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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 chem 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. My brother always laughed at that line.
Which song? I think it's on Master of Reality.
I don't know the name of the song. I think it said end of the rope, end of a rope, obviously.
I'll bet your brother thought that was 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 Ozzy.
Mm-hmm. because this is the section where we're going to talk about some controversies, and Ozzy And his day certainly had a few of them.
He was kicked out of Black Sabbath in the late 70s because he partied too hard for Black Sabbath even.
He was replaced by the great Ronnie James Dio.
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.
He bit... and the story has changed a lot over the years.
So depending on who you're talking to is what version, but, uh, He he bit the head off of one to shock people in a room and apparently was being let out and bit the head off the other.
There are also people that said that they were not alive at the time.
Yeah, that's what I thought. The same thing when he bit the head off of a bat in Des Moines in 1982 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 Neal. And I don't know what is worse.
Biting the head off of a live bat or biting the head off of a bat that's been sitting around dead for a couple of days.
I don't know. Flip a coin, buddy. Either way, I've reached a point in my life where I can't even take talking about like that.
That's that's the just don't kill the dog.
That'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 tour with Motley Crue, and I feel bad for those ants.
Yeah, exactly. What did they do? Nothing.
I think Ozzy 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 Mustaine, like Ozzy, like their bandmates were partying as hard as they were, sometimes harder.
But they didn't turn into evil jerks. Yeah.
Who would like get in your face or try to kill you or like try to do something horrible and 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 Mustaine.
I think Ozzy 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 1985, led by Tipper Gore.
Al Gore's wife, at one point, you know, they on a mission to clean up music and to at the very least to get ratings on record albums.
So at one point they released their filthy 15 of the filthiest 15 songs and nine out of the 15 were either metal or hard rock bands.
Yeah, I mean, Def Leppard. Come on. I mean, 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 ACDC and Twisted 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, let's talk about Satan and how great he 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 Madonna, Prince... Def Leppard like it's just it was 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.
Yeah. You mean the badge of honor? Exactly.
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 to night, like the two hour version of Headbangers 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 24 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 REO Speedwagon's 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... than FM radio even, because that was generally genre-ed.
And they didn't jump around from Madonna to Iron Maiden on radio.
No. 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 Headbangers Ball, Um, initially I think it was called the heavy metal mania, uh, hosted by D Snyder, but then it became headbangers ball with once again, the great Ricky Rockman.
Love that guy. At least then Metalhead's had a place to go where you could really sink in for a couple of hours, you know?
Mm-hmm, for sure. Same with, remember, 120 Minutes for New Ravers?
Yeah, Matt Penfield, yeah. You want to see a Bauhaus 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 Dee Snider.
He nodded to us once in passing in a hallway.
That's right. So, yeah, Headbangers Ball also had some tours in North America when it was really big, 87, 89, and 92.
Oh, like a festival thing? Yeah, pretty much.
Oh, cool. Yeah. And then I think also we should mention too- that one of the things about metal is that it has been, and I think still remains, pretty... white working class male for the most part, but it's definitely gotten more diverse than it was in the mid 80s, 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. Uh, body count came around.
They were, I mean, I think they were for sure kind of speed metal.
Yeah. But with, with ice tea wrapping. Yeah, I saw them at that Lollapalooza.
I'm not going to include Living Color at all.
Boo! Sorry, Livia. You missed the mark there.
No, Vernon Reed's... Guitar playing is metal.
I don't know. Listen to the song Glamour Boys.
I mean, come on. Well, that's kind of hair metal-y.
Glamour Boys, is it? Hey, hey, speaking of hair metal, I forgot one great hair metal band.
Oh, let's hear it. That came out much more recently.
Oh, I thought you were going to say Europe.
No, Europe's definitely in there with the final countdown.
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 they're tongue-in-cheek, but they're really great as far as hair metal music goes.
They're 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 Whitegloves from Arch Enemy.
She's actually the second woman singer for Arch Enemy.
There was a singer named Angela Gossow who was, I think, replaced the original male singer of Arts 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 is great. I met her backstage because she was kind enough to invite us to the Motley Crue show where she still plays with the Alice Cooper band.
Mm-hmm. And I met Nita, and she's super awesome, and I think she's since gotten married, so congratulations on that.
Oh, congrats. Yeah. She's also in Iron Maidens, the Iron Maiden, all women Iron Maiden cover band.
Yeah, for sure. And guess what? That Judas Priest show I'm going to, Nita will be there because Alice Cooper is 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 nerd.
Yeah, that's right. And a great guitar player.
For sure. Speaking of Judas 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. Mm-hmm. like a legit style for a demographic.
But yeah, that 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 guess.
Yes. That's right. All of the 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 metal 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. 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 umlaut over the O in 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 umlauts in there, it just looks more metal.
Yeah. I think even Scandinavian bands that have their own thing, which is the forward slash going through the O...
Yeah, yeah, that looks pretty metal. I think they actually, in some cases, replaced that with an umlaut.
That's how metal the umlaut is. Oh, wow.
And apparently a rock critic named Richard Metzler claims that he was the one who told Blue Oyster Cult to use that, to use an umlaut unnecessarily.
People say that Blue Oyster Cult was the one who did that, like you said.
And Richard Metzler also claims to be the one who suggests that they use more cowbell in their music.
Oh man, I didn't see that coming somehow.
Yeah. Oh, that makes me very happy. Very nice.
Classical music as 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 lead guitarists were schooled in classical, not the least of which is the great Randy Rhoades, who we'll talk about later.
Mm-hmm. And Eddie Van Halen, you know, took, you know, classical piano lessons and stuff like that when he was a kid.
Metal God. Very good 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 sub-genre is there are very few bands 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 sub-genre.
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, 100%. They all have chops. That was another thing that got me a little bit into metal was I started playing guitar when I was 13 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, Judas Priest, and I'll go Glenn Tipton and KK Downing, and I can name all these guitar players.
Nice. It's from pouring over that magazine.
Like I wasn'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. Oh, man. Who knows what could have happened?
He even told me the band. I can't remember what the band was.
I wouldn't name check them 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, I got a BC Rich, Candy Apple Red 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 the flying V. Oh, okay.
They don't call it the flying triangle? Yeah.
The Flying B 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. 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, Chuck? 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 a, And a lot of metal songs, like figuratively, like thematically and literally.
Yes. So, yeah, there's like the Led Zeppelin song about the darkest depths of mortar and all sorts of other stuff, too.
And throughout like their whole catalog.
I think who else was well known for that?
I think Megadeth had a song that was based on Aragorn's speech in the Return of the King.
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, there's a group called Burzum.
It was a solo project by Varg Vikernes. He was imprisoned for murdering former bandmate Euronymous from Mayhem.
Oh, okay. And then he was also charged with burning down churches.
He's from the black metal scene. Anyway, Burzum does not talk about Lord of the Rings stuff at all.
And yet, it's still from Lord of the Rings, Burzum is.
But this, I think, kind of gets across how black metal the Burzum project was.
Burzum... in Lord of the Rings means darkness in the black speech that's spoken in Mordor.
So it's dark in the darkest place, and it means darkness in that dark place language.
That's how dark that black metal was. And their album cover is Vanta Black.
That's right. No light can escape from it.
We should also mention, we'll take a break here in a sec, but we should also mention the Gothic font.
I mentioned fonts. you got to 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 spookier 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'll run across a metal album cover and you'll be like, What?
What is the band's name? I can't decipher this at all.
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 you're like, I still don't see it.
It's pretty funny. It's like a very spinal tap.
Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah. And they definitely should at least get name checked in this episode, right?
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, just today their new trailer for the Spinal Tap sequel dropped.
Oh, really? Uh, yeah, it doesn't look that great, but I don't know.
I'm going to definitely see it. I'm withholding judgment.
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, uh the the idea isn't solid like that's a very like uh realistic thing for an old metal band mm-hmm I just I don't know.
We'll see. All right. So enough of fonts.
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.
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All right, Chuck, so if you are not a metal listener, but you're aware of heavy metal just in general, You probably associate it with satanic stuff.
And again, 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 Maiden 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 on the government's behalf, 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, 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 aside 80s hair metal, which just sang 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.
Yeah. Starting with Ride the Lightning, the title song is back from 1984.
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 the lyrics aren't left-leaning in general, they also tend to be libertarian too.
And their whole album, Injustice for All, song after song after song, It has a huge, robust political message to it basically across the entire album.
Yeah, for sure. The song One is an anti-war song.
And Justice for All is about the corruption of the justice system.
Eye of the Beholder, that's about the repression of freedom of speech and expression.
Mm-hmm. What else? The Shortest Straws about fascism, witch hunt riding through.
Blackened is a straight up overt environmentalist song.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they literally talk about poisoning Mother Nature.
Yeah, and you find this. It's not just Metallica.
You find this throughout Metallica. um, throughout the, the metal community.
Like even if it's not like clear immediately, um, 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 um and death metal too down into like that's the message of just about every um every metal song at its heart.
At least one song on the album is going to be like that.
Yeah, even old Dave Mustaine with Megadeth.
I mean, peace sells, but who's buying? He's singing about peace just like the hippies in the 60s might have been. just through a very different 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 1986 where he said, A band should be aware of what's going on instead of being so wrapped up in themselves, CeCe DeVille.
That's apparently ironic. Yeah, that's pretty ironic.
Yeah, for sure. And then, you know, you have cases where like Pantera's former frontman, Phil Anselmo, 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 Scott Ian 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 grind core bands, like napalm death bands. 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, 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 have found.
Um, and of course, you know, we should say there's, there, there are people that struggle with mental health where, um, music and certainly metal has had some negative impacts yeah and there are examples of that but um Aside from that, it seems like metal actually kind of tests and taxes your brain in a good way.
Maybe taxes in the right word 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 interesting because if your brain's decoding that, you would think that it would be focused on that, but it's not.
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 hundreds of thousands or millions of heavy metal fans that maybe despondent 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. 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-reviewed journals that show that there are positive emotional effects that are experienced by metalheads from listening to metal music.
Yeah. There's one from 2013 that studied 414 British metalheads.
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.
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. That's not very surprising either.
I was like, are they playing them? Are they confused and they think Van Halen's metal and that's what they're playing?
Like the 1984 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 2019.
It was 32 fans of metal 44 non-fans of metal.
And they found, and this one's important because I think, especially in the 80s with the PMRC, there was a lot of Just gobbledygook 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 2019, they found that metalheads 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.
Yeah. Right. 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 we did, is that there's just such a dumb... misunderstanding or 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've talked a little bit about genres and sub-genres, 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, were all those under Mathcore?
Yes. This is where Mathcore came from. Oh, yeah, sure.
Okay. So MathCore is a type of... 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, or the Dillinger escape plan, okay?
Super niche. And math core is a combination of metal core and math rock.
And I know you know what math rock 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 Math Rockin', You may have heard it and not known it was math rock, but you just thought like, like what an interesting odd band.
So you've got math rock. Math rock, you said, with its interesting time signatures and very technical playing.
That evolved from prog rock. like Rush, Genesis, King Crimson, yes, from the 70s, right?
And then Math Rock was also influenced by jazz.
That's just Math Rock. That's one part that Math Core is made up of.
On the other side, you've got Metal Core, 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 from hardcore punk.
Hardcore is like bands like Code Orange, Vain.
Hardcore punk... is Minor Threat, Black Flag.
They're very closely related. They sound similar, but they're different sub-genres.
So metalcore is hardcore and extreme metal, which is a big umbrella term for a bunch of other types of metal too.
Okay. Extreme Metal is also under Mathcore?
Yes. Extreme Metal is the basis of Metalcore.
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 metalcore probably eventually led to metalcore.
This is how divided and cut up the genre of heavy metal is.
That's how niche it's gotten into. Yeah.
And again, some people will come along and be like, this sounds just like progressive metal to me.
Like, no, it's math core. 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 Reddit 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 sub-genres, 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 titles, suffixes or prefixes.
And you probably have an actual 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 going to talk about album covers and the death of Randy Rhodes right after this.
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All right, promised talk of album covers.
I want to give a big, big shout out to a guy named Blake Massey who wrote a really great article on TheMetalPit.org.
And also shout out Sherry Thomas from The Aquarian, because Blake wrote a really, really great piece on heavy metal album art. 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 it all with just dark imagery, very provocative stuff.
A lot of times, sometimes they would hire out just a company, but I feel like especially with metal, many times the band is very closely involved. and the vision for the album cover because, I mean, album covers are always important, but it feels like metal, they're even more important.
Yeah. It's just part of the experience, you know?
Yeah. Um, like you, 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 1970.
Mm-hmm. 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. I'm standing in front of this old like, you know, torn down or not torn down, but just sort of dilapidated building.
And this was in 1970 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, we're going in a different direction here.
Check this out. 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.
That was as grim as their album covers got.
This is spooky. It's definitely different.
I just think that's really cool. 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.
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 uh 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 1986, 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 Priest has always had a great logo.
But it's that Metallica logo and then that uh, 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, I'm not actually sure.
Oh, Larry Carroll. And it's basically hell.
It's just a landscape of hell. There's Off to the foreground in the left, there's some heads floating in a lake of blood.
There's a goat on a throne presiding 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, um, holy diver, um, The Dio album cover.
It's almost like it's cartoon realism almost.
Uh-huh. 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 about some DIA artwork, I realize that I've seen that masked person.
I did not know that his name was Murray.
I didn't either. He reminds me of the black spy from Spy vs. Spy.
He's just not wearing the hat. Yeah, yeah.
I never really thought about that. I didn't either until I saw him.
Yeah, just go check out the Holy Diver cover.
It's great because Murray is kind of standing up behind a mountain, whipping a chain that's wrapped around a priest. who's in the ocean with the waves lapping and he's clearly struggling to stay alive.
And Dio, by the way, he took over after Ozzy left Black Sabbath.
I think it was him immediately after Ozzy, 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 and Roses, we should talk about. I mean, so I don't really throw them 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 It's drawn 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 an 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 Rhoads, 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, everyone, you can stop screaming at your speakers.
Yeah, 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 seating 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, that is a great song, which is ironic.
It's a bang your head, Metal Health will drive you 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 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 Rhoades and his untimely death. at age 25.
Yeah, I mean, I think we both had our kind of big things we wanted in here.
Yours was Iron Maiden and mine was the death of Randy Rhoads because it was one of the saddest things That happened to music.
Big shout out to Rex Thompson. He wrote a great piece on it for liveforalivemusic.com.
But Randy Rhodes was a great kid. He was a very soft-spoken guy, virtuoso from the jump as a teenager.
Mm-hmm. And so much so that when apparently when he was a kid practicing so much, His mom like called a doctor when it's like, can this hurt my son's fingies?
Like, could this cause permanent damage to his little fingies?
I read also that she was a piano player, so she must've been, he must've really been playing.
Yeah. So he formed Quiet Riot. I had no idea about this.
My only understanding of Quiet Riot was from mental health onward.
All right, let's just be honest. It was mental health.
That's it. Right. So he formed Quiet Riot back in 1973.
Yeah. I had no idea that Randy Rhoads was in Quiet Riot or that Quiet Riot had been around 10 full years before Metal Health came out.
He was a child, basically. And same, you know, Kevin Dubrow 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.
It 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. Right.
Pretty great. Yeah, and that was it. So he became, I mean, just an absolute legend thanks to his stint with Ozzy.
Right. Was Ozzy fan just Ozzy Osbourne? Yeah, it was just Ozzy Osbourne.
Ozzy Osbourne in the Dew Wops, 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 Ozzy 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 person. spirited, really nice kid and just absolute just slayer on the guitar until a very, very sad day in 1982.
Yeah, it is terribly sad. It was so unnecessary, Randy Rowe's death.
And again, like, this guy's finally starting to hit the stride that he has known he could get to his whole life.
Yeah. He was Crazy Train. Yes. Everyone's heard Crazy Train.
That's Randy Rhoads. Yeah. And he was also, like you said, he was a good guy.
Like people just loved him, right? So he was 25 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.
Right. 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 Rhoads and Ozzy had had an argument backstage at the Knoxville show because Randy Rhodes was concerned about Ozzy's behavior.
He was drinking. He was like, you're going to die young.
You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up.
Ozzie didn't like that, so he stormed off, and they hadn't made up yet because Ozzie was still sleeping, 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, a 1957 Beachcraft on the property.
And he was like, hey, I can fly that thing.
Let's take it for a spin. The plane was unguarded.
And so he and initially keyboardist Don Airy and tour manager Jake Duncan were got on board, flew around a little bit, and landed safely.
And then after that, he was like, hey, anyone else want to take a ride? young spirited awesome randy rhodes it's like yeah man i'll go up there that looks like a blast and then the seamstress for the band rachel youngblood uh also boarded the plane And while they're up there, Randy Rhodes is like, hey, Ozzy'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 Acock, Andrew Acock was like, I can get closer.
We can do it faster. 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 150 miles an hour careening, spinning out of control.
And that's exactly what happened. The plane struck the ground and 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 poor schmo's garage.
Yeah, Ozzy slept through the plane hitting the bus that he was on somehow.
That explosion woke him up. And apparently emergency services weren't quick to get there, but it's pretty clear that everyone died immediately.
Right. uh the autopsy showed that acock had still had cocaine in the system and ozzy was like yeah He testified that he was using coke, like, well into the night.
He was the bus driver. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Well into the night. This was the next morning.
And his pilot's license had expired a long time ago.
And that was it. We don't have any black box recording or anything.
It was just a... a huge loss to the music world and a huge, huge loss to the Osborne family who loved him so much.
And Ozzy was already in bad shape. And this was... the beginning of a very, very bad, dark time for him.
Yeah, he's said since that Randy Rhoads' death sent him spiraling down that path Randy Rhodes 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 out. he's hard 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. Kauai Metal. Do you know what kawaii means in Japanese?
No. Cute. Right? So cute, kawaii metal means cute metal.
It's Japanese metal. It combines J-pop. right with metal and it actually kind of works so if you're curious about um j-pop metal or kawaii metal, look up the bands Baby Metal and Lady Baby, and that'll be a pretty good start down your journey into the J-pop metal realm.
All right. And I want to quickly, I know I promised in part one, the Rolling Stone top 10 metal albums of all time.
So I don't want to leave that off and I'll just quickly go through.
From 10 to 1, we've got Pantera with Vulgar Display of Power.
Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz at 9. Megadeth's Peace Cells, but who's buying it?
8. Motorheads, No Remorse at seven. Slayers, Rain and Blood at six.
Sabbath, self-titled Black Sabbath at number five.
Number of the Beast from Iron Maiden at number four.
Judas Priest, British Steel. Great 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 13 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 those 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 heavy metal 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.
I've been meaning to do this for a while, and it kind of fits because I know that the author, Keith Rawson, 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... 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.
Oh, 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 presale. It's just...
I can't wait to read what he does next. And Keith is like a super cool guy.
So Fever House, The Devil, My Name, and the upcoming Coffin Moon, which that one's about vampires.
Like I said, it's fixed. Like Keith... Keith Rawson, R-O-S-S-O-N.
Okay, since you said that, I've been trying to figure out how to shout out to... horror movies that I've seen recently that are like, these are the best I've seen in a really long time.
One's Japanese. It's got subtitles. It's called Best Wishes.
Ringu? No. That's a good one, though. This is called Best Wishes to All.
It's 100 times more off the chain than Ringu.
It's not as scary as The Grudge or the Japanese version of The Grudge.
It's just nuts. It's really good though.
Another one is one of the darkest horror movies I've ever seen.
It 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, being into this kind of stuff.
It's just an amazing, amazing movie. It's not for everybody, but if it is for you, you will love this movie.
I think if you can just get past the weirdness and enjoy it, I think just about anybody could enjoy Best Wishes to All.
Yeah. 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, six, two, to be honest.
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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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