The Kinks – The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968) All my friends who were trying to play like Yngwie Malmsteen and all that shit, they were really not into Slayer. This is heavier than anything else.' Slayer was a harder sell for some of my friends in those days. But I kept putting it on, and it clicked for me when I took it to Iraq: 'Wow, this is really great shit. When I first bought that cassette, I didn't like it. It was a great time in heavy metal because there was an evolution happening in the Eighties. It was heaviest stuff that I could get my hands on. I can't prove that, but they had no clue what heavy metal was in 1989 in Baghdad. All my family there were like, 'What the fuck is this that you're listening to?' I might have been the first person to take heavy metal to Iraq. Show No Mercy was the one I would listen to the most - on an old Sony Walkman with headphones, and a Mötley Crüe T-shirt on. I took a bunch of my cassettes and heavy-metal magazines just to keep me occupied. I was there for a month and a half and I got to see the whole Saddam cult of personality. There was no Metallica, Slayer or anything like that yet. That's what heavy metal was at that time. It wasn't 'Love Bites' and shit like that. The early Def Leppard albums had attitude - you could rock to those albums: On Through the Night, High 'n' Dry, Pyromania. Hysteria came afterwards, and they totally lost me on that one. When you're a little kid, you don't always go towards the underground.

Def Leppard didn't have the Devil on their album cover. Even though that was not a Devil song, the way the song starts has this dark intro. That song 'Too Late for Love' would scare the hell out of me. She was buying me a record that she knew I was so passionate about - but she would always say, 'As long as it doesn't influence you too much.' It's funny because of what I became. At the time, heavy metal had a Satanic, taboo thing going on: 'Is heavy metal connected to Satanism?' She would watch these television news specials. I dragged my mom to the record store to buy me a record, and that was the first one that she bought.

Its on eazy e album cover