Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, pp. 86–105. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Acknowledgments
*
I am grateful for the generosity of the nearly two hundred heavy metal fans from Minnesota, California, Michigan, and Illinois who discussed their music and their lives with me. Through interviews, casual conversations, and questionnaires, their assistance was invaluable in helping me to understand heavy metal. In contrast to the common stereotype of metal fans as sullen and inarticulate, I was surprised by the friendliness and enthusiasm I found among fans and musicians alike. Most fans were pleased to find someone taking their music seriously; they were eager to fill out the questionnaires I circulated at concerts, and far from having to persuade people to let me interview them, I received many more requests to do interviews than I could accommodate. In particular, I thank Peter Del Valle for helping me to set up my first interview with a group of fans.
I have learned from conversations about heavy metal and popular culture with many other people, particularly Chris Kachian, Csaba Toth, and Metal Mark of GMS. I thank Gary Thomas and the members of his Gay Studies class for an evening spent discussing heavy metal videos and gender construction. My work has benefited from the ideas and criticisms of my students at the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College, especially those in my Contemporary Popular Music Studies course at Michigan. Thanks also to my metal guitar teacher, Jeff Loven, and to the many other rock musicians I have performed with and learned from, especially Gene Retka, Steve Cekalla, James Capra, Dave Michel, John Helgen, and Gregg Ramseth.
William Schurk at Bowling Green State University is the knowledgeable curator of an enormous archive of popular music, including heavy metal recordings and fan magazines (many confiscated from fans by parents or police). I thank him for his assistance and for granting me access to materials that I found useful. For travel funds that enabled me to carry out that research and to present papers on heavy metal at a number of academic conferences, I thank the University of Minnesota, especially Vern Sutton and the School of Music, as well as the School of Music at the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College. And I am pleased to have an opportunity to acknowledge the influence of Bruce Lincoln, who introduced me to cultural criticism and changed my life nearly fifteen years ago.
Several non-metal-fan friends were brave enough to overcome strong misgivings and accompany me to heavy metal concerts; I thank Bruce Holsinger, Chris Kachian, George Lipsitz, Susan McClary, and John Mowitt for the pleasure of their company and for their insights concerning what they saw and heard. It is regrettable that the only violence I ever witnessed at a heavy metal concert was committed by one of these people.
For their helpful comments on drafts and portions of this book, I thank Andrew Goodwin, Wendy Kozol, Carolyn Krasnow, Richard Leppert, John Mowitt, and Christopher Small. I am particularly grateful to those who read the entire book and provided much-needed corrections, provocations, and encouragement: Simon Frith, Dave Marsh, Terry Cochran, Charles Hamm, and Ross Chambers.
Finally, I owe my largest intellectual debts to Susan McClary and George Lipsitz. To put it simply, Susan taught me how to think about music, and George taught me how to think about popular culture. I feel proud and fortunate to have been their student and friend, and it is to them that I dedicate Running with the Devil.
| November 1992 | R.W. |
Introduction
*
In the catacombs of a nineteenth-century warehouse, hulking in a rundown riverfront district, passageways wind through rough stonework to connect small rooms, each fronted by a sturdy iron door. Behind these doors musicians compose and rehearse through all hours of the day and night. Wandering the crooked hallways, I hear waves of sound clashing and coalescing: powerful drums and bass, menacing and ecstatic vocals, the heavy crunch of distorted electric guitars. In some rooms, lone guitarists practice scales, arpeggios, heavy metal riffs, and Bach transcriptions. Occasionally, I pass an open door, and musicians who are taking a break consider my presence with cool curiosity.
I am struck by the resemblance of these underground rehearsal spaces to the practice rooms of a conservatory. The decor is different, but the people are similar: musicians in their late teens and early twenties, assembled for long hours of rigorous practice. There is a parallel sense of isolation for the sake of musical craft and creativity, a kindred pursuit of technical development and group precision. And like conservatory students, many of these heavy metal musicians take private lessons, study music theory, and practice scales and exercises for hours every day. They also share the precarious economic future faced by classical musicians; in both cases, few will ever make enough money performing to compensate them for the thousands of hours they have practiced and rehearsed.
There are important differences from the conservatory environment, too, not the least of which is the grungy setting itself, which underlines the fact that this music does not enjoy institutional prestige or receive governmental subsidy. The musicians must pool their funds to pay for rental of the rooms, and the long hair that marks them as members of a heavy metal subculture also ensures that they are not likely to have access to jobs that pay well. On the other hand, many of these people are actually working as musicians, at least part-time. Unlike most of their peers in the academy, they know a great deal about the commercial channels to which they hope to gain access. Some talk of not compromising their art for popular success, but there is little evidence of the music academy’s pretense that art can be pursued apart from commerce. This is in part because they are more closely connected with their potential audiences, through their own fan activities and those of their friends, while relatively few aspiring classical musicians actually belong to the moneyed class that underwrites the performance of classical music. Heavy metal musicians are, in fact, strongly influenced by the practices of the musical academy, but their activities also retain the priorities of collective creation and orality derived from traditions of popular music making.
The noisy vaults of that warehouse and the musicians who haunt them evoke images and raise issues that will be central to my discussions of heavy metal. If metal could be said to have gotten started in any single place, it would be Birmingham, England, the industrial city whose working class spawned Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That heavy metal bands now labor in spaces abandoned by industry is particularly appropriate for a music that has flourished during the period of American deindustrialization. And just as the labor of industrial production is invisible in mass media representations of consumer products,
