Bang Your Head Slick Black Cadillac Highway To Hell Quiet Riot

Metal Health (Bang Your Head) Album: Metal Health (1983)
Slick Black Cadillac Quiet Album: Riot II (1978)
Highway To Hell Album: Highway to Hell (2016)
by Quiet Riot

"Metal Health", sometimes listed as "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)", "Bang Your Head" or, as it was listed on the Billboard Hot 100, "Bang Your Head (Metal Health)", is a song by the American heavy metal band Quiet Riot on their breakthrough album, Metal Health. One of their best known hits and receiving heavy MTV music video and radio play, "Metal Health" was the band's second and final top 40 hit, peaking at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Being about the headbanging subculture, the song caught the attention of many heavy metal fans on its release. The single contained both the studio-recorded version and a live version, which was later released on their Greatest Hits compilation. The lyric, "well now you're here, there's no way back", eventually became the title for Quiet Riot's documentary, released in 2015.

The song title is a play on the phrase "Mental Health," and is a celebration of the rebellious nature of heavy metal and fans who bang their heads to the music. Lead singer Kevin DuBrow wrote the lyric, which is based on the slights he heard throughout his life. DuBrow, who died of a drug overdose in 2007 at age 52, did indeed have a "mouth like an alligator," as he would always speak his mind.

Thanks to a video that got lots of airplay on MTV, this song helped bring heavy metal music with a pop sheen into the mainstream, paving the way for photogenic hair bands of the '80s like Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister.

Quiet Riot had been around for a while, releasing their first album in 1977 with Randy Rhoads, who later became Ozzy Osbourne's go-to axeman, on guitar. By the time they released their third album, Metal Health, they were polished and poised for stardom. "Metal Health" was the first single, but it went nowhere. Their cover of the Slade song "Cum On Feel The Noize" was released as a follow-up, and that one caught on in America, going to #5 in November 1983, the same month the Metal Health album topped the chart, becoming the first metal album to do so. With the band now established, "Metal Health" went up the chart, landing at #31 in February 1984.

Guitarist Carlos Cavazo and drummer Frankie Banali are the co-writers on this track along with Kevin DuBrow. "We were huge fans of AC/DC, so we wanted something that had a very simple, straight ahead groove at a certain tempo," Banali said in a Songfacts interview. "It went through a lot of different changes, and what I mean by 'changes,' a lot of that song has to do with the tempo. I listen to a lot of classical music and jazz, and the thing that I found interesting about both classical music and jazz is that certain parts of a song only work at a certain tempo, and they don't work at another tempo. With jazz, they shift gears - the same thing with classical. With rock 'n' roll, you basically start at a tempo and you end at that tempo. So the tempo on that record is not slow, but it really digs into the groove. It didn't work at that tempo live, which is why we actually played it a little faster live - because it gets the energy of the audience. So that is something that we paid attention to.

And at one point, Metal Health was much longer than it is now. Kevin was really good about trimming fat."
The video, directed by Mark Rezyka, is a case study on how to make a memorable clip on the cheap. It was the band's first video, and the budget was very tight. They got a community collage to let them film it there for free, and recruited student to form the crowd in the stage scenes.

As opposed to many early MTV favorites, it has a cohesive storyline: Kevin Dubrow is strapped into a straightjacket, wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask, trapped in a padded room. He makes a daring escape from the asylum, then drops from the rafters to rock the crowd at the concert.

MTV loved it, since zeroed in on their target demographic of young male rock fans, but it didn't do well at first. After "Cum On Feel The Noize" (also directed by Rezyka) took off, the network revived "Metal Health." Dubrow's asylum look became one of the iconic images of MTV.

On the album, the song is listed as "Metal Health." The single was released as "Bang Your Head (Metal Health)" in most territories, and a version of the song is published as "Metal Health (Bang Your Head)," which Frankie Banali says is the official title.

This song provided not just the title track for the album, but also the visual presentation. The album cover shows DuBrow in a straightjacket and mask, as later seen in the video. The mask became a kind of talisman for the band, showing up in their promotional materials and on later album art and videos.

The songwriter/producer Spencer Proffer produced the album, including this track. Proffer owned a recording studio and was key to giving Quiet Riot their start, but much of his later work was far less Metal: he was the music consultant on the show Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, and produced the TV series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child.

The song can be heard in the movie Footloose, playing in car of the character Ren. It was also used as the entrance theme for Randy The Ram in the 2008 movie The Wrestler.