Okay, confess. What's your metal story? I know you have one, don't be shy or embarassed about it...

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

Answers

ooh. me first. my indie-rock-snob friends love to laugh at me for this (even though one of the biggest indie-rock-snobs i know used to be a huge guns n roses fan. heh.) i was a hair metal groupie wannabe. (on the next oprah...) yup. i even admit it. i met warrant and poison, by god. and a million other little hair bands that you've never heard of. bless alex chance's soul for making me listen to jane's addiction and jello biafra's spoken word. if it weren't for his intervention... i can't even imagine the horrors. he and jimmy herring are the people who saved my indie rock soul from eternal damnation. not that i haven't had the occasional relapse. oh the hair band tales i could tell. :)

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

I surfed into this site and couldn't resist: I play in a melodic indie rock band now in Chicago, but a few years ago the band played at this DIY space at a punk show in Auburn, a small Central New York town. Anyway, inexplicably, there were the customary punk and indie kids, but also a group of about 10 35-40 year olds, drunk + stoned off their asses, right out there in the middle of the indie kids. Wierd beard. One guy in particular had a frilly leather jacket, a perfect Tony Iommi mustache, and of course, the "Metal Up Your Ass" shirt. Anyway these guys were getting rowdy and annoying, so at one point in the show I asked that guy if it was tough to meet girls looking like that. He looked puzzled, like he was going to hit me or something, until he yelled, "I get TONS of pussy!" I think I laughed straight through the set, and into the next week.

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

I own not one, but two Megadeath albums. I think that says it all.

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

I saw Guns N Roses live in New Haven, CT, 2/93. A friend from college scored free tickets, so I went. Sue me. The smoke was so thick that it obscured the 10 foot high "no smoking" signs on the other side of the arena.

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

I was never much into it the first time around. I was a skater and not much into the mainstream stuff. You could say now I a born again hair band fan. Most of the bands sucked and still do, but there were a few that are actually pretty good bands. My favorites are Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses, and Poison. Some day my kids will be annoyed when I listen to these "oldies" on the old FM radio in my car.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2000

Does Ministry count? If so, I've got three of their albums, plus a shitload of the side project albums. If Prong also counts, I have a few of those, plus White Zombie.

I was a little behind on hair metal, though.

Chris

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2000

I was a total folk-rock snob in high school, surrounded by Jimmy Buffet and Steve Miller Band fans. But then ...And Justice For All came out, and we all cheered for exiting light & entering night. At a pep rally, an otherwise very quiet & studious boy who'd transferred from the local Catholic prep school got up and wailed on the electric guitar, riling up the assembled classes with his cover of "Enter Sandman." No lie -- in that gym, my obsessively preppy high school got the jump on the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video by about two years.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2000

first of all -- it's megadeth. no a.

well actually i think that is all i need to say at the moment. although i saw l.a. guns last month, and i thought they kicked ass. really.

even if they did come out to a kid rock son

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2000

motley crue, after they kicked out Vince and added that one fellow who looked like a member of skynard came to the town I was living in (fargo, nodak) and did an "autograph signing" at the metal/head shop, 'Mothers Records.' anyway, we thought it would be rather humorous to get the Crue autographs, I'm not sure why, I was 18 at the time and did many idiotic endevaors, though this was the first (and only)relating to heavy metal. The line stretched for four blocks! hundreds of middle westerners waiting with a sharpie and notebook to meet Tommy, neal, Nikki and that other guy! My friends and I wait for 2 hours (on a sunday afternoon, we had nothing better to do) and when we finally "meet the crue" only one friend had an item for them to sign: a copy of Theater of Pain picked up at a flea market en route to the autography party, and she yells at the new singer, "You can't sign it! You're not a true blue member of the Crue" (or something to that effect, this being seven years ago...) and he just laughed and started drinking beer. Tommy asked me personally if I had any 'zines' as produced a copy of a local fanzine for him to ink, I obliged and gave him Absolutely Zippo or some other east bay zine I surely must of thought was the "shit" being a freshman who didn't like nirvana like all the other kids.. tee-hee. We kept telling the crue that "they rock!" and how we lost our virginity (collectively, in a strange animalistic way) to the "Too Fast for Love" album. One of the members opined, "That must have been some hard ass love making!" and then I asked if they would play "Pour some sugar on me" and Nikki says, "Dude, that's not us..." really angst ridden and pissed off like, so I then request, "Paradise by the dashbaord lights" and he was really angry, and the securituy guards were asking us to "move along" and thats when my attractive friend winks and says, "Will you sign my breast?" they giggled, and I think offered her "back stage passses."

-- Anonymous, August 06, 2000

I am such a closet rockstar! I'm particular to the grunge/metal/alt rock types especially. Many times I've put in a Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots CD as loud as my speakers can handle it and sung along with the whole thing. I once even drummed along (in my own special, i.e. wildly inaccurate, way) to the entire Operation: Mindcrime album.

I love to go out for karaoke and have a drink or five and snarl out a couple of tunes. It's great because everybody else is usually singing these lovely ballads and showtunes, and then I go up there with a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other, all leather jacketed up to sing 'Plush' (my standard) or 'Come Together' (my standard backup).

I really should learn some new songs. But I guess the point of that whole ramble was ummm, yeh .. I wanna be a rockstar. Or something :)

-- Anonymous, February 14, 2001

In my first (and only) semester at Northern Illinois University, I lived in a dorm that housed four times the population of my entire high school. Three of the two thousand (or so) students in my dormitory were identical triplets - and they were heavy metal triplets. Three girls; all tall, slim, and identically dressed in uncomfortable-looking bluejeans and black band t-shirts, with long stringy brown hair. They all shared a room, they always went to meals together... it didn't seem entirely healthy somehow.

One of them had a boyfriend. Wiry guy, also metal, dressed like they did, shorter hair. You'd see her and him together in the dorm commons; they'd be making out on a couch, and the other two sisters would always be somewhere else in the room. I was in the room once when this happened - I wasn't watching, but it was sort of hard to ignore - and the woman working at the information desk shouted out to the boy:

"Hey! How do you know which one you're kissing?"

It was a tacky question, but a fair one, I think.

-- Anonymous, April 18, 2001

It seems that everytime a member of the Indie Rock dominated press adresses Metal or any other genre of music that truly deserves to carry the mantle of "Rock" in it's title, the tone is flippant, kitchty and generally dismissive. As if the current glut of waifish hipsters plugging in in their every-day clothes and subjecting the audience to thier whiny middleclass observations is an artisticly worthier experience, or for that matter, worth $6-7.00. Alas, these are the people who dictate taste now, the people resonsible for Blink 182 and the like, and they've waged a campaign of revisionism against Metal that untill recently was successfull in getting people to forget that for a twenty year span, Metal was the dominant musical genre in both Pop and Underground, and, in fact, has never died. It reached this level of success without the help of major labels. Metal was the first indie rock. And yet we feel the need to apologise when "Too Fast For Love" is found amongst our other records; "Um, yea. I just got that for laughs". And yet, bands that want to play Metal/HardRock have to hide behind MC5 covers or the recently acceptable, AC/DC, lest booking agents from "Rock" clubs tell them to try some "Flashback 80's" type venue instead. Whenever a Rock journalist writes about bands like Electric Wizard or Behold! The Living Corpse, they always say something to the effect of "Brings back all the good parts of heavy music and leaves the bad behind". They have no respect for the genuine article. Somehow, Punk can be recycled and regurgitated over and over again without such back-handed comments, presumably because Punk music is down. That's crap. Punk music is what rich kids listen to when they want to go cultural slumming. METAL is the music of the working class and poor. This is the true reason why the indie rock establishment refuses to grant metal/hard rock it's due respect. They fear that if they squeek down from their Ivory Tower on their vintage Shwinns and simply say that Behold! The Living Corpse, for instance, is "An evening of pure ass-kicking Rock", they might show up at the show and have to share airspace with hessians and white trash.

-- Anonymous, May 31, 2001

justom os roght, you're all a bunch of posers!

-- Anonymous, July 23, 2001

Oh my, we've just been called "posers"! I feel like I'm back in high school!

-- Anonymous, July 25, 2001

you should feel that way. your posted topic is rather juvenile and i would expect only a pubescent twit to have a secret 'metal story'. give up and fuckin admit that metal is your king and that your little modest mouse is bullshit. myron

-- Anonymous, July 29, 2001

i've got four letters for you: RATT! call me crazy, but i think thiose fools sound like the sunset strip version of the dwarves.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 2001

sure they do. who the HELL ever said we were talking about RATT here? is that you have no knowledge of any metal bands that arent pop? if so, then i pity you. i am sure that anyone defending meatl up here doesnt consider RATT an example worth fightin for. now, NILE, BEHOLD! THE LIVING CORPSE, ZENI GEVA, THRONES, BURNING WITCH... thats what i am talking about here, and thats why its fun to call you all posers...

-- Anonymous, August 01, 2001