January 16 - Kingdom Come

Yesterday's post really made me travel down memory lane - and I realize that I started listening to Heavyrockmagasinet while I was in sixth grade as well. Taking the time to sit and write some of this out really leads to a very interesting perspective of my life, and I am certainly making new connections myself. And, let's face it, this blog is really written for me. As a matter of fact, writing a blog like this is really the epitome of egocentrism, narcissism, and navel-gazing. The truth is that I could have done this quietly - just writing like this for myself throughout the year - but I fear that I would have quit before I even started (now that almost happened anyway - just look at the time stamp for the January 1 post). But now, by tricking myself into believing I have an audience, I am feeling slightly more compelled to publish something every day than I would be if I was the only audience. But I digress - in a good way though, just to let whomever reads this know that I am not actually conceited enough that I think this has any kind of importance or significance to anyone but me... And that was yet another digression...

So, back to Heavyrockmagasinet. The reason I started listening to it was really to prove my dad wrong. He did not agree that I liked hard rock and heavy metal, but pointed out that I only liked Kiss. If you had seen my bedroom wall at that time, you would know that he was right. The Donald Duck wallpaper (I miss that now) was covered with Kiss posters and pictures. However, there was no way that I'd ever admit to that, so I found Heavyrockmagasinet and started listening to it, not as much to broaden my musical palette, but to prove my dad wrong. The thing is, it really did broaden my musical palette. Gustav Alfheim and Stein Vannebo were the hosts, and their command of hard rock and heavy metal was second to none. Thanks to them I discovered the classic hard rock bands, discovered some newer music (the pre hair-metal bands), and also discovered some of the more obscure early metal bands, such as the wonderful Sir Lord Baltimore. The song that found its way to one of my early mixtapes was Kingdom Come.