Sound of the Beast: A Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal
aka: How I Became Awesome - Session 1
It is now time to take a self-indulgent trip down memory lane to a time when Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, and Iron Maiden comprised pretty much the only metal bands I knew about that didn't suck. And Ozzy I guess. No Judas Priest, no Motorhead, no Death, no Bathory, no nuthin'. Enter the above book. Over a period of about a month when I was... 14(?), it gave me a crash course in metal and solidified my burgeoning love for the genre, which has lasted over a decade and a half now.
I'm about to reread this book, and I guess I'll do this by chapter or something, maybe by band, I don't know. I'll probably talk about bands that I find in the book that I discovered at the time, what they meant to me at the time, what they mean to me now, **** like that. Maybe review the book or some **** as I go along. We'll see. Basically this is going to be me rediscovering my earliest days as a headbanger, and hopefully dragging you along with me...
I guess as an intro to this series, I was just reading the introduction, and I could swear it had mentioned Celtic Frost and Saxon, as they were the first two bands I ever looked up from the book, but apparently I was mistaken as to where I found them. I think they were on the inside cover with a pictures of a bunch of concert tickets and other physical paraphernalia from metal history. They must have been cause I know they were the first I checked out.
I've come to like Celtic Frost a lot more over the years, but at the time, as a plebe who was still only a year or less from being a god damn Limp Bizkit fan, I wasn't too enthused. I downloaded
To Mega Therion (in retrospect probably not the best introduction) and was turned off by the production, vocals, and primitive extreme metal sound (though not due to it being too much for me to take), and so I switched to Saxon's
Wheels of Steel. It was an excellent choice, as it immediately began my years-long love affair with that band and album. The fun, the riffs, the vocals, and pretty much everything else instantly grabbed me by the balls and didn't let go for months. I don't know how many times I listened to "Wheels of Steel" and "Motorcycle Man" at the time, but those songs were on repeat for way, way, way long. Way long.
So having got that out of the way, let us next proceed to
Sound of the Beast's introduction and first chapter... till next time.