Speed Metal: Fans Fixate on Oblivion

Members of the new underground gathered here late one afternoon in a metal-walled room padded with dirty yellow carpet. Singer Dennis Conant, sweat spitting off the tips of his frizzy locks, pressed a microphone against his lower lip and screamed the lyrics to a song called “Oblivion.”

A groupie watching him appeared to be enchanted. “The lyrics have a lot of pain,” she observed. “Death is intriguing--I don’t care what anybody says.”

The metal-walled room is a unit in a mini-storage warehouse. Hayward, and the nearby factory towns south of Oakland, have become the heartland of speed metal, an underground music that has bubbled up in the last two years to fill the void left when heavy metal--formerly the music of choice for angry youth--went commercial.

‘Dark,’ ‘Ugly,’ ‘Brutal’ Sound

Characterized by its frantic pace and desolate lyrics, it’s sometimes called caffeine metal, or thrash metal. Critics use adjectives like “dark,” “ugly” and “brutal” to describe the sound.

Along with the music has arisen a speed-metal culture that is fascinated by death. Some young people appear to have gravitated to speed metal simply for its shock appeal, say those familiar with the scene. But for others, the music speaks of the way they feel about their own lives and futures.

Speed metal is too new to have been much analyzed by sociologists or psychologists. But Los Angeles psychologist Michael Peck, who has specialized in working with suicidal adolescents for 24 years, says he has counseled a few youths who are into speed metal. They tend to be the most troubled of his clients, he said.

“The kids that we’re talking about are heavy drug users, they have no positive orientation, and they’re angry,” he said. “Some of these kids are suicidal, some of them are homicidal, but I don’t think you’ll find many that are happy.”

Irene Goldenberg, a professor of psychology at UCLA, who said she is not specifically familiar with speed metal, said she considers it a natural development in a death-obsessed society that craves violence on the evening news and in movies. “The death theme reiterates what’s going on in the culture,” she said.

Goldenberg, a child psychologist who specializes in family issues, said parents and teachers should be less concerned with the music--which is the expression, not the cause of the problem--and more with “the kids in trouble, who are the problem. We need to look to the fact that there are a lot of kids unattended to and who are not being observed.”

Speed-metal fans Jennifer Smith and Lorraine Brugette sat smoking cigarettes in a friend’s living room and told how they met:

Some of the kids in Union City, where the two live, agreed that Jennifer needed to be beaten up for the crimes of being too blonde, too tan and too cute. The assailant was to be dark-haired Lorraine, four years Jennifer’s elder. The confrontation was set for the day of Jennifer’s Sweet 16 party.

Instead of scrapping, the pair ended up sitting on the curb together, drinking whiskey. The thing that forestalled a fight, they explained, was the discovery that they had a common love of local speed-metal bands like Violence and Forbidden Evil.

Since that day, their lives have revolved around the Hayward warehouse where the bands rehearse. Friends say they often party till the early hours of the morning, causing Jennifer to miss school on occasion.

Lorraine, who dropped out of high school, says she has no permanent home but sleeps at various friends’ apartments. She has a 2-year-old son, Jesse, whose name is tattooed on her right shoulder.

Lorraine’s mother--who does not approve of her daughter’s life style--looks after the child. Once in a while Lorraine is allowed to visit. “When I’m around my kid, I’m different,” she said. “That’s a whole other world. I never combine the two (speed metal and motherhood.)”

The young women are typical of speed-metal fans encountered by Venice writer Judy Wieder, who frequently reports on heavy metal and its variations for rock magazines. Speed metal, she said, “is a place for those who don’t belong, kids who are on the wrong side of absolutely everything.

“What I feel when I go into these places (speed-metal clubs) is a lot of anger--and what they’re mad at is all confused. In certain ways, the music is a good thing. It gives them a place to go and counteracts some of the rejection and lack of love.”

Director Penelope Spheeris, known for her film on punk culture, “The Decline of Western Civilization,” said speed-metal followers she interviewed for a new film tend to come from lower-income families. Many don’t get a lot of attention or love at home.

“They’re kind of blanked out,” she said. “but that’s not to say they’re going to go out and kill people.” Spheeris said the scene can be positive for those who delve into death as a way of “trying to define life.”

In the movie “River’s Edge,” based on a murder in Milpitas in 1981, a teen-ager strangles his girlfriend on a riverbank, and then brags about the killing to his classmates, who make excursions to view the corpse.

The actual murder, which occurred in Fremont a few miles from Hayward, predates speed metal. But the movie sound track, on Enigma Records, is almost entirely speed metal. It’s a fitting sound for a film about kids who say things like “Sometimes I think it’d be easier to be dead,” said Lisa Gladfelter of Enigma Records.

“River’s Edge” director Tim Hunter said of the sound track: “It seemed like the music that the kids in the picture would be listening to.” But Hunter, who says he is not given to analyzing the behavior of the characters in the film, doesn’t see anything ominous in the trend toward death-drenched music.

“I was fairly morbid too when I was in high school,” he said. “Those years are a good time to dwell on death and dark things.”

Glenn Goodwin, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College, agrees, saying, “These themes have been with us forever.”

In the early ‘60s, he said, college students intrigued with death turned to Camus and Sartre. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, added psychologist Peck, there were popular songs that dealt with untimely death--songs like “Earth Angel.”

But Peck said earlier examples of death themes in popular culture tended to have a romantic quality. The music served as a catharsis for people who had just broken up with someone, or who were just feeling sorry for themselves, he said. To him, speed metal, on the other hand, seems to convey the message: “You’re right in the way you feel about life, in the attitude that your life will amount to nothing.”

While film maker Hunter said he likes listening to speed metal, Enigma Records’ Gladfelter, 25, said “I really can’t get into speed metal. It’s kind of a negative life style. They’re really into the gloomy side.”

As a symbol of the gloom that pervades “River’s Edge,” a skull decorates a denim jacket worn by a central character in the film. Skulls, on denim jackets or vests, are standard accouterment at speed-metal concerts at clubs like Fenders in Long Beach, and at the Stone in San Francisco.

The L. A. metal scene tends toward “glam,” or glamorized heavy metal in which performers wear sequins and makeup, rather then the rougher-edged speed metal most popular in the Bay Area, the East Coast and in West Germany and other parts of Europe, according to observers.

Speed-metal fans there shun makeup, sequins and other heavy-metal accessories. If they wear any jewelry at all, it is often macabre. One speed metal magazine had an ad for tiny fake body parts--an eyeball, an ear, a finger--to be worn as rings or earrings.

Andy Galeon, the 14-year-old drummer for Death Angel, had just returned from an East Coast tour with the band. Now he was looking out the window of his mother’s house in Daly City, at a row of matching houses across the street.

“Killer weather over here,” he said to a caller on the telephone.

The members of Death Angel, five Filipino cousins, are proof that not all speed-metal addicts are alienated outcasts. The vocalist was senior class president at his high school; another band member sang in the choir.

The boys’ manager, Kat Sirdofsky, freely states her opinion that much of speed metal is “violent and sexist and so stupid .”

By fixating on death and violence (typical band names are Megadeath, Slayer and Cryptic Slaughter), some speed-metal fans are simply searching for “the next heaviest trend,” as well as emulating what they’ve seen other fans and bands doing, she said.

William Howell of Metal Blade Records in Reseda, agrees with Sirdofsky that speed-metal themes tend to be tedious. He said he coaches up-and-coming bands to ditch the violence: “It’s time to move on to another subject, guys.”

Howell said the trend toward ever scarier band names and song titles has given rise to speed-metal parody bands such as “Satan Stole My Lunchbox.”

But while Death Angel may see the humor in some of the more Gothic gore, they are deadly serious about the central theme of their music: nuclear devastation.

In one corner of Galeon’s tidy living room is a piano with some photographs of Andy and his 10-year-old sister, Audrey, displayed prominently. Also in a position of prominence on the piano is Death Angel’s new album, “The Ultra-Violence.” The jacket art is of a toppled city, with a requisite skull in the foreground.

The title, said bass player Dennis Pepa, refers to the destruction of human society in a nuclear war. Speed-metal bands dwell on war “because it’s such a big threat to our generation,” Pepa said.

“We understand these things a lot more than other kids,” he added soberly. (In a thematic parallel in “River’s Edge,” the murderer in the film shrugs off any guilt for his deed by saying “The whole world’s gonna blow up anyway.”)

When asked why they don’t advocate anti-nuclear activism instead of just drawing pictures of The End, Pepa replied: “Kids know it (activism) isn’t going to work. The bombs just keep getting bigger.”

Jennifer Smith and Lorraine Brugette recently met at Jennifer’s place one evening to get ready to go to a rehearsal of the band Militia. Lorraine wore tight jeans and a tank top. The top did not conceal a fresh crimson scar on Lorraine’s arm where doctors had inserted a metal plate after a guy she knew hit her with a baseball bat.

On the drive across town, the two discussed the fact that it was a good thing Jennifer’s mom hadn’t come home the night before, because the girls had dented her car after sharing a fifth of tequila.

In Hayward, the two roamed the deserted aisles of the mini-storage company until they came to Unit 328. The door swung open and the two were ushered inside by the band.

The lead singer, Dennis Conant, was wearing Stanford sweat pants and a T-shirt that said “Kill ‘Em All” on the back. The shirt was bunched up above his ribs so spectators could see his diaphragm pumping as he began to shriek out a song.

During a break in rehearsal, Lorraine and Jennifer flirted with band members. But Lorraine later admitted that this is not their No. 1 speed-metal band.

That honor would have to go to Forbidden Evil. To describe the band’s greatness, Lorraine uses the term she applies to anything she really likes: “They’re God.”

Lorraine said her current favorite Forbidden Evil song goes:

Come my children follow me

You’ll be smashed to the ground

In the pits of hell.

“The music takes you over,” she said. “It makes you want to go off.”