By Steve Almond
Britny Fox promotional postcard, 1991.
I spent a thousand nights as a rock critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived for three years at the tail end of the eighties and where I grew old enough to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in nature and that it had everything to do with desire and physical release and ecstatic worship of the Godhead, which is to say, with kaballah.
I say this with almost no solid evidence, as befits the mystical assertion. I am, after all, a typical American Jew, properly secularized, properly humanized, long ago sprung from the superstitions and rabbinical esoterica of the shtetl. I grew up in a progressive California city, with a couple of parents who dabbled in hippiedom.
I knew that my Jewish classmates went to temple. They took part in youth group ski trips and sponsored tree plantings in Israel. But our family took religion in strange, frankly contrarian manners. Let me offer the DIY bar mitvah as a prime example. This was a concept my father pioneered, one which did not include an actual rabbi, or an actual temple, though it did include a post-speech hot tub. My father—blessed be his meshugas—took it upon himself to teach us the necessary Hebrew prayers. We went at these phonetically, the result being a version of the mother tongue that would be hard to call intelligible. My grandfather Irving’s exact words: "It sounded like you were speaking Spanish, kiddo." Fair enough.
What I’m suggesting is that we missed out on the communal aspect of Judaism, the many coming together as one, and that this was part of a deeper familial neurosis that kept us at the fringe of things. We were shy people, frightened of connection, frightened of intense emotion; we used snobbery as a dodge.
As to music, my father sang opera; my mother was a concert-quality pianist. I took piano lessons from an elderly Russian woman, Mrs. Sosoyev, for several years. I don’t remember many of the actual lessons, only that Mrs. Sosoyev would, on certain days, accompany me to her bathroom and (somewhat frighteningly) hold my small, grubby hands under the hot water spigot. I was not much of a pupil. I lacked the patience, the necessary self-belief, and showed a tendency to bang the keys of my mother’s piano in frustration.
So I became, instead, a devout listener. I had grown up on a steady diet of Beatles and Stones, dabbled in prog rock (Styx was my vice; I spent one unfortunate summer memorizing the entire Paradise Theater album) and eventually threw in my lot with the various lonely boys of New Wave. The point of rock music, as far as I was concerned, was to express a sense of stylish alienation, a kind of glum glam personified by crooners such as Morrissey and Gordon Gano. Remember: Boys don’t cry.
You will have to imagine, then, what it was like for me to attend my first heavy metal concert. I was fresh from college, the new meat rock critic at the El Paso Times. This was an October night, down to an autumnal 85, and I was one of 15,000 people packed into the University of Texas at El Paso auditorium for an evening with Metallica. It was like nothing I’d ever expereinced: the sheer volume of the music, the strobe lights, the deafening and endless bombast. I was in the second row, front and center, stabbing song titles and glib adjectives onto a reporter’s pad while, all around me, 10,000 kids, skinny boys mostly, flailed and howled.
I didn’t really get what was happening at first. Which is to say: I thought of myself as slumming. Observing El Paso’s metalheads as they thrashed against their own bleak prospects, as they closed their eyes and hoped for a way out through the music—all this was a matter of professional duty.
But I was more like those kids than I would have ever admitted to myself, as insecure about my manhood, as desperate for affirmation, as hungry for touch. It didn’t matter that I wore skinny thrift-store ties and wingtips, or carried around business cards with my name and title printed on them. It didn’t even matter that I had a girlfriend who read Nietzsche. What mattered was my insides, which were in a continuous state of riotous want. I wanted sex and violence, simple enough, but more than this, deeper than this, I wanted a brotherhood of belief.
And there were certain nights when this desire became manifest. I’m thinking, in particular, of a triple bill (Ratt, with Britny Fox and Kix) at the El Paso County Coliseum, which is where they held the rodeo, such that the place still smelled of rodeo: burnt popcorn and hay and horse shit. There were no floor seats at this show. It was just us dudes standing around; I was alone, per usual. My girlfriend did not accompany me to metal shows. I found myself chatting up a couple of vatos between sets and then a joint was being passed around and I did my civic duty, took a hit, then another, and Ratt hit the stage and the crowd surged forward. They’d rigged the drums so that every time the drummer took a whack the stage lights changed configuration. I was fairly certain I had been beamed inside a pinball machine.
Then I gave myself over the spectacle entirely, dropped my notebook and released my body to the music. I can remember the bodies banging around me, which became my own body banging, and I remember gazing at Stephen Pearcy, the lead singer of Ratt, screeching from atop a stack of amps. He seemed me, in that moment, something more than a man, something closer to a vision.
What I was seeing—I recognize this now—was the Godhead as described in the Zohar: a manifestation of the Almighty revealed to those below as a body of bright emanations. This is the cosmology put forward by the Kaballah: you can’t see God Himself. He’s ineffable. But you can, in the midst of certain ecstatic states, catch sight of his emanations.
It’s true that I was stoned, and true, also, that the mind of the 23-year-old stoner is prone to such aggrandized visions. But I was also an athiestic cynic who regarded God as little more than a powerful fantasy. I was as shocked as anyone to feel the warm prickle of a celestial presence.
Not that I felt this every time out, mind you. It couldn’t be summoned by my own desire, or a particularly kickass set, or even pot. I would simply, during particular shows, lose myself in the riot of lights and notes and suddenly the lead singer, or the guitarist (whoever was leaping in the spotlight) would devolve into a loosely knit body of emanations, what a kabbalist would identify as the limbs of the primordial man, Adam Kadmon. It happened with David Coverdale of Whitesnake and Jeff Keith of Tesla and Kip Winger. I didn’t even like Winger.
Actually, though, I doubt a kabbalist would have much patience with my visions. Notwithstanding the romantic blather of Madonna and her ilk, the Kabbalah is a mostly bloodless pursuit, an abstract set of textual interpretations that has more in common with a cryptogram than the soothing, spiritual tropes of Buddhism.
It is only this one aspect of Kaballah—the revelation of the Godhead—that seems related to my metal days. My great idea, the one living inside me, was to lay eyes on the divine, some trace of the divine.
For the devoted metalhead this happened all the time. They could slip into their rooms and crank the headphones, or pore over the letters of their favorite lyrics, and feel God. But I needed the shows, the presence of other believers, a large body of them. It was their faith I was connecting to, or absorbing, their mystical reverence. And here, I think, is where my particular upbringing comes into play.
What I had wanted as a child—but turned away from—was some sense of belonging, an affiliation that linked me to the rest of the universe. I had grown up in a family of men, so my sense of belonging was inexorably linked to certain ideals, the kind of masculine omnipotence that (for better or worse) found its expression in guys like Kip Winger.
It didn’t matter that these shows were an illusion, crafted with catwalks and costumes and dry ice machines and lights. What mattered was the vision forged, which was of sufficient majesty to quiet the chaos within me. This is our basic human impulse. We wish for an end to the chaos of doubt. At least, that was my wish, on those certain nights, in those packed and sweaty arenas, with the lightning and din above me and 10,000 brothers surging around me. This was me, at last, finding my tribe. This was me gazing, with them, upon the great father sent, at last, to soothe us.
Steve Almond is a bestselling author and writing teacher; his recent books include Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow.