I'm a bit of an oddity, I think. I lived in small town Canada, under a thousand people 20 miles from the nearest city. In 1974, at the age of 16, I quit school and went to work at a factory making windows and doors, the only place to work in town. The first thing I did was to start assembling a stereo, and in about six months I had an Akai 15 watt per channel amp, a Dual Noresco 701 direct drive turntable and Shure cartridge, a pair of generic three way speakers - 12 inch woofer, 6 inch mid range, and 2 inch cone tweeter - I'd gotten from a liquidation warehouse, and about 100 albums.

I'd been introduced to rock by an older sister who was more than a little wild. Most of what I had would be called classic rock now: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Deep Purple, etc., but it was all brand new and glorious to me. I'd started hanging around with an older guy that I worked with. He already had a large record collection and introduced me to bands like Captain Beyond, Nektar, Genesis, Arthur Brown, and Eloy. In the winter of 1976 he went on vacation to Los Angeles. Two weeks later I got a phone call, and he said, "Hey, man, I just pulled into the driveway. You have to come and see this!" When I got there he had the trunk open and was pulling out bundles of albums. I couldn't believe my eyes; the trunk and back seat were stuffed full. He'd gone to a place in LA called The Record Warehouse that sold bundles of 25 records for $10 USD -- bought 500 albums in all. They were all "deletes" with a hole punched through the label near the spindle hole. We got them into the house and started going through them. Anything that looked interesting we would put on the turntable and give it a listen. One band that blew us away was a band called Judas Priest, the Sin After Sin album. Neither of us had heard of them and we were absolutely fucking amazed! It was a demo copy, with "Promotional Copy, Not For Sale" printed on it in big red letters; the label on the record was plain white with the same warning. In all there were six copies of it. Another band we had never heard of was Hawkwind. The Hall of the Mountain Grill album. If I remember correctly, 8 copies. Twenty-something copies of Ian Thomas, Good Night Mrs. Calabash! Coven, Angel, Scorpions . . . many others that I don't remember any more. We spent pretty much all night going through things.

Fast forward to 1986. I was working for Canadian Pacific Railroad on the Steel Gang. We'd been working on the main line towards Calgary from Mission, BC, and finally arrived at Kamloops. We were parked out of town on a siding, working 10 days on and four days off. A bunch of us got together and rented rooms on the strip for a four day drunk. I had a ghetto blaster and several cases of cassettes that I took everywhere with me. There was a whole lot of metal going on: Accept, Helloween, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Dio, Metallica, Merciful Fate, Judas Priest, Scorpions -- I had tons of that shit. While I was in Vancouver, before I'd caught the bus out to Mission, I'd gone to Sam The Record Man in Vancouver and picked up some new albums. One of those was Bathory, The Return(Sorry for the shitty quality. I tried a couple dozen times and my awesome $50 digital camera just aint up to the task.) Here it is in my cassette rack; can you spot it? I remember sitting in the motel room and someone put it in the blaster. They all thought it sucked huge donkey balls; I thought it rocked like fuck. In the end it all comes down to taste, I guess. I originally thought it might be my first taste of death metal, if you can call it that (certainly the beginnings of thrash.), then I realized I still had a Venom album, bought new at that time, that was older. The Warfare album is a limited edition, and, as some of you may know, Carnivore's Peter Steele (R.I.P) eventually went on to form Type O Negative. Coven, of course, was the original black metal band.

Well, I could go on a lot longer, but this is getting a little long. I've handed off my record collection, some 800 albums that I had in storage (found another 100 or so under the stairs a couple months ago, that included the ones shown), to a nephew. He was starting to get into metal and learning the guitar, so I thought it was time. \m/