[canadaspaceman]

When grunge hit I was disgusted and hated it. Bunch of no talents who could barely play their instruments. Started listening to top 40 then country of all things ( Martina McBride, Reba, Trisha Yearwood, etc.).

yes, in the 1990s when it was trendy to be into grunge and death metal, i got into country music too. It was honest music.
I think real metallers always go against the grain.
Glad I got into it, and that lead to me checking into David Allan Coe, and rockabilly like Ricky Nelson.
for example,
In the 1980s i was caught between liking/hating glam. Now? don't care if people know what I like,and learning the glamsters got more pussy than anybody else.

[vertigoflow]

If Blue Oyster Cult counts I had a cassette I would listen to walking to school almost every day when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

The next year I picked up this compilation and got a couple of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath records and was hooked for life.

[canadaspaceman]

If Blue Oyster Cult counts I had a cassette I would listen to walking to school almost every day when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

The next year I picked up this compilation and got a couple of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath records and was hooked for life.

Yes, Blue Oyster Cult is included, they used to be called the world's first all jewish heavy metal band.

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[Vfm71]

When I was around seven, my father had a friend who was a DJ. It was the time of disco music and he had many records and a really cool sound system. I was crazy to mess with it but they left me with an old electrola and the discs that did not pay. And so I found Black Sabbath's Sabotage on the "bad" stack, the record never left my hands ever since. I have it until today

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[Xzalter]

Since I don't consider classic rock stuff (sabbath,purple,lizzy...blablabla) metal, I would say 12 years old - Grim Reaper See You In Hell.... I love you Steve I am now 50..................

[Robbert]

There was always music at our house thank to my music nut dad. The first band I was into was KISS. They had a worldwide #1 hit in 1979 so I must have been 10 years old then. Of course I didn't realise then true hard rockers considered them 'traitors' for their disco sellout move.

When my parents divorced I visited my dad every other weekend and he took me to my first rock shows. The first one was the BruPop Festival in a small local town where the headliner was the Pat Travers Band.

He also took me to see KISS in Leiden with an up and coming British Band called Iron Maiden as the support act.

It was a good time to be into hard rock and heavy metal in The Netherlands. There were two shows on prime time radio that played it, Alfred Lagarde's Beton (mostly classic hard rock) and Hanneke Kappen's Stampij (focusing a lot on the upcoming NWOBHM).

To me heavy metal is hard rock's younger and more brutal cousin. Even the more extreme forms of metal haven't changed that for me. I hate it when people state that Black Sabbath singlehandedly invented heavy metal and that a band like Deep Purple has no place in its history. Purism is dumb.

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[Yurei]

About 12 or 13 with KISS and Aerosmith (back when they were still good).

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[gothika]

I was a kid..not sure at what age tho

[achad1979]

14 years old, a friend from that time lent me two Slayer cassettes - Live Undead and Hell Awaits and all started!!

We start with the tape trading, well I gave them blank cassettes, unbranded 90-minute black cassettes. I still remember those days, kinda.

What hit me hard was the "Them" album that I remember, I didn't even study becouse i was nothing but listen to that album, I was 16 years old maybe.

Cheers!!!!!!!!

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[Azrael444]

I had first contact with metal music through early 2000's Popular bands like Linkin Park(nu-metal), and video game soundtracks also had some of metal music in them for example Need for Speed underoung 1 and 2, 'Most Wanted" had Bullet for my Valentine and Avenged Sevenfold tracs, but when I really started with metal music was 2007, when I was 10. Linkin Park became my favourite band, the same year I was introduced to System of A Down. 1 year later started listenin to Disturbed thanks to NFS soundtrack. and in 2009 I had a contact with "legit metal" in form of Metallica- Black Album and Iron Maiden - Number of the Beast (1982). After that I started listening to Iron Maiden in 2009, I was 12 years old and I thought that this is serious metal haha, like Im not even supposed to hear such music. I didn't knew about metal one bit, but I was curious enough to see why some people complain about Metal in the first place, I was curious if there is a metal that is unpleasent to hear and *too heavy* - and that determined many of my future findings and new genre exploration, the search for *heaviness* but anyway... In late 2009 I check metal music Wikipedia and found that Iron Maiden is a heavy metal (I thought it was the toughest metal music at that point. And then discovered that Thrash metal is supposed to be more harsh and then that Death metal is the most heavy of metal genres, while Black metal is just satanism added to rage on instruments ahahhahahah. But because of that I had contact with Melodic Death metal (In flames), and Slayer. So again when I was 12 I wondered what is the hardest metal song and In some guitar hero game the Judas Priest track was the hardest one to do so it came to me that Painkiller by Judas Priest is the best metal song, this way I discovered Death, that was a very very first band for me to show me Death metal, I was very surpirised about the way of playing, I started discovering their albums in backward order. So the progressive metal was a huge mystery for me, why are they playing like that, so yeah Death was the first *REAL METAL* band for me (because Iron maiden is soft af), and I was 13 at that time
listening to Death on daily basis. and i stucked with that band for about 2 years, then I got into Acid Drinkers (thrash metal) and 3 years later when I was 16 I started discovering Melo death/ Doom metal, Death metal, some non-satanic Black metal and that way my whole horizon just opened and metal became part of my life, Sorry for such long post but ive always thought that it was very weird for me to be into Death metal at 13/14 years of age.

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[KennyT]

I started in 1973 at age 11... and had been listening to stuff like T Rex, Alice C, Slade, Sweet and Quatro. The first Metal song I ever heard was Sweet Leaf by Black Sabbath, and I thought the noise at the intro. was the sound of a dying seal! A huge Sabbath fan ever since!

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[Deathdancer]

I don't know an exact age or what people consider metal. The Aussie pub scene of the 70's wasn't metal but we had bands playing louder and harder than many other bands of the time. I remember buying Destroyer, and at the same time buying In Rock and Black Sabbath, but they seemed like a natural progression from what I was listening to rather than actually starting to listen to something new. By the early to mid 80's bands like Renegade, Virgin Soldiers, Slaughter Lord and Tyrus were start to play regular gigs and metal definitely took over as a genre of choice.

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[nickkxx87]

I discovered metal alone, at the golden age of 11 through a Greek radio station that was called Atlantis... (unfortunatelly this station nowadays is for mostly for mainstream "rock - pop" listeners....)

The first song was from Raw Silk - Street Girl!

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[canadaspaceman]

I think it was canadaspaceman. It got me to thinking about grunge. I was listening to classic metal bands, thrash bands, and even hair metal up until grunge appeared. I got seriously angry about the existence of grunge when it was becoming big. I hated everything about it from the whiney negativity of the lyrics to its thrift store fashion statement. .

In Toronto, hard rockers/metalheads in the 1970/80s , until grunge-era, wore lumber jackets and flannel shirts, which is one way that crappy Seattle scene faked their way/glommed onto metal.
i don't have many pics from back then, will have to dig them up.

[Deathdancer]

We wore flannel shirts and less so lumber jackets in favour of denim jackets in Oz through the 70's, 80's and early 90's, then metalheads started getting fashionable. Nike shoes, labels on the button up shirts so the band t-shirt could be seen underneath, faded jeans that were bought faded and actually had a cut too them rather just denim that covered the legs.

Then in the late 90's as more metalheads grew up, got jobs and became upstanding members of society some of the gigs in the city actually had people showing up straight from work in their collar and ties, although the true metalhead always removed his tie and stuffed it in his shirt pocket! :)

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[poserkiller]

I was 13 years old in 1983-84 when I got into metal. Grim Reaper and Ratt, then got into the heavier stuff like Venom, Slayer, Possessed and Celtic Frost by 1984-85.

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