Ps: back on topic, the “scariest” guitar thing I heard as a kid was probably Friday Night in San Francisco. More recently, any of the Shawn Lane stuff that can be found on YouTube.
In terms of inspiration, however, my personal favourite is Vinnie Moore (what a surprise! 
)
Shawn Lane was a scary mofo indeed! What a guy!
Vinnie Moore is very inspiring as well, in my opinion he’s in the middle between the Yngwie and the PG style.
Do you think maybe the Nazi references are just meant “tongue in cheek” as well? Birth the triple 6 references and the Nazi references those bands use are incredibly distasteful even if meant jokingly as you supposed. How does someone joke about anything that serious?
Yes he is! He’s another of the Shrapnel guitarists I listened to back then… Mike Varney was a good judge of talent. He signed lots of guys who have had impressive careers. He signed Steeler which as far as I know is the biggest selling album Shrapnel ever had. He helped lots of guys get noticed and eventually move onto bigger labels and more exposure.
Done right, metal and especially extreme metal can allow us to talk about taboo subjects in a way that stops past atrocities being forgotten and forces us to turn our eyes towards things that we’d rather we didn’t see.
Done wrong, it’s just crass sensationalism and attention seeking.
Where’s the line? I don’t have the answer.
This was a moment for me. I wore out this flexidisc of “Blue Powder” that was released long before Passion and Warfare. It came with Guitar Player magazine an ad for Carvin in 1986. The A side was Michael Hedges “Because it’s There” (I think). I had never heard anything so visceral using so many different techniques, grooves, etc.
I remember those flexi discs… They had one with Black Star sometime around 1984. It’s in the issue with Yngwie on the cover. I liked those things.
Did you liike Hedges at all? I’ve never heard him but have heard good things about him.
I love Hedges. Saw him live several times and he always hung around after the show to chat with fans, sign discs etc. Definitely a major influence on me.
LONGtime Maiden fan here. The 666 - The Number of the Beast - that song was about a nightmare the bass player (songwriter Steve Harris) had. There was a LOT of Christian and biblical references in Maiden, just like all literature, which is how they approach it. Except the drummer, he’s born again.
They’re ordinary guys living an extraordinary life. They have kids and wives and all that.
They happen to like writing about darker or scarier things. That’s just metal.
For me, I was a guy who grew up on my Dad’s Stones and Jimi albums, picked up the guitar because of Nirvana’s Unplugged, and then through Jimi and SRV got into blues, and for a 18 year old kid got pretty decent at it.
So, with that as a background, for christmas one year my brother got a compilation album with KROQ, I think, live-in-the-studio performances. I remember popping it in later on that night, after listening to an Albert King album I’d gotten and thinking that this was really it, as far as guitar playing goes, because I’d heard some stuff about Kenny Wayne Shepherd and this guy named Joe Satriani. There was a great acoustic version of “Blue on Black,” which I dug the shit out of, and then I jumped ahead to this Satriani song called “Always with Me, Always With You.”
I don’t think I breathed for the next four minutes. The performance is floating around the net these days as a mp3, but he’s playing it with a much higher gain sound than the stuido, as a guitar/bass/drums performance, with a fair amount of gain on the heavily palm-muted arpeggios in the intro. It completely changed my perception on what you could do with an electric guitar, I’d never heard anything so technically astounding, aggressive, and beautiful, at the same time.
I think Michael Hedges is by far the best and most important acoustic guitar player of all time.
There are myriads of players following the path he created.
Nothing but one guitar in the track. Mesmerizing.