Picking up where Part I left off, at this point, it wasn't hard to see I was a child of the 1980s. Even to this day, I still turn on the radio and a particular station here still has 80s weekends which are great for me (and torture for my wife and kids).
"Enough with the neon, Dad!"
But a one-two punch was about to change my life forever.
For those who want to know how fast of a transition that was coming, the last album I had bought at this time was the Soundtrack to the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie in 1990.
Anyway, so what I didn't know was on the last day of school in 7th grade choir, the teachers said we could bring in our favorite videos by bands or artists we liked. I didn't have anything like that so going in that day, I didn't know what to expect. I believe there were at least 7 VHS tapes of New Kids on the Block, who were absolutely massive at that time, and one other VHS tape I wasn't familiar with. That video tape was 2 of One by Metallica. The teacher put that one in after torturing us with New Kids for 40 minutes.
This was my gateway drug.
That was the first punch. I can't really describe what I felt other than it was life changing. It altered the way I saw music and art forever. And suddenly, heavy metal ruled my life.
Following that, came the second punch:
I still don't know what it is.
I became obsessed with metal. Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, King Diamond, Iron Maiden, Death Angel, Faith No More, Testament, Motorhead, Overkill, Metal Church, Judas Priest, Nuclear Assault, Queensryche; I had to have them all. And suddenly, my clothing taste changed (all black), and my musical collection grew exponentially. No more Ninja Turtles, Transformers and Video Games. All band posters now. And girls. Truly, a complete teenager now.
My first live show my dad took me and a friend to was Judas Priest with Megadeth and Testament. Not bad for a 13-year-old at the time.
Now I needed a source of where I could get all the metal in the world. And I found it.
The cornerstone of metal music in the 90s.
And soon, I found myself craving heavier, darker, scarier stuff. Soon, bands like Sepultura, Napalm Death, Death, Cannibal Corpse, Amorphis, Morbid Angel, Entombed, Obituary, and Carcass took over my stereo. The faster, the better. The darker, the better. I needed all the death metal. DEATH METAL!!!!!
You know, happy music. Also: "Blllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaahhhhhh!"
I also gained some interest in politics now and really enjoyed the juxtaposition of incorporating these kinds of lyrics into the kind of shit politicians spit out (still to this day). I fancied myself as a philosopher of sorts, even on the darkest end of life. I began writing songs and poetry, expressing my feelings through music. I also began to seriously question my religious beliefs (much to the horror of my mother) and experimented with darker philosophies. Declaring my love of "satan" certainly was lot of fun then but looking back, I feel more like it was just me trying to find my own identity. Instead of calmly discussing with people, I kicked the metaphorical door in on my childhood and began the process of re-inventing myself. Very loudly.
I formed my first band(s) around this time with my friends. Some of the bands were Psychic Disruption, Somatic Death, Morbid Passion and Boltern and various others. I started on guitar but moved to bass later on. If I remember right, the first actual song I wrote was called "Welcome To Hell", a metaphor for suffering through depression paralleling the tortures of hell and junior high bullying. Nothing from this era that was recorded still exists as they were all rehearsal recordings - probably for the best.
Interestingly enough, I also began to collect Halloween album soundscapes - not just the movie soundtracks but the kind of stuff you would hear playing from windows or front doors on Halloween night. I had a deep love of Halloween since I was a child (for reasons I can't really explain - my best guess is that it was ingrained into me by my maternal grandfather who was born on Halloween) and that increased 10-fold following the discovery of all this darker music.
Dumb as it looks, there was some creepy shit on this CD.
I started making my own compilation tapes, intersplicing stuff from the Halloween soundscapes with metal music. I wasn't sure why, but I think I was trying to create my own escape as at the time, I was also starting to suffer from depression as noted earlier. It affected my grades as well as my family. I think it was first here I started experimenting with drugs but at the same time, none of those things ever gave me the buzz music did. To this day, music is still my drug.
Side note, looking back on the compilation tapes I made, it's interesting that I seemed to be creating my own horror movie soundtracks because while I loved the sound of the soundscapes, but the metal wasn't quite there - all of what I was hearing at the time was the politics or the death/murder/gore stuff - which I thought was neat at the time but didn't resonate with me. I was trying to create atmosphere. Little did I know what I was in for later down the road.
Meanwhile, along with my friends, we started a D&D Group (yep, more cliches) and went to more concerts (saw Metallica twice) and generally became a stereotype. It's interesting that I got into this kind of music as it seemed to peak around this time because music as we all know was about to take a major turn once 1993 came around.
I had written a previous blog (now gone) about how I noted that Metallica was at least partly responsible for this paradigm shift with the release of their self-titled album in 1991 as this was when popular kids at school went from "Metallica is satanic" to everyone wearing Metallica shirts.
"When does Metallica's second album come out?"
For me, I was about to have my mind blown again with this shift - but not for the same reason the music industry did. And thanks to my source of metal music at that time, things were about to get deep and bloody.
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