This is a post about fathers, in a sense. It's also a post about metaphysics. A physical father can die. A metaphysical father lives forever. Mark Shelton, guitarist, singer and mainman of long-standing underground metal legends Manilla Road has passed away. Manilla Road are however, eternal.
I'll have to walk the long way home with you on this, dear reader.
My father got me a (tiny) classical guitar and signed me up for lessons when I was just 5 years old. Isn't it a cute mental image? In reality, the memory is sad. I was a sad child because there was a lot of family sadness on the family table and I wasn't allowed to leave and go to my room until I had eaten my daily, it felt, portion of family sadness. So, guitar was just more to do on a full stomach.
I learned the most basic music theory (which is what I still use, the rest are personal inventions), a little bit of sight reading and my basic chromatic exercises before I even had any sort of musical taste. If I remember correctly, I got the first couple of classical guitar degrees at my music school, before we had to move again, you know how it goes.
Classical guitar just meant more homework for child Helm. A series of generally disinterested guitar teachers didn't help ignite any sort of fire, because they were thinking about their abject fantasies of being guitar heroes while they were looking down on a tiny confused child that didn't know why it was frettin' them frets at all. It's easy to feel disgust even at children when they stand as impeding symbols to your own actualization.
Few years down the line, around ten years old, I think - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood consists of kaleidoscopic floating shards, inchoate in some sort of dim mist. Is it the same for you, reader? - I asked my father to stop bringing in the guitar teacher, because I didn't like him, the work, or the guitar much. He had in his mind that he owes it to the children to provide some avenues of culture and expression so he fought me on this, he fought a tiny ten-year-old that wasn't learning Sagreras compositions, it's kind of funny to think about. Anyway, he did a smart thing around the same time that helped us meet halfway on the matter.
At age 10, 11, 12 - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood is like looking through venetian blinds onto the scene of a minor but perpetual accident - I developed a fascination with heavy metal music. My father was skeptical about the morbid themes but allowed it because at least he could see some fire in his youngest child's eyes, and also, we were an atheist household so a little bit of satan here and there wasn't considered anathema.
This fascination coupled with a classical guitar lying around and basic motor skills to operate it meant that now little teenager Helm was about to cross a particular threshold, from the childlike solipsism where one does something because they've been instructed to do it to one doing something because they've set personal goals. This sounds fun and good and as a kind of progress, but it is also a very destabilizing process as I remember it, because what teenager me wanted to express was mitigated through the demonstration of other, adult and accomplished musicians.
I wanted to play fairly complex music to express fairly complex (and very teenager-dramatic) emotions and ideas, but I was just a little kid and I had just got my first electric guitar and it didn't sound like that, you know? It didn't sound like my rapidly emerging pantheon of heavy metal heroes for sure. I won't bore you with hilarious details of my first 'guitar rig', though, truly I can attest that a whole host of aesthetic sensibility was established for me just out of these early limitations, so it's worth getting into that at in the future, perhaps.
The point is, gear concerns aside, on some level, also, I knew from this young age that I never would truly sound like my heroes. It was a weird sort of prescience, from a weird little child with big ideas but also a sense of self-reflection that described these limitations, I could see my own limitations in certain ways. Nobody will ever tell this to a child, or a teenager: there's certain things you will probably never accomplish because you will not have the willpower, the mental fortitude, the peace of mind to dedicate enough to achieve. Heavy Metal goes on and on about how death is real, and I'm not so sure, honestly. Death happens, I guess. That's not so heavy metal a motto, is it? Sadness is real, however. It's real and ongoing and it describes limitations. If you're sad, you're going to have to be smart about how you get things done for the rest of your life because just turning the willpower knob to eleven won't work for you.
Parents certainly would never tell this to their children, because they are the instigators of various and frequent emotionally distressing events that contribute to such sadness. So one is left to cope and understand themselves and try to work with what they've got.
In this teenager state of mind, as I was going through that, I was looking for allies, for inspirations, for some sort of guidepost that encouraged me on my way. Amazing guitar players with their fluid legato and impossible sweeps were more like gods to me, I couldn't see myself in them at all.
But heavy metal is a beautiful genre. In its vast and ambiguous spaces live and thrive not just Apollonian guitar gods but also mutants, troglodytes, outcasts and weirdos. One could say that so they do in the punk and dark wave scenes and there even moreso and I would agree but the magic thing for me was that all these heavy metal mutants were trying to do what the Apollonian guitar gods were also doing: they wanted, with their limited means and weird talents, to build something, to construct an almost architectural monument to the same gods of romance and horror. A weird punk band, regardless of how much I might like their songs, always felt more like an ephemeral and scene-related exercise. You play in a punk band because you started a punk band, you go to squats, you are in the broad anarchist space, you try to meet people, you play gigs for them, you sell some t-shirts, perhaps you put out an album eventually, sure you express beautiful and worthwhile emotions but it's all too human.
This wasn't my child fantasy of heavy metal (and there is no other fantasy of heavy metal worth a damn). No, I got into heavy metal because I wanted to do something at once bigger but also more personal. Interfacing with the genre in these terms is not a social exercise, it is instead a moral one. You build your own backbone one riff at the time and it doesn't matter who likes it or even gets to hear it. You hear it. When your steel is true and real, virtue is its own reward.
Ask any metalhead that you think has a bit of virtue to them and they will all get to that point of description, regardless of their divergent paths: when they listen to the best this genre has to offer they are not thinking about the world-as-it-is. They aren't thinking about a cool squat gig or a great party or a person that they dated. They are thinking about power. About darkness. About grandeur. Malice, eternity, nothingness, God, the devil and themselves in eternal dialectic relation. All these nodes of immense and overwhelming force are directly connected to a single recipient. It's direct and immediate and absolutely exhausting, it inspires a thousand things and they aren't all beautifull as that song goes. Let's connect one more thing from another song, another book, another something, because eventually you'll have to learn this if you don't already: "For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy." and there aren't any happy sorcerers, alright?
This is the mindset and I've been trying to elucidate but honestly, I think over the years (and we've been doing this for some years now, friends) it becomes more and more clear: if you don't understand this mindset, you will never understand how heavy metal feels. If you have actualized this mindset from other experience and culture then you can map it onto the ridiculous grandeur of metal music and appreciate it even if it wasn't there in your childhood. But that achievement of experiencing art on the metaphysical plane cannot be gifted. Open your eye, yeah? Do it, you know how. Do the work and then all this nonsense will achieve some shape and grace.
Well, for inadvertent reasons I did the work early. My hands couldn't play shit, but I knew what I was seeking. And there we enter Manilla Road.
Boy, are Manilla Road a weird band! Not to me, to me they sound complete and correct. But to outsiders they sound off in so many ways. This is why, as a dear friend of mine has remarked, this shit, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, this shit is called "underground metal" to outsiders. But for me, and for him, for us few, it's just HEAVY METAL. The weird little mutants mean more to us than their mainstream inversion. See? In my mind, Iron Maiden or whatever is the inversion of Manilla Road. Manilla Road are more important to me. If you listen to their music, now, as an adult, you probably would not understand why.
Yes, Mark Shelton's voice was nasal, and the production on their arguable best effort, "Crystal Logic" is garage sub-basement. There's no virtuosity on display, there's barely any bells and whistles to this, it's actually quite punk rock in a way. The material has no uniformity, the record cover looks like this:
But the ideas! The lyrics! The moods! Listen to "The Veils of Negative Existence", by God if you do one thing today, listen to this song and read the lyrics and open your eye.
I'll have to walk the long way home with you on this, dear reader.
My father got me a (tiny) classical guitar and signed me up for lessons when I was just 5 years old. Isn't it a cute mental image? In reality, the memory is sad. I was a sad child because there was a lot of family sadness on the family table and I wasn't allowed to leave and go to my room until I had eaten my daily, it felt, portion of family sadness. So, guitar was just more to do on a full stomach.
I learned the most basic music theory (which is what I still use, the rest are personal inventions), a little bit of sight reading and my basic chromatic exercises before I even had any sort of musical taste. If I remember correctly, I got the first couple of classical guitar degrees at my music school, before we had to move again, you know how it goes.
Classical guitar just meant more homework for child Helm. A series of generally disinterested guitar teachers didn't help ignite any sort of fire, because they were thinking about their abject fantasies of being guitar heroes while they were looking down on a tiny confused child that didn't know why it was frettin' them frets at all. It's easy to feel disgust even at children when they stand as impeding symbols to your own actualization.
Few years down the line, around ten years old, I think - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood consists of kaleidoscopic floating shards, inchoate in some sort of dim mist. Is it the same for you, reader? - I asked my father to stop bringing in the guitar teacher, because I didn't like him, the work, or the guitar much. He had in his mind that he owes it to the children to provide some avenues of culture and expression so he fought me on this, he fought a tiny ten-year-old that wasn't learning Sagreras compositions, it's kind of funny to think about. Anyway, he did a smart thing around the same time that helped us meet halfway on the matter.
At age 10, 11, 12 - it's hard to tell, my memory of my childhood is like looking through venetian blinds onto the scene of a minor but perpetual accident - I developed a fascination with heavy metal music. My father was skeptical about the morbid themes but allowed it because at least he could see some fire in his youngest child's eyes, and also, we were an atheist household so a little bit of satan here and there wasn't considered anathema.
This fascination coupled with a classical guitar lying around and basic motor skills to operate it meant that now little teenager Helm was about to cross a particular threshold, from the childlike solipsism where one does something because they've been instructed to do it to one doing something because they've set personal goals. This sounds fun and good and as a kind of progress, but it is also a very destabilizing process as I remember it, because what teenager me wanted to express was mitigated through the demonstration of other, adult and accomplished musicians.
I wanted to play fairly complex music to express fairly complex (and very teenager-dramatic) emotions and ideas, but I was just a little kid and I had just got my first electric guitar and it didn't sound like that, you know? It didn't sound like my rapidly emerging pantheon of heavy metal heroes for sure. I won't bore you with hilarious details of my first 'guitar rig', though, truly I can attest that a whole host of aesthetic sensibility was established for me just out of these early limitations, so it's worth getting into that at in the future, perhaps.
The point is, gear concerns aside, on some level, also, I knew from this young age that I never would truly sound like my heroes. It was a weird sort of prescience, from a weird little child with big ideas but also a sense of self-reflection that described these limitations, I could see my own limitations in certain ways. Nobody will ever tell this to a child, or a teenager: there's certain things you will probably never accomplish because you will not have the willpower, the mental fortitude, the peace of mind to dedicate enough to achieve. Heavy Metal goes on and on about how death is real, and I'm not so sure, honestly. Death happens, I guess. That's not so heavy metal a motto, is it? Sadness is real, however. It's real and ongoing and it describes limitations. If you're sad, you're going to have to be smart about how you get things done for the rest of your life because just turning the willpower knob to eleven won't work for you.
Parents certainly would never tell this to their children, because they are the instigators of various and frequent emotionally distressing events that contribute to such sadness. So one is left to cope and understand themselves and try to work with what they've got.
In this teenager state of mind, as I was going through that, I was looking for allies, for inspirations, for some sort of guidepost that encouraged me on my way. Amazing guitar players with their fluid legato and impossible sweeps were more like gods to me, I couldn't see myself in them at all.
But heavy metal is a beautiful genre. In its vast and ambiguous spaces live and thrive not just Apollonian guitar gods but also mutants, troglodytes, outcasts and weirdos. One could say that so they do in the punk and dark wave scenes and there even moreso and I would agree but the magic thing for me was that all these heavy metal mutants were trying to do what the Apollonian guitar gods were also doing: they wanted, with their limited means and weird talents, to build something, to construct an almost architectural monument to the same gods of romance and horror. A weird punk band, regardless of how much I might like their songs, always felt more like an ephemeral and scene-related exercise. You play in a punk band because you started a punk band, you go to squats, you are in the broad anarchist space, you try to meet people, you play gigs for them, you sell some t-shirts, perhaps you put out an album eventually, sure you express beautiful and worthwhile emotions but it's all too human.
This wasn't my child fantasy of heavy metal (and there is no other fantasy of heavy metal worth a damn). No, I got into heavy metal because I wanted to do something at once bigger but also more personal. Interfacing with the genre in these terms is not a social exercise, it is instead a moral one. You build your own backbone one riff at the time and it doesn't matter who likes it or even gets to hear it. You hear it. When your steel is true and real, virtue is its own reward.
Ask any metalhead that you think has a bit of virtue to them and they will all get to that point of description, regardless of their divergent paths: when they listen to the best this genre has to offer they are not thinking about the world-as-it-is. They aren't thinking about a cool squat gig or a great party or a person that they dated. They are thinking about power. About darkness. About grandeur. Malice, eternity, nothingness, God, the devil and themselves in eternal dialectic relation. All these nodes of immense and overwhelming force are directly connected to a single recipient. It's direct and immediate and absolutely exhausting, it inspires a thousand things and they aren't all beautifull as that song goes. Let's connect one more thing from another song, another book, another something, because eventually you'll have to learn this if you don't already: "For the sorcerer exhaustion is ecstasy." and there aren't any happy sorcerers, alright?
This is the mindset and I've been trying to elucidate but honestly, I think over the years (and we've been doing this for some years now, friends) it becomes more and more clear: if you don't understand this mindset, you will never understand how heavy metal feels. If you have actualized this mindset from other experience and culture then you can map it onto the ridiculous grandeur of metal music and appreciate it even if it wasn't there in your childhood. But that achievement of experiencing art on the metaphysical plane cannot be gifted. Open your eye, yeah? Do it, you know how. Do the work and then all this nonsense will achieve some shape and grace.
Well, for inadvertent reasons I did the work early. My hands couldn't play shit, but I knew what I was seeking. And there we enter Manilla Road.
Boy, are Manilla Road a weird band! Not to me, to me they sound complete and correct. But to outsiders they sound off in so many ways. This is why, as a dear friend of mine has remarked, this shit, Cirith Ungol, Brocas Helm, Manilla Road, this shit is called "underground metal" to outsiders. But for me, and for him, for us few, it's just HEAVY METAL. The weird little mutants mean more to us than their mainstream inversion. See? In my mind, Iron Maiden or whatever is the inversion of Manilla Road. Manilla Road are more important to me. If you listen to their music, now, as an adult, you probably would not understand why.
Yes, Mark Shelton's voice was nasal, and the production on their arguable best effort, "Crystal Logic" is garage sub-basement. There's no virtuosity on display, there's barely any bells and whistles to this, it's actually quite punk rock in a way. The material has no uniformity, the record cover looks like this:
But the ideas! The lyrics! The moods! Listen to "The Veils of Negative Existence", by God if you do one thing today, listen to this song and read the lyrics and open your eye.
I sail the seas of negativity
To banish evil from this place
I fight with sword of fire and lightning
I am the guardian come this day
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I am the master here to stay
My crystal shield will never fail me
It can withstand the devils rain
And with the Lords of Light to guide me
I bring forth vengeance in their name
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I know it's not my mind at play
Upon the Island of Damnation
The Horde of Hades screams and wails
The blood of life and execution
Has put back light into the Veils
I will never put my sword down
I will never run away
In The Veils of Negative Existence
I am the master here to stay
Inside of the darkness
Between the planes
A tesseract dimension
Few know its name
On Prydwen, my long-ship
Of silver sails
Excalibur at my side
We shall not fail
Yeah, this isn't any old bullshit about the Lonelyness of the Long-Distance Runner or whatever. This, for teenager Helm was a revelation, not because I hadn't understood what heavy metal is before this point (even my entry to metal with Metallica has the core essence of metal right there, no worries) but it was the first time I felt like I could do this. I can play weird shit too. Manilla didn't sound off to me, I could sense that in the weird outsider choices that had led them to this place, I could replicate not their choices, but that ethos. Mark Shelton was the ethos of heavy metal, for me, and he still remains. The first song I learned to play along to was "Riddle Master", off of the same record, Crystal Logic. It's a simple song with an alluring atmosphere. And it allowed for me to come inside it and seek both riddle and master for myself. Every time I play that riff and wait for the cymbal accent on the two of the beat, we're all in there together. Manilla Road knew how to be their real selves but also allow listeners to step in their world with them. That's love, if you ask me. Love for their most tender and true self, in their heart, and also total openness and access for those that seek.
Mark Shelton was old, not old enough for his passing to not be untimely and therefore tragic, but older than heavy metal. He was a hippie. Metalheads hate the hippies, usually. Mark managed to synthesize the ground-floor 'love is all you need' of hippiedom and slotted in '...but arm yourself with four feet of cruel steel while you're at it". On Crystal Logic is this lyric that I keep thinking about, all my life:
"There's Good and there's Evil and there's no in-between
We shall slay evil with logic, Crystal Logic".
I wrestled with this idea for years, through my most post-modern and moral relativist sojourns, even when I disagreed with the word of this, the spirit burned right through me. Now I am 34 years old and I agree 100% with the text as written. I don't know if I'll ever have the courage and power to slay evil with crystal logic, Helm is too sad, but I can surely know and say that this is right and just.
There's as many Manilla Road stories for me as there's Manilla Road songs, almost. It's no joke when I'm telling you that I've seen Manilla Road live twice and when they played "Death by the Hammer" it felt like I was getting crushed by metal like never before or since. Absolute exhaustion and ecstasy, because as Manilla Road are crushing you with their hammer, they also actually love you. Witness:
Mark served this ethos through thick and thin, he served heavy metal in its purest distillation for 40 years. I had the pleasure to meet the man briefly and can attest to the continuity between his higher self (the spirit of this band) and his actual meatspace personality. Pure class. I'll always remember him fondly as one of my few and sacred, really, Heavy Metal Father Figures. He wasn't instrumental just to my journey through heavy metal creativity, Manilla Road's work has touched hundreds of thousands of little metal mutants, and through them, many more millions. He's touched the musicians that speak to the broader public in ways that Manilla Road never were equipped to do so. Their moral seed germinated in a myriad more successful bands that have the money, the opportunities, the mainstream talent and the determination to go further than the underground. In a way, Manilla Road are the metalhead's metalhead icon. There's a reason, though rife with misgivings and acrimony, that this shit is called 'true metal'.
In the world of aesthetics, there's nothing that is true and false, there's only impressions and arguments to make. But in moral terms, verity lives. It is on that plateau that Manilla Road's steel was true and real. Though they would never ask or need for accolades and respect, as virtue is its own reward, I am sure that love would always be welcome in their hearts.
I've loved Manilla Road for 20-odd years. I'll die before I stop.
