It started with Metallica. Well, for me anyway. It was '83 or '84 and I was 10 or 11 years old. A friend of mine had an older brother who had record with a weird-looking black sleeve with a bloody hammer on the front. He took the record out of the sleeve like a man possessed and slapped it on the turntable with the immortal words I've used so many times since, "check THIS shit out!" From the opening riff of "Hit The Lights," I was hooked. It's not an understatement to say that my life hasn't been the same since that day.

At the time, I had already started to get into some metal, but it wasn't the same. I started young, with an unusual obsession with The Police. I had heard some of their songs on the radio and loved that shit. I had all their tapes and/or records and jammed them all the time. I briefly touched on this previously, in Anatomy of A Music Geek. Anyway, at the time, he'd turned me on to some cool heavy metal bands like Sabbath, Ozzy, Deep Purple, Creedence, Kiss and some others but nothing and I mean NOTHING could prepare me for the sounds coming out of the speaker THAT day. It was one of those "you just HAD to be THERE, at THAT time" moments. That fade-in riff and James Hetfield snarling out the immortal lines, "No life 'till leather, we're gonna kick some ass tonight. We've got the metal madness, When our fans start screaming! It's right well alright. When we start to rock, We never want to stop again!" I never DID want to stop. It was like he was injecting the metal madness directly into my brain, where it's grown and festered ever since.

Later, I would preach Kill 'Em All as the single most defining record ever released and in some ways, it is. It changed the face of music in the '80's. The version I heard (the original, Metal Blade version) was picked up by Electra and re-released a VERY short time after it's initial pressing on MB. The mere fact that a major label picked up a thrash metal band resculpted the landscape of heavy music in the '80's.

I quickly learned about Metallica's history and the firing of Dave Mustaine. My friend's brother had gotten ahold of a taped copy of Burnt Offerings, a bootleg of Megadeth's second show ever (side-note: I fairly recently aquired a CD copy of this boot, which sounds a hellovalot better than that tape did). It took a while to get Killing Is My Business... But Business Is Good! because it wasn't released on time and such, but it was worth the wait. The absolute intensity of that record made up for the horrible, horrible production. Although Mustaine DID clean it up quite a bit and re-release it a couple of years ago and it sounds fantastic, other than the bleeping of "These Boots" which comes close to killing the impact of the record. From the piano-intro of "Last Rites/Loved To Death" to the closing of "Mechanix" (which as we all know is the same music with different lyrics as Metallica's "Four Horsemen," right?), it is pound-for-pound, minute-by-minute the most intense heavy metal record. Ever.