I met Dino and Raymond from Fear Factory, the first time they came around the midwest in '92, I think. Dino was really fucking cool and got my brother and I passes telling the people at the place we were his guitar techs. I know he's a bit of a joke these days, but he was really cool to a couple of stupid metal kids with no tickets. Every time they came back to town we'd hook up and bullshit before their show. They always remembered me, which was awesome to me as a teenager, you know? One of those times, I showed up with a Brujeria 7" and asked to get it signed. Dino looked at Raymond and looked back at me and said he didn't know what band I was talking about. He said Raymond played in Phobia and maybe I was getting confused. At the time "no one" knew who was in Brujeria and they played it off well, 'cuz for a bit there I felt like an idiot. 'What a moron I am', I thought, 'These guys aren't in Brujeria and now they think I'm a retard'. After like an hour of me feeling like a monkey's ass, Dino broke down and asked me for the 7". As he signed it, he told me no one had ever called him out on Brujeria outside of California. When Raymond was signing it, he said it was "the first and only" Brujeria record they'd ever sign. I don't know if that is/was true, but for a while I got a lot of 'awesome metal-brownie points' out of the story.
I went to some metal fest in Jersey a while back. DRI was playing later in the night and I was looking through crates of records for sale. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here, those fests are THE worst places to shop for records. Sure, they have good shit, but everything is marked up 400%. Still, I was bored and the last thing I wanted to do was sit through another shitty Gorguts-like death metal band on stage 3. So, I started going through the tables. You know when you are going through records, sometimes you run into the dude coming the other way, checking out the crates from A toward Z, while you are going Z to A? Well, we met right by the "D" crates. I picked Crossover out of a crate. I have 2 other copies of this record, so it's not like I was seriously considering buying it, but I took it out just too look-at-it type thing. Well, the dude going the other way said "that's a great record, you should buy it." I turned around to tell him I knew it was an awesome record, but that I already had it when I realized it was Kurt Brecht. Well, I bought the record (for like $10!!) and got him to sign it. Now I have 3 copies of Crossover.
If anyone knew me in the early 90's they can tell you I was obsessed with Swedish bands. Johnny Helund from Unleashed was like my hero. I have their first 3 CDs autographed and I have tons of photos with the band. These photos are fucking hilarious and and all-around pathetic. Anyway, I can't remember who Dismember were playing with (maybe Deicide and Vader?), but I know that I missed every band that night except them. I just sat backstage with them and they told me 1000 stories about Carbonized, Unleashed, Entombed, Nihilist and all those bands that, at the time, I worshiped. Their manager Oli and I wrote a few times back and forth after that. David Blomquist was the first death metal guy I met who didn't smoke or drink. I'm not sure he was nailed to the X, but I remember him talking about being a vegetarian and shit. Nice guys, nice guys.
Here's a weird one... My friend Jaime (I have talked about him here before, we went on road with Kreator and Paradise Lost), somehow knew the guys in Sacrifice. I didn't really like them, but for some reason I had the record. They came to town and Jaime told me they'd get us in free. So, I went down and met up with them. They needed to exchange some Canadian dollars, so we ate something and headed to the bank. The people in the bank were pretty fucking rude and made them wait like 15 minutes before even talking to them. So, when the lady at the counter was finally talking to them I pretended not to know them, walked up and asked them to sign the record. I thought I was "teaching the lady a lesson" by showing her that she had been rude to "rock stars", but I'm sure she could not have given 3 shits.
