This year marks my 25th anniversary of being a "metalhead". Back in 1983 when I was in the 6th grade I discovered heavy metal. Back then heavy metal was exploding with bands like Quiet Riot, Dokken, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Ratt, Dio, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and so on. Quiet Riot's "Metal Health" is the album that pretty much got me heavily into metal music back in 1983. After that album I pretty much searched high and low for every metal band I could find on vinyl and cassette. A few years later I would discover heavier bands like Metallica, Megadeth, King Diamond, Savatage, Anthrax, and of course Slayer.
For a few years Motley Crue was my favorite band. I just couldn't get enough of "Shout At The Devil". I swear I wore the grooves out on that album. One band made me pretty much forget about the might Crue. That band was Metallica. In late 1986 I heard "Master Of Puppets" for the first time and was floored by it's heaviness. Of course I had figured that I would be a Metallica fan for life. My first ever concert was Metallica on the Justiice tour with Queensryche opening. My love for Metallica ended when I heard an album called "Under The Influence" by my STILL favorite band Overkill. I could devote many blog entries to Overkill, but I'll spare you for now.
Thrash was definitely my main choice when it came to metal, but I longed for some heavier stuff. Don't get me wrong I loved bands like Overkill, Nuclear Assault, Kreator, Death Angel, Testament, Exodus, Metal Church, Coroner, and so on, but I knew that somewhere out there there had to be heavier bands.
One day while looking through a Metal Maniacs magazine I saw album covers that were just evil and scary looking. I knew I just had to have the albums pictured! My first introduction to Death Metal was the band Deicide. I bought their self titled album used for cheap. This was sometime during the summer of 1990. I remember this because I had bought a Sony Discman around this time when I was working a crappy Burger King job. What came out of my speakers at the time sounded like shit to me. LOL It wasn't untill my birthday of that same year that Death Metal would takes it hold on me. A friend of mine bought me Obituary's "Cause Of Death", and I was hooked. I had to have more of this brutal sounding Death Metal, and I had to have it now! From that point on my friend and I would read thank lists from every Death Metal band's cassette inlay card to find more bands that we could check out. We didn't have the internet back then, so it was a lot of looking at band logos, and pics of the band on the backs of cds and cassettes to determine if they could possibly be what we were looking for. Sometimes we'd come up with crap, but most of the time we would hit death metal pay dirt!
Those days were awesome. Those days were fun. Now the scene is stagnant as hell...in my opinion anyway. I still pay attention to all of the bands that I like, but rarely bother checking out new bands. After 25 years I've pretty much heard it all before.
I'm rarely ever excited about anything by a new metal band these days. That's pretty sad, BUT I still love all of that old stuff, and listen to it regularly. I've got 25 years worth of stuff I love to listen to, and I'm fine with that.
E-LIMINATION!
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