Minor League Rocker

Cover art is metal to the max - and so are the tunes.

Let me take you back to when I was 14 years old. This is gonna surprise you, but I didn’t really listen to much music. None of it got me excited. I often listened to Top 40 radio while playing computer games, but that was more like background noise.

My hesher of a neighbor at that time took it upon himself to set me on the right track (at least musically). He started me off slowly, ramping up the intensity as I began to immerse myself into his metal culture. Though he led the way, I also began discovering my own stuff. Here are 5 albums that changed the way I rock, in no particular order. Those supplied by The Hesher Neighbor are starred.

Savage Amusement* (Scorpions) - The Hesher and I might be the only people on the planet who actually like this album. Word is the Scorps themselves don’t even like it because of its meticulous over-production. But this was my first exposure, and I loved Klaus’s voice and the HUGE guitar tone. Even today, this album also has a dark, menacing gleam absent in any other Scorpions album.

Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II* (Helloween) - Okay, so riddle me this: Why did Master of Puppets get so much more attention than Keeper Part II? After all, this album is more intense, the playing more mind-boggling, the themes just as apocalyptic (yet often humorous). My theory? Helloween drew heavily from classicial music with wild harmony parts and a singer with crazy vocal range. Metallica drew from more accessible punk. I also think Helloween’s often-absurd lyrics -and farm animal noises- made it hard for them to take as seriously, even after they’d clean house with a blazing dual harmony guitar solo. I will also say that every Helloween riff had a point, where Metallica often got bogged down in riffs for riffs’ sake, just to through something in there. Kind of like The Dave Mustaine Project (aka Megadeth).

Live After Death (Iron Maiden) - My first exposure to Iron Maiden came from a mix tape a dude named Neil made for me. One listen, and I scuttled to the record store for a live album. It was like giving a espresso to an infant, an instant shot of “WTF that rules!” that delighted me. Everybody in the band sounds like they have a piece of Stonehenge its very self tucked away in their stretchy pants. “Aces High” remains an all-time favorite, as do many of the other classics on this stupendously awesome live album. I even love that spot in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” where Bruce Dickinson sounds more like Al Bundy than himself (”Then, the spell starts t’break!”).

Beast from the East (Dokken) - As a high school junior, a girl named Tracy sat behind me in English class. She decreed that I needed to listen to Dokken, so she dubbed a copy of her live Beast album. And let me tell you, this thing rocked me silly. George Lynch’s guitar tone was monumental, and Don Dokken had a gritty vibe that sounded heavy as hell. I was almost crushed when I got a hold of a studio album - oy vey, so overproduced, shiny and barren. But this … this was awesome stuff. The same songs, but stripped to their essentials and delivered with feeling.

Queensryche's Michael Wilton - He rules, and plays the most awesome ESP on the planet. Photo from Hotsource.com.au.

Operation Mindcrime* (Queensryche) - Gadzooks! To this day, no album impacts my mood as much as Mindcrime. I’ve removed it from my car, because it makes me want to crash my Subaru into a Hummer, steal a steamroller and go on an anti-authority rampage. The guitar tone is studiously and purposefully annoying (as admitted by the members), but so evocative. The songs interlink quite well. The arrangements are dense. They employ both guitarists to good effect, rather than just having them double each other. I love the way the play different voicings of the same chord, a technique I try to apply in Hung Dynasty songs. I know this list isn’t supposed to have any order, but this might be the #1.