Tuesday, April 24, 2007

how it all began...








well the 5 posts obviously didn't pan out...I will strike that up to illness. I came down with the flu last week had to take 2 days off. Anyway we are in the middle of state testing. I hope my students do well on this test...but I guess I will have to wait til next year to find out.

So one of the more frequently asked questions I get it "how did you get into heavy metal?" Well let me try and sum it up for you. First I need to take you back to 1990 and the 7th grade, sad part is that some of my students weren't even born yet. Well we earned enough marbles to go to the park & we were allowed to bring our own music. I heard a song that day that changed my life forever Got the Time by Anthrax, actually it is a cover version, but I was in the 7th grade. That song was the most agressive, fast, and catchy piece of music I have ever heard. In fact, it is still one of my favorite songs.

Well after that I was hooked. I needed to hear more. So on a trip to Bakersfield with my cousin, I looked for Anthrax's Persistence of Time, but they didn't have it. Now I wasn't leaving without some metal album. So I looked around and found another band I had heard of Megadeth. I picked out the coolest looking album Rust in Piece...seriously look at the cover how cool is that? Well when I got the chance I listened to that album and was blown away by the speed of the songs and the guitar solos were mind boggling. After that I went looking for everything Megadeth.

When I got to high school, I was still into Megadeth, Anthrax, and Guns N Roses. My brother was listening to Metallica at the time. Now believe or not I had not heard of Metallica at the time...my first Metallica song One from ...And Justice for All. After that I really became addicted to all things metal.

Now during the mid 90's metal went very underground. Grunge & Nu-Metal were the popular forms of music at the time, so not alot of new bands or music was being played anywhere much less MTV which was becoming more TV than MTV.

So fast forward to 2002, I am flipping through the channels and I hear this blistering guitar solo and I wait to see who it is. I mean it's 2002 guitar solos have been dead for a long time, so this peaked my interest. The band, Shadows Fall, the song Destroyer of Senses. Well by now the internet was pretty huge so I began to search abou this band. From that I found Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, and God Forbid. From there I was able to find out their "influences" of In Flames, Soilwork, At the Gates.

From here out the rest is history. Maybe I will try to break down how I view the sub-genres of metal or talk about some new music.

No comments: