I too come from The South and loved The Devil Went Down to Georgia. A bit later Christian Death or The Electric Hellfire Club might have been my introduction to underground music. They were for a lot of us. Nothing cooler than Old Scratch if you're a kid in the south just starting to realize there's a lot to hate about it.
I bought Skinny Puppy's vivisect vi purely because the album cover was badass. After all, it worked with pink floyd's "dark side of the moon." That's right, kids: if you grew up in the sticks, without a record store, music was purchased unheard, mail order, because the odds of your parents driving you an hour to the nearest Hastings were slim indeed. Then I moved to Washington and bought the new Front Line Assembly at the grocery store. I teared up on the spot.