The Eagles dominated AOR at their peak, went solo and saturated the AOR market individually and then for awhile when the classic rock stations came online dominated that format as well. They are like that painting that hangs in your living room that you don't even notice anymore...

I used to work with Joe Walsh...briefly. Everyone else thought of Joe as cute, funny, irrascible, quirky and unpredictable....

...I thought all those things made him a dbag...and yes I have stories but they aren't for general public consumption.

As for metal and its draw...for me personally its about the combination of classical music, the blues and the middle finger...if you take the first two ingredients in that recipe you can combine them in an infinite number of ways so that each new output is something never heard before....something neither genre was able to do on its own by the time metal came along.

With classical music, its precision and rules made it mechanical and with few exceptions (Wagner and Paganinni, for example) devoid of emotion. The blues had no rules and was all about emotion....

...the proverbial peanut butter and chocolate if you will...

IMO, along with free jazz, it's the one of the last bastions of true musical expression.

Go back and listen to that Amon Amarth vid I posted. Even the gruffly sung vocals have melody....the main riff is nothing if not melodious, albeit loudly so....and the interplay between both guitars and bass follows the rules of harmony (dualling lead guitars, a bassline that moves independently from the main riff)...the drums are certainly much faster than what the older folks in here are used to listening to, but to deny that they are rhythmic and complimentary to what is happening elsewhere in the piece?

Melody, harmony, rhythm.