Chris Holmes of WASP drinks so much that he doesn’t even know how much he drinks. Long live rawk.
It’s hard to believe that Penelope Spheeris’ three documentaries about the grime and glamor of the hard-rocking lifestyle in L.A. have never been available on DVD. Hell, they were barely even available on VHS back in the day. But now, at last, the Decline of Western Civilization Collection is out on DVD and Blu-Ray — a no-brainer, perhaps, although for Spheeris it was anything but easy. She told the Wall Street Journal:
“That’s my identity, those movies, and I wanted it to be right, but looking back at Decline meant I had to relive the pain of not getting them seen. … [Putting together the reissue] was like being at the shrink for two years, and not being allowed to leave.”
The first film chronicles the L.A. punk scene at the turn of the ’80s, focusing on bands including Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fear, Germs, and X. The second, subtitled “The Metal Years,” documents the music and (more importantly) excesses of KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison, Aerosmith, Megadeth and others. The third movie looks at the homeless punk scene in L.A. circa the mid-’90s.
In our brief tribute to the late Christopher Lee, we mentioned that he began a sideline as a heavy metal singer late in life. Rolling Stone fleshes it out a bit more: By the time of his collaboration with Manowar on “Dark Avenger” Lee was already a bona fide metal recording artist in
Mastodon has just released their latest video, a dark puppet-show journey into the secret world cats might very well inhabit. The clip is directed by Skinner, an artist you’ll be seeing in a future issue of Heavy Metal. Skinner on the concept, from an extensive post at The Art of Skinner: One
The music video for “The New International Sound Part II” by Gener8ion with M.I.A. shows scenes from Shaolin Tagou, China’s biggest Kung Fu School. According to the award-winning 2012 documentary Dragon Girls, the school is home to 26,000 students. Dragon Girls was directed by German
We imagine the anti-consumerist, anti-everything anarchist Johnny Rotten circa 1977 peering into his future and vomiting just a little bit at this development. (We imagine the current John Lydon just thinks it’s funny.) Virgin Money, a tentacle of the Virgin empire headed by Richard Branson,
If you follow the Swedish Satanic metal band Ghost (operating as Ghost B.C. in the States), you know they’ve had some big news: Frontman Papa Emeritus II was given the boot and replaced by Papa Emeritus III. This was announced last month in a strange clip that ran during a late-night airing
Jim Carrey was bouncing around in 1988—he’d starred in a mediocre ’80s comedy (Once Bitten), carried off a supporting role in a big hit (Peggy Sue Got Married) and even had his own sappy, short-lived sitcom (The Duck Factory). He was Jim Carrey but not JIM CARREY, MEGASTAR. He ended
Spotify, that ginormous music-streaming, data-compiling beast, takes a look at its own numbers regularly and spits out some idea of what’s what—and in an interesting recent report, the word from Spotifyland is that heavy metal fans all over the world are the “most loyal.” Now,
Nekrogoblikon’s “No One Survives” was a surprise YouTube hit of 2012 thanks to a fun, re-watchable and touching (if bloody) music video. For a band that caters to goblins and goblin enthusiasts, 3.8 million views (and counting) is a pretty big number. But that was then, this is
In a recent interview with Conan O’Brien, Bill Kreutzmann, longtime Grateful Dead drummer, reminisced about the time he and his bandmates performed on the Hugh Hefner-hosted talk show Playboy After Dark. According to Kreutzmann, an associate of the band, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and
