The most important band to you, musically?

Quiet Riot. Specifically "Metal Health."
Being too young to buy my own music, and having survived through Disco in the 70's, I was happy when Rock 'N" Roll started to make a comeback on radio. From about 1978 to 1981 bands like the Stones, Peter Gabriel, Led Zepplin, Cheap Trick, Rush, and Kansas were dominating airplay. There were some pretty hard-hitting bands like Ozzy, Sabbath, AC/DC, and young bands like Van Halen and Def Leppard were getting some solid rotation in the mix as well.

Then around early 1981 New Wave struck, and it struck hard! Once Devo encouraged listeners to "Whip IT", and The Vapors started Turning Japanese the airwaves degenerated into a flood of keyboard driven electronica Punk crap. Men Without Hats, The Police, The Cars, Blondie, Thomas Dolby and a host of others made radio completely unbearable for 2 long, miserable years.

When "Metal Health" came out in 1983 it was like being released from Purgatory. It also marked the beginning of Hard Rock and Metal explosion of the 80's and early 90's, which is the best era in radio history, IMO.

And then Grunge struck hard, and radio has never recovered from that. At least I don't think so, but I haven't listed to commercial radio in over 15 years. Fortunately, by then I could buy my own music, so I don't care what happens to radio.
 
cslebn said:
For me I was influenced oddly by my parents. My dad was streaming REM, Yes, Rush, and King Crimson (ah yes); while my mom played broadway and motown. To this day I still love Les Mis, PTO, and Jekyll and Hyde. Basically the two started to combine so the complex elements of King Crimson merged with the symphonic nature of broadway and became metal.
Click to expand...

Nice to see another person who appreciates musicals here. :) I sang a song from Jekyll & Hyde one year for a vocal contest when I was in high school. I sang "Someone Like You." I think this was not long after I'd seen a touring cast come through my city. The actor who played Jekyll/Hyde had at one time been a college football player. The dude was huge, and did an amazing job.
 
I know this is a pretty typical answer for progressive metal fans, but without Dream Theater, I wouldn't be as obssessed with music as I am today.

I loved singing along to songs on the radio as a kid, but when I realized that there was more to music than what was on the radio (around the age of eleven), I fell in love with guitar heroes like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and George Lynch. Then at the end of 1992, my mother decided to go with an album reccommendation for my dad as a Christmas gift. The guy at our local music store suggested she buy "Images And Words" because she told him that he was a big fan of Fates Warning and Queensryche. My dad threw on the cassette, and he was floored!

My dad played the hell out of that tape, and I remember hearing it and enjoying it. However, it wasn't until I was 14 (1995) that I truly started listening to albums in their entirety. I was then that I started raiding my dad's tape collection and rediscovered "Images And Words." As I was listening to it, I thought, "Not only is there a guitarist in this band who rivals my instrumental guitar heroes, but there's an entire band of musicians who play their instruments just as well as he does!" As if that wasn't enough to keep me in musical bliss, there was a singer on that album that was unlike any singer I've ever heard before. The emotion, the range, and the tone of James LaBrie's voice hit me like a ton of bricks. From that point on, I knew two things:

1) I wanted to sing in a band
2) I wanted to sing in a progressive metal band just like James LaBrie

I was on a mission to find more bands along the lines of Dream Theater. Thanks to friends I've made through the years as well as the internet, I have found out about more bands than I could possibly imagine. To this day, Dream Theater remains my favorite band, though I continue to have plenty of "Wow!" moments when listening to other artists.


Stay metal. Never rust.
Albert
 
Late1970’s - Several groups got me through the dead radio period of Disco. A form of music I couldn’t stand due to its bland beat and simplicity. I detested the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

Queen (so quirky, epic and no musical style was off-limits. II through A Day Of The Races are classics)
Rainbow (I liked all the versions of the band but the Dio and Bonnet years were the best)
Heart (folk rock introduction with great female vocals and Roger Fisher’s riffing guitar)
Kansas (epic long songs with dynamics. Steve’s voice with Livgren’s song-writing)
Meatloaf (rock opera original. Campy but what guts!)
Styx (From Crystal Ball to Paradise Theater, a rock band with range and good hooks)
Alice Cooper (the shock artist with good song-writing chops and fun lyrics. From The Inside and Welcome To My Nightmare were and still are my favorites)
Jesus Christ Superstar (odd choice but Ian Gillian’s singing is the gold standard of JC to me. The songs were both campy and powerful songs).


1980’s - Disco was gone but was replaced with equally banal New Wave and Punk. Thank God for large record stores with massive stocks (all but gone today). I can remember spending hours in stores searching through the stacks of vinyl.

Black Sabbath (H&H and Mob Rules are two classics)
Ozzy (Blizzard and Diary with Randy. Great songs and guitar)
Dio (I still remember finding Holy Diver in the record store. I knew Dio from Rainbow and Black Sabbath. But this first album and the follow up, The Last In Line, were the biggest influences on me)
Iron Maiden (Killers through Seventh Son are the metal standards. Like Holy Diver, I can remember buying Piece Of Mind when it first came out. Never really heard of the band but was was blown away by the album)
Fastway (those first two albums had great licks and bass groove. Not to mention King's vocals).
Jethro Tull (more folk rock with power guitars)
Triumph (epic and slightly progressive songs up through and including Thunder Seven)
Quiet Riot (Thankfully returns metal to the airwaves)
Saga (World’s Apart was the gateway but Silent Knight with the song Don’t Be Late blew me away)
AC/DC (Back In Black through Flick The Switch. Still their best albums)
Whitesnake (Slide It In and 1987 or Whitesnake as it’s called in the States. Power cords and hooks. Also served as an introduction to rock driven blues as I explored their early albumss.)
Scorpions (Blackout and Love At First Sting were massive albums)
Mike Oldfield (Five Miles Out and QE2 had great rock instrumentals).
Rush (Loved all of their albums from 2112 through Signals. Progressive hard rock/metal introduction).
Night Ranger (Dawn Patrol and Midnight Madness were monsters. Before the over-exposure of Sister Christian).
Y&T (fun boogie rock albums of Black Tiger through In Rock We Trust).
 
Reading through this thread makes me realizes....as much as Metallica has totally lost whatever it is they had in the beginning, without them, many of us (and other metal heads around the world) would not be here.
 
Europe/Bon Jovi/AC/DC got me into hard rock/metal in the mid 80's and wanting to play guitar.

got into all the glam and thrash stuff in the late 80's....most important or influential of that time were Metallica, Megadeth, Yngwie, Ozzy, Extreme and Van Halen.

when glam died the 91-95 era was all about AIC, FNM, Bungle, and Tool.....but the three biggest influences for me at this time were Vai, Dream Theater and T-Ride....also got heavily into 70's bands like Sabbath,Purple,Zepplin,Rush. Also got into a band called Jellyfish.

95-2000 mainly prog bands and certain guitarists.....Holdsworth, Ron Thal and SYL/Devin Townsend.

2000-Present nothing too new or exciting as a whole.....got into some melodic death stuff and certain prog bands...lots of great albums from bands i love but from an influence point of view maybe only Soilwork.

So important from the point of view of a musician

1.VAN HALEN
2.DREAM THEATER
3.ALICE IN CHAINS
4.DEEP PURPLE
5.MEGADETH
6.HOLDSWORTH

of those 5 i'd probably only put VH in my top 5 fave bands
 
My teen years weren't marked by angst or pain. In fact, quite the opposite. my problem was that I thought it was necessary to literally shove everything down as far as you could shove it and never let anyone know you felt much of anything. Self imposed repression! Unsurprinsgly one of the few times I felt comfortable 'feeling' was when i was alone in my room at night with the lights out and a pair of headphones. I'd relive entire days in my head, where i'd fantasize about saying and doing all the things I wanted to but couldn't. My primary soundtrack to much of this experience was Soundgarden's album Superunknown. I hadn't really been exposed to any real metal outside of Pantera (which to this day, I cannot get into - always felt their lyrical and sonic approach was about as graceful and intelligent as a 500 lb. gorilla.) and some of the then popular nu-metal bands (Which, I will say at the risk of raising a few hackles, I dislike for the same reasons I dislike Pantera.) and by then, Superunknown, to my peers was precisely as it's title would suggest.
There were a couple of lyrics that -really- hit me at the time, specifically, from the title track:
"If you don't want to be seen / You don't have to hide / If you don't want to believe / You don't have to try / To feel alive"
At the time I was struggling with a number of doubts I was having about my (then) faith - Stuff like that helped me to let go and not feel like I was doing something horrible.
I wasn't into "grunge" on the whole; Nirvana has never done anything for me, Pearl Jam's good material could fill maybe two albums. the only bands from that more popular 'group' I really like are Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, however were are a few lesser known acts that I didn't discover 'til recently (Skin Yard, Gruntruck, Screaming trees) that I enjoy.
Turn your nose up if you want to, I find the 'hate' that many of the bands of the time get around here is largely due to guilt by association, rather than any actual sonic qualities.

Nwhatt -really- expanded my horizons, and through a long series of ties, got me into metal, was King Crimson's albums Lark's Tongue in Aspic. I don't quite have the same emotional attachment with it that I do with Superunknown, but it really blew my mind when I listened to it for the first time. Lark's tongue was probably the first truly progressive album I ever listened to and enjoyed (subsequently, Most of the progressive metal I like is more influenced by KC than by Rush or Dream Theater, which is to say, generally more abrasive and "angular".) and opened me up to an entirely new(to me) sound that I could not have previously even fathomed as existing. It was harsh, delicate, exotic, tense, hypnotic - and more than anything it was liberating. I can't quite quantify the 'liberating' bit, but it certainly opened my mind to more types of music that I feel, without the aid of this album, I would have missed out on entirely.

So between Soundgarden and King Crimson, there really isn't much more room, but without them, I would never have been able to truly enjoy 90% of the music I listen to, and the latter allowed me to better appreciate that musical "comfort zones" are for the timid and frail of heart. If a band can experient in making music, the least we can do is give listening an experimental approach. Sticking with what you know, and what you know you'll like, is for 'fraidy cats.
 
It seems that the theme is kind of more stuff that was really important when all this music obsession stuff began, as opposed to really big things right now, so I'll go with that...

The earliest thing I can remember identifying as something which positively ruled, in terms of heavy rock, is probably Styx. My dad had all these CD's laying around his apartment and having nothing else to do at about 8-9 years old I would go through them all. I really liked the Billy Joel stuff, there was the 2 CD best of set there, that was pretty fascinating, and then Styx was just something else entirely. I remember hearing the guitar tone and the leads on 'Blue Collar Man'...'Miss America'..etc and being blown away at whatever that distorted metallic sound thing was. Additionally, Dennis DeYoung, I would later come to realize, is very close to a perfect vocalist. I also got Def Leppard - 'Hysteria' at a garage sale with a dollar I had because the cover art was cool. I found the guitar tone to be bizarrely fascinating. I would sort of stab in the dark for heavy stuff after that, I got into W.A.S.P. because 'Wild Child' was on this Harley sampler I found in a box somewhere, got into Maiden because this house an old babysitter broke into had this Maiden England poster on the wall and I grabbed it because it was awesome even though I had no idea what it was (later I would get a Best of the Beast cassette from K-Mart). I also got some Metallica and Priest tapes around that time and so those 5 or so bands got me into everything. This is still about the 9-10 year old timeframe..a LOT happened from 8-10 in terms of finding music and figuring out what it was and stuff. And I was completely outcast in school despite elementary school being the best and most fun era of school by FAR..my mom was an alcoholic and insane, and my dad was sort of there but not quite and I was more or less always in my own little world, learning how to do everything myself around that age, and always with the tape player attached to my head. Mostly it was about the guitar at first, just the TONE of stuff was something I would obsess over, I would hear The Cult - Sweet Soul Sister on the radio and that Billy Duffy riff at the beginning with nothing behind it sounded like the coolest thing in the universe to me, or Dave Murray's soloing tone, or Chris Holmes and that eerie sound he got on 'The Last Command'. I wanted a guitar just so I could make this distorted sound thing. Later on when the first major wave of depression hit (about 11-12..middle school, the stupid people that go there, step-parents, abuse, girls, and all the rest), I was listening to some of the same stuff a lot, but the darker stuff. Dickinson's 'Chemical Wedding' had came out, and so had 'KFD' by W.A.S.P. and I would sit there by myself and absorb stuff like that which was absolutely heady and dark for a kid and scribble lyrics and stuff... I didn't leave the room except to go to school, and then in like a year there was no more school either but that's a different story. Part of that though involves a computer arriving to the house and me discovering the Internet, and therefore a bunch of new big bang bands such as Gamma Ray..Darkseed... all kinds of stuff....
 
Great thread!

For me, it goes back to rock-radio back in the AOR days, with Rush being a primary influence, along with Pink Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, etc.
I'll never forget when I went to the LaserDrive show at the planetarium in Atlanta, where they play music -- loudly! -- along with starscapes and laser imagery. Rush, Pink Floyd, Billy Thorpe....that was like a religious experience and I honestly think it cemented my interest in music for good.

Next musical milepost: Guns'n'Roses. Rock radio had become very 'safe' and banal in Atlanta, and then one day 96rock played G'n'R's "Paradise City" as their "smash or trash" song -- you call them and tell them if you liked it or not. The moment I heard the song and that it had done well, I thought "radio is about to change forever" -- and I was right. Several months later "Welcome to the Jungle" was released as a single. G'nR opened the door for hard rock and allowed Metallica to storm the radio scene, about a year later.

Sometime in 1987, the first person to join the fan-club I was now running for a British SF/fantasy author* sent me some stuff by bands from Seattle, where he hailed from. He specifically mentioned Queensryche and when Operation: Mindcrime came out the following year, I was able to get it for free from 96rock as a contest prize.
I was floored. I even stopped the car on the side of the road in shock so I could hear it without noise. The album got me into 'progressive' metal, and since they were opening for Metallica, it's why I went to that particular show and, through a friend, met and befriended Kirk Hammett. QR and 'Tallica pretty much got me into the 'serious' metal scene for good.

Next milepost: hearing "Pull Me Under" on 96rock here, one of the 3 or 4 times it was actually played. :yow: Loved the song, the drumming stood out particularly. I worked out a trade with a deejay friend at the radio station: I get him a CD copy of a rare 'Tallica song so he could copy it to broadcast cart (CD burning was still a few years away), he gets me some freebies -- including I&W on cassette, as they didn't have any promo CDs left. Same thing happened as with Mindcrime: I stopped the car on the side of the road so I could hear it better. I was floored AGAIN.
I got involved with Dream Theater's online fandom, including the Ytsejam Mailing List, swiftly discovered bands like Superior and Symphony X, and became highly active in the more "underground" prog-metal scene.

Beginning in late 1993 or 1994 I had begun hanging out regularly at WREKage, the metal radio show in Atlanta (been running for between 25-30 years). By around 1998, the show's two then-student hosts were only playing brutal death and black-metal, and after some online complaints on Jim Raggi's forum -- from friends of the two students -- I was brought on-board to add more progressive metal to the mix. We jokingly called my segment "Paul's Progressive Patio."
--But along the way, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: I began to really like some of the music I was intended to replace. I already liked, e.g., Opeth, but I began getting into other, more extreme metal bands, and nowadays I like extreme metal a bit more than other genres.

So, for me:

Rush/Pink Floyd/Billy Thorpe/BOC --> Guns'n'Roses --> Queensryche --> Metallica --> (Ozric Tentacles) / Dream Theater --> Opeth --> almost everything with talent. :kickass: :headbang:


-----
* Michael Moorcock; the international fan-club was called The Nomads of the TimeStreams. I ran it from c. 1987 through 1993 or so. Technically, Kirk Hammett, like me, is still a lifetime member.

.
 
Really, I can only speak to what influenced me in various phases of my life:

First band I was interested in: The Beach Boys. That was mostly me going through my parents record collection. They were what stuck with me.

First band that I was interested in that wasn't in my parents record collection: Journey. My cousins gave me a cassette of "Escape" for Christmas one year. For the longest time, they were my favorite band.

Band that had a major influence on setting me on the road of hard rock/heavy metal: Van Halen. I didn't really get into them until 1984, but I got into them huge. They were the gateway drug for a lot of 80s hard rock for me.

Band that got me into progressive rock: Rush. Back in college, it seemed everyone and their brother was listening to Rush. I was vaguely aware of them, but with having a lot of it around me it rubbed off on me bigtime. It was also timed well with the start of the Internet and subscribing to The National Midnight Star introduced me to many bands I had never heard of.

Band that got me into progressive metal: Dream Theater. Pretty obvious, but again, Ytsejam was a tremendous resource for giving me reasons to part with money for tons of CDs.
 
I think for me it is a cross of 4 bands. I always had a thing for the underappreciated bands it seemed. I got into heavy metal around 83-84. While at the time the most easier stuff to get would be Maiden / Preist / Sabbath / and lighter stuff like Van Halen. While I listened to that stuff I was also lucky to have at the time I think it was called Z-Rock in Chicago. It was a short lived metal station. They played all sorts of stuff so I was able to hear new stuff. With that and buying magazines it was really the only way to find out about new bands. There was no internet so you basically bought off word of mouth or reviews back then.

One of the most important bands to me back then and will always have a place in my heart is VoiVod. They are and always will be a band way ahead of its time. Dimension Hatross was a cassette tape that I played over and over again. I loved the story and the concept. I was into lots of sci-fi and comics back then to so it was cool to have music that went along with it. There were lots of metalheads in my school and area where I lived and it was funny that this was a band they all hated. At the time they were to different and not writing about satan and stuff. It was something to different at the time. This was a band too that led me to discover more underground stuff.

At the time also when I was listening to lots of Voivod and stuff I also got into Helloween. After the first time they played the "Halloween" video on Headbangers Ball. I was hooked. Everyone always kind of called them Iron Maiden lite. I thought and still do, that this was one of the greatest bands on Earth. They could do no wrong. I loved the catchy songs and everything about them.

With these two bands it really opened to door to discovering so many other bands that really shaped my musical taste. When the compilation from Noise Records came out called the Doomsday News. It introduced me to bands like Rage, Scanner, Sabbat, Vendetta, Coroner, and others. I started hunting all these bands down and really still havent stopped yet with looking for more and more new bands to get into. I loved finding bands that I thought no one else knew about. It was something exciting finding these new great bands.

Nuclear Assault were another band that was a huge part of my teen years. It was refreshing to hear a band with smart lyrics. At the time not many metal bands covered current events or songs about the goverment and stuff. That was mainly punk music. This was one of the first thrash bands I really got into. I will never forget the day I got "Survive". I listened to that tape so many times. Then hunting down the previous releases was great to be able to hear a great band evolve. They were also the first "underground" band I got to see live in 89.

Two other bands which in the 80's that were important to me where Heathen and Vio-lence. Both had different vocal styles for thier genre at the time. Heathen had the graspy vocals that fit the music great. I loved thier lyrics and song structures. Vio-lence just blew me away when I first heard "Eternal Nightmare". It was an impulse buy to. I saw ads for months in magazines before it came out. The tape / CD was sold for cheaper than most as a marketing thing when it first hit the stores. This was one and still is one of my favorite albums of all time.

Each one of these bands really helped open the doors for the other bands I am into even now. Even when I got out of metal in the 90's these were the few bands that I would still pull out and listen to once in a while. Something about them always kind of stuck with me and always bring me back to my younger days for sure.
 
I forgot to mention Floyd and Queensrÿche. I heard songs from both bands on the radio; 'Learning to Fly' and 'Jet City Woman' respectively...I think right before I first got the Internet...and at one point I was living at an unofficial relative's house around that time, long story..and I remember playing the 'Momentary Lapse Of Reason' tape over and over and being completely blown away. Still am, still one of my favorites by the band, I don't care what anyone thinks. :loco:

As for Rÿche, the quirkiness of 'Empire' led me into 'Mindcrime', and, well.....it goes..
 
Diabolik said:
hile I listened to that stuff I was also lucky to have at the time I think it was called Z-Rock in Chicago.
Click to expand...

This got me to remember how important 103.1 WVVX with Scott Loftus was to me in the 80s in Chicagoland. I think they only were on from 8pm to like 2am and the rest of the time the station was a political or religious station.

It was on this channel that you'd also hear all the metal bands that were not big on the radio or MTV (until Headbangers started in '87). It was this station that got me to wait at the door at Sound Warehouse for Mindcrime to come out. Other bands that station opened the door would be Metal Church, Testament, Fates Warning to name a few.

It was the death of these types of stations and lack of internet that made much of the 90s a dead zone for new music me. Just didn't hang around enough metal fans to hear much by word of mouth during that time.
 
Honestly, if I had to nail down ONE band that was the most important to me musically as an artist, it would have to be Queensryche. From the EP to Promised Land, the band never failed to blow me away and it shaped who I became when I started singing in bands...I used to think that if I could only sing like Geoff Tate, I could die a happy man.
 
The first album I ever owned was Deep Purple's "Machine Head", so the first rock song I learned on keyboard was "Smoke On The Water". Elton John was a huge influence on my piano playing, and showed me that you could be a dweeb, play piano and still be adored by many. Rush has been the pinnacle ever since "All The World's A Stage" came out...
 
AirGuitarLoonhouse said:
This got me to remember how important 103.1 WVVX with Scott Loftus was to me in the 80s in Chicagoland. I think they only were on from 8pm to like 2am and the rest of the time the station was a political or religious station.
Click to expand...

My brother and I listened to WVVX religiously.
Got into tons of stuff from that station and also found out about all the underground shows and what not.
 
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