In his latest blog, The General Journals: Diary Of A Frontman... And Other Ramblings - Life Affirming, MACHINE HEAD frontman Robb Flynn continues to reminisce about discovering music:

"I first 'discovered' hard rock and metal when I was living in San Lorenzo with a friend of mine, Lisa Sgroe. We started with VAN HALEN, AC/DC, and DEVO (and DURAN DURAN, but we won't go into that right now) and I was off and running. My family then moved from San Lorenzo to Fremont and one of the first friends I made was a girl named Lori Kibby. She turned me on to the "Heaven and Hell"-era of Black Sabbath and I flipped out on it! Clement and Vernon Leung turned me on to the Pop-rock of the time. Another friend, Rene Sanchez, his older stoner brother would get us all stoked on the bands we knew, as well as plenty of others. Rene was a good kid though, and when I wanted to start smoking weed we ended up drifting apart. Looking back it was kind of a bummer, we were close.

The first time I ever got high was with my buddy Elvis Faria (I shit you not, his name was Elvis) and his dad smoked. So Elvis would go in and steal some weed from somewhere in his dad’s bedroom. On that fateful day when I smoked for the first time, Elvis put on BLACK SABBATH's We Sold Our Soul For Rock N Roll. 'Paranoid' was the first song he jammed and I'll never forget it as long as I live. It wasn’t just the music, those lyrics hit me like ton of bricks. I'd never heard something so dark and depressing.

Lyrics like 'Make a joke, and I will sigh, and you will laugh, and I will cry, happiness I cannot feel, and love to me is so unreal.' What the fuck? This was heavy and fucked and not the usual 'let’s take-on-the-world' kind of stuff, but more 'I-want-to-die' type shit! It scared the crap out of me and I thought I would go to Hell for listening to it, like instantly… so I asked him to change it. But you know how kids are. A few days later there we were, cutting high school and smoking weed and I asked him to put on Black Sabbath again. This time I was 'ready,' this time, I fell in love.

As I got more into smoking weed an older buddy named Vance Sterbank, who lived down the street would play BLUE ÖYSTER CULT's 'Godzilla' and GARY HUMAN's 'Down In The Park' while we got high. Then one day he put on 'N.I.B.' by Black Sabbath. The intro, the sound of the bass riff when it kicked in... in my stoned haze I asked him, 'what is THAT?' 'What makes that sound?' It was the heaviest thing I'd ever heard. He said 'that's a bass, I got one, wanna try it?' He pulled out a bass his dad had picked up for him and I fiddled around with it and said out loud to him, 'that is the sound I want to make.'

Smoking weed and listening to music became my default thing to do in high school. Well, that and frying on 'purple micro dot' mescaline, trying to 'maintain' and not let the teacher see I was about laugh-to-death hiding behind my book. Tripping was mostly with my friends Matt Williams, Jim Barger, and Elvis. AEROSMITH’s Live Bootleg was one of our favorite 'go-to' records to listen to while stoned in my buddies bedroom at night. Fuck man, it rocked, hard. And while these dudes were my friends, we weren't really "friends." When I finally met Jim Pittman in high school art class, even though he didn't smoke weed or know any of my stoner friends, we really bonded. I talk about him in the ‘Remembering Cliff Journal,’ he’s an important character in my “story” for lack of a better word.

By the time we met I had a 4 string classical guitar with nylon strings that my dad had picked me up at a flea market. I say four string because two of the string were missing, but I didn't need the high strings anyway, I wanted to play riffs! The first song I ever learned how to play on guitar was 'The Lemon Song' by LED ZEPPELIN. I wasn't particularly enamoured by Zeppelin at that time, I didn't really like them as I was definitely WAY more into Black Sabbath, though Sabbath wasn't on the radio. But if you lived in Northern California at that time, Zeppelin was on endless loop on the 2 rock radio stations, 92.3 KSJO and 98.5 KOME. I do however remember really liking their song 'Ramble On'.

So there I was, just noodling on the guitar and I just happen to stumble on those notes to Zep’s 'Lemon Song'. All single string notes, no chords, but I knew they were the right notes, don’t ask me how I knew, I just did. At this time I had no lessons of any sort, (though I'd take a few and get fed up enough to practice more... alone) but it was my weed dealer and a real-all-around-jerk named Roger _______ that taught me my first power chord!

One day we were stoned in his bedroom and I decided to show him that I had learned the notes to 'Sweet Leaf' by Black Sabbath. He then turned to me and said 'yeah, but can you do a power chord?' I was curious, 'what's a power chord?' His answer was perfect stoner wisdom, 'It's exactly like it sounds, it’s the sound of power.' That’s all it took. It totally felt like one day I was noodling, single notes, and the next, I was working on my power chords, learning riffs. My life literally changed directions in that moment. Prior to this all my time and effort went back and forth between Jiu-Jitsu and the guitar…that week I quit Jiu-Jitsu and started playing guitar non-stop.

I began to play all day and my dad could see I was into it, so he "rented" me an electric guitar from a music shop (whose name I can't remember) at the Fremont Hub."

Read the entire blog entry here.