A Classic Metal Workout Playlist

For the last four months, I have been doing something different with my life.  Something that consumes quite a bit of time and energy.  It's working out regularly - mostly doing cardio and weight circuit training (I've written a bit about that on my main blog, Orexis Dianoētikē).  When my workload gets especially crazy, or if I get seriously sick, I might only get in 1 or 2 workouts in a week.  But most weeks I'm at the gym 5, and sometimes 6 days a week.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've likely seen me post occasionally about the music I listen to when I exercise - all classic metal.  Occasionally, I'll listen to just one band or even one album.  But usually, what I'm listening to is my classic metal workout playlist, set to play randomly.  

Two days ago, I posted a screen shot of a bit of that playlist from my phone.  One of my fans said that he'd really like to see what else is in that playlist.  It's really a work in progress at this point, but I'm happy to share the song listing as I've set it up so far.  So, with no further ado, that's what I'm doing below - arranged by band.

Judas Priest, Saxon, and Black Star Riders at the Riverside

Earlier this week, my wife and I went to a metal show we had been anticipating for a long time.  Judas Priest was the headliner, with Saxon and Black Star Riders as the opening bands.

The Riverside here in downtown Milwaukee seems like a somewhat unlikely venue for a metal show at first.  It's self-described as "opulent," not inaccurately, given the furnishings and decor. It was somewhat comical to see it filled up with metalheads dressed the part, guided to their seats by ushers who seemed a bit confused by their guests.

I took a few shots with my phone.  Black Star Riders came on first.  They're basically the latest incarnation of Thin Lizzy - a band with no original members left (a topic I've previously written about) - but under the Black Star Riders name, they create and perform new music as well.

Saxon followed them, and put on what I can - with no hyperbole or qualifications - say was an amazing performance!  There's a lot to be said about Saxon as one of the major early NWOBHM bands - and I'll do that in much greater detail in a post next week - so I'll just write this for now.

I never really understood how early Saxon - on their first, self-named album, and then on Wheels of Steel, and on Strong Arm of the Law - rocketed to the top of the bills for so many metalheads.  Their stuff is not bad, but - with a few exceptions - not really great either, particularly when you compare it to the other British bands they were often classed with at the time - Motorhead, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Def Leppard.  (They do get better on Denim and Leather and The Power and the Glory, I'd say, and through a good bit of Crusader)

Saxon's later work - especially the albums from the last decade - displays a marked development in musicianship.  Sloughing off certain of their weaker original members - in particular, bassist Steve Dawson in 1986 and guitarist Graham Oliver in 1994, who would go on to form their own version of the band - improved the band considerably.

Seeing them in concert helped me understand their popularity.  They put on a hell of a show now, and I imagine they did so back in their early days.  Biff Byford - at 67, an age when many singers have long since lost their volume and high end - belts the songs out with a voice that could be from 30 years ago.  And the present line-up of musicians takes their classic songs and performs them as they could have been played - that is, better than they were originally composed.

The main attraction, of course, was Judas Priest, arguably one of the greatest and most influential classic metal bands (who else would I include at their rank? that's a topic for another post!).  We had seen them twice at previous shows in the last decade, and were excited to go to another Priest show literally just down the street from where we live.

My wife had asked me what songs I hoped they would play, and I mentioned a few that we hadn't heard them do in concert yet.  They played several of them, including "Saints in Hell" - as Rob Halford noted, this is the 40 year anniversary of Stained Class!

You know which song this one was from - right?  "The Green Manalishi"!

And it wouldn't really be a Priest show, without Halford riding out on a motorcycle, would it? (especially with Harley Davidson just down the road here in Milwaukee!)

For me, an amazing highlight of the show came not long after that.  It was one of those moments that impressed itself upon me so deeply that I'll be reminiscing with fellow metalheads the rest of my life.  I have been listening to the song "Painkiller" for decades now, and I've seen Priest play it in those two previous shows.  What Halford did with it this time around was simply amazing.

Halford is 66 years old, and he has maintained the superlative range, the strength, and the sustain of his voice down to the present.  His rendition of Painkiller this time around can only be compared with the performance of a world-class athlete who, decades past his youthful years, not only manages to match - but through sheer force of will and talent shatters - one of his early records.  It was as metal as one can get.  An inspiration.

As I write this, we're getting ready to head off to a repeat show tonight with Saxon and Black Star Riders at the local casino.  Now that I've seen how good the present-day Saxon actually is, I'm super-excited to hear a longer set - expect some writing about them next week, here in Heavy Metal Philosopher!

The Ship Of Theseus and Bands With No Original Members

A number of the responses to my last post here - RATT - immediately referenced the "Ship of Theseus".  That's not surprising, since what I was writing about focused on the identity of a band in terms of its membership, and the "Ship of Theseus" is a classic puzzle about a whole and its constituent parts.  But as I pointed out to those commenters, that puzzle really has to do with a different kind of case.

It's not as if there aren't some bands, though, to which the "Ship of Theseus" issue would apply.  I thought it might be useful for others - and interesting for me - to write a follow-up piece specifically discussing how and why.  Simply put, the Ship of Theseus bears upon cases where none of the constituent parts of a whole are original to it.  In terms of bands, this means we would be focused on bands that contain none of their original members.

The fundamental question then is whether they do remain the same band or not, despite all of the replacements of members.  It is always useful to consider examples, and in classic metal, we do have a number of illustrative cases we can examine - and discuss (in comments or social media).  I think it might also be helpful to consider some cases close to but not quite like the Ship of Theseus as well, where one original member of the band is left (but reserve that issue for a later post)

Reconstituted RATT And The Issue Of Who Is The Band

It's old news by now that two really key things are happening with RATT.  First, three of the original members - vocalist Stephen Pearcy, guitarist Warren DeMartini, and bassist Juan Croucier - are gearing up to tour (and here's hoping they play Summerfest here in MKE!).  Second, drummer Bobby Blotzer definitively lost his case to use the RATT name in court, and that name has now passed back to those other three original members.

Those two bits of news would be interesting enough on their own accounts - after all who doesn't like the idea of (as much as can be mustered of) classic RATT touring again, and who isn't happy to see the group name reverting back to more of the original members - but there's also a philosophical issue raised by all of this as well.

Who is the "real RATT" in this case?  Pearcy, DeMartini, and Croucier? Or Blotzer?  Both?  Neither?  Or if we think about it more generally - when a band splits up, and multiple members lay claim to the band's name, who should we consider to be the band?

3 Undeservedly Panned Albums from 1983

Even the greatest of bands can suffer occasional missteps, turning out an album or two that aren't just below the high standards their earlier releases established, but genuinely, head-shakingly, take-a-swig-to-wash-away-the-taste bad.  It's true that music critics can be a demanding and rather eccentric lot -- and as a profession, they've been off base at times in condemning some amazing albums, bands, or even movements of music -- and fans, as well as the chart numbers and album sales figures they drive can prove a faddish and finicky lot.  But there are indeed efforts and experiments by bands that make even the real cultists, the diehard believer fans ask "what the hell are they doing?"

Remembering the Columbia Record Club

It is often when institutions, artifacts, or practices become entirely -- or at least effectively -- defunct that we come to realize or reconsider what they had meant.  The busier our lives get, the more useful such distinct moments become as markers memorializing the meaning of the past within the ongoing present.

For me -- and for many of my generation, those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s -- the news earlier this month that the long-moribund Columbia Record Club had filed for bankruptcy was such a moment.  As the news filtered into social media networks, many of us reminisced together, some recounting how many times they had joined the club.  For my part -- and that's mostly what this post will be about below -- I was reminded of how taking advantage of the club's offer played such an important role early on in building my metal collection.

Generations of Metalheads: Passing On My Bass

This year, I am passing on an object that, by virtue of giving it to my teenaged daughter, effectively becomes a family heirloom -- my bass guitar.  On her own initiative, she asked this summer if she could get it out of storage -- I hadn't played it for years, since now I putter around with a banjo that previously belonged to my dad -- and start learning how to play.  I was surprised, and very happy, that she wanted to learn an instrument -- she is already a strong singer -- and to learn this instrument particularly in order to play metal songs, specifically KISS songs!

So, for the last four weeks, she's been plunking away here, downloading tabulature, practicing, and taking lessons from a bassist at a local music store.  I've recently had it overhauled -- the buddy-of-a-former-brother-in-law who "rewired" it a decade back did what I hesitate even to call a "job," even with the qualifier of "bad" -- and she got to play it today for the first time actually plugged in.  Not into a bass amp, and not turned up all that high, but still enough for her to get a sense of the raw sonic power that the instrument she held, fretted, and plucked!  So, I'm experiencing the kind of excitement and pride that parents feel when one of their children decides to follow along, not necessarily in their footsteps, but along a similar and shared path.  And added to that is the simple fact that I've discovered that my teenage daughter is a genuine metalhead!

Q&A with the HMP: My 10 Favorite NWOBHM Albums

After my last post, reminiscing a bit about Raven and reviewing their latest (and amazingly good) album, one of the followers on my Facebook page asked me:  "Out of curiosity, what are some of your favorite NWOBHM albums?"  I responded that I'd have to think about it, but I wanted to strike before the iron cooled off, and since Sunday is -- while not a day of rest for me, since I held a 2-hour online class session in my Philosophical Foundations class! -- a day when I get to indulge myself a bit, I thought over some IPA and cigarillos, I'd put other writing projects aside and hammer out this post.

There's some dispute about just what precisely counts as New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), but while acknowledging that, I'm not going to really discuss that tangled issue here -- it will supply fodder for another blog post down the line, I promise!  I'm not going to include any works by bands that, while not British, play with a definite NWOBHM sensibility -- like the American band, Riot, the Finish act, Oz, or the Japanese group, Loudness.  I also won't include Judas Priest or Motorhead, since although they played a significant and even seminal role, they do antedate the movement somewhat (and by not discussing them, it opens some space for less well known acts).  It's going to be -- as these sorts of things always are -- rather subjective.  but in any case here they are:

New Release! Raven - ExtermiNation

One of my longstanding favorite metal bands from the 1980s - Raven - has recently released their new album, ExtermiNation, and for anyone with any doubts about whether the Gallagher brothers + Joe Hasselvander still rock as hard as they did back in the 1980s (true, it was a different drummer prior to '87) or as they did with their more recent (2010) Walk Through Fire. . .  its clear that the answer is a resounding Yes! (In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that the affirmative needs to be accompanied by some quick headbanging and a double moloch.)

I'm extremely fortunate to have a fellow metalhead in my wife -- it means that I not only get to play a variety of metal without enduring groans of complaints at home, not only that I get encouraged to write in this very blog, but also that I have a hot companion who enjoys live acts as much as I do.  Both of us have been eagerly awaiting this new release together -- for two interconnected reasons.

Video Flashback: Sampson - "Vice Versa"

One of the bands that often gets short shrift when people are talking about the New Wave of British Heavy Metal is Samson -- often they're brought up as a kind of a musical footnote, as the band in which Bruce Dickinson would shine as the singer who would not long after front Iron Maiden.  And, to be sure, a case can be made that their best work was the two albums on which he sang, as "Bruce Bruce" -- Head On (1980) and Shock Tactics (1981).  It's unfortunate that these albums, and the band as such, doesn't get more notice, for if you listen to those two albums, you hear the vitality of a genuinely heavy and yet melodic band, whose members come together quite well for some classic early-80s metal compositions.
I came across this gem of a video for "Vice Versa" several days ago -- I'm not sure of the context of clicking and searching that brought me to it, but I remember being intrigued by the idea that they had managed to get into the growing video scene early on in.  As a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s, we had MTV -- and cable at all, for that matter -- only for the briefest trial period, so what I got to see of music videos was entirely a matter of what got played at friends' houses, and what I got to see when we would stay at the house of my tech-early-adopter uncle (and purchase-indulgent aunt!) in Chicago.  So, this video was entirely new to me.

Identity and Alterity: Why We Can't Really See Some Bands That Still Exist

My wife and I are always on the lookout for nearby tour dates for classic metal acts -- and we've been pretty fortunate in recent years, actually, since quite a few come to the Tri-State area.  In the last several years, we've been to a whole host of classic acts -- Iron Maiden, Judas Priest (twice), Motorhead, KISS (twice), Megadeth, Raven, Accept, UDO, Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, and Alice Cooper.  And, back in our younger days -- our teens and twenties, before we got together -- there's a whole host of other bands which we saw independently, with our respective friends.

There's some groups -- the Scorpions for example -- who I saw back in the 1980s (at a Monsters of Rock show), but who my wife has never seen on stage, and as we were thinking about who might still be touring and who we might try to get tickets for in the coming year, she said something rather paradoxical to me.  "It's too bad that we can't really see the Scorpions."  What she meant by that isn't that we couldn't sometime purchase tickets to see them when they wind up back over here in the USA -- that's certainly possible -- but rather that it long ago became impossible to see the band whose music we came to love back in the heyday of classic metal -- the 1980s.

Recomendations: Metal Killers Kollection

In some ways, I grew up at just the right time to appreciate at least two of the waves of development of heavy metal.  I was born in the year of the moonwalk -- the real, not dance-step one -- in 1970, so that placed me in my formative years as a kid in the meadows, kettles, and moraines of southeastern Wisconsin, while perhaps not in the right place, certainly in a good position to get exposed to classic bands like KISS and AC/DC by radioplay and albums in the 1970s -- something I'll write another post about later on -- and then to be present in the early and mid-80s, as a teenager, when successive waves of metal were washing over the midwest from multiple locations -- both coasts, England, Germany, and Japan.

Again, this is an experience I want to explore thematically and in more detail in further posts -- one of the main ways I actually came in contact with (to me) new bands, albums, and songs was through poring through and occasionally purchasing from discount bins of records and tapes in stores like Target, K-Mart, and even Farm-and-Fleet (and when we vacationed in the panhandle of Florida, a Walmart).  One of them -- I got it in the spring of 1986, and listened to it over and over for weeks -- was a 2-tape compilation, the first volume of Metal Killers Kollection.  And it was mindblowing. . . .