The Gun Club part 1

Imagine a place if you will, where anarchy and debauchery reign supreme, a place where nobody was crowned king and noone was trodden down, a place where everyone who had ever been, never came out the same...

This place was called The Gun Club and it was there that a biannual party was held for about 7 years, it started as a party for a group of people who's birthdays were held all around the same time in mid August, it then grew beyond measure, what started as a party with about 20 attendees ended up by the culmination of its 7 year stretch with about 300 people attending, it was known about and looked forward to by everyone in the local area, it was a place where you left your inhibitions at the gate and if you weren't physically and mentally prepared for what you were about to bare witness to, you would likely break down, which I saw many times.

I'm going to tell you some of the stories that I remember from the days of yore, so sit back, relax and try not to vomit.

In the early days of the Gun Club parties it was just a small group of close friends who were getting 6 birthdays out of the way at once, we would all turn up about 3 or 4 pm and start setting everything up, bbqs, generators, bins, beds and bonfires all the while starting to drink.  As you can imagine things started to get a little hazy and crazy by about 6 or 7 pm, by that time everyone had rocked up and the bonfire was about to be lit.  Douse the bonny with enough petrol to run a big block chev for a few days and away she goes, WOOOOMFFF.  Eyebrows, facial hair and pubes melt and curl from the heat.  These early days were pretty tame compared to what followed in the years to come, but that's not to say these parties weren't fun.  I can remember one of these early parties, someone 'found' a keg of beer, or at least that was his story.  I don't think I've witnessed so many people sculling beer before, it was a little warm, the tap was stuffed, so everyone was just hammering it down like it was the last keg on earth.  Now I've seen movies that paint a pretty good picture of what a Norse mead hall must have looked like but the little shed on the gun club property was as close as you would get to one in the modern era, there was singing, cheersing, sculling, spilling and screaming, the floor was slick and glistening with spilt beer there were young people passed out pissing themselves it was pretty much what you would imagine after the Vikings had returned from a successful raid and were celebrating their spoils of war... But it wasn't, it was 20 or 30 close friends making a mess of themselves in a place where they used to shoot guns at clay targets for fun.

Now this is when the word started to get out about these wild, out of control parties, the people who attended started telling people they knew and from here on out these parties started to gain quite a reputation. 

Ok so I can't really remember what order these memories come in, as it's been a number of years and I was very, very drunk for most of these 'memories' so I'll just write them as they come to me. 

It had become a bit of a tradition at these parties that people would bring old couches that they no longer wanted or needed so that people would have places to sit. I don't think many or any of the couches made it past the first party they attended, as they were always getting busted and thrown in the fire.  On this particular night one of these couches was an old kind of wooden one, with thin cushions and slats along the back of it, kind of like what you might see at your nan's house in the family room.  Anyway, I was sitting there chatting away... Uh... Bullshitting away to whoever would listen, when I look up and see my friend who is a larger fellow coming over to join me on the lounge, he says something smartass to another one of our friends who proceeds to give him a playful shove, my friend (this happened in absolute slow motion by the way, the world around us slowed to a glacial drip) he trips, stumbles grasping at anything that would slow his fall but there was nothing able to stop his descent, he crashes through... Literally through the couch, the one I am sitting on, but the seat over.  I saw my life flash before my eyes, I shot up, surprised I wasn't dead or injured and looked back at the lounge which was completely shattered, like the slats on the back were all snapped in half and the seat was smashed in beyond recognition, my friend was completely fine, we were brought to tears of laughter for about 15 minutes and then proceeded to smash it up more and lob it on the fire, because... It was broken.  We were probably going to do it anyway, but this gave us a better excuse.

There was another tradition at the Gun Club parties where people would go out in to the empty paddocks in their cars and rip it up, it got to a point where people would buy cars or build something ridiculous specifically for this reason.  We had a guy build a home-made supercharger for his tiny little corolla which had to poke out of the bonnet, chain drive straight from the flywheel.  Or another guy had an old hq wagon where the exhaust was cut off and poked through the bonnet which shot flames and made it sound like a truck. My brother took his turbo cordia out there once and thrashed it so hard that the manifold was glowing red.  My best mate took his old Gemini out and thrashed it so hard and for so long that sparks began to fly out of the exhaust which managed to set the paddock on fire for a bit.  I got out there in my old camry or 'the ute' as we used to call it and did the old reverse ringies, it was basically a mini summernats twice a year.  Then after a few years of using the paddocks we graduated to the little lean to shed on the property and used that as a burnout slab, we had every man and his dog backing their cars in to have a go.  It wasn't until breakfast time that I realised no one moved the BBQ out of the lean to before the burnouts commenced, that took some cleaning before bacon and eggs the next morning.  There was one party where one of the "unprepared" people that I talked about earlier called the cops on us all and said we were being dangerous and what not, the police came out and said "at least it's not on the roads, in traffic, if anything this should be condoned" we egged them on a bit and they did a burnout up the road as they left.  It was a good place to get all of that utter nonsense out of our systems in a safe...ish environment and not on the roads where we could injure people.

I don't think I ever threw up at any of the gun club parties, but there were many that did, some were even unaware that they did and blamed others for their indiscretions.  Which is where I'm headed with this story.  Two of my good friends who are now married, slept in their car after drinking far to much one night, he got up first and was stumbling around looking for something to drink, I looked over and noticed something on his shoulder, I got up to get a closer look... It was fucking spaghetti.  I lost my shit, "someone was a little sick last night" I said.  He goes "aww she fucking spewed on me" I was in absolute stitches as was every one else who was awake.  She wakes up and was adamant that it wasn't her, regardless he wasn't having it and was sure it was her, it wasn't until much later when he remembered waking up in the night to throw up, panicking because he couldn't get out of the car because they had the back seats layed down and the doors were child locked for some reason, so he just had to spew and so he did... on himself... and his future wife.

So this is the end of part 1 of The Gun Club... be sure to stay tuned for part 2, I'm saving the best stories until last.

Vikinghammer Out.

Vikinghammers Life in Metal

Long ago at the end of the age of the power derived from flora a sinister sound brewed deep in the minds of the sick and twisted and when the power had grown the sound spewed forth and great evil spread across the land and created the profane art, with this power the gods crashed their fists upon the earth and demanded to be heard and as the sound grew in strength the disenfranchised minds of youth picked up their torches and marched to the beat of Bill Wards drums...

For most of you that know me, know that I'm a massive metal head I'm going to tell you how and why that all came to pass and I might generalise a bit and try and get a bit of the metalhead stigma out of the way.

When I was young, primary school young my parents used to have a radio on pretty much 24/7 which was great but it was also the worst first thing in the morning, before school. I used to listen to all of the old classics they would play on there and I loved them, David Bowie, Tina Turner, The Police that sort of thing but the band that I really remember enjoying the most was Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was something about the music that really sucked me in, John Fogarty's voice and the catchy guitar work most likely. I used to stop what I was doing when I heard CCR playing, I think dad used to have a tape in the shed he would play as well... maybe? I remember hearing Down on the Corner a lot when I was young. Then when I got a bit older maybe 10 or 11 I used to listen to a lot of Triple J which at the time was playing a lot of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden (R.I.P. Chris Cornell), all those sorts of alternative bands, I was addicted to it, I would listen to music every night, tape songs off the radio all that sort of thing, I used to listen to heavier and heavier music and used to stay up late and catch the 3 hours of power on Triple J which was the metal programme they had on every tuesday night which was awesome, bands like Metallica, Slayer, Sepultura were regulars, along with some of the best Australian metal acts at the time like Segression, Sakkuth, Pod People etc. it was truly an awesome time for music. My parents weren't to happy about me listening to stuff that heavy at 12 years old so I never really got any CD's or anything but I was allowed to get the Hottest 100 compilation almost every year which was great, some of the best bands of all time made it on those cd's, I also really wanted to get the Led Zeppelin III album for my birthday, which they had just re-released on CD but I never got it. I used to listen to them day in day out and I was truly addicted. The only outlet I really had for metal though was listening to the 3 hours of power that I stayed up to listen to every week and I would record the best songs and make my own compilation tapes, I must have had about 20 tapes at one stage. Then when I was about 14 my dad and mum became good friends with the people who owned the Caravan Park in my home town and their son who was a few years older than me, had an amazing CD collection, he showed me some of the best bands of the time and which are still some of my favourite bands today, Deftones, Spineshank, Coal Chamber, Tool, etc. which was fucking incredible, I'd never even really seen metal cd's before and he had apple boxes full of them, I was always asking him to burn me off cd's which I know he hated me asking him to do all the time, but eventually he gave in and showed me this new kind of thing where you can put like 300 songs on a CD, he introduced me to MP3's and it changed my life, he burnt off 1 mp3 cd and I listened to it religiously for years, I lost it for a while when we were moving house, I was looking through the draws in my old desk and there it was stuck upright in the back of the drawer I pulled it out and was so stoked I found it again, I managed to copy off most of the songs but the CD was scratched to hell. He probably doesn't know how much that cd meant to me so thanks Dave, for a kid who loved metal but only got to listen to it for 3 hours a week, it really meant the world. I actually still try and find some of the songs from that cd when they pop in to my head.

I got older, got deeper in to highschool and really only got to listen to the mainstream stuff because there were no cd stores nearby and by this time the 3 hours of power had changed names got a new host and become really weak, so I was listening to bands like Pantera, Soulfly and Korn but occasionally someone would bring some true metal to school, someone bought Chaos A.D. to school and was listening to it on the computers in the library which was awesome and another guy was listening to a Cannibal Corpse tape on his walkman one day which blew my mind. As the years went on through school it got kind of boring and I stopped listening to metal almost at all (except for that mp3 cd) wasn't a fan of Limp Bizkit, Slipknot or Korn which were huge for everyone else but not so much for me, I wanted heavier music and also music that I hadn't heard a million times before. There was one other guy who was in the year below me who used to like the same stuff I did, like Acid Bath, Tool and Slayer then there was a few other guys who enjoyed metallica but little else. Highschool was kind of a dead zone for metal for me, it wasn't until I was at the end of my schooling career when Napster had just come out that I really got back in to metal, when I could look stuff up and actually listen to it, experiment and really come in to my own. I found heavier and heavier music, I still listened to a lot of the mainstream stuff because it was the early days of the internet there wasn't much in the way of finding out what music was good and even what bands were out there, but I was just muddling along finding more and more amazing stuff, even genres I had heard of but never really got to listen to like Black Metal and bands like Darkthrone and Immortal which I consider a couple of my all time favourite bands and even to this day Black Metal is still probably my second favourite genre behind Doom metal which is another genre that I found around this time with bands like Electric Wizard and Candlemass, I just ate it all up.

It wasn't until I was about 21 when one of my best mates introduced me to another guy Mick who was like me, listening to every heavy band he could get his hands on and we used to just hang out and listen to metal for hours while we drank beer and talked shit, this was the real growth period, we would constantly be showing each other new bands we had found or showing each other stuff we'd heard years ago, it was true metal appreciation. So much so that we formed a band with a guy who played guitar, me on vocals and Mick on drums, the other guy wanted to play punk sort of stuff but we managed to get in a few metal songs here and there and even write a few original ones, we left that band because I didn't really like the guy and we weren't playing the music we really wanted to, but another friend of ours Bunyip had just started learning guitar and his new neighbour was a massive metal head, so we would head around there and get on the piss, listen to music, play some music until the neighbour came and told us to shut up or we were to drunk to move. This period lasted years and was great, we had some amazing parties and some epic jams, then when Bunyip was good enough we started a band with him and we got pretty good, we were writing original music, probably not what we thought we would be playing, it was stoner, kyuss like stuff which we still really enjoyed, we had a few gigs here and there but we always had a revolving door of musicians, we had 3 different bass players, 3 drummers, 4 guitarists, Me and Bunyip were the only mainstays in the band, me on vocals and Bunyip playing guitar or Drums, so in the end it got to hard to keep retraining musicians so we gave up, I still miss it to this day. This all ended when I was about 28 and I didn't really do much else other than join a few groups on facebook and post some metal which is where I met my future wife then when I was about 31 myself, Mick the drummer and my fiance and future Wife decided to start a Metal website called The Metalithic which was doing really well there for a while and I was writing review after review and really enjoying it, we were interviewing really huge names in the industry and had some of the latest news but it got to a point where I had to focus my time on something that was going to make some money so about a year ago I decided to give it up and now my time is dedicated to video games, I still listen to metal any chance I get (I'm listening to Drudkh at the moment) and am thinking about starting up The Metalithic again as a YouTube Channel but am yet to pull the trigger on that...

So there you go that's how I became a metal head now for the WHY am I a metal head.

There are a few explanations as to why I am a metal head in the last chapter but that's not really what I mean. Metal for me and for most metal heads is more than just mere music, it is a passion beyond measure and beyond compare. The music has more substance, more emotion and more talent than any other genre and if you ask any true metal head they'll tell you the same. Most people listen to metal and say they can't understand it, or it's just noise or crap and that's because they don't want to give it the time it deserves, but for some people I understand it's just not for them, there are genres that I don't understand and don't like, I have given them some time but it's just not for me and that's fair enough, same goes for non metal heads. I'm not saying if you listen to metal you will fall in love with it, but you should at least try it out see how it goes, but that being said you have to jump in to something casual, you can't just go from nothing to Inquisition or Extermination Dismemberment and expect to have it rock your world that will take some warming up to. Start with something like Metallica or Black Sabbath and once you've got the hang of that move up the chain of brutality. Metal offers something that not really any other genres offer and that's variety, there are so many sub genres of metal that you'll almost find something that will suit your tastes, I like other sub genres more than others but I'll listen to them all depending on what mood I am in at the time. I've been known to go from orchestral power metal straight in to brutal death metal one after the other and I've also been known to stick with a single genre for months, depends on how I'm feeling.

Metal heads do get a bad rap, we're all labeled as satanists or mental when in actual fact some of the nicest people I know are metal heads and when you're at a gig there's no fights or people being dickheads it's just people enjoying themselves and enjoying the music we all love. The majority of the time metal heads also listen to other genres as well, I like my rock and I've been known to listen to indie music and even occasionally pop music, all it really takes for me to listen is a catchy tune and some actual talent which I can respect in (some) pop singers. It's something that is often misconstrued and can be rude, I have been genuinely offended by people calling me a satanist or saying one of my favourite bands is shit and because it's a metal bands it's acceptable, but when I fire back I get told off... I guess it's a whole other thing, it doesn't happen often anymore but when I was in a band and you get told one of the biggest influences on you is shit or absolute crap it's hard not to take offence.

Anyway I think that's enough ranting and raving for now, I might make a regular blog with bands everyone should check out or something like that but for now...

Stay Brutal,

Vikinghammer out.