Metro metalhead

Jay Kohl’s M.F. Metal Music store fosters heavy-metal music appreciation in Bryant, beyond

Jay Kohl owns M.F. Metal Music in Bryant.
Jay Kohl owns M.F. Metal Music in Bryant.

M.F. Metal Music is an anomaly not only in Bryant but also in Arkansas. The medium-sized store, which opened in June 2012, is tucked away in a quiet strip mall next to Goodwill. On one Wednesday afternoon, the TVs on the wall play a live concert DVD by the Greek black-metal band Rotting Christ, whose frantic sound provides the day’s ambience.

Jay Kohl, owner of M.F. Metal, is behind the counter, ready to greet whoever walks through the door. His store is filled with heavy-metal CDs and vinyls with colorful cover art, along with T-shirts and wall art. About anything associated with metal music is either for sale or decorating the walls.

Alongside the Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Pantera albums, there are albums by Rwake, Crankbait, Vore and Living Sacrifice — all Arkansas-based bands that are more known outside of Arkansas than within, Kohl says. It’s bands like these, as well as numerous other local acts, he looks to support.

Kohl, 60, is a native of Wayne, Nebraska. His decades-long love affair with music began in the 1960s and 1970s in his hometown at the local head shop, which sold vinyl records.

After attending Wayne State University in his hometown, Kohl managed two drive-ins and a movie theater in Spirit Lake, Iowa. During his time in Iowa, he got involved in tae kwon do. In 1983, he moved to Milwaukee, where he opened a tae kwon do school. The martial art brought him to Little Rock a decade later, when he took a job at the American Taekwondo Association’s national headquarters. He worked for the association for 18 1/2 years.

Through that entire time, Kohl has fostered his love of heavy-metal music. For him, heavy metal was about producing good music that pushed the boundaries, while pop music was about the flavor of the week.

Q: Why did you choose to open a heavy-metal music store in Arkansas of all places?

A: Because I knew I would be the only one. I knew it was a very niche market, but I also knew there were a lot of metalheads in the area and thought, “What better opportunity to at least give it a shot?” Kind of one of those things where I’d rather live with the potential failure than the regret. So my wife and I discussed it at length and decided to go ahead and give it a shot. We live in Bryant and figured that, No. 1, we wanted to do something in our town that we were living in, not only for convenience but to do something for the area that it didn’t have. We also figured it was a bit cheaper to do business in Bryant than in Little Rock. And when we found this location, it had pretty much everything that we really, really wanted — it had the square footage; it had a great parking lot; it’s a safe area, clean, well taken care of, next to a tattoo shop — so it had everything we felt was going to be important.

Q: What does the “M.F.” stand for?

A: A common question. Much like a songwriter that writes his lyrics so the listener can come to their own conclusion, we have done the same with our shop name. It could be “My Favorite Metal Music” or “Mighty Fine Metal Music” or whatever you would like it to stand for.

Q: What are the advantages of coming to a place like this to buy a CD instead of just ordering online?

A: One of the things I based this on is a store up in Milwaukee called Ear Wax [Record Shop]. It is a punk and metal shop. Anytime I’d go up to Milwaukee to visit family, I’d go in there and browse. It’s one thing to look online — which, to me, really has no excitement whatsoever — and another to walk into a shop and have the decor and ambience of the place, be able to talk to the guy behind the counter and get some suggestions, talk over things and be able to look through all the CDs.

When you look online, you’re probably going to look for things that you know. When you come to a shop like this, there will be people who spend half an hour to 45 minutes browsing through everything there is, which is what I used to do. You may pick up a CD because the cover art looks cool or the name of the band sounds interesting, or any number of reasons. When going online, you tend to be very specific when you do that type of thing.

Q: How have things changed from opening to now?

A: To answer that, I’ll have to go into a little bit of what our philosophy is in the first place. I knew that being the niche market that it was that not only the fact a lot of people say a lot of physical CDs and vinyl and all that are on their way out, that it’s all going to be digital before too much longer. That was one strike against the concept. And the fact that we’re just doing hard rock and heavy metal just further limited the potential clientele.

A couple of things we wanted to accomplish was to provide something you couldn’t find anywhere else and, second of all, get really involved in the metal community as far as the local bands, showing support for them and carrying their CDs, EPs and T-shirts. We wanted to be the place where a band can come in and drop off some CDs to sell them. We don’t take any of the money from it. If we sell everything the band leaves in here and the band wants to give us something, that’s fine, but we don’t require it.

The concept is that if a band tells all their fans that they can get their CD at our shop, it’s a way of promoting the shop and getting new people in and hopefully not only will they buy their CD but become a regular customer. So getting really involved with the metal community, building more personal relationships instead of just going after the dollars and cents, was going to be critical to any sort of longevity.

Q: What can you say about Little Rock’s metal bands?

A: All of them are working so hard. I have a very high regard for anyone that can learn and be good at an instrument. Being able to put a band together is very difficult, and [keeping] a band together is very difficult. Then to be able to write your own material is just … I don’t know how many people realize how special a gift that really is.

Q: What is it that makes the metal community unique?

A: You can go with the stereotypical “they’re the ones [who] aren’t that much involved with the cliques” like sports and that type of thing. [They] may be a little bit more of the outcasts or the ones that think a little bit differently or don’t follow the norm so much. They’re very interested in being different than everybody else rather than the same. The music that they hear on the radio doesn’t speak to them at all — it seems empty and shallow.

Metal music — which a lot of people will label it as being very aggressive, and of course, sometimes it is — is something I prefer to think of it as far more passionate than a lot of other music. On the radio — whether it be pop, country or hip-hop — one band or one person becomes successful; label records are looking for repeats of that. Metal bands go out of their way to try and be different than everybody else and create their own sound and stand out from other bands. They tend to be very loyal people, too.

It’s kind of interesting people walk into the door that never met me before and just because of the fact that it’s a metal shop — and obviously, I must like metal — I get called “brother” more than ever by people who never met me simply because we have a common like of metal music. They automatically feel comfortable here.

Q: Do your customers break the metal “black-T-shirt-and-jeans” stereotype?

A: Absolutely. It’s actually kind of a funny story. Shortly after we opened, this little gray-haired lady came walking in, and I greeted her and said, “Hi, if there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.” I was thinking, “I’m not really sure she knows what we have here,” but she spent like a half hour going through and looking at stuff. And we started talking, and she said, “This is really cool, finally a place I can walk into and people wouldn’t question why I was looking at what I was looking at.” And she has been a regular customer for all three years. People like what they like, and how hypocritical would it be to judge somebody by the way they look when that’s what metalheads hate about everybody else?

Q: Have you been doing live metal shows since the beginning?

A: It took us about a year. It’s something I was looking forward to possibly doing. Then after about a year, C.T. from [Little Rock band] Iron Tongue contacted me and said, “We’re getting ready to release our new CD, and we’d actually like to do a show in a record store on the release date. Would you be interested?” I said I didn’t have any equipment or anything, but I’m interested.

That afternoon, Iron Tongue played a set here. They brought the gear, and we found out it sounded pretty decent in here, and we started picking up gear. Downtown Music was open at the time — and of course, Vino’s, Rev Room and Juanita’s — and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to compete with them. So at first, we were doing just a couple of shows a month on a Thursday night, staying away from the weekends when everyone was going to be going to the bigger shows and just having local bands. Then Downtown Music closed, and so we started picking up slack from there and having more traveling bands come in.

We’ve been working with some of the promoters here in central Arkansas, and they started bringing in touring packages and bands on tour and putting local bands on the bill. It just kind of grown to the point where we’re averaging two shows a week. In fact, this week, we got four.

We haven’t had in major national bands, but we’ve had bands from all across the country play here. We’ve had bands from Brazil, Australia and Israel play here.

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