Harder, faster!

I’m standing on the edge of a hurricane staring through a flurry of human limbs and torsos, searching for calm, any calm at all, in the eye of the storm.

None is to be found.

Instead, there are two-dozen tattooed leviathans standing at the center of this swirling pit of human refuse that has congealed in front of the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium stage. These callous giants chuck anybody who happens to brush up against them back into the churning vortex as easily as they might drop frogs into a blender.

Lightning flashes. Thunder rolls. Someone screams.

“Slayer!!!”

The chaos in the pit increases with the tempo and volume of the heavy-metal music blasting from twin stacks of speakers set on either side of the stage. Blinding strobe lights momentarily freeze and isolate macabre images: a two-foot-tall rainbow Mohawk attached to a grinning skull, a pierced face with more hardware in it than your father’s toolbox, a narrow waist cinched tight in a spiked leather corsette. The odor of beer, marijuana, tobacco and vomit fouls the air.

It’s some kind of fun, and I can’t help recalling what Slayer bassist and singer Tom Araya told me in an interview several weeks before the seminal thrash band’s Sacramento performance. What was his muse, I’d asked. What did the band draw upon for creative inspiration?

“We write as the superior being, and about how we destroy the underdog,” he’d answered, laughing merrily. “I like to write in the I, the first-person me, me being the one that’s doing the killing.”

Slayer, I think, surveying the carnage around me.

They’re to die for.

With song titles such as “Die by the Sword,” “Raining Blood” and “Mandatory Suicide” to his band’s credit, it would be easy to take Araya literally. It’s a great way to get things done, this superior–being-destroying-the-underdog theory. Just ask Hitler. Or Stalin. Or George W. Bush. But it hardly explains why metal’s biggest fans are these very underdogs to be destroyed. Or why some music critics consider Slayer’s most recent release, Christ Illusion, among the best anti-war albums of 2006. Or why a thriving underground metal scene continues to exist in Sacramento, despite the fact that the mainstream music industry, as well as most local clubs, gave up on the genre more than a decade ago.

So here I am on the edge of the storm, searching for answers to these enigmas among the 4,000-plus local metal heads packed into Memorial Auditorium to see Slayer. Little do I know that I am about to have my own flesh-and-blood head handed to me in a basket.

There’s nothing all that cerebral about metal. True, some aficionados try to gussy it up, pointing to the extreme virtuosity of your Eddie Van Halens, the classical-music influences of your Yngwie Malmsteems or, God forbid, the lyrical content of Rush songs. All this is beside the point. Heavy metal, or just plain old metal—referring to the entire metal genre and its seemingly infinite number of sub-genres—is a physical thing. Consider Metallica’s earth-shattering Master of Puppets, one of the top metal albums of all time. Who, exactly, do you think the puppets are? Who do you think is pulling the strings? What, exactly, is sucking me into Memorial’s mosh pit?

I’m an old hand at “moshing.” At least I used to be. Now I’m just old. At 46, I know better than to climb into the pit with a bunch of ink-stained behemoths. But the music pulls on something deep down inside of me, fires up long-dormant muscle memories, moves my arms and legs against their will. Someone on the edge of the pit gives me a little shove and, just like that, I’m in the maelstrom, reflexively swinging my arms and legs like a speed skater scrabbling in the vacuum of outer space, desperately trying to gain a purchase.

I don’t know exactly what hits me.

A fist, someone’s skull, or some other rapidly moving body part or object, flies out of nowhere and lands a crushing blow on my left cheekbone. There’s a bright flash on the dark horizon of my mind’s eye. My knees buckle. Just as I lose consciousness I think that perhaps doing an article on Sacramento’s heavy-metal scene isn’t such a great idea after all.

The golden age of metallurgy
Someone once said that there are just two ages of music: before Jimi Hendrix and after Jimi Hendrix. I’m inclined to agree with that assessment, but when it comes to the origins of metal, as heavy as Hendrix was, the band name that comes up the most often is Black Sabbath, fronted by everyone’s favorite reality TV star Ozzy Osbourne. Sabbath released its eponymous first album in 1970, and nearly four decades later the group remains one of metal’s strongest influences.

Much of the credit for Sabbath’s staying power must go to guitarist Tony Iommi, who perfected the driving, dissonant distorted guitar attack that has become metal’s signature characteristic. Iommi employed heavy use of the tritone, a.k.a. the devil’s note, a musical interval that was banned in medieval times because it was believed to conjure up Beelzebub.

Brett Rechtfertig, 17-year-old lead guitarist for local up-and-coming teen metal band Nephilim, is only one of Black Sabbath’s more recent converts. As a fifth grader growing up in Granite Bay, he recalls listening to groups such as the Offspring and Rage Against the Machine prior to his fateful encounter with Ozzy & Co.

“I pretty much heard Black Sabbath and that’s when it all changed,” he says. “It’s just so heavy. I had never heard anything like that. It was really bluesy and like dark and kind of evil and stuff. When I first heard it, I went ‘whoa!’ It really caught me off guard. I got into the history of it, all the different types of metal there are. It was kind of like a crazy new-world thing to me.”

Black Sabbath alone doesn’t account for the sound you’ll hear on Nephilim’s debut CD, Mortality. Thrash metal is also a major influence. “When I heard Pantera, that’s when everything else changed,” Rechtfertig says. “They changed music for me, the lyrics, the kind of stuff they talked about.”

Pantera singer Phil Anselmo’s lyrics often championed the struggle to maintain individuality in an increasingly homogeneous world. This is where the superior being destroying the underdog gets flipped. In many metal songs, including Slayer’s, the underdog becomes the superior being in order to assert individuality. Combined with thundering, distorted guitars, it’s a potent means of self affirmation. But the main new element that second wave metal bands such as such as Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, Pantera and Slayer brought to the genre was speed, and lots of it. The tempo of thrash-metal songs approaches 250 beats per minute—50 beats per minute more than a highly trained athlete’s maximum heart rate and light years beyond any conventional rock or pop song.

Perhaps no band plays faster or harder than Slayer. Drummer Dave Lombardo’s double kick bass set the standard for what’s become known as “blast beat.” When I first heard it in the 1980s, it sounded like a playing card stuck in a bicycle’s spokes, so fast that it was almost inaudible. Slayer’s Araya traces this speed back to a single source: early ’80s West Coast punk rock.

“When you’re in a band, when you become bandmates, you listen to everything that everybody else listens to,” he says. “So we got force-fed West Coast punk by Jeff [guitarist Jeff Hanneman]. Anything West Coast: Adolescents, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Fear, everybody. You name it, it was constantly being played all the time.”

Araya, Hanneman, Lombardo and guitarist Kerry King channeled West Coast punk’s meth rush into their own music, giving birth to thrash metal with the release of Show No Mercy in 1983. They found that punk’s rebellious aesthetic suited their own temperament, as well. “We had the attitude of going against the grain,” Araya says. “That’s always been our attitude, not only as a band, but personally, as people. We always want to go against the establishment. We’re always against whatever it is … just something to go against!”

That included the Hollywood “hairspray bands” of the time, such as Poison and Ratt.

“They put on makeup like women and we put on makeup like men!” Araya chuckles. “That was our way of going against that. We came up with this ugly image. We chose not to look pretty. We chose the darkness instead of the bright flashing lights of Hollywood.”

The fusion of punk and metal united two previously opposed camps. Jeff Jaworski, singer for local metal band Will Haven, grew up with Shaun Lopez, guitarist and founding member of Far, the Sacramento rock group that disbanded in 1999 after a decent run on the national scene. Jaworski says the pair became friends in junior high school, but listened to different types of music back then.

“He was into like Van Halen, metal kind of stuff. I was into punk rock,” Jaworski says. “The first band we actually agreed on was Slayer, around the Hell Awaits album. We started trading tapes. I’d give up some punk, like Suicidal Tendencies or DRI, he’d give me some metal, Metallica, Possessed, bands like that.”

As the punk-metal synthesis evolved through the 1980s and 1990s, growing harder and faster all the time, the number of genres proliferated. Hardcore, speedcore, grindcore, crustcore, metalcore, thrashcore, thrash metal, groove metal, death metal, black metal. Kenny Hoffman fronts the punk grindcore band KnifeThruHead as well as the black metal band Kuru. He also promotes local metal shows at clubs such as On the Y and the Distillery. He thinks the plethora of genres is necessary for music to progress “beyond the same old bullshit on the radio.”

“Punk was kind of like the gateway drug to metal for me,” Hoffman says. “You start drinking and smoking pot and stuff and you want to get into something more hardcore. That was what punk was to me—the gateway into hell. The message behind metal is chaos. You can do whatever you want in metal compared to other genres, lyrically and musically.”

That explains why three local bands that sound entirely different, Nephilim, Will Haven and Kuru, all can be categorized as heavy metal. Nephilim guitarist Rechtfertig is a “shredder,” capable of playing intricate solos at extremely high speed. On the other hand, Will Haven guitarist Jeff Irwin uses his instrument to throw down broad sheets of discordant noise. “You’ll never catch me shredding,” he says. Kuru’s “brain-bleeding cannibalcore” qualifies for its own chapter in the American Psychiatric Association’s DMS-IV, but still can be lumped into metal with Nephilim and Will Haven.

Jaworski isn’t so certain how useful all the different labels are, anyway. In the end, it all comes down to the same thing. How far does the music go?

“Whether you’re talking about Slayer or Minor Threat, it’s still fast, aggressive, heavy, whatever,” he says. “It’s yelling in your face. That’s part of it, just pushing yourself to the extreme. [Extreme’s] such a played-out word, but that’s just the easiest way to summarize punk and metal under one kind of umbrella. When I think of punk, I honestly think back to Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry, just everyone. Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Stooges, everyone who’s pushing the envelope. In a way, punk and heavy music has always been around.”

The natives are restless
Heavy music always may have been around, but it hasn’t always been shown the love, at least on this side of the pond. This spring, Will Haven—guitarist Jeff Irwin, bass player Mike Martin, drummer Mitch Wheeler and Jaworski—travel to Europe for a two-month tour of the continent and the United Kingdom. There, they’ll be greeted by an audience that’s more receptive to their music, including a scheduled crowd of 17,500 in Marmande, France.

“I think kids are a little bit more appreciative of heavy music over there,” Wheeler says. “It’s not that it’s more mainstream, it’s just not so cliche. Here you’ve got bands that cater to 13-year-old kids and whatnot. Over there, it seems like its a little bit older crowd that’s still listening to metal.”

“It’s a totally different vibe over there,” Irwin agrees. “They’re into it for the right reasons.”

And sometimes the wrong reasons, like the Norwegian death-metal bands that burned down a bunch of churches in Norway during the 1990s. It’s a different vibe in Europe, all right, with different weather patterns to boot. On one previous tour, the band nearly froze to death when the heater in their van conked out. Such hardships are worth it, Irwin says, because of the pay off that comes on stage performing before an appreciative crowd.

“We’re like a tornado that comes to town and blows the house down,” he says. “There’s nothing else like it when we’re up there kicking asses.”

The superior being destroying the underdog, in other words.

Metal may be more popular in Europe, but there’s no shortage of Sacramento bands willing to experiment with the various genres. As a promoter and a musician, Hoffman is familiar with most of them: Malevolent, the New Plague, Werewolf, Kolosson, Shrine of Scars, Killgasm, Mucus Membrane, Pisshitter. His own band, Kuru, may be the hardest and weirdest of the lot. It takes its name from the disease caused by cannibalism that was first discovered in New Guinea in the early 1900s.

“It’s like Mad Cow disease for humans,” Hoffman says. “If you eat people, you get this disease and go crazy and eventually die.” With tongue somewhat in cheek, Hoffman claims his band is pro-cannibalism. “Of course we are, why not?” he says. “I think animals are more important than human beings. Human beings destroy everything. I’m for any form of eradication of human beings, and if it tastes good, more power to you.” When pressed, he conceded Kuru didn’t necessarily condone killing and eating, say, its own audience members. But Hoffman didn’t rule it out either. “I’d eat people given the chance. I’m an experimental type person.”

Harder, faster. But how hard and fast do you really want to go? Hoffman’s not worried about alienating potential fans.

“Metal is not for jocks, it’s for nerds,” he says. “It’s for Dungeons & Dragons freaks, outcasts. It’s not for the cool people.”

That may partly explain why there’s a shortage of venues willing to support such music in Sacramento. On the Y and the Distillery host metal shows, and lately the Blue Lamp has gotten in on the action. Bands have the opportunity to open for larger national acts at the Boardwalk in Orangevale. But ever since the Loft closed in Midtown, there’s been no dependable club for underage metal heads, at least in the downtown area.

“There’s a real lack of underage venues in Sacramento,” Hoffman says. “That’s a shame, because they’re the ones who care about the music the most. They have money, too. They’ll actually buy your records instead of buying beer.”

Teenage bands like Nephilim are the future of Sacramento metal, and they are fortunate to have two underage clubs where they can play in the suburbs to the east, the Underground Café and Club Retro. Since winning Skip’s Music’s Stairway to Stardom in 2004, they’ve had no trouble gaining gigs at both venues, which happen to be situated in churches, of all places. Drummer Brian Gifford says censorship is not an issue, at least for Nephilim, which always draws a good crowd.

“It’s OK to rock with the lord, they just don’t want us to cuss,” he says.

Lyrically, their songs are clean and devoid of the anti-religious sentiments expressed by bands like Slayer. But even if the lyrics were anti-Christian, it’s doubtful church officials would know it, since singer Brian Curtin’s low, guttural growl is nearly indecipherable.

“Our singer barfs on stage sometimes,” Rechtfertig admits.

“He barfed on stage when we opened for Testament [at the Boardwalk], one of our favorite bands ever. Toward the middle of the last song, he tried to barf directly into a water bottle, but he put his mouth around it. It didn’t work. That made it airtight so nothing could go in, so he just kind of barfed all over his hand and outside of the water bottle. He screams too hard too quick and he doesn’t really pace himself, and he probably doesn’t have anything really good to eat.”

“Yeah, it happens,” Rechtfertig says.

“We get over it though,” Gifford adds.

“It’s not really a big deal,” Rechtfertig concludes.

The band, which also includes bassist Britt Green, has been playing together for two years with the current lineup, and is amazingly tight for a quartet of 17-year-olds. They have some songs that clock in at over 200 beats per minute, but lately have been adding slower songs to the mix. Rechtfertig’s guitar playing is simply phenomenal; the kid’s a shredder, capable of playing soaring, melodic solos in addition to crunchy fast rhythm passages. There’s no telling how far Nephilim will go, but the sky’s the limit. Informed that the potential future kings of Sacramento metal regularly gig in a church, Slayer’s Araya is ecstatic.

“No way,” he says incredulously. “But they’re doing it? And the church is allowing it? That’s cool! That’s really cool! I wish there were clubs like that when this band was forming. When we put together the band, all the clubs, they looked at us last. What the fuck are you playing? This stuff sounds different, we can’t let you in our club.”

The pit & the pandemonium
I come to on the floor of Memorial Auditorium, uncertain how long I’ve been knocked out. I stand up on wobbly legs. The flesh storm whorls around me and I barely stagger to safety at the edge of the pit without getting creamed again. I’m nauseous, my head hurts and I want to go home.

Then King and Hanneman hit the opening notes of “Jihad,” one of my favorite songs on the new Slayer album. As Araya explained to me, it’s “seen from the point of view of the Jihadist, of the person, of the I, of the me, of the I’m-better–than-you and I’m-gonna-kill-you guy, which is basically the kind of position we take as a band when we write about topics.”

In other words, the point of view of the Muslims who crashed the jetliners into the Twin Towers on 9/11. The superior being destroying the underdog. Needless to say, the song, along with “Eyes of the Insane,” about soldiers who return from Iraq and commit suicide, has caused some controversy. When I inform Araya that some critics have called Christ Illusion one of the best anti-war albums of 2006, he laughs hysterically.

“Whenever we envision a topic, it’s always done in a very matter-of-fact type way,” he says. “Nothing is written with the intention to be a for or against type of song. I want you to take it and absorb it, and whatever you get out of it is yours, you know what I mean? Obviously, they’ve interpreted it as anti-war.”

The heavy-metal music acts as a tonic; I soon forget about the bump that’s risen from my left eye socket. King and Hanneman’s twin machine gun guitars, Lombardo’s insanely fast drumming and Araya’s throbbing bass draw me back into the pit. This time I stay upright and avoid any sudden impacts. I’m caroming off people like an errant cue ball, arms and legs akimbo, just like the old days, slam dancing to Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. I’m remembering something Nephilim drummer Brian Gifford’s mom, Donna, told me. Nothing’s really changed since she and I were kids.

“I can’t help but like metal,” she says. “I grew up with Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. I think it’s kind of cool now, because Brian saves all his concert tickets and he’s seen a ton of bands. He’s seen Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, bands that my husband and I grew up liking. They are so much like us. Our generation, their generation, are very much alike. They’re faced with very similar challenges and choices that we were faced with. It’s like reliving the ’70s with these kids sometimes. They look like we did, they experience the things we did. My parents never really, really got it.”

At Memorial Auditorium, Araya screams out to “Jihad”: the final chorus,

This is God’s War
God’s War
This is God’s War
God’s War
Fucking Holy War

It’s impossible to say whose side he’s on, other than the superior being destroying the underdog. He’s just a year younger than me, and sometimes finds himself dreading going up on stage to sweat out another two-hour show. Then the music starts, and he’s energized. That’s the way it is if you want to be in Slayer. The show must go on. No ifs, ands or buts. That’s all this superior being destroying the underdog stuff is really all about. Life’s insurmountable obstacles can turn us all into underdogs at one time or another. By becoming the superior being, heavy metal helps us cut down those obstacles to size. If the only other choice is giving up, what’s wrong with that?

After slamming three minutes to “Jihad,” this underdog is out of breath and adjourns to the Memorial Auditorium balcony. Three mosh pits open up on the crowded floor, one large hurricane and two smaller ones. As the band plays harder and faster with each successive song, the three pits meld into one enormous writhing amoeba. Someone starts throwing firecrackers off the balcony into the amoeba. No one seems to mind. The band plays on, harder, faster, determined to destroy, or perhaps transform, every last underdog in the place.

Slayer, I think, surveying the carnage around me.

They’re to die for.