That’s just the way life is; anything that makes you and everything around you feel really excellent, sorry, but it will hook you so severely that you’d think you were a myopic trout. I know this, because I encountered this principle at work in my own life, back in the early Eighties. No, it wasn’t dope or booze or fast floozies that got me-- it was a substance even more insidiously addictive.

My habit, brothers and sisters, was Heavy Metal. I tried it just the one time, I swear, and pretty soon I was bathing in the wicked stuff. It was true, what they warned me of. Just a little taste was all it took, and next thing you know I was growing my hair long, lobbying for a leather jacket, and giving my mother earaches. I had fallen into the dreaded trap of gateway drugs... well, "gateway bands" would be a better term, I guess, but Mom probably thought it was drugs just the same.

Let me tell you my sordid tale...

It was the worst of times... period. Like the Great Depression, you cannot truly understand how bad it was unless you lived through it. The period of 1980-1982 was a vast musical wasteland, groaning under the weight of numb-dick synth-pop and geek-given New Wave and IQ-impaired Euro-crap; an ever-present crud-stream flowed through this vista, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of pseudo-punk failures, country-lite, dullard-dance, and pop whack-offs. In short, there was no shortage of shit, and an emergent MTV made doubly sure that everyone got a heaping plateful. The new network played the fat bastard of a schoolmaster to my Oliver Twist, only sort of in reverse-- instead of saying "Please, sir, I want some more," I was pleading "No more, please!" And they kept ladling sewage into my bowl. Sewage like "He’s So Shy" and "Funkytown" and "The One That You Love" and "Bette Davis Eyes." Let’s not forget "9 To 5" by Dolly Parton (not to be confused with "Morning Train (Nine to Five)" by Sheena Easton) and "Queen of Hearts" by Juice Newton and "Mickey" by Tony Basil. It was an era when Duran Duran, Bonnie Tyler, ABC, and Gino Vanelli (affectionately nicknamed 'Antichrist') all walked tall. The Thompson Twins and Thomas Dolby made livings. And Boy George kept warbling "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?"... even though everybody I knew answered resoundingly in the affirmative.

But none of this prevented my younger self from watching MTV-- quite the opposite, in fact. My brother and I logged enough Music Television hours for our pilot’s license, slack-jawed and wall-eyed and working contours into the furniture. We didn’t know any better and there was nobody to warn us against the evils of this new corporate criminal society. Well, except for my parents, who made us turn it off as soon as they got home from work and scolded us for inviting rot like that into our brains, but who ever listened to them? Looking back, I realize now that if someone had come right out and asked me which songs I liked on MTV, I probably would have answered "What songs? I’m watching videos here." I didn’t really like or dislike anything on MTV. It wasn’t a matter of taste and preference. Odd people doing strange things in under four minutes, that was what MTV was all about. It was okay.

It all turned around on one fateful day in 1983. A new video came on the Almighty Tube. Big deal, right? New videos were MTV’s bologna and cheese, right? The ten-year-old version of me had sat through tons of "video premieres" in his time, and none of them had given him any more stimulation than fifteen minutes with a Rubik’s Cube.

This one was different. The plot of the thing was not exactly inspired by John le Carre: in the beginning, an unkempt teen was eventually overwhelmed by his stereo system, which kept growing and growing until it was roughly the size of a nuclear missile silo. In the second act, the band was playing to a congregation of its faithful fans, which has never been the most original idea to include in any video. But a chaotic storyline and cheesy visuals have never hurt anyone, no matter what your art teacher or music professors say. As videos go, this one was pretty cool.

I’ve got to admit that, at first, I didn’t even hear the music. In my defense, this was par for the course when I was watching Music Television. Music was hardly necessary. No, the thing I noticed first was the image of this band, this Quiet Riot. Like a Bigfoot sighting, I’d never actually seen anything like them before; but (also like a Bigfoot) I knew immediately what I was looking at. Tigerskin trousers, long hair, guitars, leather-- yep, what we had here was what they call a "heavy metal band." I was so much in shock that I would have sat down if I hadn’t already been sitting down.

See, if you were the approximate age I was in the early Eighties, heavy metal groups were a lot like Russians-- you heard plenty about them, but you never truly ran into any. None of the grown-ups involved in my formative years made any bones about the fact that heavy metal was one of the Bad Things in Life That You Have to Avoid. Like razors in Halloween apples and (come to think of it) punk rockers, it was a threat unseen, an enemy that the big, dumb adults would never let you get a decent look at. One heard all kinds of stories about bat-eating and spitting on crosses-- if I have room in a future column, I’ll relate how I managed to become deathly afraid of Kiss at age five (it all began with a marauding, teenage band of trick-or-treaters in Kiss gear, and finally ended when my mother, in an astonishing moment of role reversal, told me to lighten up, they were just a rock band). In addition, the type of kids who were listening to hard rock in elementary school were also more often than not the type of kids who beat you up if you even approached them, so it was difficult to get an honest opinion.

Thus, the Quiet Riot video for "Cum On Feel the Noize" was my first sighting of a metal band. I found, to my horror, that I liked it. I honest to goodness enjoyed it. There was no devil-worshipping or axe murdering going on-- it was just four grown men acting goofy. To their credit, they seemed to be having a lot more fun than the Human League ever did. I liked how the singer made a funny face when he sang "So you say I got a funny face," and then went on to say that, nevertheless, it made him money, and also that he didn’t know why... no, he didn’t know why. I liked how the drummer attacked his instrument like that gorilla in the commercial, the one who beat up on all that luggage. I liked how they all wore colorful clothes and were unable to sit still for one moment at a time, like they had insects down their pants or something. I liked the guest appearance by Dr. Doom from my Spiderman comics. All in all, I felt like Luke Skywalker being tempted by Darth Vader to come over to the Dark Side.

Then another sensation hit me, like an anvil on Wile E. Coyote. I truly liked the music too.

This was all too much, but there was no denying that the music was maybe the thing I liked the most about it. It reminded me of the cool rock ‘n’ roll that my dad played once in a long while, the stuff played by San Francisco bands who could hardly take time out of their grueling hallucinogenic regimen to even tune up, the stuff he put on when he had two too many and Mom was already asleep. There wasn’t a trace of howling, hissing, or barking-- from the rumors I’d heard about heavy metal, I was expecting at least two out of the three. There was one part where Kevin Dubrow screamed, but it was a good-natured scream, the kind of war-cry you’d give when you were playing kick-the-can and had just punted that Folger’s canister halfway down the alley. It was so energetic and wonderfully absurd that I couldn’t help smiling. It was a rainbow riot of circus clowns and storm warnings and pogo-stick races. The video was cool, yes, but the music just couldn’t be lived without.

Then it was over, done in four minutes and forty-seven seconds. I couldn’t believe it. It was going to take a lot more time than that for me to figure it all out.

I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who first started turning on to heavy metal at approximately the same time I did, when metal first began to go overground. Unless you had a cool older brother or a father who owned Uriah Heep albums, there was no consistent outlet where you could find metal-- other than (once in awhile) the aforementioned MTV. And after seeing Quiet Riot, the grand majority of MTV’s play-lists were repugnant to me. Always the ironic one, my mom was ecstatic about the fact that I had seemingly outgrown videos and VJs and Devo. Then I started my love affair with what my mother has always referred to as bands with "purple hair and tight pants." Mom was very non-plussed.

But, if you did happen to be developing a metal addiction at the same time I was, you remember "Cum On Feel the Noize" and you also surely remember the subsequent indoctrination sessions that you went through when Music Television deigned to play heavy metal. Things were pretty quiet: I’d somehow convinced Mom to buy me the Quiet Riot tape for Christmas or a birthday, and I was forbidden to play it when my Dad was sleeping, when the dog was sleeping, when my parents were home, when they weren’t home, on Sundays, on days of the week, when we had company, or on any holiday-- even Islamic ones. Then came1984 (draw your own metaphorical conclusions here) and Quiet Riot was all of a sudden the least of her troubles.

If memory serves, Twisted Sister was the next onslaught to the moral and aesthetic sense that my mother and all of Western Civilization had spent good time instilling in me. TS’s video for "We’re Not Gonna Take It" was a perfect vehicle to interest young and impressionable viewers; it had cartoonish violence and grown men acting goofy again, only now they were dressed like women. This made it even goofier. I immediately got the joke, if I do say so myself. You see, Twisted Sister was trying to look like a nightmare version of every kid’s big sister. As for myself, I didn’t have a big sister and I thanked my lucky stars for it. Some of my friends had them and, trust me, Dee Snider seemed docile and amiable in comparison. In addition, the song was a tonic of directionless rebellion for me (back when I had no empowerment and also not the first clue how to go about rebelling about it), even though I thought at first, quite seriously, that the tune was directed towards criminals. But clear thematic content was not a big requirement for me at the time; I preferred shout-along choruses and vague aggression. Some say this is a preference that has continued to the present day.

Speaking of gender-bending, Milton Berle actually starred in Ratt’s video for "Round and Round". This meant nothing to us junior high metal fans; instead of grown men dressed up as women, we now had an old man dressed up as a woman and apparently falling in love with himself. What a hoot. By this time, though, I had matured considerably and I didn’t much care who was wearing the skirts in the video anymore. I was hooked on the painter’s palette of sound and defiance and jollity, enchanted by the colorful lights and cotton candy and roller coaster rides that made up the Metal Carnival. In a major setback, however, my helpful aunt informed my mother that Ratt’s album cover showed several of the rodents crawling over and chewing on a woman’s nylon-clad leg. I leave it to any of you with Ratt’s debut EP to judge her accuracy. When Ratt headlined at the Armory in my town, with Blackfoot and Mama’s Boys opening up, it was the social event of the season for everyone under twenty. I was not allowed to go (even though every member of my circle of friends went) and I have hated all forms of censorship since.

The final tumbler in the clicking lock of my Metal habit was "Jump" by Van Halen. This exhibit featured the goofiest grown man of them all (David Lee Roth, as if you didn’t know) and even more ridiculous pants, this time in the form of the patchwork jeans that Eddie apparently found on a compost heap. But in some ways, "Jump" was the one that really expanded the vista of my swelling heavy metal awareness. You see, the song was heavy rock, but it was also kind of pretty, in its own warped, tawdry way. One simply couldn’t dislike that song, and I didn’t even try. Controversial Metal commentator Chuck Eddy called it "invincible" and "one of the most supersonic singles of any decade." Until I heard it, I still held on to some vestige of my authority figures’ dismay about Metal. Once I realized that its songs could be beautiful if they wanted to be, all my presumptions about the possible toxic effects of Metal fell away like a house of cards at a Motorhead concert.

In short, I was hooked.

Like any junkie, I needed to fix as much as possible and, like every spazzy kid in junior high, I needed that fix as cheap as it got. My allowance was fixed at a firm five bucks and all my threats to unionize had been ineffective. There was only one alternative to a career in burglary. I went off to Kmart, to sort through the bargain bins.

At first, it was fairly rough going because, even though I knew that I liked Heavy Metal, I didn’t know much about it. I bought a copy or two of Hit Parader and Creem for research, and suddenly I knew more about Metal than I’d even wanted to. It turns out that there were roughly twenty billion metal bands in the mid-Eighties, and all of them were clamoring for my attention. Schoolwork took a backseat to memorizing band names. And this sort of research was not without peril; once, my dad, reaching for his Field & Stream, accidentally picked up one of my metal mags and began to read it. He gave a small shrug in tandem with a shake of his head, although I never figured out whether this gesture of uncertainty was directed toward his son’s intellect and taste or toward Paul Stanley’s sexual orientation.

At last, armed with my ill-gotten information, I began to bargain-buy in earnest. It became, in time, something of a tradition. Every Saturday morning, I would bike my way in the morning’s milky sunshine to that Mecca of the Financially Impaired and culled through what the bins had to offer. Any name that was familiar to me from the metallic resources at my disposal was immediately red flagged for purchase. Prices ranged from $2.95 to $3.95, which didn’t leave me much for the video arcade but, what the hell, I could always look under the couch cushions. Every week I added one cassette to my blossoming tape collection.

But this resulted in a very uneven and very diverse metal collection. The first entry was an early-era Sammy Hagar compilation called 'Cruisin’ & Boozin’' (complete with a "Haggar" misspelling on the front cover); tunes like "Never Say Die" and "Keep On Rockin’ " didn’t sound much like my concept of metal, but I figured this was due to my general ignorance. I still have it. In a major coup, I got three Rainbow albums, 'Straight Between the Eyes,' 'Bent Out of Shape,' and 'Blackmore’s Rainbow.' Also, 'Thunder in the East' by Loudness and Aerosmith’s 'Done With Mirrors.' Sometimes I got lucky, and new releases with damaged containers were included; through this policy, I added Dokken’s 'Breaking the Chains,' Autograph’s 'That’s the Stuff,' and the debut of Aldo Nova. A curious artifact called 'The Best of Deep Purple,' which wasn’t; it was all stuff from their pre-Gillan beginnings. Then again, what did I know? It sounded just fine to me.

The worst of times had become the best of times. In many ways, this was my favorite period in my career as a metalhead. Like all addicts, I have fond memories of those first swigs out of the bottle. The fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing or which band I was going to experience next only served to make it that much more fun. The throes of my obsession were so intense, however, that I looked to any outlet to increase my drug intake. A friend of mine borrowed me 'Holy Diver' when I told him that I really liked the words on Rainbow’s first album-- if I had been an experimental user before, the introduction of Ronnie James Dio made sure I became a hardcore mainliner. Then my brother, who has always been something of a musical nomad, ceased his rap fixation and began to tape metal albums off of his friends’ records. He came home from high school one day with W.A.S.P.’s 'Last Command' (whose Blackie Lawless went a good way to ensuring that my mom didn’t much care for my new musical preferences; this after I put a pin-up of him holding a noosed doll on my wall), 'Back In Black,' 'Moving Pictures,' Ozzy Osbourne, and Triumph’s double-live set 'Stages.'

It is of such stuff that heavy chemical dependencies are made. In the first half of the Eighties, all these perilous, gateway drugs were just lying around. Some of us picked them up... and never got rid of them.