High School Memories

My senior picture, sans metal shirt. My mom told me to class it up and wear the bolo tie and southwestern shirt that day.

An ongoing discussion I have with my wife revolves around our high school memories. While her's are generally pleasant and memorable, mine are horrible and I try to forget them as much as I can. Much like a Vietnam vet who has flashbacks upon seeing a moving ceiling fan, I too have flashbacks whenever I even see a high school yearbook. Not really, but that story makes this post more poignant. The truth is that like most people who were into metal, school was not always fun for me (wah!, life was hard...wahhhhh!). I was a bit of an outcast, though largely by choice, now that I think about it. Like other metalheads, I didn't have the personality or looks that would have taken me to a higher level in the social pecking order, but my outcast status was mostly manufactured. I was a loser to some extent, but if I had simply chosen to listen to more popular music, and perhaps worn fewer metal shirts, I would have been a step above the kids with cerebral palsy. Those kids (CP kids) were the ones who really couldn't help themselves at all. Stupidly, I chose to wear Slayer shirts to school. I know that last sentence may be controversial in a metal forum such as this, but screw it. It's true.

In this post I will see how I would have measured up against some luminaries in the world of metal, had we attended school at the same time. In order to do research for this piece, I had to fire up the Nocturnus time machine. Normally, I don't use the time machine for just any ol' post, luckily gas prices have gone down, and we're now able to use such technology more freely. Don't complain about the fact that the pictures I'm using are not of the most obscure metal people on earth. Sorry, but high school pictures from the guys in Order From Chaos, Dorsal Atlantica and Sarcastic (they had a demo on Wild Rags) are not easy to come by.

Tom Araya

Tom was voted "class clown", which is weird, because I would have thought he'd be voted "most likely to end up looking exactly like Chief Sitting Bull." Seeing these pictures reminded me of a time at a Milwakee Metal Fest in 1993 or so when I was going to the bathroom between bands. I had a Sharpie marker in my hand for some reason, and I was playing around with it as I walked down a long hallway to get to the bathroom. The only other person in the hallway was Tom Araya. I made a left turn towards the bathroom and went by Tom. As I walked by him, he put out his hand as though to grab the marker out of my hand to sign something. Since I didn't want him to sign anything, I just walked past him and giggled as I did so. He kinda' stood there staring as I walked past.

Okay, but back to the pictures of Tom...looking at theseleads me to believe that although Tom had long hair and was perhaps into slightly heavier music than other kids, he was well liked. He would have sort of been my friend, but would have also been friends with hot girls who were smart. He would have known that hanging out with my kind would bring his stock down, and he would have been right. The mention of him being a "bench warmer" in the first picture makes me think that he at least played some sport during his high school years. Taking all this into consideration, I think Tom and I would have let each other borrow some tapes, but he would have never hung out with me outside of school. He liked metal, but was smart enough to tone it down around hot girls and cool dudes who weren't into metal. I would have been too die-hard and stubborn (and thus loserly) for his taste. He would have signed my yearbook, but would have kept his distance. Smart move.

Veredict: Friendly during school hours.

Kirk Hammett

Just look at that picture! Filipinos have all the luck...they can make money having sex with middle aged men who like boys when they are 12, or when they are 45. Man, some ethnic groups have all the luck! Looking at this picture, and those huge glasses that make Kirk look like a Greyhound bus, it's hard to imagine that this young man would one day loose his hair and grow the world's thinnest bicycle-skid mustache. Still, Kirk would have been my boy back in the day! In the 8th grade, our lunch table would have also included the kid who looked like a fish due to severe fetal alcohol syndrome, but we still would have been happy during lunch. Forever losers when it came to the opposite sex, we would have pretended that it didn't matter to us. Inside, we cried...but on the outside...everything was gravy.

Veredict: Best buds

Gene Simmons (aka Chaim Witz)

Though it's hard to pretend that I went to high school with Gene Simmons when his picture looks like it was taken during the Civil War, I will try. Gene would have creeped me the hell out in school. Insanely intense, and douchy around girls (remember that he came from a very religious Jewish family, went to an orthodox Yeshiva for a good part of his life, and then went on to coin the term "blumpkin"), Gene would not have been my cup of tea. I picture him being the guy with greasy hair and huge dandruff flakes the size of Bran Flakes. He was the guy who was prematurely grown up, acting like an adult when he was 6. Condescending as all hell, perhaps the one thing that we would have shared would have been our disgust for all things high school. My disdain for high school students came from thinking they were all idiots due to ignorance, his would have come from thinking they were all just too young. We would have talked briefly in class, but only to ask each other for an eraser. If someone like him would have died two years after graduation, I would have said "Oh, I remember that guy. He was in my Biology class."

Veredict: Class acquaintances

Ronnie James Dio (aka Ronald James Padavona)

Like with Gene Simmons, it's hard for me to pretend I could have gone to school with someone this old, but here it goes. Ronnie played tons of sports (just look under his picture), but would have been cool. In math class, we would bond about our short stature. If you look under his name, it states that his nickname was "Pigmy", a person from any human group who grows to be less than 5 feet tall. Though I'm not that short, Dio and I would have joked around, and he would have taught me to "own" my shortness. Due to his Italian heritage, we would share stories about our crazy grandparents and their inability to function with the US. Although our musical tastes would have been slightly mismatched, we still would have hung out at parties. Ronnie would have been the guy who jokingly plopped his balls down onto the overhead projector while the teacher was talking to the assistant principal by the classroom's door.

Veredict: Friendly outside of school

Paul Stanley ( aka Stanley Harvey Eisen)

Just as it was hard for me to stretch the bounds of my imagination when it came to the pictures of Gene Simmons and Dio due to the time when they were taken, it's even harder for me to do this with Paul Stanley's picture. How am I supposed to pretend I went to school with a forty year old Jewish woman with an Emo Phillips haircut? Also, it looks like his face is melting. Okay, I'll try.

We would have been friendly in Home-Ec. class. Since Paul is an elderly jewish woman, his cooking skills would have been superior to mine, but still not great. He would have nagged me to eat, plainly stating "eat, eat! you're skin and bones!" He would tell me long-winded stories about how his aunt, auntie Pearl, was taken away by "those ghouls, the Nazis". I would ask him "Paul, why do you sound like a southern black woman sometimes?" He would dismiss my questions, and continue making flavorless meals.


Veredict: Home Ec partners

Metal Inquisition History Lesson: I Was In The Wild Rags Street Team

Here at Metal Inquisition, our primary goal is to entertain. Another, perhaps secondary goal, is to school today's metal youth in metal history. It's with that spirit in mind that this post was written. School is in suckas.




This seemingly unassuming corner in Montebello California was once upon a time the home of Wild Rags Records, the record label and store run by the infamous Richard C (full name Ricardo Campos). Richard C is without a doubt one of the more polarizing names you can bring up to those who were involved in the underground metal scene in the early 1990's. Widely known as "rip-off" (a now seldom used term common in the days before the internet when tape trading occurred strictly through the mail) Richard and his label continue to be the topic of conversation on the internet, even though the label has not existed in some time, and the man himself has long ago fallen off the face of the earth. A Myspace tribute page is out there, but very little else remains of the once infamous label. Makes you wonder who on earth would even take a minute out of their time to keep the memory of the label who put out records by Zombified Preachers Of Gore alive...but anyway. I keep using the word "infamous" when referring to the man and his label, because I don't know what else to call the label and the bands they put out. "Laughable" could also work I guess...but then again I have the entire Nuclear Death discography on my Ipod...so I can't make fun of the label all that much.

Though Wild Rags started out releasing questionable music (including glam bands like Cherry Street), the label would go on to put out influential releases by the likes of Nuclear Death, Impetigo, Brutality, Blood, Bloodcum, Sigh, as well as Emperor and Internal Bleeding. I also remember them distributing demos by bands like Excrutiating Terror before they became the darlings of the powerviolence scene. Back to Internal Bleeding though...as I write this I have to laugh because I remember having Internal Bleeding's first demo, and thinking to myself "man, they signed to Wild Rags? They're gonna be huge!" Such a thing would only be funny to someone like me, who had the first Internal Bleeding demo back when it first came out. Old timer metal humor I guess.

My limited interaction with Richard C began after I went to a Morbid Angel show in 1991 or so, and received a flyer that talked about how much of a rip off Wild Rags was. Since I was planning on ordering the Impetigo "Faceless" EP that week, I included the flyer along with my order, and asked for his thoughts on the matter. The response I got from Richard was unexpected to say the least. Along with the EP, I got a large box with tons of records, CDs, stickers, tapes and about 50 copies of his publication The Wild Rag. The letter that came along with all this stuff explained how the guy that made the flyer was full of crap, and that he'd appreciate it if I would pass out his flyers, records and magazines at the same shows where the anti-Wild Rags flyers were being passed out. I quickly decided that the last thing I wanted was to get into a confrontation with some stranger at a show regarding a guy in California I had never met. So, I decided to sell the copies of the magazine to fellow metalheads in school (for a buck each) keep the records I liked, and sell the rest at a local record store. For a couple of years the boxes kept coming, and I had a steady supply of free gore and grind records, as well as a few bucks in my pocket. This all seems like ancient history now, but at the time I have to admit that I felt pretty cool being somehow connected to a somewhat legitimate record label. I remember telling kids in school that I was the local rep. for a label, or something like that. Even thinking of it now I cringe...but such is life.

I actually met Richard at the Milwakee Metal Fest one year without even knowing it. I approached him to buy a shirt in the parking lot to the venue, and noticing that he only had Wild Rags merchandise, I asked him if he was Richard. He quickly said "no, I don't know that guy". Later it became clear that it was him, but he didn't really want anyone to know who he was. I'm sure he wanted to avoid getting his face punched in by all the people he had supposedly ripped off...but the allure of thousands of metal fans eager to spend their money on his records and badly screened shirts had made him fly all the way to Milwaukee. Little did I know that angry guys in bands were the least of his problems. More on that in a minute.


After a few years, the packages of free stuff dried up. His zine The Wild Rag became even worse and more laughable than it had been before, and I lost interest. I had completely forgotten about the label and Richard, until fellow metal brother Sergeant D brought up the subject to me about six years ago. I began to tell him about my interaction with Richard C, and as I told him the story I thought to myself "Holy crap, I was in the Wild Rags street team before street teams existed!"

Out of all the stories and accounts of whatever happened to Richard, the only one I seem to think is truthful comes from Pat who played in Hellwitch. I used to trade metal videos with Pat around 1990-1992 and wrote with him a lot. He always struck me as being a nice and upfront guy (he also had unbelievable penmanship by the way, all in cursive...not very metal). In this interview from 2006 he said:

..Ricardo was charged by the U.S. government with crime of income tax evasion and was sent to prison!! Actually, I’m not sure if he was caught, but I know he was wanted for this crime. Some say he fled to his home country of Mexico. The members of Sadistic Intent went to the government auction of Wild Rags’ stock and purchased most of it. They now run a record store in L.A. called Dark Realm, which sells much of Ricardo’s confiscated inventory! Haha! I love telling this story! As we say in America, “What comes around, goes around!”. Ricardo got his!

Okay, now that I have this story out of my system...I promise I'll try to make my future posts funny.

Helloween en Espanol!

If I were a Spanish teacher, this is how I would teach my students.