Thou Shalt Suffer. Old Funeral. Morbid. What do these bands have in common? Well, besides a shared Scandinavian heritage, these three bands are all well-known because they are the preludes to much bigger and much better bands. Thou Shalt Suffer became Emperor, Old Funeral gave its members to Immortal, Mayhem, and Burzum, and Morbid sacrificed their lead singer to Mayhem, the fiery founders of Norwegian black metal. Dust, a New York City-based outfit from the early ‘70s, is another band that is notable for bequeathing its members to other institutions. While guitarist and vocalist Richie Wise would go on to produce Kiss (with the help of Kenny Kerner, Dust’s lyricist, producer, and manager) and bassist Kenny Aaronson would go on to play with the likes of Edgar Winter, Bob Dylan, and Foghat, hard-hitting drummer Marc Bell, the man responsible for Dust’s tremendous back-end, would gain fame and some fortune as Marky Ramone of the mighty Ramones. Initially forming in the late 1960s, Dust started out as just three big city kids who were heavily influenced by the British rock scene of the time. Chief among these influences were bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin, with a dash of The Rolling Stones thrown in for good measure. Added to this mixture was good, old-fashioned American muscle backed by plenty of amplification and enough youthful vim and vigor to blow-up Detroit ten times over. It’s no wonder then that Dust found their biggest audiences in the Midwest (St. Louis in particular), for their brand of bluesy, down-to-earth hard rock seems like the perfect analog to the blue-collar mentalities of the then forming Rust Belt.
In just two records, Dust set the stage for later hard rock and heavy metal bands, both in terms of their music and their artwork. In the former, Dust, who had a penchant for delving into country music at times, mostly kept to a standard rock and roll formula that gave special leeway for sheer volume and the accompanying bombast. In the latter, Dust marketed themselves with equal amounts of mystery and fantasy. On their first record, which is merely named “Dust,” the trio choose a picture of ragged skeletons propped together in the Spanish Republican fashion, who often left monks and nuns out in the open air for the purposes of proletarian ridicule. Given the fact that “Dust” was released on Kuma Sutra Records, then one could accuse Dust for smearing together sex and death like pornographic French philosophers.
On their second record - “Hard Attack” - Dust linked themselves with the artwork of Frank Frazetta, an illustrator and painter who would later become synonymous with Conan, the Barbarian and Floridian rockers Molly Hatchet. Dust obviously tapped into Frazetta’s talents well before either Molly Hatchet or Scotland’s Nazareth, and long before the boys from Jacksonville started “Flirtin’ with Disaster,” Dust were playing a type of gutsy, unpolished hard rock that often sounded more Southern than South Bronx.
Of the two records, “Hard Attack” is the superior, but “Dust” is not without its own special power. “Dust” opens with “Stone Woman,” a twangy rocker that showcases the slide guitar talents of Wise. “Stone Woman” also puts on display Bell’s furious drumming, which is so fast that at one point it sounds like Bell employed a double-kick drum well before Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor. The boys in Dust must have hit a dry spell in their personal lives when they were recording “Dust,” for “Chasin’ Ladies” follows “Stone Woman” as yet another adolescent ode to the charms of the opposite sex. “Chasin’ Ladies” is at once catchy and floating (at least vocally speaking), but its heavy and chaotic core underscores the hard rock ambitions of Dust. After the country and western episode of “Goin’ Easy,” Dust then return to solid earth on the vicious “Love Me Hard” and “From A Dry Camel,” a psychedelic metal masterpiece. “From A Dry Camel” is a threatening, wah-wah-heavy metal song that effectively uses the gong years before Alex Van Halen discovered that particular percussion instrument. “From A Dry Camel” shows the traces of Black Sabbath, while at the same time highlighting the Orientalist tendencies of that era’s hippy hessians with their weed smoke and their plugged-in Gibsons.
In 1972, a year after releasing their self-titled debut, Dust were starting to realize that they had already hit a ceiling insofar as touring went. Never radio friendly and never recipients of major label support, Dust suffered the fate of a lot of bands from that era. Luckily for them, they were all talented enough to find careers after Dust, and lucky for us, right before they exited on stage left, they left behind “Hard Attack.” “Learning To Die,” the record’s fourth track, is worth the sticker cost alone. “Learning To Die” is the type of song that helps to remind you why you fell in love with rock and roll in the first place - it’s multi-varied, rollicking, and, most importantly, loud.
Other standout tracks on “Hard Attack” include the pummeling “Suicide” (which eerily presages High On Fire), the punk-y “All In All,” and the dreamy ballad “Thusly Spoken.” Taken as a whole, “Hard Attack” feels like a trip through J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth on acid, or some other kind of barbarous adventure seen through the prism of a kaleidoscope. Despite the often overwhelming presence of modern throwback metal bands, “Hard Attack” and Dust seem like things impossible to copy today. After all, why would you want to copy them? Dust did all they needed to in two albums, and if the documentary “Such Hawks, Such Hounds” is any indication, then the short life of Dust has had a disproportionate influence on the long history of hard rock and heavy metal. Few bands are this lucky, and even though they picked their own name (and thus chose their own fate), Dust won’t be turning to ashes anytime soon.
Words: Benjamin Welton.
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