Velvet Revolver guitarist Slash tells a funny story about his first listens to Aerosmith’s Rocks album. That day, he’d planned some afternoon doobage/canoodling with a comely young lady only to have his attention devoured by that then-new and always awesome Aerosmith record. I imagine him on her bed, shushing her and batting away her caresses — all because Rocks was totally rocking his world for the first of a billion times. I get that. Horny hotties come and go; an instant connection to timeless music is bigger.

And the very same thing happened to me Saturday night! Just replace Slash with hunky me (mental image note: I play lefty), his sexy chick with this chatty mess from my neighborhood, and Aerosmith’s Rocks with The Time Of No Time Evermore by Dutch occult rockers The Devil’s Blood.

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If you consider yourself a geek (as I do) and you’re not reading Topless Robot, you’re really missing out. Proprietor Rob Bricken covers all things nerd on a daily basis, ranging from comics to movies and television to video games to toys, and he is one funny motherfucker; even when I don’t agree with his opinions (he’s pro-Tron but anti-Nolan… fuck that jazz), I love reading his stuff ’cause it’s just so damn funny.

His latest master work is a list of the “10 Nerdiest Literary Inspirations for Concept Albums.” And it will shock no fan of the genre to learn that multiple metal bands made the list.

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It all started when humble blogger Keith Spillett tried a little good ol’ fashioned investigative journalism for his blog Tyranny of Tradition, but it ended with an email from Sarah Palin herself praising trad metal outfit Ghost and condemning all of their fellow Swedes. How’d it get from there to here?

Spillett had been hammering Palin’s people for a response about her use of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” as an entrance song for a campaign speech in 2008; after months and months of unreturned emails, Spillett’s inbox finally lit up with a response from Palin herself, and better yet, a follow-up including her thoughts on Ghost’s Opus Eponymous, an album that’s certainly got quite a bit of buzz in the metal community right now. Palin a metalhead? Who’da thunk it.

I’ll let you all read the entirety of Palin’s email on your own time, including bits about her love of Blue Oyster Cult and her TLC television show. But for now, the juicy bits:

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Nowadays, classic metal seems all the rage — some cool kid told me this while walking to the market — and with MetalSucks doing the whole “Ten Great Bands That Inadvertently Helped Ruin Heavy Metal” thing, I got to thinking: how did metal become metal? We all know the Sabbath/Priest/Zeppelin “who started heavy metal” debate, but what about the in-betweeners that were probably “heavy metal” to my dad’s mom when Pops was just growing that ridiculous mustache and finding out that drinking beer was pretty cool once you got past that taste?

(Okay, full disclosure: I was drinking a beer and cranking UFO while reading the Van Halen story, so there.)

We’ve all known 3 Inches Of Blood for more than a few years at this point, but with the rise of bands like White Wizzard, Holy Grail, the criminally underrated Wolf, Gypsyhawk, RAM, and Cauldron waving the flag for the classic metal sound, I got to thinking about the bands that inspired them. These are groups where you could look back at them and say that they aren’t even definable as “metal” anymore.

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