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Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal Paperback – February 17, 2004
Ian Christe
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The definitive history of the first 30 years of heavy metal, containing over 100 interviews with members of Black Sabbath, Metallica, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister, Slipknot, Kiss, Megadeth, Public Enemy, Napalm Death, and more.
More than 30 years after Black Sabbath released the first complete heavy metal album, its founder, Ozzy Osbourne, is the star of The Osbournes, TV's favourite new reality show. Contrary to popular belief, headbangers and the music they love are more alive than ever. Yet there has never been a comprehensive book on the history of heavy metal - until now. Featuring interviews with members of the biggest bands in the genre, Sound of the Beast gives an overview of the past 30-plus years of heavy metal, delving into the personalities of those who created it. Everything is here, from the bootlegging beginnings of fans like Lars Ulrich (future founder of Metallica) to the sold-out stadiums and personal excesses of the biggest groups. From heavy metal's roots in the work of breakthrough groups such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin to MTV hair metal, courtroom controversies, black metal murderers and Ozzfest, Sound of the Beast offers the final word on this elusive, extreme, and far-reaching form of music.
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Print length416 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherIt Books
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Publication dateFebruary 17, 2004
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Dimensions6 x 1.04 x 9 inches
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ISBN-100380811278
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ISBN-13978-0380811274
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Ian Christe grew up in the metal strongholds of Switzerland, NewMexico, Indiana, Germany, and Washington. He moved to New York Cityin 1992, and has covered emerging technology and fringe culture forReuters, Wired, and Salon.com. His hundreds of articles on heavymetal have appeared in Spin, AP, CMJ, Metal Maniacs, and the Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock and been cited by The New York Times.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
The 1970s:
Prelude to Heaviness
- February 13, 1970: Black Sabbath debut released
- June 4, 1971: Black Sabbath gold in America
- December 1975: Judas Priest records Sad Wings of Destiny
- October 28, 1978: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park airs on NBC
- December 11, 1978: last date of Ozzy Osbourne's final tour with Black Sabbath
Heavy metal came into being just as the previous generation's salvation, rock and roll, was in the midst of horrific disintegration. Four deaths at a free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway in December 1969 had shaken the rock community and left the youth culture disillusioned with pacifist ideals. Then, while Black Sabbath was marking the pop charts in April 1970, Paul McCartney effectively announced the breakup of the Beatles. Instead of comforting their audience in an uncertain world, rock giants Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors all were dead of drug overdoses within a year.
Shortly after JFK, RFK, and MLK fell to the bullets of assassins, so, too, were the originators of rock and roll falling to naïve excess. Jaded and frustrated, the Love Generation that created counterculture left the cities in droves, returning to their homelands, heading to the hills - anything to exorcise the communal nightmares of utopia gone awry. It was the end of the 1960s and of all they represented. As the nonviolent flower children gave way to the militant Black Panther party, Kent State campus massacres, and increasingly violent street revolts by frustrated students in Paris, Berlin, and Italy, it was out with the old hopes everywhere and in with the new pragmatism.
Black Sabbath seemed to thrive on such adversity, never pretending to offer answers beyond the occasional exhortation to love thy neighbor. Though legend likes to portray the band as scraggly underdogs, the band's debut soon took to the British Top 10 and stayed there for months. The band's maiden American tour, planned for summer 1970, was canceled in light of the Manson Family murder trial. There was an extremely inhospitable climate in the United States toward dangerous hippies. Still, the record charted high in America and sold over a half million copies within its first year.
Vertigo Records scrambled to get more material from its dire and mysterious conscripts, interrupting Sabbath's nonstop touring for another recording session in September 1970. Hotly rehearsed as ever, and with intensified creative purpose, the band emerged after two days with the mighty Paranoid, its bestselling album and home of classic Sabbath songs "War Pigs," "Paranoid," and "Iron Man."
While Paranoid retained the haunting spirit of Black Sabbath, the themes of the second album were less mystical and more tangible. Obsessed with damage and loss of control, Ozzy Osbourne in plaintive voice bemoaned the ills of drug addiction in "Hand of Doom," nuclear war in "Electric Funeral," and battle shock in "Iron Man." Like the mesmerizing title track of Black Sabbath, the soul of Paranoid still grew from an occult-oriented number, "Walpurgis," whose imagery powerfully summoned "witches at black masses" and "sorcerers of death's construction." When recorded for Paranoid, the song was slightly rewritten as "War Pigs," a cataclysmic antiwar anthem indicting politicians for sending young and poor men off to do the bloody work of banks and nations.
Now Sabbath was becoming experienced not just as musicians but as generational spokesmen. If change was to be brought by music, Sabbath lyricist Geezer Butler saw that he would have to fight ugliness on the front lines. The new Black Sabbath songs sought peace and love - not in the flower patches of Donovan and Jefferson Airplane but in the grim reality of battlefields and human ovens. Ozzy Osbourne delivered these lyrics as if in a trance, reading messages of truth written in the sky.
Billboard magazine blithely wrote that Paranoid "promises to be as big as their first," and indeed the songs "Paranoid" and "Iron Man" both came close to cracking the U.S. Top 40 singles chart. It seemed that the music of the 1960s had existed just to ease audiences into Sabbath's hard prophecies. Written allegedly in less time than it takes to play, the frantic three-minute single "Paranoid" sent Sabbath's second album to number one on the British charts and number eight in America.
While the hierarchy of rock and roll collapsed around them, spectators were overwhelmed by the intuition that Black Sabbath was beginning an entirely new musical era. "Paranoid is just like an anchor," says Rob Halford, singer of Judas Priest, a local Birmingham band. "It really secures everything about the metal movement in one record. It's all there: the riffs, the vocal performance of Ozzy, the song titles, what the lyrics are about. It's just a classic defining moment."
Sabbath soon found squatters in their huge sonic space. Inspired acolytes, signed to one-off record deals while playing the university student-union circuit, brought early and short-lived aftershocks. Japan's outlandish Flower Travelin' Band and South Africa's clumsy Suck went so far as to record Black Sabbath cover songs as early as 1970, when the vinyl on the original records was barely dry. Others were motivated to mimic Sabbath by the prospect of a quick buck. A 1970 album by Attila presented young Long Island crooner Billy Joel (then a rock critic and sometime psychiatric patient) dressed in warrior garb, playing loud Hammond B3 organ to a hard rock beat, damaging ears with the songs "Amplifier Fire" and "Tear This Castle Down."
Before Black Sabbath, "heavy" had referred more to a feeling than a particular musical style, as in hippiespeak it described anything with potent mood. Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles often wrote songs that pointed toward a heavy break, a bridge between melodies that tried to resolve conflicting emotions and ideas. The "metal" in heavy metal put a steely resilience to that struggle, an unbreakable thematic strength that secured the tension and uninhibited emotion. As ordained by Black Sabbath, heavy metal was a complex maelstrom of neurosis and desire formed into an unbending force of deceptive simplicity. It had omnivorous appetite for life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sound of the Beastby Christe, Ian Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.Copyright © 2003 Laura Lippman
All right reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : It Books; First Thus edition (February 17, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0380811278
- ISBN-13 : 978-0380811274
- Item Weight : 1.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.04 x 9 inches
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Best Sellers Rank:
#102,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #24 in Blues Music (Books)
- #53 in Heavy Metal Music (Books)
- #148 in Music History & Criticism (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Ian Christe is the author of Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal and Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga. He was raised in the heavy metal hotbeds of New York, Germany, Switzerland, New Mexico, and Indiana.
He has been heard aloud since 2004 on Sirius XM's weekly heavy metal history show Bloody Roots, and he has appeared in numerous documentaries relating to hard rock and heavy metal.
He is also the publisher behind Bazillion Points Books, home to books for voracious readers including Murder in the Front Row, Touch and Go, Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries, Swedish Death Metal, Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie, Once Upon a Nightwish, Hellbent for Cooking, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside/Outside of AC/DC, and other deep music-related books and DVDs. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Customer reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Now for the problems (again, I mostly like the book, but these are things that might bother some readers):
As other reviewers have noted, Christe focuses heavily on Metallica. While they are certainly one of the most influential metal bands of all time, they receive more attention here than any other band. On a related note, there is a strong Anglo-American bias. While Christe has the requisite chapter on black metal in Norway, he mostly talks about British and American bands, giving a very skewed picture of the development of metal.
He also clearly lets his own musical tastes get in the way of objectivity, with the most obvious case being the way he treats hair metal. Every time he mentions it, he denigrates it, and tries to reduce its historical importance.
The treatment of hair metal is in some ways indicative of a larger trend in the book, of whitewashing metal. If you are looking for stories of debauchery (the sex and drugs side of things), you won't find them here. Christe paints a picture of metal as socially conscious and intellectually engaged. While this is true of a lot of metal, I don't think it's true of all, or even most, metal. Similarly, Christe downplays things like Satanism, going so far as to say that metal bands only ever use it as a metaphor. Again, that's probably largely true, but it's not so simple. Over and over I got the feeling that Christe was trying to present a respectable picture of metal to outsiders. Not a bad goal, of course, but a bit disingenuous in a history.
Finally, if you're looking for any kind of musicological discussion of metal, you won't find it here. In the grand scheme of things, there's very little discussion of the music itself here.
Overall, this is a solid book and really the best thing out at the moment, but there are some glaring problems that leave me hoping that someone else will eventually write a better history of metal.
There are serious organizational challenges in writing about times where a lot of things are going on at once. Criste handles them well. Each chapter covers a few years and people working in a shared style and set of priorities, with half a dozen or so bullet points at the outset to date key albums and events. He never has to back up more than a few years to pick up the next thread, and it was always clear to me how different folks were reacting to each other. Sidebars define various sub-genres and provide short discographies.
Criste puts a lot of effort on the growth of heavy metal as communities nurtured outside conventional music publishing. First there were exchanges of mail and tapes, then fanzines, later BBSes and Internet mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, and file sharing. As he remarks at one point, this made it possible for bands who never played in person for more than 20 people to sell 100,000 copies of their albums through the labels paying attention to tape trading.
I was pleasantly surprised by the global sweep of this book. Criste discusses the social place of heavy metal in dozens of countries, especially where it's an outlet for young people's negativity in places where public negativity toward the official line isn't allowed. The interviews in these chapters are particularly illuminating.
In the 2003 epilogue, Criste shows himself aware of the ties between some heavy metal and right-wing extremism. He explicitly warns of the potential for outright fascist use of the music and community. Good spotting.
I'm very happy to recommend this book with utmost enthusiasm.
However, the scanning from paper to ebook could really, really have stood a human editor to look it over. The scanning process introduced hundreds of errors, most of them simple problems with punctuation and spacing, and the sidebar items that form a significant portion of the book are uniformly a mess. It makes the book difficult to read, and it's a shame.
Top reviews from other countries
Though it gets to parts that seem to be very Sabbath and Metallica heavy, and in other places, the author goes on odd rants about the rap-metal fad that went on in the nineties, it's quite a good read and is particularly insightful.