Early Life
Jon was originally introduced to rock music at the age of three. His older sister introduced Jon to bands such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper and Blue Öyster Cult. In 1979, at the age of eleven, Jon attended a Kiss concert with his father. Since then, Jon has said that this was the moment when he realized what he wanted to do for a living.
Jon Schaffer went to a Lutheran school for five years, during which he developed a lot of anger and rebellion, due to the abusive nature of the pastors. On one occasion, one of the pastors shoved a bar of soap down Jon's throat, because the pastor felt threatened due to Jon's refusal to submit, after he couldn't answer Jon's questions about evolution versus creationism. According to Jon, this did have an effect on him forming a band, so that he could "prove these people wrong".
In 1984, at the age of 16, Jon moved to Tampa, Florida. Shortly before he left, one of Jon's childhood friends died in a motorcycle accident, which made Jon even more determined to move to Florida and start a band. While in Tampa, Jon slept in his car until he nearly lost his life in a car accident, after which he got an apartment and a job as a hot mop roofer.
Read more about this topic: Jon Schaffer
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“We passed the Children’s Bureau bill calculated to prevent children from being employed too early in factories.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.”
—William Barrett (b. 1913)