This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk 9780520943889

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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,

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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.

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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

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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.

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“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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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“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,

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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!”

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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§ion=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.

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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.

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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

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