To many people who saw “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, the cult documentary’s landscape was more alien and frightening than that of the Red Planet. To others, especially those who grew up in the eighties and swore their allegiance to hard rock music, the imagery was nostalgic and tear inducing. The year was 1986, and the Largo, Maryland Capitol Center had attracted thousands of headbanging teenagers to worship featured acts Judas Priest and Dokken.
Like a Sunday morning church congregation, the faithful geared up early for the concert, swaggering impatiently next to their muscle cars after navigating around orange traffic cones to the venue’s massive parking lot. Drunken stoners with frosted hair, headbands, and tank tops faced off against horse-bound patrol cops with tan uniforms and redneck moustaches. The tinny sound of such Judas Priest anthems as “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming” and “Breaking the Law” strained from car stereos, while ticket-buyers stood in line and gave the “devil’s hand sign” to passers-by.
Meanwhile, all of these memorable sights and sounds were being immortalized by filmmaker Jeff Krulik, a bespectacled, balding fortysomething who fought his way through the rabid masses like a war photographer storming the beaches of Normandy at D-Day. When Krulik asked a concert-bound girl where she was from, the mascara-dipped wench replied, “I came here from the West Coast. I’m on acid now.”
Get the whole story in part two of GET OFF ON “HEAVY METAL PARKING LOT”>>>
