Most Influential Albums: Zakk Wylde - Book of Shadows

Zakk Wylde... jeez. My first real rock concert was Ozzy Osbourne & Alice in Chains at the Tulsa Fairgrounds race track, next to Driller Stadium in the early 90's (the now laughably titled "No More Tours Tour"). That Ozzy album & tour was a wake-up call to guitarists everywhere. Ibanez guitars, rack effects, and solid-state amps got ditched for Les Pauls, Marshalls, and stomp-boxes. Why? Zakk freaking Wylde, that's why.

Zakk was amazing. Yeah, he had chops for days, looked cooler than anyone on MTV (who else could wear a bowler hat with a bullseye painted on his guitar and still look cool??), but man - that SOUND. I was addicted to that buzz-saw guitar tone and those signature screaming harmonic squeals.

So all of us recently-converted Zakk addicts were crushed when Zakk left Ozzy. We waited in anticipation for his new project, Pride & Glory. When it wasn't metal, but rather a swamp-blues infected Southern Rock that had more influence from the Allman Brothers than from the Van Halen brothers, most Ozz fans were bummed, myself included (I later rediscovered the Pride & Glory album and still dig it immensely). I was also shocked that his voice sounded so deep and bluesy, when he looked much more like a Sebastian Bach-esque pretty boy from that era.

A few years later, I saw this CD in a record store. Given my previous let-down with Pride & Glory, I passed it over a few times, but kept going back whenever I'd return to that store, wondering if it would be as cool as No More Tears. Keep in mind this was before you could preview tracks on the internet... buying an album was a dice roll, so with no radio play, you might be flushing $15 and won't know it until the crap is already in your ears. So I never pulled the trigger...

Fast forward a few years - my buddy and fellow Ozzy fan, Homer Robison, was commenting about this CD one night. He gave me the impression it was worth a listen and offered to let me borrow it. I was working in web design at a company in Tulsa at the time and took the CD to work with me to plug into the headphones while I designed websites for people who always just wanted us to rip off someone else's work... not expecting the disk to be anything more than mediocre.

I was so stunned by how amazing the opening track, "Between Heaven and Hell", was that I was literally immobilized by it. I sat there with my jaw open, staring at my CD player wondering what in the world was going on. I listened to it again... and again... and again... the whole album can't be this awesome, can it?? I decided to find out. Yep, it was.

Given, some albums/songs/movies/books/cult leaders hit you at just the right time in your life to make a life-changing impact when they might not have even scratched the surface a year previous. Maybe that's what happened, but this record resonated with me then beyond anything else I had known.

Truly though, Zakk got ripped with this project. If this had been released by an up & coming black kid from Louisiana and had been executive produced by Clive Davis, this thing would've stomped the Grammys that year. Hard.

It's the perfect marriage between swamp blues, acoustic folk, and heavy rock (if a 3-way marriage can be considered perfect - maybe the album is Mormon?). Yeah, he's still got the riffs & chops (I don't think it's physically possible to play any faster than he does on the solo to "Throwin' It All Away"), his piano work is practically a religious experience, but its the songs on here that seal the deal. Raw, vulnerable, yet lush and undefeatable at the same time. He's hitting the target he aimed for dead-center and then some.

So I absorbed this music for months, indoctrinating anyone who would listen. It sparked a writing streak of southern-fried rock songs in me that lasted for years. The undisputed fan favorite from my band's album at the time was a song called "Better". It's hard to say if that tune, "A Beautiful Girl", "Don't Walk Away", "Southern Highway Love Song", or several other songs I've written would even exist if I hadn't heard Book of Shadows.

Since I was late getting on the bus for this CD, Zakk released yet another new album several months later. This time it was with a new group, Black Label Society... a heavier than hell, grungy, decrepit, tuned-down, scare your mom, beat up your dad, kill your spatula dealer, set fire to your elementary school, and run away with your bus driver's wife, metal band. The kinda crap that weenie, young, white-trash teen boys listen to in order to make themselves seem scary and tough... audio testosterone substitute. Garbage.

However, Black Label would be playing in Joplin, Missouri, and my buddy Homer and his wife were going. I hitched along and experienced the loudest concert ever.

What's that? You have a loud concert story you're thinking of? Nope. Yours wasn't as loud as this. No, it wasn't. We're talking 'Boeing 747 landing on your ear drum' loud; praying for your ears to bleed so the blood can act as an insulator between the razor-blade sharp sound waves and the liquefied brain stem you're trying to prevent from spilling out of your split skull.

And Zakk was scary. By this time he had transformed from pretty boy glam rocker to demon trucker with arms the size of Hulk Hogan's torso, who used gigantic chains for a guitar strap. To top this off, his first guitar, the infamous bullseye Les Paul, had been stolen a few nights previous. He looked like some sort of crazed, beer-guzzling Norse God who hates... well, everything. When he demanded the crowd "Make some F***-ing NOISE!!!", his ice blue, bloodshot eyes got the size of circular saw blades, and we all screamed out of fear, not willingness to show him we were rockin'. We honestly just did whatever he said so he wouldn't come down into the crowd and eat us.

After the show, a line was forming for autographs with Zakk. I didn't really need the signature, but I just had to tell him what I thought of Book of Shadows. The line went pretty quickly. The metal-head fans in front of me would rave about what a great guitarist he was, and 8-foot tall, world-devouring Zakk would just grunt and sign, without ever looking up. I finally got up to him, and muttered out, "Book of Shadows is my favorite album of all time" (which it honestly was at that point). Zakk stopped, put down the black Sharpie marker, looked me right in the eye, and said, "Man, thanks... that really means a lot. I worked really hard on that album." He shook my hand (HARD), patted me on the back, and said, "Thanks for coming out, dude." Then he went back to grunting at people.

At first I was confused why he took the time to address me personally out of the crowd. My brother put it together and told me, "That's the only album of his that he put his own name on. It's obviously the most personal representation of himself".

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