My Checkered Youth as a Metalhead

My very first music purchase was a cassette tape of AC/DC’s classic, Back in Black. I played it, on a newly-gifted Panasonic tape recorder, till the magnetic tape snapped from wear. Sitting on my bed, a fifth-grader, fists-clenched, as Angus Young’s demonic guitar licks pumped out the likes of “Shoot to Thrill” and “Have a Drink on Me”, I experienced the first thrills of what would become a lifelong addiction. That was an excellent beginning, but after that, my past as a metalhead has been a checkered affair.

Metal, an early version of it, was the music of choice for the miscreants who used to beat me up in shop class. Junior high school was, quite certainly, the most miserable period of my life. Shop class was the worst time of the day. I was a nerd, and the shop bullies lived very troubled lives. I sat in the back of the room, averting my eyes to avoid any action that might remind them that I existed. This was exceedingly difficult, because their shirts danced with lurid images of angels and devils, pentagrams, and blood. Molly Hatchet, Metallica (yes, at least I think I remember a very early Metal Up Your Ass tour shirt, it would be worth a fortune now if it existed), Iron Maiden, Led Zepplein, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and so on. These angry preteen sociopaths dominated shop class, PE, the school yard, every other place it did not take a B average to enter. They wore their concert shirts with pride. I was to later learn that many of them came from abusive backgrounds. Terror of these bullies made their music all the more fascinating. I kept wondering how it was that rock bands could advocate the worship of Satan so openly. In hindsight, I realize, they had incredible taste in music.

They did not sell metal shirts at K-Mart. To get one, a lad had either to garner the freedom, and social skills, required for actually attending a metal show, or have a very cool older sibling, one with the worldliness to have grown tired of a band and moved on to something else. Eventually, I had such a sibling. My first rock T shirt was a Pink Floyd T, emblazoned with the image of a spectrum refracting a beam of white light into colored rays. It was a hand-me-down from my sister, who was eschewing her early days of rock and roll, drinking, and older boys to pursue the clean-cut life of a good girl who would later grow up to shoe horses and drink chai lattes. I cut the arms off, to make it appear less feminine, and wore it proudly. This must have been the ninth grade, and by then, I had been telling my classmates I listened to nothing but classical music. A lie. In truth, I did not listen to music at all, except for what I experienced from watching Friday Night Videos or as the guest on Saturday Night Live. It was on TV somehow, that I discovered the Plasmatics. I knew that somehow, I should not be permitted to see images of Wendy O Williams, clad in a leather bra, cutting televisions in class with a chainsaw. My parents were oddly strict and very religious. Not because of any prohibition, but simply due to general somberness, they never played music. By strange extension of their desire for quiet, our house was a very nonmusical place.

This was the early 1980’s Metallica had just played their first few shows, Punk Rock was reaching an early apex in California, and hair metal was becoming truly big, My sister’s ex-boyfriend, a charming young mysogynist devoted to cars and drinking, fell from a scaffold at a Van Halen concert and suffered a serious brain injury. People in NYC were piercing their cheeks with safety pins. I wrote the logos of various bands on my Pee Chee folder, like any other white kid, to affirm my status as a nonhomosexual who did not openly wish to join ranks with the Mexican contingent. In truth, however, I sat that whole era of music out.

This, highly political, element of music listenership, seemed to be a serious issue. In South San Francisco, a working-class suburb of the bohemian metropolis, the white denizens of the place felt besieged and outnumbered, marginalized and usurped by encroaching hoards of Asian immigrants, a large and well-established Mexican community, and the presence of an enormous homosexual counterculture flourishing in the city proper. Whites were a minority in South City, then as now. It was not so much racism as otherness. These other cultures were vastly different, and their members more numerous. Organized along family lines, they were tightly knit, and extremely competitive for jobs, grades, benches at the mall. As for the gays, the objection to them was religion, plain and simple. Perhaps, also, there was a fear that they would somehow recruit our members, assimilate some of us into their gayness. It could spread, somehow. Middle class men, with families, would abandon their families and go to the city to be gay. All of this, of course, is what filtered down to me from above, distorted by my own perceptions. My parents were uprooted Midwesterners, staunchly Catholic and utterly perplexed by the clash of cultures. The major blowback of all of this was the need to pick a side. There were two, rock, and soul. I chose to rock.

To choose rock meant to reject disco, and everything associated with it. Disco was meant to be hated, despite its infectious beats and alluring clothes. It was, quite literally, gay. To choose rock meant to align myself with Judas Priest, Queen, and a number of other bands to which I never actually listened. KSJO was San Francisco’s only real rock station, and to emblazon a binder with its yellow diamond logo was a strong statement of allegiance. Rock was working class. Rock was white. "Soul", what we called soul, was neither. It was an artificial aggregation of everything else. It included Disco, but also, paradoxically, oldies. It included Latin American Music and R & B. I watched Dionne Warwick sing on Solid Gold, but I knew it was somehow bad to like her. Except for the AC DC tape, I listened to very little music. Most of the rock I heard, I overheard from the car radios of my sister’s creepy, fascinating friends. They would play Jefferson Starship, Foreigner, Van Halen, the J Geils Band, whatever could loosely be classed as hard rock.

By high school, my smart but much cooler, friend, Dwight, had introduced me to Rush. Here was a band I could stand for. No songs about hedonism and girls from them. They sang songs about reason, freewill, science fiction, and how leadership and clear thinking could triumph over adversity. At one time or another, I owned every Rush album up to Hold Your Fire. As an adult, I realize that, if I had immersed myself in the nascent punk scene, or snuck to the city to see the first shots in what would become the thrash movement, I would be a very different person today-a serial killer or a convict, a dead rock star, a carpet layer, or perhaps an office worker with six kids. It was Rush, and to a lesser extent Pink Floyd and Yes, that kept me from listening to anything that was cool and less than ten years old. I have Rush to thank me for my status as a biology lecturer and part-time evolutionary biologist.

I don’t know whether to love them or hate them for this. There are too many possibilities. Instead of listening to the Sex Pistols, dying my hair blue, and chasing girls, I drew elaborate dungeons, read Astronomy magazine, and played Hemispheres over and over till I decided Circumstances, on the B side, was a real work of genius.

There are too many possibilities. As an adult, I despise just about the entire Rush catalog. It comes off as didactic and grandiose-technically perfect and completely missing the point of rock and roll. I have Bertrand Russel to read when I want to hear a voice of reason criticize Jesus, not Geddy Lee. There are some incredible moments here and there, such as 2112, and the more Sabbath-inspired pieces from Caress of Steel (pretty much Bastille Day, that's it).

Like all Dark Ages, this era is darker in hindsight than in actuality. My close friend in high school, Rolf, an all-around evil nerd, introduced me to the real thing-metal. He was clean-cut, accepted by the kids in shop class as a low-ranking hanger-on. Dorky, and evil. We stayed up together watching videotapes of Faces of Death and the Evil Dead. He liked scary shit. Together, we logged hours playing Dungeons and Dragons, listening to Venom, Accept, Merciful Fate, and Ozzy Osbourne, nursing our darkest fantasies of rape and pillage. It is only now, as I write this, that I notice the connection between the music I listened to at the time, and the fact that in years of playing D & D, I never once played a character that was not evil incarnate. No druids. No paladins. A string of evil clerics, antipaladins, necromancers, and the like. Strange to think of it now. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I never brought any of the music home. I was in the process of rejecting Christianity at the time, quietly and secretly, and the soundtrack to evil would have raised a million satanic, red pentagram flags with my parents. I wore a lot of black clothing, even then, and played Dungeons and Dragons. Even lacking a Venom album on the turntable, I was interrogated about possible ties to satanism more than once. In fact, I owe my rejection of Christianity not to Ozzy Osbourne, or to King Diamond, but to Issac Asimov.

As an example of how uncool I was, I shared an art class, two years in a row, with members of the early thrash band, Death Angel, and barely noticed. I was a junior in high school at the time, and had come to the conclusion that, unless I did something radical to reinvent myself, I would never, ever, have sex. I bought a West guitar from the want adds and attempted to learn to play. I got nowhere.

Dennis Pepa, co-founder of Death Angel, and a fixture in the early thrash movement was a student at El Camino High school. A senior, so unmistakably cool it was impossible not to notice him on the five or six days a year he chose to attend classes. He was a genuinely decent guy, as were his cousins, various relations, and hangers-on, all of which made it into the band. He was also great with pen drawings. One afternoon, probably on an errand looking for his metalhead friends that sat in the back of the room drawing pictures of corpses, he looked over my shoulder and inspected the iguanodon I had drawn in charcoal pencil.

Dennis:
“That’s good. I like it. Hey, do you play?

My response:
“Yeah, a little guitar. I’m not very good.”

Dennis:
“What do you play?”

Me:
“Blues.” (True, actually, I had decided that, since all rock comes from blues, blues I should play.)

Dennis:
“Cool. Sure you don’t wanna come play with us some time?”

Me:
“Nah. I really suck.”

That same year, Kirk Hammet, of Metallica fame, produced Death Angel’s first demo tape.

Death Angel was a Phillippino thrash band. In one stroke, he dissolved any illusions I might have harbored about metal being music for whites only. Here were Asians doing it better, and looking much cooler doing it. He was also the first real metalhead who was ever nice to me.

I don’t think I spoke a word to him, before or since. I never played with them, obviously, never met Metallica. Cest la vie.

I bought a copy of Metallica’s “And Justice For All” two years later, living in a noisy dorm, my first week at UCLA, but that is another story.