How one Iowan found family and belonging obsessively listening to metal music

Editor's note: Sam Blum first told this story on stage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project's "Family." The Des Moines Storytellers Project is a series of storytelling events in which community members work with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage. An edited version appears below.

I was wearing a Between the Buried and Me shirt when I was first thrown violently into a wall of mattresses. It was hot, nearing 120 degrees in that garage. I was holding my most prized possession, a guitar, my Gibson SG, who is lovingly named Mel. I was playing in my band.

We were playing at the FSU House in Cedar Falls in the early aughts, right next to a Subway and down the way from Happy Chef. The FSU stands for, well, F--- S--- Up.

There were about 30-40 kids jammed into that garage, each gleefully smiling, headbanging, moshing, and torrentially sweating. Even though we didn’t know everyone’s names in that putrid and moldy space, we were a community of like-minded outcasts, playing the music we loved — metal.

Metal is not widely celebrated or even considered by most, so to really experience it you have to seek it out. You have to search. Of course, as any fan will tell you, there is always that gateway band.

For me, my 8th grade year coincided quite nicely with a certain local Iowa band’s debut self-titled album — a little gem called Slipknot. Being as this is for the Des Moines Register, you guys might be familiar. Twenty-five years later, I still know every riff, every lyric and every breakdown Corey Taylor rap.

So it was 8th grade, and the door was open. There were bands out there — bands my age. So you start going to shows.

You find northeast Iowa bands: Innocence Broken, Modern Life is War, Infandous, From Citizen to Soldier. You head up north for Nehemiah, Summary Execution, Martyr A.D., With Dead Hands Rising.

Head over to Wisconsin for EndThisDay who turned into Coma Eternal. You got 7 Angels 7 Plagues who are still rocking as Misery Signals. Head over to Detroit for the grandaddies in Black Dahlia Murder.

Head a little south to Peoria for my loves in The Serpent Son.

We can go west for those Orange County bands like Bleeding Through and Throwdown. Or the south for some Cattle Decapitation, Mastodon and Cannibal Corpse.

The east coast with Botch and Cave In. Then you get overseas for those French boys in Gojira — and then Sweden, you get the masters of Meshuggah.

There’s an ocean of amazing music out there. You just have to find it and experience it live.

And after each of these shows, you buy a band shirt.

Eventually, your mother finds that your closet becomes filled with black T-shirts. They feature indecipherable band names, skulls, gore, blood, all in an adult medium. I was skinny back then.

Your mom becomes terrified.

I got my first guitar at 11 years old. It was a real piece of work. My mom got it for me from Sears, about $30, a plyboard nylon string mess that never stayed in tune. I wanted an electric guitar with an amp. I wanted to play Rammstein riffs and headbang.

My mother smiled, a devilish grin, and said, “Sammy, if you can play Van Halen on this, we’ll talk about an electric guitar.”

She of course figured this was a fad — that I’d grow out of it. And by giving me an impossible task she wouldn’t have to shell out for a Squire Stratocaster beginner pack for $150, complete with a frontman amp, shoulder strap and heavy picks.

A month later, while I was wearing a Metallica "Load" shirt, I shredded out Van Halen’s "Panama" from their album "1984" and then stared dead-eyed at my mother until she took me to Bob's Guitars in Cedar Falls.

My freshman year of high school I started a band. It was with my good buddy Nate who had already graduated and worked at Walmart. It was all-consuming to me. All I wanted to do was create music — this aggressively loud and pissed-off music.

My parents let me use the basement. My dad conveniently had to mow the lawn whenever we had practice. After a few months, the lawn was … immaculate.

It turned out Nate was more invested in my older sister than the band. It’s cool, though. They’ve been married for over a decade with three beautiful sons. He probably made the right choice.

Metal is a tricky genre to write. It defies the norms of traditional song structure. The majority of popular music supports the singer, complete with repeated choruses and vocal patterns.

But metal is a wall-to-wall labyrinth. Sure, you might repeat riffs and themes, but there doesn’t need to be a chorus or repeated patterns. It’s unconstrained. There’s no set rule of what to do.

The vocalist is an equal aspect of the band, not a feature.

Some of the most talented musicians on earth play to nearly empty dive bars with a dozen people in attendance. They’ve devoted most of their lives to mastering their instrument. Then 99% of people take a few seconds of listening and say: “It’s just screaming.”

But metal creates something more than music. It creates a community, or as the cool kids would say, "a scene."

When you are a metal kid, you’re young, introverted, not good-looking, very few friends. But at a show you transcend yourself and you become part of something bigger. A community of like-minded outcasts, all brought together by dropped-C chugging and blast beats.

And you pick up that T-shirt, or patch, or sticker, or ripped CD to show your support.

If you take anything away from this, it’s this: When you see another kid with a band shirt on or a patch on their vest, even a sticker on their rear windshield, you know something about each other. You know you’ve seen the same sh--. You’ve both been searching for meaning, been searching for something to form your identity, and until you discovered this scene, your search was fruitless.

These shows, the ones in a garage filled with mattresses or a moldy basement or a dive bar or even some kid’s backyard, you discover yourself. Those kids were not an audience. They were family.

I was recently trying to think of my best day — my favorite day. It’s a lot tougher than I thought. Side note: If anyone tells you that it’s the day their kid is born that person is lying. That day is filled with anxiety and yelling and sweat and blood and then they hand you this seven-pound screaming and slippery creature and say, “Hey, you take care of this.”

No, my favorite day was in February of '08. Super Bowl Sunday in fact. The Colts beat the crap out of the Bears, which made me happy. I'm a Vikings guy.

The day before that Sunday my bass player, Noah, gave me a call and asked if I wanted to open for Converge for a Super Bowl party. I laughed into the phone and hung up.

He calls back. “No, Sam, seriously. They have an off date on their tour with Mastodon and want to headline a show at Gabe's. They want a local opener.”

I nearly vomited.

To put this in context, Converge is my favorite band. I have several terrible tattoos to prove it. They are this vicious mix of metal, hardcore, grind, noise, and melody, all packaged in this beautiful aggressive sound.

The first time I saw them I was 15 at Hairy Mary’s in Des Moines. Now it’s called Lefty’s. They opened with a 12-minute opus of a song called Jane Doe. Seriously, who opens with a 12-minute song? I’m not a big church-going guy, but those 12 minutes were a religious awakening. I knew, right then, there was no going back. I was hooked. Doomed now to a life of riffs and sweat and blast beats.

Converge did that. And now my band was going to open for them.

The day of the show we came early to sound check, Converge was already on stage in the empty venue. We got to watch them play to basically no one, they were laughing with each other and perfecting the mix. Tearing threw a few tunes.

Then it was our turn. Converge stayed to watch. They smiled and nodded along.

I can’t explain that feeling. When you have a band you look up to, that you nearly idolize, that has meant so much to you it hurts and you see that they are normal guys nodding along to your tunes — music that you wrote in your dorm room — it was incredible.

I was of course wearing a Converge shirt before the show started. I was tuning up with my other guitarist, Nate — different Nate, not the one banging my sister— and we were at the front of the stage watching kids pour in.

It was unreal. Really, Gabe’s Oasis in Iowa City isn’t the biggest of venues, but hundreds of kids were flooding it. Pretty rare for a show that was announced 24 hours earlier. Someone asked us if we wanted a drink. We said, "Yes." We were given triple shots of some type of whiskey, and Nate and I looked at each other and then the crowd. We smiled.

I hadn’t seen or talked to Nate in years, but at that moment, we were a family. That entire crowd, crammed into Gabe’s, we were family. I’ve never felt so a part of something, and it was something that I had to honor to contribute to. It was the most transcendent half-hour of my life.

Fast forward 15 years or so. I’m a teacher now, AP Literature, if you can believe that. I have a son and daughter, Oliver and Eliot. I’m up to my neck in student loan debt. I was married just a few months ago, even. You could say I "grew up."

A month or so back I was taking my son to the Farmer’s Market downtown. Holding his hand, I was mostly concerned with a breakfast burrito and to stock up on cheese curds. I was wearing a Black Dahlia Murder shirt, with a giant letter "D" on the back made from skulls. They’re from Detroit after all.

I look across the way, and there’s a man standing there side-eyeing me. He was older, probably in his 40s, his middle school daughter furiously typing on her phone.

I look over at him. We give each other the customary up-down, and he’s wearing a Cannibal Corpse shirt. Our eyes meet. He smiles, and we give each other a knowing nod. I never asked his name or even talked with him, but at that moment we were part of a community.

We were family.

ABOUT THE STORYTELLER: Sam Blum grew up in Nashua, a small town in northeast Iowa. After college, he got the opportunity to live in Colorado and Oregon. Now he teaches AP Literature and AP Composition at Central Academy in Des Moines, a job he absolutely adores.

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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: How one Iowan found family and belonging listening to metal music