In November of 1991 I worked two jobs. Most nights I spun records at Gumby’s, the local alternative nightclub. Other nights I was on-air radio talent at WMUL FM, the college radio station, where I was also a producer (think “music director” for a single format). It is the intersection of these two jobs that put me in the position to lay out GG Allin.

I would often use my position at one place to help out the other. Mostly this took the form of doing on-air interviews with bands that were playing in town. We would record the interviews, edit them for profanity and time, and then broadcast them a few hours before the show. This was a win for everyone: the station got a listener bump, the club got an attendance bump, and I often got to party with rock stars. I did a lot of interviews. Most of them were boring but every now and then I’d land a gem.

On a Wednesday evening in November, 1991, GG Allin and his band the Murder Junkies were going to play at Gumby’s. I had no interest in seeing them perform which was good because I worked radio on Wednesday nights. However, like the dutiful music nerd that I was, I agreed to set up an interview with GG and to broadcast it. We were to meet at Davidson’s Records, a store ran by my friend Dave, which was across the street from the radio offices.

GG was late to arrive, of course. He was alone (no entourage) and he was thin and twitchy and clearly not doing well at all. He had sunglasses on and a hoodie and looked more than a little like the wanted posters for Ted Kaczynski, back when we only knew him as the Unibomber. He stank like a homeless person in summertime.

Every third word out of GG’s mouth was “fuck”, “fucking”, or “motherfucker”. I do not wilt from exposure to foul language but the Federal Communications Commission was pretty keen on not letting words like that over the airwaves. Keen enough that I would end up facing some pretty serious fines if I knowingly broadcast them.

We talked for a bit, the three of us: Me, Dave, and GG. It comes to light that GG thought the interview was going to be broadcast live. When I corrected his confusion, he went absolutely apeshit as if a switch had been thrown inside of his tiny junkie mind. He called me a coward and a “Tool of the Man” who carried water for the censors. Little flecks of spit and/or hopefully chicken kept flying out of his mouth while he ranted. At this point I am getting a little heated as well but I’m trying to be cool because it’s my friend’s record store.

Finally, he said, “Well, if the interview isn’t going to be live, then I’m not fucking doing it, you fucking coward.” To this I replied, cold as ice: “Then we are not fucking doing the fucking interview. Motherfucker.”

This was his last straw, apparently. It doesn’t matter what he said to me, about me, about my family, about my friends, about my jobs – it mattered that I called him a “motherfucker”.

So he took a swing at me.

If you’ve ever been in a fist fight with a junkie, you already know how this ends. Fist fights are always tricky: you never know who can fight and who just shows. I’m from West Virginia. We used to get into fist fights for fun. Because we were bored.

He made a feeble feint with his left before trying to land a haymaker with his right. By and large, heroin addicts are slow and transparent, so I saw all of this coming for a country mile. It was like he had spent a long time thinking about how to throw a punch like that but had never actually done it. He lifted his left fist and then tried to swing his right.

I took a step forward, into his zone, and connected. Hard. He fell backwards into a CD rack

and he went down, legs splayed out, and all the compact discs fell down on his head like out of a cartoon or a shitty romantic comedy.

I stood over him, really angry, and shouted down, “Okay, motherfucker. You want to go outside with me? I will knock out your remaining teeth.”

GG did not want to go outside with me.

He sat on the floor, confused, as if he were not sure how (or why) he found himself on the ground. I wasn’t sure if he was high or not but it was suddenly like a spell had been lifted and I could see him for what he truly was and I was disgusted by it. If anything he started smelling worse.

Dave kicked him out of the record store. “Get the fuck out before I call the cops!” GG picked himself up as best he could and slunk out the door. I helped Dave pick up the CDs and put them back on the rack and when I left I half-expected that I’d have a junkie with renewed courage to deal with but no: GG had hot-footed it back to the club.

That night he would shove one of the club’s microphones up his own asshole. There is not one moment that I regret being absent from that spectacle.

A year and a half later, GG would die as he lived: pointlessly and on heroin.

Those who know me are aware that music – of all kinds – is a big part of my identity. I have a perpetual drum track running in the back of my skull, continual chord sequences firing behind my eyes. Even if there is nothing coming out of the stereo, you can be assured that there is a soundtrack running through my life.

So which twenty-five albums altered me the most? What an interesting question – one that requires me to examine the nooks and crannies of my history.

I wanted to avoid including the same band multiple times. However, there are places where that would be impossible (as the reader will see) and in such cases I have simply noted them in a single entry.

This is in no particular order.

1) Metallica, And Justice for All. Metallica was the sound track for my junior year of high school. This should really be all Metallica albums up to Justice; we sort of listened to all of them in a shuffle and on repeat.

2) The Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen. This album has influenced my own music probably more than any other. I’d actually put all of Greg Dulli’s work on here if I could but Gentlemen is the best distillation – especially the guitar solo in Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer.

3) Jane’s Addiction, Nothing’s Shocking. While my junior year of high school was set to metal, my senior year’s soundtrack was built from what is called “alternative rock” and Jane’s Addiction was a heavy part of that. Nothing’s Shocking was my introduction to them, but Ritual de lo Habitual came out not long after that. When I was feeling full of grief for my friend Martina, I would listen to Three Days and Then She Did on repeat.

4) Queensrÿche, Operation: Mindcrime. This was my sophomore year’s soundtrack. I heard the final track first – Eyes of a Stranger played on FM 105 – and I bought the album the next day. I think I burnt a hole in the disc. I then found their previous album, Rage for Order, which also holds fond memories for me: walking in the West Virginian winter, snow crunching under my boots, crushing heavily on a girl named Barbara.

5) Skinny Puppy, Vivisect IV. In later high school, this was my introduction to “industrial” music. My friend Cliff turned me on to them one Saturday afternoon while playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

6) Kyuss, Welcome to Sky Valley. I listened to this on repeat during my drive across the country to move to San Francisco. There is no feeling like blasting desert rock while you cross the Salt Flats in Utah in the middle of August.

7) Massive Attack, Mezzanine. This album I associate with late 1999 and my time at Organic. I specifically remember walking to work one December morning listening to it and feeling very much at peace.

8) The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My father forced me to listen to this one day when I was seventeen. It was the first I’d ever really listened to the Beatles and I had no idea that they could sound like this. My mind, focused entirely on heavy metal, was warped forever.

9) Billy Joel, The Nylon Curtain. This was the first album I ever owned that I actually intentionally purchased. I was very young and filled with an unnatural level of stress for a fourth grader and the only thing that seemed to speak to that was the album’s single, Pressure. I remember once that the principal, Mr. Walton, once tried talking to me, trying to understand what I was going through. He was a good man, struck down too early by cancer. I still listen to this album. It holds up.

10) Slayer, Reign in Blood. This was the beginning of my descent into evil. It is a perfect album. I’ve written extensively about this album before and have listened to it at least once a week every week since I first bought it, zero-day, back in 1986.

11) Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine. This is another zero-day album. I was friends with the record store owner and he suggested that I’d like it so I bought it, ear un-listened. I associate this with hanging out in Huntington’s graveyard with Shannon and Chris and Buddha. I used to see kids at the high school across the street wearing Pretty Hate Machine t-shirts think, “that album came out before you were born.”

12) Various Artists, Spawn: The Album. This is associated with my time at Sun Microsystems and a lot of my classes in Hebrew and other religious studies that I was taking at the time.

13) Ozzy Osbourne, The Ultimate Sin. This was the first heavy metal album that I actually owned (instead of having tape-duplicated from a friend’s collection). Ozzy has disavowed it and it has been deleted from his catalog, but it’s got some strong stuff. This is the soundtrack to playing Dragonlance games with Jason and Aaron and Jake – the mice in the walls.

14) Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. This album, like Gentlemen, has had a massive influence on my own music. It is like a modern symphony and only two tracks long.

15) Dio, Sacred Heart. I decided to study Latin based on the writing on the album cover (spoiler: it doesn’t make sense). It is difficult to overstate the admiration and love I hold for Ronnie James Dio, a man I mourn to this day.

16) Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction. This was junior high school and my introduction to marijuana and alcohol. This album is the root of all the bad decisions I have ever made. The band’s follow up, GNR Lies, is also special to me because it was Martina’s favorite album and I listened to it on repeat for days after her death.

17) Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV. This is me working at a golf course when I was fourteen. We snuck beers and smoked a lot of cigarettes and dope and got hella tips.

18) Dethklok, Dethalbum II. While the whole album is fun, I associate this mostly with when I was first dating my wife, Stacey, who was living in Seattle at the time. I would fly up every other weekend or so and listening to Bloodlines on repeat was how I was able to psyche myself up and over my fear of flying.

19) Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. This is the album I listened to on repeat when I moved into the first apartment I had to myself. It reminds me of liberation.

20) The Crystal Method, Vegas.
I associate this album with the late 1990s and the crazy drug-fueled time that it was. We would go clubbing almost every night (goth clubs mostly, not dens of electronica). Money and drugs flowed out of tech companies like water. IRC channel traffic was high: #meditation, #/dev/gaf, #sfgoth.

21) Pink Floyd, The Wall. This album is important for two reasons. First, the movie screwed up my little mind when I was a teenager. Second, because I coded nearly all of Elemental’s app while listening to it on repeat (which is why it’s towards the top of my last.fm profile).

22) Nirvana, Nevermind. The entire period of my college life could be summed up with this album. It came and changed the world and my direction in it; I even got my ass beat down over it. I still listen to it constantly, even today.

23) The Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion. This album was my favorite during my college years – even over Nevermind – and influenced all sorts of things about me.

24) White Zombie, Astro Creep: 2000. I listened to this on a pilgrimage I once made to Devil’s Tower. I was totally burnt out and needed some alone time in the desert. I learned a lot about myself on that trip.

25) Hal WIllner, Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus. This is an obscure disc. It is a tribute to the master Charles Mingus. It came into my life at the right point in time and gave me a love for . . .well. You just need to listen to it.

“How old were you when you realized that you liked heavy metal music?”

And I had to sit and have a think, because it wasn’t an easy question.

My analytical mind drove through several interpretations of the question:

• What was the first Heavy Metal song I heard?
• What was the first Heavy Metal song I liked?
• When did I know that I liked Heavy Metal?

and so forth.

I thought about it.

The first song I remember hearing that was absolutely held within the genre of “Heavy Metal” was Quiet Riot’s Metal Health (Bang Your Head). The year was 1983 and I was ten years old.

Our neighbors down the street, the Chertows, owned an honest-to-$deity jukebox and kept it in the children’s play room. I was within age of two of that clan, and thus spent time there doing things that ten year olds do (mostly losing at Monopoly). The eldest daughter of the clan was maybe six years older, an honest-to-$deity teenager – and she absolutely loved that song. So one day, while we were playing (Lincoln Logs, I think), she loaded up the juke with that song on repeat.

I fell in love with it.

It was so very . . . primal. I’d never heard anything so raw and unpolished. So chaotic and angry. It sang to me.

But the roots of this go back further.

I think it starts 1977, when I heard Cold as Ice by Foreigner on the radio in my parent’s car. I would have been five, maybe six years old.

Now, Cold as Ice isn’t Heavy Metal. It’s Hard Rock. Clearly. That said, it’s a pretty heavy song. And Foreigner, they were everywhere in the late 70s. Of course, there was heavier stuff playing on the radio during this period, but my parents weren’t fans, and they’d always click the channel over.

Foreigner, though, they would listen to. And compared to the saccharine sounds that normally wafted through the station wagon’s speakers (Barry Manilow, The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Kenny Rogers – all of whom I love), it was downright apocalyptic.

It was then, I think that I first hear the Siren Call of the True Metal.

I could feel its voice deep in my bones, whispering dark prophecies:

“Brandon. There is something louder, angrier, faster. It is out there. You must find it. You will know it when you hear it, and through this shared sound you will meet your tribe. And it will be good. You will be welcome there.

“You will become a disciple of Ozzy. You will deeply mourn the future passing of Dio.

“You will become melancholy when you ponder the loss of Randy Rhoads. You will feel strong and justified in your anger while listening to Reign in Blood. You will feel over-educated when trying to explain Iron Maiden’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner to others.

“Black Sabbath will become your solace.

“You will not be alone.

“Oh, yeah. Eventually, you’re going to find your real identity. Everyone’s going to stop calling you ‘Brandon’ and start calling you ‘Jorm’. But not for another 18 years or so.”

And so it came to pass that eventually I discovered Ozzy Osbourne. And through him, Black Sabbath, and through them, Dio. And then Slayer, and Iron Maiden, and Metallica, and so forth down the line.

Thirty-odd years later, I still listen to Foreigner. And I still remember that ride in my mom’s station wagon when the music world opened up to me.

A Perfect Album is a disc that has few, if any, flaws. They are best listened to whole and each track can often serve as a solid single in its own right. These albums are quite often the magnum opus for the artists that produce them. Equally, they often define (or redefine) musical genres and, in some cases, all of the music that comes after them.

Here is a handful of albums that I consider perfect. It is in no way an exhaustive list.

You should listen to each one of them at least once in your life.

XTC, Skylarking, 1986

Released to little fanfare in the mid-80s, Skylarking was an attempt by Andy Partridge to find his mojo again after his wife threw out his Vicodin. The artists clashed heavily with the album’s producer, Todd Rundgren, but the end result is a sublime experience.

Listening to Skylarking is like drinking a memory. A beautiful day spent in the park with someone you love, watching clouds and simply being in each other’s presence. A day where you really and truly learn the mind of your parter, sharing joys and grief and speaking of philosophy.

The track most people know, Dear God, was originally intended as a B-Side but its popularity thrust it into the limelight. It’s a pity, actually: it’s one of the weaker tracks.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, F♯ A♯ ∞, 1997

If Skylarking is a pleasant memory of a beautiful day, F♯ A♯ ∞ is its dark opposite. Primarily instrumental, it smells of the icy memories of mourning, a brutal nostalgia. This album is the soundtrack to the apocalypse.

It opens with a voice over:

“The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows.”

The album’s funereal tones inspired Danny Boyle’s vision for 28 Days Later. There were rumors that he wanted to use this as the film’s soundtrack, but Godspeed refused to allow commercial exploitation.

It is only three tracks long but the shortest clocks in at a mere seventeen minutes.

Slayer, Reign in Blood, 1986

There exists no more pure an album in all of Heavy Metal than Reign in Blood. There quite simply isn’t room for discussion on the matter. At just under twenty-nine minutes, each of its tracks are tight toned, expertly executed, and sinfully succinct. Despite the band’s reputation for “speed metal,” the songs are actually rather slow by later standards but the energy of the music drives an impression of brutality with more power than the largest of diesel engines.

For many years the band would perform the album in its entirety during concerts.

It is my belief that modern music as we know it would not exist without Reign in Blood. You see, the album’s producer was a man named Rick Rubin and this band helped him to launch The Beastie Boys into the stratosphere. It was Kerry King, guitarist for Slayer, who laid down the licks on Licensed to Ill, helping to give birth to Rubin’s trademark metal/rap fusion and cementing him as the “go to” producer.

Seriously, look up Rubin’s discography. See how many of your favorite albums he produced after this.

I first owned this album on cassette tape. Since it was so short, we would listen to its entirety and then simply flip the tape over and listen to it again.

Guns N’ Roses, Appetite for Destruction, 1987

Nearly every bad decision I’ve made in my life can be traced back to the moment I first heard this record.

I’m a man with a fair number of sins and bad ideas and I regret none of them: they make me who I am today. Those events were part of a journey – a journey that began with smoking my first joint, which happened while listening to Appetite for Destruction.

Often unacknowledged for its place in music history, Appetite served as an intervention for rock n’ roll. Music at the time was becoming over glammed and less aggressive^[1]. Appetite, released in the same time period, helped to reverse this trend and usher in a new age of garage-driven music.

Jane’s Addiction, Nothing’s Shocking, 1988

While Guns N’ Roses were busy redefining what “hard rock” meant, Jane’s Addiction was toiling to lay the foundations for “alternative rock.”

Nothing’s Shocking seems to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the late 1980s, a kaliedescope of the good and the bad. It is a dream of Los Angeles, possibly a version that never existed.

The album’s follow-up (Ritual de lo Habitual) arguably had more impact on the alternative scene but is not as solid of a record. While Ritual blew the door off its hinges, Shocking weakened the walls.

The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, 1966

When Brian Wilson first heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, he decided he needed to step up his game. Rubber Soul was an album that existed in a new space for him, a space of unity and completeness.

He spent the next two months and came up with an album that is arguably one of the greatest albums of all time. Pet Sounds is a masterwork through all tracks, weaving a vision of joy and love for simply living within the moment. It introduced instruments and composition techniques that have dominated popular music ever since.

The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969

If Brian Wilson was blown away by Rubber Soul, the Beatles were equally blown away by Pet Sounds – so much that they cited it as the driving force behind the experimentation they employed on Sgt. Pepper. However, while Sgt. Pepper is a masterwork, it is eclipsed by the perfection that is Abbey Road.

The second half of the album is meant to be taken as a single medley. Voices and songs blend together, a final, unified hurrah for a band that had been fractured and broken apart by the stresses of fame, family, and drug abuse.

While Let it Be was the final Beatles album to be released, Abbey Road was the last one recorded. Taken in that context, “The End” serves as the ultimate capstone to the band’s musical career, including the only drum solo by Ringo and a combined, three-part guitar solo by Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. The album’s final coda – “Her Majesty” – was a happy accident and typical of the joy that the band was capable of generating.

AC/DC, Back in Black, 1980

“Never trust the music taste of a man who does not own a copy of Back in Black,” is one of my cardinal rules in life.

AC/DC’s singer, Bon Scott, died in February of 1980. Rather than disband, they found a new singer, Brian Johnson, and worked through their grief to produce and release Back in Black just six months later – an album which would become the second-best selling album of all time.

Bon Scott died of alcohol poisoning after being left alone in a car in South London. According to legend, the last sound he heard was the chiming of Big Ben. Accordingly, and in tribute, Back in Black opens with the chiming of bells and renewed energy: the band is not finished with us yet.

When taken in that context, the entire album is a furious attack upon the idea of grief. It becomes an anthem for life.

The Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream, 1993

The sophomore effort from the Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream is exactly what it claims to be: an ethereal experience, a shared moment, a whispered conversation between yourself and the secret, silent twin that you keep inside your heart.

A siamese dream.

Billy Corgan’s multi-layered, heavily-fuzzed guitar work combines with half-mumbled lyrics to produce a half-remembered sound. It flows from ear to ear, singing about secrets, a lullaby listened to as we lay our childhoods to rest.

Michael Jackson, Thriller, 1982

Despite the success of Off the Wall, Michael Jackson could very easily have slipped into obscurity as a has-been child star were it not for the efforts of one man: Quincy Jones. In the same manner as Rick Rubin, Quincy applied the magic of sound production to Michael’s vocal work in such a way that the whole of the album was greater than sum of its parts. Thriller is a perfect pop-record, releasing seven(!) singles out of its nine tracks.

Say what you will about MJ’s off-album antics, the man could sing. His charisma drips through the grooves of the record leaving the listener in need of a towel. The tracks themselves betray a breadth of musical talent that Michael was never able to recapture and redefined the largest genre of music in existence.

1) Yes, “Wild Side” is pretty goddamned hard. But the rest of the album fits the pattern.

It was a difficult game for me. Not so much the “playing” of it (I came in second); rather, simply selecting a song that described me was an effort akin to cleaning the Augean stables.

What the hell, man? What the hell?

This is not a song that I like. It’s a song that best describes who I am. That’s tough. It took me a whole day of combing my library to find the right track:

Mark Lanegan’s version of In the Pines (called “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”), off his 1990 album, The Winding Sheet.

Why?

Because this track, over many others, actually represents a great deal about who I am.

The first time I heard Lanegan’s version was 1991, I think. I was working as a disc jockey at a nightclub (I wasn’t quite old enough to drink but I was “cool” with some people and knew my shit and had filled in on emergency shifts so there we are). It was maybe an hour before we opened, the owner, Kerwood, threw The Winding Sheet on over the system while we set up.

The track came on and I was instantly able to sing along to it. I didn’t know how or why; I just knew the lyrics.

Almost.

(Kerwood is long gone now, overdosed on amphetamines, dead in a small West Virginia town. The man would wake at five in the afternoon, take a hit of LSD, do a couple of whippits, and then drink until he couldn’t feel the acid anymore.

And then he’d take more acid.)

(He once smoked me out and the joint was laced with PCP. That experience set me off pot for about a decade.)

Anyways.

In the Pines is a folk song from the Appalachians, where I was born and raised. I have fuzzy memories of people singing it around me. My grandmother? Possibly; she had a robin’s voice and there are many songs my three-year-old self learned while sitting on her lap.

(I learned it primarily as “In the mines, in the mines,” by the way, which makes more sense given the coal mining focus of my people.)

Lanegan’s version was a powerful retelling for me. It took the folk music I knew (and liked) and recast it, cloaking it with a chaotic distortion and anguish I’d never heard.

That mental shift has remained with me.

Do the lyrics reflect me? Not so much. It’s not the words. For me, the song represents my struggle to continually merge my history, lineage, and folklore into the modern, progressive mindset that dominates me.

When I am alone playing my guitar? My fingers fall into the patterns of Appalachian blues and folk. Take that, slow it down (or speed it up). Add in some echo, a lot of distortion, noise, fuzz – scream it, scream everything

birth to dying, all we are is trying

If you can understand that, then maybe I’ve succeeded in dumping my brain into notes and noise.

Nearly everyone playing the game guessed that song was mine, by the way.

An interesting bit of history about Lanegan’s version:

This track came a hair’s breadth away from subtracting both the Screaming Trees and Nirvana from history. Caput! Bands end, there is no Teen Spirit.

Mark Lanegan’s biggest fame comes from being the vocalist for a couple different bands: The Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age (with one of my favorite musicians, Josh Homme, the brilliance behind Kyuss), the Gutter Twins (with the other of my favorite musicians, Greg Dulli, from the Afghan Whigs).

The recording of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, in 1989, was actually intended to be one of the first tracks on an album by a new band (for Lanegan and Mark Pickerel, the Trees’ drummer) called “Lithium.”

The bassist on that track (and for the band)? Kris Novoselic. The guitarist? A young upstart and major fan of Lanegan’s named Kurt Cobain (who was once turned down as bassist for the Melvins – a job that would go to Lori “Lorax” Black, daughter of Shirley Temple).

When Nirvana covered the track for their “Unplugged” session, they were actually covering Mark Lanegan’s version (which was based on a 78 RPM recording he had of Lead Belly). Lead Belly’s most common lyrics went “Black girl, black girl, where did you go…”

Years later, Dave Grohl (the only member of Nirvana not involved in the recording) would refer to The Winding Sheet as one of the best albums of all time and one of Nirvana’s biggest influences.

Yay, history.

Previously, Previously, and Previously

First: the cameras of 20 years ago, they were shit.

Rebel! Fight! Fuck Tipper Gore and her damned parental advice! Happy Harry Hard-On 4 Lyfe!

(There is a great sadness that we tried to shout down a man named Bush and his war in Iraq then, only to see the concept become what people in the music business call “recurrent” 10 years later.)

We were supposed to be disaffected, angry at our lot, angry at the legacy of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First.

But mostly, I remember the music. I remember feeling like this change was something that I could own. Every generation that hits the age of fourteen believes that they are the first to discover Led Zeppelin and sure we had that flaw but we were the first to discover Cobain. There was a magic in that.

I mostly remember being excited all the time.

(The Vietnam Memorial is not what you expect. More so when one is high and it is two a.m. Further, Abe Lincoln’s head is just, you know, fucking big. Dude. Dude. DUDE. I’m telling you: Abe Lincoln, man. His head. It’s fucking huge.)

In New York, I remember walking the streets of Greenwich Village, eating pizza that you had to fold in half. We drank fresh beers hidden in paper bags: each bottle lasted long enough for us to reach the next corner store, where a fresh brew could be procured. Hieneken, one dollar, and the clerk will pop the cap and bag the bottle for you.

I remember us making friends with obvious gang members at three a.m. in a subway station in Manhattan, and then having the train conductor come find us: “You white boys need to come up front with me. You’ll get stabbed!” And then I remember what it was like travelling through the belly of New York City in the front car of underground.

I remember getting into a shouting match with GG Allin, almost coming to blows. I remember smoking out with James Iha outside of CBGB where we had seen Velocity Girl.

I remember being excited. I don’t remember being sad and I don’t remember being angry.

I certainly don’t remember being this young.

A shout comes from the wizard, the sky begins to crack.
And he’s looking right at you!
Quick! Run along the rainbow before it turns to black…

Attack!

Ronnie James Dio is the reason that I studied Latin in school.

The year 1985 saw the release of Sacred Heart. The album cover had Latin written in script around the central image (a dragon visible inside of a crystal ball):

FINIS PER SOMNIVM REPERIO TIBI SACRA COR VENEFICVS OSTIVM AVRVM

Rather than do something intelligent, like, oh, finding someone who knew Latin and could translate it for me, I decided to take it as my “elective language” (the other choices being French or Spanish, one of which might have been useful). So it came to pass that, once again, the Dark Spirit of Heavy Metal influenced my life.

Let this be my love letter to Ronnie James Dio.

Ronnie James Dio was one of the most important names in all of rock-n-roll. He was the Satanic Saint who injected evil into the heart of heavy metal.

He died this morning at the (alleged) age of 67 years, a victim of stomach cancer.

His career as a musician began in the late 1950s, with all that implies.

Yes, children, the man who introduced The Horns to heavy metal sang doo-wop in the 1950s.

From Ronnie and the Prophets to Elf to Rainbow to Black Sabbath to his own band. His lyrics, album covers, and videos paved the landscape of heavy metal in the eighties, a legacy that followed forever after.

Is it a coincidence that he had such a prominent part in The Pick of Destiny? Jack Black understands: Dio is the man. So much so that his Brütal Legend was an exploration of one of Dio’s various Satanic album covers.

You run along the rainbow and never leave the ground
Still you don’t know why!
Whenever you dream, you’re holding the key
It opens the door to let you be free

And find the Sacred Heart.

Last August, I had the good fortune to see RJD tour with the other members of Black Sabbath under the moniker of Heaven and Hell. It was quite possibly the most powerful concert I’ve ever been to: everyone was in top form, and, for a man in his late 60s, Dio had it going on.

His energy infected the crowd to a level where I found myself hugging random strangers with joy simply because we were sharing the experience of Ronnie James Dio.

You see, Ronnie was always about the fans first and foremost. Never about the glam and glitz of the a rock star; always the concept of entertaining. He sang from the heart and we felt it.

His lyrics were cheesy as all hell. How many times can we go fighting dragons? How many wizards will there be? Evil Woman, Look Out!

The cliche didn’t matter to my twelve and fourteen year old selves. Every note, every word, every self-indulgent guitar solo: it was all awesome. Whenever Ronnie’s full-throated vocal chords strung a series of sounds, proclaiming the superiority of the sleeping souls of dark demigods? We understood. He spoke to our Dungeons & Dragons-playing, zit-faced, pubescent, virgin identities.

A soundtrack to the age of fourteen.

Even the logo for his fucking name was awesome. “Dio” is a bastardized word that means “god” or deity. But when you flipped it upside down, it said “DEVIL”. How fucking bad-ass? Knowing this secret, it was a thing. A mote of power in the life of an outcast teenage child.

I cannot say “Rest in Peace,” Ronnie James. You were not that man. You were a hunter of dragons through the blasted, apocalyptic wasteland of the Lower Planes.

Instead, a different sentiment:

Reign in Hell, Ronnie James.

I miss you, and I hope you are slaying dragons down there. You now know what is beyond the rainbow, what the wizard holds within his hands.

“Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” – Mark Twain

The lyrics to the song and the story it tells change a lot. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. Sometimes the girl is raped, sometimes, not. Sometimes the man is killed by a train. Sometimes not.

Anyways, certain bits kept sticking in my head, and I realized that, subconsciously or not, I had my own version of the story. So I wrote up some new lyrics for it that change its tone somewhat. The “narrator” is revealed unambiguously to be both the murderer and a ghost, forced now to eternally wander through the Pines (hell, maybe?), searching for his girl.

In the Pines

My girl, my girl, Don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines
I’ll shiver all the night through

Her father was a hard-workin’ man
Lived a mile and a half from here
Her head was found in a dried up well
But her body never was found

My girl, my girl, where did you go?
I hid from the wrath I sown
In the mines, in the mines,
Where the sun never shines
I shivered all the night through.

My breath was chill’d in the tunnel’s air
Murder – girl sixteen years old
The sheriff come; he shot me there
Left me dead in the coal dust and cold

My girl, my girl, where did you go?
I’m goin’ where the cold winds blow
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I’ll shiver all night through

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines,
Buried bones, bound with twine
I still wander, searching for you.

I had been playing it well enough on my own, and enjoyed it.

Tonight, Jeremy brought over a violin. That, combined with Maynard playing bass, made for an excellent test of my transcription.

We rocked the living fuck out of it. You might say to yourself, “Self, how can adding a violin be ‘rocking the living fuck’ out of something?”

The answer is that the song is not about “rocking”. It’s about experience. Lanegan’s version is angry; Cobain’s is almost psychotic. The way we were playing it was . . . sadder. I’m not pissed at my girl for sleeping out; I’m sad about it.

It was interesting how the violin worked. It was both “lead” and “not lead”. I don’t say it was “rhythm” because it can’t be – not with its treble – but it could drop to the background and let another instrument come forward.

We experimented a lot with the song itself and discovered that it had a lot of room for exposition in all areas. Between the more “obvious” verses, we could drop into long, winding jam sessions. As long as one of us kept the basic four or five notes in sequence, the others could walk all over town.

I’m really digging on the bowed instrument additions.

We’ll have to get some amplification on vocals for it. Though, to be honest, I’m actually not sure the way we played it requires vocals. Maybe only a single verse, spoken or sung cleanly in the right place.

I do know that my vocals sounded about four million times better when I sang from my heart rather than trying to mimic Leadbelly or Lanegan or Cobain. I am sadder than Lanegan or Cobain, with less baritone.

Totally happy about it.

This is based on Mark Lanegan’s version (called “Where Did You Sleep Did You Sleep Last Night”) from The Winding Sheet (recorded in 1989, 2 years before Smells Like Teen Spirit would make Cobain famous and 4 years before he would perform it for MTV).

Interestingly (to me, at any rate) Kurt Cobain performed guitar and secondary vocals on Lanegan’s version. When Nirvana performed it for Unplugged in New York, they were really covering Lanegan’s version and not Lead Belly’s version (which says “Black Girl, Black Girl, Don’t Lie to Me”).

Trivia Fun Fact: Cobain was a huge fan of the Screaming Trees and Mark Lanegan, which is why he performed on The Winding Sheet.

Another Trivia Fun Fact: Cobain says that the song was written by Lead Belly, but it wasn’t; it’s an old traditional song from my homeland (the Appalachians). The lyrics change depending on who sings it.

Tuning: Drop D (DADGBe).

The basics are just laid out; as the song gains more energy, start playing the power chord version (e.g., DAD, instead of D). It’s the same for every verse.

* = let ring out

e--------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--3---0----0---7-----7-----5---0---3--------------------------------------
My girl, my girl, don't lie  to  me, 

e--------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D---3----3---7----7---7----5-----3---0-------------------------------------
Tell  me where did you sleep last night

e--------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--3--3---0------0--0---7------7-----7---5---5--5--3-----------------------
In the pines, in the pines, Where the sun never shines
e--------------------------------------------------------------------------
B--------------------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D--------------------------------------------------------------------------
A--------------------------------------------------------------------------
D---3---7---5---5-----3----2----0*----------------------------------------
I'd  shiver  all  the  night through

My Girl, My Girl, Don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines
I’d shiver all the night through

Her husband was a hard-workin’ man
Til a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a dried up well
And his body never was found

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
I would shiver all night through

My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m goin’ where the cold winds blow
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver all night through