Classic Metal Class This Weekend - Metal In America in the 1970s!

 

We have a session of our monthly classic metal class coming up this Saturday at Noon Central Time. I'll be joined again by Scott Tarulli - professor of guitar, studio and gig musician and bandleader, and fellow metalhead - and this time we're discussing more music history (and veering into some philosophy as well).

The topic this session is heavy metal bands, music, and identity in the 1970s, specifically in America.  So in addition to tracing out the influence British metal exercised in catalyzing American metal in the 1970s, we're also going to be tracing out the development of distinctively heavy metal scenes (like that of LA in the late 70s and the early 80s.  And we'll engage in some analysis - maybe even some argument between us - about what American bands really qualify as "heavy metal" and which are better described as "metal-adjacent" or "kinda metal" hard rock.  We might even indulge in some wild counter-factual speculation about how metal might have developed differently if Jimi Hendrix hadn't met his untimely death (we'll see!)

So it'll be a mix of music history, sociology, philosophy, and musicology, all centered around American bands and musicians.  To give a little foretaste, I'm going to claim that bands that are definitely American metal in the 1970s include Sir Lord Baltimore, Bang, Pentagram, Montrose, KISS, Twisted Sister, Riot, Van Halen, Cirith Ungol, Mickey Ratt, Quiet Riot, and the Plasmatics.  There's also a part of the story to be told about Dokken as well.

We're also going to discuss how we ought to classify acts ranging from Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, Aerosmith, Foghat, Ramjam, Mountain, Y&T, The Runaways.  Does their music in the 1970s qualify as "metal", or should they be just lumped in to the larger genre of "hard rock"?  (I like to call them "metal adjacent")

So, High Noon (my time), this Saturday, February 20!  Here's the Zoom link for the session.  I hope to see you there!

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?

The Scene of the Past: Metal Albums 40 Years Back

Among the seemingly endless listicles and galleries the VH1 website regularly churns out, one caught my eye a week or so ago -- finding its way into my Facebook stream, if I remember rightly -- a gallery that takes us back into the years before metal becomes a self-conscious movement, and has yet to extricate itself from the closely aligned and still more vague genre of "hard rock":  20 Classic Metal Albums Turning 40 in 2015.

Perhaps it's because I'm myself near to the midpoint of my own 40s that this retrospective -- among so many others -- got me ruminating as I clicked through the albums picked out by the VH1 writers.  I can say that my friends and I quite literally grew up as teens with classic metal in the 1980s, and became excited in  our childhoods by bands in the 1970s we didn't even realize might form part of a broader and deeper musical movement -- formative years for sensibilities and imaginations.  Of course, our generation could have that experience precisely because an earlier generation had been over the previous decade gradually feeling their way -- some more deliberately and consistently, others almost by happenstance or experimentation towards sounds that embodied and incorporated elements that would turn out to be central in later metal music.

"Define" Heavy Metal, You Say?

You'll notice that, at first, it looks like I've placed the quotation marks in the wrong places in the title of this entry.  But, no. . .  they're set around just the right term -- define.  You'll see, or rather read, why momentarily.  First though, a bit of back-story.

I would say that one of the words I hear most often from non-philosophers in early-on conversations with philosophers, almost always placed in the interrogative is "define," as in "now, how would you define. . . ?" or "what's your definition of . . . ?" or "can you define. . . .?"  Occasionally, most often I'd say in student papers, I end up seeing the indicative ". . .  is defined as . . .  according to the . . . .   dictionary/encyclopedia/my uncle Jake, etc."

I don't hear "definition" pop up all that often when philosophers are plying their trade, teaching, or talking amongst themselves.  Why is that, you might wonder?  Well, although we hale from a profession and tradition that gets a good early start with Socrates wandering around asking people for definitions of key concepts, like virtue, justice, knowledge, and so on. . .  most of us have come to realize -- one way or another -- just how difficult it can be to provide adequate definitions for any really interesting concept, experience, phenomenon.  "Give me a definition of. . . "  You demand that in many philosophical circles, and they rightly peg you as right off the bus, really or just ironically naive, or as playing at debater's tricks