that time i was into progressive metal

I came across some remixes of KISS songs and gave them a listen. The guy who did them absolutely admits that he purposely replaced a ton of the instruments with samples, and I know exactly why. That band never sounded good, and the only possible way to get a decent sound is to replace the original sounds. The remixed studio version of Rock and Roll All Nite (with solo!) is genuinely good, but the first thing I heard was that snare drum with gated reverb. Nope, wrong. The studio sound in 1975 for rock drums was super dry, and very much on purpose. Other 1975 rock songs like Fox on The Run by Sweet, Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith, Feel Like Makin' Love by Bad Company, Tush by ZZ Top and so on all had dry drums. The reverb wasn't just light, but rather simply engineered right out. Reverb in all forms was very not-cool at that time and wouldn't make a return until the reverb-everything sound of Van Halen in 1978.

So what the hell does this have to do with progressive metal? That snare with gated reverb fired off something in my brain that made me remember Crimson Glory from the late 1980s. And there's a story behind this one.

I found out about Crimson Glory when I was barely a teenager. How? No idea, but I can hazard a guess. Maybe I saw them in a magazine and then went to buy their album on tape (I didn't do vinyl records). Or, I went to look around for some new music at the record or department store, and just bought the tape in the hope it would be good. Getting music like that was not something I did often, but if I had a few bucks on me and was in the store, I wanted to get something so I didn't leave empty-handed.

The album I bought was Transcendence.

While I wasn't in love with the music when I first heard it, I liked it enough to play it quite a bit. It was good.

A friend of mine at the time found out I had that tape, and he wanted it really bad. My tape, specifically. This confused me since he could have easily went and bought a copy himself. But for whatever reason, he didn't. I think I know why, and I'll talk about that in a moment.

This friend asked me at first to give him the tape "if I didn't want it". No, not doing that. Later on, he offered to buy it off me. Um, no dude, not doing that. Then a little while later, he asked to buy it again. Nope. He gave up after that...

...except he didn't. The fate of that tape is that it was stolen from me by that asshole.

A running joke some comedians used to make is that if you lost one of your worthless tapes or records or whatever, somebody must have stolen it. Well, in my case, yeah, that prick actually did steal my tape.

The memory I have of this is faded now, but it was one of two situations that happened. Situation 1, he borrowed the tape and never returned it no matter how many times I asked for it back. Situation 2, he came over to hang out at my house one day, got sticky fingers and just straight up nicked it. I'm thinking it was situation 2 because I had the thought even back then that if he got his hands on it, I'd never see it again. This was especially true given his interest in the tape, and being the only guy I knew who even knew Crimson Glory existed other than myself. So yeah, he stole it.

That theft was something I let go, because whatever, it's just a tape.

Crimson Glory's Transcendence ended up being a here-today-gone-tomorrow thing. I just happened to be at the store when the tape was in stock. However, I don't think it sold well enough for the store to restock it or whatever, so it most likely vanished from the shelves pretty fast. And that's probably why that guy stole the tape from me. He probably tried to buy that tape, couldn't find it anywhere, I was the only guy who had it, he wanted it, he nicked it.

Is owning an original copy of Transcendence from the late '80s a prize now? No. The tape, CD or vinyl record can be acquired easily. If I really wanted that tape back, I could just buy another for about 20 bucks shipped.

So okay, nearly 40 frickin' years have passed since I last heard those songs. I go to listen to them again, online of course, and whammo, instantly familiar. Like, scary familiar. The first track Lady of Winter comes on, and for a brief moment I was in the late '80s again, being a kid sitting in my room and listening to that tape. Kinda intense.

That feeling really speaks to how much of a signature sound that album has. Now while true you can absolutely hear some fake drums, pretty much the exact same thing happened with Dream Theater. When you hear that totally fake, totally electronic snare drum on Pull Me Under, you cannot un-hear it once you know it's there. With Crimson Glory, the fake drums are heard most with the toms. I don't know why I can detect a fake snare or tom considering I don't even play drums, but my ear can pick it up very easily.

At the same time however, that half-real/half-fake drum sound was the only way to get the percussion to sound correct for late-1980s progressive metal. So while I wince a little when I hear the fake stuff, I get over that since that is part of the progressive metal sound of the era.

Progressive metal was something I liked, and then just stopped listening to it. I didn't stop liking it, but it had just run its course with me.

Am I back to liking it now? Not really, but I am amazed at how unbelievably quick I remembered Crimson Glory's music nearly four decades later, and all because of a snare drum sound from a remixed 1975 KISS song.

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