How did you first get into ......... Metal?

How did everyone get into metal?
For me it was when Nirvana hit big and some of my mates were metalheads and they loaned me various things, some I hated some I liked, then I started finding my own stuff via Kerrang and Raw Magazine (some grunge/alternative some metal,got into stuff like Godflesh, Fudge Tunnel, that to me was more interesting than Pantera or what have you.Then with the lines blurred between grunge & indie i discovered more of that kinda stuff in tandem. I wasnt really into music til then though i was one of the 1st in my year at school who had a cd player in like 1987 so had some various cds.

But I'm sure most of you will have far more interesting stories than I have! So let's hear them! Did anyone stop listening to metal then get back into it? For some reason when I hit 30 my tastes got heavier.

My story is fairly uninteresting. I read Adrien's year end list on Pop Matters and listened to youtubes of Genghis Tron and Meshuggah, and thought it was awesome. I wanted to learn more, so I tried to explore more things metal after that.

The first metal records I ever owned were all by Judas Priest - Hell Bent for Leather, British Steel, Sin After Sin, Unleashed in the East: Live in Japan, Screaming for Vengeance and Point of Entry, all bought (for me, by my dad) within the span of a year or so in 1982, when I was 11. I don't remember exactly how I heard about them; I definitely remember seeing the video for "Heading Out to the Highway" on MTV, though. I wasn't listening to many other bands until about '85, when a friend gave me a copy of Motörhead's No Remorse. By the following year I was listening to Accept, Metallica, W.A.S.P. and a bunch of other stuff and it's been all downhill since.

when i was 7 or 8 my brother and i had bon jovi's crossroads (my choice), the first rage against the machine album, the spaghetti incident by g'n'r (both my brother's choices) on tape, and a couple of beastie boys albums a friend had taped us (relevant in that they have some hardcore tracks on them). For the rest of my childhood, until i was 16 or so and my tastes became more catholic, we almost exclusively bought or taped albums that were rock, rap, punk or metal, although we did also enjoy chart stuff on the radio as well, i liked especially euro-dance and the prodigy, we just didn't tend to ever buy much of it.

"hair" metal was all over the radio and MTV when I was a kid: Twisted Sister, Poison, Europe, Whitesnake, etc. By the time I got to high school, there was a punk/mod vs. metal divide - you were one or the other. I was the former, because a lot of the metalheads at my high school were dumb jocks, and i was a sullen weirdo that was more attracted to the anarchic artiness of 70s punk and wore safety pins in my ears. Eventually i got over this division and decided i was going to like what i liked regardless of who was who in highschool in the late 80s/early 90s.

Iron Maiden covers. It was all about Eddie.

^^^^ ten year old gamers don't have the best criteria for picking up records.

Hearing Kiss for this first time as a 9 year old.

xp - i think the key phrase is "ten year old" rather than "gamer"

What's always astonished me is that anyone over the age of 9 likes Kiss. I mean, I can see getting into them as a kid - they're superheroes who play rock 'n' roll! What's not to love? I owned the comic books. But once you've heard actual hard rock/metal, how could you ever go back and listen to even Destroyer (their consensus best album, yes?) with a straight face?

alex i said metal ;)
xp

It was really gradual for me. Moved from tiny town to small city in 1983 at the age of 12, saw Ozzy/Maiden/Priest album covers & t-shirts for the first time, got Quiet Riot's Metal Health late that year, but metal really didn't click until summer/fall of '84 with Ratt and Twisted Sister eventually giving way to Maiden, Slayer, and W.A.S.P.. By the end of '84 the obsession was all-consuming!

I was introduced to Sabbath when I was around 6 by an older cousin; l liked it but I didn't understand it was a different thing from the Eagles and Zep and Bad Co I heard on the radio. A couple of years later I started to get into D&D with some older neighbors who were seriously into Maiden (this was '81, so I guess the self-titled and Killers), which was a little scary and a little cool. That same year I bought the Judas Priest compilation Heroes, Heroes because of the badass D&D-esque cover. Heard Van Halen and AC/DC all the time - the older kids played Back In Black on the bus - but it was Quiet Riot's Metal Health that tipped the scale and got me buying Circus magazines and Dokken records. Was never really a metal head, but kept listening up through college; after I dropped out, I didn't have two nickels so listened to the radio and my old stuff. Skipped a bit more than a decade - '94-'05 - then got back into it through a friend at the local record store and hanging out and asking questions on here.

http://i637.photobucket.com/albums/uu92/damien_stone/heavymetal.jpg

ignore Journey & Stevie Nicks & the Dan. focus on Sabbath and Nazareth and BOC.

I then denied my metal roots when I got into hardcore (punk vs metal teenage warfare) but then speed metal brought it all back home.

ugh - Hero, Hero. Cover is this:

http://www.readplatform.com/uploads/2009/11/Judas_Priest-Hero_Hero-Frontal.jpg

I was a KISS fanatic as a kid too and I always wanted more nasty Gene-demon songs like God of Thunder. hearing the first Black Sabbath album (bought with The Mob Rules a couple weeks after I got the Heavy Metal soundtrack) was like manna from Hell.

I grew up hearing pop hits on the radio in my parents' car when we were going places, and knew there was some elusive common quality to the things I liked best. I remember discovering Toto's "Hold the Line", and thinking "Man, this is the coolest thing ever." And then hearing Boston, and thinking "No, THIS is the coolest thing ever." And then Rush, and then Blue Oyster Cult, and then, finally The Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell. Then it was deep Black Sabbath for a while, interspersed with BOC and Deep Purple and UFO and BOC (and Rush and Boston, although I did get over the Toto thing), until I got to college (1985-89) and the combination of used-record stores and a part-time job suddenly expanded my musical world dramatically: Metal Blade samplers, Anthrax, Celtic Frost, Fates Warning, Hallow's Eve, Helloween, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Metallica, Metal Church, Queensryche, Savatage, Slayer...

No return.

My story is fairly uninteresting. I read Adrien's year end list on Pop Matters and listened to youtubes of Genghis Tron and Meshuggah, and thought it was awesome. I wanted to learn more, so I tried to explore more things metal after that.

― subversive time travel (FACK)

Glad to have helped in some way!

alex i said metal ;)

Fair point, actually, but Kiss were inarguably the gateway drug into all things metal.

Seriously you did man thanks

some guy on the internet sent me master of puppets (the song) when I was like, 11.

after that, it probably went something like iron maiden -> gothenburg -> real death metal and black/tr00 metal, and there was a dovetailing between metal and being generally into fantasy books and games.

nowadays don't really listen to metal

It was a long, gradual process for me. My folks were way into Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones so hard rock was always playing at my house.

Definitely love "Godzilla" by B.O.C. at age 5 because it was about Godzilla!

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was awesome to me, and I had a Kiss iron-on shirt, but I didn't listen to the records because I was too young to even own music.

Then Pyromania and Metal Health spun my world around... and "Big Balls" by AC/DC.

In middle school, I finally discovered Sabbath, while my friends were veering towards the Sex Pistols. I even bought a Celtic Frost tape because of the cover art. But I didn't really get it til later.

In high school, I was spinning the Spinal Tap soundtrack and Iron Maiden's Killers a lot. Eventually, And Justice For all, Reign in Blood, and Killing Technology took me the rest of the way.... which was Scream Bloody Gore, Symphonies of Sickness, Streetcleaner and the first Naked City.

I've always liked a lot of different styles, but metal must be at least 1/3 of my collection. So much to love.

I've kind of spelled this out before, but I've had a sort of twisted journey when it comes to metal. My first memory even close to "metal" was being fascinated with Kiss as a young child, I loved all their songs. Which dovetailed into a love for glam metal, especially since I was 11 or 12 and MTV was finally on our rural cable system. So Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt, Metallica... I liked a lot of that stuff. Then I got into Metallica, Megadeth, and Suicidal Tendencies through friends at school. Fell hard for G n R. But then Nirvana and Dr. Dre changed my listening habits for much of the 90s, delving into rap, punk, and indie for most of the decade. At the time I didn't feel like I was missing out on anything in metal, but I've since learned how much crucial shit I missed out on. I checked back in around 98-99, but outside of Slipknot and a little Korn I couldn't get into nu-metal at all. So I went a few more years pretty much ignoring it, until I bought Mastodon's Leviathan on a whim and fell hard for it. Ever since I've been moving forward with metal and returning to check on all the fantastic shit I missed during my years with blinders on.

Early to mid '90s for me; the grunge thing passed me by originally, I got put off my Kurt Cobain's tatty sweaters and stringy hair (or maybe it was just the tatty sweaters and stringy hair of his legions of fans round these parts). Anywho, then I got into Soundgarden in 1994 and delved more into the Seattle stuff; meanwhile, friends into the same thing copied me tapes of Metallica, Sepultura, Napalm Death -- anything that was considered good back in the day -- and it went on from there. I've never considered myself a metalhead as such, just someone who's into metal (among other genres).

Pasted from the Sigh thread (which I'm assuming inspired this one):

I'd been listening to grunge and pop punk most of my musical life. Hints of Metallica, early Korn etc.

Wasn't till about 2000-2003 (and a little before these times) my group of friends in Letchworth where I lived were die-hard true metallers. I used to get a bit tired of them banging on about what was "true" (Emperor, Enslaved, Manowar, Ulver etc) and what was "false" (nu-metal and its preceders plus stuff like Dimmu Borgir), and growing up I often couldn't discern what made one or the other.

Still after going round people's houses and being exposed to hours and hours of stuff, it eventually clicked. That said I couldn't get as enthralled as they did, much preferring techno, reggae, IDM, indie etc.

The stuff that I did like was the more avant/experimental/epic stuff like Ulver, Sigh, Arcturus, not so much things like Immortal or Darkthrone (a bit too dissonant and trebly for me). I also loved Electric Wizard and some of the stoner/doom stuff. Still I never felt I truly identified with it all and it was more to do with having to learn to enjoy it rather than it being something instantly appealing.

When I left to go and live in neighbouring Hitchin I didn't see that crew quite as much and they all went separate ways. The guys I shared a house with really didn't like metal at all and would actively complain or take the piss if I put it on, so I eventually stopped keeping up with it due to lack of exposure.

Nowadays, I have a lot of metal on my HD but I seldom listen unless I'm in a particular mood. I'd like to get back into it and was saying to my gf I may attempt to get back into metal. Sigh's album is definitely helping, and also, strangely, Rodrigo Y Gabriela's stuff is reminding me of why I did like a lot of it.

I was seven. It was the first week or so that we had cable and I discovered MTV, which was one channel over from Nickelodeon. I took my little cassette recorder and pressed record. My dad had been recording cartoons for me this way on Sunday mornings while I was at Sunday school - we didn't get our own vcr until 1989. They played "Locked In" by Judas Priest and "In My Dreams" by Dokken. The only other song I remember from the tape was "Let's Go All the Way" by Sly Fox(chuff chuff zinny ninny). I got the impression that Judas Priest and Dokken were somehow different from all the other musicians. I guess my mom did too, because she put MTV off-limits.

That summer, I heard some of my cousins talking about Motley Crue and Cinderella. Then we moved to a new town and the neighborhood kids had Girls, Girls, Girls and some other hair metal.

In '88 or '89, my dad's boss's son got a bass guitar and when we were over at their house for Thanksgiving, he played Anaesthesia (Pulling Teeth) and the bass interlude from Orion, which blew my mind and sent me headlong into thrash.

It's funny seeing lots of people say they discovered metal ages 9-13 as when I was that age , I did not know anyone into it at all. It wasnt until Appetite For Destruction got big(aged 14 or 15 i guess) that people i went to school with were into it, one of my mates got into the whole Poison, Warrant,Motley Crue etc thing purely because they were in the charts (he never read a music mag in his life).

Metal/Heavy Rock just seems to have been far more mainstream in the rest of the world, especially the US, than in the UK. (I guess this may have neen because of Kiss? Because they were never as big here. I never even heard of them until crazy nights was a top 5 hit here.)

It was definitely more a cult middle class thing (like indie) until grunge went mainstream and nu metal got really big with 12 year olds. Then you would see loads of 9 year olds wearing slipknot,linkin park or korn hoodies and limp bizkit had a #1 single, which not even Nirvana managed.

My Revolver editors are gonna kill me for sharing this, but I was 100% a hip-hop kid until the alternative boom of the '90s. Then around Nirvana time, me and my best friend would raid his older brother's records and I quickly fell into "alternative metal" as 12-year-old: Ministry, Primus, Faith No More, Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails, etc...

Throughout high-school and college I would get into avant-rock thanks to the bands the alt-metal guys said influenced them: (Residents, Naked City, Zappa, Napalm Death) and eventually noise (Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, Negativland) and the newish metalcore that reminded me of the alt-metal bands I grew up with (Converge, Dillinger Escape Plan, Cave In).

Through aaaaall that I fell backwards into grindcore, death metal and black metal--because it reminds me of avant/jazz traditions NOT because it reminds me of metal. I never owned a Metallica album but I loooove Carcass

Saxon, wheels of steel. some Accept, VanHalen, Tigers of Pan Tang. never liked Maiden/Crue. harsh end of metal-socialization by a DK live gig.

when i was 12 or 13 or so i had a friend who'd inherited his older brother's metal/hard rock record collection. i asked him to tape me nazareth and he filled up the extra space on the tape with four motorhead tracks (overkill/i won't pay your price/limb from limb/i'm the doctor), which to my surprise i really dug.

(years pass, discover sabbath etc. but don't really listen to that much metal)

circa 2001 a band i was in did a live-to-air on resonance fm. after we play, me and another guy go to talk to the presenters briefly, plugging a gig or whatever, walk into the studio and go "whoah! what the fuck is this??" to whatever it was that they were playing. it was mayhem, "wolf's lair abyss". the current obsession continued from there. also, (this is true!), when we left the station, who should be checking out the guitars in one of the shop windows on denmark street, but lemmy! his jeans were tucked into white cowboy boots and my friend got his autograph for his estranged wife.

Kiss when I was 8. Iron Maiden when I was 12, it was the covers (and a friend who borrowed LPs from his cousin). Then Metallica, Venom, Slayer, Accept, Possessed, Kreator (local library had tons of metal vinyl), and onwards to more undergroundish stuff like Hellhammer, Barthory, Root, Vulcano, Master's Hammer (through tape trades) and the like. Doom when Cathedral, Paradise Lost and Winter came up, by that time I had money to buy actual records. Full Black Metal convert with A Blaze In The Northern Sky, that's when I started to do some reviewing/writing.

It is kind of weird that I don't tend to think of my upbringing as especially sheltered, and yet when I think back to age 11 and me + pals sitting round with the cassette version of Use Your Illusion II in the dinner hall, feeling unanimously badass about the fact that we had something absolutely *peppered* with swear words on school property... it does give me pause to wonder

That's funny, at most schools the pupils pepper everything with swear words.

As a kid in the late 60s, I remember being spooked by the cover of the Black Sabbath debut, and I remember Led Zeppelin II lying around, though my dad didn't play those as much as other albums. Later my cronies in middle school were all about the Stones, Skynyrd, Alice Cooper, etc. We were also fascinated by Kiss for a while (my first big show, 1976). In high school, my friends and I listened to hard rock, prog rock, and scarce but intriguing scraps of punk and new wave. In college it was all college radio and Athens bands. Through all those years, I don't think I ever met anyone who was into metal per se. I guess it was just not a thing in Georgia then.

About 1990, a friend introduced me to Metallica, my first clue of current metal beyond MTV hair metal. By that time I was into jazz and 70s music I had missed the first time around (including Sabbath and Zeppelin). Those interests eventually led me to ILM and the Rolling Metal threads, where I learned that something had been going on over the previous 25 years that I might want to hear. Gradually I started getting canonical death, grindcore, black, and doom metal albums, reading Decibel, buying new metal, and going to shows. I still listen to other styles more than metal, but it has become as a steady part of my diet, and I know a few metal fans IRL now.

re: kerr's email.

I think the alternative 90s poll covered it p well, Space Jam OST had half of us covered.

that got you into metal?

you sent me an email asking me to start a thread like this for the autogoons.

it was vevezulas that got me into metal fyi

the first metal album I bought was Earth's Extra-Capsular Extraction but the band that got me into metal was Isis

I am fully aware this opening myself up for so much shit but y'all far too cool to unleash it right

correct

Though I thought it was a combination of Tool + francis that got you into metal.

That's funny, at most schools the pupils pepper everything with swear words.

― pfunkboy (Herman G. Neuname), Tuesday, 15 June 2010 14:14 (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

So did ours, that's why it's weird - it wasn't a private or otherwise posh school

Think I've posted this before but Niel Kulkarni reviewed 'Aenima' by Tool in the Melody Maker and it was a total lightbulb moment for me, mainly due to the fact he mentioned a bunch of math-rock bands that it reminded him of - this is pretty shallow in hindsight but I was like 16 or 17, plus it planted something one way or another so ¯\(°_°)/¯

*Neil. FFS!

It was probably Neurosis and all those bands that got me back into listening to heavy stuff 8 or 9 years ago actually. I never stopped listening to grunge bands I liked or Helmet or Fudge Tunnel or Godflesh or Melvins or Ministry et al but Neurosis definitely got me back listening to newer metal after the whole nu-metal thing put me off, and I wouldn't touch any BM because of the whole nazi thing, it took me too long to realise that you cant judge a whole scene on one or 2 bands. I think hearing the Weakling album in about 2002 changed my mind.

Entombed still couldn't get me into Death Metal though.

Kiss Double Platinum advert on tv. 1977. dug the way Gene sang "Calling Dr. Love." older sister bought me Rock and Roll Over for 13th birthday soon after. it's been nothin' but hell since.

Mencap - first time I think I heard Cypress Hill when I was about 12-13 it sounded so illicit (swearing, drug and crime references) I was seriously worried about authority figures finding out about it.

How did you first hear ........swearing in music? ;)

I think hearing the Weakling album in about 2002 changed my mind.

I hadn't heard Weakling by that point but I was aware of the tUMULt thing and I did like Burmese. I bought 'Monkeys Tear Man to Shreds' from the label site and Andee included a thank-you card; I was really like "Oh! That's so nice!"

I was big into The Fucking Champs so I checked them out.

\m/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss6t6qUlBeg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZGa40Hl4zI&feature=player_embedded

my uncles got me into Metallica when I was in my early teens, and from there I got into Tool and a lot of the nu and alt metal that was on the radio. somewhere in late 2004, I got into indie and more or less stopped listening to metal—with the exception of Death Magnetic, which I bought on the day it was released, although frankly I'm not even sure if I've ever listened to the whole thing—until I picked up Mastodon's Crack the Skye sometime last year. it really wasn't until mid-to-late last year, though, when I started to pay serious attention to the genre

My introduction to "metal" was watching MTV when I went on a summer holiday to the US in 1992. MTV featured a steady rotation of (amongst acts such as En Vogue) Nirvana's Lithium, Alice in Chains' "Them Bones" and Metallica's "Wherever I May Roam". I was hooked, and started buying Kerrang! and Raw, getting into bands like Soundgarden, Faith No More, Megadeth, Slayer, Pearl Jam- a mix of thrash metal, alternative metal and grunge, basically. All the stuff I started out liking was American.

Later on, as I went through my teens, I started getting into death/ thrash bands like Carcass and Sepultura, stoner bands like Kyuss, and classic metal like Sabbath, Zeppelin and Motorhead. There were also a few good Brit alternative metal/ rock/ punk bands around at the time- Therapy?, The Wildhearts, Terrorvision (I liked the latter anyway!). I also started listening to more and more indie (this was during the height of Britpop in the UK, when the likes of Oasis, at least for a teenager, were fairly unavoidable) as well as dance music and hip hop. I only started paying attention to metal again in the last 5 years or so, though I continued to like Metallica, Zeppelin, the Sabbs and AC/DC during my "metal wilderness years".

In terms of sources for this stuff, the natural one was Claire Sturgess' show on R1 (whatever happened to her?). As my tastes broadened, I started to listen to Peel, as well as Lammo and Radcliffe, also on R1. Peel would, of course, continue to play interesting metal (particularly grindcore) up until his death.

that video i posted, which one of you is the dad? ;)

*Looks at Glenn*

I don't wear glasses.

no way. it's clearly Scott.

xp

I cant see it being Chuck. Scott are you going to own up?

Heard a neighbor's copy of Black Sabbath's Paranoid when I was 9, was spooked but intriuged. When I was 10-11 I borrowed a bunch of Kiss albums from a friend, but couldn't get into them (ironically I like them more now, especially the Dolls-like glam of the early stuff). 1982, inspired by "Run to the Hills" on MTV, same friend who had the Kiss albums got into Iron Maiden. I got The Number of The Beast, my first official metal album, and was SOLD! After that, more Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Scorpions, Def Leppard, etc. I was in a musicland when a longhair asked about when the new Metallica was gonna be out. That was the first I heard of 'em, and based solely on their name, I got Ride The Lightning. I was aware of Slayer, but was not ready, ha. Dabbled in Ratt, Motley Crue, Cinderella, but got quickly bored and thought I'd outgrown metal. Around 1989 some friends in college had a metal radio show that I'd listen to and I got really into Slayer, Bolt Thrower, Terrorizer, Carcass, Sepultura, Napalm Death, Prong, Motörhead, etc. Metal listening receded again in mid-90s, and perked up again when I got into Entombed's Uprising in 2000. Since then been going to gradually more and more metal shows, as they're a way more entertaining than most indie rock (Mastodon, Sword, Enslaved, Opeth, Nachtmystium, Sabbath, Gojira, Slough Feg, High On Fire, etc.)

I've always been pretty lolindie, so it was through shoegaze for me...Got into Jesu and Alcest for the shoegaze bits and ended up enjoying the metal side just as much. From there I started looking into Hydra Head and Profound Lore and realized that I had been depriving myself for too long. I got a subscription to Decibel, and it was all downhill from there.

I really could have gotten more fully into metal sooner if I wasn't actually scared by a lot of it. I recall a friend in the 4th grade playing the opening track from the first Black Sabbath record, and I basically ran away. Even the cover of Bark at the Moon seemed somewhat terrifying to me.

Other friends of mine around that time were big on Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister and though I really enjoyed horror movies, I was convinced that these bands (as well as Dead Kennedy's) really would corrupt me in some awful way.

Metal Health helped break me of that fear I suppose because I don't recall feeling the same ever again after I embraced that album.

I always hated horror movies so therefore hated all the album covers.

Nate did glam metal scare you?

being into metal seems different than liking some metal or whatever. i think the first metal-type stuff i ever got serious about was kiss, mostly destroyer, listened to in my friend mark malcolm's basement rec room when i was about 11, over and over again, mostly side 1, skipping "great expectations", playing guitar w tennis rackets. i was always gene. later that year, i got into rush in a similar way, in that me and my geek friends had a fantasy band that we'd pretend to be while air guitaring to hemispheres and permanent waves. i had a name that i can't for the life of me remember and a costume (barbarian themed). we each had an album cover we'd designed and a conceptual storyline to go with it, etc. but i wasn't really into metal at that age. wouldn't have been able to say who black sabbath were.

in high school, i kinda hated metal. hated the crowd and culture that went along with sabbath, hendrix, purp worship, and in my mind, i attached pretty much anything metal to that. i started getting into punk and new wave, college stuff like jonathan richman and the violent femmes. plus classic guitar rock, and MTV hits of whatever sort. among those, i loved songs & videos by iron maiden, accept, judas priest, ozzy, dio, quiet riot, twisted sister (among many others), but i'd never buy the albums. it seemed like someone else's music and i kept my distance. wasn't until i was in college and most of my weed friends were heavy into metallica, crossover & thrash, voivod, venom and the like that i started thinking that i liked metal in a general sense. to tell the truth, bands like black flag, the butthole surfers and green river helped convince me that metal might be okay to check out. i.e. coming at metal late, through indie & punk. listened to tons of metal in the 90s, but also recoiled from the likes of RATM, rap metal, techy death & post-hc stuff. spent time with the melvins, monster magnet, sleep, sabbath, old metallica, slayer and maiden recs, kyuss, entombed's wolverine blues.

suppose i'll always be more an observer than an acolyte of metal.

Why do you think being into metal is different from other genres? I know metal fans say it a lot, but surely the same was said of say hip-hop back in the day.

Also what was the American equivalent of Kerrang?

it's not completely unique to metal, cuz yeah, you get tribalism in lots of genres: punk & hip hop, for instance. but the intensity of tribalism in metal does sometimes seems unique. dunno why that is, and the larger part of it is certainly in my head, cuz i've never felt excluded by metal peoples or at shows or whatever. metal crowds are among the most enthusiastic, unpretentious and welcoming.

still, i have the idea that metal is mostly defined these days by identity affiliation. bands aren't metal just due to their sounds, but due to the fact that they ARE METAL, on the inside, by self-definition. and more to the point, are serious about it. and i'm not true metal that waay. i'm more like rock & punk & noize and maybe some metal to go along with that, i.e., wishy-washy. i don't even have facial piercings to regret.

Also what was the American equivalent of Kerrang?

I'd say Rip.

Circus!

My cool young aunt gave me this for my 8th birthday:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/Double_platinum_album_cover.jpg

My interest faded circa 92-93 (circa Kyuss and Earth) only to increase slightly after seeing many of the early C4AM95 (The Fucking Champs) shows and now has laid dormant for the better part of ~15 years?

"Nate did glam metal scare you?"

It never appealed to me much. I had the Van Halen "Jump" single and Slade "Run Runaway", but honestly Crue et al did not get my attention until much, much later.

At the age when I should have been into glam, I was getting into Birthday Party and Big Black and Confusion is Sex.

Circus was really dominant from 83-87, it was a good mag. Rip really dominated after that for a while though. Actually the one I read the most obsessively was Metallion, an outstanding Canadian quarterly glossy mag that featured a ton of undergound bands long before the rest of the world picked up on them.

just older brothers who liked def leppard and ratt and dio and judas priest (priest was especially popular in my town) and ac/dc and etc etc

honestly it's a weird question to me cuz growing up, before nirvana and NIN and all that, there really wasn't a question of IF you liked metal, just what kind...the girls like warrant and bon jovi and shit and the dudes like some of that but also maiden and preist and metallica...EVERYONE liked GnR though.

i grew up in a small town in southern MN, everyone liked metal, it was just the way...all that shit about ppl in rural areas liking country was bullshit for us, at least until garth brooks...country was nerdy, parent's music and shit....

Probably first through alt-metal stuff - Tool, Detones, etc. - in late jr. high. First all-out metal purchase was Arch Enemy's Wages of Sin, used.

At the age when I should have been into glam, I was getting into Birthday Party and Big Black and Confusion is Sex.

― Nate Carson, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 3:02 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this is where i was at in the mid-late 80s. plus butthole surfers, scratch acid, stooges & mc5, mudhoney, flipper, melvins, drunks w/ guns, halo of flies. closest i got to liking glam was gnr.

wages of sin is a damn good record xpost

xpost to myself

but metallica/anthrax were about as far as it got in terms of it being popular w/everyone...slayer and then everything that followed like deicide and shit was only for METAL dudes, not everyone

metallica and anthrax were big but when it got more extreme than that, only the hardcores kept up...plus then early alternative was coming fast and everyone who liked GnR and stuff switched over to nirvana and jane's addiction and beastie boys

and some ppl that didn't want to be alternative started listening to garth brooks and tim mcgraw and shit like that

sh@kedown otm. that's how it went

(though liking rap was sort of parallel to metal, shit like 2 live crew and PE and NWA and Slick Rick and Run DMC, we liked that as much as metal and at the same time)

At the age when I should have been into glam, I was getting into Birthday Party and Big Black and Confusion is Sex.

― Nate Carson,

You totally made the right decision.

Bon Jovi & G 'n' R were really popular at my school, but noone was a metalhead. I remember one guy liking Iron Maiden but I dont think he was into other metal, noone dressed "metal" as it was strictly school uniform (it was just a normal state scottish catholic secondary in Ayr not a private school) and if you had long hair you woulda been kicked out. One of my mates had a bono type mullet thing and got suspended for it. Which was a load of bullshit. Jeans were banned too. I think Ayr schools were really strict with school uniform unlike Lanarkshire. I think they thought they were posher than the rest of the west of scotland lol

but metallica/anthrax were about as far as it got in terms of it being popular w/everyone...slayer and then everything that followed like deicide and shit was only for METAL dudes, not everyone

metallica and anthrax were big but when it got more extreme than that, only the hardcores kept up

Funny you say that as the whole troo/kvlt shit is really a newish phenomenon, in the 70s and 80s metal bands were happy to get big and play arenas. Now if you get a mention on pitchfork youre a hipster band and if you sell lots of albums or sign for a major label you're a sellout.

Noone would ever accuse slayer or maiden for selling out and they sold shitloads.

re shakedown: in the late 80s, the people i knew who were most into hip hop tended also to be into metal & pop alternative: metallica, jane's, gnr, fishbone, maybe slayer.

haha^^^

1991
Location: North America
Dates: July 18, 1991 – August 28, 1991
Main Stage:
Jane's Addiction
Siouxsie and the Banshees
Nine Inch Nails
Living Colour
Ice-T & Body Count
Butthole Surfers
Rollins Band
Violent Femmes
Fishbone
Emergency Broadcast Network

shit... why did I think Slayer was there that year?

were US metalheads into that whole ska-punk thing?

no one i knew was, other than fishbone, who appealed to the funk, rap & metal crowd.

but small sample, you know...

Yeah, I just wondered what kind of person was into ska-punk as it just didn't really exist over here outside of a couple of bands Less Than Jake/Mighty Mighty Bosstones. I dont recall actual punk guys liking it. Fishbone clearly had the same JA crowd you guys got.

Fishbone, to me at least, seems a pretty far-reach from ska-punk. I hold them in the same light as (pre-Mother's Milk) RHCP and *lol* Mary's Danish. Why, I'm not sure.

I was 9 years old, watching Nickelodeon, when a giant man crashed through the wall and handed me a Metallica tape. Then he vanished.

What is that supposed to be, a Lollapalooza lineup? Violent Femmes and Fishbone were not there.

1991

Location: North America

Dates: July 18, 1991 – August 28, 1991

Main Stage: Jane's Addiction, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Ice-T & Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band, Violent Femmes, Fishbone, Emergency Broadcast Network

Side Stage: Othello's Revenge

There used to be a Lucozade commercial featuring British athlete Daley Thompson and the main riff from Iron Maiden's Phantom Of The Opera on the telly when I was about 13. It took me a while to find out what it was but that led to me buying their ST debut. I didn't like the rest of the album as much and I wasn't initially keen on the singing but that whole song just blew me away. The way it had three parts and lasted for seven minutes. It blew my mind. I didn't even get what heavy metal was. The next thing I bought was Live After Death which probably came out at around the same time. The next 'real' metal thing that I bought after that at the same time of its release was 'Ride The Lightning' by Metallica.

Before 1984/5 I'd already bought or taped albums by Queen but nothing strictly metal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj87n_dEwRU&feature=related

Most people had no idea that was iron maiden, everyone knew that advert though

1991

Location: North America

Dates: July 18, 1991 – August 28, 1991

Main Stage: Jane's Addiction, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Ice-T & Body Count, Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band Violent Femmes, Fishbone, Emergency Broadcast Network

Side Stage: Othello's Revenge

None of those bands played any shows I went to or heard about in '91, and there wasn't a second stage either. Nor were they listed on the tour shirts. Must have been very select dates.

everyone loved that advert too
xp

Emergency Broadcast Network weren't a performer on the stage, they were this sort of performance art troupe that showed videos through monitors on the side of a custom vehicle they had. I bought one of the videos - on VHS.

guys... if it's on wikipedia, it is God's truth.

Looks like Fishbone played in Dallas and Seattle. Love the internet.

Fishbone would have been a good addition to the bill. I saw them a couple of times in '89-90, including one show at the Palladium in NYC where 2 Live Crew were an unannounced opener.

Fishbone/Primus is one of my favorite shows ever.

ilm's primus love is amusing

Frizzle Fry is a pretty great album, Herman.

"Noone would ever accuse slayer or maiden for selling out and they sold shitloads."

I actually think a lot of my friends would say that Maiden sold out with Somewhere in Time, though I personally love that album.

And as much as Slayer sticks to their guns musically (ie: refuses to evolve as artists), they align themselves with horrible metalcore support and Jaegermeister sponsorship.

So to a degree, I'll say that both sold out. I don't fault them for it though, and I'd gladly go see either band live tomorrow.

I saw Fishbone and Primus together once. That was sort of simultaneously one of my best and worst concert memories, because I was working security, behind the barricade. So yeah, I got in for free and met members of both bands, but during the actual show it was my job to a) repel stage divers, some of whom included my friends, and b) retrieve Angelo Moore every time he dove into the audience.

The Gummo soundtrack...

Sorry if that makes me a "hipster."

Oh and also BCAT helped a lot... Brooklyn Community Access TV.

Primus was a major fave of a lot of metal dudes and punk dudes at my highschool, but i'm sure a lot of that was because they were from the Bay Area, and one of the dudes at my high school's brother or cousin or something was their pot dealer.

This is probably good for another thread, but a lot of non-metal crossover bands have been mentoined that are loved by many metalheads and drew people to metal. Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Rush, Queen, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, UFO, Molly Hatchet, Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy, Van Halen, Bad Brains (esp Quickness), Primus, Melvins, Monster Magnet, Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Mars Volta. What else? Baroness?

I grew up with Kiss, and remember liking Judas Priest a lot circa Defenders of the Faith (had a glow-in-the-dark velvet poster of it on my wall). I never really thought of things as "Metal" until Metallica came around. Just considered it loud rock. Kind of skipped past all the late 80's and 90's stuff, and then got interested in Opeth years later when I decided I was going to come to terms with growly vocals. Played Deliverance about a million times over and over one week, until the singing started to sound normal to me.

But yeah, the answer is probably Kiss and Alice Cooper. Not a huge fan or anything, but probably spend about 5-10% of my listening time on things that would qualify as metal.

I'm really loving all of these stories, bringing back memories of my own. I was into metal since basically the second grade, in a sense. It was the first type of music I ever got into except when I was really young and loved michael jackson during the thriller era, like everyone else my age did at the time. Then when I started taking the bus to school, all of the older kids wore Metallica and Iron Maiden t-shirts and shit, and I thought these were the coolest guys in the world and I wanted to be just like them.

So I became this poser metalhead little kid who loved metallica but hadn't heard any of their music, until I got a little older and finally did hear ride the lightening and then master of puppets. And I loved that shit, along with Judas Priest, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Slayer, Testament fucking Pantera. In the late 80's early 90's, I was probably the most metal little hesher dude you ever could've met. Rocking big dorky glasses, a mullet, and metal t-shirts wherever I went.

Then I remember getting kind've bored with metal shortly after the black album came out, though I did like it at the time. Other than Vulgar Display of Power, this felt like a lean time for me. Megadeth and Testament put out boring albums as did most of my other favorites, and I wasn't really into some of the more extreme stuff like Sepultura at the time. And I started listening to more and more stuff that my skater friends were into: punk and industrial. Nine inch nails, got into marilyn manson, primus, alice in chains, and gradually by probably 1998 had turned my back on metal altogether.

Eventually went through a corny indie phase from roughly 2002-2005. Around 2006, my then-girlfriend-now-partner turned me onto Amon Amarth which rekindled my love for metal. I'm by no means an only metal kind of dude these days. I listen to a lot of different stuff, but metal is definitely a solid part of my diet. Though being casual about it makes me feel an awful lot like a poser, and I can feel the rebuke that a 14 year old me would give me as a result.

I'm really loving all of these stories

Though being casual about it makes me feel an awful lot like a poser, and I can feel the rebuke that a 14 year old me would give me as a result.

There's a lot of metalheads that remain 14 all their lives it seems..

yo!

I said 14 not 41!

In 1989 I was twelve years old and we went to a school-camp. One of my roommates had a bunch of hard rock tapes with him we would spin all day, and it included stuff like Maiden, Priest, Dio and Guns 'n Roses (it was about this time that Paradise City was a big hit in Europe). From then on I got hooked and discovered Van Halen, Crue and Quiet Riot. Extreme became my favorite band, because at the time I started playing guitar and I was a big fan of Nuno Bettencourt. That is, until I discovered Steve Vai who would become my hero for several years.

Then I went to middle school and went deeper. Around 1990/1991 I started getting into the heavier bands, first Anthrax and Metallica, then Megadeth and Slayer. Dave Mustaine became one of my heroes. Then, in early '92 grunge broke big in Europe and I got into Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a few months later followed by Soundgarden (Superunknown era) and especially Alice In Chains, while simultaneously going deeper and deeper into instrumental guitar stuff and progrock. I started reading Aardschok magazine around that time.

In 1993 I was sixteen and went to my first concerts/shows. First was a Joe Satriani show (I was a really fanatical aspiring guitarist), later that summer I went to my first and only stadium-rock-concert, which was Metallica/Megadeth/Suicidal Tendencies. In november I went to an indoor festival organised by Aardchok magazine and Dream Theater was headliner, and my mind was blown by their monstrous virtuosity.

In 1994 at seventeen, I started playing in bands and hooked up with a punk guy who got me into a lot of hardcore. It started with nonsense bands like Mucky Pup, but we progressed soon to bands like Dead Kennedys, Gorilla Biscuits and Sick Of It All. I loved the attitude and aggression of those bands. I went to my first hardcore show in august 1994, which was Rain Like The Sound Of Trains/The Offspring(!!!)/Ignite/Slapshot (can anyone believe that line-up?). I was really hooked to that scene from then on, but still loved my metal. The weirder it got the better. Primus and Mr Bungle came into my life.

In 1995 was simultaeously going to hardcore and punk shows while studying jazz guitar, instrumental guitar fusion-stuff and progressive metal. In the summer of 1995 I got admitted to a conservatory where I would spent the next few years studying guitar. By that time I was listening to everything I could get my hands on, from metal to indie to jazz. One very big eye-opener was Meshuggah's Destroy Erase Improve, one the perfect fusions between brutal metal and jazzy stuff. Death and Cynic were also favorites around that period.

Around 1999 I was finished with my music study and kinda lost track of the metal scene for a while. I started playing in an indierock band, discovered bands like The Posies, Pavement, My Bloody Valentine and Motorpsycho. I also really got into mid-nineties emo and posthardcore bands like Jawbox, Snapcase, The Promise Ring, Refused (though more on the hardcore side of things), At The Drive-In and Sunny Day Real Estate. Vera in Groningen became my venue.

In the early 2000's I started writing for some internet zines and slightly returned to metal thanks to a friend who was (and still is) one of the editors of a big Dutch metal community. But strangely enough it was hardcore that got me back to heavy music somewhere around 2005, thanks to bands like Converge and Modern Life Is War.

This is probably good for another thread, but a lot of non-metal crossover bands have been mentoined that are loved by many metalheads and drew people to metal. Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Rush, Queen, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, UFO, Molly Hatchet, Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy, Van Halen, Bad Brains (esp Quickness), Primus, Melvins, Monster Magnet, Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, Mars Volta. What else? Baroness?

― Fastnbulbous, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 03:14 (9 hours ago) Bookmark

Faith No More, RATM, GNR, Aerosmith. Although a number of those bands are squarely metal IMO, but I don't want to get all metal police here!

this has always been my idea of heavy metal (from 1979):

http://cdn3.ioffer.com/img/item/840/568/91/fWLRsETu4wB8XzG.jpg

I'd say a number of the bands mentioned in the posts above count as metal.

not denying that. just saying that the bands mentioned in the Creem piece were at that time very much considered as being heavy metal. hard rock was the stones, skynyrd, who, etc.

I remember hashing out the differences between hard rock and heavy metal with some schoolmates in 3rd grade. Bon Jovi was hard rock but Poison was heavy metal, we were sure.

every single one of those bands on that Creem cover have probably said they are not metal and would take offence (apart maybe from Kiss) Led Zep always said they were not metal.

I would consider all the bands on that cover to be hard rock. To me, real metal started with Maiden and Priest and NWOBHM.

re shakedown: in the late 80s, the people i knew who were most into hip hop tended also to be into metal & pop alternative: metallica, jane's, gnr, fishbone, maybe slayer.

― contenderizer, Tuesday, June 15, 2010 10:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah at that point things were starting to branch out from metal qua metal...bands like janes (which i first read about in Circus actually)...and Faith No More and Fishbone and Metallica (their misfits covers were huge) and GnR...

also ppl forget about the other sorta arty metal bridge-to-alt bands like Mind Funk and Warriorsoul and Suicidal and even Soundgarden and Alice in Chains (i first thought of those last 2 as metal bands before i'd even heard of "grunge")

Maybe that's why those particular groups were on the cover of a magazine asking "Is Metal Dead", because that was the representation of metal at that time. Priest was alive and kicking at that point, but that was post-Ozzy, pre-Dio for Sabbath. '79 probably wasnt the best year for metal qua metal, but I m sure some wiseguy will come up with a list here that proves me wrong.

xpost

xpost

ooh and Love/Hate was sorta in that camp...and, for some reason, Queensryche, even though it doesn't make sense in retrospect

Love/Hate were utterly dreadful and Queensryche = boring.

yeah i'm just saying they had some importance to us back then

i still kinda ride for the Ryche, goofy as they are

In the early 90s when I first got really into music, everywhere I went in Glasgow I saw metalheads with Sacred Reich t-shirts, saw a lot of them in Hamilton too. Were they a popular band or highly rated? Cuz even in 2nd hand shops there was shitloads of their LPs. So clearly they were popular in the west of Scotland at least for a while.

haha man, yeah they weren't super popular...i think they were one of those bands that sold more t-shirts than albums.

they weren't anymore popular than, like, vio-lence or flotsam & jetsam

probably less popular than MOD or exodus i guess?

Maybe they gave away tshirts or something cuz honestly everywhere I went i saw guys with them on

If Kiss were the 70s kids gateway to metal are Slipknot the 90s Kiss?

hmmmm, to answer the initial question, it was a long process i guess, had a friend when i was in grade school that was kinda obsessed with AC/DC but mostly we spent time running around on dirt bikes and building forts and shit and since this was pre-walkman i didnt hear it much except for when we would secretly listen to it in the basement of his psycho-fundamentalist parents house. was sort of obsessed w/welcome to my nightmare all on my own, but spent most of the time hearing whatever bands my dad was touring w/at the time, which was mostly the country circuit and like black oak arkansas/sha-na-na/dr. hook, none of which really did it for me.

moved when i was at the end of 7th grade and did that typical puberty-era reinvention where no one knows who you are at the new school so i went for the metal crowd, i think mostly because the only other apparent option was jock shit and people in popped collars - guy who lived by me and a few other dudes had our own small town tape trading empire, fell hard for anthrax/metal church/helloween/savatage(lol)/slayer side by side w/dead kennedys and black flag. spent my entire first summer cutting lawns for rich rural jerks listening to reign in blood over and over again on my first walkman so i could buy a leather jacket and be awesome.

started hanging out w/NOTED ILX POTENTATE hi dere soon after that via riding the same bus and being in honors classes together (unfortunately although they were nice dudes my metal peeps were less of the D&D nerdy and more of the dirt bikes and blowing shit up variety (which was awesome but) so we kinda drifted apart). kept my metal roots watered w/stompy industrial and some punk rock stuff but kinda lost touch w/the metal for a while (small town mn pre-internet meant youd better have a group search party to get anything cool), also just fucking despised the hair metal thing.

hit college during the grunge boom, pretty much hated most of it (although i was down with nirvana and the melvins), had a dude down the hall that was a huge grindcore fan and we used to hang out and irritate our floor by playing that stuff REALLY LOUD, went down the mr. bungle rabbithole into zorn and painkiller naked city and GOD.

dabbled over the next many years but spent most of my time on other shit because i couldnt really get a foothold in, nu-metal didnt work for me (other than SOAD), then got thrown back into the dunk tank by K's brother who served up the finest in black and death metal, went ulver crazy around the same time, started reading the rolling metal thread and buying tons of shit again and well here we are.

speaking as a 70's kid, kiss did more to keep me away from metal than anything. hate that band.

oh another funny note about my stunted moronic metal journey - REFUSED to listen to black sabbath or led zeppelin because i lumped them into the whole classic rock cannon that all the people i could not stand listened to in my jr. high/high school, so i actually only sat down and did so by buying the box sets within the last year. before that i had heard zep IV and paranoid and thats it.

I'm so relieved that by meeting Dan, you stopped listening to Savatage (lol).
Kudos to dan for saving you!

If Kiss were the 70s kids gateway to metal are Slipknot the 90s Kiss?

Judging by the volume of Slipknot T-shirts I still see on the street today, I would say yes.

Everyone was into Slipknot when they first broke through, right? Most metal people I know were into them; I got their second album on release day. Lost interest after that, but I can picture them as the perfect gateway band to a lot of cool music, much more so than any other nu-metallers (except maybe Deftones, but I think they turned kids onto the hardcore and indie rock they liked, rather than metal).

I was never into Slipknot (or Kiss)

yeah i never got slipknot, maybe because thx to seeing the first bungle tour out of control dudes in masks had already been done better imo

(also i think i should give a lot of credit to big black for keeping my metal fires burning, have always been down for loud abrasive and mean-spirited)

MTV in the '80s. And Sabbath and Iron Maiden album covers staring at me in the record store.

i should also give way more credit to primus, who i was down with up to lesser degrees (yeah im looking at you pork soda and punchbowl) until the brown album which i thought was just embarrassing for everyone involved (mostly me)

Pork Soda was the one I had i think.

yeah frizzle fry and sailing the seas of cheese are still pretty fucking great, diminishing returns from there on out for sure.

blame it on creeping hippie nonsense.

Shall we just blame it on dan?

DAN YOU FAILED!!!!!!!!

dabbled over the next many years but spent most of my time on other shit because i couldnt really get a foothold in, nu-metal didnt work for me (other than SOAD), then got thrown back into the dunk tank by K's brother who served up the finest in black and death metal, went ulver crazy around the same time, started reading the rolling metal thread and buying tons of shit again and well here we are.
― ULTRAMAN dat ho (jjjusten),

theres never a bad reason to blame everything on dan tbh

xpost: OH SHIT FREE AT LAST hahahaha i didnt even think of that!

clearly he was too busy trying to think of ways you would googleproof it he forgot about the normal name.

More stories please?

Definitely love "Godzilla" by B.O.C. at age 5 because it was about Godzilla!

<3 you Nate - seriously, I think this summarizes or points to how a lot of guys our age (mid 30s - early 40s) got into metal.

I think it sums up Nate perfectly!

hahah my dad toured w/BOC also but i dont think i ever noticed that they were metal

also if that were the case there should also be a groundswell of peeps my age that are hardcore into the "albino kinda blues dudes" genre

well, my favorite song when I was 5/6 was "Rapture" by Blondie because it was about an alien from outerspace that ate things that rhymed.

John did you and Dan ever have an industrial band?

and did you name it using this band name generator? http://www.gnphurts.com/ing/

oh man i am sad to say that history has denied us all the hilarity of a HI DERE/ME high school era collaborative industrial band. it would have been pure shame-filled magic to be sure.

we did win awards for a duet performance at the state choral competition, but sadly there are no tapes so i can not mock up the imaginary industrial dance extravaganza from that.

Use the generator and tell us what your bandname would have been anyway :)

Dans Of Death?

Dans Macabre

the best one i found on there yet is "Daddy Loves my Pixels", so that

Justen Thyme & Dans Macabre has a ring to it.

Steely Dans

Age 10, my best friend has 2 older brothers who wear Iron Maiden/Metallica/Megadeth t-shirts with skulls on and sometimes we are allowed into their bedrooms to play on the computer and I marvel at the posters on the wall - more skulls, alcoholic drinks, fast cars, weird names like Lawnmower Deth. These guys seem pretty cool and sophisticated to me (ha ha).

Soon Iron Maiden have a #1 single. The older girls on my school bus think it is a bunch of terrible wailing. I don't really like it either but I feel contrarian (future ilxor alert) so I stick up for it. Becoming pretty fascinated with this music that I've barely heard - if I liked it, I would feel smarter than them for hearing what is good about it, right?

So yeah, then I start listening to the Radio 1 Friday Night Rock Show, and then grunge happens and slowly, slowly the smug part of me that wants my musical choices to validate my angsty ego discovers that this indie/alt business is where it's REALLY at for that. But when I go to university and meet some other indie kids, I realise my Voivod tape is still good for feeling like I have out-indied the indies...

lol Lawnmower Death sophisticated? hahahahaha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nobBCY2Am4

Heh, I know! And I realised much later that these guys I thought were the height of cool were, well, they were two glasses-wearing teenage boys with BBC Micros (when the cool kids had Amigas, or consoles, or no computer at all) and pictures of goblins in their bedrooms. But...

I had an Amiga 500. Thank you Voivod.

When I was young it seemed like every older kid was into metal. Everywhere you saw teenagers gathered it was a sea of AC/DC & Iron Maiden t-shirts. I figured that getting into metal was something that just happened naturally when you hit 6th grade, like starting to like girls or something. I decided to jump the gun and started taping Headbanger's Ball. Of course I responded first to pop-metal, but then I began to dig the sci-fi/fantasy elements in bands like Iron Maiden and Anthrax. Later, I started going to shows--Maiden, Dio, Kiss, Ozzy, Metallica, Slayer, Voivod--and had my own collection of scary t-shirts.

I listened to almost nothing but metal until 11th grade, when I entered my VU-Sonic Youth-Tom Waits snob phase. I still followed my favorite bands for a few more years, but I mostly ignored metal until recently when I started dling albums people were talking about here, and found some newer stuff I liked--Amon Amarth, for instance.

I got into metal through Quiet Riot and Shout at the Devil, which came out when i was 11 or 12. As i moved on into HS, I played sports, but life where I grew up (south side of Chicago) wasnt a John Hughes movie, and stoners, burnouts and jocks all hung together and often were one in the same. Around high school, i discovered weed and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and subsequently tossed Crue and Quiet Riot to the side and got into the real thing.

I thought Bill would be a total 80s glammetal dude complete with big hair and make up with a harley davidson and lots of chicks.

hahahahaha-i wish!

How I expected Bill to be
http://imcdb.org/images/151/208.jpg

Oh my, Bill released a solo album!
http://img.jamendo.com/albums/2410/covers/1.300.jpg

From my "ditch period"

Hysteria was the first album, period, that I discovered, bought & loved. It led to memberships in both the Columbia House & BMG clubs (back in their heyday of full spread ads in Parade Magazine, pennies & scotch tape) & a pretty wide assortment of pop metal cassettes from 87-89. We didn't know about Headbangers Ball yet, so these would have consisted a of a lot of lightweight stuff, like Europe & Britny Fox. Then GnR made all the leotards & what not seem sorta lame. Finally, a friend brought some Metallica tapes to school that he had borrowed from his older brother & everything to the lace & hairspray side of GnR was immediately amputated. We were into Anthrax too, & stuff like Sacred Reich, Testament, Flotsam & Jetsam & Exodus, but I think we were actually a bit afraid of Slayer - they seemed to us like legit satanists.

i remember being afraid of king diamond cuz he was supposed to be a "real" satanist

I am still trying to get into.... Metal. It is an unforgiving genre(s). Have Reign in Blood and a Zao album cued up again. Let's see how this goes.
What would be youse guyses strategic picks of albums for the purposes of conversion/preaching for metal?

There's been some good banter on that very topic here:

Mordy's Metal Listening Club - New Albums Every Monday

I really don't recommend starting with Slayer. That's jumping into the deep end of the pool. Honestly, the best starting places for metal are the big, obvious ones: Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Metallica. Maybe In Flames or Mastodon if you want something a little heavier. Starting with the really extreme stuff is the best way to stop immediately.

St. Anger is always the correct answer to the "where to start" question, btw

xp: That's not necessarily so. I think that a lot of extreme stuff could have appeal to an outsider. I personally don't like Reign In Blood, having tried to get into it a number of times myself. An extreme album that is very listenable that I think sounds great and has a lot of heart is Death - Leprosy. But, you know, ymmv.

St. Anger is always the correct answer to the "where to start" question, btw

is this a joke?

i do love the disaster that is St. Anger but, yes, that is a joke good sir

Start from the beginning: Black Sabbath off Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath

St Anger and Death Magnetic must be avoided at all costs.

Start from the beginning: Black Sabbath off Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath

― Chicago to Philadelphia: "Suck It" (Bill Magill), Thursday, June 17, 2010 1:54 PM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark

This is the answer.

I'd totally recommend Some Kind of Monster as a gateway movie to something, though!

Motorhead - No Remorse:

imho, if you listen to and don't like anything off of this comp, then metal is clearly not for you.

Yeah, I kind of forgot Black Sabbath there. My bad.

Anyway, I think it all depends on where you come from. If you listen to Discharge or John Zorn or Merzbow, then, yes, go for the extreme stuff. My instinct is that it's better to ease yourself in, though. And I definitely don't recommend starting with Reign in Blood. That is an intense, difficult record. I still have trouble listening to it all the way through.

but its short!

i love reign in blood but if you are coming into this with the general modern not sure about guitar solos bent, the loopy bullshit going on there will drive you insane

whoa wait you are also easing yourself in with Zao??

Grind records are short, and I definitely wouldn't recommend starting with those.

Yeah, Zao isn't a good idea, either.

I think i hated metal for about 5 minutes after hearing Zao for the first time tbh

I would say that Christian metalcore is not particularly representative of the genre as a whole.

see i love motorhead but i don't see them as being particularly representative of metal as a genre IMO

avoid all metalcore

They aren't, necessarily, but they are a good gateway drug, and they influenced about a zillion bands. Zao... um... exist.

Reign in Blood is pretty catchy though.

otm start with Sabbath. everyone's heard the big songs on Paranoid and the first is a little too bloozy, so we used to indoctrinate our anti-metal friends in college with a bowl and Master of Reality. they usually were hooked by the end of 'Children of the Grave'

i like slayer but not nearly as much as a person is supposed to.

the production of reign in blood could have been a lot better...kinda prefer seasons in the abyss tbh

Although a number of those bands are squarely metal IMO, but I don't want to get all metal police here!

It doesn't bother me if people call those bands metal, even if they are obviously not ;) While I'd call Black Sabbath's first as the first real metal album, in my collection it's tagged as "proto-metal" which plays well with other stuff of that era in mixes. I consider the first modern metal albums to be Sabotage (1975) and Scorpions - In Trance (1975), followed by Judas Priest - Sad Wings of Destiny (1976). To me AC/DC is bloozy hard rock until Back In Black started getting more metal, and definitely after. Same with Kiss' glammy trash rock that became more distinctly metal on Creatures Of The Night (not necessarily for the better). I think Eddie Van Halen can be a big influence on metal guitarists without actually being metal.

Was dimebag darrell the 90s eddie van halen? if so who is the 00s version?

I think it's still Dimebag...

are the metalcore guitarists influenced by dimebag? I know every guitar mag/metal mag has an RIP Dimebag as often as Mojo has a beatle on the cover but I wasnt sure if he still influenced the actual bands in the 00s.

Just thinking though, a lot of kids will get into metal purely because of all the RIP Dimebag articles, in the same way kids in the past have got into Nirvana/Hendrix etc.

There's a lot of Dimebag ripping-off in metalcore, for sure. Kiddie bands veer into all sorts of flaccid Pantera homages.

One of the miggest metal guitar gimmicks these days is the Gojira pick-scrape. Everyone from Behemoth to As I Lay Dying is ripping that off and overdoing it to a comical degree.

Biggest. Not miggest.

report from the guitar store field: yes, the kids of today are all about the dimebag worship, to which i shrug and say "ehhhh" but thats just me

You were supposed to tell me ages ago who the biggest influences on your customers were , you said you would get back to me but never did. :)

Savatage is fine. You guys picking on them just made me reload Hall of the Mountain King. With bonus tracks.

off the top of my head (brace yourselves) dimebag, kurt cobain (yes still), dragonforce (lol), lamb of god, jack white

and what are the dads weekend band influences? eddie van halen?

*wonders if john is in a weekend band*

Obviously too busy to answer as he's jamming this weekend.

Here is my metal story:

I grew up in a strange household where dad loved that new rock and roll music as a kid but he married a woman who hated all forms of music (really, she had no time for music at all. A friend asked her about music in the background of movies and she said it distracted her.) and then he stopped caring uch about music save for what was on the radio. I had no older brother or sister so getting into music at all was pretty unlikely.

As a very young child in Hollis, Queens, I was in the middle of the disco era. I decided that I, like all of my black classmates (I was the only white kid in my class at PS 35) liked disco music.

A next door friend, Clifford, whose mom worked in some capacity for ABKCO Records at the time (she used to show off signed Rolling Stones contracts to friends to impress them) heard that I was into disco and he was offended. He, four years older and far wiser, was a rock fan and he was going to make me one as well.

Cliff dragged me into his house and made me listen to the LPs that he and his older brother had. It was then that I heard stuff for the first time, stuff like Yes "Roundabout" and Led Zeppelin "Stairway To Heaven" and even the B-52's "Rock Lobster" which the 10-year old me adored (as does the 42 year old me) and made me walk away happy to say "Disco Sucks" before it was a cliche, ironic, or wrong.

Not long afterwards, I was prone to strange hobbies, such as listening to AM radio late at night and trying to see how far away the radio stations were (I was always thrilled when I heard a Canadian station).

I was also somewhat OCD and loved lists even at an early age. So listening to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem was something I got into the habit of doing at a young age. Naturally, I kept a book where I counted down along with Casey, keeping meticulous record of chart movement, debuts and weeks on the chart.

(I was ignorant that I could have bugged dad for a subscription to Billboard Magazine which would have had all I craved and even more.)

This was all taking place in the early '80s. I remember just about every song on this list and this listwith alarming clarity and I had an unhealthy fascination with Stars On 45 (I was so psyched when it made it to #1, even though it was just for one week).

Well, two songs changed everything:

AC/DC's "Back In Black" spent only a couple of weeks on the countdown, peacking in the high 30s if memory serves. And around the same time, Billy Squier had a longer run with "The Stroke."

It was when those two songs entered the charts and my life that I made a profound discovery: Loud guitar shits all over "Bette Davis Eyes."

With that as my backbone, I was either going to be a metalhead or a stripper. I and everyone who knows me will agree I made the right choice.

At that point I started listening to rock radio (the countdown was on the local Top 40 station) and I started discovering all of the usual '70s classic rock suspects and the then-current stuff from the likes of Van Halen, Judas Priest, Dio, Accept (the first cassette I bought was "Metal Heart") and soon afterwards, the commercial metal of the time (Motley Crue, Quiet Riot, Ratt).

When I was in High School, I fell in with the stoners since no other peer group would have me. They expanded my Black Sabbath and Ozzy knowledge beyond the stuff radio stations played at the time ("Paranoid" and "Crazy Train" pretty exclusively) and also started exposing me to the burgeoning underground metal scene.

I was 14 in 1983 and 18 in 1987. If anyone can think of a better time to be a metal teenager than those years, I would argue you were wrong forever and there is no way you could change my mind.

I was also lucky enough to be situated in the suburbia outside of Washington DC as a teenager (having moved from Queens with my family when I was about 12). I went to high school with a kid named Kenny Thomas who actually took guitar lessons from Brian Baker of Minor Threat and Dag Nasty.

Between him and some punk friends in school (one of whom played me Fear on a field trip on her walkman and I immediately fell in love), I also was one of the first long hairs (to be fair, it was a mullet then - it was the '80s!) to get into the DC hardcore scene, the even-harder New York stuff and older punk. When metal and hardcore finally crossed over, I wondered what took everyone so long?

Hard to believe that two songs would have such a profound influence on my life from that point on but there it is.

How about you, Al?

― NYCNative, Friday, 4 March 2011 20:38 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

As paul simon didn't say dont call me Al!

Pretty simple really - Nirvana. Got a cd player in our house in like 1987 or something. Had a few U2 & Queen cds that i listened to all the time so I got my own stereo at xmas, the first in my year at school bizarrely (nope we werent rich or middle class or anything ) so that got me sorta into music in that I would get my folks to buy me cds sometimes but it was all chart stuff like the aforementioned U2,Queen,Bon Jovi and the odd NOW or Hits comp and various greatest hits cds of bands.

Then in 1991 (aged 18) we moved to Hamilton (handy cuz i was a season ticket holder - a long story). in the summer with no football on i had some spare cash, and my new found non footy friends were into glam metal heavy rock some thrash basically average kid kerrang/raw readers stuff. Some of it i really hated (always hated the glammy shit as my mate at school was into it despite never reading a music mag in his life (he still hasnt) so i dunno how he heard of this stuff as i cant see radio playing it at the time. but a few things like ride the lightning,master of puppets sounded good and i did like def leppard as i had a well worn dub copy of hysteria from someone at school.
My footy mates (bar 1 metal/punk/indie guy) were all into indie. Madchester indie & the smiths.

then i heard my metal mates playing nirvana. bang. a revelation. i had been listening to the rolling stones & sex pistols and this music was just what i needed. I borrowed stuff off friends then started buying lps,tapes,cds of albums that got good reviews in RAW and Kerrang. Got into AIC just before dirt came out, bought all the other grunge stuff i could find, got big into faith no more,soundgarden,janes,pearl jam, then i dug deeper screaming trees etc Helmet,ministry,nin then the footy mate i mentioned loaned me pixies,husker du,sabbath,slayer,anthrax,megadeth,stone roses lps and i realised i liked that kinda indie rock and metal as much. Manics became my band along with Nirvana Quickly realised that pantera sucked despite everyone loved them while i listened to godflesh etc.

Then i heard aphex twin,lfo,fsol etc and i would listen to electronic stuff but non-dancy stuff til i heard underworld & orbital in like 93? Another life changer, but i did not abandon the grunge/indie/alt rock/metal stuff at all. got way into kyuss and monster magnet and all the stoner rock before getting into doom (while i still would listen to all that older stuff) i then got into pfunk,krautrock, jazz ,alt country and when i first got Napster i got long sought after albums i needed to complete collections of (like redd kross - neurotica that i finally did find on lp 10 years after getting their other records,but p2p meant i heard it a few years earlier). once i got my fill of finding stuff i knew i wanted but didnt have i then started to look for new music like post rock and the whole stoner/psych/doom/noiserock/post metal boom coincided with me listening to heavier stuff again resulting in really getting back into doom & sludge and finally hearing black metal that i liked.

not very interesting and im sure no one will have read of all that but there you go. and i cba proofreading that or spellchecking or fixing anything else :) I leave that to the actual people who write for a living!

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Friday, 4 March 2011 21:06 (2 days ago)

reposted from mordys metal thread

in my mind this thread title reads like

How did you first get into [power chord] ... [lettin it ring out] ... Metal?

Ah, you see for me it's: How did you first get into [sound of rainfall]... [bell tolls]... Metal?

How did you first get into... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOWy7s1F9LE&feature=related ... Metal?

hahahahaha

How did you get into metal Alan?

liked a lot of pop stuff when I was very young but the first rock bands that really clicked for me were metallica and nirvana. I was in 5th grade at the time. the black album and nevermind were the first albums I bought for myself. don't remember which one got picked up first but I did have a tiny collection of cds, tapes, and lps I had gotten as gifts prior to that. but those two made a big impression because they felt like things I had discovered on my own. (via mtv, heh.)

always liked more fringe stuff that wasn't metal proper like faith no more and nine inch nails but metallica led me to slayer, megadeth, etc. all downhill from there.

I was gonna repost when I saw this bumped and I see that Al is now my spokesperson, haha!

The gateway drug for metal for me was AC/DC.. at about 6 or 7, my parents spent a lot of time with another couple couple, their boys were older and I remember being enchanted by the cover of the Highway to Hell record, simply due to the horns on Angus's head.. They put on Back in Black, and those bells tolling hooked me in from then on..
The first 3 taped I owned from saving my allowance were Quiet Riot-Metal Health, Def Leppard-Pyromania and Motley Crue-Shout at the Devil.. a few years of that at 9, 10, 11.. by 12, I had been taking drum lessons for about 4 years, then a guy at the music store I was taking lessons at was playing the new Metallica record, Master of Puppets.. It was fucking on! Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer,.. the more thrashy the better, and since I grew up in the Bay area, thrash was king anyway.. Vio-Lence, Exodus, Death Angel, Testament, Frobidden... every weekend when I was in high school we were going to see one of these bands ansd the shit ton of lesser known local bands that were playing at the time..
When I got to college to persue a music degree, I got into Jazz, Fusion, and some hip-hop, but I've alway kept the metal flag flying..

I was about 14 and I'd only been listening to actual music for probably a year. and even that was just Aerosmith. So I was at this lame middle school dance club and Enter Sandman came on, and even though I'd heard it before 3 years earlier when it came out, the heavy sounding guitars just excited the hell out of me. From there, I began listening to Mandatory Metallica on weekends and I heard "One" and "Damage, Inc" for the first time, and collected their whole discography.

I then moved to Megadeth, though I started with the way wrong era (ie, Youthanasia and Countdown). Managed to shoehorn a Crowbar album in there, and then picked up several Panteras, then stopped exploring for a while.

It wasn't until I walked into a store at age 18 and finally decided I wanted to give Slayer a go (with their very underrated Divine Intervention album) that suddenly I was thrown into extreme metal.

From then to the next two years I acquired about 350 or so metal albums.

this thread has reminded me that the first album I ever bought with my own money was Donna Summer and the second album that I bought with my own money was AC/DC "Back in Black". My grandmother was visiting at the time and I can recall putting the headphones onto my grandmother's ears and making her listen to AC/DC, feeling entirely certain that she too was going to think that this was the best music ever made. She didn't.

haha your poor gran

I never did.....

your point being?

we all know you have never liked Metal, Geir. Why did you have to post you never got into it. I don't get the point.

Celtic Frost. I was 15, and more or less an indie kid. Smiths, JAMC, New Order, The Cure. I also dug lots of stuff from the 50s through to the 70s - Eddie Cochran, Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Zeppelin.

I was at a friends house when another friend stopped by. He had the To Mega Therion tape and popped it into the deck. I was immediately blown away. I think it was the outside the box thing that captured me. Orchestral instruments, soundscapes, operatic vocals.

Over the next year, I discovered the big 4, the teutonic 3, etc. I didn't dive too deep.

By 18-19, my tastes changed back to the US indie thing. Sonic Youth, Sub-Pop, AmRep, K, Merge. I didn't really get back into metal until 2006. Weird trajectory. I never stopped liking metal, though.

my cousin Quitty is at fault. at one time he made a 'zine called Hessian Obsession.

basically whenever my family went to visit his he would make me and my brother listen to his Nugent and Priest and Maiden records and argue with my brother about why Motley Crue was better than Frankie Goes to Hollywood

but you stopped listening to metal
When did you stop listening to ................Metal?

waht

In high school I was really into MMA, jiu jitsu etc. So I joined the wrestling team. Most of the team were pot smoking farm boys, and one guy gave me that comp of early Black Sabbath. I'd never done drugs but "Sweet Leaf" made me want to; it was also my introduction to fat riffs. Before that I was into US Indie rock, and then 60's stuff (Stones etc.) Later, I got really into dance music, then jazz, and got obsessed with the concept of "swing". I couldn't really get into death or black metal, but the stoner and doom genres were right up my alley. My raver friend moved away, so I stopped being involved with that for a while, and spent a great summer getting into Kyuss and co. After a while I got back into dance music, esp. the really whacked out early darkcore, which made me hungry for more extreme sounds. Godflesh showed up next, I really love the dub remixes Justin does, and after that I rediscovered the Swans and Killing Joke, so black and death metal were a logical next step. Celtic Frost, Morbid Angel, and Darkthrone are all on heavy rotation now. I just started listening to Mastodon after unconciously avoiding them for a while; I guess I'm a sludgy prog guy now.

I was 12 and bought iron maiden's piece of mind when it came out in '83. I'd been fascinated by all the maiden album covers for a while, that one purchase really kicked off my grade school metal obsession.

I was a big kiss fan in the late 70s, and I bought the heavy metal soundtrack when it came out, but didn't really consider myself a metal fan... I was more into new wave or glam stuff like queen and bowie.