Heavy Metal Pt II

In part two of Heavy Metal Week Josh and Chuck break down how specialized heavy metal music has become, talk about some of the great album covers, look at how metal hits the brain, and explain the sad death of guitar great Randy Rhoads. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:09Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:19Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too for part two of our episodes on heavy metal, the music. Sorry all you chem majors who showed up with different expectations.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Would you like to see the Pope on the end of the rope? Do you think he's a fool?

• 1:38Josh Clark?

  What is that?

• 1:40Speaker 03

  That's Sabbath. My brother always laughed at that line.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  Which song?

• 1:43Speaker 03

  It's on, I think it's on Master of Reality. I don't know the name of the song. I think it said end of the rope, end of a rope, obviously.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  I'll bet your brother thought that was funny.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  He did.

• 1:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  I think that's the only thing he knows about Black Sabbath, which is hysterical.

• 1:56Josh Clark?

  Some of it is pretty comical, you know?

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, and I guess let's go ahead and kick off part two with talking about Ozzy. Uh, because this is the section where we're going to talk about some, some controversies and Ozzy.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  In his day, certainly had a few of them. Uh, he was kicked out of Black Sabbath in the late seventies because he partied too hard for Black Sabbath even. He was replaced by, uh, the great Ronnie James Dio. And went on to have a solo career, but there are a couple of things that happened in his life. Notably, biting the heads off of things. That gained him a lot of attention. Uh, at one CBS sales convention. He was supposed to release these live doves. And instead he bit the heads off of them. He bit. And the story's changed a lot over the years. So depending on who you're talking to is what version.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  But, uh, he, he bit the head off of one, uh, to shock people in a room and apparently he was being let out. Bit the head off the other. There are also people that said that they were not alive at the time.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's what I saw.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  The same thing when he bit the head off of a bat in Des Moines. In nineteen, nineteen eighty-two onstage when somebody threw a bat onstage, right?

• 3:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And somebody tracked down the guy who threw the bat and he said that bat had been dead for days.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mark Neal.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  And I don't know what is worse. Biting the head off of a live bat or biting the head off of a bat that's been sitting around dead for a couple of days.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  I, I don't know. Flip a coin, buddy.

• 3:28Josh Clark?

  Either way, I've, I've reached a point in my life where I can't even take talking about like that. That's, that's the, I just don't kill the dog. That's, that's where I've gotten to in life.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  No, I'm with you.

• 3:40Josh Clark?

  You know?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, he, he snorted live ants, uh, beside a swimming pool on tour with Motley Crue and I feel bad for those ants.

• 3:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly. What did they do? Like, you know? I, I think Ozzy was a cool dude in a lot of ways, but he was also very hard to get around. And that was one reason why I got kicked out of Black Sabbath. Like some people, like Dave Mustaine, like Ozzy, like their bandmates were partying as hard as they were, sometimes harder. But they didn't turn into evil. Jerks.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  Who would like get in your face or try to kill you or like try to do something horrible and like ruin everybody's time. That's how you would get kicked out of a heavy metal band by being such a jerk that your bandmates are like, we can't put up with this anymore. We're going to replace you.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that was definitely the case with Mustaine. I think Ozzy was a little more, his reliability became an issue.

• 4:31Josh Clark?

  Oh, is that right?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think that was a deal. But we should talk a little bit. I know we covered it in the Satanic Panic episode, but you can't have a metal episode without talking a little bit about the Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC in 1985, led by Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife. At one point, you know, they own a mission to clean up music and to, at the very least, to get ratings on record albums. So at one point, they released their filthy 15 of the filthiest 15 songs and nine out of the 15 were either metal or hard rock bands.

• 5:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I mean, Def Leppard. Come on.

• 5:10Speaker 03

  I mean, they're, they're considered metal, but I don't know what song that would have even been.

• 5:14Josh Clark?

  No, that's what I'm saying. Not whether or not they're metal. Same with AC/DC and Twisted Sister. Like, what are these guys singing about that you need to censor? Like, give me a break. Venom and Merciful Fate. Again, I get why suburban parents were scared of these guys. They were like legit, like, hey, let's talk about Satan and how great he is and how much you suck religious people. So, yes, I'm sure, and I'm not saying like, yeah, they deserve to be censored. I get that one. But Madonna, Prince, Def Leppard, like, it's just, it was, it was, it just goes to show you how preposterous the whole thing was. But

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:47Josh Clark?

  A lot of people say it worked. I mean, that's how we ended up with the warning explicit lyrics sticker, which actually helped a lot of hip hop groups sell more records.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  You mean the badge of honor?

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  Exactly.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:59Josh Clark?

  But some people say that MTV actually kind of was under pressure to stop showing as much heavy metal and that heavy metal got pushed a little bit out of the mainstream, but, but instead on to Night, like the two hour version of Headbanger's Ball every week, which is not a lot compared to what it used to be like. I don't know if we said, but Iron Maiden had not one, but two videos played on MTV in the first 24 hours that MTV was on the air. And I think they were played more than once. And the first one was sandwiched in between Rod Stewart's Sailing and REO Speedwagon's Keep On Loving You.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the rotation for MTV was eclectic for sure. And that's kind of what people liked about it for the most part because it was way more eclectic than FM radio even because that was generally genred. And they didn't jump around from Madonna to Iron Maiden on radio.

• 6:59Josh Clark?

  No.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  For the most part, I mean, maybe there might be some like, maybe K-Rock was doing something like that, but generally you had to go to MTV to get metal at all. And then when they sequestered it to Headbanger's Ball, initially, I think it was called the Heavy Metal Mania hosted by Dee Snider, but then it became Headbanger's Ball with, once again, the great Ricky Rockman. Love that guy. At least then metalheads had a place to go where you could really sink in for a couple of hours, you know?

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  For sure. Same with, remember 120 Minutes for New Wavers?

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Matt Benfield.

• 7:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah. You want to see a Bauhaus video? That's where you go.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 7:37Josh Clark?

  And if you want to know our metal bona fides, people, we've been in the same room as Dee Snider. He nodded to us once in passing in a hallway.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 7:47Josh Clark?

  So yeah, Headbanger's Ball also had some tours in North America when it was really big, 87, 89, and 92. So they were like-

• 7:55Speaker 03

  A festival thing?

• 7:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Oh, cool.

• 7:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Josh Clark?

  And then I think also we should, we should mention too, that one of the things about metal is that it has been, and I think still remains, pretty white, working class male for the most part, but it's definitely gotten more diverse than it was in the mid 80s, say.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there weren't a lot of bands. I mean, there were bands like Bad Brains that was way more punk, but had metal sort of sounds with their guitar. Love Bad Brains. Body Count came around. They were, I mean, I think they were for sure kind of speed metal.

• 8:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but with Ice-T rapping.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw them at that Lollapalooza. I'm not going to include Living Color at all, even though Livy does. Sorry, Livy, you missed the mark there.

• 8:44Josh Clark?

  No, Vernon Reed's guitar playing is metal.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  I don't know. I just listened to the song Glamour Boys. I mean, come on.

• 8:54Josh Clark?

  Well, that's kind of hair metal-y.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Glamour Boys, is it?

• 8:58Josh Clark?

  Hey, hey, um, speaking of hair metal, I forgot one great hair metal band.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Oh, let's hear it.

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  That came out much more recently.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Oh, I thought you were gonna say Europe.

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  No, Europe's definitely in there with the final countdown. No, The Darkness, they're a great hair metal band, even though they're like, I guess tongue in cheek, I think they know that they're tongue in cheek, but um, they're, they're really great as far as hair metal music goes. They're talented musicians.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there was a wave around then where people started to kind of try to evoke that thing again, and The Darkness was in that group.

• 9:31Josh Clark?

  Uh, and then Fishbone, that was another all-black band that you could make a case had some definite metal tendencies for sure.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, Not Living Color, definitely Fishbone. I loved Fishbone. Truth and Soul is one of the great albums of all time, and I saw them several times in concert.

• 9:46Josh Clark?

  Okay, and then also Living Color featuring Vernon Reed.

• 9:50Josh Clark?

  And we talked a little bit about women too, right? We talked about Elisa Whiteglaze from Arch Enemy. She's actually the second woman singer for Arch Enemy. There was a singer named Angela Gosow, who was, I think, replaced the original male singer of Arch Enemy, again, a melodic Swedish death metal band. And then there's another metal queen out there who at least used to be a Stuff You Should Know listener named Nita Strauss.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, Nita is great. I met her backstage because she was kind enough to invite us to the Motley Crue show where she plays, still plays with the Alice Cooper band. And I met Nita and she's super awesome and I think she's since gotten married, so congratulations on that.

• 10:34Josh Clark?

  Oh, congrats. Yeah, she's also in Iron Maidens, the Iron Maiden, all, all-women Iron Maiden cover band.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And guess what? That Judas Priest show I'm going to, Nita will be there because Alice Cooper's opening up.

• 10:46Josh Clark?

  Awesome, dude. Well, hopefully she hears this.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  I hope so because we're not in touch or anything. I just remember she was super sweet and was big into science.

• 10:54Josh Clark?

  That's really cool, man.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Kind of a science nerd.

• 10:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  And a great guitar player.

• 10:57Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm, for sure. Um, speaking of Judas Priest, are you going to dress like a leather daddy to the Judas Priest show?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  I'm not going to dress like a leather daddy because I don't have those clothes and I wouldn't want to just, uh, what do you call that? Appropriate? Like a legit, uh, style for a demographic, but, um, yeah, that, I mean, that's definitely a, a heavy metal, the leather and studs is a heavy metal trope like no other.

• 11:24Josh Clark?

  Where did it come from Chuck?

• 11:26Speaker 03

  I mean, probably Rob Halford and, and going to underground gay clubs in London would be my guess.

• 11:31Josh Clark?

  Yes, that's right. All of the, um, like, black leather, metal studded look that permeates heavy metal, still in part to this day, came from gay BDSM clubs that Rob Halford, as far as I know, the only out LGBTQ, um, metal singer, uh, went to while he was still very much in the closet.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's great. It's amazing. I can't wait to see, uh, I'll send you videos and stuff.

• 12:00Josh Clark?

  Okay, please do.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, just you, not, not, not everybody. Maybe I'll post some on my Instagram account, at Chuck the Podcaster. So be looking for that this fall.

• 12:07Josh Clark?

  Okay, fine. So Chuck, speaking of tropes, like dressing like a leather daddy to be a metal god, there's actually a few others that are, they're not necessarily like, oh, this is a characteristic of metal. They're just things that bands have done and copied each other on over the years that now people say like, this is a characteristic of metal, right?

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, I have to mention the decorative umlaut. It's one of the funniest, kind of greatest things and one of the biggest, except for I think Blue Oyster Cult, who I don't consider metal. They have the, the umlaut over the O and oyster.

• 12:43Josh Clark?

  They're definitely, definitely.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  But it became very metal. There's no other way to make anything seem metal in writing than to, uh, there's certain fonts that we'll talk about, but if you throw a couple of decorative umlauts in there, it just looks more metal.

• 12:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I think even Scandinavian bands that have their own thing, which is the, the, the forward slash going through the O.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that looks pretty metal.

• 13:06Josh Clark?

  I think they actually, in some cases, replaced that with an umlaut. That's how metal the umlaut is.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 13:12Josh Clark?

  And apparently a rock critic named Richard Metzler claims that he was the one who told Blue Oyster Cult to use that, to, to use an umlaut unnecessarily. People say that Blue Oyster Cult was the one who, who did that, like you said. Um, and Richard Melzer, or Metzler also claims to be the one who suggests that they use more cowbell in their music.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Oh, man. I didn't see that coming somehow. Yeah.

• 13:37Josh Clark?

  Oh, that makes me very happy.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  Very nice. Classical music as an inspiration is definitely, I don't even call it a trope. It's just a thing in metal. The theatricality, the virtuosity and that technical ability. You'll find that many heavy metal league guitarists were schooled in classical, not the least of which is the great Randy Rhoads, who we'll talk about later.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And Eddie Van Halen took classical piano lessons and stuff like that when he was a kid.

• 14:08Josh Clark?

  Metal god.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Very good piano player.

• 14:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Not a metal god, but yeah, so classical for sure.

• 14:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the thing is, one thing to understand about metal across the board in any genre or subgenre is there are very few bands that make music where you can suck. You essentially have to be an expert, extremely talented musician to play metal. Even the stuff that you're like, what is this? If you actually stopped and listened to the layers, the composition, the time signatures. Like, this is really complex, complicated music in every single subgenre. So like metal as a whole, as a group, metal musicians tend to be about as talented as you'll find in any rock outfit, by far.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. They all have chops. That was another thing that got me a little bit into metal was I started playing guitar when I was 13 and immediately subscribed to Guitar Player Magazine. Which was, I mean, that's how I knew about all those guitar players. Emily always makes fun of me when she's like, Judas Priest. And I'll go Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, and I can name all these guitar players. It's from poring over that magazine. Like, I wasn't even that into Judas Priest, but I knew these guys from these articles.

• 15:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah. I still, to this day, lament that I had a terrible teacher for electric guitar. My salmon colored, I don't even remember what kind of guitar it was. But I remember I complained about him before and someone who had that same teacher rode in and was like, I know exactly what you're talking about. That guy sucked.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Who knows what could have happened?

• 15:44Josh Clark?

  He even told me the band. I can't remember what the band was. I wouldn't name check them anyway because I don't want to shame the guy. But he was a terrible guitar teacher and I was really into it at the time.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Well, I got a B.C. Rich, candy apple red B.C. Rich guitar because of that early sort of hard rock influence. Cause it's kind of a corny guitar now. Did not get a Warlock for people who know B.C. Rich guitars. That's one of the most metal looking guitars ever.

• 16:08Josh Clark?

  Oh, is it like the, the triangle, the flying triangle?

• 16:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no, that's the flying V.

• 16:13Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay. They don't call it the flying triangle?

• 16:17Speaker 03

  It can, the flying V can definitely be metal, but it also has been used in a lot of classic rock.

• 16:23Josh Clark?

  Well, what's the one you're talking about?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  I'll send you a picture of it. It's, you'd know it as soon as you saw it.

• 16:29Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  You probably don't have your phone though, right?

• 16:31Josh Clark?

  Oh, there it is.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  I'll send it to you and you'll text me after.

• 16:36Josh Clark?

  What else? Chuck, anything else?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you gotta mention Lord of the Rings, cause we kind of joked about it, but Lord of the Rings has been in a lot of metal songs, like figuratively, like thematically and literally.

• 16:47Josh Clark?

  Yes. So, yeah, there's like the, like Led Zeppelin song about the darkest depths of mortar and all sorts of other stuff too. And throughout like their whole catalog, I think, who, who else was well known for that? I think Megadeth had a song that was based on Aragon's speech in, in the Return of the King. Like it's a really recurring, it is, it's a trope. There's no other way to put it. It's been in heavy metal from the outset, still through today. People are referencing it in some ways. In some cases, like, like there's a group called Bersom. It was a solo project by Varg Vicarines. He was imprisoned for murdering former bandmate Euronimus from Mayhem.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 17:32Josh Clark?

  And then he was also charged with burning down churches in the, he's from the black metal scene. Anyway, Bersom does not talk about Lord of the Rings stuff at all. And yet it's still from Lord of the Rings, Bersom is, but this I think kind of gets across how black metal the Bersom project was. Bersom in Lord of the Rings means darkness in the black speech that's spoken in mortar. So it's dark in the darkest place and it means darkness in that dark place language. That's how, that's how dark that black metal was.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  And their album cover is Vanta Black.

• 18:11Josh Clark?

  No light can escape from it.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Uh, we should also mention, we'll, we'll take a break here in a sec, but we should also mention the Gothic font. I mentioned fonts. Uh, you gotta have the right font on your metal album. Sabbath definitely was kind of one of the first, I think. Their album Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath, uh, used the Old English Blackletter typeface. And there's nothing spookier looking than Blackletter, you know?

• 18:33Josh Clark?

  No, for sure. But what's hilarious is it's just evolved and evolved and evolved to where very frequently you'll run across a, um, metal album cover and you'll be like, what? What is the band's name? I can't, I can't decipher this at all.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Can't even read it.

• 18:47Josh Clark?

  It's just so tangled. Like I can't tell what it says. Sometimes when you find out the band's name, you'll be like, oh, okay. I see it now. But other times you're like, I still don't see it.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  It's pretty funny. It's like, uh, it's very Spinal Tap.

• 19:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah. And they definitely should at least get name checked in this episode, right?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, in fact, uh, just today at their new trailer for the Spinal Tap sequel dropped.

• 19:10Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it doesn't look that great, but I don't know. I'm, I'm gonna definitely see it. I'm withholding judgment.

• 19:18Josh Clark?

  It just, it doesn't look very good?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  No, I think it was just, I don't know. Uh, I mean, it's a good enough concept. Like get the old band back together for one more show. So it's not like, uh, the, the idea isn't solid. Like that's a very like, uh, realistic thing for an old metal band. Um, I just, I don't know. We'll see. All right. So enough of fonts. Let's take a break and we'll talk, uh, about some brain stuff and album covers and social views and all of that fun stuff right after this.

• 20:04Josh Clark?

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• 21:07Josh Clark?

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• 21:56Josh Clark?

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• 23:19Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck. So if you are not a metal listener, but you're aware of heavy metal just in general, you probably associate it with satanic stuff. And again, in some cases, you're absolutely right. And not like satanic in the Satanic Temple or Satanism. Like Satan, the folkloric mythological evil one, like some bands are super, super into that, right? But there's also a lot of other stuff. Remember, we talked about Iron Maiden having all these different themes to their songs? One of the things that metal is not necessarily known for, but it's a big part of it, they have like pretty strong social views. And if you really kind of drill down into them,

• 24:01Josh Clark?

  it's essentially super populist, anti-establishment, anti-fascism, anti-authoritarian messages, frequently anti-aggression too, especially the government, on the government's behalf, the government being aggressive. You can find that throughout the entire metal community. And I think a lot of people kind of overlook it.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean. Cast aside the, the black metal scene, which can, like you mentioned in, I guess it was part one, where there's a lot of like white supremacist threads and things like that and far right ideology. If you, if you cast that aside, cast aside 80s hair metal, which just something about chicks. One might make the argument that heavy metal is a very sort of low key leftist musical genre.

• 24:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like, okay, so take Metallica, for example, starting with Ride the Lightning, the title songs back from 1984. It's, it's basically about like how the, it questions the government's state monopoly on violence, right? Like their moral right to execute anybody. That's pretty anti authoritarian. It's also pretty libertarian throughout. So if the, if the lyrics aren't left leaning in general, they also tend to be libertarian too. And their whole album, Injustice for All, song after song after song, has a huge, robust political message to it, basically across the entire album.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. The song one is, is an anti-war song. And Justice for All is about the corruption of the, the justice system. I, the Beholder, that's about the repression of freedom of speech and expression.

• 25:45Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  What else?

• 25:46Josh Clark?

  The Shortest Straw is about fascism, witch hunt riding through. Blackened is a straight up overt environmentalist song.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, they literally talk about like poisoning mother nature.

• 25:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And you find this like, it's not just Metallica, you find this throughout, throughout the, the metal community. Like, even if it's not like clear immediately, if you actually stop and listen to the subtext of what the song is saying, it's usually about the powerful and the elite being served at the expense of the masses, the populist masses. That is essentially what you can boil almost every song, again, saving black metal and death metal too, down into, like, that's the message of just about every, every metal song at its heart. At least one song on the album is going to be like that.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, even old Dave Mustaine with Megadeth. I mean, peace sells, but who's buying?

• 26:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Like, he's singing about peace, just like the hippies in the 60s might have been, just through a very different, you know, sort of genre.

• 26:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and some people actually credit him for promoting metal music to have messages. He was taking a shot clearly at hairbands, too, at the same time. But there was an interview with him in the LA Times in 1986 where he said, "A band should be aware of what's going on, instead of being so wrapped up in themselves." C.C. DeVille.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  That's a fairly ironic.

• 27:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  From Dave Mustaine.

• 27:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  And then, you know, you have cases where like Pantera's former frontman, Phil Anselmo, was caught on video shouting "white power" onstage and giving a Nazi salute. And like, the metal community was outraged. Like, people came out, you know, speaking out against them, not the least of which was Scott Ian of Anthrax, saying like, you know, "That's a vile thing to do." And they were, you know, it was heartening to see that kind of thing, you know?

• 27:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was about as close to being canceled as you can get in the metal community, which isn't really a cancel culture, you know?

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Is that not a thing?

• 27:44Josh Clark?

  No. And then it actually goes all the way to the far left, and this is much less typical, but you have like grindcore bands like Napalm Death that came out of the hardcore punk tradition of being very socially left, even into like the anarchist territory, essentially. But for the most part, it's probably center-left, maybe libertarian, is the bulk of the messages that you'll find in metal music.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Can we talk about how your brain does on heavy metal? Because they've actually done some studies that have found, and of course, you know, we should say there's, there are people that struggle with mental health where music and certainly metal has had some negative impacts.

• 28:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And there are examples of that, but, you know, aside from that, it seems like metal actually like kind of...

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Tests and taxes your brain in a good way, maybe taxes it in the right word, challenges your brain in a good way.

• 28:37Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Because it immediately starts firing to start making sense of this sort of musical puzzle and all these complex rhythms and time signatures that kind of go hand in hand.

• 28:46Josh Clark?

  Right. Yeah. So your brain basically is, is being worked out. Like it's, it's not just, just sitting there like being vibed at, like it's working, trying to decode all this stuff. And yet, paradoxically, for a lot of people, they report that it actually helps improve their focus. I think people with ADHD and people on the autism spectrum tend to report that heavy metal actually helps them focus better, which is pretty, pretty interesting because if your brain's decoding that, you would think that it would be focused on that, but it's not. It's, it's doing, it can do that separately, apparently. And then also emotionally, it seems to have positive effects, too.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, there, there are so many, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of heavy metal fans that maybe despondent or angry or frustrated or sad or something. And this music provides a real outlet, you know, whether they're just in their room on their headphones, or they're driving around in their car through their, you know, weird suburbia that they don't relate to, or where they're going to a concert. And it provides a real legitimate release for that stuff.

• 29:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that's not just like anecdotal. There have actually been studies that have been published in peer reviewed journals that show that there are positive emotional effects that are experienced by metalheads from listening to metal music. There's one from 2013 that studied 414 British metalheads. And they found, they found a mixed bag, right? They found that they had a higher openness to experience, which is one of the big five personality traits, generally considered positive. They have more negative attitudes toward authority. Can't really disagree with that if you are questioning the authority of a corrupt government, right?

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 30:34Josh Clark?

  Lower self-esteem. Didn't quite understand that. That might just be that metal music attracts people with lower self-esteem. I don't think it gives people lower self-esteem.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the case.

• 30:44Josh Clark?

  Greater need for uniqueness.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 30:48Josh Clark?

  And then lower religiosity, religiosity, that's not very surprising either. You know, I was like, are they playing them like, are they confused and they think Van Halen's metal? And that's what they're playing like the 1984 album. But it turns out like they're playing like legit metal stuff like they played As I Lay Dying, Cradle of Faith, Overkill, like actual metal. And they were still getting these results, which I found heartening.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. There was another study I thought was pretty interesting from 2019. It was 32 fans of metal, 44 non-fans of metal. And they found, and this one's important because I think especially in the eighties with the PMRC, there was a lot of just gobbledygook going around that like it's going to make your child something. It's going to make them into this, it's going to make them violent. And in that study in 2019, they found that metalheads have the same negative bias toward seeing violent imagery that people who don't listen to metal have, even if they're listening to metal that has violent lyrics and themes. It doesn't then transfer, like if they see an image of violence, they're still like, oh, I don't want to see that.

• 31:55Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. I don't actually want to do that.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Right, I just want to, yeah, exactly. It's just rocks.

• 32:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly. It just keeps going on and on. I think the, the point of these studies, especially if you compile them together like we did, is that there's just such a dumb misunderstanding or wrong interpretation of what metal is and what it does. Again, excepting black metal, they're definitely the outliers here.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So we talked a little bit about the genres and subgenres, but we'll dig in a little more here because it gets really confusing. And I don't know many of these bands at all, but I feel like we should just mention a few of these subgenres, right?

• 32:39Josh Clark?

  Do you want to? You want to go through this kind of anatomy of just a single subgenre?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like, I mean, were all those under mathcore?

• 32:47Josh Clark?

  Yes, this is where mathcore came from.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 32:52Josh Clark?

  Okay. So mathcore is a type of of metal music, very, very, very niche subgenre. And it's so niche that the bands of this subgenre have names like the Tony Danza Tap Dance Experience, or the Dillinger Escape Plan, okay? Super niche. And mathcore is a combination of metalcore and mathrock. And I know you know what mathrock is, right?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I used to listen to a little bit of that in college. That is rock music that's very complex musically, a lot of weird time signatures, a lot of starts and stops. If you've heard mathrock and you may have heard it and not known it was mathrock, but you just thought like, like, what an interesting odd band.

• 33:36Josh Clark?

  So you've got mathrock. Mathrock, you said with its interesting like time signatures and and very technical playing, that evolved from prog rock, like Rush, Genesis, King Crimson, yes, from the 70s, right?

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:49Josh Clark?

  And then mathrock was also influenced by jazz. That's just mathrock. That's one part that mathcore is made up of. On the other side, you've got metalcore, the other half of mathcore. It's a combination of hardcore and extreme metal. You might say, oh, okay, hardcore punk. No, wrong. Hardcore is different if you're a purist.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:10Josh Clark?

  From hardcore punk. Hardcore is like bands like Code Orange, Vain. Hardcore punk is Minor Threat, Black Flag. They're very closely related. They sound similar, but they're they're different subgenres. So metalcore is hardcore and extreme metal, which is a big umbrella term for a bunch of other types of metal, too.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Okay, and extreme metal is also under mathcore?

• 34:35Josh Clark?

  Yes, so extreme metal is one of the bases or is the basis of metalcore. And there's different types of subgenres in extreme metal. You've got death metal, black metal, progressive metal, kind of like prog rock, but metal, doom metal, stoner metal. These are all varieties of extreme metal. And so all of those can have their own core, right? Their own version of metalcore. And so probably progressive extreme metal with hardcore. That version of metalcore probably eventually led to metalcore. This is how divided and and cut up the genre of heavy metal is. That's how niche it's gotten into.

• 35:20Josh Clark?

  And again, some people will come along and be like, this sounds just like progressive metal to me. Be like, no, it's mathcore. Get it right. You know, that's, that's essentially like, um, I just find it fascinating that people have gotten that.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:35Josh Clark?

  That into the weeds. And I've seen in a couple of places, um, probably on Reddit or something where people are like, this is ridiculous. Let's just take a big step back and and get out of this mindset because it's getting kind of weird.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there are definitely some genres that have subgenres, but I don't think there's anything that approaches metal. Even like, I don't know, even hip hop has a lot of subgenres, but I don't think it comes close to metal even.

• 36:00Josh Clark?

  No, no, I don't think anything does. I mean, you can basically take anything and give it several subgenre titles, suffixes or prefixes, and you probably have an actual like metal subgenre.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, agreed.

• 36:15Josh Clark?

  I just found that interesting. I appreciate you taking that little diversion with me.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  I love it. Uh, all right, we'll take another break here and come back and finish up the part two of the two part duology. And we're going to talk about album covers and the death of Randy Rhoads right after this.

• 36:47Josh Clark?

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• 37:51Josh Clark?

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• 38:23Josh Clark?

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• 39:10Speaker 03

  All right, promised talk of album covers. I want to give a big, big shout out to a guy named Blake Massey, who wrote a really great article on the metalpit.org. And also shout out Sherri Thomas from The Aquarian, because Blake wrote a really, really great piece on heavy metal album art and, you know, basically kind of pointing out and making the case that that's where it all starts, is like being in the record store, seeing this imagery. Black Sabbath kind of starting it all with just dark imagery, very provocative stuff. A lot of times, you know, like sometimes they would hire out just a company, but I feel like especially with metal, many times the band is very closely involved in the vision for the album cover because, I mean, album covers are always important, but it

• 39:55Speaker 03

  feels like metal, they're even more important.

• 39:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's just part of the experience, you know?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:00Josh Clark?

  Like you buy the poster even if you're like me and you're into Iron Maiden's poster art, not really their music yet.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it's legit amazing art. I mentioned in part one, I think, about the Black Sabbath self-titled debut album in 1970. One of the most terrifying album covers I've ever seen. It's just a, it's a photograph. It's got this cloaked figure. It looks like a woman standing in front of this old, like, you know, torn down, or not torn down, but just sort of dilapidated building. And this was in 1970 when like psychedelia and colorful album art was a thing. And it was just very, very creepy looking.

• 40:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but it also said, hey, everybody, like, we're going in a different direction here. Check this out. Like, I can't imagine what that landed like. It must have just looked so different. Like, think about Led Zeppelin's album covers. The grimmest one they had was the Hindenburg Explosion in black and white.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:58Josh Clark?

  You know, like, that was, that was as grim as their album covers got. Like, this is, this is spooky. Like, it's definitely different. I just think that's really cool, like, to think back of just how, how some people must have seen this and been like, I'm reborn.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, there's a range, like everything. You can look at something like the cover of Number of the Beast. We already talked about the great Derek Riggs and Eddie, their mascot. But if you look at their album covers, Iron Maiden's especially, they're just, they're so intricate. And there's so much to see when you sit down on your floor with your headphones on as a teenager. But they can also be a little more simplistic. Like if you look at the great cover for Metallica's Master of Puppets from 1986. You know, a little can say a lot. It's just there. First of all, you gotta have a great logo. And Metallica's logo is always great.

• 41:45Josh Clark?

  It is.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  As is Iron Maiden's Judas Priest has always had a great logo. But it's that Metallica logo and then that, that cemetery with those crosses connected to the puppet strings is just like kind of chilling to see. So shout out to Metallica and Peter Minch, who designed that one.

• 42:03Josh Clark?

  And we talked about, while I talked about Rain and Blood earlier, and its album cover is actually, it's art. Like it's, it's very clearly like a painting. I can't remember who did it. I'm not, I'm not actually sure. Oh, Larry Carroll. And it's basically hell. It's just a landscape of hell. There's off to the foreground in the left, there's some heads floating in a lake of blood. There's a goat on a throne presiding over this horrible place. The Pope is wandering around wondering what the hell's going on. But it has its own style even. It's not like, like if you look at Holy Diver, the Dio album cover. It's almost like, it's cartoon realism, almost.

• 42:43Josh Clark?

  This is, this is art. It's like a style of a painter that, that the Rain and Blood cover is, which makes it even more unsettling, I think.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that Holy Diver cover is great. You know, Dio has an amazing logo. And they also have a mascot named Murray.

• 42:59Josh Clark?

  Did you know that?

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Uh, I didn't. I guess now that I think about some. Dio artwork, I realized that I've seen that masked person. I did not know that his name was Murray.

• 43:12Josh Clark?

  I didn't either. He reminds me of the black spy from Spy versus Spy. He's just not wearing the hat.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's I'd never really thought about that.

• 43:19Josh Clark?

  I didn't either until I saw him.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, just go check out the the Holy Diver cover. It's great because Murray is kind of standing up, you know, behind a mountain, whipping a chain that's wrapped around a priest who's in the ocean with the waves lapping and he's, you know, clearly struggling to stay alive.

• 43:37Josh Clark?

  And Dio, by the way, he took over for after Ozzy left Black Sabbath. He, I think it was him immediately after Ozzy, right?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was.

• 43:45Josh Clark?

  But he was also in another band with an album cover that we talked about before, Rainbow. Their album cover for Rising is one of my favorite, not even just metal album covers, just album cover in general. It's got a very pretty rainbow on it.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  It is very pretty. Guns N' Roses, we should talk about. I mean, so I didn't really throw them in in the metal crowd, but I think maybe early on they might have been thrown in that group of hair metal. But, you know, very famously, their original Appetite for Destruction artwork was very controversial for obvious reasons. You know, trigger warning here because it it's drawn, you know, like a cartoon, but it depicts a sexual assault that's happened from a robot. And people were like, we can't put this on our shelves. Record stores were saying that. So Geffen Records was like, yeah, maybe we are going a little too far here. They put that on the inside cover sleeve and then ended up with an iconic cover as a result that, again, it's it's drawn like a animated

• 44:46Speaker 03

  sort of drawing, but it's that Celtic cross with each band member's head at various points on the cross. And again, another great logo.

• 44:54Josh Clark?

  It is. It turned out pretty good. I heard Geffen's first idea was to put a nice price sticker over the offensive painting.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Is that a joke?

• 45:03Josh Clark?

  It is.

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Okay. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me.

• 45:06Josh Clark?

  Remember those stickers? The nice price?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  That's right. I do want to mention the one more, though, before we get to Randy Rhoads, Quiet Riot, because they were the very first metal band to hit number one on the charts.

• 45:19Josh Clark?

  With which one? Metal Health or Come on, Feel the Noise, or both?

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Well, Metal Health, that was the album. Come on Feel the Noise was on that album.

• 45:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but they also released the song Metal Health as a single, right?

• 45:30Speaker 03

  That was also on that album.

• 45:31Josh Clark?

  Right. So which one reached number one first? Or do you mean their whole album reached number one?

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:36Josh Clark?

  I got it finally, everybody. You can stop screaming at your speakers.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're the first metal band to have a number one record. Metal Health came out and kind of changed the game. And it featured the man in the iron mask very famously. It's a pretty cool album cover and that guy was in the videos as well.

• 45:55Josh Clark?

  I've always wanted to play that album during seeding for one of our shows. But those two songs are really the only good ones on there. The rest are just slimy.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:05Josh Clark?

  So I've always skipped it. But yeah, Metal Health, that is a great song, which is ironic. It's Bang Your Head, Metal Health Will Drive You Mad. I think he says it just like that. It's funny, it's a very slow song. So I mean, you can bang your head to it, but you do it very slowly.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 46:24Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, you had said you specifically wanted to end this on a huge downer. And I think you've really knocked it out of the park with your choice to talk about Randy Rhoads and his untimely death at age 25.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think we both had our kind of big things we wanted in here. Yours was Iron Maiden and mine was the death of Randy Rhoads. Because it was one of the saddest things that happened to music. A big shout out to Rex Thompson. He wrote a great piece on it for liveforlive music.com. But Randy Rhoads was a great kid. He was a very soft spoken guy, virtuoso from the jump as a teenager. And so much so that when, apparently when he was a kid practicing so much, his mom like called a doctor and was like, can this hurt my son's fingies? Like, could this cause permanent damage to his little fingies?

• 47:13Josh Clark?

  I read also that she was a piano player, so she must have been, he must have really been playing.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:20Josh Clark?

  So he formed Quiet Riot. I had no idea about this. My only understanding of Quiet Riot was from Metal Health onward. All right, let's just be honest. It was Metal Health, that's it.

• 47:32Josh Clark?

  So he formed Quiet Riot back in 1973. I had no idea that Randy Rhoads was in Quiet Riot, or that Quiet Riot had been around 10 full years before Metal Health came out.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  He was a child, basically, and same, you know, Kevin Dubrow was the singer and everything, but they signed to CBS Records. The band was kind of taking a different direction than he thought, like, I'm better than what we're doing. And he was right. And he left the band, was pretty frustrated, and he got a call that Ozzy Osbourne had left Sabbath and was forming a new band. And as the story goes, he auditioned for a very hungover Ozzy Osbourne and was warming up with some scales. And Ozzy was like, you got the job. Pretty great.

• 48:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And that was it. So he became, I mean, just an absolute legend, thanks to his stint with Ozzy. Right? Was Ozzy Band just Ozzy Osbourne?

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was just Ozzy Osbourne.

• 48:30Josh Clark?

  Ozzy Osbourne and the Dewops or the Five Dimes or something like that?

• 48:34Speaker 03

  No, it was just him. And, you know, the saddest part about all this is that he was, he really awoke something in Ozzy and became very, very good friends with he and his wife. I guess they weren't even married at the time, but his eventual wife Sharon, who I saw at a restaurant in LA last year, by the way.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  But he lived with them when he was in England and was part of the family, basically, a very playful, spirited, really nice kid and just absolute just slayer on the guitar until a very, very sad day in 1982.

• 49:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it is terribly sad. It was so unnecessary, Randy Rhoads' death. And again, like, this guy's finally starting to hit the stride that he has known he could get to his whole life.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  He was Crazy Train. You know, everyone's heard Crazy Train. That's Randy Rhoads.

• 49:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, and he was also, like you said, he was a good guy. Like, people just loved him, right? So he was 25 at the time. It was the day after a show in Knoxville, Tennessee. The tour bus had made it out of Tennessee, through Georgia, safely into Florida, and they stopped in a town called Leesburg, Florida, to repair their bus, which makes sense because Leesburg, Florida is well-known as the bus repair capital of Florida. And so they decided to take the whole, the whole day off, the day they were going to spend the night in Leesburg. So they were just messing around that day. And again, they had a show the night before and everybody was either hungover or still messed up from the night before. Apparently Randy Rhoads and Ozzy had had a, um, an argument backstage at the Knoxville

• 50:08Josh Clark?

  show because Randy Rhoads was concerned about Ozzy's behaviors, drinking. He was like, you're going to die young. You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up. Ozzy didn't like that. So he stormed off and they hadn't made up yet because Ozzy was still sleeping even and Randy was now awake and people were messing around in Leesburg.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was sleeping on the bus. So, um, the bus driver, he was a former commercial pilot. His name was Andrew Acock and there was a Beechcraft Bonanza propeller plane, a 1957 Beechcraft on the property. And he was like, hey, I can fly that thing. Let's take it for a spin. Uh, the plane was unguarded and so he and initially keyboardist Don Airy and tour manager Jake Duncan got on board, flew around a little bit and landed safely. And then, uh, after that, he was like, hey, anyone, uh, anyone else want to take a ride? Young, spirited, awesome Randy Rhoads is like, yeah, man, I'll go up there. That looks like a blast. And then the seamstress for the band,

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Rachel Youngblood, uh, also boarded the plane. And while they're up there, um, Randy Rhoads is like, hey, Ozzy's, you know, sleeping off another hangover. Let's like buzz the bus and see if we can wake him up.

• 51:18Josh Clark?

  So they did, right? They did four times and each time, uh, Acock, Andrew Acock was like, I can get closer. We can do it faster. And they, they managed to do it three different times. And on the fourth time, their luck ran out and I guess his wing clipped the bus and it doesn't take much pressure to send a plane going 150 miles an hour careening, spinning out of control. And that's exactly what happened. Um, the plane struck the ground and slid, uh, or hit a tree. And Randy Rhoads and Rachel Youngblood were ejected, probably dead immediately, um, from the plane. I believe Andrew Acock was left in the plane. It exploded into flames, but not

• 51:59Josh Clark?

  before it had cruised into and taken a stop in some poor schmo's garage.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Ozzy slept through the plane hitting the bus that he was on somehow. That explosion woke him up and apparently emergency services weren't quick to get there, but it's pretty clear that everyone died immediately. The autopsy showed that ACOG had still had cocaine in his system and Ozzy was like, "Yeah." He testified that he was using coke like well into the night.

• 52:30Josh Clark?

  He was the bus driver.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. Well into the night, this was the next morning and his pilot's license had expired a long time ago. And, you know, that was it. We don't have any like black box recording or anything. It was just a huge loss to the music world and a huge, huge loss to the Osborne family who loved him so much and Ozzy was already in bad shape and this was the beginning of a very, very bad, dark time for him.

• 52:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he said since that Randy Rhoads death sent him spiraling down that path that Randy Rhoads had argued with him about getting off of in the first place. Cause like you said, they formed some sort of bond that just didn't last very long and just broke Ozzy's heart, I guess.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, super, super sad.

• 53:16Josh Clark?

  It is sad and I've been thinking, okay, how can we end this on a slightly higher note? And I've got it Chuck, kawaii metal.

• 53:26Josh Clark?

  Do you know what kawaii means in Japanese?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 53:29Josh Clark?

  Cute, right? So cute, kawaii metal means cute metal. It's Japanese metal. It combines J-pop, right? With metal and it actually kind of works. So if you're curious about J-pop metal or kawaii metal, look up the bands Baby Metal and Lady Baby and that'll be a pretty good start down your journey into the J-pop metal realm.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  All right. And I want to quickly, I know I promised in part one, the Rolling Stone top 10 metal albums of all time, so I don't want to leave that off and I'll just quickly go through from 10 to 1. We've got Pantera with Vulgar Display of Power, Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz at 9, Megadeth's Peace sells But Who's Buying It 8, Motorhead's No Remorse at 7, Slayer's Rain and Blood at 6, Sabbath, self-titled Black Sabbath at number 5, Number of the Beast from Iron Maiden at number 4, Judas Priest's British Steel, Great Record at number 3, Master of Puppets at number 2 from Metallica and number 1 with a bullet.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Paranoid from Black Sabbath. And I know what you're thinking. Where else is Iron Maiden? They were also at 13, besides number four, with their debut record.

• 54:43Josh Clark?

  Okay. I dispute a lot of that, but let's just not get into it. Okay?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  It's a Rolling Stone list. You know how those go.

• 54:50Josh Clark?

  They really, I think they're just trolls, essentially.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably.

• 54:54Josh Clark?

  Well, I think that's it, everybody. That's everything we have to say about heavy metal right now. And again, sorry, we did not name check your favorite band. If you want to tell us to get into something, email us. We love that kind of thing. We hope you enjoyed this. We did the best we could. Thanks again to Olivia for taking this journey with us. And since I said that, of course, it's time for listener mail.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  You know what? I'm gonna call an audible here, not gonna do a listener mail. Instead, I want to shout out a book writer. Been meaning to do this for a while, and it kind of fits because I know that the author, Keith Rossin, is into some heavy music. I don't know if it's metal or what. I just know he's into some pretty hardcore music. I took a flyer on a book with a cool cover a long time ago, finally took it on vacation. It's a duology called Fever House. And the second book is called The Devil By Name. Great, great horror books. I've never read horror in my life. There's a thread of humanity and the characters in the heart of his stories are incredible.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  And then you've also got good horror stuff.

• 56:04Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah?

• 56:05Speaker 03

  So recommend Fever House and The Devil By Name from Keith. And then his upcoming book, I had shouted him out on Instagram. He got in touch, and so we're kind of Instagram messaging now. And his book publisher sent me a galley of his new book out this fall. It's called Coffin Moon. This one's about vampires, and it is great. And so sign up for the pre-sale. It's just, I can't wait to read what he does next. And Keith is like a super cool guy. So Fever House, The Devil By Name, and the upcoming Coffin Moon, which that one's about vampires. Like I said, it's fixed.

• 56:39Josh Clark?

  Like Keith.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Keith Rossen, R-O-S-S-O-N.

• 56:42Josh Clark?

  Okay, since you said that, I've been trying to figure out how to shout out two horror movies that I've seen recently that are like,

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 56:49Josh Clark?

  These are the best I've seen in a really long time. One's Japanese, it's got subtitles, it's called Best Wishes.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Ringu?

• 56:56Josh Clark?

  No, that's a good one, though. This is called Best Wishes to All. It's a hundred times more off the chain than Ringu. It's not as scary as The Grudge, or the Japanese version of The Grudge. It's just nuts. It's really good, though. Another one is one of the darkest horror movies I've ever seen. It centers on snuff films.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Ugh.

• 57:17Josh Clark?

  It's called Red Rooms. They do such a good job that they don't even actually show any of the videos in question. And it's more about this woman's descent into madness, you know, being into this kind of stuff. It's just an amazing, amazing movie. It's not for everybody, but if it is for you, you will love this movie. And I think if you can just get past the weirdness and enjoy it, I think just about anybody could enjoy Best Wishes to All.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  I love it. I enjoy it when we throw out these recommendations. That's great.

• 57:49Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, that was great. That was a great end to the metal episodes, too, I think. Good job.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, those were fun. I feel like we could have done a part three, four, five, six, two, to be honest.

• 57:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us about heavy metal or anything, you can send it via email. Send it off to [email protected].

• 58:13Speaker 00

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