(or The Way Judas Priest Songs From 1976 Can Transcend Time)
by Isabel Poling
Recently I went to see two local thrash metal bands – Hatchet and Devastator – at a bar in San Francisco that will remain unnamed for obvious reasons. I ran into the members of Devastator, who I knew from previous shows, outside the door.
“Hey, I don’t know if I can get in,” I told them. “Can I help you carry your gear inside?”
Once I was in the club, I did my best to avoid anyone who looked ready to check IDs, but nobody really seemed to care. I can almost always pass as at least eighteen. Sometimes twenty-one. Usually I’m not the only sixteen year old at most of the shows I go to – either of local bands or bigger tours. But when adults talk to me at these concerts, they think I’m older until the inevitable point at which I’m cornered with a question where I have to admit that I’m still in high school, still live with my parents, or even simply “Wait, how old are you?”
The underground heavy metal scene appeals to people of all ages, and most bands and promoters realize this and schedule all-ages events. For several years, San Francisco's primary metal venue was The Pound – a small, dark, dirty club not much bigger than the average living room, located in the industrial district right on the edge of the San Francisco Bay (past the post office but not before the recycling center), which might as well have qualified as the edge of the world. To get there by bus, you'd have to pass through the ghetto, and on more than one occasion a bus driver said to me “You must be going to that club.” Once you got to the actual pier where it was located, you'd never see much of anybody who wasn't adorned with long hair and a black t-shirt for whatever show was happening.
The Pound closed in October of 2006, the given reason something about the Port Authority and an expired lease. The loss of the club itself wasn't too severe, but with it went San Francisco's primary outlet for all-ages heavy metal concerts. With a few exceptions at bigger venues that generally don't appeal to metal bands or clubs outside of the city in places like Oakland and Concord, most tours have either been skipping the area or playing at bars.
Local metal bands have resorted to playing at old punk venues like The Gilman in Berkeley, or (unfortunately both closed due to noise complaints) The Balazo in San Francisco's Mission district and The Hazmat in Oakland. With the thrash metal scene on the rise again, it's not difficult for somebody my age to catch these bands frequently, and they rarely play 21-and-up shows, probably because the bookers know where the fan base lies. Having seen Hatchet, a thrash band from Petaluma, at least ten times since the end of 2006, I'm used to standing at the front of the crowd with a fan-base of mostly fifteen to twenty year olds – adorned with tight jeans, big white sneakers, and denim vests covered with patches, all in the style of 1980s “retro thrash” – moshing, stage-diving, and causing general mayhem. A general rule with thrash metal bands is that the intensity of the moshpits represents the quality of the band, and by these standards Hatchet is one of the best. To quote a friend after a recent all-ages show: “Did we just see Hatchet, or Slayer?”
So going to see them at a bar was significantly different. A scattered crowd of people whose average age seemed to be around thirty-five all stood at least fifteen feet from the stage. I decided that I wasn't going to let a bunch of burn-outs bring me down, so I went up to the stage to headbang and rock out as usual. Only alone this time. The energy was missing, the fire of people still naïve enough to be rebelling against something, or maybe just there to have a good time. Either way, nobody stood with me by the stage.
Everyone – regardless of age – can find somebody to talk to at a metal show. By the time I realized that I wasn’t always going to have a companion to accompany me to every concert, I was able to adapt to most any social situation. And it’s not too difficult to approach people with a free conversation starter like “Hey, where’d you get that shirt,” or “Did you see these guys the last time they were here?” Even seeing somebody on the street, it’s a kind of automatic bond to know that somebody else sits in his bedroom and plays air drums the same way you do to the same obscure band in your own home.
To say that heavy metal is a young person's genre is a foolish generalization, much like the assumption that all metal is about devil worship. The music is about music, and it stretches far beyond what somebody with no frame of reference in the scene can imagine. It can be music of love just as much as it is about hate; it extends into themes of philosophy as easily as it does into pure violence and destruction. Fans vary as much as the music, from people who look like they could listen to any kind of music, to teenagers who get in trouble at school for having gory images on their shirts, to the forty-five year olds who still tell everybody about seeing Judas Priest in 1980, growing out their gray hair to cover their widening bald spots. Metal has genuine emotion, which is something that everyone can appreciate, but show after show, it's the young fans who'll go up front and come out of the show with their necks wrecked from headbanging and their bodies covered in bruises from slamming into everyone around them. Everyone will listen to the music, but the youth will set apart a metal show from any other concert.
When I went to the bar show, I ran into somebody who saw me and immediately asked “Who the fuck let you in?!”
People my age are putting energy into the scene, and keeping alive what an average person would think is a dead genre. I let myself in.