So. You can take your drumming Gorilla and your hand holding otters and your CSS fakers and your dude dancing to 10 millions views, and forget them all if you think you know what a viral video is. Because this is it, right here. We’re talking old school. We’re talking betamax, baby. We’re talking nth generation dubs and word of mouth. We’re talking the most bootlegged underground rock documentary of all time. We’re talking Heavy Metal Parking Lot. All fifteen glorious, unintentionally hilarious and unexpectedly touching minutes of it.
The premise of the film itself is so far from greatness it beggars belief that it managed to become the beast it is today. In the mid 80s, two then amateur filmmakers working for public access television in Maryland, stalked teenage headbangers tailgating in an arena parking lot as they got wasted and blared their car stereos in shirtless anticipation of their date with the hottest ticket in rock: Judas Priest. Or, we should say, “F*CKEN JUDAS PRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEST!!” while flipping the goat and spraying the nearest person with beer.
Tracking the film down these days is not so difficult. One call to a reputable collector record store gets you, “Yeah man, we get it in every week,” like you’re so hip to it, wanting it now, 22 years after the fact. No less, it’s now on DVD. And while the actual documentary itself is short and sweet, there is over two hours of extras, which is where the true beauty lies. But we’re getting ahead.
By 1986, for largely inexplicable reasons, The Metal was king. Metallica were huge. Motley Crue and LA Guns ruled the Cathouse on the Sunset Strip. Hair metal was shortly to reach its critical apex (all of which would be documented in another legendary underground film.) And the fans, the lovers of metal – the hangbanging kids – were demonised by the American press in a good ol’, down home, moral panic. This culminated in Judas Priest being taken to court and charged with inciting the suicides of two young fans who supossedly were driven to it by listening to Stained Class backwards. The case was dismissed and history proved metal fans to be perfectly harmless, if somewhat incoherent on camera.
“Metal rules. Madonna sucks man, she’s a dick,” spits the very wasted Zebra Guy in one of the most quoted scenes in all of rockumentary. Elsewhere there’s bunches of kids off their faces on acid and weed, extolling the virtues of Dokken and Slayer, making out with their girlfriends and doing Priest impressions for the camera. The production values are zero, but the monologues from kids goofing in front their friends are priceless. The glorious, spotty, long haired exuberance of youth is captured in vignettes where metalheads rag on pop music, call for pot to be made legal, and otherwise keep it real for all teenage stoners down the ages.
The copius extras feature a particularly poignant 2002 return to the arena as it’s being bulldozed, tributes and knock-offs including Neil Diamond Parking Lot, an indepth history of the spreading of the tape and how it came to be Nirvana’s tourbus favourite. More impressively, the filmmakers tracked down the stars of the film – many of whom had no idea they had gone on to become underground cult heroes, and when confronted with it all these years later, fail to betray even a hint of embarrasment at their former selves.
The true gem though, is a tour through the Heavy Metal Basement: where one man has dedicated his life to obsessively collecting and cataloguing metal paraphenalia since the early 70s (“Dude, you’ve got a KISS pinball machine. That’s so cool!”). His concise history of Judas Priest would shame the most Pitchforkian of music afficianados and proves it’s the people toiling nerdily in obscurity who, when given their moment to shine, truly enrich the history of music. As Heavy Metal Parking Lot so gleefully reminds us, rock and roll really is all about the fans. And metal fans are fans for life.
Spread the word.
