Heavy Metal Goes Platinum

Poison. Anthrax. Alice in Chains. Skid Row. The band names alone conjure images of mayhem, torture and death. Heavy-metal rock, with its raw lyrics, pummeling beats, banshee vocals and buzz-saw guitars, seems custom-made for leather-clad lowlifes with tattooed biceps and lobotomized brains. Teenagers love it. Always have. But during the early 1980s, when the insipid glam-rock of Duran Duran ruled the charts, heavy metal was the idiot in the basement, shunned by music-industry executives and dismissed by critics as adolescent noise.

Not so in the hardheaded ’90s. Today Duran Duran is history, and heavy metal is white-hot. Thanks to bands like Metallica, which sold 650,000 copies of its namesake album in the first week of its August release, every parent’s worst nightmare has become a record executive’s dream come true. Metallica entered Billboard’s top-albums chart at No. 1 and stayed there for four weeks, spawning the hit single Enter Sandman. Even the critics are coming around. Rolling Stone awarded Metallica four stars in its review, calling it “an exemplary album of mature but still kickass rock & roll.”

Metallica is not the only band turning heavy metal into pure platinum. Skid Row’s latest, Slave to the Grind, has sold 2.5 million copies worldwide since last June. Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge entered the charts 13 weeks ago at No. 1 and sold 2 million copies in less than a month. Poison’s past three albums, Look What the Cat Dragged Down, Open Up and Say Ahh and Flesh and Blood, have sold a combined total of 12 million copies; all five of Motley Crue’s have sold more than 1 million each.

Those numbers are giving metal bands the kind of clout once reserved for pop’s biggest stars. In August Columbia Records signed Aerosmith, a hard-rock band with metal overtones, to a $30 million-plus contract. Motley Crue’s deal is even sweeter. Elektra Records will pay the Crue at least $35 million, including a $22.5 million advance, for its next five albums. Meanwhile, A&M Records expects big things from Soundgarden, a Seattle-based band that packs the sonic punch of early Led Zeppelin.

MTV, which features heavy-metal bands every Saturday night on the Headbangers’ Ball program, acknowledged metal’s ascendancy by inviting Metallica to play on its 1991 video awards show. On that show, the Viewer’s Choice Award for Best Video went to Queensryche, another metal band with a broad following. In October the heavy-metal scene will get its own Grammys when the first Concrete Foundations Awards are held in Los Angeles.

Most metal bands still must rely on concerts and word of mouth to sell records. “It’s a cultlike audience,” says Geoff Mayfield, director of retail research for Billboard. “A record like Metallica can sell without airplay and without MTV. So there is a voracious appetite.”

Musically, heavy metal has evolved somewhat, from a monotonous barrage of frenetic tempos and slashing guitars toward richer aural textures and even an occasional ballad. Metallica is typical of the metal bands that have renounced their raunchy roots and polished their music, if not their image. Gone are the crude lyrics and blaring wah-wah guitars that marked its sound in the mid-‘ 80s. Many of the tunes on Metallica could almost be called reflective, like Holier Than Thou: “Gossip is burning on the tip of your tongue/ You lie so much you believe yourself/ Judge not lest you be judged yourself.”

Metal musicians play to the alienated fantasies of a mostly white, young and male audience by portraying themselves as disillusioned outsiders who have turned their backs on a corrupt civilization. Dressed like renegade bikers, they sing anthems to the rebellious and the wild, or wild at heart. Outrageous behavior is more than a pose for many of them, notably Skid Row’s lead singer, Sebastian Bach (ne Bierk), whose on-the-road antics have included tearing up hotel rooms and striking a concert spectator with a bottle that he hurled into the audience.

“Things have come full circle,” says Bach, a Canadian who sang in church choirs before finding his true calling in the Toronto club scene. “In the ’70s pop was more hip, and now the energy of punk has come into heavy metal. Punk was a socialist thing, and metal was a capitalism thing.” Yet both are sneeringly anti-Establishment. In Slave to the Grind, Skid Row proclaims, “Can’t be the king of the world/ If you’re slave to the grind/ Tear down the rat racial slime.”

“We’re not going to f—- in’ sell out like the mainstream,” vows Bach. “The kids can see through the phoniness.” No doubt. Which could raise a ticklish problem for bands like Metallica and Skid Row, which presume to voice the disaffection of middle-class youths while earning fat-cat salaries. To stay on top of the heap, metal’s messiahs may have to figure how to keep both their millions and their edge — or risk becoming long-haired rebels without a cause.