One hundred and twenty five dollars. That was the price, in June 2017, of a shirt from the online shop run by Kendall and Kylie Jenner, and what it carried was an old photograph of Ozzy Osbourne with a photograph of one of the sisters slapped across it that blotted out half of the singer's face, as though he were an old bill on a hoarding and her picture the new poster pasted over him. The same treatment went onto Metallica, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Doors. The singer's wife and manager, who had spent four decades building the name the shirt was trading on, was Sharon Osbourne, and she said in public that the sisters had not earned the right to put their faces next to musicians of that stature. The singer and rhythm guitarist whose band's logo sat on another of the shirts was James Hetfield, and he called it disrespectful. Within days the line was withdrawn and the sisters apologised.
Nobody had asked for the apology on behalf of fashion. It was demanded on behalf of a flag. Heavy metal bands shirts are the one garment in popular culture that most of their owners would defend like colours carried into a fight, and the row over a celebrity range was a row about who has the right to fly them.
Heavy metal bands shirts, worn like a hand on a cave wall
The older habit is written on stone. On the walls of caves from Borneo to Patagonia, people pressed a hand flat against the rock and blew a mouthful of ground ochre around it, so that when the hand came away its outline stayed behind in red, the fingers sharp against the wall, and anyone who came down into that chamber by firelight thousands of years later could see, before anything else, that somebody had stood there and wanted it known. The hand stencils of Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia and the caves of Borneo were made exactly that way. The band shirt is the same handprint, worn instead of left.
What the shirt says is simpler than any review. It names a band, it shows the band's picture, and it tells a stranger across a school yard or a bus station which banners the wearer marches under. That is why the image went onto cotton almost as soon as it went onto cardboard: the covers, mascots and lettering traced in heavy metal album art were built to be recognised at a distance, and a chest is only a sleeve that walks.
Black became the colour because it suited the pictures, and it made the printing harder. On black cotton the inks of a screen print sink into the fibre and vanish, so the printer first lays down an underbase of white ink, cures it with heat, and only then prints the colours on top of it, one screen per colour. Every Eddie on every chest is two layers deep. The white does the work nobody sees.
Designs that outran the records
Some shirts outlived the albums they were drawn for, and one outlived an album that was never released. The Los Angeles quartet whose first record was meant to be called Metal Up Your Ass, with a sleeve showing a hand clutching a dagger as it rose out of a toilet bowl, and whose label's distributor balked at both before release, was Metallica. The album came out in 1983 as Kill 'Em All. The toilet and the dagger went onto a shirt instead, and the shirt has been reprinted ever since. It is a heresy that became a catalogue item.
The trio that took "Ace of Spades" onto BBC television's Top of the Pops twice in October 1980, Lemmy Kilmister's bass cranked past any sensible setting, Eddie Clarke's guitar loud enough to shake the fittings loose from the studio lighting rig and Phil Taylor battering the drums as if they owed him money, was Motörhead. Millions of British households saw the band that night. What most of them later wore was not the song. It was the logo with the umlaut and the tusked skull. The American illustrator who had drawn that skull for the band's first album in 1977 was Joe Petagno. The beast has been on every Motörhead record since.
Those two images, the lettering and the skull, now hang in chain stores and supermarkets on several continents, next to shirts for bands that were founded decades later and bands that never played a note of metal. The band that put its mascot on its first shirts in 1980 and kept him there through every line-up since is Iron Maiden, and Eddie, painted by Derek Riggs, is worn today by people who have never owned a Maiden record, which is the surest measure of how far a mascot can travel.
The single design that proves the point came off a seven inch. For "The Trooper", released by EMI in June 1983 from Piece of Mind, Riggs dressed Eddie as a British cavalryman of the Crimean War, sword raised and a tattered Union flag in his other fist, charging straight out of the frame at whoever held the sleeve. The song is about the Charge of the Light Brigade. The picture outran it. Redrawn, recoloured and reprinted for four decades, that redcoat is the Maiden shirt people who own one Maiden shirt tend to own.
The handrail and the untouched wall
Show caves learned something about touch the hard way. A stalagmite that stands within reach of the handrail on a tourist route is stroked by thousands of palms a year, and the grease and dirt of all those hands seal its surface, so that the column goes grey, stops taking on new calcite and dies where it stands, while the formations a few feet further back, beyond the reach of any arm, keep growing white and wet in the dark. Some designs have gone grey in exactly this way. A Motörhead logo sold by the million on a supermarket rack no longer says anything about the wearer. The same logo on a shirt bought at a show still does.
A chest is only a sleeve that walks.
From that comes the quarrel every fan knows by heart, the challenge to name three songs. It is a catechism aimed at the unbelieving, and it misses what the chain store has actually done. The shirt at the supermarket pays a licence fee and puts the name in front of teenagers who have never heard of the band. Most bands take the royalty and let the argument run. Their fans do not.
The crowd in the band's own film of "Master of Puppets" in Manchester on 18 June 2019 settles the argument better than any fan can. Tens of thousands of people shout the song back over its fast middle break, and the camera swinging across the stadium shows shirts from every decade of the band's life and dozens of other bands besides, faded ones and new ones, bought at shows and bought at shops, all of them singing the same words.
Old cotton and the collectors
The old shirts became a market of their own. Collectors of vintage heavy metal bands shirts look first at the hem of the sleeves and the bottom edge, because most shirts made in the United States before the middle of the nineties were sewn with a single line of stitching there, where later ones carry a double line, and that one detail separates a 1984 tour shirt from a reprint of the same design. The originals of the eighties change hands for many times what they cost at the merchandise stand. The reprints are sold faded on purpose.
That faded look is the final irony. A new shirt distressed in a factory to resemble one worn for thirty years copies the damage without the thirty years, the way a painted backdrop copies a sky. The bands who meant it are still on film, in the car parks and the dressing rooms, and the shirts are in every frame of the heavy metal documentaries, worn by the people who bought them on the night. Those are the ones that count. They shrank in the wash years ago, the print has cracked across the chest, and they still carry the dirt of the evening they were bought on.
