My Musical Evolution – Part 213 The Metal Years Stand Up And Shout

We are the sum of the choices we make and the experiences we have had. In 1984, The Rise was incredible, The Fall was devastating. Did it change me? It had to, right? I didn’t dress differently. I might have partied harder. I might have been more focused on the Heavy Metal Music.

Enter Dio. Rainbow In The Dark was making the orunds on MTV and getting airtime on the metal hour radio programs. Ronnie James Dio filled the vacancy in Black Sabbath when they fired Ozzy Osbourne. If you thought Van Halen was different with Sammy Hagar , you should check out some of the Black Sabbath albums with Dio. Oh wait, we will.

Holy Diver was a good addition to the pile of Metal records I was. The guitar work was impressive and the percussion on Dio albums is always mixed in such a crisp manner. Of course Ronnie James Dio’s voice is a powerful force of its own. The guy has the lungs to do opera.

It was around this time that I upgraded my home stereo. I had been rocking my old Sears all in one for years. I wanted something a little louder. Something more modern. I really wanted a kick ass Pioneer component system with massive speakers and 50,000 Watts of power. What I could afford was another Sears all in one. This one was designed to look like a component system. It really was a major upgrade from the previous. It had dual cassettes with high speed dubbing that I never actually used. It have a graphic equalizer and those Mountain Dew Green LED driven peak meters and other lights. The speakers where about 3 feet tall and features 8″ woofers and 3″ mids and 2″ tweeters. For the price range it was really good stuff. It eventually would get passed along to my sister. I wish I would have taken a good picture of it.

It was considerable louder than my previous model. One afternoon I was rocking out to this very Dio album at high volume. My angry mother entered the room yelling about how loud it was and I couldn’t hear her. After turning it down, she told me she could hear it as she pulled into the driveway.

It has been a long time since I’ve given these old metal albums a serioius listen. They stir up more emotion than memory. With the music of The Academy Days, I’d get mental images of people, places and events. With The Metal Years, I get a more physiological response. The urge bang my head as it were.

Stand Up And Shout