Okay, this is my story.
I grew up with classic rock and all the stuff that 96rock used to play back in the day. Most was good, some was great, some was dreck, but hey, it's what was there to listen to.
I'll never forget the night when, during a period while 96rock had quit playing any "heavy" metal (they were airing supposed listener comments like some chick whining "hey, cool it with the heavy metal"), they played "Paradise City" by Guns'n'Roses. They played it on their old nightly "Smash or Trash" feature, where listeners would call in and rate the song. It was much heavier than the stuff they were playing at the time, listeners loved it, and it changed the face of rock-radio for a decade, making it possible for a band like Metallica to achieve commercial airplay. (Much later, 96rock played the actual first single from
Appetite, which was "Welcome to the Jungle.")
So Metallica started to get some well-deserved airplay from -- at the time -- the Justice album. A friend of mine I knew out in Washington wrote me and suggested a band from his area called Queensryche. I won a free tape from 96rock from some contest and picked up
Operation: Mindcrime at a store. I was so astonished I had to pull off the road and listen to it without road-noise. This was before they had achieved any commercial success. I was blown away. When the video for "Eyes of a Stranger" came out I dutifully called MTV's Top 20 Countdown every day, trying to get it played. Of course the calls don't determine what gets played
that day...but each call was charted, and on some days I'd get through 14 or 15 times (out of 1,000 calls they said they took). Eventually Adam Curry announced, with a gleam in his eye, that QR had placed just off the countdown. "Keep up the calls, Queensryche fans"...and then QR made it, later that week. They were on their way to getting some attention.
I really wanted to see QR, and they were opening for Metallica on tour. A friend of mine met both bands in Florida and befriended Kirk Hammett a few days before the show at the Omni, and promised to hook me up with a backstage pass. I already had a ticket. At the will-call window they didn't have anything for me. I explained the situation to the unusually-nice older lady behind the window. She called downstairs, talked to someone, who spoke with someone else. She grinned and gave me the thumbs-up. "They checked with Kirk, and the passes are on the way!" Cool! Then she went home -- it was well into QR's set by now, and I was freezing my nadz off in leather jeans and that chill between-buildings downtown breeze. I saw the carefully innocuous will-call ticket courier cross from the Omni over to the will-call window with the passes. I went up to the window, but the sole remaining lady there couldn't find the passes. I still don't know what happened, but I went inside. I'd managed to miss Queensryche -- the band I'd wanted to see -- but holy shit, this Metallica band was great! I'd heard a little of their stuff from Master before, but I was hooked. Later on that tour I befriended Kirk myself, and from then (1989) up until 1994, I was treated like royalty at their shows. (WREKage-Tim, who I met during this period, befriended Jason as well.) That's how I first got into the metal "scene."
Ironically, I got into modern prog-metal in a similar way to QR. I'd heard a song on 96rock called "Pull Me Under" by Dream Theater and liked it a lot. I had made friends with a cool deejay at 96rock, metalhead Alan Ayo, and when he heard I had a Metallica rarity on a CD-single ("Breadfan"), he asked me to bring it by the studio so he could record it on broadcast cartridge -- CD recorders were just a gleam in some inventor's eye back then. In exchange he offered me my choice of CDs from their freebie/promo closet. "I'll take these two CDs, but....do you have any Dream Theater?" "Just a cassette tape, but it's yours. Great choice, too! I'm a drummer and they really smoke!" On the way home, I had to pull off to the side of the road again. I was blown away.

Dream Theater's online fandom (back then, just email lists, this was before the Web) got me into bands like Symphony X and Superior and Fates Warning.....and the rest was history.
I'm still not sure how I got into "extreme" (death- and black-) metal, my favorite genre now, but osmosis through WREKage helped. I'd started hanging around the studio with Tim back in the Wreck Room days (1994-5 or so), and by 1998, when I did my first 'official' shows on WREKage, I was already into some extreme stuff. I've been there most weeks since then. :b4ldm3t4l: