Classic Metal Class Session 8 - NWOBHM and Metal Identity

We are starting off the 2021 year of monthly Classic Metal Class sessions this Saturday with a discussion that continues delving into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) in the early 80s.  This time the focus is on how the musicians and fans were involved in something that was not just a musical movement, but involved developments of what we can call a more and more self-conscious "metalhead" identity.

There are a number of aspects to this, and I'm sure the conversation - as always - will stray a bit past the limits of these topics, but what we plan to discuss include:

• the progressive formation of consciousness of self as "metalheads"
• the thematization of heavy metal as a type of music and experience within song lyrics
• the development of and influence on genres of metal by bands in this period
• the continuities between older British, American, and European metal and the NWOBHM

As always, I'll be joined by my cohost and special guest, Berklee School of Music guitar professor and fellow metalhead-since-childhood, Scott Tarulli (you can check him out here).  We'll kick the ideas back and forth for half an hour or so, and then start responding to questions and comments - we always get some great ones from participants!

Here's the Zoom link for the session - the session is this Saturday, 12:00 PM Central Time.  Hope you can join us for what will be a rich conversation about classic heavy metal!

Classic Metal Class Session 7 - New Wave of British Heavy Metal

We started our discussion of a major movement in the development of heavy metal - the New Wave of British Heavy Metal - in Classic Metal Class session #7.  We turned over so many interesting topics that we'e going to return to it in the next session.  If you missed the class session when it took place, and you'd like to watch or listen to the discussion, here's the recording

The Fall semester is at last starting to wind down as well, so I'm hoping to be able to start writing posts regularly here again in Heavy Metal Philosopher.

Classic Metal Class Session 5 - Mid-Late 1970s British Metal

We have another session of our monthly Classic Metal Class coming up tomorrow at Noon Central Time.  Here's the ZOOM LINK to join us!  Guitarist and Berkelee School of Music professor Scott Tarulli will be joining me as a special guest again for this session. 

In Session #5, we will be looking at the mid-late 1970s (1974-1979) and the ongoing development of heavy metal as a more and more self-conscious genre of music. We'll be discussing this ongoing history, features of metal in that era, and how the sounds were getting heavier and harder, leading into early 80s metal.

While many of the main bands that comprise the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (e.g. Iron Maiden, Raven) were active in the pub scene, and producing demos at the time, we're going to be focusing on the bands that were producing albums in this time period.  So, among the bands we'll be discussing will be Judas Priest, Motörhead, Budgie, UFO, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Whitesnake, Gillan, Saxon, Girlschool, Quartz, Nazareth, and Magnum

I hope you can join us for it! If you can, you get to participate in the discussion.  We will be recording the session as well, just like the four previous class sessions, all of which you can view here.

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!

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.

"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