I’ve been telling stories all of my life. Lots of stories. More than you might think. For some perspective:
• I worked eight years as a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper, writing and publishing stories every day, Monday-Friday.
• I spent 18 years working in healthcare publishing, during which I interviewed hundreds of experts for industry newsletters. And hosted hundreds more on a podcast. I wrote and told all of their stories.
• I spent 25 years covering high school football. In that time I spoke to hundreds of players and coaches, likely thousands. I witnessed great victories, painful defeats, and stood in the pressbox and the stands capturing every detail, sometimes in the driving rain or shivering in brutal cold. And cataloged them all in the pages of a newspaper.
• I’ve told the stories of my grandfathers and their incredible service in two major world wars.
• I’ve told the story of a former colleague who passed away far too early, a keynote speech I delivered to a crowd of more than 1,200.
• I’ve written hundreds of essays, book reviews, and author profiles, here on The Silver Key and for websites like Goodman Games, Black Gate, SFFaudio.com, and The Cimmerian.
• I wrote a non-fiction book about the lives of sword-and-sorcery authors, telling the weird story of the creation of a niche subgenre of fantasy fiction. A long and interesting story, start to finish, as told in Flame and Crimson.
I learned something from every person I researched or interviewed. Even if it was someone I thought I knew well, my knowledge of them deepened. I’m incredibly grateful to have had this amazing career. No regrets, I loved it all. I would do it all over again.
But something was missing.
Where was my story in all of this?
Did I even have one worth telling?
For most of my life I’ve considered my story, if it all, as irrelevant, inconsequential. Who was I, next to a star football player, an influential selectman, the chief of police? Next to men and women who wrote influential works of fiction, or fought in wars? Or played in heavy metal bands?
But with the passage of time and (slow) accumulation of wisdom I came to realize a profound truth: That every life is a story. That anyone who has lived a life—even one marked heavily by disappointment and failure—has a story in them, if they are brave enough to speak about it, or set it to paper. That my life, which I formerly had not bothered to examine—and if you had asked me just a few years ago would have said was not worthy of examination—might have something of value. That it was a unique story, and therefore one worth telling.
For I too lived. Foolishly, tentatively, averagely. But also loudly, passionately, and colorfully, in my own way. In no small part because I grew up listening to the best damned music genre for pale teenage boys our planet has ever seen.
Heavy Metal.
I was part of a unique culture, during a unique period of time that shall never again exist. I was never on the stage, but I was, and remain, a fan, passionately devoted to an utterly unique and misunderstood genre of music.
I don’t look the part, and never have, but heavy metal resonates in my soul, with the same volume of an amplified arena concert.
The fans’ story is an unwritten chapter in the rich and colorful history of heavy metal. We’ve got Ozzy’s story, and Gene Simmons’, Rob Halford’s, Bruce Dickinson’s, and hundreds more…but what about those who bought their albums, attended their concerts, and followed their exploits on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball?
Eventually I came to realize this was a story worth telling. It was time to tell the story of a fan … who happened to be me.
I started with a difficult and subjective question for which I did not have an answer—how much of my story, vs. how much of metal’s? But as I began to draft, and redraft, the decision made itself: it would be my story, with metal as the backdrop. The soundtrack to my life, if you will.
My story needed to be told, finally, after a lifetime of telling everyone else’s.
Growing Up Metal is not a heavy metal history. If you’re looking for that, look elsewhere. There are many other worthy metal histories written by authors with far greater knowledge of the genre’s depth and breadth than my own. I’ll happily send you my recommendations.
I think in Growing Up Metal you will find something unprecedented, and unexpected.
Growing Up Metal is the story about how I grew from boy to adult with heavy metal as my constant companion. I tell the story of heavy metal, but heavily filtered through my experiences and perspective. Growing Up Metal is not a sordid tell-all, but it’s intensely personal. Revealing, and raw, and real, which was not easy for someone who spent most his life wearing masks of one sort or another. Who was I, underneath the Gene Simmons face paint? Writing it was incredibly therapeutic, and transformative. Difficult … but also a lot of fun. I did a lot of dumb things, over-the-top, ridiculous things, and lived to tell the tale.
If you’re going to write a memoir you can’t half-ass it, deflect the spotlight, paint over your faults, tell lies or comforting untruths. Books are a serious business that when told truthfully and at length put their subject under the microscope.
You can’t hide in a memoir, and if you do, it will suck. No one wants to read a pale copy, sharp edges shorn off and colors muted.
I didn’t hide writing Growing Up Metal. My life is in its pages.
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In my younger days I lived a life of consumption. I voraciously consumed music, books, and experiences, at the expense of never looking inside. Today we’re constantly bombarded with external stimulus. The smart phone is if nothing else the greatest distraction machine ever invented. “Doom scrolling” has entered the vernacular.
Writing Growing Up Metal afforded me a space to stop and reflect.
The great mythographers Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell said that the real frontier we are called to explore is within. In Growing Up Metal I excavated the events of my past. I reflected on the life I’ve lived, who I was, and who I became, after many trials and false starts and failures.
In the end I was surprised to find it resembled something of The Hero’s Journey, though it did not set out as one.
Heavy metal has an interesting story. It rose, it fell, and was reborn from ruins … a story which strangely parallels my own. All of that is in there. Triumph, failure, crash, and coming to life again.
Each chapter ends with an “amplifier” sidebar in which I digress from my life and discuss the history of metal, or its themes and importance, in more detail. If you remember the 80s and 90s and life before the internet, how we bought and consumed music before Spotify and YouTube, you’ll get mainlined nostalgia for a brief point in time that no longer exists. If you grew up in the New England region, you’ll recognize a lot of the venues where the events unfold. Some of these venues have been bulldozed into the ground, which might be for the best.
I was further spurred to write this book with the advent of generative AI and large language models (LLMs). These are machines that “create” using machine algorithms and aggregated text others have written. LLMs are powerful tools which I believe have a useful purpose… but not in creative spaces. I draw a firm, unwavering line when it comes to using AI for the arts. After all, the life I lived was profoundly human, full of awkward romance and painful mistakes, occasional catastrophes and towering triumphs. Of a modest sort, but not to me. The writing needed to be mine. It’s 100% authentic meat space, and I was adamant my voice would be mine, not a machine.
I hope you enjoy Growing Up Metal, learn something from it, and perhaps recognize something of yourself in its pages. And if you’re at the right age, at a pivotal time in your life, it may even help you make different choices, ones I might have made to change the course of my life.
Growing Up Metal is complete. I hope it strikes a heavy power chord among metal fans, maybe something akin to the shock we feel when Judas Priest starts into The Hellion/Electric Eye.
I think it rocks.
If you’ve liked what I’ve had to say here over the many years, please consider picking up a copy. Consider it my personal mix tape to you.
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