Classic Metal Mania

Scorpions lead guitarist Matthias Jabs, circa 1980. His Gibson Explorer is one of the signature guitars of 1980s heavy metal.

Let’s start off the Song Classic series with one everyone probably feels they’ve heard too many times already.  ”Rock You Like A Hurricane” (view video) was the first single off the Scorpions’ 1984 album, “Love At First Sting”, and it quickly became one of the Scorpions’ biggest hits, rising all the way to #25 on the USA Billboard Top 100, a pretty lofty spot for a heavy metal song.  It hit heavy rotation on MTV (back when they actually used to show music videos) and radio all across the United States, and I would not argue with anyone who said it was overplayed to death.  It was.

But so what?  If you can step back from the mainstream popularity of the tune, it’s easy to appreciate how it became so popular in the first place.  The fact is, it’s a flat-out great song, and held wide cross-genre appeal simply because it was so good to listen to.  The main riff is heavy but instantly accessible, and because it also happens to be easy to play, every budding guitarist has learned it.  The solos are not so easy – Matthias Jabs simply scorches, laying down one of the seminal heavy metal solos of the 1980s, a searing escapade in cascading sheets of notes with great melodic flair, further establishing himself as one of the best guitarists in all of heavy metal.  There are some nice change-ups, such as the alternating half-time verses, and provocative lyrics that never degenerate into juvenile immaturity, like so many other bands of the day.

It’s hard to fault a band for producing a momentous piece of work that gets them wide recognition.  ”Rock You Like A Hurricane” is a metal classic, deservedly so, and it remains one of my favorite metal songs from the early 1980s.

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

On September 24, 1991, Nirvana released the seminal album Nevermind, heralding the dawn of a new age of grunge, and classic heavy metal as we knew it was officially dead.  It didn’t happen overnight, or even over the previous year.  It had been coming on for half a decade, and Nirvana’s release simply drove the final stake into a bloated genre that found itself overcome with frivolous excess and artistic bankruptcy.  Metal had seen its glory days come and gone, and bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden led the new wave of hard rock and roll – underproduced, underperformed, but infused with a soul and craftsmanship that had been missing from mainstream heavy metal since the mid-1980s.

It served as a wake-up call to metalheads, and a new breed of metal was born.  Gone forever were the corny lyrical cliches, undernourished musical hooks and primping image-obsessed pansies that had so infused the genre over the previous decade, as fresh new bands formed in the underground and led the way to the resurgence of heavy metal that we’re seeing in the mainstream today.  I suppose that the crash of  ’91 ended up being a good thing, as it gave rise to self-reflection within the genre that resulted in new metal bands and new outlooks from older metal bands, aiming for high artistic intentions and high standards of musicianship, qualities that had been lost over the previous decade.  Today, groups like Mastodon, Children of Bodom and Dream Theater blaze new trails in ways that were largely unimagined back in the late 1980s…and one thing most of today’s bands share in common is a love of true classic metal.

Led Zeppelin, circa 1977

Because when you filter through all the dreck, pomp and circumstance that passed for popular metal as the 1980s drew to a close, you find that there were still some great bands putting out great work.  And if you go back farther, to the early ’80s, back into the 1970s and even the 1960s, great metal abounds.  It’s often said that 90% of everything is crap, and heavy metal was certainly not immune from this phenomenon.  But in retrospect, the 10% that was worth listening to was really worth listening to, and for a while there, it seemed as if the 90% rule was turned on its head.  There was a golden age in metal from the early 70s and into the mid 80s.  All the big advances in technology and musicianship were being made in those days, and the influence of classic metal and hard rock  on today’s music is literally everywhere.  From the early shred of Michael Schenker and Randy Rhoads, to the jaunty excitement of Eddie Van Halen and Warren DeMartini, to the progressive complexity of Queensrÿche and Dream Theater, and to the wicked crunch of Metallica and Megadeth, it’s clear that today’s metal was incubated in fertile ground indeed.

It’s worth treading on that ground again, and this blog is meant as both a celebration and a retrospective of that brand of heavy metal.  It’s the music I grew up with and loved dearly, and although my musical tastes and inclinations have matured and branched in many directions since that time, I still listen to it frequently today.  I have long maintained that in all of popular music, heavy metal instrumentalists are among the most talented and technically proficient musicians out there, and I’ve heard no reason to change that opinion given the current crop of superb instrumentalists in the modern heavy metal genre.  Here you will find band and artist biographies, full discographies, pictures, video, audio, and album reviews of the best (and the worst!) that metal had to offer prior to 1991, which is the year I will consider the era of classic metal to be over for the purposes of this blog.  I do not pretend to be an expert, I simply assert myself as a fan, and when you don’t agree with an opinion or if you feel something is worthy of commentary, I sure hope you’ll post your own thoughts along with mine.  Music is not an objective exercise, and it’s worth hearing thoughts and opinions from a wide variety of sources.  So come on in, crack a cold one, and I hope you enjoy the read.  Headbangers unite!