Metal 101

[November 19th, 2008]

All hell is breaking loose in Room 135. In the south wing of Westview High School in Beaverton, 17 students—mostly gangly freshmen and sophomores—are leaving their posts by the snack table and are in various stages of rocking out. Eric Gearhardt, a longhaired 15-year-old in a black Nirvana T-shirt, is playing some serious air guitar, his body flailing along to the imaginary chords he’s strumming. A young couple stands in the corner, holding hands and dancing to the thick, muddy riffs blasting from the computer. And to my right, three boys are moshing when Gentry Louk pulls me aside to tell me a secret. “Do you know the rule about mosh pits?” Louk asks, pulling up his left pant leg to uncover a splint on his foot, a sly grin revealing a missing middle tooth and a smile that stretches from cheekbone to cheekbone. “The thing is, you never want to bend down. My dad and I learned that the hard way.”

It’s not that uncommon for a 15-year-old to know mosh pit etiquette. But the fact that I’m hearing this in a suburban classroom in one of Oregon’s largest high schools (about 2,550 students at last count) while trying to restrain myself from body slamming too hard with the kids, their shouts barely audible as the music of Portland sludge rock band Black Elk blares in the background, is a bit odd. And that’s just what Brian Baumann wanted.

Nearly every Wednesday for the past two years, the 34-year-old Baumann—a learning specialist and teacher in his fifth year at the school—and a rag-tag group of 12 to 15 regulars have gathered to worship at the throne of Black Sabbath, Slayer and a host of local, underground and underappreciated heavy metal bands. Welcome to the Westview Metal Club, a haven for disenfranchised kids, Isis fans and shy teenagers who come together to rawk out—and feel like they belong somewhere.

“There are kids that don’t have a voice in the school,” Baumann says, making sure to watch his words. “My point was to help direct more resources to kids that don’t have a connection to [this] school. Everything goes to basketball, to the choir, to plays—especially in a wealthy school like this. So I’m fighting for just a little chunk of the pine because if there wasn’t something like this, they wouldn’t feel any connection to their school.”

Baumann—a lifelong music fan with a serious knowledge of all things “local” and “heavy”—is the orchestrator behind the after-school club and the creator of the incredibly positive, fertile community that surrounds it. Together with 35-year-old ESL teacher Jonathan Hughes, he started it in September 2007 with modest expectations, only to see things take off faster than a Jimmy Page guitar solo.

“The first one was pretty awkward—we had kids that were like, ‘I’m black metal or death metal, and everything else sucks’ or kids that were like, ‘I like the radio KUFO bands,’’’ Baumann says, grinning. “We had no idea who would show up. We put giant posters around the building with the dudes from Slayer on the principal’s window.”

Before long, the club was a hit with both the students and faculty, with Baumann noting that even “50-some-year-old Spanish teachers have bought shirts from us.”

Though the first meeting—where a group of about 20 metalheads watched a bootleg of a Black Sabbath concert from 1970—was basically a glorified, popcorn-fueled listening session, the club encourages the social aspect, by inviting students to bring in their own music and by staging awesomely hardcore events like a late October “metal pumpkin carving” competition (categories: Slayer, Sabbath and “most likely to get smashed”). It’s designed to stimulate conversations and create friendships. And through it all, the club has only one concrete rule: Respect thy metal.

“We listen to a lot of stuff that wouldn’t really be considered regular metal,” says Oliver Campbell, an affable, extremely knowledgeable 16-year-old clad in a Boris and Sunn O))) shirt he got for $7 at Buffalo Exchange. A heavy dose of the listening comes from local bands like thrashers Wolves in the Throne Room and Black Elk, whose bass player, Don Capuano, took the bus out to the ’burbs to share a few tracks from the band’s new record Always a Six, Never a Nine to a captivated audience. Black Elk’s music is hardly commercial, nor the type of noise most teenagers would appreciate, but to this crowd Capuano is on the same level as, say, Ozzy Osbourne. A few diehards even own the record already.

When it’s time for a short Q&A with Capuano, Campbell and Co. immediately shout out “I love you!” before quickly responding “How are you so awesome?” Though initially shy about interacting, they ask the 35-year-old bass player what his favorite things were when he was their age (Metallica’s Master of Puppets made him want to pick up a guitar) and get him to sign a pair of sneakers and paper torn from notebooks the minute he takes the cap off his Sharpie.

Both Baumann and Capuano note that they never had anything close to this welcoming when they were in school, and Baumann continually stresses that his goal for the club is to foster an appreciation and love for music—especially on the local level—and let every student know it’s easy to get involved with. They too can be promoters, or bassists, or even music writers. All it takes is a little self-confidence. “It just blows me away that some of these kids are already in tune,” he says. “The thing is that they are already 10 times cooler than anybody else even recognizes yet.”