I was born without you, baby...

I was a Boy Scout, but I was never dutiful, responsible, or enthusiastic. A couple of moribund years passed before I could say this to my parents, who told me "joining is the only intelligent decision you've ever made in your life." Camping trips and handbooks thus became doleful obligations. This set the tone for the summer of 1993, with another unhappy trek to a campground in the boonies. The experience was ritual by now: you sit in a group at the wooden picnic benches, and exchange macho insults. Two older boys were waiting at one particular bench. They were supposed to teach us how to tie knots, though I received knowledge of infinitely greater value.

Someone had a boombox on the table, and a neighboring stack of cassettes.

"What's that?"
"Not for you."
"Anything good?"
"You wouldn't like it; it doesn't suck."

He pulled a tape from the pile. It was red and black with lightning bolt figures in place of the letter "S." The cover art was stark, simple, and it bore vaguely fascist iconography. The mood became just a little off-putting. He slapped the plastic door shut and flipped the switch on top of the box, and I heard those loud droning bends on the guitar chords. Some Englishman was shrieking about a time traveling robot coming back to save us from ourselves, only to decide that we didn't deserve to live. Contacts buzzed within my twelve-year-old brain, and cyborg circuits hummed with life. Iron Man lived again, and I was reborn.

And in short order I, a nerdy and socially awkward suburbanite became obsessed with heavy metal. I did this in ignorance, at the outset of the Great Metal Purge, a time when the English speaking world decided that metal was passe and that its fans were drooling mongoloids. For roughly a decade, listening to metal was about as cool as painting flames on a hopped-up Gremlin. There was nothing clever or ironic about it. You walked into a music store, announced to the surly clerk that you were spending your allowance on a Savatage CD, and they looked at you like someone who collected wombat turds.

But Black Sabbath were still hip. Vaguely. Mostly. They retained the vestiges of psychedelia and hard rock that informed grunge. If Soundgarden and The Melvins were allowed to listen to Master of Reality on infinite repeat, then so was I. Getting my very conservative and very White Catholic parents to overlook an album called We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll was a more delicate matter. I expended two years of begging, mowing lawns, and pruning shrubs. I finally broke their resolve at age 15, and Tony Iommi's buzzing roar overwhelmed our house. My dad was unthrilled.

"It's satanic garbage that rips off Cream, set to tuneless screaming."

His love of Bob Seger, Cream and the Allman Brothers led me to this place. The rough beast slouched toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

Dio was more of a departure. By the time he joined Black Sabbath in 1979, their downtuned heavy psych was subsumed by prog and arena rock. This, combined with the diminutive tenor's operatic delivery made him an easy target in the era of Seinfeld. Dio Sabbath represented everything grunge fans and punks mocked about metal: theatricality, homoeroticism, escapism, and romanticism. This was music for the terminally uncool, and listening to it felt like begging for a swirly. I promptly bought Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell. I might as well have drawn a middle finger on the receipt.

Over and over I heard "the Ozzy albums are the only good ones," and I took pride in dismissing that conventional wisdom. I was in my late teens, and a pompous contrarian. Still, I had to confess that Sabbath's day had come and gone. I'd only seen one rock concert, ZZ Top, and my prospects for a Sabbath show seemed a pipe dream. That was before I found out about Ozzfest...