and Dan Spitz of
Anthrax. Thrash metal paralleled hardcore in the value it placed on
speed, but retained its metal trappings most openly in the way it adapted
to the new virtuosity.
No band better exemplified this mix of elements than Metallica.
Highlighted in the previous chapter for its association with the independent labels Metal Blade and Megaforce, here I explore in more detail
the band’s role in shaping the sound and style of thrash metal. Metallica
was not the thrash band most committed to speed above all. Other
groups, such as Exodus and Slayer, played a “purer” strain of thrash in
which velocity and aggression meshed in a way that more closely
approximated the aesthetic of hardcore. Nonetheless, Metallica went
further than these other bands in popularizing a faster breed of metal.
They also potently dramatized how the turn to speed accompanied
other changes in the subcultural trappings of heavy metal concerning
audience behavior and response. Although Metallica was not a
“crossover” band per se, the speed with which they played encouraged
and accompanied the absorption into the U.S. metal scene of a kind of
intense physicality akin to that found in hardcore, first evident in the act
of headbanging and then in the importation of slam-dancing.
The acceleration of heavy metal tempos was one of the strongest symbols of the tendency toward metal/punk crossover that grew during the
1980s; thus did Brian “Pushead” Schroeder use the term “speedcore”
to describe the stylistic merger then under way. Yet the case of Metallica
makes clear that the foundational importance of fast tempos in the formation of thrash metal was not only the product of punk influence.
Metal Blade’s founder, Brian Slagel, absorbed a DIY ethos more from
the punk-inspired labors of British heavy metal than from the pursuits
of local punk and hardcore. So too for Metallica, the influence of
NWOBHM was paramount in shaping their inclination to play fast.
Singer and guitarist James Hetfield especially credited Motörhead and
Venom as “the two bands that really helped us get aggressive. Their
style was attack-oriented. Venom were way ahead of their time. . . . They
made a lot of fuckin’ noise for three guys!”40 Guitarist Kirk Hammett
explained that punk assumed significance for the band only after the
release of their first album, Kill ’Em All. Before that, they “were influenced by Sabbath, Priest and the whole New Wave of British Heavy
276 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
Metal.”41 Punk bands such as Discharge, the Misfits, and Black Flag
reinforced the musical direction of Metallica but were not the original
inspiration. Rather, early thrash metal, like the turn to independent
production among metal entrepreneurs, was largely the outgrowth of
overseas influences working their way into U.S. heavy metal.
Whatever were the sources of their style, by all accounts the musical
approach of Metallica assumed sharper definition upon the band’s relocation from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Although the Southern
California metal scene was beginning to thrive in 1982, when the band
was formed, the original members of Metallica saw themselves as outsiders to a scene in which Mötley Crüe and Ratt were the leading attractions. Indeed, James Hetfield claimed that the band’s preference for fast
tempos arose in part from their desire to confront the tastes of local
metal audiences around L.A.: “Eventually we started playing everything
faster, because . . . the crowd wasn’t paying any attention to us and that
pissed us off. In L.A., people were just there to drink and see who’s there
and shit. We decided to try to wake everybody up by playing faster and
louder than anybody else.”42 In San Francisco they found a metal scene
far less oriented toward glam style and pop musical hooks. Led by the
band Exodus, a number of San Francisco groups were beginning to stake
out musical terrain comparable to that pursued by Metallica, supported
by figures such as Ron Quintana, a disc jockey and fanzine writer who
played a role akin to Brian Slagel in promoting Bay Area metal. Playing
their first San Francisco show in September 1982, Metallica would move
to the city only months later. Interviewed in summer 1983, drummer
Lars Ulrich declared in the pages of Kerrang!, “We’re not an LA band
anymore, San Francisco is home for us now.” He described the scene in
San Francisco as “much more intense than it is in LA,” with fans more
into “die-hard, underground Metal.”43 By that time, the band had
replaced two of its original members, guitarist Dave Mustaine and
bassist Ron McGovney, with San Francisco musicians Kirk Hammett
and Cliff Burton. In San Francisco the relatively isolated stylistic maneuvers that Metallica had begun to pursue in Los Angeles became a part
of something larger and more recognizable as a shift in the terms of the
heavy metal genre.
Kill ’Em All, Metallica’s debut album, further crystallized the band’s
own sound and the broader recognition that the group was at the leading edge of a new metal pathway. The record expanded on the tendencies hinted at by their contribution to Brian Slagel’s Metal Massacre
compilation, “Hit the Lights,” a newly recorded version of which was
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 277
the opening song on the album. Speed remained a key factor for the
band, and some of the songs on Kill ’Em All outpaced that introductory
statement. But along with speed, the band was building extended song
structures with often jarring shifts from one section to the next. The
group’s harmonic vocabulary also grew, with the standard rock changes
of “Hit the Lights” being supplanted by flatted chords and chromatic
devices meant to connote something of the sinister quality conveyed by
bands such as Black Sabbath and early Diamond Head. Responding to
these qualities, the metal journalist Malcolm Dome observed in his
review of Kill ’Em All that Metallica “know only two speeds: fast and
total blur. Yet the remarkable thing about it all is that the band do not
use hi-speed tactics to mask either a lack of power or else a dearth of
musical technique.”44 In contrast to Venom, whose own commitment to
speed existed alongside a rough musical approach that seemed almost
to mimic the punk critique of virtuosity, Metallica played with an
unusual combination of speed and precision. Despite their precision, or
perhaps because of it, the band was capable of generating the sense that
they were playing at the edge of control, that the power of their music
might threaten to overtake them and their audience all at once.
Longer songs, such as “The Four Horsemen” and “Seek and
Destroy,” most embodied the multiple dimensions at work in the music
of Kill ’Em All. By contrast, on “Whiplash,” the closing song of side 1,
the band pushed its propensity for speed and sonic force to the limit. In
certain regards “Whiplash” could be considered essentially a rewrite of
Motörhead’s “Overkill,” as a rhythmically powerful song about the
bodily intensity of heavy metal. “Whiplash” was, if anything, even more
unrelenting than “Overkill,” however, due not so much to the speed of
the song as to the use of guitar timbre. Whereas Eddie Clarke’s guitar
sound in “Overkill” mostly occupied the midrange of the instrument,
Metallica’s guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett stayed resolutely toward the bottom, the two guitars doubling each other by rapidly striking the open E string with a sound that was supersaturated
with distortion. Chord changes were few, and, as the Metallica scholar
Glenn Pillsbury has noted, the single shift from E to G during the song’s
verses fulfills more of a rhythmic than a harmonic function, providing a
momentary departure from the onslaught of sixteenth notes that creates
something of a rhythmic shock effect.45
Pillsbury also develops the useful concept of “cycles of energy” to
describe the musical action of the song.46 The continual current of
kinetic energy put forth during the verses gives way in the chorus to a
278 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
rather dramatic change of key to C that is accompanied by a change in
rhythmic articulation; the chords of the chorus linger like true power
chords rather than giving way in quick succession. Whereas the energy
of “Whiplash” flows unchecked during the verses, the chorus serves
almost like an energy storehouse that builds to a potent climax: the guitars stop completely, but the drums spill over with a series of offbeat
tom fills that are punctuated by Hetfield’s unhinged shout of the title
line, at which point the instruments regather momentum and move full
force back into the pummeling action of the verse. More so than “Hit
the Lights,” “Whiplash” used these shifting dynamics to maximize
musical impact. The exertion of energy marked by unadulterated speed
was compounded by the sense of imbalance conveyed by abrupt changes
in tempo and rhythmic pattern.
The lyrics of “Whiplash,” as noted, strive to verbally represent the
energy carried by the music. Significantly, the song depicts that energy
as the basis of a new form of metal community. Like its counterpart
“Overkill,” “Whiplash” is addressed to an imaginary “you” whose
response to the music is detailed in extreme terms: “Bang your head
against the stage like you never did before / Make it ring make it bleed
make it really sore.” Unlike Motörhead, though, Metallica inserts itself
into the song’s lyric, a maneuver that has a complex effect. Singing about
themselves, Metallica brings a sense of narrative to “Whiplash” that
adds a layer of tension to the song. “Overkill” was more squarely about
the immediacy of musical and physical experience; “Whiplash” sets
that immediacy within a fictional account of a show and its aftermath
that culminates in a final verse describing the band’s life on the road and
continued commitment to repeating the experience detailed in the first
several verses. The mix of synchronic and diachronic elements, of physical immediacy and narrative development in the lyrics can be seen as
analogous to the juxtaposition of forms of energy in the song’s musical
structure. Metallica represents themselves and their fans caught in the
musical moment, but that moment has a larger coherence that arises
from the exchange of energy that occurs during a show and that gets
carried from location to location as the band moves about on tour.
Furthermore, in its characterization of “headbanging” as a core
activity of heavy metal fandom, “Whiplash” documents a shift in the
norms of subcultural behavior that paralleled the musical changes stimulated by the influence of NWOBHM. At roughly the same time that
slam-dancing was becoming the favored mode of audience interaction
among hardcore audiences, heavy metal fans in the United States were
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 279
also finding new ways of embodying their response to the music. Ron
Quintana described this development in the following provocative
terms: “The old U.S. metal salute—the raised pounding fist—was slowly
being replaced by the European ‘headbang.’ Americans usually just
stood there and shook their fist or ‘prong’ (index and pinky fingers
raised). Europeans usually shook their heads very fast and violently to
the beat. . . . At most Dutch and British concerts I attended, the headbangers barely even looked at the band, except between songs!”47 In
Quintana’s insider account, headbanging thus arose and was disseminated in tandem with the musical changes that resulted in the emergence of thrash and speed metal. Quintana goes on to note that at the
time “there was none of the punk thrashing, headwalking, and stage
diving that was to sweep the metal crossover scene years later.”48
Distinct as were the practices of headbanging and slam-dancing at this
moment, headbanging as characterized in Quintana’s recollection and
in the lyrics of “Whiplash” was nonetheless comparable to slamming in
its enactment of physical strain. Certainly headbanging had notable differences from slam-dancing. The headbanger remained more isolated,
less prone to seek direct contact with those around him, whereas slamming was predicated on such contact and could thus be deemed a more
overtly collective endeavor and also a more potentially threatening one.
When attached to the accelerated pace of a song like “Whiplash,” however, headbanging assumed a character more in line with that of slamming, channeling the aggression and impact of the music into the sphere
of bodily response. Typically cast as a mark of metal’s difference from
punk, in the context of the heavy metal underground of the early 1980s
headbanging could also be taken as a gesture foreshadowing the broader
convergence of the two genres.
Two years later, in 1985, such convergences were further on display
when Metallica made a return engagement to Los Angeles. The band
was opening for Armored Saint, another local group that got its start
with Metal Blade and was strongly influenced by NWOBHM, albeit in
the case of Armored Saint, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden were more significant than Motörhead or Venom. Both Armored Saint and Metallica
were signed with major labels, Chrysalis and Elektra, respectively;
Metallica had just released its Elektra debut, Ride the Lightning, to considerable acclaim and sales approaching gold record status. Hosting the
show was the Hollywood Palladium, a midsize venue that held many
heavy metal shows during the 1980s, its capacity of a couple thousand
ideal for groups whose popularity had outgrown the club circuit but
280 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
that were not yet ready for the arena. The Palladium also had a large
open floor with no seats, which gave club goers considerable room for
maneuvering themselves around the stage but also created room for
more unruly forms of audience interaction.
Reviewing the concert in the Los Angeles Times, Duncan Strauss
praised Armored Saint for their “lean, mean, and clean attack” and
pegged them as the next likely band to rise from the local scene to
national stardom (which never really happened). Yet he admitted that
the strength of Saint’s show was almost overshadowed by the opening
set by Metallica. Characterizing Metallica as a “highly unorthodox
practitioner of metallism,” Strauss said that they “aimed for that wild
danger zone between hard-core and hard metal.” The audience
responded accordingly. “The middle of the Palladium floor became a
huge slam dance pit,” observed Strauss, “with people careening off each
other recklessly enough to turn the term ‘head banger’ into a literal
expression.”49 Metallica may not have set out to promote metal/punk
crossover, but by 1985 their shows were clearly spaces where subcultural norms intersected and overlapped, where headbanging and slamdancing existed side by side and even began to merge.
DECELERATED
Metallica and other metal bands who foregrounded the velocity of their
attack used speed as a means of physical intensification, but also as the
basis for a new form of metal collectivity in which a self-defined underground set itself against a more accessible heavy metal mainstream.
Hardcore had similarly used speed to create lines of inclusion and exclusion and reinforce the music’s separation from other branches of punk
and other, more mainstream pop forms. What did it mean, then, when
bands affiliated with hardcore began, deliberately and self-consciously,
to slow down? Did it represent a move in the direction of the mainstream, or a disavowal of hardcore values? Did slower tempos entail
diminished intensity of musical affect or physical response? Most pointedly, was the desire to play slow a sign that a band had chosen to “go
metal,” to embrace a genre that many hardcore adherents continued to
disdain? These questions arose when Black Flag, one of the leading exponents of the hardcore sound and its associated ethos, made a concerted
move away from their previous rapidity on their 1983 album, My War.
Released after a two-year period in which legal troubles prevented the
band from issuing any new material, My War was received as a radical
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 281
departure from the band’s previous work, and to some degree as a fall
from grace. In retrospect, though, the album represented a broader
movement alluded to earlier, of bands expanding the stylistic parameters of hardcore from within to create more experimental or hybrid
forms that retained a significant measure of intensity and aggression. It
also marked a particular moment in the history of SST, the record label
headed by Black Flag members Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, when
the label revived its fortunes by encompassing a variety of sounds that
included intimations of metal/punk crossover.
To understand the shift undertaken by Black Flag with My War, we
first need to look back at the band’s earlier music and career. The first
Black Flag record, released in 1978, featured four songs, including
“Nervous Breakdown” and “Wasted.” The group played fast buzzsawstyle rock and roll very much reminiscent of the Ramones, though original singer Keith Morris had a sarcastic, nasal vocal tone markedly
different from that of Joey Ramone. Notably, none of the four songs featured any guitar solos by Ginn, something that would change by the time
of the band’s next release, the 1980 Jealous Again EP. That record’s title
track featured the guitarist playing off-kilter Chuck Berry–like fills that
set the pace for a midsong solo that begins in a similar Berry-derived
vein but quickly shifts into less strictly tonal terrain. Ginn’s staccato
picking generates a blur of indistinctly struck notes that mutates into a
descending scale that follows a decidedly nonpentatonic logic. The solo
concludes with a sliding series of double-stops that careen down the
fretboard, leading back into the verse.
On Damaged, the first full-length Black Flag album issued in 1981,
Ginn emerged as one of the most musically extroverted guitarists in
hardcore (figure 21). Refusing the barre-chord minimalism of contemporaries Minor Threat, on Damaged Ginn developed his own brand of
antivirtuosity, which prefigured and strongly influenced the more dissonant musical approach of grunge. Like later guitarists such as Steve
Turner and Kim Thayil, but even more forcefully, Ginn pursued a form
of calculated imprecision full of apparently “wrong” notes and
assaultive blasts of feedback. One such feedback blast opened the
album’s first cut, “Rise Above,” and several other tracks on Damaged
began in similar fashion. Vocalist Henry Rollins, who joined the group
shortly prior to the recording of the album, offered a revealing impression of Ginn’s growing tendency toward sonic excess in his recollection
of his first rehearsal with the band: “They handed me a mic and said,
‘What song do you want to play?’ . . . I said ‘Police Story’ which starts
Figure 21. Greg Ginn of Black Flag assaults his guitar. Photo © Glen E. Friedman.
Used with permission.
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 283
with Ginn, and that feedback. He had no volume setting on his guitar,
just an on/off switch. That’s how the guy is—either asleep or all over you
like a cheap suit. Whenever he turned the switch on, it’d feed back. If
you hear those early Flag records, every time a song would begin you’d
hear that screech because that was him turning his guitar on.”50 On
Damaged, such gestures were set within songs that were notable for
their conciseness—fifteen songs in just over a half-hour of playing
time—and their unrelenting energy, with the rhythm section of bassist
Chuck Dukowski, drummer Robo, and second guitarist Dez Cadena
propelling the music forward. Meanwhile, the lyrical content of the
record effectively veered between three distinct registers. Songs like
“Rise Above,” “Spray Paint,” and especially “Police Story” gave voice
to a proto-political stance of confrontational anti-authoritarianism,
“Police Story” offering an especially sharp indictment of the police
harassment of local punks. By contrast, the songs “What I See,”
“Depression,” and the two separate tracks bearing the title “Damaged”
were far more insular in tone, outlining a perspective of extreme alienation and even self-loathing that would become especially identified
with Rollins over time. Finally, there were the cuts “Six Pack” and “TV
Party,” which contributed an air of humor and social satire to the proceedings. The chanted tag lines and choruses of the two songs conveyed
a sort of fraternal camaraderie that was complemented by the sarcastic
tone of the verses, which parodied suburban pastimes of drinking beer
and watching television in a manner reminiscent of the Dictators at
their most bratty.
Damaged was widely hailed as a landmark punk/hardcore release,
drawing praise from punk fanzines and commercial rock publications
alike. Unfortunately, the album also generated a controversy surrounding Black Flag that almost put an end to the solvency of SST and the
band. On the surface, the situation was a classic instance of the perils of
running an independent record label. Black Flag arranged for the album
to be distributed by a small record label called Unicorn, which had a distribution agreement with the major label MCA. While preparing the
album for release, the head of distribution at MCA, Al Bergamo, decided
that the content of the album was not in keeping with the image that the
label wanted to promote, and withdrew his support.51 Left to promote
the album without major label backing, Unicorn floundered, and SST
sued the label for unpaid royalties and expenses. Unicorn countersued
and effectively prevented Black Flag from releasing any more albums
until the dispute was settled. When Black Flag sought to circumvent the
284 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
restriction with a compilation of early recordings titled Everything Went
Black, released without the band’s name on the cover, Unicorn applied
greater pressure, to the point that Ginn and Dukowski each spent five
days in jail for contempt of court. Only when Unicorn finally went
bankrupt in late 1983 did SST reclaim the rights to Damaged and Black
Flag recover the capacity to record under its own name.52
Black Flag were no strangers to controversy. The legal difficulties
they faced were exacerbated by the already hostile relationship that
existed between the band and the Los Angeles Police Department.53 Yet
the conflict with Unicorn was in many ways a bigger hurdle than their
other problems. For all the touring that Black Flag did, the inability to
release a record of new material for two years created a gap between the
band and its fans. Interviewed in 1983, Ginn explained that the music
of Black Flag had been undergoing significant changes since the recording of Damaged: “It’s more sophisticated in a way. The songs are longer.
It’s slower, more varied, more improvised. The problem is that people’s
idea of us is two years behind, because all the records that are out are
that old. We have a lot of new songs. The reason we’re not recording is
strictly the legal thing. It’s not because we’re stagnating or anything.”54
Whether Black Flag’s music had indeed “progressed” would soon
become a point of some contention in itself. However one judges the
changes that entered into the band’s sound by 1983, one thing seems
clear from Ginn’s account. The inability to release new music made the
years between 1981 and 1983 into something like a creative incubation
period for Black Flag, during which the band absorbed a range of new
influences and broadened their sound to ultimately divisive effect.
What happened in these years could be likened to a return of the
rock-and-roll repressed. “Old wave” bands such as Ted Nugent and
Black Oak Arkansas had been early favorites of Ginn and original Black
Flag lead singer, Keith Morris; Henry Rollins, a native of Washington,
DC, and his close friend Ian MacKaye also reported an affinity for
Nugent in particular in the years before their taste for punk had fully
taken hold. Allegiance to punk, and even more so to hardcore, involved
a repudiation of such tastes and the excesses they were taken to represent. During the years between the recording of Damaged and the sessions for My War, though, Ginn and the other members of Black Flag
reclaimed with a vengeance their affinity for rock styles derived from
the early 1970s, with heavy metal progenitors Black Sabbath occupying
a particularly central role in the group’s new vision. Rollins recalled of
the time: “The post-Ozzy Sabbath with Dio and Gillan was a big deal
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 285
for Greg Ginn. He got ahold of Heaven and Hell and the first Dio album
simultaneously, and once Ginn got into something, man, that was it. . . .
All the ZZ Top records were in the Flag lexicon, as well as MC5, Velvet
Underground, early Nugent, Sabbath, AC/DC with Bon Scott, Captain
Beyond—Stoner Rock. Not much Punk Rock. The only Punk you’d see
around would be SST stuff and our friends. Otherwise, Punk was too
lightweight for Ginn and Dukowski.”55 Here was the aesthetic crux of
the matter: while punk typically shared with heavy metal a taste for distortion, the quickened tempos of hardcore obliterated some of the sonic
qualities that had marked the heavy music of an earlier era. Hardcore
was treble, not bass; drum patterns tended to highlight the piercing
sound of the snare rather than the throb of the kick drum; even the bass
parts in hardcore were often played farther up on the neck than was customary in other rock styles and were geared toward mobility rather than
laying a solid, bottom-heavy foundation. Ginn and his cohorts turned to
the music of Black Sabbath and others to reorient their sound to a lowend sort of heaviness that punk had largely forsaken.
The musical result of this move to reclaim older rock influences, My
War departed from its predecessor, Damaged, in two principal ways.
Lyrically, the songs were almost entirely given over to the theme of alienation. Gone were the more overt expressions of anti-authoritarian sentiment, and also missing was the humor that had leavened the intensity
of Damaged. Moreover, the pitch of alienation that ran through the
songs had deepened considerably, with Rollins acting out rather elaborate fits of emotional self-laceration. The more striking departure was in
the pace of the album. Whereas Damaged had fifteen tracks compressed
within its thirty-five minutes, My War had nine stretched across a fortyminute running time. Most notoriously for adherents of the “louder,
faster” approach that had come to define the hardcore aesthetic, side 2
of the album had only three songs, averaging over six minutes in length,
played at dirge-like tempos far removed from almost everything the
band had recorded to that point.56
Ginn’s dissonant-bordering-on-atonal guitar playing was taking up
more and more space in the songs as well, especially on the three tracks
of side 2, often to jarring effect. “Nothing Left Inside,” the first song on
side 2, contains a striking solo by the guitarist that shows the increasing
refinement of apparently unrefined style. Marking the end of a brief
instrumental bridge by slowly running his pick against the strings of his
guitar, producing a sliding and scraping effect well-known to fans of
heavy rock, Ginn begins his solo by holding a single off-kilter note for a
286 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
full bar. The note, an F-sharp, rests uneasily against the dominant key
of the song, which is an unremitting, almost droning E. Ginn not only
sustains the heavily distorted note, he manipulates it with a degree of
finger vibrato well beyond the norm, pushing it off pitch into the realm
of untempered sound. In the rest of the solo, Ginn progressively moves
into the guitar’s higher registers, playing lines infused with a hint of
blues but pursuing notes that offer none of that style’s sure resolution,
and at times attacking his guitar in an aggressively staccato fashion that
trades sustain for sharply picked ugliness.
Assessing the change signaled by My War, Michael Azerrad went so
far as to claim that “within the hardcore scene, side two of My War was
as heretical as Bob Dylan playing electric guitar on one side of Bringing
It All Back Home.”57 It was not simply that Black Flag had deviated
from the norms of hardcore, but that in doing so they appeared to be
openly flashing the influence of heavy metal. Such were the terms
according to which Tim Yohannon, editor of Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll,
criticized the album. Crediting the band for their long-standing efforts to
“break ground for punk,” Yohannon nonetheless was moved to observe
of My War, “It sounds like Black Flag doing an imitation of Iron Maiden
imitating Black Flag on a bad day.”58 On one level such a description
hardly seems apt. The dissonance that lay at the heart of Greg Ginn’s
guitar style, and the tortured vocal approach of Henry Rollins, were a far
cry from the tonal precision and more measured emotional tone of
Maiden. But Yohannon’s judgment reveals the extent to which, under the
influence of hardcore, certain musical qualities had assumed a sort of ideological weight that went beyond the specifics of a given performance.
Black Flag did not necessarily sound like heavy metal in the literal sense;
there were certainly few metal bands at the time that sounded like Black
Flag. Yet the slowed tempos, the longer duration of the songs, and the preponderance of guitar soloing found on My War were qualities that signified “metal” within the generic terms of the day. Moreover, they signified
aspects of metal that most embodied the supposed passivity promoted by
the genre, measured against a hardcore aesthetic that equated speed
with physical intensity and active involvement.
The members of Black Flag, for their part, resisted the application of
the heavy metal tag with tongue in cheek. Profiled in Musician magazine
following the release of My War, Ginn and Rollins seemed amused at
the consternation caused by their new sound and toyed with the suggestion that they had “gone metal” in explaining their approach. Ginn
characterized the group as “progressive jazz heavy metal hippies playing
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 287
punk rock”; Rollins observed somewhat more seriously, “Take the
‘metal’ out of ‘heavy metal’ and that’s what we are—it’s just heavy. . . .
Heavy metal is a defined form. Black Flag is not a defined form.”59 The
band’s turn to heaviness was not a full-fledged embrace of heavy metal,
but a partial rejection of the punk/hardcore scene as it had taken shape
during the early 1980s. Even before the release of My War, Ginn was on
record stating his distance from punk. “The thing that most people don’t
understand,” he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, “is that
we’ve never been out to create this punk scene. . . . We want people to
listen to us as a band rather than as a stereotype. . . . A lot of what you
call the punk scene is really backward, and it always has been.”60 These
views would only harden over time. Interviewed in 1986, just after the
breakup of Black Flag was made public, Ginn complained of the degree
to which the punk audience “demands something familiar.” Expanding
his point, he went so far as to observe that the 1960s had presented a
much greater opportunity for youth music to have an impact on the culture at large. “Right now, the music is really conservative. Even in the
‘underground’ community. And I think that reflects what’s happening
with the mood of the country.”61 Slowing the tempo of its music, Black
Flag defied expectations and generic norms and laid the groundwork
for a broader recognition that deceleration did not equal passivity, but
could be the means to channel another sort of musical energy from that
most valued in hardcore.
ANOTHER KIND OF HEAVY
Black Flag may have caused a good measure of dissension with their
decision to slow their music down, but they were not alone in their
embrace of more deliberate tempos from within the punk/hardcore
scene of the time. In San Francisco, Flipper pursued a similar approach,
matching a gradual rhythmic pace to unharmonious musical textures
and lyrics laced with cynicism. Nowhere else, though, did the turn to
slowness find the acceptance that it did in Seattle. The 1986 Deep Six
compilation, discussed in the previous chapter, marked the moment at
which the initial stirrings of the Seattle Sound came into focus; slow
tempos were a stylistic hallmark for many of the bands featured. Among
the Deep Six bands, one group’s influence was primary in matters of
deceleration. The Melvins absorbed the influence of Black Flag and
other contemporary bands pushing hardcore in the direction of experimentation and eclecticism and created a peculiar generic mutation of
288 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
their own in which tempo became the main point of challenge and
invention.
One can garner some sense of the Melvins’ impact on the larger
Seattle rock scene from two anecdotes taken from two of the scene’s
most high-profile figures. Kurt Cobain’s indebtedness to the Melvins has
been widely reported in biographies of the performer and his band,
Nirvana. Melvins members Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, and Matt Lukin
grew up in the small logging town of Aberdeen, Washington, as did
Cobain; Cobain’s introduction to punk rock came at his first Melvins
show, which was held in unusual circumstances. One day in 1983, an
employee at the Thriftway supermarket in nearby Montesano handed
Cobain a flyer for something called the Them Festival, the name a play
on the more extravagant US Festival held farther south in California
that year. The Them Festival was not really a festival at all, but a concert scheduled for the following night in the parking lot behind the
market. When Cobain showed up the next evening, he found that it was
the Thriftway employee’s band that was playing. What he heard that
night was a revelation: “They played faster than I had ever imagined
music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden
albums could provide. This was what I was looking for. Ah, punk rock.”
Not everyone in the small audience responded in kind. Many were less
enchanted and shouted at the band to “play some Def Leppard.” But for
Cobain, it was his first exposure to the Melvins, and to in-the-flesh punk
rock. As he wrote in his journal, “I came to the promise [sic] land of a
grocery store. I found my special purpose.”62
It was a year later, 1984, when Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil
remembers first seeing the Melvins performing. The show was at a characteristically oddball Seattle venue called the Mountaineers, the auditorium of a local mountain club that was rented out for weekend concerts;
according to Melvins guitarist and singer Buzz Osborne—the Thriftway
employee noted above—it was the first show of any notable size the
band played in Seattle.63 By this time the Melvins were undergoing a
transition. When Cobain first encountered them, the Melvins played
“typewriter drumming speedcore,” very much in keeping with the hardcore proposition that speed equals power, force, aggression.64 Now, as
was evident from the set they played that night at the Mountaineers,
they recognized the value of slowing down. Thayil and his friends in the
audience were fascinated by the slowness of the Melvins: “Everyone
kept yelling, ‘Kim did you hear that.’ It was like, ‘The fuckin’ Melvins
are slow as hell!’ I was blown away—the Melvins went from being the
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 289
fastest band in town to the slowest band in town.”65 At a time when the
cohort surrounding the Melvins was holding fast to the hardcore aesthetic, Thayil considered the band’s decision to play slow an act of
courage, a mark of the band’s willingness to disown the ready cultural
capital that comes from playing what the audience expects.
When Black Flag slowed down, they sent ripples of confusion and
even anger coursing through much of their primary audience. In Seattle,
when the Melvins slowed down they sent a different sort of shock wave
through the local scene. By no means did everyone jump on the “loud
slow rules” bandwagon, but local musicians who were looking for a
way to challenge the strict musical rules of Seattle’s punk scene derived
considerable inspiration from the Melvins’ change. Kurt Cobain was
influenced by the Melvins to turn punk and abandon his Iron Maiden
albums; Kim Thayil and other Seattle musicians such as Mark Arm
learned a rather different lesson from the band. At the time of the
Mountaineers concert, Thayil, Arm, and future Soundgarden bassist
Ben Shepherd had been talking about a certain sound they wanted to
achieve, a sound much like the sludgier moments of the Stooges or the
MC5, “a slow, depressing, trippy, heavy thing. We talked about that a
lot,” claims Thayil. “But the Melvins went ahead and did it.”66
What exactly did the Melvins do, musically speaking? The band’s
early recordings show that the embrace of slow tempos happened in
stages and existed in complex relationship with other aspects of the
Melvins’ sound. Their contribution to the Deep Six collection—some of
the earliest Melvins music to see release—captured a band working to
reconcile musical elements that many found irreconcilable. Four
Melvins songs appear on Deep Six, more than by any other band, but
the total running time of their four songs is less than six minutes. On
brevity alone, the Melvins come across more like the Minutemen than
My War–era Black Flag; two of their four songs are only forty seconds
apiece. “Blessing the Operation,” the first such piece, is the best proof
that as of early 1986 the band had not entirely forsaken the velocity of
hardcore. The other, “She Waits,” is like a condensed version of the
Melvins’ developing aesthetic, with an ominous riff and a large dose of
squealing feedback that lasts for nearly half the song’s brief duration.
At two minutes, seventeen seconds, “Scared” is an epic by comparison in its length and also in the number of shifts and transitions it contains. “Scared” opens with some heavy metal–like power chords, but
those chords are overshadowed by a funny bit of vocal yelping by Buzz
Osborne—“ooh ooh ooh,” sung in mock falsetto—that sounds entirely
290 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
out of sync with the tone struck by the instruments. Humor was a crucial part of the Melvins’ creative arsenal, and here they made sure that
listeners would not take them too seriously. The moment immediately
following that humor-laced introduction veers in a different direction.
As an Osborne-struck power chord hangs in suspension, bassist Matt
Lukin plays a ready-for-hardcore bass riff that announces a dramatic
acceleration of tempo. The maneuver is a classic hardcore gesture,
almost a cliché of the form. In this instance, though, the suggested
increase in speed never happens. When Osborne and drummer Dale
Crover reenter the fold, it is at roughly two-thirds the tempo suggested
by Lukin’s bass riff; the verses that proceed move at a steady midtempo
pulse, the sound dominated by a Sabbath-style guitar riff. A minute into
the song Crover’s drumming becomes more assertive; while the pace of
the bass and guitar remain consistent, he adds fills beneath the verses
that could have been excerpted from the more extreme end of thrash
metal. As with Lukin’s earlier suggestion of speed on the bass, the band
as a whole does not follow the cue so much as relish the rhythmic dissonance. Indeed, the band soon slows down considerably to reprise the
opening seconds of the song, this time with Osborne performing in
sing-songy falsetto throughout the progression rather than merely issuing isolated yelps. Concluding the song is a reiteration of Lukin’s speedy
bass riff, a last gasp of hardcore energy that ends with a single power
chord and Osborne’s shout of the title, “Scared!”
The Melvins’ Deep Six material balanced and juxtaposed competing
musical elements with considerable boldness. Like Black Flag, the
Melvins gestured toward the genre of heavy metal while holding it at
arm’s length. Their approach could be heard as metal by a certain
species of hardcore purist, but like their Southern California counterparts, the Melvins sought a more obtuse sort of heaviness.67 Meanwhile,
the slowness so admired by Thayil was mainly evident relative to the
band’s faster moments; or rather, at this stage, the Melvins were notable
less for their sheer slowness than for their ability to manipulate expectations where tempo was concerned. Some slower moments were featured on the band’s own album released later that year by C/Z, the local
label that had also issued Deep Six. It was only with their second record,
Gluey Porch Treatments, that the Melvins’ recorded work began to
approach new extremes of deceleration.
“Eye Flys,” the lead track of the album, is an especially patiencetrying endeavor and represents something of a crystallization of the
band’s early aesthetic. It begins with a creepy-crawly bass figure played
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 291
by Matt Lukin with all deliberation. The bass stands alone in a spare
sonic space for a full measure before Dale Crover adds a single drum
stroke. Crover continues adding single strokes at three-second intervals,
preserving the spareness of the sound and the sense that things are
moving very slowly. Forty seconds into the piece, Osborne’s guitar
enters: he strikes a midrange note laced with overtones that sustains
unchangingly atop the continuing bass and drum pattern. Another track
of guitar, barely audible beneath the hum of the first, adds small blips of
distortion that disrupt the smooth surface of the music.
This balance of effects lasts for well over a minute, until, some two
minutes into the song, the distortion of Osborne’s guitar starts to
become more abrasive. The guitar soon bursts into high-pitched feedback wails; in response, Crover for the first time departs from the evenly
spaced lone drum strokes he has been hitting, issuing a few frenetic fills.
The pace does not pick up accordingly. Osborne’s guitar continues to
feed back and begins to sound increasingly tortured, but Crover returns
to his single-stroke approach and Lukin’s bass pattern remains a constant. Only past the four-minute mark of the song do things change on
a larger scale. One track of guitar begins to double Lukin’s bass line,
which gives a signal to Crover to enter the fold in more steady fashion.
At this point the pattern of the song undergoes considerable transformation, with the three band mates cohering in a way they’ve refused to
do till now. Osborne sings a couple of verses in a voice that sounds torn
with pain. The air is thick with power chords that move in an ominous
and unpredictable progression, and for all that the band has shifted
gears the tempo remains stubbornly slothful. Things slow down even
more prominently in the last half-minute, when the band grinds out a
crushing final riff that takes the song past the six-minute mark—a far
cry from the forty-second sound bursts they included on Deep Six.
Slowness was not an omnipresent part of the Melvins’ music, even at
this stage; the very next track on Gluey Porch Treatments, “Echo
Head/Don’t Piece Me,” ups the tempo considerably. Slowness also did
not function in isolation from the band’s other qualities. On “Eye Flys”
and many other songs, the Melvins demonstrate an acute sense of
dynamics and use silence or near-silence as effectively as they do booming volume and distortion. The slow build of “Eye Flys” would come
across very differently if it was all performed at the same level, if the
quiet stirring of Matt Lukin’s bass line did not contrast so strongly with
the loud, intermittent crashes of Dale Crover’s drumbeats, and if both
were not allowed to remain unaccompanied for such a long time. Also
292 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
notable is the band’s unusual sense of timing. The Melvins routinely
favored meters different from the standard 4/4 rock pattern. More definitive than their proclivity for odd meters, though, was their proclivity
for rhythmic contrasts, as much evident in “Scared” as in “Eye Flys.”
Crover was the key in this regard, showing an ability to move between
the most minimal drum accompaniment possible short of silence and a
sort of rhythmic frenzy that often seemed out of sync with the pace of
the other instruments. The slowness of the Melvins assumed its full
effect in conjunction with these other elements, which together created
the sense experienced by Thayil and others that the band specialized in
the musically unexpected. At the same time, slowness was the Melvins’
best method of attack against the belief of a particular segment of
Seattle’s rock audience that music needed to be fast to be powerful.
SWALLOW MY PRIDE
Looking back at 1980s independent rock, Thurston Moore of Sonic
Youth observed that at the start of the decade “nobody was looking at
anything pre-1977” as a point of musical departure. “The first time I
noticed somebody doing that was when we first went up to Seattle and
saw Green River. I realized that there were people up there making reference to music that pre-dated punk, which was such a radical thing to
do at the time.”68 By the account of Greil Marcus and others, punk had
sought to escape the burden of rock history, to play as though the form
were being reinvented anew,69 and with its commitment to speed, hardcore seemed, if anything, to reinforce this sense of historical refusal. In
relation to such tendencies, the impulse to reclaim certain strands of the
musical past could appear radical, as Moore puts it, and not simply nostalgic. Black Flag and the Melvins both used elements drawn from the
past, and elements that were widely viewed with disfavor, for the purposes of provocation. For Moore, though, it was Green River—another
of the Deep Six bands—who epitomized this trend. Green River played
with more familiar rock forms than the Melvins, but the two bands
shared a willingness to counter notions of generic propriety. In the case
of Green River, that meant reclaiming the musical legacy of the prepunk
1970s and aligning it with a postpunk sensibility.
The story of a single song, recorded in multiple versions, will suffice
to demonstrate how past and present dimensions of the metal/punk
continuum were realigned through the music of Green River. “Swallow
My Pride” was not a song especially drenched in sounds of the past, at
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 293
least not on first listen. Yet the song had a hidden dimension made manifest only some years after its initial release. First recorded by Green
River for their 1985 debut EP on Homestead Records, Come on Down,
the band’s only non–Sub Pop release, “Swallow My Pride” enjoyed an
unusually productive afterlife. Two other Seattle bands, the Fastbacks
and Soundgarden, recorded versions of the song, making it into something like a de facto anthem of the Seattle rock scene in the years immediately prior to the widespread commercial explosion of grunge. The
most compelling remake of the song would be by Green River itself,
though, who did a modified version for their final, posthumous Sub Pop
record, Rehab Doll (1988). On this recording the song’s residue of the
past came to the surface.
Come on Down was the sole Green River release to feature the original membership, including guitarist Steve Turner, and “Swallow My
Pride” was the lone song on the record credited to Turner and singer
Mark Arm, who would later rejoin forces in Mudhoney. Placed on side 1,
track 3 of the EP, “Swallow My Pride” opens with Turner’s undistorted
guitar playing a rough version of the main riff, which centers around an
F-sharp chord fingered on the bottom strings and some blues-tinged
bent notes. After two bars Stone Gossard’s more distorted guitar enters,
and after two more the rhythm section of Jeff Ament and Alex Vincent
join the fray, opening the way for Mark Arm to assume position. Arm
sings with a mix of sneer and whine that would remain part of his musical arsenal for years to come, but without the more aggressive, almost
barking tone that he would subsequently develop. Meanwhile, his lyric
for “Swallow My Pride” is more complex than the crude double entendre of the title might lead one to expect. This is a song about meeting a
girl, no doubt, but not a song about the simple urge to get off. Rather,
said girl begins a discourse on being American: “Even though we’re
headed for war / This nation’s prouder than ever before.” Such patriotism stirs Arm’s hostility. As the first verse ends, he suggests that “this
little girl’s going to hell,” but come the chorus, his attention shifts in
another direction. The main riff, with its shards of fuzz, gives way to a
more basic power chord progression (F-sharp–A–F-sharp), and Arm
leers, “Now I wouldn’t mind/If you swallowed my pride/Make me feel
alright / Deep inside, feel alright.” With verse 2 these unfettered trappings of cock rock rescind. The song’s larger narrative continues, Arm’s
hostile feelings grow, and his “little girl” fails to understand that “pride
comes before a fall.” Does that mean the singer’s pride foreshadows his
own fall, whether from manhood or some sort of grace? The meaning is
294 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
left ambiguous as the chorus repeats four times before the song comes
to an abrupt halt.
Barely three minutes long, “Swallow My Pride” is the most concise
track on Come on Down. With its neatly structured verse-chorus format
it is the most pop-sounding song on the album, while its moderate-fast
tempo and rough edges make it the most punk-sounding as well. What
truly defines the song, though, are two parallel layers of tension: musically, the tension between the bluesy/punky riff of the verse and the
straight-up hard rock power chords of the chorus; and lyrically, the tension embedded in Arm’s tale of ideological conflict and sexual desire. In
many ways “Swallow My Pride” is a tale of barely repressed sexual
aggression, a sentiment that would run throughout Arm’s songwriting
with Green River and later with Mudhoney. The female figure in the
song is as much a target of disdain and rage as of desire; indeed, the various sentiments all but blur together in a couplet such as “First I fell for
her looks / now I wanna go for the throat.” Yet there are signs that we
should not take any of this too literally. One of those signs is the closing
line of the second verse, the notion that “pride comes before a fall,”
which betrays an element of self-consciousness not evident in the rest of
the lyric. Another is the exaggerated contrast between verse and chorus.
The multiple repetitions of the chorus at the song’s end leave one with
the sense that lust trumps any other feeling expressed in the lyric,
whether anger or ideological disagreement. However, Arm sounds more
convincing in the verse than he does in the chorus, and the music that
surrounds him is not steeped so much in hard rock cliché. In the end,
the two parts of the song do not add up so much as they undercut each
other, the narrative qualities of the verse making the more impulsive
chorus, and by extension the standard gestures of cock rock, seem less
than secure, if not untenable.
Of the three remakes of “Swallow My Pride,” that by the Fastbacks
makes most of the song’s sexual politics, and also does most to
rearrange its musical framework. If deceleration was one of the more
prominent musical effects of the shift occurring in Seattle rock at middecade, the Fastbacks reverse the process on “Swallow My Pride,” playing the main riff at a markedly faster pace than on the Green River
recording. Guitarist Kurt Bloch also tightens the power of the riff by
playing it as a sequence of cleanly struck single notes rather than as the
looser aggregation of notes and chords played by Turner and Gossard.
Meanwhile, bassist Kim Warnick’s vocals enact something of a gender
reversal on the lyrical perspective, a change especially apparent in the
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 295
way she and the band handle the chorus, the seat of the song’s more
masculinist tendencies. Contrary to the earlier Green River recording,
the Fastbacks omit the first iteration of the chorus, moving directly from
verse 1 to verse 2. The chorus comes only at the song’s end, and when it
does, the band shifts gears entirely. Whereas the Fastbacks sped up the
song during the verses, now they slow it down. Warnick sings the lines
of the chorus with relish, while around her the sound is thick with echo
and squealing guitar, lending a psychedelic dimension to what had been
more straightforward hard rock. In the hands of Green River the chorus
to “Swallow My Pride” is tinged with irony. Played by the Fastbacks,
irony rules the day, turning the whole song into a parody of hard rock
and its masculine underpinnings.
Remaking their own song some two years after its initial release,70
Green River made some of the same revisions. Most notably, the band
incorporates a female voice—belonging to Sonic Youth bassist and
vocalist Kim Gordon—to accompany Mark Arm. The effect of
Gordon’s presence is analogous to Kim Warnick taking the lead vocal in
the version by the Fastbacks, but less overarching. This Kim is playing a
supporting role. Her voice is hazy in the song’s mix, audible but hard to
distinguish, and while her inclusion may challenge the uniformity of the
song’s male protagonist, she does not seize the song from him. The
second Green River version of “Swallow My Pride,” like the Fastbacks’
rendition, also postpones the chorus to the end of the song. Although
this may seem a minor detail, it opens the way for a more dramatic
transformation in the song’s second half, in which the chorus morphs
into a different song entirely. That song is “This Ain’t the Summer of
Love,” by Blue Öyster Cult; to understand the significance of its emergence here in the midst of a Green River song from the late 1980s, we
need to take a trip back in time.
Beginning life in the late 1960s as the Soft White Underbelly, and then
existing briefly as the Stalk-Forrest Group, Blue Öyster Cult was quickly
placed into the metal category with the release of their eponymous first
album in 1972. Just as quickly were they seen as offbeat practitioners of
the nascent form due to the skewed wit that ran through the band’s lyrics
and song titles and the use of timbral shadings that were not as insistently “heavy” as many other early metal bands. As such, they earned a
rare reputation as a heavy metal critic’s band, whose music was marked
by intelligence and a dark sense of humor. In large part this reputation
stemmed from their association with the same critical brain trust that
296 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
would later oversee the career of the Dictators: the journalist-cum-producer Sandy Pearlman, his associate Murray Krugman, and the writer
Richard Meltzer. Pearlman had an especially significant hand in the
band’s songwriting and in the formulation of an image for the group that
played with elements of fascist imagery and themes of power and subordination (or “Dominance and Submission,” one of their song titles)
well before such devices had become part of the repertoire of punk.
Evidence of the band’s unusual stature came in 1976, when, despite
their status as heavy metal icons, Blue Öyster Cult appeared on the inaugural cover of Sniffin’ Glue, the pathbreaking fanzine that would exert
a pronounced influence on the ideological shape of British punk. That
same year they issued what would become the best selling album of
their career, Agents of Fortune, which also included their most successful single, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” a song dominated by a rich sequence
of arpeggiated chords, the airiness of which gave an eerie undercurrent
to the lyrical depiction of a young lovers’ suicide pact. By comparison,
“This Ain’t the Summer of Love,” the lead cut on Agents of Fortune,
was a more straightforward hard rock song, driven by a simple, alternating sequence of two power chords. It also was the result of an
unusual songwriting collaboration that involved another of this book’s
earlier protagonists. When not on the make with the Runaways, Kim
Fowley was always hustling for other opportunities. Contacted by
Murray Krugman to see if he had any lyrics he could contribute to the
upcoming Blue Öyster Cult album, Fowley arranged a meeting between
Krugman and Don Waller, a Los Angeles musician and journalist
known for his affiliation with one of that city’s most important early
rock fanzines, Back Door Man. Waller laid out all his lyrics on the rug
of Fowley’s apartment floor; Krugman singled out “This Ain’t the
Summer of Love” as the one for Blue Öyster Cult to record.71
Opening Agents of Fortune with a snarling flourish, “This Ain’t the
Summer of Love” might be the most biting piece of antinostalgic and
anti-1960s commentary put to music. The lyric is spare but suggestive,
and the verses are especially elliptical, each one ending with the assertion “This is the night we ride.” Where these night riders might be
headed, and to what end, remains a mystery, but in the chorus the song’s
ruling concept becomes clear: “This ain’t the garden of Eden/There ain’t
no angels above/And things ain’t what they used to be/And this ain’t the
summer of love.” Like Alice Cooper trashing Don McLean’s “American
Pie” a few years earlier, Blue Öyster Cult here appears to relish the passing of something others hold more dear. In this case it is not “the
METAL, PUNK, AND MUSICAL AESTHETICS 297
music,” rock and roll, that has died, but the pastoral, communitarian
mythos that surrounded it at a particular point in time. Indeed, the
music seems full of life on “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” The power
chords that drive the verses are rich with distortion and sustain, while
the chorus features a more complex melody and layers of harmonized
vocals that add texture to the song’s lyrical message. A fierce guitar solo
by Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser rips the song in half, on the heels of
which the chorus takes over for the remainder of the song, the title
phrase repeating multiple times to drive home the band’s unsentimental
declaration that in the 1970s rock is not about going back to the garden,
it’s about riding into the night noisily and with abandon.
One minute, forty-five seconds into Green River’s remake of “Swallow
My Pride,” the change takes root. Just seconds before, Mark Arm sang
his first and only pass through the song’s chorus with the original lyrics
intact. Now, as the bass and guitars fade to leave a solid, steady drumbeat, Arm and his band mates begin to chant, “This ain’t the summer of
love.” The line has an air of menace borrowed from Blue Öyster Cult
but lacks the vocal harmonies that slightly softened it more than ten
years earlier. That it emerges as all instruments but the drums fade suggests that Green River wants its listeners to hear this message without
distraction. When the bass and guitars come back into the mix, however, other layers of influence become apparent. The two-chord
sequence that accompanied the chorus of “Swallow My Pride” becomes
without alteration the two-chord sequence that underpins the verses of
“This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Indeed, the former appears modeled
on the latter, the only difference being a downward shift in pitch (from
A–C to F-sharp–A), a gesture characteristic of the grunge proclivity for
deep, bottom-heavy progressions. While the secret musical link between
the two songs comes into focus, Arm extends the act of lyrical appropriation under way as well. He sinks his teeth into the chorus of the Blue
Öyster Cult original, singing it once, and then a second time, altering
the melody to fit the simplified chord pattern, reveling in the song’s disavowal of nostalgia, and finally drawing out the single syllable of “love”
for a whole measure, not to emphasize its power but to repudiate it.
This ain’t the summer of love, indeed—it’s the voice of kids in hate.
Of course, as an exercise in antinostalgia, the unexpected emergence
of a song from ten years past sends a decidedly mixed message. Green
River does not reject the basic impulse to look backward; rather, they
reject the romanticism that typically accompanies such impulses.
298 LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
Crucially, they also evoke that very moment of rupture that had
informed so many rock musicians and critics in the 1970s, and do so in
a way indicative of that earlier moment’s most challenging tendencies.
Like Blue Öyster Cult singing Don Waller’s lyrics in 1976, they mock
the suggestion that the late 1960s was some golden era never to be
reproduced or recovered. At the same time, like Lester Bangs singing the
praises of “Wild Thing” while chastising those who had disrupted the
Party for the sake of Art, the members of Green River engage in their
own search for an alternative, usable past. In this capacity, maybe the
most compelling feature of the merger of “Swallow My Pride” and
“This Ain’t the Summer of Love” is precisely the way the latter song is
tucked into the former. Performing an undisclosed partial cover of a
song that was not quite obscure but not quite a hit, by a well-known but
hard to categorize band from the previous decade, Green River asserted
above all the value of hidden knowledge in the sphere of rock. Only
those in the know would detect that there was a cover contained within
this new version of “Swallow My Pride.” Among that knowing minority, even fewer would recognize how the song might fit into the band’s
own genealogy of influences. Green River pieced together its own secret
history assembled from the shards of 1970s rock, the effect of which
was analogous to the alternative virtuosity of grunge guitarists like Steve
Turner and Kim Thayil or the depressed tempos of the Melvins.
Resources from the past became the means to counter the orthodoxies
of the present and to create a new synthesis that melded hardcore’s radical sense of refusal with the ambivalent embrace of heavy metal excess.
Conclusion
Metal, Punk, and Mass Culture
T
he 1988 Monsters of Rock tour, on which Metallica shared the bill
with the Scorpions, Dokken, Kingdom Come, and the principal
tour organizers, Van Halen, consolidated thrash metal’s incorporation into the dominant structures of the rock industry. Covering the tour
in Rolling Stone, Doug Pullen rightly observed that Van Halen and
Metallica indicated “the two distinctly different directions in which
heavy metal is evolving,” the one leading straight to the heart of the pop
mainstream, the other moving toward “the tortured, bone-crunching
punch of speed metal.”1 Metallica’s direction proved to be a detour on
the way to the mainstream rather than an entirely different course, however, something that the band’s drummer and de facto spokesman Lars
Ulrich did his best to emphasize at the time. In an exchange with the
metal journalist Mick Wall, Ulrich said Monsters of Rock provided an
opportunity for Metallica to escape the usual categories used to
describe the band, categories that Ulrich refused to name but that were
clearly along the lines of thrash, speed, or death metal. Puzzled by this
assertion, Wall challenged Ulrich: “You say you dislike the categories
Metallica have been placed into, but do you agree that you do stick out
like a sore thumb on this bill?” The drummer only grudgingly agreed,
admitting, “We are obviously the most extreme band on this bill.”2
299
300 CONCLUSION
Metallica had once disclaimed its association with the L.A. metal scene
due to a taste for “extremity,” but in 1988 the band embraced its connection with the likes of Van Halen. The subcultural audience the band
had found in such locations as the Stone in San Francisco was no longer
sufficient to meet the band’s aspirations, but just as crucially, the metal
audience had changed and expanded in ways that made room for
Metallica’s dramatic rise in popularity.
Similar shifts laid the groundwork for the massive commercial ascent
of grunge. While Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Kim Thayil, and others
constructed a musical lineage for themselves in which punk and “underground” music weighed most heavily, the success of their music resulted
largely from a shift in the tastes of metal audiences, and this shift could
just as easily be cast as a move within metal as a move away from it. A
series of articles in Billboard stemming from the success of Seattle rock
conveyed some of the generic confusion that surrounded the grunge
phenomenon. In January 1992, two weeks after Nevermind hit the
number 1 spot on the charts, Craig Rosen reported that the album “may
have altered the perception of what constitutes mainstream hard rock,”
and further observed that the band’s achievement was “part of a trend
in which acts that were once thought to be alternative . . . are gradually
accepted by the heavy metal audience.”3 Three months later Chris
Morris noted the role of “grunge-punk bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam,
and Soundgarden” in drawing renewed attention to punk roots, citing
for support the fact that the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks had
been certified platinum just a month earlier, nearly fifteen years after its
initial release.4 Then, in May 1992, Elianne Halbersberg filed an extensive piece on the current state of the heavy metal market. Calling metal
“this most resilient and profitable modern genre,” Halbersberg opened
her article with a provocative pronouncement: “Fragmented, indefinable, in flux: Heavy metal has never experienced such radical transformations as the kind that now rock it in the ’90s. The lines between hard
rock, funk, pop, rap and alternative have blurred; audiences have
merged; and industry executives . . . complain that ‘every other label is
looking for the next Nirvana.’ It’s symptomatic of the changes afoot
that metal/rock’s biggest success story is a band whose sound, look and
outlook might have drawn hostile responses from mainstream headbangers a scant five or six years ago.”5
Where the U.S. record industry was concerned, Nirvana and grunge
more generally could be called metal, punk, or alternative in the months
METAL, PUNK, AND MASS CULTURE 301
surrounding the band’s ascent. Given Billboard’s status as the leading
U.S. record industry publication, we can see in these pronouncements
an effort to give the phenomenon some generic designation, in keeping
with Keith Negus’s insight that music corporations have a vested interest in preserving the integrity of such labels.6 More notable, to my mind,
is the way the music of Nirvana and other bands associated with grunge
and with Seattle defied such categories at the same time as it was clearly
connected to them. The diversity of generic tags applied to the music
was a sign of the extent to which the moment of grunge’s commercial
rise was a moment of generic transformation and realignment that took
hold in different ways in popular music production, consumption, and
performance. Amid this realignment, the relationship between metal
and punk was both oppositional and symbiotic. That the musicians
associated with grunge were more likely to stress opposition, and the
industry more likely to stress symbiosis, speaks to the different investments in genre labels that these two groups had. Crucially, both sorts of
discourses were essential to the success of grunge as a musical formation and a popular phenomenon. Grunge was at once inviting and exclusive; it generated a sense of mass belonging that hinged on its capacity
for highlighting the expressive force of anger and introspection.
Moreover, grunge was the one genuinely mass-oriented musical phenomenon, in U.S. popular music at least, predicated on the interplay
between heavy metal and punk. Indeed, I would claim that grunge was
the logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of two decades of rock historical development during which, in the words of the sociologist Deena
Weinstein, metal and punk held firm as “the two dominant examples of
youth attempting to create and hold onto their own distinctive and unassimilable culture.”7 Both metal and punk emerged in the early 1970s, as
ideas if not genres, out of the perception that rock was in danger of
losing the capacity to represent its core teenage audience. The idea that
rock’s core audience was, or should be, teenagers was itself an ideological construction designed to promote the notion that rock should be
visceral rather than reflective, Dionysian rather than Apollonian. This
idea was based also on the belief that the only guarantee for rock to
remain a vital and perpetually relevant medium was the demand that it
continually adapt to the shifting tastes of youth. Such convictions were
in many ways a carryover from the preceding decade, during which the
category of “youth” was invested with considerable transformative
potential. But they were also a reaction against some of the tendencies
302 CONCLUSION
arising out of the 1960s, in particular the growing tendency to valorize
rock as a form of “art,” and the accompanying inclination to treat rock
superstars as untouchable culture heroes.
In 1988, the remnants of Green River channeled the antinostalgic spirit
of Blue Öyster Cult in proclaiming “This ain’t the summer of love”;
eight years later, fellow Seattle musician Kim Thayil asserted, “If I was
17 back in 1969, I wouldn’t have gone to Woodstock. I would have gone
to Detroit.”8 Rock musicians in the 1990s were still trying to sort
through what the end of the 1960s had meant. Had it truly been the end
of the vision of mass freedom in rock, as Ellen Willis has suggested?
And if so, was that vision worth trying to preserve or restore? For Thayil
and many others associated with grunge, such concerns were clouded
by a growing sense of generational schism between themselves and the
“boomers,” whose coming of age had become the dominant paradigm
of youth culture. Thayil vented his anger about these matters after the
death of Kurt Cobain in 1994: “There’s millions and millions of people
in their 40s who think they’re so fucking special. . . . And we get their
understanding of history. They’re denying other age groups their own
memories. All I’ve heard from them, ever since Kurt killed himself, is
this nonstop criticism of Generation X. . . . Why are they so freaked out
about Kurt Cobain? . . . Because they don’t understand his music, and
they don’t know who Kurt spoke to. . . . They thought they had a
monopoly on rock & roll, and all of a sudden they realize they don’t.”9
It became commonplace to the point of cliché to associate the rise of
grunge with the coming into consciousness of a new generation, Gen X,
who were defined by their difference from the baby boomers. What was
often overlooked in commentary on the generational character of
grunge, however, was that, musically speaking, the most contested historical fault lines were largely the same as they had been since the early
1970s. The punk explosion of the late 1970s may have added a more
thoroughgoing sense of rupture into the rock historical narrative, but
the rupture that marked the shift from the 1960s to the 1970s had never
been closed. Indeed, that earlier break loomed even larger in the 1990s
than it had in the preceding decade.
Maybe the most intriguing sign of the way the end of the 1960s weighed
on the music of the 1990s was the revival of the rock festival. Woodstock
94, held in the summer of 1994 on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that
most lauded of festivals, was especially symptomatic in this regard, and
held its own importance within the metal/punk continuum as the moment
METAL, PUNK, AND MASS CULTURE 303
when Green Day solidified its status as an icon of punk’s new capacity for
mass appeal. Of greater consequence was Lollapalooza, which started in
the summer of 1991 and endured with greater and lesser degrees of success for seven summers, not counting the effort to revive the festival in the
early years of the twenty-first century. Lollapalooza dovetailed with the
rise of grunge and the broader success of “alternative” rock. The project’s
mouthpiece and one of its founding planners, Perry Farrell, was the vocalist for Jane’s Addiction, a Los Angeles band that exerted considerable influence on the sound of 1990s rock and that was built on a fusion of 1970s
metal and 1980s postpunk similar to that of Soundgarden. The first
Lollapalooza in 1991 was essentially the farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction,
but as the festival was restaged in subsequent years it became clear that it
had significance beyond its association with any one band.
Farrell’s vision for the festival was avowedly utopian: he wanted to
stage an event that would revive the oppositional spirit of youth culture.
His strategy—developed in combination with Ted Gardner, manager of
Jane’s Addiction, drummer Stephen Perkins, and the booking agents
Marc Geiger and Don Muller—was to merge various strains of challenging rock-based music with political and artistic exhibits that would motivate those in attendance to take a more active stance toward the world
around them. Over time this strategy would broaden to incorporate a
concerted effort to bridge the gap between local and mass dimensions of
popular music through the creation of a second stage. Lollapalooza’s
second stage would feature acts of more limited notoriety than those
appearing on the festival’s main stage, some of whom would be drawn
from the region in which that day’s show was held. The concept behind
the second stage was to create an alternative within the alternative and
owed much to the value of locality in alternative rock. Yet it was also an
outgrowth of one of the more distinctive aspects of Lollapalooza: unlike
the most well-known festivals of the past, from Monterey Pop to
Woodstock to the US Festival, this was a touring rock festival. As Farrell
said in 1991, comparing his endeavor to Woodstock, “I’m lucky because
I have that, times twenty-one. I have twenty-one chances to get it right.”10
The first year of Lollapalooza was a surprise success in an otherwise
moribund summer touring season. The festival’s lineup had the right
mix of eclecticism and consistency, with Jane’s Addiction joined by the
postpunk icons and goth progenitors Siouxsie and the Banshees, the
black heavy rock band Living Colour, the industrial group Nine Inch
Nails, the gangster rapper Ice-T, and two leading lights of the more creative end of 1980s punk and hardcore, the Butthole Surfers and Henry
304 CONCLUSION
Rollins. What perhaps most connected these bands was that, with the
possible exception of Jane’s Addiction, none had the sort of following that
would fill a twenty-five-thousand-seat venue on their own, but all had
well-defined constituencies. The risk behind Lollapalooza lay in the
assumption of the festival’s organizers that the relative diversity of the
lineup would be a blessing rather than a curse. That their assumption
proved true held out the promise that youth culture was not so defined by
generic and subcultural divisions that new alliances could not take shape.
Not all observers shared this optimism. In Flipside, the reviewer Al
Flipside wondered, “What is so alternative/striking about a $30 show,
in a big commercial arena, with the only common thread that ties the
bands together is to make their huge guarantee?”11 By the second
Lollapalooza tour, in 1992, the format of the festival—which had
seemed so eclectically progressive a year earlier—was already beginning
to seem formulaic. Replacing Jane’s Addiction as headliner that year was
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, another L.A.-based posthardcore fusion
ensemble. Representing the new visibility of Seattle rock, Lollapalooza
1992 featured both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, the latter of whom
were just beginning to see their debut album, Ten, turn into a
Nevermind-level success. L.A. gangster rapper Ice Cube assumed Ice-T’s
position as the lone rapper, and Nine Inch Nails’ industrial slot was
handed over to Ministry. Rounding out the lineup were two British
bands, Lush and the Jesus and Mary Chain, whose more soft-spoken
approach made them seem odd figures out. If the lineup of Lollapalooza
1992 seemed to strangely echo that of the first year, the burden of the
festival as a representative event in the sphere of “alternative” rock had
only intensified. Writing in Rolling Stone, Kim Neely captured the transition well: “Lollapalooza ’91 was the underdog tour that could. . . . But
that was last year. . . . This year, everyone wants to be alternative, and
Lollapalooza ’92 was viewed as a golden egg from the git-go.”12
From that year forth, Lollapalooza-watching became something of
an annual sport in the music press. It was almost as though the
1960s–70s shift from festival rock to arena rock was being replayed all
over again in the context of a single annual event. Lollapalooza 1991
became the era’s new yardstick of rock-and-roll community, compared
to which even Woodstock 94 could only pale in comparison. Each subsequent installment of the tour became an occasion to consider the state
of Lollapalooza and of alternative rock more generally. In 1993 the tour
seemed to lack a true headliner, with the decidedly offbeat Primus slotted as the year’s main attraction. The next year was the year Nirvana got
METAL, PUNK, AND MASS CULTURE 305
away; in a fabled stroke, one of Kurt Cobain’s last decisive career moves
was to refuse the offer to headline the 1994 tour. In 1995 Lollapalooza
got “too alternative,” with Sonic Youth as the lead attraction, a move
that may have restored some of the festival’s integrity in certain quarters
but that did not consistently generate the crowds of years past.
Which brings us to 1996. After the relatively disappointing results of
the 1995 installment, the Lollapalooza brain trust set its sights on
restoring the festival’s drawing power. The results were as follows:
Metallica was picked to headline that year’s tour, a move that prompted
Perry Farrell to resign his position as creative coordinator; and for the
first time Lollapalooza failed to feature any rap acts, making it a totally
“rock,” and totally white, affair. With a key element in the festival’s stylistic mix excluded, Lollapalooza 1996 became, in effect, the
metal/punk Lollapalooza—and as such, revealed what had arguably
been the true generic underpinnings of “alternative” rock from the start.
Joining Metallica on the tour were the punk founders the Ramones, the
latter-day East Bay punks Rancid, and, in keeping with Lollapalooza
tradition, two bands from Seattle, Soundgarden and the Screaming
Trees. The lineup raised many eyebrows, not least because Metallica
had itself undergone a recent transformation, its members shaving their
characteristic long hair and restyling their sound and appearance in a
way that led many to claim they had gone “alternative,” and led many
fans to raise the accusation of “sellout.” However much Metallica may
have changed, though, in the context of Lollapalooza they were metal,
and according to Perry Farrell and others did not fit the original vision
of what the festival was meant to promote.
For the festival organizer, Marc Geiger, on the other hand, the notion
that Metallica’s presence undermined the spirit of the event was off base.
Countering his detractors, Geiger asserted that alternative had been
dead since 1993, if not before, and that though Metallica might represent an ostensibly “verboten” genre the band was in fact “actually alternative to what’s happening now.”13 In a backhanded way, Geiger’s
perspective gained support from the contrarian rock critic Chuck Eddy,
who reviewed the festival for Spin. According to Eddy, Lollapalooza
1996 marked no break with the festival’s past; rather, it was a return to
normalcy, since by his account the event had “pretty much always been
a heavy-metal fest.” Citing the legions of “heavy” bands that had populated the festival through the years—from Jane’s Addiction to
Soundgarden to Pearl Jam to L7 to Primus and onward—Eddy also suggested, with no small degree of validity, that Metallica’s audience had
306 CONCLUSION
not been exclusively metal for years, and that the band’s most recent
music resembled 1970s-style “boogie” rock of the Foghat variety more
than metal proper. “So if anything,” said Eddy, evoking the early 1970s
moment that had shadowed the festival since its beginnings,
“Metalpalooza is really ’70s-palooza: Out there in the mud and sunburn scorch, Metallica/Soundgarden/Screaming Trees come off dangerously close to Grand Funk/Uriah Heep/Mountain.”14
If the lineup of Lollapalooza 1996 confirmed the notion that the festival had been little more than restyled arena rock from the outset, there was
some irony in the fact that, as a crowd-pleasing maneuver, the inclusion of
Metallica did not have the desired effect. Lollapalooza 1996 was not significantly more successful than the “alternative” installment of the previous year. According to Chris Cornell, who was himself a fan of Metallica,
the band’s presence was just too divisive: “There were a lot of Metallica
fans obviously [in attendance]. With Soundgarden, there was a fairly
good crossover. . . . But there was also a percentage of the Lollapalooza
audience which would tolerate Soundgarden, but not Metallica.”15 For
Gina Arnold, longtime advocate of alternative rock, the matter ran
deeper than that. Rooted in the San Francisco Bay Area and a close
acquaintance of the members of Rancid, Arnold saw the 1996 tour as
one beset by a significant “moral and artistic dichotomy,” with Rancid
(“straight-edge, DIY, indie-label”) on one side, and Metallica (whom
she terms “defending champions of humorless heavy metal”) on the
other. Pondering the genre-spanning character of the lineup, Arnold
observed, “In theory, a tour that melds together these utterly populist
elements would create a mighty strong metal indeed. But in practice, the
two things have turned out to be more antithetical than gangsta rap and
industrial rock, than jazz and Eurodisco.”16 Arnold acknowledged that
punk/metal crossover was far from novel in 1996, but stressed in turn
that such crossover impulses had still not made their way to middle
American locations such as Des Moines, Iowa, and Ferris, Texas, where
the tour had scheduled stops. Metal and punk may have had a wellestablished history of contact by the mid-1990s, but the two genres still
had the capacity to polarize.
Synthesis and polarization, integration and disintegration, solidarity
and distinction: from the moment of metal’s entry into the arena, these
competing impulses were set in motion in a historically distinctive
manner. In 1971 a Grand Funk Railroad concert was believed to divide
people even as it drew them together; the 1996 Lollapalooza performed
METAL, PUNK, AND MASS CULTURE 307
a similar ritual, as had countless comparably scaled events of the intervening years. The discourse surrounding such events betrays rock’s
uneasy status as a form of mass culture, or perhaps betrays the uneasiness of mass culture more generally: the desire for belonging in rock has
continually been set against the longing to be set apart. Even the largest
arena or stadium has a clear boundary between those inside and those
outside; even the largest crowd has its others. Lawrence Grossberg
addressed these elements of what he termed “the rock formation” in an
important 1984 essay: “Rock and roll’s relation to desire and pleasure
serves to mark a difference, to inscribe on the surface of social reality a
boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ . . . It makes a particular historical
moment—and the generations emerging within it—into an apparently
permanent rupture.”17 For Grossberg the most salient such boundary is
between those who identify with rock and those who do not, but his
observation also describes relations within rock, where who is “them”
and who is “us”—or more specifically for my purposes, who is “metal”
and who is “punk”—are subject to continual redefinition.
Like all music genres, metal and punk were created and have been
continually reproduced out of this simultaneous drive toward differentiation and unity. As such, the study of the metal/punk continuum provides one set of answers to the question posed by the aesthetic theorist
Theodore Gracyk: “In an era when popular music is understood to be a
major source of identity, what sort of identity can that be?”18 My
answer, reflecting on the varying terms of metal and punk, is this: The
identities constructed through rock are highly contingent, but not arbitrary. They are premised only in part on the usual sociological categories according to which identities are assumed to derive meaning
(class, gender, race, sexuality, even youth). In the metal/punk continuum, identities have been formed most powerfully around particular
questions of value concerning the social and musical aspects of rock,
such as the following, which have pervaded my own inquiry:
· Who is the most authentic rock performer? Is it a performer who
stands apart from the crowd by virtue of his or her talent and
imagination, or is it a performer who exists more at the level of
the crowd, who makes the act of making music seem more
ordinary than extraordinary? Is it a performer who obeys gender
norms or one who subverts them?
· Who is the most authentic rock audience? Is it a young audience?
Is it a mass audience, or one smaller and more localized? How
308 CONCLUSION
does the size and nature of the crowd matter in the formation of
rock-based communities?
· How should rock be played? Should it be fast or slow? How loud
is loud enough, and how loud is too loud? Should it be played
with technical precision? Or does technique get in the way of the
real energy and excitement of the music?
· How should rock be produced? Is the ethic that influences the
music and its distribution as important as the music itself? Does
a DIY ethic foster a more meaningful sense of participation in
the music among both performers and audiences?
· What is the meaning of rock’s past? Which aspects of the past
should be retained, and which should be rejected? Is novelty,
progress, or innovation more important to the continued vitality
of rock than preservation and continuity?
As I have tried to show, these questions have infused the metal/punk
continuum not by presenting a series of either/or propositions—metal
equals x, punk equals y—but by presenting a fluid set of meanings and
values around which the two genres have assumed definition in themselves and in relation to each other. This is not to say that metal and
punk are fundamentally the same. It is to say that the differences
between metal and punk are not the product of essential characteristics
that have defined the two genres, but have arisen through the historical
process of contesting the value and definition of rock.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: THE METAL/PUNK CONTINUUM
1. Rick Johnson, “Is Heavy Metal Dead? Last Drum Solo at the Power
Chord Corral,” Creem 11, no. 5 (October 1979): 42–46.
2. Joe Blow, “Happy Half-Wits?” Creem 11, no. 9 (February 1980): 10.
3. Real Rock Fan, “No More Talentless Wimps!!” Creem 11, no. 12 (May
1980): 6.
4. Two Fuckin Dedicated Rock Fans, “Deep Thoughts Continued. . . ,”
Creem 11, no. 12 (May 1980): 10; B. Lee, “Robert Frost Plagiarized!!” Creem
12, no. 1 (June 1980): 10.
5. Kodi, “Typed Letters Get Results!” Creem 12, no. 7 (December 1980): 6.
6. Susan Whitall, “The Clash Clamp Down on Detroit, or: Give ‘Em Enough
Wisniowka,” Creem 12, no. 1 (June 1980): 41–45, 60–61; Dave DiMartino,
“Remnants of the Flesh Hangover: If You Hate Van Halen You’re Wrong,”
Creem 12, no. 2 (July 1980): 41–46.
7. Punk Wop, “Punks No Dummies!” Creem 12, no. 4 (September 1980): 6.
8. Dan Reynolds, “Intelligent Analysis,” Creem 12, no. 5 (October 1980):
9; T. J. (“Red”) Gein, “Fascism, Heavy Metal Linked!” Creem 12, no. 5
(October 1980): 9–10.
9. “Clash vs. Led Zeppelin!!!” Creem 12, no. 5 (October 1980): 39, 63. The
same issue saw Rick Johnson revoke his year-old proclamation of heavy metal’s
death, with a new article on “Heavy Metal’s New Wave.” This article is discussed in more detail in chapter 5, in connection with the New Wave of British
Heavy Metal.
309
310 NOTES TO PAGES 4–8
10. See chapter 1 of Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular
Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3–20.
11. Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 10–14.
12. Alyssa “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” D., “‘Simonon’ Purposely
Misspelled!!” Creem 12, no. 1 (June 1980): 8.
13. The masculine bias of heavy metal has received considerable comment.
Most illuminating is Robert Walser’s chapter on metal and masculinity in
Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 108–36. Deena Weinstein
also emphasizes the masculine orientation of metal in Heavy Metal: The Music
and Its Culture (New York: Da Capo, 2000), 102–6.
14. Eva Soon-to-Be-a-London-Resident Crawford, “Bad Taste Makes
Waste!” Creem 12, no. 4 (September 1980): 6.
15. The classic account of this tendency, though one framed in rather different terms, is Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s
Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62. Huyssen wrote of cultural discourse a century ago, “It is indeed striking to observe how the political,
psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the [twentieth] century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture . . . clearly remains the privileged realm of male
activities” (47).
16. Jeff Martin, “Blatant Generalizations!!” Creem 12, no. 4 (September
1980): 9.
17. Ouida Montague, “What about the Mazola?” Creem 12, no. 2 (July
1980): 9.
18. Lew, “Tear Down the Walls, Man!!” Creem 12, no. 5 (October 1980): 10.
19. John Keane, “Try to Remember,” Creem, 11, no. 9 (February 1980): 8.
20. See Franco Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications,” in
Popular Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Gotenberg,
Sweden: International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 1981),
52–81; Frith, Performing Rites, 75–95; Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music:
Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London: Arnold, 2000), 102–29; Walser,
Running with the Devil; Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures
(London: Routledge, 1999).
21. Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres,” 55–59. Frith has a useful summary and analysis of Fabbri’s model in Performing Rites, 91–93.
22. This is not to diminish the importance of the musical dimensions of
genre, or to downplay the value of analyzing genre in musicological terms.
Robert Walser makes the best case for so doing in Running with the Devil, in
which he asserts, “The danger of musical analysis is always that social meanings
and power struggles become the forest that is lost for the trees of notes and
chords. The necessity of musical analysis is that those notes and chords represent
the differences that make some songs seem highly meaningful and powerful and
others boring, inept, or irrelevant” (30). Musical analysis is an important part of
my own method for discerning the meaning and significance assigned to the
NOTES TO PAGES 8–16 311
genres of heavy metal and punk, though unlike Walser I do not seek to provide a
systematic overview of the defining musical qualities of either genre.
23. Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 106. Toynbee’s insight is largely based
on the work of the film theorist Stephen Neale, whose monograph, Genre
(London: British Film Institute, 1983), remains a standard work on the subject
in the realm of film studies.
24. The literary theorist Heather Dubrow discusses the idea of the generic
contract in Genre (London: Methuen, 1982), 31–37. Jeffrey Kallberg has developed it in a musicological context in Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History,
and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5.
25. Negus, Music Genres, 26.
26. Walser, Running with the Devil, 4.
27. See Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral
House, 2001), for the most thorough account of hardcore to date. Regarding the
contested nature of punk more generally, critic Frank Kogan has insightfully
observed, “Punk is a word, and one of its uses . . . is to have its use fought over. . . .
Musical genres get fought over because genres and their names are social markers.” See Kogan, “Roger Williams in America / The What Thing,” in Real Punks
Don’t Wear Black (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 45. Later in the
same piece Kogan coins the useful term “Superword” to describe particular words
such as rock ’n’ roll, heavy metal, punk, and glam rock, which have the power
to generate controversy through the very act of trying to define them (54–56).
28. Franco Fabbri, “What Kind of Music?” Popular Music 2: Theory and
Method (1982): 137.
29. Dubrow, Genre, 116.
30. Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres,” 57.
31. Arena rock as a general phenomenon remains one of the least studied
and understood phenomena in the history of rock, given its importance to the
development of the medium. Perhaps the most detailed discussion of the subject
is in Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Pay: The
History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977),
137–54. Chapple and Garofalo focus almost exclusively on the economic
aspects of arena rock, rightly arguing that it was one of the most important factors in the broader expansion of the rock industry that occurred in the late
1960s and into the 1970s. My own concern, developed more extensively in
chapter 1, is with the cultural dimensions of arena rock, with how it was perceived to have changed the meanings of the rock concert and how it was connected to changes in the nature of the rock audience.
32. Nico Ordway, “Politics of Punk,” in Search and Destroy #1–6: The
Complete Reprint. ed. V. Vale (San Francisco: V/Search, 1996), 13.
33. Charles Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (New
York: Hyperion, 2001), 351.
34. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven, 351.
35. Robert Duncan, The Noise: Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Era (New York:
Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 37.
36. Along with the works of Walser and Weinstein already cited, the key
works are Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (New
312 NOTES TO PAGES 16–23
York: Pantheon, 1991); Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Greatest Heavy
Metal Albums in the Universe (New York: Harmony Books, 1990); Chuck
Klosterman, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota
(New York: Scribner, 2001); and Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast: The Complete
Headbanging History of Heavy Metal (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
37. See Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Jon Savage,
England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The
Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Penguin, 1996).
38. Melly’s formulation of the term pop explosion can be found in Revolt
into Style: The Pop Arts (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), especially 41–42.
Marcus’s first use of the term came in his essay on the Beatles for The Rolling
Stone Illustrated History of Rock ’n’ Roll, first published in 1976 but retained in
the most recent edition edited by Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly
George-Warren along with the original editorial work of Jim Miller (New York:
Random House, 1992), 209–22. However, one can find seeds of the idea in
Marcus’s work as early as his epic 1971 rumination on the end of the 1960s and
the meaning of rock in the new decade, “Rock-a-Hula Clarified,” Creem 3, no.
3 (June 1971): 36–52.
39. Greil Marcus, “The Beatles,” in DeCurtis et al., The Rolling Stone
Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 213.
40. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 16.
41. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 2.
42. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 8, 15.
43. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 6.
44. Frith, Performing Rites, 90–91.
CHAPTER 1: STAGING THE SEVENTIES
1. Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the
Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 264.
2. Robert Duncan, The Noise: Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Era (New York:
Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 39.
3. Deena Weinstein has argued for the central role of the concert in the construction of the heavy metal genre, an argument on which I build in portions of
this chapter. See Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (New York:
Da Capo, 2000), 199–235.
4. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular
Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 236.
5. For a more recent analysis of the social and cultural significance of
crowds, see Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds., Crowds (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006), which contains an illuminating collection of
essays that consider crowds across scholarly disciplines, historical eras, and geographic regions. Disappointingly, for all its diversity of perspectives, the only
substantial discussion of musical gatherings in Crowds is a very short essay on
NOTES TO PAGES 23–33 313
the 1969 Altamont music festival by Greil Marcus (“Rolling Stones Play Free
Concert at Altamont Speedway, December 6, 1969,” 128–30).
6. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1962; New York: Noonday Press,
1984), 15.
7. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 16–17. One of the main distinctions that
Canetti draws in interpreting the crowd is between the “open” crowd and the
“closed” crowd. The open crowd is unlimited in its capacity to grow and also
tends to be a more spontaneous formation. The closed crowd is bounded in its
growth but tends to have a more definitive sense of its status as a collectivity.
8. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 27.
9. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 28. The “discharge” referred to in this passage is another key term for Canetti, which he describes as “the moment when
all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal” (17). In
effect, this is the moment when the crowd becomes conscious of itself as a
crowd, rather than as a collection of separate individuals. This concept resurfaces later in the chapter in connection with the audience dynamics of Grand
Funk Railroad’s appearance at Shea Stadium.
10. Ellen Willis, “Crowds and Freedom,” in Stars Don’t Stand Still in the
Sky: Music and Myth, ed. Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (New York: New
York University Press, 1999), 153.
11. Willis, “Crowds and Freedom,” 154.
12. Willis, “Crowds and Freedom,” 156.
13. Willis, “Crowds and Freedom,” 157–58.
14. Duncan, The Noise, 46–47.
15. Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock (1970; New York: Da Capo,
1987), 26–27.
16. Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 30. Philip Auslander cites this passage
as well, in what is perhaps the most sophisticated argument to date regarding
live performance and notions of authenticity in rock. See Auslander, Liveness:
Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 76.
17. James Miller, Almost Grown: The Rise of Rock (London: William
Heinemann, 1999), 229.
18. Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 165.
19. McKinney, Magic Circles, 167.
20. Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents: My Life
Inside Rock and Out (1992; New York: Da Capo, 2004), 219.
21. Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 135, 143.
22. Quoted in Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 189, 214.
23. Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 331–32.
24. Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 354.
25. Quoted in Graham and Greenfield, Bill Graham Presents, 335.
26. Aerosmith with Stephen Davis, Walk This Way: The Autobiography of
Aerosmith (New York: Spike, 1999), 54–55.
27. Richard Robinson and Andy Zwerling, The Rock Scene (New York:
Pyramid Books, 1971), 144. Knight appears to be overlooking, perhaps deliberately, Grand Funk’s earlier appearance at the Detroit rock ’n’ roll revival,
314 NOTES TO PAGES 33–44
alluded to in the advertisement that opened this chapter. Then again, it would
also seem that this interview may well have been reprinted from, or at least conducted, two years earlier, in 1969, though I have not found precise evidence for
this. But it was in 1969 that Grand Funk Railroad played on a bill with Led
Zeppelin at the Olympia Auditorium in Detroit. For an account of the show, see
Billy James, An American Band: The Story of Grand Funk Railroad (London:
SAF Publishing, 1999), 20–21.
28. Robinson and Zwerling, The Rock Scene, 147.
29. Quoted in Metal Mike Saunders, “The Case for Grand Funk Railroad,”
Fusion (December 1972), which in turn is reprinted on the valuable Internet
archive of rock journalism, Rock’s Back Pages, www.rocksbackpages.com/print
.html?ArticleID=1423. Marsh’s review initially appeared in Creem magazine.
Saunders also observes that Richard Robinson was the first critic of note to state
his approval of GFR.
30. A complete 1971 tour schedule for the band is reproduced in James, An
American Band, 182–83.
31. Kristofer Engelhardt, From Grand Funk to Grace: The Authorized
Autobiography of Mark Farner (Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide
Publishing, 2001), 28.
32. Indeed, Terry Knight and the Pack were among three Flint area groups
featured in a survey of Michigan rock in issue 13 of Greg Shaw’s seminal rock
and roll fanzine, Who Put the Bomp, which is discussed in more detail later in
this chapter. See Dick Rosemont, “Sounds of the Sixties, Part Two: Michigan,”
Who Put the Bomp, no. 13 (Spring 1975): 41.
33. The Cape Cod anecdote, and Brewer’s comment, come from Timothy
Ferris, “Knight vs. Funk: An End to ‘Brotherhood,’” Rolling Stone, no. 119
(October 12, 1972): 24.
34. Saunders, “The Case for Grand Funk Railroad.”
35. Engelhardt, From Grand Funk to Grace, 220.
36. Terry Knight, liner notes to Grand Funk Railroad, Live Album
(Hollywood, CA: Capitol Records, 1970).
37. Kenny Kerner, “An Interview with Grand Funk Railroad’s MentorManager-Producer Terry Knight,” Circus 5, no. 9 (September 1971): 29.
38. Kerner, “An Interview with Terry Knight,” 30.
39. Greil Marcus, “Rock-a-Hula Clarified,” Creem 3, no. 3 (June 1971): 38.
40. Marcus, “Rock-a-Hula Clarified,” 42.
41. Marcus, “Rock-a-Hula Clarified,” 43.
42. David Farber, “The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution,” in The
Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1994), 292.
43. Lester Bangs, review of Grand Funk Railroad, Survival, Rolling Stone,
no. 84 (June 10, 1971): 42.
44. Bangs, review of Grand Funk Railroad, Survival, 43.
45. Engelhardt, From Grand Funk to Grace, 268.
46. Chris Welch, “Funk in the Park,” Melody Maker 46 (July 10, 1971): 28.
47. Quoted in Timothy Ferris, “World’s Biggest Car Radio Performs in
N.Y.,” Rolling Stone, no. 89 (August 19, 1971): 6.
NOTES TO PAGES 45–57 315
48. For an extensive discussion of the MC5 and their significance, see my
chapter, “Kick out the Jams! The MC5 and the Politics of Noise,” in
Instruments of Desire, 207–36.
49. Ferris, “World’s Biggest Car Radio,” 8.
50. Ferris, “World’s Biggest Car Radio,” 8.
51. Richard Goldstein, “Thus Sprach Grand Funk Railroad,” Harper’s 243,
no. 1457 (October 1971): 42.
52. Goldstein, “Thus Sprach Grand Funk Railroad,” 42.
53. Lenny Kaye, “To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest,” Creem 3,
no. 6 (November 1971): 73.
54. L. Kaye, “To Live Outside the Law,” 73.
55. L. Kaye, “To Live Outside the Law,” 73.
56. L. Kaye, “To Live Outside the Law,” 74.
57. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 18.
58. Duncan, The Noise, 29.
59. L. Kaye, “To Live Outside the Law,” 74–75.
60. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music,
3rd revised ed. (1975; New York: Obelisk/Dutton, 1990), 6.
61. Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New
York: Doubleday, 1990), 58.
62. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 239.
63. Greg Shaw, “The Ultimate Significance of ‘Rockin’ Robin,’” Crawdaddy,
September 1972, 38.
64. Shaw, “‘Rockin’ Robin,’” 39.
65. Shaw, “‘Rockin’ Robin,’” 40.
66. Shaw, “‘Rockin’ Robin,’” 41.
67. Shaw, “‘Rockin’ Robin,’” 41. Shaw’s use of the phrase “pop explosion”
here is worth noting, for the way it parallels Greil Marcus’s own adoption of the
term some four years later for his essay on the Beatles. The concept was clearly
circulating through rock critical discourse of the 1970s as writers sought to
make sense of the changes then taking hold and the relationship of those
changes to the music’s past.
68. Greg Shaw, “The Beat,” Who Put the Bomp, no. 12 (Summer 1974): 4.
69. Lester Bangs, “James Taylor Marked for Death,” in Psychotic Reactions
and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus (New York: Knopf, 1987), 56.
70. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 58–60.
71. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 61.
72. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 59–60.
73. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 64.
74. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 74.
75. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 73.
76. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 75.
77. In Instruments of Desire, I discuss at length the masculine orientation of
rock in the 1960s and 1970s, centered around a discussion of the electric guitar
as “technophallus,” a term I coined to describe the peculiar blend of technology, virtuosity, and male virility inspired by the instrument. See especially
chapter 5, on Jimi Hendrix (167–206), and chapter 7, on Led Zeppelin
316 NOTES TO PAGES 57–66
(237–76). Lisa Rhodes’s recent study, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock
Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), captures other
crucial dimensions of the gendering of rock in these years. Rhodes offers a
detailed analysis of the stereotyping of female fans and performers in the rock
press from the years 1965 to 1975 and draws especially valuable attention to
the position of groupies in the culture surrounding the music.
78. Bangs, “James Taylor,” p. 57.
79. Quoted in Matt Ashare, “Lenny Kaye Returns with Patti Smith—but
with a Difference,” Boston Phoenix, June 6–13, 1996, reprinted at www.
bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/music/reviews/06–06–96/LENNY_KAYE.html.
80. The Anthology of American Folk Music has recently been the subject of
much comment, especially surrounding its 1997 reissue on compact disc. My
understanding of its significance is most indebted to the work of Robert
Cantwell, whose reading of the Anthology occupies a full chapter of his book,
When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 189–238. Cantwell repeatedly stresses the “aural” dimensions of
the Anthology and terms it—in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase—“a
theater for the ear” depicting a sense memory of American music existing in
something like “a prelapsarian American harmony” (205).
81. Lenny Kaye, “The Hemi-Headed, Decked-and-Stroked, Highly
Combustible Juggernaut of the New,” in the booklet accompanying Nuggets:
Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 (Los Angeles, CA:
Rhino Records, 1998), 13.
82. Lenny Kaye, “The First 27 Artyfacts: The Original Nuggets Track-byTrack,” notes included on the CD insert to the Rhino reissue of Nuggets.
83. Shaw, “The Beat,” 4.
84. Bangs, “James Taylor,” 68.
85. L. Kaye, “The Hemi-Headed,” 13.
86. Greg Shaw, “Sounds of the Sixties, Part One: The Bay Area,” Who Put
the Bomp, no. 12 (Summer 1974): 27.
87. Lester Bangs, “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: A Tale of
These Times,” in Marcus, Psychotic Reactions, 8. The article originally
appeared in the June 1971 issue of Creem.
88. For an interesting effort to historicize the use of the fuzztone effect in
rock, see Michael Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic and Other
Satisfactions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 12–22.
89. “Its production sophistication and sure-footed mastery puts it at the very
outer time boundaries of this album, and meant that the new age which had
long been threatening was now about to show its hand.” L. Kaye, “27 Artyfacts.”
90. L. Kaye, “27 Artyfacts.” Neil Young would later cover this song on the
album Ragged Glory (New York: Warner/Reprise, 1990).
91. Lenny Kaye, “The Flamin’ Groovies: They’re Only in It for the
Groupies,” Circus 5, no. 6 (May 1971): 43.
92. Ben Edmonds, “Psychedelic Punkitude Lives!!!” Creem 4, no. 7
(December 1972): 56.
93. Lester Bangs, “The Sinal Folution,” New Musical Express, October 8,
1977, 41. For details of the break between Knight and the members of Grand
NOTES TO PAGES 66–78 317
Funk, see Ferris, “Knight vs. Funk.” Bangs conveniently omits the fact that
Grand Funk enjoyed perhaps its greatest commercial success following Knight’s
departure with the album We’re an American Band, produced by Todd
Rundgren, the title single from which was the group’s largest hit.
94. Bangs, “The Sinal Folution,” 42.
95. Bangs, “The Sinal Folution,” 42.
96. Gene Sculatti, “Time Is on Our Side,” Who Put the Bomp, no. 16
(Winter 1976–1977): 5, 62.
97. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 230.
CHAPTER 2: DEATH TRIP
1. Two shows from this tour were the basis for the film Good to See You
Again, Alice Cooper, directed by Cooper’s set designer, Joe Gannon, which
includes footage from the Billion Dollar Babies Tour along with a series of
comedic vignettes. The description of Cooper and his band performing “I Love
the Dead” that follows is taken from the version depicted in the film.
2. Lenny Kaye, “Open Up and Bleed: Stooges in New York,” Rock Scene 2,
no. 1 (March 1974): 11.
3. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral
History of Punk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 146.
4. Kevin Dettmar has insightfully analyzed the many ways in which the idea
of rock’s death has been put to use in his recent book, Is Rock Dead? (New
York: Routledge, 2006).
5. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in
Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 4. Auslander’s
point here builds on the earlier observations of Simon Frith regarding the status
of performance in popular music; see Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of
Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 203–25.
6. An advertisement for Whiplash mascara appeared in an issue of Rock
Scene 3 (July–August 1974): 47. The tagline reads, “Liberate your eyes with
Alice’s own unisex mascara.”
7. Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 39.
8. Van Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 222.
9. Miles, “They Simper at Times,” Other, 1973; reprinted at Rock’s Back
Pages, www.rocksbackpages.com.
10. Michael Bruce with Billy James, No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Inside
Story of the Alice Cooper Group (London: SAF Publishing, 2000), 26.
11. Bruce and James, No More Mr. Nice Guy, 34.
12. Alice Cooper with Steven Gaines, Me Alice: The Autobiography of Alice
Cooper (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 92–93.
13. Cooper and Gaines, Me Alice, 97.
14. Bruce and James, No More Mr. Nice Guy, 33.
15. Cooper and Gaines, Me Alice, 206.
16. Lester Bangs, “Alice Cooper, All American: A Horatio Alger Story for
the Seventies,” Creem 3, no. 8 (January 1972): 24–25.
318 NOTES TO PAGES 79–92
17. Elaine Gross, “Where Are the Chickens, Alice?” Rolling Stone, no. 68
(October 15, 1970): 18.
18. Paul Trynka, Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (New York: Broadway
Books, 2007), 82–83.
19. Van Cagle deals extensively with the Warhol influence on glam rock in
Reconstructing Pop/Subculture, especially 65–95.
20. Trynka, Iggy Pop, 72.
21. Iggy Pop and Anne Wehrer, I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories
(New York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1982), p. 43.
22. Pop and Wehrer, I Need More, 60.
23. Pop and Wehrer, I Need More, 60.
24. Michael Watts, “Oh You Pretty Thing,” Melody Maker 47 (January 22,
1972): 19.
25. See Cagle, Reconstructing Pop/Subculture, 13; Barney Hoskyns, Glam!
Bowie, Bolan, and the Glitter Rock Revolution (London: Faber and Faber,
1998), 6.
26. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998), 125.
27. Gross, “Where Are the Chickens,” 18.
28. Gross, “Where Are the Chickens,” 18.
29. Robert Duncan, The Noise: Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Era (New York:
Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 90–91.
30. Duncan, The Noise, 91.
31. Duncan, The Noise, 91.
32. The veritable moral panic that surrounded Cooper at the height of his
early 1970s popularity is a running theme in the journalist Bob Greene’s booklength story of touring with Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar Baby (New York:
Atheneum, 1974).
33. The quote is attributed to “Heidi Wurstner, 19, student, Goddard
College, Plainfield, Vt.,” and appears in Eric Ehrmann, “The Stooges,” Rolling
Stone, no. 55 (April 2, 1970): 32.
34. Pop and Wehrer, I Need More, 103–5.
35. Iggy himself suggests that many Scorpians were in attendance at the
February 9 show, but Paul Trynka contradicts this claim, suggesting that the
high proportion of bikers in the audience that night was due to the Stooges having
hired a rival biker gang, God’s Children, for protection. See Trynka, Iggy Pop, 175.
36. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14.
37. The full sequence of these photographs appears in Pop and Wehrer, I
Need More, 28–30.
38. Jackie Curtis and Rita Redd, “Iggy Stooge—The Magic Touch,” in
Jonathan Eisen, ed., Twenty-Minute Fandangos and Forever Changes: A Rock
Bazaar (New York: Random House, 1971), 209.
39. Curtis and Redd, “Iggy Stooge,” 210, 212.
40. Curtis and Redd, “Iggy Stooge,” 214–15.
41. Dave Marsh, “The Incredible Story of Iggy and the Stooges,” Creem 2,
no. 13 (May 1970): 30–31.
NOTES TO PAGES 92–99 319
42. The notion of “camp” used here is most indebted to that described by
Esther Newton in her classic study, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). Newton defines camp in
relation to the more basic work of female impersonation. Whereas the latter is
“concerned with masculine-feminine transformation,” the former is “concerned with what might be called a philosophy of transformations and incongruity” in which all identities are construed as a form of role-playing (105–7).
43. Cooper and Gaines, Me Alice, 91.
44. Quoted in Lester Bangs, “Alice Cooper: Punch and Judy Play the
Toilets,” Creem 7, no. 2 (July 1975): 75.
45. Quoted in Bangs, “Alice Cooper, All American,” 77.
46. An anonymous article in Rock Scene expanded on this insight by way of
explaining the connections between Cooper and David Bowie. During the late
1960s, the article claimed, “rock had to be organic, and organic meant that you
couldn’t put on a flashy set of clothes or brush your hair back out of your face
before you stepped onstage to perform.” Bowie and Cooper represented a movement to draw audience attention to “what’s happening on stage,” a development that was especially crucial at a time when “rock and roll has got to
compete with television, movies, and other visual events for an audience.”
Whereas Bangs emphasized an almost McLuhanesque sense of media consciousness in his explanation of Cooper’s appeal, in Rock Scene the matter was
a more basic one of economic competition generating the need for a new
emphasis on visual style. “The Two Best Shows in Town, Alice and David,” Rock
Scene 1, no. 4 (September 1973): 17–18.
47. Bangs, “Alice Cooper, All American,” 76.
48. Charles Shaar Murray, “Hype Hype Hooray,” New Musical Express,
June 30, 1973, 5.
49. Murray, “Hype Hype Hooray,” 6.
50. Lester Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies and Fun: A Program for Mass Liberation
in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who’s the Fool?” in Psychotic Reactions
and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus (New York: Knopf, 1987), 38.
51. Marsh, “The Incredible Story,” 31.
52. Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies,” 40–43.
53. Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies,” 44–45.
54. Bangs, “Of Pop and Pies,” 48.
55. One would think the “TV eye” would be a reference to television and
the intensive, monotonous gaze that it engenders. According to Kathy Asheton,
the sister of the Stooges’ guitarist and drummer, this was not the case. By her
account, “TV eye” was a term coined by her and her girlfriends to refer to a particularly lustful type of stare, the TV standing not for television but for “twat
vibe.” McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 51.
56. Natalie Stoogeling, “Popped,” in Eisen, Twenty-Minute Fandangos, 193.
57. Strangely, although Lester Bangs describes this broadcast at length in his
essay on the Stooges, he omits any mention of the band’s appearance, concentrating instead on that of Alice Cooper, who won Bangs’s approval by eliciting a
pie (or perhaps a cake) in the face from a disgruntled member of the audience,
to which the singer responded by smearing the pie into his face more and more.
320 NOTES TO PAGES 99–111
For Bangs, this was a moment worth relishing because it showed in Cooper a
rock star who was willing to “play the fool” rather than remain safely on his
pedestal. See “Of Pop and Pies,” 34–35.
58. This footage is included on a bootleg videotape of Stooges and Iggy Pop
material that I purchased on eBay. To my knowledge it has never been commercially released in unedited form.
59. Marsh, “The Incredible Story,” 32.
60. Dettmar, Is Rock Dead?, 125.
61. Dettmar, Is Rock Dead?, 125.
CHAPTER 3: THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
1. “Little Sister” is credited to Joan Jett and Inger Aster, a pseudonym for
the Belgian songwriter Jacques Duvall, a much older figure who was likely
brought in either by the Runaways’ record company Phonogram or the band’s
older male manager, Kim Fowley, to collaborate with Jett on the song.
2. Pagan Kennedy, Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural History of the 1970s
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 57.
3. Bill Osgerby has made a similar argument regarding the Dictators in
“Chewing Out a Rhythm on My Bubble Gum: The Teenage Aesthetic and
Genealogies of American Punk,” in Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy
of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (London: Routledge, 1999), 154–69. As Osgerby
writes in making a comparison between the Dictators and the Ramones, both
bands “created a playfully ironic pastiche of suburban adolescence” (156).
Insightful as Osgerby’s remarks are, he compresses the whole of the band’s
career into three pages and thus glosses over many complexities and contradictions regarding their sound and image, not least being the way the band straddled the line between metal and punk.
4. See Kirse Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image
in Popular Culture, 1955–1966 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002). May’s study ends in the mid-1960s, and she suggests that various
events of that era—the racial unrest in Watts and the student political movements in Berkeley in particular—tarnished this inviting image of the state’s
youth. However, though such events may have significantly qualified the degree
to which California youth were subject to idealization, the earlier associations
she discusses continued to linger.
5. Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic
Books, 1996), xxi.
6. Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New
History of the American Adolescent Experience (New York: Perennial, 1999), 139.
7. Palladino, Teenagers, 103–5.
8. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile
Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 205–9.
9. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 104.
10. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of the
American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002),
100–110.
NOTES TO PAGES 111–115 321
11. As Kirse Granat May writes in Golden State, Golden Youth in association with California’s rise to prominence, “A new definable teenage type was
created, and it was an ideal of exclusion: white, middle-class, mobile, carefree,
and conformist” (4).
12. Greil Marcus, “The Beatles,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of
Rock & Roll, ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly George-Warren, and
James Miller (New York: Random House, 1992), 214–15.
13. Peter Braunstein, “Forever Young: Insurgent Youth and the Culture of
Rejuvenation,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and
’70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002),
251–52.
14. Thomas Frank describes this absorption of countercultural values and
aesthetics into advertising in his provocative book, The Conquest of Cool:
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997). According to Frank, for advertisers seeking
to break away from the stale norms of their field, the counterculture “seemed to
have it all: the unconnectedness which would allow consumers to indulge transitory whims; the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral Puritanism;
and the contempt for established social rules that would free them from the
slow-moving, buttoned-down conformity of their abstemious ancestors” (119).
15. Quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugsand-Rock-’n’-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1998), 235.
16. Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the
Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 181.
17. Lenny Kaye’s own transition from critic to musician, and his integral role
in early punk rock as guitarist for the Patti Smith group, is also worth noting in
this context. However, as instrumental as Kaye was in articulating some of the
historical and aesthetic principles behind the emergence of punk, the version of
the music that he played with Smith was far less preoccupied with youth than
was the version put forth by the Dictators or the Runaways, and so does not
figure strongly in the account that follows.
18. Found at profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile
&friendid=99711726, December 4, 2006, 2:45 p.m. Teenage Wasteland
Gazette only existed for a very limited number of issues, and I have found none
either in library collections or available for purchase, so all available information is unfortunately secondhand.
19. This argument, in far more expansive form, is the backbone of Meltzer’s
pioneering exercise in rock-criticism-as-faux-philosophical-treatise, The
Aesthetics of Rock, with an introduction by Greil Marcus (1970; New York: Da
Capo, 1987). It can be found in more distilled form in the many articles he
wrote in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s for a range of publications, a
number of which have been collected in A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music
Writings of Richard Meltzer (New York: Da Capo, 2000).
20. Meltzer’s article is reprinted as “Handsome Dick Throws the Party of
the Century,” in A Whore Just Like the Rest, 361–64, although there it is said
to have appeared in a publication called Zoot, about which I know nothing.
322 NOTES TO PAGES 115–123
Profiling Blum/Manitoba, Robert Duncan cites the story as having appeared in
Teenage Wasteland Gazette; see Duncan, The Noise: Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll
Era (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), 60.
21. Meltzer, “Handsome Dick,” 362.
22. Meltzer, “Handsome Dick,” 363.
23. Duncan, The Noise, 61.
24. Duncan, The Noise, 62.
25. Paul Kendall, “Sandy Pearlman: A Wizard, a True Star,” Zig Zag, no. 58
(March 1976): n.p.
26. Written by music industry professionals Henry Glover and Morris Levy,
“California Sun” was first recorded in 1960 by black R & B singer Joe Jones,
who turned it into a modest hit. Four years later, the Indiana garage rock band
the Rivieras recorded a version of the song that achieved far greater success,
rising to the number 5 position on the Billboard singles charts in February 1964.
This was the version that provided the template for the Dictators, and for the
Ramones, whose own cover of the song will be discussed shortly.
27. Greg Shaw’s article, “The Ultimate Significance of ‘Rockin’ Robin,’”
Crawdaddy (September 1972), which was discussed at length in chapter 1, is the
best example of such thinking. There Shaw, who was himself a California youth,
recalls the years 1964 to 1966 as a time when young people “set about discovering the limits of our potential as teenage rock & roll pleasure punks” (40).
28. Donna Gaines, A Misfit’s Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock &
Roll Heart (New York: Villard, 2003), 109.
29. Quoted in Billy Bob Hargus, “Cars ’n’ Girls: The Dictators,” Perfect
Sound Forever, May 1996, www.furious.com/perfect/dictators.html.
30. Writing in the Village Voice, Richard Meltzer—who is credited under the
pseudonym Borneo Jimmy for “inspiration” on The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!—
plays up the Dictators’ connection to wrestling, going so far as to call them
“rock’s first bonafide genuwine actual nothin-but wrasslin-type villains.”
Meltzer, “The Dictators: Badguys Per Se,” Village Voice 20, no. 18 (May 5,
1975): 124.
31. Meltzer, “The Dictators,” 128.
32. Meltzer, “Handsome Dick,” 361.
33. Dan Nooger, “Punkoid Pleasure,” Village Voice 19, no. 18 (May 2,
1974): 68.
34. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral
History of Punk (New York: Penguin, 1996), 203–4.
35. In his recent memoir of life in the New York scene of the 1970s, original
Blondie bassist Gary Valentine describes the emergence of Punk magazine and
the concurrent rise of the Dictators and the Dead Boys as having represented a
“fuck art, let’s rock” mentality that narrowed what was considered acceptable
on the scene. See Valentine, New York Rocker: With Blondie, Iggy Pop and
Others, 1974–1981 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002), 114–15.
36. Jayne County with Rupert Smith, Man Enough to Be a Woman (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1995), 108.
37. Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at
Max’s Kansas City (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 257.
38. McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 275.
NOTES TO PAGES 123–131 323
39. Quoted in McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me, 275.
40. James Wolcott, “The Dictators Make Trains Run on Time,” Village
Voice 21, no. 23 (June 7, 1976): 118.
41. Wolcott, “The Dictators,” 118.
42. Quoted in Roy Trakin, “Rock ’n’ Roll Made a Mensch out of Me!” New
York Rocker 1, no. 14 (September 1978): 7.
43. Quoted in Trakin, “Rock ’n’ Roll,” 7.
44. Quoted in Dave Schulps, “Cars & Girls & Apple Pie (& a Slice of Rock
& Roll to Go),” Sounds, November 5, 1977, 27.
45. Quoted in Ira Robbins, “The Dictators Look for the Perfect Wave,”
Trouser Press, no. 29 (June 1978): n.p., reprinted on the Dictators’ official band
website, thedictators.com/trouserpress.html.
46. Interviewed by Ira Robbins around the release of Bloodbrothers, Andy
Shernoff and Scott Kempner both emphasized their new commitment to punk,
which was buoyed by the experience of touring England in late 1977 to support
Manifest Destiny. Kempner put the matter most strongly: “My main thing in
life, period, right now is to break as many new wave bands as possible and take
over. I no longer want to say . . . ‘Well, we’re not new wave and we’re [not] old
wave—we’ve got our own bag.’ I really want to be a part of this thing.” See
Robbins, “The Dictators Look for the Perfect Wave.”
47. Mick Farren, “Groupie Paradise Almost Lost,” New Musical Express,
December 28, 1974, 13. In his recently penned memoir, Farren described the
dynamic at Rodney’s in far more critical terms, suggesting that the stars who
visited the club not only partook in the pleasure of forbidden sex with underage youth of both sexes but also routinely exploited and humiliated those
youth. Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (London: Pimlico, 2002), 345.
48. The sexual economy at Rodney’s was perhaps unique in the youth of
the participants, but it was also representative of larger trends. The feminist
rock historian Lisa Rhodes shows in compelling detail how “the groupie”
became one of the most common stereotypes of women who chose to participate in rock music and its attendant culture during the 1960s and 1970s.
Groupies were typically defined as women whose interest in rock music was
subordinate to their desire to have sex with the swaggering male rock stars of
the era, though in fact many who considered themselves groupies were not preoccupied with sex so much as with having personal contact with favorite performers. Although some recent writers have sought to reclaim the groupie as a
sign of women’s agency and active participation in rock, Rhodes emphasizes
the debilitating aspects of the designation, which was used to police the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in rock-oriented spaces and to suggest that
women—or girls—could gain legitimacy in rock only through their sexuality.
See Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
49. Quoted in Chris Salewicz, “And I Wonder . . . I Wah Wah Wah Wah
Wonder . . . ,” New Musical Express, July 24, 1976, 25.
50. Quoted in Salewicz, “And I Wonder,” 25.
51. Mac, “Kim Fowley, an American Tradition on Legs . . . ,” Zig Zag, no.
28 (February 1973): n.p.
52. Cited in Ben Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” Mojo, no. 78 (May 2000): 74.
324 NOTES TO PAGES 131–137
53. In her recent study of girl-group music, Jacqueline Warwick provides a
useful corrective to historical accounts that have portrayed the female members
of girl groups as mere puppets at the hands of more powerful male producers,
showing that the singers of the era exerted considerable agency in the making of
girl-group music, even when working with figures as notoriously controlling as
Phil Spector. See Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the
1960s (New York: Routledge, 2007).
54. Quoted in Brendan Mullen and Marc Spitz, We Got the Neutron Bomb:
The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 46–47.
55. Patterson briefly chronicled the band’s debut in “Local Action—The
Runaways,” Back Door Man, no. 5 (December 1975); a reprint of the article can
be found on the official Runaways website, www.therunaways.com/ra_press17.html.
56. Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” 76.
57. Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” 75.
58. Fred Patterson, “The Runaways—Face Shifting,” Back Door Man
(December 1977), reprinted at www.therunaways.com/ra_press16.html.
59. Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” 76.
60. See Warwick, Girl Groups, 196.
61. “Born to Be Bad” appears on the second Runaways album, Queens of
Noise (1977), but evidence suggests that it was part of the group’s live shows
much earlier. The song is also credited to Kim Fowley, Sandy West, and Michael
Steele; Steele had left the band over a year before the album’s release.
62. Lisa Fancher, “What the New Breed Say,” Who Put the Bomp, no. 14 (Fall
1975): 4. In a few years Fancher would follow in the footsteps of Greg Shaw and
others as an avatar of rock-oriented DIY, founding one of the more important
independent labels tied to Southern California punk and new wave, Frontier.
63. Lisa Fancher, “Are You Young and Rebellious Enough to Love the
Runaways?” in Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap, ed.
Evelyn McDonnell and Ann Powers (New York: Delta, 1995), 284–85; originally published in Who Put the Bomp! no. 15 (Spring 1976).
64. Fancher, “Are You Young,” 286.
65. Fancher, “Are You Young,” 286.
66. Cherie Currie and Neal Shusterman, Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie
Story (Los Angeles: Price Stern Sloan, 1989), 44.
67. The historian Elaine Tyler May makes such an argument regarding portrayals of female sexuality in the post-WWII, cold war United States. Particularly
striking in regard to the current discussion is her analysis of the imagery of
woman as “bombshell,” a militaristic image that highlighted the extent to which
women’s sexuality posed a threat to the well-being of patriarchal masculinity
and even national security. See “Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb,”
in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 154–70. In American
Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular Culture (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2006), the youth culture scholar Ilana Nash makes
similar arguments regarding the representation of teen girl sexuality in popular
culture of the same era, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Nash places strong emphasis
on the way such images became a means to control teenage girls and direct their
NOTES TO PAGES 137–142 325
desires in socially sanctioned directions. To my mind the case of the Runaways
presents a less straightforward instance of sexual regulation, given the degree to
which the members of the band participated in the creation of their sound and
image. Nonetheless, the band clearly reproduced some of these earlier tendencies.
68. Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” 78.
69. See Robert Walser’s important discussion of the gendered dimensions of
guitar-based virtuosity in heavy metal in Running with the Devil: Power,
Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press, 1993), 76; and my own discussion of the electric guitar as signifier of masculinity, or “technophallus,” in Instruments of Desire: The Electric
Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 188–90, 244–52.
70. On Quatro’s embodiment of female masculinity, see Philip Auslander,
Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2006), 193–226. About Quatro’s approach,
Auslander writes, “By capitalizing on the productive tensions within the role of
female cock-rocker and interweaving it with other gender performances, Quatro
successfully used that role as a position from which to destabilize not only the
gender codings from which it is constructed but the very notion of a reified
gender identity” (210). On the broader phenomenon of “female masculinity,”
see Judith Halberstam in Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998).
71. The latter record, long since canonized as a key document in the early
history of punk, consisted of songs that had been recorded four years earlier but
only saw release in 1976. Significantly, Kim Fowley produced some of those
early Modern Lovers sessions, though the final production credit was given to
former Velvet Underground member John Cale.
72. Robot A. Hull, review of The Runaways, Creem 8, no. 3 (August 1976):
66.
73. Hull, review of The Runaways, 66.
74. Georgia Christgau, review of The Runaways, Circus, no. 139
(September 13, 1976): 14.
75. Christgau, review of The Runaways, 14.
76. Lisa Robinson, “The Runaways: Naughty Nymphets Leave Lisa Cold,”
Creem 8, no. 6 (November 1976): 46. The remarks concerning Smith can be
found in Chris Salewicz’s profile of the band, “And I Wonder,” 26.
77. Tony Parsons, “The Runaways, Roundhouse,” New Musical Express,
October 9, 1976, 41.
78. Jonh Ingham, “Runaways (gasp): At Last an (groan) Objective (pant)
View,” Sounds, October 9, 1976, 42. The article’s title is unfortunately representative of the way music paper editors exploited the band’s youth and femininity even when their writers took the band seriously.
79. Harry Doherty, “You Sexy Things!” Melody Maker 51 (October 16,
1976): 13.
80. Quoted in Edmonds, “Fowley’s Angels,” 77.
81. Quoted in Sandy Robertson, “The Runaways,” Sounds, November 12,
1977, 47. This position is at least partly unfair to Currie, who left the band
326 NOTES TO PAGES 142–152
under considerable duress generated by her contentious relationship with
Fowley. For Currie’s version of her departure from the band, see Currie and
Shusterman, Neon Angel, 102–7.
82. Quoted in Sandy Robertson, “Love and Death in LA,” Sounds,
September 10, 1977, 22.
83. Phil Sutcliffe, “A Runaway Victory,” Sounds, November 19, 1977, 38.
84. Phil Sutcliffe, “A Runaway Victory,” 38.
85. Phil Sutcliffe, “A Runaway Victory,” 38.
86. See Brendan Mullen, Don Bolles, and Adam Parfrey, Lexicon Devil: The
Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs (Los Angeles: Feral
House, 2002), 49–50, for Jett’s apartment and her position in the L.A. punk
scene; and 169–172 for her role in producing the Germs.
87. Quoted in Brenda K., “The Runaways: A Lot More Than Horny Hype,”
New Wave Rock, no. 3 (February 1979), reprinted on the Runaways’ website,
www.therunaways.com/ra_press20.html.
88. Quoted in Tony Parsons, “Flight from the Fleshpots,” New Musical
Express, July 29, 1978, 8.
CHAPTER 4: METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
1. Geoff Barton [writing under the pseudonym “Brigadier Godfrey BartonFfynch-Carstairs (Retired)”], review of Motörhead’s Overkill, Sounds, March 3,
1979, 47.
2. Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic (Chicago: Redoubt Press, 1990),
201.
3. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). See the introduction to this
book for more extensive discussion of Marcus’s ideas on this score.
4. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge,
1979); Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and
Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
5. Hebdige, Subculture.
6. This brief description of Farren hardly begins to do him justice. He was a
major presence in the London underground of the 1960s. He was involved in the
production of the influential publication IT (International Times); he worked
the door at one of the leading rock performance spaces of the psychedelic era,
the UFO club; he organized one of the largest British rock festivals of the 1960s,
the Phun City festival, and infamously disrupted an even larger festival, on the
Isle of Wight, by staging a counterfestival outside its gates. The details of Farren’s
many adventures can be found in his memoir, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette
(London: Pimlico, 2002), which is one of the best personal accounts of the
emergence of the British counterculture.
7. Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, 250.
8. Lemmy Kilmister with Janiss Garza, White Line Fever: The Autobiography (London: Pocket Books, 2002), 81–82.
9. Tony Tyler, “‘Knock Knock!’ ‘Who’s There?’ ‘Lemmy’ . . . ,” New Musical
Express, February 8, 1975, 42.
NOTES TO PAGES 152–158 327
10. Lemmy attributes his dismissal from Hawkwind not to the bust itself,
but to his drug preferences. By his account, as a speed freak he was progressively
ostracized by the dedicated acid heads that formed the core of the band.
Kilmister and Garza, White Line Fever, 92–94.
11. Pete Frame, “Motörhead and the Pink Fairies,” Sounds, June 4, 1983, 25.
12. Quoted in Geoff Barton, “Picked to Click in ’76,” Sounds, January 3,
1976, 5.
13. Kilmister and Garza, White Line Fever, 109.
14. Mick Farren and George Snow, Rock ’n’ Roll Circus: The Illustrated
Rock Concert (New York: A & W Visual Library, 1978), 42–49.
15. Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978),
especially 10, 15–18.
16. Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1967), 333–34.
17. Quoted in Kris Needs, “The Carnivore Carnival,” Zig Zag, no. 108
(December 1980): 24.
18. Deena Weinstein notes the importance of biker subcultures as a source
for heavy metal style in her sociological study of the genre, Heavy Metal: The
Music and Its Culture (New York: Da Capo, 2000).
19. Caroline Coon, “Punk Rock: Rebels against the System,” Melody Maker
51 (August 7, 1976): 24.
20. Paul Morley and Adrian Thrills, “Independent Discs,” New Musical
Express, September 1, 1979, 23.
21. Morley and Thrills, “Independent Discs,” 26.
22. Of course, whether the Sex Pistols pursued their various deals with EMI,
A&M, and Virgin out of a desire for deliberate sabotage, hoping to subvert the
usual business workings of rock from the inside, remains very much a matter of
interpretation. Jon Savage, author of the monumental study of punk and the
Pistols, England’s Dreaming, would certainly claim as much, and did so in several articles written during the era for the British weeklies Sounds and Melody
Maker. No doubt there is some significant truth to this perspective. Malcolm
McLaren’s managerial strategy was markedly confrontational, and he was able
to use the publicity surrounding the band’s various dealings to bolster their
image as renegades who refused to be contained by the decorum of the music
industry.
23. Interviewed in 1978, for instance, Strummer asserted against critics of
the band, “Listen, we want to reach a lot of people. If we’d put our own label
together we’d have only reached a few hundred or maybe thousand people.
What’s the good of that when you’re trying to be realistic about these things?”
Simon Kinnersley, “Strummer Speaks,” Melody Maker 53 (March 11, 1978): 8.
24. Stiff Records advertisement, in New Musical Express, May 14, 1977, 32.
25. Cited in Savage, England’s Dreaming, 280.
26. Tony Parsons, “Corpse Rock??” New Musical Express, April 9, 1977, 29.
27. Kilmister and Garza, White Line Fever, 120. Lemmy can be heard on
the Damned’s cover of Sweet’s glam rock classic “Ballroom Blitz,” which is
included on the compact disc reissue of the Damned’s third album, Machine
Gun Etiquette (Emergo, 1990). For a review of the April 1977 show that paired
328 NOTES TO PAGES 158–163
the two groups, as well as the Adverts, see Jon Savage, “Damned: A Piece of
Cake,” Sounds, April 30, 1977, 34.
28. Quoted in Roy Carr, “On the Down Home, Dusty Flip Side of the
Record Biz, Something Stirs,” New Musical Express, November 6, 1976, 27.
29. Mark P., “A Bit on Chiswick,” Sniffin’ Glue, no. 12 (August–September
1977): 7–9, reprinted in Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk
Accessory (London: Sanctuary, 2000).
30. Mark P., “A Bit on Chiswick,” 9; Danny Baker, “A Day in the Life,”
Sniffin’ Glue, no. 12 (August–September 1977): 26, reprinted in Mark Perry,
Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory (London: Sanctuary, 2000). It
should be noted that Mark P. concluded his Chiswick survey with a statement
of despair that prefigured the demise of the zine, the editorship of which he had
already abdicated: “This whole piece was an exercise in ‘how to bore the pants
of [sic] you while reviewing records that you’ve probably already heard or got.’
Writing is for cunts who are scared to show the [sic] faces. . . . That’s why the
GLUE should stop right now.”
31. Armstrong, interviewed for an overview of Chiswick contained on the
“Punk ’77” website, a valuable source for British punk history: www.punk77.
co.uk/groups/motorhead.htm.
32. Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, “The Boy Looked at Johnny”: The
Obituary of Rock and Roll (1978; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 72–73.
33. Kilmister and Garza, White Line Fever, 99.
34. Quoted in Frame, “Motörhead and the Pink Fairies,” 25.
35. Pete Makowski, “Motorhead Banger,” Sounds, August 20, 1977, 30.
36. Geoff Barton, “Motörhead,” Sounds, October 22, 1977, 56.
37. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, “Fear and Loathing at the Roxy,” New
Musical Express, March 19, 1977, 39.
38. Jon Savage, “Roxy Music,” Sounds, June 25, 1977, 28. Savage retrospectively builds on these impressions, with the benefit of hindsight, in
England’s Dreaming, 300–301.
39. Kris Needs, “Motorhead,” Zig Zag, no. 76 (September 1977): 20.
40. Needs, “Motorhead,” 21.
41. A recent collection edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno,
Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (New York: Routledge, 2004), includes
several essays that address the social and cultural function of distinguishing
between the good and the bad in the sphere of musical judgment, including one
essay each on the genres of punk and metal. In the opening essay of the collection, Simon Frith refers to one manner of response to “bad” music involving
“anger at music being played too loud,” which he notes is a reaction motivated
not by “volume as such . . . but the feeling that someone else’s music is invading
our space, that we can’t listen to it as music . . . but only as noise, as undifferentiated din.” Such was the response engendered by Motörhead in many critics of
the band, as will be shown below. See Frith, “What Is Bad Music?” 32–33.
42. Paul Sutcliffe, “As Loud as a Tube Train Running through Your Inner
Ear,” Sounds, November 5, 1977, 53.
43. Deanne Pearson, “The Ugly Faces of HM,” New Musical Express, April
21, 1979, 47.
NOTES TO PAGES 163–173 329
44. Neil Norman, “The Ultimate, Metallic K.O.,” New Musical Express,
November 11, 1978, 70.
45. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 45.
46. Quoted in Savage, England’s Dreaming, 419.
47. Walser, Running with the Devil, 45.
48. Martin Popoff, The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal (Toronto:
Collector’s Guide Publishing, 1997), 295–96.
49. Quoted in Harry Doherty, “Priest Ordained,” Melody Maker 52 (June
11, 1977): 35.
50. Paul Morley, “Religious Mania in Manchester,” New Musical Express,
February 18, 1978, 46.
51. Jon Savage, “Play Doughty, Play Dirty,” Melody Maker 53 (December 9,
1978): 44. This album would be released in the United States under the title Hell
Bent for Leather.
52. Savage, “Damned: A Piece of Cake,” 34.
53. Paul Morley, “Up Against the Wally!!!” New Musical Express, February
11, 1978, 36.
54. Paul Rambali, “‘All I Want from Life Is a Big P.A.,’” New Musical
Express, June 29, 1978, 16.
55. Taylor discussed his use of the double bass drum setup in Gary Cooper,
“I Hear the Sound of Distant Drums . . . ,” Sounds, April 14, 1979, 46. Cooper
noted Taylor’s technical proficiency as a drummer in that article, observing,
“Phil talks about drumming theory with a knowledge and expertise which I’ve
only ever previously encountered in people like Phil Collins and Bill Bruford. It’s
that old Motorhead story all over again.” He continued, “The band looks like
the aftermath of a Moorcock demolished London . . . but, in fact, Phil, Lemmy
and Larry have years of experience and considerable ability.”
56. John Hamblett, “Lemmy Stays Put,” New Musical Express, March 17,
1979, 47.
57. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London:
Routledge, 1999), 183.
58. On this point, Franco Fabbri goes so far as to assert, “A genre, in order to
be called such, does not necessarily have to have what is normally meant by the
term ‘audience.’” Fabbri does not mean to discount the audience as a part of the
composition of music genres, but intends to resist the tendency to define genres
in terms of their apparent listenership, and thus to reduce them to sociological
constructions. See Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications,” in
Popular Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Gotenberg,
Sweden: International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 1981), 59.
59. Coon, “Punk Rock,” 25.
CHAPTER 5: TIME WARP
1. Geoff Barton, “Wednesday Night Fever,” Sounds, August 19, 1978,
22–23.
2. Barton, “Wednesday Night Fever,” 23.
330 NOTES TO PAGES 173–178
3. The dates used here are a matter of interpretation and to some extent contention, as are any efforts to place fixed dates on a historical phenomenon. Few
would dispute 1979 as the beginning date of NWOBHM, but the cutoff date is
harder to determine. As will be shown in this chapter, the initial enthusiasm had
largely dissipated by 1981, but new bands continued to emerge well after that
date, and some of the bands initially associated with the movement began to
realize success on a larger scale only afterward. By 1983, the two most successful such bands, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, had reached key stages in their
careers, while other of the leading NWOBHM bands were reaching turning
points in their recorded output, often for the worst. The year 1983 is also when
the American heavy metal market began to grow significantly, a factor that
changed the stakes for metal bands and that took away some of the momentum
and the specificity of the British movement. And finally, 1983 saw the emergence of thrash metal in the United States, which carried the influence of
NWOBHM bands into new directions but also changed the stylistic parameters
of heavy metal quite dramatically. Yet a case could well be made that NWOBHM
remained a detectable phenomenon for some years forward. The most thorough
compendium of NWOBHM-related information, Malc Macmillan’s The New
Wave of British Heavy Metal Encyclopedia (Berlin: Iron Pages, 2001), uses 1986
as a loose terminal date.
4. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in
Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 14; Deena
Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (New York: Da Capo,
2000), 170. Weinstein does acknowledge that a process of generic specialization
began to grow with NWOBHM, but her discussion of the subject is decidedly
brief (p. 44).
5. Quoted in Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging
History of Heavy Metal (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 33.
6. Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 151.
7. Barton later recalled, “The phrase New Wave of British Heavy Metal was
this slightly tongue-in-cheek thing. . . . I didn’t really feel that any of these bands
were particularly linked in a musical way, but it was interesting that so many of
them should then be emerging at more or less the same time.” This admission
might be taken as evidence of the manufactured nature of NWOBHM, but to
my mind it attests to the influence of Barton’s journalistic efforts on the growth
of British metal. Mick Wall, Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised
Biography (London: Sanctuary, 2001), 88.
8. Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities
and Scenes in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (October 1991): 374.
9. Geoff Barton, “If You Want Blood (and Flashbombs and Dry Ice and
Confetti) You Got It: The New Wave of British Heavy Metal: First in an
Occasional Series,” Sounds, May 19, 1979, 28.
10. Barton, “If You Want Blood,” 28.
11. Quoted in Barton, “If You Want Blood,” 29.
12. Sandy Robertson, “Whatever You Do . . . Don’t Mention Michael
Schenker,” Sounds, May 26, 1979, 19.
NOTES TO PAGES 178–185 331
13. Geoff Barton, “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal—Part Two: Def
Leppard,” Sounds, June 16, 1979, 33.
14. Barton, “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal—Part Two,” 34.
Interviewing Def Leppard several months later, in February 1980, Allan Jones
of Melody Maker asked the band exactly the same question, why such a young
band—and one that had formed during the height of punk—had chosen to play
heavy metal. For the most part, he drew a very similar set of responses, but Steve
Clark added something notable by comparing the newer crop of metal bands to
punk in terms of the way they relate to their audience: “Thing about new wave
. . . were that they had a definite feelin’ for audience. They were just like audience [sic]. There was a sort of rapport. An’ it’s the same wi’ new wave heavy
metal bands. Like, wi’ old wave heavy metal bands, like Rush, it were ‘Look at
me. I’m in a band. I’m on a ten-foot stage. I’m above you.’ There isn’t the same
rapport. I fookin’ ’ate that. We haven’t got that attitude, that Sabbath, Deep
Purple attitude. We believe it’s t’ kids that count.” Allan Jones, “The New Lords
of Denim,” Melody Maker 55 (February 2, 1980): 29.
15. Barton, “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal—Part Two,” 34.
16. Geoff Barton, “Hammer Horror (The New Wave of British Heavy Metal:
Part Four),” Sounds, September 8, 1979, 41.
17. Quoted in Geoff Barton, “Blood and Iron,” Sounds, October 27, 1979,
19. Ironically, Iron Maiden’s first appearance in Sounds had come two years earlier, when the band was profiled as part of the rising tide of punk and new wave
performers then drawing so much attention. See “Sounds of the New Wave,”
Sounds, April 2, 1977, 23, 26.
18. Quoted in Barton, “Blood and Iron,” 19.
19. According to Geoff Barton, the “KER-ANNG!” insert was initially meant
to be a separate entity from Sounds, spearheaded by Alan Lewis, but the management for the larger corporation that published the paper revoked its support
for the venture, thus delaying its start for over a year. See Steven Ward, “Geoff
Barton, Behind the Wheel: Former Kerrang! Editor Discovers a Different Kind
of Speed,” rockcritics.com, www.rockcritics.com/interview/geoffbarton.html.
20. Geoff Barton, “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass,” Sounds, December 1,
1979, 28.
21. Geoff Barton, “One over the Eight: The New Wave of British Heavy
Metal Update,” Sounds, December 1, 1979, 30–31.
22. “The Heavy Metal Top 100,” Sounds, December 1, 1980, 39.
23. The inaugural issue of Kerrang!, published in June 1981, included an
updated “Heavy Hundred” list as its centerpiece, this time compiled by Barton
from a survey of readers.
24. Neal Kay, liner notes to Metal for Muthas (1980; Chessington, UK:
Sanctuary Records, 2001).
25. Macmillan, The New Wave, 19.
26. Geoff Barton, “Metal Industry: Massive Redundancies,” Sounds,
February 9, 1980, 36.
27. Watson, “Neal Kay Is God,” Sounds, March 1, 1980, 54.
28. Keith Kahn-Harris, Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge
(Oxford: Berg, 2007), 122–31.
332 NOTES TO PAGES 185–193
29. Dave Ling, liner notes to the reissue of Metal for Muthas (Chessington,
UK: Sanctuary Records, 2001).
30. Howard Johnson, “Armed and Ready,” Kerrang!, no. 8 (February
1982): 37.
31. H. Johnson, “Armed and Ready,” 37.
32. H. Johnson, “Armed and Ready,” 37.
33. Chas de Whalley, “Neat and Tidy!” Kerrang!, no. 26 (October 7–20,
1982): 36.
34. Ian Ravendale, “Wang Dang Sweet Pan Tang,” Sounds, February 2,
1980, 12; Ian Ravendale, “Are You Ready for the NENWOBHM?” Sounds,
May 17, 1980, 29–31.
35. Interviewed by Ian Christe, John Gallagher described the atmosphere at
the workingmen’s clubs in colorful detail: “You’d go before an audience that had
no intention of being entertained by you and antagonize them into a reaction. . . .
People were throwing pint glasses at us. We used to play shows where there’d be
three sets. We’d be going nuts; then, in between sets, there’d be bingo.” Christe,
Sound of the Beast, 32.
36. Ravendale, “Are You Ready for the NENWOBHM?” 30.
37. Geoff Barton, “Ranting and Raven,” Sounds, September 19, 1981, 41.
38. In an October 1980 review of two mediocre heavy metal compilations,
Barton opened with a tirade that seemed an extension of his disappointment
with the Metal for Muthas record: “Sadly but inevitably, the movement known
as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—and that’s positively the last time I use
that term—has peaked and is currently and irrevocably locked into a slow
downward spiral into ignominy. Amidst a welter of hastily-assembled albums,
cash-ins and trash-ins, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern the difference
between good and bad, between genuine, committed HM exponents and
freshly-smelted bandwagon jumpers.” Geoff Barton, “Scrap Metal,” Sounds,
October 4, 1980, 39.
39. Barton, “Ranting and Raven,” 41.
40. Robbi Millar, “Raven Mad,” Sounds, June 19, 1982, 9.
41. Neil Jeffries, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen!,” Kerrang!, no. 43 (June
3–16, 1983): 40.
42. See Walser, Running with the Devil, 137–71; Weinstein, Heavy Metal,
245–63; Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (New
York: Pantheon, 1991), 175–92.
43. Walser has noted the moralism of Osbourne’s perspective; see Running
with the Devil, 147. Lester Bangs made the same point in far more detail in an
extensive story on Black Sabbath for Creem, “Bring Your Mother to the Gas
Chamber: Are Black Sabbath Really the New Shamans?” Creem 1 (June 1972):
40–45, 78–79. Gaines addresses the association between Zeppelin, mysticism,
and the occult in Teenage Wasteland, 178–83. Susan Fast addresses the band’s
connection to myth and mysticism with less emphasis on the occult in In the
Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 49–83.
44. Gaines, Teenage Wasteland, 186.
45. Garry Bushell, “Back in Black (Magic),” Sounds, February 27, 1982, 29.
NOTES TO PAGES 194–203 333
46. Stan, “(Black) Mass Hysteria,” Sounds, April 10, 1982, 62.
47. Quoted in Dante Bonutto, “Hellsapoppin,” Kerrang!, no. 29 (November
18–December 2, 1982): 34.
48. Quoted in Bushell, “Back in Black (Magic),” 29. Interviewed in 1985,
Cronos reiterated this sense that Venom had a connection to punk in attitude
and, to some degree, in their musical approach. See Derek Oliver, “Hell
Awaits,” Kerrang!, no. 94 (May 16–29, 1985): 34.
49. Bushell, “Back in Black (Magic),” 29.
50. Quoted in Bonutto, “Hellsapoppin,” 27.
51. Walser has discussed this tendency to equate authentic metal values with
real manhood; see Running with the Devil, 130.
52. The phrase “iron maiden” was at times used in the British press in reference to the hard tactics of the conservative Thatcher, lending the image under
discussion a twisted irony. Iron Maiden, the band, claims that the association of
the phrase with Thatcher had nothing to do with their use of it as a band name;
rather, they were drawn to it for its original meaning, as the name of a medieval
torture device.
53. Quoted in Wall, Run to the Hills, 135.
54. Quoted in Wall, Run to the Hills, 134.
55. Macmillan, The New Wave, 309.
56. Wall, Run to the Hills, 90–91.
57. Geoff Barton, “Iron in the Soul,” Sounds, April 5, 1980, 32.
58. Geoff Barton, “Sleeping on the Job,” Sounds, October 18, 1980, 18.
59. Quoted in Garry Bushell, “Oi! The Debate,” Sounds, January 24, 1981,
30.
60. Garry Bushell, “Iron Maiden,” Sounds, February 23, 1980, 24.
61. Quoted in Bushell, “Iron Maiden,” 25.
62. Robbi Millar, “Maiden: A Bag over the Head Job,” Sounds, February 7,
1981, 46.
63. Garry Bushell, “Cockney Crossroads,” Sounds, February 28, 1981, 23–24.
64. Quoted in Bushell, “Cockney Crossroads,” 22, 24.
65. Quoted in Bushell, “Cockney Crossroads,” 24.
66. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working
Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
67. Recordings from this tour were later released on the EP Maiden Japan
(London: EMI, 1981).
68. Walser, Running with the Devil, 45.
69. Macmillan, The New Wave, 151.
70. Quoted in Andy Secher, “Def Leppard vs. Iron Maiden: Who Rules the
Metal Empire?” Hit Parader, no. 228 (September 1983): 6.
71. Rob Halford of Judas Priest pronounced this view in the strongest terms,
though one can find similar such statements running throughout the pages of
Sounds and Kerrang!: “The USA still looks to Britain as the true origin of Metal.
American musicians have a lot of skill, but all of them looked to Britain for their
inspiration. I honestly don’t think that there has ever been a true American
Heavy Metal band!” Howard Johnson, “Faith Healer,” Kerrang!, no. 85
(January 10–23, 1985), 10.
334 NOTES TO PAGES 203–208
72. See Deena Weinstein’s discussion of “lite metal,” in which she refers to
Def Leppard, among other bands, in Heavy Metal, 45–48.
73. Quoted in Steve Gett, “Leppard Spotted in USA . . . ,” Melody Maker 55
(August 23, 1980): 9.
74. The historian Jonathan Rose has offered a compelling portrait of the
fascination that the United States held for many in the British working classes:
“[America] has always fascinated the proletariat as much as it has repelled the
European educated classes, because it promised the former a measure of freedom and affluence that the latter was not prepared to grant.” Rose, The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2001), 353.
75. Geoff Barton, “Def or Glory,” Sounds, March 1, 1980, 20.
76. Barton, “Def or Glory,” 20.
77. Quoted in Geoff Barton, “Tonight’s Not the Night,” Sounds, March 22,
1980, 33.
78. Quoted in Pete Makowski, “The Leppard Doesn’t Sleep Tonight,”
Sounds, February 6, 1982, 22.
79. Garry Bushell, “Spot Cash for Metal,” Sounds, August 6, 1983, 24. As
has been discussed by various commentators, including Robert Walser and
Chuck Klosterman, the “feminization” of the metal audience during the mid- to
late 1980s was a point of much concern in some quarters. Klosterman addresses
this matter with humor and insight in an early chapter of his critical memoir of
1980s metal, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota
(New York: Scribner, 2001). According to Klosterman, Def Leppard became a
source of derision among a certain breed of metal fan because “girls liked [the
band’s music] way too much.” He proceeds to explain: “Since no one could
agree on what metal was (or which bands qualified), the only gauge was to look
around and see who was standing next to you at a concert. . . . So when girls
named Danielle who wore Esprit tank tops suddenly embodied the Def Leppard
Lifestyle, it clearly indicated that Def Leppard no longer represented the people
who had comprised the core audience for On Through the Night” (36–37).
80. Quoted in Bushell, “Spot Cash,” 24.
81. Dante Bonutto, “Screaming for Vengeance (Part One),” Kerrang!, no.
56 (December 1–14, 1983): 20.
82. Quoted in Geoff Barton, “Best of British,” Kerrang!, no. 75 (August
23–September 5, 1984): 24.
83. Jeff Eastby, letter published in “Kommunication” column, Kerrang!, no.
34 (January 27–February 9, 1983): 14.
84. Quoted in Geoff Barton, “It’s Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away,”
Sounds, March 5, 1983, 14.
85. Richard Smith, “Will Heavy Metal Survive the Seventies?” Circus, no.
181 (May 11, 1978): 27–30.
86. Rick Johnson, “Is Heavy Metal Dead? Last Drum Solo at the Power
Chord Corral,” Creem 11, no. 5 (October 1979): 42. This is the same article
that triggered the long-running feud over the relative merits of metal and punk
in the letters pages of Creem, discussed in the opening pages of this book.
NOTES TO PAGES 208–220 335
87. David Fricke, “Headbangers and Invisible Guitars,” Circus, no. 244
(June 24, 1980): 38.
88. Rick Johnson, “Heavy Metal’s New Wave,” Creem 12, no. 5 (October
1980): 45.
89. Christe, Sound of the Beast, 30.
90. Lars Ulrich, liner notes to ’79 Revisited: New Wave of British Heavy
Metal (Tarzana, CA: Metal Blade Records, 1990).
CHAPTER 6: METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
1. Al Flipside, “What Is This Thing Called Hardcore?” Trouser Press 9, no. 6
(August 1982): 23.
2. Chris Morris, “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters,” Los
Angeles Times, September 4, 1983, Sunday Calendar, 57.
3. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub/Pop USA,” The Rocket, April 1983, 30.
4. Holly Kruse, Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes
(New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 30–33.
5. Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic (Chicago: Redoubt Press, 1990),
51.
6. For a detailed discussion of the rise and fall of Britpop and its connection
to cultural and political currents of the late 1980s and early 1990s, see John
Harris, Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock
(New York: Da Capo, 2004).
7. David Hesmondhalgh, “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of
a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 51.
8. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of
Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997), 117.
9. Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral
House, 2001), 275.
10. Quoted in Blush, American Hardcore, 21.
11. The story of the Masque is best recounted in Brendan Mullen and Marc
Spitz, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2001), especially 123–30.
12. This theme appeared repeatedly in interviews with the Weirdos. For one
choice example, see Lynn X, “Weirdos,” Search and Destroy, no. 8 (1978),
reprinted in Search and Destroy #7–11: The Complete Reprint, ed. V. Vale (San
Francisco: V/Search, 1996), 56.
13. Ruby Ray and V. Vale, “Screamers,” Search and Destroy, no. 5 (1978),
reprinted in Search and Destroy #1–6: The Complete Reprint, ed. V. Vale (San
Francisco: V/Search, 1996), 89.
14. Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, Hardcore California: A History of Punk
and New Wave (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1983), 38.
15. Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (New
York: Pantheon, 1991), 83.
16. “The Church,” Flipside, no. 54 (1987): 48, reprinted from Flipside, no.
17 (December 1979), for a special tenth-anniversary issue.
336 NOTES TO PAGES 221–230
17. Steven Gelber, “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity,” American Quarterly 49 (March 1997): 79.
18. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 205.
19. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 197.
20. Blush, American Hardcore, 52.
21. Quoted in David Grad and Daniel Sinker, “Black Flag: An Oral
History,” in We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews, ed.
Daniel Sinker (New York: Akashic Books, 2001), 78.
22. Quoted in Mullen and Spitz, We Got the Neutron Bomb, 196.
23. Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination
(New York: Times Books, 1999), 334.
24. Quoted in Jay Babcock, “A 12-Step Program in Self-Reliance: How
L.A.’s Hardcore Pioneers Made It through Their Early Years,” www.jaybabcock
.com/blackflagweekly.html, originally published in L.A. Weekly, June 22–28,
2001.
25. Quoted in Blush, American Hardcore, 53.
26. Eric Olsen, “Greg Ginn Interview,” Blogcritics, November 21, 2003,
blogcritics.org/archives/2003/11/21/183736.php; interview originally conducted in 1992.
27. Craig Lee, “SST Label Offers Parade of Bands,” Los Angeles Times, July 22,
1982, section 6, p. 4.
28. “Guns or Records? SST Survival Catalogue,” ca. 1986. These catalogues
were regularly inserted into SST releases to ensure that any record buyer who
purchased an album by the label would be informed of the full scope of its
output.
29. Chris Willman, “Ghosts of Rock ’n’ Roll Past Come Back,” Los Angeles
Times, March 4, 1985, section 6, p. 2.
30. Michael Azerrad has observed of the 1980s indie scene, “The best labels
inspired as much loyalty as bands, sometimes more, because the bands on the
label could be expected not only to be good, but good in a certain way. It was
very common to see someone wearing an SST T-shirt, but few wore T-shirts that
read ‘Columbia Records.’” Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from
the American Indie Underground 1981–1991 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 8.
31. Olsen, “Greg Ginn Interview.”
32. This is not to say that Ginn is above reproach for his business practices.
He has earned a less than stellar reputation for his handling of royalties for SST
bands. Ginn also lost the admiration of many when he failed to adequately support the group Negativland, who were signed to the label at the time that they
were sued by Island Records for their 1991 parody of the U2 song, “Still Haven’t
Found What I’m Looking for.”
33. Quoted in Grad and Sinker, “Black Flag,” 81.
34. Eric German, “Behind the Screams—Part 2: Interview with Brian
Slagel,” Metal Update, www.metalupdate.com/interview.metalblade.html, 2.
35. Ron Quintana, “San Francisco Heavy Metal: The Birth of a Scene,” in
Metallica Unbound: The Unofficial Biography, by K. J. Doughton (New York:
Warner Books, 1993), 139.
NOTES TO PAGES 230–234 337
36. Quoted in Martin Popoff, “Metal Blade Records: Double Decades of
Aggression,” liner notes to Metal Blade Records 20th Anniversary box set (Simi
Valley, CA: Metal Blade, 2002), 1–2.
37. I have not procured any issues of The New Heavy Metal Revue. The content summaries provided here are drawn from a German website designed for
heavy metal collectors, Metal Treasures, which reproduces covers and provides
a list of contents for three issues of the zine: www.metal-treasures.at/mag3.htm.
Covers for all five issues of Slagel’s fanzine are reproduced in the booklet accompanying the Metal Blade Records 20th Anniversary collection, cited above, but
that source provides no further information regarding the contents of particular
issues.
38. Quoted in Sylvie Simmons, “There Is No Fire Escape in Hell!” Sounds,
January 30, 1982, 26.
39. David Konow, Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 2002), 130.
40. Quoted in German, “Behind the Screams,” 4.
41. Reviewing the album in Sounds, David Roberts was as unimpressed
with Metal Massacre as Geoff Barton had been with Metal for Muthas.
Expressing his almost total disappointment in the release, Roberts summed up
his views by reflecting, “A few years ago we could look to the US to provide
class HM/HR acts in the form of Kiss, Starz, Angel, Aerosmith and numerous
others, but since our own NWOBHM the North Americans have lapsed into
copying the antics of Iron Maiden, Saxon, etc. and doing it extremely badly.”
Roberts’s judgment is, to my mind, a touch harsh and marked by no small degree
of chauvinism. As will be explained below, though I too believe many of the
tracks on Metal Massacre are far too ordinary, the collection has its highlights
and is significant for demonstrating just how powerfully the NWOBHM influence was working its way into American heavy metal. See Roberts, “California
Droning,” Sounds, June 12, 1982, 30.
42. Doughton, Metallica Unbound, 19–20.
43. Popoff, “Metal Blade Records,” 3.
44. Commenting on the preponderance of such labels in the United States,
the United Kingdom, and Europe, the metal scholar Deena Weinstein has gone
so far as to call the early 1980s “the years of the indies” for metal. Her account
of the role of independent labels in the making of metal is one of the better ones
available, though her explanation for the momentary rise of indie activity in the
United States is based one-dimensionally on the conditions of the popular music
market of the time. See Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture
(New York: Da Capo, 2000), 186.
45. For guitarists, Varney would assume considerable visibility as the author
of Guitar Player magazine’s monthly “Spotlight” column, a showcase for new
talent that Varney used to some degree as a vehicle for finding new Shrapnel
artists. Among the musicians featured in Varney’s column during the 1980s
were Yngwie Malmsteen, Paul Gilbert, Vinnie Moore, and Tony MacAlpine, all
of whom became associated with an influential style of virtuosity informed by
classical music; Gilbert, Moore, and MacAlpine released albums with Varney’s
label.
338 NOTES TO PAGES 235–240
46. Quoted in Mick Wall, “Can You Feel the Force?” Mega Metal Kerrang,
no. 10 (1988): 21. On the career of the Zazulas and their proprietorship of
Rock ’N’ Roll Heaven, also see Jory Farr, Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of
Power in Popular Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 148.
47. Quoted in Wall, “Can You Feel the Force?” 22.
48. Quoted in Damien, “Better Hate Than Never,” Terrorizer, no. 92
(September 2001): 40.
49. Quoted in Joel McIver, Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica
(London: Omnibus, 2004), 62.
50. By the end of 1983, after less than two years of operation, Metal Blade
would release four separate volumes of Metal Massacre; by 1988 the number
was up to nine. Although the quality of any given Metal Massacre compilation
was never better than inconsistent, as a series it marked one of the most concerted and high-profile efforts to bring attention to relatively unknown metal
bands, some of whom played at the cutting edge of the genre, most of whom
played well within established conventions but sometimes exhibited the odd
burst of inspiration.
51. German, “Behind the Screams,” 9. Slagel recollects that Show No Mercy
sold around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand on its initial release in the
United States, with a comparable amount of albums sold overseas.
52. Quoted in Popoff, “Metal Blade Records,” 11.
53. Pushead, “Speedcore,” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 22 (February 1985):
n.p.
54. Pushead, “Speedcore.”
55. Pushead, “Speedcore.”
56. Donna Gaines offers an extensive and insightful profile of Milano in
Teenage Wasteland, 195–216. Milano is a native of Bergenfield, the New Jersey
suburb that was the setting for the book.
57. Gaines, Teenage Wasteland, 200.
58. Quoted in Howard Johnson, “Suicide Solution,” Kerrang!, no. 147
(May 28–June 10, 1987): 8.
59. Quoted in Don Kaye, “Jokers (Ahead of) the Pack,” Mega Metal
Kerrang, no. 11 (1988): 33.
60. Popoff, “Metal Blade Records,” 11.
61. Like many independent labels, Metal Blade has entered into partnership
with one or another major label or major label affiliate over the years. Fairly
early in the label’s history it had such a partnership with Enigma, which in turn
had an arrangement with Capitol Records to facilitate distribution on a larger
scale. When that deal dissolved in the early 1990s, Metal Blade entered into a
similar partnership with Warner Records, which came to an end shortly after
Warner’s merger with Time, Inc. As of 2007, Metal Blade is without major label
affiliation. Speaking to the pros and cons of such deals, Brian Slagel has said,
“Once you sell a portion of the company, you lose a little bit of that freedom.
That’s the bottom line. People make an investment and then they want to know
why you are doing certain things. At this point in time, I’m not really into doing
that.” Quoted in German, “Behind the Screams,” 13.
NOTES TO PAGES 241–244 339
62. Doughton describes his tape-trading involvement in Metallica Unbound,
9–11.
63. K. J. Doughton, “Metal Detector,” The Rocket, March 1983, 29, and
“Metal Detector,” The Rocket, April 1983, 29.
64. Since at least the 1960s Seattle city officials have assumed a restrictive
stance toward the leisure activities of young residents. All-ages venues were routine targets of police harassment, and few were able to remain running for more
than a short period of time. The Rocket often drew attention to the city’s policies and also occasionally tried to guide its readers to the relatively few venues
that provided quality entertainment for audiences below drinking age. See Ann
Powers, “All Ages,” The Rocket, December 1983, 18; Lara Williamson,
“Teenage Like Me,” The Rocket, November 1988, 17, 46.
65. Gina Arnold, Route 666: The Road to Nirvana (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993), 158.
66. Pavitt’s column ran from April 1983 until April 1988. Its appearance
predated the formation of the Sub Pop record label by about three years,
maybe closer to four, depending on when one dates the beginning of the label.
By the time of its termination the label had been running steadily for well over
a year.
67. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub/Pop USA: West Coast Secedes from Nation,” The
Rocket, August 1983, 32, and “Sub/Pop USA,” The Rocket, December 1983, 29.
68. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub/Pop USA,” The Rocket, January 1985, 29, italics in
original.
69. Gina Arnold has vividly described this facet of the era. Musing on the
proliferation of scenes that captured her imagination as a resident of Northern
California, she writes, “Midwest and South, the Northeast and Texas, portions
of the country we’d never thought about in our California cloud, took on all this
significance in our poor little geographically deprived brains. . . . We pined for
Athens and Minneapolis and Boston, creating in our minds’ eyes a new America
where every small town contained exactly four cool people and one large
garage” (Route 666, 62). For a more analytical account of the importance of
locality and localism in independent rock, see Kruse, Site and Sound, 13.
70. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub/Pop USA: Fanzines Document U.S. Cult Bands,” The
Rocket, July 1983, 34.
71. Azerrad, Our Band, 436.
72. The Sub Pop catalogue lists Sub Pop 100 as the tenth release by the label
and includes Pavitt’s various fanzine-related cassette compilations as its earliest
product. On some level this rewrites history, but it also accentuates Pavitt’s role
as the true founder of the label, while making his partnership with Poneman—
which took shape only after the release of Sub Pop 100—representative of a
second phase in the label’s history. One might also note the parallels between
Sub Pop and Metal Blade, in that both labels essentially began as extensions of
fanzines published by their founding figures.
73. Azerrad, Our Band, 420.
74. Clark Humphrey, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, 2nd ed. (Seattle:
MISCMedia, 1999), 104.
340 NOTES TO PAGES 245–251
75. Interview with Dawn Anderson, from the Tablet Newspaper webzine,
http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/vol2iss_17/features/backfire2.htm.
76. Dawn Anderson, “White Noise,” The Rocket, June 1986, 25.
77. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub/Pop USA,” The Rocket, April 1986, 23.
78. Paul de Barros, “Seattle’s Born-again Rock Scene,” Seattle Weekly 11,
no. 6 (February 5, 1986): 35.
79. Quoted in Humphrey, Loser, 107.
80. Bruce Pavitt, “Sub Pop USA,” The Rocket, June 1987, 32.
81. John Sinclair, former MC5 manager, powerfully made this case for
Detroit as early as 1970. Writing about local bands such as the Scot Richard
Case and the Rationals, who had released solid albums that found little audience outside of Detroit, Sinclair asserted, “These bands . . . have become a powerful force for change just because they haven’t been ‘discovered’ by the industry,
and the scene they are a part of will develop in its purest direction . . . simply
because it hasn’t been certified by the pigs as the ‘happening thing, baby.’” See
Sinclair, “Motor City Music,” in Music and Politics, by John Sinclair and Robert
Levin (New York: World Publishing, 1971), 29.
82. Jonathan Poneman, “Digging the Garden,” Spin 8, no. 8 (November
1992): 61–62.
83. Robert Allen, “The Godfather of Grunge,” The Rocket, September
1989, 27.
84. Adam Tepedelen, “Jack’s Juggernaut,” The Rocket, June 1992, 29.
85. Michael Azerrad discusses this aspect of Peterson’s photographs in his
introduction to the book-length collection of Charles Peterson’s work,
Screaming Life: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene (New York:
HarperCollinsWest, 1995), 18–19.
86. Cynthia Rose, “Sub Pop: See Label for Details—An Interview with Bruce
Pavitt,” Other, 1994, reprinted at Rock’s Back Pages, www.rocksbackpages.com/
print.html?ArticleID=1305.
87. The label’s most grand maneuver along these lines came just a few
months later, when Pavitt and Poneman invited the British music journalist
Everett True to visit Seattle and gain a firsthand look at the thriving local scene.
The resulting article, published in Melody Maker, gave Seattle rock unprecedented visibility on an international scale. See True, “Sub Pop: Seattle Rock
City,” Melody Maker 64 (March 18, 1989): 26–27.
88. As a member of Mr. Epp, Arm became the first local musician to refer
to his band as “grunge” in print, albeit in a backhanded manner. Responding to
a call from the Desperate Times zine editor Clark Humphrey to nominate the
most overrated band in Seattle, Arm—then still using his birth name, Mark
McLaughlin—wrote to nominate his own group: “I hate Mr. Epp and the
Calculations! Pure grunge! Pure noise! Pure shit!” His letter proceeded to criticize the band for its lack of “chains and mohawks” and for its pretentious love
of prog rock icons Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Arm concluded by stating, sarcastically, his own taste for Philip Glass, whose music is “repetitious, redundant
and repetitive. Pure art! It’s sooooo intellectual, like me.” More than laying out
a nascent definition of grunge, Arm’s letter displayed his wide-ranging knowledge of the cultural prejudices that fed into the local scene and his tendency to
NOTES TO PAGES 251–260 341
assume an air of bemused detachment, poking fun at everyone’s tastes, including his own. Arm’s letter is quoted in Humphrey, Loser, 62.
89. Turner described the unusual chemistry of the Ducky Boys in Mike
LaVella, “Mudhoney,” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, August 1990, reprinted at
Mudhoney from Seattle, WA, www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ptn/mudhoney/articles/
199008xxmr.html.
90. Richard White, “The Art of the Deal,” The Rocket, January 1989,
22–23. Interviewed by White, Wood spoke enthusiastically of his own hopes for
arena-size success, recalling how the 1975 Kiss concert album, Alive, fed his
fantasies: “I’d use my bed as a drum riser and a tennis racket for a guitar. And
at the end of the album I’d smash my tennis racket, my guitar, start the album
over for the encore, and walk out on stage with a brand new guitar” (23).
91. In fact, Arm and Turner had already found another venue to extend their
partnership before the formation of Mudhoney, in another shambolic, mocking
band called the Thrown Ups.
92. LaVella, “Mudhoney.”
93. Grant Alden, “Mudhoney Sell Out,” The Rocket, March 1992, 25, and
“Sub Plop?” The Rocket, August 1991, 21–24.
94. The terms of the contract with Geffen awarded Sub Pop a $75,000 cash
payment and a 2 percent royalty on sales of Nirvana’s next two albums. These
figures are taken from Michael Azerrad, Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana
(New York: Main Street Books/Doubleday, 1993), 163.
95. Everett True, Live through This: American Rock Music in the Nineties
(London: Virgin, 2001), 103.
96. Kim Neely, “Alternative Music,” Rolling Stone, nos. 645–646 (December
10–24, 1992): 43.
97. Neely, “Alternative Music,” 43.
CHAPTER 7: LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
1. Jon Matsumoto, “The Minutemen,” Flipside, no. 46 (1985): n.p.
2. An alternative recording of the song by the Minutemen almost doubles
the length to over one minute and is otherwise notable for replacing the exclamation “No way!” after the song’s lone verse with the more profane “Fuck
you!” This version was released on the SST label compilation The Blasting
Concept, Volume II (Lawndale, CA: SST, 1986).
3. The qualification of this insight is based on a fundamental recognition,
that tempo—whether perceived as fast or slow—is not an absolute musical
quality, but one that assumes significance in context. In this regard, much of the
discussion of tempo that follows builds on the observation by Simon Frith:
“Musical tempo . . . is not something objectively in the music (a metronome setting, beats per minute) but an effect of the listener’s (or player’s or conductor’s
or deejay’s or dancer’s) ‘aural sensibility.’” Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value
of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 152.
4. Robert Walser, in a definitive analysis of the piece, describes the effect of
the finger-tapped section with particular insight: “Tapping directs musical interest toward harmony, the succession of chords through time. . . . Van Halen
342 NOTES TO PAGES 261–262
continually sets up implied harmonic goals and then achieves, modifies, extends,
or subverts them. At the end of the solo, he increases the harmonic tension to
the breaking point with frenetic alternation of tonic and dominant. Finally, he
abandons purposeful motion; the piece undergoes a meltdown.” Walser,
Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 74–75.
5. Reprinted in Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk
Rock and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 280.
6. Punk resistance to virtuosity can be, and has often been, overstated. Early
punk bands in both New York and London included some accomplished players,
including Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television, Robert Quine of Richard
Hell and the Voidoids, Brian James and later Captain Sensible of the Damned.
7. Walser, Running with the Devil, 51.
8. The evidence for such views is too plentiful to cite in full, but for one rich
example, see Eddie Van Halen, “My Tips for Beginners,” Guitar Player 18, no. 7
(July 1984): 52–60, a lesson by the guitarist (as told to writer Jim Ferguson)
accompanied by a transcription of “Eruption” by then-rising virtuoso Steve Vai
(62–66). The brief prologue to the piece begins, “Eddie Van Halen is the premier rock guitar innovator of the ’70s and ’80s. Like predecessors Chuck Berry,
Jimi Hendrix, and mentor Eric Clapton, he has extended the instrument’s vocabulary, his seamless right-handed tapping, popping harmonics, and unrestrained
solos flights setting new standards for hard rock guitarists” (53).
9. “Randy Rhoads Stumbles into the Spotlight,” Guitar World 2, no. 3 (May
1982): 53.
10. Heavy metal was by no means the only, or even the primary, rock genre
that promoted the incorporation of classical music. Progressive rock, played by
the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, was even more overt in its absorption of classical influences, and more so than heavy metal sought to emulate
some of the compositional complexity of classical music along with the more
general usage of harmonic and melodic elements derived from the classical
sphere. Even more than the specific musical elements of the classical repertoire,
progressive rock imported into rock an idea of “art” often openly indebted to
high art, classical ideals, though on this point there was not full uniformity
among all groups associated with the genre. For background on progressive
rock, see Paul Stump, The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive
Rock (London: Quartet Books, 1998); Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The
Time of Progressive Rock (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1998); Edward Macan,
Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Kevin Holm-Hudson, ed., Progressive
Rock Reconsidered (New York: Routledge, 2002).
11. In a 1986 interview, for instance, Malmsteen proclaimed, “Classical is
the peak of the development of music. . . . Classical is the source of music; it’s
like a religion almost.” Joe Lalaina, “Yngwie Malmsteen: Like Him or Not, He
Demands Your Attention,” Guitar World 6, no. 1 (January 1986): 25. Assessing
such views, Walser astutely noted, “Yngwie Malmsteen exemplifies the wholesale importation of classical music into heavy metal, the adoption of not only
classical musical style and vocabulary, models of virtuosic rhetoric, and modes
NOTES TO PAGES 263–269 343
of practice, pedagogy, and analysis but also the social values that underpin these
activities” (Running with the Devil, 98).
12. Derek Oliver, “Mike Varney,” Kerrang!, no. 133 (November 13–26,
1986): 40.
13. Oliver, “Mike Varney,” 40.
14. See Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the
Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), 187–90, 244–57.
15. In her analysis of the sexual politics of Led Zeppelin, Susan Fast rightly
points out that women too shared this sense of empowerment and provides considerable evidence of such through interviews with female Zeppelin fans.
Important as her claims are, I believe that Fast on some level underplays the
operation of gender-based power relations to make her argument, due to her
goal of affirming female participation and desire in what has typically been
described as an exclusionary, sexist sphere of musical belonging. See Fast, In the
Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 159–201.
16. Jas Obrecht, “Vivian Campbell: Dio’s Fire and Brimstone,” Guitar
Player 19, no. 2 (February 1985): 25.
17. Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral
House, 2001), 42.
18. Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock
(Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986), 60.
19. Quoted in “Does Punk Suck???” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 13
(April–May 1984): n.p.
20. Quoted in “Does Punk Suck???” n.p.
21. Quoted in “Does Punk Suck???” n.p.
22. Quoted in “Does Punk Suck???” n.p.
23. “Does Punk Suck???” n.p.
24. This argument is drawn from Michael Azerrad’s extensive history of
1980s indie rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American
Indie Underground, 1981–1991 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001). About Zen
Arcade, Azerrad writes, “Zen Arcade was Hüsker Dü’s most strenuous refutation of hardcore orthodoxy. . . . [The album] had stretched the hardcore format
to its most extreme limits; it was the final word on the genre, a scorching of
musical earth—any hardcore after Zen Arcade would be derivative, retrograde,
formulaic” (181, 183).
25. James Rotondi, “Steve Turner Turns on the Fuzz Gun,” Guitar Player 26,
no. 2 (February 1992), reprinted at Mudhoney from Seattle, WA, www.ocf.
berkeley.edu/~ptn/mudhoney/articles/199202xxgp.html.
26. Mike Rowell, “Slob Rock: The Unruly Raunch of Buzz Osborne and the
Melvins,” Guitar Player 30, no. 9 (September 1996): 40.
27. Interview with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, New Musical Express,
August 1991, reprinted at www.nirvanaclub.com/index.php?sc=3&section=info/
articles.
28. Kurt Cobain, Journals (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002), 266. Guitar
Institute of Technology, or GIT, was established in 1977 in Hollywood.
344 NOTES TO PAGES 270–276
Although at its inception it was overseen by musicians who stemmed mainly
from Southern California’s jazz and studio musicians’ scene, by the late 1980s it
had become aligned with the region’s burgeoning heavy metal scene and was
known as the place where aspiring metal virtuosos would go to hone their craft
and pursue opportunity.
29. James Rotondi, “Is Shred Dead?” Guitar Player 27, no. 8 (August 1993):
36.
30. Quoted in Rotondi, “Is Shred Dead?” 34.
31. Quoted in James Rotondi, “Origin of the Screechies: The Evolution of
Shred,” Guitar Player 27, no. 8 (August 1993): 32.
32. The two major exceptions to this pattern were Joe Satriani and Steve Vai,
two guitarists who achieved notoriety in the 1980s for their prodigious technique, but who were more indebted to the blues-based aesthetic of Hendrix in
particular than many of their virtuosic peers, and who commonly used the wahwah pedal.
33. Quoted in James Rotondi, “Seattle Supersonic: The Screaming Life and
Odd Times of Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil,” Guitar Player 30, no. 7 (July 1996),
reprinted at www.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/gplayer_7–96.shtml.
34. Jeff Gilbert, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Grunge,” Guitar World
15, no. 2 (February 1995): 40.
35. In fact, on portions of these two albums Black Sabbath uses both of the
suggested techniques simultaneously, tuning the whole guitar down half a step
and tuning the bottom string down to D, which provides an even deeper, more
resonant bottom end.
36. I have analyzed Page’s use of these tunings, in particular the altered open
D (D-A-D-G-A-D) tuning, in Instruments of Desire, 268–71.
37. Quoted in Alan Di Perna, “Pearl Jam, Untuned,” Musician, no. 165
(July 1992): 79.
38. Josef Woodard, “Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell,”
Musician, no. 161 (March 1992): 78.
39. Perhaps the biggest exception to this observation is Mike McCready,
lead guitarist for Pearl Jam, whose playing was more conventionally virtuosic,
albeit in a different vein than that exemplified by Van Halen. Profiled by Guitar
Player in 1994, McCready was heralded for the blues underpinnings of his style
and was identified as one of a number of contemporary guitarists who were
“introducing classic blues-based rock to a younger generation not weaned on
Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, or Steve Cropper.” See James Rotondi,
“Blood on the Tracks,” Guitar Player 28, no. 1 (January 1994): 44.
40. Quoted in K. J. Doughton, Metallica Unbound: The Unofficial
Biography (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 22.
41. Quoted in Burke Shelley, “Metallica up Your Ass,” Seconds, no. 16
(1991): 25.
42. Quoted in Brad Tolinski and Alan Paul, “Iron Men,” Guitar World 13,
no. 8 (August 1992): 48.
43. Quoted in Xavier Russell, “M.U.Y.A.,” Kerrang!, no. 48 (August 11–24,
1983): 22–23.
NOTES TO PAGES 277–287 345
44. Malcolm Dome, review of Metallica’s Kill ’Em All, Kerrang!, no. 47
(July 28–August 10, 1983): 13.
45. Glenn Pillsbury, Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of
Musical Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 11.
46. Pillsbury explains the concept as follows: “Ultimately, rhythmic intensities do not signify nearly as strongly by themselves. Rather, the changes in intensity provide the crucial context for their signification, and the various contexts
then create the cycles of energy that make thrash metal songs so effective”
(Damage Incorporated, xx–xxi).
47. Ron Quintana, “San Francisco Heavy Metal: The Birth of a Scene,” in
Doughton, Metallica Unbound, 148.
48. Quintana, “San Francisco Heavy Metal,” 148.
49. Duncan Strauss, “The Sounds of Metal at Palladium,” Los Angeles
Times, March 12, 1985, section 6, p. 2.
50. Quoted in Blush, American Hardcore, 60.
51. Quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Bergamo described Damaged as an
“anti parent record, past the point of good taste. I listened to it all last weekend
and it just didn’t seem to have any redeeming social value. It certainly wasn’t like
Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkle [sic] and the things they were trying to say.”
Quoted in Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic (Chicago: Redoubt Press,
1990), 112.
52. This account of the dispute between SST, Unicorn, and MCA is largely
drawn from Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, 36–37; and Carducci, Rock
and the Pop Narcotic, 112–13.
53. The LAPD was notorious for its harassment of the Southern California
punk scene, which only deepened as punk audiences began to engage in the
apparently violent act of slam-dancing. Although other scene participants such
as Jack Grisham, later the singer of Orange County hardcore band T.S.O.L.,
were more directly responsible for promoting the scene’s more violent tendencies, Black Flag became the most visible scapegoat as accusations of punk violence rose. The band’s shows became common targets of attention, and at one
point local police even raided SST headquarters, which had relocated from the
Church to a building in Torrance.
54. Quoted in Richard Cromelin, “Black Flag Hangs at Half-Mast,” Los
Angeles Times, June 11, 1983, section 5, pp. 1, 5.
55. Quoted in Blush, American Hardcore, 66–67.
56. “Damaged 1,” the closing song on Damaged, is the early Black Flag
song that most approximated the approach taken by the band on side 2 of My
War. The song was the longest on Damaged, running at over four minutes, and
also had a markedly slower tempo than other tracks recorded by the band.
57. Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, 44.
58. Tim Yohannon, review of Black Flag’s My War, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll,
no. 13 (April–May 1984): n.p. Coincidentally or not, this review appeared in
the same issue of Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll that contained the “Does Punk
Suck???” feature.
59. Quoted in Chris Morris, “Black Flag,” Musician, no. 68 (June 1984): 20.
346 NOTES TO PAGES 287–299
60. Robert Hilburn, “Black Flag Presents the Punk Challenge,” Los Angeles
Times, January 18, 1983, section 6, p. 6.
61. Don Waller, “Ex–Black Flag Rockers Battle the Mainstream,” Los
Angeles Times, November 27, 1986, section 6, p. 2.
62. Cobain, Journals, 60–61.
63. Gilbert, “The Father, the Son,” 39.
64. Cobain, Journals, 62.
65. Quoted in Gilbert, “The Father, the Son,” 39.
66. Quoted in Gilbert, “The Father, the Son,” 39.
67. Expanding on the reflections cited above, Kim Thayil explains the way
heavy metal figured into the reception of the Melvins: “I’ve always liked slow,
heavy music, so I thought they were doing heavy metal the way metal should be
done. People said, ‘Well, slow is metal; if you slow down, it’s not punk.’ And
metal was frowned upon. But the Melvins’ music didn’t have the operatic vocals
and self-indulgent, never-ending guitar solos” (quoted in Gilbert, “The Father,
the Son,” 39). Meanwhile, Melvins mouthpiece Buzz Osborne took a position
that echoed, and was perhaps taken directly from, the rhetoric of Black Flag,
protesting, “Don’t call us heavy metal. Heavy maybe, but metal never.” Alison
Yount, “The Melvins,” The Rocket, May 1987, 10.
68. Quoted in Charlie Bertsch, “Thurston Moore,” in We Owe You
Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Sinker (New York:
Akashic Books, 2001), 52.
69. In Marcus’s formulation, the Sex Pistols—who epitomized punk for the
writer—“damned rock & roll as a rotting corpse . . . and yet, because they had
no other weapons and because they were fans in spite of themselves, the Sex
Pistols played rock & roll. . . . They used rock & roll as a weapon against itself.”
Greil Marcus, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History
of Rock & Roll, 3rd revised ed., ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly
George-Warren, and James Miller (New York: Random House, 1992), 595.
Marcus would expand on these insights in his later work, Lipstick Traces: A
Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989).
70. Green River recorded its second version of “Swallow My Pride” in a
1987 recording session, according to the liner notes of Rehab Doll, but the
album was not released until the following year.
71. This story is recounted in Kim Fowley, “Kim Fowley and BÖC: An Affair
to Remember,” Hot Rails to Hull, hotrails.co.uk/blueskybag/kimfowley/
summeroflove.htm. On the album, the song would be credited to Waller,
Krugman, and BÖC band member Albert Bouchard, and Fowley would receive
partial credit as the song’s publisher.
CONCLUSION: METAL, PUNK, AND MASS CULTURE
1. Doug Pullen, “Monsters of Rock Tour Kicks Off in Wisconsin,” Rolling
Stone, nos. 530–531 (July 14–28, 1988): 45.
2. Mick Wall, “Judgement Daze,” Mega Metal Kerrang, no. 11 (1988): 8.
Interviewed two years previously by Malcolm Dome, Ulrich had been less
NOTES TO PAGES 300–307 347
opaque in making a similar point: “I don’t think that the word ‘Thrash’ ever
applied to us, anyway. Sure, we were the originators of the style because of the
speed, energy and obnoxiousness in our songs, but we always looked beyond
such limitations and were better defined as an American outfit with European
attitudes to Metal.” Dome, “Absolut Beginners,” Kerrang!, no. 120 (May 15–28,
1986): 28.
3. Craig Rosen, “Some See ‘New Openness’ Following Nirvana Success,”
Billboard, January 25, 1992, 12.
4. Chris Morris, “New Acts Catch Up with Punk’s Past: Grunge Rockers
Reignite Interest in Genre,” Billboard, April 18, 1992, 1.
5. Elianne Halbersberg, “Shards of Steel: What’s Behind the Splintering
Metal Market and Who’ll Pick up the Pieces,” Billboard, May 23, 1992, HM3.
6. Keith Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures (London: Routledge,
1999), 47–52.
7. Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (New York: Da
Capo, 2000), 109. Clearly Weinstein’s statement would have to be qualified
according to race, since for African American and other nonwhite youth hiphop served a similar function in the 1970s and 1980s, and that musical and cultural formation has arguably replaced metal and punk in representing the
yearnings for autonomy among white youth as well in more recent years.
8. Quoted in Mike Rubin, “The Real Thing,” Spin 12, no. 4 (July 1996): 46.
9. Quoted in Kim Neely, “Into the Unknown,” Rolling Stone, no. 684 (June
16, 1994): 52.
10. Quoted in David Fricke, “Lollapalooza,” Rolling Stone, no. 613
(September 19, 1991): 14.
11. Al Flipside, “Lollapalooza,” Flipside, no. 74 (September–October
1991): n.p.
12. Kim Neely, “Lollapalooza ’92,” Rolling Stone, no. 639 (September 17,
1992): 62.
13. Quoted in Steven Daly, “R & R Summer,” Rolling Stone, no. 736 (June
13, 1996): 37.
14. Chuck Eddy, “Lollapalooza,” Spin 12, no. 6 (September 1996): 68.
15. Cornell cited in Brendan Mullen, Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry
Farrell and Jane’s Addiction (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 248.
16. Gina Arnold, Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense (London: Pan Books,
1998), 20.
17. Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll
and the Empowerment of Everyday Life,” in Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays
on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 39.
18. Theodore Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of
Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 16.
Bibliography
BOOKS
Aerosmith with Stephen Davis. Walk This Way: The Autobiography of
Aerosmith. New York: Spike, 1999.
Antonia, Nina. The New York Dolls: Too Much Too Soon. London: Omnibus
Press, 1998.
Arnold, Gina. Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense. London: Pan Books, 1998.
———. Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London:
Routledge, 1999.
———. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Azerrad, Michael. Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. New York: Main
Street Books/Doubleday, 1993.
———. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie
Underground, 1981–1991. New York: Little, Brown, 2001.
Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Edited by Greil
Marcus. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Belsito, Peter, and Bob Davis. Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New
Wave. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1983.
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-’n’Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
Blush, Steven. American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Los Angeles: Feral House,
2001.
349
350 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braunstein, Peter, and Michael Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation: The American
Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Bruce, Michael, with Billy James. No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Inside Story of
the Alice Cooper Group. London: SAF Publishing, 2000.
Burchill, Julie, and Tony Parsons. “The Boy Looked at Johnny”: The Obituary
of Rock and Roll. 1978; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Cagle, Van. Reconstructing Pop/Subculture: Art, Rock, and Andy Warhol.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 1995.
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. 1962; New York: Noonday Press, 1984.
Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996.
Carducci, Joe. Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Chicago: Redoubt Press, 1990.
Chapple, Steve, and Reebee Garofalo. Rock ’n’ Roll Is Here to Pay: The History
and Politics of the Music Industry. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1977.
Christe, Ian. Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy
Metal. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Christgau, Robert. Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from
Vaudeville to Techno. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Cobain, Kurt. Journals. New York: Riverhead Books, 2002.
Considine, J. D. Van Halen! New York: Quill, 1985.
Cooper, Alice, with Steven Gaines. Me Alice: The Autobiography of Alice
Cooper. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976.
County, Jayne, with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to Be a Woman. London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1995.
Cross, Charles. Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. New York:
Hyperion, 2001.
Currie, Cherie, and Neal Shusterman. Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story.
Los Angeles: Price Stern Sloan, 1989.
DeCurtis, Anthony, James Henke, Holly George-Warren, and James Miller, eds.
The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. 3rd ed. New York:
Random House, 1992.
Dettmar, Kevin. Is Rock Dead? New York: Routledge, 2006.
Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of the American
Movies in the 1950s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Doughton, K. J. Metallica Unbound: The Unofficial Biography. New York:
Warner Books, 1993.
Douglas, Susan. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
———. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York: Times
Books, 1999.
Draper, Robert. Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History. New York:
Doubleday, 1990.
Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Plume, 1994.
Dubrow, Heather. Genre. London: Methuen, 1982.
Duncan, Robert. The Noise: Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Era. New York: Ticknor
& Fields, 1984.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 351
Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of
Alternative Culture. London: Verso, 1997.
Eddy, Chuck. The Accidental Evolution of Rock ’n’ Roll: A Misguided Tour
through Popular Music. New York: Da Capo, 1997.
———. Stairway to Hell: The 500 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums in the
Universe. New York: Harmony Books, 1990.
Eisen, Jonathan, ed. The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American
Cultural Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1970.
———. Twenty-Minute Fandangos and Forever Changes: A Rock Bazaar. New
York: Random House, 1971.
Engelhardt, Kristofer. From Grand Funk to Grace: The Authorized Biography
of Mark Farner. Burlington, Ontario: Collector’s Guide Publishing, 2001.
Farber, David, ed. The Sixties: From Memory to History. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Farr, Jory. Moguls and Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Farren, Mick. Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. London: Pimlico, 2002.
Farren, Mick, and George Snow. Rock ’n’ Roll Circus: The Illustrated Rock
Concert. New York: A & W Visual Library, 1978.
Fast, Susan. In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock
Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk. Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1999.
Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and
the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Gaines, Donna. A Misfit’s Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll
Heart. New York: Villard, 2003.
———. Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New
York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music
and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Gilbert, James. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile
Delinquent in the 1950s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Gilmore, Mikal. Night Beat: A Shadow History of Rock & Roll. New York:
Doubleday, 1998.
Gracyk, Theodore. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Graham, Bill, and Robert Greenfield. Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside
Rock and Out. 1992; New York: Da Capo, 2004.
Greene, Bob. Billion Dollar Baby. New York: Atheneum, 1974.
Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998.
352 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harris, John. Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English
Rock. New York: Da Capo, 2004.
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.
Hedges, Dan. Eddie Van Halen. New York: Vintage/Musician, 1986.
Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a
Post-Punk World. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Hicks, Michael. Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic and Other Satisfactions.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Hine, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of
the American Adolescent Experience. New York: Perennial, 1999.
Holm-Hudson, Kevin, ed. Progressive Rock Reconsidered. New York: Routledge,
2002.
Hoskyns, Barney. Glam! Bowie, Bolan, and the Glitter Rock Revolution.
London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
———. Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of Los
Angeles. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Humphrey, Clark. Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. 2nd ed. Seattle:
MISCMedia, 1999.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.
James, Billy. An American Band: The Story of Grand Funk Railroad. London:
SAF Publishing, 1999.
Jones, Amelia. Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998.
Kahn-Harris, Keith. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford:
Berg, 2007.
Kallberg, Jeffrey. Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Kelly, Karen, and Evelyn McDonnell, eds. Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky:
Music and Myth. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Kennedy, Pagan. Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural History of the 1970s. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Killen, Andreas. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of
Post-Sixties America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Kilmister, Lemmy, with Janiss Garza. White Line Fever: The Autobiography.
London: Pocket Books, 2002.
Klosterman, Chuck. Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North
Dakota. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Kogan, Frank. Real Punks Don’t Wear Black. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2006.
Konow, David. Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal. New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2002.
Kruse, Holly. Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes. New
York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton
Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1985.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 353
Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music
Culture, 1970–1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Lee, Tommy, Mick Mars, Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, and Neil Strauss. Mötley Crüe:
The Dirt. New York: Regan Books, 2001.
Levin, Robert, and John Sinclair. Music and Politics. New York: World
Publishing, 1971.
Lydon, John. Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. New York: Picador, 1994.
Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the
Counterculture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Macmillan, Malc. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal Encyclopedia. Berlin:
Iron Pages, 2001.
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
———. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music. 3rd revised
ed. 1975; New York: Obelisk/Dutton, 1990.
Martin, Bill. Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock. Chicago:
Open Court Press, 1998.
May, Kirse Granat. Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular
Culture, 1955–1966. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
May, Lary, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
McDonnell, Evelyn, and Ann Powers, eds. Rock She Wrote: Women Write about
Rock, Pop and Rap. New York: Delta, 1995.
McIver, Joel. Justice for All: The Truth about Metallica. London: Omnibus,
2004.
McKinney, Devin. Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral
History of Punk. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Melly, George. Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts. New York: Anchor Books, 1971.
Meltzer, Richard. The Aesthetics of Rock. 1970; New York: Da Capo, 1987.
———. A Whore Just Like the Rest: The Music Writings of Richard Meltzer.
New York: Da Capo, 2000.
Miller, James. Almost Grown: The Rise of Rock. London: William Heinemann,
1999.
Mudrian, Albert. Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal
and Grindcore. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004.
Mullen, Brendan. Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s
Addiction. New York: Da Capo, 2004.
Mullen, Brendan, Don Bolles, and Adam Parfrey. Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times
and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. Los Angeles: Feral House
Press, 2002.
Mullen, Brendan, and Marc Spitz. We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story
of L.A. Punk. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.
Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular
Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
354 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Neale, Stephen. Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1983.
Neely, Kim. Five against One: The Pearl Jam Story. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Negus, Keith. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge, 1999.
Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979.
O’Dair, Barbara, ed. Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock.
New York: Random House, 1997.
Palladino, Grace. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Perry, Mark. Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory. London: Sanctuary,
2000.
Peterson, Charles. Screaming Life: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene, with
a foreword by Bruce Pavitt and an essay by Michael Azerrad. New York:
HarperCollinsWest, 1995.
Pillsbury, Glenn. Damage Incorporated: Metallica and the Production of
Musical Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Pop, Iggy, with Anne Wehrer. I Need More: The Stooges and Other Stories. New
York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1982.
Popoff, Martin. The Collector’s Guide to Heavy Metal. Toronto: Collector’s
Guide Publishing, 1997.
Quisling, Eric, and Austin Williams. Straight Whisky: A Living History of Sex,
Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll on the Sunset Strip. Chicago: Bonus Books, 2003.
Rhodes, Lisa. Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Robinson, Richard, and Andy Zwerling. The Rock Scene. New York: Pyramid
Books, 1971.
Rollins, Henry. Get in the Van: On the Road with Black Flag. Los Angeles:
2.13.61, 1994.
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
Sabin, Roger, ed. Punk Rock, So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Schnapp, Jeffrey, and Matthew Tiews, eds. Crowds. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006.
Sewall-Ruskin, Yvonne. High on Rebellion: Inside the Underground at Max’s
Kansas City. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998.
Silverstone, Roger, ed. Visions of Suburbia. London: Routledge, 1997.
Simmons, Gene. Kiss and Make-up. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.
Sinclair, John. Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings. New York:
Douglas Book Corporation, 1972.
Sinker, Daniel, ed. We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews.
New York: Akashic Books, 2001.
Stump, Paul. The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock.
London: Quartet Books, 1998.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 355
Swiss, Thomas, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman, eds. Mapping the Beat:
Popular Music and Contemporary Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998.
Taylor, Timothy. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Thompson, Hunter S. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1967.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital.
Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions.
London: Arnold, 2000.
True, Everett. Live through This: American Rock in the Nineties. London:
Virgin, 2001.
———. Nirvana: The Biography. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2006.
Trynka, Paul. Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed. New York: Broadway Books, 2007.
Vale, V., ed. Search and Destroy #1–6: The Complete Reprint. San Francisco:
V-Search, 1996.
———. Search and Destroy #7–11: The Complete Reprint. San Francisco:
V/Search,1996.
Valentine, Gary. New York Rocker: With Blondie, Iggy Pop and Others,
1974–1981. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 2002.
Waksman, Steve. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of
Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Wall, Mick. Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised Biography. London:
Sanctuary, 2001.
Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy
Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Warwick, Jacqueline. Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in
the 1960s. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Washburne, Christopher, and Maiken Derno, eds. Bad Music: The Music We
Love to Hate. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Weinstein, Deena. Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture. New York: Da
Capo, 2000.
Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class
Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
———. Profane Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
Alden, Grant. “Mudhoney Sell Out.” The Rocket, March 1992, 25.
———. “Sub Plop?” The Rocket, August 1991, 21–14.
Allen, Robert. “The Godfather of Grunge.” The Rocket, September 1989, 27.
Allman, Kevin. “Nirvana’s Front Man Shoots from the Hip.” The Advocate,
February 1993. Reprinted at www.nirvanaclub.com/articles/02.00.93.html.
Anderson, Dawn. “Legions of Dead Bands.” Backlash, February 1988.
Reprinted at www.unofficial-mudhoney.com/press/880200.htm.
———. “Roosevelt! Rock ’n’ Roll High!” The Rocket, November 9–23, 1994,
24–27.
356 BIBLIOGRAPHY
———. “White Noise.” The Rocket, June 1986, 25.
———. Interview, www.tabletnewspaper.com/vol2iss_17/features/backfire2.htm.
Ashare, Matt. “Lenny Kaye Returns with Patti Smith—but with a Difference.”
Boston Phoenix, June 6–13, 1996. Reprinted at www.bostonphoenix.com/
alt1/archive/music/reviews/06–06–96/LENNY_KAYE.html.
Atkinson, Terry. “Van Halen’s Big Rock.” Rolling Stone, no. 293 (June 14,
1979): 11, 14.
Auslander, Philip. “I Wanna Be Your Man: Suzi Quatro’s Musical Androgyny.”
Popular Music 23, no. 1 (January 2004): 1–16.
Babcock, Jay. “Their War.” www.jaybabcock.com/blackflag.html.
———. “A 12-Step Program in Self-Reliance: How L.A.’s Hardcore Pioneers
Made It through Their Early Years.” www.jaybabcock.com/blackflagweekly.
html. Reprinted from L.A. Weekly, June 22–28, 2001.
Baker, Danny. “A Day in the Life.” Sniffin’ Glue, no. 12 (August–September
1977): 26. Reprinted in Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk
Accessory. London: Sanctuary, 2000.
Bangs, Lester. “Alice Cooper, All American: A Horatio Alger Story for the
Seventies.” Creem 3, no. 8 (January 1972): 18–25, 76–79.
———. “Alice Cooper: Punch and Judy Play the Toilets.” Creem 7, no. 2 (July
1975): 48–52, 72–76.
———. “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber: Are Black Sabbath Really the
New Shamans?” Creem 1 (June 1972): 40–45, 78–79.
———. Review of Grand Funk Railroad, Survival. Rolling Stone, no. 84 (June 10,
1971): 42–43.
———. “The Sinal Folution.” New Musical Express, October 8, 1977, 41–42.
Barton, Geoff. “Best of British.” Kerrang!, no. 75 (August 23–September 5,
1984): 24–27.
———. “Blood and Iron.” Sounds, October 27, 1979, 18–19.
———. “Def or Glory.” Sounds, March 1, 1980, 20.
———. “Hammer Horror (The New Wave of British Heavy Metal: Part Four).”
Sounds, September 8, 1979, 41.
———. “If You Want Blood (and Flashbombs and Dry Ice and Confetti) You
Got It: The New Wave of British Heavy Metal: First in an Occasional Series.”
Sounds, May 19, 1979, 28–29.
———. “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass.” Sounds, December 1, 1979,
27–28.
———. “Iron in the Soul.” Sounds, April 5, 1980, 32.
———. “It’s Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away.” Sounds, March 5, 1983, 12, 14.
———. “Metal Industry: Massive Redundancies.” Sounds, February 9, 1980,
36.
———. “Motörhead.” Sounds, October 22, 1977, 27, 56.
———. “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal—Part Two: Def Leppard.”
Sounds, June 16, 1979, 33–34.
———. “One over the Eight: The New Wave of British Heavy Metal Update.”
Sounds, December 1, 1979, 30–31.
———. “Picked to Click in ’76.” Sounds, January 3, 1976, 4–5.
———. “Ranting and Raven.” Sounds, September 19, 1981, 41.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 357
———. [writing under the pseudonym “Brigadier Godfrey Barton-FfynchCarstairs (Retired)”]. Review of Motörhead, Overkill. Sounds, March 3,
1979, 47.
———. “Scrap Metal.” Sounds, October 4, 1980, 39.
———. “Sleeping on the Job.” Sounds, October 18, 1980, 18, 20.
———. “Tonight’s Not the Night.” Sounds, March 22, 1980, 33.
———. “Wednesday Night Fever.” Sounds, August 19, 1978, 22–23.
Becker, Bart. “Semi-Pop Music.” Seattle Weekly 12, no. 28 (July 15, 1987): 27–31.
Bonutto, Dante. “Hellsapoppin.” Kerrang!, no. 29 (November 18–December 2,
1982): 24–27, 34.
———. “Screaming for Vengeance (Part One).” Kerrang!, no. 56 (December
1–14, 1983): 18–20.
Bushell, Garry. “Back in Black (Magic).” Sounds, February 27, 1982, 29.
———. “Cockney Crossroads.” Sounds, February 28, 1981, 22–24.
———. “Iron Maiden.” Sounds, February 23, 1980, 20, 24–25.
———. “Oi! The Debate.” Sounds, January 24, 1981, 30–31.
———. “Spot Cash for Metal.” Sounds, August 6, 1983, 24–25, 46.
Carr, Roy. “On the Down Home, Dusty Flip Side of the Record Biz, Something
Stirs.” New Musical Express, November 6, 1976, 25–27.
“Chiswick Records: Motörhead.” www.punk77.co.uk/groups/motorhead
.htm.
Christgau, Georgia. Review of the Runaways, The Runaways. Circus, no. 139
(September 13, 1976): 14.
“The Church.” Flipside, no. 54 (1987): 48. Reprinted from Flipside, no. 17
(December 1979).
“Clash vs. Led Zeppelin!!!” Creem 12, no. 5 (October 1980): 39, 63.
Cobain, Kurt, and Krist Novoselic, interview, New Musical Express, August
1991. Reprinted at www.nirvanaclub.com/index.php?sc=3&section=info/
articles.
Considine, J. D. Review of Soundgarden, Louder Than Love. Rolling Stone, no.
563 (October 19, 1989): 84–85.
———. Review of Soundgarden, Superunknown. Rolling Stone, no. 677 (March
10, 1994): 63–64.
Coon, Caroline. “Parade of the Punks.” Melody Maker 51 (October 2, 1976):
26–27, 63.
———. “Punk Rock: Rebels against the System.” Melody Maker 51 (August 7,
1976): 24–25.
Cooper, Gary. “I Hear the Sound of Distant Drums . . .” Sounds, April 14,
1979, 46.
Corcoran, Michael. “Northwest of Hell.” Spin 5, no. 9 (December 1989):
41–44.
Daly, Steven. “R & R Summer.” Rolling Stone, no. 736 (June 13, 1996): 37–41, 63.
Damien. “Better Hate Than Never.” Terrorizer, no. 92 (September 2001): 40–43.
de Barros, Paul. “Seattle’s Born-again Rock Scene.” Seattle Weekly 11, no. 6
(February 5, 1986): 35, 37.
de Whalley, Chas. “Neat and Tidy!” Kerrang!, no. 26 (October 7–20, 1982):
36.
358 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dickson, Dave. “The Snake Pit.” Kerrang!, no. 103 (September 19–October 2,
1985): 30–33.
DiMartino, Dave. “Remnants of the Flesh Hangover: If You Hate Van Halen
You’re Wrong.” Creem 12, no. 2 (July 1980): 41–46.
Di Perna, Alan. “Pearl Jam, Untuned.” Musician, no. 165 (July 1992): 79–80.
“Does Punk Suck???” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 13 (April–May 1984): n.p.
Doherty, Harry. “Priest Ordained.” Melody Maker 52 (June 11, 1977): 35.
———. “You Sexy Things!” Melody Maker 51 (October 16, 1976): 13.
Dome, Malcolm. “Absolut Beginners.” Kerrang!, no. 120 (May 15–28, 1986):
24–28.
———. Review of Metallica, Kill ’Em All. Kerrang!, no. 47 (July 28–August 10,
1983): 13.
Doreian, Robyn. “Soundgarden—Seattle’s Superwellknown.” Metal Hammer,
October 1996. Reprinted at web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/
hammer_10–96.shtml.
Doughton, K. J. “The Compleat History of NW Metal.” The Rocket, December
1986, 10–11, 47.
———. “Fundametalists.” The Rocket, January 1984, 13, 43.
———. “Metal Detector.” The Rocket, March 1983, 29.
———. “Metal Detector.” The Rocket, April 1983, 29.
Eddy, Chuck. “Lollapalooza.” Spin 12, no. 6 (September 1996): 68.
Edmonds, Ben. “Fowley’s Angels.” Mojo, no. 78 (May 2000): 72–81.
———. “Psychedelic Punkitude Lives!!!” Creem 4, no. 7 (December 1972):
54–56.
Ehrmann, Eric. “The Stooges.” Rolling Stone, no. 55 (April 2, 1970): 30–34.
Elliott, Paul. “How Does Your Garden Grow?” Sounds, October 21, 1989.
Reprinted at web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/sounds_10–21–89.
shtml.
Fabbri, Franco. “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications.” In Popular
Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg, 52–81. Gotenberg,
Sweden: International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 1981.
———. “What Kind of Music?” Popular Music 2: Theory and Method (1982):
131–43.
Fancher, Lisa. “Are You Young and Rebellious Enough to Love the Runaways?”
In Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap, ed. Evelyn
McDonnell and Ann Powers. New York: Delta, 1995.
———. “What the New Breed Say.” Who Put the Bomp, no. 14 (Fall 1975): 4.
Farren, Mick. “Groupie Paradise Almost Lost.” New Musical Express,
December 28, 1974, 13.
———. “The Runaways: From Jailbait to Jes’ Plain Bait.” New Musical Express,
October 2, 1976. Reprinted at Rock’s Back Pages, www.rocksbackpages.com/
features/runaways/farren_runaways.html.
Ferris, Timothy. “Knight vs. Funk: An End to ‘Brotherhood.’” Rolling Stone,
no. 119 (October 12, 1972): 1, 24–26.
———. “World’s Biggest Car Radio Performs in N.Y.” Rolling Stone, no. 89
(August 19, 1971): 1, 6–8.
Flipside, Al. “Lollapalooza.” Flipside, no. 74 (September–October 1991): n.p.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 359
———. “What Is This Thing Called Hardcore?” Trouser Press 9, no. 6 (August
1982): 22–26.
Fowley, Kim. “Kim Fowley and BÖC: An Affair to Remember.” Hot Rails to
Hull. hotrails.co.uk/blueskybag/kimfowley/summeroflove.htm.
Frame, Pete. “Motörhead and the Pink Fairies.” Sounds, June 4, 1983, 24–25.
Fricke, David. “Headbangers and Invisible Guitars.” Circus, no. 244 (June 24,
1980): 38.
———. “Lollapalooza.” Rolling Stone, no. 613 (September 19, 1991): 9–14, 86.
“Gary Tovar of Goldenvoice.” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 30 (November
1985): n.p.
Gelber, Steven. “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining
Domestic Masculinity.” American Quarterly 49 (March 1997): 66–112.
German, Eric. “Behind the Screams—Part 2: Interview with Brian Slagel.”
Metal Update, www.metalupdate.com/interview.metalblade.html.
Gett, Steve. “Leppard Spotted in USA. . . .” Melody Maker 55 (August 23,
1980): 9, 33.
Gilbert, Jeff. “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Grunge.” Guitar World 15, no. 2
(February 1995): 36–50, 194–197.
———. “Soundgarden Climbs a Stairway to the Stars.” The Rocket, October
1988, 19–20, 23.
Gilmore, Mikal. “Van Halen: The Endless Party.” In Night Beat: A Shadow
History of Rock & Roll, 195–205. New York: Doubleday, 1998.
Goldstein, Richard. “Thus Sprach Grand Funk Railroad.” Harper’s 243,
no. 1457 (October 1971): 32, 36, 42–44.
Grad, David, and Daniel Sinker. “Black Flag: An Oral History.” In We Owe You
Nothing: Punk Planet, the Collected Interviews, ed. Daniel Sinker, 76–93.
New York: Akashic Books, 2001.
Gross, Elaine. “Where Are the Chickens, Alice?” Rolling Stone, no. 68 (October 15,
1970): 18.
Halbersberg, Elianne. “Shards of Steel: What’s Behind the Splintering Metal
Market and Who’ll Pick up the Pieces.” Billboard, May 23, 1992, HM3.
Hamblett, John. “Lemmy Stays Put.” New Musical Express, March 17, 1979,
47.
Hargus, Billy Bob. “Cars ’n’ Girls: The Dictators.” Perfect Sound Forever, May
1996. www.furious.com/perfect/dictators.html.
“Heavy Hundred.” Kerrang!, no. 1 (June 1981).
“The Heavy Metal Top 100.” Sounds, December 1, 1980, 39.
Hesmondhalgh, David. “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a
Popular Music Genre.” Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 34–61.
———. “Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success
and Failure of Rough Trade.” Popular Music 16, no. 3 (1998): 255–274.
Hull, Robot A. Review of the Runaways, The Runaways. Creem 8, no. 3 (August
1976): 66.
Ingham, Jonh. “Runaways (gasp): At Last an (groan) Objective (pant) View.”
Sounds, October 9, 1976, 42.
———. “The Sex Pistols Are Four Months Old . . .” Sounds, April 24, 1976,
10–11.
360 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jeffries, Neil. “Mad Dogs and Englishmen!” Kerrang!, no. 43 (June 3–16,
1983): 40–41.
Johnson, Howard. “Armed and Ready.” Kerrang!, no. 8 (February 1982):
36–37.
———. “Faith Healer.” Kerrang!, no. 85 (January 10–23, 1985): 9–10.
———. “Suicide Solution.” Kerrang!, no. 147 (May 28–June 10, 1987): 8.
Johnson, Rick. “Heavy Metal’s New Wave.” Creem 12, no. 5 (October 1980):
42–47.
———. “Is Heavy Metal Dead? Last Drum Solo at the Power Chord Corral.”
Creem 11, no. 5 (October 1979): 42–46.
Jones, Allan. “The New Lords of Denim.” Melody Maker 55 (February 2,
1980): 28–30.
K., Brenda. “The Runaways: A Lot More Than Horny Hype.” New Wave Rock,
no. 3 (February 1979). Reprinted at www.therunaways.com/ra_press20.html.
Kay, Neal. Liner notes. Metal for Muthas. 1980; Chessington, UK: Sanctuary
Records, 2001.
Kaye, Don. “Haughty Culture.” Kerrang!, no. 233 (April 8, 1989). Reprinted at
web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/kerr_4–8–89.shtml.
———. “Jokers (Ahead of) the Pack.” Mega Metal Kerrang, no. 11 (1988):
32–33.
Kaye, Lenny. “The Flamin’ Groovies: They’re Only in It for the Groupies.”
Circus 5, no. 6 (May 1971): 42–45.
———. “The Hemi-Headed, Decked-and-Stroked, Highly Combustible
Juggernaut of the New.” Liner notes to Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the
First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968, 13. Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 1998.
———. “Open Up and Bleed: Stooges in New York.” Rock Scene 2, no. 1
(March 1974): 1, 49.
———. “To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest.” Creem 3, no. 6
(November 1971): 14–17, 72–75.
Keister, John. “Culprit.” The Rocket, July 1982, 24, 30.
———. “1983: It Was Us versus Them.” The Rocket, December 7–21, 1994,
18, 20.
———. “Who’s Killing Seattle Rock and Roll?” The Rocket, June 1984, 18–19.
Kendall, Paul. “Sandy Pearlman: A Wizard, a True Star.” Zig Zag, no. 58
(March 1976): n.p.
Kent, Nick. “Farewell Androgyny.” New Musical Express, March 16, 1974,
24–25.
———. “The Sex Pistols Interview.” New Musical Express, August 19, 1978,
25–28.
Kerner, Kenny. “An Interview with Grand Funk Railroad’s Mentor-ManagerProducer Terry Knight.” Circus 5, no. 9 (September 1971): 27–31.
“Kim Thayil.” Guitar for the Practicing Musician, September 1990. Reprinted
at web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/guitar_9–90.shtml.
Kinnersley, Simon. “Strummer Speaks.” Melody Maker 53 (March 11, 1978):
8–9.
Lalaina, Joe. “Yngwie Malmsteen: Like Him or Not, He Demands Your
Attention.” Guitar World 6, no. 1 (January 1986): 25.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 361
Lang, Dave. “The SST Records Story, Part 1.” Perfect Sound Forever, July 1998.
www.furious.com/perfect/sst1.html.
———. “The SST Records Story, Part 2.” Perfect Sound Forever, July 1998.
www.furious.com/perfect/sst2.html.
———. “The SST Records Story, Part 3.” Perfect Sound Forever, July 1998.
www.furious.com/perfect/sst3.html.
LaVella, Mike. “Mudhoney.” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, August 1990. Reprinted
at Mudhoney from Seattle, WA, www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ptn/mudhoney/
articles/199008xxmr.html.
Leer, King. “What Makes Alice Run?” Circus 6, no. 4 (February 1972): 60–63.
Ling, Dave. Liner notes. Metal for Muthas. Chessington, UK: Sanctuary
Records, 2001.
Lock, Graham. “What Made a Nice Girl Like This Stick Her Head Down Toilet
Bowls?” New Musical Express, October 7, 1978, 28–29.
Mac. “Kim Fowley, an American Tradition on Legs . . .” Zig Zag, no. 28
(February 1973): n.p.
Macnie, Jim. “Soundgarden’s Full Punk Power Slide.” Musician, no. 136
(February 1990): 32–40, 56–57.
Makowski, Pete. “The Leppard Doesn’t Sleep Tonight.” Sounds, February 6,
1982, 22–23.
———. “Motorhead Banger.” Sounds, August 20, 1977, 30.
Maloof, Rich. “Kim Thayil of Soundgarden: Down on the Upbeat.” Guitar, July
1996. Reprinted at web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/guitar_7–96.shtml.
Marcus, Greil. “Anarchy in the U.K.” In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History
of Rock & Roll, 3rd revised ed., ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly
George-Warren, and James Miller, 594–607. New York: Random House, 1992.
———. “The Beatles.” In The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,
ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, Holly George-Warren, and James
Miller, 209–222. New York: Random House, 1992.
———. “Rock-a Hula Clarified.” Creem 3, no. 3 (June 1971): 36–52.
Marsh, Dave. “The Incredible Story of Iggy and the Stooges.” Creem 2, no. 13
(May 1970): 1, 29–33.
Marshall, Clay. “Metallica.” Liner notes to Metal Blade Records 20th
Anniversary box set. Simi Valley, CA: Metal Blade Records, 2002.
Matsumoto, Jon. “The Minutemen.” Flipside, no. 46 (1985): n.p.
May, Elaine Tyler. “Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb.” In Recasting
America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May,
154–170. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
McCormack, Ed. “Subterranean Satyricon: New York City’s Ultra-Living
Dolls.” Rolling Stone, no. 120 (October 26, 1972): 14, 16.
McCoy, Sarah. “Bar Wars.” The Rocket, April 1980, 13.
McLane, Daisann. “Aerosmith’s Train Keeps a Rollin’.” Rolling Stone, no. 285
(February 22, 1979): 11, 24–27.
Meltzer, Richard. “The Dictators: Badguys Per Se.” Village Voice 20, no. 18
(May 5, 1975): 124, 128.
———. “Get behind the Blue Oyster Cult (Before It Gets behind You).” Creem 3,
no. 9 (February 1972): 28–29.
362 BIBLIOGRAPHY
———. “Handsome Dick Throws the Party of the Century.” In A Whore Just
Like the Rest, 361–64. New York: Da Capo, 2000.
Miles. “They Simper at Times.” Other, 1973. Reprinted in Rock’s Back Pages,
www.rocksbackpages.com/print.html?ArticleID=743.
Millar, Robbi. “Maiden: A Bag over the Head Job.” Sounds, February 7, 1981, 46.
———. “Raven Mad.” Sounds, June 19, 1982, 9.
Miller, Paul. “The Harder They Come.” Kerrang!, no. 160 (October 31, 1988):
28–31, 33.
Mitchell, Tony. “The Sound of Silence.” Sounds, December 1, 1980, 34.
Morley, Paul. “Religious Mania in Manchester.” New Musical Express,
February 18, 1978, 46.
———. “Up against the Wally!!!” New Musical Express, February 11, 1978, 36.
Morley, Paul, and Adrian Thrills. “Independent Discs.” New Musical Express,
September 1, 1979, 23, 26.
Morris, Chris. “Black Flag.” Musician, no. 68 (June 1984): 17–22.
———. “New Acts Catch Up with Punk’s Past: Grunge Rockers Reignite
Interest in Genre.” Billboard, April 18, 1992, 1.
Mueller, Don. “American Metal Championship: Quiet Riot vs. Motley Crue.”
Hit Parader, no. 240 (September 1984): 31–35.
Murray, Charles Shaar. “Hype Hype Hooray.” New Musical Express, June 30,
1973, 5–6.
Need, Bruce. “1982: Fireworks, AC/DC, More AC/DC, and Still More AC/DC.”
The Rocket, December 7–21, 1994, 16–17.
Needs, Kris. “The Carnivore Carnival.” Zig Zag, no. 108 (December 1980): 23–26.
———. “Motorhead.” Zig Zag, no. 76 (September 1977): 20.
Neely, Kim. “Alternative Music.” Rolling Stone, nos. 645–646 (December
10–24, 1992): 43.
———. “Into the Unknown.” Rolling Stone, no. 684 (June 16, 1994): 46–52, 117.
———. “Lollapalooza ’92.” Rolling Stone, no. 639 (September 17, 1992):
60–64, 106.
Newman, Robert. “1984: Mighty Cranium-Impaling Metalmeisters.” The
Rocket, December 7–21, 1994, 22, 24.
———. “On the Prowl.” The Rocket, January 1983, 16–17.
———. “Oral History.” The Rocket, November 1980, 7–12.
Nooger, Dan. “Punkoid Pleasure.” Village Voice 19, no. 18 (May 2, 1974): 68.
Norman, Neil. “The Ultimate, Metallic K.O.” New Musical Express, November
11, 1978, 70.
Obrecht, Jas. “Eddie Van Halen: Young Wizard of Power Rock.” Guitar Player
14, no. 4 (April 1980): 74–102.
———. “Vivian Campbell: Dio’s Fire and Brimstone.” Guitar Player 19, no. 2
(February 1985): 14–25.
Oliver, Derek. “Hell Awaits.” Kerrang!, no. 94 (May 16–29, 1985): 32–34.
———. “Mike Varney.” Kerrang!, no. 133 (November 13–26, 1986): 40–41.
Olsen, Eric. “Greg Ginn Interview.” Blogcritics, November 21, 2003. blogcritics.
org/archives/2003/11/21/183736.php.
Ordway, Nico. “Politics of Punk.” In Search and Destroy #1–6: The Complete
Reprint, ed. V. Vale, 13. San Francisco: V/Search, 1996.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 363
Osgerby, Bill. “Chewing Out a Rhythm on My Bubble Gum: The Teenage Aesthetic
and Genealogies of American Punk.” In Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural
Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin, 154–169. London: Routledge, 1999.
P., Mark. “A Bit on Chiswick.” Sniffin’ Glue, no. 12 (August–September 1977):
7–9. Reprinted in Mark Perry, Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accessory.
London: Sanctuary, 2000.
Parsons, Tony. “Corpse Rock??” New Musical Express, April 9, 1977, 29.
———. “Flight from the Fleshpots.” New Musical Express, July 29, 1978, 7–8.
———. “The Runaways, Roundhouse.” New Musical Express, October 9,
1976, 41.
Parsons, Tony, and Julie Burchill. “Fear and Loathing at the Roxy.” New Musical
Express, March 19, 1977, 39, 52.
———. “Q: Who Killed Bambi? A: Who Gives a Flying One?” New Musical
Express, February 24, 1979, 33–34.
Patterson, Fred (Phast Phreddie). “Local Action—The Runaways.” Back Door
Man, no. 5 (December 1975). Reprinted at www.therunaways.com/ra_press17.
html.
———. “The Runaways—Face Shifting.” Back Door Man, December 1977.
Reprinted at www.therunaways.com/ra_press16.html.
Pavitt, Bruce. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, April 1983, 30.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, June 1983, 32.
———. “Sub/Pop USA: Fanzines Document U.S. Cult Bands.” The Rocket, July
1983, 34.
———. “Sub/Pop USA: West Coast Secedes from Nation.” The Rocket, August
1983, 32.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, December 1983, 29.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, April 1984, 28.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, November 1984, 31.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, January 1985, 29.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, August 1985, 30.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, April 1986, 23.
———. “Sub/Pop USA.” The Rocket, January 1987, 23.
———. “Sub Pop USA.” The Rocket, June 1987, 32.
Pearson, Deanne. “The Ugly Faces of HM.” New Musical Express, April 21,
1979, 47.
Poneman, Jonathan. “Digging the Garden.” Spin 8, no. 8 (November 1992):
60–65, 117.
Popoff, Martin. “Metal Blade Records: Double Decades of Aggression.” Liner
notes to Metal Blade Records 20th Anniversary box set. Simi Valley, CA:
Metal Blade, 2002.
Powers, Ann. “All Ages.” The Rocket, December 1983, 18.
———. Review of Sub/Pop 9. The Rocket, August 1983, 27–28.
Pullen, Doug. “Monsters of Rock Tour Kicks Off in Wisconsin.” Rolling Stone,
nos. 530–531 (July 14–28, 1988): 45.
Pushead. “Speedcore.” Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 22 (February 1985): n.p.
Rabid, Jack, and Greg Sahagian. “Tomata Du Plenty (1948–2000).” The Big
Takeover, no. 47 (2000): 135–142.
364 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rambali, Paul. “‘All I Want from Life Is a Big P.A.’” New Musical Express, June 29,
1978, 16.
“Randy Rhoads Stumbles into the Spotlight.” Guitar World 2, no. 3 (May
1982): 53.
Ravendale, Ian. “Are You Ready for the NENWOBHM?” Sounds, May 17,
1980, 29–31.
———. “Wang Dang Sweet Pan Tang.” Sounds, February 2, 1980, 12.
Ray, Ruby, and V. Vale. “Screamers.” Search and Destroy, no. 5 (1978).
Reprinted in Search and Destroy #1–6: The Complete Reprint, ed. V. Vale,
89. San Francisco: V/Search, 1996.
Robbins, Ira. “The Dictators Look for the Perfect Wave.” Trouser Press, no. 29
(June 1978). Reprinted at www.thedictators.com/trouserpress.html.
Roberts, David. “California Droning.” Sounds, June 12, 1982, 30.
Robertson, Sandy. “Love and Death in LA.” Sounds, September 10, 1977, 22.
———. “The Runaways.” Sounds, November 12, 1977, 14–16, 47.
———. “Whatever You Do . . . Don’t Mention Michael Schenker.” Sounds,
May 26, 1979, 18–19.
Robinson, Lisa. “Alice Cooper Did Not Invent Glitter.” Creem 5, no. 6
(November 1973): 50, 77–78.
———. “The Runaways: Naughty Nymphets Leave Lisa Cold.” Creem 8, no. 6
(November 1976): 46–47, 69–70.
Rose, Cynthia. “Sub Pop: See Label for Details—An Interview with Bruce
Pavitt.” Other, 1994. Reprinted in Rock’s Back Pages, www.rocksbackpages.
com/print.html? ArticleID=1305.
Rosemont, Dick. “Sounds of the Sixties, Part Two: Michigan.” Who Put the
Bomp, no. 13 (Spring 1975): 36–42.
Rosen, Craig. “Some See ‘New Openness’ Following Nirvana Success.”
Billboard, January 25, 1992, 12.
Rotondi, James. “Blood on the Tracks.” Guitar Player 28, no. 1 (January 1994):
34–46.
———. “Is Shred Dead?” Guitar Player 27, no. 8 (August 1993): 30–44.
———. “Origin of the Screechies: The Evolution of Shred.” Guitar Player 27,
no. 8 (August 1993): 32.
———. “Seattle Supersonic: The Screaming Life and Odd Times of
Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil.” Guitar Player 30, no. 7 (July 1996). Reprinted
at www.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/gplayer_7–96.shtml.
———. “Steve Turner Turns on the Fuzz Gun.” Guitar Player 26, no. 2
(February 1992). Reprinted at www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ptn/mudhoney/articles/
199202xxgp.html.
Rowell, Mike. “Slob Rock: The Unruly Raunch of Buzz Osborne and the
Melvins.” Guitar Player 30, no. 9 (September 1996): 37–42.
Rubin, Mike. “The Real Thing.” Spin 12, no. 4 (July 1996): 40–49, 104–105.
Russell, Deborah. “Seattle’s Soundgarden Shoots to No. 1.” Billboard, March 26,
1994, 12.
Russell, Xavier. “M.U.Y.A.” Kerrang!, no. 48 (August 11–24, 1983): 22–23.
Salewicz, Chris. “And I Wonder . . . I Wah Wah Wah Wah Wonder . . . ”New
Musical Express, July 24, 1976, 24–26.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 365
———. “Oy Lemmy, Is It True You Were a Hippie?” New Musical Express,
August 26, 1979, 18–20.
Saunders, Metal Mike. “The Case for Grand Funk Railroad.” Fusion, December
1972. Reprinted in Rock’s Back Pages, www.rocksbackpages.com/
print.html?ArticleID=1423.
Savage, Jon. “Damned: A Piece of Cake.” Sounds, April 30, 1977, 34.
———. “Play Doughty, Play Dirty.” Melody Maker 53 (December 9, 1978): 44.
———. “Roxy Music.” Sounds, June 25, 1977, 28.
Schulps, Dave. “Cars & Girls & Apple Pie (& a Slice of Rock & Roll to Go).”
Sounds, November 5, 1977, 26–27.
Sculatti, Gene. “Time Is on Our Side.” Who Put the Bomp, no. 16 (Winter
1976–1977): 5, 62.
Secher, Andy. “Def Leppard vs. Iron Maiden: Who Rules the Metal Empire?”
Hit Parader, no. 228 (September 1983): 4–6.
Sekuler, Eliot. “Van Halen: Wild and Wonderful.” Hit Parader, no. 216
(September 1982): 4–7.
Shaw, Greg. “The Beat.” Who Put the Bomp, no. 12 (Summer 1974): 4.
———. “Sounds of the Sixties, Part One: The Bay Area.” Who Put the Bomp,
no. 12 (Summer 1974): 26–29.
———. “The Ultimate Significance of ‘Rockin’ Robin.’” Crawdaddy, September
1972, 37–41.
Shelley, Burke. “Metallica up Your Ass.” Seconds, no. 16 (1991): 22–26.
Simmons, Sylvie. “Cruesin’ and Buesin’.” Sounds, February 20, 1982,
14–15.
———. “There Is No Fire Escape in Hell!” Sounds, January 30, 1982, 26.
Sinclair, John. “Motor City Music.” In Music and Politics, by John Sinclair and
Robert Levin, 14–31. New York: World Publishing, 1971.
Smith, Richard. “Will Heavy Metal Survive the Seventies?” Circus, no. 181
(May 11, 1978): 27–30.
Solomon, Linda. “Big Offensive from Wayne County . . .” New Musical
Express, April 6, 1974, 27.
“Soundgarden Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard Chart.” The Rocket, March
30–April 13, 1994, 13.
“Soundgarden Hyperventilate and See Stars.” Musician, no. 186 (April 1994):
34–40, 44–46, 62–63.
“Sounds of the New Wave.” Sounds, April 2, 1977, 23, 26.
Stillman, Deanne. “The Hand That Rocks the Craven.” Village Voice 18, no. 21
(May 24, 1973): 50, 52.
———. “The NY Scene: Put on Your High-Heel Sneakers.” Crawdaddy, June
1973, 26–27.
Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and
Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (October 1991):
368–388.
Sutcliffe, Paul. “As Loud as a Tube Train Running through Your Inner Ear.”
Sounds, November 5, 1977, 53.
Sutcliffe, Phil. “Big Teasers from Barnsley.” Sounds, August 18, 1979, 18.
———. “A Runaway Victory.” Sounds, November 19, 1977, 38.
366 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tepedelen, Adam. “Jack’s Juggernaut.” The Rocket, June 1992, 29.
Thompson, Jack. Review of Soundgarden, Ultramega OK. Spin 4, no. 9
(December 1988): 104–105.
Tolinski, Brad, and Alan Paul. “Iron Men.” Guitar World 13, no. 8 (August
1992): 42–48, 69–74, 79–80.
“The Top 100 Northwest Records of All Time.” The Rocket, October 1989,
28–40.
Trakin, Roy. “Heavy Metal vs. Hard Core: Will the Twain Ever Meet?” Hit
Parader, no. 217 (October 1982): 22–23.
———. “Rock ’n’ Roll Made a Mensch out of Me!” New York Rocker 1, no. 14
(September 1978): 4–7.
True, Everett. “Sub Pop: Seattle Rock City.” Melody Maker 64 (March 18,
1989): 26–27.
Turner, Gregg. “L.A.: The Weirdos.” New York Rocker 1, no. 9 (September–October 1977): 10–11.
“The Two Best Shows in Town: Alice and David.” Rock Scene 1, no. 4 (September 1973): 17–18.
Tyler, Tony. “‘Knock Knock!’ ‘Who’s There?’ ‘Lemmy’ . . .” New Musical
Express, February 8, 1975, 37, 42.
Ulrich, Lars. Liner notes. ’79 Revisited: New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
Tarzana, CA: Metal Blade Records, 1990.
Van Halen, Eddie. “My Tips for Beginners.” Guitar Player 18, no. 7 (July 1984):
52–60.
Waksman, Steve. “California Noise: Tinkering with Hardcore and Heavy Metal
in Southern California.” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (October 2004):
675–702.
———. “Contesting Virtuosity: Rock Guitar Since 1976.” In The Cambridge
Companion to the Guitar, ed. Victor Coelho, 122–132. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
———. “Into the Arena: Edward Van Halen and the Cultural Contradictions of
the Guitar Hero.” In Guitar Cultures, ed. Andy Bennett and Kevin Dawe,
117–134. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Wall, Mick. “Can You Feel the Force?” Mega Metal Kerrang, no. 10 (1988):
20–24, 29.
———. “Judgement Daze.” Mega Metal Kerrang, no. 11 (1988): 8–13.
Walley, David. “Iggy Stooge.” Jazz & Pop 9, no. 1 (January 1970): 23–25.
Ward, Steven. “Geoff Barton, Behind the Wheel: Former Kerrang! Editor
Discovers a Different Kind of Speed.” rockcritics.com, www.rockcritics.com/
interview/geoffbarton.html.
Watts, Michael. “Oh You Pretty Thing.” Melody Maker 47 (January 22, 1972):
19, 42.
Weisbard, Eric. “Revolutionary Debris.” Spin 10, no. 3 (June 1994): 40.
Welch, Chris. “Funk in the Park.” Melody Maker 46 (July 10, 1971): 28–29.
Whitall, Susan. “The Clash Clamp Down on Detroit, or: Give ’Em Enough
Wisniowka.” Creem 12, no. 1 (June 1980): 41–45, 60–61.
White, Richard. “The Art of the Deal.” The Rocket, January 1989, 22–23.
Williamson, Lara. “Teenage Like Me.” The Rocket, November 1988, 17, 46.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 367
Willis, Ellen. “Crowds and Freedom.” In Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky:
Music and Myth, ed. Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell, 153–159. New
York: New York University Press, 1999.
Wolcott, James. “The Dictators Make Trains Run on Time.” Village Voice 21,
no. 23 (June 7, 1976): 118.
Woodard, Josef. “Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell.” Musician,
no. 161 (March 1992): 77–78, 82.
X, Lynn. “Weirdos.” Search and Destroy, no. 8 (1978). Reprinted in Search and
Destroy #7–11: The Complete Reprint, ed. V. Vale, 56. San Francisco:
V/Search, 1996.
Yohannon, Tim. Review of Black Flag, My War. Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, no. 13
(April–May 1984): n.p.
Yount, Alison. “The Melvins.” The Rocket, May 1987, 10.
Discography
The original release date of reissued material is noted in brackets.
CHAPTER 1: STAGING THE SEVENTIES
Flamin’ Groovies. Teenage Head. Buddha, 1999 [1971].
Grand Funk Railroad. On Time. Capitol, 2002 [1969].
———. Closer to Home. Capitol, 1970.
———. Live Album. Capitol, 1970.
———. Survival. Capitol, 2002 [1971].
———. E Pluribus Funk. Capitol, 2002 [1971].
———. Phoenix. Capitol, 1972.
———. We’re an American Band. Capitol 2002 [1973].
———. Live: The 1971 Tour. Capitol, 2002.
MC5. Kick Out the Jams. Elektra, 1969.
———. Back in the USA. Atlantic, 1992 [1970].
———. High Time. Rhino/Atlantic, 1992 [1971].
Michigan Mayhem! Volume one. More Fun, 1996.
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. Rhino
Records, 1998.
CHAPTER 2: DEATH TRIP
Bowie, David. The Man Who Saved the World. EMI, 1999 [1971].
———. Hunky Dory. RCA, 1971.
369
370 DISCOGRAPHY
———. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. RCA,
1972.
———. Aladdin Sane. RCA, 1973.
Cooper, Alice. Easy Action. Warner Bros., 1970.
———. Love It to Death. Warner Bros., 1971.
———. Killer. Warner Bros., 1971.
———. School’s Out. Warner Bros., 1972.
———. Billion Dollar Babies. Warner Bros., 1973.
County, Jayne. Rock ’n’ Roll Cleopatra. Royalty, 1993.
New York Dolls. New York Dolls. Mercury, 1973.
———. In Too Much Too Soon. Mercury, 1974.
The Stooges. The Stooges. Elektra, 1969.
———. Funhouse. Elektra, 1970.
———. Raw Power. Columbia, 1973.
———. Metallic K.O. Skydog/Jungle, 1998 [1976].
T. Rex. Electric Warrior. Warner/Reprise, 1971.
———. The Slider. Demon/Wizard, 1997 [1972].
CHAPTER 3: THE TEENAGE ROCK ’N’ ROLL IDEAL
Chuck Berry. The Great Twenty-Eight. MCA, 1984.
Dead Boys. Young, Loud, and Snotty. Sire, 1977.
Dictators. The Dictactors Go Girl Crazy! Epic, 1975.
———. Manifest Destiny. Elektra/Asylum, 1977.
———. Bloodbrothers. Elektra/Asylum, 1978.
Ford, Lita. Out for Blood. Mercury, 1983.
———. Dancing on the Edge. Mercury, 1984.
Germs. (MIA) The Complete Anthology. Rhino/Slash, 1993.
———. Germicide: Live at the Whisky 1977. Bomp, 1998.
Jett, Joan. Bad Reputation. Boardwalk, 1981.
———. I Love Rock and Roll. Boardwalk, 1981.
———. Album. MCA, 1983.
Kiss. Kiss. Casablanca, 1974.
———. Hotter Than Hell. Casablanca, 1974.
———. Dressed to Kill. Casablanca, 1975.
———. Alive! Casablanca, 1975.
———. Destroyer. Casablanca, 1976.
———. Rock and Roll Over. Casablanca, 1976.
———. Love Gun. Casablanca, 1977.
Max’s Kansas City 1976. ROIR, 1996.
Quatro, Suzi. Suzi Quatro. Bell, 1974.
Ramones. The Ramones. Sire, 1976.
———. Leave Home. Warner/Rhino, 2001 [1977].
———. Rocket to Russia. Sire, 1977.
Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. The Modern Lovers. Rhino, 1989
[1976].
Runaways. The Runaways. Cherry Red, 2003 [1976].
DISCOGRAPHY 371
———. Queens of Noise. Cherry Red, 2003 [1977].
———. Live in Japan. Cherry Red, 2003 [1977].
———. Waiting for the Night. Cherry Red, 2003 [1977].
———. And Now . . . The Runaways. Cherry Red, 1993 [1979].
Smith, Patti. Horses. Arista, 1975.
———. Easter. Arista, 1978.
Television. Marquee Moon. Elektra, 1977.
CHAPTER 4: METAL, PUNK, AND MOTÖRHEAD
AC/DC. High Voltage. Atlantic, 1976.
———. Let There Be Rock. Atlantic, 1977.
———. Powerage. Atlantic, 1978.
Buzzcocks. Spiral Scratch. Mute/New Hormones, 2000 [1977].
The Clash. The Clash. Epic, 1979.
———. Give ’Em Enough Rope. Epic, 1999 [1978].
Count Bishops. The Count Bishops. Chiswick, 1976.
Damned. Damned Damned Damned. Castle, 2002 [1977].
———. Music for Pleasure. Castle, 2002 [1977].
———. Machine Gun Etiquette. Emergo, 1990 [1979].
Hawkwind. Doremi Fasol Latido. CEMA, 1991 [1972].
———. Hall of the Mountain Grill. CEMA, 1992 [1974].
Judas Priest. Sad Wings of Destiny. Gull, 1976.
———. Sin After Sin. Sony, 2001 [1977].
———. Stained Class. CBS, 1978.
———. Hell Bent for Leather. CBS, 1978.
———. Unleashed in the East. CBS, 1979.
Motörhead. Motörhead. Roadrunner, 1988 [1977].
———. Bomber. Bronze, 1979.
———. Overkill. Bronze, 1979.
———. Ace of Spades. GWR, 1986 [1980].
———. No Sleep til Hammersmith. Bronze, 1981.
———. Iron Fist. Bronze, 1982.
———. No Remorse. Bronze, 1984.
Pink Fairies. Never Never Land. Polydor, 2002 [1971].
———. Kings of Oblivion. Polydor, 1973.
The Roxy London WC2. Earmark, 2004 [1977].
Sex Pistols. Never Mind the Bollocks . . . Here’s the Sex Pistols. Warner Bros., 1977.
———. Flogging a Dead Horse. Virgin, 1986 [1979].
———. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. Virgin, 1980.
CHAPTER 5: TIME WARP
AC/DC. Highway to Hell. Atlantic, 1979.
———. Back in Black. Atlantic, 1980.
Angel Witch. Angel Witch. Castle, 1998 [1980].
Black Sabbath. Black Sabbath. Warner Bros., 1970.
372 DISCOGRAPHY
———. Paranoid. Warner Bros., 1970.
———. Master of Reality. Warner Bros., 1971.
———. Vol. 4. Warner Bros., 1972.
———. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Warner Bros., 1974.
———. Sabotage. Warner Bros., 1975.
———. Heaven and Hell. Warner Bros., 1980.
Cockney Rejects. Greatest Hits, Volume One. Rhythm Vicar, 1999 [1980].
Deep Purple. In Rock. Warner Bros., 1970.
———. Fireball. Warner Bros., 1971.
———. Machine Head. Warner Bros., 1972.
Def Leppard. On through the Night. Mercury, 1980.
———. High ’n’ Dry. Mercury, 1981.
———. Pyromania. Mercury, 1983.
Diamond Head. Lightning to the Nations. Sanctuary, 2001 [1981].
Discharge. Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing. Castle, 2003 [1982].
The Flame Burns On: The Best of Neat Records. Castle, 2002.
Girlschool. Emergency. Snapper, 1997.
Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden. Harvest, 1980.
———. “Sanctuary.” EMI, 1980.
———. Killers. Harvest, 1981.
———. Maiden Japan. EMI, 1981.
———. The Number of the Beast. Harvest, 1982.
———. Piece of Mind. Capitol, 1983.
———. Powerslave. Capitol, 1984.
Judas Priest. British Steel. CBS, 1980.
———. Screaming for Vengeance. CBS, 1982.
———. Defenders of the Faith. CBS, 1984.
Metal for Muthas. Sanctuary, 2001 [1980].
Metal for Muthas 2. Sanctuary, 2001 [1980].
Raven. Rock Until You Drop. Neat, 1981.
———. Wiped Out. Neat, 1982.
———. All for One. Megaforce, 1983.
Samson. Shock Tactics. Sanctuary, 2001 [1981].
Saxon. Wheels of Steel. EMI, 1980.
———. Denim and Leather. Carrere, 1981.
———. Strong Arm of the Law. Carrere, 1982.
———. Power and the Glory. Carrere, 1983.
———. Crusader. Carrere, 1984.
’79 Revisited: New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Metal Blade Records, 1990.
Tygers of Pan Tang. Wild Cat. MCA, 1980.
———. Crazy Nights. Edgy, 1997 [1981].
Venom. Welcome to Hell. Sanctuary, 2002 [1981].
———. Black Metal. Combat, 1982.
———. At War with Satan. Castle, 2002 [1983].
———. Possessed. Combat, 1984.
Witchfinder General. Friends of Hell. Heavy Metal, 1983.
DISCOGRAPHY 373
CHAPTER 6: METAL/PUNK REFORMATION
Bad Brains. I Against I. SST, 1986.
Black Flag. Damaged. SST, 1981.
———. The First Four Years. SST, 1983.
———. Everything Went Black. SST, 1983.
———. My War. SST, 1983.
———. Slip It In. SST, 1984.
———. The Process of Weeding Out. SST, 1985.
The Blasting Concept, Vol. 2. SST, 1985.
Corrosion of Conformity. Animosity. Metal Blade, 1994 [1985].
Cro-Mags. The Age of Quarrel. HCNY, 2004 [1986].
Dangerhouse, Vol. 1. Frontier, 1991.
Dangerhouse, Vol. 2. Frontier, 1992.
Deep Six. A&M, 1994 [1986].
Dinosaur Jr. You’re Living All Over Me. SST, 1987.
D.O.A. Hardcore ’81. Sudden Death, 2002 [1981].
D.R.I. Dealin’ with It. Death, 1985.
———. Crossover. Rotten, 1994 [1987].
Green River. Rehab Doll/Dry as a Bone. Sub Pop, 1990.
History of Portland Punk. Zeno, 2000.
Hüsker Dü. Land Speed Record. SST, 1987 [1981].
———. Zen Arcade. SST, 1984.
———. Flip Your Wig. SST, 1985.
———. New Day Rising. SST, 1985.
Last Call: Vancouver Independent Music, 1977–1988. Zulu, 1991.
Live from the Masque: Forming. Year One, 1996.
Live from the Masque: Dicks Fight Banks Hate. Year One, 1996.
Malfunkshun. Return to Olympus. Sony, 1995.
Meat Puppets. Meat Puppets II. SST, 1983.
———. Up on the Sun. SST, 1985.
———. Out My Way. SST, 1986.
Metal Blade Records 20th Anniversary. Metal Blade, 2002.
Metal Massacre. Metal Blade, 1982.
Metal Massacre 3. Metal Blade, 1983.
Minutemen. Double Nickels on the Dime. SST, 1984.
———. My First Bells. SST, 1984.
———. 3-Way Tie for Last. SST, 1985.
Mother Love Bone. Mother Love Bone. Mercury, 1992.
Mötley Crüe. Too Fast for Love. Universal Music, 2003 [1981].
———. Shout at the Devil. Elektra, 1983.
Mudhoney. Superfuzz Bigmuff. Sub Pop, 1988.
———. Mudhoney. Sub Pop, 1989.
———. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Sub Pop, 1991.
———. My Brother the Cow. Reprise, 1995.
Nirvana. Bleach. Sub Pop, 1989.
———. Nevermind. DGC, 1991.
———. Incesticide. DGC, 1992.
374 DISCOGRAPHY
———. In Utero. DGC, 1993.
Quiet Riot. Quiet Riot II. CBS, 1979.
———. Metal Health. CBS, 1983.
Ratt. Ratt. Time Coast, 1983.
———. Out of the Cellar. Atlantic, 1984.
Redd Kross. Born Innocent. Frontier, 1991 [1981].
Saccharine Trust. We Become Snakes. SST, 1986.
Saint Vitus. Saint Vitus. SST, 1984.
———. Hallow’s Victim. SST, 1985.
———. Born Too Late. SST, 1986.
Screamers. In a Better World. Xeroid, 2000.
Screaming Trees. Even If and Especially When. SST, 1987.
Seattle Syndrome 2. Engram, 1983.
Skin Yard. Skin Yard. C/Z, 1986.
Slayer. Show No Mercy. Metal Blade, 1983.
———. Hell Awaits. Metal Blade, 1985.
Soundgarden. Screaming Life/Fopp. Sub Pop, 1987.
———. Ultramega OK. SST, 1988.
Sub Pop 200. Sub Pop, 1988.
Suicidal Tendencies. Suicidal Tendencies. Frontier, 1983.
Tad. God’s Balls/Salt Lick. Sub Pop, 1990.
———. 8-Way Santa. Sub Pop, 1991.
T.S.O.L. T.S.O.L. Nitro, 1997 [1981].
———. Beneath the Shadows. Restless, 1989 [1982].
U.S. Metal. Shrapnel, 1981.
Weirdos. Weird World. Frontier, 1991.
———. Weird World, Vol. 2. Frontier, 2003.
Wipers. Box Set. Zeno, 2001.
X. Los Angeles. Slash/Rhino, 2001 [1980].
———. Wild Gift. Slash, 1981.
———. Under the Big Black Sun. Elektra, 1983.
———. More Fun in the New World. Elektra, 1984.
CHAPTER 7: LOUDER, FASTER, SLOW IT DOWN!
Alcatrazz. No Parole from Rock and Roll. Rocshire, 1983.
Alice in Chains. Dirt. Columbia, 1992.
Angry Samoans. Back from Samoa. Triple X, 1990 [1982].
Anthrax. Spreading the Disease. Island, 1985.
———. Among the Living. Island, 1987.
Bad Brains. Bad Brains. ROIR, 1982.
———. Rock for Light. PVC, 1982.
Blue Öyster Cult. Blue Öyster Cult. Columbia, 1972.
———. Tyranny and Mutation. Columbia, 1973.
———. Secret Treaties. Columbia, 1974.
———. On Your Feet or on Your Knees. Columbia, 1975.
———. Agents of Fortune. Columbia, 1976.
Circle Jerks. Golden Shower of Hits. Avenue, 1992 [1983].
DISCOGRAPHY 375
———. Group Sex/Wild in the Streets. Frontier, 1988.
Dischord 1981: The Year in 7 Inches. Dischord, 1993.
Exodus. Bonded by Blood. Century Media, 1999 [1985].
Fartz. World Full of Hate. Alternative Tentacles, 1982.
Flipper. Generic. Def American, 1981.
Green River. Come on Down. Homestead, 1985.
Tony MacAlpine. Edge of Insanity. Shrapnel, 1986.
Yngwie Malmsteen. Rising Force. Polydor, 1984.
———. Marching Out. Polydor, 1985.
Megadeth. Killing Is My Business . . . and Business Is Good. Combat, 1985.
———. Peace Sells . . . but Who’s Buying? Capitol, 1986.
———. Rust in Peace. Capitol, 1990.
———. Countdown to Extinction. Capitol, 1992.
Melvins. Ozma/Gluey Porch Treatments. Boner, 1989.
———. Houdini. Atlantic, 1993.
———. Stag. Atlantic, 1996.
———. 26 Songs. Ipecac, 2003.
Metal Church. Metal Church. Elektra, 1985.
Metallica. Kill ’Em All. Megaforce, 1983.
———. Creeping Death. Elektra, 1984.
———. Ride the Lightning. Elektra, 1984.
———. Master of Puppets. Elektra, 1986.
———. . . . And Justice for All. Elektra, 1988.
———. Metallica. Elektra, 1991.
———. Garage Inc. Elektra, 1998.
Minor Threat. Complete Discography. Dischord, 1988.
Vinnie Moore. Mind’s Eye. Shrapnel, 1986.
Pearl Jam. Ten. Epic, 1991.
———. Vs. Epic, 1993.
———. Vitalogy. Epic, 1994.
Possessed. Seven Churches. Century Media, 1998 [1985].
Queensrÿche. Queensrÿche. EMI, 1983.
———. Operation: Mindcrime. EMI, 1988.
Racer X. Street Lethal. Shrapnel, 1986.
Screaming Trees. Dust. Epic, 1996.
Slayer. Reign in Blood. American, 1986.
———. South of Heaven. American, 1988.
———. Undisputed Attitude. American, 1996.
Soundgarden. Louder Than Love. A&M, 1989.
———. Badmotorfinger. A&M, 1991.
———. Superunknown. A&M, 1994.
———. Down on the Upside. A&M, 1996.
Van Halen. Van Halen. Warner Bros., 1978.
———. Van Halen II. Warner Bros., 1979.
———. Women and Children First. Warner Bros., 1980.
———. Fair Warning. Warner Bros., 1981.
———. Diver Down. Warner Bros., 1982.
———. 1984. Warner Bros., 1984.
Index
Page numbers in italics denote illustrations.
A&M Records, 250, 251, 327n22
Aardschok magazine, 230, 231
Abaddon, 193, 194
Acconci, Vito, 81
AC/DC, 13, 147, 180, 205
Action House, 60, 82
Adolescents, 218
Adverts, 157, 328n27
Aerosmith, 1, 13, 31, 66, 133, 337n41
Agent Orange, 14
“Aggressive Perfector,” 235
“Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love,” 256–58,
341n2
Albini, Steve, 248
Alcatrazz, 262
Alexander, Dave, 90, 98
Alice in Chains, 273; Dirt, 273
“Alley Oop,” 130
Altamont, 24, 28, 48
alternative rock. See independent rock
Amazing Randi, 72, 86
Amboy Dukes, 60, 63
Ament, Jeff, 251, 252, 293
American Graffiti (film), 113
“American Nights,” 142
“American Pie,” 85, 103, 296
“Anarchy in the U.K.,” 17, 137
Anderson, Dawn, 245
Angel, 337n41
Angel Witch, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183,
184, 185, 231, 235
Angelic Upstarts, 200
Anthology of American Folk Music, 58,
316n80
Anthrax, 239, 275
Antoni, Robert “Stewkey,” 64
Araya, Tom, 235
“Are You Ready,” 36, 43
arena rock, 7, 10–13, 14, 19–22, 23–25,
31–34, 46, 68, 86, 93–96, 99–102,
107, 127, 133, 145, 205–6, 249, 251,
299–300, 304, 306–7, 311n31
Arm, Mark, 251, 252, 271, 272,
274, 289, 293, 294, 295, 297,
340–41n88
Armored Saint, 279, 280
Armstrong, Roger, 158
Arnold, Gina, 242, 306, 339n69
Asheton, Kathy, 319n55
Asheton, Ron, 79, 90, 97, 98, 99
Asheton, Scott, 79, 90, 98, 99
Aster, Inger, 320n1
“Athletic Rock,” 191
Audio Trader magazine, 230
377
378 INDEX
Auslander, Philip, 73, 74, 325n70
authenticity, 27, 37–38, 72, 73–74, 75,
89, 92, 95, 135, 192, 197, 202–3, 216,
219, 307, 333n71
Azerrad, Michael, 244, 286, 336n30,
343n24
“Baby Please Don’t Go,” 63
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 262
Back Door Man fanzine, 132
“Back to Africa,” 121
Backfire fanzine, 245
Bad Brains, 228
Bad Company, 6, 173
Bad Religion, 251
Baiza, Joe, 223
Baker, Brian, 265
Baker, Danny, 158
“Ballad of Dwight Fry,” 77–78, 84
“Ballroom Blitz,” 327n27
Band, 59
Bandwagon pub, 172, 173, 177, 179,
180, 181
Bangles, 132
Bangs, Lester, 22, 41, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51,
61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 87, 94–95, 97, 98,
102, 114, 246, 298, 319n46,
319–20n57, 332n43; “James Taylor
Marked for Death,” 51, 54–57, 60
“Baphomet,” 183
Barbarians, 59, 60, 64
Barrett, K. K., 218
Barton, Geoff, 146–47, 153, 161, 162,
169, 172, 173, 175, 176–77, 178–81,
184–85, 191, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206,
207, 208, 330n7, 331n19, 332n38,
337n41
Bators, Stiv, 5
Bay City Rollers, 205
Beach Boys, 34, 111, 116, 117
Beastie Boys, 115
Beatles, 16, 25–29, 26, 38, 39, 46, 48,
52, 65, 68, 112, 171, 315n67
Bee Gees, 6
Bennett, Don, 62
Bergamo, Al, 284, 345n51
Berkeley Square (club), 14
Bernstein, Nils, 242
Berry, Chuck, 34, 62, 84, 95, 109, 111,
127–28, 190, 281, 342n8
Big Brother and the Holding Company, 29
Big Takeover fanzine, 266
Billboard magazine, 300, 301, 322n26
Bingenheimer, Rodney, 129, 130, 131
Birch, Paul, 187, 188
Bitch, 231, 233, 235
Black Flag, 14, 213, 217, 218, 219–220,
222–24, 225, 226, 228, 243, 251, 254,
265, 268, 276, 280–87, 289, 290, 292,
345nn51,53,56; Damaged, 281, 283,
284, 345nn51,56, 346n67; Everything
Went Black, 284; Jealous Again, 281;
My War, 224, 225, 226, 226, 280,
281, 284, 285–87, 289, 345n56
“Black Leather,” 143
“Black Magic,” 236
black metal, 189, 193, 195
“Black Metal,” 192, 193
Black ’n’ Blue, 242
Black Oak Arkansas, 284
Black Sabbath, 1, 8, 13, 21, 41, 53, 66,
67, 132, 133, 137, 138, 150, 151, 164,
177, 183, 193, 208, 224, 259, 272,
273, 275, 277, 284, 285, 290, 331n14,
332n43, 344n35; Heaven and Hell,
285; Master of Reality, 67, 272;
Paranoid, 67; Sabbath Bloody
Sabbath, 272
Blackmore, Ritchie, 107, 261
“Blessing the Operation,” 289
Bloch, Kurt, 294
Blondie, 322n35
Bludgeon Riffola record label, 178,
204
Blue, Vicki, 143
Blue Cheer, 10
Blue Öyster Cult, 133, 152–53, 295–97,
298, 302, 346n71; Agents of Fortune,
296
“Blues in A,” 183–84
Blues Magoos, 60
Blum, Richard. See Manitoba, Handsome
Dick
Blur, 215
Blush, Steven, 216, 264, 265
Board, Mykal, 266, 267, 268
“Bodies,” 17
Bolan, Marc, 73
Bomp fanzine. See Who Put the Bomp
Bomp Records, 222
Bon Jovi, 8, 13
Bonutto, Dante, 205
Boon, D., 14, 257, 258
Boone, Pat, 111
“Born to Be Bad,” 134, 324n61
Bossmen, 35
Boston (band), 6, 13
Boston Tea Party, 31
Bouchard, Albert, 346n71
Bourdieu, Pierre, 4
Bowie, David, 73, 74, 81, 94, 115, 129,
136, 319n46
Brainstem Records, 212
Brando, Marlon, 110
Brewer, Don, 34, 35, 36, 47
Brewer, Jack, 223
INDEX 379
Britpop, 215
Bron, Gerry, 168
Bronze Records, 168
Bruce, Mike, 76
Bruford, Bill, 329n55
A Bunch of Stiffs, 157
Burchill, Julie, 159, 161
Burton, Cliff, 276
Bushell, Garry, 194, 198–200, 201
Butthole Surfers, 303
Buzzcocks, 156; Spiral Scratch, 156
Byrds, 224
Byrne, Sean, 62
Cadena, Dez, 283
Cafe Wha?, 60
Cagle, Van, 74
Cale, John, 325n71
“California Girls,” 116
“California Paradise,” 128
“California Sun,” 116–17, 118–19, 120,
322n26
Calvert, Bob, 159
Cameron, Matt, 252
camp, 319n42
Campbell, Vivian, 263
Candlestick Park, 27, 28, 29
Canetti, Elias, 23–24, 25, 48
Cannibal and the Headhunters, 65
Cantrell, Jerry, 273
Cantwell, Robert, 316n80
Captain Sensible, 342n6
“Captured City,” 181, 184
Carducci, Joe, 147, 214
Carroll, Ted, 158, 159, 229
Casale, Tina, 244
Cassavetes, John, 95
Castaways, 60
Cat Butt, 250
CBGB, 122, 123, 125, 140, 217
CBS record label, 156
Chantays, 118
“Cherry Bomb,” 136–38, 140, 142
Chicago Democratic Convention (1968),
113
Chiswick Records, 158, 159, 168, 186,
229, 328n30
Chocolate Watch Band, 60, 62–63
Christe, Ian, 208, 331n35
Christgau, Georgia, 139
Chrysalis Records, 279
the Church, 219–20, 345n53
Cincinnati Pop Festival, 99–101,
319–20n57
Circle Jerks, 14
Circus magazine, 139, 208
Cirith Ungol, 231
“City Kids,” 152
Clapton, Eric, 30, 61, 261, 272, 342n8,
344n39
Clark, Steve, 178, 202, 331n15
Clarke, “Fast” Eddie, 153, 154, 154,
159, 160, 168, 169, 277
Clash, 1, 3, 6, 13, 140, 143, 156–57,
158, 178, 216; London Calling, 13
class, 180, 197, 198, 199–201, 204,
334n74
Cobain, Kurt, 12, 269, 273, 288, 289,
300, 302, 305
Cochran, Eddie, 149
“Cock in My Pocket,” 88
Cockney Rejects, 194, 199–200
Collins, Phil, 329n55
“Comfort Me,” 41
Cook, Paul, 143
Coon, Caroline, 171, 212
Cooper, Alice, 53, 67, 70–71, 71, 72–74,
75, 76–79, 80, 81, 82–87, 87, 89, 90,
93–96, 102–3, 105, 108, 127, 131,
145, 251, 296, 317n1, 319n46,
319–20n57; Billion Dollar Babies, 70,
86, 94, 317n1; Easy Action, 82–83;
Killer, 67; Love It to Death, 67, 77,
84, 86
Cornell, Chris, 247, 248–49, 252, 273,
300, 306
Corrosion of Conformity, 237, 238,
243
Count Five, 59, 60, 61–62
County, Wayne, 122–24
Coventry Bar, 122
Cow Palace, 14
Cox, Jess, 174, 188
Crash, Darby, 14
“Crash, Band, Wallop,” 191
Crawdaddy magazine, 50, 51
Cream, 33, 80, 150
Creation Records, 215
Creedence Clearwater Revival,
56, 256
Creem magazine, 1–6, 39, 44, 46, 50, 65,
92, 115, 138, 208, 334n86
Cro-Mags, 15
Cronos, 193, 194, 195
Cropper, Steve, 344n39
Crover, Dale, 288, 290, 291, 292
crowds, 20, 22, 23–25, 27–28, 34, 38,
39, 47–48, 50, 68, 74, 93, 95–96, 97,
100–102, 103, 302, 306–8, 313nn7,9
Cryan Shames, 60
Crysys, 242
Culprit, 242
Currie, Cherie, 108, 130, 132, 133,
136–37, 138, 140–42, 141, 143, 144,
325–26n81
Curtis, Jackie, 91–92
380 INDEX
C/Z Records, 244, 248, 290
Czezowski, Andy, 161
Dadaism, 149
“Damaged,” 283, 345n56
Damned, 140, 157, 158, 167, 327n27,
342n6; Damned Damned Damned,
157; Machine Gun Etiquette,
327n27
Dangerhouse Records, 218
“Dazed and Confused,” 31
Dead Boys, 6, 122, 322n35
Dead Kennedys, 254
Dean, James, 149
death: as element of rock performance,
70–71, 78, 85–87; as trope in rock discourse, 72, 75, 102–3
death metal, 240, 299
Death Records, 237–38
The Decline of Western Civilization
(film), 13, 219
Deep Purple, 6, 13, 67, 132, 150, 201,
331n14; Deep Purple in Rock, 67;
Fireball, 67
Deep Six, 244–46, 250, 287, 289, 290,
291, 292
Def Leppard, 6, 174–75, 178–79, 181,
184, 185, 191, 202–6, 207, 208, 231,
288, 330n3, 331n14, 334n79; High ’n’
Dry, 205; On Through the Night, 204,
205; Pyromania, 202, 205
Demon Flight, 233
“Depression,” 283
Descendents, 212, 218
Desperate Times fanzine, 340n88
Detroit: as music scene, 32–33, 246–47,
302, 340n81
Dettmar, Kevin, 102
Deviants, 150
Diamond Head, 174, 181, 185, 186,
231, 277
Di’anno, Paul, 180, 182, 183, 199, 200,
201–2
Dickinson, Bruce, 180, 201–2
Dicks, 228
Dictators, 106–7, 108–9, 114–27, 128,
135, 136, 137, 139, 144–45, 148, 156,
283, 296, 320n3, 322nn26,30,
323n46; Bloodbrothers, 127, 323n46;
The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, 115,
116, 119–22, 120, 125, 126, 127,
322n30; Manifest Destiny, 125–27,
323n46
Dikmik, 151
Dinosaur Jr., 228
Dio, 13, 263, 285
Dio, Ronnie James, 284
Discharge, 238, 276
Dischord Records, 186, 216, 225
disco, 1, 6, 172, 208
DIY (do it yourself), 50, 212, 213,
215–17, 220–22, 228, 231, 234,
246, 254, 264, 267, 275, 306, 308,
324n62
“Doctor Wu,” 256
Doherty, Harry, 140
Doherty, Thomas, 110
Dome, Malcolm, 277
“Dominance and Submission,” 296
“Don’t Fear the Reaper,” 296
“Don’t Look Now,” 256
“Don’t Need Your Money,” 190–91
“Don’t Touch Me There,” 188
Doors, 67, 115
Doughton, K. J., 233, 241–42
Douglas, Susan, 221, 222
Downing, K. K., 204
Dr. Feelgood, 149
Dracula (film), 77
Dream Theater, 8
D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles), 15, 236,
238, 239, 240, 241; Crossover, 239
Dubrow, Heather, 9, 148
Ducky Boys, 251
Dukowski, Chuck, 219–20, 222, 281,
283, 284, 285
Dunaway, Dennis, 77
Duncan, Robert, 21, 25, 48, 49, 82–83,
163
Duncombe, Stephen, 215–16
DuPlenty, Tomata, 218
Duran Duran, 207
Duvall, Jacques. See Aster, Inger
Dylan, Bob, 59, 65, 286, 345n51;
Bringing It All Back Home, 286
Ebony Records, 174
“Echo Head/Don’t Piece Me,” 291
Eddie, 195–97
Eddy, Chuck, 305–6
Edmonds, Ben, 65, 137
Edmunds, Dave, 158
E.F. Band, 183
Elastica, 215
electric guitar: and distorted timbre, 61,
63, 159, 165, 271, 274, 277, 281, 283;
and power of amplified sound, 80,
97–98; and virtuosity, 137–38, 257,
259–64, 268–74, 281, 283, 285–86,
315n77, 325n69, 337n45, 342nn8,11,
344nn32,39
Electric Prunes, 58–59, 60
Elektra Records, 279
Elliott, Joe, 175, 178, 203, 204–5, 206,
206, 207
Emerson, 207
INDEX 381
Emerson, Lake & Palmer, 340n88,
342n10
EMI, 156, 182, 185, 232, 327n22
Endino, Jack, 247–48
“Eruption,” 259–60, 261–62, 341–42n4,
342n8
“Evil Has No Boundaries,” 236
Exodus, 275, 276
Exploited, 245
“Exposed,” 125
“Eye Flys,” 290–92
Ezrin, Bob, 77
Fabbri, Franco, 7–8, 9, 10, 170, 329n58
Fairweather, Bruce, 251
Fancher, Lisa, 134–35, 136, 138, 324n62
Fanny, 131
“Far Beyond the Sun,” 262
Farber, David, 40
“Farmer John,” 64
Farner, Mark, 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 47, 48
Farrell, Perry, 303, 305
Farren, Mick, 129, 150–51, 152, 153,
323n47, 326n6
Fast, Susan, 332n43, 342n15
Fastbacks, 250, 252, 293, 294–95
“Faster Than the Speed of Light,” 191
Fear, 14
femininity, 106, 129–30, 131, 134,
136–38, 139, 142–43, 316n77,
323nn48,53, 324–325n67, 325n70,
334n79, 342n15
Ferris, Timothy, 44–45, 46
“Fever,” 136
“Fighting for Rock and Roll,” 183
Fillmore Auditorium, 29–30
Fillmore East, 30, 31
“Fire Power,” 191
Fisk, Steve, 244
Flamin’ Groovies, 23, 53, 65, 115
Fleetwood nightclub, 219, 220
Flipper, 287
Flipside, Al, 210, 212, 213, 243, 304
Flipside fanzine, 210, 218, 220, 256, 304
Foghat, 306
Folkways Records, 58
Ford, Lita, 13, 107, 108, 132–33, 133,
134, 137–38, 144, 231; Out for Blood,
144
Foreigner, 6, 13
Foster, Peggy, 133
“Four Horsemen,” 277
4-Skins, 194
Fowley, Kim, 106, 127, 128, 130–32,
133–34, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140,
217, 296, 320n1, 324n61, 325n71,
326n81, 346n71
Fox, Jackie, 108, 132, 143
Fox, Lucas, 152, 153
Frame, Pete, 152
Frampton, Peter, 21
Frank, Thomas, 321n14
Free, 173
Frehley, Ace, 272
Frey, Dwight, 77
Fricke, David, 208
Friedman, Marty, 262
Frith, Simon, 4, 7, 18, 170, 328n41,
341n3
Frontier Records, 324n62
Funichello, Ross “the Boss,” 116, 117,
121, 122, 125
Furnier, Vince. See Cooper, Alice
Gaines, Donna, 118, 193, 219, 240,
332n43
Gallagher, John, 189, 190, 191, 193,
332n35
Gallagher, Mark, 189, 190, 191
Gannon, Joe, 94, 317n1
Garcia, Jerry, 46
Gardner, Ted, 303
Gear, Tommy, 218
Geffen Records, 251, 252, 341n94
Geiger, Marc, 303, 305
Gelber, Steven, 220
gender in rock. See femininity; masculinity
Gendron, Bernard, 50, 56, 69
genre, 7–10, 18, 74–75, 148, 149–50,
170–71, 209, 213, 214, 238, 240,
254–55, 286–87, 300–301, 306–8,
310–11n22, 311n27, 329n58
Germs, 143, 217, 218, 326n86; GI, 143
“Getcha Rocks Off,” 178, 181
Gidget, 111
Gilbert, Eugene, 109–10
Gilbert, Paul, 337n45
Gillan, Ian, 201, 284
“Gimme Shelter,” 41, 48
Gimme Shelter (film), 48
Ginn, Greg, 213, 217, 219, 220, 221–23,
228, 229, 240, 243, 268, 281–83, 282,
284, 285, 286, 287, 336n32
girl groups, 128, 131, 134, 323n53
Girlschool, 185, 231
glam rock, 72–73, 74–75, 79, 81, 91, 92,
122, 123, 124, 129, 132, 135, 144,
149
Glass, Philip, 340n88
Glitter, Gary, 129
Glover, Henry, 322n26
“God Save the Queen,” 196
Godard, Vic, 164
go-go, 212
Goldstein, Richard, 44, 45–46, 49, 68
Gopal, Sam, 150
382 INDEX
Gordon, Kim, 295
Gossard, Stone, 251, 252, 269, 273, 293,
294
Gracyk, Theodore, 307
Graham, Bill, 11, 32, 52, 113; and rock
concert promotion, 29–31
Grand Funk Railroad, 1, 19–21, 20, 23,
31, 32–50, 43, 51, 53, 66, 67–68, 93,
94, 105, 127, 153, 306, 313n9,
313–14n27, 316–17n93; Closer to
Home, 38; E Pluribus Funk, 34; Live
Album, 33, 36–38, 68; On Time, 36;
Survival, 34, 41, 42, 48; We’re an
American Band, 317n93
Grande Ballroom, 79
Grant, Lloyd, 233
Grateful Dead, 29, 30, 46, 58, 151, 224
Great White, 13
Green Day, 303
Green River, 213, 244, 245, 246, 247,
250, 251, 259, 272, 292–95, 297–98,
302, 346n70; Come on Down, 293;
Dry as a Bone, 246, 247; Rehab Doll,
293, 346n70
Griffin, Felix, 240
Grisham, Jack, 345n53
Gross, Elaine, 82, 83
Grossberg, Lawrence, 307
Gruen, Bob, 123
grunge, 7, 166, 213, 214, 251, 259, 261,
268–74, 275, 298, 300–301, 302, 303,
340n88
Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT),
343–44n28
Guitar Player magazine, 261, 263, 269,
270, 337n45, 344n39
Guitar World magazine, 261
Gull Records, 186
Guy, Buddy, 344n39
Halbersberg, Elianne, 300
Halberstam, Judith, 325n70
Halford, Rob, 166, 201, 333n71
Hammett, Kirk, 275, 276, 277
Hanneman, Jeff, 235
Hanszek, Chris, 244, 248
hardcore, 9, 210–11, 212, 213, 216, 217,
224, 228, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241,
243, 245, 253, 255, 258–59, 261,
264–66, 268, 270, 274–75, 278, 280,
281, 283, 285, 286, 287, 290, 298,
303, 343n24
Harper’s magazine, 44, 45
Harris, Steve, 180, 198, 199, 200, 201
Hawks, 59
Hawkwind, 151–52, 153, 159, 162,
327n10
headbanging, 275, 278–79, 280
Heartbreakers (Johnny Thunders and
the), 6, 122
heavy metal, 36, 53, 63, 74, 120, 121,
124–25, 132–33, 134, 138, 143, 168,
172–209, 268, 269, 270, 274, 295–96,
325n69, 342n10, 346n67, 347n7; and
arena rock, 10–11, 13, 21–22, 25,
133, 205–6, 209, 299–300; and biker
subcultures, 153–55, 173; as genre,
8–9, 10, 37, 66–67, 137, 139, 150,
163–66, 174, 181, 182–85, 189, 192,
193, 194–95, 209, 233, 234, 238–40,
259–64, 272–73, 274–80, 299–300,
330n3, 332n38, 333n71, 334n79,
337n41, 347n2; and independent
record labels, 174, 186–89, 209, 211,
212–13, 214, 229–40, 241–43, 255,
263, 337n44, 338n61; and punk rock,
relationship with, 1–7, 15–16, 17–18,
23, 67, 75, 107, 127, 137, 139–40,
143–45, 146–49, 160–67, 169–71,
173, 176, 177–78, 185, 189, 194,
196–202, 208–9, 211, 224, 228, 229,
231, 235, 236–40, 241–43, 245, 251,
253–54, 255, 256–59, 274–76,
278–81, 284–87, 296, 298, 300–308,
331n14; and Satanic themes, 181,
192–94, 236; and tape trading, 230,
241; vocal styles within, 201–2
Heavy Metal Records, 174, 186–87
Hebdige, Dick, 148, 149
Helix, 13
Hell, Richard, 342n6
“Hello America,” 203
Hell’s Angels, 48, 152, 153
Hendrix, Jimi, 58, 63, 150, 177, 261,
270, 272, 315n77, 342n8, 344nn32,39
Hetfield, James, 233, 234, 275, 276, 277,
278
Heybourne, Kevin, 183
Hilburn, Robert, 287
Hit Parader magazine, 202
“Hit the Lights,” 233–34, 276, 277, 278
“Holidays in the Sun,” 17
Holland-Dozier-Holland, 157
Hollywood Argyles, 130
Hollywood Palladium, 13, 279–80
Holmstrom, John, 122
Homestead Records, 293
Hull, Robot A., 138–39
Humphrey, Clark, 340n88
Hunter, Rob, 189
Hunter, Russell, 152
Hurley, George, 258
Hüsker Dü, 14, 224, 228, 268, 343n24;
Zen Arcade, 268, 343n24
Huyssen, Andreas, 310n15
Hyde Park, 42, 43, 43
INDEX 383
“I Can’t Control Myself,” 54
“I Get Around,” 117
“I Got You Babe,” 121
“I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,”
58–59
“(I Live for) Cars and Girls,” 117, 120
“I Love Playin’ with Fire,” 142
“I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” 143
“I Love the Dead,” 70, 84, 86, 317n1
“I Want Freedom,” 41
“I Want You,” 54
“I (Who Have Nothing),” 35
“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” 16
Ice Cube, 304
Ice-T, 303, 304
Iguanas, 79
“I’m Eighteen,” 84–85
“I’m Your Captain,” 45
“In ’n’ Out of Grace,” 274
independent record labels, 155–58, 174,
186–89, 210–55, 336n30, 337n44,
338n61
independent (indie) rock, 214–15, 228,
241, 254, 268, 273, 300, 303–6,
343n24
Infa-Riot, 198
Ingham, Jonh, 140, 143
“Inside Looking Out,” 47
“Into the Sun,” 36–37, 47
Iommi, Tony, 107, 138, 270, 271, 272
Iron Maiden, 13, 174, 176, 177, 179–80,
181, 182–83, 184, 185, 190, 191,
195–202, 208, 209, 230–31, 235, 279,
286, 288, 289, 330n3, 331n17,
333n52, 337n41; Iron Maiden, 185,
198; Killers, 199; “Sanctuary,” 196;
“Soundhouse Tapes,” 180, 185
“Iron Maiden,” 181
Island Records, 157
Isle of Wight festival, 326n6
IT (International Times), 326n6
Jackson, Michael, 51, 202; Thriller, 202
Jaguar, 187
James, Brian, 342n6
James Gang, 79
Jane’s Addiction, 254, 303, 305
Jazz Masters, 34
“Jealous Again,” 281
Jefferson Airplane, 29
Jesus and Mary Chain, 304
Jett, Joan, 104, 107, 127–28, 129–30,
131–32, 133, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142,
143, 144, 320n1, 326n86
Jimi Hendrix Experience, 33, 150
Jive Records, 186
Johansen, David, 73
John, Elton, 21
Johnson, Howard, 186–87
Johnson, Rick, 1, 208, 309n9, 334n86
Jones, Amelia, 81
Jones, Joe, 322n26
Jones, Steve, 143, 261
Joplin, Janis, 31
Judas Priest, 13, 14, 154–55, 164,
166–67, 170, 192, 201, 204, 208, 233,
235, 275, 279, 333n71; Killing
Machine, 166–67; Stained Class, 167
Kahn-Harris, Keith, 185, 267
Kaiser Auditorium, 15
KAOS radio station, 211
Kay, Neal, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181,
182, 184, 185, 209, 232
Kaye, Lenny, 22, 44, 46–49, 50, 51, 58,
60, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 114, 253,
321n17
Keel, Ron, 233
Keen, Speedy, 158
Kempner, Scott, 116, 124, 323n46
Kennedy, Pagan, 105
Kent State shootings, 113
Kerner, Kenny 39
Kerouac, Jack, 56
Kerrang! magazine, 173, 180–81, 186,
191, 192, 194, 206–7, 229, 263, 276,
331n19
Kesey, Ken, 30
“Kick Out the Jams,” 169
Kilburn and the High Road, 149
“Killers,” 201
Kilmister, Ian (Lemmy), 150–52,
153–54, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159,
160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 169, 190,
327nn10,27
King, Ben E., 35
Kinks, 10, 150
Kiss, 1, 6, 8, 12, 13, 66, 124, 145, 147,
251, 272, 337n41, 341n90
Klosterman, Chuck, 334n79
Knickerbockers, 60
Knight, Terry, 32–33, 34–35, 37–39, 40,
42, 43, 44–45, 49, 50, 66, 68, 313n27,
316–17n93
Kogan, Frank, 311n27
Konow, David, 231
Korn, 8
Kornarens, John, 230, 233–34
Kramer, Wayne, 274
“Kree Nakoorie,” 262
Kreutzer, Rodolphe, 260
Krokus, 13
Krome, Kari, 131, 133, 135
Krugman, Murray, 296, 346n71
Kruse, Holly, 214
Kubrick, Stanley, 42
384 INDEX
Laing, Dave, 265
“Land of a Thousand Dances,” 116–17
LaVey, Anton, 193
Leather Charm, 233
“Leaving Here,” 157
Led Zeppelin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 13, 21, 31–32,
33, 67, 94, 144, 150, 173, 193, 205,
259, 273, 314n27, 315n77, 332n43,
342n15; Led Zeppelin III, 67; untitled
fourth album, 67
Lee, Craig, 219, 223
Lee, Geddy, 3
Lee, Peggy, 136
Lemmy. See Kilmister, Ian
Lennon, John, 27
“Let’s Talk About Girls,” 62
Levy, Morris, 322n26
Lewis, Alan, 173, 175, 176, 331n19
“Lights Out,” 179
Limp Richerds, 251
“Little Deuce Coupe,” 117
“Little Sister,” 104–5, 320n1
live albums, 37–38
“Live for the Whip,” 233
Living Colour, 303
Lloyd, Richard, 342n6
localism in rock. See scenes
Lolita (Nabokov), 136
Lollapalooza, 303–6
London: as music scene, 140, 161–62
Long Beach Arena, 13, 132, 133
Los Angeles Forum, 13
Los Angeles Times, 210, 211, 223, 224,
280, 287, 345n51
Loudness, 13
“Louie Louie,” 89
Lowe, Jim, 59
Lowe, Nick, 157
L7, 305
Lucas, George, 113
Lugosi, Bela, 77
Lukin, Matt, 252, 288, 290, 291
Lunceford, Bascom Lamar, 16
Lush, 304
Lydon, John. See Rotten, Johnny
MacAlpine, Tony, 262, 337n45
MacKaye, Ian, 216, 265, 284
Macmillan, Malc, 197
Madison Square Garden, 30, 31, 32,
93, 96
Magicians, 60
Makowski, Pete, 160, 162
Malfunkshun, 244, 245
Malice, 233
Malmsteen, Yngwie, 13, 14, 233, 262,
263, 265, 270, 274, 337n45, 342n11;
Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force, 262
Manitoba, Handsome Dick, 114–15,
119–20, 120, 121, 122–24, 125
Manowar, 235
Marcos, Imelda, 27
Marcus, Greil, 16–17, 28, 39–40, 41, 45,
49, 68, 112, 148, 149, 292, 312n38,
315n67, 346n69
Marsh, Dave, 33, 92, 97, 101
masculinity, 5, 57, 62–63, 72–73, 81–83,
86, 89, 90–92, 106, 138, 221–22, 263,
293–95, 310n15, 315n77, 319n42,
325nn69,70
Masque club, 217–18, 220
“Master Race Rock,” 121–22
Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, 238, 266–68,
270, 286
Max’s Kansas City, 71, 72, 82, 87,
122, 123
May, Elaine Tyler, 324n67
May, Kirse Granat, 320n4, 321n11
Mayall, John, 61
Maysles, Albert, 48
Maysles, David, 48
MCA Records, 187, 188, 283
McCain, Gillian, 16
McCready, Mike, 269, 272,
344n39
McDonald, Jeff, 221
MC5, 23, 32, 44–45, 67, 153, 169,
246, 274, 289, 340n81; High Time,
67
McGovney, Ron, 276
McKay, Steve, 100
McKinney, Devin, 27–28
McLean, Don, 85, 103, 296
McNeil, Legs, 16, 122, 123
Meat Puppets, 223, 224, 227
Megadeth, 15, 233, 275
Megaforce Records, 212, 214, 234–35,
239, 275
Melly, George, 16
Melody Maker, 81, 140, 175, 327n22,
331n14, 340n87
Meltzer, Richard, 26–27, 114–15, 121,
296, 321n19, 322n30
Melvins, 213, 244, 245, 252, 269, 272,
287–92, 298, 346n67; Gluey Porch
Treatments, 290, 291
Mendoza, Mark “the Animal,” 125
Mensch, Peter, 206
Mercer Arts Center, 75
Mercury, Freddie, 12
Mercyful Fate, 194
Metal Blade Records, 212, 213–14,
229–40, 241, 242, 253, 254, 255, 275,
279, 338nn50,61, 339n72
Metal for Muthas, 181, 182–85, 195,
204, 232, 233, 332n38, 337n41
INDEX 385
Metal Mania fanzine, 230, 231
Metal Massacre, 213, 231–34, 232, 235,
236, 242, 276, 337n41, 338n50
Metallica, 8, 15, 207, 208, 213, 233–34,
235, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245,
275–80, 299–300, 305–6; Kill ’Em All,
235, 242, 275, 276–77; No Life ’til
Leather, 235; Ride the Lightning,
279
metal/punk continuum, 7, 15, 18, 72, 75,
258, 274, 292, 307–8
metal/punk crossover, 7, 15, 146–49,
160–66, 167, 169, 170–71, 176, 184,
185, 194, 197–99, 208, 209, 213, 214,
229, 238–40, 241, 242–43, 245, 255,
275, 280, 281, 306
Metropolitan Opera House, 31
Michael and the Messengers, 60
Michalsky, John, 61
Mickey Mouse Club, 111
Milano, Billy, 239
Miles, 75
Millar, Robbi, 199
Miller, James, 27
Miller, Jimmy, 168
Mills, Hayley, 139
“Mind Over Metal,” 191
Ministry, 304
Minor Threat, 216, 265, 281
Minutemen, 14, 218, 222, 223, 256–58,
268, 289, 341n2; Double Nickels on
the Dime, 256, 257, 268
Misfits, 276
Mission of Burma, 212
Modern Lovers, 138, 325n71
Mods, 149, 159
Mojo Navigator Rock & Roll News, 50
Monsters of Rock concert tour, 299
Monterey Pop Festival, 25, 303
Montrose, 181
Moody Blues, 6
Moore, Thurston, 292
Moore, Vinnie, 262, 337n45
Morley, Paul, 155, 166, 167
Morris, Chris, 211, 212, 300
Morris, Keith, 281, 284
Morrison, Jim, 47
Morrison, Van, 63
Mother Love Bone, 251
Mötley Crüe, 207, 211, 229, 231, 276
Motörhead, 15, 146–49, 150, 152–55,
154, 157–71, 174, 176, 185, 189, 190,
199, 208, 224, 231, 234, 238, 275,
277, 278, 279, 328n41, 329n55; Ace
of Spades, 154, 234; Motörhead,
158–59, 160; Overkill, 146–47, 166,
167–68, 169
“Motorhead,” 159–60
Motown, 149
Mould, Bob, 268
“Moulty,” 64
Mountain, 306
Mouse, 60
“Mr. Crowley,” 262
Mr. Epp and the Calculations, 251,
340n88
Mudhoney, 252, 253, 271, 272, 273–74,
294; Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge,
252; Superfuzz Bigmuff, 252, 271,
271, 274
Muir, Mike, 240
Mullen, Brendan, 217
Muller, Don, 303
Murray, Charles Shaar, 96
Murray, Dave, 183
Music for Nations record label, 174
Music Machine club, 177
Musician magazine, 286
Mustaine, Dave, 233, 275, 276
“Mystery Train,” 16
Nabokov, Vladimir, 136
Nash, Ilana, 324n67
Nazz, 60, 63, 64
Neat Records, 174, 186, 187–89, 192,
193, 229
Needs, Kris, 161–62
Neely, Kim, 254, 255, 304
Negativland, 336n32
Negus, Keith, 7, 8, 170, 171
Nelson, Jeff, 265
NENWOBHM (North East New Wave of
British Heavy Metal), 188
“Neon Angels on the Road to Ruin,” 128
“Nervous Breakdown,” 223, 281
New Heavy Metal Revue fanzine,
230–31, 232, 337n37
New Musical Express, 130, 140, 144,
150, 151, 157, 169, 175, 269
New Torpedoes, 207
new wave, 2, 4, 5–6, 124, 127, 144, 161,
172, 173, 176, 178, 207, 212
New Wave of British Heavy Metal
(NWOBHM), 147, 149, 172–209,
212, 214, 229, 230, 231–32, 234, 235,
236, 238, 267, 275, 278, 309n9,
330nn3,7, 331n14, 332n38, 337n41
New York: as music scene, 60, 75, 107,
118–19, 122–24, 322n35
New York Dolls, 75, 121, 122,
124, 135
Newton, Esther, 319n42
“Next Big Thing,” 120
Night Owl Cafe, 60
Nine Inch Nails, 303, 304
“1970,” 100
386 INDEX
Nirvana, 12, 249, 249, 250, 251,
252–53, 254, 269, 270, 287, 300–301,
304, 341n94; Bleach, 253; Nevermind,
251, 252, 253, 300, 304
Nixon, Richard, 40, 112
Norman, Neil, 163
nostalgia, 53, 56, 69, 113, 115–17, 118,
128, 161, 259, 292, 296–98, 302–3, 306
“Nothing Left Inside,” 285–86
Nugent, Ted, 1, 13, 63, 284, 285
Nuggets, 22, 51, 57–66, 69, 113–14,
118, 138–39
Nuns, 234
NW Metal fanzine, 241
Oasis, 215
Oi, 198–99, 201
“One Chord Wonders,” 157
100 Club, 140
101ers, 149, 158
“Open My Eyes,” 63, 64
“Open Up and Bleed,” 72
Ordway, Nico, 11–12
Osborne, Buzz, 269, 272, 288, 289, 290,
346n67
Osbourne, Ozzy, 262, 332n43
Osgerby, Bill, 320n3
Osterberg, Jim. See Pop, Iggy
Overkill, 224, 242
“Overkill,” 168–69, 170, 277, 278
Oz record shop, 229, 230
P., Mark (Perry), 158, 212, 328n30
Pack. See Terry Knight and the Pack
Paganini, Nicolo, 262
Page, Jimmy, 261, 270, 271, 273
Palladino, Grace, 109
Pandemonium, 233
Pantera, 8
“Paranoid,” 137
Parsons, Tony, 140, 157, 159, 161
Patterson, “Phast Phreddie,” 132, 133
Pavitt, Bruce, 211–12, 214, 241, 242–44,
245–46, 247, 249, 252, 253, 254, 257,
339nn66,72, 340n87
“PCC,” 246
Pearl Jam, 252, 254, 269, 273, 300, 304,
305, 344n39; Ten, 273, 304
Pearlman, Sandy, 106, 115, 296
Pearson, Deanne, 163, 165
Perkins, Stephen, 303
Persian Risk, 207
Peters, Dan, 252
Peterson, Charles, 248–50
Pettibon, Raymond, 225, 226, 236, 248
“Phantom of the Opera,” 177
Phillips, Sam, 253
Phonogram, 185, 203, 204, 320n1
Phun City festival, 326n6
Pillsbury, Glenn, 277, 344n46
Pink Fairies, 150–51, 152; Kings of
Oblivion, 152
Pink Floyd, 151, 173
“Pipeline,” 118
Poison, 8
Police, 13
“Police Story,” 281, 283
Polygram Records, 251
Poneman, Jonathan, 214, 241, 244, 246,
247, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 339n72,
340n87
Pop, Iggy (James Osterberg), 2, 6, 71–74,
75, 79–80, 87–92, 91, 93, 96–102,
101, 103, 105, 318n35
Pop Art, 79
pop explosion, 16–17, 28, 112, 312n38,
315n67
Popoff, Martin, 166
Portland, Oregon: as music scene, 212
Posh Boy Records, 218
Praying Mantis, 181, 184
Premiers, 64
Preslar, Lyle, 265
Presley, Elvis, 16–17, 20, 95, 111, 171, 253
Presley, Reg, 54
Prime Movers, 79
Primus, 304, 305
progressive rock, 149, 150, 197, 342n10
psychedelic rock, 30, 52, 58, 62, 64,
150–51, 224
“Psychotic Reaction,” 59, 61–62, 63
pub rock, 149, 158
Punk magazine, 122, 123, 322n35
punk rock, 13–14, 25, 35, 53, 55, 62,
63, 65–66, 74, 83, 116, 123, 129, 158,
159, 173, 174, 179, 184, 250, 252,
270, 288, 289, 292, 294, 296, 321n17,
323n46, 324n62, 325n71, 326n86,
345n53, 346n67, 347n7; as genre, 9,
16–17, 50–51, 57, 66, 68–69, 98, 107,
119, 122, 138–39, 149, 155, 164, 216,
223, 260–61, 264–68, 280–87,
311n27, 320n3, 346n69; and heavy
metal, relationship with, 1–7, 15–16,
17–18, 23, 67, 75, 121, 127, 139–40,
143–45, 146–49, 160–67, 169–71,
176, 177–78, 180, 185, 189, 194,
196–202, 208–9, 213–14, 224, 229,
231, 235, 236–40, 241–43, 245, 251,
253–54, 255, 256–59, 274–76,
278–81, 284–87, 298, 300–308,
331n14; and independent record
labels, 156–57, 185, 210–11, 212,
213, 214, 217–28, 241, 243, 255; and
mass audiences, 11–12, 22–23, 68,
303; and suburbia, 218–22
INDEX 387
Pushead (Brian Schroeder), 238–39, 243,
257, 275
Quatro, Suzi, 128, 129, 131, 132, 138,
325n70
Queen, 12, 144
Queensrÿche, 13, 242
Question Mark and the Mysterians, 35,
98
Quiet Riot, 207, 211, 262
Quine, Robert, 342n6
Quintana, Ron, 230, 231, 241, 276, 279
Rabid, Jack, 266, 267, 268
Rainbow, 144, 165, 170
Rainbow Tavern, 246, 247
Raine, Allison, 266, 267, 268
Rambali, Paul, 167
Ramone, Joey, 5, 190, 281
Ramone, Johnny, 261
Ramones, 1, 2, 3, 4, 118–19, 124, 125,
144, 156, 190, 216, 258, 261, 281,
305, 320n3, 322n26; Leave Home,
118; Ramones, 119, 138
Rancid, 305
rap music, 25, 212, 303, 304, 305,
347n7
Rationals, 340n81
Ratt, 13, 233, 276
Raven, 174, 189–92, 193, 194, 229, 231,
235; All for One, 192; Rock Until You
Drop, 189, 191
Ravendale, Ian, 188, 190
RCA Records, 253
Red Hot Chili Peppers, 14, 254, 304
Red Lion pub, 179
Redd, Rita, 91–92
Redd Kross, 218, 221
Reed, Lawrence, 236
reggae, 149
Remains, 60
Replacements, 14
“Revelation (Mother Earth),” 262
Reyes, Ron, 220
Rhoads, Randy, 262
Rhodes, Lisa, 316n77, 323n48
Rice, Barbara Anne, 266, 267, 268
“Rich Bitch,” 88
Richards, Keith, 61
Richman, Jonathan, 138
Riggs, Derek, 196–97
Riordan, Vince, 199
Riot, 235
“Rise Above,” 281, 283
Riverfront Stadium, 99
Rivieras, 116, 118, 119, 322n26
Robbins, Ira, 323n46
Robertson, Sandy, 177–78
Robinson, Lisa, 140
Robinson, Richard, 32–33, 49
Robo, 283
“Rock Brigade,” 204
rock music history: efforts to reclaim
value of, 51, 53, 58, 65–66, 69, 114,
173, 259, 284–85, 292–93, 297–98,
303; as object of conflict, 5–6, 15–18,
56, 148–50, 171, 176–79, 197,
296–98, 302, 308, 346n69
Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven record shop, 234,
235
Rock Scene magazine, 71, 319n46
“Rock Until You Drop,” 191
“Rockaway Beach,” 118
Rocket magazine, 211, 241–42, 245,
246, 339n64
“Rockin’ Robin,” 51
Rocking Vicars, 150
Rodney’s English Disco, 129–30, 131,
323nn47,48
Roeser, Donald “Buck Dharma,” 297
Rolling Stone, 41, 44, 50, 82, 254, 299,
304
Rolling Stones, 6, 21, 32, 35, 41, 42, 48,
56, 61, 62, 65, 68, 168, 171; Exile on
Main Street, 168
Rollins, Henry, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286,
287, 304
Ronettes, 134
Rosen, Craig, 300
Roth, David Lee, 5, 14
Roth, Ulrich, 261
Rotondi, James, 270
Rotten, Johnny (John Lydon), 2, 17, 160,
195
Roundhouse, 140
Roxy club, 161–62, 179, 217
Rudolph, Paul, 152
Runaways, 104–5, 106–9, 114, 127–45,
133, 217, 296, 324n61, 325n67; And
Now . . . The Runaways, 143, 144;
Queens of Noise, 324n61; The
Runaways, 138–39; Waiting for
the Night, 104, 144
Rundgren, Todd, 64, 76, 317n93
Rush, 6, 331n14
Ryder, Mitch, 32
Saccharine Trust, 223
Sado-Nation, 212
Saint Vitus, 224, 242
Salewicz, Chris, 130
Samson, 176, 177, 180–81, 183, 190,
201
Samson, Paul, 180
San Francisco: as music scene, 29–30, 50,
61, 276, 300
388 INDEX
San Francisco Mime Troupe, 29
San Jose: as music scene, 61, 62
“Sanctuary,” 182–83, 195, 196
Sanderson, Duncan, 152
Santana, 31
Satanic Bible, 193
“Satisfaction,” 61
Satriani, Joe, 344n32
Saunders, Metal Mike, 37
Savage, Jon, 16, 148, 161, 166–67,
327n22
Savage, Rick, 178, 179
Savage Pink fanzine, 266
Saxon, 181, 184, 185, 191, 200, 207,
230, 337n41; Wheels of Steel, 191
“Scared,” 289–90, 292
Scarry, Elaine, 89
scenes, 60–61, 65, 176, 187, 210–12,
228, 243–47, 253, 339n69, 340n81
Schacher, Mel, 34, 35, 37, 47
Schenker, Michael, 261
“School Day,” 109, 127
“School Days,” 127–28, 142
Scorpions, 6, 13, 177–78, 299
Scot Richard Case, 340n81
Scott, Bon, 285
Scratch Acid, 244
Screamers, 218
Screaming Trees, 250, 305, 306
Sculatti, Gene, 66–67
Search and Destroy magazine, 11
Seattle: as music scene, 211–12, 214,
241–42, 244–47, 250–52, 253,
288–89, 292–93, 298, 300–301, 304,
305, 338n64, 340n87, 340–41n88
Seattle Syndrome 2, 212
Seduction of the Innocent, 110
“Seek and Destroy,” 277
Seger, Bob, 32
Sex Pistols, 1, 2, 4, 6, 13, 16–17, 137,
140, 143, 144, 156, 166, 169, 171,
178, 196, 202, 216, 258, 261, 265,
300, 327n22, 346n69; Never Mind the
Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, 169,
300
Shadows of Knight, 60, 67
Shangri-Las, 134
Shaw, Greg, 22, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 67,
68, 102, 114, 131, 222, 253, 315n67,
324n62; “The Ultimate Significance of
‘Rockin’ Robin,’” 51–54, 322n27
“She Waits,” 289
Shea Stadium, 29; Beatles at, 20, 20,
25–27; Grand Funk Railroad at, 20,
34, 38, 39, 42–49, 50, 68, 313n9
Shepherd, Ben, 289
Shernoff, Andy (Adny), 114, 116, 117,
119, 121, 124–25, 126, 127, 323n46
Shonen Knife, 244
Shrapnel Records, 234, 242, 262–63,
337n45
Sideburns fanzine, 157, 261
silent majority, 40
Simon and Garfunkel, 345n51
Sinclair, John, 44, 340n81
Siouxsie and the Banshees, 303
Situationism, 149
“Six Pack,” 283
ska, 149
Skin Yard, 244, 245, 248
skinheads, 149, 239
Slade, 129
Slagel, Brian, 213, 229–31, 232, 233,
234, 235, 236–37, 241, 243, 276
slam dancing, 14, 210, 219, 258, 275,
278, 279–80, 345n53
Slash fanzine, 218
Slash Records, 218
Slayer, 15, 235–37, 238, 243, 275; Show
No Mercy, 236, 237, 237
Sledgehammer, 179, 181
“Sledgehammer Rock,” 191
Smallwood, Rod, 197
Smegma, 212
Smith, Fred “Sonic,” 274
Smith, Harry, 58
Smith, Patti, 118, 138, 140, 156,
321n17
Sniffin’ Glue, 158, 296, 328n30
Social Distortion, 14, 218
S.O.D. (Stormtroopers of Death), 239,
240, 241; Speak English or Die, 239
Soft White Underbelly. See Blue Öyster
Cult
Sonic Youth, 228, 244, 292, 295, 305
Sonny and Cher, 121
Sony record label, 155
Sound Barrier, 13
Soundgarden, 228, 244, 245, 246,
247–49, 250, 251, 252, 254, 269, 270,
273, 288, 293, 300, 303, 304, 305,
306; Badmotorfinger, 273; Screaming
Life, 247–49
Sounds, 140, 142, 146, 147, 153, 160,
161, 172, 173, 175–81, 182, 184, 188,
193, 194, 198, 199, 205, 229, 231,
327n22, 331n19, 337n41
Southern California: as music scene,
12–14, 107, 129–30, 143, 207,
210–11, 213, 217–20, 222, 229–31,
233, 235, 276, 324n62, 326n86,
345n53; in popular culture, 111,
116–18, 203, 320n4
“Space Station No. 5,” 181
Spector, Phil, 130, 131
speed (amphetamine), 159, 168
INDEX 389
speed metal, 189, 207, 213, 229, 234,
235, 238, 239, 259, 299
speedcore, 238–39, 243, 245, 275,
288
Spheeris, Penelope, 13, 219
Spin magazine, 305
Spitz, Dan, 275
“Spray Paint,” 283
Springsteen, Bruce, 6
SSD (Society System Decontrol), 243
SST Records, 186, 213, 214, 217–28,
227, 238, 240, 241, 242, 248, 250,
253, 254, 255, 268, 281, 283–84, 285,
336nn30,32, 345n53
Stalk-Forrest Group. See Blue Öyster
Cult
“Stallions of the Highway,” 181
Standells, 67
Stanley, Paul, 272
Starz, 337n41
Status Quo, 173
Steele, Michael, 132, 324n61
Steeler, 233, 262
Steely Dan, 256
Stewart, Rod, 115
Stiff Records, 157–58, 161, 168
Stooges, 23, 32, 53, 67, 68, 71–72, 74,
79–80, 87–88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96–102,
121, 126, 157, 246, 289, 318n35,
319n55; Fun House, 67, 79, 98, 100;
Metallic KO, 88–89; Raw Power, 71,
74; The Stooges, 79
“Straight Edge,” 265
Stratton, Dennis, 183
Strauss, Richard, 42
Straw, Will, 176
Strummer, Joe, 158, 327n23
Styx, 6
subcultural capital, 4, 185, 254, 259,
267–68
Suicidal Tendencies, 240
Sun Records, 253
Sub Pop fanzine, 211, 244
Sub Pop 100, 244, 339n72
Sub Pop 200, 250
Sub Pop Records, 213, 214, 215, 225,
241–54, 255, 293, 339nn66,72,
340n87, 341n94
Subway Sect, 164
Suede, 215
Suicidal Tendencies, 15
Surfaris, 118
Sutcliffe, Paul, 162–63
Sutcliffe, Phil, 142–43
Swallow, 250
“Swallow My Pride,” 259, 292–95,
297–98, 346n70
Sweet, 129, 135, 327n27
T. Rex, 53
Talas, 13
Taylor, James, 54
Taylor, Phil, 153, 154, 154, 159, 168,
169, 329n55
“Tear It Down,” 239
Teddy Boys, 149
Teenage Wasteland Gazette, 114, 321n18
teenagers. See youth
Teeter, Richie, 125
Television (band), 118, 342n6
“Tell the World,” 233
Temple of the Dog, 252
tempo, 162, 165, 169, 234, 235–36,
258–59, 265, 274–75, 277–78,
280–81, 285, 286, 287–92, 298,
341n3
Terry Knight and the Pack, 34–35
Thatcher, Margaret, 195, 201, 333n52
Thayil, Kim, 246, 247, 249, 269, 270,
272, 273, 281, 288–89, 290, 298, 300,
302, 346n67
theatricality, 70–72, 73–74, 76, 78–79,
86, 89, 93, 94, 101–2, 120, 149,
319n46
Thee Midnighters, 65
Them, 63
Thin Lizzy, 6, 165, 173
“Third Stone from the Sun,” 63
13th Floor Elevators, 60
“This Ain’t the Summer of Love,” 295,
296–98, 302, 346n71
“This Town,” 246
Thompson, Hunter S., 153
Thornton, Sarah, 4, 174
thrash metal, 174, 189, 207, 213, 229,
234, 235, 239, 255, 259, 274, 275–78,
299–300, 330n3, 344n46, 347n2
Thrills, Adrian, 155
Thunders, Johnny, 6, 118, 122; So Alone,
118
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” (Strauss), 42
tinkering, 221–22
Toad the Wet Sprocket, 183, 184
Tokyo Blade, 207
“Tomorrow or Yesterday,” 183
Touch & Go Records, 225
“Touch Me, I’m Sick,” 252
Townshend, Pete, 30, 61, 99
Toynbee, Jason, 7, 8
Trap Records, 212
Troggs, 54–55, 57, 62
Trouble Funk, 212
True, Everett, 254, 340n87
Truly Needy fanzine, 266
Trynka, Paul, 79, 318n35
T.S.O.L., 14, 218, 345n53
Tupperwares, 218
390 INDEX
Turner, Steve, 251, 252, 269, 271, 272,
273–74, 281, 293, 294, 298
“TV Eye,” 98–100, 126, 319n55
“TV Party,” 283
Twisted Sister, 13, 207
2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 42–43
Tygers of Pan Tang, 174, 181, 185,
188
Tyler, Steven, 5, 31–32, 93
Vagrants, 60
Vai, Steve, 342n8, 344n32
Valentine, Gary, 322n35
Valentine, Helen, 109–10
Van Halen (group), 3, 5, 6, 13, 167, 177,
211, 256–57, 259, 299, 300
Van Halen, Eddie, 3, 257, 259–62, 260,
263, 268, 272, 274, 341–42n4, 342n8,
344n39
Vanian, Dave, 140
Varney, Mike, 234, 262–63, 337n45
Velvet Underground, 67, 98, 115, 285,
325n71
Venom, 15, 174, 189, 192–95, 229, 235,
236, 238, 275, 277, 279
Ventures, 118
Verlaine, Tom, 342n6
Village Voice, 122, 124
Vincent, Alex, 251, 293
Virgin Records, 327n22
virtuosity: and grunge, 268–74, 298; and
heavy metal, 165–66, 194–95, 234,
256–58, 259–64, 269, 270, 274, 275,
337n45; punk rock resistance to, 157,
165–66, 256–58, 260–61, 264–66,
277, 281–83, 342n6
Voidoids, 342n6
Voivod, 243
volume, 162–65, 170, 328n41
Wall, Mick, 197, 299
Waller, Don, 296, 298, 346n71
Wallis, Larry, 152, 153
Walser, Robert, 7, 8–9, 163–64, 174,
193, 202, 261, 310n22, 325n69,
332n43, 341n4, 342n11
Warhol, Andy, 79, 91
Warner Bros. Records, 252
Warnick, Kim, 294, 295
Warwick, Jacqueline, 324n53
W.A.S.P., 13
“Wasted,” 281
Watt, Mike, 222, 256, 258
Weinstein, Deena, 174, 193, 301,
337n44, 347n7
Weirdos, 218
Welch, Chris, 42
Welch, Raquel, 92
Wenner, Jann, 50
“We’re an American Band,” 20
Wertham, Frederick, 110
West, Leslie, 261
West, Sandy, 108, 131–32, 133, 133,
143–44, 324n61
“What I See,” 283
“Whiplash,” 277–79
Whisky-a-Go-Go nightclub (the Whisky),
135, 223
“White Line Fever,” 157
Whitesnake, 13
Who, 61, 64, 115
Who Put the Bomp, 50, 51, 54, 60, 67,
114, 131, 134
Wild Cat, 188
Wild One, 110
“Wild Thing,” 54, 55, 56, 298
Williamson, James, 89
Willis, Ellen, 24–25, 49, 95, 302
Willis, Paul, 153, 200–201
Willman, Chris, 224
Wilson, Lee, 198
Winterland Ballroom, 30
“Wipe Out,” 118
Wipers, 212, 244
Witchfinder General, 187
Witchfynde, 181
Wolcott, James, 124
Wonder, Stevie, 34
Wonder Woman, 85
Wood, Andrew, 251, 341n90
Wood, Dave, 188, 229
Woodstock, 24, 302, 303
Woodstock 94, 302, 304
“Wrathchild,” 177, 182
Wagner, Dick, 35
“Walk, Don’t Run,” 118
X (band), 14; Under the Big Black Sun,
14
UFO (band), 6, 165, 170, 179
UFO club, 326n6
Ulrich, Lars, 208, 230, 231, 233, 234,
241, 276, 299, 346–47n2
U-Men, 244
Ungano’s, 91
Unicorn Records, 283–84
United Artists record label, 153, 155,
158, 159
“United Forces,” 239
Uriah Heep, 168, 306
US Festival, 211, 288, 303
U.S. Metal, 234
U2, 336n32
INDEX 391
Y & T, 13
Yamamoto, Hiro, 247, 249
Yardbirds, 35, 56, 61, 62, 65, 150
Yes, 6, 342n10
Yohannon, Tim, 267, 268, 286
“You Really Got Me,” 10
“Young, Fast, Scientific,” 126
youth, 108–14, 115–16, 118, 122, 127,
128, 129, 131, 134–37, 165, 200–201,
320nn3,4, 321n11; as aspect of rock
audience, 40, 41, 45, 51–54, 56, 57,
69, 82, 83–85, 105–6, 125, 135,
138–39, 145, 176, 177–79, 301–2,
303, 322n27, 347n7
Zazula, Johnny, 234–35
Zazula, Marsha, 234–35
Zig Zag fanzine, 161
Z.Z. Top, 133, 285
Text:
Display:
Compositor:
Printer and Binder:
10/13 Sabon
Akzidenz Grotesk
International Typesetting and Composition
Thomson-Shore