At a similar-ish time, the young Spencer was discovering music as well. His older sister had introduced him to Nirvana, and with a slight foreshadowing of his musical future, he became, “the kid that was bleaching his hair, trying to look like Kurt Cobain, begging my parents to get me a guitar.” At “eight or nine”, he saw a school band doing a cover of Breed, as well as The Offspring’s Come Out And Play (Keep ’Em Separated).
“I was like, ‘Man, that's what we got to do next year, we got to play at this talent show at my school,’” he laughs. “My friends and I were young, but we were the kids in school that were wearing the flannel shirts. You weren’t allowed to have band shirts, or shirts with any writing on it, we would get in trouble for wearing that, so we’d hide it under our flannel shirt and show our band shirts at recess, when the teachers couldn't see.”
The big moment came when Charnas Snr took his soon to see Metallica on the Load tour in 1996, at the Boston FleetCenter, formerly Boston Garden. Already a keen fan who would study music books of the band’s songs, as with Scream, seeing The Four Horsemen left a huge impact on the young Spencer.
“It's crazy how vividly that concert still plays in my mind,” he says. “I remember Lars [Ulrich, drums] was the first person who came out onstage. He was in, like, boxer shorts and a wife-beater, he was drinking a beer and looking into the audience, and I just remember people going crazy. And it was a blistering set. And my dad, who hadn't really gotten into modern metal yet, was even impressed. To me it was like, ‘Man, they make metal music feel like it's a sporting event,’ just by how precise and how aggressive and how fast-paced and intense the music was.”