What got you into this hellish heavy metal music?

For sure, as a metal head, we get it, we are privy to a sound that has shaped our lives, woken us up, carried us through teenage years, banged chicks to, fired in the death deck on our cars on our way to a mundane job, got stoned to, seen the greatest bands live in concert, while so-called metal brothers tend to die off and seek the safety. If you are on this forum, then METAL, u know what it means.

But what got you into this awesome music (or f,ucked up your ears?)

I'll go first. I'm an only child (adopted) from a pretty middle class background, private school etc. My folks always had female babysitters for me in the early 70's - thinking little boy will be sleeping as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and the Who thundered through my floorboards. Man, I went downstairs first time I was awoken my this thunder, so in love with this music, I got to keep the same babysitters (heavy rock heads) for another five years. By that stage AC/DC were making serious noises and became my favorite band. I was well and truly tuned to 10 by that stage. I'm in my 40's now - and hell, I love this music even more as the days go on.

In metal we trust

What is your story?

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What got you into this hellish heavy metal music?

Satan, obviously. More specifically, Appetite for Destruction. I've been on a downward spirial ever since.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

Quote :

What got you into this hellish heavy metal music?

Satan, obviously. More specifically, Appetite for Destruction. I've been on a downward spirial ever since.

Good old Satan, heh, heh. I was watching this documentary on Ytube the other week, its about these Italian black metal freaks who murder the lead singer in some Satanic band, and his girlfriend. I must root it out and post it. It has Glen Benton from Deicide talking about it.

The usual culprits - a friend's older brother playing the Paranoid album. It scared the crap out of me, but I had to keep listening to it.

Also, my brother played Alice Cooper's School's Out album all the time, but I don't remember ever hearing it as a kid. That probably seeped into my brain as well.

Heavy metal and promiscuity aren't mutually exclusive.

3 stages for me starting from when I was 8/9: Styx best of (stuff like 'Blue Collar Man', 'Renegade', et al) blowing me away + Harley Davidson compilation CD which had W.A.S.P. - Wild Child on it, and an Iron Maiden - Maiden England poster which inspired me to purchase the newly released Best of the Beast on cassette at K-Mart.

So, Sabbath/Cooper are to blame so, it looks that way. I love classical, jazz, blues, all sorts - but metal is the daddy: never had any mainstream airplay, never promoted, never got a fair deal, yet snakes around the music world - refusing to ever go away -- metal is Medusa, attack it, and she branches out into even more sub cultures.

First gig I ever saw was AC/DC supported by Y&T in Dublin 1982. You know that feeling when your balls tingle but u can't explain at your first ever gig; that's what I felt when Y&T hit the stage - the noise, the utter theatrics, blew my mind. And as the infocomercial says: there is m ore! AC freakin' DC -- Oh my God!!!!!!!!!! I have seen hundreds of metal bands but never in league with AC/DC. Not even Zepp in 2007 could ever match AC/DC shows I've seen.

I don't really have an interesting story, just that my father and I would drive around jamming Metallica's Ride the Lightning & Master of Puppets when I was a little kid. I eventually got into it myself through asking him what other bands were as cool as Metallica. He gave me stuff like Maiden, Helloween, Priest, Sabbath, Dio, etc.

Another factor that helped shape my musical development was those cable 'Music Choice' channels; one was called something like Arena Rock, and it introduced me to stuff like Def Leppard, Billy Squire, Ratt, and Tesla. Perfect gateway stuff.

And though I didn't like most of it at the time (stuff that's not heavy enough when you're ten and used to Priest and Maiden, ha), there was another channel that played more traditional classic rock stuff, and it introduced me to King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, The Who, and the Doors, etc.

K-Tel records N.U.R.O.C.K. album. Despite it's title it was actually a metal comp which had the two songs that started me off Ozzy - Flying High Again and Krokus - Long Stick Goes Boom. Played those over and over and over till I got both the albums they were from. And yeah at first I honestly thought they were songs about planes and dynamite. I learned real quick though and here we are thirty years later.

Got into music in grade school when I discovered bands like Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper and Thin Lizzy. Became obsessed with it. Soon after it was heavier stuff like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, then the 80's came and it was all over!

My cousin, he'd bring records that he'd bought round to mine and I was hooked pretty quick, there were so many great records coming out at that time 1979/1980 and so many great bands. Top of the tree was AC/DC.

K-Tel's Axe Attack introduced me to a lot of great stuff.

I was slightly late with live shows actually. Nothing ever used to come here. I think the initial live metal experience was my own bloody band. Then Stryper. By that time I was already hundreds deep in the metal collection.

Maiden and Metallica crica mid 90s. That's where it started for more on a more serious note. Prior to that it was the last good years of MTV in the early 90s with more glammier stuff they were showing.

One of the first bands I became aware of was KISS after seeing them on the Paul Lynde Halloween special in 1976, got Rock 'N' Roll Over and Alive! shortly after that (I was 6 years old).

I still really wasn't aware of it being a specific genre and my other favorite bands over the next few years were Boston, Queen, Heart, Foreigner, E.L.O., Pink Floyd, etc.

I became aware of AC/DC around the time that Back In Black came out, but I was still at an age where I called everything "rock". By the time 1981 rolled around my favorite bands were Rush and Yes.

Then in mid-1982 I was watching HBO's Video Jukebox and they played the videos for Iron Maiden's "The Number Of The Beast" and Judas Priest's "You Got Another Thing Comin"...and that was really when the lightbulb went off and I started exploring what "heavy metal" was all about. Got both of those albums later that summer and also picked up Black Sabbath's Live Evil because I liked the album cover.

Prior to 1982 I thought Heavy Metal was an illustrated magazine and a movie that was based on it...never really heard it used as a description for a style of music until I started reading articles about Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath in magazines.

I always found myself waiting for the top 40 stations to play Zep or Purple, but had to suffer through lots of America and 5th Dimension and what have you. Finally I discovered a 50,000 watt clear channel broadcast from beaming from Little Rock Ark which featured a late night show called "Beaker Street" which was mostly hard rock without the BS. That pretty much set my tastes.

I started at 12 yrs old listening to stuff like GnR, Quiet Riot, White Snake, Bloodgood, Barren Cross, etc. The Summer of 88, I believe it was, I was watching MTV (at my grandparent's....I didn't have cable) and "One" by Metallica came on. I had only heard of them at that point (late in the game, I know)....anyways, right before "darkness, imprisoning me..." They started this (now classic) breakdown that made my jaw drop to the floor! .....I didn't even know guitars could do that!!....it was a magical moment.
After that I moved to a new town and along with acquiring Deliverance's self titled album; I met a group of guys that mostly listened to Thrash/Speed Metal that introduced me to a whole new world (including Metallica's back catalog of course)....it was all down hill from there. lol
I'm 36 now and still love all things Metal!

Van Halen.

ultmetal wrote:

Got into music in grade school when I discovered bands like Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper and Thin Lizzy. Became obsessed with it. Soon after it was heavier stuff like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, then the 80's came and it was all over!

basically my story as well, same bands same time frame.

An anti rock rally at my local church, they played 'Highway to Hell' to demonstrate the evils of rock music, instead it made me an instant fan.

Van Halen - 1984
Def Leppard - Pyromania
Journey - Frontiers

Beginning with those 3 albums, I ventured into music heavier than Michael Jackson, John Cougar and Hall & Oates.

AC/DC popped my cherry. I'll always remember the day in 1993 (I was 13). For years I had this weird hobby of dubbing the radio onto tape. Most of it was pop and smooth jazz. My parents...well, my mom at least...forbade me to listen to our local rock station. Lo and behold, I became curious that day and flipped the dial over and BOOM, it was Big Guns from the soundtrack to Last Action Hero. It was like scorching testosterone had introduced itself to my blood and the dam of puberty just f*cking broke wide open. I remember the slew of songs that came on after--because I still own the tape!--Savatage, Arcade, Gary Hoey, Alice in Chains. Then I found Van Halen and it was all over.

Best memory of an otherwise uneventful, yet happy, childhood.

I grew up in a strict Christian household as my dad was a pastor. In about 6th grade, I went to shoot hoops with my uncle and he was listening to Poison's Flesh and Blood album in his truck, LOUD! I was blown away by the sounds and the way that it felt in my chest. I was hooked. Later that same summer, a friend of mine down the street came over and brought Stryper's THWTD and Deliverance's S/T album. I cranked it up and promptly got into trouble for listening to rock n' roll. I was told that I could only listen to "Christian" music, so I saved my paper route $$ and cleaned out the metal section at the local Christian bookstore. Sacred Warrior, Whitecross, Barren Cross, Vengeance Rising, Haven, Tourniquet, etc.

Shortly before entering highschool the dreaded grunge wave hit, but my dad, trying to be helpful, brought home a video about the dangers of Heavy Metal. The video featured bands like AC/DC, Overkill, Celtic Frost, Slayer, Exodus, Gn'R, Metallica, and I was absolutely floored. I watched the video the next day and took notes on all the albums that I wanted to own. I think his idea backfired a bit.

I am still working on that part. The vast majority of my 20's was devoted to punk and I listened to almost no metal at all other than the stuff that I already had, so now I am playing catch-up and rediscovering quite a few gems that I missed along the way.

I will say tho, that my dad has really turned me on to a lot of the 60's and 70's rock/metal that he used to own back in the day, and spins every now and again on youtube and such. Stuff like early BOC, Blue Cheer, the Kinks, and Status Quo. He was huge into Brit-Rock and Garage Rock during his formative years, so maybe the love of metal is genetic?

My mom tried the same stuff, books, tracts, videos (anyone remember Hell's Bells?), talks with youth pastors etc. All it did was provoke my curiosity. When I started getting into thrash my mom made a deal to let me buy CDs from the local Bible House (she never did check under my mattress...). I started buying loads of Deliverance, Tourniquet, Living Sacrifice, Vengeance, Mortification, etc etc etc, and all it did was make me want harder, faster music, and that my friends is how I found Slayer and Morbid Angel.

TL; DR: thank you, mom, for lighting my path to Slayer.

Luckily I didn't have to deal with oppressive parents when it came to music. My Mother told me that my Dad was listening to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple & Jimi Hendrix constantly when I was a baby. When she bought me my first copy of Paranoid she told me "I'm sure you'll love it, because you've already heard it".

She also took me to my first rock concert when I was 6 years old (The Doobie Brothers).

In the 80s she took me to see Iron Maiden, Ozzy, Van Halen and Metallica (she enjoyed the concerts as much as I did).

Later on I took her to see King's X, Faith No More and Soundgarden because she liked those bands as much as I did.

corplhicks wrote:

My mom tried the same stuff, books, tracts, videos (anyone remember Hell's Bells?), talks with youth pastors etc. All it did was provoke my curiosity. When I started getting into thrash my mom made a deal to let me buy CDs from the local Bible House (she never did check under my mattress...). I started buying loads of Deliverance, Tourniquet, Living Sacrifice, Vengeance, Mortification, etc etc etc, and all it did was make me want harder, faster music, and that my friends is how I found Slayer and Morbid Angel.

TL; DR: thank you, mom, for lighting my path to Slayer.

yeah, I watched that video too. All my stuff was in the top of my closet, until one of my brothers found my Biohazard CD and were listening to it. BUSTED!

2004 in eigth grade, I remember the first time I heard Scorpion -No One Like You on the radio, and I had to hear more of them, so I got the Box Of Scorpion set. I also recall hearing Def Leppard- Animal around that time as well, I checked out a bunch of their albums from my local library and liked what I heard. Metallica were also one of my firsts, I heard Unforgiven on the radio and asked my mom to get me the Black Album and I played the hell out of it, I also checked out their discography from my library.