November 1988

METAL CONTENTS

CHAINMAIL

ENOUGH OF STRYPER!!! It’s bad enough when you can’t print “fuck” without fearing the wrath of Tipper Gore and her band of loonies. What I found obscene was Michael Sweet’s ignorant and moronic comments on AIDS. Calling AIDS a “judgement of God” demon-strates the type of attitude that held back science for centuries (As for God’s allowing innocent children to die, look up, for example, I Samuel 15:3 and see that he couldn’t care less).

Deep Purple: APPROACHING LAVENDER

Sal Treppiedi

Much to everyone's surprise, the reunion of Deep Purple’s Mark II lineup (vocalist Ian Gillan, guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, bassist/producer Roger Glover, keyboardist Jon Lord and drummer Ian Paice) has proven to be a durable one, producing two respectable studio LPs (Perfect Strangers and House of Blue Lights) and the new live double album Nobody's Perfect.

Judas Priest Ram It Home!

David Dumas

Without a doubt, Judas Priest have been a prime example of the earsplitting virtues of heavy metal for most of their 15 years together.

BEBE BUELL/ GARGOYLES POSTER

TESTAMENT Place Your Order

Mike Gitter

Alex Skolnick’s mom, an author of child-development tests, would have never guessed that her pride and joy would have broken with the family academic tradition to earn his living playing in one of the Bay Area’s most prominent proto-fascist metal outfits.

NEW FACES IN METAL

RECORDS

Harold DeMuir

On paper, the basic concept of hardrock/heavy metal looks just dandy: everything you always liked about rock ’n’ roll, only more of it. That’s the ideal anyway. The cruel reality, as you may have noticed, is something else entirely. Because the genre’s natural audience is teenage kids (a demographic group to which you, the reader, may well belong) who supposedly don’t know any better, it’s all too easy for the music industry’s powers-that-be to channel hard-rock’s more threatening—i.e., too nasty or too serious—impulses into easilymarketable packages that do little to threaten the musical or social status quo, and, as such, are hardly recognizable as the spiritual descendents of, say, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Stooges.

ANIMAL POSTER

Soul Asylum Going Loony Toons

Mike Gitter

Prince and-Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner have a lot more in common than one might think. First off, they’re both from Minneapolis, and secondly, they're both notorious for copping Elvis moves. Prince is the "angry little man," a prissy with an attitude, and Soul Asylum’s guitarist/vocalist Pirner wrote the book on precocious sexuality, whipping around a scraggly, wild mane and gyrating like the King in a beer-drenched backscrub bar.

The Metal Underground

Tom Nordlie

Yeow! I haven’t yet gotten hold of their debut album Vivid, but I caught NYC’s Living Color at a club last weekend and they were astounding. Real heavy, real funky, unpredictable (they encored with the Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”), with chops, chops and more chops acquired from years of avant-jazz work and Lord knows what else.

JOHN NORUM

Kate Batisa

Control freaks. They’re everywhere. Your boss is one. Teachers too. Cops. Parents. Everybody wants to be in charge. Most of us, however, are too embarrassed to admit it, and laugh foolishly when we’re accused of being, well, bossy. Not John Norum.

VIXEN

Anne Leighton

With their self-titled debut album, L.A.’s Vixen—singer Janet Gardner, guitarist Jan Kuehnemund, bassist Share Pederson and drummer Roxy Petrucci—ably remind the male-dominated music world that women are as capable as anyone of producing high-quality hard rock.

BRITNY FOX

Anne Leighton

"I had the Britny Fox dream as a kid,” swears frontman Dizzy Dean Davidson. "I used to write it on all my schoolbooks, along with Kiss and Slade.” The singer got the name of his future band from an old family coat-of-arms moniker, Brittany Foxx.

CHYLD

George “Metal” Smith

When I was a kid my Dad used to take me to this crummy place in backwoods eastern Pennsylvania called Port Carbon to watch auto races. We’d sit on the log bleachers and watch a young dude with the exotic name of Ehrmann Fulk beat the pants off the other dilapidated sportsters.

DIRTY LOOKS

Kate Batisa

The worst gig that Dirty Looks frontman Henrik Ostergaard can remember doing began with a lobster dinner. “It was the first time the promoter had ever done a show, Ostergaard recalls with a smirk, lolling on a staircase backstage before a gig at L.A.’s Whiskey A-Go-Go.

POSSESSED POSTER

FIFTH ANGEL’S KEN MARY

S.L. Duff

When the hard-boiled taskmasters from METAL called me with the assignment to interview Ken Mary—a drummer—I didn’t exactly get worked up enough to do backflips. A drummer? I mean, have you ever talked with one? Worse yet, have you ever had dinner with one?

DAVE MUSTAINE POSTER

Live Metal

Mike Gitter

He’s back! No, Jason Voorhees is probably busy hacking unsuspecting camp counselors to dogmeat. Leatherface can’t break away from his family’s "Texas style” lunchmeat business and Norman Bates is likely laid up on some psychologist’s couch working out family problems.

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM POSTER

IMPELLITTER! GESUNDHEIT...

Paul Suter

Ludicrous speed. Mel Brooks hit on it in Spaceballs without ever realizing that he had summed up a whole generation of heavy metal. Songs, melody, stuff like that—can a band really function successfully at. . . ludicrous speed? Or, more to the point here, can a guitarist really say anything more than “look at me” whilst frantically diddling away?

STRYPER POSTER

JOAN JETT WANTS TO BE YOUR DOG!

Judy Wieder

At the tender age of 13, when most young girls are yelling and screaming over their rock idols, Joan Jett was one.

ACE FREHLEY: In A Giddy Mood

Holly Gleason

“Say ‘Dukakis’ and ‘hanging out’ in the same sentence,” requests Ace Frehley, on the phone from New York City.

MOVIN’ METAL

METAL is moving. Again.