Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (47 page)

The Pahlers weren’t the first to put metal on trial. In the mid-eighties, in two widely publicized cases, other parents blamed rock stars for their sons’ suicides. In 1984, depressed California teenager John McCollum held a loaded .22-caliber handgun to his head and pulled the trigger while listening to songs by Ozzy Osbourne. His parents filed a lawsuit in a California civil court against Osbourne and CBS Records, alleging that the song “Suicide Solution” encouraged their son to end his life. In 1986, an appeals court dismissed the case, claiming Osbourne’s First Amendment right to free expression exonerated him from blame. Then, in 1985, two teens in Reno, Nevada, James Vance and Raymond Belknap, were smoking pot and drinking beer while listening to Judas Priest’s 1978 album,
Stained Class
, which features a cover of the Spooky Tooth song “Better by You, Better Than Me.” The teens later attempted a dual suicide in a church playground.

San Francisco Examiner
, September 29, 1989: . . . Near dusk, the two went to the playground of a local church with Raymond’s sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun. Raymond Belknap, seated on a merry-go-round, placed the end of the shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger, killing himself. A few minutes later, James pointed the same gun at his chin and fired. Somehow, the blast missed his brain and he lived. [Vance died in 1988 from medical complications.] Four months later, Raymond Belknap’s mother went to attorneys with James Vance’s letter connecting the death pact to heavy metal music. Reno attorneys Ken McKenna and Tim Post began to examine the music, lyrics and album cover for suicidal messages. They say they found references to blood, killing and the implications of suicide in the lyrics, but no explicit directives to take one’s life. Those they claim to have found in the music and album cover’s subliminal messages. [The case went to trial in 1990 and after a bizarre hearing involving all five band members, an aggressive prosecutor, and supposed audio experts, the case was dismissed.]

IAN HILL:
With all due respect to the families involved, we treated it as an immense joke until we were actually sitting there in court. The use of backwards masking is protected by the Constitution. So they came up with this weird idea of subliminal messages. They play you a song, and you go, “Well, I can’t hear anything.” They say, “Well, that’s because it’s subliminal.” Then it’s up to you to prove that the message
isn’t
there. It was absurd. There was a sound on there that was a combination of a high-hat cymbal and Rob exhaling, and it sounded like “Do it!” But anybody that actually wants to go out and murder their own clientele has got to have some commercial death wish.

ROB HALFORD:
It was a very sad experience. We’ve never been a band that has or ever will make music that will hurt people, and we were enraged that we were being accused of something we didn’t do. It caught the public’s attention. It was like a very bad
Jerry Springer
episode. But it was very serious. We couldn’t just make it go away. It was a very important and sobering reflection on some of the things that happen in families where kids aren’t given the right love, care, and attention, and they go off the rails. The irony was those two boys loved Judas Priest. So we couldn’t figure it out until we got to the courtroom, and within the first couple of days we went, “Oh, we know what this is about. This is about making a fast buck on something that’s so tragic.”

As Pantera was enjoying the success of
Cowboys From Hell
, the members’ pals in Anthrax entered their third phase as a band. With the departure of Joey Belladonna after 1990’s
Persistence of Time
, Anthrax hired Armored Saint vocalist John Bush. The timing was peculiar. Anthrax was coming off the momentum of having played the legendary 1991 Clash of the Titans festival with Megadeth, Slayer, and Alice in Chains,
Persistence of Time
had gone gold, and Anthrax had just inked a lucrative deal with Elektra Records. Moreover, the band had broken boundaries by collaborating with Public Enemy front man Chuck D for a cover of the hit “Bring the Noise” and touring with their hip-hop heroes—moves that helped set the stage for the evolution of nu metal a few years later.

SCOTT IAN:
Public Enemy had never gotten groupies before, and our crew guys would always have chicks on the bus getting naked, and they’d take pictures of these girls. [Public Enemy rapper] Flavor Flav was out of his fucking mind for that. He couldn’t get on our bus fast enough to see what was going on because that didn’t happen on Public Enemy’s bus. But it was a weird time for us. Everything seemed great from the outside looking in, but inside we were miserable because we didn’t even know how we were gonna write another record. We just couldn’t move forward with Joey [Belladonna] because he didn’t represent us musically anymore. It wasn’t personal. Creatively, we felt like we were going somewhere else, and his voice wasn’t going to work.

JOEY BELLADONNA (Anthrax):
I wasn’t ready to go anywhere. I thought I was doing fine, and I think I could have continued with them even when they changed the style of their music. But it’s like being in a relationship. If someone wants to move on you can beg them not to leave, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

SCOTT IAN:
Changing lineups sucks. It’s a horrible thing to deal with, but any time we’ve ever done it, we did it to move forward, whether or not the fans liked it or it helped us commercially. It was what we had to do in order to continue.

JOHN BUSH:
At first, I was thinking, “I don’t know if I want to replace Joey Belladonna.” He did so much with the band, and fans associated his voice with the Anthrax they loved. When I joined Anthrax, my attitude was, “Once I’m in, let’s go for it.” The guys always embraced me and I never got much negativity from the crowd. Maybe the people that weren’t into it just stopped listening. But the thing that bummed me out the most is that the [four studio] records I did with Anthrax will probably never get the fair shake they deserve because we went through a bunch of management changes and label debacles, and all of that took over how people saw the music. Those records were really unfairly looked at in comparison to the success that Anthrax had in the eighties.

SCOTT IAN:
We signed a deal with Elektra, and we had a team of people working with us all the way from the head of the label, Bob Krasnow, down to people in the mailroom. But between ’93 and ’95 there was a huge corporate shake-up and everyone we worked with was let go, and they brought in Sylvia Rhone to run the label. The first meeting our manager had with Sylvia, she put our contract on the table and said, “I never would have done this deal. I wouldn’t even have signed this band. What do you want me to do for this next record?” That was the attitude from the label on
Stomp 442
. That record sold about 150,000 copies, and I’m surprised it even did that well. They did nothing. They put it out and we toured our asses off, but at that point in time, if you didn’t have someone fighting for you as a metal band, you were fucked in the face of the grunge world. Look at Pantera in ’95. EastWest [Records] was going to bat for them. We were basically thrown out in the trash.

JOHN BUSH:
The band’s sound
did
change a little, but it needed to change. Times were changing and we were changing with it. I hear
Sound of White Noise
and I think of the influence it had on so many bands. I listen to a band like Godsmack, and so much of it sounds like it was influenced by
Sound of White Noise
.

In 1991, Metallica also reinvented itself by writing a batch of new songs that eschewed the amphetamine-freak tempos and complex rhythms that were the hallmark of earlier albums. The eponymous record—which became widely known as
The Black Album
because of its black cover—was produced by studio veteran Bob Rock (Aerosmith, Mötley Crüe), and featured simple, heavy songs filled with strong melodies and instantly memorable hooks. There were even two fairly traditional but well-written ballads, “The Unforgiven” and “Nothing Else Matters.” Old-school followers were divided on the record, but
The Black Album
garnered the band millions of new, loyal fans and spawned five hit singles. By November 2009,
The Black Album
had sold more than fifteen million copies in the United States.

LARS ULRICH:
. . .
And Justice for All
was on the thin side in terms of its lyrics and its sound, so we decided to track down this Bob Rock guy who had made this Mötley Crüe album which really sounds beefy and see what his story is. The first thing that he told me was that he felt that we had never made a record that was up to his standards. That was a bit of a battle cry. We had never been challenged before, and nobody ever really said, “Well you can also do it this way, and you can also try it in a different key, or why don’t you try this kind of drum fill.” [We were like], “Why don’t you go fuck yourself and stop telling us what to do. Just get us that bass sound like the Mötley Crüe album.” But as the process wore on we very reluctantly realized that maybe this guy had some relevant suggestions, and he won us over.

KIRK HAMMETT:
We gave Bob a bunch of gray hairs. There’s a twitch in his eye that won’t go away. But Bob, what did Mötley Crüe give you? We gave you gray hair and a twitch! They’ll stay with you forever.

LARS ULRICH:
Me and Bob almost came to blows on that record. All of a sudden he’s saying, “If you want to come across sounding lively, you have to start playing like a band, acting like a band, being more like a band,” because it was very much the James and Lars show up til then. Me and James used to guard it like the fucking crown jewels. We would tell everyone, “Yes, it
is
a band,” but I think everyone knew that me and James were pretty much taking care of everything.

BOB ROCK (producer):
I think what makes these guys what they are is the fact they weren’t content with just making another
Justice
. They said, “Okay, that’s fine, but now let’s go on. Let’s make something new.” That, to me, is the sign of a really great artist. It would have been so simple for them to have just done what they had already done.

LARS ULRICH:
To turn it around, instead of saying [
The Black Album
] is more accessible to more people, you can also say it turns fewer people off. Seriously. It was less annoying to more people.

EERIE VON:
I think we definitely had an influence on Metallica. When James played me . . .
And Justice for All
before it came out, I was like, “Meh. It’s not that good.” I just didn’t like it. We talked to those guys like real people, not superstars. We spoke our minds. We were always telling ’em, “Dude, you’ve got seven parts in this song. Fuckin’ seven parts, and the tempo changes ten times.” I was like, “Why don’t you take each riff and write a good song?” So when James played me “Enter Sandman,” I was like, “Yeah, this is what I’m talking about.” I was so happy. Of course everyone thinks they sold out on that album.

LARS ULRICH:
I think of course, when you go [from] making ten-minute songs that travel between ten different musical landscapes to songs like “Enter Sandman,” it’s no secret that people will point to you and go, “Oy, what’s going on here?” I know deep in my heart and soul that it was the direction we wanted to try and go, the only thing we hadn’t explored.

KIRK HAMMETT:
The Black Album
sold fifteen million, which freaks me out. It’s still selling. I can’t figure out who the hell is buying it. My theory is that people are just wearing out their CDs and buying it for all their friends.

For Metallica,
The Black Album
was a commercial breakthrough. For Pantera, it was an opportunity. For years they had dwelled in the shadow of their favorite band, Metallica. When their heroes were no longer the heaviest game in town, Pantera saw an opening and vowed to capitalize on it; they did so with 1992’s
Vulgar Display of Power
.

REX BROWN:
I heard [Metallica’s] first single, and it didn’t sound like Metallica at all. We just went, “Oh, Jesus Christ. Man, we gotta do something. We gotta blow some people’s minds.” When that record came out, we could tell the direction they were going and it just seemed like a letdown, so we went, “Well, there’s this big, huge fucking gap to fill.”

VINNIE PAUL:
We felt like, although it was a great record, they had moved away from being a total metal band. I remember thinking, “Wow, we can step up to the plate and move up with the likes of Megadeth and Anthrax and these bands we eventually toured with.”

ZAKK WYLDE:
I used to goof with Dime, “
Vulgar
is like with the
Spinal Tap
album, except instead of it being ‘you can’t get none more black’ it’s ‘you can’t get none more heavier.’” It was the most brutal thing. It took heavy to a whole other place. But what made it so brilliant was the musicianship. It wasn’t just heavy for the sake of being heavy. The songwriting and the way they put everything together was slammin’, and so was the production. It was just extreme fuckin’ great, heavy shit.