What attracted/got you into heavy metal?

Well, I was always curious about heavy music, growing up in a small country town and not being exposed to any of it. The whole image and everything attracted me so much, that I had to just find out about it. I first got into it by borrowing some Metallica cds, and I really got into them. I remember some of the first albums I bought were 'Metallica - ...And Justice For All', 'Maiden - NOTB', 'Megadeth - Peace Sells', 'Sepultura - The Roots of Sepultura', and a few others. The thing that got me right into Maiden, and into heavy music ALOT more, was when I was looking for a book to read, and I came across Maiden's 'Run to the Hills' Biography. I only had 2 of their albums at the time (NOTB and FOTD), so I didn't know much about them at all. After I finished reading it (couldn't put it down either), I went out and bought all their albums a couple of weeks later. Since then I have just gotten further into metal, and being a big net user helps to find out about heaps of good music. :)

I guess it will be a different story for most of you guys, coz the net wasn't around when you were getting into metal. ;) :)
 
It was more or less a natural thing for me.My dad used to play heavy metal kinda stuff all the time from before I was born.Aparantly the only thing that would keep me calm as a baby was Kiss,Alice Cooper,Van Halen,Black Sabbath.
So i guess it all came from that I never really got into much else except the odd New Romantic 80's style stuff.
 
I loved Deep Purple's Machine Head (and still do) when i was 13-15 cos' my Dad played it in the car whenever we went on camping/fishing trips cos' Mum wasn't there, hehe.

But during that time i still listended to chart/pop stuff.

But the turning point was when i was 17, a mate lent me a tape of Live After Death and it changed my life forever haha!
 
I guess I've just had rock in my blood since I was a little tacker running around listening to Bon Jovi and Guns N Roses in primary school... but they were the only bands I was really listening to alot because they were on TV so much at the time, so when that stuff wasn't so big anymore nd I wasn't exposed to it, I kinda lost interest at the time...

Then when I was 14 I saw Kiss live when Dad had 2 free tickets so he took me along. From the very first song they played... I was a Kiss fan already! It just blew me away, it was so huge and larger than life, I loved it! The attitude, the volume, the sound... heheh. I found my calling you could say haha! Within 1 week of the concert I had 2 Kiss videos and 3 albums!

It just snowballed from there really... I rediscovered my old Jovi and Gunners roots and got back into them, then Def Leppard, then Megadeth, Anthrax and Metallica, then Maiden, and the rest is history heheh. Within a year I was the "freak" of the school because I was listening to about 100 old metal bands that people either had never heard of, were scared of (including Maiden haha!), or remembered as being "gay hair bands".

It was kinda tough for me getting into metal in too... coz in 1997, I had no net at the time, and did not know even 1 metal fan, not even one!! I mean everybody gets into metal through people recommending things or playing it around them... I couldn't!

So my way of discovering bands was hiring out concert videos of bands which looked interesting, buying cheap CDs which I thought might be good because of the cover haha (that's how I got into Maiden and Megadeth!), and buying Metal Edge magazine and reading up on '80s metal bands.

Once I got the net though, which was a couple of years ago (when I started posting here), it became much easier, as I could just download samples from bands I read about. That's how I finally got into a few non-'80s bands hhahaa, mostly power metal stuff.
 
The first metal I heard was Stars by Hear N Aid on Rock Arena on the ABC (anyone remember that?!)...

Even though I was a HUGE synth pop fan at the time, the other tribute songs (Do They Know It's Christmas, etc.) just made me wince every time I heard them. So when the host said that a bunch of metal bands did one, I thought "Ha, yeah - this'll be good - a bunch of hairy old drunks screaming over the top of out of tune guitars!"

How wrong was I?! Geoff Tate?! Dio?! Halford?! Shiiiiittt!!!

I was intrigued! Not long after that, a friend's brother played me Sabbath's Live Evil and Queensryche's Rage For Order and I was hooked! They were the first 2 metal records I ever bought and it's been an absolute passion ever since! :)
 
Mine was a combination of two cousins who took upon themselves to guide me to metal from a young age,year 5 i think it was. One who listened solely to glam shit and hard rock. The other who was a huge 80's thrash fan.
They made me listen,and hey,i liked it
Then in year 8 I discovered the other metalheads in my class and thats how i got most my mates.

it's treated me well.
 
I listened to the radio a lot when I was a kid, but could never find a genre that I liked. I mean, I liked a song here and there, but when that artist's next song was released, I thought it was shite.

So I bumbled along for years, until my best mate took Powerslave to our Year 10 camp in 1985. I was listening and thought "Hey - this is good!" Not just a song, but the whole album.
The next week, he taped Piece Of Mind and Powerslave for me. For the whole of the summer school holidays of 1985-86, I listened to these albums non-stop.

When we returned to school for Year 11, he said "I think we should see what this Metallica are like". So he bought Ride The Lightning and I bought Master Of Puppets.

I've never looked back since.

No - I certainly didn't have the net in 1985....
 
Lucky i had the net,I've discovered 90% of bands i listen to from the net.

Fuck some of you people are alot older then me.I'm still a little tacker, me and Blitzy are gunna have to form an exclusive club i think.
 
My brother got his hands on a copy of Live After Death in 1986 (from our other brother, I believe) and it went on from there. I didn't actually buy a metal album until "Best of the Beast" came out some 10 years later - cheap way to get into music :)

It wasn't until I got on the net back in 1995 that I discovered a lot of the bands I like now, and it's all thanks to Queensryche. I was reading about them because I loved "Operation Mindcrime" back in 1992 but hadn't listened to them since, and a lot of people said that Dream Theater was a similar band, so I checked them out, and then I joined a DT mailing list and discovered a whole slew of other bands.

I still don't see the resemblance between the two bands, though.
 
Sounds kinda like my sister's situation Spiffy... she likes most of the same stuff as me but only owns 3 albums because she just takes mine all the time to listen to. My entire Iced Earth collection lives in her bedroom, as they're her fave band.
 
I have a feeling Spawn will no longer hate your sister ;)

My story..
I'd had never been interested in any form of music until I was about 13. One of my mates was just getting into Nirvana and I knew that my brother had a few of their albums. I ask my brother if I could borrow them (for my mate) and he was quite surprised that I was interested - I wasn't, but played along.
Instead of Nirvana he gave me a single tape. He said the first song was cool, 'cos it was about flying planes and shit rather than the usual 'life sucks, I wanna kill myself' crap of Nirvana.
So I listened and liked it. The song started with this cool speech that really sets the mood of the song "....WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER ".
I listened to that one song over - just kept rewinding the tape back to the beginning. It was at least a few weeks before I realised that the following song, 2 Minutes To Midnight fucking ruled too.

Needless to say, my mate never got to hear those Nirvana albums, but we were both so hooked on Maiden I don't think he even noticed. :D

The first albums I actually bought was Load. I was after Maiden, but strangely enough they didn't stock it at Target :lol: .
Next album was Appetite For Destruction, then finally came Live After Death on CD (I almost worn the tape out).
 
Originally posted by Koichi
At least you haven't stopped listening to decent music like alot of people do when they hit late 20's.

If they stop, it means they weren't true fans in the first place and don't deserve to listen to metal! :)

And yeah, I agree - 32 ain't old at all, Joe! ... Is it? :err: Damn, where's my walkin' stick....?

HAHA!