I’ve written countless pieces/blog posts about Chuck Schuldiner. It seems I write something on every anniversary of his death/birth, but it’s deserved. It’s amazing how much this dead man has impacted my life. Yes, life. His words go beyond music. His music goes beyond reality.
It’s hard to put into words just how much I love his music, and how much something as simple as a few notes on a guitar and a few growled words has changed the course of where I am. Let me explain.
I first discovered Death when I was 14 years old. Before I found Death, I listened to mostly Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, you know, bands of that nature. I was still a metal guy, I still had my long hair and band shirts, but I was into shred guitar and thrash mostly. As far as myself being a guitarist, I was young. I was 2 years into playing and I was obsessed with playing flashy leads and shredding the guitar like people like Yngwie and Alexi Laiho (I got into Children of Bodom the previous year and I still credit them with being my first extreme metal band, and hence leading me to Death in the first place but I digress). I had this magazine and it was actually the Dimebag Darrell Tribute issue of GuitarWorld I believe. So how I would read this thing was I would read and reread all of the articles on the people I already knew. Dimebag and Cliff Burton and I think Jimi Hendrix was in there as well. I must’ve flipped through that thing 7 or 8 times. But during my flipping I was enthralled with an image of a man. This image:
Something about this image stuck in my head. And so on the billionth time of reading this magazine, I decided to give it a try. The story of a man, his music, his life and his death. His views on music and his philosophy on music matched very closely with how I perceive music as. So at the back of this magazine was the guitar tab to a song of his. This song was called Crystal Mountain. The rest as they say, is history.
It’s amazing how something like just checking out a song can change so much. I became obsessed with death metal. I needed more. I had to have more. So I discovered all the great death metal bands, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Necrophagist, etc. My guitar playing changed as well. Long gone was the shred aesthetic. I learned instead to embrace the power of simpler riffs, of originality and basic things of music like tension and relief and how to properly structure a song. Death lead to Behemoth. Behemoth lead to Watain. Watain to Bathory, and so on. Without Death, I wouldn’t have discovered black metal, I wouldn’t be making the music I am and I wouldn’t be fighting for the chance to make my music a reality.
Unfortunately, Chuck died when I was 9 years old, several years before I discovered his existence. I will never see him perform live before my eyes. I’ll never be able to tell him what his music has done to my life. As sad as this makes me, it makes my connection to his music all the more ethereal. More spiritual. I cherish that.
So RIP Chuck Schuldiner and Happy Birthday.
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Tagged Children of Bodom, chuck schuldiner, crystal mountain, death, death metal, guitar world, megadeth, metal, metallica, music, slayer, tribute
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