I was reading a while back about this guy called Mingering Mike who, back in the 70s, created a whole fictional recording career for himself and his friends. He hand-painted album covers and disc labels and recorded a cappella cassettes of his original compositions. It got me thinking back to my own imaginary music career, as Yugoslavian heavy metal singer/guitarist Jim Rock, leader of the band Iron Metal.
The germ of the idea was formed during repeated viewings of a videotaped nightclub performance by the Swiss heavy metal band Krokus, a program shown innumerable times on the fledgling USA network during 1982. By December of that year, I had developed a minor obsession with the show, especially frontman Mark Storace's mangled attempts at stereotypical heavy metal between-song patter ("See this little shitty newspaper bit? The Brooklyn Zoo rocks tonight!") After watching it with my best friend, Tim, we hit on the idea of forming our own imaginary metal band. The idea was to be from an even less likely country of origin than Switzerland, so we made our "band" natives of Yugoslavia and gave them the cleverly redundant name Iron Metal.
The material you have here represents a triple-album set (in just under 30 minutes!) composed of the group's first set of recordings, the 11-minute 'Iron Metal I' from December 1982, along with the more ambitious double-album set 'Rock on the Hole' from about six months later. Much as George Michael's UK solo hit "Careless Whisper" was released in the States as a Wham! record to help build brand-name recognition, this Jim Rock solo album is now being released under the Iron Metal banner. I apologize to any purists who have been offended. - Perry Amberson
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