Interesting contrast with what is to come, no? Anyway.
So the year was 1998, and the music video for Turn the Page and Whiskey in the Jar were going around MTV. Never mind that I was a hormone-addled teen who thought both were titillating visually, but the music, I was not very used to. Now, I was back then as I am now a bit of an outcast, always an acquaintance with the cool kids, but never friends with any. And they were all into it. Metallica was all they talked about. So I decided, what the hell, I'm gonna go buy my first damn casette tape. The internet being in its infancy (56k dial-up, people) I did the next best thing: I took a friend who claimed knowlege on the subject with me. He thought Kill 'em All (1983) would be too harsh for me to start, so he advised that I get the 1984 Ride the Lightning instead.
Like an idiot, I bought his arbitrary decision wholesale. We went to the movies after that, and I remember thinking as I twirled the tape in my hands, this is the first album I've actually bought... which was me being forgetful, as that was actually the Small Soldiers Soundtrack*.
So I got home, put it on.
That was the story of the rest of the week. I didn't get it. I didn't hear anything properly, it was just a mess of noise. I could hear someone yelling some shit, and I had the lyrics, but I understood nothing. Was this what was so goddamn good? This was nothing like the videos I saw on T.V. - not as fucking advertised! But I was determined. I was going to understand this. I was going to 'get it' and be 'with it'. It was just a research problem, nothing more - no different than figuring out why some dinasours developed certain parts or working out ways for Tom to get that goddamn Jerry at last.
And I sure as hell wasn't going to back down until I was sure I had gotten my pocket money's worth out of this damn thing.
Deciding that headphones might solve the problem, and it might help if I laid down with the booklet in hand and tried to read through the lyrics, I unwittingly created my album ritual (more on that later).
Everything started to fall into place. I stopped listening, I began hearing it. I began to hear the drums, the riffs, I began to get excited when a solo hit... the rumbling in the background was the bass, I was later to discover, and it was something fierce. Claws out, balls to the wall. Fight Fire with Fire taught my agression, For Whom the Bell Tolls taught me the slow burn*, Trapped Under Ice taught me white-knuckle-tight despair, Fade to Black taught me loss, Creeping Death taught me about epics. The album taught me how some albums flow extremely well, as it did; it taught me song structures, choruses, verses and bridges, but most of all, it soldified the notion that yes, I did ineed love this darkness.
Now this was the beginning of me developing an actual affinity for music, in this case heavy metal, and following through. Before long, I had amassed every album they had put out (except Kill 'em All*), had observed a band's evolution from something like this to something like ReLoad (1997.) Which was, even then, like watching a perfectly beautiful garden slowly wither away into a tangled up mess.
Unfortunately, Metallica albums, for me, didn't hold up well. I went through the entire discography recently, and I found that they didn't have all that much to offer me. Perhaps because I am older now and have listened to more (and more versatile) shit than just heavy metal over the years, or maybe because my life had been at a certain place then that it isn't in now, it just doesn't sound good anymore.
But in that two-year period between 1998 and 2000, my whole life was Metallica. I knew all the lyrics of all the songs, back-to-front. I carried the entire discography in a backpack, next to my Walkman and a shitload of spare batteries. I annoyed people when I started headbanging or playing air guitar everywhere.
In essence, this was it, for me. This was what I liked.
Then, 2000 happened.
*Footnote: 1- I remember that I found Rush's Tom Sawyer to be exceptionally boring.
2- Until sludge metal came along and I found out what 'slow' actually meant.
3- Oddly enough, I never found Kill 'em All, and nobody thought to remind me that it existed, so I forgot about it, and by the time the internet had managed to remind me that there was an album that was supposed to have doubled as the origin of Megadeth also, it was too late and I didn't care.
Like an idiot, I bought his arbitrary decision wholesale. We went to the movies after that, and I remember thinking as I twirled the tape in my hands, this is the first album I've actually bought... which was me being forgetful, as that was actually the Small Soldiers Soundtrack*.
So I got home, put it on.
That was the story of the rest of the week. I didn't get it. I didn't hear anything properly, it was just a mess of noise. I could hear someone yelling some shit, and I had the lyrics, but I understood nothing. Was this what was so goddamn good? This was nothing like the videos I saw on T.V. - not as fucking advertised! But I was determined. I was going to understand this. I was going to 'get it' and be 'with it'. It was just a research problem, nothing more - no different than figuring out why some dinasours developed certain parts or working out ways for Tom to get that goddamn Jerry at last.
And I sure as hell wasn't going to back down until I was sure I had gotten my pocket money's worth out of this damn thing.
Deciding that headphones might solve the problem, and it might help if I laid down with the booklet in hand and tried to read through the lyrics, I unwittingly created my album ritual (more on that later).
Everything started to fall into place. I stopped listening, I began hearing it. I began to hear the drums, the riffs, I began to get excited when a solo hit... the rumbling in the background was the bass, I was later to discover, and it was something fierce. Claws out, balls to the wall. Fight Fire with Fire taught my agression, For Whom the Bell Tolls taught me the slow burn*, Trapped Under Ice taught me white-knuckle-tight despair, Fade to Black taught me loss, Creeping Death taught me about epics. The album taught me how some albums flow extremely well, as it did; it taught me song structures, choruses, verses and bridges, but most of all, it soldified the notion that yes, I did ineed love this darkness.
Now this was the beginning of me developing an actual affinity for music, in this case heavy metal, and following through. Before long, I had amassed every album they had put out (except Kill 'em All*), had observed a band's evolution from something like this to something like ReLoad (1997.) Which was, even then, like watching a perfectly beautiful garden slowly wither away into a tangled up mess.
Unfortunately, Metallica albums, for me, didn't hold up well. I went through the entire discography recently, and I found that they didn't have all that much to offer me. Perhaps because I am older now and have listened to more (and more versatile) shit than just heavy metal over the years, or maybe because my life had been at a certain place then that it isn't in now, it just doesn't sound good anymore.
But in that two-year period between 1998 and 2000, my whole life was Metallica. I knew all the lyrics of all the songs, back-to-front. I carried the entire discography in a backpack, next to my Walkman and a shitload of spare batteries. I annoyed people when I started headbanging or playing air guitar everywhere.
In essence, this was it, for me. This was what I liked.
Then, 2000 happened.
*Footnote: 1- I remember that I found Rush's Tom Sawyer to be exceptionally boring.
2- Until sludge metal came along and I found out what 'slow' actually meant.
3- Oddly enough, I never found Kill 'em All, and nobody thought to remind me that it existed, so I forgot about it, and by the time the internet had managed to remind me that there was an album that was supposed to have doubled as the origin of Megadeth also, it was too late and I didn't care.
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