Welcome to another edition of From My Collection. A couple nights ago, I went out to dinner with some friends. As the evening went on and we reminisced over various memories, one friend asked the question, “What was the first record you ever bought?” For me, there’s two answers to this question: AC/DC’s High Voltage and Quiet Riot’s Metal Health. I was 10 years old and I bought them from my neighborhood Half Price Books for the low, low price of $2.99 each. Mind you, this was about the going price for vinyl in the late 2000s, before hipsters hijacked the market, but I digress. The point is, 13 years and a few thousand records later, these two were the ones that started it all. In today’s essay, I look back upon Quiet Riot’s Metal Health, what it meant to me, and what it meant to heavy metal as a whole upon its release. Get ready to bang your head!!!
The late 2000s were a last hurrah for the music industry as past generations knew it. Vinyl couldn’t be given away. To hear new music, you had to actually show up to the store and purchase the CD (streaming wouldn’t catch on for quite some time). And FM radio was still half decent. Sure, it was a far cry from its album oriented glory days of the 70s and 80s, but there was still a wider variety of music being showcased to a large-scale audience. This was before the soulless bastards at iHeartRadio swooped in and downgraded every classic rock radio playlist in America to “Hotel California”, “Freebird”, and half of Back in Black.
Here in Chicago, there were three stations I listened to on the regular. The first was 97.1 The Drive, which is still on the air to this day. Their main focus was flagship classic rock, bands like The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and so on, with deep tracks sprinkled in between. Granted, those deep tracks are played less and less as the years go by, but they have an entire HD station devoted to these album cuts, so I can’t entirely fault them. Plus, a couple days ago they played Judas Priest’s rendition of “The Green Manalishi (With the Two-Pronged Crown)”. Where else are you gonna hear that over the airwaves?
The second was 97.9 The Loop (R.I.P.). The longest running rock station in the city, I could always rely on them to deliver my fix of heavier bands, like Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica. They’d also play Queensrÿche, Megadeth, and Dio era Black Sabbath. You know, bands The Drive were “too scared” to play. And then there was 104.3 Jack FM. In what can only be described as the fever dream of a bunch of middle aged businessmen who grew up in the heart of the MTV era, Jack FM was a DJ-less radio station that played a variety of rock and pop hits from the 70s and 80s. The only breaks in between songs were for commercials or a snarky voice (presumably “Jack” himself) that said, “104.3 Jack FM, playing what WE want.”
Jack’s format was largely a hybrid of the Drive’s and the Loop’s, but with an extra emphasis on 80s hair bands: Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Skid Row, and Quiet Riot, just to name a few. Now when I say Quiet Riot, I’m speaking of two songs in particular: “Metal Health”, which only got played occasionally, and “Cum on Feel the Noize”, which got played A LOT. I used to sit around my radio, waiting for the song to come on. When it did (and it always did), I’d turn the volume knob all the way to the right and sing along as loud as I could.
Around this same time, my mom had just gotten her record player working again and was playing various selections from her collection. It inspired me to start one of my own and to explore the world of rock n’ roll outside of The Beatles. One weekend in 2009, I went over to Half Price Books in Niles, a little suburb 10 minutes from me, with my allowance money in hand. I didn’t know what I was gonna get, so I went for the first two that caught my eye. The first was AC/DC’s High Voltage, conveniently placed front and center in the “A” section. I stared at the cover of Angus Young looking all crazed with his Gibson SG. As I turned it over, I immediately recognized some of the tracks. “”T.N.T.”, “It’s a Long Way to the Top”, “The Jack”…hey, the Loop plays these!”
That was album #1. I had enough money for one more. And there it was, in all its 80s metal glory. “Woah.” That was the only word I could muster as the masked, straightjacketed, one-eyed man on the cover of Quiet Riot’s Metal Health stared into my soul. If I listened close enough, I could almost hear him whisper, “Buy me.” And I did! But not just for the cover alone. As I turned over to the back, I glanced over the track list. I knew “Metal Health” was on there because, duh. But how about…yes! There it is! “Cum on Feel the Noize”! I was sold. This song that I’ve rattled my brain and blown my voice out to on numerous occasions was now MINE.
As soon as I got home, I dropped the needle on Metal Health. By now, I was well acquainted with its opening two tracks, but they sounded so much bigger and broader and better on vinyl than they did on radio. It was at that moment I knew vinyl was for me. If I turned it up loud enough, it sounded like Quiet Riot was playing live in my bedroom, and for all purposes they were! Yet again, I banged my head to “Metal Health” and went mental for “Cum on Feel the Noize”, which I wouldn’t learn was a Slade cover until junior high.
10 year old me was a little taken aback upon hearing “Don’t Wanna Let You Go”, a gentle, melodic ballad. I thought these types of songs were reserved for bands like Styx and Foreigner. You know, “dad rock” bands who could go “mom rock” when need be, not a metal band like Quiet Riot. But as much as I didn’t want to like it, I couldn’t help but sway my head back and forth to the lush melodies. Furthermore, Kevin DuBrow gives a phenomenal vocal performance. “Slick Black Cadillac” managed to get my blood pumping, evoking the young, dumb, hard rocking fun of “Cum on Feel the Noize”, while “Love’s a Bitch” achieved the exact opposite. This was dark and heavy, reminding me of Black Sabbath, who my dad had just introduced me to the summer prior. As if that wasn’t enough, I felt so rebellious having a song that contained the word “bitch” blaring from my stereo.
As I turned over to side B, I was greeted by another extremely heavy song, albeit one that tapped into a different dimension of heaviness, “Breathless”. If “Love’s a Bitch” was the distant L.A. cousin of Sabbath, “Breathless” was the distant L.A. cousin of Screaming for Vengeance era Priest. It was rapid and aggressive, yes, but hooky and melodic as well. Meanwhile, “Run for Cover” got me pushing the limits of my neck muscles again. As DuBrow shouted, “You better run for cover! I’m a hit and run lover!”, I thought to myself, “THIS is what heavy metal is all about.”
“Battle Axe” served as a brief minute and a half interlude, showcasing guitarist Carlos Cavazo’s best Eddie Van Halen “Eruption” imitation. I’m sure at the time I was overly impressed by this barrage of notes at lightning speed, but still not nearly as impressed as I was over the lyrics of the following song, “Let’s Get Crazy”. Musically, it lies in the same family tree as “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Slick Black Cadillac”, but boasts lyrics more absurd than both combined. The one that I’ll never forget was, “Wanna kiss your lips not the ones on your face.” At 10 years old, I had zero concept of sex or what a woman even looked like undressed…and yet, something about that lyric felt so right, as if it would come in handy during the great testosterone rush of 2012 (AKA puberty).
By the time the band started playing ballad #2, “Thunderbird” (a tribute to fallen guitarist Randy Rhoads), I lay on my bed in a daze. I already knew I was hooked on metal when I first heard Rush, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest over the summer of 2008. This album only reinforced it. From here on out, it was “all metal, all day”. I quickly became the “neighborhood metalhead”, buying all the records I could, wearing my favorite band t shirts, and drawing band logos in my assignment notebook. In a neighborhood of wine drinking boomers whose idea of rock n’ roll was post-Cream Eric Clapton, I felt rebellious wearing my little KISS Creatures of the Night shirt.
Now you know what Metal Health meant for me. What did it mean for Quiet Riot? Well if you lived through the era, I’m sure this paragraph can go without being said. Metal Health turned Quiet Riot from a Sunset Strip obscurity to a household name overnight, and not just any household name. They quickly became thee band synonymous with heavy metal, if only for the summer of ’83. Metal Health and Def Leppard’s Pyromania only further continued the trend of blockbuster metal albums set in motion a year prior by Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance and Scorpions’ Blackout. Without these albums to pave the way, there’s no telling what the rest of the decade could’ve held for this music.
Quiet Riot would never achieve this level of success again. In fact, by 1984 they were dethroned by another persistent American metal band, Twisted Sister. However, there’s no denying their mark on the genre and pop culture as a whole. When people hear “Cum on Feel the Noize”, they think of the 80s, and when they think of the 80s, they think of an objectively better time to be alive than today. Although the time of our youth has since long passed (whether it be the 80s, 90s, 2000s, or even early 2010s), the music will keep the spirit alive forever.