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This past Tuesday night, I went to Charlotte’s newest live-music venue- the Fillmore. Anvil was performing and this past year’s documentary, ‘Anvil: The Story of Anvil’, depicting their history and struggles to achieve rock stardom had won me over; not with their music, but because these men have marched thanklessly to their own thrash metal drum for more than a quarter-century.
I got into heavy metal music when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was loud and aggressive and was one of three things in those tender years that captured my imagination; the others being comic books and professional wrestling. These interests shaped me and, in some ways, have never stopped being influences, but as I got older they changed- and so did I.
Wrestling evolved into sports-entertainment, and in its effort to appeal to multitudes of mainstream masses and marketing moneymen, it moved in a direction that left me in the weeds.
Comic books turned on me as well. Prices climbed and climbed, but creativity waned. Even the look and the feel of a comic in my hands felt foreign as we neared the 90s, with slick pages and computerized colors with digital dialogue. ‘Alternative’ and ‘variant’ cover-art filled the book racks- hoping to get avid collectors to buy the same book twice, while stories started arcing and looping from title-to-title- stretching thin my teenage dollar. Now and then I would bite, buying into a separate title just to get to the end of the story I was reading, and most times it left me feeling cheated, and with a comic I’d never look at again.
Heavy metal, hard rock, or whatever name you want to give it, also began biting me in the ass. It was 1985, and I remember being at my friend’s house as we waited anxiously for the MTV world premier of Motley Crue’s new video. The video would be the first taste we’d get of their new album, ‘Theatre of Pain’ which I’d been chomping at the bit for. Even the name of the album excited me, but then the vee-jay played the ‘Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room’ video and changed everything. It was with uneasiness that I picked up that album, and with confusion that I listened to track-after-track. Some songs I dug, but probably because I wanted so badly to salvage something of my love for that band. Crue became rich and famous, putting out more bad music, sounding nothing like the grit and grime of 81’s ‘Too Fast for Love’. Stripper music, ballads and anthems- polished and pretty; designed, I guess, to appeal to that wider market.
Too many other bands followed suit, and where I used to pick up magazines like ‘Hit Parader’ or ‘Circus’ for rock and metal news and reviews, those were soon full of hair-sprayed, pretty faces after ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ of their own. Image overtook the music, and pages full of Poison and pop-metal had no appeal for me.
I stopped buying wrestling magazines too. Where they once gave me glimpses of the stories being told in ring all over the country, they had become as boring as the stuff on TV. There was a time that a wrestler could become imprinted in my memory with no more than a gory photo and some copy covering the blood feud they were embroiled in. They had the same effect on me as comic book heroes and villains did- only they were real people. I had never seen him wrestle, but Bill Apter and others had me convinced that Bruiser Brody was the wildest and perhaps most dangerous wrestlers to ever set foot in a wresting ring- perhaps only rivaled by the Madman from the Sudan, Abdullah the Butcher- who I had also never seen wrestle, but saw enough pictures to believe he was as insane as he looked. These men didn’t need to speak, in fact I had no idea what their voices sounded like- the imagination they stirred through those photographs spoke for them- just as pro wrestlers used to in the ring. I never needed the Masked Superstar to say he was after Backlund more than once. His actions in the ring said it for him, and his style and presence made his claim. Superstar’s neckbreaker and cold cover told me that Backlund was in trouble and would eventually have to face this challenger. I was only eleven years old, but I got it- without two hours of talk to hand-feed the story to me. What Superstar didn’t say on the mic- he said in the ring, and my imagination did the rest. He was a great performer and storyteller.
Anvil are those comic book visionaries- like Alan Moore’s uncompromising ‘Miracleman’ run, the Bruiser Brodys and Abdullah the Butchers that carried on without commercial success or TV cameras, and continued to do exactly what they always had, despite the ‘changing landscape’ of their industry, and they are the heavy metal band that continues to plug in and play, twenty-five years later.
The Anvil documentary involves a loose concept of “making it”, but no matter if it’s a couple-dozen diehard fans in Denmark or ten-thousand Japanese metalheads filling a field in Fukuoka, Lips, Robb and G5 have already made it. They do what they love, enjoy it, and have never changed the original formula. That attitude may have limited them through the years, and maybe they don’t have the fanbase they could, but I have no doubt that the one they have is as faithful and devoted to Anvil as Anvil are to making their music.
To Read the Rest Check out http://gonzogeek.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/its-a-work-anvil-the-story-of-pro-wrestling/
