Rollins Band – Weight (Imago, 1994)

In 1994 I was a freshman in high school.  A good boy who followed the rules, got good grades and showed up to work on time… on the outside.  On the inside I was a fucking maniac, an animal caged inside a pressure-cooker that wanted to kill, fuck or destroy everything in sight.  A ball of hormones and confusion, tightly wrapped in a nice little Catholic school attending, grocery bagging for $4.65 an hour package.  I couldn’t wear my black jeans and Metallica shirt to Catholic school, I didn’t have the strength or the self-confidence to stand up to the privileged, pampered, future white collar asshole scumbags of America that ran the place and I definitely didn’t have the courage to be anything more than friends with the ladies.

But alone in my room, cranking Weight on my first stereo at as close to top volume as I could get away with, yelling along with Henry Rollins:

“You’re pathetic and weak / You’re a fake and you lie / I’d like to crush you like an insect / But I don’t want to do the time / Do you really want to confront me? / Do you really want to deal with me? / No! / I didn’t think so!” – “Step Back”

I felt ten fucking feet tall.  I felt like Rollins was speaking directly to the war going on inside my head, like maybe at some point he too had been a scrawny little nothing that quietly went about his daily business, keeping his head down and trying not to draw too much attention to himself, all the while wishing he could be something more, wishing he had the stones to “fuck on the floor and break shit” (to borrow a phrase from the man himself, see the Henry Rollins – Up For It DVD).

Of course, it also helped that the musical backdrop for Rollins’ vein-popping pep talks was an incredibly rich one.  In fact, referring to the music as a backdrop is to do it a great disservice.  Rollins Band drew from the entire spectrum of sound as I knew it at the time; rock, metal, prog, blues, funk, punk/hardcore, Weight had it all in spades, making for an album that was crushing but also funky and danceable in some bizzaro-world kind of way, all without sounding silly or contrived.  These were men that held Black Sabbath’s apocalyptic doom dirges and George Clinton’s bop gun-fuelled freak-outs in equal esteem.  Chris Haskett, Sim Cain and Melvin Gibbs played with the same intensity and conviction that Rollins put into his words, a perfect soundtrack for raging hormones, sexual frustration and a pent up desire for reckless abandon that an existence in the bowels of the Midwest could never hope to gratify.

Even today Weight is an inspiring album for me.  Being a little older and wiser(?), I have a better understanding (I think) of where Rollins was coming from with his lyrics, as well as a deeper appreciation of the vast ocean of musical influences Haskett, Cain and Gibbs were drawing from/destroying with.  When the pressures of my everyday existence (corporate job, crazy relatives, bills to pay, etc) start to get me down, I still find myself reaching for Weight, still trying to find “grace in times of friction”.

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In case you were wondering, yes, this was at least partially inspired by the recent Invisible Oranges interview w/ former Rollins Band bassist Melvin Gibbs, which can be read HERE.

If you’re still feeling nostalgic like I am, here are the two well known music videos from Weight, for the songs “Disconnect” and of course “Liar”.

Wolverine’s Blues (or how I discovered death metal)

It took the combined might of Columbia Records, Earache Records, Marvel Comics, MTV and Sweden to bring death metal to a 13 year old boy attending Catholic school in Central Iowa.

At that age, staying up late on Saturday nights to watch Headbanger’s Ball had become a weekly ritual.  It wasn’t like I had a life or anything in that weird, awkward period just before high school.  This was a golden age for MTV, as they were playing stuff like Metallica, Megadeth and Danzig during the day, but I craved more.  Oftentimes I would fall asleep during the Ball, but it seemed like the later into the night the show went, the heavier and stranger the bands got, so I always tried my hardest to stay up and take it all in.

That’s when I witnessed Entombed’s video for the title track off of Wolverine Blues. To be honest, at that age I was probably more excited about the X-Men character Wolverine appearing in the video than I was about the music.  In addition to be being a budding metalhead, I was a full-blown nerd of the comic book collecting, Dungeons & Dragons playing variety.  Yes, the first time I heard death metal I was on the fence about it.  I think it was probably the vocals that threw me off.  As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, I was accustomed to actual singing, or at least vocalists who tried to sing… the whole growling thing didn’t really set well with me at the time.

Fast forward a few years and I found a copy of Wolverine Blues at a used CD store.  Seeing Wolverine on the cover and remembering the video, I bought the damn thing even though I wasn’t sure if I was ready for it or not.  By then I owned some albums by “gateway” bands like Sepultura, Slayer and Pantera so it seemed that the time was right.

Sure enough, I ended up loving Wolverine Blues and it remains to this day one of my favorite metal albums.  It might have started “death ‘n’ roll” for better or worse, but for me it opened up another door to the world of extreme music far beyond what I was comfortable or familiar with at the time. In retrospect, it sounds more like ultra gnarly punk rock than pure death metal, but at the time it seemed like the meanest, heaviest motherfucker of an album on the planet.

Of course, from what I gather the members of Entombed were none too pleased about being forced to partner with Marvel Comics, and the Columbia/Earache deal wasn’t the platinum-selling success that the two labels had hoped for.  But nonetheless, for a brief moment the planets aligned and my life’s path was irrevocably changed forever.

So thanks Entombed… I definitely owe you, big time.

I Was A Teenage Metalhead.

Okay, so a couple of folks have asked me to write something about how I got into heavy metal. Well, let me start by saying it wasn’t easy to do, being trapped in the bowels of the Midwest. Furthermore I’m only 30, which means I was way too young to get caught up in the ’80s glory days of tape trading (I was 8 years old when Nihilist released their first demo, about 4 when Death released theirs) and too old to have had the internet readily available to me at a young age (we did however, have some sweet Apple computers at school that you could play Oregon Trail on). There were very few outlets for discovering metal available to someone growing up when and where I did. I think it started with classic rock. It might not have been easy to catch an underground metal show in central Iowa, but it was easy to turn on the radio and hear Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Steppenwolf, Kiss, etc… the building blocks of heavy metal. I always gravitated towards the heavier side of classic rock, so metal was a natural progression.

And I discovered metal through MTV. This might sound like a completely ridiculous notion now, but back then MTV actually had something to do with music and didn’t constantly show programs about knocked up trailer park dwellers, morbidly obese high schoolers who want to be dancers and cheerleaders only to fail miserably, and more sexually confused 20-somethings than you can shake a stick at (take that how you will). It was Metallica’s video for “One” that hit me like a sledgehammer to the skull. I caught it while randomly flipping channels one day after school. It was one of those moments of “This is the music I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear.”. The dynamics, the guitar tone, the machine-gun drums, everything about that song was perfect. It blew all the hair metal MTV had been playing at the time out of the water. Metallica weren’t a bunch of preening tarts like Poison, they were genuine bad asses with a dark, heavy sound that matched their black-clad image. Of course, it was all downhill from there…