Running with the Devil. Robert Walser
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from Germany, became the first heavy metal band from a non-English-speaking country to achieve international success. Heavy metal shows became increasingly spectacular as musicians performed in front of elaborate stage sets to the accompaniment of light shows, pyrotechnics, and other special effects. Incessant touring of these impressive shows built the metal audience in the 1970s. Kiss, between 1974 and 1984, made nineteen albums, seventeen of which went gold (thirteen went platinum) with virtually no radio airplay.30 Many of the most successful performers of heavy metal, like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, have never had a Top 40 single.
The rise of heavy metal was simultaneous with the rise of professional rock criticism, but their relationship was not cordial. Flushed with enthusiasm for the artistic importance of rock music, critics were deeply suspicious of commercially successful music, which smacked of “sellout” because it appealed to too many people. Many critics were also hostile toward visual spectacle, which they saw as commercial artifice, compromising rock music’s “authenticity.” With the exception of some writers at Creem, they abhorred the face paint and fantastic costumes of Kiss, the macabre theatricality of Alice Cooper, and the fireworks, smoke, and unearthly props of everyone else in heavy metal. The pronouncements of the critics had little effect on the loyalties of heavy metal fans, for whom the concert experience remained primary: Led Zeppelin’s 1973 tour of the United States set new concert attendance records, breaking the previous records held by the Beatles. However, critics contributed to the establishment of heavy metal as a genre, since such labels were useful to them, as they were to the music industry, then in a phase of commercial growth and diversification (including increasingly specialized radio formats).
Heavy metal record sales slumped severely during the second half of the 1970s, as attention shifted to disco, punk, and mainstream rock bands like Fleetwood Mac. Writing for posterity in 1977, Lester Bangs summarized: “As the Seventies drew to a close, it appeared that heavy metal had had it.” Bangs described metal’s obsolescence: “What little flair and freshness remained in heavy metal has been stolen by punk rockers like the Ramones and Sex Pistols, who stripped it down, sped it up and provided some lyric content beyond the customary macho breast-beatings, by now not only offensive but old-fashioned.”31 Bangs’s description of that moment was a fair one, but the 1980s saw the growth of heavy metal on a scale none had imagined.
Heavy Metal in the 1980s
During the 1980s, heavy metal was transformed from the moribund music of a fading subculture into the dominant genre of American music. Eddie Van Halen had revolutionized metal guitar technique with the release of Van Halen’s debut album in 1978, fueling a renaissance in electric guitar study and experimentation unmatched since thousands of fans were inspired to learn to play by Eric Clapton’s apotheosis in the late 1960s and Jimi Hendrix’s death in 1970. But the real boom occurred with what became known as the “new wave of British heavy metal,” around the turn of the decade. The United States was overrun by another “British invasion,” as important for metal as the Beatles and Rolling Stones had been fifteen years earlier for pop music. Singer Joe Elliot recalls: “As years went on, hard rock did feel a certain loss of popularity with record audiences. But around 1979 or ’80, it came back again. Suddenly, there was us [Def Leppard], Iron Maiden and Saxon doing really well.”32 Bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead exported very different styles of music, but they all were experienced as a wave of renewal for the genre of heavy metal. For the most part, the new wave of metal featured shorter, catchier songs, more sophisticated production techniques, and higher technical standards. All of these characteristics helped pave the way toward greater popular success.
The next wave of metal came out of Los Angeles around 1983–84. Motley Crüe and Ratt spearheaded a revival of “glam” metal androgyny, and other L.A. bands, like Quiet Riot, Dokken, and W.A.S.P., gained international attention. Southern California emerged as the center of heavy metal music for the 1980s, and bands from other parts of the country, among them Poison and Guns N’ Roses, flocked to Los Angeles in hopes of getting signed to a major label contract. In 1983, Def Leppard released Pyromania, the album that brought them stardom, leading the metal boom of the following year. In 1983, heavy metal records accounted for only 8 percent of all recordings sold in the United States; one year later, that share had increased phenomenally, to 20 percent.33 Dokken, Iron Maiden, Motley Crüe, Ratt, Twisted Sister, and Scorpions rode the crest of this new success.
The following year, bands from around the world joined in the metal boom: Japan’s Loudness, Sweden’s Europe, and Germany’s Scorpions all achieved widespread acceptance, not only in their homelands but also among English-speaking fans. Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen had comparatively less commercial success with his albums of 1984–88, but his extension of metal’s neoclassical tendencies greatly influenced other heavy metal guitarists. Malmsteen’s fusion of heavy metal with Baroque musical rhetoric upped the ante for technical prowess and inspired legions of young imitators.34 Heavy metal fan magazines proliferated in France (Hard Force, Hard Rock), Italy (HM, Heavy Metal, Rockstar, Flash), and Germany (Rock Hard, Horror Infernal, Metalstar, Breakout, Metal Hammer), just as new magazines appeared in the United States and Britain (RIP and many others), and already established rock and pop magazines began focusing exclusively on metal (Hit Parader, Circus).
The popularity of heavy metal continued to increase throughout the decade. Billboard attributed this trend in the economy of American popular music to a shift in the subcultural support of metal: “Metal has broadened its audience base. Metal music is no longer the exclusive domain of male teenagers. The metal audience has become older (college-aged), younger (pre-teen), and more female.”35 The release of Bon Jovi’s third album, Slippery When Wet, in 1986 was an important moment in this transformation of the metal audience, for Bon Jovi fused the intensity and heaviness of metal with the romantic sincerity of pop and the “authenticity” of rock, helping to create a huge new gender-balanced audience for heavy metal.36 Bon Jovi’s success not only reshaped metal’s musical discourse and sparked imitations and extensions, but it also gained metal substantial radio airplay for the first time. A Billboard writer summarized: “Many credit the mass-appeal success of Bon Jovi’s ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ last summer with opening programmers’ ears to the merits of metal. Others give a nod to Mötley Crüe’s “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” for dispelling the notion that top 40 and hard rock don’t mix. Metal and hard rock have fallen between the programming cracks because of their predominantly teen appeal.”37
In December 1986, MTV significantly increased the amount of heavy metal it programmed, initiating a special program called “Headbangers’ Ball” and putting more metal videos into their regular rotation. The response was tremendous; “Headbangers’ Ball” became MTV’s most popular show, with 1.3 million viewers each week.38 Heavy metal’s spectacular live shows made it a natural for television, where its important visual dimension could be exploited and presented virtually unchanged. Once heavy metal achieved access to the airwaves, its popularity and influence increased sharply. In June 1987, the number-one album on the Billboard charts was by U2, but the next five places were held by metal bands: Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads. For the rest of the decade, metal usually accounted for at least half of the top twenty albums on the charts.39
The expansion of the metal scene during the 1980s, however, was accompanied by its fragmentation. Genres proliferated: magazine writers and record marketers began referring to thrash metal, commercial metal, lite metal, power metal, American metal, black (satanic) metal, white (Christian) metal, death metal, speed metal, glam metal—each of which bears a particular relationship to that older, vaguer, more prestigious term “heavy metal.”40 Just as one of the major musical debates of nineteenth-century Europe was over who should be considered Beethoven’s musical heir (Wagner versus Brahms), metal bands and fans continually position the music they care about with respect to a lineage dating back to the late 1960s founders: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple. Though allegiances were often complex and genre boundaries blurred, two main camps formed during the 1980s.
On the one hand, there was the metal of the broad new audience forged during the mid-1980s