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50 Years of IRON MAIDEN episode 25: Visions of the Beast featuring Bob Cesca from Camp Chaos

50 Years of IRON MAIDEN episode 25:  Visions of the Beast featuring Bob Cesca from Camp Chaos

GRAB A STACK OF ROCK #124

Back in 1999/2000, a little video called “Napster Bad!” went viral.  You know it, you shared it, you loved it.  Well, not Harrison because he was not born yet.  Bob Cesca (founder of Camp Chaos) created that video and many others, including official music videos for bands such as Motley Crue, Yes, and…Iron Maiden!

Bob is a talented jack of many trades, and also a massive Rush fan.  In this effortless interview, Bob tells us everything you wanted to know about him and Iron Maiden.  2003’s Visions of the Beast double DVD was a massive collection, and Camp Chaos did six music videos for it.  These videos mixed animation with the original familiar music video footage.  We break them all down in detail, including how to access the Easter Eggs.  How was he contacted by the Maiden camp?  How much input did Iron Maiden have on his creative process?  Why did he choose certain Eddies and settings, and how did he decide what to edit out of the originals to make way for animation?  It is a fascinating trip back in time, as current events impacted some of the videos, even though the songs themselves were oldies.  Hey…are there 10 ME-109s out of the sun…or not?

Bob also answered all our non-Maiden questions, such as why James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich have no noses in “Napster Bad”?

After Bob had answered all our questions, Harrison and Mike took a deep dive on the rest of the contents of the DVD set.  If you owned Visions of the Beast back in the day, own it now, or not yet…you will want to pop it in after this episode.

Please welcome Mr. Bob Cesca to Grab A Stack of Rock, and 50 Years of Iron Maiden!  Join us at the premiere in the comments tonight – we love interacting with you!

A big thanks to Tim Durling for introducing us to Bob!

Friday November 7 at 7:00 P.M. E.S.T.  Enjoy on YouTube.

Past episodes:

Handy YouTube Playlist:

REVIEW: Metallica – St. Anger (bonus DVD, 2003)

Happy long weekend, Canada!
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METALLICA – St. Anger (bonus DVD, 2003 E/M)

Ahh, the much-maligned St. Anger! When I first reviewed St. Anger back in 2003, I pointed out that some Metallica fans are suffering from “Highschool Syndrome”:

Highschool Syndrome: “The band doesn’t sound the same as they did when I liked them in highschool, therefore they are sellouts and I don’t like this album.”

A staunch critic must remember something before they brand St. Anger a sellout. An album recorded this harshly, with songs this aggressive by anyone else would get zero airplay. How is that selling out?

Perhaps by “selling out”, some fans are referring to the lack of solos and the alternative, downtuned sounds on St. Anger. Unfortunatly, the lack of solos is really a mistake. Kirk Hammett did record at least one very cool and appropriate solo for this album; check out the movie Some Kind Of Monster for a glimpse at that. Hammett felt that the cutting of guitar solos was a mistake and so do I. As Hammett said in the movie, “Having no solos dates the album to THIS time (2003)”.

The production by Bob Rock was definitely the wrong direction. He was overcompensating for what was perceived as overproduction on Load, Reload and Black. The band probably should have taken a production direction like Garage Inc. (heavy, but conventional) instead of pushing the envelope like they did.  The sound he created was so harsh that it is actually headache inducing for me to listen to St. Anger in one sitting. (And this is selling out?)

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The songs contained herein are by and large pretty decent. The title track was brilliant, with a great video to match. My personal favourite is the fast and furious “Frantic”, the melodic “Sweet Amber”, the angry “Shoot Me Again” and the epic “All Within My Hands”. There are ample time changes and musical adventures going on here, which harken back to the ambitiousness of Justice, while not sounding like old-school Metallica.

The lyrics, mostly introspective, are not my cup of tea. Some may call them brilliant, some may call them psycho-babble trash. Whatever they are, it is the first time that Hetfield didn’t helm them and they were written by the entire band. Truly, they’re not that bad when you’re banging your head at full speed, but most fans want to hear Metallica raging against something other than themselves.

The CD comes with a cool booklet, and of course the bonus DVD: all of St. Anger, recorded by the Hetfield / Ulrich / Hammett / Trujilo lineup, in order, in the studio. (Bob Rock played bass on the album.)  At the time, a freebee like this was a bigger deal.  They were obviously trying to placate pissed off fans after the fallout of Napster.  There was even a code to download an entire live show of your choice. Basically, you are getting the value of three albums in one, for the price of a single CD.  Not bad.

Yet, St. Anger was a hard album to love, and few people did. It is the sound of a fractured band piecing itself back together and experimenting with some interesting directions. It could have been better.  It’s an important album in the sense that, this was a huge turning point.  The band were basically reduced to two guys (Kirk and Lars) for months on end while James was in recovery.  We all know the story.

From that point of view, it’s an interesting listen.  Music had changed, Metallica were trying to lead and play catch-up at the same time, so it seemed.  I think you have to give them credit for attempting something new, sometimes those albums end up classics 20 years down the road.  There are enough good riffs and solid songs on St. Anger to come back to it once in a while.

Besides, if you want a band to sound the same album after album, why would you listen to Metallica?  AC/DC are still around, you know.

3/5 stars

Don’t count Bob Rock out — his work with the Tragically Hip has been excellent!

Part 87: The Great Change

RECORD STORE TALES PART 87:  The Great Change

The Great Change happened around the turn of the millennium.

Prior to that, CD sales were fast and furious. DVD sales had begun to replace VHS sales. We still carried blank cassette tapes. Not too many people were downloading music. Most people weren’t even connected to the internet yet.  I still had friends who would come over to use it, and I only got it in mid  ’98.

Then I noticed a change. Cassette sales dwindled while requests for blank CD’s increased. Initially we resisted carrying blank CD’s. We thought by doing so, we would be unintentionally killing a CD sale. Eventually we began carrying blank discs, when they started dropping in price.  They, they took off.  We started hearing about Napster. And Metallica. Metallica fans began selling off their discs.

I remember one guying coming in with a great selection of Metallica discs. All the albums, plus the Live Sh*t box set.

“Wow, this is a great Metallica collection you have here,” I commented as I went through the discs.

“Thanks. I’m selling them because of that fucking asshole Lars. I ripped them all to my computer and now he can go fuck himself.”

                                                      

I’ll never forget that because at first I felt like, “Well, that doesn’t really do anything to Lars, you already paid for the discs and gave him your money,” but I guess it was the principle of the thing. People were really pissed off. And that represented a huge change.  People always bitched about CD prices.  $24 for a regularly priced disc, that’s a lot of money.  I used to get two albums for that money in 1986. There’d never been a satisfactory answer as to why a kid had to pay $24.99 for the new Judas Priest in 1998.  And believe me, it wasn’t the stores ripping off the kids.  The margin we made on new CDs could barely be called profit.

Over the next five years, I watched CD prices and sales drop, while we were forced to diversify in order to stay alive. We had already been carrying DVD’s. We started carrying McFarlane dolls.  They were cool, but a lot of them were really limited.  For example, for Kiss, we only got one Eric Carr, and two Aces.  People would want the whole set, but all you’d have left was Paul and Gene.

Then bobble-heads came (which I hate, I absolutely hate bobble-heads). Then Osbournes family toys. Trivia games. Simpsons toys. Clocks. Posters. Books. Hats. CD wallets with a Linkin Park logo on them.  Anything we could make a reasonable buck on, even if it was only marginally related to what we did, like the Simpsons toys. (We carried DVD’s, so Simpsons was marginally related.) Then we’d knock down whatever wasn’t selling to clearance prices, and try something else.

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The only tangent that was really successful was Xbox and Playstation games. We had so many requests, and physically a game is identical to a CD or DVD, so games were a no brainer.  People asked for them all the time.  We had to educate ourselves from the ground up on game pricing and we jerry-rigged a way in our computer system to inventory them. However to me, the scent of decay was in the air. Because downloading had killed such a huge chunk of our music sales, the stores were nothing like the way I remembered.

Working in a store selling video games and bobble-heads wasn’t the dream job that started me on this path.  I was always there for one reason:  the music!

Well, yeah, and the staff discount.