by Brian Posehn
By seventh grade, 1978–79, my metamorphosis into a rock fan had begun. Pop and disco could no longer pierce my thickening hide. I was drawn to a lot of bands in those next couple years, several styles approaching rock and hard rock, but there was one constant that drew me to rock—the guitars, the driving beat, the attitude, the big vocals, the aggression. I grew up in a perfect time to be a hard-rock fan: it was constantly changing, and it was getting more aggressive and shocking.
I knew that when rock and roll started in the fifties it was shocking and seen as rebel music. And I wanted the modern version of that, whatever was shocking or scary now. But not too scary. And as I became more and more disenfranchised from junior high, my mom, and the church and started to feel like a misfit, I became a bigger rock fan. Rock music didn’t make me a misfit, but it was there for me when I felt left out.
By the way, I’m the first person ever to feel that way about rock music. I’m pretty fucking cool, you guys. I liked rock—we’ve established—and by eighth grade I really liked hard rock and I wanted it harder. I became obsessed with seeking it out.
I found a lot of music by listening to metal shows on the radio, reading every music magazine I could get ahold of, snooping around record stores, and just asking a record store clerk, “Hey, what is new and heavy?” and “Hey, what is that you’re playing?” and “Hey, how old do I have to be to work here?” But I didn’t always find bands on my own. Older kids in the neighborhood or at school passed quite a few of my favorite bands on to me.
Even with KISS, it was somebody else passing them on—though I never knew that mystery kid. I remember nothing about him, only that 45 and my intro to KISS. Maybe it was a ghost kid. Maybe it was the devil getting me to sell my soul to Satan through the music of four dorks in makeup. Lots of other music was first introduced to me by some cool, older kid. Just like I’d been schooled on comedy legends Richard Pryor and Cheech and Chong from two older neighborhood stoners, John and Doug, I’d learn about music in similar ways—well, one way—from neighborhood stoners.
I heard about a lot of my favorite bands at school. I was exposed to AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, The Cars, and Pink Floyd through other kids in junior high. Actually, my math teacher, Mr. Ross, had a Nugent poster in his class. I doubt he still does—it’s pretty liberal where I grew up, and Mr. Ross wore Birkenstocks and taught math and drama. So he’s not dumb, and he not only likes theater, he taught it. He probably gave kids an outlet for shit the Nuge would frown on and try to shoot at.
In seventh grade I remember the Blues Brothers and The Eagles being super popular. “Cool” kids played the Blues Brothers on their boombox at lunch. I didn’t get it. I liked the Blues Brothers routine on SNL and would later love their movie, but I gotta be honest: outside of “Rubber Biscuit,” the music didn’t do much for me. They were playing old man’s music. I wanted music for me.
At one point it seemed like everybody in my entire junior high loved The Eagles, but not this guy. “Hey Posehn, what is your favorite Eagles album?” Me, totally panicking, “Um, the one with ‘Hotel California’ on it.” They all laughed. “That is Hotel California, dumbass. That’s what the album is called.” Ugh, really fun times. I got made fun of for not liking the fucking Eagles. I should have killed everyone there just for that.
Billy Joel was huge at my school too. I didn’t like Billy Joel. Now I fucking hate Billy Joel. Glass Houses was super popular. Somebody played it during art, and I thought it sounded like beer commercial music.
I didn’t dig Springsteen either or most of the shit I heard in art class. Didn’t love Bob Seger or The Steve Miller Band. I didn’t think his song “Rock’n Me” was very rocking at all. In fact, I found the Steve Miller Band to be rather lacking in the rock department.
It wasn’t all shitty classic rock, which back then we just called rock. I also heard Led Zep’s “Black Dog” through a cool kid’s boombox at lunch and was stunned. The kid’s name was Joel. I didn’t know much about him other than the fact that he knew everyone, everyone loved him, he was a seventh-grader, and the eighth-graders didn’t fuck with him. When I heard Robert Plant’s opening line, “Hey, hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove,” my twelve-year-old brain was trying to figure out what the heck that super-cool-sounding singer guy was saying and who he was saying it to.
Then the band kicked in with this monstrous groove. I knew about Zeppelin, but being kid-centric, I kind of saw them as an older person’s band, like Black Sabbath or Deep Purple. My uncle liked Led Zeppelin. He also liked Hendrix, The Stones, and The Who. So I lumped them in together. They were cool, but not for me. I wanted current music, which is how Zep really won me over: they made a great record in ’79, In Through the Out Door. It might not be their best record, but it was new and pretty cool, and that was enough. I bought the cassette and was officially a Zeppelin fan.
I found a couple of other bands at Altamira Junior High—Cheap Trick, The Cars, and Pat Benatar, who I instantly liked. And Pink Floyd, who I didn’t click with right away. I heard quite a bit of Pink Floyd’s The Wall during art class. I liked the single “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two,” but I thought the rest was too mellow. Now I think “Comfortably Numb” is one of the best songs ever. Pot and age will make anyone a Pink Floyd lover.
Actually, most of my musical schooling happened closer to home. Thin Lizzy was on the radio, but my friend Tony’s older brother, Mike, told me “Aw, man, they don’t play the good shit on the radio. You gotta listen to the whole Jailbreak album.” He’s right: that album rules. Mike had a UFO sticker on his Camaro, so he knew what he was talking about. I was aware of the band UFO, but only that I knew cool older kids with nice cars and mustaches liked them. Mike wasn’t the only older sibling of a friend who influenced me.
Enter Kristi. Hinchman’s cute, older sister. Kristi was only two years older than us, but like Tami Baker, she and her friends seemed like adults to me. She was like Lori Partridge, but wilder and more 1979: she made out in Camaros with dudes with mustaches. They were seventeen but looked like the teens in Porky’s, which is to say thirty-year-olds. She lived with Hinchman’s mom but still kept stuff at her dad’s house. When she wasn’t around we raided her record collection.
Through her or, more importantly, from rooting through her shit, I was turned on to Motörhead: Ace of Spades, Black Sabbath: Paranoid, and that terrible fucking “human” Ted Nugent’s Double Live Gonzo. And she’s responsible indirectly for turning me on to one of the single-greatest metal records ever, the sonic perfection that is Judas Priest: British Steel. Through Kristi I also heard about local Bay Area bands Yesterday and Today as well as Huey Lewis and the News; I stuck with one of them. Yesterday and Today became Y&T, and Huey Lewis and the News were notable for ruining the eighties.
I remember learning about Van Halen from Jamie, an older girl who lived in our apartment complex. Jamie was my sometime babysitter. And by learning, I mean she schooled me like a hard-rock professor. One night she brought over Van Halen: I and II and played them on my mom’s stereo. She played “Beautiful Girls,” “Running with the Devil,” her favorite, “Jamie’s Crying,” and a couple of others. I loved all of it. The guitars. Those vocals. It was heavy and very slick and melodic at the same time.
We looked at the album covers: “This is Eddie and Alex Van Halen. Eddie is the best guitarist since Hendrix.” My Van Halen lessons worked; I bought both albums immediately. So when Van Halen released their third record, Women and Children First, I was waiting for it. And it was awesome. One of their heaviest records. Women and Children First was my first Van Halen record. I bought it on cassette first, because of one word: Walkman.
Because I was able to have music with me at all times in 1980, my cassette buying increased. I amassed a pretty big collection quickly. I was still getting vinyl, mind you. Some stuff you could only get on vinyl, especially when I started going more metal. Jamie also turned me on to Journey, and her mom taugh
t me what marijuana smelled like. Her house also smelled like my Uncle Gary’s house and my friend Larry’s mom. Jamie only babysat me a couple of times because I was getting to the age when I didn’t need a sitter really, but I loved that she brought records over. Kids today don’t know about bringing records over to someone’s house without bringing irony and kitsch with them. And fuck irony and kitsch. Never been a fan.
The years 1980 and 1981 were great for my musical development. I got deeper into Van Halen and Journey and bought Infinity and Evolution with my sweet paper route cash. And I was properly introduced to bands I’d only heard of previously, like UFO, April Wine, Triumph, and Black Sabbath. A kid in freshman wood shop had bought Heaven and Hell from the record store across the street from the high school. I honestly wasn’t a Black Sabbath fan before that; I think I was kinda scared of them. Actually, I know I was. As a Christian kid I thought their act seemed real and pretty scary.
He had the vinyl in class, and I looked at the art and was in. It was subtle, not overtly evil and too scary. That was my intro to Black Sabbath, the first album with the new singer, Ronnie James Dio. Black Sabbath with Dio was new, so I was fired up to check it out. Not long after I bought Heaven and Hell, the Heavy Metal soundtrack with the new Sabbath song, “The Mob Rules,” was released. Which, to this day, is still one of my favorite Sabbath songs. A couple of months later the album Mob Rules dropped.
The more nerdy I got about music, the more I wanted to go to a live show. I wanted KISS to be my first concert; they came through San Francisco on the Dynasty tour in 1979. I didn’t love that album, but I still wanted to see them. It was a big nope from my mom. She thought I was too young. I was so jealous of the kids from school who went. They were two friends, Pete and Brian, and from their details about the show, Ace Frehley sounded like the highlight. He was still my favorite in eighth grade. And then Ace left soon after, so missing the show really stung. Or Ace was fired, depends on which KISS member’s book you read. I of course read them all. And, of course, Ace’s was the best.
A year and a half later, in the summer of 1981, I would finally go to my first concert. It was Y&T, the Tubes, and local act 415 (the SF area code) at the Petaluma Fairgrounds. Music nerd fact, 415 featured the singer Eric Martin, who later had a solo band, The Eric Martin Band, and the song “Sucker for a Pretty Face.” Anybody? Didn’t think so. Eric also sang for Mr. Big with Billy Sheehan from Talas, David Lee Roth, and a million other eighties bands.
I went to the concert with Hinchman and my mom’s friend’s daughter. Don’t even remember her name. Yep, barely knew her, but I wanted to go to that concert so bad, so when I heard my mom’s friend Lynn tell my mom that her daughter was going to the Petaluma Fair, I jumped on it, did some schmoozing and finagling, and a week later we were watching Y&T with fellow teens and drunk grownups. The friend, Lynn’s daughter or whatever, didn’t even watch the concert; she just dropped off two young boys and picked them up four hours later. The late seventies were so awesome. There were no weirdos or murderers yet because murder wasn’t invented until 1982.
The Tubes were the headliners, but Hinchman and I really wanted to see Y&T the most. We liked The Tubes—I had seen them play “White Punks on Dope” on TV—but that was as deep as I went on them. And 415, the local openers, weren’t terrible, just late-eighties pop rock, like The Babies. But they were not our focus at all; we came for the middle act. That both bands didn’t suck was a bonus, but these two dudes came over the hill from Sonoma to Petaluma at fifteen years old to see Y&T, as previously indicated.
And we were not disappointed. They made me a bigger fan than I already was. It was the Earthshaker Tour; I had to score the Earthshaker album the day after the concert. Lead singer/guitar player Dave Meniketti was putting on a guitar-shredding clinic, an impressive front-man and overall badass. When they played “Rescue Me” it was super explosive and dynamic. The whole band ripped, but Dave was the star; his guitar playing was the most impressive musical feat I’d ever seen.
His tone was incredible, and still, in my mind, Dave Meniketti is one of the most underrated hard-rock guitar players around. Hinchman and I definitely both loved the live experience and wanted more of it. I had a blast being a part of this big group, and it introduced me to songs I didn’t already know. At the end of the show I wanted to delve deeper into Y&T but also experience more live events. I wouldn’t get to go to another live show for a whole other year, but I was hooked on concerts. Forty years of concert T-shirts and drunk dudes peeing too close for my liking at a giant piss trough awaited me.
I liked a lot of music in those years; it was a full-on obsession. But my favorites by the end of ’81 were Van Halen, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, and America’s favorite madman, Ozzy. I also started a lifelong love affair with Rush. Those three genius Canadians have a whole chapter coming up, so hang on. I was already a fan of AC/DC after hearing Highway to Hell. Then my freshman year Back in Black was released, the first album since rock god and original singer Bon Scott’s death. It didn’t take long to get used to Brian Johnson, Scott’s replacement. The riffs were still great from the guitar god brothers, Angus and Malcolm Young. But this record somehow sounded bigger than anything they’d done before. Production was a new concept for me.
By junior high I was back in therapy; I went to the same guy for several years. When my mom and I were at our worst, we started going to a family therapist named Hank. He helped as much as he could. When high school was at its worst, I went to him by myself. He actually became a friend. Hank would let me earn AC/DC cassettes as incentives for not being a dick to my mom. He used his own money to help me—what a cool dude. More about Hank my helpful shrink later. I earned copies of High Voltage and Powerage next. AC/DC were another obsession. I blew out my mom’s speakers with Back in Black.
Back in Black wasn’t too dramatic, not like a music video or Back to the Future—there were no explosions. I was just cranking the iconic title track “Back in Black,” and the opening riff sounded amazing so loud, and then it didn’t. There was a loud buzz, followed by a sound of a playing card flapping on a bicycle wheel. The paper woofer cone on her cheap-ass JCPenney’s speakers had ripped. It was like a heavy-metal rite of passage, ruining your mom’s stereo. Thanks, Angus and Malcolm! Fuck you, Mom. Christmas 1981 at my Uncle Gary’s in Tahoe was dominated by a gift from my mom, a cassette of AC/DC, For Those About to Rock. She got better at gifts when I told her exactly what to get. The title track played over and over to drown out my mom and my nana’s constant bickering that holiday. Great record, but heavier stuff was taking over. I also played the crap out of my gift of Rush, Exit… Stage Left. This whole time I was getting deeper and deeper into Rush, but, like I said, more about them later.
I found Def Leppard in a Musicland, a chain record store in the Santa Rosa mall. As California chain record stores went, it wasn’t the best. Tower ruled, but I didn’t have one close by. I heard the Def Leppard riffs first and asked the clerk what was playing. He pointed to the cover of their second album, High ‘N’ Dry. It was brand new. I had been shopping for school clothes with my mom and ducked into the record store because it was impossible at that point for me to walk by a record store and not go in. I walked in and had to have whatever this was that was playing. I didn’t know who they were, but the production sounded like AC/DC’s Back in Black.
They were both produced by the same guy, John “Mutt” Lange. So, duh. The vocalist had a different singing style from Brian Johnson. He had a smoother voice, and the music was more melodic and slicker than AC/DC, but the opening track, “Let It Go,” drew me in and didn’t let me go. Sorry, I just flashbacked to writing high school music reviews. It was hard rock, not quite metal. It was the innate musicality and melody to it that I was drawn to it and had that metallic guitar tone. I loved the hooks. I liked the lyrics. Sure, they were simple, but to a young kid they reeked of cool. I was drawn to their attitude, and with the guys in the band teenagers themselves, it added to the appeal:
teenage rebellion music made by teenagers. Fucking-A! Sign me up, man!
I got really into that record—cassette, rather—and played it all the time. It is a perfect record, not a bum track on the whole thing. Def Leppard wound up being such a massive band after this, and that would be hard for me and tested my fandom. I bailed on them after Pyromania but still think they’re a great band with a unique sound and some of the biggest hooks in rock. I’m not gonna make one-armed drummer jokes. You and I are both better than that. Two years later they would have one of the biggest albums in the country, and I would start hating Def Leppard.
Of all the music I’d hear my freshman year, none would be as life changing as Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne. Maiden was mind-blowing. I had never heard anything as cool and as heavy as them. The other stuff I listened to was hard rock. This was heavy metal. Maiden had this indescribable authenticity, and the whole band had chops. I didn’t even know what chops were—it was so intense and complex and not like anything I’d ever heard.
I heard Killers before I heard Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut. And though I dig Iron Maiden, I prefer the second record. It’s heavier and better produced. Killers starts with “Ides of March,” this metallic instrumental with marching percussion, a ripping guitar solo, then “Wrathchild” starts, Dave Murray rips a mini-solo, and heavy metal changed forever. Paul DiAnno’s menacing vocals start.
And at that time I had never heard anything this fast or aggressive. The metal screams were the coolest thing ever, and the lyrics—holy shit. “Wrathchild” is revenge horror; the singer is hunting a dude down. Then comes “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is based on Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The lyrics were always a draw for me with Iron Maiden, and I thought it was so cool that they wrote songs inspired by literary works; they would do it more and more over the years. For me it started here. I had always loved storytelling songs, and Maiden did that song after song. They don’t get half the credit they deserve.