Maiden Canada

I've mentioned previously that both of my kids are big metal fans and I've mentioned that Bozeman is a lousy place to keep up with metal tours. That's one of my bigger disappointments for all of us in Bozeman, and I'm sensitive to the fact that my kids will not be able to spend their teens hanging out at local all ages shows, checking out the bands like The Squares, (Night) Ranger, Metallica, Testament, Exodus and Y&T before they make it big. The first couple of years in Bozeman we just lumped it, streamed concert videos and complained a lot.

This year is different. I already wrote about our trip to Finland and Sweden, centered around seeing Amaranthe in Göteborg. For us serious metalheads, though, one show a summer really isn't enough and as a parent of two kids that love metal, there are certain experiences that it's essential I share with them. Thanks to Iron Maiden's North American Tour - 2012, our other big show for the summer was obvious. It wasn't a question of whether we'd go, just a question of where. The obvious choice is Salt Lake City in terms of a road trip, with Denver and Seattle being close seconds for short hop plane trips. But, for a summer trip and the chance to pass through Glacier National Park on the way, Calgary really was a no brainer.

Nancy and I think it's incredibly important to expose our kids to a variety of experiences. They have been to Yosemite, we make regular trips to Yellowstone and have a long list of national parks and monuments yet to visit. I have similar feelings about making sure they experience certain bands. Sadly, they will never get to see Queen but thanks to videos and documentaries, they've got a good understanding for how magical Queen's live performances were. On the metal side, there are only a few bands that sum up the genre as effectively as Iron Maiden. We're talking about a band that covers all the bases: a scary mascot, comic book like and bigger than life, fast tempos, soaring vocals, songs about stalkers, mythology and warfare. Plus, like Queen, they put on an amazing show.

Bruce Dickinson is a master of getting the crowd involved. Maiden shows involve every single audience member. Admittedly there are times that you simply can't hear Bruce, even when he is singing, because the crowd is singing so loudly. And, somehow, Iron Maiden manages to capture that energy across the entire globe. This isn't a national band, this is a global one. They've honed their chops and their show over decades and they're the perfect band to show our kids where metal came from and why it still lives on despite a complete lack of coverage in the mainstream press.

We've got about a week before the show, and less than that before the road trip begins. I can't wait to share an evening with my kids and enjoy one of the bands that really got me started on this crazy metal ride. I look forward to seeing the stage lights glowing in their eyes, and the periodic jaw-dropping looks of disbelief that I know will grace their faces that night. I want to see them as they watch Steve Harris' crazy dancing spider fingers. Maybe they will wonder, as I did, "How does he play all those great galloping bass lines like that." I've never quite figured it out, to this day.

It really just boils down to a show that can't be missed. Sometimes you just gotta make the effort and go out of your way for the sake of the experience and opportunity. We look forward to traveling through beautiful Alberta and sharing an evening in Calgary with our northern neighbors, enjoying one of the best metal bands ever. Hope to see some of you there!

I Am Metal Dad

As a father of 2, I often think back to the experiences I had as kid, the ones that really shaped who I've become and how I approach life. Often what jumps out at me are the times that my sister and I used to visit my dad's chemistry lab at U.C. Berkeley. I remember playing with plastic molecular models and being fascinated by the air and gas valves with color coded caps. I remember the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) room, the centrifuge room and trips up and down the elevator. Most of all, though, I remember interacting with my dad and his students and feeling comfortable in an intellectually challenging place surrounded by a bunch of fun personalities.

Those experiences were a huge factor in the path my life has taken, through my Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry into my career working in Silicon Valley as a software engineer. Being in a creative, exciting and challenging environment and sharing it with bright, motivated colleagues really, for me, is the key to long-term satisfaction. Despite all of that, there's an even more fundamental element to who I am, namely, music. Though I've studied classical, jazz and blues, it wasn't until I discovered heavy metal and hard rock that I really felt at home. There's something about the combination of power and precision that is a perfect match for my typical energy level. Big, bombastic classical works and intricate baroque compositions come close but there's an innate grit and energy to heavy rock that sets it apart for me.

Much like my dad, and really, like any dad that's really engaged with his kids, it's only natural that I share the things I love with my kids. At 10 years, my daughter, and 7 years, my son, are both fully capable of enjoying music and having their own opinions. I have no interest in scripting out their lives, telling them what they should or should not like or do. But I know from my own experience, and from watching dads around me with older kids, there's really no worry, kids will find their own path and stand apart from their parents' interests. At the same time, it's incredibly important to expose kids to all sorts of creative and intellectual stimulation, so they can explore it all and figure out what's right for them. Since metal and other heavy forms of music are key parts of who I am, it makes sense for me to share that with my kids.

My wife and I tend to be open-minded and relaxed about what we let our kids experience. We both think the key is to experience the more mentally and emotionally challenging things (e.g. horror movies, more mature comedies, troubling dramas, etc.) as a family, being very careful about the timing so as to only stretch the kids a little bit at a time, never overwhelming them. We often have some of the most interesting and enlightening conversations after watching movies together, when the topic falls a bit beyond what they've encountered in their lives at that point. As a parent, you never really know whether the experiences you have with your kids translate in any way to other families. We are all so unique, and yet so similar, you it's hard to know when things are uniformly applicable to all and when they are completely restricted to our own personal experience.

Considering all of that as background, I am very careful about how my musical background impacts the kids. Music has been the single, fundamental driving force in my life and I want desperately to share that with the kids. I also want to avoid overwhelming them with my own interests, because it's up to them to find out what's important to them. That eventually filters down to this: I share the music that I love with my kids but leave it up to them to decide what grabs them the most. I also know full well that at any point, one or both of them could decide they have no interest in music or that they prefer a completely different style of music. I have a very good friend and periodic coworker whose kids are just approaching college age. He's also a musician and a big music fan, very broadminded and eclectic but with key interests in Keith Richards, Neil Young and similar singer-songwriters with a little edge. He was very supportive of his boys' interests in music and shared music with them all the time. Somewhere along the way, both boys discovered modern metal and embraced it. They love the really heavy stuff, filled with growling and pummeling energy. That's not at all what my friend loves, but still is reflective of a love for music.

Thus, I must embrace my role as "Metal Dad". It's what I love and what I know. Loud rock and metal are what I play during my radio show at KGLT and what I have to review each week as the Director of Loud Rock. When the kids help me review new releases, prep my show or keep me company during my show, what they hear is all loud rock and metal. I encourage them to be open-minded, to embrace classical and country, pop and polka, to experience it with equal curiosity. But, what I can best teach them about is metal, because it's what I know. I can tell them about the performers, the sub genres and the evolution of the style. Unfortunately, the one thing I can't do very well here in Bozeman is give them the same local music scene that I grew up with. I was able to spend my teens going to local clubs in the Bay Area and to experience first hand the discovery and success of Joe Satriani, Y&T, Night Ranger, Metallica, Testament, Exodus and many more. I was able to see bands like AC/DC, Aerosmith, UFO, the Scorpions and Rainbow regularly in the larger venues around the Bay Area. I often went to multiple shows in a week, and my own musical personality grew out of all those experiences. Here in Bozeman, however, it's lucky if we get a metal show every few months and major metal acts do not come here at all.

So, what does "Metal Dad" have to do to keep sharing the metal world with his kids? The same thing folks in Montana do if their kids are on soccer teams, or ski teams or basketball teams: travel. The distances are long in this part of the country, but you accept the knowledge that travel is part of the equation. Although it takes time, two hours of driving around here is a heck of a lot more satisfying than driving two hours in a major metropolis. You can go a long time without seeing another car on the road and the scenery in many parts of the state is absolutely breathtaking. This year it really hit home, it makes no sense to sit here in Bozeman waiting for the metal to come to us. We must seek out the metal. And that's what we will do.

Coming up soon, we'll run over to Billings to catch Halestorm, then shortly after that we head north through Glacier National Park to reach Calgary in time to see Iron Maiden on their big 2012 tour. About a month later, our big summer vacation will take us to Sweden and Finland, sandwiched around an Amaranthe show in Göteborg. And then in early fall, we head over to Salt Lake City to see Nightwish. At the moment, both kids love female-fronted metal bands, including those with a symphonic bent. My son also has a soft spot for hair metal, with Def Leppard as his "go to #1" but he also loves My Chemical Romance.

Metal Dad knows full well that at some point, my daughter may decide that mainstream country is the way to go, and my son might become a shreddin' bluegrass mandolin player. That's OK by me. It's not about the "right music" vs. the "wrong music", it's about the joy of discovery and the comfort of familiarity. If there's anything I can do for the kids, it's to help them embrace the world, the good and the challenging, and embark on the journey that's right for them. In fact, those journeys are already underway and I have the privilege, for now, of tagging along for the ride. It's an awesome experience.

Scattershock - A History: Part 2

In my recent article, I described the people and events that were at the heart of my early bands and marked the beginning of the trail towards Scattershock. I left off at the end of my stay in Boulder, having made the decision to return to Berkeley to finish school.

Once back in Berkeley, Steve Rosenthal and I reunited and started up our songwriting activities again. We got caught up in the MIDI craze and began recording demos that used sequenced drums, bass and keyboards, synchronized to the Fostex 4-track for guitar and vocals. We were calling our project "Secret Life" at that point, and the focus was writing and recording. We mixed a demo tape using our combination of analog tape and MIDI, which included two songs that would eventually become part of the Scattershock repertoire: "Same Time Next Week" and "Don't Wanna Talk".

At the end of my undergraduate years, I made the decision to enter UCSF to study towards a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry. That meant that, Nancy (my wife to be) and I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco. As a very strange coincidence, Mike Levine had taken a job in San Francisco and was relocating from Colorado. Steve was also taking classes at San Francisco State University, making our next musical chapter fall into place effortlessly. Steve, Mike and I decided to join up under the "Secret Life" name. By this time I'd retired the Fostex 4-track, replacing it with a first-generation Pro Tools system, beginning with 4 tracks and eventually expending to 16. We wrote and recorded a bunch of songs during this period, and recorded them into Pro Tools. Mike was doing most of the lead vocals by time and all three of us were taking vocal lessons from Rubinoos drummer and great friend, Donn Spindt. We'd adopted a new name, "Shatterbox", one that better reflected the hard rock and grunge influence that had worked its way into our material. This was a very creative and productive period for all of us. We maintained a rehearsal space, first in the Turko Persian building near the Balboa Park BART station, and then eventually in the 3rd St. Rehearsal Studios near Hunter's Point. Somehow, though, over the course of my 5-ish years in graduate school and my early years in the software industry, we slowly watched our lives grow apart. Mike eventually moved back to Colorado and Steve and I struggled to spend significant amounts of time together.

Somewhere along the way, Steve and I recognized that we still wanted better recording of the Shatterbox material. Without Mike, we were short a bass player and primary vocalist. We solved the first problem by bringing in Paul Olguin, a great bass player that Steve had played with previously while backing Linda Brady. We'd gotten to know Gannon Kashiwa, a recording engineer in Denver and beta tester for Digidesign, and decided that we would record our songs with him. We gave Paul the earlier Shatterbox recordings and some demo tapes to help him learn all the songs and soon after loaded all our gear into a U-Haul trailer and headed to Denver for a week. It was a memorable week. Working with Gannon was great, both because I didn't need to think about engineering but also because he's a great guy. By the end of the week, we'd tracked 14 songs and headed back to the Bay Area, hard disk in hand.

Little did we know that it would be more than a decade before any of that material was finished. In an upcoming article, I'll explain more about why it took so long and how it eventually led to Scattershock and the "Wrong Train" release.

Shadowside - the metal world continues to expand

I am often intrigued by the ever-growing world of heavy metal. Just as the mainstream continues to push metal farther and farther into a corner, the world as a whole fights back. Most of us recognize by now that northern Europe has kept the metal flames burning strong but these days I'm fascinated to hear great metal delivered from almost every corner of the globe. I recently wrote an article about the SLoT, a Russian band that got my attention last summer. Similarly, when Shadowside's latest album, Inner Monster Out, showed up in the New Loud Rock bin at KGLT, it quickly grabbed my attention. Only later did I discover that the band is from Brazil.

All it took was a quick preview of the first two songs on the album, "Gag Order" and "Angel With Horns", for me to be hooked. Dani Nolden's incredibly powerful vocals deliver a similar impact to Lzzy Hale of Halestorm and Liv Jagrell of Sister Sin. Anger, agony and frustration come through clearly in Dani's voice but she unabashedly embraces the melodic component of her voice. Raphael Mattos' guitar work, Ricardo Piccoli's bass and Fabio Buitvidas' drum parts pummel the listener and make it absolutely clear that Shadowside is a metal band.

While Halestorm draws its material as much from hard rock and even rock & roll, and Sister Sin harkens back to some of the raw melodic hair metal bands of the 80s, Shadowside is a metal band. They're overall sound will be right at home for power metal fans. Instrumentally they borrow bits and pieces from death metal but without much of the guttural vocals that are typical of that style. Fans of the many female-fronted symphonic metal bands (e.g. Nightwish, Within Temptation, Epica) will also find much to like in Shadowside. Even progressive metal fans will find familiar elements in Shadowside's music. The band manages to pull together elements from many metal sub genres, while maintaining a steady, common thread of intense energy and vocal polish that is unique.

I have already included songs from "Inner Monster Out" in my Heavy radio show and fully expect to continue that trend in the future. If you can't wait to experience Shadowside, choose your favorite streaming service and take a listen to "Gag Order" and "Angel With Horns". If you question how heavy the band can get, take a listen to "Waste of Life" and realize that Dani would be right at home sharing the stage with Rob Halford. And, just when you were wondering what else Shadowside can throw at you, check out their cover of Motörhead's "Ace of Spades". If you love metal, I think you will love Shadowside!

Scattershock - A History: Part 1

Scattershock's roots go back many years ago to when Steve Rosenthal and I met during my Junior year in high school. Not long before, Ben Ulrich, a great friend and great drummer had decided to go in a different direction, leaving me with the makings of a band minus a drummer. Fortunately for me, chance occurrences aligned and I met Steve, a hard hitting drummer and huge fan of Phil Rudd, John Bonham and Keith Moon. Steve joined me, my sister, Leslie (on vocals) and Amir Zitro (on bass) in Saber, a heavy rock band that split time between covers and originals. We gigged at a few parties and booked our own show upstairs in the Oakland Auditorium ballroom, a show that had little audience but remains the biggest hall I've ever played. I still have the recording of that show stashed away somewhere, including some great stage banter. Our original songs were heavily influenced by Iron Maiden, the Scorpions, and Rainbow. In retrospect, that might be obvious to many of you considering such titles as "Crazed Marauder", "Beyond The Line" and "Unusually Strange".

At some point we discovered a British band that was calling themselves Saber (or maybe "Sabre") and decided to change our name to Onyx. Then Steve and I graduated from high school and, after a false start at UC Berkeley, I decided to attend G.I.T. in Hollywood for a year. During the two years after high school, including the year I was at G.I.T., the Saber/Onyx lineup remained the same but we changed the name to Exposé, got some professional publicity shots done and moved up a notch in the Bay Area club scene, playing the likes of the Chi Chi Club, La Peña and the Berkeley Square. It was during that time that I began my interest in recording, acquiring a Fostex 250 4-track recorder and using it to track various early compositions. Sometime during that period, Steve, Leslie and I did our first studio recording at Saver Sound in Oakland, recording a song that I'd written called "Can't You See".

Then I made a decision that marked the demise of Exposé and started a new path that would eventually merge back with Steve and lead to Scattershock. I chose to start my undergraduate studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For my first year, I landed in the dorms, off campus in Williams Village. As luck would have it, I ended up with a room right next to Mike Levine, a bass player who had grown up in nearby Arvada. We very quickly realized how much overlap we had in musical interests, sharing bands like Van Halen, the Scorpions, and Iron Maiden. Mike had a close friend named Grant Bolinger, a great great guy and accomplished drummer, who finished off our rhythm section. Mike, Grant and I used to rehearse in Mike's basement, although on any given day that only lasted until Mike's dad opened the basement door, flicked the lights on and off a couple times and then as soon as we quieted down just enough, he'd yell "It's Over!!!".

During my second year at CU, Mike, Grant and I ended up renting a house in Boulder out near the Table Mesa Shopping Center. I had a big bedroom in the basement, adjacent to another big room we used for rehearsing and recording. I was still tracking to the Fostex 4-track, which was the heart of a couple really memorable recording sessions: a 4-song demo for a local band called "Toy" and our own "Billy and the Boingers" song, featuring Toy's lead vocalist, Ron Foxhoven, which we submitted to the Bloom County theme song competition. I also formed a cover band called "In Progress" with Grant and we played one very long and memorable gig at the Dark Horse in Boulder. It was a pretty busy year musically, but I had made the decision to return to Berkeley to finish my undergraduate studies, and figured that meant the end of my musical collaborations with Mike and Grant.

In my next article, I'll explain how my Boulder and Berkeley paths came back together, setting the stage for the eventual birth of Scattershock.