MONASTIC ROCK ROOTS

I never have been too much of a Metal fan in my time. But perhaps a weird outlier in my musical development was the fact that the first “favorite band” I ever had were the hard + heavy for their time Steppenwolf as a small child. ProtoMetal Biker Rock? If you asked me between the ages of 6-9 what my favorite song was I’d have probably said “Born To Be Wild” or “Magic Carpet Ride. I generally had the “golden hits” 45 of those two songs as soon as I could have records of my own to play. But I was a Top 40 listening kid, basically. I liked the organ in that band more than the guitars.

A big shift happened for me in 1978 as I discovered that there was more than Top 40 on the FM dial, and there began three years of my “FM Rock” period. At one point I actually owned the first three Van Halen album as I was still forming my persona. I soon realized that i did not have what I’ll call a “Metal disposition” in high school as the quirkier sounds of New Wave were actually speaking in my ears in ways that Heavy Metal did not. So I sold my VH LPs to a kid in school and got on ,with my life prior to learning about used record stores!

But at the end of my dalliance with “FM Rock,” the 1980 period had UK act Judas Priest finally breaking through with their “British Steel” album and I heard a few cuts from that or live material on the King Biscuit Flower Hour. By 1981 I was appalled that Ramones had obviously ripped off the chord sequence from “Priest’s “Breaking The Law” for their 1981 song “We Want The Airwaves,” but actually played it slower that Judas Priest! I was offended by Ramones and went off them for a full eight years! Meanwhile by the end of 1980 I had a new favorite band, Ultravox. The opening track [in America, at least] to their album “Vienna” was the intense “Sleepwalk,” which features a breakneck tempo coupled with a grinding synth riff. A song that their drummer typified as having “all the guts and gore of Judas Priest, but done on synthesizers.”

THE NEED FOR PRIEST MANIFESTS

It was sometime last year when I began to get the itch to have Judas Priest in the Record Cell. I thought to myself that I should give “British Steel” and “Point Of Entry” a try and to go from there. At 60 years of age, I had nothing to prove. My criteria for listening to music is no longer, “how does this music help to define me” but “does this music have integrity?” And I was feeling the integrity, many years down the line, from the Judas Priest camp. It seemed clear from my perspective that the band were the band that shepherded the NWOBHM into being and cleared the underbrush that allowed Modern Metal to send off new shoots of growth.

I swear I hadn’t heard a note from the band since maybe the videos from 1986’s “Turbo” getting an airing on MTV. But I went to local stores to buy used CDs of those two albums, only to get a rude awakening. Used Judas Priest CDs were absolutely not ample underfoot! Even new CDs were scanty on the shelves. So I began looking further afield. To no avail! When at the biggest Record Show in the world in Den Bosch in the Netherlands last year, I saw plenty of Judas Priest CDs in evidence for €10.00 but I was determined not to spend hard fought vacation Euros on something that I felt I should be able to get in America.

Then later last summer, after attending a show in Raleigh, I was shopping with my friend Todd in Schoolkids Records and he told me that there was a simple reason why I couldn’t get any used Judas Priest CDs. He claimed that it was because no one ever gets rid of their Judas Priest CDs! And then we had an eye-opening discussion of Judas Priest on CD format with the store’s owner, who had plenty of colorful commentary on the label and industry politics behind the scarcity. Nevertheless, I managed to find a used “British Steel” CD late last year at a local store I don’t frequent heavily. Price was $9.00 – a premium for a used disc not Out Of Print, but I had been grousing so long about wanting this that I didn’t find the time to be a cheapskate. So I bought it.

And I loved it! It helped that the three songs I liked from hearing on the radio in 1980 [“Breaking The Law,” “Living After Midnight,” “Grinder”] were nowhere near the best the album had to offer! It opened with “Rapid Fire,” which I swear had to have been the initial spark of thrash metal with its relentless tempo and steadfast resistance to Pop structure. You held on to that one for dear life and sped along with it. So I had crossed the Judas Priest Threshold® and was more than happy with it. So I’ve been searching for those other used CDs ever since. But a few months ago I happened to be reading The Guardian and saw a glowing review of Judas Priest live in the UK that had me visiting the Judas Priest website to see if perchance they might be coming close to striking distance. Just for the hell of it.

THE METAL GODS ANSWER MY PRAYERS

And I saw that they were due to be in Charlotte on September 20th! I wanted to go. I only know one album but this seemed like a chance too right to pass up. The Metal Gods were whispering in my ear and I was paying attention. Then it got better. When I investigated, the tour was in conjunction with Alice Cooper. Of course, I’d seen Cooper before, in 2001 on his “Dragontown” tour in Cleveland, but his presence on the bill gave me a great idea. My metal loving, guitar playing neighbor had lost his wife last year and was a raving Cooper fan. He never missed a local show but this was as close as Cooper was coming this year. I should go to the show with him and we’d have a hard rocking adventure that day. So I bought two tickets to the show and saw my August and September schedule get really crazy with the sort of events that have impacted the regularity of this blog. I was content to get cheap seats at the edge of the seated area in the huge shed. We wouldn’t be under the roof but at least we had seating. Behind us was the lawn and that was a little too cheap even for me.

On Saturday I picked up my neighbor at noon and we headed towards Charlotte. We ate a Greek lunch and stopped by Repo Record as it was walking distance from the restaurant, but nothing awaited us there this time. I’m trying to cut back any way. Since I’ve been trying to unload a thousand CDs I don’t have room for all year now. We got to the venue’s free parking lot early and were among the very first cars there. We hoofed it across the street to the long queue’s that were beginning to form outside the PNC Music Pavilion. It was not brutally hot, but we picked the line that was adjacent to shade trees in any case. Around this time, thoughts of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” couldn’t help popping in my mind, though the crowds here were far more civilized than the burnouts in that famed opus. True, there was a sea of black t-shirts, of course. That was always going to happen, but I was determined to wear something colorful to stand out. In this case, my bright yellow “Top Of The Pops” Rezillos t-shirt from 2002! This would be a help later on as I found out!

At 5:45 sharp the lines began moving. We scanned our tickets and got into the venue which was a first time visit. Since I was coming here to see Lene Lovich, DEVO, and the B-52’s in about a month, I wanted to see the layout of the place. I always look at the merch table and I was agog at more pricey goods than I’m used to. I guess there’s a Metal premium on merch that I was unaware of? I think of $45 t-shirts as being pricey, but the prices started at $50 here! There looked to be a Judas Priest tour book that I swear was $100!!! Which had to have been a mistake on my part [I hope]. The most interesting piece of merch was a life-sized plush boa constrictor in a top hat of the Alice Cooper merch. That seemed to be a steal at only $40. My neighbor and I both demurred as we found our seats. Way in the back, but still dead center. As the pre-show music on the PA was loud, I opted for my earplugs early.

There was an opening act for this tour, and as chance would have it, I even had a slight familiarity with them, Raleigh’s own Corrosion of Conformity. Their 1992 single “Vote With A Bullet” garnered a little safe harbor play on college radio back in the day. What had been an extreme pronouncement 33 years ago was now much less so. They started their set sharply at 6:45 and they even had plenty of bodies in the 18,000 seats even as the setting sun was going to blast the stage with its ebbing rays during their set.

The PA sound was good. I wear Earasers concert rated plugs to protect what’s left of my hearing. They are attenuating plugs with the same filters that my hearing aid uses rated at 31 dB. I was hearting the music turned down to a tolerable level. Better still, the mix engineer was not engaging in any bass fracking here today! The bass drum hits didn’t shift my organs with each hit. It was surely loud but not mixed to feel loud! A grateful Monk breathed a sigh of relief.

Fortunately, the opener had an audience! The guys behind us were enthusiastically shouting “C.O.C.!!” and the huge venue was over half full. So Corrosion Of Conformity had their moment of triumph. They alone of the three bands on the bill actually referenced the others on the bill and indicated their disbelief on being part of this tour with greats like Cooper and Priest as they were readying their eleventh album for release for next year. Yes, I heard “Vote With A Bullet” but other songs in their set swung a little more and almost dabbled with Funk. They wrapped up their set in a tight 30 minute slot as the swarm of roadies broke down and prepared for the next act.

THE KING OF SHOCK ROCK

Which I thought was going to be Judas Priest in all honesty, but after a 25 minute set transition, we were delivered Alice Cooper in all his visual glory. But this being the 21st century, the video staging was a huge part of the presentation, though Cooper would still have plenty of room for his traditional theatrics. There were no jumbotrons when I saw him in 2001! Cooper opened with a cut, new to me, from “Special Forces;” “Who Do You Think We Are.” He had a trio of lead guitarists onstage with him and my neighbor had good things to say about Nita Strauss, whom he had seen in earlier shows prior. More modern Alice followed with “Spark In The Dark” but the old dudes like myself got heir first tossed bone of the evening with the classic “No More, Mister Nice Guy.” Always a fave Cooper cut in the Record Cell, though my favorite “Billion Dollar Babies” single was “Hello Hooray.” Which I only recently found out was a Judy Collins [!] cover version!

The video feed on the jumbotron featured lots of live inserts from the action onstage, which was helpful since we were pretty far back. The actual band seemed about as big as dolls on the stage, as the pics from my seat reveal. I’m usually cold to the idea of watching a concert off of a huge video screen, but I’m usually in pricier seating as well. So the evening would be a weird blend of watching the stage, watching the jumbotron behind the stage, and watching the large monitors flanking the stage or even the one closest to our seats; hanging off of the roof structure. Going to a show this large out of doors was really stepping outside of my comfort zones even more so than the genre stretching to include Metal in my musical diet. It’s not like I hadn’t seen Janes Addiction or Killing Joke before. Still, at least it wasn’t a stadium. The crowd here were waaaay better than my sole 1983 stadium experience…seeing a Rock Superbowl® with The Police.

I certainly appreciated stone cold classic “I’m Eighteen” though Cooper was now singing it at the age of…77! Next came a pair I also knew. “Muscle Of Love” and “Feed My Frankenstein;” a Zodiac Mindwarp cover from his 80s Hair Metal resurgence. The next wave of the set drifted to that period for a run of Cooper singles that I might have caught snippets of on MTV before I had to stop watching anything but 120 minutes in the late 80s. Stuff like the Desmond Child song “Poison.” I get it. It was a Pop hit and sold lots of discs but this was the era of Alice Cooper that I’d have preferred to have missed entirely.

When the set moved to the third and final phase we were in better hands. Ms. Strauss got a guitar solo at center stage as the intro to “Brutal Planet.” My neighbor took a bathroom break near this point in the set and on his way back to the seat, a little complication arose. I was the one who had tickets on my personal device. Had I not been wearing a bright yellow shirt he might not have found our seat in the nighttime darkness! And then came the psychodramatic material that Cooper made his name on. “The Ballad Of Dwight Fry” and it’s straitjacket tale followed by the tasteless necrophilia anthem “Cold Ethyl.”  The next thing we knew Cooper transitioned to the empathetic hit “Only Women Bleed.” Those two were a thematic whiplash that was a bit hard to take and then the guillotine came out and it was time for “off with his head.” Leading to the second coming of Alice Cooper [now in white tux and top hat] for the climactic “Schools Out.”

It was the undisputed Alice Cooper radio classic. If you were in elementary school back in 1972 like I was, you will never forget [or get tired of] this song. The one new wrinkle was Cooper interpolating the chorus of “Another Brick In The Wall” into the song’s climax! I sure didn’t see that one coming! Truth be told, I thought it cheapened the appeal. As the second 77 year old guy I’ve seen singing lead in a Rock concert in two weeks, Cooper was certainly holding his weight onstage. His vocals were certainly up to snuff. Pun intended. And his trio of guitarists kept the energy circulating throughout his tight 75 minute set. A bit Hard Rock. A bit Metal. And a bit Hair Metal. Well, two out of three ain’t bad!

FINALLY ACCEPTING JUDAS PRIEST…45 YEARS LATER!

Cooper had played from 7:40 to 8:55 and I’m very used to outdoor shed shows having a 10:00 p.m. curfew. I wondered how the evening was going to play out with seemingly insufficient time for a Judas Priest set. After the video overkill of Cooper, the roadies had their work cut out for them to break down the set. Forty minutes later, we got the video screens showing ads for the vendors go black and the “Invincible Shield” cover art appeared on the main screen onstage. Then the first minute of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” blasted out of the speakers. My Sabbath fan neighbor was prepped for a cover version but this was the traditional opening salvo for Judas Priest as the song faded quickly and “All Guns Blazing” opened the set.

As a near complete Judas Priest neophyte, this was an interesting experiment. I half attended this just to see where next in their catalog I might want to explore. My only hope  for the evening was that I might get the awesome breakneck pacing of “Rapid Fire” in a live setting. The third song in the set was the MTV über-classic “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'” which I probably saw 800 times [no fooling] on MTV in the ’82-’83 era where our neighborhood got equipped with cable and we literally had MTV on [with a ßeta tape cued in the VCR] for a year or two. But the next song was one I only recognized by title. “Freewheel Burning” was of a piece with the slipstream tempo of “Rapid Fire” and was number two with a bullet on my new personal Judas Priest list of faves. What a smoking hot song this one was!

It was almost overkill when they followed this up with “Breaking The Law.” A song whose distinctive staccato chorus I have always tried to work into any conversation I’ve had in the last fifteen or so years. Then came a run of material that I was unfamiliar with, but it was all really good! The band just had the sort of lean, relentless sound that guarantees no boredom in your future. I remember maybe seeing the title “Electric Eye” maybe in a review at the time. It too, was a speed machine barreling headfirst at top velocity.

The pace eased up for the band’s tribute to those rockers now in Valhalla. “Giants In The Sky” was a memorial song from their latest, “Invincible Shield” with images of the rock stars of both the distant and recent past. Ronnie James Dio, Janis Joplin, Lemmy, Freddie Mercury… even Christine McVie was noted in the collage of departed artists. But of course with Judas Priest being a Brummie Metal band, Ozzy Osbourne was onscreen for the song’s final minute.

I was thoroughly enjoying this show by this point. Then, they played “Painkiller.”

Great Googly Moogley! Now THAT’S what I call Metal. It was a erupting speedball of shrieking sound powered by double kick drums, 120 mph twin guitar riffs and Rob Halford’s fearless range. And it took it its damn sweet time to reach its climax six to seven minutes into the track. Leaving the audience in a state of shellshock. I actually saw people around me head banging…and totally accepted it. Actually, I didn’t want it to end. But that was the end of the set. But the band were soon back onstage for an encore.

I had wondered if Halford still took a motorbike onstage anymore but the early classic “Hellbent For Leather” put an end to that internal speculation as he rode the hog into the lights. The audience had no problem taking the chorus from Halford when he handed it off. The tight, tight riffing revealed not an once of fat on the bones of the music. This is what I think I was responding to in the music of Judas Priest at this late stage of the game. The intensity was on par with Punk Rock, and the band claimed to have been reactive to the Punk coming up several years into their journey by seeing what they could take from it. Like smart guys.

And then the US breakthrough single from “British Steel” closed it down with “Living After Midnight.” It was a fun track, not anywhere near the breakneck intensity of what they could deliver if they wanted to, but there’s nothing wrong with a little fun. And this show had been a lot of fun for me. I had entered into it just to see if my instincts were right to make room for Judas Priest in my Record Cell, and I didn’t know how right they were! As with Cooper, Judas Priest had delivered a tight 75 minute co-headlining set to close the venue down at 10:50, shockingly! A first for This Monk. I’ve never seen an outdoor venue [that wasn’t a festival] move past the 10:00 p.m. line in the sand.

This had been an interesting experiment. Judas Priest songs from albums I was completely clueless about were even better than what I’d heard and was intrigued by. This tour was not so much the “Invincible Shield” tour as the “Shield Of Pain” tour celebrating the 35th anniversary of “Painkiller” with many songs in the set coming from that opus. And was I ever thankful for that! The frenetic title track was the tightest Speed Metal I’d ever heard. It’s not typically my thing, but this sure was! That the band can deliver at this level 45 years into their history paints an impressive picture. My trip into the world of Judas Priest was a first for me but I am hoping that it will not be my last. In the meantime, a copy of “Painkiller’ is on my hotlist to acquire. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Post-Punk Monk Programming.

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