Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too for part two of our episodes on heavy metal the Music. Sorry all you ken majors who showed up with different expectations.
Would you like to see the pope on the end of the rope? Do you think he's a fool?
What is that?
That's Sabbath which my brother always laughed at that line which it's on. I think it's on Master of Reality. I don't know the name of the song. I think I said end of the rope, end of a rope. Obviously.
I'll bet your brother thought that it's funny.
He did. Yeah, I think that's the only thing he knows about Black Sabbath, which is hysterical.
Some of it is pretty comical, you know.
Yeah, I mean, and I guess let's go ahead and kick off part two with talking about Ozzie, because this is a section where we're going to talk about some some contra Ozzie and his day certainly had a few of them. He was kicked out of Black Sabbath in the late seventies because he partied too hard for Black Sabbath even he was replaced by the great Ronnie James
Dio and went on to have a solo career. But there are a couple of things that happened in his life, notably biting the heads off of things that gained him a lot of attention. At one CBS sales convention, he was supposed to release these live doves and instead he bit the heads off of them. And the story has changed a lot over the years, so depending on who you're talking to is what version. But he bit the head off of one to shock people in a room, and apparently was being let out, bit the head off
the other. There are also people that said that they were not alive at the time. The same thing when he bit the head off of a bat in Des Moines nineteen eighty two on stage when somebody threw a bat on stage right.
Yeah, And somebody tracked down the guy who threw the bat and he said that bat had been dead for days.
Yeah, Mark Neil and I don't know.
What is worse, biting the head off of a live bat or biting the half of a bat that's been sitting around dead for a couple of days.
I I don't know, flip a coin, buddy.
Either way, I've I've reached a point in my life where I can't even take talking about like that. Yeah, that's the way. I just don't kill the dog's That's where I've gotten to in life.
No, I'm with you, you know. Yeah, I mean he snorted live ants beside a swimming pool on tourd Motley Crue and I feel bad for those ants.
Yeah, exactly what did they do? Like, you know, nothing? I think Ozzie was a cool dude in a lot of ways, but he was also very hard to get around, and that was one reason why I got kicked out of Black Sabbath. Like some people like Dave Mustain, like Ozzie, like their bandmates were partying as hard as they were, sometimes harder, but they didn't turn into evil. Yeah, who would like get in your face or try to kill you, or like try to do something horrible and like ruin
everybody's time. That's how you would get kicked out of a heavy metal band, by being such a jerk that your bandmates are like, we can't put up with this anymore. We're going to replace you. Yeah.
I think that was definitely the case with Mustaane. I think Ozzie was a little more. His reliability became an issue.
Oh is that right?
Yeah? I think that was a deal. But we should talk a little bit. I know we covered it in the Satanic Panic episode, but you can't have a metal episode without talking a little bit about the Parents Music Resource Center the PMRC in nineteen eighty five, led by Tipper Gore, al Gore's wife. At one point, you know, they own a mission to clean up music into it at the very least to get ratings on record albums.
So at one point they released their Filthy fifteen of the filthiest fifteen songs, and nine out of the fifteen were either metal or hard rock bands.
Yeah, I mean def Leppard, Come on.
I mean they're they're considered metal, but I don't know what song that would have even been.
No, that's what I'm saying, not whether or not they're metal. Same with the CDC and Twisted's sister, Like, what are these guys singing about that you need to censor? Like give me a break, Venom and Merciful Fate again. I get why suburban parents were scared of these guys. They were like legit like, hey, let's talk about Satan and how Brady is and how much you suck religious people. So yes, I'm sure, and I'm not saying like, yeah, they deserve to be censored. I get that one. But
Mandonna Prince def Leppard, like it's just it was. It just goes to show you how preposterous the whole thing was. But yeah, a lot of people say it worked. I mean, that's how we ended up with the warning explicit lyrics sticker, which actually helped a lot of hip hop groups sell more records.
You mean the Badge of Honor exactly. Yeah.
But some people say that MTV actually kind of was under pressure to stop showing as much heavy metal, and that heavy metal got pushed a little bit out of the mainstream. Yeah, but instead on Tonight like the two hour version of Hebbanger's Ball every week, which is not
a lot compared to what it used to be. Like, I don't know if we said, but Iron Maiden had not one, but two videos played on MTV in the first twenty four hours that MTV was on the air, and I think they were played more than once, and the first one was sandwiched in between Rod Stewart's Sailing and Ario Speedwagons Keep On Loving You.
Yeah, I mean the rotation for MTV was eclectic, for sure, and that's kind of what people liked about it for the most part, because it was way more eclectic than FM radio, even because that was generally genre and they didn't jump around from Madonna to Iron Maiden on radio. Now for the most part. I mean, maybe there might be some like maybe k Rock was doing something like that, but generally you had to go to MTV to get
metal at all. And then when they sequestered it to Headbanger's Ball, initially I think it was called the Heavy Metal Mania hosted by de Snyder, but then it became Headbanger's Ball with once again the great Ricky Rockman. Love that guy. At least then metal heads had a place to go where you could really sink in for a couple of hours, you know.
For sure. The same with Member one hundred and twenty minutes.
For New Rivers, that was Matt Benfield.
Yeah, you want to see a bow House video, that's where you go.
Yeah, for sure.
And if you want to know our metal bona fides people, we've been in the same room as d Snyder. He nodded to us once in passing in a hallway.
That's right.
So yeah, Headbanger's Ball also had some tours in North America when it was really big eighty seven, eighty nine, and ninety two, so.
They really a festival thing.
Yeah, pretty much cool. Yeah, And then I think also we should we should mention too that one of the things about metal is that it has been and I think still remained pretty white, working class male for the most part, but it's definitely gotten more diverse than it was in the mid eighties.
Say yeah, I mean there weren't a lot of bands. I mean, there were bands like Bad Brains that was way more punk but had metal sort of sounds with their guitar love Bad Brains, body Count came around. They were I mean, I think they were for sure kind of speed.
Metal, yeah, but with with iced tea wrapping.
Yeah. I saw them at that Lallapalooza. I'm not gonna include Living Color at all. Does Sorry, Olivia, there.
No Vernon Reid's guitar playing is metal?
I don't know. I listened to the song Glamour Boys, I mean, come on, well, that's kind of hair metally Glamour Boys, is it? Hey?
Hey, speaking of hair metal, I forgot one great hair metal band, let's hear it that came out.
Oh, I thought you're gonna say Europe.
No, Europe's definitely in there with the Final Count. Yeah, No, the Darkness. They're a great hair metal band, even though they're like, I guess, tongue in cheek. I think they know that their tongue in cheek. But they're really great as far as hair metal music goes. There talented musicians.
Yeah, I think there was a wave around then where people started to kind of try to evoke that thing again, and The Darkness was in that group.
And then Fishbone that was another all black band that you could make a case had some definite metal tendencies for sure.
Yeah. Not Living Color, definitely Fishbone. I loved Fishbone. Truth and Soul is one of the great albums of all time, and I saw them several times in concert.
Okay, and then also Living Color featuring Vernon Reed. And we talked a little bit about women too, right. We talked about Elisa White Gloves from Arch Enemy. She's actually the second woman singer for Arch Enemy. There was a singer named Angela Gossau who was I think I replaced the original male singer of Arch Enemy again, a melodic Swedish death metal band. And then there's another metal queen out there who at least used to be a stuff you should know listener named Nita Strauss.
Yeah, Nita's great. Met her backstage because she was kind enough to invite us to the Motley Cruz show where she plays still plays with Alice Cooper band, And I met Nita and she's super awesome and I think she's since gotten married, So congratulations on that.
Yeah, she's also in Iron Maidens, the Iron Maiden all women Iron Maiden cover band.
Yeah, for sure. And guess what that Judas pre show I'm going to, Anita will be there because Alice Cooper's opening up.
Awesome, dude. Well hopefully she hears this.
I hope so, because we're not in touch or anything. I just remember she was super sweet and was big into science. That's really cool man kind of a science. Yeah, that's great guitar.
Player for sure. Speaking of Jewish Priest, are you going to dress like a leather daddy to the Judas Priest show.
I'm not going to dress like a leather daddy because I don't have those clothes and I wouldn't want to Just what do you call that appropriate? Like a legit style for a demographic, But yeah, I mean that's definitely a heavy metal The leather and studs is a heavy metal trope like no.
Other where did it come from, Chuck?
I mean probably Rob Halford and going to underground gay clubs in London would be my guest.
Yes, that's right. All of the like black leather, metal studded look that permeates heavy metal still in part to this day, came from gay BDSM clubs that Rob Halford, as far as I know, the only out LGBTQ medal singer went to while he was still very much in the closet.
Yeah. I think it's great. It's amazing. I can't wait to see. I'll send you videos and stuff, Okay, please do Yeah, just you, not everybody. That's maybe I'll post some on my Instagram account at Chuck the Podcaster, so be looking for that this fall.
Okay, fine, so Chuck. Speaking of tropes like dressing like a leather daddy to be a metal god, there's actually a few others that are. They're not necessarily like oh, this is a characteristic of metal. They're just things that bands have done and copied each other on over the years that now people say like, this is a characteristic of metal, right.
Yeah, I mean I have to mention the decorative umlaut. It's one of the funniest, kind of greatest things and one of the biggest except for I think Blue Oyster Cult, who I don't consider metal. They have the umlout over the oh and the oyster, but it became very metal. There's no other way to make anything seem metal in writing than to There's certain fonts that we'll talk about, but if you throw a couple of decorative umwouts in there, it just looks more metal.
Yeah. I think even Scandinavian bands that have their own thing, which is the the forward slash going through the oh yeah, I think they actually in some cases place that with an umlaut. That's how metal the umlaud is.
Oh wow.
Okay, And apparently a rock critic named Richard Metzler claims that he was the one who told Blue Oyster Cult to use that to use in umlaut. Unnecessarily, people say that Blue Oyster Cult was the one who did that like you said. And Richard Meltzer or Metzler also claims to be the one who suggests that they use more cow bell in their music.
Oh man, I didn't see that coming somehow.
Yeah, makes me very happy.
Very nice. Classical music is an inspiration is definitely. I don't even call it a trope. It's just a thing in metal, the theatricality, the virtuosity and that technical ability. You know, you'll find that many heavy metal league guitarists were schooled in classical not the least of which is the great Randy Rhodes, who we'll talk about later. And Eddie van Halen, you know, took you know, classical piano lessons and stuff like that when he was a kid
piano player. Yeah, not a metal god, but yeah, so classical for sure.
Yeah. The thing is one thing to understand about metal across the board, in any genre or subgenre, is there are very few bands where that make music where you can suck. You essentially have to be an expert, extremely talented musician to play metal. Even the stuff that you're like, what is this? If you actually stopped and listened to the layers, the composition, the time signatures like this, is really complex, complicated music in every single subgenre. So like
metal as a whole. As a group, metal musicians tend to be about as talented as you'll find in any rock outfit by far.
Yeah, they all have chops. That was another thing that got me a little bit into metal was I started playing guitar when I was thirteen and immediately subscribed to Guitar Player magazine, which was I mean, that's how I knew about all those guitar players. Emily always makes fun of me when she's like, uh, Judas Priest said, I'll go Glenn tipped it in KK Downing, and I can
name all these guitar players. It's from pouring over that magazine. Like, I wouldn't even that into Judas Priest, but I knew these guys from these articles.
Yeah. Yeah, I still to this day lament that I had a terrible teacher for electric guitar on my Salmon colored I don't even remember what kind of guitar it was, but I remember I complained about him before and someone who had that same teacher wrote in and was like, I know exactly what you're talking about. That guy sucked.
Oh man, who knows what could have happened.
They even told me the band. I can't remember what the band was. I wouldn't name check him anyway, because I don't want to shame the guy. But he was a terrible guitar teacher and I was really into it at the time.
Well that I got a BC Rich candy Apple read bc Rich guitar because of that early sort of hard rock influence. Because it's kind of a corny guitar. Now, did not get a warlock For people who know BC Rich guitars, that's one of the most metal looking guitars ever.
Oh is it like the triangle, the flying triangle? No?
No, no, that's a flying bee.
Oh okay, bitch, they don't call it the flying triangle.
It can. The flying bee can definitely be metal. But it also has been used in a lot of classic rock.
Well, what's the one you're talking about.
I'll send you a picture of it. It's you'd know it as soon as you saw it. Okay, you probably don't have your phone though, right, Oh, there it is. I'll send it to you and you'll text me after what else?
Check anything else?
Well, I mean you got to mention Lord of the Rings because we kind of joked about it. But Lord of the Rings has been in a lot of metal songs, like figuratively, like thematically and literally yes, so.
Yeah, there's like the like led Zeppelin song about the Darkest Steps of Mortar, and all sorts of other stuff too and throughout like their whole catalog. I think who who else was well known for that. I think Megadeth had a song that was based on Aragon's speech in the Return of the King. Like it's a really recurring it is. It's a trope. There's no other way to put it. It's been in heavy metal from the outset still through today. People are referencing it in some ways.
In some cases, like like there's a group called Bursom. It was a solo project by varg Vicarnes. He was imprisoned for murdering former bandmate Uronymous from Mayhew and then he was also charged with burning down churches in the He's from black metal scene anyway, does not talk about Lord of the Rings stuff at all, and yet it's still from Lord of the Rings. Bursom is But this, I think kind of gets across how black metal. The Bursom project was. Bursom in Lord of the Rings means
darkness in the black speech that's spoken in Mordar. So it's dark in the darkest place, and it means darkness in that dark place language. That's how That's how dark that black metal was.
And their album cover is Banta black.
No light can escape from it.
We should also mention we'll take you break here in a second. We should also mention the Gothic font I mentioned fonts. You gotta have the right font on your metal album. Sabbath definitely was kind of one of the first. I think their album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath used the old English black letter typeface, and there's nothing spooky you're looking than black letter, you know.
No for sure. But what's hilarious is it's just evolved and evolved and evolved to where very frequently you run across a metal album cover and you'll be like, what, what is the band's name? I can't I can't decipher this at all.
I can't even read it.
It's just so tangled, like I can't tell what it says. Sometimes when you find out the band's name, you'll be like, oh, okay, I see it now, But other times I still don't see it.
It's pretty funny. It's like a it's very spinal tab.
Yeah, yes it is. Yeah, and they definitely should at least get name checked in this episode.
Right, yeah. Absolutely. In fact, just today at their neutral tailor for the Spinal Tap sequel dropped. Uh yeah, d it doesn't look good that great. But I don't know, I'm gonna definitely see it. I'm withholding judgment.
It just it doesn't look very good.
No, I think it was just I don't know. I mean, it's a good enough concept, like get the old band back together for one more show. So it's not like the idea isn't solid, like that's a very like realistic thing for an old metal band. I just I don't know. We'll see, all right, So enough of fine, so let's take a break and we'll talk about some brain stuff and album covers and social views and all that fun stuff right after this, all.
Right, Chuck. So, if you are not a metal listener, but you're aware of heavy metal just in general, you're probably associated with satanic stuff. And again, yeah, in some cases you're absolutely right, and not like Satanic in the Satanic temple or Satanism, like Satan the folkloric mythological evil one, like some bands are super super into that, right, But there's also a lot of other stuff. Remember we talked about iron mat and having all these different themes to
their songs. One of the things that metal is not necessarily known for, but it's a big part of it. They have like pretty strong social views, and if you really kind of drill down into them, it's essentially super populist, anti establishment, anti fascism, anti authoritarium messages. Frequently anti aggression too, especially the government on the government's half, the government being aggressive.
You can find that throughout the entire metal community, and I think a lot of people kind of overlook it.
Yeah, I mean cast aside the black metal scene, which can there, like you mentioned in I guess it was part one, where there's a lot of white supremacist threads and things like that and far right ideology. If you cast that aside, cast a side eighties hair metal, which just saying about chicks, one might make the argument that heavy metal is a very sort of low key leftist musical genre.
Yeah, Like okay, So take Metallica for example, starting with Ride the Lightning, the title songs back from nineteen eighty four, it's it's basically about like how the it questions the government's state monopoly on violence, right, like their moral right
to execute anybody. That's pretty anti authoritarian. It's also pretty libertarian throughout, So if this, if the lyrics aren't left leaning in general, they also tend to be libertarian too, and their whole album and Justice for All, song after song after song has a huge robust political message to it, basically across the entire album.
Yeah, for sure. The song one Is is an anti war song, and Justice for All is about the corruption of the justice system. I the Beholder, that's about the repression of freedom of speech and expression.
What else The shortest straws about fascism, which went writing through Blackened is a straight up overt environmentalist song.
Oh yeah, you know they literally talk about like poisoning mother nature.
Yeah. And you find this like it's not just Metallica. You find this throughout throughout the metal community. Like, even if it's not like clear immediately if you actually stop and listen to the subtext of what the song is saying. It's usually about the powerful and the elite being served
at the expense of the masses. The populist masses. That is essentially what you can boil almost every song again, saving black metal and death metal too down into like that's the message of just about every metal song at its heart, at least yeh one song on the album It's going to be like that.
Yeah, even old Dave mustay in with Megadeth. I mean, peace sells, but who's buying. Yeah, he's he's singing about peace, just like the hippies and the sixties might have been, just through a very different, you know, sort of genre.
Yeah, and some people actually credit him for promoting metal music to have messages. He was taking a shot clearly at hair bands too at the same time, but there was an interview with him in the La Times in nineteen eighty six where he said a band should be aware of what's going on instead of being so wrapped up in themselves. C. C.
Deville, that's apparely ironic.
Yeah, that's a pretty misname, yeah for sure.
And then you know you have cases where like Pantera's former frontman Phil and Selmo was caught on video shouting white power on stage and giving a Nazi salute, and like the metal community was outraged, Like people came out, you know, speaking out against them, not the least of which was Scottian of Anthrax saying like, you know, that's a vile thing to do, and they were, you know, it was heartening to see that kind of thing, you know.
Yeah, for sure. I mean it was about as close to being canceled as you can get in the metal community, which isn't really a cancel culture, you.
Know, is that not a thing?
No? And then it actually goes all the way to the far left, and this is much less typical. But you have like grindcore bands like Napalm Death that came out of the hardcore punk tradition of being very socially left, even into like the anarchist territory essentially. But for the most part it's probably center left, maybe libertarian. Is the bulk of the messages that you'll find in metal music.
Can we talk about how your brain does on heavy metal? Because they've actually done some studies that found and of course, you know, we should say there's there are people that struggle with mental health where music and certainly metal has had some negative impacts. Yeah, and there are examples of that. But you know, aside from that, it seems like metal actually like kind of tests and taxes your brain in
a good way. Maybe taxes in the right way. It challenges your brain in a good way, yes, because it immediately starts firing to start making sense of this sort of musical puzzle and all these complex rhythms and time signatures that kind of go hand in hand.
Right, Yeah, so your brain basically is being worked out, like it's not just just sitting there like being vibed at, Like it's working trying to decode all this stuff. And yet paradoxically, for a lot of people, they report that
it actually helps improve their focus. I think people with ADHD and people on the autism spectrum tend to report that heavy metal actually helps them focus better, which is pretty pretty interesting because if your brain's decoding that, you would think that it would be focused on that, but it's not. It's doing it can do that separately, apparently. And then also emotionally it seems to have positive effects too.
Yeah, for sure. I mean there are so many, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of heavy metal fans that maybe desponded or angry or frustrated or sad or something, and this music provides a real outlet you know whether they're just in their room on their headphones or they're driving around in their car through their you know, weird suburbia that they don't relate to, or where they're going to a concert, and it provides a real legitimate release for that stuff.
Yeah, and that's not just like anecdotal. There have actually been studies that have been published in peer review journals that show that there are positive emotional effects that are experienced by metal heads from listening to metal music. There's one from twenty thirteen that studied four hundred and fourteen British metal heads and they found a mixed bag. Right. They found that they had a higher openness to experience, which is one of the big five personality traits generally
considered positive. They have more negative attitudes toward authority. I can't really disagree with that if you are questioning the authority of a corrupt government.
Right, Yeah, for sure.
Lower self esteem. Didn't quite understand that that might just be that metal music attracts people with lower self esteem. I don't think it gives people lower self esteem.
Yeah, I think that's the case.
Greater need for uniqueness, love it, and then lower religiosity religiosity. That's not very surprising either. You know. I was like, are they playing them? Like, are they confused? And they think Van Halen's metal and that's what they're playing, like the nineteen eighty four album. But it turns out like they're playing like legit metal stuff, like they played As I Lay Dying, Cradle of Faith Overkill, like actual metal, and they were still getting these results, which I found heartening.
Yeah, for sure. There was another study I thought was pretty interesting from twenty nineteen. It was thirty two fans of metal, forty four non fans of metal, and they found and this one's important because I think, especially in the eighties with the PM rec there was a lot of just gobbedygook going around that like it's going to make your child something, it's going to make them into this,
it's going to make them violent. And in that study in twenty nineteen, they found that metal heads have the same negative bias toward seeing violent imagery that people who don't listen to metal have. Even if they're listening to metal that has violent lyrics and themes, it doesn't then transfer like if they see an image of violence, they're still like, oh, I don't want to see that.
Right exactly. I don't actually want to do that.
Right, I just want to yeah exactly, it's just rocks.
Yeah exactly. It just keeps going on and on. I think the point of these studies, especially if you compile them together like weed, it is that there's this such a dumb misunderstanding or or yeah, wrong interpretation of what metal is and what it does. Again, accepting black metal, they're definitely the outliers here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So we talked a little bit about the genres and subgenres, but we'll dig in a little more here because it gets really confusing and I don't know many of these bands at all, but I feel like we should just mention a few of these subgenres, right.
Do you want to? You want to go through this kind of anatomy of just a single subgenre.
I mean I feel like, I mean, we're all those under math corps.
Yes, this is where mathcore came from.
Oh yeah, sure.
Okay, So mathcore is a type of metal music, very very very niche subgenre, and it's so niche that the bands of this subgenre have names like the Tony Danza tap Dance Experience, where the Dillinger, Escape Plan, Okay, super niche and mathcore is a combination of metalcore and mathrock. And I know you know what mathrock is, right, Yeah.
I used to listen to a little bit of that in college. That is rock music that's very complex musically, a lot of weird time signatures, a lot of starts and stops. If you've heard mathrock, and you may have heard it and not known it was mathrock, but you just thought, like, like, what an interesting odd band.
So you've got mathrock mathrock, you said, with its interesting time signatures and very technical playing that evolved from prog rock like Rush, Genesis, King Crimson, Yes, from the seventies, right, yeah, and then mathrock was also influenced by jazz. That's just mathrock. That's one part that mathcore is made up of. On the other side, you've got metalcore, the other half of math core. It's a combination of hardcore and extreme metal.
You might say, oh, okay, hardcore punk, no wrong. Hardcore is different if you're a purist, Yeah, from hardcore punk hardcore is like bands like Code Orange Vein. Hardcore punk is minor Threat, black Flag, They're very close to really they sound similar, but they're they're different subgenres. So metal core is hardcore and extreme metal, which is a big umbrella term for a bunch of other types of metal.
Too, Okay, and extreme metal is also under mathcore.
Yes, so extreme metal is one of the bases, or is the basis of metal core. And there's different types of subgenres in extreme metal. You've got death metal, black metal, progressive metal kind of like prog rock but metal, doom metal, stoner metal. These are all varieties of extreme metal. And so all of those can have their own core right, their own version of metal core. And so probably progressive extreme metal with hardcore, that version of metal core probably
eventually led to metal core. This is how divided in and cut up the genre of heavy metal is. That's how niche it's gotten into. And again some people will come along and be like this sounds just like progressive metal to me, be like, no, it's mathcore, get it right, you know, that's essentially like I just find it fascinating that people have gotten that, Yeah, yeah, that into the weeds.
And I've seen in a couple of places, probably on Redded or something, where people are like, this is ridiculous. Let's just take a big step back and get out of this mindset because it's getting kind of weird.
Yeah. I mean, there are definitely some genres that have subgenres, but I don't think there's anything that approaches metal even like, I don't know, even hip hop has a lot of subgenres, but I don't think it comes close to metal even.
No, No, I don't think anything does. I mean, you can basically take anything and give it several subgenre title suffixes or prefixes, and you probably have an actual like metal subgenre.
Yeah, agreed.
I just found that interesting. I appreciate you taking that little diversion with me.
I love it. All right, we'll take another break here and come back and finish up the part two of the two part duology, and we're gonna talk about album covers and the death of Randy Rhoades right after this
all right promised talk of album covers. Want to give a big, big shout out to a guy named Blake Massey who wrote a really great article on the metalpit dot org, and also shout out Cherry Thomas from the Aquarian because Blake wrote a really really great piece on heavy metal album art and you know, basically kind of pointing out and making the case that that's where it all starts. Is like being in the record store seeing this imagery Black Sabbath kind of starting at all with
just dark imagery, very provocative stuff. A lot of times, you know, like sometimes they would hire out just a company, but I feel like, especially with metal, many times the band is very closely involved in the vision for the album cover, because I mean, album comes are always important, but it feels like metal they're even more important.
Yeah, it's just part of the experience, you know. Yeah, like you buy the poster even if you're like me and you're into Iron Maiden's poster art not really their music.
Yet, Yeah, because it's legit, amazing art. I mentioned in Part one. I think about the Black Sabbath self titled debut album in nineteen seventy one of the most terrifying album covers I've ever seen. It's just a it's a photograph. It's got this cloaked figure. It looks like a woman state in front of this old like you know, torn down or not torn down, but just sort of dilapidated building.
And this was in nineteen seventy when like psychedelia and colorful album art was a thing, and it was just very very creepy looking.
Yeah, but it also said hey, everybody, like we're going in a different direction here, check this out. Like I can't imagine what that landed like, it must have just looked so different. Like think about led Zeppelin's album covers. The grimmest one they had was the Hindenburg explosion in black and white. Yeah, you know, like that was as grim as their album covers got. Like this is this
is spooky, Like it's definitely different. I just think that's really cool, like to think back of just how some people must have seen this and been like I'm reborn.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, there's a range like everything that you can look at something like the cover of Number of the Beasts. We already talked about the great Derek Riggs and Eddie their mascot, but if you look at their album covers Iron Maidens especially, they're just they're so intricate and there's so much to see when you sit down on your floor with your headphones
on as a teenager. But they can also be a little more simplistic, like if you look at the great cover for Metallica's Master of Puppets from nineteen eighty six. You know, a little can say a lot. It's just there. First of all, you gotta have a great logo, and Metallica's logo is always great. It is, as is Iron Maiden's Judas Priests has always had a great logo. But it's that Metallica logo and then that that cemetery with those crosses connected to the puppet strings. It's just like
kind of chilling to see. So shout out to Metallica and Peter Minch who designed that one.
And we talked about while I talked about Rain and Blood earlier, and its album cover is actually it's art like it's it's very clearly like a painting. I can't remember who did it. I'm not actually sure, oh Larry Carroll. And it's basically hell. It's just a landscape of hell. There's also the foreground in the laughter. There's some heads floating in a lake of blood. There's a goat on a thrown residing over this horrible place. The Pope is
wandering around wondering what the hell's going on. But it has its own style even it's not like like if you look at Holy Diver, the Dio album cover. It's almost like it's cartoon realism. Almost this is this is art. It's like a style of a painter that the rain and Blood cover is, which makes it even more unsettling, I think.
Yeah for sure. Yeah, that Holy Diver cover is great. You know, Dio has an amazing logo and they also have a mascot named Murray.
Did you know that?
I didn't. I guess now that I think of some Dea artwork, I realized that I've seen that mask person. I did not know that his name was murdered.
I didn't either. He reminds me of the Black Spy from Spy versus Spot. He's just not wearing the hat.
Yeah, yeah, that's I never really thought about that.
I didn't him there until I saw him. Yeah.
Just go check out the Holy Diver cover. It's great because Murray is kind of standing up, you know, behind a mountain, whipping a chain that's wrapped around a priest who is in the ocean with the waves lapping, and he's, you know, clearly struggling to stay alive and deal.
By the way he took over for after Ozzie left Black Sabbath. He I think it was him immediately after Ozzie, Right, yeah, it was, but he was also in another band with an album cover that we talked about before. Rainbow. Their album cover for Rising is one of my favorite, not even just metal album covers, just album cover in general. It's got a very pretty rainbow on it.
It is very pretty guns n' roses we should talk about. I mean, so, I don't really throw them in in the metal crowd, but I think maybe early on they might have been thrown in that group of hair metal. But you know, very famously, their original Appetite for Destruction
artwork was very controversial for obvious reasons. You know, trigger warning here because it's drawn, you know, like a cartoon, but it depicts a sexual assault that's happened from a robot, and people were like, we can't put this on our shelves. Record stores were saying that. So Geffen Records was like, yeah,
maybe we are going a little too far here. They put that on the inside cover sleeve and then ended up with an iconic cover as a result that Again it's drawn like a animated sort of drawing, but it's that Celtic cross with each band member's head at various points on the cross and again another great logo it is?
It turned out pretty good. I heard Geffen's first idea was to put a nice Price sticker over the offensive painting.
Is that a joke?
It is?
Okay? I mean it wouldn't surprise me.
Remember those stickers, the nice Price.
That's right. I do want to mention the one more though, before we get to Randy Rhod's Quiet Riot, because they were the very first metal band to hit number one on the charts.
With which one Metal Health or Come On Feel the Noise or both?
Well? Metal Health that was the album Come On Feel the Noise was on that album.
Yeah, but they also released the song metal Health as a single.
Right, that was also on that album?
Right? So which one reached number one first? Or do you mean their whole album reached number one?
Yes?
I got it finally everywhere you can stop screaming at your speakers.
Yeah. They they're the first metal band to have a number one record. Metal Health came out and kind of changed the game, and it featured the man in the Iron mask very famously. It's a pretty cool album cover and that guy was in the videos as well.
I've always wanted to play that album during seeding for one of our shows. But those two songs are really the only good ones on there. The rest are just slimy. Yeah, so I've always skipped it. But yeah, metal Health is a great song, which is ironic. It's bang your head metal Health with Dragon Mad. I think he says it just like that. It's funny. It's a very slow song, so I mean you can bang your head to it, but you do it very slowly.
That's right.
So Chuck, you you had said you specifically wanted to end this on a huge downer, and I think you've really knocked it out of the park with your choice to talk about Randy Rhodes and his untimely death at age twenty five.
Yeah. I mean, I think we both had our kind of big things we wanted in here. Yours was iron maiden of mine was the death of Randy Rhodes because it was one of the saddest things to happen to music. A big shout out to Rex Thompson, he wrote a great piece on it for Live for Live music dot Com.
But Randy Rhodes was a great kid. He was a very soft spoken guy, a virtuoso from the jump as a teenager, and so much so that when apparently when he was a kid practicing so much, his mom like called a doctor when it was like can this hurt my son's fingies? Like could this cause permanent damage to his little fingies.
I've read also that she was a piano player, so she must have been he must have really been playing. Yeah, So he formed Quite Right. I had no idea about this. My only understanding quite Right was from Metal Health onward. Well, all right, let's just be honest. It was Metal Health, that's it, right, So he formed Quiet Riot back in nineteen seventy three. I had no idea that Randy Rhodes was in Quite Right, or that Quite Right had been around ten full years before Metal Health came out.
He was a child basically, and same you know, Kevin Duburrow is a singer and everything. But they signed to CBS Records. The band was kind of taking a different direction than he thought, like, I'm better than what we're doing, and he was right, and he left the band, was pretty frustrated, and he got a call that Ozzy Osbourne had left Sabbath and was forming a new band. And as the story goes, he auditioned for a very hungover Ozzy Osbourne and was warming up with some scales and
Ozzy was like, you got the job, all right? Pretty great?
Yeah, and that was it. So he became, i mean just an absolute legend thanks to his stint with Ozzie. Right, was Ozzy fantist Ozzy Osbourne?
Yeah, it was like Ozzy Osbourne.
Ozzy Osbourne and the dow Wops or the five Dimes or something like that.
No, it was just him. And you know, the saddest part about all this is that he was he really awoke something in Ozzie and became very very good friends with he and his wife. I guess they weren't even married at the time, but his eventual wife Sharon, who I saw at a restaurant in la last year, by the way, but he lived with them when he was
in England and was part of the family. Basically a very playful, spirited, really nice kid and just absolute just slayer on the guitar until a very very sad day in nineteen eighty two.
Yeah, it is terribly sad. It was so unnecessary. Randy Rose. Yeah, and again like this guy's finally starting to hit the stride that he has known he could get to his whole life.
He was he was crazy trained. You know everyone's heard crazy Train, that's Randy Road.
Yeah. So and he was also, like you said, he was a good guy. Like people just loved him, right, So he was twenty five at the time. It was the day after a show in Knoxville, Tennessee. The tour bus had made it out of Tennessee through Georgia safely into Florida, and they stopped in a town called Leesburg, Florida, to repair their bus, which makes sense because Leesburg, Florida is well known as the bus repair capital of Florida.
And so they decided to take the whole day off the day they were going to spend the night in Leesburg. So they were just messing around that day. And again, they had a show the night before, and everybody was either hungover or still messed up from the night before. Apparently, Randy Rhads and Ozzie It had an argument backstage at the Knoxville show because Randy Rhodes was concerned about Ozzie's
behaviors drinking. He was like, you're going to die young, You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up. Ozzy didn't like that, so he stormed off and they hadn't made up yet because Ozzie was still sleeping even and Randy was now awake and people were messing around in Leesburg.
Yeah, he was sleeping on the bus. So the bus driver, he was a former commercial pilot. His name was Andrew Aycock, and there was a Beachcraft Bonanza propeller plane in nineteen fifty seven Beachcraft on the property, and he was like, hey, I can fly that thing. Let's take it first. Ben the plane was unguarded and so he and initially keyboardist Don Airy and tour manager Jake Duncan got on board,
flew around a little bit and landed safely. And then after that he was like, hey, anyone, anyone else want to take a ride? Young spirited, awesome. Randy Roads is like, yeah, man, I'll go up there. That looks like a blast, and then the seamstress for the band, Rachel Youngblood, also boarded the plane, and while they were up there, Randy Rhoads is like, hey, Ozzie's you know, sleeping off another hangover. Let's like buzz the bus and see if we can wake him up.
So they did, right, they did four times and each time a Cock Andrey Acock was like, I can get close, we can do it faster, and they managed to do it three different times. On the fourth time, their luck ran out, and I guess his wing clipped the bus. And it doesn't take much pressure to send a plane going one hundred and fifty miles an hour careening, spinning
out of control, and that's exactly what happened. The plane struck the ground and slid or hit a tree, and Randy Rhodes and Rachel Youngblood were ejected, probably dead immediately from the plane. I believe Andrew Aycock was left in the plane. It exploded into flames, but not before it had cruised into and taken a stop in some Poorschmoe's garage.
Yeah, Ozzie slept through the plane, hitting the bus that he was on. Somehow that explosion woke him up, and apparently emergency services weren't quick quick to get there, but it's pretty clear that everyone died immediately. The autopsy showed that Acock had still had cocaine in the system, and Ozzie was like, yeah, he testified that he was using coke like well into the night.
He was he was the bus driver.
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, well into the night. This was the next morning, and his pilot pilot's license had expired a long time ago, and you know, that was it. We don't have any like black box recording or anything. It was just a huge loss to the music world and a huge, huge loss to the Osbourne family who loved him so much. And Ozzie was already in bad shape and this was the beginning of a very very bad dark time for him.
Yeah, he said, since that the Randy Roads death sent him spiraling down that path that Randy Rhoades had argued with him about getting off of in the first place, because, like you said, they formed some sort of bond that just didn't last very long and just broke Ozzy's heart.
I guess yeah, super super sad.
It is sad, and I've been thinking, Okay, how can we end this on a slightly higher note? And I've got it, Chuck Kawhi metal. Do you know what kawaii means in Japanese?
No?
Cute, right, so okay, cute kawai metal means cute metal. It's Japanese metal. It combines jpop right with metal, and it actually kind of works, so if you're curious about jpop metal or kawahi metal, look up the band's Baby Metal and Lady Baby, and that'll be a pretty good start down your journey into the jpop metal realm.
All right, And I want to quickly I know I promised in part one the Rolling Stone top ten metal albums of all Time, so I don't want to leave that off, and I'll just quickly go through from ten to one. We've got Pantera with vulgar display of power, Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz at nine, Megadeth p Cells but
who's buying it? Eight, Motorheads, No Remorse at seven, Slayers Rain and Blood at six, Sabbath self titled Black Sabbath at number five, A Number of the Beasts from Iron Maiden at number four, Judas Priest, British Steel Record at number three, Master of Puppets at number two from Metallica, and number one with a Bullet Paranoid from Black Sabbath. And I know what you're thinking, where else is Iron Maiden? They were also at thirteen besides number four with their debut record.
Okay, I dispute a lot of that, but let's just not get into it, Okay.
It's a rolling Stone list, you know how let's go they really I.
Think they're just trolls essentially.
Yeah.
Probably, Well I think that's it everybody. That's everything we have to say about. Have you medal right now? And again, sorry we did not name check your favorite band. If you want to tell us to get into something, email us. We love that kind of thing. We hope you enjoyed this. We did the best we could. Thanks again to Olivia for taking this journey with us. And since I said that, of course it's time for listener mail.
You know what, I'm going to call an audible here, not going to do a listener mail. Instead, I want to shout out a book writer. Been meaning to do this for a while, and it kind of fits because I know that the author, Keith Rossen, is into some heavy music. I don't know if it's metal or what. I just know he's into some pretty hardcore music. I took a flyer on a book with a cool cover a long time ago. Finally took it on vacation. It's a duology called fever House and the second book is
called The Devil by name great great horror books. I've never read horror in my life. There's a thread of humanity and the characters in the heart of his stories are incredible. And then you've also got good horror stuff. Yeah, so recommend fever House and The Devil by Name from Keith, and then his upcoming book. I had shouted him out on Instagram. He got in touch, so we're kind of Instagram messaging now, and his book publisher sent me a galley of his new book out this fall. It's called
Coffin Moon. This one's about vampires and it is great, and so sign up for the pre sale. It's just I can't wait to read what he does next. And Keith is like a super cool guy. So fever House to double my name in the upcoming Hoffin Moon, which that one's about vampires, Like I said, it's six like Keith Keith Rossen rosso Win.
Okay, since you said that, I've been trying to figure out how to shout out two horror movies that I've seen recently that are like, oh great, these are the best I've seen in a really long time. Once Japanese, it's got subtitles. It's called Best Wishes Ringo. No, that's a good one. Though. This is called Best Wishes to All. It's it's a hundred times more off the chain than Ringo. It's not as scary as The Grudge or the Japanese version of the Grudge. It's it's just nuts. It's really
good though. Another one is one of the darkest horror movies I've ever seen.
It.
It's centers on snuff films. It's called Red Rooms. They do such a good job that they don't even actually show any of the videos in question, and it's more about this woman's descent into madness, you know, being into this kind of stuff. It's just an amazing, amazing movie. It's not for everybody, but it's if it is for you, you will love this movie. And I think if you can just get past the weirdness and enjoy it, I think and just about anybody could could enjoy. Best Wishes to All. I love it.
I enjoy when we throw out these recommendations.
That's great, okay, Chuck, that was great. That was a great end to the Metal episodes too. I think, good job.
Yeah, those were fun. I feel like we could have done a part three, four five, I think so to you to.
Be honest, for sure, Yeah, if you want to get in touch with us about heavy metal or anything. You can send it via email, send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Four