“It was huge”: the era Slash called the best years for metal
The metal genre has a spectrum of connotations for music fans. Those of a harder disposition would understandably look to gatekeep the title and spare it for music of a certain volume and tempo that fits with the full-blooded intent of the genre. While others, perhaps to the dismay of the aforementioned, would be willing to include the likes of Slash and Axl Rose into the fold under the guise of ‘hair metal’.
As the decadence of 1970s rock spilt into the 1980s, Guns N’ Roses became somewhat of a punky antidote to bands like The Rolling Stones. But whether by design or not, their music slipped into a brand of commercial rock ready to dominate the charts in a way your average metal band perhaps couldn’t.
While they mastered the art of commercialism, a brand of counter-culture rock, creating choruses that punk-loving children could sing with their parents, their emergence was rooted in hard rock sensibilities. And seven years prior to the release of the band’s breakout album, Appetite for Destruction, Slash believes the foundations of metal were laid, and one particular year boasted the competition of the genre’s best bands.
“One of the biggest years for metal in the ’80s was 1980,” Slash explained. “And you had Back In Black come out, and then you had Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman come out, and all that. And Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell. It was a huge, huge year for rock.”
Slash has never been shy about expressing his love for both Osbourne and Black Sabbath. They’ve widely been regarded as the godfathers of metal, with Jack Black calling Osbourne the “motherfucker” who “invented heavy metal”, while Slash backed up his claims by stating, “Black Sabbath was the first band that defined heavy metal for me. It had that heavy sort of approach that made you feel like ‘These guys are for real.’”
But Heaven and Hell was the first record the band recorded without Osbourne on vocals. It was Ronnie James Dio’s first effort in filling in for ‘The Prince Of Darkness’, by bringing a completely different brand of singing to the band. More theatrical than Osbourne, it introduced a more ballad-tinged soundscape to Sabbath’s brand of metal, which can be easily identified if you trace forward to Appetite for Destruction in 1987. With Slash on guitar and Axl Rose charging the songs forward into the realms of operatic rebellion, they developed a discography that Dio could have seamlessly contributed to.
However, as Slash remarked, the decade began with a thumping boom in 1980 with those three records. But in keeping with the two decades that preceded it, it seems this particular brand of metal would have just the ten years to enjoy its moment in the sun, for the worlds of rock were ready to shift come the turn of the decade. Appetite for Destruction would begin a swansong for a genre that would give way to a burgeoning grunge and britpop movement, which would soon leave the eccentricity of its metal forefathers behind.
