Night Beat Part 11

One other artist had a rough time of it in 1990, and that was Irish singer Sinead O'Connor. The year began wonderfully for her, with a number 1 hit single, "Nothing Compares 2 U," and an equally high-ranking alb.u.m, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got. But during the summer, when O'Connor refused to allow the national anthem to be played at one of her performances in New Jersey, local and national media treated the event as major news. Overnight, there were calls for her to be deported back to the United Kingdom; radio stations announced they were boycotting her music; and she was vilified by other celebrities (including Frank Sinatra) and hara.s.sed in public. Over and over, irate Americans asked the same question: What did O'Connor have against the national anthem? (The answer is easy, and fairly innocent: O'Connor is opposed to nationalism of any sort, and in fact refused to pose with an Irish flag for a photo session for Rolling Stone earlier in the year.) But there was another question that wasn't asked and perhaps should have been: Namely, in a year when rock was treated as subversion by so many American lawmakers and pundits, how could any principled rock & roller do anything but refuse any false tributes? Why should any performer be forced to pay tribute to a nation that is so reluctant to stand up for the rights of its own artists?

The incident was merely another reminder that these are dangerous times to advertise yourself as a malcontent in American pop culture. But it was also a reminder that rock's best and bravest heroes aren't about to back down when confronted by indignant authoritarians. Kicking against social repression and moral vapidity-that's an activity which, for well over thirty years now, rock & roll has managed to do better than virtually any other art or entertainment form. But at this juncture, the forces that would not only condemn but curtail or silence that impulse are formidable. If 1990 taught us anything, it is that if we value rock as a spirit of insolent liberty, then the time has come to form a bulwark against those who would gladly muzzle that spirit.

clash of the t.i.tans: heavy metal enters the 1990s.

"It looks like h.e.l.l," says the security guard, gazing at the scene before him. "It's like h.e.l.l just came popping up all over the place."

It is a hot spring night in 1991, in Dallas, Texas, at the open-air Starplex theater, where the Clash of the t.i.tans-a bill featuring three of the leading exponents of speed-metal rock & roll, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer-is playing its opening date of a two-month trek across America. Onstage, Megadeth is playing a loud-hard-fast set of songs about rage and apocalypse, but at the rear of the theater, on a large gra.s.sy slope, it looks like apocalypse may be happening for real. Up on that knoll, hundreds of heavy metal fans have started to build bonfires and dance and stomp around them in an almost tribal fas.h.i.+on. From a distance it almost looks as if the fans are tossing themselves in and out of the pyres, like one of Bosch or Bruegel's portrayals of the inferno brought to modern life.

"Man, I have never seen anything like that," says the security guard, shaking his head, still transfixed. "This is what we get for letting this heavy metal s.h.i.+t into this place. I tell you, the stuff is f.u.c.king evil."

HEAVY METAL: Over the course of its history it has been accused of everything from musical low-mindedness and lousy politics to the spread of teenage suicide and suburban Satanism. It has also been blasted by federal legislators, local lawmakers, conservative (and liberal) moralists, concerned parents, and prominent religious figures, all of whom see the music as a corrupting influence on the young: a music that is capable of entering the souls of its listeners and delivering them to the darkest forces of evil.

But for all the scorn and dismissal that has been perpetually hurled its way, heavy metal is the only constant standard-bearer that rock & roll can claim. Whereas movements like rockabilly, psychedelia, disco, and even punk played out their active histories in a handful of years each, metal has proven consistently popular for over twenty years now. Plus, it has also served as a vital and reliable rite of pa.s.sage for its audience-that is, it is music that articulates the frustrations, desires, and values of a youth population that has too often found itself without any other cultural advocate or voice. Indeed, metal often works as music for outcasts: kids who feel pressed or condemned by adult society, who feel despised or hopeless or angry, and who need to a.s.sert their own pride and bravado. Consequently, a music that many regard as a form without redemption is actually a music that can help powerless young people feel powerful-or at least feel like they've found a means to outrage or repel an increasingly coldhearted society.

In other words, metal persists. Though the music may remain a prime target for legislators and moralists-and though many critics are now claiming that guitar-driven rock & roll has lost its primacy in the world of popular music-heavy metal remains as audacious and defiant as ever. At present, in fact, it supports one of the most energetic and far-reaching alternative-culture scenes in all modern pop, a vast and complex international network of record labels, magazines, radio stations, nightclubs, newsletters, and leather-and-T-s.h.i.+rts shops. What's more, metal (in the early 1990s) is enjoying the widest spectrum of musical stylists it has ever seen, including the progressive hip-hop and punk-inflected rock & roll of Living Colour; Faith No More; and 24-7 Spyz; the cla.s.sic bad-boy posturing of Guns n' Roses, the blues-derived majesty of the Black Crowes, the pretty-boy raunch of Poison and Warrant; the grungy grandeur of Pacific Northwest bands like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Tad; and the avant-garde extremism of British grindcore bands like Napalm Death, Carca.s.s, and G.o.dflesh.

Yet when it comes to sheer disrepute or bravado, nothing in all pop-except for some of the more notorious rap artists of the day-can compare with speed-metal or thrash-metal bands like Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax. Inspired as much by the brutal rhythms and bellicose stance of early 1980s hardcore punk as by heavy metal's own styles and obsessions, these bands are making some of the boldest music of our time, and, some critics would claim, also some of the most frightening. "When victory's a ma.s.sacre," sings Slayer in a song from the group's latest alb.u.m, Seasons in the Abyss, "When victory is survival/When this end is a slaughter/The final swing is not a drill/It's how many people I can kill." It's a brutal decree, and though it's possible to read it as an indictment of the bloodshed that it describes, it's also possible to hear it as a celebration: a surrender to the exhilaration of the kill. Either way, it's one of those moments that serves notice that something in rock & roll's moral center is now s.h.i.+fting. An art form which has often striven to convince its audience that the world might yet be redeemed through action or opposition now seeks to tell us unflinchingly violent truths about the increasingly violent modern soul.

"Bands like us are writing a new book in rock & roll history," says Dave Mustaine, the lead singer and guitarist for Megadeth. "If Elvis Presley liberated the body and Bob Dylan released the mind, we're releasing whatever's left: all the stuff that people would rather overlook in a world that's gone mad. Actually, I prefer to think of us as modern troubadours who are spreading joy and harmony by saying 's.h.i.+t, f.u.c.k, p.i.s.s, kill,' and all the rest of it."

FOR THE BETTER PART of the last decade, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax have been working in rock's margins, making extreme music for a fervid young audience that much of the pop world-including the heavy metal mainstream-would just as soon ignore. In fact, as far as much rock media is concerned, this whole scene may as well be invisible.

But the Clash of the t.i.tans tour is an attempt to change all that, and to a.s.sert that these bands can attract a ma.s.s following that is a legitimate pop community in its own right. It's an ambitious venture, but also a risky one. Though the three co-headlining bands share a roughly similar style, they don't all share the same interests. Slayer, a Los Angeles-based band, plays rageful tunes about the horror of interminable warfare and unconscionable murder, while Megadeth-despite its smartly humored songs about drug abuse, ecological disaster, and impending apocalypse-is pretty much a band for guitar aficionados. Anthrax-a New York band-plays some of the most erudite and ambitious political rock of the day, with an eye toward helping the heavy metal audience understand the power and responsibility that lies within its own community. In short, there is as much separating these three bands (including profoundly different philosophies in politics and personal behavior) as there is uniting them (namely, a shared belief that metal is one of the most exciting, intelligent, and viable pop forms of the day).

Consequently, there is some concern about what might happen when the bands' various audiences mingle. Megadeth tends to draw a crowd of headbangers-long-haired young males who stand around bobbing their heads as a way of keeping time with the music's lickety-split rhythms-while Anthrax draws a crowd that likes to slam-dance and mosh: a style of dancing in which kids stomp around together, flailing and bouncing off each other at a furious pace. Slayer's audience, however, can sometimes seem flat-out violent. At Slayer shows in Los Angeles in recent years, the LAPD (always good for an overreaction) sent in riot squads and helicopters to deal with some rowdy fans outside the concert halls, and at an ill-famed show at New York's Felt Forum in 1988, the group's fans went wild, tearing seats apart and hurling them around the floor and getting into fights with security guards. The band's lead singer, Tom Araya, tried to calm the crowd down, but after a few songs the Forum's management ejected Slayer from the stage. "Thanks a lot, a.s.sholes," Araya told the crowd. "You f.u.c.ked this up for yourselves."

For this tour-which will easily draw some of the biggest thrash or mosh crowds ever a.s.sembled in the States-the three bands have hired a special security overseer, Jerry Mele, who previously worked with Madonna, among others. Shortly before each show, Mele convenes a meeting of the hall's various security and management personnel. "Look," Mele tells the guards a.s.sembled at the Starplex amphitheater in Dallas, "I want you to treat these kids with respect. It may look like they're fighting or hurting each other out there, but it's their way of having fun. If they come over the barricade down front-and some of them will-don't hurt them and don't throw them out. Bring them over to me at the side of the stage. I'll have a talk with them and give them another chance. Believe me, if you do things this way, we won't have any serious trouble here." You can see the look of skepticism on the faces of these guards-big, muscular men, some who are accustomed to resolving rowdiness with force-but in the end they agree to Mele's requests.

The first test comes an hour later, when Slayer opens the Dallas show (the three bands will rotate the headline slot). There is nothing in all modern pop like the moment Slayer takes a stage. The whole place rises to its feet as the band slams into "h.e.l.l Awaits" at a ludicrous breakneck pace, and hundreds of kids press their way to the front of the stage, where they proceed to throw themselves into each other, mos.h.i.+ng and slamming with a furious intensity. At first the security force looks a bit edgy-it is not always an enviable position to be staked out between Slayer and its fans-but in a short time their patience and gentleness with the fans pays off. n.o.body shoves or punches anybody, and the few times that any guards see a kid who looks like he's trying to hurt other dancers in the mosh pit, Mele makes his way into the crowd and drags the offender out himself. Later, when Anthrax makes its appearance, the slamming is even more congenial-though in large part that's because Anthrax's music, in contrast to Slayer's, is more concerned with questions of community than with the thrills of violence. When Anthrax plays, even young women find the mosh pit a fun place to hang out-which is rarely the case during a Slayer set.

But then, just before Megadeth is set to perform, the fires on the hill begin: eerie-looking eruptions of flame, surrounded by stomping circles of kids, all pus.h.i.+ng and shoving to dance as close to the flares as possible.

When you venture up close, though, the fire-dancing doesn't seem particularly threatening or licentious. In fact, there appears to be a rather strict social order at work in constructing the event. First, one or two kids strip off their T-s.h.i.+rts and set them ablaze, waving them over their heads like fiery flags until they attract the attention of other fans. It's almost as if they are setting the fires as a way of drawing each other in closer, as a way of finding other sympathetic souls in a dark landscape. After a bit, the kids toss the burning rags into a heap and toss in paper cups and other inflammable sc.r.a.ps until they have something like a watchfire going. Meantime, a growing circle of dancers begins to tramp around the fire in a mosh rhythm, picking up speed and attracting new members as it spreads outward. The only time the scene ever gets scary is when security guards charge up the hill, pus.h.i.+ng the kids aside and extinguis.h.i.+ng the fires with chemical sprays. The resulting smoke is harsh and burns the eyes, causing the kids to turn and run, sometimes knocking each other down in the process. Invariably, though, the fires start up again, and the circle of wildly stomping dancers reconvenes.

It's as if the conflagrations taking place on the hill were an enactment of the defiance and rage that the music onstage has been proclaiming all day long. At the end of Megadeth's set, Dave Mustaine sings the s.e.x Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K."-the song that first announced that rock & roll could accommodate the vision of a world in ruin. By the time he gets to the song's incendiary closing verse-"I want to be anarchy, you know what I mean?/'Cause I want to be an anarchist/Again I'm p.i.s.sed/DESTROY!"-the hill has erupted in small bonfires from top to bottom, as if the fans are acting out the song's incitements as fast as Mustaine can proclaim them.

In the end, not much real damage is done. In the morning there will be a few square feet of torched gra.s.s and some predictable local media outrage. But for some of the kids gathered here, a genuine power struggle took place tonight-the first one that many of them have ever won.

THE NEXT DAY'S show in Lubbock, Texas, proves to be something of a letdown. The turnout is one of the smallest that the tour will see-a little over two thousand fans show up in an arena that can hold over twice that many-but a bigger problem seems to be the sound. The members of each of the bands come off the stage complaining that they could not hear themselves playing, and that the mix in the sound monitors had been messy and dim. In particular, Megadeth's Dave Mustaine is coldly furious. At the end of the evening, he stands in the backstage area and tells his tour manager that he wants the sound man suspended from the board for the following evening. It is plain that the tour manager will not find this an easy request to accommodate, though it's also plain that Mustaine-who has a formidable reputation for being arrogant and headstrong-isn't about to give ground.

It's only two days into this trip, but already Dave Mustaine is beginning to wear on the nerves of some of the others involved in the tour, particularly Slayer. A former heavy drug user and drinker, Mustaine these days is scrupulously clean and healthy. As a result, he insists on keeping himself at a distance from the members of Slayer, who still enjoy drinking and acting up. In a Los Angeles Times article that appeared at the outset of the tour, Mustaine told an interviewer that he had been embarra.s.sed by Slayer's behavior during their recent European tour together. "There were times where it was detrimental to my sanity," he said. "When we travel and we're stuck on the same plane, and they're completely inebriated, swearing at the top of their lungs and belching and guzzling. . . . I felt like I wanted to crawl off into the bathroom of the plane and die. . . . I have more respect for their luggage than their behavior." Needless to say, these comments haven't gone over well, nor has Mustaine's insistence that Megadeth stay in different hotels than Slayer and that the band's two dressing rooms are located as far apart as possible.

But there is also another side to Dave Mustaine, and it can be surprisingly affecting. A few minutes after his tantrum about the sound problem, the thin, blond Mustaine sits on the band's bus in the parking lot of the Lubbock Coliseum and talks quietly about all the years and friends.h.i.+p that were lost to his drug abuse. In moments like this, there is nothing in Mustaine's manner that is arrogant or taxing. Instead, he comes across as somebody who is smart, conscience-stricken, and deeply sad-as if he has endured a long nightmare and is just now coming to terms with how he managed to inflict so much damage on himself and others over the years.

In some ways, Mustaine's long bouts of self-abuse were probably an extension of the ruin he had felt as a child. When he was seven, his parents divorced, leaving Mustaine and his sisters and mother living in poverty in the suburbs of Southern California. By his early teens, his mother was absent much of the time, and Mustaine spent the next few years residing with his sisters and their families. One day, when he was fifteen, says Mustaine, one of his brothers-in-law punched him in the face when he found him listening to Judas Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny. "I decided right then," says Mustaine, "that I was going to play this music. That would be my revenge."

In the early 1980s, after playing in a series of pop and metal cover bands, Mustaine hooked up with Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield, from Norwalk, California. Together, they formed Metallica-a band that, within a few years, would become the most important heavy metal ensemble since Led Zeppelin. It was Metallica, in fact, that codified speed-metal as a music derived from the rhythmic brutality of hardcore punk and the yowling melodic drive of early-1980s British denim-and-leather metal bands like Motorhead and Iron Maiden. But for all its gifts, the group was also beset with serious personality conflicts. Mustaine and the others fought frequently-sometimes about drug use, sometimes about leaders.h.i.+p of the band-and in time, the tension became unbearable. "One day," says Mustaine, "they woke me up and said, 'Uh, look, you're out of the band.' And I said, 'What, no warning? No second chance?' And they said, "No, you're out.'

"To this day," continues Mustaine, "I have a hard time seeing those guys. Something inside me feels like saying, "You know, you guys are really f.u.c.ked for firing me. You didn't give me a chance-and I really miss you; I miss playing with you.' And while they're responsible for their own success, I don't think they ever would have developed the way they did if I hadn't come into the picture. I was a key part of that band."

Back in Los Angeles, Mustaine settled deeper into his drug use and thought for a time about quitting music altogether. But in 1984, after he met Dave Ellefson, a ba.s.sist who had just moved to California from rural Minnesota, Mustaine decided to take another stab at band life, and formed Megadeth. "I thought of this band as not just the return of Dave Mustaine," he says, "but also my revenge. I thought, "This is the music I want to play: a jazz-oriented, progressive music that's going to alter heavy metal as we understand it.' " Mustaine proved good to his promise. Though Megadeth shared Metallica's pa.s.sion for hard-and-fast riffs, the best tracks on alb.u.ms like Peace Sells . . . But Who's Buying and So Far, So Good, So What! demonstrated a melodic and textural versatility that no other band in metal has matched.

But Megadeth has also seen its share of problems-including numerous band firings, as well as Mustaine's worsening drug problem. "One of the earlier members in the band," he says, "finally got me into heroin. He had told me it was like being back in the womb, and, I mean, I was a s.l.u.t. p.u.s.s.y was my favorite thing in the world and for me to be fully inside a p.u.s.s.y was the fantasy of a lifetime, and that's what heroin was like to me. I became like a dope-seeking missile, and after a while I was losing my mind. I got to the point where I just could not play anymore. I knew that I was going to die if I didn't get sober, and even that wasn't enough to make me stop. I would have done anything for c.o.ke or heroin. I would have even gone into prost.i.tution."

One morning in early 1990, while driving home in a drug-and-alcohol stupor, Mustaine was pulled over by the police. He had heroin, cocaine, speed, and liquor in his blood system, and he also had some of those same substances in his car. He was arrested, and a short while later he was given a choice: Get clean-and stay clean-or go to jail. It turned out to be the impetus Mustaine needed. Within a few weeks he had joined a twelve-step addiction recovery program, and has stayed clean since. "In fact, tonight," he says, seated aboard the bus in Lubbock, "is my birthday: A year ago today was the last time I used any drugs. And you know what? Now a lot of my dreams are coming true. In the last year I got married, we put together our best version of Megadeth yet, and we also finished our best record, Rust in Peace. I think it all has to do with the fact that now I pray and meditate a lot. I don't sit at home by the phone waiting for some f.u.c.king creep to come over with powder."

Mustaine glances at the clock on the wall. It is now past 1 A.M. The bus should already be on its way to the next stop, but everybody's waiting for a final band member to arrive. When somebody suggests that the musician is out having s.e.x with a young woman that had been seen backstage, Mustaine turns momentarily livid. The woman, says Mustaine, is a recently recovered addict, and he won't tolerate anybody in his band using her. As it turns out, the rumor is false-the person in question had barely even met the woman-and a few moments later when the woman shows up to say goodbye to everybody, Mustaine and ba.s.sist Ellefson (who is also a recovered addict) spend several minutes talking with her and encouraging her to keep up her sobriety.

"A lot of things have changed for me," Mustaine will say later. "I think I now have a more genuine concern for others-though I'm still not strong enough to be around people who are drinking or using drugs. Also, I don't have the same kind of interest I once had in the occult. I think it's simply that now I know that there is a G.o.d, and, uh, it's not me."

THE NEXT DAY-when the t.i.tans tour appears in San Antonio-is a Sunday, and one of the local newspapers bears a story on its front page under the headline: "Face to Face with a Devil." It is a flimsy story of a woman who was reportedly exorcised of a demon by a local priest, but it is covered as if it is major news, and it also serves as a reminder that these Texas cities that this tour has been visiting the last few days are strongholds for conservative religious values. On the surface, towns like these might seem unlikely places to harbor a substantial heavy metal audience. (In fact, a few years back, San Antonio's city officials considered banning heavy metal concerts within the city, but instead settled for an ordinance restricting kids under the age of fourteen from attending "obscene performances.") But as Donna Gaines points out in Teenage Wasteland (probably the best book written about contemporary youth culture), conservative communities tend not only to breed a fair amount of repressed anger and fear, they also tend to breed conservative fears-like fears of the devil and rock & roll. And, if you're young and have had to live with these sort of values too long, what could be better as a way of rubbing against the local ethos than subscribing to the symbology and values of heavy metal?

You can see signs of the local youths' appet.i.te for offense as the crowd begins to arrive at San Antonio's Sunken Gardens amphitheater. Most of the fans here are young, and many of them are wearing black T-s.h.i.+rts emblazoned with the names of their favorite metal bands (besides this show's headliners, big favorites include Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Danzig). These s.h.i.+rts are rife with horror-derived imagery, including depictions of rotting ghouls, greenish skulls, and apocalyptic demons. The iconography may sound gruesome, and yet when you're confronted with an endless variety of these s.h.i.+rts in ma.s.s quant.i.ty, there's actually something mesmerizing-even lovely-about it all. Plus, it's simply a kick to draw the attention or disapproval of others by wearing these s.h.i.+rts. It's a way of boasting your toughness and your proud status as an outcast. Conservative moralists can fume all they like about the question of what art is tolerated inside our museums, but they're missing an important point: The canvas has s.h.i.+fted in this culture, and it is kids like the ones who are gathered here in San Antonio who are bearing the defiant new art on their chests. And the best part is, there is no way this art can be shut down or deprived of its funds. It has already spilled over into the streets, and into our homes.

At 7:00 P.M., Slayer takes the stage in San Antonio, and begins to slam across its fierce music. There is a dense and pummeling quality to the band's sound-the ba.s.s rumbles, the drums explode at a rat-a-tat-tat clip and the guitars blare and yowl in unison-but it's all played with a remarkable precision and deftness. Meantime, the audience that is jammed up close to the stage erupts in frenzy, with some kids slamming and bounding hard against each other while others clamber atop one another so they can dive over the barricade. This goes on and on until even the band can't take its eyes off the action. On a night such as this, there isn't anything in all rock & roll like a Slayer show. Watching the melee and hearing the fulmination of the music, you feel like you're seeing a live band as exciting as the s.e.x Pistols.

At the same time, this is a band that deals with some fairly unsettling subject matter. When Slayer first emerged in the mid-1980s-chasing hard after the punk-metal coalition that had been made possible by bands like Black Flag, Metallica, and Venom-the group's repertoire (written at the time by guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman) was heavy with songs about Satan and h.e.l.l. But in recent years, under the influence of ba.s.sist and vocalist Tom Araya-who is now the band's chief lyricist-the emphasis has s.h.i.+fted. Araya-whose family fled Chile during a time of political unrest and who has lived around some of the rougher sections of Los Angeles and witnessed the effects of gang warfare-decided the band should write more about the human and social horror of the modern world, and over the course of the band's last three alb.u.ms, he has developed a special affection for topics like political oppression, modern warfare, gang killings, and serial murders. Perhaps the band's most chilling song is "Dead Skin Mask," told from the point of view of Ed Gein, the famous ma.s.s murderer who killed numerous children and adults and flayed them, and who later served as the inspiration for such works as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Ma.s.sacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. In "Dead Skin Mask," Araya enters into Gein's heart and mind, and tells the story of his crimes from inside that dark and awful place.

"I know that a song like that," says Araya, "where I'm writing it as if I am the person who is doing the killing, freaks people out. They say, 'How could you sit there and think that way?' Well, it isn't hard at all. In fact, it's very easy. I sit there and I ask myself, 'Now how would it feel if I really wanted to kill somebody?' And I know: I'd feel an exhilaration. I'd feel awesome.

"See, when I wrote 'Dead Skin Mask,' I had just read this book called Deviant, about Ed Gein. As I read it I was trying to understand this guy-why he did what he did, and how he got that way. The fact that he could seriously skin these people and preserve their body parts . . . I mean, this guy had noses and ears. He had garter belts made from female body parts. This guy was f.u.c.king out there. Can you imagine doing that and thinking that it's okay, and not really knowing the difference between right and wrong? That's just f.u.c.king amazing, to do things like that with no heart at all. And then I came across another book about this guy named Albert Fish, who a long time ago murdered all these little boys and then ate their p.e.n.i.ses. He said he tried eating their t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, but he found them too chewy."

As he speaks, Araya's face gradually lights up, until by the time he gets to the part about chewy t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, he is smiling delightedly. After a moment or two, he catches what he's doing and blushes. "You know," he says, "I can sit here and talk about mutilation with a smile on my face and laugh because of the things these people do, but I do know the difference between wrong and right. I mean, I sit and think about murder, and sometimes I think it would be real easy to do. And then I write the stuff, and for me it works as kind of a release. I figure, well, I've thought about it, I know what it would feel like-and that's good enough for me."

LISTENING TO Tom Araya talk about the t.i.tillations of murder can be as unnerving as listening to Slayer's music-in fact, even more so. At least with Slayer's music it's possible to make a case that, by presenting horror in such unflinching and unromantic detail, some of the band's boldest songs actually work as critiques of violence and evil. But after talking to Araya, you have to wonder if some of the songs aren't precisely what they sound like: namely, celebrations of the ruin of life.

Actually, either interpretation-critique or celebration-seems fine by Slayer, who is probably more adept than any other band at depicting terrible realities without giving any indication of how the band views the moral dimensions of those realities. But by completely sidestepping any moral reaction, it's possible that Slayer has misjudged just how deep the horror runs in the stories it has chosen to tell. Killers like Ed Gein or Albert Fish may be fascinating to read or talk about, or to see portrayed on the screen, but the truth is, real human lives were tortured and destroyed at their hands, and the horror and misery didn't end there: The surviving families and friends of both the victims and the killers had to live the rest of their lives with the effects of those crimes, and with the knowledge of all the hopes that were forever transformed and sealed off in the seasons of their bloodshed. This is the sort of horror that never knows an end-the sort that lasts beyond death or fiction or art-and it may be a greater evil than Araya and his band are prepared to comprehend or address.

At the same time, for all his creepy interests, there's really nothing unpleasant or evil-seeming about Araya himself. In fact, he comes across as a basically funny, courteous, and sweet-tempered guy who has a deep affection for his family and his fans, and who only becomes really unpleasant when he witnesses a security guard roughing up some exuberant fan. In short, Araya is a bit like many of the rest of us: On one hand he can be fascinated by the depictions of evil in a true-crime book or a piece of fiction like The Silence of the Lambs, but when the real violence spills over into his own world, he is genuinely repelled.

And sometimes that violence can spill over in unexpected ways. For example, during the recent Persian Gulf War, Slayer received several letters from troops stationed on the front line, some of whom stated they were anxious to kill the Iraqis ("the f.u.c.king ragheads," as one soldier fan put it) and thanked Slayer for providing them with the morale to do so. Closer to home, Geraldo Rivera presented a show a year or so ago called "Kids Who Kill." It featured a panel with five adolescents, all of whom had killed either other kids or family members, and all of whom cited a pa.s.sion for thrash or speed-metal bands-particularly Slayer. To some critics, incidents like these might suggest that Slayer's art is a dangerous one, that it works as an endors.e.m.e.nt of violence or might even help embolden it. Well, perhaps. But at the same time, what would it be like if the music of Slayer didn't exist? If the band disappeared or were silenced, would that absence diminish the frequency of murder? Would it have had any impact on the killings committed by the children on Geraldo Rivera's show?

Jeff Hanneman, one of Slayer's lead guitarists (and the author of "Angel of Death"-the song that got the band thrown off CBS Records), doesn't think so. "Obviously," he says, "a lot of our fans do identify with evil-or at least they think they do. But the truth is, when you come across one of the most hardcore Slayer fans-one of these guys going Sa-tan! Sa-tan! Sa-tan!-and you say, 'Now calm down, dude; do you really believe in Satan?' he might go, 'Yes! Sa-tan!' And then you go, 'No, no-do you really believe in Satan?' he'll go, 'Uh, well, no, not really.' You know, to him it's cool because it's evil, and evil is rebellion.

"I mean, these are just normal kids-at least normal by today's standards," Hanneman continues. "You have to remember, this society has changed a lot, and some of these kids are coming from some pretty rough family realities and some pretty hopeless conditions. This music is a way of reacting against all that. They go to a show, thrash around for a few hours, and then they go home and hopefully they've worked some stuff out of their systems. Whereas when they listen to something like Motley Crue, with some song about a hot girl . . . well, they can relate to that, but they've got this anger inside that they need to get out and Motley Crue doesn't help them do that.

"Basically, I think we're doing a positive thing," says Hanneman. "But if some kid goes overboard, I can't take responsibility for that. I mean, we all have an inborn capacity for violence, but most of us know where to stop. If somebody goes over that line, then their boundary is obviously gone, but that has more to do with how they grew up than with our music. Sometimes we're a little bit over the borderline about killing and stuff like that, but it isn't like we're out there giving them knives, saying, 'Here, cut your throat. Hurt somebody.' That isn't what we're doing."

Rick Rubin, who has produced Slayer since the mid-1980s, has his own view of the band's impact on its listeners. "There's no question," he says, "that a lot of really troubled people like this band. You can see them some nights at the show: kids who are living with boredom and stress every day of their lives, kids who really have no ambition and nothing to live for. And I think that these kids recognize that the people in this band are troubled spirits as well. There's a kins.h.i.+p there. All these people-both the band and its audience-have these feelings in common. Slayer exists because people feel this way-because some kids kill, or want to kill. But Slayer is simply a reflection of that condition, not the cause, and you shouldn't blame a mirror for what it reflects. If you don't like what Slayer represents, then change the world, and make it a better place. Do that, and bands like Slayer won't exist."

TO A CASUAL listener, most speed-metal bands might seem rather interchangeable. After all, most of them tend to boast predictably dire names (some of the more memorable current ones include Morbid Angel, Suicidal Tendencies, Atrocity, Entombed, Carca.s.s, Coroner, Repulsion, Dismember, Deathcore, Abomination, h.e.l.lb.a.s.t.a.r.d, Napalm Death, Pungent Stench, Death Strike, and, uh, Defecation), and nearly all of them trade in predictably dire topics like, you know, death, the devil, and d.a.m.nation. What's more, they all feature guitarists who blast out grinding sheets of rhythm and noise, and vocalists who yell or growl impossibly wordy descriptions of perdition at impossibly breakneck clips.

But these are simply the givens of the genre-the shared traits that give any pop style its claim to singularity or separateness. Within the kingdom of speed-metal, each band is singular unto itself, but there is probably none that is more inspiriting than Anthrax. Like Slayer or any other number of bands, Anthrax often deals with questions of rage and despair. But in contrast to these other bands, Anthrax wants to know where those dark feelings come from, and how they affect the lives of the people in the group's audience. If speed-metal can lay claim to its own Clash or Who-a band that tries to make sense of its audience's moment in history and how that moment can be transformed into the basis for community-then clearly, that band is Anthrax.

In part, Anthrax's commitment to the ideals of community owes as much to the band's interest in punk as to its roots in metal. Like most of the other musicians on this tour, the members of Anthrax first developed their pa.s.sion for heavy metal in the middle and late 1970s, when artists like Kiss, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC were defining the frontier of rock & roll bravado. But in 1976, all that changed. Punk groups like New York's the Ramones and England's s.e.x Pistols took heavy metal's style and stripped it of its excesses-its overreliance on flashy lead guitars and pretty-boy c.o.c.k-rock-and transformed it into something that was at once both more primitive and more radical. Indeed, punk bands drew new stylistic, generational, and political lines across the breadth of rock & roll, and they declared that if you did not stand on punk's side of the line, then you did not stand anywhere that counted. As a result, the punk and metal factions didn't get along very well, despite a common interest in pa.s.sionate, guitar-and-drums-driven rock & roll.

But Scott Ian, who was a heavy metal fan attending high school in Jamaica, Queens, New York, when punk was at its peak, couldn't see the reason for all the division and antipathy. "To me," he says, "Iron Maiden was every bit as underground-and every bit as valid-as the Ramones or s.e.x Pistols."

In 1981, when Ian and a couple of other friends co-founded Anthrax, he envisioned the group as drawing from metal's style but punk's spirit. At first not much came of the idea; others in the group were happy to stick with metal's familiar styles and fans. But on Sundays, when the band wasn't playing or rehearsing, Ian and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante started hanging out at Manhattan's legendary punk club, CBGBs, and making friends with members of the local hardcore scene. For a brief while, they even formed a side band-the legendary Stormtroopers of Death, regarded by many as a key punk-metal crossover group. In time, many of the hardcore kids started coming to Anthrax's shows, and they brought with them some of their scene's more colorful rites-like stage-diving and slam-dancing. The mingling of the two audiences made for some tense alliances at first; punks thought the metalheads had wretched fas.h.i.+on sense and bad politics, and the headbangers didn't dig the punks' violence. But by the mid-1980s, the punk scene had lost most of its stylistic inventiveness and some of its cultural clout, and the emerging thrash and speed-metal bands simply appropriated punk's rhythmic intensity and its radical zeal as well.

These days, Anthrax can pretty much be exactly what it wants to be-a heavy metal band with a punk-informed conscience. Over the course of the group's last four alb.u.ms, Anthrax has become increasingly politically savvy and activist-minded, yielding some of the smartest songs about the social and emotional conditions of modern-day youth culture that rock & roll has produced in the last decade. But sometimes the band's progressivism hasn't set well with parts of its audience. In 1989, when the members of Anthrax appeared on the cover of heavy metal magazine RIP with their friends in Living Colour, a black metal band, the magazine received some ugly responses from several readers. Angered by the incident, and by the killing of black youth Yusef Hawkins in New York's Bensonhurst area, Ian wrote "Keep It in the Family" and "H8Red," a pair of scathing songs about race hatred that appeared on Persistence of Time.

Says Ian: "I think there's a pretty good percentage of our audience-you know, white middle-to-lower-cla.s.s kids-that hates black music and probably hates blacks as well. Why they hate blacks, they probably don't know; it's a prejudice that they've never questioned. I'm exposed to it all the time. People see me wearing a Public Enemy T-s.h.i.+rt, and they ask me, 'Why do you like that n.i.g.g.e.r music?' I can't really talk to somebody like that, you know? I don't care if they've bought every one of our alb.u.ms, I'm just not going to waste my time talking to somebody like that, and I'm certainly not going to condone their att.i.tude just because they're an Anthrax fan. They can like us or not, but I still think they're an a.s.shole."

Ian pauses for a moment and shakes his head. "I wish there were a way to reach those people," he says after a bit. "Maybe for some of them the music does make a difference. Maybe they can hear a song like "H8Red' and understand that it's a song about being hated just because of the way you look-whether it's because you have long hair or you're a skinhead or you're black.

"I mean, I think for a lot of our fans who are into this music, things aren't easy. Some of them are working jobs they can't stand, and they aren't sure who to blame for their lives, and so some of them end up getting drunk all the time or turning to drugs. I think what we try to say to them is: 'Hey, we've all gone through some of the same s.h.i.+t, but, you know, you can find a place in your life where you can make it. You know, you may hate your parents and hate your job and hate your life, but it's your life, and you just got to f.u.c.king do what you got to do to make yourself and your world better.' I think if Anthrax has any message, that's it: Make yourself and your world better."

A short while later, Scott Ian and the other members of Anthrax-singer Joe Belladonna, drummer Charlie Benante, ba.s.sist Frank Bello, and guitarist Dan Spitz-are onstage in Houston, spreading that message the best way they know how: by playing brilliant and enlivening rock & roll. It's debatable, of course, whether the audience completely understands or agrees with what the band is saying in its music; maybe for many of those here the sheer visceral impact of the band's performances is the only real meaning that matters. Still, there is something heartening about watching Joe Belladonna deliver a song like "Keep It in the Family"-which admonishes the band's fans not to fall into the easy traps of their parents' legacies of racism-and witnessing the audience flailing and thras.h.i.+ng to the words, as if this were a declaration worth raising a ruckus over.

A little later, though, when the band gets around to "Antisocial," there's no question that everybody knows what is being talked about. On record, the song is a rousing attack on a man who uses law and order and wealth to beat down the people he doesn't understand. But in concert, it becomes something else. "You're anti, you're antisocial, yowls the band, pointing its fingers at the audience, and the audience stands up on its chairs and roars back the same line-"You're anti, you're antisocial"-pointing back at the band. Finally the band and the audience are yelling the same refrain to each other at the same moment, over and over, until the voices rise into the thousands. In that moment, both the crowd and the band are taking a term that has been used for years as a method of branding young people as outcasts and they turn that epithet into both a mutual accusation and a mutual affirmation. They are telling one another that they know exactly how the world views them, and that they are proud to be known by those terms. In that moment, Anthrax and its audience are forging a bond of community that, quite likely, they rarely find outside the society of heavy metal music. It is a way of saying: "We are here for each other. Whatever the rest of the world might say about us, we are here for each other."

In the world that heavy metal and its fans are consigned to live in, that isn't such a bad promise.

PART 5.

lone voices.

randy newman: songs of the promised land.

Coming over the pa.s.s, you can see the whole valley spread below. On a clear morning, when it lies broad and colored under a white sky, with the mountains standing far back on either side, you can imagine it's the promised land.

ROSS MACDONALD.

THE WYCHERLY WOMAN.

Trouble in Paradise, Randy Newman's first pop alb.u.m since 1979's Born Again, is perhaps the most forceful, full-formed statement about life in Los Angeles that popular music has yet produced. In it, Newman regards the city's infamous frivolity and relentless, pacific gloss with humor, affection, fury, and bite-and he affirms them as worthy images (and even worthier ends) for a city with an incurable fixation on surface appearances. Newman also acknowledges that beneath such surfaces (and perhaps because of the broken confidence and swift hatred that those surfaces can also breed-particularly for those buried under those surfaces) there lurks an inevitable undertow of disillusionment and fear. Disillusionment that can turn quick fun into quicker meanness, especially when arrogance and indulgence become common ways to attain pleasure.

Trouble in Paradise is only partly about Los Angeles, but it's those parts that give the record such resonance and depth. And by and large, it's the city's sheen and exuberance that compel Newman here. In the surging, boastful, "I Love L.A.," Newman barrels along in a sleek convertible, a "big nasty redhead" beside him, and calls out the names of the city's most familiar symbols of opportunity and escape. In a rousing, challenging voice he shouts: "Century Boulevard!" And a boisterous chorus roars back: "We love it!" "Victory Boulevard!" "We love it!" "Santa Monica Boulevard!" "We LOVE it!" "Sixth Street!" "WE LOVE IT!"

Some critics regard "I Love L.A." as an ironic pose rather than a heartfelt anthem, as if what Newman says in the song is that this city is all quick surfaces and images. Well, he is saying that, but if you think he says it with cynicism or disdain, think again. Newman means what he purports here: He does love L.A.-in no small part because it's the place he calls his home, but also because he's fascinated by its knack for promoting veneer as its own distinction. Which isn't to say Newman is oblivious to the empty-headedness the city cultivates. In "My Life Is Good," an obnoxious nouveau riche songwriter declares to his son's schoolteacher that wealth and position guarantee a claim to license and the servitude of others; by song's end, Newman has deflated the haughtiness and sense of privilege that many in this city brandish as una.s.sailable rights. At the same time, Newman isn't so sure that the shallowness L.A. fosters belies its claim as the last American promised land. After all, a promised land is as good as a land of last hope. And when last hopes are gone, what often emerges is a place whose people are resentful of its culture and of one another, and who verge on ethical (not to mention aesthetic) desperation. The displacement born of this desperation is what has always made L.A. such an alluring place to write about-and an increasingly risky place to live.

Newman's advocacy of L.A. is an interesting position for anyone to stake out in early-1980s pop music. Since the pop explosion of the 1960s (when Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Lou Adler, and the Byrds created versions of L.A. sound that set new standards in rock fun and studio art), and throughout the 1970s (when such artists as the Eagles and Jackson Browne forced those conceptions of fun to accommodate a new, heavily idealized ethos), Los Angeles has stood for a measured, bright-toned sound, espousing certain romanticized truths. The city's music has also depended upon ma.s.s popularity (meaning accessibility) to a.s.sure its validity.

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, L.A. became the setting for a revealing conflict of pop styles. Though the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Toto, and other well-bred L.A. acts continued to command a ma.s.s audience, a sharp-tempered and persistent underground movement also rose, sp.a.w.ning bands like X, the Germs, the Go-Go's, Black Flag, and Fear-all of whom sought to give as much definition to the sound and ideals of modern L.A. as any of the bands that came before them. There's a part of me that would like to think Newman's Trouble in Paradise is a record that's smart and expansive enough to contain both versions of L.A. (Warren Zevon's records, too, might be seen as working this trick, though Zevon perhaps too strongly represents personal concerns as an exemplar of cultural style.) Certainly at its best, Randy Newman's lyricism is as acerbic as that of, say, X, and obviously a lot wittier and more adept at parody than the tiresome punk burlesque of Fear.

Even the best and brightest of today's punk-derived artists could learn an invaluable lesson from the way Newman wields point of view, and the way he inhabits and animates a song. The character in "There's a Party at My House," who winds up what began as an innocent saturnalia with an implied vision of rape (maybe even sportive s.e.x murder), isn't repugnant merely because of his dangerous impulses, but because he speaks to us in a way that can arouse our own desire to join the party. As a result, the song is more powerful than the anti-misogynist rock of Gang of Four, or for that matter, the pro-misogynist rock of Fear.

Yet what clearly separates Newman from the punks isn't so much his idea of intelligence or viewpoint as it is his particular allegiance to sound. To be sure, Paradise is, in places, an a.s.saultive, even bombastic record-in fact, Newman's most physical sounding rock & roll since "Gone Dead Train" on 1970's Performance soundtrack. But it is also a meticulously crafted, professionally realized work-a work that a.s.serts precision and control as clear-cut aesthetic choices. "I Love L.A." may roar and careen like a fine, fast, heady ride down the Imperial Highway, but there isn't a reckless turn or offhand moment on the whole track, or anywhere else on the alb.u.m.

In effect, Newman's attention to artifice amounts to something of a recasting of his former sound. Though elaborate arrangements often graced the music of 12 Songs, Sail Away, and Good Old Boys, they almost never determined the actual form or temper of Newman's Tin Pan Alley- and blues-infused songwriting. But on Paradise, the arrangements-the very outward show and force of some of the songs-are often as much a part of the songs' meanings as the characters and wordplay that make up their textual detail. This may be Newman's way of saying that he stands for (and stands up for) that exacting refinement which so many critics identify with the L.A. sound. Newman has as much as said so in recent interviews: The good values, he a.s.serts, are not the guileful intelligence that a songwriter like Elvis Costello employs, or the social-minded bravura of the Clash, but rather the stylish dourness of Don Henley and the fastidious musicians.h.i.+p of Toto. To underscore his point, Newman rounded up several Los Angeles signature performers (including Henley, Rickie Lee Jones, Christine McVie, and Linda Ronstadt) as a way of reaffirming that, at its best, the L.A. sound was always more the result of shared community than cliquishness.

Which all means that Newman's championing of that sound is much like his backhanded advocacy of L.A. as a culture of veneer: Either one can accept the city (and its music) for its surfaces, or one can accept it for the variety of truths those surfaces conceal, even nurture.

In some ways, this is where Paradise achieves its greatest literary effect. Both the sound and the meaning of its songs contain a vision of fun that does not end in mere fun, and a darker vision which is too complex to give in to rote notions of L.A. as a vast, sprawling network of desperation. According to Newman, desperation alone isn't any more notable as a version of truth than fun is. In a sense, such recent L.A. bands as the Go-Go's and X approach a similar conclusion, though from differing angles. Each band represents a contrary truth about this city-quick fun, or desperate action. But neither can fully convey the idea that to find the truth of this city, you must first penetrate those poses of fun and trouble and examine the way the search for fun (and the inability to capture it for very long) creates trouble and despair. (Neither do X or the Go-Go's reveal enough about how trouble can enrich the idea of fun, or at least make its invention necessary.) So what does Randy Newman say when cruising down the fabled mean streets that have fed the dark ruminations of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Charles Bukowski, and Joan Didion? He says: "Roll down the window/Put down the top/Crank up the Beach Boys, baby/Don't let the music stop."

Trouble in Paradise so often weaves fun with darkness and gentleness with meanness that they begin to seem interchangeable, and then they seem inseparable. It tells us that hard truths wouldn't matter much-wouldn't be endurable-without the chance to hit the highway, where the wind can cleanse us of thoughts and the radio can fill the gaps in our feeling the way it fills the s.h.i.+ny, dirty sky around us.

It's the way we've learned to ride out h.e.l.l, in the City of Angels.

al green: sensuality in the service of the lord.

When Al Green takes a stage, both miracle and mystery attend his arrival. Miracle, because the man sings heartfelt, revealing praises to his idea of G.o.d, in a wonder-working voice. Mystery, because the man has willfully-pointedly-abdicated the ma.s.sive pop audience he could so easily command (and still actively merits) at the same time he has raised his performing talents to new pinnacles. Quite simply, when we witness Green, we are witnessing our greatest living soul singer-witnessing him stare down the vista of a self-willed, commercially barren future, smiling at the promise of boundless riches at the end.

But whether Green commands a substantial audience is beside the point, at least in his own mind. At L.A.'s Greek Theater one night in August 1983, where he played to a perhaps half-capacity crowd, he dismissed the importance of popular acclaim, exhorting the crowd, "Clap your hands and give the praise to G.o.d. That's a fittingly deferential gesture for a performing Christian (though I can hardly picture Bob Dylan or Jerry Lee Lewis offering similar directives), but the piety of it is also beside the point. This is a knotty issue, but it's only fair to offer my own prejudices up front: I enjoy many religious performers (not only gospel vocalists, but also sufferin' rockers like Van Morrison and Pete Townshend) for much the same reason I can enjoy angry eccentrics like Bob Dylan and Johnny Rotten: because the conceit of their conviction manages to fuel their jeering conception of modern life as a loathsome h.e.l.lhole, and because that conviction gives order and purpose to the unruly limits of their pain. It doesn't matter, in terms of their art, whether their beliefs amount to "truth" or not; it suffices that theirs is a self-sustaining vision that informs and shapes their regeneration.

In the same respect, the fact that Al Green promotes G.o.d as the raison d'etre of his art doesn't particularly secure or sanctify Green's music. It's fine, I suppose, to limit music's purpose to a celebration of G.o.d, but music as a way of canva.s.sing for salvation-which is what much of modern gospel is-is an inevitably self-advancing notion. Or at least it's self-centered more than purely great-hearted or altruistic: The supplicant is concerned with proclaiming himself as a model for deliverance by virtue of personal faith and received grace, which is a lot like the s.e.xual boasting Green used to sing about, but not at all like true outgoing, reciprocal romance. Somehow, I always thought there was as much integrity in Albert Camus' affirmation, in The Rebel, of those religious insurrectionists (or resisters) who reject the certainty of salvation for themselves because of its elitist, nonegalitarian conditions. Of course, the day I hear a pop (or gospel) song about that view, I'll figure real miracles are afoot. It's just that a hardbitten look at real life seems a bit more demanding than a blithe contemplation of a distant afterlife; real life is where spiritual hope is tested and tempered-and remeasured.

In any event, Al Green clearly feels that today's pop world is anathema to the purposes of his music, and given his talents, I wouldn't slight his current repertoire. "The Lord taught me how to sing," Green explained to his audience at the Greek, "but I rewarded him by singing 'Love and Happiness' and 'Let's Stay Together.' " The audience roared hungrily at the mention of the songs. "And people ask me, 'Why can't you still sing "Call Me" or "For the Good Times." ' Well, Jesus brought me through all that-He brought me through 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart' and 'I'm Still in Love with You.' Good songs, good times, but I want you to know I found the Rock . . . , and with that, Green moved into a beautiful rendering of "Amazing Grace," and it seemed just as well that something had brought him through all his previous greatness, because his new greatness is so sweetly convincing.

Ah, but what greatness it once was. Green, who possesses as well-mannered a drawl as R & B has ever yielded, was pretty much the cla.s.sy singles artist of the 1970s, producing an even more consistent string of high-art hits than Stevie Wonder or Elton John. Between 1971 and 1976, he slotted thirteen Top 40 singles, including the aforementioned "Love and Happiness," "Let's Stay Together," "Call Me (Come Back Home)," and "I'm Still in Love with You," as well as "Sha-La-La (Makes Me Happy)," and "L-O-V-E (Love)." Produced by Willie Mitch.e.l.l for Memphis' Hi Records, Green's records were exemplary post-Stax soul: spa.r.s.e, ba.s.s-driven arrangements covered and colored by Green's breathy, high, fragile crooning. They were records that also bespoke unfathomable reserves of casual, elegant s.e.xiness, and Green's image as a ladies' man was further enhanced by a swoony, physically stirring live act in which his lithe yet unrestrained presence gave new depth to s.e.xual euphoria.

Apparently, the image also carried over to his personal life. In 1974, a woman who loved Green and had tried to fasten him to a promise of marriage, grew wild at his rejection. Embittered, she reportedly attempted to wound him with scalding grits before killing herself. Green's career fell into quick disarray, and he never recorded another major hit after the incident. When he recouped in 1977, producing himself for the first time, Green seemed still pulled by some of the same old urges, but also reanimated by a new spiritual awareness. "It's you that I want but it's Him that I need," he sang in one of his finest songs, "Belle" (from The Belle Alb.u.m), and it sounded as if Green were firmly trying to shut out the hope of pop heroism for good. Whatever conflict remained, Green resolved it fairly quickly: All of his alb.u.ms since that date-including Truth 'n' Time, Higher Plane, The Lord Will Make a Way, Precious Lord, and I'll Rise Again-have been gospel affairs, sometimes transfixing, sometimes miscast, but never less than masterly sung.

Perhaps gospel is Green's way of making up for the implicit excesses of his previous s.e.x style, but that s.e.xiness-that revelry in loss of inhibition, that surrender to sensual movement-is still very much a part of Green's live act. At the end of a lovely and rousing version of "People Get Ready," he tossed off his beige, double-breasted jacket and prowled the stage like a fierce, balletic wolf, as ravenous and alluring as his former carnal self had ever seemed. And just as jolting, too: When, early in the show, he stripped off his black bow-tie, one woman to my left, who had been shouting "Hallelujah" only moments earlier, suddenly shrieked, "Take it all off, Al! Revelations indeed.

But Green didn't seem entirely comfortable with this response. During one point when he attempted to venture into the audience and was rushed by women trying to plant fervent kisses on his face, he fairly begged, "Shake my hand, please!" Religious fervor is as much a way of covering for past fears as it is a way of expressing necessary wors.h.i.+p, and in those moments, Green looked like a haunted, fearful man.

But the fear and the correlated joy he has found in his supplication has made of Green a better singer and greater artist. That last trait is what is central here, for what is truly transcendent about Green isn't the spirituality of his songs so much as the uplifting art he brings to bear upon his religion, for Green is still the most dazzling soul singer around-only now he takes the calling literally. Indeed, he's as riveting a live vocalist as Frank Sinatra or Dylan. His reading of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" was the ideal example: He curled around the song's imperative spirit with an impossible effortlessness, imbuing his pinched, high breathiness with the same old tested sensual elegance.

It was a lot like hearing religion, and also a lot like hearing s.e.x, but nothing like the playful manner in which Marvin Gaye or Prince might mix the two extremes. Green has been through the fire of the latter, and the fiery balm of the former, and he sees nothing light or trendily shocking in juxtaposing the two. But I doubt that I'll hear anything more sensually pleasing than that vocal on "People Get Ready"-a physical expression of spiritual longing that made me feel good all over, and also made me feel sort of transported. I could listen to Al Green from here to Judgment Day and it would seem like salvation to me. Or at least close enough for this h.e.l.l on earth.

jerry lee lewis: the killer.

Look, we've only got one life to live. We don't have the promise of the next breath. I know what I am. I'm a rompin', stompin', piano-playin' sonofab.i.t.c.h. A mean sonofab.i.t.c.h. But a great sonofab.i.t.c.h. A good person. Never hurt n.o.body unless they got in my way. I got a mean streak. . . . I gotta lay it open sometimes.

JERRY LEE LEWIS, 1977.

Jerry Lee Lewis-the Louisiana-born, wild-haired piano player-had as much a.s.saultive impact on rock & roll culture as any artist prior to the s.e.x Pistols: He lived out rock & roll's s.e.xual and impulsive audacity with such hauteur and flamboyance as to be deemed a perilous talent in the late-1950s. For that distinction-as well as for the startling depth and display of his talent-there are many rock & roll chroniclers who regard Lewis as the exemplary performer of his era: more unrepressed than Elvis Presley, more forcible than Chuck Berry, more insolent than Little Richard.

Of course, it is not only for his musical swagger that Lewis seemed preeminent, but also for the manner in which he has consistently embodied-that is, lived out-the promise of rock & roll's threat. Rock & roll is mean and corrupting music, he has said many times, and to perform that music, Lewis has forsaken many hopes and a few beliefs. Indeed, he lives and speaks as a man who has lost his soul-and knows exactly what that loss means. For this act, existentialists would have named him a rebel, though his friends and fans simply call him the Killer.

It is a tough moniker, but Lewis has been tempered by the times. In mid-1958-at the peak of a career that looked to overtake Presley's-he married Myra Gail Brown, his thirteen-year-old third cousin (it was his third marriage), and the resulting scandal reduced him to a career of secondary concert dates and record deals that he never quite overcame. In subsequent years, Lewis would bury two sons, lose Myra and other wives to divorce, hatred