The Rock Climb
A Metal Story
By Octavious Rayne
The time for total musical domination only heavy metal could provide was here; metal was our weapon, the music was the ammo, we were the trigger, and we were ready to let it fly like a fully automatic.
The Turtlenecks and we were the final two acts to perform. Nothing like piling on the pressure. They played first. Some sappy, melodic, typical boy-band garbage—no surprise. In fact, while hearing it, I felt myself becoming a bit feminine for a few seconds.
The stage changeout seemed to take forever, but finally it was finished. Our make-or-break moment was upon us. It was now or never. Or so we thought.
The stage was all set. We did the typical all-hands-in thing and walked out there, our heads held high, our instruments glinting in the multicolored stage lights like mirrors in the sun.
We looked out at the crowd, and it was surprisingly quiet. Everything felt like it had slowed down to slow motion for a few seconds. I turned and looked at each of the other three guys, and we each gave one another the nod to start. I turned to the crowd and said, “We are Primal Rage! And this is Slam Your Fist in The Face of Authority.”
I hit the first chord on my guitar. I don’t really remember much after that except a blur of music and lights. When the song was finished, we knew we had done our absolute best. We rocked hard, kicked ass, and melted faces—but it was in the hands of the judges now.
Every story has a beginning; I guess this is ours. And it is a good one.
My name is Biff Johnson. Funny name, I know, but my parents had a sense of humor, and my dad was a huge Back to the Future fan. My stage name is Wrath Bone. Yeah, I’m in a heavy metal basement/garage band with my friends from school and my cousin. We were fifteen years old at the beginning of this story. Our school’s name is Saxon Ville High School in the town of—yep—Saxon Ville. I’m not going to name the state because, trust me, it’s not one worth mentioning, but it is in the Midwest.
My other bandmates, who were also my best friends—and one is my cousin—were Wrath, AKA Johnny Willhelm, my cousin and drummer; Wrath Child, AKA Shawn Stevens, rhythm guitar; Wrath Man, AKA Gordon Bloom, bass; and, of course, me, Wrath Bone, lead vocals and lead guitar. Our band is called Primal Rage.
We all met and became friends in the fourth grade. I was a very outgoing kid, never tried to be someone I wasn’t, so I proudly wore my vintage Mötley Crüe Dr. Feelgood T-shirt I got from a Goodwill store as often as I could. It complemented my faded, torn-up black jeans and my vintage black-and-white Converse All-Stars quite nicely. With my shaggy black dyed hair and the black fingernail polish I stole from my sister, my persona was clear.
Johnny is my cousin, like I said. He lived only a few blocks away. He was very much like me in almost every way.
We grew up together—if you can call what we did “growing up.” We had many things in common, especially our shared love of hard rock and heavy metal music. He was tall and skinny then and often thought he resembled Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe. Due to Johnny’s obsession with Tommy Lee, we always knew Johnny was going to be the drummer.
Shawn Stevens, AKA Wrath Child, was our rhythm guitarist. He came to our school in third grade. Shawn was one of us from the beginning. We knew as soon as we saw him—he was wearing his older brother’s Ozzy shirt—and Johnny and I looked at one another and said it all without saying a word. We just nodded and smiled.
Wrath Man, AKA Gordon Bloom, was our bass player. He had been in school with us the whole time, but he was very quiet, so he didn’t really talk to anyone, and nobody knew anything about him. We found him playing bass by total accident, but once we saw him play, his career followed, and soon after, Primal Rage was born.
As most bands do, we started in the garage the first year we got together. But as winter crept up on us, our dilapidated garage grew cold, so my mom—feeling sorry for us and being kind-hearted—let us move to the basement. We made a deal with her right then and there: if our band lasted long enough, we would play in the basement in winter and fall, and in the garage in spring and summer. We happily agreed.
Back to age fifteen and all the fun stuff that followed. At this point, we were a well-oiled machine. All of us had mastered our craft much like the stone masons of old; we were stone-cold killers at our chosen craft.
We played random parties and birthdays during those years. It was fun and got us recognition and some local fame, but the groupies we were in it for kept avoiding us. Still, we gained some followers, and that was cool.
One day, I was walking home from the store down the street when I saw something on a telephone pole that stopped me dead in my tracks and almost made me drop the Slurpee I had just bought. There, neatly stapled to the pole, was a flyer advertising an upcoming battle of the bands in our area. Wow, this is it, I thought—our ticket to fame and fortune. All the good bands start out with a battle of the bands. We are a shoo-in for this, I thought, so I rushed home to call up the guys and tell them the news of our impending rise to fame.
The guys all rushed over to stare at the paper in my hand. As each one read it and passed it to the next, you would think I’d just handed them a million-dollar check or something. To tell the truth, it felt like it, too. After reading it several times, we unanimously agreed that we were entering the battle of the bands in two weeks.
We agreed that practice would be our sole focus for the next two weeks—along with getting the seventy-five-dollar entry fee turned in on time, which we did.
We had been writing original songs for years, and I’ve got to say they were pretty good. We didn’t really know how good they were yet, but soon that question would answer itself—though not in the way any of us expected.
A few days later, the four of us were in our favorite music store, Rock Solid, picking up new strings, picks, sticks, and a few new mic and amp cables, when we heard a voice from behind us that always reminded us of nails on a chalkboard—our archenemy, douchebag boy-band Turtleneck Sweater’s lead singer, Brian Webber. Of course, he knew about the battle too and had to drop the gauntlet and issue a challenge.
My guys and his guys had been mortal enemies since we all started playing music in our town. We expended a great deal of energy competing with them for gigs. Unfortunately, they would win most of the time because there wasn’t a big metal scene at our school or in our town—but there was no shortage of boy-band fans.
The challenge was simple: if they won the battle of the bands or placed ahead of us, we would withdraw our application to play at the school’s homecoming dance. If we won or came in ahead of them, same thing. Both sides agreed to the conditions, and then we went our separate ways to prepare for battle, not just any battle, a music battle. The battle of the bands. For us, the stakes were no higher. Plus, a win came with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar check, a two-thousand-dollar gift card to the music store, and, of course, respect—and finally, maybe some groupies. We had to win; there was no other option, not for me anyway. As far back as I can remember, I knew I was meant to be a rock star. I had to win.
We went through all our music to decide on that one kick-ass song that would safely carry us over the top. After much deliberation, we decided on the title track for the album we were working on: Slam Your Fist in the Face of Authority. We had that song down to a fine semblance of lyrical and instrumental perfection. We were going to slaughter those ass clowns, and they wouldn’t even see it coming.
When our moment finally came, here’s what it really looked like up close: Johnny spun his sticks like helicopter blades, just like Tommy Lee. Shawn blazed his rhythm guitar so well it would have made James Hetfield jealous. Gordon banged on his bass so that it thundered in the majesty of the mighty Cliff Burton. And me, I ripped my vocals with so much authority that for a moment I would have sworn I sounded like the mighty Dave Mustaine himself. Yeah, at that moment we were rock stars, and we shone like them too.
Now that we’re all caught up, here is the rest of the story.
When the announcement was read, I almost spontaneously combusted. I thought I saw a tear in Johnny’s eye; Shawn’s shoulders dropped like a pair of bricks, and Gordon’s face mirrored the obvious despair we all felt. The Turtlenecks won. We were ready to crawl in a hole and die a thousand times over. The humiliation of losing is never fun. But a metal band losing to a pathetic ass boy band was almost too big a burden to bear.
After the shock wore off a bit, and the sting began to subside, while the kids we paid to be our roadies packed up our stuff, we casually went out in the alley to smoke our troubles away in an herbal cloud of relief. Oh—sorry, for you non-metal folk, that means to smoke a joint.
We finished up our alley activities and stood to walk to the van to begin our trip home, so we could spend the rest of the evening wallowing in despair. We all let out several sad sighs, I think to stall for time, so as not to face the inevitable we all knew was waiting for us like the Grim Reaper does moments before you die. We concluded that that was that, and it was over for us. We made ourselves accept it. This was the end of Primal Rage forever.
Then, while walking to the van, we heard hurried footsteps and then a man’s voice from behind us. He said, out of breath, “Hey, Primal.” We turned around, half expecting it to be some assholes who were gonna razz us about the loss. But it wasn’t. It was a big music producer from nearby Chicago. His name was Chuck Shaker. He asked us if we knew who he was, and of course we did—he produced many of our favorite bands. He said our show was amazing. We thanked him, not quite sure where this was going. He then asked us whether, with better instruments and equipment and the opportunity to play in a real studio, we could sound even better. Of course, we said yes. He handed us a card and told us to bring ourselves and all our music—especially that song from the night before—down to Bone Shaker Records at noon the next day.
We were down at the studio at 11:30 a.m. just to make sure we weren’t late. We still weren’t sure what the hell was going on, but we knew it wasn’t normal.
At noon, we went inside and introduced ourselves to the receptionist. She said Mr. Shaker was expecting us, then immediately took us down the hall to the actual studio band room. He was there waiting for us. He said we had one shot to impress him, and it had to be our song from the previous night.
We grabbed our instruments, and after a few minutes of sound checks, we were ready to play—and we did. We played our asses off, and it sounded incredible.
When the song was over, it was silent as a crypt; you could have heard a pin drop. We were breathing hard and sweating like a fat person at a cookie sale. We looked at each other, then at the window to the recording booth. Mr. Shaker was looking at us strangely and talking to his mixer board guy for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only a minute or two.
Then, finally, a loud click came over the speakers, and we heard Mr. Shaker’s voice say, “So do you guys want a record deal or what?”
We, after recovering from the shock, screamed, yelled, cheered, and fell to our knees, crying in utter disbelief and happiness. We screamed, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Shaker, you’ve made our dreams come true.” He said, “No, you did that; I was just here to see it.”
Not only were all our dreams coming true, but there were now sure to be some damned groupies.
In all seriousness, though, we knew it was our destiny, and it was ours to lose or win. But at that moment, we knew that neither did we win this, nor was it given to us—it was ours for the taking all along, and we took it all.
Every story has a beginning, and this is ours. Our beginning, our destiny, our ascension to the stars—the rock stars.
The End