It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity
In the Ingoldsby Legends, the comic verse Richard Harris Barham published in the 1830s and 1840s, a jackdaw in the cathedral at Rheims steals the Cardinal's ring off the table while the old man washes his hands. The Cardinal curses the thief in bed, at board and in every breath, and by dawn the curse has crumpled one claw, turned every feather the wrong way and stripped the head as bald as a palm, so that the bird comes limping in, eye gone dim, and leads the monks to the back of the belfry door, where the ring lies in its nest among the sticks and the straw. Every fan of this music keeps a stash like that. Most of what is in it is foil.
Heavy metal music trivia worth keeping is the ring. Each piece of it can be traced to a document, a broadcast, a patent or a species description, never to the playground folklore that circulates about the same bands, the acronyms and the chickens and the backwards messages, which has been knocked down often enough already. The music's roots and first records sit in the related chapter. The things that fell out of its pockets on the way are stranger.
Heavy metal music trivia from the fan clubs
The two teenagers in Terre Haute, Indiana, who started telephoning the local rock station WVTS in January 1975 to demand Kiss records and kept calling however often its programme director turned them down, now styling themselves the president and field marshal of an army that did not yet exist, were Bill Starkey and Jay Evans. By July the station had given in. It was playing Kiss and talking about the Kiss Army on air.
The army then did what armies do and took the town. When Kiss played Terre Haute on 21 November 1975, all ten thousand seats sold, Starkey was brought on stage and handed a plaque, and the name two teenagers had invented to bully a disc jockey became the band's official fan club soon after. The faithful had enlisted themselves.
The same band later sold its followers their own funeral. The Anglo-Saxon laid in a ship under a mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk around 625, most likely a king, with his helmet, his sword, a lyre and silver from the Eastern Empire packed round him for the voyage, went into the ground as a display of who he had been. In 2001 Kiss put the same argument on sale as the Kiss Kasket, a coffin wrapped in a photomural of the four faces and the logo, at $4,700 a unit. A sepulchre with a merchandise number.
Day jobs, godfathers and fathers
The bassist who spent six months of the early seventies teaching sixth grade at a public school in Manhattan turned out to be Gene Simmons, who had taken a degree in education at Richmond College on Staten Island before the classroom and a stage name after it. The blackboard lost.
The Danish tennis player who represented his country in the Davis Cup for years, played jazz clarinet on the side and moved his family to California in the summer of 1980 so that his son could try the professional game, was Torben Ulrich, and the son was Lars, who picked up a drum kit instead. The boy's godfather was Dexter Gordon, the jazz saxophonist, who would be nominated for an Academy Award for his leading role in the 1986 film Round Midnight. Few drummers in the music have had a more improbable catechism.
The singer of Iron Maiden had a day job too, and it was radio. From the launch of BBC 6 Music in 2002 until the station dropped the programme on 28 May 2010, Bruce Dickinson presented a Friday Rock Show on it, reviving the title Tommy Vance had carried on Radio 1 from 1978 to 1993. The man who sang "The Trooper" spent eight years playing other people's records to the nation. He did it well.
He also put his name to a beer. Trooper, brewed by Robinsons in Stockport and launched in May 2013 with Dickinson working on the recipe beside the head brewer, passed thirty five million pints in sixty eight countries by its tenth birthday and turned a song about the Charge of the Light Brigade into a pump clip on bars around the world. The cavalry charge ended at the bar.
A sepulchre with a merchandise number.
In the rock and on the ice
The Swedish palaeontologist who worked through Silurian rock from Gotland, found the jaws of a marine worm some 430 million years old and named the species after the singer of Motörhead in 2006, answers to the name Mats Eriksson, of Lund University. The worm is Kalloprion kilmisteri. It is older than the first dinosaurs by nearly two hundred million years, and it still had a louder name than most of them.
The band that played to about 120 scientists and competition winners inside a transparent dome at Carlini Station in Antarctica on 8 December 2013, with the amplifiers shut in isolation cabinets and the whole set fed to the audience through headphones so as not to disturb the continent, was Metallica. That show made it the first act to play on all seven continents, all of them inside a single year, and Guinness World Records wrote it down. The quietest concert the band has ever given is the one that set the record.
On the screen and at the patent office
The Birmingham band that an episode of The Simpsons, "Steal This Episode", broadcast on 5 January 2014, labelled death metal were Judas Priest, and the objection from the audience was loud enough that the following week Bart wrote "Judas Priest is not death metal" over and over on the classroom blackboard in the opening titles. Rob Halford called it a really beautiful gesture on KISW radio in Seattle that November, and a show that had spent nearly twenty five years making fun of everybody had, for once, been made to write out its lines like a schoolboy. Six months later Redeemer of Souls entered the Billboard 200 at number six, the band's first American top ten after forty years. Not bad for a death metal band.
The producer who stands at the console in the most famous comedy sketch ever made about a rock record, demanding more cowbell on "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from a player in a shirt two sizes too small, is a character called Bruce Dickinson, played by Christopher Walken on Saturday Night Live on 8 April 2000, with Will Ferrell, who wrote the sketch, on the cowbell. He is not the singer of Iron Maiden. The name was lifted off a greatest hits reissue, where it belonged to a manager at Columbia Records, and the man who actually produced the Blue Öyster Cult song was David Lucas.
| Fact | Year | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Kiss Army founded in Terre Haute | 1975 | WVTS campaign, Starkey and Evans |
| Kalloprion kilmisteri named | 2006 | Species description, Mats Eriksson |
| Van Halen's guitar support patented | 1987 | US patent 4,656,917 |
| Metallica in Antarctica | 2013 | Guinness World Records |
| "Judas Priest is not death metal" | 2014 | The Simpsons chalkboard gag |
The guitarist who filed for a patent on a hinged plate that folds out from the back of a guitar and rests on the player's leg, holding the instrument flat so that both hands can work the fretboard from above, and who was granted United States patent 4,656,917 for it on 14 April 1987, was Eddie Van Halen. He had filed the application in July 1985, at the height of the band's fame, and the drawings show a man playing a guitar laid flat across his thigh like a small keyboard, both hands hammering the strings from above. The papers call it a musical instrument support. The covenant it describes is simpler: two hands on the neck and nothing holding them back.
None of this changes a riff, and all of it belongs to the music the way a scar belongs to the arm. For what came before any of it, when the records were still looking for a name, the place to start is proto-metal, the loud blues and garage bands of the late sixties that nobody yet called anything.
