One of the aspects of heavy metal music that keeps it a young person’s game is the centrality of headbanging. For instance, it is very, very difficult to do your taxes while headbanging, and this fact constitutes a central part of its appeal. Along with pogoing and moshing, there is a visceral thrill to headbanging that perfectly fits the music to which it is linked.

Danish photographer Jacob Ehrbahn spent the summer of 2012 traveling to various European heavy metal festivals (specifically Denmark’s Copenhell, Germany’s Wacken Open Air, and Sweden’s Metaltown) and capturing those jubilant instants in time when the heavy metal fans were at the moment of extreme exultation—in mid-headbang, naturally.

Ehrbahn’s intense, joyous portraits of music fandom in action have been collected in a book called Headbangers, which will be available in September and is available for pre-order.

We’ve collected a few gems here, but you can see more at the Great Photojournalism website.
 

 

 

 
More pics after the jump…...
 

The Slayer Pizza:  Chopped Fra Mani toscano, soppressata, finocchiona, Cypress Grove “Lamb Chopper” cheese, house marinara, signature communion wafer crust, and an altar wine gastrique.
 
Rice and Bread, an online “food and music magazine,” hosts the “perfect pairings” series in which craft beers or decadent food creations are paired with classic metal albums. Our favorite entries in this series come courtesy of Chef John Hurkes, whose brutal recipes are absolutely inspired.

Chef John Hurkes’ latest creation is the “Black Sabbath Pizza”:
 

Ingredients: English banger sausage, smoked mozzarella, squid ink béchamel sauce, purple basil leaf, sweet lavender honey, and an authentic Mapledurham Watermill crust.
 
Hurkes’ notes on his creations read like a foodie Forry Ackerman:

What is this pizza that stands before me? A slice in black which points at me. Just like the conception of heavy metal, the Black Sabbath pizza is cooked from scratch. The flour is stoner-ground and rises from the early ’70s. The 12” crust is pressed from an actual bread recipe written by an “Evil Woman,” the miller’s wife of the Mapledurham Watermill in England. Spinning like a record, Ozzy Osbourne’s legendary vocals cascade into a wood-fired wheel of flavour riffles. Would you like a “N.I.B.”ble? Finger-picking through each slice, Tony Iommi’s hand-crafted guitar solos resonate through “Wicked World” and march across heavy slabs of sausage in “Children of the Grave.” Shrouded in the creamy black sauce, Geezer Butler’s bass lines find “Solitude” under a blanket of delicious smoked cheese as Bill Ward’s drums stick to the honey and herb “Sweet Leaf.” As the pizza is finished and the beer bottles burn out, you’ll be left “Into the Void.” Soon the world will love you, sweet pizza.

Other favorite Chef John Hurkes’ metal meals include “The Danzig Juicy Lucifuge… the Mother of all burgers”
 

Ingredients: New Jersey black-angus beef, blue-cheese Lucifuge, the onions of Christ, and blackest of the black BBQ sauce. Served on a house-made Twist of Pain bun.
 
“Exodus pork belly blood feast”

Ingredients: Fire-roasted pork belly crusted with Black Carbon salt harvested from the Dead Sea, grilled and thrashed blackberry-infused blood-sausage puree, smoke-poached egg yolks, purple fingerling potatoes, seared orange, and wasabi micro greens.
 
“Nuclear Assault Nachos”

Ingredients: Fire-braised pig confit, pickled onions and jalapenos, nuclear cheese reactor, and OC-17 police grade pepper-sprayed multi-continental fried chips.
 
We spoke with Chef John Hurkes about the series and his inspirations.

How did the “Perfect Pairings” idea develop, and what makes for a “perfect pairing”?

Chef John Hurkes: It was originally developed pairing metal albums with craft beer, but it sort of shifted towards food when Jason Schreurs of Rice and Bread Magazine approached me about pairing some of my favorite metal albums with my food creations. To make a “Perfect Pairing” you need a great metal record, quality ingredients, and some fucking metal ingenuity.

How has heavy metal informed your culinary style?

CJH: Metal crossover cooking can go a lot of different ways. There’s so many different genres and albums to be inspired by. However, it’s tricky sometimes developing new recipes and styles. It’s not like you are going to listen to an Electric Wizard album and decide to slow cook a doom metal burrito in an electric microwave for an hour. There is a degree of sophistication. When you are a serious metal head it changes your overall output in life. So it has definitely influenced what i’m doing with these dishes and how I will continue to cook them in the future.

You mentioned to me before that you traded heavy metal records with a friend from England for a cookbook signed by the miller’s wife of the last working watermill on the River Thames. You used a bread recipe from that book to create the Black Sabbath Mapledurham Watermill crust. Are there any other instances where metal has been an inroad to new recipes or cookbooks?

CJH: For sure. Metal is always an influence on how I develop new recipes. Sometimes there are different influences like religion or say politics. When I made the Nuclear Assault Nachos I thought homeland security was going to raid my kitchen shelves. It was the ultimate nacho riot as the pig confit was fire-braised and the resistant multi-continental chips got pepper sprayed in the cross fire. I feel like i’m always on a special heavy metal path with my next dish.

All of the photos of your creations look absolutely delicious, but we can’t eat the photos. Are there plans to share these recipes with the rest of the world, or are they guarded secrets?

CJH: They are guarded in a metal recipe box. But i’ve been discussing with my friend Jason Schreurs over at Rice and Bread Magazine about a collaboration with a cookbook that features each of the metal dishes. In the meantime, we’ve got other evil metal cuisine to unveil over at Rice and Bread.

I’m going to name some bands, and you tell me what kind of food immediately comes to mind. We’ll start with Iron Maiden.

CJH: A virtuosic metal salad with “Trooper” battlefield greens.

Loudness

CJH: Probably a Japanese guitar shredded squid dish with a sweet red chili sauce. Law of Devil’s Land is a great album.

Burzum

CJH: It would have to make you go BRRRR! Perhaps a stout beer ice cream float topped with chopped bacon and a burnt and candied communion wafer stave church steeple.

Mercyful Fate

CJH: The course of the pharoahs is served at the sound of the dinner bell. That’s all I got.

Celtic Frost

CJH: Morbid pig tails.

Municipal Waste

CJH: Is there such thing as weed-fed beef? Maybe a burger with beer soaked cheese, an IPA mustard, booze sloshed pickles, and a few other ingredients I shouldn’t mention for legal reasons. You would be wasted by the time you finished eating it.

Brujeria

CJH: I’m thinking tequila braised goat shoulder hacked apart with a machete and piled into tacos with in an unholy mole crafted from an evil trinity of chile peppers.

What is the most evil ingredient in any metal-inspired meal?

CJH: Communion wafers. You can bread anything with them and they cook amazingly in a lake of grease fire. I even made the delicious “Slayer Pizza” with them. For a while I was convinced that my kitchen was cursed after I made that pizza. Every Sunday for several months, my kitchen appliances would break or some crisis would happen. Evil cooking has no boundaries.
 

Carcass-inspired surgical veggie sammich. “Welcome to the poser slaughter. It’s an eight-inch vegetarian mouth-thrasher’s abattoir.”
 
Drool over more crossover edibles at Rice and Bread.

 
Apparently “Heavy metal Chic” is the hot new look, whether you like the music or not! First, retailer H & M created an affordable line of metal vestmentss for bands that have never existed, including a few pieces that appear to reference white supremacist imagery (you’d think as a Swedish retailer, they’d know better). It was an absurd stunt, and we all had a laugh, but at least we all learned something. Right?!?

Wrong! Diesel—commonly known as the denim line of Guido douchebags—is now selling a $298 jacket and a pair of $348 jeans, both covered in “metalesque” patches. Again, these are not real bands, nor do they sound even passably cool—“ACAB” is apparently an acronym for “All cats are beautiful?!?” You know, at least with the H & M stunt, this stuff was affordable, but these prices for phony bands and “70% Cotton, 26% Polyester and 4% Elastane-Spandex?” The denim isn’t even real!

If I may dust off an old chestnut: death to false metal! (And death to false denim!)
 

 

 

 
Via Metal Sucks

 
Sure, everyone knows Germany’s Scorpions from their 1980’s (thinning) Hair Metal hits “Rock You Like a Hurricane” and “There’s No One Like You,” but The Scorpions career goes back much further. Their first album, 1972’s Lonesome Crow is (surprisingly great) proggy Krautrock. Over the course of the bands next four releases they shifted their approach to more of a hard rocking, proto-metal sound—a sort of Deep Purple on speedball. By the release of 1977’s Taken by Force, The Scorpions were in full-on assault mode.

 
The track we’ll be examining today is so musically (and lyrically, as we’ll see) ahead of its time, that I dare call it proto-thrash. The performance here from a German television show (how did this get on TV?) rocks so unbelievably hard that you can almost forgive Klaus Meine’s interpretive jazz-hands dancing.

What makes 1977’s “He’s a Woman, She’s a Man” so breath-taking is the stark way in which it deals with the subject of transgender that’s light years beyond what The Kinks were ambiguously laying out in 1971’s hit “Lola.” Granted, The Scorpions’ 1977 English-as-a-second-language is not necessarily sensitive to the titular character referred to as “it” throughout the tune; but a breakdown of the lyrics reveals the storyteller encountering a person of indeterminate gender, at first expressing shock and disbelief, but ultimately essentially saying “fuck it, I’m horny and attracted to this person regardless of my Teutonic heavy metal dude confusion.” The first two verses express bewilderment, the second two express acceptance.

I saw it walking lonely down the street
Cool like a cat and like a crazy dream
I’m looking twice again and can’t believe
It turned around and then it looked at me

I thought, “Oh, no”, it really couldn’t be
It was a man and was a woman too
He’s a woman, she’s a man

I think it really came from far away
I’m feeling hypnotized, I have to stay
It takes my hand and says, “Come on, let’s go”
We’re going home there’s nothing more to say

He starts to move, she starts to play
I need a body, why not you?
He’s a woman, she’s a man

The Scorpions were no strangers to being sexually confrontational in their art. The album which preceded this one, Virgin Killer, featured in its shocking original cover art a nude prepubescent girl with slivers of cracked glass just barely covering the area over her pelvic girdle. The cover, which frequently makes “worst LP cover of all time” lists, was banned in the US, as was the Hipgnosis-designed cover for their Lovedrive LP.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
So we’re clear up front, obviously not ALL heavy metal t-shirts are terrible—you can have my 1997 Keelhaul shirt when you can steal it off my rigid corpse. And of course, over-the-top offensiveness is half or more of the point with a lot of the more brutal bands. But as with many things, a hell of a lot of these ARE just objectively, completely shitty, and the Metal is Awful Tumblr is dedicated to collecting photos of the very worst.

Metal has so many terrible aspects, but the worst is the fucking shirts.

This is where we revel in that awful truth.

We reserve the right to comment on any awful metal shite anywhere, anytime. But mostly just terrible shirts.

And Trey Azagthoth. That guy is an idiot.

 

One of Odin’s ethical axioms is apparently “blow up planet Harrelson.”
 

Morrissey has shirts that are more metal than Diabolos Rising‘s.
 

The front of this VxPxOxAxAxWxAxMxC shirt is kinda crap, too. I’ve never been sure if this band was a goof, or if they were legitimately trying SO HARD to be “extreme” they ended up hilarious by accident. The name stands for “Vaginal Penetration Of An Amelus With A Musty Carrot.” An amelus is a baby born with no limbs. Draw your own conclusions.
 
More ridiculous tees after the jump…

Skull Kontrol
 
A San Francisco-based artist named Ben Venom (nice name!) cuts up heavy metal t-shirts and turns them into fantastic handmade quilts on general themes that are pretty heavy metal in their own right. He also does the same thing with motorcycle t-shirts (not pictured here).

Hard to make out any specific logos…. I do spot Red Fang, Manowar, and King Diamond. Pausing the video at bottom makes it much easier—also saw Metallica, Kreator, Ozzy, Pantera, Death, and AC/DC.

Can you spot any others?
 

In to the Sun
 

Tools of the Trade
 

Killed by Death / Strange Case of Mr. Wolfman and Dr. Death
 
More after the jump…
 

 
While my interest in heavy metal music is peripheral at best, I’m incredibly fascinated by one of the great incongruities of music subcultures: how can an outcast group, formed on the margins, manage to marginalize people?

Much has been made of Riot Grrl, formed as a response to hyper-macho punk scenes, but Girlschool and Lita Ford, aside, metal has never really had its own ladies’ auxiliary, so to speak. Compounded with the fact that metal, of course has an overwhelmingly white fanbase, black women have certainly never had much of a visible presence in the scene.

Laina Dawes is a black music journalist from a small city in Ontario, and the author of What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal. Adopted by a white Canadian family, and raised in a fairly monochromatic town, her musical tastes developed initially around pop radio. As she was exposed to the heavy metal bands favored by boys in her neighborhood, she quickly became a life-long fan.

Laina talks at length about her issues with the scene. Aside from a general lack of diversity, no subculture is immune to explicit racism or sexism. When there were women at shows, there was an expectation of a certain type of sexpot hesherette. When Dawes wasn’t the only black girl at a show, she often felt the palpable subtext of female competitiveness heightened, belying the comradely atmosphere she sought out in metal in the first place.

She portrays the scene unflinchingly, despite her connection to it. Black fans and artists were sometimes subject to racism from white fans and artists, alike. When actress (and part-time metal singer) Jada Pinkett-Smith got on the Ozzfest bill with her band, fans noted a sudden volley of unselfconscious racist diatribe, the likes of which hadn’t been overt in shows past. Dawes compellingly compares the presence of black women in metal to the election of Obama: while it may be progress, it still exacerbates the nastiest of reactionary tendencies.

Ultimately, however, Dawes is writing about her love of heavy metal, and the community she seeks to foster within the scene:

I was dying to find other black female metal fans who were equally passionate about their ethnicity and their metal. I was always proud to be a black girl, but I struggled with people perceiving me as not being black enough. I traveled to as many concerts I could afford, and I collected albums, concert t-shirts, and metal buttons. I encouraged others to use the music to create personal freedom, to get them to acknowledge their feelings of anger and aggression. There was a lot of rage around me, and I knew that it could be channeled into the positive energy that I found through metal.”

What Are You Doing Here? isn’t an academic study, just a memoir of how one music fan navigated a scene, and an interesting look at how it feels to be an outsider in a culture already on the outside.

 
So I was gonna sit here and write a long, rambling post about Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine and the amount of bullshit that’s been spewing out his tiny little mouth of late. You know, something about a guy with a shoulder length frizzy perm being anti-gay, something about a 100% no-homo-heterosexual dude feeling threatened by the sex lives of African women and other consenting adults. Maybe throw in a little reference to still smarting about Metallica here, or “small man syndrome” there, perhaps go off on a diatribe about the über-pseudo-macho world of heavy metal being just as “authentic” as that of drag queens, about how the biggest shit-talkers always reveal themselves to be the most immature, petulant little nerds desperate to live up to a false sense of masculine superiority in the end.

But I’m not going to waste my effort.

I mean, why should I bother? Mustaine is doing all that hard graft for me! Seriously. Here are a selection of quotes from recent interviews displaying the wisdom of Dave Mustaine:

Dave Mustaine on Bible prophecy:

Mustaine explained a biblical prophecy to LA Weekly. “Even if you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in faith, you’ve got to understand, when Israel became a country again, that was a prophecy in the Bible that came true, and the Bible was written so many hundreds of years ago,” says Mustaine. Also, any of the stuff that it says in there about the end times — that stuff’s really happening right now. Look what’s happening over in the Middle East. It’s crazy.”

Dave Mustaine on Rick Santorum:

Earlier in the election, I was completely oblivious as to who Rick Santorum was, but when the dude went home to be with his daughter when she was sick, that was very commendable. Also, just watching how he hasn’t gotten into doing these horrible, horrible attack ads like Mitt Romney’s done against Newt Gingrich, and then the volume at which Newt has gone back at Romney… You know, I think Santorum has some presidential qualities, and I’m hoping that if it does come down to it, we’ll see a Republican in the White House… and that it’s Rick Santorum.

Dave Mustaine on Afircan women:

There’s so many houses without a dad that it’s just terrible. I mean, you know how they used to say there should be a license to have a baby? Well, as far-fetched as that sounds, I really think that, if the parents aren’t going to stick together, they shouldn’t make that kind of commitment to life. I watch some of these shows from over in Africa, and you’ve got starving women with six kids. Well, how about, you know, put a plug in it? It’s like, you shouldn’t be having children if you can’t feed them.

Dave Mustaine on gay marriage:

Do you support gay marriage, or is that something you oppose?

Well, since I’m not gay, the answer to that would be no.

OK. What about for people who are gay?

Since I’m not gay, the answer to that would be no.

Would you support legislation to make marriage between a man and another man legal?

I’m Christian. The answer to that would be no.

All this is a real shame, because Megadeth were a fucking great band. It’s just too bad that if Dave Mustaine’s reputation ever recovers from being a “very conservative” über-douche who lets the TV make up his mind for him, he’s going down in the annals of history as the guy who wept for Metallica:
 

 
The second of this week’s seasonal mixtape treats, and this one is quite a departure from yesterday’s Disco Argento mix. Ave Satanas is (as the name would suggest) a compilation of Satanic rock from the late Sixties and early Seventies, that could be considered the roots of what we now know as black metal, though at the time it would have been classed as psychedelic. It was compiled by one DJ Goatface Killer, better known as Russell Elder from Glasgow’s Mono music emporium.

There are culty groups aplenty on Ave Statanas, like Germany’s Lucifer’s Friend, Chicago’s Coven (pictured above), Leicester’s Black Widow and the original Iron Maiden (not to be confused with Bruce Dickinson’s lot). The music represents a time when rock was getting heavier, drugs were getting harder and post-hippy culture was getting darker, hence the inclusion of extracts from both Anton LaVey’s “The Satanic Mass” and Bpbby Beausoleil’s score for Lucifer Rising. It’s also unlikely that you’ll hear the word “Satan” uttered so much in the course of around 80 minutes - below is the tracklist featuring the year and country of origin of each track:

01. ANTON SZANDOR LAVEY (USA) / THE SATANIC MASS (EDIT) (1968)
02. ANTONIUS REX (ITALY) / NON FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA (1974)
03. BLACK WIDOW (UK) / IN ANCIENT DAYS (1969)
04. COVEN (USA) / BLACK SABBATH (1969)
05. BULBOUS CREATION (UK) / SATAN (1969)
06. THE RATTLES (GERMANY) / THE WITCH (1968)
07. THE GHOST (UK) / NOW YOU’RE DEAD (1970)
08. THE GUN (UK) / RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1968)
09. THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN (UK) / FIRE (1968)
10. ROKY ERICKSON & THE ALIENS (USA) / WHITE FACES (1977)
11. LOLLIPOP SHOPPE (USA) / YOU MUST BE A WITCH (1967)
12. DUFFY (UK) / JUDGEMENT DAY (1971)
13. BEDEMON (USA) / CHILD OF DARKNESS (1973)
14. LUCIFER’S FRIEND (UK / GERMANY) / LUCIFER’S FRIEND (1970)
15. IRON MAIDEN (UK) / GOD OF DARKNESS (1969)
16. AFFINITY (UK) / THREE SISTERS (1970)
17. SAM GOPAL (UK) / THE DARK LORD (1969)
18. BOBBY BEAUSOLEIL (USA) / LUCIFER RISING PART II (1972)
 

 
Download DJ Goatface Killah pres Ave Satanas here.

BONUS! The original video for “The Witch” by The Rattles:
 

 
Yes, there is one rogue track from 1977 on the mix, care of Roky Erickson and The Aliens, but I’m sure we can all let that oversight slide. After the jump, audio clips of some of the tracks featured on Ave Satanas…

 
Rock journalist Steve Krakow (Plastic Crimewave) is blogging about forgotten musicians of Chicago. The Secret History Of Chicago Musicians sheds light on a number of bands I’ve never heard of and it’s a fascinating read.

Krakow went in search of the Windy City’s equivalent of Anvil, a band that flirted with fame but ended up in the cutout bin of history, and he found Amulance.

Amulance’s story is filled with your typical rock band nightmares. Formed in 1984, the group suffered through shady management, bad record deals, tours that fell through and even a murder. It’s another tale of speed metal gone off the rails and heavy metal heartache.

In compiling the reasons Amulance never made it, I’d put the vocalist’s and the lead guitar player’s fashion sense some place close to #1. Fortunately, the band has revamped it’s look for it’s recent re-union gigs. Good luck guys, it’s a jungle out there….but you already know that.

 
More heavy metal thunder after the jump…

 
Unfuckingbelievable live videos of Vanilla Fudge. Mark Stein, Tom Bogert, Vince Martel and Carmen Appice - heavy metal thunder.

Music critics hated them, but time has proved them wrong. This shit rocks!

Turn up the volume.

 
WinterBand  are an Apostolic Pentecostal rock group led by a ZZ Top-looking religious zealot and badass named Steve Winter. A fire and brimstone nutjob with a beard more flammable than a Rhode Island nightclub, Winter makes Jimmy Swaggart seem like the voice of reason. His hatefilled diatribes against other religious sects, his extreme and bizarre views on Christian doctrine, his appalling attitude toward women, his dozens of wacky Internet sites, and numerous lawsuits against anyone who questions his legitimacy as a religious prophet, portray a man who is operating in the void left by Jim Jones, David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult). Within the Pentecostal community, Winter has accrued an enemies list so long it makes Nixon’s look like a haiku.

Visit his website and you’ll get a glimpse into the brain of one angry and ugly Bible thumper, seething with self-righteous disdain for virtually every sentient being on the planet.

Winter’s a third-rate hustler, a pious Three-card Monte player on the backstreets of holy salvation. The Steve Winter FAQ provides an interesting insight to the nature of his internet spamming and scamming. Google the dude. He’s everywhere, even appearing on religious-themed dating websites.

Clearly, this guy gives me the creeps and that’s why I find him so compelling. His particular strain of holier-than-thou sermonizing coupled with shitty apocalyptic hard rock is far more doom-laden than most Christian rock. His 70s style riffage and uber right wing politics make him the perfect opening act for teabaggin’ asswipe Ted Nugent.
 

more facial hair after the jump