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The book is always better than the YouTube, but with a few weeks to go before Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal book is available, at least this video preview offers a quick fix.

So after kicking back and watching the disappointingly short French Open men’s tennis finals last Sunday [yeah, I know], I fired up some YouTube footage of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe’s insane Wimbledon epic battle in 1980 [yeah, I know]. Not to be outdone by myself, I thought it would be a hoot to see old Torben Ulrich [yeah, I know] kicking up some sod back in his tennis-playing heyday. Instead, I found this peculiar piece of evidence.

After retiring from tennis, Lars Ulrich’s dad came into public view during Metallica’s painful Some Kind of Monster film. In the movie, this bright and sage voice listens to a preview of what the band had created during their years in the studio. After, he squints his huge black eyes and proclaims: “I would say, ‘delete that.’” And they did! Who with a beard so long could be wrong? Turns out he was just protecting his own turf — check out the druidic Ulrich the Elder here exploring some epic, spacey, meditative sound design while battling a laptop loaded with glitch samples.

I’m pretty sure Cop Shoot Cop is the best band New York City ever produced, based on the caustic metal-scraping Headkick Facsimile record from 1988, and then the slick gallery of nightmares Ask Questions Later from 1993. With two bassists thrashing under a dangerous tower of metal percussion, this big giant barbed middle finger of a band decorated their sound Lower East Side Chainsaw Massacre style with all the best elements of no wave, upscale “new music”, punk, and maybe even thrash metal. This was the angry, amped-up pinnacle of a scene that spawned Sonic Youth, Swans, Unsane, Prong, and Pussy Galore. Most importantly, they felt like a grief-stricken junk monster rising from the smoke, sweat, and grease of New York City. During the glowering days of 1988-1993, they orchestrated perfectly the reality of the crack epidemic, bums roasting pigeons in trash cans, blood-soaked heroin tissues tiling bar bathroom ceilings, random late-night shootings, nervousness all day, and burned out cars everywhere. And they transcended that with Ask Questions Later, when they became more like the Bad Seeds and less like the Birthday Party.

Hip enough to tap the vein, Strapping Young Lad did a bad metal cover of “Room 429″ from Ask Questions Later, but the original is really a masterpiece of drug/torture/suicide narrative. Great lyrics, great rhythmic overkill, great band.

The man in the metal cage, C$C drummer Phil Puleo, runs a retrospective site which includes several dozen MP3s spanning the band’s career, including album and live tracks, demos, and a Peel Session. I saw them play several times in the early 1990s, and I used to see the guys around a lot, but I was too far on the periphery to even began to tell tales now on the turmoil they went through in those days. I remember their tour van was an out-of-commission special education “short bus” with a military camo paint job. That was pretty funny.

LINK to copshootcop.com and updates on the veterans.

How brutally overconfident do you have to be to name your band Soggy? These French freaks come to NWOBHM power-riffing by way of an advanced Stooges fixation, complete with rubberized, writhing, and shirtless frontman. If rock and roll is really about shoes and haircuts (as David Lee Roth claims), then Soggy are true rulers, judging by this 1981 clip from French TV. Messiah Marcolin — eat your heart out.

Thanks Brian Turner!

From the A-Z band biography reference section in Swedish Death Metal:

“SPORTLOV — The natural end result of the black metal movement. In 2000 some musicians from Uppsala heard about the German band Vintersemestre (which means “Winter Holiday” in Swedish), and decide the ridiculousness of black metal had gone too far. (What kind of name is that, anyway?) They decided to make some extreme black metal themselves, basing lyrics around winter sports to mock the genre’s obsessions with snow, ice, trolls, etc. They succeeded beyond all expectations, and sound very good! This might come as no surprise, since members hail from supreme metal and crust acts like Defleshed, Dark Funeral, Diskonto, F.K.Ü, and Uncurbed. Highly recommended.”

“Jump,” Ft. Lauderdale train wreck–Roth and backing keyboard track are fine, but is Eddie playing Merzbow?, 2/20/08

Word on the streets of Los Angeles is that Van Halen are canceling hotel rooms and going back into hiding, and not planning to finish the remaining 20 dates of the thus-far seamlessly executed Roth reunion tour. This is sad news if the tour is actually canceled, as the dozens of shows since September have been a nightly slap in the face to naysayers who thought the band wouldn’t last a week. I was almost ready to thank Valerie Bertinelli for writing her book about sex and drugs and Eddie, filling in the gossip that I left out of Everybody Wants Some, but if her Oprah/Larry King/The View dishing has sent Eddie off the deep end and jeopardized this tour, she better not expect a bouquet from Wolfie come Mother’s Day.

There’s a show tomorrow night in Dallas, so we’ll know what’s happening soon enough. And now we know…a little. After a day of truly frenzied Internet rumormongering, Van Halen came forth in late afternoon and announced rescheduled dates for the four shows that were supposed to happen this week, including tonight’s. Everything should be back to normal next Monday, March 11, in Charlottesville, VA. By way of explanation: “According to Eddie Van Halen’s physician, he is undergoing a battery of comprehensive medical tests to determine a defined diagnosis and recommended medical procedures.”

Okay, Job for a Cowboy are now officially unemployed–Spongebob can dry up and blow away. This Sesame Street edit by YouTube user HATW1R3 is a true blasterpiece, based on a song by defunct Dutch goregrinders Last Days of Humanity.

Thanks, Monte!

This “heavy” 1972 session by proto-metal bangers Atomic Rooster is legendary because replacement singer Chris Farlowe casually chomps a sandwich throughout the duration of the song. The early ’70s were all about unconventional technique and ultra-tight headbands!

Thanks to everybody who sent over the stripped DLR vocal from “Runnin’ With the Devil” this week. All of you. Thanks. And you and you and you. I appreciate it. I feel a little guilty for not already warping it on top of a dancehall riddim. But Eric Haugen has synced the naked Roth with this 1978 Van Halen promo video shot at the Whiskey. Great!

Thanks, Todd.

Hey, good news–it looks like Rick Ernst’s long-awaited Get Thrashed could finally appear on DVD late this spring. Fingers upside-down crossed…

In the meantime, avail ye of one the funniest and pure-hearted DVD documents ever to arise from the corpse of thrash or any form of metal, Rotting Corpse - Circus of Fools, by director SPLarsen with huge participation by the band. Here’s the trailer:

As you can see, speed-addled nonsense abounds. The movie itself is a series of semi-sequential three to four-minute narratives by a large cast of characters, building up to a thrilling climax where singer/guitarist Walt Trachsler gets his ass kicked on stage by Tom Wopat, aka Luke Duke from the original Dukes of Hazzard. (Huh? Don’t worry, I didn’t ruin the ending.)

Circus of Fools is a great story of a group of metal friends putting everything into a fool’s errand, making a lot of mistakes, and taking pleasure from perverse actions. For instance, Walt smashes his guitar into pieces at every show (given to him at no small expense in the mid-80s by older local rock guitarist “Diamond” Darrell Abbott!), only to rebuild it before the next gig. I’ve never seen a better document of how a fringe metal band forms, survives, and fights the world.

At the end of the day, this is all about the friendships of a bunch of dudes from Texas, and how they lived metal every day. Former Overkill drummer Rat Skates’ Born in the Basement DVD is equally insightful and entertaining, yet he reveals more of the insane logistics and career aspects of launching the thrash movement from scratch. The two movies together paint the thrash microcosm in great detail–and I hope in 3005 a conquering alien race discovers these great documents of our human heritage.

LINK

Thanks Steve Murphy!