A single father has taken his son with cerebral palsy to more than 1,200 heavy metal concerts since he discovered how soothing and reassuring it can be.
Now he has organized a metal festival in his son’s honor to help raise awareness of the disease.
Richard McDade first realized his son loved heavy metal when Mason was just a baby. According to McDade, all Mason did was cry from when he was a baby until he was a toddler.
One day, McDade put up a Metallica video of him doing the dishes and noticed the crying had stopped.
In fact, Mason had fallen asleep to the music.
“It was the first time he’d done it without getting caught,” McDade told My Good Planet. “After that, it started happening in the car whenever Metallica was on his back. He would calm down and relax. At first it was just Metallica, then it spread to other bands. ”
When Mason was 12, his father took him to his first gig. Since then, the duo have attended over 1,200 shows, including Metallica on eight occasions.
But in 2017 Mason was hospitalized with a fever of 107.9 and the outlook was not good. So his dad decided to throw him the biggest and loudest birthday party he could imagine.
Name it Mason MetalFest.
“Mason wasn’t 110% yet, but we had 10 bands playing, and a lot of Mason’s friends and supporters came out of the metal scene. All of those people were positive, and that was a turning point on his path. towards recovery,” McDade said.
Credit: Richard McDaid/Facebook
Now it has become an annual event to help raise awareness for cerebral palsy. Mason, now 23, is the official music correspondent for the event.
