Heavy Metal T-Shirt Confessions

In the comments section of the last post about Kerrang! T-Shirts we got to talking about band T-Shirts that we used to own. With that in mind, I reckon it's time to come clean about the ones I had, and I encourage you to do the same. Think of this post as a place where you can stand up among friends, say your name and then tell everyone that you used to have a Scorpions baseball shirt.

1. Rainbow and Black Sabbath
The first piece of clothing merchandise I owned actually wasn't a T-Shirt; it was a scarf similar to the one in the picture, which I bought at Rainbow's concert at the Ingliston Exhibition Centre in 1981, the first concert I attended. Unfortunately when I wore it to school everybody thought it was a Multi-Coloured Swap Shop scarf. To be fair, it doesn't look very rock & roll, does it? I also bought a bright red sweatshirt with the artwork of the Rainbow Rising album (this was before black had consolidated itself as the colour of choice for rock T-Shirts). Despite this looking even less metal than the scarf it was actually stolen from our washing line.

On the same trip I bought (from Ingliston Sunday market) a Mob Rules T-Shirt (with the tour dates on the back).

This was more like it! A real bona fide Metal shirt! Looking back with mature eyes, it's a pretty unpleasant T-Shirt for a 12 year-old boy to be wandering about it, but perhaps that was the attraction.

2. The Marillion Period
The early 80s were when bands really started to wake up to the idea of making money by selling "official" merchandise. Two bands who were at the forefront of this were Iron Maiden and Marillion. Both were signed to EMI and had album artwork that they could transfer to T-Shirts. I was going through my Marillion phase at the time and had a grey T-Shirt with the Punch & Judy single sleeve as well as the Garden Party one below.

In its own way it was even more ugly than the Sabbath T-Shirt. At the time I was discovering Prog and like many other 14 year olds I thought that The Wall was a work of staggering genius. So while others were going around with "Frankie Say Relax" T-Shirts I had the one below:

3. Alice Cooper Raise Your Fist & Yell Tour T-Shirt
As the 80s went on I lost touch with Metal. I never really got into Thrash and as for Hair Metal... Well I'd rather have worn a Frankie Say Relax T-Shirt. So the last one I bought would have been the Alice Cooper shirt I bought when I saw him at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1987 or so, when he was touring the Raise Your Fist & Yell album with a guitarist that looked like Rambo.

Pretty ugly, eh? Mind you, it's nowhere near as repulsive as Raise Your Fist & Yell.

And that concludes my relationship with Rock T-Shirts. Except that it doesn't of course, I've started buying them again in the last few years, and have a liking for faux-vintage shirts for tours that I was far too young to have seen at the time (so I have a Kiss Cobo Hall 1975 shirt, despite the fact that in 1975 I was 5 years old and hadn't traveled further than Aberdeen). In the Metal: A Headbanger's Journey film, Bruce Dickinson speculates that metal fans have managed to preserve their inner 15 year-old into their adult selves. I think he's onto something, and I'm sure my Black Sabbath Vol 4 T-Shirt would agree.

Branded Metal

I took the above photo a couple of weeks ago while out shopping. I wasn't aware that Converse had released a set of Black Sabbath trainers. The ones featuring the artwork of the first album are tempting in a garish way; I like the fact that they subtly declare your allegiance. You can imagine yourself seeing someone the bus wearing these and nodding knowingly. "Can you help me?", you would ask, "Are you for my brain?" they would reply. Except of course there's the likelihood that the person wearing them wouldn't recognise the secret language, or indeed any Sabbath song.

The evidence is accumulating that Heavy Metal band names, logos and artwork may live on longer than their music. Bands such as AC/DC, Motorhead, Kiss and Black Sabbath seem to being used more and more frequently to project some kind of image, real of otherwise; imagine Che Guevara but with a Jack Daniels T Shirt.

I've nothing against bands "maximising their revenue streams" via Motorheadphones or Kiss Koffins, but I can't help thinking that ultimately they'll overdo it and become shorthand for a lifestyle choice, like what has happened with Bob Marley and happening with the Ramones.

Of course, the irony is that 40 years ago the idea that Sabbath and fashion would in any way intersect would have seemed as likely as Ozzy singing in front of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. But then what do I know? Perhaps the officially-licensed Sabotage Chequered Underwear and Red Tights Combo is already in development.

Pioneers

An old boss of mine had a line that he would use whenever someone was trying to sell him an idea on the basis that if we went down a particular direction, we would be "pioneers".
"I don't want to be a pioneer", he would reply, "I know what happened to the pioneers; the indians filled them with arrows."

The clip above is from a Black Sabbath concert in Paris in 1970, which has been knocking around on DVD for a while now. When I first saw this concert, what struck me was the audience. You get a good look at them at the start of this clip, as the cameraman helpfully pans across the cinema in which the show takes place. It's not a heavy metal audience. Instead, it's a bunch of French hipsters, who look a lot like the 1968 students from Bertolucci's The Dreamers. You can imagine that they had turned up to see what this new English rock band sounded like; the one that the music press was saying were even louder than the Yardbirds. Louder than the Yardbirds! Ce n'est pas possible! They probably showed Zabriske Point afterwards.

But of course it's not a heavy metal audience. There were no heavy metal audiences before Black Sabbath. No denim jackets with back patches. No studded wristbands. No air guitars. None of the above. Sabbath must have spent the first 5 or so years of their existence playing the likes of N.I.B. and Black Sabbath in front of crowds of bemused hip young things wondering what the devil was going on. That couldn't have been as easy as it sounds. They must have taken a lot of arrows.

The Checked Drawers of Destiny

What's your favourite Black Sabbath album? Don't be coy now, I can't imagine that anyone who comes by this blog doesn't have a favourite Sabbath record. Me, I sometimes lean towards Paranoid, but if push comes to shove I'll probably choose the last decent album they made with Ozzy: Sabotage.

In the same way that Ozzy Osbourne is now famous for advertising World of Warcraft and yelling "Shaaaaron!", Sabotage these days is probably best known for appearing on Worst Album Cover of All Time Lists, rubbing shoulders with dodgy country and hip hop records. I've always thought that bands should be able to change or update album covers when they're reissued, in the same way that paperback books are (I'm sure Blind Faith would agree with this idea). Perhaps then, Sabotage would be looked at differently. Which it deserves to be, because it's a remarkable record.

It's remarkable because it's mental. It was made after Sabbath learned that they had been swindled out of heaps of cash due to dodgy deals and that despite having sold millions of records they were poor as church mice. Well, maybe not church mice. Agnostic mice. You know what I mean. Anyway, the resulting album is the Black Sabbath album that really should be called Paranoid. Songs display wild mood swings, gonzoid riffs one minute, chilled out hippy stuff the next: Symptom of the Universe, Thrill of it All, The Writ, none of these were taking their tablets according to the prescription. Sabbath were never really there for the nice things in life, but they never made anything else quite as angry and paranoid as Sabotage. The album is characterised by a furious and impotent anger at their problems, like Caliban raging at his reflection in the water. It's bloody brilliant. 

And then they got rubbish. Their next album, Technical Ecstasy, is awful. Full of songs with titles (Rock & Roll Doctor, Dirty Women, Gypsy) that even Whitesnake would have thought twice about. They never recovered.

Footnote: You know that little piece of music "Blow on a jug" that they tagged on to the end of the album? Well, I have to confess that when I first heard I wondered if it was really part of the record or if their record company had pressed the album on top of another one. My 13 year old self hadn't really figured out the whole record making process. To be fair to him, the record was the reissue on the cheap-as-chips NEMS label. Anything was possible with that crowd.