Golden Lake Michigan - 1984-ish

I bought my first AC/DC album at Target - Dirty Deeds, not long after we moved to Duluth, first Target I had ever seen. Must have been 79, 80. Over the next years I bought every AC/DC album that had ever been released, and nothing else. In '82 I heard Number of the Beast and switched to Iron Maiden. From there I started discovering all of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal albums, pretty much entirely on my own - with Sean and Randy - but for all practical purposes... this was long before the Intrenets. We seemed to have a knack for choosing new artists from the pictures and social clues available on the outside of their plastic-sealed album covers. As the dust settles twenty-five years later, we found many hidden gems , and didn't really get hung up on crazy crap.

The Metal world is a place that I always figured out for myself, in the combinations that made sense to me, and it still is. I pay as little attention as possible to style, and genre, and personality, I like guitar-riffs, I like music. (now- I mean, back in the day style was of course, extremely important ;))

There were however, two people who greatly helped open my eyes in my transition from Metal to everything. The first was my 1985 Augsburg college dorm-mate Doug Moen, a twitchy, thinning blond hair, bean-pole from White Bear Lake who had a nervous habit of loudly snapping the fingers of one hand when excited or nervous. I came with my enlightened set of NWOBHM discs. He came with a mix of Hendrix and obscure classic rock, and a full load of the cutting-edgiest alternative rock available in 1985. Some bands I can completely acknowledge my introduction to from him include: Husker Du - Zen Arcade (which had come out the year before - local boys even), Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy and The Cult - Love - both of which had come out just that year. We didn't listen to my albums much. Somehow, he had the inside knowledge. We walked downtown a couple times, connected some, but were both lost in our own deals at that point. Never talked to him since. The music has lasted forever though.

He had half their back-catalogs too. He loved Hendrix, who I didn't love at the time, and one of his few other "classic rock" albums was Robin Trower (known as an exceptionally huge Hendrix fan) - Bridge of Sighs album. That title track was covered as a bonus song on the 2008 album by a band that you know that I know: Opeth. Full circle.

The other influence... I met soon after returning to dull-hut, after that first year away - through Randy in fact, happened to live in an apartment on the next block...

another time.