It's Always a Battle Between Good and Evil

Spin magazine recently devoted an article to the question of where all the rock stars have gone. The idea is that where the past gave us Led Zeppelin's zany antics with a fish and a vagina, Fleetwood Mac's creative use of inter-band "incest", Motley Crue's general debauchery and Guns and Roses' bi-polar behavior; today our "rock stars" are anything but. In fact, they could easily pass for you and me. But able to play an instrument. Ok. Maybe not.

The irony of the piece is they answer their own question. The stuff that was once taboo is not longer that. Tats are common. Piercings are ubiquitous. In fact, when I was in Vegas, the amount of ink and metal in and on the women made me think they had stepped on an IED at the Bic factory. I'm pretty certain they could qualify for a VA pension. Or at least one from Bic. It's hard to be freaky when everyone is freaky. So I don't lament the passing of the "rock star". I do lament, however, the passing of dangerous rock.

One of Rock's truisms along with "I'll totally respect you in the morning" is that Satan is a vital component of most Rock and Roll. I was born in 1971 (Although I fudge and always say that it's actually "x"-29 where as "x" = Today's Date). That was the year Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" dropped onto record players in America and the dark lord began in earnest to spread his/her/its... whatever... wings over rock music. Granted, I was blissfully unaware of the menace as I was simply a toddler, but I was old enough by 1979 to know about KISS. And specifically what it stood for which, according to my elementary music teacher Mrs. Osbourne, stood for "Kings In Satan's Service". (I've bolded the first letters so you can see the diabolical connection)

I grew up in a house was so idol-ladened with crucified Jesuses a visitor didn't think religious significance but a devotion to Roman era snuff films. The fact that Satan somehow figured into all the blood and suffering visited upon our resident bearded man, it's safe to say I was PETRIFIED at the thought of being possessed by the dark lord and his minions and convinced I would go to hell with prolonged exposure the El Diablo in any and all his forms. That KISS was associated with Beelzebub was some scary shit to a kid weened on my mother's catholicism. That one of the guys was even called "The Demon" only supported Mrs. Osbourne's allegations. It was only later on, when I was older, that I learned to question my sources. And when I was older it would have occurred to me to doubt the veracity of a music teacher who confirmed KISS' satanic roots while then playing The Beatles' White Album which actually DID inspire murder and mayhem. I'm not saying the Beatles were Satanic... I'm just sayin'. So I did not listen to KISS as a kid. There was just too much at stake with my soul being the primary object of a eternal battle between good and evil. Now why good and evil would be so preoccupied with one geeky 13 year old soul is beyond me, but I spent my tweens convinced I was on the precipice of demonic possession. But it is a very dark cloud that doesn't have a silver lining and later on I realized that I had inadvertently spared myself not demonic possession but certain brain damage from such classic lyrics as... ahem... from the KISS classic "Love Gun"... ahem....

I really love you baby
I love what you've got
Lets get together, we can
Get hot
No more tomorrow, baby
Time is today
Girl, I can make you feel
Okay
No place for hidin baby
No place to run
You pull the trigger of my
Love gun, (love gun), love gun
Love gun, (love gun), love gun

Those aren't Satanic Lyrics. Those are lame lyrics. And this was a hit record. The 70's. The decade taste forget. Indeed. Yikes!

That being said, my formulative years for music were in the 80's. This is the decade when I came to be. I started to tap into pop culture. I grew my hair short in the front and long in the back. I pegged my pants. I wore clothes so bright they would have set off a Geiger counter. Despite this I lost my virginity. And I developed my musical taste. Where I started listening to top 40 by the time I met Chuck Albright in the 8th grade I was starting to inadvertently dabble in the dark arts. No, I had not yet turned my back on Catholicism, but instead started to listen to heavy metal. If you were to believe the Iron Maiden album covers, this was Satan's musical home turf.

I think my brain is inherently wired for hard sounds. I like punk, I like alternative, I like emo and scremo and whatever the fuck the kids call it. And I like... dare I say love? Heavy Metal. But when I first started listening to it, it wasn't just a gulity pleasure, there was a threat of eternal damnation. But dammit, I love Iron Maiden. And Metallica. And Ozzy. So I had to manage this situation carefully. I needed something. A method to manage the madness. And to manage the bad-ass.

What I devised was a system of acceptable music based on the demon/witch/succubi/dark elements content of the band and it's music. On one end was Stryper, which was a total hairspray band... but... they were Christian metalists. And they sucked, but that was not important because they would serve a practical use in my vinyl collection, which I will get to in a second. On the other end of the spectrum was Slayer, who not only called their album "Hell Awaits" but had pictures of pentagrams, goat head demons and upside down crosses. There was no coy allusion to the dark forces, these guys were "out and proud" if you will. Much like radiation, continued and prolonged exposure to Slayer left only one possibility... possession and slavery to Mephistopheles. With my system is was safe to repeatedly listen to music on the safe end of the demonic scale but dangerous to listen to music on the more satanic end of the scale. My scale was also precise. So I didn't paint a group with a broad brush , I was more considerate of the specific output. For example, Motley Crue's "Shout at the Devil" was obviously dangerous and hence important to limit exposure, where later albums such as "Theater of Pain" and "Girls Girls Girls" were pretty much ok because the band had obviously embraced Christianity and stopped writing about Anton La Vey. Iron Maiden was patricularly problematic because they had songs that on one hand were socially conscious... "Run to the Hills"... damn we were some pig fuckers to the native Americans... to philisophical... you are right Bruce, we really are living in the "Golden Years"... to outright satanic... "Number of the Beast"... Oy vey!. So when listening to Iron Maiden, the song was a very important element. My system dictated that I could listen to "The Trooper" all I wanted, but I had to only listen to "Number of the Beast" on special occasions... you know... like Halloween. My system was a precision scalpel and not a blunt force instrument.

But where my system was qualitative, it had a quantitative component. I had to account for the literal demon content of the vinyl. Basically the more satanic the band, the more likely the actual record itself had stored demonic properties in THE DISC ITSELF! (Imagine Dramatic Chipmunk just turned around). Subsequently it was important to follow some rules with disk storage. My records were not arranged according to the alphabet, but according to their demon content. I would not be prudent to store all the metal albums next to one another because the sheer weight of their evil could easily rip a hole in the space/time/mythology continuum and I could easily have a battleground for the lives of all the souls on the planet happening in my bedroom while I tried to "read" the most recent SI Swimsuit Edition. The idea of imps and large demons battling arch angels and Christian warriors above my bed while I simply wanted to get some alone time with Christie Brinkley was incredibly unappealing. And frankly, my room wasn't big enough. We were living in a tiny townhouse as a result of my father's impeccable stewardship of the family finances. My room was a postage stamp. There could not be a final battle in my bedroom for good and evil. There simply wasn't anyplace to put the arch angels. An epic battle deserves an epic battlefield and my townhouse was not it. Unless we knocked down a wall. Then my sister would have been pissed. And both good and evil would have been fucked.

Taking all this in mind, my albums were carefully positioned to put the non-satanic (re. good) albums next to satanic ones. So where there was an Iron Maiden album, right next to it, Depeche Mode. Where there was Metal Church, there was Madonna (The whole church thing was very thematic). And where there was Slayer, there was Stryper (Although frankly, I think Slayer would have kicked the shit out of them). So if you rifled though my albums you would definitely notice a theme. My system was perfect. If you go and read papers from the 80's (or USA Today) you will note the absence of apocalyptic confrontation. It was obviously my doing.

Over the years, I would abandon a lot of the dogmas of Catholicism with its inherent dramatics. Frankly, I just don't buy them. But if I am wrong... and I have been known to be wrong so many times... maybe one tween's clever system may have been a stalwart defense against the powers of Evil while still allowing for the deliciousness of it's sound. And the 80's were allowed to progress unimpeded simply because of my accounting for demonic metrics. Long live rock and roll!