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Pre-Internet Metal Memories


Requiem

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  • 3 months later...
On 6/1/2017 at 4:35 AM, Requiem said:

In 1997 I used to work in a small supermarket with my best friend and we would make these mix tapes for our boss. He was a 'regular' middle aged guy at the time yet for some reason he really loved the gothic metal and doom stuff we would put on these tapes for him, along with Korn and Deftones. We would listen to these tapes on a tape deck in the supermarket office, which was always so crazily messy. If you were asked to work in the store room it was great because you didn't have to serve any customers and you could just listen to music and talk while you moved boxes around and checked off stock. 

The guy would start drinking cans of beer at around 4pm in the office, go out and serve customers, come back in and drink more beer. He used to buy my friend and I alcohol when we were under age and leave it in the empty block next door and we would come back that evening and collect it. Man, it was amazing.

On the last day of high school my friend and I hung out in our boss's van while he was in the shop working, drinking Wild Turkey and Cola bottles, listening to Paradise Lost on that tape deck before heading back to school for recess and lunch. One of the greatest days of my life. 

Are you sure it was the music he liked? Providing alcohol for minors, rendezvous in vans... Count yourself lucky your boss wasn't Kevin Spacey! 

Oh, I'm only kidding. I'm sure it was fun.  

 

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On 04/11/2017 at 8:01 PM, Vampyrique said:

Are you sure it was the music he liked? Providing alcohol for minors, rendezvous in vans... Count yourself lucky your boss wasn't Kevin Spacey! 

Oh, I'm only kidding. I'm sure it was fun.  

 

Our boss definitely had a crush on my friend and he made it clear to him a few times when he was drunk. We just thought it was funny at the time. He was a great guy though. I mean, he was weird, but who wouldn’t be working 6 long days a week in a small local supermarket in a country town. He really wanted to be us - he would tell us this all the time. We had not a care in the world.

Anyway, the pre-internet aspect of it all was regarding how much fun we could have with an old tape deck and some mix tapes. 

Other things I remember of that tipsy final ‘day’ of school include a girl coming up to me and for no real reason spitting a massive mouthful of water in my face and eyes. Also afterwards this other girl was super drunk and was walking around at the after party looking for me, calling my name, just wasted with her friends looking after her, and I did one of those ‘kiss someone else to hide’ deals like in the movies and made out with this amazingly hot girl a year below me. For some reason I was also asked to give this brief speech in front of the whole school at the end of the day, which I did tipsy and covered in water mixed with tomato sauce (and that first girl’s saliva). 

The year was 1997 and these are true stories. 

Thanks for getting me all nostalgic Vampers! ?

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  • 1 month later...

got into metal in the late 70's and early 80's....raiding friends older brothers music collections and mix tapes were the way we discovered new music. College radio stations, and some local stations were good

also got into underground punk/hardcore, so there was 'zines....

but seeing live shows at  all ages clubs, VFW's, church basements and punk houses were my biggest exposure...people would hand out flyers about other shows; record distro's would have 7" records and 'zines....so organic....it was true Social Media....

early MtV exposed me to some cool stuff as well. Headbangers Ball was awesome in it's first 3-4 years...before the clog of hairspray and grunge happened....

On 11/3/2017 at 11:08 AM, Ghouly said:

I remember if you wanted a t-shirt, a flag, a band patch, any kind of decent merch,  you had to get one of those crappy little black and white paper catalogs and order via mail and hope your shit arrived within 2 months. 

I LOVED those catalogs!! Got sooo many patches and pins form them...never even considered the scam possibilites...but I think back then, the notion to scam was not as prevalent 

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We used to change tapes with friends, this was probably the main way of finding new bands for a good few years to me. The quality of course degraded after copying the songs over and over, but so many bands that i have discovered this way.. and even genres! My first introduction to black metal came with traded tapes. Music was the way to make new friends back then. You talked to someone somewhere and you found that you like the same band, instant friendship. 

We had this amazing metal radio show in the 90´s, it was something i was eagerly waiting for every week with my tape recorder ready. You started recording every song, and if it was good you kept it, if not you rewind so you are ready for the next song. I actually discovered one of my all time favourites Paradise lost this way. Maybe a year ago i remembered a song i recorded from the show that i had not heard for over 20 years. Spent a lot of time finding it and eventually did. Amazing moment to hear something you loved as a kid, and hear it again after so many years. The song was "Fall of the leafe - Wings of my desire untamed". 

We had one music store in town that had a great selection of metal. I used to spend all of my money on cd´s. Many times you chose something because you liked the cover, other times it was because a friend had talked about it. Albums really mattered back then. You spent so much time with your purchase. Even if you didn´t like it at first, you gave it quite few tries and it had a far bigger chance of growing on you than these days. 

Sometimes i really miss those days.. the thrill of finding new music you loved was so much bigger.. 

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4 hours ago, xUpTheIronsx said:

got into metal in the late 70's and early 80's....raiding friends older brothers music collections and mix tapes were the way we discovered new music. College radio stations, and some local stations were good

also got into underground punk/hardcore, so there was 'zines....

but seeing live shows at  all ages clubs, VFW's, church basements and punk houses were my biggest exposure...people would hand out flyers about other shows; record distro's would have 7" records and 'zines....so organic....it was true Social Media....

early MtV exposed me to some cool stuff as well. Headbangers Ball was awesome in it's first 3-4 years...before the clog of hairspray and grunge happened....

I LOVED those catalogs!! Got sooo many patches and pins form them...never even considered the scam possibilites...but I think back then, the notion to scam was not as prevalent 

Great stories. I loved those black and white catalogues too but I can't remember ever having ordered anything from them except a Cathedral 'The Carnival Bizarre' t-shirt back in 1995. I loved that shirt and wore it everywhere. 

I was always fascinated reading through those catalogues and looking at all the different t-shirt designs for Metallica, Megadeth etc. It was amazing. 

12 minutes ago, ChainsawAkimbo said:

We used to change tapes with friends, this was probably the main way of finding new bands for a good few years to me. The quality of course degraded after copying the songs over and over, but so many bands that i have discovered this way.. and even genres! My first introduction to black metal came with traded tapes. Music was the way to make new friends back then. You talked to someone somewhere and you found that you like the same band, instant friendship. 

We had this amazing metal radio show in the 90´s, it was something i was eagerly waiting for every week with my tape recorder ready. You started recording every song, and if it was good you kept it, if not you rewind so you are ready for the next song. I actually discovered one of my all time favourites Paradise lost this way. Maybe a year ago i remembered a song i recorded from the show that i had not heard for over 20 years. Spent a lot of time finding it and eventually did. Amazing moment to hear something you loved as a kid, and hear it again after so many years. The song was "Fall of the leafe - Wings of my desire untamed". 

We had one music store in town that had a great selection of metal. I used to spend all of my money on cd´s. Many times you chose something because you liked the cover, other times it was because a friend had talked about it. Albums really mattered back then. You spent so much time with your purchase. Even if you didn´t like it at first, you gave it quite few tries and it had a far bigger chance of growing on you than these days. 

Sometimes i really miss those days.. the thrill of finding new music you loved was so much bigger.. 

Same here, especially listening to the radio with the tape recorder at the ready. I'm not sure I ever heard Paradise Lost for the first time that way, but I remember taping 'Like Gods of the Sun' and 'Grace Unhearing' by My Dying Bride from the radio in about 1996. Also stuff by Evereve and Theatre of Tragedy. When gothic metal was fairly popular the guy managing the playlists for the metal show just played so much gothic metal. It was amazing. 

Great days for sure. 

 

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3 hours ago, ChainsawAkimbo said:

We used to change tapes with friends, this was probably the main way of finding new bands for a good few years to me. The quality of course degraded after copying the songs over and over, but so many bands that i have discovered this way.. and even genres! My first introduction to black metal came with traded tapes. Music was the way to make new friends back then. You talked to someone somewhere and you found that you like the same band, instant friendship. 

We had this amazing metal radio show in the 90´s, it was something i was eagerly waiting for every week with my tape recorder ready. You started recording every song, and if it was good you kept it, if not you rewind so you are ready for the next song. I actually discovered one of my all time favourites Paradise lost this way. Maybe a year ago i remembered a song i recorded from the show that i had not heard for over 20 years. Spent a lot of time finding it and eventually did. Amazing moment to hear something you loved as a kid, and hear it again after so many years. The song was "Fall of the leafe - Wings of my desire untamed". 

We had one music store in town that had a great selection of metal. I used to spend all of my money on cd´s. Many times you chose something because you liked the cover, other times it was because a friend had talked about it. Albums really mattered back then. You spent so much time with your purchase. Even if you didn´t like it at first, you gave it quite few tries and it had a far bigger chance of growing on you than these days. 

Sometimes i really miss those days.. the thrill of finding new music you loved was so much bigger.. 

I bought so many albums for the artwork first...Grim Reaper; Venom, Diary OF A Madman by Ozzy, tons of punk and hardcore 7"s...we also had a great metal radio station...WAZU, but it was only on for a year. By then, hair metal was starting to blow up, and the local big stations were either playing pop crap, or hair metal, or straight up rock. As metal in general got more popular, the radio stations around here played it less and less...which was fine with me...let me have my niche genre that made me feel like I knew something no one else did...

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  • 11 months later...

Resurrecting old posts...Like most oldies, my experience was similar to those described above. I first became interested in metal when I saw Iron Maiden posters being sold in the local supermarket. Occasionally I would see an older guy wearing similar T-shirts in the street. The funny thing is that I never actually got to listen to Iron Maiden until discovering Europe, who had made it into the Top 50 with the final countdown. I eventually bought some Iron Maiden pirated tapes, played them to the ground, etc...Then an older metal fan gave me a compilation tape, which allowed me to discover more of the bands that were popular in the 80s. After that, there was tape trading at school, and exchanging the scant information some of us would manage to get through whichever magazines we could get our hands on. My first extreme metal purchase was Bolt Thrower's world of chaos. At first I didn't like it, especially since I thought there was something wrong with the record itself: the vocals sounded so low it seemed like the record was being played too slowly, while the music was so fast it sounded sped-up!

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  • 3 months later...

I must have been about 12 or 13, in 1978 or 79, when my cousin started playing me his record collection when my family. Isited his on a Saturday evening.

he introduced me to Sabbath, Zep, Purple, Floyd, Genesis and any others that I don’t recall now. I couldn’t afford to buy records then, or for almost the next ten years, so I started by taping his Zep and Sabbath.

Later I discovered Rainbow then AC/DC, Van Halen, Saxon, etc, but still had to tape record my friends albums. Eventually I even had to decide what had to be sacrificed and recorded over when something new came out that I wanted a copy of.

i never listened to radio (it winds me up that someone else is deciding what gets played, and I still hate listening to it), and all my music discoveries were word of mouth, until I started buying guitar magazines in the late 80’s.

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I've said before it was my cousin who introduced me to metal. It would have been 2003 or '04 and we were playing some video game when he recognised a song or something. Before I knew it we were in his room listening to Pantera, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and a host of other bands I don't really remember. He told me this was "metal" and from then I was hooked. I would save my pocket money for months just waiting for the chance to visit a cd store looking for a metal section then buying at random. Not everything I bought stuck but I did discover a great many cool bands. In 2011 I discovered this place and it's made finding new bands so much easier.

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  • 1 month later...

1973. My 10th birthday, and my grandmother bought me Paranoid, by Black Sabbath. I don't think I could conceive of anything more heavy and evil sounding than that at the time (in all fairness, I don't think anybody could). I had heard heavy music before -- one of my other favourites was Deep Purple's Black Night -- but that was my first heavy album. Mine. I was right happy.

There's been a few more albums passing through my hands since then.

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On 4/1/2019 at 3:58 AM, MaxFaust said:

1973. My 10th birthday, and my grandmother bought me Paranoid, by Black Sabbath. I don't think I could conceive of anything more heavy and evil sounding than that at the time (in all fairness, I don't think anybody could). I had heard heavy music before -- one of my other favourites was Deep Purple's Black Night -- but that was my first heavy album. Mine. I was right happy.

There's been a few more albums passing through my hands since then.

Must have been amazing being a teenager in the 70s and 80s. What else took place?

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  • 4 months later...

Well, I can't remember a time pre-internet, but yeah, the internet has made people instant-gratification seeking zombies, passions for topics are lessened as a result. If something is not available instantly it is more viable to just forget it than looking forward to get it eventually these days it seems. It unfortunate, but you can't change it.

 

However. Being younger I can assure you there are still young metal fans out there, going to record stores and buy random CDs that look cool just by the cover. Just less bands press CDs as full-digital is the way to go now. IDK, I prefer my analog media personally but I like collecting in general.

As for posters, I think the "normal" teenager does not and generally less people do. I have some big fabric posters on my walls and my friends usually have some also.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I have fond memories of getting 8 or 9 th generation cassette copies of Ride The Lightning when it was new , tape copies of Mercyful Fate  " Don't Break The Oath ",  a copy of Exodus " Bonded By Blood " and being turned onto Air Raid - RockForce " 69 in a 55 /  Anytime " on vinyl when my Aunt took me to see them at the Chabot College Battle of the Bands.

Honestly , I miss the old way,but the internet gives me so many more bands to discover. I'm loving it.

 

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I had a friends that was a year older than me at primary school, I would have been 9ish (1989)... he introduced me to Metallica, Slayer... Anthrax probably came next, I rented Among The Living from my local library... Rust In Peace (Megadeth) may have been the first album that I actually bought. By 1991 I was allowed to go and hunt for records in the city on my own, where I bought albums like Arise by Sepultura and Blessed Are The Sick by Morbid Angel based purely on the covers. Headbanger's Ball introduced me to quite a lot of metal, too, as did Raw Power (British show).

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Right!  I bought Slayer " Show No Mercy" based on the album art. My l8ve for that album was razzed about umercifully because my Metal friends would say " yhe singer sounds like he has his  dick in a toaster........here Iron Maiden and Judas are real bands."

They were all wesring Slatanic Wermacht shirts 6 months later.

So yeah, buying metal based on album art was a crap shoot ,but every npw and then you'd fond gems.

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When I was just getting into extreme metal, I met some random kid in the parking lot of a strip mall that was into that sort of thing. We chatted, and he told me about a bunch of cool bands. That was cool, but here's the weird part: he told me that there was a black metal band called Vlad Tepes that recorded one demo, and then all the members killed themselves. I have never about this anywhere else. I have found there are two metal bands using the name Vlad Tepes, and neither of them committed group suicide. Has anyone heard of this happening with any group? It seems unlikely that the kid made it up, but I think it is probably an urban myth. This was probably in '95 or '96, and I had no access to the internet; few people did at the time.

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19 minutes ago, Parker said:

When I was just getting into extreme metal, I met some random kid in the parking lot of a strip mall that was into that sort of thing. We chatted, and he told me about a bunch of cool bands. That was cool, but here's the weird part: he told me that there was a black metal band called Vlad Tepes that recorded one demo, and then all the members killed themselves. I have never about this anywhere else. I have found there are two metal bands using the name Vlad Tepes, and neither of them committed group suicide. Has anyone heard of this happening with any group? It seems unlikely that the kid made it up, but I think it is probably an urban myth. This was probably in '95 or '96, and I had no access to the internet; few people did at the time.

Must have been a really, really terrible demo... :D The only Vlad Tepes I'm familiar with was an LLN band. Those guys were intentionally secretive and there were a lot of rumors going around. It wouldn't surprise me if that was one of them.

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3 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Must have been a really, really terrible demo... :D The only Vlad Tepes I'm familiar with was an LLN band. Those guys were intentionally secretive and there were a lot of rumors going around. It wouldn't surprise me if that was one of them.

Agreed, definitely sounds like their kind of thing.

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1 hour ago, Parker said:

When I was just getting into extreme metal, I met some random kid in the parking lot of a strip mall that was into that sort of thing. We chatted, and he told me about a bunch of cool bands. That was cool, but here's the weird part: he told me that there was a black metal band called Vlad Tepes that recorded one demo, and then all the members killed themselves. I have never about this anywhere else. I have found there are two metal bands using the name Vlad Tepes, and neither of them committed group suicide. Has anyone heard of this happening with any group? It seems unlikely that the kid made it up, but I think it is probably an urban myth. This was probably in '95 or '96, and I had no access to the internet; few people did at the time.

LOL--- it may have been one of those things like my buddy in high school telling me there was something called African Ceremonial Death Weed.  Every dude I knew in a Metal Up Your Ass shirt was looking for it but.......... 

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6 hours ago, Deadbydawn said:

LOL--- it may have been one of those things like my buddy in high school telling me there was something called African Ceremonial Death Weed.  Every dude I knew in a Metal Up Your Ass shirt was looking for it but.......... 

LOL, was that supposed to be some kind of marijuana or WTF?

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On 10/7/2019 at 3:47 PM, Parker said:

LOL, was that supposed to be some kind of marijuana or WTF?

LMFAO,

yeah--- nobody ding me for going off topic.

So one of the guys who were I went to high school with kept talking about his older brother Derek getting batches of " African Ceremonial Death Weed"  Said cannabis from the dark continent was reserved only for Tribal Shamans/ Necromancers who would smoke this gamja that was so powerful and supernatural---- it would produce the same euphoric effects as today's weed, hallucigenic effects of psylocibin snd L.S.D.,and ,the m8nd numbing effects of opium.

OF COURSE THIS WAS THE SAME GUY WHO SAID THE DRUMMER FROM Y&Ts MOTHER WAS A CASHIER AT OUR LOCAL K-MART AND WOULD BLESS FANS WITH FREE SWAG.

I figured that pursuing either--' African Ceremonial Death Weed  or Leonard Haze's mom would only lead to misery and ruination of the immortal soul and refrained from eitber 

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  • 2 years later...
On 10/7/2019 at 3:09 PM, Parker said:

When I was just getting into extreme metal, I met some random kid in the parking lot of a strip mall that was into that sort of thing. We chatted, and he told me about a bunch of cool bands. That was cool, but here's the weird part: he told me that there was a black metal band called Vlad Tepes that recorded one demo, and then all the members killed themselves. I have never about this anywhere else. I have found there are two metal bands using the name Vlad Tepes, and neither of them committed group suicide. Has anyone heard of this happening with any group? It seems unlikely that the kid made it up, but I think it is probably an urban myth. This was probably in '95 or '96, and I had no access to the internet; few people did at the time.

Hi Parker. That's a good story. Did you ever find out if it was true.  My friend told me cliff Burton died at a metalica concert when his massive amp blew up. I was a bit sceptical tbh. This was made up obviously and I found out before too long. 

Re memories of before the internet. The only place I got music or to listen to new music was the largely the record shops as none of my friends liked metal. It was ok but nowadays is so easy with so much on internet and the choice is so much better. Somehow I think atmospheric blackened doom with alot of Gregorian chant in Greek would not be at hmv in the UK. Yes I do own this. 😁

 

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