Classic Metal Class Session 2 Tomorrow Noon Central!

We're doing another of the online Classic Metal Class sessions tomorrow, Saturday May 16 at Noon Central Time, and anyone who wants to attend is invited! 

If you'd like to register for the session - which you'll need in order to get the Zoom link and the cool handout on the topic for this session - just click here and fill out the form.

I'll be joined again by special guest, Scott Tarulli - guitar professor, band leader, studio and gig musician, and a good friend and colleague - and we'll be discussing the "Black Sabbath-Deep Purple Nexus".

By that admittedly strange term, what I have in mind is not just the early metal music they composed, played, and recorded, and not just their massive influence on so many other metal acts that were to follow.  I also mean the musicians they took in from other bands, developed, and then spun off and out into other bands.  There's a lot of connections between these two main poles of the nexus and the other acts that fit into it.  These include three important metal solo bands - Gillan, Ozzy Osborne, and Dio - and two other major bands - Rainbow and Whitesnake.

So join us tomorrow for a conversation that will range over classic metal music history, philosophical ideas and speculations, and most likely a lot more (including a kids' cartoon)!

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.