Surfing With Avantasia

We've surfed with Tobias Sammet before.  When last we sailed with him through the frothy white seas of Babylonian iniquity, he was singing lead for Edguy and raising towers of untold height.  Such hubris!  Well, the world hadn't seen nothing yet:  Sammet went on to form power metal's pre-eminent supergroup, AVANTASIA.  What's that?  You thought all power metal bands ALREADY sounded like supergroups, with everybody trying to outsing and outshred their fellow soul-patched lifers?  Just try listening to this with a straight face:



Think nothing of it, friends, that's just Jens Johansson of Stratovarius tickling the ivories at 3:20!

In Edguy's "Babylon," Sammet joyfully proclaimed that nobody could stop him from raising towers to Babylon, no matter how much the old ladies in town frowned upon such a practice.  It was an homage to hubris as happy as any song you're likely to hear.  (HACHOO!)  In "Angel of Babylon," Sammet contrasts Babylon with Paradise, a conception that's pretty common.  (Indeed, if I ever get around to editing and compiling all these ramblings, Babylon As Hell will get its own chapter.)  But the question remains:  how does our friend Tobias imagine his Hellish prison of despair?

1. Its entrance is marked by a "tower in the night, up to the sky."  This got me wondering, what would Freud say about such a tower...?

2. Babylon's relationship with Paradise is expressed in curiously intimate, and consistent, terms:  it exists on "the back side of light," it's "the snake in the backyard of heaven," and when you visit Babylon, "Venus" guides you "to the back door of love."

3. While peering at Babylon through the shadows, Tobias and his supersinger friend Jorn witness "iniquity galore."  Do they run away in terror and disgust?  Hardly!  "Been worth a detour and some more," they crow.

Well!  It kind of makes me wanna go to Babylon, how about you?  Tobias's Babylon sounds less like a Hellish gauntlet of fire, and more like a delightful, if not completely sanitary, bathhouse.  This may be an important wrinkle in the story--the symbolic oppositional society that dare not speak its name.  I wonder how that OTHER Tobias would read it...?

Surfing With Holy Soldier

Come on, man--why don't you look into Holy Soldier?



Unbeknownst to me, before I happily stumbled across the above Dio/Rainbow cover, there were TWO Holy Soldiers, albeit with some continuity in their personnel. Basically, they were High-Voiced Soldier and Low-Voiced Soldier. The High-Voiced Soldier I grew up with featured Steven Patrick on lead vocals. He had a great voice! He sang with a quivering tenor that gave every song an undertone of exquisite pain, sort of like Brad Delp of the band Boston. Patrick always sounded like he just couldn't get enough God. So when you hear a song like "Love Me," my favorite, you really feel that this guy's at his wit's end and NEEDS God in a way that only his voice can express:



Low-Voiced Soldier--remakers of Rainbow's "Gates of Babylon" and Larry Norman's "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus"--were fronted by Eric Wayne. I don't really know anything about him, aside from his hairy machismo. According to Lutheran theologian/CCM critic Mark Allan Powell, the Wayne-led album Promise Man is supposed to be really good. (But then he says they sound like "Crash Test Dummies doing Soundgarden songs," so I don't know WHAT to believe!) Me, I'll rep for the High-Voiced 1990 debut, Holy Soldier, and maybe the High-Voiced followup Last Train, which I listened to on the bus en route to a band contest once. It had a cover of "Gimme Shelter" and may have been beautiful. I can't promise anything beyond that, but it's gonna cost you, what?, a buck, so why not shell out and take a chance?

AS FAR AS THEIR TENUOUS RELATION TO BABYLON: Um, they covered Rainbow for this 1995 movie Raging Angels, an Alan Smithee film that featured Shelly Winters in a very special role as Grandma Ruth. Here's what one IMDB commenter has to say:

"The ending sees a rather over tanned Archangel take on the Devil in a rubbish sword fight, as well as some of the most rip off music.

"Buy this movie."

I think we can all imagine the depths of suck this movie would drag us through*. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that the idea of Babylon-as-hell is alive and well, even in the most dire B-movie universes. Also worth noting that although the song "Gates of Babylon" is narrated by the devil, there's nothing that says a Christian metal band can't cover it. It's sort of like The Screwtape Letters, or Petra's "Killing My Old Man" ("So I'll nail him to the wood..."). I'm admittedly out of the CCM loop, but it seems like Back Then was a more adventurous time. (sigh...) (Please prove me wrong...)

High-Voiced Soldier have one more Babylon reference, on their debut album. In the grimly eschatological "When the Reign Comes Down," Steven Patrick sings with trademark desperation about Babylon burning, the world stopping its turning, the sky raining fire, the flames rising higher, and--whoa baby, check out what's in store for rapists and killers:

"The scavenger of lost souls
It feeds as they expire
Licks the lips of the mouth of Hell
And spews eternal fire"

Tell me again, why was I allowed to listen to these guys but not Slayer?

*The soundtrack featured another (High-Voiced) Soldier tune, "The Pain Inside of Me," along with Stryper's "To Hell With the Devil" (over the end credits) and lead actor Sean Patrick Flanery's--yes--"Come In My Mind." (Now THERE'S an invitation!) Plus Boston, Golden Earring, and Candlebox! Remember Candlebox?

Surfing with Dio

If you dare:



Since this is the most unspeakably awesome song in the history of mankind--well, in the history of Babylon songs--well, I'm not sure it beats the Pajama Party, but anyway, it's Really Good--I've no idea why we haven't covered it yet. Basically, our industrious friend RJ Dio is the devil and Babylon is hell. How do I know? At the end of the song, he proclaims "The devil is me/ And I'm holding the key/ To the gates of sweet hell/ Babylon."

I normally hate it when singers spell out things that are better left implicit in their texts. You know, at the end of "Missing You," when John Waite cries out "I been lying to myself!"? I want to slap him. Or when, in "King of Pain," the Police backup singers (the Deputies?) sing "That's my soul up there" after every line? I want to, um, freeze them in a waterfall like dead salmon. No, not threatening enough? Well fine, I want to stick them in a room with this demented DIO SATAN who will BIND them, SELL THEM AS SLAVES, REMOVE THEIR VEILS WITH A SABER DANCE, and then DRAG THEM AWAY TO BABYLON, all while making the whole excursion sound appealing. This is the deranged eternal punishment I wish upon the Police, and upon any other singer that doesn't trust the subtlety of their material.

Except I don't mind it so much with RJ, because his song is the mother of everything that rocks the bells. Both in this solo live version I've been listening to, and in the Rainbow original above, he rides what's almost a funk groove, based on a harmonic minor melody over what I think is a Phrygian (=Stygian?) riff, with a flat second. So the harmonies sound vaguely Middle Eastern, and you can TOTALLY envision a diabolical seven-veiled dance going down with heads on platters, plus he mentions a genie and a magic carpet ride, which was probably more sinister in the days before the Disney "Aladdin." And I don't care what anyone sez, Dio's a great singer. Sui generis, oui?

He presents a Faustian, Crossroads-style bargain for the listener. "Look away from the sea," he woos, "I can take you anywhere/ Spend a vision with me/ A chase with the wind." Sounds appealing! Sounds a little like a Chicago song. But then, once you've moved closer to him and seen the Gates of Babylon, all turns sour. "The power of what has been before/ Rises to trap you within." Oh crap! "A magic carpet ride, a genie, maybe more/ A city of heavenly sin." What have I done?!? Well, here's what you've done, in hard insistent triplet syllables: "Sleep with the devil and then you must pay...." (guitar chords buildingggg.....) "Sleep with the devil the devil will take you aWAY!" That, my friends, is badass.

Verse two opens with the demonic couplet, "You can see but you're blind/ Someone turned the sun around." Stop and ponder that line for a moment. Have you ever considered such awesome power? ("Someone"--how coy!) Awesome not just because this power is able to turn the sun around, but also because doing so obliterates all we know about astrophysics. Why would turning the sun around make you blind? It would throw the earth off its orbit, sure, and probably kill all living things, but is the other side of the sun that much brighter than the one we're used to? But see, we're no longer on earth, necessarily--we're out now on some cosmic magic carpet ride, with a man who has just revealed himself to be the devil, and our whereabouts hover between the earth we know and the cosmos of sun, city of heavenly sin, and hell. No moorings, no bearings, but dangerously close to Babylon.

Dio doesn't need subtlety here because he starts off so temptingly. When he sings his Chicago verse and then draws out the line "mooooove closer to me," it's hard to resist. But once he pulls off the Dio mask to reveal the devil inside (albeit one who probably doesn't look a whole lot different), his theft of your soul becomes blatant, and he cackles his delight. And let's face it, if you're cackling your delight over a soul you just won and a terrified little head that'll wind up on a platter, you don't need subtlety. You can just come right out and reveal that you're the devil, this is hell, you've greedily devoured John Waite AND the Police, and who's gonna do anything about it?