OP

Quoted from swampfire:

My kid thinks I'm a tool because I'm just now starting to respect Metal as a musical genre. I downloaded the rest of "Master of Puppets" and listened to it front-to-back, and I'm pretty blown away. "Orion" is similar to the fusion jazz I used to listen to. Really love the whole album.
I think the reason I dismissed Metal in the 80's was that there were so many BAD metal bands:
http://deathscream.net/the-top-50-worst-heavy-metal-bands-of-all-time/
Plus. I played guitar pretty seriously in the 80's, and we started a band called, I kid you not, "Leather Feather". I was so turned off by the music we made, that I went back to playing classical and jazz guitar.
Anyway, I think Metal can be very good. Or very bad.