Gary Holt and Tom Araya of Slayer perform during the second day of the 2014 Heavy Montréal festival. Slayer is back this year.

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So there you have it: even Satan retires.

Even Mephistopheles wants Freedom 55. Hey, hit the links, reruns of Family Feud. BarcaLounger, riding mower in a tatty robe, hanging at the mall lecturing the young ’uns. After 38 years as the ne plus nega of death metal, as the darkest and devilest of major metal bands, Slayer is calling it a day and heading into that bad night.

The band is bowing out on a worldwide farewell tour that will roll until Nov. 30, 2019 (and probably beyond), and headline Saturday, July 27, at the 10th edition of Heavy Montréal, their last Quebec performance. There will be cheers and tears south of heaven, memories of a legacy of carmine performances, and questions why (of which more later). But perhaps it’s just time. For when you gaze too long into the Slayer, the Slayer gazes into thee.

And what better place than Heavy Montréal, the Summer Pandaemonium by the River. Or as it’s also known by the South Shore locals who loathe it, the F*** St-Lambert Festival. Two days, four-stage shopping for all your metal needs. From Anthrax to Watain, they’ll muzzleload the amps, fans will man the stage barricades and Jägermeister pitstops, and they’ll all pull the shades on the sweet sunshine of Île Sainte-Hélène and invoke Samhain in midsummer.

Because while it’s all about the Slayer, it’s not all about the Slayer. Above all, Heavy Montréal is a lesson in the breadth of metal.

Co-headliners Ghost will pop the bulbs on their necro-Broadway pop-metal. Playing their only summer fest show in North America, Saturday night’s headliners are divisive — is it a cunning blackmetal/pop crossover that delivers onstage, or just pope-shtick with production values — but undeniably marquee.

The fest is a two-day tour of what’s happening from the major leagues out into the styx. You get two of the Big 4 (Slayer, Anthrax). There are the Lifers, 39-year thrash legends Metal Church and 37-year vets Corrosion of Conformity. Where else can you find Memphis Christian metal band Skillet — who it’s presumed will have their stage crosses rightside up — on a bill with bad Swedes Watain — who won’t.

Amy Lee’s Evanescence will reweave their gauze-goth hard rock for the lovelorn. Fire up your inhalation devices for Cali stonehengers Fu Manchu, and buckle up for Cattle Decapitation, the extreme end of death, who deliver the unexpected, using offence to prod response: they’re actually an animal welfare protest band. Proficiency experts will head for tech-death Rivers of Nihil and Toronto’s unquantifiable Devin Townshend.

Out in the woods, gambol with indefensible personal fave Nekrogoblikon, who have mascot John Goblikon onstage and truly do celebrate goblinhood. In a more mainstream register, there’s whatever’s left of the parted-out Quiet Riot, version umpteen (judgment reserved), and the ever-popular (and somehow always disappointing) Godsmack, doing their post Layne-Staley medley.

Comic relief

Tellingly, there’s more room for comic relief here than at any other music festival. In the gag-glam vulgarity of Steel Panther, whose bassist Russ Parrish once introduced “one of the best drummers in … our band” and whose singer Michael Starr proudly declares “I am not a chubby Bret Michaels … I am a skinny Vince Neil.” In the same yucks register, Metalachi hail from Mexico / East L.A., sing in Spanish and play a crossbreed that should by now be self-explanatory. Less Les Paul, more guitarrón. Galactic Empire? Star Wars geeks, get front and centre.

Locally, celebrate Montreal stalwarts Kataklysm, noise/sludge band Great Sabatini, and truly promising Sergio Leone-stoners Mountain Dust. You’ll get the odd miscast punk or hardcore band like Terror, but they’ll still be welcomed and patronized, as this fest is known for its catholic (ahem) taste range.

There is also actual rock star Slash (who’d have blown the roof off the 2017 GNR show at Jean-Drapeau had there been one) with Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators. Can’t go wrong.

In its 10th edition, Heavy Montréal is as established as any other genre cluster in the city’s cultural constellation. Like metal itself, it continually finds a way to shake off the leprosy and persist. For that, Heavy can look back to the 2014 edition breakthrough, when headliner Metallica blasted it into the global metalfest datebook, spearheading an event with blockbuster attendance of 75,000 over two days — something Nick Farkas, Evenko vice-president of concerts and events, described then as Heavy Montréal’s “Eminem” moment, or the flashpoint when something local/regional becomes international/destinational. Now, amid the tens of thousands at Jean-Drapeau Park on the sultriest weekend of the year, you’ll hear francos and anglos, but also Yankees and Southerners, Calis and Texans, and Euros from everywhere they do or don’t stage a massive metal gathering.

And there is the mood, and the mode.

Both are embodied in the crowd. Tribalists from every genre, sub- and micro-genre. Blackened death kids in corpse paint and glamsters with enough Aqua Net to atomize the remaining ozone. Stoners, bikers, movingly awkward zitfacers. Dads with earmuffed toddler daughters on their shoulders, pregnant people in black F-U T-shirts in 30-degree sunshine. Bottle-blondes in black leather hot pants and five-inch heels crunching on gravel holding hands with beer-bellied dudes in leather vests heading for The Faceless. And the Forest. Osheaga also has its Forest area, but at Heavy Montréal, that zone exhales an illicit thrill. Come on in, it’s bad in here. This is where the truly unpaid demonstrate their complete allegiance to their dark master. And I mean the ones onstage.

A codified celebration

From circle-pits to walls of death, there is a codified celebration of a kind of violence here, or at least brute physicality. And yet in all the years covering every stage from noon to tomb time, I’ve not seen a single real fist fight. And it’s not like these people don’t drink.

Slayer was a different issue. Stepping back into their (our) history, the second time I saw them, in the Verdun Auditorium, a kid lurched out of the mosh pit, heading for me and my journalist notepad (rookie mistake). He wanted to register a comment, but all I could register was a front tooth, or half of it, broken off at a perfect 45-degree angle. Oh, and all the blood on his mouth and face.

I was concerned. After he crowed about how great he felt, he dove back into the melee. That was all you needed to know about Slayer, and when I interviewed guitarist Kerry King years later, he concurred, calling it “a brotherhood of insanity down there.”

Which leads one to wonder: why would Slayer hang up the goat horns? When you’re still the thrash/diablo superweights, the band once aptly nicknamed “the Rolling Stones of death metal,” why? Singer-bassist Tom Araya is only 58. Fifty-eight. That’s the new 29 in rock band years.

Well, in the 50th year since the unbirthing of metal by Black Sabbath, maybe it’s just fatigue. They have taken their beating over the years, physically, with Araya’s headbanging, and otherwise. In one of the great horror-coincidences of all time, Slayer had the misfortune of releasing their ninth album, God Hates Us All, in September 2001. As in, on Sept. 11, 2001. Timing really is everything.

Perhaps the subject matter just took its toll — all the serial killers, genocide, war, hell, torture, Nazism and the Big Guy. Most likely, King realized that, 33 years after you recorded Reign In Blood, routinely cited as a genre masterpiece, and six years after his co-founding guitar partner Jeff Hanneman died of cirrhosis, Slayer has served its sentence. There’s nothing to prove and no incisors left to snap off.

So. Slayer bows. Whither the metal? With no real mainstream presence on radio, in movies, TV or magazines, and only in perfervid cult/niche websites, how is this supposed to survive?

A bright star

‘No presence’ is really the point, and this weekend is the object lesson. For 48 hours and all the months of anticipation that led up to them, none of it matters. With that absence from the mainstream, the live gathering is the Proof of Life. Every gathering in the global constellation of gatherings, in which Heavy Montréal is now a bright star.

It would be foolish to argue that metal is un- or apolitical. There are plenty of examples of politicized songs or albums — I mean, even cross faded Ozzy’s Sabbath sophomore album leads with War Pigs. But that’s not the same as the pull in other genres toward defined positions or even candidates. No, metal is anti-establishmentarian, nonspecifically rebellious and conveniently slotting into either end of the political spectrum, explaining why it has the broadest of them — from Gojira and Napalm Death on the putative left to you-don’t-wanna-know on the putative right.

Is metal eternal? There are two tests. How old is it? At least as old as the fellow who coined the term ‘Heavy Metal’. Ozzy? Dio? Nah. It was another junkie, appropriately, who wrote “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.” I mean, did William S. Burroughs nail it, or what?

And how young is it? Will Mosh Pit Girl be there? The festival can only hope. If so, MPG, feel free to report your status, and your reviews to the email below.

Markjlepage@yahoo.com

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