Archive for the ‘Rants And Writings’ Category

A lot of the younger generation have it in their head that guitar players of yesterday are not as good as the technical guitar players of today and do not give the true guitar greats enough respect. In a sense, they are correct in the guitar players of today are perhaps more technically advanced players than those that pioneered rock and roll in to the metal foundries of today.

Let’s first look in that reasoning. The technical death metal guitar players of today play notes at a much higher rate of bpm than anything that was being played back in the late 60’s, right up in to the mid 90’s even. With maybe the exception of one Eddie Van Halen’s Eruption, that melted the faces of many people in 1978 before “melting faces” ever became a stupid, overused term in metal. From then on he was emulated and ended up inspiring many more guitar greats. Read the rest of this entry »

So Bill Ward went on a rant about his interview in the London Times taking his words out of context, like most douche-bag journalists do. Some piss-ant from the Times interviewed the Founding drummer of Black Sabbath and totally proved just how retarded, uninformed and totally NOT a fan of Black Sabbath. How you say? Well, this fucknut called Tony Iommi; Tommy Iommi. (Correction: The “Tommy” Iommi thing was in a sidebar thing that is no longer visable. I can’t find it anyway.) So whoever wrote that is the retarded and uninformed fucknut; but the guy(s) that wrote the article are still douches.

In all seriousness, if I were ever to start a Black Sabbath tribute band…my stage name would so be TOMMY FUCKING IOMMI!!! Read The London Times Interview and then read Bill Wards word on it.

Image stolen from: TamaDrum.co.jp

Marty Friedman was always my favorite Megadeth guitarist. He’s simply amazing and I love his solo work too. When word got out that Chris Broderick was part of the newest version of the Megadeth line up, shortly after Glen Drover left, I was excited. Glen Drover was (and still is) a great guitar player, but I thought if there was anyone that could help bring the classic Megadeth sound back to the band, it was Chris.

To me, Chris not only brings the shredding speed back in to the mix, but a lot of the ultra melodic solos that seemed to be absent after Marty left. Not only that, but he plays them with more accuracy than ANY post-Friemand Megadeth guitarist. It’s kind of toss up for me. On one hand I still love Marty Frieman’s work, but I’m more enthusiastic about what Chris Broderick is bringing to the Megadeth table these days. With that said, check out this video where Marty and Chris play the solo from Tornado Of Souls, and compare. Friemand…or Broderick?

In 1995 metal was still in a questionable stage. Grunge was still ruling the radio waves, the new wave of extra shitty punk music was beginning to get bigger and nu-metal was in its embryonic stage. Metal bands were not getting the attention they deserved, but the horror movies still knew that sometimes the best music to go along with a good thriller, was metal.

Tales From The Crypt, the popular HBO series released their first movie starring probably one of the worst actors ever; Billy Zane and Thomas Haden Church. Okay, so Billy Zane isn’t that bad and is kind of funny in this flick. Oh, and Jada Pinkett Smith didn’t exactly offer any Oscar material to the movie either. Aside from a cast of mediocre actors, in my opinion, the film was a favorite of mine back then and the soundtrack was filled with veteran and up and coming metal bands. Read the rest of this entry »

Re-posting this from awhile back. (Originally posted in December, 2008)

The Origin Of The Misfits and Danzig Skull.

Since the late 70’s the notorious “Misfits Skull” has been an icon in rock and metal. If you’re a fan of The Misfits or Danzig, then you might already know where it came from. There are a million posers out there in the punk, rock and metal genre that wear this mascot/logo and probably have never heard a Misfits song before in their life. Some don’t even know that it belongs to The Misfits. These are the same people that wear the Led Zeppelin Swan Song T-shirt. All they know is that “It’s cool to like Led Zeppelin” like it’s some kind of trend. It makes me sick when I see that douche from Fall Out Boy with the skull on his sleeve or his lip sinking girlfriend wearing that shirt. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the digital age, compilation albums on CD were a hot commodity. Compilations with hit singles and such, were something that people were willing to buy because they were not willing to buy an entire album, risking their money and not liking every other song on there. This is exactly why people started “file sharing”. They didn’t want to pay good money for 1 good song and 8 fillers, like most record companies put out. Some people are only hit-single fans and not so  much music fans; meaning they are only in to what the radio is playing and/or what is trendy. These days and especially with metal, there is rarely such a thing as a filler and 98% of metal fans are true music fans. The other 2% are deathcore fans, but I have faith that they too will eventually grow out of that phase.

In the 80’s, when black cassette tapes started being “dubbed” by people, the record industry had a fit and they were afraid that would bring them down. Sure there were people that would bootleg cassettes, but a lot of people just wanted to make compilation or “mix” tapes of their favorite bands. Even after cassettes died out, people were still using blanks to make mix tapes of their favorite bands from cd’s. This went on for quite some time before CD burners for computers hit the market. Again, the music industry freaked out. When cd burners were released, they were very expensive and CD-R’s were not very cheap either. On top of that, not every CD player would play a burned CD. So it took some time for CD-Rs and technology to catch up with itself. Read the rest of this entry »

With the recent ousting of James Lomenzo, or whatever happened, I got to thinking about something I wrote about him awhile ago. In fact it was only a year and three days ago that I wrote it. It was originally posted at Metal Martyr and part of another post, but I picked apart the section about Lomenzo.

Now I’m not picking on or disrespecting James Lomenzo here. He’s a great Bass player, but I started to look at his history and images of the like and found it kind of funny. Lomenzo during his White Lion days took on the semi-glammish look of White Lion. No big deal, that was the look back then in bands like that. Then I kind of remembered him in Black Label Society, with David Lee Roth and now Megadeth. Check it out.

James Lomenzo the glamster with White Lion from ‘84 to ‘91. (Second to the left)

Read the rest of this entry »

No, this picture is NOT me. Almost two years ago, I wrote an article on Metal Martyr called “So You Want T0 Get A Tattoo“? I recently got an old, bad tattoo covered because I just didn’t think it would flow well with my new place of employment. No, it wasn’t a gang related tattoo or anything like that. It just wasn’t a good tattoo and I’ve been wanting to cover it for years anyway. I got the tattoo covered last Tuesday and it has been the fastest healing tattoo I have ever had. Not only that, but it was a lot of ink and fairly large. I got to wondering why it would heal faster than any other tattoo that I have had and the answer was quite simple. I’ll get to that in a bit. Here are the basics that I set down before. After that, I set down some very basic tattoo care tips. Read the rest of this entry »

The same Revolver Magazine that ahd the Vulgar Display Of Power article also had an excerpt from Ozzy’s new book called “I Am Ozzy“. I’ll share a short piece of it that had me laughing a bit before I went to work this morning. Here Ozzy was talking about when they first started touring America and all the black magic, Satanist types that were constantly thinking the band was “Evil” and into the occult.

“They just wouldn’t fuck off, those Satanists. I’d walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they’d be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. So one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang “Happy Birthday.”

“They weren’t too fucking happy about that, believe me.”

Just picturing a young Ozzy doing that with a big smile on his face, made my day. I can’t wait to read this book as I’m sure it’s probably filled with all sorts of fun stories like this.

I picked up the “special” Pantera Vulgar Display Of Power issue of Revolver today. I expected the entire magazine to be pretty much dedicated to Pantera and Dimebag. Sadly it wasn’t.

The article on Pantera was great. Short, but great. The entire article talked about writing, recording and touring for the album and it was cool to get everyone’s insight on the record as well as other musicians besides the dudes in Pantera.

The rest of the issue was the usual bullshit that revolver published, with the exception of a couple of pages here and there. I really got sick of the “Bleeding Star clothing” ads on every other page. They must be the new Hot Topic. What was once a fairly decent metal magazine has fallen to trend rock and metal over the last 5 years or more. At least we still have Metal Maniacs…Oh shit, wait. That’s right. Well at least we get the online version anyway. With all the killer metal blogs online these days, there really isn’t a need to wast paper on magazines like Revolver.