Question Of The Week: Show Love, Share Metal!
For music people, one of the most joyous, fun things is to hook a friend on a killer band. It’s gratifying too, like locking together puzzle pieces or dipping chocolate into peanut butter. Or pizza into potato chips. Whatever. Anyway, we all know the delight of matching dude to jam, the momentary mastery of ear-chemistry, the perpetuation of metal’s unstoppable pandemic. Plus it makes your dudes so happy and gives you a lifetime partner in jamming! So let’s trade tips and reminiscences in today’s gooey, lovey, sharing-is-caring MetalSucks Question Of The Week! Yaay!
Inspired by being an awesome metal dude who lives to give, we asked our staff the following:
What’s your fondest experience of getting a friend into a band?
Fondness of ours and yours below! Have an awesome wknd :)
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GRIM KIM
When we were in high school, my best friend Kelly was obsessed with folk punk. Sweet, scratchy acoustic tunes from bands like Johnny Hobo And The Freight Trains, Ghost Mice, Michael Jordan Touchdown Pass, and Mischief Brew dominated the airwaves whenever we hung out, and eventually, despite my unshakable sixteen year old opinion that “everything is shit but Guttural Secrete, Crucial Unit, and Kult Ov Azazel,” it grew on me. Emotional, simple songs by Eric Petersen or Pat the Bunny about holding hands and whiskey offered a perfect soundtrack for our various adventures, and I still love the stuff. Blame nostalgia, maybe, or sentimentality, but I was secretly thrilled to find this:
Free Pizza For Life!
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EMPEROR RHOMBUS
My buddy Zach and I are at summer camp. We’re CITs — Counselors In Training — so we’re working the mail room, sorting packages and shit. Zach is a hardcore ska fan; he keeps telling me that metal is uninteresting and that I need to get into Catch 22. Finally, I decide to play him something, hopefully to change his mind. So I throw “Fabulous Disaster” by Exodus into my Discman (this was just before mp3 players) and had him listen to it. Today, Zach drums in my stoner black metal band, loves 1349, and knows more than I ever will about metal as a genre. He went on to get a ton of his high school friends heavily into underground metal as well, including a transcendental black metaller who shall remain nameless. And to think all it took was some Bay Area thrash on a nice summer day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChdqwW9gras
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DAVID LEE ROTHMUND
“Omg no way dude I don’t like metal.” That’s the kind of shit I have to hear sometimes. To that I say: “Mastodon, motherfucker.” Cause like, how on earth can you not like Mastodon? Right away I want to recommend Remission and Leviathan, but that shit has too high an ABV for newcomers. So instead I point them to Crack The Skye and The Hunter. But here’s the kicker: These greenhorns get hooked on the newer, more digestible Mastodon. Then their curiosity leads them back to two of the best metal albums ever made. Sneaky like that, ha! Plus, Mastodon knows how to make us all lol (see below).
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LEYLA FORD
I got my husband into Thin Lizzy. First, I made him watch the movie Detroit Rock City. Then I made him listen to all the great music in it (which, funnily enough, includes no KISS songs). He loved “Jailbreak” and had actually made it to college without ever listening to it. Or any other Thin Lizzy songs (not counting Metallica’s cover of “Whiskey in the Jar”). Now we both own most of the catalogue on CD and half on vinyl. Frontman Phil Lynott is one of our household gods.
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ANSO DF
Oh dude my stubborn buds were all into Metallica and Sepultura, but all macho-ly against metal bands with operatic singers. But I knew change was on the wind in 1996 when a skate video featured “Hallowed Be Thy Name” by Iron Maiden — cuz those suggestible phonies always grew to love even the most random jamz (Cadillac Tramps, Celebrity Skin, McRad) from any video’s best segments. I let their interest kinda percolate, then blam! on a road trip I blitzed them with my all-killer/no-filler Maiden jamtape. Success! And then the dominos fell: Anthrax, Queensryche, Black Sabbath, and even Rush. Two decades later, one lifebro thanked me tearily at our nearby Maiden England tour stop; the moment is forever sealed in my bank of fond memories!
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DAVE MUSTEIN
I’ve gotten a friend of mine who primarily listens to EDM into metal — via brutal death of all things. Despite refusing all flavors of extreme and less extreme metal, he was won over by the parallels between his synthetic wobbles and the ridiculously overwrought bass drop of Vomit The Soul‘s “Self Perception Veil.”
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AXL ROSENBERG
This one time, I brought a woman back to my pad and played her some Prostitute Disfigurement, and she got so turned on that she ripped my pants off and gave me a blowie right there n’ then, without any encouragement from me. [sigh] I will never forget my time spent hanging out with Kip Winger.
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