Stephen King and heavy steel simply make sense collectively. The well-known creator’s subject material unfold of brutal horror, epic fantasy, and authoritarianism (amongst different issues, like murderous vehicles) all match completely into the leather-clad, guitar-shredding, shock-and-awe stylings of the steel style, and the affiliation was solely bolstered by each King’s work and the steel style exploding in reputation across the identical time within the late Nineteen Seventies and early ’80s.
The connection is especially pure within the case of “The Stand,” King’s first dive into the epic fantasy style in 1978 forward of his “Dark Tower” series. A large success in its day, “The Stand” has remained one in all King’s hottest and influential works, proper alongside books like “The Shining,” “It,” “Carrie,” and “Salem’s Lot.” It is also been one in all his most closely tailored, with miniseries versions of “The Stand” hitting in both 1994 and 2020, and a movie adaptation reportedly within the works. Past that, the novel has been extremely influential in different sectors of standard tradition (Damon Lindelof has cited it as an inspiration for “Misplaced”), however particularly within the new wave of heavy steel that was beginning to pop off when the e-book first got here out.
Of specific notice, Metallica’s seminal 1984 sophomore album “Experience the Lightning” and its title monitor each take their names from a line within the e-book, the place a personality makes use of the phrase in reference to execution by electrical chair. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was studying the e-book on the time and located himself struck by the expression, which he introduced to guide singer and frontman James Hetfield. “I keep in mind considering, ‘Wow, what an important music title,'” Hammett instructed Rolling Stone in 2014. “I instructed James, and it ended up being a music and the album title.”
Metallica wasn’t the one steel band impressed by The Stand
In case you’re a metalhead, or a wistfully reformed metalhead like me, “Experience the Lightning” is about as foundational as “The Stand” is to the Stephen King universe. Positive, it is no “Grasp of Puppets,” however what album is? You would possibly assume the chances could be lengthy for 2 information in the identical hyper-specific style to take direct inspiration from the identical e-book, however you would be underestimating the attain of King’s work and the shared pursuits of ’80s steel musicians.
No different thrash steel band is even near the stratosphere of fame the place Metallica lives, however Anthrax is about as shut as any. That is largely due to their 1987 album “Among the many Residing,” whose title monitor was immediately impressed by “The Stand.” Guitarist Scott Ian particularly has lengthy been an enormous fan of King’s, and people who’ve learn the e-book will simply see the connections with lyrics like, “Purge the world with hearth / Damnation is the worth he’ll pay / For an evil man’s want / Good versus evil / The stand to conquer evil.” The music additionally namechecks the e-book’s Captain Journeys virus that wipes out an enormous proportion of the nation’s inhabitants, to not be confused with the very actual infectious illness the band is known as after.
In 2024, King not directly paid the respect back with a reference to Anthrax in his “You Like It Darker” brief story assortment. Some issues simply make sense collectively, and Stephen King stories and heavy steel are two of them.
