This is one of the ones that got away: a great, fun interview that never made the pages of The Courier-Mail. I was talking to Jim Parsons and Dick Carruthers in London: Jim was on the landline, and Dick was on the street via mobile phone, catching a cab.
It’s a friend to the friendless, a soundtrack to our lives, a way of life… heavy metal is all of these things and more to the practitioners and followers of music’s loudest, scariest genre.
The culture is explored in a double DVD Heavy Metal: Louder Than Life, directed by Dick Carruthers and produced by Jim Parsons. It’s a well-crafted documentary, arranged thematically, providing insight for the innocently curious and thrills for headbangers.
Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler reveals the origin of the title, while numerous luminaries explore the origin of the species, rooted in the electric guitars of Jimmy Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad. But it was the British who broke the ground, with Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and the genre-defining Sabbath.
Now the genre is fractured into various shop labels: death metal, speed metal, black metal, thrash… Zeppelin and Purple don’t seem quite so confronting compared to the antics of Marilyn Manson, the costumed cleverness of Slipknot.
“It’s hard to be outrageous,” says Parsons, who eschewed Carruthers’ attempt to have him noted as co-director despite being heavily involved in the interviews and production. “When I had my nose pierced 20 years ago, my parents – people – were were shocked. Now you can work in a bank and have tattoos. You can have a bolt in your forehead and people just say, ‘nice piercing, man’.”
Metal, he says, has been absorbed into the mainstream, so those who want to shock the system have to go further to be noticed. It’s a short-term tactic which means nothing without good music.
“If you have really good music, you can get somewhere,” he says. “There’s a reason Slipknot are the biggest metal band in the world and it’s not because of their costumes or their performance; it’s because their records are really good.”
While Louder than Life canvases that range of styles – it talks to members of Metallica, Kiss, Motorhead, Korn and Napalm Death, for instance -- it does not purport to be a definitive history of metal. It’s an introduction and a sampler, aimed to entertain both the aficionado and the newcomer.
It does this by compiling a series of interviews with musicians, producers and reporters and presenting them thematically rather than as a straight chronology of the music. These are coloured and linked by concert footage and film clips.
“The progression is from the old to the new, normally, but it jumps about,” says Parsons. “You have Pantera, then Deep Purple, the Korn.”
“It isn’t a top 10,” says Carruthers. “It goes through the beginnings, the sound, the vocals, the look, the iconography… It’s not a history of metal. It’s a story about heavy metal in their words, not ours.”
It was a difficult process, says Carruthers, who has filmed live shows by Oasis, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. “There’s no voiceover, no first person dialogue. The opinions are those of the people in it. It’s more difficult technically, but it’s a more rewarding way to do it.”
Says Parsons “It’s the sum of its parts. We took the most exciting bits on every topic we talked about and we had 35 chunks. Only 22 of them made it into the movie.”
As it is, the movie is almost two hours long, with another two hours of extra material included on a second disc.
Knowing the documentary was being made for DVD, they capitalised on the format’s interactive possibilities by including clickable icons which take the viewer to further information before returning them to the movie, a bit like a digital footnote.
But it’s the music and the personalities who shine, imbuing the documentary with the humour and honesty that are part and parcel of the genre.
As informative and entertaining as it might be, there’s no guarantee the viewer will come away with a definitive answer to the question, what is heavy metal.
Even Ronnie James Dio (Sabbath/Rainbow/Dio) isn’t too sure.
“Metal?” he says on the DVD. “Who the fuck knows?”
Heavy Metal: Louder Than Life (Hopscotch) is out through Shock.
Fact file:
What: 2 DVD set, each just under two hours long, exploring the genesis, development and culture of heavy metal.
Who: Interviews with luminaries and not-so-luminous figures of heavy metal, including members of Black Sabbath, Metallica, Kiss, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Motorhead, Megadeth, Dio, Korn and Napalm Death.
Extras: The second disc contains an interview with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider; an interactive metal timeline from 1969-2005; an interview with a ‘mystery headbanger’; a guide to classic metal albums; doco on metal school; anecdotes; forum with fans; pictures of metal icons like Jimmy Page’s Les Paul #1 and other famous guitars.
Format: widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1
