Interview With Guitarist Scott Tarulli

It is hard to believe that it has been more than a month since Scott Tarulli and I finally crossed paths and got to hang out and talk shop in Manchester, New Hampshire!

I had mentioned earlier that week that I'd shortly be just a short drive from his home base in Boston - presenting at the 6th St. Anselm Conference - and he drove up that Saturday with beers and snacks, ready for some intensive discussion about the music business, education, rhetoric, philosophy. . .  and of course all sorts of matters of the metal scene!

I actually recorded 1 1/2 hours of our conversation - here's the video of it - in the hotel room where I was staying.  I call it an interview, and I suppose it started out more with Scott interviewing me.  But it quickly turned into an open-ended, sometimes at-tangents, super-enjoyable conversation - and I even got a bit of "interviewing" in on my side, putting Scott on the spot.

Fan Mail From A Philosopher

Last month, for the first time, I did something I'd long and often thought about -- but never actually decided to do -- to write a fan letter.  Or, really, since it's on a relatively small card, I suppose one could call it a fan note.  To many metalheads -- even among those who know me well -- it might appear a rather odd gesture, not so much in its origins or its expression, but rather in its object.

I wrote what is in effect a kind of note of appreciation -- on the same embossed "Dr. Gregory B. Sadler" stationary that I normally reserve for expressions of gratitude or friendship, confined primarily to academic and institutional recipients -- and I mailed it off back in October to a Mr. Ian Hill, Bassist, of Judas Priest. 

10 Great Classic Metal Bassists: What Makes for Greatness?

As with any sort of highly positive qualifier -- "supreme," "top-notch," "greatest" and so on -- the quickest and most cursory of internet searches uncovers dozens of lists (not all of which would necessarily qualify as "great" themselves).  There's Metal Descent's Top Ten Most Recognizable Heavy Metal Bassists, Heavy Metal Time Machine's Top Ten Bass Players,  Gears of Rock's Top Ten Metal Bassists of All Time -- there's even more specialized lists like Metalholic's Top 12 Female Hard Rock/Metal Bassists 2013.

Interestingly, you see quite a few now-iconic metal bassists make their way into less genre-focused lists like Ultimate Guitar's Top 10 Bassists of All Time -- which includes a few proto-metal band's long-axemen (Cream's Jack Bruce, for example).  Steve Harris and Cliff Burton often jockey for position as the top-number metal representatives on these sorts of lists -- and rightly so, I think.  In fact, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking off and on, not so much about these sorts of lists, but of just what qualifies a bassist as being genuinely "great" -- not just good, competent, a contributor to his or her band, their songs, and their sound -- but someone outstanding, of a clearly superlative rank.  Those musings have had me assembling a list of my own -- one restricted, understandably enough, to  bass heroes of the core of metal, the now-classic, dynamic forms it assumed and spilled over into during the 1970s and 1980s.

Middle-Schoolers Finding Meaning in Metal

One of the signs that metal not only became a distinctive, identifiable genre of music -- that happened quite some time ago -- but that as it developed, as song-by-song its potentialities were discovered and deployed, metal set down something like a foundation, a bedrock, upon which each new generation can build, raze, rebuild, and most of all find and generate meaning -- sense and significance that sets a person, or in this case case a duo of kids, into continuity with a generation-spanning community.

A Vimeo video making its rounds through social media, "Unlocking the Truth" (titled after the band) made its way into my own timeline, and after watching it (see below), my second reaction -- my first was just to think it was cool to see two young guys clearly enjoying creating metal -- was to be struck by the fact that they find a kind of anchoring, expanding, lived-out meaning within that music.  For me, thirty years ago in my own childhood and adolescence, that was one of the aspects or dimensions to heavy metal that drew me in and kept me listening.

Video Flashback: Black Sabbath - "Trashed"

Of Black Sabbath's many albums, I can easily say -- though this is still supposed by many to be anathema -- that Born Again was early on and still remains one of my favorites.  Ian Gillan's collaboration with the band was short-lived and, from his description, ill-fated.  But, that period produced some excellently playful, grit-guitar heavy, imaginative songs that, for me, ought to be Sabbath standards:  Digital Bitch, Hot Line, Disturbing the Priest -- and of course one of the heaviest metal songs ever composed, Zero the Hero.  The entire album -- panned by many at the time -- has really stood the test of decades.  The songs have aged well without becoming dated and faded.  And, this holds as well for the opening track, Trashed.

I didn't actually get to see this early-MTV era video for the tune until just a few years ago.  I bought Born Again as an album, and played it enough times to wear the record down quite a bit, back in 1984, along with a trove of 8 or 9 other Metal LPs through the gimmicky Columbia Record Club  (effectively tripling the size of my metal record collection!), so Trashed early on became one of those songs permanently burnt into the figurative mp3s of my own wetware memory.  It's quite interesting to watch this video -- or rather the two videos, as you'll see below -- looking back retrospectively from the vantage point of several decades.