Before The Internet

[Gibbo]

I got to thinking the other day about how easy it is these days for us to find out about bands/songs/albums/tours, etc. thanks to the internet ...

 

Those of us with a few years under our belts probably still remember how a lot of news/recommendations came via 'word of mouth', and I thought back to all the albums I've bought over the years without hearing a single note of the music simply because someone told me it was good, or because a review raved about it, or even just because I liked the picture on the cover. Off the top of my head, I came up with:

 

Guns n' Roses: Appetite For Destruction

Faster Pussycat: Faster Pussycat

Van Halen: 1984

Def Leppard: Pyromania

Kiss Of The Gypsy: Kiss Of The Gypsy

Motorhead: No Sleep 'til Hammersmith

Black Sabbath: Mob Rules

Krokus: One Vice At A Time

Black Sabbath: Heaven And Hell

AC/DC: Highway To Hell

Elixir: Son Of Odin

Motley Crue: Too Fast For Love

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but discovering new music this way was always exciting ... or maybe I'm just getting old and longing for 'the good old days'?

[JamesEagle]

I bought hundreds of CDs based purely on reviews. Still do.

 

It often ended badly, with lots of CDs I didn't really like, but there were some out and out successes, such as, to quote your list, 'Pyromania'. (I'd heard a few songs off 'Hysteria', but nothing off it's predecessor ... then I read somewhere that it was better than 'Hysteria' and found to my surprise that I completely agreed!)

 

'White Sister', 'Pride' and 'Puressence' also spring to mind. I'd heard nothing at all by the bands, bought the albums and they still remain in my all-time top ten.

[Gibbo]

I bought hundreds of CDs based purely on reviews. Still do.

 

 

*snigger!*

[Gibbo]

I bought hundreds of CDs based purely on reviews. Still do.

 

It often ended badly, with lots of CDs I didn't really like, but there were some out and out successes, such as, to quote your list, 'Pyromania'. (I'd heard a few songs off 'Hysteria', but nothing off it's predecessor ... then I read somewhere that it was better than 'Hysteria' and found to my surprise that I completely agreed!)

 

'White Sister', 'Pride' and 'Puressence' also spring to mind. I'd heard nothing at all by the bands, bought the albums and they still remain in my all-time top ten.

 

Aside from being influenced by reviews, I also blame the late, great Tommy Vance and his Friday Rock Show on Radio 1 for introducing me to Metallica, Warrior Soul, Manowar, Slayer and Magnum ... among others ... one song by each of 'em and that was it, I was hooked!

[Glen]

Virtually every album pre the year 2000!!

 

Things which influenced me -

 

Friday Rock Show

Head Bangers Ball / MTV (when it was good)

KKKKK review in KERRANG! (when it was good!)

Listening sessions in Shades record store - where I spent half my life!!

 

Cheers

[JamesEagle]

Virtually every album pre the year 2000!!

 

Things which influenced me -

 

Friday Rock Show / Krusher's Radio Show

Head Bangers Ball / MTV (when it was good)

KKKKK 5* review in KERRANG! (when it was good!) Metal Hammer / Metal Forces / Terrorizer / Rock Power

Listening sessions in Shades Rock It record store - where I spent half my life!!

 

Cheers

 

I have edited your message slightly to show that we were leading pretty much the same life!

 

[Stefan]

I can't remember the time before internet...

[All Nights Reserved]

The Metal Hammer reviews and the owner of the local CD store, who always let us check out the new albums. Yeah... good old times.

[Fat Freddy]

Backinaday I would read any and all metal/hard rock magazines that I could get my hands on to get hip on new stuff that might be up my alley (Dark Star can vouch for me on that - there was always a huge stack of Metal Maniacs, Metal Hammer, Metal Forces, Metal Edge, Circus, RIP, etc. issues in my dorm room, with some underground 'zines mixed in...)...plus of course we in the New York/New Jersey area were lucky enough to have WSOU-FM and Z-Rock on the radio, which were all hard rock all the time.

 

...and on Saturday there was always the good ole Headbanger's Ball on MTV... yeah, you had to wade thru a lot of crap (esp. later during the Riki Rachtman era) but there'd usually be a couple of good vids mixed in...

[shamus]

I gleaned most of my info from the Bands on the Rise section and the page dedicated to rock news in Metal Edge and ads from companies like Wildside Imports which were placed in Record Collector or Goldmine. They gave a slight description for most of their upcoming releases that included mentioning the members' former bands.

[FredGarvin]

I didn't have much money as a teen in the 80s, so buying albums "blind" was always a risk, but most of the time it worked out favorably. Most of my buying decisions were based on magazine reviews, advice from friends, and (dumbly) what the album cover looked like.

 

I remember going to the mall (!) record store in the Summer of '85 and buying "Ride The Lightning" and "Bonded By Blood" just because I'd read about this new style of metal called "thrash." Luckily, I loved both albums!

[Nightrain]

I got information mostly from local magazines, videos on MTV - usually a single or two and made me blindly buy the whole album, radios, from seniors at high school, they got many tapes from the 80s and lend them to me and I slowly buy them one by one at the store. There are few listening spots on CD stores where I can try some of the releases too

 

When internet started to boom around 1996-1997, there's an audiosharing server called audiogalaxy if i'm not mistaken, got many MP3 songs from that and then Napster, but it was dead then I was introduced to CDR trading in 2001-2002, so because the cost is cheap, I just try all kind of musics through trading until MP3 and iPod days.

[Evil Rick]

A buddy of mine in jr high and high school always got record and tape mags and was a rich farm kid so he would order anything and everything. He got me into lesser known bands like Shok Paris and Mammoth. I started hanging out at a cool record shop called Ernie November and those guys were always playing new music, plus they had a huge 50 cent used tape bin that they always kept full so that was a good way to hear new bands (be they good or bad ) along with Headbangers Ball.

[KarpetRydOFunk]

Someone like me hardly knew that life. It was interesting reading an article of Olli Hermann's top 10 Hard Rock artists. A few of them he only discovered recently through YouTube.

[Leykis101]

Man I had KBER 101 here, so I generally heard all the bands as they released there albums, when I didnt, I got Metal Disc, and Wildside catalogs annually, generally if a name intrigued me I would buy it, I think Independents and self releases were the difficult ones to stay on top of, even when I worked at a cd store, and a radio station, you just couldn't stay on top of those ones, cause there really was no way to, you just had to hope you got lucky, or hope somebody you knew happened to catch them, I think thats what has really flourished with the proliferation of the internet, those bands you think, how the fuck did I not know about that back in 95? now think about it, if your like me, and thought you were pretty on top of shit, and I thought I was, and to a point I was, but since the internet, ive realized, I didnt have dick, there was so much shit that came out and I never even caught wind of it, thank you internet.

[manicego]

In Frankfurt we had this EXTREMELY cool club called The Klapperkahn, which played hard rock and the lighter side of metal (Manowar got played every now and again, Venom, Slayer, et al wouldn't) from open to close. The owner, Ritchie, had a friend in The States who would send him VHS tapes of this new show called Headbanger's Ball and lo and behold, Ritchie had an American video player so he would play videos on the weekends. When he would play stuff off of the stereo it could be anything from Motley Crue to Dokken to Pet Hate, Tokyo Blade, Jade, Kidd Gloves ... you never knew what was going to come flying at you. And he had it ALL - the major label stuff, the indie and DIY bands, you name it ... Then we had this EXTREMELY cool record store called City Music that we could listen to anything we wanted for a while before deciding to buy or not. And they sold Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Metal Rendevouz, etc so you just picked up a magazine, flipped through the reviews, found something that sounded interesting, walked over to the racks, pulled the record out (they almost ALWAYS had whatever you were looking for), plopped it down on a turntable, listened to a few songs then bought both the album and the magazine ... And did it all over again next weekend.

[Fat Freddy]

^^ I drank at the Klapperkahn several times during my trip to Frankfurt in '87. Great place. My buddy who was with me swore that I was sitting next to one of the guys from Destruction at the bar when I was there one night but I didn't recognize him.

[heaven&hell]

I miss all of the magazines and the reviews. Sure there are more bands, releases and reviews on the net now but it's amost overwhelming at times because you can't afford to keep up with so many releases since it's so much easier and cheaper to record an album with the internet and computers.

[manicego]

^^ I drank at the Klapperkahn several times during my trip to Frankfurt in '87. Great place. My buddy who was with me swore that I was sitting next to one of the guys from Destruction at the bar when I was there one night but I didn't recognize him.

There's a good chance it was. Marcel (Schmier) from Destruction liked to hang out there, as did Tankard's manager, Buffo and Matthias Prill who worked with Venom, Slayer, Legacy (Testament) and others. These three were pretty much the "odd guys out" but they were a great bunch of guys.

[Fat Freddy]

 

^^ I drank at the Klapperkahn several times during my trip to Frankfurt in '87. Great place. My buddy who was with me swore that I was sitting next to one of the guys from Destruction at the bar when I was there one night but I didn't recognize him.

There's a good chance it was. Marcel (Schmier) from Destruction liked to hang out there, as did Tankard's manager, Buffo and Matthias Prill who worked with Venom, Slayer, Legacy (Testament) and others. These three were pretty much the "odd guys out" but they were a great bunch of guys.

 

 

Yeah, I didn't know till later (after I returned to the U.S.) that Destruction were from Frankfurt. So the whole night my friend kept going "Dude! I think that's Schmier from Destruction!" and I was like "What? Nah, can't be. Get the f*ck outta here."

[manicego]

 

 

^^ I drank at the Klapperkahn several times during my trip to Frankfurt in '87. Great place. My buddy who was with me swore that I was sitting next to one of the guys from Destruction at the bar when I was there one night but I didn't recognize him.

There's a good chance it was. Marcel (Schmier) from Destruction liked to hang out there, as did Tankard's manager, Buffo and Matthias Prill who worked with Venom, Slayer, Legacy (Testament) and others. These three were pretty much the "odd guys out" but they were a great bunch of guys.

 

 

Yeah, I didn't know till later (after I returned to the U.S.) that Destruction were from Frankfurt. So the whole night my friend kept going "Dude! I think that's Schmier from Destruction!" and I was like "What? Nah, can't be. Get the f*ck outta here."

 

haha Yeah, I think Schmier was a closeted hard rock / glam fan because he was there quite a bit. He was a really cool guy and even though none of us were really fans of Destruction we'd go to support them. Pay the DM 5 to get into the show and just hang out and get drunk in the lobby LOL

[Gibbo]

KKKKK review in KERRANG! (when it was good!)

Listening sessions in Shades record store - where I spent half my life!!

 

Aah, yes ... the days when KERRPIIIING! used to be good ... I remember them

I used to LOVE Shades ...

[Leykis101]

I miss all of the magazines and the reviews. Sure there are more bands, releases and reviews on the net now but it's amost overwhelming at times because you can't afford to keep up with so many releases since it's so much easier and cheaper to record an album with the internet and computers.

You know what bro, and I don't care what anyone thinks about this, or about me for doing this, but I absolutely take advantage of file sharing and torrents, the way I see it, I spent years blowing money on overpriced Japanese imports, of bands I had never heard of, playing roulette basically hoping for every 5 bad discs, I could at least land one killer disc, when used CD shops started opening up, I think this is when things really started to progress forward, cause before the internet, you could pop into pawn shops, and used cd joints, and basically find all sorts of rare and unknown shit, you would get like the pawn shop having 20 for $20 cd sales, you could just blaze through them, something you never heard of, pull it out, check out the cover, the songs, and take a chance on it, I got to where I could spot out a rock or aor album, by the label, and the way the side name tray was formatted and printed out(ie Atlantic Records, ATCO, & CBS) if you know what I mean then you know exactly what I mean, if you dont know, I really cant explain it to you, but yeah, most everything that is released now, I head over to my 2 rock solid websites, download everything I want to check out, and when I catch one, that really grabs me, I instantly go to a website to purchase the disc, or I check Itunes for a download, generally I would much rather have the physical copy, but sometimes that's really hard, especially now a days where sometimes a physical cd isnt even produced for a certain album, fuck that, I am not going to buy anything blindly any longer, I did it all the way up until this last June, and now I illegally download and check out each album before I buy it, and so what, so all those $1000s or $10,000s of dollars ive spent over the last 20 or so years, on shit that only had one good song, but I couldnt know cause there was nothing made available to pre-listen to it, what I dont get a say about that, or those bands? but they cry and bitch over people "illegally downloading" there new albums, hey you know what, how many bands ive discovered by "illegal download"? some of my favorite bands ever I would have never even known of if I hadnt downloaded the band to hear them, I mean when it boils down to it, before I started doing it this way, I was basically a fucking sucker! they had my money the second I liked one song on it, and there was NO! refunds once I found out how bad the rest of the cd blew, I believe it's completely fair to be able to hear every last second of anything im going to pay for, no more ripping off the sucker cd buyers out there, thats what their truly pissed off about, that and it takes like .25 cents to make a cd, then selling them for $17.99, I know for a fact the band was only given .50 cents out of every cd sold, anyways, im done ranting, yeah, this is how the internet has truly opened up music.

[KarpetRydOFunk]

 

 

I miss all of the magazines and the reviews. Sure there are more bands, releases and reviews on the net now but it's amost overwhelming at times because you can't afford to keep up with so many releases since it's so much easier and cheaper to record an album with the internet and computers.

You know what bro, and I don't care what anyone thinks about this, or about me for doing this, but I absolutely take advantage of file sharing and torrents, the way I see it, I spent years blowing money on overpriced Japanese imports, of bands I had never heard of, playing roulette basically hoping for every 5 bad discs, I could at least land one killer disc, when used CD shops started opening up, I think this is when things really started to progress forward, cause before the internet, you could pop into pawn shops, and used cd joints, and basically find all sorts of rare and unknown shit, you would get like the pawn shop having 20 for $20 cd sales, you could just blaze through them, something you never heard of, pull it out, check out the cover, the songs, and take a chance on it, I got to where I could spot out a rock or aor album, by the label, and the way the side name tray was formatted and printed out(ie Atlantic Records, ATCO, & CBS) if you know what I mean then you know exactly what I mean, if you dont know, I really cant explain it to you, but yeah, most everything that is released now, I head over to my 2 rock solid websites, download everything I want to check out, and when I catch one, that really grabs me, I instantly go to a website to purchase the disc, or I check Itunes for a download, generally I would much rather have the physical copy, but sometimes that's really hard, especially now a days where sometimes a physical cd isnt even produced for a certain album, fuck that, I am not going to buy anything blindly any longer, I did it all the way up until this last June, and now I illegally download and check out each album before I buy it, and so what, so all those $1000s or $10,000s of dollars ive spent over the last 20 or so years, on shit that only had one good song, but I couldnt know cause there was nothing made available to pre-listen to it, what I dont get a say about that, or those bands? but they cry and bitch over people "illegally downloading" there new albums, hey you know what, how many bands ive discovered by "illegal download"? some of my favorite bands ever I would have never even known of if I hadnt downloaded the band to hear them, I mean when it boils down to it, before I started doing it this way, I was basically a fucking sucker! they had my money the second I liked one song on it, and there was NO! refunds once I found out how bad the rest of the cd blew, I believe it's completely fair to be able to hear every last second of anything im going to pay for, no more ripping off the sucker cd buyers out there, thats what their truly pissed off about, that and it takes like .25 cents to make a cd, then selling them for $17.99, I know for a fact the band was only given .50 cents out of every cd sold, anyways, im done ranting, yeah, this is how the internet has truly opened up music.

I only read a bit of what you said, 'cause DAMN YOU TALK A LOT, CODY! But I agree with you, brother.

[bangerdave]

I had pen pals from Japan,America & England and we all traded tapes.Kerrang,Sounds,Burnnn,Cream,Circus,Metaledge and many other mags sent me on buying missions.The staff from my local import store Metal For Melbourne would let me listen to anything i wanted and in time when i would come in they would have bands for me to check out as they got to know my tastes.I miss those days so much.