Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal
by David Konow
Three Rivers Press
For two reasons, "Bang Your Head: The Rise and Fall of Heavy Metal" is a misleading title for David Konow's history of Satan's favorite music. One is that the book is not, as its title implies, an authoritative and definitive treatise on the rock genre, mainly because for all the detail about various bands, you never get a sense for why heavy metal bands grew in popularity — in this book, they just did. The other is that, even by the book's admission, heavy metal hasn't fallen — the more accurate word may be absorbed, what with the book itself citing the rise of the nu-metal movement, and Britney Spears flashing the metalhead devils'-horn salute these days.
Konow, a writer for Guitar World and author of a biography of shlock filmmaker Al Adamson, spends about the first 120 pages in a heavy-metal-for-dummies mode to track the music's evolution from Black Sabbath onward, though forgetting seminal acts like Blue Cheer and Grand Funk Railroad, whose thudding power chords and mix of grand ambition and rampant stupidity provided as much of a blueprint for metal as Sabbath's minor-key dirges, and including acts like Boston, no one's idea of a metal band.
If you have any passing familiarity with KISS, Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin and the like, Konow reveals little that you don't know. Where the book has more to offer is when it gets to the L.A. scene of the 1980s. It makes sense; Konow's metal experience did not come from being a stoner in a dying factory town — a fertile breeding ground for both metal bands and fans to this day — but as a native Southern Californian checking out Mötley Crüe at the Forum or Guns 'n' Roses at Anaheim Stadium in the 1980s. If Konow had substituted "hair" for "heavy" in the title of his book and cut down that first 120 pages, he would have at least an engaging read on the foibles of one of the most unlikable music scenes ever created.
Where Konow should have started his book is with Van Halen, the band every L.A. hairbanger wanted to be. Van Halen was a success out of the gate in 1978, though with disco dominating the top of the charts there wasn't much room to drag something up in their wake. Still, they were the model — a charismatic, attractive and blond lead singer, killer guitarist, a a tight rhythm section and a party-hearty attitude. However, most hair-metal bands following their lead didn't have Van Halen's musical chops, nor did they address anything in their lyrics that reflected on their fans' lives. For all of Van Halen's swagger, the group's lyrics, at least in their early days, perfectly reflected the confused stoner teen — hassling from oppressive parents and teachers, begging to get laid and hating yourself while partying to forget it all.
Most tales of successful-yet-imploding bands involve members who were nice at first, but were corrupted by fame and the evil music industry. As Konow details, the hair-metal band members were assholes when they were poor, and even bigger assholes once they got rich. Even self-aware tyrant Gene Simmons blanched at the ego of unintentional protegé Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P., who not only patterned himself after the KISS bassist, but also kept a shelf full of books on how to intimidate people. The bands' relationships with women sound like a dirtier twist on the cliché about what happens to those who marry med students. Women would support their poor boyfriends, usually through stripping, and clean up after them in hopes they would be rewarded once their band got a record contract; there is no evidence this payoff ever came. Many of the bands even made a point of treating their fans like dirt, unless they were blonde and had big tits.
It seems that when a pop genre gets a run at the top of the charts — be it Philly soul, 1970s corporate rock, New Wave or today's boy bands, which appear to be on the wane — it gets five years. If you, as Konow does, chart the start of the hair-band dominance of the pop charts in 1986, with the multimillion success of Poison's first album, then hair-metal might have been swept away in 1991 no matter what. The fact that fans tossed them out so quickly and viciously for the Seattle sound and hip-hop was a direct result of the metal bands' total alienation from their fans, who were no longer willing to put up with their musical bankruptcy once something better came along, or at least something embraced by their local radio station.
Konow's book doesn't get to quite that level of reflection; the bands lived, they partied, then they died. But to say metal died with these bands is wrong, and even Konow admits that by mentioning the popularity of bands such as Korn. Teen stoners still gravitate to metal — be it Slipknot, or death metal, or some of the other zillion categories the music has split into. That makes it tough to complete a book by documenting the genre's "fall." Hair metal may be dead — even if Poison still does summer shed tours — but metal itself lives on, and still awaits the definitive book about itself.
— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)
