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.

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. . . .

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.