Puppet booths & thrash roots

I don't really have many memories from grade seven coming back to mind that are musically related. I do recall having to make puppets in groups of 3-5 and perform a puppet show in front of the class. I came up with the idea for my group and we did a parody of an old kids show "the friendly giant", only our performance was titled "the un friendly giant". We made puppets of the characters but in punk rock form, and pulled off some witty material, which was essentially doing everything opposite that the friendly giant did.

Our group even recreated the set of the show but it also was in punk form, the furniture used and broken & the room was trashed & covered with grafitti. All in all we pulled off quite an enjoyable and laughable puppet show despite all the negative undertones it consisted towards society and mankind. All concocted by yours truly of course who always seemed to take charge of group projects at school, generally when there was 5 minutes left of class and the group had sat there in silence, only speaking when terrible ideas had been muttered. I'd pull gold out of my ass! 

The breakdance styles were changing to more of a "grey cargo pants and matching vest with a burgandy turtle neck" type look, which I was digging a bit more than all the nut hugging parachute pants. These pants lead me to eventually wearing them with my "Exciter" shirt a lo,t which in turn had me on my moms back to find me cargo or army type pants. I was also getting shoe conscious now too, as kids love to tease you for being broke. My mother had always got me fairly cool looking no name shoes from the BuyWay or Bargain Harold's, but now Adidas was my shoe of choice as that's what my dad was wearing. Unknowingly that would benefit me a year down the road when I discovered RUN DMC and the Beastie Boys, who wore the same shoes as me, which would be one less item to find so I could emulate my influences.

I also now remember looking through heavy metals magazines such as Hit Parader, and seeing ads for t-shirts. These adds we're usually full page and each t-shirt design was no bigger than a postage stamp. The bands in these adds we're generally alphabetized or displayed by genre. Alongside the new bands I'd discovered like "Exciter", "Venom", "Celtic Frost" & "Motörhead", I was seeing names like "Metallica", "Overkill", "Anthrax", & "Slayer" riddled amongst other speed metal, punk and hardcore bands like "Misfits", "Sex Pistols", "Exploited" & "D.R.I." The t-shirt designs that accompanied these heavy sounding names were quite intense looking. 

My curiosity was peaked yet I had never seen these bands on television, nor had I heard them on the radio, nor had I seen their records or cassettes for sale in any of my local record stores. I suppose growing up apart of the "MTV" generation made me a bit skeptical of bands like this. I figured if they weren't in the media they weren't any good at what they did, or perhaps they were just too extreme for the masses....I'd learn later it was either or, depending on what side of the fence you were looking at it from, even a combination of the two at times, but realistically I would eventually learn it was just like myself....misunderstood.