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Mario Lalli Wants to Know When You Got Heavy

…Right after I got married — heyo!

In his first column for The Obelisk, guitarist/vocalist Mario Lalli of Fatso Jetson hits on the topic of “heavy” and what it is about it that allows for near-universal application. He tells his story, and I hope you’ll share yours in the comments below.

When did you get heavy?
by Mario Lalli

Have you ever thought about when and where and how… and why heavy rock and roll speaks to you? How did you come to discover the music and what about it moves you? What was the first step you took as a kid that led you to be reading this blog dedicated to hard rock and the culture that embraces it? The music, art, fashion, style, all of it.

It’s interesting to me to think about how certain sounds make me feel. How a “style” of music can become polarized because of the feeling that I get when I hear it is relevant to my experience. I’ll try to explain this thought… My experiences with hearing music as a child are probably very similar to yours.

The first meaningful songs we heard as babes are lullabies, nursery rhymes, etc. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”-kind of stuff. A lot of us also had music as part of our family culture… folkloric songs passed from generation to generation, music you hear in church. This kind of music has a different place in my head than a lot of the stuff I later discovered, listened to and became obsessed with (for many different reasons). There is an infinite spectrum of sounds and songs that move me in almost indescribable ways and then there is this word “heavy.”

What makes a sound, song or something “heavy?” Even more perplexing is why do I think that sounds “heavy?” When did my experiences during my pre-pubescent overload of TV, movies, real-life culture, pop culture and every other entertaining distraction the ‘60s and ‘70s tell my brain what sounds heavy? There’s got to be a reason that the first time I heard “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (Iron Butterfly) at three or four years old I already knew what “trippy” meant and that frontal-lobe-searing fuzz guitar means your frying balls. I knew that at four years old. The instant I heard that fucking rad song. Why??!!

The conditioning that goes into really understanding “heavy” is not limited to those of us that feasted on the magical ceramic wizards of rock — Blue Cheer, CreamZeppelin, Sabbath, Hendrix — but also someone who wouldn’t know any of these artists if he heard them: My father. My father is 88 years old and has been an operatic tenor since he was 18. He is very open minded while highly educated musically. The thing is he also uses the term “heavy” to describe a musical passage or a feeling in a movement. The other day we were discussing classical composers and their style and approach. He used the word heavy to explain the relentless jarring harmonies and orchestration of Richard Wagner.

And the “heavy” is in Wagner‘s Ring Cycle — a series of operas based on Norse Sagas, Vikings, Gods, death, Germanic mythology. This stuff gets pretty fucking heavy. The kind of heavy that makes Black Sabbath sound like bluegrass. Anyway the super cool thing: It’s that it’s a relative term that while varying in complexity and depth still describes and conveys this basic dramatic feeling. Now where the bell-bottoms, mag wheels and muttonchops fit in I’m not real sure… but I love it all!

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20 Responses to “Mario Lalli Wants to Know When You Got Heavy”

  1. goAt says:

    Much like everyone else here, I came roaring out of the womb with “Master of Reality” clutched in my tiny, placenta-stained, balled up fists….right?

    As a child, an early birthday yielded a box that boomed with a cassette to go with it-a scary manthing adorned in make-up clutching a piece of meat-looked like he was screaming at it, rather than preparing to eat it. I wanted to rock, and that guy did to.

    Then some guys were on the T.V. doing something called “headbanging.” Black and white in a warehouse while some war movie clips kept popping up. Dude in the video didn’t have a face! HEAVY. I often held my breath and wished for death at those Jr.High dances that year.

    A few years later some record with a picture of a sign on it in the middle of nowhere on the cover sharpened the signal of HEAVY as it dulled the edges…huh?

    …and here I am. True story.

  2. Woody says:

    The song “Apostrophe” by Frank Zappa was the first heavy jam for me. One of my older brothers bought me the album for Christmas in 1975 when I was 7 because he knew I’d like “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow.” Little did he know that I’d really get into the entire album, but especially that killer instrumental. Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper were next on my heavy horizon and then…

  3. Barry says:

    I’d have to say the first song that i remember thinking “whoa…this is heavy”, was Purple Haze. I specifically remember driving with my mom in the early 80’s as she listened to the local oldies station, and in between some doo wop and some disco came this song that changed my life. I for years thought he was signing “excuse me while i kiss this guy” though…haha!

  4. Demon Lung says:

    it was like 92. i was part of the pearl jam/nirvana crowd. then i started listening to the local college radio station wknc. i remember the first time i heard arise from sepultura it changed me. i no longer wanted to listen to pop musicmy first introduction into the stoner genre was kyuss. it was around the same time. blues for the red sun was out and i saw curt cobain on headbangers ball talk about how awesome kyuss was. then i saw the video for green machine and it was all over from there. the bands that defined my earliest moments of heavy were. pantera, seplutra, slayer, kyuss and acid bath. i was 13 years old then and heavy has stayed with me since.

  5. First time i decided heavy music was “mine” was when I saw KiSS on the Paul Lynde Halloween special when I was 6 or 7…

  6. saturnine says:

    Parental disposition, being an outsider, Tool and mid-90s alternative rock/metal, and especially Kyuss. My musical travels, in short: http://seeingthedark.com/blog/2012/01/a_history_of_drunks.html

  7. don s says:

    1972 I was 8 years old, and “no more mr. nice guy” came screaming at me from Mom’s a.m. radio, not long after that I Sold My Soul For Rock N Roll

  8. Mike M says:

    Probably the first heavy music I heard was in church. Onward Christian Soldiers, Are You Washed in The Blood…pretty intense imagery for a kid. And I grew up with a lot of old timey music, which is all death. But the first “heavy” album I remember was probably Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden at a friend’s house, whose parents let him listen to the satanic stuff.

  9. JimC says:

    Led Zeppelin 1 got me hooked back in 1969 when I was 14 y.o.

  10. Matt S says:

    Being from a town in the middle of nowhere with no good local music scene it was super hard to discover anything cool before the Internet and like many others I got really into Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, and Sabbath in Jr. High. But the first truely “Stoner” band I got into was Fu Manchu right after the California Crossing album came out. The video for Squash That Fly came on Fuse TV late one night when I was in high school, and just like that a switch went on in my brain.

  11. paul says:

    I grew up listening to classic rock. I would have to say when Zeppelin “clicked” in my head.

  12. Justin Hedrick says:

    heavy to me is the first time that i heard “Iron Man” on the nationally syndicated station “z rock” in 1992. From there it grew into Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. Then i heard a local band called HUM. from then on it was all over.

  13. JimC says:

    HUM… great band… too bad they are no longer.

  14. ZA. says:

    I had one friend in high school who’s mom was a hippie, and one day when we where hanging out at their house, she decided we were old enough, about 13 or 14, to smoke our first joint. After getting baked, I asked if I could put one of the records on that were placed in front of the stereo, and she told me to pick one. It was a choice between Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’ and a really spooky looking record, with a blurry, reddish picture of some kind of witch-woman on the front, and an upside down cross on the inner sleeve. I chose to play this record, and my life was changed forever.

  15. Sean says:

    My babysitter used to bring over her KISS records. This was around 1983 so I was six. The album covers scared me at first but I was drawn to them for some reason. The images were graphic and the music was loud, intense. Later on in life, I got so bummed on modern rock. But then I heard Fu Manchu’s “King of the Road”. That re-ignited the flame. It’s rad to see that heavy is still around and going strong.

  16. Sufferbus says:

    I heard “heavy” for the first time when I was probably 8 (1975) or so when I became fascinated with “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” (the title just makes it more ironic) from my mom’s copy of Abbey Road. The grandeur and drama communicated by that big riff that somehow brought to mind Wagner or Beethoven (though I couldn’t have told you that then…but I somehow recognized the similar….”heaviness”).

    Also, about the same time, I was mesmerized by (particularly the opening of) “Immigrant Song” on my dad’s Zep III 8-track.

    Maybe also “God of Thunder” by KISS, though to a much lesser degree.

  17. Jason says:

    Thanks Mario! For me, rock n roll permeated my house growing up. My dad had tons of records (much to my mom’s chagrin–not the music, just the space the damn things were taking up) and I was exposed to the classics quite early: Beatles, Stones, Cream, Iron Butterfly; but my dad was also a freak for Dr. Feelgood, Flamin Groovies, the Ventures and various comps, like Nuggets. My dad also was deaf in one ear, due to an industrial accident. As such, the volume in the headphones was always louder and the balance was switched to the right ear many times (quite weird when you’re dealing with records often in mono). When he finally trusted me enough to use his hi-fi/ record player, around 5-6 years old, I would gleefully trounce thru his collection, so I think it became an education in heavy thru osmosis: The KInks’ “You Really Got Me”, the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”, “Sunshine Of Your Love” by Cream, Vanilla Fudge, etc. All of this eventually led into Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Priest. But I still thank my dad for his taste, and over the years, his prized records.

  18. RalphSnart says:

    Heavy-ish? “Rusty Cage” and “Jesus Christ Pose” from Badmotorfinger. Had that on tape when it came out, probably ten or eleven years old. Pretty much just listened to those two songs over and over.
    Heavier still? Ministry’s Psalm 69 a couple years later. No one else I knew was into them. Pantera was big, and I liked them, but Ministry was too much for most kids.
    Old school heavy? My dad dug through the old records and put on the first Sabbath when we were eating supper one night when I was in high school. Already liked Cream and Zeppelin by then, but that was the point of no return.
    New heavy? Village Of Dead Roads played a show here a few years back and cleared the room, I was the only one left up front on the floor. I knew then that I had a “problem”.

  19. Rick says:

    For me, it was Sabbath. My dad had all their albums and played them fairly regularly. When I was really young I was more preoccupied with other mediums of culture than music, but having whenever my Dad played his albums, Sabbath was always the one band that I responded to in any real way.

    As I grew up and started listening to music, Sabbath was always something I listened to. I got really into grunge in high school, which lead to finding Queens of the Stone Age (through Grohl’s drumming on Songs for the Dead) which lead to Kyuss, which lead to an explosion of band searching and heavy listening. Electric Wizaqrd, Neurosis, Sleep, Saint Vitus, etc.

  20. Miguel says:

    I grew up on Mexican Folk music and due to my brother being a nazi about everything I ended up getting rap shoved down my throat and I was never a big fan…So come my teen years I picked up Follow the Leader by Korn which sent me into a huge spiral of listening to nothing but metal and as I became jaded to pop culture by 15 I started searching for smaller and smaller acts which led to my time on the Hollywood Strip…Ozzfest introduced me to Queens which introduced me to the whole stoner rock/doom scene…Then on a fine May evening I got to see Fatso Jetson and Throw Rag open for them at the El Rey which is the exact moment I knew the desert rock scene was my scene…Been hooked since….It is a bit sad to see though that not a ton of new stuff is coming out of their recently…

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