Which Group was able to take the First Hard Rock/Metal Grammy Award away from Metallica?

Somehow, when the first Hard Rock/Metal Grammy
Award was introduced in the 80s, the recording industry
voters showed themselves to be so out of touch as to
award it to a group other than Metallica.
Photo credit: Thomas Hawk / Foter / CC BY-NC

Back in the 1980s, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences began to try to update itself so as to be relevant to the younger music listeners who were coming of age in the time of MTV. Part of this effort involved creating a new Grammy Award category for the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance.

At the time, the perception was that the category was more or less created to honor one of the most innovative rock groups to come on the scene since the early 1970s, Metallica. Rising from the street and the tape trading underground culture, Metallica was an uncompromising set of musicians who basically created their own genre.

However, in all their collective wisdom, the Recording Academy voters saw fit to award the first Hard Rock/Metal Grammy to a fossilized relic of a group rather than the new heros of rock 'n' roll.

Why do we listen to Music? One group gives us the Answers

Why do we listen to music? To express regret? To get our nerve up? To relive a memory? Crimson Glory delves into feelings of recrimination, love lost, determination, horror and more on their little known masterwork Transcendence from 1988 (MCA Records/Roadracer Records). Caught up under the label of “hair band,” it was partially their faults—they looked the part—this group compares favorably to a better known 1980s progressive metal band, Queensrÿche, who thought enough of the group as to recruit one of their later lead singers when their own vocalist Geoff Tate had a falling out with the rest of the band.

Splitting into several camps during the 1980s, heavy metal evolved the genre with the emergence of speed metal and had forward motion in progressive rock, as well. Crimson Glory took on the mantle that some had thought handed off by Rush at the start of the decade with their more radio and MTV friendly compositions. More than up to the task, Crimson Glory put up amazing effort in Transcendence having an alternate-reality, forward-looking perspective of material with a science fiction/fantasy theme in large part.

Original Crimson Glory lead singer Midnight
looked the part of heavy metal singer
on 1988's Transcendence, but sang
with much depth and emotion.

Crimson Glory showed a lot of prescience in anticipating the explosion of fantasy themes in the media with their song “Where Dragons Rule,” which brings to mind a martial marching number with its rat-tat-tat-tat backbeat courtesy of drummer Dana Burnell. Before there were Lord of the Rings and Reign of Fire movies and other stories of reptilians of lore, Crimson Glory was singing of creatures rising from the lake of fire on wings of steel. And the chorus of all the members of the band answering to lead singer Midnight’s call, “In a world between myth and strange reality | In a world where dragons rule,” they answer, “Mission: Kill”. And in similar fashion, Midnight asks, “We die for the dragon—is there a reason?” This song really stirs the soul, striking a chord of defiance. When that Millennial blaring the latest 50 Cent Hip Hop iTune download comes barreling up alongside you in his daddy’s BMW, give him a blast of Old School Heavy Metal from Crimson Glory to snap him back to the real world.

The band also takes a very literary tack on “Masque of the Red Death,” which encapsulates the entire plot and character development of the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name into a mere four minutes and 15 seconds. We join the king and his guests at the masquerade ball while the pestilence ravages the land outside his high castle walls. But Crimson Glory relates how the personification of disease and death makes his way into the dance and takes all with him.

De rigueur mysterious symbols
accompanied Crimson Glory's
liner notes on the 1988 release
Transcendence.

I am sure there must have been other groups that have interpreted other pieces of literature into song, but I would have to believe that Crimson Glory is one of the few groups in heavy metal who has done so. Vocalist Midnight sings of “feeling” the disease flowing through his veins. And you can nearly experience the terror of falling into the bleeding arms of the stranger. Midnight (John Patrick Jr. McDonald 1962-2009) performed exceptionally on Transcendence but perhaps with the most dramatic presentation and dynamic vocal range on “Masque of the Red Death,” hitting and sustaining high notes that would make operatic-style singing archetypes Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford proud.

On “Burning Bridges,” Crimson Glory really channels the emotional side. As a gut-wrenching ode to love lost and isolation, Midnight croons about never wanting to cause pain, never wanting to cause sorrow. Seriously, these lyrics made me misty, nearly bringing a tear to my eye. The metaphor of burning bridges makes a powerful statement of irrevocable loss and irredeemable regret:

Now I feel the bridges burning
Flames reflecting in my eyes
The feelings much too cold to share
Smoke clouds dream I’ve left behind

This song can really get under your skin after repeated listening—but in a good way. You may find your mind wandering to those who you might have wronged in the past. Could small slights lead to failed relationships? They say don’t sweat the small stuff—and it’s all small stuff. This song gives me pause to think that the reverse is truer.

Circa 2011, Crimson Glory now rock on without their
late and previously separated singer Midnight. 

Photo credit: Pepalaje Photography / Foter /
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Another outstanding track, “In Dark Places,” uses a sea-as-woman metaphor as an unnamed ingénue entices Midnight forward to a solitary and shadowy world beneath the waves. Clocking in at a little over seven minutes, it’s by far the longest cut on Transcendence and most haunting one, as well. It is really a cryptic hymn about someone considering ending it all by drowning, saying goodbye to the sunlit world for the permanent freedom of the great beyond—in dark places we will be free.

Transcendence seems to have been out of print for some time, but Amazon.com does list an import edition available on an orderable basis, though as of this writing it was temporarily out of stock. There are also numerous new and used CDs from individual sellers and MP3 download files for the entire album. If you are interested in mind-expanding music you missed the first or second time around Crimson Glory’s Transcendence is worth a look.

-Derek Handova
Appreciative Listener

Change Your Evil Ways: Mark Farner Rocking for God and Against Injustice

In the long annals of rock and roll, no one stood larger in the hearts and minds of teenagers than Grand Funk Railroad in the late 1960 and early 1970s. Led by drummer Donny Brewer and guitarist Mark Farner, they set the standard for hedonism by which all following rockers are to be judged. The lyrics to their seminal hit “We’re an American Band” are a prime example of the hijinks they were up to in the 70s:

Four young chiquitas in Omaha | Waitin' for the band to return from the show | Feelin' good, feelin' right, it's Saturday night | The hotel detective, he was outta sight | Now these fine ladies, they had a plan | They was out to meet the boys in the band | They said, “Come on dudes, let's get it on” | And we proceeded to tear that hotel down

Grand Funk Railroad peaked out about 1976 and Farner and Brewer and the other members of the band went their separate ways. Farner tried his hand at a solo career without much success or acclaim. Brewer and the other Funkers remained together and released one album under the name Flint, an ode to their hometown, which went mostly unnoticed. Farrner, Brewer and Grand Funk reunited in the early 1980s and were included on the soundtrack to and in the 1981 full-length animated sci-fi movie Heavy Metal. After that, the band remained moribund until 1996.

In the meantime, Mark Farner underwent a spiritual awakening and became a born-again Christian. He reemerged on the musical scene in 1988 with his Christian-oriented rock album “Just Another Injustice.” I saw him on tour that year in support of this album, but unfortunately, he was unable to play the worldly “We’re an American Band,” although he did go through the repertoire of other Grand Funk hits that night in Long Beach at the Bogart’s nightclub.

Even while wearing his faith literally on his crucifix-encrusted armband, Farner does not come off as overly preachy on an album that has an admittedly niche audience. To show he was still capable of rocking it up Farner’s album opens up with “Airborne Ranger” and a set of double-meaning lyrics that can be taken either for a patriotic serve-your-country anthem or a faithful call to action against “the darkness all around you” Actually, the double meaning is not that cloaked, but it’s an enjoyable song to blast with the four windows down and blowing the doors off some lucre-loving snob in his new BMW. His solos are more restrained than in the 70s on FM heavy rotation album cuts such as “Shinin’ On” but he gets in his hot licks.

Perhaps a better cut is the pure blues jam “Judgement Day Blues.” Farner really blasts the materialistic culture of the late 80s as suffering from a “vast epidemic” of people breakin’ all the lord’s rules. A great day is a comin’, and Farner proceeds to explain it on his axe, sinfully soloing over the slow beat backed up at the bottom end by some funky bass playin’.

It’s probably just serendipity, but a track that still really speaks to me is “The Writing on The Wall” about a world full of lies, confusion and illusion. If the country was in a spate of moral crisis in the 1980s, what about today? Farner warns us not to watch it slip away again. If only we would or could learn from the examples of past generations. Every generation faces its own temptations—ours is no different from our predecessors. Hopefully, we’ll heed Mark’s warning and change our evil ways before the Day of Reckoning comes post-haste!

Whether you’re a believer or just a fan of overlooked rock albums from the past, “Just Another Injustice” is worth a look and a listen. If you’re a traditionalist, it’s available in limited quantities on Amazon, but if you tend to a more 21st century based solution iTunes and Spotify also seem to have at least the title track, if not the entire CD, online.

-Derek Handova
Appreciative Listener

Not Who You Think it is: Getting it Wrong with Kingdom Come

By the mid-1980s, the music listening public was so thirsty for a Led Zeppelin reunion, any rumor of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, the lead vocalist and lead guitarist of Zep, respectively, working together again would spread like wildfire. Flash forward to 1988. Hard rock radio stations begin playing a song that sounds very much like Zeppelin—something in the spirit of “Kashmir.” At the time in the Los Angeles-Long Beach market of Southern California, KNAC disc jockey Long Paul would introduce the song saying “It’s not who you think it is.”

The song being played was “Get It On” from the German heavy metal band Kingdom Come. Reportedly, the buzz from the song was so strong, someone at the recording studio released a rough demo to several U.S. rock radio stations even before the final tracks for the album were completely mixed. Legend has it that Kingdom Come lead singer Lenny Wolf and producer Bob Rock were at the board at the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York City when they heard their track on the radio.

Not to be caught flatfooted, they quickly rushed the finished master tracks to the record label and Kingdom Come’s eponymous debut album shipped Gold (i.e., 500,000 units sold). To further capitalize on their unforeseen good fortune, they were quickly signed onto Van Halen’s Monsters of Rock tour. With Van Halen, Scorpions, Metallica and Dokken on the bill, Kingdom Come was instantly legitimized as a rock ‘n’ roll heavyweight.

Unfortunately, the comparisons to Led Zeppelin hung heavily on Kingdom Come, with some wags tagging them with the moniker “Kingdom Clone.” Others came up with an epithet even more unsavory that cannot be repeated in polite company. The band persevered with their tour and a subsequent followup album. But they quickly disbanded with only Wolf remaining into 1992 still performing under the Kingdom Come banner. By that time, any heavy metal bands from the 1980s not named Metallica were speedily swept into the ashbin of history caught under the undertow of Grunge. That’s too bad.

Kingdom Come’s debut album showed much promise. Beyond the Zeppesque “Get It On” there are several standout tracks including “Living Out of Touch,” “Now Forever After” and “Shout It Out;” all hard rocking and blues based without any pretentiousness of the Led Zeppelin supergroup mentality of the 1970s. Not one to give up the dream, Lenny Wolf/Kingdom Come continues to release albums, with the 13th studio release “Outlier” coming onto the market in May 2013.

-Derek Handova
Appreciative Listener