How old were you when you discovered hard rock / metal? What was that like?

This could be an interesting discussion topic.   I put it here because my early experiences were all non-Christian bands.

So, I'm 50+ and when I was young, there was no metal scene, that was still years away.   However we had classic rock and some of it got heavy at times.  

If I remember correctly, the heaviest thing I heard was when I was 9 and Grand Funk's "We're An American Band" was blasting in the middle school lunch room.  I'd never heard anything like that before. I remember one of the "bad" kids that I was sitting with would go nuts and start drumming on the table when he heard that, or Three Dog Night's "Joy To The World" with that famous bellowing of "Jere-miah was a bull-frog....!"  

I wasn't too much into music back then so I didn't really get into it much.  But as I got older, my neighbors, friends, and my cousins would have records and I got to hear more heavy stuff and started to like the fuzzy guitars.  It started with songs like Sugarloaf's "Green Eyed Lady," Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein," then bands like Steppenwolf, Ten Years After, and Free.  Then it was Aerosmith, Robin Trower, and Bad Company, Peter Frampton Comes Alive, Boston,  Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Deep Purple, UFO, Derringer, Sammy Hagar, Black Sabbath, and others by the time I got to 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.    

During this time it was also fun when a classic rock song on the radio would have some cool heavy guitar like Bob Welch's "Ebony Eyes," Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath," ELO's "Do Ya" or Bob Seger's "Her Strut."   Or songs from Cheap Trick, Heart, The Who, Foghat, ZZ Top, Kansas, Cream or Queen.   Because some of the other bands mentioned above were not on any radio station yet.

By high school I began to discover other bands because they started to play them on the radio.  Sometimes it was a midnight show where they would play an entire album of a band or a King Biscuit sort of live show.   I discovered Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Zebra, Krokus, Styx ("Renegade" and "Blue Collar Man"), Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, and Foreigner that way.

Along the way I got into punk and New Wave as well.

Eventually the 1st Van Halen album came out and that changed everything.   But that's a longer story for another time.... 

Then, didn't get saved until age 25 so Christian metal didn't come across my path until much later.

I got into Petra back when I was a kid (probably around 9ish years old). My mom didn’t want my listening to secular rock at that age so she bought me Petra albums. The first one I got was No Doubt which I liked ok but shortly thereafter I got one of the compilations of their classic era (The Rock Block). It was then that I became a fan for life.

When I was 15 a lady I knew lent me Van Halen’s Best Of Vol 1. I was hooked. I became a Van Halen fanatic. After that I devoured classic hard rock and heavy metal.

When I was a 16 I got saved and started listening to more Christian music. Since then I’ve become more and more eclectic in my tastes but I still love me some hard rock and heavy metal.

I was 12 or 13. The year was 1988.

I remember first liking Kiss, then Winger and BulletBoys. After that, I quickly upgraded to heavier music.

I got into hard/heavy music at a very early age. Maybe around age 3 or so. Seriously. 

My dad was a Beatles fanatic (as am I), so the first harder rocking songs I can remember were songs like Birthday, Helter Skelter and the hard rock version of Revolution. Aside from those songs, I was also treated to Deep Purple and Boston when I was very young.

Must have been around 88, I was 11 and all the cool older youths were into rock and metal. The older brother of my friend was a big Bon Jovi fan so we were too. My first record was Slippery When Wet. We also had a Bon Jovi playback cover band, obviously everybody wanted to be Jon or Richie so we had some arguments over that lol. It was great though, we had a lot of fun.

in sixth grade I started listening to rock radio which would throw in a Black Sabbath or Maiden song in the mix. Before radio was so tightly structured you could hear Journey then Sabbath back to back.

I can't say for sure really. I guess at the end of the 90s my oldest brother was playing The Offspring and Metallica on occasion (although I can't remember hearing the latter); I must have been 9 or 10 at that point but I wasn't that interested at the time. When I was 12 my sister came back from Norway with a few modern progressive rock albums and shortly after that I got into GTA Vice City with that great 80s metal radio station. I remember being into Two Minutes to Midnight but not seeking after the genre more. That only kind of started when I was 15 when I got really into Rammstein. I didn't come much further than Apocalyptica and some Metallica, and the fact that I was pursuing a small number of alternative rock artists at the time was a good sign of my "lack of commitment to metal" so to speak.
When I was 18 I heard Secrets by Hammerfall and that one clicked so hard with me that I wanted to hear everything from them and got into power metal after that. Nowadays I branched out to different kinds of metal as well as a few other genres but power metal is still number one quantity-wise.

So yeah, there were some landmarks around 9, 12 and 15 years old but I only really got started at 18 I'd say. Doesn't happen that often as far as I know.

When I was REALLY little I remember seeing Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show.  Fast forward a couple of years and I was browsing the vinyl section at our local library and tried to check out both an Alice Cooper and AC/DC record.  Predictably my mom wouldn't let me.  Another couple years go by and Quiet Riot is all over the radio, pretty soon Ratt, Twisted Sister, and Motley Crue also.  I vividly remember watching Twisted Sister perform on the show "Solid Gold", I was in absolute awe.  Before too long a friend at school "borrowed" his older brother's Ride The Lightening cassette and brought it to school.  The moment I first heard "fight fire with fire" is something I will never forget, and that moment kickstarted a life long love of all things musically extreme.  Eventually I discovered some Minneapolis radio stations that played some heavier stuff, I remember hearing Leatherwolf, Slayer, Armored Saint, Iron Maiden,  local heroes Slave Raider, etc.  I was hooked! When we'd go to the mall I'd make a run to musicland and spend as much time as I could simply flipping through the vinyl and wondering exactly what some of these bands sounded like!  I remember seeing the Mercyful Fate - don't break the oath vinyl and thinking, WOW, these guys must be the heaviest band ever!  HAHA.  Eventually I would discover a college radio station from St Cloud State university that would BARELY come in on my stereo, but they played all sorts of crazy stuff.  That introduced me to some of the heavier punk/metal/crossover stuff like D.R.I. and Corrosion of Conformity, as well as goth, industrial, punk, etc. The 80's were an amzing time for discovering music!!  No internet, you got your news from the latest issue of Kerrang, RIP, or Hit Parader, etc,. You'd spend hours sitting in front of your stereo waiting to hear that song on the radio you wanted to add to your homemade mix tape. HAHA Great memories!

I was around 10-11 and got my first listen to Iron Maiden POwerslave from my cousin and brother. That was it for me and couldnt get enough. IM almsot 44 now even getting daily grief about my music from my Wife Im still going strong.

I was around 8 or 9 years old at a friend's house, and his older brother had a KISS record, Destroyer. He was hand copying the artwork. I first thought it was a comic book, but he explained that they were a band. He didn't play the record for me there, but later there was a TV special, I think celebrating 100 years of the phonograph, and KISS made an appearance.

I was an ABBA fan back then. I didn't become a metal fan until the early 80s, with bands like Def Leppard and the Scorpions.

I was 13 or 14.  A buddy of mine started getting into it.  I mostly listened to top 40 pop radio at the time.  I soon started liking AC/DC and Joan Jett.  Then came Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Twisted Sister, and KISS.  I was hooked as this was something my parents absolutely hated.  Most of my schoolmates liked country music with us living in a small town area of the  southeastern USA, so they didn't much care for it either.  So, hard rock and metal were total musical freedom as it was something most people didn't care for.  A few liked some hard rock if it was top 40 as well; but as someone who got picked on a lot as a kid and teenager, this was my solace when life got rough and I was publicly ridiculed or roughed up.

I remember when I was 8 and hearing the Great White Buffalo song by Nugent and hated it till I was about 16 and fell in love with it. When I was in my early teens I heard Master Of Puppets and hated it as well but absolutely fell in LOVE with Peace Sells by Megadeth. I don't know why but I thought that album for me was way better than Master Of Puppets but I also hated any other kind of thrash outside MD. But today thrash is my all time favorite genre as long as it stays fast but doesn't lose the melody but doesnt sound like Dragonforce. I remember Forbidden and when Steve Grimmet fronted Onslaught for that one amazing album they ever did that had any substance other than praise ye satan and all that retarded schlock they where known for before Grimmet

I got into music around 2010-2011. It started with songs I'd heard in Guitar Hero and I quickly developed a liking for Linkin Park. From there I listened to some other rock music of the 2000s and eventually branched off into metalcore, and from there into thrash metal and melodic death metal, and from there into black metal. When I was 16 I remember pretty much listening exclusively to black metal and death metal. Thankfully I was a believer by that time so I wasn't listening to any of the Satanic stuff and instead dove deep into Christian black metal.

I remember finding black metal very captivating when I first discovered it. Like I remember hearing early Crimson Moonlight material (from Eternal Emperor) and being very intrigued by it, because it was unlike anything I had heard before. I also remember discovering Wintersoul's only album (Frozen Storm Apocalypse), which honestly is not one of my favorites, but maybe I should give it another chance. Anyway, I remember sitting there and listening to the previews for it on iTunes, and being blown away by the speed, aggression, and raw power that was in that sound. During high school I would sometimes go wander around a park and a nearby neighborhood at night while listening to music (in hindsight, honestly not a great idea even though it was a pretty safe area), and I would usually put on black metal. I went out in the snow with The Return of the Black Death one time, intending to stay outside until the album was over, but then decided to call it quits early because I was getting really cold, lol.

These days I've gotten into some other types of music that is far outside the realm of rock and metal. But I don't think I'll ever stop liking this stuff.

For me, Metal started with slippery when wet by Bon Jovi.  Before that, my cousin showed me this album cover which had a field of white crosses on it, one of which had an army helmet perched on it.  He played it in secret so his parents couldn't hear it.  I wasn't ready for that yet.

Then along came Def Leppard: Hysteria.  Still a great album.

Then when I had become a christian,  I listened to Petra and white heart and soft heavy-ish rock stuff that is still cool.  Then a guy from that church showed me an album cover with a Nail in a hand.  I wasn't ready for that (but secretly I thought it was cool, but it scared me- Satan and music is evil and all that at the time).

The album that really kicked things off, though, was:  Silence is madness by Bride.  That was my first real heavy album.  I became obsessed after that.  Not so much now.  But it was fun back then and how fondly I think about it.

I loved Whiteheart and Petra. My parents barely let me have Petra as they believed rock music couldn’t be Christian. At a Christian bookstore (where we all bought Christian music back in the 80s), the guy who worked there heard my love of hard rock and played me some of Whitecross’s first album. I loved it. He helped me get a copy too. When I told my mom I wanted to buy the album she wanted to hear it first. So the guy played “You’re Mine” as if that was representative of the whole thing. She was suspicious since it was on Pure Metal Records, but let me get it. Soon after I discovered Dokken, Ratt, Stryper, and White Lion. The rest is history.

I was 10 or 11 when my older brother introduced me to an album called