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Not only have the musical alternatives to metal become more mechanized, they've
become more respectable. Rock has moved more and more into the mainstream,
turning into TV soundtracks and advertising jingles. Perhaps that's why what
heavy metal brings back to rock & roll now has never seemed so sorely missed or so
desperately
Heavy metal is still hard, fast, deep dark, and dirty. The lyrics of some of the
most successful hearvy
Heavy metal bands invariably face the dilemma of cleaning up their acts and
their sound to become more accessible, which may cost them their original cults.
Some manage to walk the tightrope between commercial success and "selling out"
gracefully. Eddie Van Halen (the heavy guitar hero of the generation) helped
Michael Jackson beat it to good clean crossover superstardom. But a Van Halen show,
unlike the Jacksons' Victory tour, is still not a family picnic. And you probably
won't find the Social Register groupies, who've helped turn the Stones into international
embarrassments, hanging out in Ozzy's or Motorhead's dressing room. And
there're going to have to be several changes of the guard before Mötley Crüe's Nikki
Sixx is invited to tea in the Rose Garden.
"A kid puts on a Judas Priest or an Iron Maiden or a Motorhead shirt and it
makes a statement," says Cliff Burnstein who used to manage AC/DC and now handles
Def Leppard, Armoured Saint, Kokken [Dokken], and Metallica. "Hall and Oates don't
make a statement."
So what statement is the kid making? He's telling society where he
Whatever heavy metal means to the kids who buy it today, it means something
else to the men who sell it. Even if heavy metal never received much respect from
critics or anyone else, it's been a staple of the record industry since the dawn of Led
Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Throughout the '70s, for example, Deep Purple was
Warner Bros.' best-selling
As Jerry Jaffe, vice-president of A&R at Phonogram, explains, heavy metal fans
remain more loyal than any other record buyers. 'This is the only genre," he says,
"with big catalogue between albums. You don't see that in pop acts. With pop acts,
when the life of a particular Linda Ronstadt album is over, it drops to nothing. And
then the next album comes out and starts selling again. But the catalogue on hard
rock is phenomenal. We were selling about 10,000 albums a week of Blackout by the
scorpions [The Scorpions] even when it was four years old."
That loyalty comes from a band's persistent contact with its audience. The Scorpions,
for instance, have been touring steadily since 1978, when they debuted at the
bottom of a Ted Nugent/Aerosmith bill. They were following the traditional route
for breaking heavy metal bands. The idea was to keep them on the road, building
their followings until they had the reputation or the hit record that would turn
them into headliners and/or stars.
What accelerated and revolutionized the process was MTV. Without it, it's possible
that the current heavy metal boom might have happened anyway, but it probably
wouldn't have been so popular or so lucrative. "A lot of people," says Tom
Werman, "were introduced to heavy metal who didn't really know about it before."
Cliff Burstein points to a Forbes market research study that directly connects the
surge of MTV watching and record sales with the bottoming out of the video game
business. Burnstein feels that heavy metal made such an impression on video
because "these groups, their raison d'être almost, is to play live. On the videos, they
have some excitement.'
Def Leppard created enough |
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