Tag: KISS band

Dressed to Kill: A hard rock retrospective part 4

The 1990’s were, obviously, a very confusing time. With Ellen making her big announcement near the start of the decade, to the revelations of the Bill and Monica scandal, the decade was over run with sexually confusing expressions dominating the news cycle. None of them were more shocking than seeing Marilyn Manson walk out on stage at the MTV music awards in his leather speedo singing about “The Beautiful People” to the bewildered youth sitting at home wondering what to make of this new “shock rocker” taking the world by storm.

Manson was not the first shock rock band, and they certainly weren’t the last. Unlike previous bands discussed, shock rockers aren’t identified by their sound, some are glam rock, others thrasher metal, while others a mix of industrial electro rock fused with 80’s dance pop. What united them was their ability to rely on stage antics, publicity stunts, and a growing anti-establishment movement that wanted to tear down the walls of Capitalism once and for all. Let’s start at the beginning.

You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog

Believe it or not, the first “shock rocker” was the King of Rock N Roll himself, Elvis Presley. Although his music and movies were very tame even by standards of the day, his stage antics lead to all sorts of controversies. All he had to do was shake his hips and stir young girls crazy. Of course the uptight mothers of those sexually aroused teen girls swooning for Mr. Presley didn’t take it laying down. They tried to have him banned from even appearing on television with the compromise being the camera had to stay above the waste.

I can’t get no satisfaction

To some the Rolling Stones are the turning point where rock n roll sheds it’s pop sound and returns to it’s urban blues roots. To others it’s just the continuation of the degradation of American culture. No matter where you stand the Stones rose to such prominence in the world of Rock music that to this day, the premiere authority on rock music is a magazine named after the band. Not quite as tame as Elvis, they certainly could fall into the camp of more shocking rock bands of the day.

School’s Out

There is no denying that shock rock as we know it today started the moment Alice Cooper stepped onto the scene. His theatrics, outrageous costumes, decidedly darker music themes, and eye shadow did more to create room for the counter-culture than any band before, or since. While their famous record, and the world-renown title track, were created by an entirely different band than who would later take on the name, the lead singer was really the star of the show anyways.

Ozzy

The Prince of darkness himself is easily one of the most recognizable early heavy metal rockers and clearly one of the pioneers of the shock rock genre. Of course he wasn’t the first to come onto the scene, he took it to dark places nobody else was willing to go. He was also well known for his theatrics, and is often mistaken for Alice Cooper, who both have similar styles in some ways. Black Sabbath and all bands inspired by are living proof that just being shock rock on the surface doesn’t mean the music itself can’t be taken seriously.

I Wanna Rock N Roll All Night

If you weren’t a member of the KISS Army you probably weren’t a hard rock fanatic in the 1970’s. It’s okay, I wasn’t even alive. What I do know about the and comes from second hand stories my mom told me, and what I learned from the classic comedy Detroit Rock City about a group of misfits on a road trip determined to see the band live in concert.

KISS is a prime example of a band whose style and image personifies the shock rock look and attitude, yet their music is so much softer and tamer than their image would have you imagine. Even in comparison to other hard rock bands of the time their music was very tame for the image they projected. Not that it was bad, they are still one of my favorite hard rock bands, but if you played a KISS song for someone and never showed them a poster or image of the band, you wouldn’t think they were shock rock at all.

They band was good at one thing even more than making music, business. They were not so much a band as they were a brand. They sold comic books, dolls, even video games, all trying to exemplify the shock rock image of children of the night. Yet somehow they managed to get away with recording a disco album and nobody even bothered to notice the irony. Hey it was a damn good song and still one of my favorites so can’t fault them for knowing how to make money.

Twisted Sister

By the time to get into the 1980’s there isn’t much left that shocks the metal world. You have already had Ozzy allegedly biting the head off a bat, or was it Alice Cooper? Yeah google how often those two get mixed up. There was the whole KISS backlash, you had Judas Priest on the scene and even a host of bands giving people reasons to label rock music as satanic or demonic. So when you see the cross-dressing Twister Sister come on the scene you think, okay, now I’ve seen it all. Now unlike KISS whose image didn’t fit their music, Twister Sister at least had a solid 80’s metal sound that blended in with the other hard rock bands of the time. The 80’s didn’t really see that many other cross dressing bands, aside from the one Boy George headlined, it still helped ease Americans into at least accepting there were people with different lifestyles, even if they didn’t accept those lifestyles quite yet.

Nine Inch Nails

To be more specific, Trent Reznor. This time he went in the opposite direction. The sound he created was infinitely harder and more shocking in many ways than the look he portrayed. On the surface he was just another heavy metal looking dude, nothing special. But his music, especially Head Like the Hole, really brought industrial music to the main stage. Maybe there are those who wouldn’t put NiN on a list of shock rockers, but he clearly paved the way for the mother of them all so he deserves a spot in this timeline.

Antichrist Superstar

Before I get too deep, Marilyn Manson is one of my favorite bands of all time. From the cover songs Sweat Dreams or Tainted Love, among many others; to their rock anthems The Beautiful People, Rock is Dead; to their darker tracks like Deformography, Worm Boy; or their WTF tracks like Kiddy Grinder, or Sh*tty Chicken Gang Bang, the band does shock rock better than any band before. Their music, style, videos, persona, and themes are a perfect storm of counter culture done right. Nothing about the band says conformity. During a time when rock bands sounded like Nirvana, Alice in Chains, or The Goo Goo Dolls, Manson was finding ways to churn the stomachs of their loyal followers, harshest critics, and even their peers, all while constantly putting out records that told stories that had to be experienced not just heard. The phrase nobody does it better always comes to mind when I think of Marilyn Manson and shock rock.

Other bands like Garbage, Godsmack, Orgy, etc., would come onto the scene and push the envelope of what was decent and acceptable with many more to follow. By the end of the 1990’s heavy metal, hard rock and rock n roll had each splintered into more than a dozen sub-genres, scenes and movements each equally important to their respective followers.

 

Megalomania, Pyrotechnics and Freedom of Speech: A hard rock retrospective part 2

When I was in the 7th grade I entered the world of band for the first time. My band instructor was a little pushy, his name was Mr. Hall, for some reason or another he really tried to get me to play the saxophone. I tried it out for the back to school parade and I hated it, I couldn’t get any sounds to come out of that thing that any reasonable human would consider pleasant. So I switched to percussion. He was against this because, in his views, percussion was easy and only lazy kids wanted to play drums. It was true the majority of the drum line in our school were lazy, pot-smoking good for nothings, myself and one friend being the exceptions. Still I quickly fell in love with banging the trap set and begged him to put me on the pep squad so I could play fight songs at the sporting events. We started out with a classic easy rock n roll tune called Rock N Roll Part 2, aka “the Hey song!”

Over the years I fell away from drumming despite my very strong desire to keep going. I would bang my drumsticks on anything I could, cardboard boxes, pots and pans, trash cans, whatever it took. I was able to cobble together a make shift drum set when I was 14 using money I earned throwing newspapers at people’s houses. Once I firmly got into my teen years I was clamoring to form my own heavy metal hair band with my friends.

Glam Metal, Hair Metal, pop metal, call it what you want, the 80’s took the fully established hard rock genre and took it mainstream. What memories I do have of the 80’s largely consist of hair bands rocking out to their various anthems.

Def Leppard- Pyromania

As a drummer, it would be my duty to pay homage to the band world-famous for having the “one armed” drummer. Okay so they have some good music too, especially Foolin, by far my favorite heavy metal ballad, if you can call it that, and Rock of Ages, among many other rock hard tunes. It might be their best work, it might not, but by the time Pyromania lights the metal world on fire, the hair bands have firmly become the norm.

Ratt

As someone whose initials spelled RAT, and whose nickname was “THE RAT” all through school, this was a band I had to check out. I instantly fell in love with Lay it Down and Round & Round, their two biggest hits to the best of my knowledge. I was able to get one of their greatest hits CD’s and discovered the draw of power rock. They might be tame by some standards but their music was just hard enough to keep throw coals on the hair metal fire throughout the 80’s. Too bad it all died suddenly when Nirvana crawled out of bed and said with a shrug, eh, entertain us.

MTV

Nothing was more instrumental in bringing heavy metal to the forefront of American pop culture than the budding MTV and it’s constant rock videos bombarding the youth with images of hot babes, fast cars, and loud guitars. This was the era where Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees were gutting teenagers with hair metal blasting in the background to set the mood.

If you really want to trace the rise of metal music, look no further than the introduction of the rock music video and the video stars that would soon follow. By the end of the decade every metal video was just trying to be more outrageous than the last, eventually leading us into the 90’s where music videos took on a more artistic approach with the rise of shock rockers Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.

I have written extensive articles both here and in college on the importance MTV had on American youth culture so I will just say dust off the VCR and pop in the VHS copy of Hot for Teacher if you want a reminder of what the decade was all about.

Van Halen vs. Bon Jovi

Musically the two aren’t that similar. But if you were alive in the 80’s you know the impact they had on your sisters sexuality. These two bands were the symbol of heavy metal rock stars as sex symbols, pushing the mantra of sex, drugs, and rock n roll deep into the minds of American teenagers. Van Halen was edgier with their music, while Jovi was more of a showman in their concerts. Both bands came out of the other end of the 80’s relegated to relic status, while Jovi made an attempt to make a come back in the 90’s alternative infested airwaves, Van Halen were all but forgotten by the mainstream.

One thing the two bands did was really help push the divide between the hard rockers and the glam rockers. Bon Jovi appealed more to the masses while Van Halen stood as a symbol for the troops to rally behind. The core metal audience was splintering into sub-factions by this time and these two bands were among the dividing forces.

Megadeth vs. Metallica

Here comes another fork in the road. The rise of “thrasher” metal is largely credited to the formation of these two bands, whose DNA is very inbred in some respects. The bands both kept taking metal music to even darker places with Metallica being able to cross over into mainstream success while Megadeth remained a reminder of the hardest rockers of just how heavy, heavy metal could get. There were other dark bands of the time, Dio, White Zombie, a few others, but these two stood up and carved out their own little corner of the market, then started a metal war whose repercussions were felt throughout the entire rock industry.

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Hard Rock gets a vagina. Okay that might be a little crass, but hell metal music is all about tits and ass so suck it up, whiners. Joan Jett was one of the early punk rockers with her band the Runaways, and she emerged among a world of male metal bands to be the lone wolf woman warrior for the female power rock of the decade. Sure you had rock n roll bands comprised of woman leads before, and after, namely the Go-Go’s, Heart, Hole (yeah an all female band named themselves hole and I get flack for making a vagina joke) and Garbage. The list goes on. Still, Joan Jett was able to prove women could be hard rockers too.

Everyone remembers her anthem “I Love Rock N Roll” it’s a rock classic. I enjoyed her music with the Runaways more, which yes I discovered thanks to a certain movie. Still, she had the balls to stand up to the men who dominated metal music and I gotta respect her for that, to some degree. Not to mention her music wasn’t half bad.

Live shows and stadium rock

In the early days of hard rock, metal was a fringe movement. It was born out of the punk rock scene where the bands were making a statement. That statement was make noise and have as much fun as you can while disrupting the establishment every chance you could. By the 80’s metal bands had risen to become the dominant rockers selling out arenas all across the globe. Sure new wave bands like Devo, Duran Duran, and the like, would emerge in the 80’s to slow some of that fire trying to keep rock music in the center of the pop world, but it was still the decade where arena rock finally became a real thing. There were bands selling out arenas in the 70’s, sure, but they weren’t the bands playing this new, harder sound, not as as much anyways.

Once the live shows became a mainstay bands had to resort to theatrics to keep concert goers happy. This was the period where pyrotechnics were quickly becoming staples of the rock concert. Costumed bands like KISS lead the way, groups like Twisted Sister, Black Sabbath, Motley Crue and Guns N Roses would take on the mantle before passing the torch to Manson and his spooky kids in the 90’s.

By the time you get to the end of the 80’s heavy metal is starting to wane. Mainstream America has started to discover a new, edgy sound in the form of gangsta rap, which would soon supplant heavy metal as the go-to sound for the counter culture of the teenagers looking to piss off their adult role models. Sure heavy metal was loud, it was flamboyant, and it glamorized a darker lifestyle, but hip-hip had guns, pimps, and thugs rapping about killing cops, raping hoes, and cooking crack. Times were changing, and the two were bound to merge sooner or later. Enter Rage Against the Machine and the rise of Rap Metal…

For those about to rock: A retrospective on the evolution of hard rock- Part 1

My first exposure to headbanging was while watching the film Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. It was a comedy film about a dimwitted animal lover solving crimes. It was a Jim Carey movie, it was the 90’s, it was a comedy movie. I thought the scene where he goes into a rock club and the guy was “headbanging” to the rock music was obviously a joke, nobody actually did that, right? Little did I know it wasn’t a joke, it was a very popular thing.

Soon afterwards I would continue my exposure into the metal scene. I watched the pair of time traveling metal-heads Bill N Ted on their various quests. This was around the time I started to really question why on earth anyone would listen to this hard rock music. I wasn’t even sure what constituted hard rock to begin with. Not to mention I wasn’t even completely accurate on what people were calling rock music. My dad was an old time rock n roll fan and he would always correct me saying this band or that bands was not rock n roll, they were hard rock or heavy metal or something else. My dad wasn’t exactly an authority on rock music either, he just was sort of glued to his childhood favorites and dismissed the music of the youth. I wasn’t quite so dismissive, however I was more into dance music, electronic music, hip-Hop, disco, funk, and pop music. I was having a hard time determining not only what was hard rock, but what was the appeal.

Doing my research it appears rock n roll has it’s roots in soul music, bar music and blues. None of these were genres I was a particular fan of in my early days so I had to dig a little deeper. The earliest example I could find of a mainstream song that was the beginning of the hard rock sound was Helter Skelter by the world-renown Beatles. Having listen to this song a number of times during my research I can almost hear the start of what would become, what I considered, heavy metal, yet it still sounded really primitive to me. I didn’t spend a lot of time chasing down all of the obscure references, I stuck to the mainstream stuff like Born to Be Wild, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, Dude Looks Like A Lady, and Smoke on the Water. None of these were too hard but they were often cited as the early examples of the scene.

As someone who has thoroughly studied the roots of techno, house and rap music, I can attest that different fans while share different tales of what lead from one sound to the next. The branching path of genres and sub-genres in rock music is just as complicated as the branching genres of the dance scene. To this day I can’t get people to tell the difference between Techno and House, whereas to me they are as different as night and day.

My earliest attempt’s at this included me creating a playlist of songs that one could follow from the old time rock n roll to modern day hard rock. Depending on what the end goal is determines which sub-genres or paths you cut off from the main path. For example, punk rock also has it’s origins in a lot of the same bands that metal does, yet punk eventually lead to alternative, grunge rock and ska, sub-genres I have more experience with than true metal. That didn’t stop me on my journey to find the path of least resistance.

I started with The Beatles.

Helter Skelter is such a different sound from anything I had heard by them up to that point. I don’t mean to sound as if I was around for it, I mean in the timeline. I do listen to Beatles but I was more into their early pop stuff not so much their later stuff.

When I originally did my digging I downloaded the various songs from iTunes and created a playlist when I did that I tried to see if the dots connected in a manner that made sense. I noticed there were a few missing links.

Admittedly I am missing a few sounds from some of the bands I know are often cited, yet I have no samples of their music to go off. Call me whatever name you wish, I have, to this day, never sat down and listened to a Led Zeppelin song, not one. If I have heard one of their songs, in passing I imagine or perhaps in a movie or TV commercial, I wouldn’t recognize it unless it was pointed out to me. So why am I writing this if I can’t call up the sounds of one of the bands often regarded as the fathers of metal? Sometimes you have to make do with what is available to you, also this is my journey so I wanted to discover this my own way. That being said, I have listened to bands that were described as inspired by or similar to Zeppelin so I can say that I am at least vague familiar with the sound they are attributed to.

Judas Priest

In my search I didn’t want to start entirely at the roots, I wanted to see how Beatles, Elvis Presley, Chuck Barry, Buddy Holly and others could morph into AC DC, Metallica, Iron Maiden, etc. I did pick up Alice Cooper’s School’s Out which I also cited as one of the bridge sounds, but Judas Priest was the first record I picked up that had a very prot-metal sound. In later years their music evolved more into the sound I always attributed as hard rock or heavy metal, depending on who you ask. I often used the term interchangeably with the understanding metal was the harder stuff. Now that I have done some more digging I discovered it’s even more complex than that. I placed Judas Priest at the earliest point of Heavy Metal on the timeline.

KISS

Specifically Destroyer and Alive but I dug through their entire catalog, first through their various compilations, beginning with Smashes, Thrashes, and Hits, and working my way back. KISS doesn’t have the hardest of sounds, they are more hard rock or even edgy rock n roll than metal, but they have the attitude and the look of what would become the signature metal theme, the dark medieval fantasy tones, some would describe as satanic but let’s not split hairs. Anyways they had the theatrics for sure but their sound was admittedly soft in comparison to what would follow. Still they are at the early point as well. They are also cited as a starting point for punk rock, but I won’t follow that path here.

Deep Purple

This is another one I place under the category of proto-metal. They have a very hard sound in some songs, but a very 70’s blue rock vibe. I did listen to more than one song, but the one that really matters is Smoke on the Water. This is another point where you can really start to hear a new sound emerging from the underbelly of American counter-culture.

Black Sabbath

Once you get into “the other Alice Cooper,” Ozzy Osborne and his ilk, things really start to get serious. By all rights you could make a case Sabbath and Ozzy are about as close to what would become Metal as it gets. If you follow them through the 70’s and into the 80’s, even after all the shake ups and restructuring, their sound is very much in line with what I would classify as heavy metal and hard rock at the very least.

Iron Maiden

This is the point where Metal begins to emerge as it’s own thing. By the time this band hits the scene it’s fully developed. It would be really hard to argue Iron Maiden isn’t heavy metal, and from what I have heard this is the goods through and through.

Now I could have spent more time on proto-metal bands like The Who, The Kinks, Zeppelin, or any number of others. As I did my digging though, I realized that while there are individual songs or even portions of entire albums that are recognized as having elements of what would become metal, they were still entirely different sounds in their own right. You could make a case that without the sounds of the Jackson 5, Hip-Hop wouldn’t be what it is today, but you could be hard pressed to make a case for Michael and the Gang being rap.

AC-DC

This is one of those transition bands you could argue is really just “hard rock” and that would be fine by me. Without getting into sub-genres I classify rock into the following top-level categories: rock n roll, rock, hard rock, metal, grunge, punk, ska, and alternative rock. For the most part there is a TON of overlap, I still try to avoid splitting hairs over what sound equals what genre. AC-DC is one of those bands I could firmly place under rock n roll, rock, or hard rock, but I would be hard pressed to call them full on metal and they certainly aren’t punk or ska. At least not as I understand them to be.

You will notice as I go through this series I don’t often stray from the general consensus, at least not up front. However as I discover more to this story I fully intend to give credit where due. As I looked into this it took on a life of it’s own. Consider this entry number one in a series where I take a deeper look at the origins of this music genre that I have found an affinity for, yet continues to boggle my mind and elude my sense of true understanding. Until next time keep on head banging friends.