www.titlovi.com
Birmingham, 1965,
the manufacturing heartland of England.
In one of the city's factories, a young machinist, Tony Iommi,
is about to have an industrial accident
that would change the course of rock history.
One day I went in to work and there was a woman who used to press the metal
and send it down to me, and I used to weld it.
But she never came in so they said, "Oh, you've gotta do the pressing."
So I had to get on this machine...
and of course, the thing just came down, "Snap!"...
and took the ends of my fingers off.
The injury was a personal tragedy for Iommi,
a guitar player on the verge of turning professional.
I thought, "That's it. It's all over. Forget it."
But Tony Iommi wasn't someone who gave up easily.
He was determined to find a way to keep playing.
So I ended up making some tips for myself.
I got a 'Fairy Liquid' bottle and melted it down.
I fit it onto my finger.
And then I sat there with sand paper just rubbing it down.
And it worked.
By slackening his guitar strings, it was easier to play
and made a heavier sound.
Alongside Ozzy Osborne's bludgeoning vocal,
it boosted the sound of their band, Black Sabbath,
giving birth to a new age in rock music,
Heavy Metal.
# Finished with my woman cause she couldn't help me with my mind
# People think I'm insane because I am browning all the time
We had nothing to win, we had nothing to lose.
We were just having a lot of fun, drinking booze, smoking dope and getting chicks.
It was better than working in the factory, you know.
# All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy
# Think I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacify
Sabbath inspired two generations of Metal giants.
From leather clad Judas Priest...
It was heavier, stronger, louder, more aggressive.
It had more of an attack.
...to 'thrash' kings, Metallica.
We wanted to go out there
and just play as fast as we could and as loud as we could.
This is the story of how 'heavy metal' grew on to be a global phenomenon.
And despite being the music that the critics loved to hate,
became rock's longer survivor.
It's the thing you cannot kill,
no matter how many silver bullets the critics stick through its head,
the beast just gets bigger, laughs, comes back for more,
and it's considered very exciting by a great many young people.
The four members of Black Sabbath,
had grown up amid the bomb sites in factories of Aston,
close to Birmingham center.
The band formed through an advert in a local music store, in 1966.
We were looking for a lead singer and we saw this note just saying...
"Ozzy Zig requires gig."
And I said to Bill: "I know an Ozzy but it can't be him."
I thought, I gotta have a good name to attract attention,
and I called myself, "Ozzy Zig requires gig".
About three days later there was a knock on the door where I lived,
my brother got up and answered the door and he came and said,
"Some 'thing' is outside asking for you."
I thought, "Oh no! It's this lunatic!"
He used to walk around with a shoe on a piece of string. A pet shoe.
I thought he was a complete nutcase.
More than any group at the time,
Sabbath were influenced by their surroundings.
All the guys in Sabbath... they were hard-core working class guys,
from a hard-core working class town.
It's factory music.
That's what factories sound like.
You could hear the drop stamp forges.
I'd be laying in bed at night and just kind of like tapping on the head board,
like...
You know, putting the extra rhythm into the stamp.
# Follow me now and you will not regret
# leaving the life you led before we met
# You are the first to have this love of mine
# forever with me 'till the end of time
But there was one last element that would make the band unique.
We used to rehearse at a community center across the road from movie theater.
And I think it was Tony or Geezer said one morning,
"Have you noticed? It's really weird
"that people pay money to go to the movies to get scared.
"Why don't we start writing scary music?"
The idea for a new form of heavy, scary rock
would come together on the title track, 'Black Sabbath',
the showpiece of their debut album.
Very moody setting, with the rain and the spooky cover.
Just put it on on the headphones and sit there and stare at the cover,
and get freaked out.
When I first played the riff for Black Sabbath, I really liked it.
You felt the hairs on your arms stand up. I felt, this was really good.
And we knew we had something different.
When Tony delivered those chords, I thought they were absolutely incredible.
It has so much provocation.
So you can't help, as a drummer, just going... just wildly, "Yeah!".
# What is this that stands before me?
# Figure in black which points at me
When we first started playing Black Sabbath, people would scream and run out.
Chicks would run out. People would get scared,
and we'd go, "Our scary music's working, ain't it?"
To me, that whole track embodies everything about metal.
It is heavy metal within the structure of just a few minutes.
So, with one track, Black Sabbath almost singlehandedly invented "heavy metal".
The response of the established rock press to Black Sabbath's album
would define their attitude to heavy metal for the next 30 years.
The reaction of the music press? Not very nice.
They didn't like us.
Oh God!
Any reviews that had been about the album... all negative.
They hated us... they did hate us.
But what nobody, including the band, realized
was that there was a vast audience eager to buy into the new heavier sound.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
We were driving up to this gig in Manchester and we had the radio on,
and it was John Peel, who used to do the top 20 albums every Saturday.
And went up to 13 and said, "13: Black Sabbath"... "What?!"
It was just incredible, absolutely amazing.
The next night we played in Nottingham we found a big lump of hash.
And we actually got paid 20 quid each.
It was like the most money we'd ever had and the...
the most hash as well.
It was just like the perfect weekend.
The guitar riff was central to the new heavy metal sound,
and Black Sabbath were joined by Deep Purple
in laying down the blueprint.
The riff itself is crucial to what we know as "heavy metal".
It almost drives it. It's the engine, as it were.
The riff represents energy, it represents aggression.
It represents force, and it gets you into a "metal" song.
# Black night is not right,
# I don't feel so bright,
# I don't care to sit tight.
# Maybe I'll find on the way down the line
# That I'm free, free to be me.
# Black night is a long way from home.
Guitars were important because it's like having a Jag.
Guitars were very potent instruments. Highly sexual.
Richard Blackmore, amazing technician.
A real flashbugger... great showman.
We were writing songs really based on our live experience.
And playing live was wild.
Paice was a furious drummer.
And we had John Lord y Ritchie Blackmore who were just unbelievable players.
And intent on kind of outdoing each other.
And so the music really took shape from the live experience.
It was heavy, and it was challenging. It wasn't folk music.
After the success of their hit record 'Black Night'
Deep Purple traveled to Montreux, Switzerland,
to record their next album at a casino
run by promoter Claude Nobs.
The night before recording began, disaster struck.
The band were watching Frank Zappa perform at the casino
when to their horror, a fan in the audience
fired a flaregun into the ceiling.
Within minutes the place was on fire and we were all evacuated.
Hundreds of feet high flames and smoke, when this wonderful wooden building...
went up like a tinderbox.
By the following morning
the whole casino had been destroyed.
The wind blew the smoke across lake Geneva.
It was lying there like a carpet.
And Roger wrote "Smoke on the water" just as a phrase.
Instead of heading home,
Deep Purple made the best of a bad situation
and decided to start recording tracks in their hotel.
Gentlemen, here we go. Take #5.
We barricaded ourselves into the Grand Hotel,
which we were using as a recording studio.
With drums on the landing, on the hallway.
Hamond in one bedroom and the base in another. Ritchie out in the hallway.
I smashed a microphone.
Then the engineer said,
"We've got a day to go and you're still 7 minutes short of an album."
Here we go then. This is the one.
Ritchie came up with the riff.
And that kind of strange semitone lift...
you know, no one did that before.
Rog said, why don't we just do a biographical account
of the making the record?
And so, we did.
Hence, 'We all came out to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline
'To make records with a mobile. - We didn't have much time.'
So there it is, Funky Claude, Frank Zappa and The Mothers.
We stuck it on the album to make up the numbers.
# We all came out to Montreux
# on the Lake Geneva shoreline
# To make records with a mobile.
# We didn't have much time.'
# Frank Zappa and The Mothers were at the best place around
# But some stupid with a flare gun
# burned the place to the ground
# Smoke on the water and fire in the sky
# Smoke on the water
I think a couple of DJs started playing Smoke on the Water from the live version,
and it caught on, that's all I can say.
It's like public property now.
We've become the backing group for the audience when they sing that song.
It's incredible.
When it was released as a single,
'Smoke on the Water' sold over a million copies in the US alone.
And its guitar riff became one of the most memorable of all time.
'Heavy Metal' was now so big in America
that Black Sabbath took up residence there.
The group began recording out in Los Angeles
where drugs and groupies were plentiful.
And where serious work was the last thing on their minds.
We were doing everything there... women, drugs.
Bringing stuff* actually flown in on private planes.
Sealed bags of cocaine.
We went mad... absolutely mad.
Black Sabbath's music reflected their frazzled state.
Songs like 'Snowblind' left no doubt as to their inspiration.
# What you get and what you see
# Things that don't come easily
# Feeling happy in my vein
# Icicles are in my brain
# Cocaine
Over the next few years,
the band got more and more out of control.
There came a moment, inevitably, where the well had run dry.
The whole frenzied lifestyle had just ground to a drug induced halt.
To top it all, I couldn't think of anything.
I had a writers' block.
And I certainly I... just couldn't come up with anything I liked.
I really thought the band was about to split.
I just thought, we've done everything musically that we can do,
gone as far as we can go,
and that's about it.
In 1973, Sabbath decided to give recording one more shot,
and ended up at the remote Clearwell Castle
in the Forest of Dean.
Got to this castle... it was so bloody haunted. It was unbelievable.
We used to rehearse in the dungeons of the castle.
And this black shape, just like walked past the entrance...
"What the hell was that?"
So they went out and saw this person
walk down to the end of the corridor and go into this room.
And they went in and the room was completely empty.
And there was no other way out.
The spooky castle dungeons
proved to be just the stimulus the band needed.
It sort of sparked some imagination.
And Tony picked his guitar and came out with a riff for...
'Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath'.
And I just went, "Yes!!"
Stuff just came out just like that then.
'Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath' was the first song, and then they just came out.
# You've seen life through distorted eyes
# You know you had to learn
# The execution of your mind
# You really had to turn
It was the most sophisticated album they'd ever made.
There were some tremendously high points like the title track itself.
And I think, technically, it was their absolute zenith.
While Sabbath were enjoying unprecedented success,
in their hometown Birmingham,
another group had watched patiently from the sidelines.
# There I was completely wasting, out of work and down
# all inside it's so frustrating as I drift from town to town
It was exciting for us to see a band like Sabbath get established
and become famous.
That was an inspiration, I think, for us...
to keep going, you know.
# Breaking the law, breaking the law
By the mid 1970s Judas Priest would take the music that Sabbath pioneered
into new territory,
and push them into a league of their own.
Me personally, talking as a musician, I needed to experiment more.
When we really got together and our writing blossomed,
that was the exciting thing. We were moving on.
There were no boundaries really, in our mind.
I don't want to be in a safe band. I don't wanna play safe music.
I wanna be in a band that is energizing.
# When the day is over,
# I like to ease my mind
Priest became faster, heavier and louder.
# With the beat of a heavy kind
Priest introduced twin guitar, twin lead guitar, into 'heavy metal'.
And then they had the soaring voice of Rob Halford,
which was a banshee wail,
but committed with such range and depth,
no one else could match it.
# And I can't stop talking 'bout my rock forever
We never had a real set plan of we're gonna be this kind of band.
All we knew was we were gonna be a heavy metal band.
With everything that you know and love about metal.
# So when you get those blue days,
# Here's just what to do
As Judas Priest were slowly getting established,
a new musical force was closing in on heavy metal.
# Oh we're so pretty oh so pretty vacant
From 1976, punk dominated the British music scene,
with bands like the Sex Pistols
demanding a cull of long-haired rock bands.
# And we don't care
The punk scene got our backs up
and we were really irritated and pissed of by it,
because we thought it was a load of bollocks most of it.
We were really angry that it was getting so much attention.
We knew internally it wasn't gonna last,
so we just had to ride it out.
We have always been proud of the term 'heavy metal'.
We've never seen anything wrong with it.
And when other bands disowned the tag, because it wasn't fashionable
we've flown the flag for 'heavy metal'.
Giving a two finger salute to punk,
Judas Priest changed their image
and with it the way heavy metal would progress.
What the band's army of followers didn't realize
was that the look originated from singer Rob Halford's
clandestine visits to fetish shops.
Somebody told me, "Go to Mr. S in Soho.
"They've got all this stuff down there."
So when we were in London doing a show I would stop by there
and just went mad and bought those handcuffs, and that cockring,
and this butt whip and this ***.
Just loaded it up and that's how it started.
On stage, Priest started wearing black leather and studs.
A uniform later adopted by heavy metal fans worldwide.
# Seek him here, seek him on the highway
# Never knowing when he'll appear
# All await, engine's ticking over
# Hear the roar as they sense the fear
Everybody now know that Robbie's gay,
but at the time, we were blissfully unaware of all that.
We said, "Look at those spiky things. That's cool."
# Hell bent, hell bent for leather
Who else but Rob Halford could take that look
and make it absolutely part of the image
of one of the most macho, male-oriented heavy metal groups ever?
# Hell bent, hell bent for leather
It just came about that the way forward
was undoubtedly the leather and studs, you know.
Just suddenly dawned on us that the heavy metal army needs to...
to don the uniform and go marching on.
Priest actually focused the whole of metal into genre.
They were the first band to embrace the term.
'Heavy Metal', that had a ring to it.
That had a sense of tribal belonging.
That gave a sense of exactly what you were gonna listen to.
The band's image and music finally came together in 1980,
when they moved into John Lennon's old house at Tittenhurst Park,
to record their classic metal album, 'British Steel'.
I think all of us in Priest,
will forever cite the 'British Steel' album for us
as the... a pivotal moment for the band.
We suddenly came out with these songs.
# Living after midnight, rockin' to the dawn
# Lovin' 'til the morning, then I'm gone, I'm gone
# I took the city 'bout one A.M, loaded, loaded
# I'm all geared up to score again, loaded, loaded
# I come alive in the neon light
# That's when I make my moves right
# Living after midnight...
It was quite inspirational, really,
because we were recording a lot of guitars
in the room where John Lennon did 'Imagine'.
And John and Yoko's bedroom was directly above.
We woke Rob up one night. We were playing...
'Living after midnight', I think he was in the bedroom above.
I'm trying to get to sleep and I hear this riffing...
"Oh, God! It's Glen." And I'm laying there and as he was riffing,
I started, "Oh, God! It's after midnight, you know."
And then that's it.
# I'm aiming for ya
# I'm gonna floor ya
That simple idea became a song that now we have to play
wherever we go around the world playing to,
hundreds of thousands of fans, they want to hear that song.
# The joint starts flying when I begin
# Living after midnight...
Judas Priest were rewarded for embracing heavy metal
when it seemed most out of fashion.
Their album 'British Steel' was an instant hit,
and unified the heavy metal scene around their sound and look,
creating a generation of 'air guitar' players.
But not everyone fared as well as Judas Priest,
the old guard struggled to keep up,
and the era produced its fair share of casualties.
Not least, one Ozzy Osborne.
Ozzy didn't wanna sing anything.
He was getting out of it.
We all were, to be honest, but he was worse than us.
And we had to say to Ozzy,
"We gotta do something about it, otherwise we're gonna break up."
In 1978, Ozzy was fired from Black Sabbath.
Ozzy leaving was heartbreaking.
I really missed my pal.
I missed all the humour.
Everybody was really upset and...
crying and everything when it happened.
Because none of us wanted it to happen.
Ozzy locked himself away in a hotel room
with a vast supply of drink and drugs.
Out of it in every sense.
While the old guard imploded,
by 1980 there was a grassroots explosion
of a more hard nosed type of heavy metal
for an army of fans eager for a new sound.
It was kind of pretty obvious that something was happening there
that wasn't part of the traditional
*** in the wall rock scene that we were familiar with from the early 70s.
It kind of prompted a lot of bands to come out of the woodwork.
That coined the phrase, unwittingly maybe,
'the new wave of British heavy metal'.
And it kind of stuck.
'The new wave of British heavy metal'
was led by Iron Maiden.
# Won't you come into my room, I wanna show you all my wares.
# I just want to see your blood, I just want to stand and stare.
# See the blood begin to flow as it falls upon the floor.
# Iron Maiden can't be faught, Iron Maiden can't be sought.
Founded by bassist Steve Harris, Maiden harnessed some of punk's energy
along with the 'do it yourself' attitude
that would see the band putting out their own first record.
To try and get work in the early days
we made a 'demo' tape and we thought,
"Oh, we really ought to make an actual single or whatever. "
So we put the tracks on in a single,
and we sold those in a really short space of time
just at small gigs we were doing.
It really did start the thing growing,
and real grassroots underground thing going on.
# Just sixteen, a pickup truck, out of money, out of luck.
Their home made demo got the band noticed
and a five album deal with EMI.
# I'm running free yeah...
By 1981, Iron Maiden were the figureheads
of the new wave of British heavy metal,
but for the lead singer Paul Di'Anno,
the pressure of the unforeseen success was too much.
We knew, long term, that Paul wasn't gonna be able to do it
because just couldn't keep up with it.
He didn't like being on tour and it was a problem with his voice...
giving out now and again as well and...
We just knew that his heart wasn't into it.
So we thought, if we don't change it's gonna take us under.
The group needed a frontman who was willing to take on the world.
They found him in the flamboyant form of Bruce Dickinson.
Being young and full of piss and vinegar, I said...
"Well, let's not talk bollocks about this, I've obviously got the job."
I said, "So you have to decide whether or not you can cope
"with a pain in the ass like me being in the band."
"'Cause I'm not gonna be like the other guy."
# White man came across the sea
# He brought us pain and misery
# He killed our tribes, he killed our creed
# He took our game for his own need
Bruce had everything that Paul Di'Anno didn't have,
he had rage, he had depth, he could sing,
and he had a charisma that wasn't born off the streets,
it was actually born of being of stage craft.
So Dickinson came in and lifted Maiden to a new level.
# Riding through dustclouds and barren wastes
# Galloping hard on the plains
Dickinson brought with him a whiff of old fashioned showmanship
and a keen melodic sense.
It's all to do with the rising sixth.
The rising sixth is a very popular device in popular music.
It's actually one of the reasons why "My Way" is so successful.
Because it has several of them...
"And now, the end is near."
And 'Run to the Hills' has got lots of it.
"Run to the hills..."
You put some harmonies on that and it becomes this huge, big like...
# Run to the hills
# Run for your lives
What make the rest of the song so interesting is
it's got all this quite aggressive, fast uptempo part.
But with a really strong melody imposed over all of it.
And there was nothing like it.
All the things that Maiden aspired to,
all came together in that one particular song
at the right particular time.
# Run to the hills
# Run for your lives
On the back of 'Run to the Hills', on the album 'Number of the Beast',
Iron Maiden became a global phenomenon.
This was the dawn of metal on a grand and epic scale.
We wanted to make it an event, basically.
*** with the music, of course.
But a show as well that people go and say, "Wow! Have you seen him?"
In a word, we were trying to create something theatrical.
# 6-6-6 the one for you and me
Metal now took one of its biggest turns yet.
Far away from the factory towns of Britain,
on the West Coast of America,
a new scene brazenly announced itself.
'Glam Metal' had its origins in the glitz and glamour of the sweaty clubs
of Hollywood Sunset Strip.
You know, the Strip was the place to be back in those days.
Especially the weekends it was packed with people with...
big hair and big heels and just glammed out.
The whole 'glam metal' thing just started out of nowhere.
It was quite bizarre.
I just happened to go past a club and see a whole bunch of kids,
about 15 or 16, standing outside. All wearing high heels,
and they had this kind of wild hairdos,
looking like candy floss on their head.
So I just stood in the line like everybody else and went in.
And just saw a band, never heard of them before,
they were called Motley Crew.
They sounded absolutely dreadful but they looked great, and I thought,
I have just seen the future of rock 'n roll and...
Damn it! I was right.
# Don't you know, know, know
# It's a violation
# I still hear you saying
# Such a perfect, perfect night
We were wearing women stilettos and our hair was hairsprayed up.
Our whole thing was about living large and girls and cars
and motorcycles and fun.
# Take me to the top
We were there for people to forget their problems
and enjoy the entertainment.
When MTV was launched, in 1981,
the network soon found that videos of Motley Crew
with their cartoon image, were ideal for entertaining viewers.
# Now listen up
# She's razor sharp
# If she don't get her way
# She'll slice you apart
The first video that MTV played was 'Looks that Kill'.
And it was the old goofy production with girls and flames and all this stuff.
That's when it really took off.
So Motley Crew had gone in a flash, in one year, from being
a little indy band that nobody knew about to being a major label act.
# She's got looks that kill
# Now she's bulletproof
They were iconic... They sort of defined that look.
That's what heavy metal became.
It became the entertainers, the pretty boys, selling records
attracting girls... sex, drugs and rock 'n roll thing.
And that went on to define metal for the next five or six years.
The band who invented 'hair metal'
became as well known for their off stage antics
as they were for their music.
A fact not lost for one of heavy metal's founding fathers,
who was busy resurrecting his career and on tour with Motley Crew.
I think that was the beginning of our infamy and debauchery.
Because some of the stories that came out of that time were pretty crazy
because we were all out of our minds.
He rode on our bus and he would just...
drink and do drugs, and just get crazy.
Motley Crew say something about the fact
that I snorted a line of ants one time.
And I have got absolutely no recollection of doing that.
It was like kind of trying to outdo each other.
And Nicky snorted some ants, so Ozzy snorted these ants,
but Ozzy peed on himself and then licked up the pee.
So he won.
# All aboard!
Despite all of his recreational pursuits
Ozzy Osborne made the most unexpected comeback in rock history.
Ozzy was resuscitated by Sharon Arden.
Sharon was the daughter of Black Sabbath's notorious manager,
Don Arden.
Sharon needed an entree to the serious aspect of the music business.
She was tired of working for her father.
She wanted to do her own thing.
Ozzy didn't have a clue of what was going on,
and needed someone to tell him.
The stroke of luck they had was
Sharon discovered a 22 year-old guitarist by the name of Randy Rhoads
who happened to be the new greatest guitarist in the world.
She teemed them up together
and Ozzy's solo career took of with a bang.
# Crazy, but that's how it goes
# Millions of people living as foes
# Maybe, it's not too late
# To learn how to love
# And forget how to hate
I had the wonderful experience of meeting Randy Rhoads
who was a music teacher.
And he was very patient with me.
# I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
Sabbath would go, here's some music. Put some vocals on that.
Whereas Randy would go to me, "Maybe we could try this key."
I had never experienced that before.
Randy Rhoads was an amazing guitar player.
Great looking guy, fantastic on stage.
And there's no question that those records that he made with Ozzy
are probably the best that Ozzy has made as a solo artist.
# Mr. Crowley, what went on in your head
# Mr. Crowley, did you talk to the dead
But sadly, Ozzy's partnership with Randy Rhoads
was brought to an abrupt end.
Randy and two members of Ozzy's road crew
were killed when a joy ride in a private plane went badly wrong.
The effect his death had on Ozzy and Sharon was devastating.
For a start they saw it happen.
They were standing by the side of the tour bus
when they actually saw the plane go over their heads
and into the ground.
As far as Ozzy was concerned it was the end of his career.
Absolutely. That was it. Finito.
Sharon, being made of much, much tougher stuff,
she dragged him back from the abyss.
"You will go back out on the fucking road."
Literally pushing him out on stage.
Sharon said to me, "Here's a cordless mike,
"there's the stage. Work the stage."
And I'm going...
Because my mike stand was my little place where I could hold on to.
Now I've got a cordless mike, she boots me off the backside
and says, "Work the stage. Work that audience."
And it was like the biggest shock of my life.
And then I started to have fun with it.
Throughout the 80s, Ozzy's shows attracted huge crowds,
drawn to the unaffected charisma of heavy metal's greatest survivor.
On stage, Ozzy was the guy who made you feel good to be alive.
He doesn't have much of an act.
And he's the first guy to admit it.
He jumps up and down, he smiles, he gives you the 'peace' sign.
He yells, "Come on, everybody!"
But it's so basic, and it's so obviously him,
it's an honest act.
But old habits didn't die easily.
Ozzy's success pushed him yet further into excessive use of drink and drugs.
A lot of it is just a drunk and stunk haze.
I mean I was... I thought I was king of the world.
And I was doing so much coke and so much booze...
One glass leads to two, two leads to four...
in the end I'd do something stupid.
Besides leaving a trail of decapitated birds and bats in his wake,
during one drunken bender,
Ozzy even managed to offend the entire state of Texas,
while visiting one of its heritage sites...
The Alamo.
I was legless with a bottle of Courvoisier in my hand
at nine o'clock in the morning,
and I wanted to take a pee.
So I find this old wall, I believe I had this green evening dress on,
I'm standing there having a leak...
when this guy goes mental, this deputy marshal or whatever...
"There he is!" And I was dressed in one of my wife's green evening dresses
urinating up the fucking Alamo.
Ozzy's antics didn't go unnoticed.
# Screams break the silence
While his fans adored him,
others saw Ozzy Osborne as a corrupting influence on the youth of America.
# He's Returned to kill the light
Incensed by the music's explicit lyrics and satanic themes
by the mid eighties, the American moral majority
had heavy metal firmly in its sights.
Once MTV started catching on,
suddenly this got into middle of America.
And they could see these bands.
But I think sometimes the parents,
especially the more right-wing Christians that were there,
got a little bit upset about that.
That particular form of entertainment has explicit violence, explicit sex.
We really don't see the entertainment value in this.
So many of the participants are high on drugs, they're drunk.
It's a dangerous place for these young people to be.
We feel it is very harmful for the young people in the community.
Hot on metal's trail, was the Parents Music Resource Center,
organised by a group of Washington wives
led by Al Gore's wife, Tippa,
who saw to it that metal's extreme content
was the subject of congressional debate.
Songs glorifying rape, or incest, or bondage...
- Or sex at gunpoint. - Or brutality against women.
A lot of Americans had been twisted to think that
what this PMRC organisation was projecting was fact, it was the truth.
That Metal was evil and destructive and killing our kids and...
all that load of bollocks.
It's sometimes amusing and sometimes unfortunate
where people will bring their own conclusions
and portray us in a way that we never intended to be.
...a double shooting.
Is anybody hurt?
Two kids shot at each other.
The moral panic surrounding heavy metal
reached its peak in 1985,
when two Judas Priest fans attempted suicide.
The band was accused of including subliminal messages in their records
and brought to trial.
All rise, court is now in session.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Please be seated.
What is on trial is whether there are subliminal messages present,
and if so, if they have an effect upon the listener.
We were just absolutely gutted about this tragedy.
These two guys that were hardcore Priest metalhead fans.
They loved the band.
One literally blew his head off and his mate...
was freaking out and didn't know what to do,
this is what came out in court,
and then he felt he had no choice but to try and do the same thing.
But he didn't take his own life. He ended up being terribly disfigured.
The evidence in this case, will show that on December 23rd,
Raymond Belknap this shotgun,
placed it under his chin
and pulled the trigger.
Ending his young life of 18 years.
If we hadn't had gone,
we basically couldn't have gone back to America without being arrested.
We were just absolutely gutted.
Firstly about this tragedy,
and then the fact that we were being accused
of something we had nothing to do with.
All this silly thing about subliminal messages
this *** and the other.
I heard the words "do it",
but I didn't understand in what context or why it was there.
Are there subliminal "do its" on the 'Better than you, better than me' song?
Absolutely not.
In a blow to the moral majority
the court case was thrown out
and the charges against Judas Priest dropped.
If we had lost that case, in actual fact,
every record that had been made, heavy metal or not,
every book that had been written would've had a subliminal message in it.
They would have come out of the woodwork,
and life would have changed overnight.
We flew the flag for metal, as corny as that might sound,
that's what we felt we were doing.
And we came through it ok.
Not only did the campaigners lose the court case,
they were also loosing the war.
Back in L.A., Motley Crew still reigned supreme,
only now they had lots of company.
Los Angeles was flooded with bands that looked like them.
It was like rush hour on the Sunset Strip.
If you would try to walk down that street,
you were almost asphyxiated by the smell of hairspray.
It was ridiculous.
And you would fall over men tottering around
in high heels and spandex,
which actually wasn't quite so bad.
Groups like Poison, Hanoi Rocks and Wasp,
had all followed the Motley game plan,
and earned multi-platinum sales as a result.
It was critically and commercially huge.
This was the music in the charts. This was what 'Towel Records' sold.
This was the mainstream and metal had never had that before.
It just became too big, it became too complacent.
Metal always get bloated and self-satisfied and bored of itself.
And it kind of just sits around going, "Well, what next?"
And of course, something always does come up.
This one is gotta kill all the fake people out there, all the posers.
Cutting through the commercial sound and look of hair metal,
was a radical underground scene.
At the forefront were four misfits
based up the coast in San Francisco,
Metallica.
# No remorse
# No repent
# We don't care what it meant
# Another day
# Another death
# Another sorrow
# Another breath
# No remorse
# No repent
# We don't care what it meant
# Another day
# Another death
# Another sorrow
# Another breath
What was being shown on MTV
and what was on the radio was not the metal we knew or loved.
It was pretty much pop, big hair,
get on the radio, get all the chicks you could.
It was the enemy at the time, truly.
We were pretty much doing the opposite.
We always just avoided all the clichés lyrically.
All the party stuff, all the stuff about the devil
and the sword and sorcery and all that bullshit.
We were more interested in singing
about alienation and rebellion and all this type of stuff.
Which really wasn't going on a lot in American hard rock.
# Master of Puppets I'm pulling your strings
# Twisting your mind, smashing your dreams
# Blinded by me, you can't see a thing
# Just call my name, 'cause I'll hear you scream
# Master
The thing that set Metallica off right from the start was
they were no bullshit.
There was no frilly extras.
It was drive, it was the riff, it was just forward motion.
And, certainly in the beginning, at very, very high speed.
Metallica's brand of fast and angry heavy metal
attracted the label 'thrash'.
'Thrash metal' was just 'heavy metal' once again taken beyond.
You didn't think it could go any further,
it's now gone way further.
Essentially, it's heavy, heavy, heavy music,
but done even faster, even more bleak.
The longer your hair, the dirtier your clothes,
or the more street you looked, the better.
I guess it was more... the more real you were,
or trying to be as real as possible...
We wanted attention and we wanted it now.
Over a period of time, Metallica slowly built something.
The were down to earth,
they looked like they belonged on the street,
and had a real sense of headbang.
Which was the thing at the time.
Let's get it really headbang and moshpits and so forth.
For a period of 7 or 8 years,
Metallica became the most vital metal band on the planet.
# Make his fight on the hill in the early day
# Constant chill deep inside
By the end of the 80s, Metallica and thrash metal
were edging into the mainstream.
But the band knew, if they were to survive the next decade,
they were going to have to change.
# Stiffened wounds test their pride
I remember James telling me at the time,
how many times can you be the fastest guy around?
At some point you have to say, why not be a little slower,
why not make it heavier?
See what else you can do at a different speed.
We wanted to get bigger and thicker sounding.
We wanted to sound as huge as we were live.
Ironically, the sound that impressed the group the most
had been created for Metallica's archenemy...
Motley Crew.
# He's the one they call Dr. Feel good
# He's the one that makes ya feel all right
I take the Motely Crew record, 'Dr. Feelgood'...
we'd never heard a record that sounded that good,
that had that kind of size to the bottom and the base drum.
It was just "Fuck!"
This record sounded gigantic
and we wanted to explore some of that sound.
Motely's album, 'Dr. Feelgood', was created by legendary producer
Bob Rock.
When they suggested Bob Rock, we went, "Wow! What has he done?"
And when they said "Motley Crew." "Oh, my God! No!"
"That can't be, are you sure?"
Bob Rock's first task
was to get the band to rethink the way they recorded their music.
They built everything around James,
who'd lay down a guitar track to a click track.
Everybody overdubbed everything and I'm going like, "Well.
"What the hell's that?"
"There's no vibe. Why don't you playing in one room?"
Which is what I had done with all the bands I had learned how to record.
So I set them up in a room.
With Rock laying down the law,
tensions between producer and band began rising to the surface.
We'd never been in a studio
with anybody telling us what to do, or how to do it or...
challenging us.
Now all of a sudden there was this guy saying, "Wait, try it this way" or
"Why don't you change key there, why don't you try a different drum fill,
"or why don't you sing that differently?"
That's what I'm saying, the base should be with them,
right there doing the same part,
but just not like...
We were pretty full of spunk at the time,
and nobody were gonna tell us what the fuck to do with any of this stuff.*
Working with Bob on the 'Black Record'
was not without its horrors, I think, for him.
Bob used to be a woman.
I felt like they hated me. They probably did.
Look what Bob Rock looked like ten years ago.
This guy is on the side by himself.
- Is he like the leader or...? - Yeah, he's the leader.
He told you what to do?
That girly looking guy?
Ok, let's rock it. It's fucking 2 o'clock in the morning.
There's nobody in LA right now who's having any fun.
They're all in bed.
There was a lot of...
We didn't want to give up any of our control but we knew we had to.
The sound is what we wanted and he came in and he knew exactly
what to do with us.
And slowly became trusted another seven of years.
We wanted to try and simplify things a little bit.
And as soon as we started writing,
the first song we wrote was 'Enter Sandman',
it was like, "This is working."
It's pretty good but it just needs a little more... sore character.
'Enter Sandman' was to be the album's first single,
but while the music came together quickly,
the lyrics were more problematic.
I came in with the lyrics and Bob and Lars said,
"They're not good enough."
And I couldn't believe it, you know, no one's ever challenged my lyrics.
I said, "Well, ok. There's a challenge."
# Say your prayers little one
# Don't forget, my son
# To include everyone
# Tuck you in, warm within
# Keep you free from sin
# Till the sandman he comes
# Sleep with one eye open
# Gripping your pillow tight
# Exit light
# Enter night
# Take my hand
# Off to never never land
The rewritten lyrics dealt with the universal fear of nightmares,
and the beast lurking under the bed.
# Now I lay me down to sleep
# Pray the lord my soul to keep
# If I die before I wake
Putting the prayer in there really touched a lot of nerves with people.
That was like the ultimate innocence
of, wow!, a child's room saying his prayers and all of a sudden
the Sandman's dropping this nightmares in there and wow!
It's so wrong. It's disturbing.
It's not supposed to be.
# Exit light
# Enter night
# Grain of sand
# Exit light
When the 'Black Album' was finally released,
it became an instant phenomenon,
and went on to sell over 15 million copies worldwide.
# Were off to never never land
With that one album they proved a point.
That you could be of your time, ahead of your time,
but also do it without actually kowtowering to the suits.
They did the record they wanted to do.
But always bore in mind
they could take metal to a bigger audience, which they did.
# Exit light
With the 'Black Album', Metallica took thrash to the world
and heavy metal into its third decade.
# Were off to never never land
Most genres in rock have their moment,
and that moment soon passes.
The 'Black Album' proved that metal,
never in fashion but never out of fashion,
will always just keep on going.
It'll never die. It's like when they drop all the bombs,
there'll be some cockroach playing some riff.
Somewhere.
Next week on 'Seven Ages of Rock',
enter the gladiators of stadium rock,
with Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, and U2.
To find out more about 'The Seven Ages of Rock'
and see some extra stories featuring artists in the series,
go to "bbc.co.uk/sevenages".
Transcription and synchronization by Fry.
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