New documentary thrashes through early days of Pittsburgh’s heavy metal scene

Before heavy metal became a mainstream genre, local TV station WPXI gave it the derisive — albeit, kind of rad — label of “gutter music.” This is according to a clip from a televised 1988 roundtable with local figures and musicians on the “controversial” topic.

The clip features winkingly in In the Days of Iron and Steel: The Story of Pittsburgh Heavy Metal, a new documentary by Dusty Hanna and Joshua Rievel.

The film — screening Fri., Dec. 13 at Wood Street Galleries —explores Pittsburgh’s thriving heavy metal music scene during the ’80s and ’90s.

“I’ve talked to probably 5,000 people about heavy metal music. I’ve never heard someone call it ‘slasher rock’ or ‘gutter music,’ but to each their own, I guess,” Hanna, co-owner of Pleasant Dreams Records in Polish Hill, tells Pittsburgh City Paper.

Roughly spanning 1984 through 1994, and drawing from nearly 15 hours of recorded interviews, In the Days of Iron and Steel features members from key bands from that scene such as Dream Death, Doomwatch, Eviction, and Derketa, making the case for Pittsburgh as a pioneer in heavy metal’s influential early days.

“There were some times we would do a couple interviews a night, and when we’d start out, it would be more of a formal interview,” Hanna says. “And then, by our third interview, we were just partying with the people. That’s when a lot of the good stories came out.”

“We just shot everything, never turned the camera off,” Rievel, an art handler for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, tells City Paper.

The project began as a short documentary surrounding Derketa, regarded as one of the first all-female death metal groups, performing in 2019 at Cattivo. After ending the night with several additional interviews with people in the crowd, Hanna and Rievel realized they had to tell the bigger story.

“We were like, ‘Oh, we have to mention Dream Death because they were important to the story’” Hanna says. “And then it was, ‘We have to mention Doomwatch.’ And then we were like, alright, let’s reconfigure here and do a documentary about the fans and that scene in general, which is how it came about.”

The documentary’s launching-off point is the group Necropolis, who formed in 1985 with a style that blended the West Coast thrash metal of bands such as Slayer and Megadeth with a Pittsburgh DIY ethic that inspired others to form bands regardless of their music experience, Hanna says. Led primarily by teenagers weaned on the heavy metal building blocks of AC/DC and Black Sabbath, the scene in Pittsburgh saw bands experimenting with genres, combining the aggression of hardcore punk and high-tempo thrash metal in an early example of crossover thrash music.

Meanwhile, Derketa opened up doors for future bands by being an all-female group growling death metal vocals over heavy layers of noise.

“It was very underground and pretty unheard of for one lady to be in a death metal band, let alone for there to be this band from Pittsburgh that was made up of all women who played death metal,” Hanna says.

Through show flyers and video footage, the documentary also showcases bygone venues such as the famed Electric Banana in Oakland, City Limits in Penn Hills, and Foggy Bottom in West Mifflin, as well as record stores, such as Eide’s Entertainment, that were hubs for tape trading and hanging out.

Though tapes and vinyl from that era have become cultish objects for music collectors who visited record shops like Pleasant Dreams, most bands’ reputations aren’t well-known outside of Pittsburgh, says Rievel. Rievel recalls a moment interviewing Jesse Michaels — best known as the lead vocalist for California ska-punk pioneers Operation Ivy — but whose time spent drumming for Necropolis is often forgotten.

“He basically said that Pittsburgh has an obscuring power,” Rievel says. “Every band that’s good that should be big, isn’t. And no one pays attention to them, they disappear, and then they get, probably now, a little revival of people discovering their stuff and it holds up today.”

An interview with Jeff Cherep, the guitarist for Doomwatch and Submachine, concludes the film. The revered local music figure passed away in 2023 after filming. The documentary, dedicated to Cherep, may end on a bittersweet note, but Hanna says he hopes people walk away with the sense of how vibrant the scene was, if only for a time.

“I mean, that’s really, really what it is, you know? I mean, ultimately, it didn’t change the music scene at large. It definitely didn’t change the world,” says Hanna. “But there was this group of kids from a working-class city that got together and got to experience this scene with each other.”

This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.