Excuse My Allusions, Part One

*This is a tip o' the hat to my favorite (and only, that I know of) brother Jason. I like music, he loves it. 'Nuff said.

I have spent the last few days listening to the music of my youth, more specifically, of my days in high school. I have not been doing this as a way of fondly looking back at days of yore and remembering the good old days (I was a total geek, the Apple IIe and sheets of dot-matrix printed BASIC code were my best friends). I have been listening much the same way one would look back at history to gain a greater understanding of where I was and how I came to be as a better way of looking at the future (my head hurts now). Who knew that hard rock and heavy metal could have caused such introspection? It is not, so much what lies in the lyric of the songs (Love is like a bomb, baby come and get it on/Living like a lover with a radar phone? Keats is super jealous) but the songs, as a whole, and the where I go upon hearing a certain song or band.

One of the elements that I truly loved about the hard rock/heavy metal genre was that of danger (Danger Danger, Dangerous Toys, et. al.). Being that I have never been big on taking risks or doing things that are/were unsafe, I found music that fit the anti-Jeff, as it were. I felt like I was walking on the edge, quietly in my bedroom with my enormous headphones visualizing myself giving THE MAN a big fat double middle finger. Authority figures hated the music and everything it stood for. I reveled in it. The music was loud and brash, the lyrics were, well … they were there and the performers were larger than life personalities that I lived vicariously through. Everything about it was messy and unpretty.

The rockstar element is the other factor in this equation (a phrase that I'm someone prone to using from time to time, “...the other factor in this equation”). Rockstars, to me, are/were the equivalent to superheroes. Larger than life characters that spent time breathing fire, doing copious amounts of drugs, guzzling gallons of booze, virgin sacrifices, biting heads off bats/chickens(eek!)/cows, marauding small towns and villages taking away mothers and their daughters, having cow tongues grafted on to their own to make it larger all this stuff on their days off. God forbid what they were out doing when they were on the job.

I would spend countless hours in my bedroom with albums in hand pouring over the satanic images, photographs of debauchery and the all important bevy of sexuality oozing from every inch of the cover, back cover and the inner sleeves. I listened and tried to figure out the symbolism of each lyric wondering if it was a sexual reference, drug reference or a nod to the good ol' devil. Small town northern Minnesota wasn't really the place where a youngster such as myself would know anything about the subjects secondhand (let alone firsthand). So, the education came from teachers such as Motley Crue, Slayer, Megadeth, Twisted Sister, WASP and various others with names with “x” and “z” shuffled throughout, screaming to be different. I, with the help of these fine do-gooders, had an education that few would ever receive.

Naivete is a phase that one must go through, usually starting early on and continuing on through puberty (although we are convinced we know all) and early adulthood (the 22 year old self looks at the 16 year self and shakes head, the 39 year self will do the same thing to the 22 year old self (space filler)). Looking back, I now see that it was all marketing. I was being sold a product much the same way that Proctor & Gamble reassures me that my clothes are cleaner and brighter now that I've started using Tide. I partially blame reality television for this. It started with “The Osbournes”. To see the “Prince of Darkness” picking up dog shit and kowtowing to his children blew the lid off the illusion that Ozzy could make rivers boil and fire rain from the skies above. Seeing Alice Cooper in hideous plaid pants that could be seen from MIR on some golf course in Arizona made me cringe. The dudes from Metallica hiring a therapist (analyst/therapist?) to act as a marriage counselor? Steve Plunkett writing the theme song to “7th Fucking Heaven” (okay, I really never listened to much Autograph back in the day, they were never that heavy and were foofee-haired AOR and never considered dangerous, but still...).

Was my pubescent life an entire lie? No. Was I pound foolish and penny wise? Maybe. Do I wish to be 16 again? Hell no! So what does all of this mean. Probably nothing. As I quickly approach middle age, I realize that I have become super cynical. Wary of everyone and everything. I just want to have that feeling of wonderment and awe again. To take things at face value, to believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, to have my icons and heroes be infallible, that is what I want. I want larger than life characters BE larger than life. I don't want them to be just another product on the shelf of consumerism. I don't want the curtain drawn back. I liked creating the fantasies in my head about all the songs they sang, the lives that they lived. I don't want to think that they are just like me with the same issues and problems that I have. I want to be naive again (not the bad naïve, the good naïve).

So, what do I want to do with my life? I wanna rock!

For the loosely held together second part, click here.