Metal. The horns. The scary kids screaming about Satan or shooting heroin into their eyes, the ones who corrupt the youth of tomorrow into blindly following their anti-leaders dressed in black, ready to snatch babies from their mothers arms. Pure evil. This is the assumption that heavy metal has had to live with through the years, an image some bands choose and others deal with uncomfortably. But the kids who grew up being called outcasts or weirdos are now publishing books, programming computers and creating Web sensations because aside from the Satanic persona and glowering attitude, most metalheads are really big nerds.
Decibel magazine has made it a point to prove how nerdy the metal community can actually be with their new book, Precious Metal, The Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. The book is a series of oral histories of metal albums, and even though some bog down in complete technical geekiness a la Morbid Angel describing their Altars of Madness record, Precious Metal includes the stories behind some of the most influential metal albums in years including Meshuggah’s Destroy, Erase, Improve and At the Gate’s Slaughter of the Soul. Those two records have influenced at least 95 percent of what bands today are doing.
But the book’s real saving grace is one with a local flair: Eyehategod reminiscing about their genre creating monster: Take as Needed for Pain. Leave it to a New Orleans band to tell the best stories in the entire book.
“They didn’t know what to make of it. These big ol’ tough, tattooed rapper dudes thought we were going to hell,” remembers EHG guitar player Jimmy Bower. When the band was cutting the album, they were down the hall from the Cash Money crew, and the account mentions the presence of drugs and guns in both groups’ sessions—not hard to imagine considering the wild drug stories or the outbursts of the infamous Mike Williams are just the tip of the Eyehategod legend.
Down, Jimmy Bower’s other musical behemoth, is also featured in the book but doesn’t offer the candid outlook as he did with EHG. Nola, Down’s debut record, is a bona fide classic, and here the group offers insight to what it was like to be in a band that was under the larger shadow of Pantera, Crowbar, Corrosion of Conformity and EHG, all while creating something equally crushing themselves.
Although the city has been known for funk and jazz, New Orleans was also a metal mecca before Katrina. In its small way, Precious Metal helps document that scene.
