Dear Bonobo,
In 1980s I reached my adolescent age like you did. I was born in januari 1970. As a child and teenager the music of the sixties and seventies had some influence on me, because the tv, radio, some friends and parents of friends played it. My father (born in 1927) and my mother (born in 1934) were not of the pop music and rock music generation. My father played German, Austrian, Russian, Czech, Hungarian and Polish classical music, and they played French chancon music and old school jazz music and Hungarian and Romanian gypsy music (Sinti and or Roma music). My father also liked Russian folk (Peoples) music and the choir of the Red army. (It was a contradiction of the man because he was a hard core anti-communist and anti-socialist in a liberal-conservative Dutch version). A typical thing of some rightwingers. Hating leftwing politicians, but loving leftwing writers and musicians.
It surely was high time to get seriously interested in music, as a typical teenager should. The teenage youth culture of hanging out in music stores to listen to and buy long play records, singles and ep's, and buy audio cassette tapes (BASF, Maxell, Phillips, Sony 30 minutes, 60 minutes and 120 minutes tapes) and record my favorite radio programs, certain tracks, certain songs and sometimes whole hours. Especially if it was the Heavy Metal and Hard Rock program VARA's vuurwerk (WARA's firework).
I don`t know either why I became so fond of hard rock and heavy metal. I know that as a 7 or 8 year old kid I must have heard kiss, Igy Pop, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Black Sabath (Paranoid), Blondy and Roxy Music on the radio and tv (pop music programs).
Like you Bo I was a gentle, well mannered boy and probably the ear piercing guitar riffs and fast beat gave me incentives which I lacked as a shy and introverted boy too. Of course I also didn't get that aroused as to kick through walls and trash the whole living room. But I remember myself headbanging, jumping and shaking in my teenage room with pretty black and white ladies on the wall. (Sade, Whitney Houston, a dancer for fame. In the Netherlands you had black girls and women and Asian, Turkish and Moroccan women and girls too. -Not all of them wore headgears and not all of them were stricly muslim-) And I remember that large posters with the skyline of New York and Chicago were hanging in my teenage boy room next to an American flag. We both fall in certain delicate exctasy, due to the speed, rythem, drum beats and yelling guitars of the Heavy Metal Music.
ACDC was very good, because it combined good old Blues, Rock 'n Roll and Hard rock in their unique Australian rock
We share an interest for heavy metal on the radio during the eighties. For many years (1985-1990) I listened to Hard rock and Heavy Metal programs. VARA's Vuurwerk on the Dutch National Public Radio in Hilversum was my favorite Heavy Metal and Hard Rock program. Another great radio program for hard core or hard rock music was VPRO's Front Line (Front Line). Every wednesday afternoon after I came home from highschool I listened to Front Line. It played the music VARA's Vuurwerk didn't play.
VARA's vuurwerk had access to many of the newly released records of major metal groups too. In the Capitalist and democratic Netherlands copyright was ofcourse an issue. At our radio station (my job at the local radio and tv station) we always talk about copyrights of the Dutch copyrights organisation BUMA/STEMRA. (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUMA/STEMRA ) VARA had to respect BUMA/STEMRA and play by the rules.
We share the fact that we both had a collection of cassettes with the best heavy metal music produced in 1980s. Maybe you had more audio cassette tapes then me (60), because my collection was a combination of long play records, singles, recorded cassette tapes and in the late eighties audio CD's. Like my first Audion music cd Slayers South of Heaven Album. Later Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica and Anthrax followed. I still have my collection of Kiss LP's today and the Killers album of Iron Maiden from 1981 (live in Japan).
For some reason we differ in taste in Heavy Metal, where you were/are a Metallica fan I moved more in the direction of speedmetal and the Punk rock, rougher version of heavy Metal. Maybe that's why I liked Motörhead, Slayer and Sepultura. It was fast, heavy and dynamic. But it didn't control me, because I became more ecclectic and with girlfriens my taste changed a bit. Maybe some compromises were made. And heavy metal girls were not my taste. Maybe they were like your description of Motörhead, too crude to me. Tattooed, faul mouthed, rough girls who drank and smoked to much and were a little bit toy dolls (promiscuous) and too loose for me.
You had a good taste in Heavy Metal/Hard Rock groups Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Halloween, Man-of-war, Accept. In Western-Europe we weren't aware what was taking place behind the Iron Curtain. I was lucky to recieve a long play record of Turbo from a Polish aunt in 1986. In 1987 as a 17 year old biy I went for the first time out in a discotheque in communist Poznan. So, Bo I wasn't aware that TSA exsisted. Thank god that you had these good and professional Heavy Metal hard rock musicians in Poland back then.
Accept was is one vry good German heavy metal band from the town of Solingen. The band played an important role in the development of speed and thrash metal, being part of the German heavy metal scene, which emerged in the early to mid-1980s.
The song you mention "Fast as a Shark" is a song from their 1982 album Restless and Wild.
Its blazingly fast double bass drumming is recognized today as reaching a new level in the development of the subgenre of speed and power metal. The intro to the track is a snippet from a crackly old children's recording of a traditional German tune titled Ein Heller und ein Batzen (A Farthing and a Penny). The band thought it would make a humorous contrast with their heavy metal sound, and the fact that a young Dieter Dierks (in whose studio the album was recorded) was singing on the recording made it even more of an inside joke. The band soon found themselves in an unintended controversy, however: even though the song dated from 1830, it was a popular marching song during the Nazi era and still held that connotation for many listeners, a fact the band was unaware of at the time. "So out of a funny little idea we created somewhat of a monster," Wolf Hoffmann recalls.
"Fast as a Shark" was ranked Number 33 in Martin Popoff's book The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time.
The song has been covered by Witchery, Helloween, Holy Grail, Rage, Forte, Altar Steel Prophet and Debauchery.
"High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)" the 1981 title track by British heavy metal band Def Leppard from their multi-platinum album High 'n' Dry was ranked number 33 on VH1's 40 Greatest Metal Songs. It is one of five songs by Def Leppard, which had a promotional video, but however were not single releases. This song was released as a single in Australia.
This song made the "Filthy Fifteen", a list of songs criticized by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), an American committee formed in 1985, for having explicit lyrics. The group's mission was "to educate and inform parents" about "the growing trend in music towards lyrics that are sexually explicit, excessively violent, or glorify the use of drugs and alcohol," and to seek the censorship and rating of music. "High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)" made the list due to lyrics involving "Drug and Alcohol Use". Although there are lines in the lyrics that describe alcohol use and intoxication, the song is generally perceived to be about having fun on a Saturday night in a rock and roll, albeit hedonistic, lifestyle.
Like you Bo still listen to metal though it isn`t my main interest anymore. Just one of many like in your case.
It surely is nice to recall good old times. It was nice that Tufta shared his taste and music tracks.
Hendrix, MC5, the Who, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Iggy and the Stooges, and the New York Dolls have helped to shape Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. It is true that we eighties teenagers were impatient with the old rockers of the sixties and seventies. The music of our time was more electronic, faster, louder, meaner and different.
But it is a fact that Mid-1960s British bands such as Cream, the Yardbirds, and the Jeff Beck Group, along with Jimi Hendrix, are generally credited with developing the heavier drums, bass, and distorted guitar sounds that differentiate heavy metal from other blues-based rock. The new sound was codified in the 1970s by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath with the release of Led Zeppelin II, Deep Purple in Rock, and Paranoid, respectively, which featured heavy riffs, distorted “power chords,” mystical lyrics, guitar and drum solos, and vocal styles that ranged from the wails of Zeppelin’s Robert Plant to the whines of Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne. By developing increasingly elaborate stage shows and touring incessantly throughout the 1970s to make up for their lack of radio airplay, bands such as Kiss, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Judas Priest, and Alice Cooper established an international fan base.
Heavy metal’s popularity slumped during the disco years at the end of the 1970s, but it became more successful than ever in the 1980s as Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, and Saxon headed the “new wave of British heavy metal” that, along with the impact of Eddie Van Halen’s astonishing guitar virtuosity, revived the genre. A wave of “glam” metal, featuring gender-bending bands such as Mötley Crüe and Ratt, emanated from Los Angeles beginning about 1983; Poison, Guns N’ Roses, and hundreds of other bands then moved to Los Angeles in hopes of getting record deals. But heavy metal had become a worldwide phenomenon in both fandom and production with the success of Germany’s Scorpions and other bands from Japan to Scandinavia. The most important musical influence of the decade was the adaptation of chord progressions, figuration, and ideals of virtuosity from Baroque models, especially Bach and Vivaldi, to heavy metal. Like Van Halen, guitarists such as Ritchie Blackmore (of Deep Purple), Randy Rhoads (with Osbourne), and Yngwie Malmsteen demonstrated new levels and styles of rock guitar technique, exploding popular stereotypes of heavy metal as monolithic and musically simple.
Maybe my base was more the hard rock and Punk Rock and the heaver New Wave and Post-Punk of 1970s, I liked the rough energy and anarchy of it. I hated symphonic rock and to melodious metal, it had to be fast, furious and rock 'n roll. I liked hard rock played with the Punk philosophy. I liked heavy base drums, very fast drummers, guitars played in a speed metal manner and the raw energy, power and electricity of Heavy Metal. Maybe that is something super masculine. After the pastoral concerns of the hippies, punk was a celebration of urbanism, a reclaiming of the inner city. In Speed metal hard rock, Heavy Metal and Punk rock merged into a new kind of Metal. Armed with a critique of the music industry and consumerism early British punk spawned a resurgence of interest in rock. Back to the basics of drums, guitar and base guitar.
Groups like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Motörhead, Slayer, Anthrax, Van Halen, Napalm Death and Seltic Frost were the groups that characterised the Heavy Metal scene and the large Heavy Metal festivals like
Dynamo Open Air and the larger Metal festivals in Germany, the UK and the USA. In Poland you had Metalmania from 1986 to 2009. For Polish metal fans I hope that Metalmania will return in Spodek in Katowice, Poland. Why did they stop it? The positive thing of Heavy Metal is that young folks can release some energy and share a hobby, fondness and musical taste.
This is typical North-West European metal with the Dutch accent English of the redhead singerLink with info:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gathering_(band)Here some good oldie of the British hard rock band The Cult.
Cheers,
Pieter
P.S.-
This text is a combination of a reply to a Bo's text about Heavy Metal, my own memories, tast and opinion about hard rock and elements of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. For my reply I had to look some things up and study the music and my own teenage taste and development. I am ofcourse different and more moderate and balanced than that adolescent teenageboy from the eighties today. But I credit that teenage boy for some good musical discoveries and some nice bands he found and recorded. 
