Noise Road

Now the nausea’s in my guts

and I’m wrestling with doubt

the kind you get 

when your heroes sell you out

 - Pig Destroyer, Alexandria

The whiskey-soaked larynx of Down’s NOLA album is my favourite vocal performance.  In the years following, vocalist Phil Anselmo’s slurred rants rewrote history, betrayed friends and promoted white pride.

Layne Staley’s melancholic lines are etched into my soul…  But should you stain your consciousness with the wisdom of such a man?  Should you put weight into the words of one who so isolated himself that his body rotted for two weeks before it was discovered?

Max Cavalera’s blunt attack on Sepultura’s Arise announced my metal awakening.  Cavalera overcame third world poverty to record albums that still stand tall today.  Less than a decade later, Cavalera stood at the forefront of Nu-Metal.  His first post-Sepultura single features Fred Durst.

My metal heroes failed to practice the wisdom that they preached.  They failed to live up to the values that they sold me.  They betrayed my loyalty for Fred Durst.  My metal heroes are unreliable.

No more heroes

no more, no more

In my world of enemies

I walk alone

 - Converge, No Heroes

Many say that they do not have heroes.  They do not need heroes.  Heroes are for children or for the weak.  They are crutch for those seeking to fill the void of their nothing lives…  a crutch like religion or drugs or a football team or Oprah.

I don’t need no arms around me

and I don’t need no drugs to calm me

 - Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall pt III

I need heroes.  I need something to inspire and to guide me out of the muck.  Sometimes it is a paragraph from a book or a lyric from a song…  but sometimes it is more than the works of a man.  Sometimes it is the man.

My life has been full of compromise.  I get stuck in ruts and I allow things to slowly get worse.  In contrast my heroes never compromised.  My heroes were never reasonable.

Hunter S Thompson never compromised.  Hemingway and Orwell never compromised.  Thompson rode with the Hells Angels.  Hemingway and Orwell joined the Spanish Civil War.   The man behind the words increases the power of the words.  However, Thompson and Hemingway’s treatment of their families was poor.  Both painted the walls with their brains.  What kind of heroes are those?

My fictional heroes are no better.  I recall sitting in Perth airport returning from an unsuccessful job interview.  I was overweight, suffering from chronic headaches and unexplained blood noses.  In the departure lounge, blood poured from my nose onto a paperback copy of Fight Club.  Fight Club’s narrator demanded extreme action.  I required extreme change.

I believe that is the root of my interest in the men behind metal.  They are never reasonable.  Some of our metal heroes are so far up that river that their moral compass is as skewed as Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now’s Kurtz.

Phil Anselmo has been a staple of my life since my great mate, Osaka Bonez, started driving us to under-age, binge-drinking parties.  Phil’s roar sounded from his Mum’s Toyota mini-van throughout the sketchy northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia.

Those years saw Anselmo at his musical peak.  Anselmo’s voice on NOLA has a whiskey-soaked quality between a melody and an all out Pantera assault.  Lyrics from NOLA still resonate into my thirties.

Months away from overdosing in a stadium parking lot, Anselmo tracked Trendkill’s vocals alone in New Orleans after refusing to record alongside the band in Texas.  It does not sound like a recipe for success.  However, Anselmo’s lyrics contain a rare honesty.  Junk would ultimately warp that honesty, as well as his sense of reality and history.

Buy it from a store

from MTV to on the floor

you look just like a star

its proof you don’t know who you are

If I hit bottom and everything’s gone

the Great Mississippi please drown me and run

 - Pantera, The Great Southern Trendkill

Even at his lowest, Anselmo oozed charisma.  However Anselmo is the prime example of an unreliable hero.  For all his triumphs with Pantera and Down, there have been terrible musical lows.  Some lyrics are cringeworthy.  Anselmo has been prolific, but prolifically inconsistent in quality…  and then there is the man.

If I had known Anselmo personally over the last two decades, I would not have liked the man.  My experience is that junkies do not make good friends.  Worse than any drug-related failures was the pseudo-white-pride rhetoric.  I ain’t got room in my life for that shit, Phil.

As a young adult I would defend my heroes even when their actions seemed indefensible.  This was not a matter of separating the man from the music.  I had invested my inspiration in the man.

As greys appeared in my beard, I realised that my heroes had not failed me.  My heroes did not owe me a thing.

My heroes were heroes because they represented an extreme change that I was incapable of.  This extremity produced extreme music and extreme living.  Extreme living often lead to extreme drinking, extreme drug-taking and extremely questionable words and actions.  Their failures are a direct result of their lack of compromise that inspired me.

So, what is a hero?  A hero is someone who can inspire you – whether it be from a decade of achievement or just a single lyric or riff.  I do not need a role model.  I’m 31 years old.  I do not want to be my heroes.

Despite their musical inconsistencies, despite their personal failings, despite the reality TV shows, I could not do without my metal heroes.  My trust remains in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath.

Your trust is in whiskey and weed and Black Sabbath

Its goddamn electric

 - Pantera, Goddamn Electric

This entry was posted on December 17, 2011 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Admin . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.