Metal Health (Bang Your Head)

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, the song was much longer than it is now. Kevin was really good about trimming fat."