  I
was reading a while back about this guy called Mingering
Mike who, back in the 70s, created a whole fictional
recording career for himself and his friends. He hand-painted
album covers and disc labels and recorded a cappella
cassettes of his original compositions. It got me
thinking back to my own imaginary music career, as
Yugoslavian heavy metal singer/guitarist Jim Rock,
leader of the band Iron Metal.
The germ of the idea was formed during repeated viewings
of a videotaped nightclub performance by the Swiss
heavy metal band Krokus, a program shown innumerable
times on the fledgling USA network during 1982. By
December of that year, I had developed a minor obsession
with the show, especially frontman Mark Storace's
mangled attempts at stereotypical heavy metal between-song
patter ("See this little shitty newspaper bit?
The Brooklyn Zoo rocks tonight!") After watching
it with my best friend, Tim, we hit on the idea of
forming our own imaginary metal band. The idea was
to be from an even less likely country of origin than
Switzerland, so we made our "band" natives
of Yugoslavia and gave them the cleverly redundant
name Iron Metal.
I had only started teaching myself guitar a year
earlier and still couldn't play chords. A friend had
shown me an open E tuning, and I'd developed a small
amount of skill for making a bar across all six strings
and moving from one fret to another without pausing
too long to think about it. Tim and I took turn writing
lyrics, using the four-line-verse-four-line-chorus
template of the first Ramones album and concentrating
on the most metal-oriented subjects we could think
of-sex, alcohol, drugs, the devil, policemen and their
nuts, and bridges engulfed in steam-all expressed
in the English-as-a-second-language style of Krokus.
I hastily picked out a sequence of "chords"
for each song and wrote down a number to represent
the appropriate fret on which to lay my meaty ring
finger. Then I plugged my no-name hollow-body electric
guitar (purchased in a pawnshop a year earlier) into
my distortion device-an old cassette deck which wouldn't
play tapes anymore but could still pass a signal-and
sent the output into a retired home stereo amplifier
which pumped 10 watts per channel into an old pair
of car stereo speakers that I'd inherited. Two mikes
were plugged into my new cassette deck, and Tim and
I made like two wacky Zagreb-born rock stars for around
11 minutes.
Who knew 1982 would be such a banner year for imaginary
metal? That was the year that three American comic
actors and technically proficient musicians-alumni
of the Credibility Gap and the National Lampoon shows-and
TV's "Meathead" were in L.A. shooting a
feature-length improv comedy about the declining fortunes
of a once-hot British hard rock band; a continent
and an ocean away, some of the leading lights of the
British "New Wave of Comedy" were making
a short film for the 'Comic Strip Presents...' series,
concerning a barely competent young band in the Def
Leppard mode. Meanwhile, in my bedroom in my parents'
house in northeast Alabama, two musically challenged
hillbillies were conjuring up minimalist metal with
our two growly voices and one poorly played guitar.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of all this is not
that we were both legal adults at the time of this
first Iron Metal session, but that we continued to
make recordings in this vein for the next nine years.
(I eventually learned how to play actual chords!)
When I listen to these early recordings now, it's
difficult for me to separate them from the severe
head injury I suffered in a car wreck a few months
before Iron Metal was born. My period of recovery
was a scary and disorienting time, but it turned out
to be quite productive. I made several new and enduring
friendships then, and my altered brain chemistry allowed
me to devote a surprising amount of time and energy
to the kind of idea that normally would have been
nothing more than a throwaway gag in a soon-to-be-forgotten
conversation.
The material you have here represents a triple-album
set (in just under 30 minutes!) composed of the group's
first set of recordings, the 11-minute 'Iron Metal
I' from December 1982, along with the more ambitious
double-album set 'Rock on the Hole' from about six
months later. Much as George Michael's UK solo hit
"Careless Whisper" was released in the States
as a Wham! record to help build brand-name recognition,
this Jim Rock solo album is now being released under
the Iron Metal banner. I apologize to any purists
who have been offended.
Perry Amberson
April 20, 2004 |
