Well, in the late 80s (I was about 10), I listened to Def Leppard, GnR, Metallica, on the radio, just like everybody else. And I just loved the black album (I didn't own it, but the videos and tracks on TV and radio were great).
My sophmore year of high school (I was 15), a friend of mine made me listen to the old metallica albums, and that just got me hooked. Puppets and Justice. Glorious. So I started with those, expanded into Alice in Chains, Megadeth (Forclosure of a dream was the first metal song I learned to play on guitar).
I started to watch Headbangers Ball (RIP) and by the end of Junior year, I started to get into Morbid Angel (Rapture and God of Emptiness videos) and Carcass (Heartwork video) because of HBB. And I started expanding my horizons there.... Mostly just Cannibal Corpse (The Bleeding).
Senior year, I roomed with a friend who used to room with a metalhead, so he got me into Sepultura (Chaos AD) and Manowar (The Triumph of Steel).
The next year (my first year at university) I have no clue what I did. I lived with a guy who was into Michael Jackson, so I heard a lot of that... and it's not bad, actually.
Anyway, my 2nd and 3rd year, I lived with a friend from High School who was also into metal and football. His metal knowledge (and collection) was much more limited than mine, but when he got bored, he'd get on the net and look for new bands to get into. The first real find was My Dying Bride (Angel), which was the beginning of our journey into all flavors of Doom. I absolutely
LOVED the violin, so we looked for other bands with interesting instruments and eventually stumbled on Theatre of Tragedy (Velvet Darkness...) That soprano-death vox was brand spanking new then and I gobbled it up.
Then, he found a band in the same town as our university named Ember (don't know if it's the same one that you can get albums of...) But we got in contact with them, and I hung with them a bit, and they tried to get me into true BM... Darkthrone, and what not. But I wouldn't have it. But I started getting into Dawn, Abigor, From the Depths, and Ulver.
About this time (Well, February 20th, 1998 to be exact), a Philosophy professor (!) at university got together a group that would get together once a month and listen to metal. Each person would bring some CDs and we'd listen to 2 or 3 tracks of each CD to get exposure, which is always the hard part when it comes to underground music. And that is how I got into Power Metal, Sludge Doom,
OPETH and most of the other bands I listen to now.
The group is still going strong. We just had our 40th meeting last Friday. We've named ourselves C-U in Hell! (C-U is for Champaign-Urbana, the town the university is in). We've even put out 4 compilations of tracks we like for ourselves. Comp 5 is currently in the works. Over the past 4 years, we've listened to about 830 CDs in about 200 HOURS of listening time. Of those 830 CDs, it comes to about 755 UNIQUE discs of about 470 artists. You can check up on C-U in Hell at
http://www.brutalmetal.com/CU-Metal/index.html. It's mostly just got the playlists of the meetings and the cover art of our compilations. The Cover for #4 kicks ass!
OK, that took far too long...
. Recommended to me as a gentle intro to the scene, and hey, it worked (it ain't that gentle, though 
)
