The first time that I heard this album was in 8th grade. I was sitting in the back of the school bus with my buddy Zak(RIP) and a couple of the high-school kids, when one of the older guys breaks out some contraband. Keep in mind that at that time I was going to a Christian school about 45 minutes away from where I lived and we rode the bus from Redmond to Bend through all the stops that were in between. So, back to the contraband. This guy pulls out of his back-pack a (!gasp!) walk-man (miniature cassette player that ran on batteries and used headphones for the sound),and on said walk-man was Metallica's brand new, just released, Black Album. Now, this was contraband because it was A: a walk-man, B: Heavy Metal (adults called it Devil music) C: not a Christian band. Up to this point all I had heard was just how evil Metallica was, and my metal experience had been limited to top-40 hair metal, and the almighty black and yellow brothers, courtesy of my uncle.
That day my world changed. Those of us that were in the back of the bus got to hear parts of the new album as he passed around the headphones. I was blown away by the heavy, heavy distortion, the neck snapping riffs, the pounding drums, and the lower registers of James Hetfield's voice. The songs were simple and stripped down, not the spastic thrash that I would soon discover by going back through Metallica's catalog. I was totally drawn in, and completely hooked. I received a major rush that day, in part from the music and in part for that moment shared between a bunch of adolescents of differing ages. The moment that "play" was pressed, age, socioeconomic backgrounds, familial backgrounds and everything else that separates people stopped mattering. We were brothers.
It was not until 2 years later that I actually heard the entire album from beginning to end at my friend Willie's house. Once again, we were two social outcasts brought together by our love of all things heavy. I was privileged to hear Metallica's Black Album, Master of Puppets, and Ride the Lightening, as well as AC/DC's Back in Black but it was the Black Album that stuck out. Throughout high-school I wore out 4 cassette copies of that album, during my paper routes and trips to school, work, or whenever and wherever I could listen. It takes a ton of plays to wear out a tape, but I did... 4 times. Then I bought the disc. I never have understood the whole "evil" trip but I think that the adults, my parents included, just did not understand the love of heavy music and associated Metallica with other metal bands like Mercyful Fate, Slayer and Venom whom had not matured past the "look how evil we are" stage.
20 years later, and many things have changed for the band, and for me. I do not listen to the album nearly as often now, but every time that I do, I am taken back to those days. In the late 90's I did lose track of Metallica when they released the Load and Re-Load albums, and totally wrote them off after the garbage that was St. Anger. I was not interested in their symphonic S&M album, although I did buy Garage Inc. as a new release. I jumped on the "Metallica Sucks" bandwagon for awhile, but once again, it was "Nothing Else Matters" playing on the radio that brought me back. I do not think that that if it was any other band under any different circumstances that I would have been affected in such a way. Metallica is not my favorite band, nor do I think that they the most talented, but none of that matters because at the end of the day, Metallica was my door the the metal world. I love this album now as much as I did back then, and I sincerely wish that I could be there in England at Download Fest 2012 when they play the entire album from start to finish.
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