high voltage rock'n'roll

I love rock music. I love listening to it, buying albums, searching high and low for that one album I've got in my mind that I must own. I love reading about music as well. For years, all I really paid attention to were Spin and Rolling Stone, and to put it bluntly, they're a little too snooty (I guess that's the word) for me, giving their covers to pop sensations or bands that looked a little too, well, faggy for a guy like me to carry around the magazine. So, I resigned myself to just reading about music on the interwebs. (In an ironic twist, Rolling Stone's website has some pretty good stuff on it.)

Then I found out my local bookstores had something called Classic Rock magazine. Yay me for finally looking at the big expensive imported magazines.

I probably wouldn't have noticed it if it didn't have a Metallica feature on the cover (Oct. '08), an article about the 1000 days between ...And Justice For All and the Black Album, when Metallica was still the most dangerous band in the world.

Every page of this magazine had something I wanted to read, which was stunning. I pored over this issue for no less than three hours, outlasting the included CD. Speaking of which, yes, this mag includes a CD with every issue. This one was called Guitarmageddon, and it was awesome. Megadeth, Dream Theater, Dragonforce, and Extreme, if you can believe, plus a bunch of other artists I had never heard of, but was glad to. This rock periodical had done its job- broadened my horizons, making me aware of things that I otherwise wouldn't, which never happened with Spin and RS. I was stuck reading and hearing about pop stars, rappers, and the popular like. It takes a magazine dedicated to a particular genre to excite me, I guess. I'm a rock fan; it's not like I'm going to change gears and get into jazz or hip-hop at this point. And now I have a monthly magazine written by people who are even more into this than I am, and that love shows.