As a kid, I always seemed to be alone, even though there were always people around me. I don’t know, even in groups, I always felt like I didn’t belong. Actually, I feel a lot like that today. You ever feel that way? You know, like you’re alone, even when you are with a group of people.(Of course, what other type of group would you be in? Hyenas? Or, is that a pack? Hell, I don’t know.) Growing up, I had a brother, 3 years younger than me, and some cousins. One cousin practically lived with us and he and my brother were very close. I was always pretty much alone. But, I really didn’t care. Being alone doesn’t always mean you’re lonely.
As a kid, I was a big fan of horror movies, books, music, and television. All of those things can pretty much rot your brain, if you let ‘em. And boy, did they rot mine. I am actually glad they did. My favorite character as a kid was Frankenstein‘s monster. I first saw the movie on WRAL, every Saturday night after wrestling, they had ‘Chiller Theater’. I can still picture the beginning of it, a guy running through a cemetery, breathing heavy. That was, of course, enough to send most kids hiding under their covers, praying for sleep in those days. But not me, ohhh noooo, I had to see what was coming after that. I got to watch all the old cheesy horror films. But my absolute favorite was ‘Frankenstein’. I really could identify with Boris Karloff‘s character in that movie. I felt for that monster. He was misunderstood, not evil. He had not asked to be created.
Then, I discovered KISS. These guys were like walking comic book heroes and to some extent villains.(Villains, for some reason, doesn’t look like it’s spelled right to me, but it is.) It was 1978, and their overtly sexualized lyrics went completely over my head, so I had no idea what ‘Makin’ Love’ or what a ‘Love Gun’ were. Hell, a cardboard gun came with the ‘Love Gun’ album, I thought that was a love gun, it turns out, I was completely wrong about that.
Anyway, so a child that’s alone is usually alone with his dark thoughts. Thoughts no one should know. In fact, I remember writing a story in the 3rd grade about aliens that killed everyone’s parents. I wanted to read it aloud in class, but the teacher told me that it may not be a good idea because it may frighten the other children in the class. You know, I don’t know if Mrs. Peebles contacted my parents about my fascination with death at such an early age or not. Nothing was ever said to me and my mom always encouraged me to write, proudly telling people what a wonderful imagination I had.
I was a well mannered and good student until I went to middle school, then I decided it was time to quit being the nice kid. I basically became a little asshole. I once threatened a teacher in an essay I was forced to write about why I was misbehaving in class. I will never, ever forget the look on Marvin Jones’s face when he got off the phone with Mrs. James. Oh shit, my ass was his. Though, that wasn’t nearly as bad as when he found out that I and a group of my friends took Bobby Moore’s mother’s car joy riding and decided that it would be fun to ride on top of the car, hanging on to the roof rack down paths until we got the car stuck in the red clay of Nash County, NC. I was the only kid that got his ass beat over that one. No one else’s parents found out and Bobby’s mom actually didn’t give a fuck what he did. It was around this time that I discovered my favorite band, Black Sabbath, they named themselves after a movie starring Boris Karloff. I was 13 or14, which is the prime age for a white boy to fall in love with Heavy Metal. All the other kids were listening to Michael Jackson or country music.(It’s the south.)
Black Sabbath took my love of horror movies and my alienation and made me feel that maybe I wasn’t alone in the world. There was magic in those songs. You could not listen to Sabbath without paying attention to the lyrics. Whenever I listened, I always pictured something black and evil descending from the sky. Doom and destruction would fall on all those that shunned me. Why? Because, the Sabs were all powerful, much more powerful than those posers in KISS and Motley Crue. Who fuckin’ needs those fuckers anyway? Sabbath was my band, dark and depressing. When I was listening to them, I felt that I could rule the world. In a way, I did rule my own little dark world.
Of course, I got older and started to listen to other bands and other types of music. But, I always go back to the Black Sabbath, back to those sounds of doom and despair that acted as my personal soundtrack through puberty. And to this day, even though I have heard it all, I never fail to listen and I mean, really listen to those lyrics. That sound and those songs are about the world I see, not the world I want. A dark nasty world, filled with death and despair. A world filled with villains, a world without heroes.
