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| Metal & Rock Magazines in the 90s, Visions was pretty cool back then ... |
A bit of story time to get my blog going again, I wanted to write a bit about how I got into music, especially heavy music. When I was born in East Germany in 1980, I had no real connection to heavy music for a long time. I remember being pretty scared of punks as a child. The place where I grew up, Eisleben in the middle of nowhere in central Germany, was notorious in the punk scene at the time, as I would only find out much later. However, there was a very profound experience in the form of one of the first graffiti I noticed as a child. On a garage wall there were various metal band logos, including Helloween (I loved their logo in particular), Metallica, AC/DC and others. This impressed me so much that, without knowing a single note of the music, I scribbled these logos in one of my earliest school notebooks. It must have been in the second or third grade, much to my father's displeasure at the time.
Shortly after the German reunion we were finally able to go to the shops in West Germany, and again mainly just the covers of the metal albums piqued my interest, because my interests laid elsewhere for a long time. Then followed a long period of enthusiasm for US sports, before I really delved deeper into music! However, I got my first metal tape from a friend, UDO "Time Bomb", it must have been around 1991 or '92. I also had tapes of very early Techno ("James Brown is dead"), T-REX and my childhood fave David Hasselhof (Knight Rider was still very present haha). I also started learning to play classical guitar in 1991, but rather involuntarily. In my dreams I wanted to be a professional athlete, I know, it sounds a bit ridiculous, especially since we didn't have a Baseball or American Football team or anything like that, and instead I taught all my friends these sports. I guess I was always different, an oddball as even my grandmother always called me.
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| Eisleben & the infamous GDR-Plattenbau, where I spent most of my childhood. |
Then came this "terrible adolescence", oh dear, for me that involved a big move out of the city into the middle of the Harz, wilderness so to speak, into a village with just about 10 houses. Completely cut off from my former friends and with the usual confusion of youth, I started to become more interested in music. After a short period of discovery, I quickly ended up with hard music, and at the time it was almost the hardest music you could find (Thrash and Death Metal for a couple years). The first CD I bought myself was Sepultura "Roots", which I had listened to in a Kartstadt department store. Other choices included AC/DC's "Ballbreaker" and an album by Crematory, and I was also still somewhat interested in hip hop. In fact, it was a kind of internal contradiction for a few years. I started skating (stunt inline and skateboarding), and graffiti was also a relatively important topic until 1999.
Back then, there was noise coming from my teenage room from morning to night. Today, I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for all the other family members - terrible, right? My early attempts at playing the electric guitar were anything but pleasant. I was particularly fond of Metallica's "Black Album", with "The Unforgiven" being probably that one reason why I picked up the guitar again. Discovering music was probably the best thing for me to find distraction from my otherwise unclear feelings. I hardly had any friends, spoke to almost no one, and girls were still far away on another planet, even though there was always a kind of unhappy crush back then. It was a bit of a terrible time, but I can look back with a smile today. You were still completely in your own world back then, without the internet and all that.
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| Been there, did that ... Harz, 1998 |
At some point, probably because of the constant noise, my parents gave me a second room in the basement of our house, where I set up two man-sized amplifier boxes from the old GDR brand Vermona. I also had an old record player there with only one LP Whitesnake's 1987 album, and I also stored my graffiti stuff in a hidden place. It wasn't unusual for me to arrive down there during weekends at night with dirty hands and cleaning everything with gasoline, oh what a strange memory that is today, almost 30 years later... Unfortunately, I destroyed most of my graffiti memories, sketches, photos, etc. in a fit of paranoia. Well, you never knew!
In the summer of 1999 I joined my first band, Thoughts Of A Mortal in Blankenburg, through an ad in Rock Hard magazine. At the time I had no idea what Gothic Metal was. I was actually already on the "stoner trip" but for lack of alternatives I tried out with these guys first. I had to play a little something to introduce myself, I think I chose Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" and "Possessed To Skate" by Suicidal Tendencies. The singer's girlfriend (in a Cathedral shirt) thought it was pretty cool! And this was actually the first time that I came in contact with other metalheads, at almost 19. Before that I was pretty much of a loner. At my school I was the only guy with long hair and these weird clothes ;) but I was just so incredibly shy and introverted.
In 1999 I also saw my first concerts, starting with a whole Metal Festival (Benne Open Air in Ballenstedt), and then the original Black Sabbath in Leipzig, which was rather disappointing. And I also saw Roadsaw and Nebula in Dresden which were amazing, and made me move there later. Well, it was just a completely different time... In general you were still dependent on the opinions of others, or what was available. You read magazines and studied the CD samplers that came with them, or drove to the nearest record store (Media Markt) every few weeks to listen to a few CD albums, if possible. There were a few mail orders, and I was already interested in "obscure 70s bands" back then, but I found it difficult to choose anything from black and white copied Excel lists (no pictures etc.), because they all "sounded somehow like Black Sabbath"?
But soon there was stonerrock.com and the first downloads, and perhaps that's material for another story.
