The End

At the end of the 1988 racing season I was at a crossroads. For three years I had focused my life on mountain bike racing, and I didn't have a whole lot to show for it. I was drained, disenchanted, destitute and my knees hurt. It didn't have to be that way.

In late 1987 I met a guy named Don McElfresh. We worked together at Frank's Bicycle Lane in Roseville, and we quickly became friends and training partners. Don was a very good Category 1 road racer, and he greatly influenced my training for the '88 season. At the time Steve and I had conflicting work schedules, so our riding time together was more limited than it was before. And when you start riding with a road racer, you need a road bike.

I had already purchased a beautiful orange Colnago from my manager Tony shortly after I started working at Frank's, but even back in 1987 it was considered old (I think it was a 1974 model). Don convinced me I needed something new.

I bought the Faggin and before I knew it I was spending far more time on a road bike than my mountain bike.

When Don and I first started riding together, I thought it would make me faster. He was powerful, and just staying on his wheel in flat terrain was nearly impossible at first. It was only on climbs where I could hold my own. Even going downhill it was very difficult to stay with him because he had such a huge engine. In fact, my all-time max speed record of 60.5 miles per hour was sitting behind Don on a descent into the American River Canyon. We didn't wear helmets in those days, either.

Emulating him was a huge mistake. I figured a guy getting numerous top-5 placings in big Pro/1/2 road races knew what he was doing. He did not. I realize now that Don was simply very gifted and did well despite his horrible diet and terrible training habits. Even back then we knew Don rode too much. The guy just loved to ride his bike. In hindsight, given my current understanding of training practices, I know he rode WAY too much.

We did some long rides, man. Sometimes we rode from Citrus Heights to French Meadows and back, which was 150 miles. Other times we would ride in the foothills for 6-8 hours. He knew all the quiet back roads in the region and some days it felt like we rode every single one of them.

On weekdays when we worked at the bike shop, it wasn't uncommon for us to ride before work and again after work. I remember a number of occasions when we rode over 100 miles between the two rides in one day.

For Don there was some justification for doing these long rides. Many of his races were 90-120 miles, so he needed that big base to train his body to still be firing at the end of those long races. However, I was a mountain bike racer. My races were usually around 25 miles. I needed to go really fast for a couple hours, and that's it. There was really no reason to go on a 12-hour slog up to French Meadows and climb 15,000 feet. I would have been much better served by riding 2-3 hours with some intermittent speed work. This is exactly what Steve and I were doing on our typical mountain bike rides in 1986 and 1987.

And I needed a little rest.

I just didn't rest that year. I was young and stupid and I thought that more training was better. I know without any doubt it was by far the highest mileage year of my life. I didn't start documenting annual mileage until 1995, so I don't have data from the big racing years from 1986 to 1988. But I do know I cracked 6,000 miles in 2024 for the first time since I started keeping track. I arrived at that number by doing lots of rides in the 25 to 30 mile range, and almost all of them were on a mountain bike. In 1988 we were doing lots of rides in the 60-90 mile range on road bikes. I believe I rode over 12,000 miles in 1988.

When races came around, I was terrible. Although I was in the best shape of my life in many respects, I wasn't fine tuned for mountain bike racing, and I was probably suffering from fatigue and nutritional deficiencies. On most training rides I felt great, so I didn't understand why I wasn't seeing results. The self doubt creeped in. I started coming to terms with not being good enough. I wanted to be a professional racer, but I wasn't even cracking the top ten as an expert.

As I alluded to in the first sentence, I finished the season at a crossroads. I felt internal pressure to succeed at racing, and plenty of external pressure to move on. I was 21 years old, poor and undereducated. I saw the disappointment in my parents' faces whenever the subject of my future came up.

In November of 1988 Don and I went to the Interbike trade show in Reno. All the big bike and component manufacturers and distributers were there showing the latest and greatest equipment. We were supposed to be representing Frank's Bicycle Lane, our employer, but we had other ideas.

Don produced a polished racing resume and cover letter (which I still have) to pass out to prospective sponsors, and he encouraged me to do the same. Don's was an impressive collection of top-5 finishes in many races—three whole pages of them. Mine was half a page of mediocrity.

(This is a 1993 edit I used to help get a "sponsorship" from Dean/Adventure Mountain Bikes.)

I can't find my cover letter, but it was equally pathetic. Each time I handed one to somebody at a booth, they would scan it and try desperately to say something kind or encouraging. A lot of them weren't very good at hiding a smirk.

The phone never rang. In that silence the message was loud and clear: "You are not very good."

I quit racing.

While the year was pretty horrible from a racing standpoint, 1988 still produced many great memories. Don and I had an absolute blast working at the bike shop (when cranky old Frank wasn't around) and I enjoyed some downright epic road rides. Some of the ones Steve, Don and I all did together will forever be some of my favorites. (One particular French Meadows ride deserves its own post.)

It was also a year that caused so much regret as I grew older. I still wonder even to this day what might have been if I had a mentor or coach who really understood what I needed at that time to achieve success. I'll never know.

Later.

the Crash: Part 2

At the time of the crash, I was a busy guy. If there were such a thing as a three-ended candle, I would be burning it at all three ends.

After a brutal first semester in college carrying 18 units, I was now in my second semester carrying a slightly more manageable 16. I was also working full-time as the night manager at Round Table Pizza. On top of that, I was trying to ride as much as possible to prepare for the upcoming mountain bike racing season.

We raced around ten times in 1985 and had a blast, but this was during and after my senior year of high school, and up to that point it was only for fun. I intended to race a little in 1986, but I wasn't that serious about it. I was focused on school first, making some money, and riding when I could. Steve and Doug, however, were going to take it up a notch.

They had both just started the process of having custom frames made by Ibis Cycles. I was envious, of course, but I was fairly happy with the Fisher Montare I had purchased late in 1985. It would work fine for my limited racing aspirations, and it was a major upgrade from the Ross I had raced the previous year.

Then I crashed my car.

The path I had been on, the one that seemed so very clear the previous day, had now muddied up considerably. Being a responsible adult and working hard towards some unseen life goal somewhere on the distant horizon now felt very different. Working too hard had nearly killed me. I wondered what the point was. My path suddenly had multiple forks jutting off in all directions.

Steve and Doug visited me the day after my accident and told me about the ordering process for their custom frames. They were excited in a way that nothing in my life had been giving me. Suddenly the fog cleared and my life came into focus: I was going to be a bike racer.

I called Ibis and talked to Scot Nicol, and he described the process and sent me a fit sheet. When it arrived I took all my measurements and filled out the short questionnaire. I made it clear this was a bike purely for racing and racing only. I even had them remove all the eyelets on the dropouts just to emphasize that this would be a sleek racing thoroughbred that would never have a rack or fenders bolted to it like some lowly pack mule. I went to a local autobody shop and picked out a Dupont Imron color—a metallic purple. I threw the fit sheet and a check for $300 in an envelope and mailed it off.

In a matter of weeks a pretty purple killing machine arrived, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

In the meantime, I was gathering the parts to build the most perfect racing machine possible given a relatively low budget. There were boutique parts out there that may have been better—WTB roller cams versus the Suntour version I was using, for example—but it was all very solid equipment at the time.

Was I a bit detail oriented at 18 years of age? Maybe.

Even at 18 years of age I was a fairly seasoned mechanic, having built many BMX bikes from the frame up. I already knew enough to buy my own hubs, spokes and rims to build my own wheels. I got them pretty close to the finished product, and my local bike shop fine tuned the spoke tension for ten bucks each.

It all added up to produce my favorite racing bike of all time and the one I had the most success on. Unfortunately, I would get less then two seasons out of the frame before it broke.

I went back to school around 10 days after my accident, and obviously I had fallen far behind. My heart was no longer in it, and within days I dropped out of college entirely. My candle suddenly had only two ends, and the racing end now burned with the fire of a thousand suns. I eagerly looked forward to the first race of season with a new focus. Being a responsible adult would have to wait. I was now officially a bike racer.

Later.

The Crash: Part 1

Thirty-nine years ago today I woke up early on a cold Friday morning feeling very tired. I worked late the previous night closing up at Round Table Pizza, and I had arrived home well after midnight. At 6:15 the next morning I walked out to my car and climbed in. After starting the car, I pulled the two levers that opened the primitive heater vents, then noticed the radio was off. I attempted to turn it on, but it was dead. I suspected the fuse had blown again. Replacing fuses was a common occurrence if you owned an old Volkswagen. I cussed a little because I didn't have time to fix it. I often wonder where I would be today if I had taken five minutes to replace that fuse.

I made the drive in silence without the music that normally pumped me up for class. I arrived at Sierra College in time for my 7:00 accounting class. After a long week of suboptimal sleep, I promptly dozed off as the instructor droned on about debits and credits. The same thing happened the next period in English. I also took a snooze in Trig class.

At 10:00 I was free and on my way home. I looked forward to getting a little sleep before heading back to Round Table where I would be manning a huge oven; its two conveyor belts would be spitting out pizzas non-stop for hours and hours during the coming Friday night onslaught.

I turned right from Rocklin Road onto Sierra College Boulevard and climbed the hill up to the plateau that overlooked the valley. Up top there was a long straightaway followed by a curve to the left. This is where I fell asleep.

Everyone has pivotal point or two in their past when the direction of their life changes abruptly. This was definitely one of mine.

Without the music I was accustomed to, I had drifted off, ushered into slumber in much same way my parents had done when I was a baby. Legend has it when they were unable to get me to sleep, a ride around the block in our blue bug always did the trick.

I woke up as I left the roadway when the road curved. The jolt when the car bumped down the shoulder brought me back from slumber land, and I saw in front of me a barbed wire fence running along the road.

It's funny how our brains work in those situations. This all happened in a split second, but I distinctly remember thinking about how mad my dad would be if I hit the fence. I yanked the wheel hard to the left and felt the tires biting into the soil. I barely avoided the fence and briefly ran parallel to the road before climbing back up the slanted shoulder. As I entered the roadway the sliding tires grabbed the asphalt and suddenly I was on two wheels.

Again, it seemed like I was perched precariously on my passenger side wheels forever, long enough that I tried to work through the physics of what to do. Right or left? Unfortunately I was still a couple semesters from taking a physics class. I turned the wheel to the left and the car flipped.

The sounds will forever haunt me: the screeching of metal scraping on asphalt; the silences when the car was airborne; the loud, crashing impacts as the car slammed back down to earth; the weird and difficult to describe "doink" sound as my head struck the road; the tinkle of broken glass; the tap-tap-tap of blood dripping on my jeans when I finally came to rest.

The car rolled over and over, the sky repeatedly trading places with the ground. Towards the end of the cartwheeling, the front end caught in the dirt on the other side of the road. The car flipped one more time end-over-end, ultimately coming to rest back on its wheels. I unbuckled my seatbelt and somehow opened the smashed driver door. I exited the car and tried to look around as blood poured over my face. I didn't see anyone around who could help, so I started walking back toward the college.

Before I took maybe 20 steps, someone grabbed me from behind and tackled me to the ground. I couldn't see him well, but he yelled, "Stay down!" So I did.

He quickly returned with a black bag. I had wiped enough blood from my eyes to see he was an older cop. I looked into his eyes and he looked terrified. Up until that point I wasn't in any pain, so I thought I was okay, but this cop's eyes told a completely different story. Yet, I felt strangely at peace. I began wondering if this was how it felt before you die.

He put a large dressing pad on the top of my head and wrapped it down tightly with gauze tape, going under my chin and all around my head. He again told me to stay down and ran back to his car. I peeked up to see it was a Highway Patrol cruiser. He called in on his radio and reported a single car rollover, one victim, massive head trauma. "Fuck," I said out loud. My head was clearing, the pain kicking in, and I finally grasped the seriousness of the situation.

The officer talked with me as we waited for the ambulance, and I felt eerily focused and clear-headed. The more I talked, the more the cop seemed to relax. His eyes softened and I felt like he might believe I was going to live.

The paramedics showed up and knelt down beside me. "How you doin' buddy?" one asked. I looked at the three guys gathered around me and they all had the same mustache. I ignored the question and asked, "What's with the mustache? Is that a requirement?" The cop and the paramedics looked at each other quizzically before bursting into laughter, and it took the stress level down another notch. Without realizing it, I was trying to comfort the cop.

They strapped me to a board and taped my head in place. The bandage around my head and under my jaw was so tight, I couldn't open my mouth. I was having a difficult time breathing through my nose and it felt like I was drowning. Thankfully they put an oxygen mask on me once I was locked into place in the ambulance.

I was completely immobile for the long drive to my hospital in Sacramento. It felt like hours. I'm not sure why my arms were strapped down like a serial killer. I kept taking deep draws of oxygen in an effort to control my breathing. I felt the panic creeping ever so close to the surface.

Once at Kaiser they assessed the damage. I had scraped off the top of my head, torn my left ear, damaged my neck and sustained a serious concussion.

Cleaning up my head wound wasn't much fun, at least for me. The nurse happily hummed her way through it like she was Mary Poppins. My head was a mess of dried blood, matted hair, gravel and glass. The nurse placed me on a gurney with my head at the very edge and started irrigating the wound with a clear liquid that burned like hell. She then scrubbed as gently as she could. Then irrigated again. The process repeated over and over until she was satisfied with the results—about 10 songs worth.

At some point during the clean-up my parents had arrived. As the nurse finished up they came to my side and they were white as ghosts. I can only imagine what the trip to the hospital was like for them when so little information was provided: a phone call, a brief report, and a long drive while hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

At that point I had been very busy almost dying for most of the day, and I told the nurse I had to pee. My dad and the nurse got me to my feet and made sure I was okay to walk. I made my way to the restroom and the nurse told me not to look at the wound under the bandage. This was very sound advice that I did not heed. Once inside, I immediately lifted the bandage, seeing in the mirror what looked like raw hamburger where my scalp used to be. My hair was gone, and all that remained was a huge scrape with jagged cuts and gouges missing. I blacked out briefly and had to catch myself using the sink. I completely forgot to pee and went back to the ER in shock.

From there I was taken into surgery where a nice Japanese doctor pieced my ear back together. A nurse told me he was the best plastic surgeon in Northern California. He did a wonderful job and I am forever grateful. To prevent getting cauliflower ear, he placed a butterfly catheter in my ear to drain the blood. A large test tube collected the blood and stayed taped to my head for a week. It was a huge hit at the dinner table. I think my mom and dad both lost weight that week.

By that night I was released and resting at home. The next morning, my dad changed the dressing for the first time, as directed, and we both almost passed out—he from the sight, I from the pain.

On Saturday evening the phone rang. My mom answered and listened. Her eyebrows raised and she said, "Yes, he's right here."

I took the receiver and a man introduced himself as the officer who was first on the scene. He asked how I was doing, and I described my injuries. He told me he really thought I was dying, confirming my suspicions. "All I saw was hair and blood. So much blood." He revealed that he saw the whole accident happen from a distance, and that I had rolled at least five times. Maybe six. I thanked him for being there and for taking the time to call.

On Sunday we learned where the car was being stored and went to collect my belongings. After the accident I told my dad the car wasn't in bad shape. "We can totally fix it," I said. Once I saw the car again the reality of what happened hit me hard.

We obviously weren't fixing the car. It was smashed up, the wheels folded under, and most of the windows were gone.

I couldn't believe how much blood there was. It was even splattered on the outside of the car.

In the days after the accident I would make a decision that would forever change my life's trajectory. More on that in "Part 2" of this story. Don't worry, I will finally get to the point of all this, and it's definitely cycling related.

Note: I suppose it would have been more impactful to wait a year and write about the 40th anniversary of this accident, but I don't like to be predictable. Also, the number 39 is awesome.

My childhood love for Dave Parker is the reason I called my left-handed son "The Cobra" in his baseball days.

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story.

Later.

Waiting

It’s hot. Africa hot. An eerie silence has descended upon my neighborhood. From my perspective on the front porch, not a single person is in view as far as I can see. The yards are all empty, the windows all closed, the shades all drawn. My schoolmates and I are all home from school now, and yet the streets that are normally the venue for afternoon baseball are strangely empty, the striking players refusing to play in these conditions. It will be a few hours yet before the other kids will venture out, waiting for the oppressive heat to wane. A long, crowded commute on a hot school bus has left us instead craving a tall glass of something cold and sweet and a cool place in front of the TV. But I will watch no television today, for I am in my mother’s doghouse again. I will have to sit out here on the porch for a while and serve my sentence. It seems that I alone will brave the harsh elements of this early June day.

But I am alone only in the human sense.

The magpies, normally annoyingly vociferous, are silent, taking refuge on the lush, green grass under the two black walnut trees in my front yard. They cast a wary eye towards the porch as they wait for the cool of evening to resume their normal routine. Their banana yellow beaks agape, they pant in a futile attempt to cool down. My dog Chuck, the object of the magpies’ anxiety, lies off to my side, panting also. The Labrador retriever was a gift from my parents on my fourth birthday. Three years old now, Chuck is experiencing his hottest summer yet. His black coat surely was not designed for the extreme heat of the Sacramento Valley. For the birds on the lawn he has no interest: a bird dog with no will to hunt the teasing magpies who surely haunt his dreams. Today these natural adversaries have a common enemy in the heat, much like the lions and cheetahs and zebras and gazelles of the Serengeti Plains. They lie disinterested in each other, side by side under the searing sun, waiting for nightfall to hunt and be hunted.

With dark brown, sorrowful eyes, Chuck pleads to me for help but there is little I can do. My mom won’t let him enter her house—a sterile, bright white, dirt-free environment that has certain areas where even I am not allowed to go. Dogs are dirty, she says. I have already hosed Chuck down once in an effort to cool him off, but the relief was short lived.

When the heat becomes unbearable, I turn on the hose once again and he allows me to wet his thick, black fur. Taking turns, we lap the cold, rubbery water from the hose. Relieved again for the time being, a goofy smile stretches across his muzzle and I giggle as we play in the soothing water. Sufficiently cooled off, we then return to our accustomed positions on the porch, having consumed so much water we can barely move. We both just stare out into the rising heat. There is not much else to do but wait it out.

The insects have also fallen silent. The cicadas, usually filling the summer air with their shrill song, have given up for the day. Likewise, the katydids and crickets have lost their voices. The only sound is the distant drone of Interstate 80, which runs right behind my house. Even the record-setting heat of this summer day does not slow the highway traffic. Like a purring cat that never wakes, there is a perpetual din that remains constant, day and night. The sound is a natural part of my environment, like the wind hissing through the trees or the rain pattering on the roof. But only on a very still and quiet day like today do I notice that the freeway is even there.

My house sits atop a hill, making our yard slope steeply towards the street. From the front porch the walkway in front of me drops off out of sight as it makes its way to the shimmering road. It is as if I am sitting on a dock watching ships sail over the horizon and disappear. To the left of the walkway, along the side of the garage, drooping bottlebrush bushes drip their red, prickly flowers toward the ground. The honey bees and the big, fat bumble bees that frequent these plants are nowhere to be seen. Red lava rock, as hot as it has been since its volcanic birth, covers the ground around the bushes. To my right I check the chrysanthemums, also floating in a river of red lava, for signs of life. The butterflies—Monarchs, Tiger Swallowtails, Cabbage, and Buckeyes—are gone too. However, I notice that there are tiny yellow crab spiders in some of the blooms, waiting motionless for an insect meal that will not come today. Above the mums, geraniums flourish in a planter box built just below the living room window. I stay away from them though because, unlike most people, I think they smell like dirty socks.

Our well-manicured grass is difficult to mow because of the slope. My dad says that I will be big enough to mow it myself soon. The slope of the yard does provide some benefits though. My driveway has become the favorite place for the neighborhood boys to race their Hot Wheels. We carefully set up the long tracks and race them all the way from the garage to the gutter. Lately I have been winning because my dad showed me how to put sewing machine oil on the axles to make the cars go faster.

The two walnut trees create a canopy that lets little sunlight filter through to the turf. Around the trees, a circle of stones protects the delicate daisies caressing the trunks. Like huge, six-foot hay bales, bunches of pampas grass run along the side fence. The blades are long, narrow, and razor sharp like swords. My father planted them as a deterrent to burglars but for the most part they only cut the neighborhood kids and devour our wayward baseballs. And anyway, Chuck would never let a burglar get over the fence.

The garage of our house looks like an old brown barn from a Midwestern farm. Its broad, angular roof ends on either side with eaves that hang down very low. A seven-year-old like me can easily run beneath them, but adults must duck or walk around. Over the large front door, decorative woodwork mimics the doors of a hay loft.

Over the slope of the lawn I can see the street. Images from some far-off, distant place dance and shiver in the silver heat that rises from the asphalt like fleeing spirits. Walking home from the bus stop an hour or so ago, the road a black skillet, I felt the heat biting me through my leather sandals. I tried to hop as I walked in an effort to keep my feet off the ground as long as possible, like the lizard I saw on television that alternately raised two of its feet above the fiery desert sand to keep them cool. But for me, it didn’t work. I resorted to walking in the gutter, where a small stream of warm but refreshing water flowed, even though I knew that my mom would probably get mad at me for soaking my good sandals. And I was right. So here I sit on the front porch with my dog, both banished from the house, waiting for my sandals to dry.

I find it a little hard to breathe, the heat like a mighty python constricting my chest. The air is dry, still and tasteless. Dead. No breeze to carry fragrance, no moisture to enhance it. I look over to Chuck and see that he is already dry again. Scooting over next to him I draw a deep breath. A dry dog, like a dry summer day, has no smell.

Sweat forms tiny pools at the base of each blonde hair on my arm. I sit and watch until the pools grow large and overflow their pores, generating small streams that flow down to the lake forming in valley of my elbow.

Even though the sun falls lower toward the horizon, this is the hottest part of the day. As the shadow from the front porch overhang creeps forward towards the street, the first signs of life appear before me. A trail of ants strings across the walkway, following the shadow of the overhang, noticeably avoiding the sun. I drop a small stone in their path and they become confused for a short time. But they quickly find their way around it and resume the serious business of being ants.

The magpies are still sitting under the tree, waiting. This is the first time that I have ever been this close to them. Normally they are very timid. My dad says this is because they are quite intelligent. His friend had one when they were kids and he taught it to talk. Dad says that you have to split their tongues with a razor blade to form a fork in order for them to speak. I have always wondered what it would be like to have one for a pet but I’m sure my mom wouldn’t let me have one. Birds are dirty, she would say.

I hear the doorknob click and turn around to see my mom opening the front door. “Are your sandals dry yet, kiddo?” she asks.

“Yep.”

“Okay, you can come in now.”

“Can Chuck come?” I ask.

“No honey, he’s filthy.”

“Hmm. Okay, I’ll just stay out here for a while then.”

With a frown and a shake of her head, my mother closes the door. Chuck and I stare out into the rising heat. We’re just going to wait it out.

Master of Puppets

Thirty years ago yesterday Metallica released the album Master of Puppets, one of the greatest and most influential metal albums of all time. For me, the album completely changed how I viewed music. Hearing it for the first time catapulted me from really liking music to a full-on love affair.

Everyone loves anniversaries. They give us the opportunity to reflect upon those "where I was when" moments. In 1986, at 18 years old, I worked as the night manager at a Round Table Pizza. This entailed closing at 11 p.m. on weeknights and an astounding 1 a.m. on weekends—an unheard of closing time these days. After the doors closed I did the books while my "closer" began cleaning up. Once I completed the bookkeeping, I joined in the cleaning fun until the restaurant was somewhat presentable. We then closed up and dropped off the deposit at a local bank. All told it was about a 90-minute process.

Sometime in March, a couple weeks after the album was released, all my friend and closing partner Ben could talk about was the new Metallica album he had purchased the day before. He simply would not shut up about how incredible it was. My attitude was best characterized by the word, "Whatever."

To the general public, rock music was pretty much dead at the time. Current rock music certainly wasn't on the radio in Sacramento. We had a classic rock station, pop (now called '80s music), soul, oldies and probably multiple country stations. The year of 1985 was particularly dismal. Van Halen broke up. Previously great bands like Aerosmith and AC/DC released some of their weakest work (Done With Mirrors, Fly on the Wall) that year. If you look at the top 100 songs from 1985, you'll only find about six songs representing the rock genre, and half of those sucked. The other half were power ballads. It was a tough time to be a rocker.

I was listening to music like Van Halen, Motley Crue, AC/DC, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Ozzy and Dio. Not bad. I was also listening to stuff like Dokken, Ratt, Great White and Cinderella. Questionable. But all the music had a pretty common theme in that it was guitar driven. In my defense, even on the shitiest of my hair band albums, I gravitated towards the heaviest songs.

After we closed up on that Tuesday night, Ben and I both filled up our plastic one gallon pickle jars with Michelob Dark, Round Table's finest beer, and headed to his house to listen to Master of Puppets. Ben lived in the attic of his parent's home, and to us it was the coolest apartment ever. It was accessed by quite possibly the steepest stairs ever built, and you couldn't stand up in two-thirds of the room, but I thought it was awesome. The low ceiling just made the Arabian style décor that much better.

We assumed our positions on the floor pillows, beer between our legs, and settled in. Ben put needle to vinyl and handed me the lyric sheet. This was the proper way to listen to new music back then.

The music blew me away. Long, epic songs, hard and yet melodic at the same time, with huge changes in tempo and mood. Drum beats and time signatures that were hard to identity; definitely not standard 4/4 rock tempos I was used to. Lyrics that were not of the light "girls and good times" rock and roll fare, but much darker: drug addiction, war, religious hypocrisy, control, assault and mental disease.

The timing was right. I had survived a pretty bad rollover car accident a few weeks prior. Instead of being happy to be alive, though, I was in a very dark place. I was pissed off. The aggressiveness and darkness appealed to me. I bought my own copy the next day.

In the following weeks I listened to the album over and over. I really dissected it. I tried to figure out pieces of the songs on guitar. The music was so much more complex than anything I had tried to learn previously, and at a much greater speed. I couldn't play much of it, which only impressed me more. Cliff Burton's classical music background greatly influenced the complexity and depth of the music. He died later that year in the infamous bus accident.

I soon added Metallica's two earlier albums, and any import or bootleg I could get my hands on. I eagerly anticipated anything released thereafter, and I still do to this day. I have seen Metallica live more times than I can count, and I probably will again. At 48 years old, sometimes it seems odd to me that I still listen to Metallica, but I do.

Thirty years later the album still sounds relevant. It really was a masterpiece produced by a band hitting its peak. I listened to it just a couple weeks ago while working in the yard without even realizing this anniversary was approaching, and I had that very same thought.

You can debate forever where the lines are between different music genres. Personally, I have always called everything rock to simplify things, but most people say Metallica is metal. At any rate, Master of Puppets is widely acknowledged as the first metal album to go platinum, and they did it with virtually zero radio airplay. This opened the door for harder music to hit the mainstream. Now, some 30 years later, it is not uncommon to hear Metallica in a restaurant or department store.

Happy birthday, Master of Puppets. You still sound good.