The Educated Metal Head

The Educated Metal Head
By Bryan Thomas Reed Oakes Martin



1968.
I guess I was always the quiet kid who sat in the background observing. It’s funny though because my mother used to place me in the middle of the room with queen blaring on the stereo while she cleaned the house. I was born June 2nd 1968. That year black Sabbath released their first album, so did led zeppelin. My mother was 19 when she had me and she had one older brother and sister and a younger brother. I was surrounded by music and the last gasps of the 60's ideals. I will get into what happened to my biological father later on. I will say they divorced early on and we actually lived in fear under police protection for awhile. I get my fear from that. I always feel like someone is behind me trying to get me. This fear has played a big part in my life. So it was me and my mother from birth basically to age 7. My mother worked at roger Williams college library and I had to go because, well there wasn’t anyone else to watch me. When your mother works at a library you quickly learn to do two things: read and be quiet. I love reading. My grandfather(on my mother’s side) had these huge glass bookcases filled with technical books and just all sorts of mind expanding bits of paper knowledge. I’m told my real father bought a bunch of books to try to emulate him. I can see why. I loved my grandfather...papa I used to call him. He was very smart and loved to laugh. I can still smell his pipe. We lived at 68 state street in Bristol Rhode island. July 4th I could throw a stone from our porch and hit someone marching in the country’s largest and oldest parades. In Bristol your whole life revolved not around Christmas but around the fourth of July parade. About a week before the event they would have little things going on at the Bristol commons. Now the commons is a large grassy flat piece of land smack dab in the middle of Bristol. The carnival that came every summer would set up there and they would have pie eating contests and soap box derbies. Yes I even did the pie eating contest one summer. After spending 4 hours at the parade everyone would walk up the street to go to the carnival. That night there would be fireworks and in the morning the carnival would be gone and you went back to counting the days until next year. Sometimes the kids would riot against the police during the parade and all hell would break loose. I have so many great memories of that house. We had a very tiny backyard but I knew every inch of it. My papa grew rhubarb in the backyard and I even had a rabbit for a time. Once a praying mantis landed on the kitchen screen and I began talking to it. It would sit there and listen and then it would come back the next day. They told me not to be sad because the praying mantis would not come back the next spring...but it did.One day during a trip out west with my grandparents I had a photo taken of me at a motel pool. Moments after the photo was snapped I began to choke on a peach pit. My grandfather saved my life and that photo almost became my last. I remember fruity pebbles and listening to the radio in that kitchen. Pasta sauce stewing in a pot all day. We always ate together. I remember when they had to turn the dining room into a bedroom because nonnie(my mother’s mother) had cancer and she couldn’t climb the stairs. She died there. I remember someone brought over a real gingerbread house. I think I turned my attention to that instead of the dying in the next room. I learned to tie my shoes at that house, fed my cousin a leaf and dirt sandwich, discovered how slugs die from salt, slowly emptied a whole box of tissue form a bathroom window(with the help of my cousins), and generally discovered that I was not like the other kids. I always felt like I was being judged or stared at. The more I felt alone the easier it became to sink into my books and just dream away.
“Blizzard Of 78"
No one alive in the north east can ever say they never heard of the blizzard of 1978. It lives on in all our memorys and the perfect example of this occurs every time it snows. People will empty shelves of milk and bread as soon as any forecast calls for snow.
Middletown.
When we moved out of my grandfather’s house to Middeltown Rhode Island I think I was excited but probably scared too.
Family
I never really fit in anywhere until we moved to riverside when I was in the 5th grade. When my mother married my stepfather we moved from Bristol to Middletown and then back to Bristol and then finally to riverside. My father grew up there and he knows everyone in this town. Years later after struggling my whole life to get out of this town I brought my family back here to live. I’m glad we left Bristol. With the death of my grandfather I really didn’t have any ties to Bristol. I believe, looking back, that something happened to me there. It’s a vague memory of kids in a graveyard and me and something just not being right. I don’t know maybe my mind distorts the past but still...seems like something happened to me.
I love my step dad although I never considered him that and he adopted me anyway. As far as I am concerned he is my dad. I wish they would have met sooner. But I’m glad they did and my mother deserved a good man. I have two brothers, Sean Patrick martin and Kevin Joseph martin. We had a fourth, Timothy martin, but he died shortly after birth. I never had the chance to know him and being a teenager I suppose I didn’t know what to say. My parents were devastated and it was the first time my father cried. I can’t imagine the sorrow. Only now having kids of my own do I realize what a tremendous effort on my mom’s part to pick up and carry on. It’s something we rarely talk about. I love my brothers but I suppose I’ve always been distant. By the time they came of age I was running wild in the streets. So they did the whole family thing while I was trying to find my way in the world. I’m sorry to my brother’s that I couldn’t have been a better big brother and role model. I think they deserved better.
“Music”
Music became a mainstay in my life when we arrived in Riverside. There the local kids turned me on to black Sabbath, iron maiden, the crue and dio. I had no idea and quite frankly it changed my life. When I arrived in Riverside my mother was still picking out my clothes for me and I listened to pop music. After arriving I met this kid named mike sadlier whose older sister quickly informed me that I dressed like a geek. She also had me right down bands that I needed to listen to. From that point I began to change my clothes and my music tastes.
My best friend ended up being joe prendergast and his older brother Anthony would turn us on to all types of hard rock and the blossoming metal scene. Dokken, wasp, quiet riot, scorpions, ozzy, kiss, rainbow, savatage, van halen it was a treasure chest of music and I dived right in. One thing I never got involved in was drugs. Never had a care for it. My interest was the songs and I wanted to understand them. Joe’s room was plastered from floor to ceiling with posters, I mean you could not see an inch of the actual wall, including the ceiling. I would stare at those pictures and just dream myself into those bands. At joe’s house his brother would have parties when his parents went to the casinos. They would tape garbage bags to the floor so that if you spilled your beer it wouldn’t stain and if you spilled your coke you could still use it. We would see all these guys with these chicks and you just knew they were having sex but everyone was to wasted or sick to do it. I thought man I’m not into drugs. At all. Our big thing was to tell one set of parents the other was sleeping over and then go to a concert in boston. I actually got to see van halen on the 1984 tour. But joe and I would always find ways to get into trouble naturally. All in all I would say Motley Crue was our favorite. We would try to dress like them, we even tried to wear some of their makeup. In our imaginary band I was “Tommy lee” because I wanted to be a drummer and joe was “Vince Neil” cause he wanted to be a singer.
One time He and I had both dated this girl and got dumped. Now keep in mind joe and I were always sharing girls (or rather I would meet them and he would steal them). So this chick dumps him and he decides to spray paint she is a slut on the st. Brendan’s school wall. He did it, I was just there but we got busted the next day. We had just pumped $10 worth of quarters into defender at the local arcade when his father pulled us out. When he grabbed me too I knew we were dead. There we were scraping this spray paint off when church got out.
The age of heavy metal music was just dawning. Over the horizon new bands like Accept, Quiet Riot, Savatage, and Ratt were rolling into a scene already being populated by bands like Black Sabbath, Kiss, Scorpions, Ac/Dc, and Aerosmith, Iron Maiden, Dio. We soaked it all in like sponges. Searching for my own special band to call my own I chose a melodic hard rock act left over from the 70's called Saxon. They became my favorite as well as a little band called WASP.
High School
High School was a different time for me to say the least. My best friend was going to a private high school and I felt alone and vulnerable in a school with over 2000 students. So I would keep to myself initially. Thanks to my strength in English and my weakness in Math I was at once in the high honors classes and the degenerate classes. Early on I began to hang out with some fellow “river rats” (that’s what they call kids from riverside) I had a good time with them but then drinking got involved. And One day I almost died. My friends and I skipped school and decided to drink. This was o.k. I thought because my limit by then on tolerance was a half pint of southern comfort. But the guy who brought the alcholol got a full pint. So I sadi to my buddy jim that I would just stop at the halfway point. He said when I got there I drank the rest down like it was water. Later I went into a little coma. They threw me in the shower and everything. I was very close to going out completely.My friend took me home and had me sleep it off. They brought up chicken soup and I watched through barely opened eyes as he played the star spangled banner on his guitar. I thought man if I live through this I’m going to play that one day.I came home at 10:00pm that night and said I was at work and I was tired. They bought it but my friend called me from next door and said she knew what had happened.

My first job was heartland food warehouse pushing carriages. It sucked but I needed money to support my music addiction. Then I moved up to freezer and grocery stocker. Later I worked as a:
convenient store clerk, door to door salesman, shipping receiving clerk. 1st shift,2nd shift,3rd shift, customer service manager, assistant manager(kay-bee toys), inksetter apprentice, forklift driver, delivery driver, inventory control specialist, steel worker, shipper, temp, tree surgeon, greenhouse worker, commercial sales specialist. Most if not all of these jobs fell a distant second to my love for music.

1986. “College”
After High school I went to Rhode Island College. Now it was a miracle that I graduated so my parents were pleased. What they didn’t know was that college campus would be like a candy store for me. I mean there were women everywhere. Here I was this little metal head wanna be who loved to read and was naturally quiet exposed to all these sexually active women. I dove right in and never looked back. I lost my virginity one night to an exceptionally overweight but willing girl and the next night started to date another girl I met. In between beds I crawled to class. The work came easier than high school for some reason. I found myself doing better than I thought. There was still the spectre of math hanging over my head but I carried on. Hanging out with my suite mates we would get into all sorts of trouble. One weekend we barricaded ourselves in the suite with beer and drank for two days straight. My roommate did coke and listened to classic rock. That was when I went thru my doors and zepp faze. Coming home that Christmas break I was a wild animal who thought of nothing but sex. When I brought home a girl to my parents house at 3am. It was the breaking point. They kicked me out. Looking back I don’t blame them. They had worked so hard with me to get me into college and here I was blowing it. But the opposite of teaching me a lesson happened and when I returned to school I was told don’t come back. Faced with no job and no vehicle I decided to drop to part time so I could work. But after that I just quit.I wanted to pursue music full time and I needed to pay bills so I started working and practicing.
1987. “ The Gypsy Years”
That began a series of wandering around Rhode Island. I lived in Providence, Johnston, Barrington, Riverside, Swansea, Coventry. Keep in mind throughout all of this I began to teach myself guitar. Which wasn’t easy. I also found money to take vocal lessons. I didn’t have enough money to eat but I found enough to waste on that. So I began to wander around Rhode Island. When I lived in johnston I caught chicken pox for the first time. I believe I was around 23 at the time. I even moved back home twice. I lived with roomates and girlfriends but mostly I lived alone.

1991 “The Band”
I remember the call I received from some dude in Coventry. He needed a guitarist and he was speaking about witchcraft and making it big. I didn’t really care about all that but I wanted to play so I played along. The first jam was in the drummer’s garage and they were horrible. I mean I just wasn’t sure.Up until that point I had been in a few bands most notable was “resistance” which was probably the prototype for “Witch Meadow”. We played songs like Psychosis and covers like acdc’s “tnt.” We played where ever we could and even managed to record a few songs for a demo. Later when I formed Witch Meadow we would use almost all of the music from those sessions as the basis for our first release. But the bassist and drummer I was jamming with now may have called themselves “witch meadow” but they were far from being able to perform onstage. These guys were a bunch of clowns that I was jamming with now. But they had some cool girls stop by and that was all I wrote. I joined the oddly named witch meadow band. The drummer kept falling off his chair and looked like a rocker but couldn’t really play and the bassist was way too gothic. But he did have a black Sabbath fanclub membership and that was cool to me. So I joined the band, and we began to rehearse, but they soon turned into just long jam sessions for me. I was exploring a side of my playing that I hadn’t known before. Being the most able of those musicians I just kept writing and soloing until I could feel a change in my personal playing. My band mates were more interested in the “image” of rock and roll than substance and I knew it was just a matter of time before I would quit or...fire them and keep the name. In time that’s what I did. When I decided to replace them I had already been jamming with two other musicians and they knew all the songs I wanted to do. One day I went in to those guys and said hey man lets change the name, which they promptly did to “mercy Browne”. So I copywrote the name witch meadow and then told them I quit mercy Browne. That same day I began full rehearsals as witch meadow. Yeah it was sneaky but history will judge me by the music witch meadow was able to create. The drummer was an old friend from my former band “resistance” and the bass player I taught how to play.( In the end he was showing me things). In the course of time we fired the drummer and brought in the final lineup for the band.
“When Midnight Calls”
When we finally had a singer who could sing on an iron maiden level we really exploded.
Performing and recording my music became a 24 hour obsession that nothing and no one could keep me from. When I think of the sacrifices I made in the name of witch meadow it drives me crazy. Nothing else mattered except the music, not my family, not my health, not even fiancees or girlfriends. I had only one lover and her name was heavy metal. I breathed it, talked about it, and dreamt about it constantly. While friends and family got married got jobs and got money to purchase the good things in life I practiced and performed. It paid off in that we recorded the first tape to rave reviews across the underground metal world. Five to Six nights a week we would practice from about 5pm till we were done. That might be 11pm or 3 am. Then off to work the next day too tired to do anything but show up. Saturday nights we would have a “song showcase”. We would invite some friends down to our studio to listen to our set and check out new tunes. It worked for awhile but then the party really got rolling. So Saturday nights in our studio began to look like a small club venue. You had wall to wall kids, cars all over the parking lot. We would play literally for hours. Someone would always bring us beer. Our number one rule was whatever happens in the band room stays in the band room. Things as you can imagine got pretty crazy. The worst thing was that the party began to start on Friday and then Thursday nights and we were losing our ability to write tunes in peace. Still we carried on. Our first shows went down well and we began to attract a following. There is nothing like performing to a crowd of people who know your songs. Our partying on Saturday nights had paid off because word had spread about our music. We hit that stage like a hurricane and we were relentless. Bands that followed us were usually cover bands and we left them nothing. Most would always look at us like some sort of disease but after we played they knew what we were and usually had more respect. If they didn’t it would always make us play even harder. Our biggest show was at rocky point opening for a zeppelin tribute band. Probably about 500 kids flooding in right up to this huge stage and there I was scared shitless. It was awesome. We had friends lined up in front of the stage singing along with our songs. Truly the best time I ever had onstage. And then five songs in and my amp died. Yes it just died. Luckily the zepp guys ran up and plugged me into their equipment. So we finished the show sounding like a heavier sabbath. It was still a great show.
“Down Eternity’s Hall”
The second release by Witch Meadow was in hindsight too little too late at the wrong time. We decided to record some of the newer songs we had because the songs on the tape we had already released. We thought we should push on with new material rather than re-release the tape which fared so well in reviews. We had already been performing these tunes for years so even the songs we did decide to record seemed old to us. This was a mistake. But the album is full of great material of which “do you want to live forever” and “the gift” are my favorites. Our new drummer “norm” was a breath of fresh air. His style of playing was very controlled. Like Dream Theater. He had a lot of drive.

Halloween 1999
It took a long time to begin to write this chapter. It is the pivotal moment in my life. That moment of revelation where you see through the fog of misspent youth. After Halloween night 1999 I changed. Yes it took another few months for those changes to take place but I was on my way. On that night, witch meadow died. On that night night old friends who did me no good faded away. On that night the darkness that surrounded me began to shrink away. It lied on the floor for awhile at my feet after that but eventually it ran away. On that night I was reborn. And it all began with a walk on the beach...It was Halloween and my friends were planning to head up to New Hampshire to catch overkill’s show. I was feeling depressed and the thought of stopping in Salem first didn’t appeal to me. Something about the way the night was going just didn’t sit well with me. I had brought a witch meadow cd in my jacket pocket to give to a friend who said she would be there. I was at that point in my life trying to come to grips with what I had done to myself. I had fallen for my wife’s best friend and had been duped. To make it all worse the two of them would be at the overkill show. So it was a quick crawl back into a beer bottle for me. And as a result I just lost it.
Later that night when Overkill had finished their set I was lost in tears and remorse. I stumbled out into the chilly October air and headed towards the beach, or rather towards the water.
What happened next is up to outsiders to judge. I know what happened. I found myself waist deep in the ocean and walking farther out. It was cold. But I didin’t feel it. I was numb. In truth I wanted it to all be over. And then this kid appears next to me. He’s actually in the water with me. He starts talking to me about God and how lucky I was to be in a band. And the more he talked the more I realized you know what the hell am I doing?. I began to laugh at the two of us standing in the ocean talking about music. We went back to shore together but when I got on dry sand and I looked for him he was gone. It was my epiphany. That moment of bifurcation when one moment in your life changes and a new one begins. I felt free of all burdens. I also felt wet. My cowboy boots that had seen all those shows with me were ruined from the water. But my life would change now. And even though it would take another year..change it did.


The Damage Done
Years of performing on stages across new England have left me with a torn ligament in my right knee, one failed marriage, untold damage to, joints, and mental well being, strained family relationships (some of which can never be repaired), probable damage to my hearing, and the abandonment of two or three really close friends. All in all though I wouldn’t trade all those years in for anything. Twisted Sister has a song called “ The Price” and I guess it was the price I had to pay for rocking and rolling. In any event it all led me to this point in my life. I now have a great life, three kids who I love to death and the greatest wife that anyone could ever ask for. They complete a part of me that I tried to fill with all sorts of things for so long. Now my stepson and I play xbox together and listen to Iron Maiden. My daughter has been listening to Iron Maiden since her ears formed in the womb and she loves watching vh1's metal mania with me. As we speak my wife is pregnant and we are saving for our first house.

Looking back I would have to say I’m the luckiest man in the world.