THIS Band/Album Changed My Life

Often you hear someone talking about a specific band or album and they proclaim that it “Changed Their Life”. Sometimes it’s a simple exaggeration that they used to express how much they really like it/them and sometimes it really actually changed their life.

Sometimes it’s an album that made them go sober, helped them exorcize some inner demons or simply helped them through a tough time in their life. Sometimes we find something in music that we can relate to wether it be the lyrics in a song that are inspirational or just a certain riff or melody that just makes us feel good inside.

I can’t sit here and say that a certain album changed my life in a way that it made me a happier or better person or got me through tough times because my life has always been fairly easy. Although my family didn’t have the nicest house or car we always still had a warm roof over our heads, hot food on the table and clothes on our backs…even if they were terrible hand-me-downs. My parents were stern, but fair and I was probably an ungrateful child.

The first album that I think I listened to that started to veer me off of the road of classic rock on to metal was Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. Yes, that is also a classic rock album, but I started to listen to more Zeppelin after hearing that album. Things progressed in to a heavy direction and next thing you know I was spending any money I had in my mid teens on Iron Maiden, Pantera, Megadeth and Metallica, just to name a few.

My brother wasn’t much of an influence on my musical tastes. He listened to a few hard rock bands like The Scorpions, Twisted Sister, Ratt and Whitesnake but he never really progressed much beyond Ozzy’s Bark At The Moon. I can’t really count him as an influence. He still leans towards the modern rock stuff and digs a few metal songs but generally won’t listen to any Metallica before …And Justice For All.

I think what metal music did for me was made me thicker skinned and even more open to other music. In my early years of high school there were very few people that liked and understood metal. Growing up in a small town school most of the kids were in to what was cool and popular at the time. When grunge was getting big I liked a few bands and a few songs, but I wasn’t walking around with dirty hair and a flannel shirt tied around my waist.

Most of my friends I went to school with and worked with like grunge and rock bands as well as hippy/stoner bands like Phish and The Grateful Dead. I would often get teased with the usual mocking of metal with lyrics changed to “Kill your mother, Kill you father!” in the deep growling voice. I’d also get accused of being a “devil worshipper“, you know, the usual crap metal fans in high school get. It didn’t matter to me because I wasn’t going to change my mind about the way I loved metal just because a bunch of out of touch shit-heads made fun.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I went to a bigger high school with a much more diverse crowd. I had to get away from the small town fools and convincing my parents to let me go to the bigger school took some time. This was the high school I wanted to go to in the first place. I probably would have done much better in school if that was the case from the get-go. However there was rumors that this was one of those “bad” schools so I wasn’t allowed to go where I wanted to at the time. I had to stick it out in a school where middle class prep’s thought that their shit didn’t stink because they wore Bugle Boy jeans and Z-Cavaricci while people like myself had to settle for off-brand jeans and whatever else me or my parents could afford. These kids thought that their parents had money…what they had was debt!

In the bigger school there was more people like me and even though there were still social seculars, there wasn’t as much idiocy as there was in the smaller high school. There were jocks that wore raggedy Master Of Puppet T-shirts and even a pretty girl who’s locker was next to mine that was nice enough to smile and say hi everyday, even though I wasn’t the best looking kid and probably smelled of cigarettes every morning. Most others wouldn’t give you the time of day.

I was friends with foster kids that would get bounced around from home to home because they had much worse problems than other kids picking on them. I even became best friends with a dude that was the boyfriend of a girl I hung out with in the other school. He always thought I was trying to make a move on her when I went to the other school, but that wasn’t the case. We both had a love for metal and we fed each other with new metal every chance we would get. He didn’t have many friends and neither did I. We wanted to be in a metal band but neither of us could play or sing for shit at the time so after high school we both moved on with our lives. He started a family (Not entirely on purpose) and I went off to the Marines…but the metal was still there and we would introduce each other to new stuff whenever we would get together to drink some beers and make an attempt to play guitar again. It always will be. It’s a healthy addiction…mostly.

Ok, I’ve gone way off course here, but my point is that metal and some music in general can kind of steer your life in the direction it was meant to go. I imagine if it wasn’t Zeppelin that got me in to heavy bands then it would have been another band. I have always been a kind of social outsider as most metal fans are. I always wanted to be part of some crowd but never the “In” crowd because there was just something so fake about them. Most of them didn’t make much of themselves after high school. I guess you can make it or fake it, but you can only fake it for so long. I was always ok with being in the smaller crowd with the misfits and misunderstood. We always new where we stood and if we were to fall, it wasn’t very far down if you know what I mean.

Be true to yourself and the people around you, no matter what type of music you listen to and things will work out for you in the end. If things haven’t worked out then chances are it’s not the end. Metal music has been a part of my life that I would never be the same without. As Napalm Death says “Silence Is Deafening.”.

So now that I’ve told you my pathetically mediocre life story, what band or album “Changed Your Life”?

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