Forever Metal

It started as my own private joke. On Friday nights, as a fourteen-year-old metal head, I’d watch Hells Bells: The Dangers of Rock and Roll, a Christian production meant to dissuade kids like me from listening to any popular music, so I could hear my favorite songs on the Sabbath. As Seventh-day Adventists, we didn’t engage in secular entertainment between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. No TV, no non-Christian music, and certainly, no rock and roll, but we could, of course, watch Hells Bells.

I discovered the film one Friday night when I got out of the shower and heard AC/DC blasting through the house. I dressed quickly and searched for the source. I found my parents, sitting on the living room couch watching the documentary with the sound turned up for their aging ears. The film used music tracks, clips from music videos and live concerts as a condemnation for the sex, drugs, and, of course, secret Satanic messages in rock and roll, but I saw an opportunity. They didn’t include the full songs, but the scraps were better than nothing and I could keep Highway to Hell running in my head while the narrator moralized. During the week, I could listen to rock in my bedroom, but when the sun set on Friday, I turned off my stereo and put on the film.

I convinced my mom, the leader of our church youth group, to show Hell’s Bells to my Sabbath school class. I thought I was clever, sitting in the back row, rocking out to a little metal on the Lord’s Day, but watching the film flip through clips, taking quotes and lyrics out of context, describing ecstatic kids at concerts as brainwashed, the joke was on me.

I swallowed back bile while my mom and the other adults in the room nodded along. Finally, the film accused heavy metal of pushing kids to suicide, using my favorite band, Metallica’s song “Fade to Black” as evidence and I couldn’t stay silent.

“It’s not promoting suicide! Suicide happens in our world; this is a song about suicidal thoughts.” I fought to keep my voice calm.

The brick walls in the church annex kept the room cold and I had goosebumps on my arms. There was only a thin, accordion partition between our youth group and my school’s gym. Beyond the gym was the rest of the school, my entire world contained in a few acres of church grounds.

“But that’s how Satan gets us,” a friend’s dad said. His tie lay over his belly straining the buttons on his shirt. He looked at me over his glasses from across the room, speaking slowly, like I might have trouble following his argument. “He mixes just enough truth so we’ll believe his lies.” He leaned back into his metal folding chair with a smug smile.

My mom supplied a Bible verse as back-up: “Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

Entertaining any dark thoughts let the Devil in. I sunk back into my demure floral dress, crossed my arms and stared out the window for the rest of class.

Now when I scroll through the Youtube comments on “Fade to Black,” I see people sharing what the song means to them. For some it became an anthem during years of depression. Others remember people lost to suicide who had loved the song because it made them feel understood.  

Hells Bells grew out of the Satanic Panic, a collective fear across rural America of a cancer in youth culture. Facing economic decline and the nebulous “erosion of traditional values,” the Satanic cult embodied social anxieties. The movement began with the 1960s cultural shift, but it spread widely in the 1980s when police officers and psychologists took the panic from church communities into the mainstream. 20/20 aired a show in 1985 exposing the growing threat of Satanism, giving the movement legitimacy.

Adventist apocalyptic theology made Satanic fears particularly potent. They teach that Earth is a battleground between God and Satan, and we live in the end times, when a desperate Satan, in a final frenzy, will take as many souls to Hell with him as possible. He lurked everywhere, waiting to snare us when we least expected it.

Many Adventists found even movie theaters too sensual, the sound surrounding you, so loud you can’t think for yourself, the darkened theater with light coming only from the larger-than-life screen, leaving you in a highly suggestive state.

Drums were the Devil’s instrument. Ellen White, the church’s prophet and co-founder, had written that in the apocalypse “there would be shouting, with drums, music, and dancing.” If the music’s message wasn’t bad enough, the instrumentation itself was demonic.

As I explain to my non-Adventist friends, I grew up in that town from Footloose, a movie we watched over and over, taking notes on how to break through with our parents, teachers and pastors. My sisters tried Kevin Bacon’s “What did David do?” speech to make the case for a school dance. They showed the pastor Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” music video as evidence that dancing didn’t have to be sexual.

He agreed that the video looked clean, but still couldn’t condone it. There might be hidden symbols.

My brother, Chip, older than me by seven years, had broken ground for my sisters and me when, as a young teenager, my parents discovered his collection of heavy metal tapes—a band named Judas Priest had no place in a Christian home—and took them out to the cinder block pit where we burned our trash. How metal is that?

He’d chosen albums mostly for their shock value with Satanic imagery; Dee Snyder in clown makeup eating raw flesh off a large femur. He’d struck his target, but lost his music collection.

My parents tried more positive methods, buying him Christian rock albums to channel his musical interests. STRYPER, with their long, feathered curls, makeup, yellow and black striped lycra, were as close to metal as it got.  They’d taken all of Motley Crue’s glam but none of its attitude.

Chip listened to Christian rock on our living room stereo while quietly amassing a new metal collection, recording his friend’s tapes because he couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones.

He wasn’t listening alone; my sisters and I would steal away to his room. One day while my parents were gone, we played Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” on the living room stereo, the volume turned up so we could feel the vibrations in the floor, the four of us dancing across the furniture. Chip said when he started his metal band we’d be his backup singers.

He had an entire cabinet full of pirated cassettes when my parents burned his collection the second time.

In ninth grade, in need of reform, my parents sent him to live with our uncle, a youth pastor in California, where a friend at his Adventist high school lent him a tape with Kill ‘Em All on one side and Ride the Lightning on the other. He didn’t find Jesus, but Metallica changed his life.   

In a closed social environment like an Adventist community, a person who feels threatened can’t easily find a safe place and is left with one of two options: either embrace a marginal identity or attempt conformity. Rather than dismissing the former stance as rebellion, sociologists have come to recognize it as a kind of resilience, a way for kids to regain control of their sense of self.

Chip had adopted a metal identity, growing his hair out, wearing ripped jeans and band t-shirts. Even when constrained by Adventist school’s strict dress codes, he managed to find a metal edge. By his early twenties, his hair hung in perfect spirals down his back, a goatee to give his round face a toughness, a metal image so no one would mess with him.

I envied his fearlessness. I chose conformity, didn’t push the dress code, no tight jeans, low cut shirts. Hell’s Bells stunt aside, I was a good kid, always had the right answer in Bible class, and tried to ignore the misgivings I had about those answers.

With much less parental control than my brother, I didn’t even have a good excuse for my lack of courage. My older siblings had slowly worn down my parents. When my sisters first bought pop tapes with their babysitting money, instead of burning them, my mom listened to and questioned every song (Wasn’t “I wanna feel the heat with somebody” just a little too suggestive?). In part because we’d moved from our very conservative Adventist community in Eastern Washington to a more liberal—though still straight-laced—one in Central California, by the time I hit my teenage years, no one previewed the music I bought with my own money. I even had a Metallica poster on my bedroom wall. Chip was the coolest person I knew; if Metallica was his favorite band, it was mine too.

Maybe I was just trying to have it both ways, wanting love and acceptance from my community and freedom of mind to venture outside that community’s narrow boundaries.

On Saturday nights, Chip and I would stay up late to watch MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball, a weekly ritual, immersing ourselves in the metal scene. It was a joy, seeing music videos and bands exploring the dark side of human nature, the terrifying things in the world, stepping over the edge of acceptable. I could revel in everything I kept hidden at school and at church.

I wonder if Chip enjoyed cultivating a metal heart in his little sister, the one everyone described as sweet—if they remembered I was there—if he’d intended to show me that I didn’t have to be sweet. I could always go for the throat.

One morning while Chip slept in, I got out my mom’s old acoustic guitar. She taught me a G chord and a D chord and showed me some picking patterns and I messed around for about an hour before my brother got up.

He listened to me for a few minutes, then asked, “Do you want to play this or do you want to rock and roll?” He taught me the power chords and when he moved out, he left me his old electric guitar.

Most people think of metal as a masculine genre, but at the Adventist school in Sonora, California, me and two of my girlfriends were the only metal heads. Feminists offer valid critiques—all male bands, women only appear as sex objects—but often, there’s the implicit assumption that the music’s anger and aggression are a man’s domain. With an unrelenting rhythm, power chords and lyrics about being overpowered and overpowering in turn, I can’t imagine better music for girls growing up in an honest to God patriarchy, where people discussed what exactly the bible meant when it said wives should submit to their husbands and women should keep quiet in church.

I didn’t identify with the typical bikini-clad metal vixen; I wanted to rage like the men.

In interviews, Metallica frontman, James Hetfield, has described his family’s religion, Christian Science, as elitist: that’s what other people believe, but we believe this.  Adventism, a denomination born in the same cultural milieu as Christian Science, teaches that we should be in the World, but not of the World, an elitist sense that we are the remnant, all that will be left when holy fire consumes the rest of humanity.

I could identify with the reverberations from a weird religious upbringing in Hetfield’s  lyrics. In “Dyers Eve,” over blistering guitar and drums, he shouts:

Dear Mother

Dear Father

What is this hell you have put me through

Believer

Deceiver

Day in, day out, live my life through you

Pushed onto me what’s wrong or right

Hidden from this thing that they call life

James gets it. He knows why I’m angry and I can scream along with him.

In a 2004 Fresh Air interview, Hetfield described the shock he felt listening to his music post-rehab, thinking there are fans out there who actually liked his lyrics.

“Songs like ‘Dyers Eve,’” he said. “It’s about how my parents raised me in this bubble, and now I’m out in the world alone and I’m scared. I mean, it’s heavy stuff, man.”

Even if Hetfield wants to walk it back, it was exactly what I needed. Yes, it’s raw, naked rage, but he voiced what I felt about an upbringing isolating me from the world rather than teaching me how to live in it.

When I was fifteen, Chip took me and my sisters to see Metallica in Sacramento, my first rock concert. Walking into the arena, I wondered aloud about not fitting in, but he assured me that in my black shirt, black shorts and Dr. Martin knockoffs, I looked the part.

I was drunk on the mass of humanity thrashing to the music, fists in the air, primal displays of anger, celebrating emotions I’d always locked up.

Chip lowered his head and powered into the mosh pit, hair flying, slamming into other bodies. Nearly a full foot shorter than him, I didn’t dare follow, but maybe I should have. Metal fans describe the tenderness amidst the aggression, the way others lift you up when you fall, check if you’re okay.

I did ride the crowd, surrendering to strangers’ hands passing me around.  When they set me back on my feet, Chip met me, a look of panic on his face. His little sister may have had a metal soul, but she still had a petite, teenage girl’s body.

Walking back to the car, after the show, ears still ringing, covered in sweat, my own and the strangers around me, Metallica blasted from tinny car stereos, other fans trying to hold onto the euphoria as long as possible.

Music critics consider Black Sabbath’s 1970 self-titled album to have ushered in heavy metal. The first song on the album, also eponymous, opens with the sounds of a storm, a tolling bell, then the guitars plays a diminished fifth, also known as the Devil’s Tritone. The notes move through a chord, landing finally on a sharp rather than the next whole note.

Medieval and Rennaissance composers avoided the interval because of its unsettling dissonance. Music was meant to be beautiful, to glorify God, and, in their symbolic mind, the diminished fifth created a lopsided trinity, the discord carrying something diabolical. Later musicians used the tritone to create tension in music, but always resolved it with a return to the perfect fifth. Jimi Hendrix used it in his famous “Purple Haze” riff, creating a shocking intro, then repeating it with resolution.

No one in Black Sabbath knew about the diminished fifth’s history, or even the term Devil’s Tritone; they just liked the sinister sound. Bassist and lyricist, Geezer Butler, described it as a reaction against pretty 1960s music about peace and love.  They wanted to make music about nightmares and bad acid trips.

Black Sabbath doesn’t move to a perfect fifth, instead combining the Devil’s Tritone with Ozzy Osbourne’s unsettling lyrics about a figure in black coming for him. “Oh no God, please help me,” he screams. Without a resolution, the listener assumes there is no help.

I’d known Ozzy, from Chip’s collection, remembered him looking feral, on the cover of his Bark at the Moon album. When I saw in my Columbia House catalogue, Black Sabbath’s Greatest Hits 1970-1979, the Ozzy Years, I bought it. I loved the stab at the Sabbath right in the name. It offered the perfect soundtrack to my own anxieties, a growing awareness that there was something terribly wrong with my world, that my religion, under the guise of keeping me safe, closed me off from the outside. But every time I caught a glimpse through their fortifications, I saw a world where I wanted to live.

Hell’s Bells opens with two old headbangers, or a conservative Christian rendition of old headbangers, opining about the good old days of heavy metal. Dozens of song titles scroll down the screen with the word Hell in it: AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” and “Highway to Hell,” Alice Cooper’s “Go to Hell,” Kiss’s “Hotter than Hell,” Twisted Sister’s “Burn in Hell,” Cheap Trick’s “Gonna Raise Hell,” and many from obscure bands I’d never heard of.

The people who raised me, all the adults caught up in the Satanic Panic, thought the flippant use of Hell and the Devil in rock music appealed to teenage rebellion. Certainly we enjoyed the delicious transgression, but more than anything, adults had always used Hell to scare us into good behavior. Celebrating damnation took the teeth out of it.

My parents could enjoy Johnny Cash singing about killing a man in Reno just to watch him die. They knew Cash never killed anyone, they would never kill anyone, that playing the murderer was a harmless bit of fun. With our music, they couldn’t make the same separation between performer and performance, or maybe they thought we weren’t smart enough to make it.

If it wasn’t bad enough that they misunderstood the act, they found Satanism hidden everywhere. KISS stood for Knights in Satan’s Service; AC/DC for After Christ Devil Comes, or Anti-Christ Devil’s Children. Through backmasking, the music contained hidden, awkwardly phrased Demonic messages. Play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards and you can hear, “My sweet Satan” or, “There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” It’s hard to tell. Any defense we made demonstrated the Devil’s hold on us.

Of course, there was no single diabolical message in the music, a loophole my brother had tried to exploit: “Mom, Motley Crue is shouting at the Devil!” Black Sabbath looked directly at the Christian Satan’s terror. AC/DC had a delightfully evil act, but it was clearly a show. It was such a relief to have this Satan out in the open, something to play with. As we played, the Devil looked more cartoonish than horrifying and we began to dismantle the rigid power structures that had controlled us. I suppose the adults were right to be scared.

A little over a month after the Metallica concert, I left home for Monterey Bay Academy, an Adventist boarding school. There were rumors that Ozzy had attended MBA, but didn’t graduate. Of course he was Adventist! Where else would Black Sabbath have gotten its name? (From the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film, it turns out.) I searched the library’s entire 1960s yearbook archive, going into the 1950s just in case I had my dates wrong, for a picture of John Osbourne. Ozzy wasn’t there.  

Later, during a basketball tournament, some kids (not metal heads) from Rio Adventist Academy claimed Ozzy went there. Then I heard it from a team visiting from La Sierra Academy.

If there were other metal heads at MBA, I never found them. There were some gangbangers from the cities, but most of the cool kids liked Alternative, which seemed too easy. How could we still call it Alternative when it played on every radio station?

Studies have found that metal heads and other fans of extreme music often have low self-esteem and find a sense of uniqueness in liking something most people can’t appreciate. Sounds like me.

The bad kids snuck out of the dorms at night to get high and laid. I wasn’t one of them, still dressing the part of the good kid, singing the pretty songs in choir, making the grades. I followed, in good faith, the biblical advice, to turn to those pure, true and good things, but inconvenient thoughts and emotions still surfaced. I watched the good kids and wondered why it seemed so easy for them.

I may not have kept up my good-girl appearances as well as I thought. One day, walking into choir practice, Warren, a well-liked golden-skinned boy, asked me if it was true what he’d heard, that I filed my teeth so I’d look like a vampire. It wasn’t true. I just have bad teeth, but it’s hard to hide this Goth heart.

In the dorm, we could listen to our own music if we kept the volume down. Technically, it was supposed to be consistent with Christian values, but unless someone complained, we were left to our own judgment. I knew my music would scare my roommate, so when she was around, she chose the music. It was bad. Kenney G. Celine Dion. But alone, I listened to what I wanted, letting myself rage, brood, or just have fun.

Hetfield calls “The Unforgiven” his most personal song and it’s always been one of my favorites, the one I put on repeat when I feel misunderstood and alone. It describes a man, embattled, beaten down by rigid rules since birth. Hetfield delivers each verse in his distinctive growl, but in the chorus over undistorted, plaintive guitars, his voice softens.

It’s a line in the second verse that gets me, “He tries to please them all/This bitter man he is.” It’s not their typical aggression. There’s anger—it’s Metallica, after all—but more than anything else, there’s longing.

I wondered if under his defiant metal image, Hetfield wanted love and acceptance from his community too. But he seemed to understand what it took me so long to realize, that trying to please everyone is not just impossible, it comes at too high a cost.

My senior year, the MBA administration, tired of running a quasi reform school, purged the bad kids. Of course I’d made the cut, but among all the good kids, my metal side felt too exposed. Just being there felt like hypocrisy.

I needed to fix this split self and so, after the first quarter, I packed all my things into my parents’ van, wearing my black boots when I drove away. If it were a movie, this would be the part where I went on to live my most metal life, but in reality, I left to find Jesus. He wasn’t in California, I was sure of it. I left for Upper Columbia Academy, in Eastern Washington where Chip had gone. And been expelled. Twice.  

Ozzy didn’t attend UCA, but did you know that he went to Auburn Adventist Academy, over in Western Washington?

The school was strict. When my brother attended, they’d forbid any stereo system, including walkmans, but kids found ways around the restrictions. Chip’s UCA friends actually introduced him to AC/DC and Ozzy. The rules on the books hadn’t changed much by the time I got there, but there was a tacit agreement to allow personal music devices.

I didn’t bother; I wasn’t listening to rock and roll now anyways. I spent my senior year trying to push down my anger with prayer and bible study.

Of course it didn’t work and shortly after high school, I broke open, in a torrent of self-destruction, some parts of which looked like something out of Hell’s Bells.

In “The Unforgiven” music video, an emaciated boy escapes some shadowy, towering figures, down a concrete tunnel leading to a cell. Once inside he begins carving a square on the wall, a project that takes a lifetime. As an old man, he frees the square, using it to plug the tunnel, just as another boy is about to come through—himself as a young boy? His successor? I don’t know. I’m not good at film interpretation. Then the old man basks in the light coming through the hole he’s carved.

When I watch the video, I wonder if those are the only two ways out, the way you came or the painstaking work of carving a small window. I wonder if you could turn up some typical Metallica, something furious like “Seek and Destroy” and do what metal does best. Smash it all down.

All the metal heads have grown up, and some have gone on to get PhDs. The previous generation of researchers, corroborating Tipper Gore and the Parent’s Music Resource Center, had found that kids listening to extreme music were more likely to engage in risky behavior, promiscuity, drugs and alcohol abuse. The new generation argues that the findings are correlative rather than causative. There is some evidence that kids coming from troubled backgrounds are drawn to extreme music, which offers catharsis for negative emotions. The metal head PhDs have an antipathy for the PRMC, which went before Congress and, under the guise of expert testimony, enshrined the biases against music that had provided kids a valuable tool for processing emotion.

They’ve found what so many ‘80s and ‘90s kids suspected, that, despite the demonization, extreme forms of music are psychologically healthy. Even with intense lyrics describing violence, murder, sexual deviance, rape, the listeners have a stable moral compass. They just enjoy playing with boundaries they’d never cross in real life. Fast beats, intense instrumentals, and shocking lyrics can increase anxiety in people who don’t like the music, but fans feel joy.

Like the rest of the metal head generation, Chip grew up fine. These days, he has kids to get to ballet lessons and swim meets, but he does it in a Slipknot t-shirt, his long hair graying. From time to time he throws me the name of a band he’s listening to—have you heard A Moment in Time? They’re great.

As a mom now, I’ve kept my metal life from my children, thinking the beat too aggressive, lyrics too disturbing. I put on a Disney movie, one where the characters only look dead, but come back in a moment and everything works itself out.

I go into my room, Youtube binge on live clips of Metallica through the thirty years I’ve loved them. The kids leave their happy movie and climb onto the bed with me, and for the first time, I let them stay. Crowded around my tiny phone screen, they laugh at clips of a 2018 Halloween show in Quebec, the band members all wearing monster masks, and watch mesmerized by the pyrotechnics in a 1989 show.

I haven’t protected them from anything, only held a part of myself back, the part that likes drums hitting you like a strafe of gunfire, relentless, driving bass, guitar cutting like a bone saw, and most of all, vocals that say what they want, and are not afraid to scream.

Michelle Nicolaysen lives and works with her husband on a sheep and cattle ranch in Central Wyoming. They have three kids and a dog. She ponders the role of religion in our world with her Introduction to Religion students. She's thrilled that her first literary publication features Metallica so prominently.