Anyone who was unfortunate enough to have well-meaning-yet-clueless relatives knows the feeling of disappointment. After weeks of anticipation, staring at the shiny boxes under the Christmas tree and wondering what’s inside, you eagerly tear open your presents. What lies inside? GI Joes? Transformers?? A BB gun? A new Nintendo?!? Mind racing and adrenaline pumping, you open the first box and are brutally assaulted by reality: your hippie uncle got you some handmade, wooden train from his recent trip to Chile. And it only gets worse — grandma gave you a subscription to Highlights, and mom got you enough socks and underwear to last you through high school. Dejected, you retreat to your bedroom and pout while thinking about all the awesome presents the other kids must have gotten.

This is the same feeling I got all too often as a young metal fan in the late 80s/early 90s. Back then, without the internet, finding new bands was a real crapshoot — you really never knew what you were in for when you bought a new record unless you manged to catch them on Headbanger’s Ball. You did the best you could with what you had, but it wasn’t much to go on. Time and time again I was tricked by a cool logo, sweet cover art, or a name that sounded brutal — what I thought was going to be ass-ripping thrash or hardcore turned out to be dreadful hard rock, third-rate speed metal, or limp-wristed art rock. I tried so hard to be positive and enjoy the album that I had squandered my $8 on, but I just couldn’t do it.

In no particular order, here are a few of the dozens upon dozens of bands who I tried to like, but simply could not. What are yours??

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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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