I was trying to put together a hair metal playlist to jam while writing this, but after looking through my half-terabyte of digital music files, I realized that I don’t have much any more.

My library’s stocked with tons of other forms of metal. As far as hair metal, though, I found almost none, unless I counted a few already established bands who briefly adopted some or all of the spandex, makeup, and hairspray trifecta during the ‘80s (or, in the case of Pantera, young bands who jumped on the hair metal bandwagon in the ‘80s, then found success later on playing next-gen thrash). All I could find in my music collection overall was ‘Stay Hungry’ by Twisted Sister, and a couple dusty greatest-hits CDs from Motley Crüe and Van Halen. In 20 years, I’d hardly ever listened to these CDs, much less bothered ripping them into digital files. This in spite of these albums being among the very first metal bands the early ‘80s version of me owned (I first had them as tapes, though). You’d think there’d be more of a nostalgia factor at work, but as far as hair metal goes, it’s not really there for me. Though I do now plan on ripping those CDs; between them, there’s maybe an album’s worth of good songs—more on that later.

Back to my playlist dilemma, I ended up expanding it to ‘80s metal of any genre,’ being careful not to cheat by just dumping whole albums in and hitting shuffle (I’ve found the shuffle function on virtually every music device or app I’ve ever used to be consistently non-random, anyway—the machines all have their favorites, it seems).

(My self-imposed, OCD playlist guidelines, by the way, include:

No more than two songs by any one band, and two only if: the band had more than one singer and the chosen songs feature both,

one song is instrumental and/or an intro to the other,

they’re from a band that only has one album, or

the band is Black Sabbath, in which case I allow myself one song per singer (they’ve had four, plus another—Glenn Hughes, no slouch by any means—from a solo album turned into a Sabbath album by record company fuckery) No more than two six-minute-plus songs in a row, and two only if the band is Black Sabbath and one of the songs is “Into the Void” For playlists intended for, say, road trips or day-long house painting projects from Hell, dumping and shuffling whole albums can be permitted, as long as: those stupid back-loaded “hidden” tracks that were so prevalent in the ’90s; boring filler tracks—even some of the best albums have one (I’m looking at you, “Electioneering” by Radiohead); intro tracks; live bonus tracks; and live, over-extended-to-the-point-they-become-boring songs are deleted from the final playlist with extreme prejudice

there’s a general common theme to the albums included (e.g., “‘80s metal of any genre,” though “chaos” also counts as a common theme if I really do want a completely random mix of music)

no more than two albums from the same artist are included, unless of course the band is Black Sabbath)

Quickly, my playlist grew from 28 minutes to over three hours. And considering how it only covers the ’80s, you might be surprised by how many distinct sounds and developing sub-genres are in there. Metal is truly the genre that keeps on giving—to those who continue exploring. And I’ve been exploring since I was 10.

A person’s discovery of music of any kind is a journey, and while for some pop music fads these journeys are relatively brief and uncomplicated (see: disco; fuck: disco), metal is not. It’s been around for almost 50 years now, its mainstream popularity fluctuating like a sine wave but never quite disappearing, just slinking away into the stygian underground to mutate as new hybrid sub-genres and styles emerge. After 50 years of this, things get messy. So unless you were lucky enough to be there at the beginning, your discovery of metal and its offshoots is bound to be just as non-linear and complicated as a particular sub-genre’s influences. Complicated, but still traceable for those who are more forensically inclined, as metal scholar Fenriz of Norwegian black metal pioneers Darkthrone shows in this earnest reconstruction of that particular genre’s lineage.

This complexity might be one reason why metal shows are so … friendly. There’s a sense of community, of comfort and relief in the air. Here, many fans whose backwards employers don’t allow them to wear rock shirts, or display piercings, or grow their hair, or otherwise express themselves in the Holy Workplace are finally among their own kind. Everyone’s there for the same reason, but they each got there a different way, and therefore offer new perspectives on the genre. While waiting in the beer line, complete strangers compare notes on whatever bands they’re repping on our t-shirts. I’m sure this happens at other types of shows, too, but it always happens at metal shows (and I’ve been to more than a few “other” shows where nobody talked to anyone outside their social circles). Anyway, these beer-line conversations almost always include “Dude, if you like [Band A], you’ve got to check out [Band B]” moments, which often lead to momentous discoveries. And momentous metal discoveries are important to explorers like me.

(Case in point, though not from a beer-line conversation, I might never have discovered one of my all-time favorite bands, doom metal icons Cathedral, if a friend’s older brother hadn’t insisted on playing their “Soul Sacrifice” EP on repeat in the car while driving us to see them open for Rob Halford’s Fight. He told us, sage-like, “If you like Sabbath, you can’t not like this band.” Dude was right—while tons of bands have tried to ape Sabbath’s sound directly over the years to varying degrees of success, what immediately hooked me on Cathedral was how they didn’t just take that doom-laden Sabbath sound and make it heavier, they mixed it with elements of something completely different—‘70s-style funk—and made it sound completely natural when combined with their Hammer-Horror-meets-H.P. Lovecraft lyrics. Because this discovery is so important to whatever part of my brain that processes music, whenever I hear the bone-crunching-yet-somehow-groovy opening riff from that EP, I flash back to an image from that car ride—a view of one of Cleveland’s flame-topped smokestacks off I-77 as we drove in from the suburbs. Cathedral’s performance that night—beginning with purple-bell-bottommed singer Lee Dorrian strolling from where he was sitting at the bar to the stage, wrapping the microphone cord several times around his neck until his eyes bugged out, and groaning, “All right!” as they ripped into the toe-tapping dirge “Autumn Twilight”—completely outshined the Metal God we had all come to see, and remains one of my favorite concert memories. But, as “just an opening band,” I might not have been right up front paying attention if my friend’s brother hadn’t tipped us to them, and Cathedral are obscure enough that who knows when, if ever, I might have discovered them otherwise in those dark pre-internet days …)

Whether they come from chance conversations at shows or advice from older and wiser metalheads, moments of discovery like these are, of course, huge milestones in anyone’s metal journey.

My own metal journey began just over a decade into the genre’s existence, and it had already morphed, mutated, and evolved quite a bit since Sabbath’s first barrage in the early ‘70s. This would be 1984; i was in the 4th grade. That’s when MTV introduced me to hair metal, forever changing my musical direction. Before then, I mostly listened to classical music since that’s what my parents always had playing (oh, and because it’s good). In an attempt to fit in somewhat with the other kids at school, I listened to the local mainstream rock station. My favorite song was “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” by Joan Jett, and the only tapes I owned were “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, “Sports” by Huey Lewis & The News, and a bunch of movie soundtracks. I had no idea that something called heavy metal existed.

On this particular day, I was taking an alternate route home from school to avoid some kids who wanted to beat me up (I might have given them wrong answers when they threatened me into doing their math homework). We lived in Groton, Connecticut, near the nuclear submarine base and a big Pfizer plant. Whenever I took this route home, the air would be thick with a stench similar to wet, rotting wood (what the adults told us was the plant making penicillin, though that seems like an awful lot of penicillin). I’d also sometimes hear protesters outside the sub base’s razor-wire fence, rhythmically chanting, “No one survives…a nuclear war,” while many of my neighbors worked all day inside building submarines, each of which was capable of firing 24 Trident (like the gum!) nuclear missiles with 475-kiloton payloads from under the ocean to vaporize cities 4,000 miles away. The way those protesters all droned these words as one reminded me of a cross between the brain-craving zombies in “Return of the Living Dead” and the animated, face-slapping monks in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I couldn’t get them out of my head. Maybe because, around this time, we’d have school assemblies where our vice principal would veer off from telling us about Stranger Danger or the Evils of Drugs to explaining in detail how a hair trigger works, and how, at that very moment, Russia and the United States had their nuclear arsenals aimed at each other on the equivalent of said hair triggers, ready to wipe out all life on earth at any given moment (so go home and hug your mom tonight, kids!).

Doom was in the air. And while it was scary, it was also kind of cool to daydream at school about having fucked-up Mad Max-like adventures in a post-nuclear wasteland that, for all I knew, might happen before our next math test.

I’m sure that if the internet had been available, this environment—and my increasingly apocalyptic, gallows humor headspace—would have first led my musical interests where they should have gone. To the beginning of metal; doom metal in particular. To Black Sabbath, Trouble, Saint Vitus, and all the others that built on their blueprints. Instead, on this particular day in the fall of 1984, I ran into one of my neighborhood friends whose family had just gotten cable.

Cable was, of course, a big fucking deal in 1984. So we spent the afternoon watching MTV. Some kind of a metal countdown show was on. Cue watershed moment.

The first video I remember was “I Wanna Rock,” by Twisted Sister: