Mondo metal
The Bay Area's underground metal scene is splintered, opinionated, and full of fucking life.

By Will York

METAL HAS BEEN called "the logical endpoint of rock and roll"; "the folk music of the dispossessed"; and "the beast that will not die." As Deena Weinstein put it in her book Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, "It is hard to think of other human phenomena, outside of child torture and cannibalism, that evoke such intense abhorrence [as metal]. Heavy metal polarizes people. Those who are aware of it either love it or hate it."

The Bay Area has a long, proud history of underground metal, most famously the mid- to late-'80s heyday of speed metal. Matt Harvey, guitarist-vocalist for locally based death/grind metal veterans Exhumed, says of that era, "Growing up and getting into metal in the late '80s, I was so excited because the Bay Area was the place to be, with Exodus and Testament and of course Metallica." Speed metal has faded, but although splintered into many once-unimaginable subgenres, the music is still healthy.

"I think San Francisco's got one of the most open-minded and most intelligent metal scenes that I've ever experienced," notes Matt Shapiro, who plays keyboards in the punk-metal-performance art band Nigel Pepper Cock in addition to booking San Francisco's two main weekly live metal nights, Lucifer's Hammer (Covered Wagon) and Black Church (Kimo's). There isn't a specific "Bay Area sound" like there was in the '80s. Instead there's a microcosm of what's going on in metal around the world. The sounds include the raw-edged black metal of Ludicra and Artificium Sanguis, the medical-dictionary-busing gore metal of Exhumed and Impaled, and the majestic dual-guitar attack of the Lord Weird Slough Feg and Hammers of Misfortune.

Other bands are difficult to categorize: medieval power-metal veterans Brocas Helm, morose goth-metalers the Gault, and, most well-known to non-metal audiences, instrumental math-metal trio the Fucking Champs. (This list is by no means comprehensive – be gentle with the hate mail.) Metal may still be confined to the margins of music in the Bay Area, but it's also alive and well. In fact, its outside status is one reason why the scene is so sturdy and resilient.

Outcasts

"Thanks a lot – you guys have been subpar! This is 'Back to the Grave.' We've been Impaled ... and so ... have ... you!"

Impaled guitarist-singer Sean McGrath bidding farewell to the Tidal Wave Fest crowd, June 15, 2002

"So you're doing an article on a bunch of bands no one cares about?" McGrath asks during a break at a recent band rehearsal. Perhaps he's right to wonder why a nerdy writer for the Bay Guardian would be interested in his band.

Impaled have been together since 1997, releasing a pair of albums that have generated sales figures McGrath describes as respectable – especially considering the nauseatingly gory cover art. They're well known in the metal underground, in particular the segment of it that enjoys complex death metal with graphic lyrics about things like botched surgical procedures and intestinal dysfunction (it's a bigger market than you might think). They are not, and probably never will be, known to listeners outside their genre. They know this, and while they're dedicated to their craft, they don't take themselves too seriously. They may write songs like "Ingestion of Colotomic Funk" and growl out lyrics in guttural, unnatural voices, but they're down-to-earth, friendly, and funny, in a dry, self-deprecating way.

Harvey, in addition to fronting Exhumed (which formed in 1991, when he was 15), plays in the old-school thrash band Dekapitator with McGrath. He grew up listening to relatively straight-ahead acts like Ozzy and Dio before moving first to Metallica and then to the more extreme sounds of labels like Britain's Earache, home to the bands Carcass and Napalm Death. "I just wanted to hear the craziest shit possible," he remembers, noting that he never expected to be doing it 10 years later, let alone selling 15,000 or 20,000 copies an album. "When we started out, our whole goal was just to get reviewed in some fanzines and trade demos. We'd open the mail, and it would be like some 39¢ cassette tape with tape over the holes so you could tape over it, and [the cover] was Xeroxed at best, or just written down on the J-card with notes like, 'Turn down bass, this is a rehearsal!'"

Guitarist John Cobbett, who leads Hammers of Misfortune (and coleads Ludicra and plays second guitar in Slough Feg), describes being drawn as an angry kid to the feeling of power inherent in so much heavy metal. At the same time, however, he was, as he puts it, "really interested in craftsmanship, skill, execution – all those lost arts, you know, actually caring about being a good musician."

Cobbett, one of the anchors of the San Francisco metal scene, has played in bands locally since 1988, including Osgood Slaughter (which he describes as "Thin Lizzy meets Iron Maiden meets Metallica's first album meets the Plasmatics") and the "death metal-noise" band Thunderchimp. He also started the Lucifer's Hammer series in 1997 before passing that duty on to Shapiro last year. (And it has been said that he bears a strong resemblance to Mr. Likki Lixx, guitarist for local glam metalers Pantz Noyzee, which he denies. "They're a scab on the scene," he proclaims.) In contrast to Exhumed and Impaled, Hammers of Misfortune, like Slough Feg, are rooted in older, less extreme, and more melodic metal styles – the Thin Lizzy and Iron Maiden elements are still firmly in place. But Hammers in particular are doing new things with these old-school influences. The group's first album, The Bastard, was an intricate and brilliant three-act metal opera that took several years to put together; their new material (as yet unreleased) has gotten even more sophisticated, far-reaching, and hard to classify. It flies in the face of the all-too-common accusations that metal is lowbrow music played by Neanderthal musicians.

"You know, being into metal sucks because nobody knows anything about it," Cobbett laments. "It's such a deep underground scene that you really have to explore and find out what it's all about. To most people, metal is synonymous with fuckin' stupidity, and it's really not stupid. The stuff that people think of as metal, with the hair spray and spandex and whatever – that's not metal. It has nothing to do with the real metal scene. And granted, a lot of metal is really fuckin' stupid. But I can't control the fact that that's how I grew up. I've always listened to metal, since I was little. And that's how I play. So it's kind of a drag to have to deal with this typecasting shit."

Stereotypes

Among politically progressive audiences, metal is often seen as the enemy, a view that is based primarily on hazy misconception rather than fact. Recently I was challenged to defend why I listened to music that was supposed to openly advocate racism, sexism, and homophobia. While there are no doubt some idiots in the metal scene – as in and around most rock genres – this generalization is off-base, the kind that comes from underexposure to the music and the scene.

"People are biased about metal on two different levels," Shapiro observes. "They're either biased themselves, because they think it's stupid and they associate it with Poison and Winger and all that kind of crap, or you get people who think they know a lot about music, and all they really know about is [infamous Norwegian black metal act] Burzum; maybe they've read [Michael Moynihan's "satanic metal underground" exposé] Lords of Chaos. So they immediately go, 'Oh, black metal's racist.' But there's a lot more to it than that."

In fact, the musicians featured in Lords of Chaos make up such a tiny fraction of the worldwide underground metal scene as a whole that to assume they're typical would be comparable to someone assuming it's common for punk rockers to take a shit onstage just because G.G. Allin did.)

Most of the musicians seem to have put up with the stereotyping for so long that the outside world's opinions simply don't rattle them anymore. "I think we're so disconnected from what normal people think of us that it doesn't even come to mind," says Harvey, who, along with the rest of his Exhumed bandmates, can be seen posing shirtless – wearing a bullet belt and pouring a bucket of fake blood all over himself – inside the sleeve of the band's 2000 release, Slaughtercult. "I've given up trying to explain it to other people, or to my parents. We're not on a crusade to become respectable or make this kind of music respectable. I think that it's cool that it's not respectable. Choosing to be involved in this music, it's like you're choosing to write off 80 percent of society. OK, cool! As long as you know where you stand: 'Eighty percent of people think that I'm a total piece of shit. OK!' Then again, I've gotten [fans] sending letters, like, written in their own blood. Cool."

An interesting development in recent years has been that indie rock, noise rock, and other post-punk music audiences – historically hostile or at best indifferent toward metal – have begun to inch toward embracing metal. Witness the cutesy "I Love Metal" bumper stickers that have been cropping up in unexpected places. Or better yet, go to a Fucking Champs concert and watch as the crowd mock-headbangs and makes ironic devil-horn signs. Asked for his thoughts on this phenomenon, Champs guitarist Josh Smith wearily replies, "I just wish people would stop paying attention to that demographic." He's aware, no doubt, that those folks buy a lot of his records – after all, the Champs are signed to an indie rock label, Chicago's Drag City.

"Punks are the new hippies," he continues. "Anything that doesn't sound like the Velvet Underground/Pere Ubu/Can/Nick Drake/Wire/Gang of Four/the Fall/Sonic Youth/Punk Music clearly must be a joke."

Ludicra drummer Aesop describes this crowd's tepid, often ironic embrace of Hessian culture as "metal envy." "They're not willing to delve into the scene any further than just beyond the [surface] trappings," he says. "It's like they're poking fun, but there's an envy there. They don't understand it enough, they don't wanna do the research, they don't wanna listen to any of the bands, they don't wanna be associated with any of the bands."

As for the other accusations leveled toward metal, the audiences at metal shows around here are more diverse than those associated with other genres. I've talked about these political issues with several musicians and gotten a range of well-thought-out answers. Cobbett's is the most vivid and succinct. "I fuckin' can't stand the left wing; I can't stand the fuckin' right wing," he says. "I'm politically 'fuck you' – that's my politics.

There is no political movement that I would endorse whatsoever. If I had to single out one group that I really can't stand, it's the religious right. My cross is upside down forever, man."

State of the art

If you ask five different bands their opinion of the local metal scene and how it compares to that of years past, you'll get five different answers. Impaled/Ludicra bassist Ross Sewage remarks, "This scene was actually better when Impaled started playing shows [in the late 1990s]: there were a lot of death metal bands back then. The Covered Wagon would basically have us anytime we wanted – god knows why they wanted us. Exhumed was playing around locally more; Weakling was playing. It's slowed down a little bit; a lot of clubs have closed down: the Tip-Top, the Cocodrie ..." He adds, though, that "the older the person you talk to, the earlier they're gonna say the good period was. There's gonna be some 16-year-old kid who's gonna say right now was the best fucking period he ever lived through." Harvey's comments reinforce this theory: "There's definitely lots of good bands now and a few places to play, but the scene really peaked here in the late '80s, and to compare now to that, it's not even close."

For many local bands, including Slough Feg and especially Brocas Helm – who play the oldest style of metal of any of these bands and sell an estimated 90 percent of their albums overseas – Europe continues to be a more hospitable place than the United States.

"There is no comparison," Brocas Helm bassist Jim Schumacher says. "After coming home, I'm embarrassed to see how jaded and slow the scene is here. There is so much more vitality overseas."

Guitarist-singer Bob Wright adds, "San Francisco is a great place, and we have some very loyal fans who would kill for us, but the heavy metal scene is somewhat lacking, and there are limited venues to play. In Europe, and Greece in particular, there is a much bigger scene and way more fans. The crowds go wild and sing along with us. They know all the words to all the songs, and their cell phones ring to Brocas Helm melodies."

I'm a relative newcomer, but it still seems like a good time to be in San Francisco if you like metal. I never saw Weakling, I watched the somewhat similarly styled Ludicra at the annual outdoor Tidal Wave fest a couple of weeks ago, and they seemed to embody the same kind of magic that today causes fans and fellow musicians to speak of that defunct group in hushed, respectful tones.

It was somewhat strange, at Tidal Wave, to observe how the grim, spiritually damned music brought such obvious joy to the audience, which had trekked to McLaren Park and sat through a cold evening to hear it.

Ludicra's vocalist, Laurie Shanaman, screamed her guts out, her eye sockets sinking back into her skull as if she were demon-possessed, while the rest of the band members kicked out a mass of blasting minor-key hypnotism as their long hair flailed in unison. It was unspeakably cool.

"It's not a form of music that's gonna go away, regardless of how much mainstream radio may not play it," Tidal Wave organizer Tonus Atkins says on metal's staying power. "What basically happened is that it became an underground thing, and in the underground it takes care of itself, because it weeds out the people who are just there for trends or fads. It keeps going underground and mutating."

Cobbett's viewpoint is equally positive. "Even throughout the whole dot-com thing, San Francisco has had, and still does have, one of the best fuckin' scenes in the world,' he says. "I've played all over Europe and England and been all over the country, and the only scene I think was better than this one was back in the early '80s in D.C., when you could see Minor Threat and Trouble Funk on the same bill. But there's been so many great bands in San Francisco, and nobody knows who they are. And I just laugh to myself when I read stuff like, 'There's no music scene.' Bullshit! Stick your nose out the door!"

"Metal is always gonna survive, just 'cause it's so fuckin' cool," he says. "There's something about listening to Iron Maiden ... it's just cool. People are always gonna like that. It's kind of like the ultimate form of rock 'n' roll."

Top 10 Bay Area metal albums

1. Metallica Ride the Lightning (Megaforce, 1984)

2. Exodus Bonded by Blood (Torrid, 1985)

3. Possessed 7 Churches (Combat, 1985)

4. Death Scream Bloody Gore (Combat, 1987)

5. Autopsy Severed Survival (Peaceville, 1990)

6. Sadus Chemical Exposure (Roadrunner, 1991)

7. Insanity Death after Death (M.B.R., 1994)

8. Metallica Master of Puppets (Electra, 1986)

9. Autopsy Mental Funeral (Peaceville, 1991)

10. Possessed The Eyes of Horror (Combat, 1987)

Matt Harvey of Exhumed

The current class: Some representative recordings

Impaled Mondo Medicale (Death Vomit, 2002)

Exhumed Slaughtercult (Relapse, 2000)

Brocas Helm Black Death (Gargoyle, 1988)

Ludicra Hollow Psalms (Life Is Abuse, 2002)

The Lord Weird Slough Feg Down among the Deadmen (Dragonheart, 2000)

Hammers of Misfortune The Bastard (tUMULt, 2001)

The Gault Demo Number One (self-released, 2001)

Nigel Pepper Cock The New Way (Life Is Abuse, 2002)

Asunder/Like Flies on Flesh, Split (Life Is Abuse, 2000)

The Fucking Champs IV (Drag City, 2000)

W.Y.