Machine Head - Davidian

Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast.

Album: Burn My Eyes [debut album]
Genre: Metal, Groove Metal, Thrash Metal
Album Release: August 9th 1994
Single Release: 1994 [lead single]
Length: 4:56
Producer: Machine Head & Colin Richardson
Vocalist: Robb Flynn [age 27]
Label: Roadrunner Records

Music Video


Live in 1995 at Dynamo Open Air

Charts, Streams & Sales

Spotify: Over 46 million
YouTube Music: Over 22 million

Credits

Bass, drums, guitar [x2]

Details

• In 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the headquarters of a cult, known as the Davidians, in Waco, Texas resulting in multiple fatalities on both sides. 'Davidian' is about that raid.
  
  The track is an energetic cacophony of pure aggression that focuses on themes such as revenge and wrath by including lyrics like "disrespect you have given, your sufferings my wealth". The music is technical and fast-paced requiring a high degree of precision from the musicians involved.
  
  
• In the 1980's thrash metal was born in the San Francisco Bay Area when bands such as Metallica, Testament and Possessed congregated there in order to escape the glam metal dominated Los Angeles. Machine Head also came from the Bay and would carry the legacy of such bands forward into the nineties.
  
  It's unusal that a place with so much sun would create a dark, hostile music full of aggression and bravado. It's as if the musicians themselves were rebelling against the unending sunlight by taking up the dark arts of metal. Perhaps the bands only came out at night lest they were turned into cinders by the strength of the suns rays.
  
  The Bay Area also had some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in America at the time, so it can be difficult to think of the fans working high paying jobs by day and holding up their devil horns by night but they were. I suppose that while a teenagers parents might be well-paid they themselves might not be and no matter the situation, young people will always want to rebel. How can they utilise their freedom by only doing what their parents allow?
  
  The abundance of sunlight and Californian clean-living invited challenge because too much of a thing can summon its opposite and it was the young, who look for something new, that spearheaded the change in sound away from the The Beach Boys and towards Metallica. The music of the two bands is so vastly different that even putting them in the same sentence feels jarring. That the dominant sound changed from one to the other in a period of only ten years is true but feels so far-fetched it has to be false.
  
  Of course, not everyone in the Bay Area was rich, far from it. There were people who had to clean the streets and work in shops and many of them did so they could afford to attend the metal show on the weekend.
  
  Metal is an innately rebellious genre and it could paradoxically be that the laid back, bohemian attitude of California allowed thrash metal to be born precisely because the place permitted broad deviations from normal behaviour. In other, more conservative places, a burgeoning metal scene might have been stomped to death in the cradle by puritanical parents lecturing how "no son of mine will play that filth".
  
  It's astounding how many metal bands are from California. You have Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Motley Cru, Korn, Deftones and Machine Head to name but a few. Wikipedia has a page that lists well over a hundred bands.
  
  
• "For some very bizarre reason, the very first chorus of Davidian was 'Get the fuck up to the bone-breaking groove.' And I thought that was good. I thought that was good for like three weeks. Then I remember we did a warehouse party, when we started out there wasn’t a lot of clubs in the Bay Area, and we were just playing our punk rock friends' warehouse, we were playing a parking lot. I remember getting up, we were getting to Davidian, we're gonna do this fucking chorus, I said it one time and I was like, 'Holy shit. This is fucking horrible.' In that moment, in that warehouse parking lot, this shit’s gotta change, right fucking now, because this sucks. So that night I wrote, 'Let freedom ring with a shotgun blast." [Robb Flynn talking to Kerrang in 2019]
  

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