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Musical styles come, musical styles go. Except for hard rock and heavy metal, which seem to be as big as ever.
Iron Maiden sold out the Pacific Coliseum June 3. Judas Priest will probably do 12,000 at GM Place July 24. Motley Crue will probably sell out GM Place August 11.
In many cases, these bands are selling more tickets today than in their heyday, and at a much higher ticket price (the top ticket for Judas Priest is $343). And they're doing it even though their album sales are a fraction of what they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
What gives?
They've gone "multi-generational." Their original fans still show up to punch the air and bang their heads, even though they might now be in their 40s or 50s. Plus, they've been joined by a whole new generation of teenage headbangers weaned on classic metal who want to see the leather-clad legends strut their stuff.
"What's we've seen is a rejuvenation for a lot of these acts," says Riley O'Connor of Live Nation, Canada's biggest concert promoter.
"They've brought in the younger fans who have sort of naturally gone to them as the symbols or fathers of how this all started."
It helps that heavy metal has always been a live phenomenon, where you have to have a good show or die. The Iron Maiden show still has fans walking around glassy-eyed over a month later.
"It was phenomenal," says J.J. Caithcart of Scrape Records, a metal specialty store at Broadway and Kingsway.
"It was done with conviction, with meaning, and there was a feel and a vibe in that room that was unmeasureable. Everybody from the floor to the back row upstairs was locked on. It was a moment. Not just another show with a cool vibe, it was a total moment. The band sounded better than they did 20-odd years ago. The energy level from start to finish ... people are going to be talking about it for a long time."
Dave Ogilvie concurs.
"The shows are better than ever because of the production values," says Ogilvie, a local producer and engineer who has worked with all manner of international noisemeisters, from Motley Crue to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.
"The Iron Maiden tour that's out there right now is spectacular, it embodies what a rock show should be. It has everything you want, from the singer who sings at the top of his lungs the whole show, doesn't break a note, runs around the whole time, to production with fire, with pyrotechnics, everything's involved. For a 16-year-old boy to go and see that it was as mind-blowing as it was for me when I was 16."
Toronto filmmaker Sam Dunn says the enduring popularity of bands like Maiden and Priest has finally given metal some respect from the mainstream. Begrudgingly.
"People are realizing that metal isn't going away, like it or not," says Dunn, who has made two acclaimed heavy metal documentaries, Metal: A Headbangers Journey and the new Global Metal.
"Call it metal, call it hard rock, when it first hit in the 70s with bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple in England and Kiss and Van Halen and Aerosmith in America, everyone thought it was going to be a flash in the pan. Then it hit again in the 80s and became really the world's most popular musical genre there for a few years, with the whole MTV revolution and bands like Twisted Sister and Ratt, etc.
"Every time that happened, everyone said that it wasn't going to last, that this was just a trend and this was kind of cro-magnon music for cro-magnon people. But I think what seems to be happening now is that some of those early bands, particularly Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, are still touring, and are not only huge, but bigger than they ever have been. Because now the fan base is multi-generational, maybe it's starting to get accepted as legitimate music.
"People may not like it," he laughs, "but they're realizing it's not going to be going away."
In fact, the metal virus is spreading. Dunn's new documentary explores how there are metalheads in all sorts of places you'd never suspect - Dubai, India, Iran, China, Indonesia, Israel, Brazil.
One of the highlights of the film is when he visits a Tokyo bar called Blackmore's, named after Deep Purple's guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore. He filmed a group of drunken businessmen joyously singing karaoke to the Purple classic Highway Star, which has become something of a cultural phenomenon in Japan.
"Blackmore's we couldn't resist," says Dunn, who is now working on documentaries about Iron Maiden and Rush.
"We literally walked in that place and there was all these guys standing around listening to metal in their suits. They call them salary-men in Japan."
There are other reasons for metal's continuing popularity. Ogilvie thinks that video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Star have turned on all sorts of kids to classic hard rock songs. And while CD sales have dipped, the access to music through the Internet is unparalleled, which has really helped the metal underground.
"When I was a teenager, it was unthinkable that I would hear an underground metal band like Morbid Angel before I heard Twisted Sister," says Dunn, who grew up in Victoria.
"Because Twisted Sister was on the video screens, and you had to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into this world, into this underground [to find a band like Morbid Angel].
"What's happening now is because underground extreme metal bands are on MySpace, and the biggest metal bands in the world are on MySpace, with digital downloading kids are accessing all of this music at the same time. Because of that I think the kinds of metal that are coming out, the kinds of hard music that young people are playing, runs the gamut."
The metal underground has been a constant source of creativity. That's where bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer came from.
"It seems to me that there's always this underground scene of kids who are discovering [metal] and doing their own new versions of it," says Ogilvie.
"So metal's always been kept alive, because of teenage angst I guess. It goes in waves. It goes underground, then it comes up bigger. It goes underground, then comes back bigger and bigger. The resurgence seems to be a two-year cycle at the worst."
Caithcart says there are all sorts of hot new metal acts like Opeth (who are from Sweden) and Nachtmystium (who are American). Ogilvie expects big things from two Canadian bands he's recently worked with, Hamilton's Raggedy Angry and Vancouver's Oakalla.
Expect them all to be appearing at a bar or concert hall near you soon. Metal bands thrive by doing things the old fashioned way, playing live.
"One of the most important things about metal music is that it really needs to be experienced live," says Dunn.
"The whole sort of essence of metal is it being something larger than life. It's a spectacle and an experience that you can't get in your everyday life. Going back to bands like Maiden and Priest, these are bands that knew that from the very beginning, and never shortchanged their audiences on the live experience.
"It's funny. Who would have thought it would come back to this basic principle, getting out there and hitting the road and earning your fan base through touring and touring and touring?"
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