Heavy Metal Alchemists

Heavy Metal Alchemists
By Daniel Moody

“This whole place is haunted,” says Jaden Hawthorne, the talented but eccentric singer/guitarist for the cult metal band, The Black Nylons.  “It’s like The Shining.” 

Wild vines twist around the metal signpost and swallow the weather-beaten plaque that marks the entrance to the Edgewood-Somerset Iron Furnace, where Something Wicked Studios lies several miles off the beaten path, just outside of Athens, OH, in the basement of a quaint stone cottage, which eighty years ago, belonged to the foreman of the Edgewood Iron Works.  The elegant, metal gate between two stone pillars at the end of the long, narrow drive stands in strong relief to the overgrown, backwoods setting.  The place does have an old and eerie vibe like the setting of a classic horror film.  I pass the ruin of a coke oven on the hillside that lines the winding lane, and when I reach the crest of the hill in my Subaru Outback, the lane opens into a clearing with a panoramic view of the Ohio River.

I pull up next to the gothic stone cottage with the brick chimney, and I tap the antique metal door knocker and wait.  The overgrown yard sprawls toward the river like a vast windstruck meadow, the sound of the river rushes, and the birds flock from tree to tree.  I notice the ivy vines crawling up the stone walls of the house as Jaden Hawthorne finally answers the door in a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt and a pair of baggy, carpenter’s  jeans rolled to reveal the knobby ankle bones just above his old-man slippers.  Hawthorne is still tall and gaunt, even at age forty-two, with surprisingly feminine facial features.  His blond hair, sheared short, seems out-of-place to me, because the last time I saw him, seventeen years ago at the Agora Theater in Cleveland, his hair was a thick lion’s mane of curls and tangles.  Back then he looked like a Viking prince, but now all that mystery and nobility seems to have faded.  He shakes my hand distractedly and turns to walk away, mumbling to himself like a man about to step in front of traffic. 

The furniture in his home is sparse and the design simple with a rustic theme, hardwood floors with earth toned décor and a dark red love seat by the fireplace.  He leads me to the kitchen, where there is a mound of dishes in the sink.  He offers me a glass of water. 

“Jake’ll be here soon,” he assures me, speaking a little too loudly.  “He works ‘til five.”  He bobs his head to the music piping through his earbuds.  “You’re early.  A little early.”

Twin brothers, Jacob and Jaden Hawthorne, the masterminds behind the Black Nylons, who were a progressive metal band in the mid-eighties with a diehard cult following, have been meeting one hour a day for the last twenty years to write and record their long-awaited follow-up to Something Wicked This Way Comes, their debut concept album about a haunted, traveling circus and the family of high-flying protagonists who are the main attraction. 

In 1983-84, the Black Nylons were the youngest, fastest, tightest, heaviest band on the planet, but their high-minded lyrics and high-concept album-oriented (some would say “pretentious”) approach to songwriting never found a widespread audience among the then-fledgling “Metalhead” demographic, and without a follow-up album to solidify their fan base, the band quickly fizzled and faded into obscurity. 

The Hawthorne twins were born and raised in Stow, OH, several hours north of their current residence.  Their parents had both been Olympic athletes: Ian Hawthorne a pole vaulter for the 1960 American track and field team, and Mira Collins-Hawthorne who swam the butterfly for the Americans in 1960.  So Jake and Jaden inherited the physicality, the competitive fire, and the fast-twitch muscle fibers that made their parents among the best in the world at their respective pursuits.  Poised at age 12 to earn track and field scholarships to the college of their choice, priorities suddenly flipped for the twins when Jake, the oldest by eleven minutes, received a 5-piece Rodgers kit for his thirteenth Birthday.  Jaden soon bought a Stratocaster with his allowance money, and, inspired by bands like Boston, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles, the brothers jammed out in their attic. 

At age fifteen, the twins teamed up with nineteen-year-old bassist, Brandon Mays, and eighteen-year-old guitarist, Jonah Black, and they left their hometown to go out on the road in search of their fortune like warriors of legend setting out to slay dragons.  After touring for nearly a year, The Nylons earned enough studio time to record their debut album, and it was at this time that Jaden’s psychological disorders first began to surface. 

“I remember the frontman for the Nylons,” said Len Ashmore, producer for the Something Wicked sessions, during a phone interview.  “He was a piece of work.  We didn’t record anything at all that first day.  He spent the whole time fiddling to get the right guitar tone and pissing everyone off.  The rest of the band actually fell asleep in the next room.  Finally, I just went home and told the kid to lock up when he was done.”  Years later, Jaden would be diagnosed with a personality disorder, but the condition first presented for him at age sixteen when the mounting pressures of the road and the studio and the emerging cocaine addiction, which would handcuff his ambition and creativity for the next six years, all rolled into his life at once. 

“The next day, we got down to business for a while, but it didn’t take long for him to start criticizing the other musicians.  It was a mess,” Ashmore added.  “I didn’t have any patience back then.  I told them to come back the next day.  They should go to the bar or the hotel room or whatever and figure things out.  So they stormed out of the studio and came back the next day all serious and they rushed through four or five songs in a few hours.  The rest of the band went to grab dinner, and the frontman stayed back to re-record all the parts himself and overdub some backing vocals.  He never touched the drums, but I’d say about ninety percent of the other tracks that made it onto the master mix of that album were him.  The two other guys in the band really seemed to have no idea what the singer’s vision for each song was.”

The result of the Something Wicked session was a loud and frantic but intricate and surprisingly melodic                                    suite of eight continuous songs brimming with ambition.  At times on Something Wicked, The Nylons seemed to overreach their own abilities.  The music teeters at moments on the edge of veering into chaos, but the sixty-four minute LP thrills at every turn like a good action flick. 

“It was a frantic eight days in the studio,” Ashmore continued.  “They scrambled on the last day to pull all the songs together – so much tension.  They wanted each song to transition into the next, so they worked all night on tweaking the interludes.  Then, at like four in the morning, the singer actually leapt over the drum kit at his brother, and there were fists flying and blood spraying.  It was crazy.  I’d never seen anything like it.  It wasn’t until that night that I realized how young they were.  But yeah, those two brothers had serious chops, and the band showed moments of genius, but they just couldn’t pull it all together.”

Tensions within the band escalated during the ensuing national tour until Mays and Black finally quit the band in February of 1984, and The Nylons were forced to complete their tour with a couple of stand-ins.  Fistfights between the twins became legendary.  Eventually, management for the other bands dropped The Nylons from the last six dates of the tour, and the band was reduced to performing local circuits in Ohio and Pennsylvania until they finally dissolved in November of 1984. 

After forty minutes of near silence in Jaden Hawthorne’s living room next to the fireplace where he rocks in his rocking chair and listens to his headphones, Jake finally arrives, dressed in his work clothes – black, pinstriped Calvin Klein pants, a soft, purple, button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and a solid, black tie.  He is a professor of architecture at nearby Ohio University.  Jake Hawthorne is slightly plumper than his younger brother and his eyes wearier, narrower and more analytical than Jaden’s wide, youthful, starry eyes that accept everything and always imagine greater.  Jaden brightens the moment his twin brother arrives.  They share a long hug. 

“We bought this house twenty-six years ago,” Jake says with a grin.  “And Jaden’s still afraid to go upstairs.”

“There’s ghosts up there,” Jaden fired back.  “I ain’t going up there, man.  You go up there, man.”

During the six years it took Jaden to get sober, Jake went away to Berkeley and earned two degrees in architecture.  After only three months at an Architectural Firm in Los Angeles, Jake moved back to Ohio to help his younger brother fight his demons. 

“When Jay came out of rehab, it became clear that music was the only real cure for him,” Jake explains.  “So we came here.  This beautiful landmark, all these stunning old buildings were just lying completely empty at the time, totally abandoned.  We built a studio in the basement for Jay to escape to, and I made a vow to come over every day to jam.  We promised each other we’d finish the next Nylons album.”

“So, for this album, we’ve taken all the rock and the metal and all the shit that we’ve been dealing with for years,” Jake adds.  “And it’s like we’re putting it in all this furnace, and we’ve blasted it and burnt off all the impurities, trying to refine it down to that one true nugget that got us started in this business in the first place.  We’re going back to the beginning.”

The brothers lead me down the steep, narrow staircase to their plush studio in the basement.  Jaden bounded down the steps with boyish energy and spun around in the rolling desk chair behind the sound board.  The carpet smelled new.  The red paint on the walls smelled new.  The whole studio was immaculate. 

“We’re doing it all ourselves,” Jake explained.  “Performing all the instruments, placing the mikes, manning the sound board, mixing, producing, everything.  I’ve been taking sound tech classes and violin lessons at the University.  That piano over there,” he pointed to an old, upright Baldwin in the corner of the studio.  “We bought it at auction.  We had to tear it apart, carry it down those steps piece by piece and reassemble it over there.  That took us months.”  It was obvious that the brothers had a thousand similar stories regarding the recording of the album two decades in the making.  “It’s really a miracle that this album ever got finished.”  A lone tear streaked down the drummer’s cheek.  He turned away.

Jaden leapt from his seat, leaving the chair spinning, and he darted into the studio to plink away at the piano, a chilling melody that seemed to capture Jake’s mood exactly.

Finally, the Hawthorne brothers permitted me to listen to one track from their long-suffering new album entitled, The Alchemist.  The song they agreed to play for me was called, “Fistfight in an Elevator,” the first single from the upcoming album, which is set to be released next month.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect from the Nylons’ first album in twenty years, but from the opening guitar riff, I knew I was in for something epic. 

When the drums kicked in, the telepathic bond between the twin musicians was obvious.  The music began softly and quietly and built slowly to a fever pitch that soared like a delicate bird swooping toward the sun before crashing into a cataclysmic, metal breakdown and then dissipating to a whisper only to rise again from the ashes, like the brothers themselves, and ride out a beautiful, chiming chorus to the end.

It was a truly moving experience, to sit in a homemade studio next to two brooding brothers who had wrung out their creativity for two decades to deliver their masterpiece to the world.