I can’t say that I’ve ever been much of a trendsetter in my life. The closest I came was when I was 11 or 12 – I like to think that I brought spiked hair and jams to Shoals Community School. Maybe I have my facts distorted, but I really felt cool at the time, even if I spent the remainder of my adolescence trying to live down how totally ridiculous it was. If you’re a young lady who’s going to prom next year, try to imagine what your friends would say if you decided to go with the guy who looked like nothing less than a dork five or six years ago and never really shook the image.
The rest of the time, I’ll admit, I’ve been a twisted sheep following closely behind an equally mutated leader of whatever flock I’ve been running with at the time. My obsession with Guided by Voices, for instance, wasn’t a homegrown thing – it started with a mix tape from Lane some years back. But when I find something I love, I pick it up and run with it, inadvertantly shoving it down the throats of whoever happens to be in my company at the time. (See also: Lane’s Big List of Songs And Bands He’s Burned Out On Thanks To Brandon.)
Such is the story behind my love affair with Metal.
Flashback to 1989: George Bush is in office, the ‘Net is nothing but the treading ground of a precious few eggheads, and I … well, for my 15th birthday, I opened my gift from my mum and squealed with joy as I saw that she had purloined cassettes (yes, really) by three popular artists of the day: Labour of Love by UB40, The Escape Club’s Wild Wild West, and Kylie by Kylie Minogue.
(A sad sidenote: All of these recordings still exist in my closet somewhere.)
Point being, I was a musical lightweight up until my 15th year. The greatest moment of my life up until then was when I was the correct caller to a radio station contest and won Skyscraper by David Lee Roth. “Just Like Paradise”? The best song ever, to my naive ears.
During that 15th year, I started hearing talk among my peers of this new breed of music that they were getting into. It was heavy, it was fast, it was distorted, it was dark … and it scared the hell out of me. I would retreat into the corners of my room and let The Bangles soothe my pain; I just knew that listening to, much less enjoying, Anthrax, Megadeth and the like would send me directly to the fiery gates of hell with no hope of return (I still had something resembling religion in my life then).
And then one day, inexplicably, I gave in. Perhaps it was the exhaustion from the ridicule that I would receive from the others in my little clique – hey, you try to compare the merits of Kylie Minogue to Testament. Perhaps I was just tired of feeling left out.
My friend Doug made me a mix tape of the bands he and our friends were listening to. (See also: The Power Of A Good Mix Tape, or Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.) And my life would never be the same.
I took to Metal with a fervor that would scare most devotees. My job at a local fast-food restaurant funded this foray into this new world; my wardrobe of My-Mother-Dressed-Me-Today shirts was replaced with T-shirts, all black, from the various bands that I was into - one of the greatest accomplishments of my high school years was stockpiling enough shirts so that I could wear a different metal shirt every day of the week. I had decided to stop cutting my hair as well, letting it grow as long as it could. (This upset my conservative father, who told me quite sarcastically, “I don’t care if you want to be a girl.” Some people could never be convinced.)
And I realized that it was my time to be different. Lane liked Anthrax, Doug liked Megadeth … and while those were all perfectly good bands to admire, I needed something a little more extreme. I needed something darker, faster and heavier than anything that my peers were into. I wanted something that would scare the pants off the Christians. Christianity was big in my clique, and I wanted to be the antithesis.
I had heard the band Slayer on the Power Hour, a weekly metal program that was broadcast from Wabash Valley Junior College. Realizing that they were one of the Big Three of contemporary Metal, and that no one had gotten into them yet (because they were too scared to do so), they would be My Band – and their lyrics were unlike anything I'd ever heard. Death, decomposure, Satan, purgatory ... perfect.
(Note from my high school years: I wrote a letter to a girl that I was dating, and I asked, “Do you care if we listen to Slayer when we go out this weekend?” Her reply: “No, I don’t care if we listen to Slaughter – I like them.” We didn’t go out again after that weekend.)
It wasn't like I actually *believed* in the themes that were espoused in such records as Show No Mercy, Reign In Blood and Hell Awaits. It was just part of my quest to be different. I'm not a Satanist, nor have I ever been, though you would have believed otherwise if you'd gone to high school with me.
And so the entire back catalog of Slayer was eventually mine, all the way up to their double-live record, Decade of Aggression. While New Country was getting big in my school (Garth Brooks’ “Friends In Low Places” was a favorite, almost our Prom theme), here I was, the longhair quoting Slayer lyrics as often as I possibly could, completely alienating all but those who understood the language of Metal.
This isn’t to say that Slayer was the be-all, end-all of my Metal days. The highlight, rather, was seeing Megadeth, Pantera and White Zombie in Evansville in 1993 – it was the time of my life. Megadeth was my favorite band after Slayer, and seeing them play the second show on their tour for Countdown To Extinction was exhilarating. Pantera and White Zombie were awesome as well, and the evening was a culmination of all that I loved. I never wanted the life to end.
As my obsession grew, so would the expenditures. Friday nights were spent cashing my paycheck, picking up Lane in the Escort and going to the one record store in nearby Jasper that had anything resembling a cool taste in the music we were into. He would watch in awe as I would find the metal section and purchase random cassettes – Atheist, Napalm Death, Obituary, Forced Entry, Dark Angel, Death Angel … nothing that even remotely resembled “heavy” was safe. Metal Maniacs magazine was my bible, and Slayer’s South of Heaven (which was the most accessible of all of their albums) was played at my graduation party.
And then I went to college. Nirvana were in full stride, Pearl Jam were just starting to gather steam, and grunge (sorry) was blowing the dust off the staleness of pop, but I still clung to Metal. I remember being completely unimpressed by the sounds coming from Seattle, and prayed that something, anything, that I was listening to would hit the top of the charts so that I could say that I was right.
But just as quickly and easily that my obsession with Metal started, it ended. The reference point that I use to pinpoint the end was the purchase of two records: Condemned by Confessor, and Tomb of the Mutilated by Cannibal Corpse. Both had been hyped in Metal Maniacs, and I was looking forward to both records being different from what I’d been used to.
Instead, Confessor was run-of-the-mill sludge metal with falsetto vocals, and Cannibal Corpse defied description – while their cover art was one-of-a-kind (it featured, *ahem*, oral necrophilia, except both of the parties were already dead) and their lyrics bordered on ridiculous ("I piss in your maggot-filled asshole"??? What self-respecting human being, no matter your disturbances, would even think of quoting those words to your friends?).
And I saw the folly of everything I loved. I had somehow passed that point in my life without even knowing. I was no longer into being the darkest, most extreme music fan on my block – I wanted something with substance, which was lacking in both records. If it meant loving music that was (*gasp*) popular, so be it.
It was time to leave Metal. Dinosaur Jr. and Radiohead displaced Testament and Nuclear Assault. I discovered the joys of Nirvana, the bliss of Pearl Jam, the ecstasy of Soundgarden, thus beginning a new obsession. And I cut my hair, which by 1994 was halfway down my back.
There are still Metal records that I own, that I wouldn’t sell for all the money in the world. To tell you the truth, it was the time of my life, and moments from those days will always be those I cherish. To this day, Lane and I will get out an album from that era, and remember how for a brief, shining moment, we were part of the coolest society that’s ever lived, a community that left all the lemmings out. And it was a time I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Brandon Grimes still has his Napalm Death shirt buried somewhere in his closet.