Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
What are your name? And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. It's just the two of us, and I think we should greet all the metal heads listening by.
Saying, shwing, Wow, you ready for this one?
Huh? I am. I'm pretty psyched. I'm not going to lie. I haven't been this nervous since maybe we did soccer.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, we might as well issue the cover the CoA for the entire two parter. We're gonna miss a lot. This is about heavy metal, and anytime you're doing a big genre like this, it's really hard to satisfy everybody. So we will not name specifically your favorite band most likely.
I mean, yeah, there's a pretty good chance. We are also probably going to walk by some amazing fact. Yeah, don't call us stupid. When you email in to tell us, just tell us be like, guys, get this. Yeah, that's the kind of email we like to get.
That's the kind of email that gets read on the air. It's like, Hey, I know you can't get to everything, but you missed this kind of really cool thing. Let me tell you about it.
Way to use a carrot rather than a stick.
Chuk So it is just really intimidating. I agree because and I want to chat just at the jump here about our metalness because I am not a metal head. My metal experience is largely from high school as a gen xer in the eighties hair metal.
So same here, buddy.
Okay, that's good. So my top five metal bands, and I've gotten since into like Black Sabbath and stuff like that a little bit more. But my top five metal bands look like this, and that tells you a lot about what kind of metal fan I am. Sabbath number one, Ozzy number too, okay, Motley Crue, then Rat, and then the Scorpions.
Oh really, Rat huh they were pretty good.
Rat's awesome.
Scorpions were good too. That whole Winds a Change thing, Man, that's a stirring song.
That's probably my least favorite. But those are the bands that I love. I listen on, you know, I got sometimes you get a free serious XM a couple of weeks or whatever.
Lucky.
I got very addicted to the hair Nation channel.
Oh yeah, man, that stuff still plays really well.
It does. I love it, and I even like all the kind of corny stuff from then, like put on that White Lion song and watch watch Me Go to Town that song. Wait, yeah, I love that.
Yeah that is good. Yeah, I know all those songs too. I would even take a little further and say I like Dokin. Okay, I want to make a joke about liking Winger, but there are some Winger songs that I kind of liked, but like Far and Away and I Will I Will die on this hill. The best hair metal band of all time was Poison. I mean, no questions asked.
Would you say Poison?
Poison? You know why?
Go ahead? What now? You tell me why, and then I'll tell you what's funny?
Okay, fair enough. So the reason why I say Poison is the best hair metal band of all time is because they were highly talented, but they were also totally in on the cheesiness of the whole thing too. You think they did not take themselves too seriously. You can make an argument that every rose has its thorns pretty meant pretty seriously. Yeah, But I mean, like I want action tonight, Yeah, nothing but a good time. Like those dudes were not like trying to be serious. There's no
shout at the devil or anything like that. They were just partying. Yeah, I mean they were the perfect hair metal band to me.
You can't write a song called unskinny Bob and claim to be like a serious band, right exactly. That's a good point, Like Gasoline, you want to help me, that's right exactly.
Okay, So what was funny?
What was funny is is at some point we're going to talk about, you know, how sort of white male most metal is. And Olivia, who helped us with this, you know, was able to source some some women in metal, including full bands, and she didn't find Vixen. I was like, wait a minute, that was Vixen, And then I typed into Google search female heavy metal or hair metal bands and instead Vixen and Poison.
That's hilarious. You got that one wrong, Ai.
Yeah, that was pretty funny. What are your top five? Do you have a working top five? And not the joke that you sent me via text?
Yeah? So mine's actually changed in the last couple of days. I have to say, Oh, it used to be time, wasn't. I listened to most of my metal in like eighth ninth grade, probably around the same time you did. I was like Metallica just unquestionably is my number one metal band. Oh okay, I think and Justice for All is maybe the perfect metal album.
Yeah, I like that early stuff. I like to Ride the Lightning and Master Puppets. That was good.
I do too, but I didn't like those until I was old. Actually, within the last several years I started listening to those two. I was like, damn, these are really good too. It's just different. It's way less produced, yeah, way more you know, like it's just more thrash, right yeah. But so that kind of goes to show you my taste, Like I like Metallic as their most produced good album. Okay,
So that's that's there. They're unquestionably my favorite. Black Sabbath is probably number two or a close at their Heels Nipping at their Heels as Poison, Okay. I really like Helmet, which is the alt metal band from the nineties.
Oh, I love Helmet.
Okay, Helmet was great. Yeah.
I guess I didn't really think about alt metal, but sure.
Yeah, okay, so yeah, I'm having to include them this. Yeah, I think kind of a revelation, like I'm I'm having to include alt metal here right right, I can't. Maybe Anthrax would probably be number five, right, especially in eighth grade, I loved Anthrax.
So not Iron Maiden. That surprises me.
Oh god, why did I do that? Yeah? No Iron Maiden. Okay, I'm sorry. You're right, Chuck, thank you. I was even going through my my Apple music folder still look to refresh myself. I've got like five Iron Maiden albums in there too, so I'm not sure how they got left out. Let's say Maiden's number two then.
Okay, that's great. I have been listening to the Iron Maiden lately. You know, I was an MTV kid, so I know that was my big influence. So I know the Iron Maiden songs that had big videos, but I never really dove in and kind of the same with Judas Priest, even though I have gotten way more into them lately and I think I mentioned I'm going to
actually see them later this year. And that was the other thing is like I was way more into other music, like in the eighth, the ninth and tenth grade, that's when I was really started listening to like in Excess and The Smiths and Ram and The Cure. Yeah, so that was my jam. But like if you were an MTV kid and a radio kid like you. You kind of listened to all that stuff, but I wasn't the one going to see those you know, I never saw
Ozzie live and stuff like that. Like those those kids in my high school kind of scared me.
Yeah, well they could be kind of scary. Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons they were into it for sure. Yeah. So just to update my list though, Okay, Talk is still number one. Yeah, Black Sabbath or sorry I remade, still number two. Sabbath is in there somewhere. But there's a couple new bands that I'm like. These guys are really good. Gojira, which is a French I think they like they transcend a bunch of different sub genres. So let's just say they're a French metal band and
they're very good. They actually played at the Summer Olympic opening ceremonies. You remember the dudes who were like thrashing when ye like standing on the bilink. That's Gojira. Okay, I really like Godflesh. I don't know how I missed them because I was into industrial in high school too.
They're they're industrial medal.
Yeah, I love them right, Yeah, And then I'm really now into High on Fire. Have you heard of them?
I heard of them, but I don't know anything about it.
They're amazing, Okay, I like everything. I've heard of them, and they're playing in Baltimore in mid August. Oh you me and I are seriously you got to go maybe, Oh I like them that much?
Now, yeah, you just you're being COI because you don't want all the High on Fire people to be.
Like, where's Josh. All right, let's get down to business, shall we.
Yeah, Like I said, Livia helped us out with this, and so she starts off with the definition from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which you know, it's kind of silly, but sometimes we do that because like it's kind of hard to define metal, as we'll see. And I have a lot of nitpicks with a lot of these bands that I don't consider metal that are in this material.
But oh yeah, a lot of them. I mean there are a few, but a lot.
We'll see as we go. Okay, all right, maybe you just keep a time or a dinger or something.
Clicker, clicker there, there you go.
Yeah, But Britannica says it's a genre that includes a group of related styles that are intense, virtuostic, and powerful, and includes distorted electric guitar. The virtuostick really rings to me because one thing like, there's no metal band that doesn't have a great guitar player, maybe two, maybe three, you.
Know, yeah, no, I agree, And are you taking a shot at me with the maybe three part?
No, not taking a shot like Iron Maiden has three.
Yeah, they have three guitarists, man, and you can hear it. Yeah, you can totally tell, Like, yeah, Maiden, it is pretty great. We'll talk a little more about Maiden in depth in a second, right, But I think you just kind of laid it out there, like there's that's as tight a definition as you can really kind of corral all of metal into. Just because there's so much varied stuff. It's
like a really fractured genre of music. Yeah, there's subgenres of subgenres, and there's probably subgenres of subgenres of subgenres. Like that's how niche some of this stuff is. Like if the average person came along and listened to you know, some similar subgenres are closely really related subgenres, they would
not be able to tell the difference. Some of the subgenres, like are pretty different, and the average person could tell the difference, but when it gets super niche you really have to be a fan to be able to be like, oh no, this is this is technical thrash, yeah, death core, you know.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. There is another little bit from the Grammys, because now the Grammys has awards for this kind of thing, where they mentioned dark lyrics that may focus on social issues or fantasy and myth. That's kind of important because I found when I was nitpicking and
these are just this is just Chuckstam opinion. But sometimes the difference was very small as far as like, you know, all the trappings of metal, but I still don't consider it metal because maybe a very nitpicky reason, but you know, if you're singing it's heavy gets are and you're singing about Lord of the Rings, chances are you're heavy metal. Except your led Zeppelin to me, is not heavy metal. They're hard rock as far as I'm concerned.
No, led Zeppelin is always has always said like, we're not heavy metal. We never have been. We're like blues rock, hard rock, maybe heavy rock. I don't know, but they've always said we're not heavy metal, even though like most metal historians will point to them, at least to some degree, is one of the founders or progenitors of heavy metal for sure.
Yeah, and also want to point out the Grammy's miss something. They said that when they were focusing on the lyrics dark lyrics that may focus on social issues or fantasy and myth, they forgot or girls, girls, girls.
Right for sure, because hair.
Metal not a lot of social issues, not a lot of fantasy, not a lot of myth. That was a specific period in the eighties where they were mostly singing about girls, and sometimes in a very gross way.
Yeah, for sure. I mean it's definitely the world's definitely evolved past the hair metal view of the world.
Yeah for sure.
Still fun poison, still just wants nothing but a good time everybody.
Yeah.
So we did talk about led Zeppelin. There's actually what's known is the Unholy Trinity of hard rock, and led Zeppelin's considered one of them.
Yeah, I agreed.
And yes, no one's going to say, like, I don't know, they're not hard rock, it's just are they Are they heavy metal or were they just help helpful and laying the groundwork for heavy metal? And like you said, one of the things that led Zeppelin did. They were singing about Lord of the Rings before, you know, before Orlando Bloom was even born.
Right, Uh yeah, I mean there's a guy that Libya found named Jack Mannon of the Metal Hall of Fame who said that, you know, they have lyrics related to the occult high fantasy like Lord of the Rings of War, distorted guitar, a loud, long haired, you know, great lead singer, and like again all those things is fair are fairly metal, but I just I don't know, there's something about it. They're just more hard blues rock to me.
For sure, And a lot of other groups from the sixties you would kind of lump led Zeppelin in with because they were all starting to experiment with really distortion heavy guitar. Yeah, but they were blues rock for sure, like Cream the Yardbirds, which actually like gave birth to led Zeppelin, it turns out. Yeah, Jimmy Hendrix was another one. Yeah, he has a metal tie in though. Lemmy Killmeister was a roadie for Jimmy Hendrix before he went on to found the band Motorhead.
I was today years old, did not know that?
Isn't that a great little fact?
Yeah? That's really great.
Man, can you imagine those two together on acid?
No? Yes, Actually, Deep Purple is the second of the Unholy Trinity of Rock. They were formed the nineteen sixty eight, but again a little more like prog rock to me. I think by their fourth album, which was Deep Purple in rock is when they replaced their singer with a guy named Ian Yllen and their basis with a guy
named Roger Glover. They got a little heavier then. But you know, they they might be classified as a proto metal because of their guitar player, Richie Blackmore, who was a legend who went over to be He went on to be the to form the band Rainbow, which was definitely metal.
Is it. I've seen people say no, it's definitely hard rock, because I was like, no, this sounds a lot like metal to me. I like them.
I thought Rainbow was metal. But again, these are just our nitpicking definitions.
But that's a good I mean, that's a good point. That's a good demonstration, like you can really get metal fans arguing by just saying confidently, like no, Rainbow's metal. People will start arguing with you, for sure.
Yeah, And then Sabbath comes along and to me, they're very much sort of the birth of metal, And I think a lot of that has to do like the difference between them and led Zeppelin. To me, even though there are a lot of similarities, is Ozzie's voice was just he had a very sinister, kind of creepy sounding voice, and their music just sounded more sinister than led Zeppelin.
And that just sounded like they were like the stuff they sang about. Yeah, especially today, you're like, yeah, that's metal. But when you look back at what the time they were coming out of, we're talking like the free love, hippie sixties. Oh yeah, they came right out of that.
And so a lot of people point to Black Sabbath not just as like the birth of heavy metal, but the end of the sixties, like the thing that said like, hey, we're going in a much different direction and it's not nearly as pleasant and colorful as you guys have been taking things.
Yeah, for sure, of course we're talking about the dearly departed, recently departed Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah, rip Tony Iomi guitar player Geezer Butler was a bassis in bill Ward on drums, and they were originally a blues band called Earth Blues Company. Eventually you become Earth only Earth or from Birmingham, England. As you'll see, that'll be a recurring motif here. And the name Black Sabbath came from the fact that it sounds like Geezer Butler.
Again.
Their bass player had sleep paralysis.
Yeah, it does sound like that, doesn't it.
Yeah, what happened?
He dreamt that there was a dark figure standing at the foot of his bed, and so he wrote a song. They named it. He wrote a song about that, and they named it Black Sabbath. And the Black Sabbath is taken from a Bors Karloff movie about a talking boat that wins a regatta for a group of orphans. Karloff
does the voice of the boat. And they ended up having to change their name because some other band was like, hey man, we're Earth, and then I'm sure another band was like, no, we're Earth, and then it just kept going on from there. Either way. Sabbath saw the writing on the wall, so they were like, well, our favorite song in the song that everybody like, so Mosta's Black Sabbath.
Let's just call ourselves that. So their debut album was Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath, featuring the song Black Sabbath. They were one of those.
That's right, and they you know, I'm gonna sort of pepper in some you know, rolling Stone ticket for what it's worth. But they have a list of their top one hundred metal bands, and fun fact, either Ozzi or Saba or I'm sorry metal albums, either Ozzie or Sabbath have four of the top fifteen.
Not bad, not bad at all. No, Ozzy's definitely a medal god. Which is interesting because Black Sabbath as a band, just like led Zeppelin, it said we're not heavy metal, or we weren't heavy metal, right, it's not what we were. And again most people are like you you are sorry to well, you're definitely metal.
Yeah.
But apparently Rob Halford, the lead singer Judas Priest, Yeah, I guess he was on WTF with Mark Maron at some point and he said, hey, Sabbath has always said like, we weren't the first metal band. Well, Judas Priest was founded the same year. Yeah, so we'll gladly take that title is the first metal band. And you can make a pretty good case if Sabbath says no, give it to Judas Priest. Yeah.
I don't think I realized they formed at the same time. That's interesting. And I also think Ozzie's post Sabbath career is just Ozzy Osbourne was as metal as metal gets. So there may be a little bit of like kind of joining those two things together.
That's possible, Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Heydy gone like the way of George Benson or Chuck Man g Own. People might leave, might leave. Uh oh yeah, that's right. Wow, they're just popping up all over the place, or doing the opposite of that, I guess.
Yeah, they're popped there. Yeah, lank laying down right.
So most people, though, say they'll give Black Sabbath a pass on their first debut, their debut album say like, okay, that was kind of bluesy, and it is, but it's still pretty metally. But they're like your second album Paranoid, Sorry, that is definitely metal. War Pigs is about as metal as metal gets still to this day.
Yeah, I mean Paranoid is ranked as the number one metal album of all time by Rolling Stone, So there you go.
Well, then there's no arguing with that.
I agree, and I think we should take a break and maybe come back and talk about a very unfortunate kind of legendary incident that happened to Black Sabbath early in their career. Right after this, all right, so we're back with part two of six of the Heavy Metal Duology, and I promised a little bit of talk about a famous incident, a very sad one involving Black Sabbath early in their career, and that is when Tony Iomi, their brilliant left handed guitar player, was a teenager. He worked
at a steel mill in Birmingham, England. He was on his last ship. Apparently he was heading out on tour with the band, and he came home on a lunch break and almost didn't even go back, and his mom said, get your butt back there. You got to finish your job, boy, and he went, okay, mom, and he went back and proceeded to lose the ends of his middle finger and
ring finger on his right hand. But remember he's a left handed guitar player, so if it was the other way around, he could still hold the pick and probably be okay. But this is the hand that is on the neck, so he was missing a large, large portions of his digits that make that pretty vital.
Yeah. I also read that this was the first time he used a metal press because the guy who normally did it was out, and so they had Tony Iomi cover his shift for the first time ever, like last shift ever before he goes out on tour. Like, that's just crazy that that happened. But that was actually a gift to metal in a lot of ways because he had to basically adapt. Apparently Django Reinhardt lost like some fingers or a hand or something crazy like that.
It was a fire that basically he only had use of two fingers on his fretting hand.
Okay, well, somebody told that story to Tony Iomi and it inspired him to just get back in there. He made prosthetics himself for his fingers. Apparently they worked so so so instead he had to adapt by he loosened the strings by downtuning, so everything had a deeper, like heavier sound to it. The same notes that standard tuning would produce, it had a deeper sound. He wasn't necessarily doing it for the deeper sound. He was doing it because the looser strings were easier for him to bend
with what he had left of his fingers. That was a huge development that came out of the loss of those fingertips.
Yeah for sure. Also he switched to lighter strings, he couldn't play as fast. So that's why Black Sabbath has that terrific just sort of grungy slog. And it's not like kept that kind of fast metal. It's because Tony Iomi, you know, he, like you said, he made these things out of wax and leather, and if he played fast enough, they would fly off his finger, and so he had to kind of slow it down, and that's why they had that sort of deep, sludgy grind.
Yeah. One of the other things I love about Sabbath too is they like their studio albums contain like mess ups, like blatant mess ups, like they'll just like miss the beat on drums or something like that once in a while, and they just kept going and released it on the album. I love that about them.
I'd listen right before we recorded. I have the one hundred and eighty gram versions of their their debut, which has the most terrifying album cover of all time. To me, Oh yeah, oh, I think so. And Masters of or I think Master of Reality or is it Masters I can't remember, And then I ordered I realized I didn't even have paranoid, so I ordered.
Oh, really nice stat nice work, Chuck. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's something. We'll talk a little more about album art later, but that's definitely something that's missing in the day and age of like listening to stuff digitally. Yeah, you don't have that record album to like look at while you're listening, and that's like part of the experience, right.
Yeah.
But I will say that I noticed recently I was listening to Somewhere in Time Iron Maiden album, and the album art on my iPhone moves now, so Eddie, like they show him like shooting the guy who's just out of frame. You just see his hand. Wow, eyes light up, like it's really cool. We're downloading the album just to see that alone, let alone for the music. So I'm glad that that developed, but it's still not quite the same as holding like a record album like cover and looking at it.
Yeah, for sure. The seventies also included, of course, Judas Priests. As you mentioned, Iron Maiden started in nineteen seventy five with a different lead singer. That's if you're not super into Iron Maiden and you just kind of remember the eighties music videos with the great Bruce Dickenson up front their first two records, Killers and Just I think it was self titled, right.
Yeah, Iron Maiden and then Killers and they were both it was Paul Diano was their first lead singer.
I like those records.
Let's talk a little bit about Maiden right now. You want to, Yeah, you want to get into it, yeah, because it's really pretty much impossible to overstate the influence that Iron Maiden had on you metal, you.
Know, yeah, Like no, I agree, Like if you if you.
Ask some of the people who make up the Big four of thrash bands Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, they're basically like, we wouldn't we wouldn't exist if it weren't for Iron Maiden. Like, we loved Maiden so much we decided to form our own band. We were inspired to form our own band, and it just keeps going down the line. Band after band after band started out loving Iron Maiden. It's such a great entree into heavy metal music because it's so listenable.
Yeah, totally melodic.
The lyrics are really interesting, Like the themes of the songs are really varied. And I was evidence of this. The poster art alone can't get you into Iron Maiden. Like I had my room covered in Iron Maiden posters before I listened to them at all.
Yeah, I mean we should talk about that for a second. Then their mascot is Eddie. If you've ever seen an Iron Maiden album cover or poster or live video where they have big, you know, giant Eddie walking around and stuff like a puppet, I guess he's their mascot. And he was drawn by a guy named Derrek Riggs, and he was originally he was called Eddie the Head and then just the Head, but in their British accent, the ed they like dropped their h's.
Oh is that right?
It just became ed and Eddie is how they eventually wound up with Eddie.
Very nice, and he's been on every single of the seventeen albums that they've released, most of the singles, apparently not all. I don't know why, but he's usually kind of like altered to represent whatever that particular album is about, right.
Yeah, for sure, Like he was an inmate in a mental institution for peace of mind. I do love the cover of Power Slave when he's he's a pharaoh in the desert. Pretty cool.
Apparently when they toured that album, they had like a thirty foot like actual build of that as the backdrop for their stage show.
Of course they did.
Why would you not exactly, you know, but yeah, Eddie was bossed, just Eddie alone, And he's a good example of why the loss of like an album cover is really like a big deal, because man, it doesn't get any better than Iron Maiden album covers.
No agreed. They came out in nineteen seventy five, and I believe it or not, def Leppard was also debuting along with Motorhead and they were grouped together as what's called the new wave of British heavy metal, and that was sort of happy happening concurrently with the punk scene, which is interesting because punk and metal to me are very different, but there are some sort of tendrils that work through both of those kinds of music.
Yeah, and that's where those first two albums definitely, they were definitely influenced. Paul Deano was definitely influenced by punk, so it was a lot more it was a lot closer to hardcore than the albums that Bruce Dickinson helmed. Starting with their third album, Number of the Beast, which is when the band just broke through and became metal Gods. That was back in nineteen eighty two.
Yeah, Dickinson brought that sort of operatic flourish the theatrical like some of us. I was listening today and sometimes he literally goes like from and that kind of thing, which is like, you gotta love it. He really leaned into.
It, for sure, and like, I don't know how I like, I'm not such a fan that I know who actually writes the songs. I've always presumed Bruce Dickinson did, but usually it turns out to be like the guitarist or
something like that. But they're songs are really really interesting and they're really varied, like they cover history a lot, like there's a song about World War two pilots called Aces High, the song about Alexander the Great, about white Europeans and Americans overrunning Native Americans in North America run to the Hills. That's on number of the.
Beasts two great song.
They have some really like uplifting, encouraging messages in their songs, like can I play with Madness in Wasted Years? They even have a song about the loneliness of a long distance runner and that's what it's about. Yeah, and it's really it's a great song, like it they follow the pace and like the slow down and then the speed up again once he gets a second win. Like, oh, it's a really well done song, but it's about a long distance runner running a marathon by himself. Yeah.
One of the things I haven't gotten around to yet in my recent documentary Binge is I know there's a really good Iron Maiden documentary that came out I think last year or semi recently, and I haven't checked that out yet, but that's on the list, like even higher now sure.
And if you're like, well, okay, how big is Iron Maiden, Well we've got a few stats for you, one chuck back. In twenty twelve, the Queen's sixty year Jubilee, the UK held some polls to say, like to figure out what the best of the best was of the last sixty years. The best British record album of the last sixty years, voted by citizens of the UK was Number of the Beast Iron Maiden.
So just best record.
The best record the Beatles were from Britain. Don't forget all of those guys who were the progenitors of heavy metal were from Britain. Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast was voted the number one record in the last sixty years in Great Britain.
All right, here's my statement on that. Okay, I don't doubt you. I just want to know a little bit more about the robustness of this pole and like, Okay, it's shocking to me that that would be number one over like the Stones or the Beatles or letwipl or just bands that were just way, way, way more popular.
I totally get you, and I triple check that to make sure that that was not just like some misinformed fan like that.
I just want to see the I want to see where they took this poll, like how it was done. That's why I don't want to know.
But they they got almost ten percent of the vote, so it's pretty good.
You're like it was in the parking lot of an Iron Maiden show.
So they've also sold one hundred and thirty million copies of their seventeen albums. I means bad. Even Lady Gaga's a fan.
Right, yeah, I mean I think she was knocked out by their fandom or standem because she was like what I see in an Iron Maidens fan base is what I want for myself. Like they are so wholly dedicated, and that's something I think that's true for a lot of metal bands, but they seem to be even more so than a lot of metal bands.
Yeah, and I mean like world wide. If you go to South America, they can fill a stadium every night for a month. Like people around the world love Iron Maiden. I just think it's great because they're a great band. There's not a bunch of controversy. Controversy, they're not like preoccupied with like bringing the full the full power of Satan to bear on his non believers, like right, They're just actually a lot of their stuff is pretty encouraging,
at the very least super interesting. So they're they like, they're just a good band to be beloved worldwide.
I think totally agree. I still think I'm Judas Priest more. I was listening to British Steel today and they're they're both great. They're kind of side by side for me.
Actually, Okay, I have to like add to my original top five maybe even current top five. I really like Motorhead a lot. Yeah, I don't own a Motorhead T shirt. I really haven't heard much beyond their Asus Spades album, but I love what I hear a Motorhead. I like their whole jam. They're another band that says like, we're not heavy metal.
Yeah, that's true, but they were kind of the progenitors of speed metal. I think in a lot of ways. You know, the Scorpions came out in sixty five, and Hanover I know, recommended the sales of Sharon as a very amazing YouTube thing to go watch if you want to see some pre eighties Scorpions. Okay, def Leppard came out in seventy seven. See this is where Olvia has a couple listed like Van Halen and Blue Oyster Cult and Aerosmith and ac DC that I don't think any of those bands are metal.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. You don't think Van Halen is metal?
Not at all?
Oh, I disagree with you.
Yeah, I think they're not metal at all.
All Right, I'm gonna say that I think that they qualify as metal.
Interesting, have you ever heard David Lee Roth I have? I have ice cream?
Man. Yes, I know that they have other stuff, but I'm saying, like, think they're like the stuff that sounds like metal is metal.
I don't think it sounds like metal at all. I just think they're a rock band.
Have you heard Panama?
Yeah, that didn't sound metal to me at all.
I'm just kidding, Okay. I can't think of a single metal metal song of theirs.
I think it's mostly just.
Just Eddie van Halen's playing that. I'm like, that's metal, man.
Oh see, not to me, that's just virtue virtuostic, right, rock guitar lead to me? I mean. And also, just you know, they didn't sing about those things. There was no darkness, there was no you know, the way they dress, like Eddie van Halen wore overalls on stage.
Hey, Randy Rhodes wore a polka dot like Chippendale's vest. Right, So let's not get into that, all right.
So anyway, just my opinion, I knew that, But let's talk about just the I mean, I guess this is a nice segue into the words heavy metal, because, like I said, people can nitpick this stuff to death what heavy rock was or when it transitioned into metal. There's a sociologist named Dina Weinstein that Livia found that tried to kind of root out the origins of the little literal phrase heavy metal. It was born to be Wild by Steppenwolf, you know, heavy metal, thunder, But that wasn't
talking about music. That was talking about cars and.
Stuff, right, I don't know. Could it could have influenced it to some degree or whatever, but it doesn't seem like the direct answer. Yeah, yeah, it's me. William S Burrows apparently puts up a pretty good argument for the guy who coined heavy metal, or at least put it out there, and that it was adopted to eventually describe that genre of music. It's not at all what he was doing. He had a character from his Nova trilogy
called Uranium Willy, the heavy metal Kid. Okay, I don't know enough about William S Burrow's writing to know if like Uranium Willy was like metal in the metal sense. Yeah, but he also had a drug called heavy metal that appeared in some of his other works, not Naked Lunch, but in other works. That to me makes a You could make a pretty good argument that I would buy that that ultimately maybe led to the use of heavy metal to describe heavy metal. Yeah.
I think both of those things had put it out into this public consciousness as two words that can be said together, but for my money, you got to go with Lester Bangs. This was in nineteen seventy and I think he was running for Rolling Stone at the time. But the legendary rock critic and writer, in one of his reviews in nineteen seventy said he was complaining it was a negative thing. He said, all the heavy metal
robots of years past, of the year past. When he was talking about the albums of nineteen seventy, he was talking about nineteen sixty nine. And he proceeded by a few months a guy named Mike Saunders, eventually known as Metal Mike, who described Humble Pie as a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal laden poop rock band.
Yeah, thank you for changing s to poop. Yeah, but deserve the moral purity of our podcast.
They both use the words heavy metal to describe music, I think for the first time in nineteen seventy.
Yeah, but they were, Yeah, they were negative reviews. That that's possible, I think. Dina Weinstein says like that's a real possibility. But she put something out that I thought was pretty interesting too. She pointed out that a lot of these bands came from Birmingham, England, and Detroit, Michigan,
which apparently were very similar at the time. They're very polluted, dirty, industrial, working class cities, and that the fans of heavy metal also hailed from those areas too, where areas like them, and that they would be familiar with like the feel of heavy metal like that, not the feel, what's the word I'm looking for, the.
Sensibility, No, more like the.
Just like what the term can kind of bring to mind, you know what I'm saying and associating that with music. Yeah, somebody from you know, super nice Town, USA who's experienced with metal is the nails holding their white picket fence together. They might not be able to be like, yeah, heavy metal really describes this music, but the kids in Detroit and Birmingham probably could. And I thought that was an interesting point.
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Oh geez, look at where we are. Why don't we take another break, Okay, and we'll come back and talk about how the genre started to grow and sort of split into subgenres right after this.
This is gonna be fun, okay, Chuck. So, the early seventies or the mid seventies to early eighties gave us the British Wave, the New British wave of heavy metal right laid the foundation. You would call most of that just heavy metal, like it's just so classic. They don't even fit into subgenres. They just gave the world heavy metal. From that point, it just started to split. And one of the ways that it started to split was by spreading, and it didn't spread through radio. Radio was afraid of
heavy metal almost from the outset. So bands were forced to basically say, let's just get out on the road, Let's go to our fans rather than relying on other people to help boost our popularity. And so touring in massive tours became just a part of being a heavy
metal band, especially in the early eighties. Throughout the eighties, and they would make stage shows that people would talk about four years afterwards, like we talked about the Iron Maiden nineteen eighty three Power Slaver eighty four or five Power Slave Tour and what their stage show looked like, Like that's the kind of stuff they were doing.
Yeah, for sure. The eighties. Of course, that's when hair metal comes onto the scene, and that's when I'm an MTV that's when I started getting into it a little bit. Despite my early alternative music leanings and also loving like Billy Joel at the time, stuff like that. Sure, so I was all over the place. But you know, Rat comes along, Motley Crue comes along, your band Poison Cinderella
another band that I love. I mean, we could go through them, La Guns, White Snake, Hanoi, Rocks, Slaughter, Skid Row, Doc and Wasp Warrant Warrant, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister. And we have to mention this band because it was kind of the beginnings of some really dark metal. And that has a band called Merciful Fate, Yeah, from lead singer
King Diamond, who later after Merciful Fate. I think the Merciful Fate was nineteen eighty to eighty four, and then after that King Diamond, which is obviously stage name, went on to form the band King Diamond, and they were very dark, sort of darker metal and used what's known as corpse paint, like the black and white makeup paint on a space. Yes, and very influential early I guess dark metal.
Yeah for sure. The other band that typically gets pointed to is the basis of death metal in particular is Possessed. They were from San Francisco, Okay. They released an album called Seven Churches in nineteen eighty five. That was another one that I was like, where was I What was I doing? Yeah, this is right in my wheelhouse? Like how did I not hear possessed? How did I not hear a venom? Like? I did not this stuff did not cross my path. And this it's like actual legit
death metal, but it's from nineteen eighty five. Death metal wouldn't really start to take off until the later eighties early nineties. Yeah, and we should just say death metal is like that, like you know, the growling like lyrics that you just can't understand. You have to read the
lyrics while you're listening. Yeah, that is death metal. That's like the key characteristic of death metal that anybody could come along and be like, oh, that's different than the other stuff I'm listening to because of.
This, Yeah, for sure. And you know why you didn't know about it is because you had to know the person who knew about it, because it wasn't on the radio. Stuff like that wasn't even on MTV. I mean, maybe maybe you might see something like that as a deep cut on Headbanger's Ball later on, hosted by the Great Ricky rockman. But otherwise you just had to know the dude who was like, hey, man, have you heard this?
Yeah, And so they gave birth to Morbid Angel. Autopsy Cannibal Corpse is a very very famous death metal band from the late eighties and it just keeps going on and on and on. Our longtime listener, I think she still listens. I haven't talked to her in a while. Alisa White Gloves from the band Arch Enemy, Uh huh, she listens, or she used to. But Arch Enemy is a melodic Swedish death metal band. Yeah, it's just a bunch of subgenres put into one. But if you listen
to Elisa singh she's doing that death metal like guttural singing. Yeah, it's just part of death metal, no matter what that genres carved into.
Yeah, for sure, not fully my thing. I was into a little bit of industrial metal that camera around in the mid eighties. Ministry, of course is the band that comes to mind from Chicago, who were a little more of a synthpop They were not what they became for sure early on, but they kind of led the way for the industrial music scene in the mid eighties. When their eighty six album Twitch came out.
Yeah, and that's I went in that direction toward industrial in addition to new wave stuff like I really like Nitzer Ebb and met Beat, Manifesto, Skinny Puppy. None of those will qualify as metal, but I guess Ministry kind of bridge. That was the bridge between metal and just straight up industrial. Godflesh they were another one that was no question industrial metal. And again, go listen to Godflesh's
I Guess first album. I can't remember what it's called, but it's like a black background with a white minimalist kind of face all up in your face, and you'll be like, wait, this is metal, And if you listen to it, you'll say, yes, this is metal. There's a drum machine and you're like, okay, well that seems like cheating. No, they use a drum machine because no human being could play drums at this slow a pace and not like
fall asleep or die from boredom. Right, So they have a really slow tempo but with traditional like distortion and guitars and singing that you would associate with metal, and you put it all together and it is really good.
Yeah. I saw a cool interview with the great Mike Patten of Faith No More and mister Bungle, one of the greatest singers ever in any genre, and he was singing the Praises of Godflesh and I went and listened to a little bit of it and I was like, man, this is like very very heavy stuff.
It is. Oh, it's super super dark. But they were from Birmingham too, so this is like, so Birmingham is to metal what Manchester was to britpop. Yeah. Yeah, Like it just was this center And what's crazy is it was a center for a really long time. I think there's still bands coming out of Birmingham that are no bad. Yeah.
Yeah. The Grammys got on board in nineteen eighty nine and all the wrong ways. They introduced the Best hard Rock slash Metal Performance and Metallica's and Justice for All very famously lost out to Jethrotl. They had a comeback album called Crest of a Knave and everybody immediately was like, Grammys, You've never seen more out of touch with what's going
on in the world and so pretty qui. They were like, oh, maybe we'll split the categories and the next year it was hard Rock, a hard Rock Award and a Metal Award. But they even mess that up. Like, you know, bands like Soundgarden one the metal category and stuff like that, and like they're not metal either.
Well, the Grammys aren't really known for being super in touch with underground stuff. And that's it's interesting because the reason why groups like Soundgarden won the Metal Grammy at the time was because grunge just took over. It actually pushed metal right out of the limelight or like basically starting January first, nineteen ninety, grunge just took over and it stayed that way for years, and the metals started
to kind of come back in a way. New metal came along in the mid to late nineties, so like you had slip Knot and cornco Park, I guess qualifies I'm not either, but I know a lot of people are. Like a lot of people got back into metal thanks to these guys. They basically they were like, hey, you like you like grunge, you like alternative, We're gonna help
transition you back to metal. And then there was a something called the New wave of American heavy metal starting in the early two thousands that took back over from new metal and brought it back to like legit serious metal, like as I Lay Dying, Lamb of God, and of course High End Fire and a bunch of other bands that are still coming out in America and around the world. So metal came back. Whether you like new metal or not, you can thank them for bringing metal back from obscurity
in the late nineties early two thousands. Thank you, Corn, Yeah, thanks a lot. Corn.
Alt metal was a thing too in the in the late nineties and kind of early two thousands. I think people consider a Tool kind of an alt metal band, a band called System of a Down. I listened to some Tool, but they're another band that has a very
very very hardcore loyal following, yeah, for sure. And then progressive metal that kind of I've been around in the eighties, like a band like Queen's Reich, who I never really liked that much, could probably be considered prog metal, as well as a band called Dream Theater, who are also very popular and very have fans that are like super loyal.
I remember listening to Queen's reck Operation mind Crime as like a twelve year old and being like, I don't get it. Yeah, this is where the crime way too grown up for me, right exactly?
You know what the crime is? These lyrics.
Yeah, Pantera was another one that actually kept metal alive during the grunge years. They I did not know this. Pantera started out the Cowboys from Hell, started out as a glam rock band, spandex, big hair and everything, and eventually they shifted into more of a metal sound, and they were one of the pioneers of what's called groove metal, which is essentially what it sounds like. It's catchier metal. I think there's more refrains to it, and I'm just
speaking musically. It's not it has nothing to do with like jam bands or anything like that. It's just as far as metal goes. It's probably the groovyest version of metal you could you could do.
Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate.
A couple other things, Chuck. Did we talk about the Big Four?
Yeah, we talked about the Big Four earlier of thrash bands, which of course Metallica, Megadeath, Anthrax, and Slayer.
Were you into Slayer or Megadeth or Metallica or Anthrax, No, I was.
I got into Metallica at one point when I lived in New Jersey because a friend of mine listened to them, and so I listened to Master Puppets and Ride the Lightning and Injustice for All like those are great records, a little bit of Anthrax here and there, but those generally weren't my thing. Definitely never really listened to Megadeath. I know Dave Mustaine has a has a reputation in
the industry. He was let go of from Metallica, yeah, and hasn't stopped complaining about it for forty three years.
I saw an interview with him that he's where he said like I own that, Like I was, like I had to quit drinking because I was so just agro and violent whenever I did. But yeah, he was not happy about it. But metal fans are happy because he went on to found Megadeath basically to spite Metallica, and they became huge in their own right. But I was
never into them. I really want to be into Slayer, Like I have Rain and Blood on my phone, which is not a super metal thing to say, but it's the truth, and I just like I can listen to it, but I'm not like, damn, this is good, Like I just can't get into Slayer. I've never really been into Mega Deaths, but despite trying to.
When he left, he said, I'll show you, guys, I'll go on to found a band that will never be as good or as popular as you will be.
It's got Seriously, I hope it doesn't stick in his crawl because that is that would be hard to get over.
I think he's kind of well known in the industry. There's a couple of metal people that a lot of metal people don't like. Dave Mustain is one, and then Lars Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica, is another. Even Metallica fans, there's a lot of them that are like, god, Lars, just shut up. Interesting.
What do you think about Yeah, he does, Yeah, because some of them are so like vocal about their opinions and how awesome they are and how terrible other bands are.
Yeah.
Sure, yeah, I'm sure. How about this, Let's say we wrap it up talking a little bit about black metal, and then we'll move on to part two.
What do you think that sounds good?
Okay, so we can't wrap before we talk about black metal, which was something that also emerged out of thrash, or actually I think it emerged out of death metal, to tell you the truth. But where death metal is like guttural, black metal is screaming. Essentially, it's just a higher pitched of not understandable lyrics. You have to read the lyrics along with it. But it is so death metal is like gory and like just go look at Cannibal Corpses Butchered at Birth album covering. You'll get an idea of
what death metal is about. Yeah, black metal is legit the kind of satanic metal that the censors of the nineteen eighties and the pastors of the satanic panic were actually scared of that didn't exist yet. Black metal is that so.
Does like is Merciful Fate and King Diamond do they are they thrown into that group.
I think the progenitors of black metal were Venom all the way back in nineteen eighty one. They were actually part of the new wave of British heavy metal. They like they had a picture of Baphomet in an upside down star on the cover, right, so I could see
suburban parents being actually scared of Venom. Bathory from Sweden they were another one from nineteen eighty four, and then Mayhem is the one that like took black metal into like the actual like this is kind of scary realm and because they actually did stuff in real life that involved like death and suicide and murder and church arson and stuff like that. It was like the Norwegian black metal in particular there scene at least it was kind
of dangerous. It's really just you can't say that that's not true.
Well, yeah, like you said, there was a literal murder in the band Mayhem, and I will issue a huge trigger warning and encourage you not to go look this up. But you can't talk about Mayhem without talking about the worst album cover of all time. Down of the Black Hearts is a photograph. It was a bootleg album but became very famous because it showed a photograph that the band took of an image of their lead singer right
after he had died by suicide by shotgun. And it's awful. Yeah, no other way to describe it, but just horrific.
It's essentially a close up and it's exactly what you would think it looked like. But like that was their album cover, a bootleg, like you said, true, but the picture was taken by one of Mayhem's band members, Uronymous, and apparently arrange the scene to make it a better looking photo, and hadn't even like contacted the cops yet to say like, hey, my friend killed himself. He was taking pictures of it instead, so like this was like
this was this is black metal. Well there, it's also rife with white supremacists and I'm not so I don't. I'm sure positive that there are black metal bands out there that are not down with all of that. Yea, they are still really good, but I would guess that they're not the majority. And I don't mean to put down the whole thing and sound like a pearl clutching
like parent, because I'm not. I'm just trying to get across like how like legitimate what these guys are saying is, and like if you read the lyrics, they're like, Wow, this is really nuts, man, it's cool. And I don't actually know where these guys fall, like if they're white supremacists or anything, but I know that they are exemplary of Norwegian or Scandinavian black metal called Emperor, and they have a song called The Loss and the Curse of Grace.
I think it's got a great video, like it's it's a really cool song. Read the lyrics along with the song and you'll be like, Okay, I understand black metal that's a great entree to it. I think, all right, I'll do it, Okay, but I don't I'm not really into the sound because I've read that it's deliberately meant to be noisy and put off people like me. Squares, Yeah, just let's just say it. Yes, squares who are from Scandinavia.
Yeah, yeah, all right, that's a super sized part one. I think we'll probably have the supercized part two. And there's also going to be a fun little short stuff this week. So I guess we should just call this metal week. And we don't do listener mails at the end of a part one, right, No, no.
We don't.
So take us home, baby.
Okay you ready. Yeah, we are gonna stop. We are gonna stop. We are gonna we are gonna we are gonna stop. Stop stop stop, we are gonna stop here.
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