How Heavy Metal Saved My Life: A True Story (No, Really, It Is!)

A few years back when talking about something to do with my childhood/teenage years, M and I somehow ended up on a toot about music, identity, and how for me personally, a lot of my life was shaped by my relationship with this obscure, mildly rhythmic noise. So as I sit here with a vacation largely interrupted by our ongoing COVID-19 Apolcalypse, which neat enough, is being broadcast in real time on Cable TV news while a reality show president only somewhat coherently rants each evening about how we should ignore science and send old people to die in the name of boosting the stock market so said buffoon can get re-elected in November...holy run-on sentence batman! These are fucked times, and as M and I are largely staying at home to avoid the latest, greatest, newest plague, I guess I have some free time on my hands. So I dedicate this post to M, who has occasionally pestered me to put this in writing.

I think this whole pandemic is really just marketing to get us to watch this guy's Netflix series.

I suppose in a sense this has to be autobiographical. It's largely a story of coincidence as well. So let's get right to it. I was born just over 40 years ago and raised in the outskirts of a small southern college town in the middle of Virginia. The kind of place where said college town equates to the "big city", and said college is the "center of the universe" that gives locals a certain sense of inflated importance. As though there aren't several hundred similar towns scattered about the United States. Residents here can be split into two groups; somewhat snooty white collar people (the Gilded Caste, if you will) who are brought from outside the area because of some affiliation or relationship with said college, or the "townies"; the "Jesus, Guns, and NASCAR" crowd who work in the service economy that serves said affluent crowd. There's a noticeable tension between these two groups. This became magnified as any type of blue collar factory work evaporated in the 1980's and 90's via globalization, free trade agreements, yadda yadda.

My hometown, inside of city limits...

and outside of city limits...

I was born to a teenage mom and a dad who was a factory worker, so it's easy to see what the anticipated trajectory of my life would be. "Townies" are just that, the people that never leave the damn place. My family, on both sides, goes back many generations, as people from the surrounding mountains that gradually gravitated towards said college town since it was a hub of commerce and economic activity...

So my family, if you went back enough, were like the Central Virginia equivalent of the Hatfields or McCoys.

(Side Rant: okay, so my mom's side basically relocated there after being forcibly evicted from what would become Shenandoah National Park, you can read about it here or here. The TL:DR is that during the New Deal, it was determined to be too expensive to bring electricity and sanitation infrastructure to the hillbillies of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so they were given a pittance as compensation and thru eminent domain evicted to create the National Park and Skyline Drive. Somewhere in the vicinity of Jarman's Gap Overlook on Skyline Drive is where my great grandmother was born; she passed away only in 2013. This is relatively recent history that still lives for many people. Interesting story really.)

...and took up jobs serving the general economy of the college town. They stayed, their children stayed, etc....I'm pretty sure that only two relatives that I can identify off the top of my head don't currently reside somewhere in Central Virginia within 45 minutes or so of "college town." You're born there, you go to school there, you get married there, you find a shit job there, eventually you die there.

So where does heavy metal fit into all of this?

I wish I was awesome enough to say that in 1987 I was listening to Sodom and Bathory, but I was in 2nd grade and that wasn't what they were playing on MTV.

Remember that I'm a product of the 80's, born right before Reagan was elected. So as a young kid, I'd play in the field with the kid next door that was close to my age. Now and then we'd go over to his house since he had a Nintendo (I wasn't that cool, I just had a Sega Master System. I guess having both between us was kinda cool though.) Anyhow, his older sister was all in with the glam rock/hair metal thing going on at the time, so via her, we were exposed to the hairspray and spandex shit like Whitesnake, Poison, Motley Crue, etc. We're talking late 80's so it also turned out that Guns N Roses was breaking big, and a particular California band had released their first ever music video.

Metallica was heavier, darker, and absent the spandex and hairspray, looked more identifiable and relatable. I was immediately hooked. Quickly, I became addicted to staying up late on Saturday night's to watch MTV's Headbanger's Ball seeking to hear not just Metallica, but other heavier bands, which at the time for me meant stuff like Ozzy, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies, etc. Remember that my exposure was entirely due to cable TV; I've never known my dad to listen to ANY kind of music to speak of, and my mom's tastes were a combination of pop/country and whatever played on the "oldies" FM station. Why staying up so late though? Because my mom was convinced that heavy metal was "vulgar" and "satanic."

Fuck you, Geraldo Rivera.

Anyhow, at school, the children that would be my classmates in elementary school were either the children of the Townies or the Gilded Caste of Central Virginia. If you were the kid of a Townie, you generally liked to roughhouse around, bully other kids, and your social circle was probably mostly the other Townies. Likewise, the Gilded Caste would keep to themselves. I liked comic books and heavy metal. I didn't really fit with either group, which was fine by me because for someone who is quite verbose, I'm very much an introvert. Oddly enough, classes from the time I was in elementary school were broken up by academic ability, and curiously enough the "mediocre" group was the Townie kids, and the "gifted" group were the Gilded Caste. (These would eventually become the "rednecks" and the "preppies" by high school.) Someone fucked up somewhere, because I was grouped with the "gifted" kids. Talk about being a fish out of water in terms of peer group.

I will say that being grouped with these kids in elementary school is probably the number one thing that prevented me from developing the stereotypical "Southern Accent" that the entirety of my family is infected with to some degree, ranging from that dignified "Gone with the Wind" variant to more of a barely coherent mumblespeak. With only the occasional embarassing voice "breakage" to remind me that I am white trash at the core, I generally speak with an almost neutral, perhaps Midwestern dialect (except I don't do anything stupid like call Coca Cola a "pop" or a water fountain a "bubbler.")

Anyhow, developing niche interests has a way of bridging across gaps that otherwise exist among groups based on dividers like ethnicity, economic background, etc. Turns out, some of these other kids were also into comics and heavy rock music, and I began to form friendships with kids who were otherwise part of the Gilded Caste. That means meeting the parents of these kids, who were doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc. People who had traveled and been to places.

Owning a copy of this definitely broke a lot of ice in 5th grade.

For perspective I had never left the Eastern Time Zone in my life until I was 28.

What that did was open my eyes to what was possible, and in a sense what normal life looked like for a lot of people. Why couldn't I be one of those things? After all, for the kids I was befriending, it wasn't aspirational, but an expectation to be those things.

As the 80's became the 90's and hair metal became grunge rock then an entire alternative subculture, it became this broader subculture around which I grew up and understood life; because it was still "small college town", the goths, punks, stoners, and dwindling number of metalheads all kinda had to be around each other by necessity; there just weren't enough of us to further splinter up into sub-cliques. Unfortunately (or maybe not?), some of the collection of misfits and broken toys weren't the greatest people for a variety of reasons, or I just didn't "click" with them, or whatever. Certainly wasn't doing much to help with the old dating life. Lucky for me, the internet became a thing. And with that, there was a deep rabbit hole of obscure bands to discover and vile online trolling to engage in. To the point that I began to realize that I basically had nothing in common with the people around me; as I became captivated by the still fresh drama of the Norwegian black metal scene and was discovering exciting new bands via the My Dying Bride mailing list and those fold outs that came in Century Media CDs you'd get from mailorders, I was losing any sort of cultural frame of reference with the people around me as I increasingly nerded out on heavy music (they had all moved onto whatever new hip thing among the "alt-scene" was.) And here's the thing; the smart members of that alternative scene went to college elsewhere or packed up and moved but somehow got the fuck out of that small college town. The ones who stayed behind...were becoming Townies. But at least via the internet and chat forums and whatnot, I had a connection to a world beyond. Made friends. Some that are still friends to this day.

You'd probably quickly get tired of being around people like this too.

My life sadly through this point wasn't particularly stable; between family and school, I was basically accused of being some combination of "drug addicted", "homosexual", and "devil worshipping", with a bunch of people who thought they were doing the right thing for me by wrecking my life and making everything 50 million times harder. All because I wanted to have ordinary teenage fun and had a proclivity for the color black and listened to angry music. The eventual outcome of this was dropping out of high school and moving in with people I went to high school with for a few years.

By 2005 or so, life circumstances, as they're wont to do, provided me with a pair of options. I could accept my fate and try to make the best of it pumping gas or whatever in small college town, or I could pack up my life's belongings in my Toyota Corolla and relocate to the Washington DC area. I had a job opportunity via my McJob and had made enough friends and acquaintances via a shared love..of extreme metal music of all things. This was the "shit or get off the pot" moment. So I packed my shit up and slept on an air mattress in someone's apartment and put together a life. Someone I met online because of...a shared love of extreme metal music.

My new home, or at least across the river from it.

Washington DC and the surrounding metro area, thanks to lots of government contracting and IT money, offers a lot of economic opportunity for someone willing to work hard. I was done with making excuses or just "waiting" for the right opportunity; it took 25 years of waiting to get the hell out of that small college town. Free from distractions, burdens, and excuses, I enrolled in community college, transferred to McState University, earned two degrees from McState, and began earning a professional salary. A lot of that was pure work ethic, because I'm no genius or savant; I just wanted better for myself. But that very pathway was opened up, really, because I was able to network with people via a shared love of heavy music.

Perhaps even more remarkable, and for which I'm incredibly thankful for, is that it was also heavy music that brought M into my life. It was M sending me a random message on social media because we had a shared love of doom metal that brought her into my life...almost 13 years ago. A really awesome, fun filled 13 years that saw my life accelerate on hyperdrive; and it all began because I knew useless heavy metal trivia about her hometown (neat fact: Sepultura and Sarcofago are from her hometown. Way more awesome than what my town gets to claim) and didn't make dumb assumptions about her country of birth.

Another Ice Breaker.

So yeah, every good thing that happened in my life can be attributed to heavy metal. Imagine that. It's probably why I still get excited about hearing the latest 5th generation Devourment clone and still sacrifice sleep now and then to go see a show in the warehouse of a brewery with 50 people. It's why I've probably spent too damn much money buying tour shirts from bands who have had their tours dates cancelled by COVID-19/Coronavirus. It's probably why my walls of filled CD shelves still bring me joy when other people are downsizing their collections and "growing up."

Thanks for everything guys.

Ultimately, it was heavy metal that got me the fuck out of that small college town, a place that feels more foreign to me each time I return to it for whatever obligation. The longer I am away, nothing is more obvious to me than how small town life is the death of the possibilities and optimism that comes with youth. It horrifies me to even imagine what would have happened had I not escaped. I don't know where I'll eventually drop dead, but hopefully it won't be for a long time and I'm reasonably confident it won't be there. And for that, ultimately I owe a completely ridiculous subculture of obnoxiously loud, blatantly offensive, barely listenable "music." Funny how life works.