Classic Metal Class This Saturday - The Ethics of Farewell Tours

Right now, due to Covid-19, tours and even one-off concerts are largely on hold.  But there's already talk of tours starting up once we eventually find a way to deal with the pandemic.  And some of those tours - you can guarantee it - are going to be carried out by metal bands that already did their farewell tour (in some cases, more than one!)

Some time back, we examined the question "Farewell Tours - Can You Repeat Them?" This was provoked by one of Dee Snyder's interviews, in which he criticized bands that, after announcing and doing a farewell tour, went back out on tour again, making a solid case for this practice being unethical on a number of counts.

Snyder has been a consistent voice and example on this issue, and weighed in on it in a number of interviews over this last year (for example here and here).  Eddie Trunk also weighed in recently with a quip.

The only band I can now think of that did a Farewell tour and has yet to ever play together since is @TwistedSisterNY .. so they are now on the clock haha. And they played 100% live and real right till the end !

Last year, Chris Krovatin authored a good piece on the topic of farewell tours in Kerrang!

So my co-host of Classic Metal Class - Scott Tarulli - and I decided that this would be a good topic to examine in depth for session six. You can join us on Zoom for the session this Saturday, Noon Central Time.  

We'll be recording the session, and we'll be reading and responding to questions and comments from the participants - so if you're there, your contributions will make their way into the class video.

Classic Metal Class - Session 1 This Saturday!

Classic Heavy Metal - the stuff from the 70s and 80s - has been a major part of my life since I was a kid, and before I even knew what that kind of music was called.  I've also been either studying or teaching philosophy for three decades now.  Those areas have bled over into each other from time to time, and I've been fortunate to have friends and colleagues - including Scott Tarulli, Blitch 66, and (my wife) Andi Sciacca - with whom I could "talk metal" in deep, detailed, and animated conversations.

In addition to enjoying heavy metal as a fan, I've also long been researching the history of the genre.  I've been wanting not just to engage in writing about classic metal, but also to engage in some teaching and interactive discussion about it.  So I'm starting that up this weekend with a the first 1-hour session of Classic Metal Class - and you're invited!

I'll be hosting the class on Zoom at Noon Central Time, Saturday April 25.  Here's the signup page (our Zoom is capped at 100 people).  I'm planning on presenting for the first 20 or so minutes, and then we'll open it up to discussion and Q&A - and guitarist, bandleader, and professor Scott Tarulli will also be there as a special guest, participating in the discussion!

The topic I've selected for this first session is a basic but also controversial one:  the early years of metal (1970-1974).  "Controversial?" you might ask?  Yep!  There's quite a few "origin stories" to heavy metal, and the simpler they are, usually the more wrong they turn out to be.  We'll be discussing the "it was just Black Sabbath at the start" narrative (usually coupled with "and then it was Judas Priest"), and showing how much richer, more complex, and more interesting the real story of metal's early years is! 

We'll also be touching on some more explicitly philosophical issues like how and whether we can define music genres; what the essence of heavy metal is (if there is one); what makes a band "important" or "influential"; and why this music caught on in the first place.

So join us this Saturday for what promises to be a lively discussion of this music we love!

Identity and Alterity: Why We Can't Really See Some Bands That Still Exist

My wife and I are always on the lookout for nearby tour dates for classic metal acts -- and we've been pretty fortunate in recent years, actually, since quite a few come to the Tri-State area.  In the last several years, we've been to a whole host of classic acts -- Iron Maiden, Judas Priest (twice), Motorhead, KISS (twice), Megadeth, Raven, Accept, UDO, Thin Lizzy, Motley Crue, and Alice Cooper.  And, back in our younger days -- our teens and twenties, before we got together -- there's a whole host of other bands which we saw independently, with our respective friends.

There's some groups -- the Scorpions for example -- who I saw back in the 1980s (at a Monsters of Rock show), but who my wife has never seen on stage, and as we were thinking about who might still be touring and who we might try to get tickets for in the coming year, she said something rather paradoxical to me.  "It's too bad that we can't really see the Scorpions."  What she meant by that isn't that we couldn't sometime purchase tickets to see them when they wind up back over here in the USA -- that's certainly possible -- but rather that it long ago became impossible to see the band whose music we came to love back in the heyday of classic metal -- the 1980s.

Metal Origins: Some Key Early Bands

There's been a tendency in recent years -- one I see particularly among fans into more recent "genre" metal (all the stuff ranging from "black" to "sludge" to "viking" . . .) -- to accord the origins of heavy metal primarily to on band, Black Sabbath.  This claim has been given considerable weight by a key practitioner and early innovator, Rob Halford, for whom it's become somewhat of a party-line that first there was Sabbath, and really nobody else doing it, and then there was Judas Priest.  My aim, in this and some follow-up posts yet to come, is to argue that this is far from the case -- that the story is much more complicated and interesting than that.

Don't get me wrong -- in the narrative as I reconstruct it, Black Sabbath certainly gets given their rightful pride of place.  They possess a napoleonic status of "first among equals."  I'd even go so far as to say that without Sabbath, metal might have coalesced rather differently -- and perhaps less powerfully, less coherently -- as a genre.  But it's a mistake to portray them as the sole seminal band.