I've been enjoying my second reading of Barker & Taylor's Faking It. Since I'm a fan of music that is usually outside critical acceptance, whether authenticity is a category critics use or don't use, I thought that it might be fun to put up what I consider some important "turning points" in my own evolving journey with music.
I might have mentioned before - or maybe I didn't I'm not sure - that hearing "Star Cycle" by Jeff Beck was really the beginning of it all for me. From the fusion-oriented There and Back LP, that the song even received airplay is astounding to me. That it received enough to push me to purchase the album and pretty much wear out the grooves listening to it is shocking. A record such as this would disappear almost upon release today. Since almost no one I knew had even heard of it, I knew I was on to something different because this was just . . . I still can't find the words to describe my reaction to it. Except that here - right here - was something that made sense.
Hearing Judas Priest and Iron Maiden as a high school student was one thing. Hearing Metallica as a college student, though, was on a different scale altogether. While I have come to appreciate the simple pleasures of Judas Priest on occasion, and find some of Iron Maiden's songs to be entertaining, the material on Metallica's first four records still stands out for me as taking heavy metal beyond the Black Sabbath/Motorhead/Judas Priest orbit on the one hand, and the darker musings of their musical mentors like Venom and Danzig. They certainly flirted with darker themes without succumbing to the stupidity of death metal, while also refusing to rest easy with blues-based song structures. Their subsequent career, especially after their eponymous "Black" album of 1991 is a long, slow death spiral. While their early experiments in speed metal were interesting, it was when I first heard "Creeping Death" that I knew there was something more going on here.
I remember the moment, for some odd reason, I first heard Dream Theater's song, "Pull Me Under". After a late winter/early spring of nothing but grunge, I was wondering what, exactly, came next. I happened to be driving southwest on Western Ave, the street that is the border between the District of Columbia and Maryland, and without any introduction at all came the opening. I knew, immediately, I had to have it (I can be stupid that way, I guess). In the seventeen years since then, I've purchased their CDs, gone to their concerts, absorbed their aesthetic, and am still amazed that anyone besides me loves this band. I am happy to report that my older daughter, Moriah, loves this song, too.
