Monday Metal

Next week (31 March) is the 30th anniversary of Def Leppard's Adrenalize. Back in '92*, we didn't even know Adrenalize was coming till we saw it on display at a massive record store in London, our grandparents took us there for a graduation present. When we got back to the hotel, we popped the cassette into our Walkman and were...kind of underwhelmed.

In the 15 years since Def Leppard released On Through the Night, they evolved from post-glamrock to  hardrock, to sharp-edged heavy metal to...early 90's rock. Adrenalize has a lot of soft guitar rifts and melodies. At least a couple of songs would make perfectly good romantic mood music. High and Dry (1981), where every song had searing vocals and guitar rifts, Adrenalize was not. 

Everyone likes to talk about Grunge, but the early 90s were also a time of pop one hit wonders and love ballads. Adrenalize is a product of its time. Also, lead guitarist Steve Clark had died in 1991, so the album was a four man rather than a five man effort. Adrenalize simply lacked the punch of High and Dry, Pyromania, and Hysteria.

Which isn't to say Adrenalize is bad. The album quickly grew on us that spring, becoming part of the soundtrack of and a great comfort during a very difficult time. This week is Adrenalize week at Stroock's Books, and we'll be doing a deep dive into the album. 

*Reference.

Monday Nerd Metal

 Something a bit different from Revenge of the Nerds.

If you want a taste of 'what if felt like', there it is. This was so cool, so modern so...80's. That little violin riff has stuck with us for 35 years.

Animal House was already a classic by 1984, and Revenge of the Nerds was considered a poor man's substitute. It must have run on cable everyday during the summer of 1985. Now the film is a classic in its own right. Boy 80's movies made college look like a lot of fun. They're one of the reasons we joined a fraternity as soon as we could. AXP!

By the way, you screeching, un-fuckable feminist harpies, movies like Revenge of the Nerds didn't turn us into a rapist. No one needed to tell us it wasn't cool to install hidden cameras in a sorority house. And when we pledged AXP, and were sent out on a panty raid, we just knocked on doors and the girls said, 'Sure. Do you like these? Here you go.' It was 1993, man. 

Monday Metal: Barry Soetoro Edition

We are told that Barry Soetoro has published* a memoir, his third. Damn it man, you're just not that interesting. 

Jimmy Carter, now he is an interesting man. Annapolis grad, nuclear submariner, farmer, president, human rights activist. And while Carter was the worst president of the Cold War era, he wasn't quite as cataclysmic as once thought. He's not worse than Buchanan or Adams, or Barry Soetoro. Carter is a man who could write an interesting memoir. 

Bush's Decision Points is an actual historical document that takes the reader through his thinking on various matters facing his presidency. The most interesting passages deal with W giving up drinking.

It turns out Barry released a list of his favorite songs to accompany his third memoir**:

Barry's list is very middlebrow, the 21st century version of Perry Como, Guy Lombardo, and Bing Crosby. Why Richard Nixon couldn't have done it better. This is wine-mom music.

In our own tribute to the 44th president here's a list of our top ten songs with brief commentary:

The Answer, Walking Mat: Just bashes you over the head with licks and attitude. 'Throw your stones and break my back...curse my name for all you lack.' 

The Answer, Caught on the River Bed: Sounds like galloping horses. What a solo. The whole song is thunderously inspirational. 'Come on up....come on up....come on up....'

Free, All Right Now: The best chord progression in rock. The first lead we learned to play.

Queen, Fat Bottomed Girls. What a lick, what a harmony. Pure, distilled rock n roll.

Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion: Great bass, it really carries the song, beautiful harmony in the opener and a simple, but heavy chord progression.

Spencer Davis Group, Give me Some Lovin': Sometimes you just gotta pop the cassette in the player and kick some ass, this raucous song helps you do that. Those organs are ominous and we love how they climb in the refrain. Chappie, this one's for you.

Cream, White Room: Everything about this song is heavy. Again, such a simple progression.

Led Zeppelin, Kashmir: An utterly unique tuning and progression. DADGAD, bitches.

AC/DC, by rights this list could be all AC/DC, we've seen them live four times, but we had to choose one, so we went with Rocker. We just love this performance. Bon Scott sounds like Little Richard, don't he?

*Wonder who ghost wrote this one.

**So that's what William Ayers has been doing all these years.

Monday Metal

The Fami de Stroock visited our father over the weekend, who maintain the house in which we grew up. Much has changed, but little rocks in the stream of time from our childhood remain. Here a vintage Star Wars figure*, there a piece from Risk.

The girls discovered our old stereo, a gift for our 13th birthday (1986). We showed them the ins and outs. 'You mean they play music on both sides?' We put on this old album, received as a Christmas gift in 1987:

That's Aerosmith, Permanent Vacation. We always loved that intro. The stereo still sounds good.

*Like, the ones from 1977 where you bought the empty box and mailed in the proof of purchase. Don't bother, Obi Wan is missing the light sabre, plastic cape, etc....

Monday Metal

A reader suggested Korn for Monday Metal:

[Nu Metal? WTF?-Ed]

Yeah we know, but we're going with it in the interest of comity within the Metal Community. It's all Metal, even Nu Metal, and our intro to Metal was the Hair stuff, which led us to all the rest.

On the 1st day Hashem said let there be light and there was light. And on the seventh day he rested. And on the eigth he said, let there be metal, and there was metal. 

For at first the 80's were dominated by The Cars and Wham and they were totally gay. They're gone but Metal is still here. Metal will exist forever, for it must.

Monday Metal

Get a load of this:

Bands are actually recreating the Hair Metal look and sound.

NTTAWWT. But we are surprised.

The band name, Crazy Lixx, is so obvious this blog can't believe it wasn't thought of in the 1980's.

That's about what one of those videos would feel like. And the overall song is spot-on.

A decade ago when the Metal revival began in earnest, it was thought Hair Metal was dead. Sam Dunn said so in Heavy, the Story of Metal. Yet here it is.

From a decade ago, also, get a load of Steel Panther. Stick with it, people:*

*One song on the album, Fat girl...that she blows! So meta.

Monday Metal, Animated Loser Edition

God, how I love Beavis and Butthead. I've loved them since my friend Dave and I watched them in the early 90's on MTV's Liquid Television. Ha! I loved them before they were cool.

Creator Mike Judge brought them along at just the right time. Five years before would have been too early. Five years later and nobody would have cared.

In 1992 when Beavis and Butthead first showed up on Liquid Television, MTV was a decade old. Personally I learned about and experienced music through MTV, not the radio, and my sense of what was hit wasn't through 95.5 WPLJ, But Dial MTV. In 1992 the music video was established and it was important. And it was going down hill.

Just look at this pretentious piece of crap:

Everything that killed music videos is there; pointless symbolism, blurred shots, shaky-cam, uber-seriousness. This wasn't a music video, it was art.

Here's another one:

At first a lot of people thought Beavis and Butthead were 22 minute insult to heavy metal. After all they're decks out in AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts. But this was just background. Metal was the music of the white working class, and Judge was trying to tell us this from where his animated video critics hailed. He gives a few other hints. Once Beavis starts yelling at a plant and it becomes clear he's repeating a tongue lashing he got form his mom, 'How can you do this, after everything I've done for you!?' In another instance Butthead hilariously says, 'I'll have to ask my mom's boyfriend'.

Through Beavis and Butthead Mike judge pilloried what was happening to the genre.  This usually took on two forms. One, this pair of morons was utterly baffled by what they were seeing because it was incomprehensible. Or, the video presented was so sodden with 'edge' and 'art' that Beavis and Butthead 'got it' and would riff on the video in a way that made absolutely no sense, just like the video.

Now I'm not going to show examples, at least not here. That would a a research project, really.

Maybe another post.

You know who else liked music videos? Jake Bloom in A Line through the Desert.

Metal Monday

Confessions of a Metal Head

I'm a metal head. I started in 1987, the first metal album I bought was White Snake, Slide it In. Before that Van Halen's 5150, but I never thought of them as a metal band.

By the the spring of 1988 I was growing my hair long and listening to metal. By the fall of 1989 I had a mop of hair in my face, later a mullet and a black metal T-shirt for everyday of the week. By December though, things were changing.

You see, this cute little blonde said I should get an earring. My parents, sensing a rare opportunity, said if I wanted an earring the hair would have to go. That Xmas the hair duly came off. In the spring my wardrobe changed a lot and by the fall o 1990 I was dressing more like a hippie than a metal head. A lot of ripped jeans, some tie-dye. I actually started to look like the lead singer of a 70's era classic rock band.

By senior year my hair was short and I wore a lot of long sleeve tees. I was a pretty good looking kid if I don't say so myself.

So the metal hasn't always been thriving for me. That said, even when I was looking respectable I was still buying GnR, Metallica. Heck, my soundtrack to 1990 was Led Zeppelin.

When Metal blew up, like everyone else I listened to Grunge. I never liked Nirvana, but man, Pearl Jam was a metalhead's salvation. Same with Sound Garden and Alice in Chains.

When Grunge fell I walked away from rock and 1995 was the last year MTV was important to me. Man was I getting off that train at the right time. I turned to classical, but lo and behold, the classical I liked was heavy, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, etc etc.

In the winter of 2001, when I was looking for some heavy music, Metal was still there. In 2003 I was listening to Zeppelin everyday, and in 2006, just as the Metal revival was really kicking in, I was back. I saw Maiden twice that year, AC/DC three times.

Metal was back and so was I.