If you missed session 4 of the Classic Metal Class, and you'd like to see what we covered, the videorecording of the session is now available for you to to watch or listen to.
In this session, we discuss the importance of mimesis (imitation, reproduction) in music and the arts generally, and in classic metal specifically.
We focus in particular on issues that arise out of one main mode of mimesis. This is a particular kind of band, tribute bands, which are centered entirely around mimesis.
Our first session of the new online Classic Metal Class went very well. Feedback from the participants was that they had a great time, and are looking forward to the next session, and I'll say that I - and my special guest, Scott Tarulli (who will be joining me for additional sessions coming up) really enjoyed the conversation as well!
We discussed the beginnings of Heavy Metal, looking particularly at 1970, and then continuing the narrative up to 1974. 1970 was a massively important year, with a number of early metal bands bringing out albums, and going on tour (sometimes with each other). Black Sabbath, of course, is the most influential and central band, but there are some others that play a major role in forming and fomenting this developing genre - Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, sir Lord Baltimore, and Led Zepplin each bring out important albums in 1970. And in 1971, that expands to Budgie and Flower Travellin' Band. 1972 adds the Scorpions, Blue Oyster Cult, Alice Cooper, and Bang to the mix.
There's a lot more to be said, but it was in the session! So here's the videorecording:
Watch for an announcement about the next class session coming up soon!
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.
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.
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.
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.
