Metal Blog

How did I find metal? Or did it find me? I'm not really sure about that. I moved to Washington when I was ten, and as soon as I was in the state, I knew I was home. I could feel the reach of the Mountain in the ground under my feet. This land was my home. I wish the people had been so ready for me. Or I had been ready for the weather. I froze for the first few years I was here, I didn't think I'd ever get the chill out of my toes. Also worth noting -- we moved here from Oklahoma. I had never walked on hills before. At ten, my Mom found me having trouble negotiating the steep hill of our driveway -- I was having trouble adjusting my center of balance to different grades. On top of that, I was getting in trouble for reading. My coping mechanism was being undermined. My curiosity put into blinders, because it made people uncomfortable with themselves. I had a sense of that, even then -- that their discomfort was with themselves more than it was with me. The lie was always in their eyes when they would tell me they were only looking out for me. They weren't comfortable with a student that challenged them that easily, and I didn't have a lot of interest in dumbing myself down for anyone else. Yes, you read that correctly. For reading. At first, it was what I read. I was bored with Beverly Cleary and company, and the school didn't think my parents could possibly know what I was reading instead (Clan of the Cave Bear -- a birthday present from my friend's mom...my first grown up novel...I was in fifth grade). I told them over and over that my parents knew full well what I was doing, but calls went home anyway. I took books out at recess, and got in trouble for that. Of course, trouble meant getting sat against the wall of the building. With my book. To keep the rain from ruining them, I got good at covering paperbacks with clear contact paper. I always had at least one or two mysteries or something with me, everywhere I went. {b}My response, with Mom's encouragment, was to pick a nice thick book from her personal shelf. A volume titled, darkly, "Secrets of the Temple." Oooh. Boo! It was about the National Treasury, and about 900 stultifying pages long, but I made sure to read it and understand what I read in case someone saw fit to try their luck. I remember the look on Mom's face when she set it next to my school bag -- if they wanted to talk, they could just go on ahead and talk, and look like a bunch of presumptive asses for it.{/b} I wasn't popular. I wasn't a girly-girl, not a princess with braids and blushes. {b}i even tried to do the hair and makeup and clothes thing for a couple of years, but found myself to be utterly inept. i just didn't seem to be born with the same sense for it that most girls were, like they only have to be reminded of what they already know. I have none of that. {/b} Instead, I had lots of energy, but wasn't particularly athletically focused; rather that energy expressed itself in sort of rough-and-tumble activity like chopping wood. I was brainy, but not snobby about it. I didn't quite fit anywhere. Then, one day in fifth grade, my teacher rearranged the seating chart, and I was sitting in the back of the class, with the metal heads. We weren't sure what to think of each other for the first few minutes. There I was, smart and relatively tidy. And there they were. Kids who wore tee-shirts and jeans that had holes in them, and wicked, dark looking band logos. One of them kept sliding looks at me over a sketch he was working on. I hid my book under my desk, open, so I could read along while the teacher did...something with grammar on the board. English-related subjects were easy for me, and thus I was a serious slack-ass during those discussions. After those first, few weird moments of sizing one another up, those kids met me with a "come as you are" openness that was utterly absent elsewhere. I'd found people who weren't half-assed -- when they said they were going to do something, they largely weren't full of shit -- they went and did it. Even if it was stupid, they could commit to something and follow through. No one in this crowd of rejects wanted me to pretend to be anything I wasn't -- I could be a little mannish, and some of them even *liked* that. {b}That was something I was looking for pretty seriously in the days after I encountered my temper in my friend's closet.{/b} I needed to find people who would understand that anger. That rage. And there was metal -- I heard people screaming with growling guitars and drums like metal forges. That was my rage -- someone understood! They understood, and they growled in tones I'll never produce, giving me a voice. It also didn't take me long to figure out that this bunch of kids were getting painted with a broad and negative brush. The perception was "reject." Antisocial. Possibly violent. Unpredictable. Depressed. There were lots of labels that floated around this group. Drug associated labels. Trouble makers. Rebellious. Anti-establishment. I had a cause, primitive though it might have been at that point; i knew it wasn't right that these guys were getting saddled with labels. I saw talent and intellect in them, and the prejudicial approach they were given annoyed me. I had found my people. It just took me twenty-some years to understand that. I knew I was metal when I found my violin. I remember everyone asking me why I picked the instrument I did - I'd tried others with a more classical tone. The owner of one shop called my instrument a "howler." It had a metal voice. It made the noises my voice wouldn't. From the second that instrument entered a private lesson, the discussion was all classical, all the time, sign on the dotted line in blood please. I fell away from my people, and I fell away from music, ultimately, for about fifteen years. Until recently, when I found metal again -- right there, when I needed it. {b}My Rebellion {/b} It started when I realized that my teacher was killing me. Not just my love of music, or my desire to play, or anything that specific. Each lesson brought twisting stomach cramps and anxiety attacks, dizzying, sweating -- it never mattered a whit what I'd practiced during the week, or how I'd shunted the work for other classes to the side to do that work, it was never, ever enough. I could find no way to be good at the thing that I had given so much up for. Passed up hobbies and experiences that most other people considered standard to being young and healthy, because I had to save my wrists for other things, or I had to get up at five in the morning to practice, or I had rehearsals until ten at night. This thing that was eating my life wasn't going to be satisfied until I was gone, playing Bach just like generations before me had, ad nauseum. Forget how Bach might want Bach played. Not relevant in the cloying halls of the classical set. My first break was with the instructor. I discovered she'd been bitchy with members of other sections of the orchestra who didn't kneel at her altar. Several of us lodged formal complaints against her with the Dean of the Department, but I sat down with him and got specific. I planted my feet and told him that her personal games were strangling segments of his symphony orchestra, and I was ready to walk completely rather than work with her any further. As one of few performance majors, I managed to pack a little clout, especially with members of other sections complaining as well. Then, at Christmas, about a year later, I almost did something that would have been utterly unthinkable to me previously -- I almost walked out on a performance. It was in a large Seattle church, and the congregation parked indoors, underneath the building -- never so much as catching a breath of winter air between their luxury SUVs and their pews. Outside the front doors, a couple of my fellow musicians (bass players) were giving a burger or something to a man whose taped together shoes and beat up overcoat could only indicate one thing. On the doorstep of a church, during the Christmas season, but no one knew he was there because they were all too good for their own front door. Inside it was hideous ostentation. A brass cross at least thirty feet high hung suspended above the altar. Flowers buried the edges of the sanctuary. Marble fonts graced the corners. The woodwork glowed. And everyone was jockeying to sit next to the University president. I could hear their conversation as they passed in front of the stage. It was lewd. The idea of entertaining that shallow crowd made me a little sick. But I was all the way in Seattle, with no way home other than the school coach...so I played. Under protest. My conductor knew it, I think. Saw a look on my face, and really understood that I didn't find him or his Miata impressive. His influence alone was no longer enough to keep me in line and in my seat. Conductors all want to be intimidating, but in reality, they bruise easily. It was only a few weeks later, in a moment of metal, I pissed off my conductor so amazingly that I had him out of his seat, sweating and swearing, blustering in my face. And I escaped the university music department, repressed but not decommissioned. {dropnote:"Sonata Arctica: Live in Finland"}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah3cFQy6SQ8{/dropnote} {dropnote:"Nightwish: Wacken, Floor Jansen"}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSw0Rih71LQ{/dropnote}