Discovery

When I first stared playing guitar I was frustrated with the fact that the sound coming out of the amplifier was not like the sound I heard on the song. I twisted knobs, I switched cords, I even tried to figure out if I was using the pick wrong. Nothing I did created that crunchy, heavy metal sound I so desperately was trying to reproduce. I wasn’t taking any lessons and this was 1988 or so and the internet didn’t exist in a way that was useful to me.

I was then asked by a friend if I was going to see a buddy of mine and when I said I was he asked be to take a distortion pedal to him that he was borrowing. I said sure but what is a “Distortion Pedal”? My friend asked if I was an idiot and then said it’s what you plug your guitar into to play with distortion. He said you run a cord from the guitar to the pedal and from the pedal to the amp and when you step on the pedal it turn the sound on and off.

I couldn’t wait to get this thing home and try it out before I handed it off to my buddy. When I finally got home from school, I dumped my book bag, raced downstairs, plugged everything in and turned on my amp. I turned up the volume on my guitar and played the chords to “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath.

The goose bumps I got all over me and the grin that formed on my face were so strong that I’m sure my folks would have thought I was on drugs at the time. Just remembering that moment to capture it here is enough to have me grinning like an idiot. I suppose the adrenaline rush I got at finally playing a Sabbath tune that sounded (somewhat) like a Sabbath tune was healthy fix. Needless to say, the very next thing I was earning money for was my own distortion pedal which was a D.O.D. Thrashmaster and turned out to be a piece of junk. But while it worked I enjoyed many hours of grinding away trying to play like Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax , Metallica and Black Sabbath.

My parents, however, did not.