I typically really feel like my complete status of being cool and hip is a giant fats lie.
Initially, shut up. I’m so cool and hip. My mother mentioned I used to be. She additionally mentioned for those who made enjoyable of my new pants, it is since you had been jealous and weren’t my actual associates. So now who’s the nerd?
Here is my secret: I by no means went to any actual music live shows after I was a child.
Properly, that is not solely true. I went to music live shows, however not the cool ones.
In highschool, my associates went to live shows like KISS, Mötley Crüe, Styx, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, and so on. Not me, after all, as a result of I did not get to be cool again then. Not like now. So, I could have missed the cool exhibits rising up, however a minimum of I’ve nonetheless obtained my listening to.
That is as a result of I used to be the child whose mother solely let him watch one hour of TV per day. The child whose mother then went and introduced that at a PTA assembly.
I very almost had a slim risk of just about going to a KISS live performance after I was 12. My associates and I had been enormous KISS followers within the sixth grade, and I had all their data. I even purchased a few their solo albums.
That alone ought to let you know how a lot of a fan I used to be as a result of these solo albums sucked.
(To be clear, the band’s title is spelled KISS, not Kiss. I am not simply doing that to profess my love for the band or present my coolness. We have already established that I am eminently cool and hip.)
So, you’d suppose one of many first live shows I ever went to can be a KISS live performance, proper?
Reread that half about my mother and TV.
In 1979, we heard KISS was going to play in Indianapolis, so we had been going to ask our mother and father if we might go. Tickets had been $10, and Ticketmaster wasn’t round so as to add 1,000,000 {dollars} in “comfort charges,” which meant you can go with out mortgaging the nation of Luxembourg.
Besides this was within the early days of the Satanic panic, which gripped America’s uptight coronary heart within the early Nineteen Eighties.
Dungeons and Dragons was a couple of years from turning into labeled as How To Tame Your Demon, ne’er-do-wells had been cramming razor blades into apples with wild abandon, and the Enjoyable-Hating Uptight Sanctimony Squad had been feverishly deciphering Satanic messages by enjoying rock and roll data backward.
Not rock-n-roll. “Rock. And. Roll.”
The FUSSies fastidiously enunciated every phrase so mother and father would know precisely what evils had been making an attempt to devour their youngsters. They sat ramrod straight and stared straight into the TV digicam and America’s soul as they shrieked concerning the hidden messages spewing out of music for the youths.
These had been those who had been scandalized when Elvis Presley gyrated his pelvis on TV and youngsters wore dungarees to highschool, in order that they weren’t about to let younger folks take pleasure in themselves.
Luckily, my mother and father weren’t spiritual, in order that they missed all of the fear-mongering, however a few my associates weren’t allowed to take heed to KISS or play D&D after that.
It was all BS, after all. Sure, even your neighbor’s cousin’s mother’s tales about that one child from the subsequent city over. Nothing ever occurred in your city, it occurred to some child the subsequent city over. Besides it did not.
It was nothing greater than mass hysteria breathlessly repeated by folks nonetheless reeling from the adverse influences of jazz. Teachers who later studied Satanic panic contacted varied police departments across the nation, and so they all reported the identical factor: Nothing like that ever occurred there. There have been no lacking virgins, no human sacrifices, and nobody was ever turned evil by what the FUSSies heard.
But it surely nonetheless stored me from going to a KISS live performance. That, and since my buddy instructed his mother that youngsters had random intercourse on the live shows.
If there had been the tiniest sliver of a risk of us going, it vanished with that useful piece of data, and no child in my college would ever be allowed to go to a KISS live performance. In any respect. Endlessly and ever, amen.
After I obtained to highschool, my associates had been going to heavy steel live shows, however I refused. I hated, and nonetheless hate, heavy steel. I used to be a New Wave child, and people bands by no means got here to East Central Indiana. Most of them by no means left England.
I attended my first live performance at age 12 when Chuck “Really feel So Good” Mangione performed at Ball State College. We noticed him yearly for 3 or 4 years, however I by no means obtained a t-shirt.
The truth is, I by no means went to an actual live performance till ten years in the past after I went to see Styx play on the Indiana State Truthful, though random folks did not have intercourse there. I’ve seen loads of stay music in bars and small theaters, however by no means the actual rock live shows within the arenas and stadiums.
Am I disillusioned that I by no means obtained to go to actual live shows after I was a child? Perhaps somewhat, however probably not, as a result of I nonetheless have a couple of issues going for me.
I SAID, I STILL HAVE A FEW THINGS GOING FOR ME!
Picture credit score: PXHere.com (Artistic Commons 0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is completed and out there from 4 Horsemen Publications. You will get the book and print variations right here.