Heavy Metal Memory: The demotape

Remember back when bands actually did demotapes as in on actual cassettes? If you do then you may be dating yourself. For a long time that's how bands shopped their music around and got their name out while they were trying to get signed. Now bands uses their sites or My Space or things like that to spread their name. I guess some bands might have the tracks for you to download and they can get cd's made for a cheap cost if they just have a few songs to shop around. Anyway I was never a collector of demotapes, but I bought a few here and there between say 1988 and 1992. A lot of magazines like Rip and others would plug a band and list where you could send to get their demo tape and how much it cost. I was cheap so I never paid more than four dollars for a demo tape. I heard several demos from a commercial hard rock band called Defcon from Chicago. I was sure they would get signed because they had the sound that was big at the time. They never got signed then and they broke up. However Retrospect records signed them recently and stuck all of their demos on one cd. I heard another demo from a band that I thought would be good because they had gotten a lot of hype. However I thought their demo was a mess of styles with no real direction. The band was Biohazard and of course you know that they did indeed get signed, but they didn't get a whole lot better at least not to my ears. Then there was another band who claimed to be influenced by Rush and Voivod. The band was Thought Industry and I thought their demo showed promise, but it was a little off the wall and the production was fuzzy. They got signed about three years later to Metal Blade. Their music was still off the wall, strange progressive metal, but they were tighter once they had been signed. Demos were a great way to get your music heard and I shared demos I liked with my friends so they could hear them to. I didn't follow that whole Metallica/Napster mess several years ago. Yet my first thoughts were back to when Metallica were one of the first bands to really benefit from tape trading as their No sleep till leather demo got re-recorded and passed around the country and to other countries by fans. So the band benefited greatly from this process and to me Napster operated on similar lines which it made it seem strange to me that Ulrich was upset over it. I will leave you with a humorous demo story. I saw Corrosion of conformity play in a tiny club in 1992. They had two local bands opening for them and the first band was good. The second band was called Gridlock and they were horrible. It was like they took the worst of generic speed metal and New York hardcore and combined them into a truly awful mess. They even did a rap song during their set and it was as bad as you could imagine it would be as the singer even put on a Panama Jack hat just for the song. Anyway at the end of their set they were tossing demotapes to the audience. They threw one to where me and my friends were and all of us just stepped aside and let it land on the floor because none of us wanted it. It just got stomped on as people moved through to get to the bathrooms before Corrosion's set. Not all demos were good, but it was a great tool for spreading your sound around.