Who Moved My Cheese Metal?

One of the last and best eighties metal bands to break out over the airwaves was Slaughter with their debut 1990 release, Stick It To Ya.

The album had three charting hits and quickly brought Slaughter to the attention of the metal loving masses.

“Up All Night” rode all the way to #27 on the Billboard charts.

With slick musical production and solid arrangements featuring Mark Slaughter’s smooth vocals and rhythm guitars, Dana Strum’s bass, Tim Kelly’s lead guitars and Blas Elias’ drums, Slaughter managed to stick out on the radio in a time when big guitars and bigger, higher vocals were the norm.

Mark Slaughter’s vocals are quite interesting in that his lower register has a softness and personality that are reminiscent at times of Robert Plant from the early Zep years. He shows that part of his impressive range to good effect on the opening to their biggest hit, the power ballad, “Fly To The Angels.”

Now this guy can sing!    (Here is the “Official Video!)

There is a richness in Slaughter’s vocals that was so often lacking in the “to the clouds” metal singers of the time. Add in a first rate band, which they were and you’ve really got something great.

1992′s The Wild Life produced three more chart singles, “The Wild Life,” “Days Gone By” and “Real Love” but it was not nearly as successful as their debut album. And by 1994 with Slaughter having arrived on the scene relatively late in the game, they were among the many artists thrown to the street when EMI absorbed what had been the independent Chrysalis label in 1994.

With Kelly having an assortment of legal issues, Mark Slaughter having surgury for vocal nodules, changing musical tastes with the advent of Grunge, adding to that, Dana Strum being injured in a motorcycle accident it wasn’t until 1995 and a new label that Slaughter was able to release Fear No Evil.

It was far too late, music had moved on and the album was not a sucess.

 Slaughter still tours occasionally with an assortment of previous members and guests. Tim Kelly, sadly was killed in an automobile accident in 1998.

Obviously, Brian Johnson came into AC/DC under difficult circumstances.  The emotions after the loss of Bon Scott aside, the number of bands that have come successfully through a change of frontman (via death, ego, or just the passage of time) is very small indeed. And bands that have been more successful, artistically or commercially, after that kind of transition are even rarer.

But AC/DC, with the benefit of an image built as much around Angus Young as Bon Scott, was able to go on after Scott’s death a different but vital band. And this, of course, was the title track of their first record back:

Now this is great ’80s metal falsetto. Sure, he sounds like a parrot on acid, but didn’t it jump right off the radio back then?

Johnson’s approach obviously covers some of the same territory as Scott’s, but you couldn’t mistake one for the other. And, no disrespect to those who think Bon was better, but I prefer Johnson’s less nasal and more controlled way of going at a song to Scott’s anarchic attack.

And what Johnson is doing here is, I might reiterate from an earlier post, not easy. He’s jumping in and out of falsetto (while singing really fast), apparently effortlessly and absolutely bang on pitch. Sure, his diction is rotten, but that’s a choice: As “You Shook Me (All Night Long)” demonstrates, he’s quite capable of making every word clear when he wants to.

By this late date, the metal falsetto isn’t as subtle (odd word in this context….) or sexy or surprising as in the early ’70s when it was all new, and it was getting a bit played-out by the time of Back in Black. But Brian was certainly the best falsetto screamer of the ’80s — miles better, in my opinion, than any of the hair metal boys.

By the late eighties the screaming rock falsetto bit had kind of been run into a rut.

Starting out with high and loud masters like Ian Gillan and David Coverdale then evolving into the macho, scratchy screams of AC/DC’s Brian Johnson and the withering screeching of Rush’s Geddy Lee the whole thing was becoming a parody of itself.

It reached a point where high was good in and of itself and the fact that it was becoming really annoying seemed not to matter all that much.

With that in mind…

Now I like this song. The emotion is first rate. The lyrics are a bit simple minded but they really do convey the point of it rather well. What I have a though time with is that Kix’s lead singer Steve Whiteman sounds like he may have recently swallowed a box of razor blades. It’s not a bad vocal I suppose in that the feel is there, but where is the finesse?

“Don’t Close Your Eyes” starts out with the keyboard doing a simple one/two chord count then the guitar and vocal join in. Sounds great and gets your attention, (Always a good thing). Whiteman’s vocal on the verse is restrained and is appropriately weepy when selling the story, it’s actually pretty nice. When we get to the chorus build the song swells with the legally required big guitar power chords and bigger vocals.

This is where it crashes.

The vocal is so overblown it’s just kind of hard to take it all that seriously. Watching the video helps make it tolerable but when there are no images to push the song along well, it’s just kind of dumb.

From the album, Blow My Fuse, “Don’t Close Your Eyes” made it all the way to the eleventh position on the Billboard Charts in 1988. The band didn’t last very far into the ninties as their follow up album, “Hot Wire” was not released until 1991, right in the middle of the “grunge movement” led by Nirvana and others. The era of the metal falsetto had died an unexpectedly quick and sudden death.

By the late eighties the falsetto lead singer was all but a requirement to be heard on rock radio, and back then if you didn’t get any airplay, well, you weren’t likely to sell anything. To anybody.

The internet, MySpace, iTunes and MP3′s were years away, so if you didn’t get some radio station’s program director’s attention with your new power ballad, fully equipped with ridiculously high vocals, blazing guitar leads, thumping bass and double-kick drums, you were gonna stay playing that same club for another two years of Friday nights at  9 o’clock spot and never quite getting the midnight spot.

Unless you happened to have Jon Bon Jovi as a fan.

Bon Jovi and bandmate Richie Sambora were largely responsible for getting fellow Jersey guys Skid Row their shot with a major recording deal. And a big deal it was. Skid Row’s eponymous debut album sold over 4 million copies and produced three charting singles with “18 And Life” reaching the number 4 slot.

Skid Row was definitely one of the more interesting bands to come out of the tail end of the Hair Band/Glam Metal era. Lead singer Sebastian Bach was, to my ear, one of the better singers of his day. When he goes up through the rafters he sounds very strong and full while staying very masculine. Not easy to do up that high. He also is quite believable and passionate, particularly in “18 And Life.”

Skid Row had a few more hits to come with their next album, Slave To The Grind, which became a number one album in 1991, but “18 And Life” was the highest charting single they ever produced. And the most powerful.

Well, maybe a not-so-great moment in falsetto, from late-’80s hairmeisters Cinderella.

Tom Keifer sings like a reasonable person for one verse, and then, for no pressing reason, up he goes, taking a stab at a metal falsetto. Of course, I’ve no objection to falsetto for no good reason, but Tom just doesn’t have it on this one.

He’s working at it, I’ll give him that. But even for a hair band, this is not really a plausible vocal performance. Scratchy is fine, but this is very weak — Keifer is having trouble throughout, and if you go to around 2:40-2:50, he actually can’t hold on to it and drops out of the falsetto a couple of times.

It’s not a bad record, but he can’t do what he’s trying to do. Which makes the point: A good metal falsetto is not easy. If you think about what Brian Johnson did with AC/DC in the ’80s or what Barry Gibb did in the ’70s, it takes considerable technical ability to be able to get up there and sustain that level of volume, and stay on pitch, when you’re outside your natural range. And it takes skill to do it without destroying your voice. Keifer badly damaged his voice, unfortunately, as did another subpar screamer, Def Leppard’s Joe Elliot.

So when you are appreciating, or attempting, a metal falsetto, keep in mind that to make it work, you have to know what you’re doing. Which brings us to another of Bridey’s Rock Axioms: Good singers rarely get enough credit, but bad singers always get more credit than they should.

Rather than going for something nice and subtle in the arena of metal falsetto I thought that I would jump right in with some eighties hair band, head banging,  screaming, screeching falsetto!

“In My Dreams” has about all you can want for in the clouds metal vocals. The vocal layers of the introduction tell you where this is going pretty fast.

When “Dreams”came out on 1985′s Under Lock And Key album, Don Dokken and the band were riding the wave of hair metal/heavy metal bands that filled up the radio at the time. While never quite at the top of the heap, Dokken sold a few million albums here and there and were MTV regulars with Don’s full and powerful falsetto at the front, bassist Jeff Pilson, drummer Mick Brown and guitar master George Lynch putting it all together in a slick mix of strong vocal harmonies with a delightfully overblown combo of guitar, drum and bass.

Dokken would have a few more hits over the next few years including “Dream Warrior” from the movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street 3, Dream Warriors, (natch…), but would never, at least to me, quite hit the same level of metal magic as “In My Dreams.”

As Bridey relates, this style of throwing your voice up through the rafters became a rock mainstay for nearly thirty years starting with Ian Gillan and ending, (mostly), only with the advent of grunge in the early nineties. So many bands and singers used the metal falsetto in so many ways it can become a bit difficult to track how far and wide it ranged.

The first metal band to actually have a few hits with the style was of course Deep Purple with Gillan up at lead vocals. A short time earlier Gillan had been the original voice of Jesus in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar before it became the stage play and eventual movie that would star Ted Neeley as Jesus. For those who may have wondered why the vocal parts for Jesus are in the stratosphere, well, that’s why. What Gillan started Neeley would take to the stage for the next forty years.

As much as I have always enjoyed Ted Neeley’s performance in the movie, well,  take a listen to Ian Gillan from the original album.

When Gillan gets going…

Falsetto! Which is to say, deliberately singing above one’s natural range. It’s ordinarily a man’s trick — indeed, some say women can’t properly do it at all, though I don’t know if I’d agree — and it doesn’t just mean a guy singing high (and it doesn’t mean a guy singing like a girl).

Pete Townshend, for example, never needed to push above his normal range, since he was very nearly a male alto naturally. Or trained singers like Meat Loaf or Steve Perry could get sky-high without ever ranging into falsetto.

But many good singers have falsetto at their command as a useful special effect, and, of course, some of the men we’ll be talking about over the next few days — as we look at Great Moments in Falsetto — live up there all the time.

Particularly, since we’re Who Moved My Cheese Metal? and all, we’ll be talking about the “metal falsetto,” that glorious shriek heard from so many men of metal in the ’70s and ’80s.

And one of the finest practitioners was big Ian Gillan of Deep Purple.

It’s right there in the first 30 seconds: That absolutely fantastic, echoing yowl that opens this song, and opens Purple’s remarkable Machine Head. That yowl is, to my mind, the birth of heavy metal. Everything before “Highway Star” was just hard rock.

The lyrics are pretty goofy (“big fat tires and everything!”), but Gillan’s solid, straightforwardly rocking vocal bounces back up into a great, scratchy falsetto when the chorus comes around: “I love her! I need her! I see her!”

With the guys Gillan had playing behind him, he had to use every tool available to make an impact. He had to be able to create urgency and demand attention, and level the playing field for a singer against four showy, first-rate players who were generally making a hell of a lot of noise. And he does it, on this and many other records, by going high. Gillan’s raw, raunchy falsetto is surprising and powerful and sometimes sexy and always the opposite of feminine. No wonder it was so often imitated.

(And while you’re here, if it’s been a while or you don’t know this one as well as “Smoke on the Water” or “Woman From Tokyo,” take six minutes and listen to the whole thing; it’s just a fantastic record. And if that long guitar break that starts at 3:45 does not amaze and delight you, you might recheck your headbanging credentials. Because that, even after nearly 40 years, is the real thing.)