Sometimes we do dumb things, we all do. It’s part of the human condition to make mistakes. So it’s with only a small bit of embarrassment I share this story with you. Years ago, when I was a wee lad I attended a Sunday school where we were taught about God and Jesus and the miracles of walking on water and producing unusually large quantities of fish out of thin air. Powerful stuff, especially for children. The thing is, I think some pieces of the story were lost in translation. After all, the deserts of the Middle East are a long way from North America. We were learning about a different place, a different time. It was an alien culture with strange names.
So perhaps it’s understandable that, when asked to illustrate a scene from the Bible, a very young version of myself, drew a modern cityscape with apartment buildings, stores, paved roads, streetlights and a range of mountains in the background. When asked which Biblical scene I had rendered, I pointed at the lights and answered, “The Israel Lights.” Honestly, I thought the Israelites were lights in the country of Israel.
I share the above story with you to demonstrate that I lived a somewhat sheltered life in my early years. I was, without a doubt, a bit naive, a little cut off from the rest of the world. Which forms the backdrop for my next story.
In my late teens I attended a party with the usual amount of loud music, barley-legal drinking and regular carrying on. At one point I recall sitting in the host’s living room, nursing a beer and chatting away about work or girls or classes or girls or cars or girls… One of those things which frequented my adolescent mind. And, suddenly my brain took note of the CD player changing discs and a new sound filling the room. The guitar work is casual, but powerful, the voice mournful and strong. It instantly resonated in my bones and I turned to the guy next to the stereo and asked, “Who is this?” He looked back at me like I had two heads and had announced to the room I was from deep space and replied, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe I’d asked, “Metallica.”
Thus began my journey into the world of metal. It was late getting started, but rarely does your first crush turn into your life long love. And that’s how I got started down the path which brought me here, ear deep in the most passionate music community in the world.
Do you remember the first time you heard metal music? Do you remember what first got you interested in the genre? What first got you hooked? Write it out and send it to surdus@welovemetal.com. Our favourite submissions will get published so you can give the whole world your story.
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Surdus
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Back in the days when MTV actually occasionally featured music, I listened to what my (much revered) older brothers listened to. Rap.
One morning, whilst preparing for school, I witnessed a rather dark and vague (to my young mind, anyway) video, set to music that reminded me of my father’s classic rock, only featuring a healthier dose of resentment.
That song was Metallica’s “Unforgiven II”. I remember taping it on VHS because MTV didn’t play it nearly enough for my newly developing tastes. A few short weeks later I was slapped in the head by the video for “Fuel”. That was it. Game over, rap.
Arguably not even metal, by some purists’ standards, but all the same, those were my first tastes, and things spun (gloriously) out of control from there.