* Music *
Sam Dunn: When people talk about the birth of
heavy metal they generally talk about the great British bands
like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple
but America also played a really important role in
the origins of this music and you can't talk about
American metal without talking about Kiss.
* Music *
But the question for this episode is, what are the
origins of American metal and how do we get to KISS?
* Intro *
* Music *
>> The evolution of heavy music in America goes back much
further than the explosion of Kiss in the 1970's and if there
is one style of early American music that was heavy for its
time it's surf music especially the sound of the surf guitar.
Sam Dunn: And I've been thinking back to the first guitar riff
my Dad ever played for me and it was a surf guitar song
by the legendary Dick Dale and I remember loving it
because it had this real intense sort of shredding vibe to it.
So I'm wondering what place does
surf music have in the history of metal?
Sam: read the little write-up on Dick Dale here at the museum
and one of the first things it says, 'father of heavy metal'
Dick Dale: That's what they called me, critics would say,
this music sounds like the metallic galloping of two trains
coming and just crashing. I didn't consider myself
a guitar player, I don't know what an augmented
ninth or thirteenth is and I don't care.
I just bang on that thing and I make it scream with pain or
pleasure and I get sounds of Mother Nature.
* Music *
Dick: I heard about a man called Leo Fender, he said well how
come you got to play so loud, you're blowing up
my amplifiers, and I said, well, because I'm playing at a place
called the Rendezvous Ballroom and I want my guitar and
speaker to sound like Gene Krupa.
* Drums *
Dick: So the Stratocaster was built with a thick
body so that it would give it that fat sound and I put
thick strings on it to gave it a fatter sound then Leo created
the first 100-watt output transformer peaking 180 watts.
To this day that's never been matched and
people's ears started, whoa what is this?
Don Branker: He took the guitar and turned it into
a instrument not just a small part of the music,
he was able to do things on the guitar
that nobody had seen before.
Now had he been playing on a wall of amps like Van Halen had,
heavy metal may have been twenty years earlier.
* Music *
>> Along with surf music another genre that
was a distinctly American contribution to early heavy
metal was garage rock and it doesn't get much more American
than Ted Nugent who long before he became the Motor City Madman
he was the guitarist for 60's garage rockers the Amboy Dukes.
Sam Dunn: I've come all the way to his Spirit Wild Ranch
deep in the heart of Texas and I think the real challenge is
to not have Ted talk about hunting and politics
and actually try and focus on the music.
Ted Nugent: Barack, Barack Obama. (burping)
Ted: You get that? Sam Dunn: Got it.
Ted Nugent: Open the show with that (beep).
Sam: Take 3.
Ted Nugent: It's the only decent use
I found for those syllables, gas release.
Sam Dunn: You heard it here at the ranch.
Sam Dunn: Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Goddammit.
The Amboy Dukes, were you guys called garage rock?
Ted: Sure the Amboy dukes were the quintessential garage band.
We had all the flailing kerrang outrage, the uninhibitedness,
the ferociousness of my Chuck Berry Bo Diddley
dreams was as raw and unrefined as possible.
All of us garage bands, all of us kids taught
every band okay we can't play like (beep) anymore.
* Music *
John Drake: It was a bad boy attitude, you know just
like a swaggering attitude, this is what we do.
The volume kept going up that was another thing you know,
you just happen to notice it,
now you're really starting to get this feeling.
* Music *
Lenny Kaye: When the English bands came over here
all brandishing guitars of some form or another,
it was like, oh we have to get back to where we started
and that's when you have all these garage bands in America
suddenly taking root in every town all across the USA
that would certainly lay the ground work
for the next stage of what the music would become.
* Music *
>> The American garage rock movement created
fertile ground for bands to experiment with heavy sounds
in the mid 60's and it was the Steppenwolf song
"Born To Be Wild" that not only pushed music in a heavier
direction but also featured the phrase, "heavy metal".
Sam Dunn: Was Steppenwolf the first band to use the term "heavy metal"?
John Kay: To be honest with you it doesn't really matter very
much, I do know that from that time on there
were people who thought of Steppenwolf as being
the band that was perhaps kind of a prototype for other bands
to come which eventually became heavy metal.
* Music *
Corky Laing: The drums are there pulsing away kicking
ass you know, you get shivers when you hear the organ,
the guitar is rolling, John Kay had that leadership voice of
the generation, he didn't just tell you about it he made
a point of it you know, it wasn't just a lecture.
He beat people up in terms of telling them how they're gonna
live their life now and how things are gonna change.
* Music *
John Kay: When we started playing some of the tunes
that we kicking around we realized that our sound was not
only more aggressive and rocking heavier but also we were
not stretching out into these kind of ethereal sounding,
you know eight minute songs that had long sweeping solos
that you know etc. we were more like, make your statement and
do it in a compact fashion and hit hard and then move on.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: In the late sixties rock music in America
was becoming increasingly heavy and aggressive and loud
and one of the bands that often get cited as
the loudest of all time is California's Blue Cheer.
* Music *
Sam: And so I'm meeting with guitarist Randy Holden
because I want to ask him, what was the attraction
to playing at such punishing volume?
* Music *
Sam: Tell me about San Francisco at the time and
to what extent you guys were breaking free
from the typical San Francisco scene.
Randy Holden: The psychedelic vibe kind of co-mingled with
folk music and rock and that was you know, had it's place I
suppose, for myself I was always attracted to minor key and
powerful notes, I was tuning my guitar to "D", a whole step note
down from the time I was playing surf music and I did it because
I just love the sound of that thunder.
Dickie Peterson: When Blue Cheer started,
in San Francisco at the time the music scene was so wide open,
I mean there were no rules and it was the only way
a band like Blue Cheer could have surfaced was in that
environment because we were going against all the grains,
we were too loud, we were, our music was too simple,
we weren't sophisticated enough, we were rowdy,
we were obnoxious little punks.
Geddy Lee: In many ways they were the first metal band
but they didn't think in terms of metal,
it was volume that they were all about and fury.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: What was the appeal to you of playing so loud?
Randy Holden: I don't know I'm born with that, that's just
something that totally takes me away.
There's something, there's beauty in that.
I would sit and imagine what would it sound like if you were
right there when a nuclear explosion went off and I thought
if you had enough amplifiers you could come close to that maybe.
* Music *
>> Perhaps the most important city in the
development of early metal in the U.S. is Detroit.
So I've come to the motor city to meet with Wayne Kramer
guitarist for the legendary Detroit band the MC5
to find out why this city became the epicenter
of heavy music back in the late sixties.
Sam Dunn: Can you describe what things were like back then?
Wayne Kramer: There was a sense of urgency in finding
a militant position to take to oppose the disastrous
direction things were going in. Every day there were
developments on the national and international scene,
political developments that poured gasoline on the fire.
Flower power was nice but that wasn't enough power,
my generation was in agreement that the way our parents were
doing things completely was a disaster and
the only chance we got is to say something about it and
say it as loud as we can and we found that
electric guitars were a good way to do that.
* Music *
Wayne Kramer: There was an esthetic that developed in
Detroit unique in the world and it kind of gave me the sense
that you know I don't have to live in New York, I don't have
to live in London you know, I don't have to live in
San Francisco, we've got something going on here and
we were all influenced by the industrial base of Detroit.
This idea of metal and the noise showed up in the music.
James Williamson: I think the music really more than anything
else was a reaction to the industrial nature of Detroit.
You were either working on cars or selling cars or thinking about cars.
Scott Asheton: Or stealing cars.
James Williamson: Or stealing cars.
Wayne Kramer: Every weeknight clubs would be full of
workers that were working days or working afternoons
and they could stay in the bars till 2 in
the morning and so bands could play.
So there was a lot going on for a musician.
Jaan Uhelzski: We had all the California bands like the
Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother but
the Summer of Love never made it to Detroit.
We liked things that really got us off,
you know, simple direct over the top make you move,
make you want to dance stuff.
The MC5 especially Wayne Kramer, they would go, "Kick out the
jams (beep), or get off the stage", meaning this is a
weak performance, just get out of here and that just
became kind of their tag phrase, their motto.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: So why does The MC5 get included
in the conversation about heavy metal?
Wayne Kramer: Well The MC5 gets the credit or the blame,
and I'll take both,
for what came to be known as metal and punk rock,
wasn't my plan (laughs).
Guys like Townshend, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, I was heavily
influenced by these guys and when I combined that with what
I was hearing from the free jazz movement, I thought well this
is clearly the next step. I can do things with the
guitar to make it sound very unguitar like.
* Music *
Ted Nugent: I thought I was a bad (beep) on the guitar,
I thought the Amboy Dukes were bad (beep)
they had that James Brown Wilson Pickett Sammy Davis shake
going on and then I saw The MC5, it was stupifying.
Lenny Kaye: My life changed by The MC5,
a great show band, beyond politics, beyond anything,
a great loud roar of high energy, complimented on the
other side by the complete simplicity
and directness of The Stooges.
* Music *
>> While The MC5 created a sound that hadn't
been heard before in America, another Detroit band that
took music to new levels of rawness and intensity in
the late sixties was Iggy and the Stooges.
Iggy Pop: When we were forming our group The Stooges before we
were ever on stage, we'd all liked heavier rock, that just
made me feel like it had an inner unstated message.
To assert myself in a primal way, to take the sex when
I wanted it, to take money when I wanted it,
to be somebody not to have a job and to be somebody.
* Music *
Iggy Pop: When we first played those songs, people would
do this, I mean literally, if there was any room to get back
most people got back but didn't want to leave and some people,
the type that later became called "stoners" or "sluts",
those are our two big fan bases and then a few "intellectuals",
they'd come forward and the others would peek in horror from
the back of the place and the (beep) sounded heavy.
That's what it was desperately important to me to be.
* Music *
Iggy Pop: I think the one thing that allows people to
find all sorts of stuff in our music is that we
never really stuck it out in your face too much.
It was in your face in one way but in another way it had
kind of a sullen, an inward quality that you also find in
goth music, grunge music, in metal music.
* Music *
>> The Detroit bands established a new direction
in heavy music in the late sixties but Detroit's reign as
the epicenter of American hard rock was short lived.
By the early seventies the legendary Grande Ballroom
had closed and The MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges
had fallen apart due to drug problems.
But there would be one Detroit musician who would
eventually drag American hard rock out of
the underground and into the mainstream.
* Music *
>> The story of American heavy metal would not
be complete without the Alice Cooper Band.
They're one of the most extreme live acts of all time and
they've also written some of heavy metal's most memorable
radio anthems. So how did this outrageous underground
band from Detroit get their start?
Alice Cooper: Every weekend at the Grande or the Eastown or
these great rock dungeons, it was like, you know, The MC5,
Iggy and Alice. Iggy was the king of the punks
and I was this other thing, I was this sort of,
you know, Phantom of the Opera kind of character.
We loved it, you know, we could go as far as we wanted to go on
stage, and I mean, it was always who's crazier Iggy or Alice?
Sam Dunn: What do you think enabled you guys to achieve
that marriage between a harder sound and yet
also be accessible on radio at the same time?
Alice Cooper: It was time and we had a producer named Bob Ezrin
who got it, he heard us at Max's Kansas City, he heard Eighteen
and he went ohh, he said, "what's that song I'm Edgey"?
and I said there's no, you mean Eighteen?
And he goes, yah yah yah.
He says that song is so dumb, it's a hit.
We would play it and he would go no no no no, dumb it down,
the song is about a guy that's I'm eighteen, I'm a boy,
I'm a man ahh and I dig it.
* Music *
Bob Ezrin: Mike Bruce was writing great pop stuff
that then the band would take and make into hard rock
and then Alice had these you know strange ideas
and sensibilities that he would inject into the lyrics.
The job that I had was to take all of those
elements and to organize them in a way that
brought a kind of spine to each of the songs.
Alice Cooper: Bob knew how to take our insanity and make it
into a real palatable package. Song's like "Eighteen" and
"School's Out", even if you hate Alice Cooper you have
to like those records because they're fun to listen to.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Did radio have a significant role in catapulting Alice?
Bob Ezrin: The Alice Cooper group owe their career to radio,
it was actually Rosalie Trombley who was at CKLW "The Big 8" in
Windsor, Ontario, the other side of the river from Detroit who
heard our sad little rendition of "I'm Eighteen".
Alice Cooper: She heard this record and her son liked it,
her teenage son, her son said that's the coolest record,
so she added it and the next thing you know, it got
request, request, request and it was a major hit.
Now if you were to hit on CKLW that means you,
that was the biggest station in the Midwest, if you got
a hit on CKLW you had a national hit.
Radio wise we were a bit of an oddity.
The hardest rock thing on the radio at that time
probably was The Guess Who.
To crack the Top 40 you were up against Motown, Burt Bacharach.
In order to get into that Top 40 you had to have a record really
made a dent, that made people go, 'what was that?'
You know and that's what "Eighteen" did.
Bob Ezrin: Then after that we were looked at like a radio act.
It was kind of expected, it wasn't a matter of trying
to get radio anymore, it was radio was waiting for
the next thing we were going to do.
* Music *
>> With "I'm Eighteen" on the charts and "School's Out"
hitting number one in the UK, Alice Cooper was now
a household name. But radio success was an anomaly for
hard rock bands during the 1970's. For most bands, touring
was the only way to reach audiences and there's no better
example than the successful touring act than Kiss.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: I wanted to get you perspective on how
touring became so critical during the seventies.
Ace Frehley: In the early days I remember playing certain places
where I knew the people weren't huge fans when we walked in.
People in the audience after you know the first couple songs,
some of them would be sitting like this going, all right
prove it. Half way through the show you know people
were up and you know by the time the drums levitated and
everything blew up, they walked out of the club you know, fans.
Peter Criss: You know we do these shows, sell it out,
there were cheering and smiling, we got a lot of girls at night,
had a great party and then go back and go,
why aren't we on the radio?
Next day we would read the papers, it said we sucked,
we were loud, we were boisterous, we were out of control,
they don't understand us, this band should be killed
or shot or hung. What's wrong here?
Christopher Knowles: If you're not getting played on the radio
you have to play it to the people directly.
This is before MTV, this is before YouTube, touring was
really the only way that they could get their music out
to the people. So these guys are touring incessantly.
Sammy Hagar: There was a cult thing to where a band would
come to town and you had 500 or 600 people that were
saying, I'm gonna see this band but even Kiss didn't explode
on their first record, you know they went out and worked
and opened for people and busted their balls out on the road.
Larry Harris: Here's a band who was only played on FM radio, got
very little Top 40 airplay which is what most bands in those days
had to get to explode, and we had left Warner Brothers who was
our distributor and we had none of our own money and we couldn't
afford to put them back into the studio so what we did was do a
live album because we really had no other choice.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Why do a live record at that point?
Peter Criss: Desperation, and yah, we were like at the
end of our rope, we were so frustrated that we could not
get our sound on vinyl.
We hear a lot of other English bands, you hear
from Zeppelin to The Who, all these other bands,
a few bands by then did do live albums and
they sounded phenomenal, why can't we do this?
And finally Eddie Kramer came into the picture,
we went out on the road with Eddie with a bunch of
trucks and we recorded every night live.
When we went and listened every night in the trailer, that it
was so exciting, what we were missing was the audience,
the screaming, the kids involved in the energy of the music,
we thought now this is what kids will bring home to their
living room and get partied out and get crazed and stoned,
and put it on and party all night long.
* Music *
Larry Harris: We never thought it would explode the way
it exploded, nobody did, the live album gave this energy
that no studio album could capture with this band.
It was for fans who saw them and wanted to relive it
and it was for fans who didn't see them and got off
on what was going on, the excitement.
Ace Frehley: It was the right record at the right time and it
gave the band a shot in the arm because prior to that the first
3 albums did ok, we weren't a million album selling group, if
the live would have failed you know, I don't know what would
have happened. You know, but Kisstory is Kisstory (laughs).
* Music *
>> Alive was Kiss' first album to reach the top 10
and is still the bands longest charting record of all time,
so now that Kiss and Alice Cooper were selling millions of
records, what did it take to bring the entire American
hard rock genre into main stream culture?
* Music *
>> In the early seventies Kiss wasn't the only American hard
rock band building a devoted fan base through their
live show. Kiss' main competitor was Boston's Aerosmith.
* Music *
>> Aerosmith has sold 150 million albums
and holds the record for the most gold and platinum
albums by an American group.
But Aerosmith's musical contribution to the evolution of
heavy metal remains largely untold.
So I'm meeting with bassist and founding member Tom Hamilton
to find out where the Areosmith sound came from and
why it made such a big impact back in the early 70's.
Tom Hamilton: Joe and I had been playing together in bands
before Aerosmith when we were teenagers.
We loved Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, we technically weren't
great musicians, we just got the loudest amps we could.
Turn them up and play it as fast as we could.
Steven was sort of on a parallel route with his bands but they
were very professional, very polished, more towards pop.
Joey was way into funk bands, Kool and the Gang and James Brown.
When we finally met up and got together, those elements
developed into the sound of the band.
Christopher Knowles: Aerosmith to me is a swing band,
all their riffs are basically horn charts transposed to the guitar.
I mean Aerosmith are really taking the Rolling Stones
and combining it with Led Zeppelin, talk about a
sure fire formula for success.
Slash: They had a certain kind of swagger that sort of
developed and progressed from record to record.
I just love the sort of misfit almost hopeless screw up sort of
sounded like on record but with this great back beat and this
sort of like anxiety-ridden kind of delivery.
* Music *
Tom Hamilton: When we first came out, Rolling Stone
just said these guys are just a second rate Stones rip off
basically you know, oh I get it, you know Jagger/Richards.
The rock press wanted to hear a little bit more, you know,
of an intellectual component from their bands and
we were just about, you know, rocking out.
David Krebs: Aerosmith was, a sore thumb because I think at
that point in time Columbia looked at Aerosmith as being in
their eyes déclassé, like the difference between where Havard
and you belong at some local school kind of thinking.
Tom Hamilton: We just had to go out on the road and now
you would call it viral marketing, get on the best tours
we could opening for whatever band. We opened for some
weird people back then but it was a crowd, we didn't care.
And so eventually you know we just built that up to a critical mass.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: As you know I mean, the band really started
to hit big with the album "Toys in the Attic".
David Krebs: Toys in the Attic had "Sweet Emotion"
and "Walk This Way". "Dream On" was a single
that came out, off of the first album and I think may
have cleared the high seventies and fell off the charts.
After we had success I convinced Columbia to re-release
"Dream On" and it went to Number 6.
Tom Hamilton: I remember the first time hearing one of our
songs on the radio, that's when "Dream On" became a hit.
I realized, oh my god if I'm hearing it, that means there's
like thousands of other people listening to it right now for
the first time and it was such an amazing rush.
All at once the whole thing just gave way and we were this
big band and we were playing stadiums,
playing in front of 50, 60 thousand people.
We had reached a creative pinnacle and we were starting to
become successful doing something like what we idolized,
boy were we having a fun time at that point.
* Music *
>> With Aerosmith cracking AM radio on "Toys in the Attic",
they opened the door for other American hard rock
bands to hit it big on radio but there's no seventies hard rock
song more radio friendly than Kiss' power ballad "Beth".
* Music *
Sam Dunn: Tell me the story of how you came to
work on "Destroyer" and specifically "Beth".
Bob Ezrin: The first thing that happened was that I saw them
play live in, I believe it was Saginaw, MI in a 9000 seater and
what was remarkable about it was that, from the moment they
started playing people were up on their feet and they never sat
down they just stayed on their feet through the whole concert
and yelled and screamed and pumped their arms in the air
and they left and they were very happy,
but the whole crowd was made up of 15-year-old boys so then
I met them and I said we got to expand your horizons here
and your fan base. What we have to do is make
you more attractive, a little more romantic so in looking
through Peter's material he had this thing called "Beck".
Peter Criss: And I said, "I got a great song man, and I know we
don't do ballads, god forbid the band don't do, because the band,
that was the rules we'll never ever do a ballad as long as we
live and so I spruced it up and I upped the beat and I sang it
to Gene, he goes, "that's not so bad" and finally when Ezrin got
to rehearsals I sang it for Bobby and he said no I hear it
much lower and I think we should call it "Beth".
Bob Ezrin: It was almost like a country song was sort of folky,
you know it had a kind of little bounce to beck (sings) "I hear
you calling" so I said to Peter, do you mind if I take this home
and play around with it a little bit and he said, no go ahead.
Once I hit that little riff in the piano, I suddenly heard a
lush you know orchestral approach to this thing and
I heard a lush ballad.
* Music *
Bob Ezrin: And then the job was to go back and sell Kiss
you know the (beep) and balls masters of the universe on the
idea of doing a song with a piano and an orchestra.
Peter Criss: Gene and Paul, they hated it so they knew
I had to go in and sing it, the two of them were
sitting there in the console as I was out of the room and
they're doing this and they're doing this to me,
so Ezrin threw them out and sure enough by throwing them out
we got it maybe on the fifth take and it came out beautiful.
* Music *
Peter Criss: The album went out and they wound up
putting it on the b-side of "Detroit Rock City".
And sure enough a DJ in Georgia flipped it over one day
for the hell of it and put it on and then the phones
starting ringing and it was like, you know, play
that song again. Once "Beth" got on, everything got on,
everything went gold, everything started being played.
Ace Frehley: "Beth" was a big shot in the arm for us,
it gave us exposure to people that normally
wouldn't even know who Kiss was.
That album sold twice as many copies because of that one song.
We all got houses and cars out of it too, you know that didn't hurt.
* Music *
people over here, I would
appreciate it if you'd stand up again and move to your rear,
please, ladies and gentlemen Mr. Ted Nugent.
* Music *
>> By 1978 American hard rock was peaking and there
was no bigger celebration of this music than Cal Jam 2, a
massive two-day festival in the heart of Southern California.
Four years earlier Cal Jam 1 featured British metal bands
Black Sabbath and Deep Purple but by '78
the focus had shifted to American bands.
Sam Dunn: What happens between '74 and '78?
Don Branker: Well you started seeing a transition, all of a
sudden American bands started doing a sound that attracted a
wider base audience and that was Nugent, Heart, Foreigner
and Aerosmith of course and we drew a 100,000 more people
with that show than we did the show in '74.
Ted Nugent: It was a great great day, the audience was awesome,
it was perfect, it was just a sea of unified celebration.
* Music *
Sam Dunn: What are your memories of Cal Jam 2?
Tom Hamilton: We were staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel
and every half an hour somebody was coming in and saying,
my God there's a 175,000 people, no there's 250,000,
there's 300,00 until there was 350,000 people there.
The thought that way out in the darkness people were just going
all the way to this invisible horizon, it was really cool.
David Krebs: Strategically we were at a point where I'm
beginning to see cracks in Aerosmith and part of my
thinking was to try and do these giant events
to build sort of a canopy over them while they were covered
because it was not fun by then.
Tom Hamilton: We were starting to make money and were
starting to buy instead of just little packets of stuff,
we could buy bags of it, it was so decadent.
One of the sad things about our history is that you know moments
like that are inspiring and really exciting but they're
also, it brings out a lot of intensity that somehow got the
better of us. Talk about monkeys with guns you know,
you give these guys this situation and what do they do,
they get burnt out and (beep) up and blow it.
* Music *
>> In the wake of Cal Jam 2 Aerosmith started to
freefall and their record sales were declining. So given that
the biggest band in American hard rock was struggling,
what was the state of the rest of the hard rock genre?
Christopher Knowles: The record industry is hurting badly,
sales are way down and a lot of the big groups that made
the seventies the seventies are really starting
to either break up or burn out or sell out.
Don Branker: Hard rock became kind of irrelevant to a whole
new crop of people interested in music.
You started seeing music dissect and diversify
as the beginning of disco even started.
Jaan Uhelzski: Disco, disco killed so much in its wake.
Sam Dunn: I Was Made For Loving You baby.
Jaan Uhelzski: I know, but you know,
yah, I have no excuse for that.
* Music *
Peter Criss: A disco song (laughs).
They bitched about a ballad, we're doing disco now.
It was like to me Black Sabbath doing a disco song,
I could not see Ozzy singing a disco song.
Larry Harris: There were a lot of bands who weren't disco
doing disco songs, Kiss saw what was happening with
Donna Summer and the Village People and Cher and
they saw the sales and how huge this was becoming.
Knowing Gene and Ace and everybody they probably said,
well if we can sell more records and
make more money we'll give it a shot.
Ace Frehley: "I Was Made For Lovin' You" was a huge departure
and it was something that I wasn't really happy about
either because it started to get into the disco vein
but somehow it happened then, it was a big hit.
Do we want to be remembered for it, is the big question.
* Music *
>> Kiss doing disco put the nail in the coffin for
American heavy metal and by the late seventies Creem magazine
had declared it officially dead. But it was California newcomers
Van Halen that helped reinvigorate metal in America.
So what exactly was new about the sound of Van Halen?
Slash: When I first heard Van Halen it was just like, wow,
the overall vibe of Van Halen was very energetic
and very new sounding, very fresh sounding and
it had a ton of attitude, it was just in your face.
Kevin Estrada: It was time to give up on Styx, you know it was
time to give up on Foghat even though those guys might have
been 20 or 25, they look like they're 40 with those mustaches.
When the first Van Halen album came out it just blew me away
and we never heard anything like that put together in that kind
of way with the hooks and the hard edge.
Michael Anthony: When we came on the scene we didn't want to be
pigeon holed into one kind of genre so we would always tell
everybody, no we're big rock because it was just something
that was different you know, Van Halen plays big rock.
David Lee Roth: We got everything, we got enough food
and booze for about 500/700 people here this evening you know.
Originally what we were gonna to do, is we were gonna turn all
the equipment around backwards and show our behind to
the audience and that way everybody be backstage you know.
Chris Knowles: Van Halen recaptured what I think hard rock
lost in the seventies and that's sort of a Dionysian celebration.
Partically with the rise of more distinct heavy metal, they lost
that feeling of celebration and Van Halen are all about that.
Sammy Hagar: They came on crazy drinking friggin' straight out
of the bottle and doing drugs and got the chicks.
Just opened it up for Poison, opened it up for Motley Crue.
Van Halen were the next generation in my opinion of reinventing metal.
*