IS HEAVY METAL A LOADED GUN AIMED AT ITS FANS?

The question, soon to be debated in court, is whether rock ‘n’ roll was to blame.

John McCollum, an Indio teen-ager and heavy-metal fan, shot himself to death in October, 1984, with his father’s .22-caliber pistol. When McCollum killed himself, he was listening to “Speak to the Devil,” an Ozzy Osbourne album that contains a song called “Suicide Solution.”

According to a Riverside County coroner’s report, McCollum died while “listening to devil’s music.” And last fall, his parents filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, blaming Osbourne and his record label, Epic Records, for “encouraging the boy to take his own life.”

The incident made headlines again recently when the McCollums’ attorney held a press conference, saying that the suit was being pursued to “teach (Osbourne and CBS) a lesson,” terming Osbourne’s music “unconscionable and inflammatory.”

Osbourne’s attorney, Howard L. Weitzman, has disputed the charge, calling it “slanderous, preposterous and ludicrous,” while Osbourne has said the song “Suicide Solution” was actually an anti-suicide composition about AC/DC vocalist Bon Scott, who drank himself to death several years ago.

Is heavy metal really the villain? Could rock ‘n’ roll prompt a teen-ager to take his or her own life? Pop Eye asked psychologist Robert Butterworth, a frequent talk-show guest who specializes in counseling teens. Now the president of Contemporary Psychology Associates, Butterworth has served as a staff psychologist at the San Bernardino County Department of Mental Health and as a program director at the L.A. County Department of Health Services.

“I’ve never seen any links between heavy-metal music and all its trappings and teen-age suicide,” said Butterworth, who acknowledged that he was not familiar with the details of the Osbourne case and would only discuss the overall issue of teen-age depression and suicide. “Just because some kids who have listened to heavy metal happen to have committed suicide doesn’t make it the cause. What about all the kids who’ve died who didn’t listen to metal music? It’s too simplistic a solution.

“When something tragic happens in a family, the parents often shift the responsibility from family problems to some other scapegoat. To take a hypothetical example, what if a popular revival of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were accompanied by an increase in teen suicide? Would we make a case for banning or censoring Shakespeare’s works?”

Butterworth said that parents often take rock lyrics far more seriously than their children. “You have to remember that kids are more much preoccupied with the visceral sensation of the music, not what it’s saying. Parents tend to look at music more intellectually--they’re older and focus on the lyrics much more than the kids.”

Butterworth added that parents sometimes miss the distinction between metal music’s influence on appearance and it’s effect on behavior. “A lot of youngsters I see identify with a particular band and its appearance, but not with its behavior,” he said.

“Adolescence is a time when kids are trying on new identities--new clothes, so to speak--and it’s not at all abnormal to experiment with different identities. In a sense, heavy metal actually helps some kids, because it gives them a group identity, a kind of security that they often don’t have on their own.”

Butterworth pointed to the similarities between heavy-metal music and horror movies, which, he said, both provide teen-agers with a fantasy world full of colorful imagery and vivid thrills. “It’s the intensity that attracts kids. I don’t think they take heavy metal’s satanic symbols seriously at all. To them, it’s theater. In fact, if you look at album covers by bands like Osbourne and Iron Maiden, what you really see is a lot of religious icons. You almost feel as if these groups are taking kids back to the age of chivalry, when knights went on quests to slay dragons and other horrifying creatures.

“The strangest phenomena of all is that the parents who are the most upset by their kids coming home wearing a Mohawk hairdo or metal paraphernalia are the ones who were hippies when they were kids, with long hair and beads of their own.”

According to Butterworth, parents should spend more time talking to their children and listening to their music, instead of rejecting it outright. “You don’t have to like it,” he said. “But you should try to understand it instead of feeling threatened by it. It would be much healthier if parents would put a bigger emphasis on understanding what makes kids feel lonely or depressed instead of looking for solutions like attacking lyrics.”