I had this completely messed up dream where I went to New York, met up with Jamie Roberts (PR, BigMachineMedia), Rob Blasko (Ozzy Osbourne), Maria Brink (In This Moment), and Bram from MetalInsider.net, and went clothing shopping, while the dudes from Metal Injection followed us around with a camera. We got like a billion hoodies and shirts and shoes, and ate burgers and drank Long Island Iced Teas. Then later, my Dad called and bought the whole band dinner at the way-too-nice-for-our-band restaurant downstairs at the hotel we’re staying at. It was nuts.
Oh wait, that really happened a couple of days ago. What a completely insane trip this has been.
We started off at an Army Surplus Store (not really our thing, but it was a convenient place to meet up) and I got an old pair of boots. I later discovered the sole needed to be re-glued, which I’ll do later, but overall they’re pretty comfy and practical. The guys think I should get some sweat pants and tuck them into the boots. I don’t share their Cannibal Corpse-inspired enthusiasm for said questionable outerwear, but it might need to happen simply for the sake of doing something ridiculous and embarrassing: something I have a well-developed natural penchant for any way, independent of outside influence. We’ll see. (Hint: nope.)
Next on the list was some sort of hipster thrift store, featuring such gems as leather pants (multiple colors, of course), torn up dresses, ironic button-up shirts, and what appeared to be a combination lighter/mini-dildo. I doubt a more convincing indie-rock-band-heaven-on-earth exists outside of LA. Unfortunately for the very nice people trying to help us find some decent clothes, we weren’t really digging it. It sort of felt like we were back in Junior High, and our moms were taking us shopping for new school clothes: absolutely pure in their intentions, but somewhat fuzzy on the details of modern teenage fashion. I felt a little bad about turning down their suggestions, especially considering Maria and Blasko had been flown out from California just to help us out, but a large part of marketing is knowing your audience, and the people that we know that listen to our music would be pretty pissed off if we ended up changing our image. I really doubt that anybody involved with the contest wanted that at all.
I’d imagine it’d be hard to figure out what to do if charged with enhancing a metal band’s image: part of the point of metal is that it doesn’t really matter what you look like or what you wear, as long as you’re honest about it. I can understand the point of presenting a somewhat unified image though. If everyone in the band is wearing similar-themed stuff, and then one guy’s wearing some sort of insane retro-80′s-neon-throwup getup, that’s very likely going to throw some people off in a not-great way. Even metal fans can fickle and image-driven, sometimes more so than other genres’ fans. Just look at what happened to Metallica the second they cut their hair. With that simple decision, their entire image changed. Accompanied by the not-subtle change in their music, we were left with essentially a completely different band. Would Metallica fans have felt the same way about the band’s new sound if they’d kept their long hair and standard metal-band getup? What if the band had cut their hair just before releasing Master of Puppets? Would that album have been received as well? Obviously, I don’t have the answers, but it leaves you with something to think about. What if Metallica looked like the guys in Cobra Starship or Ratt when they put out “Kill ‘em All”? Hell, part of the reason they were so popular is because they looked like regular metal dudes, not glammed-up chicks.
Fortunately, us Iron Thrones dudes mostly wear pretty standard stuff when it comes to metal bands: jeans, t-shirts, & hoodies. Unfortunately for the people charged with enhancing our image, there’s really not much you could do to make us look like we sound, and so with very few exceptions, we ended up just getting more of pretty much exactly what we already owned. We also found that the budget we had to work with went quite a long way when purchasing “normal dude” clothes, vs. hipster stuff. The only slightly out-of-character purchase ended up being my boots, which I’d been needing for a while as the tread on my previous pair had worn out, causing me to fall on my ass several times last winter.
Any way, I’d say the biggest take-away from this experience was coming to realize just how much a band’s image is intimately connected with perceived legitimacy, particularly in the metal scene, whether or not most metal fans would like to admit it. This is especially true now that we’re in a time where most people end up seeing a band before they even hear them. First impressions are everything, and the image you portray has a very real affect on how people experience and interpret your music.
Cheers,
-steve.h