In addition to my earlier post about Metallica, who really were responsible for me starting to get more serious about guitar, I wanted to add a few more "weird" early influences, maybe just for giggles, who knows ... but sometimes people ask me and then I always think of other things, whereas lately I felt that I probably had to mention these as well.
So besides Metallica, there were four big other influences from these "dark times" of the mid-1990s. Starting with number one, BAD RELIGION, and no one would have guessed this, but for a moment in time I "religiously" played along to some of their songs. The most frequently played one was their "All Ages"-sampler, which I got shortly after "The Grey Race", their actual album at that time. 1996 was a somewhat *magical year* for me.
The next quite big influence would be THE OFFSPRING and their album "Smash" (from 1994, but still very present a few years later), which really taught me how to play power chords. I had this weird Metallica songbook before where it seemed like they just transcribed the song melodies instead of the riffs? It was kind of a weird book that didn't do anything for me. I preferred to learn stuff by listening to my favorites at the time and playing along. Luckily this was preceded by five or six years of classical guitar school.
Number three of the strange influences would be BIOHAZARD, especially their live album "No Holds Barred" from 1997. At that time I was already into classic rock (especially Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin), but mainly still into metal and heavy stuff. Biohazard had quite a lot of groove tracks, which soon led me to Stonerrock. However, I played this live album almost every day for quite a while. I wonder how my parents and siblings didn't go crazy with my loud habits back then. Some of it must have sounded awful. I really wasn't very good at a lot of things in the beginning.
Another important one of those "weird influences" was SEPULTURA, not so much because of my guitar style, but because they were the one band that really got me into metal and hardrock in the first place. Their 1996 album "Roots" was actually the first longplayer I bought with my own money, on a school trip to Braunschweig in that very year, ... even though the first metal album I had was UDO "Timebomb", sometime in the early 90s, when I was still completely clueless and more interested in US-sports or video games.
My favorite Sepultura-albums though are, and will forever be, "Beneath The Remains" and "Chaos AD". I really loved that band back then, and like I said, they were responsible for getting me interested in a lot of heavy stuff like early Machine Head, Obituary, Sodom, etc. I really was a child of the 90s, but strangely enough I also got into Hip Hop later on, which sometimes caused quite a contradiction in me. People have forgotten how narrow-minded the 90s were sometimes, when you had to decide what you wanted to be, Metalhead or Hip Hopper, and Techno wasn't even considered music by some ;)
