American radio did not ignore heavy metal by accident. It was built not to hear it. The consultant who tore album rock stations off the freeform shows of the late sixties and bolted them to a researched playlist was Lee Abrams, and the format he tightened had room for Led Zeppelin, a place for Boston and no slot at all for a new band with a singer who screamed. Abrams had proved the format first at WQDR in Raleigh, North Carolina, before consulting firms carried it nationwide. Hundreds of stations bought the programme. Heavy metal radio, for most of the eighties, meant a few hours after midnight.
So the music learned to travel without it. Kept off the daytime dial for a decade, the records moved the way a Catherine wheel moves when it is nailed to a washing-line pole instead of fired into the sky, never climbing high enough for the whole town to see it, spinning in one place and spraying sparks straight into whoever stood closest, which in practice meant a sixteen-year-old with a cassette deck and a record shop with an import rack. The sparks landed anyway.
The courts, the stickers and the preachers that came after the music in the same years belong to that part of the history. The radio refusal was quieter than any of them, and it did more to shape how the records sounded.
The consultant's playlist
Album rock, the format the trade called AOR, had begun as disc jockeys playing whatever they liked off whole LPs. Tightened through the seventies by consultants who tested songs on listeners and cut whatever tested badly, it became a rotation of proven names aimed at the adults advertisers were paying to reach, and a song with a scream in the first verse and a guitar solo in the fourth minute tested badly with almost everyone who was not already a fan. The fans were not the target.
What did get through got through in disguise. The Pasadena quartet that reached number one on the Hot 100 in 1984 did it with a synthesizer riff rather than a guitar one, and the band was Van Halen, whose "Jump" sat at the top for five weeks while the guitar solo waited politely in the middle. The heavier records on the same albums stayed on the turntables of the people who already owned them.
The Birmingham five came nearest to the daytime dial on their own terms. "You've Got Another Thing Comin'", from Judas Priest's Screaming for Vengeance of 1982, was a mid-tempo stomp with a chorus built for open car windows, and album rock stations played it often enough to push the record past a million copies in America, a platinum certification in April 1983. It was the exception the programmers pointed to. It was also the slowest song on the side.
The irony is on the record. The same consultant who had kept the style off the air later ran Z Rock, the only national network that played nothing else, after joining its parent company in 1989 and giving the music a bastion of its own. Neither decision was about taste. Both were about who was listening.
Seven minutes do not fit a radio clock
The other obstacle was the stopwatch. A commercial station runs on a clock divided into songs of three or four minutes, advertising breaks and station idents, and heavy metal of the eighties wrote as if the clock did not exist. Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" runs past thirteen minutes. Metallica's longest songs of the period ran past eight.
The East London band that filled American arenas through the World Slavery Tour of 1984 and 1985 without a single hit on American radio was Iron Maiden, and The Number of the Beast still went platinum in the United States on the strength of the shows and the sleeves. The stations never noticed the queue.
The San Francisco quartet that sold more than half a million copies of Master of Puppets in its first year, with virtually no radio play and no video at all, and took it to number 29 on the Billboard 200 on the strength of touring alone, were Metallica. The album earned the band its first gold certification. The siege had been conducted entirely on foot.
Released by Elektra in 1988, ...And Justice for All climbed into the top ten of the album chart with songs averaging more than six minutes. When the band made its first video, for "One", early in 1989, the single had to be cut down for the stations, the edit taking the song the way a picture framer takes a panorama too wide for any wall, sawing off the quiet opening and the machine-gun ending and leaving the middle in a frame that fitted the clock. The album itself had already climbed to number six on the Billboard 200, and the video premiered on MTV on 20 January 1989. The full version won the Grammy. Nobody hung the framed one.
Heavy metal radio, for most of the eighties, meant a few hours after midnight.
Heavy metal radio on the margins
Where the music did reach the air, it came in by the side entrance. The satellite network that went on the air from Dallas on Labor Day, 1 September 1986, feeding twenty-four hours a day of hard rock and heavy metal to any station willing to take it, was Z Rock. It reached mostly small towns and weak signals, and some of its affiliates were AM stations that could barely be heard past the county line.
The rest was the late shift. College stations, run by students with no advertisers to please, gave the style whole evenings, and commercial album rock stations across the country put their metal into a specialist hour on Sunday nights, where the barrage could not frighten anyone who mattered to the sales department. Tape trading did the rest, a dub of a dub of a dub posted from one bedroom to the next, the treble wearing off each copy the way the grain wears off a stair tread under a household of boots, until the riff arrived in a new town as little more than hiss and conviction. Fanzines printed the addresses. The record shows the bands sold anyway.
When radio finally listened
The first gap opened on a ballad, as it usually did. The Seattle-area five who had spent the eighties on concept albums and dystopias, and who reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1991 with a quiet orchestral song about lucid dreaming, were Queensrÿche.
Released on EMI in 1990, Empire carried "Silent Lucidity" onto stations that had never played the band, with a string arrangement by Michael Kamen smoothing over a song that owes more to Pink Floyd than to Judas Priest, and the album went on to a triple platinum certification. It was not the record that proved radio wrong. It was the record radio could afford to be right about.
The anthem that settled the argument that summer was "Enter Sandman", the first single from Metallica's self-titled album of August 1991, which went onto rock radio in heavy rotation, reached number sixteen on the Hot 100 and pulled the album to number one. Within a few years the stations had a new format, active rock, built around the heavier guitars the old playlists had kept out. Radio did not change its mind. It changed its audience.
Even then the heaviest records went round it. Pantera's Far Beyond Driven, released in March 1994, entered the Billboard 200 at number one with a single nobody could play on daytime radio, the old tactics working exactly as they had for Master of Puppets eight years before. The road still sold more than the transmitter.
By then the style had spent fifteen years finding its listeners on its own, and radio was far from the worst of its enemies. The sermons were louder, and they came from the pulpit rather than the transmitter, which is the story of the church against heavy metal.
