I'm 13 years old, it's 1982 and the poetry of rock ’n’ roll is ringing in my mind.
So many years ago I’m not even sure it was real anymore. But real enough, I suppose; what makes up our dreams, our songs, our poems... they’re the only reality that truly matters in the end.
I’m walking across a parking lot outside the back door of what was then a drug store, a café counter at the back, toward the front stairs of the junior high school I attend on weekdays. It’s dark, but there are a couple of bright streetlights on the edges of the lot illuminating the area. Crisp, but not cold enough for gloves just yet.
No idea where I was coming from, but I was headed home. Once I crossed the street I’d have made my way south to the corner of 2nd Avenue and 3rd Street SE, turned left and walked another four blocks east to my parents' humble house in Jamestown, N.D.
On repeat in my head –
Suite Madame Blue, gaze in your looking glass You’re not a child anymore Suite Madame Blue, the future is all but past Dressed in your jewels, you made your own rules You conquered the world and more, heaven’s door Styx – “Suite Madame Blue”
Heaven’s door. With riffs and lyrics like that? Absolutely.
The poetry of rock and pop were already etched in the depths of my adolescent head, bringing color, texture and taste to the music and my life.
Annette
The first lyrics I remember sticking showed up the summer before 5th grade. Like it was yesterday –
I have a massive crush on my big sister’s friend’s little sister. Annette. She's a year older, with big, brown eyes and long, brown hair with those loose, loopy 1970s curls at the ends.
The huge car is parked in the gravel driveway of the little house my parents are renting against the base of the bluff on the southeastern-most point of the tourist town, Medora, N.D. My sister and her friend are inside. I’m in the back seat of the boat of a vehicle, Annette’s in the front. She peeks over the bench seat, teasing me.
About what I don’t recall, but it is as it would be a few years later in that deserted parking lot in Jamestown: heaven’s door. The dashboard radio's on –
If you change your mind, I’m the first in line
Honey, I’m still free
Take a chance on me
If you need me, let me know, gonna be around
If you’ve got no place to go, if you’re feeling down
If you’re all alone when the pretty birds have flown
Honey, I’m still free
Take a chance on me
ABBA – “Take a Chance on Me”
Annette. The name, exotic and glamorous even now. My first real crush. Just one line from that song and I feel the heat and taste the dust of that 1978 summer day, wishing desperately she’d climb over the bench seat and into the back with me.
There was also the ride home with my sister and her boyfriend in his fancy short-box pickup after the Belfield High School boys basketball team lost the state championship the following spring. Queen on the stereo, the loss be damned –
I’ve taken my bows And my curtain calls You brought me fame and fortune And everything that goes with it I thank you all But it’s been no bed of roses No pleasure cruise I consider it a challenge before The human race And I ain’t gonna lose Queen – “We Are The Champions”
For my money, the 70s was the greatest music decade of all time, disco crap excluded (with all due respect to the disco enthusiasts - sorry, not sorry). My money and my memories. And not just because of that idyllic, pre-teen 45 minutes in an overheated car the size of a pontoon.
Of Walls & Wolf
A couple of years later, now in Jamestown, a 6th-grade music project calls for groups to select a popular song, practice it and sing it in front of the class. Three friends and I get two bars into our selection before the teacher, a young man who apparently lost his balls at some point in his collegiate career, sends us down to the principal’s office.
Paying a visit to Jake Wolf was not a good thing. He was tall, intimidating, foreboding, with a rich, deep voice that called forth whatever image of god an 11-year-old might conjure.
Plus, at the time public humiliation and nutritional deprivation were the school’s preferred punishments; land a detention and you’d be pressing your nose up against a wall of the lunchroom while the entire school filed through the line and stared at your back from the tables as they ate and your stomach and pride grumbled furiously. That was for relatively mild infractions; as I recall, teachers could still pull the paddle out for more serious violations.
“Grab your ankles!”
All of which is going through my head as my friends and I make our way to Mr. Wolf’s office.
Speaking of irony. I don’t recall having a strong sense of it at that age, but I’m certain I’ve never had a more ironic moment since.
Whether it was to amuse our classmates or be massive pains in the ass to the new music teacher, we had, of course, settled on Pink Floyd:
We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom HEY, teacher, leave them kids alone Pink Floyd – “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”
We’ve been practicing for a couple of weeks, have a whole dance routine worked out, as required. Jake makes us perform it for him in front of the desk in his little office. I can’t stop giggling.
I’ll never forget ol’ Jake’s booming voice demanding to know why I was laughing, what I thought was so funny. I don’t recall getting a detention; Mr. Wolf must’ve thought it was funny himself and let us off with a warning and private performance already served.
I ran into Jake in the parking lot of Sam’s Club a few years back, had a quick chat. Sadly, he passed in 2017. I still have a soft spot in my heart for him.
The risk of the paddle aside, rock ’n’ roll was with me to stay, more specifically the poetry of it all. For a few years it was mostly pop, though, standing in the darkness along the wall at a high school dance, listening and watching several of my friends, in a heavy-voiced, highly animated teen performative intended, I think, to impress the girls over in the corner –
Darkness falls across the land The midnight hour is close at hand Creatures crawl in search of blood To terrorize y’all’s neighborhood And whosoever shall be found Without the soul for getting down Must stand and face the hounds of hell And rot inside a corpse’s shell Michael Jackson – “Thriller”
Not exactly Sandburg or Yeats, I know. But still.
The ’80s were a weird time, both in terms of hormone-addled existence and rock ’n’ roll. Pop was king, no doubt. The Eurythmics? Are you kidding me? Loved the music and Annie Lennox's style; as a redhead I really wanted to have it cut into that bright orange crew. Alas, those were the days of the mullet and I lacked the courage to go against the grain.
In some ways Berlin bracketed the definition of my 80s teens, in turns titillated by “Sex,” which was all I ever thought about, it seemed, and trashed riding on “The Metro” in an adolescent understanding of why I could only make the fringe of the "cool" crowd mixed with a fog of resentment that the pretty girls didn't take to me like they did to them –
I’m alone, sitting with my empty glass My four walls follow me through my past I was on a Paris train, I emerged in London rain And you were waiting there, swimming through apologies
It was never going to last, all that synth, psych and angst, no matter how often we wore a glove on one hand, yet I still have an oft-listened-to, hundreds-long ’80s playlist in my iTunes account.
The Lizard King
College was retro time. Sure, there was Edie Brickell, Sinéad, Love & Rockets and a Paul Simon revival, but for me it was mostly Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, Hendrix and The Doors. Experiencing the lyricism of The Lizard King for the first time was an epiphany:
It was the greatest night of my life. Although I still had not found a wife I had my friends Right there beside me. We were close together. We tripped the wall and we scaled the graveyard Ancient shapes were all around us. The wet dew felt fresh beside the fog. Two made love in an ancient spot One chased a rabbit into the dark A girl got drunk and balled the dead And I gave empty sermons to my head. Cemetery, cool and quiet Hate to leave your sacred lay Dread the milky coming of the day. Jim Morrison – “Graveyard Poem”
An English major and aspiring poet myself, I seriously dug digging into those kinds of lines. I vaguely recall delivering a post-party, alcohol-addled and gonja-graced dismemberment of that particular piece, unravelling its potential meaning and implications for my roommate between bites of Taco John’s Potato Olés® as he drove us back to our campus apartment in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.
“Wow,” he said. “Where’d you get all that?”
“It’s what we do in class every day,” I said, laughing before munching into another softshell.
Who the hell knows what I said or whether it made any sense. The mechanical engineering major, who had introduced me to The Doors in the first place, was incredulous. Understandably.
No matter.
I listened. I thought. I felt. Life was rich.
Which takes me back to Floyd and an album disparaged by my high school newspaper in 1985, a couple of years after its release:
They flutter behind you, your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future, to take care…
She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile
Haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign
Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macs
For the gold in their bags or the knives in their backs
Stepping up boldly, one put out his hand
He said, “I was just a child then, now I’m only a man”
Pink Floyd – “Possible Pasts” from “The Final Cut”
Man, it just doesn’t get any better.
The reviewer was out of his element. Clearly.
It’s Still Rock ’n’ Roll To Me
Point is, in the words of the illustrious Joan Jett, “I love rock ’n’ roll,” and for me the hook isn't always so much the melody, grinding guitar or smash, crash and bash of the drums – although I revel in that, too – but the words, the ideas, the feelings.
And the memories. Mustn't forget the memories.
I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can indulge that love pretty much all day every day, and as loudly as I want. I'm a freelancer who’s mostly at home alone all the time, so there’s usually no one around to bother.
Over the years my palette has expanded considerably to include everything from Sinatra and Black Uhuru to Flo Rida and Alice in Chains, from Metallica and Green Day to Phoebe Bridgers and The Cold Stares. Rock, blues, punk, ska, reggae (like my theme song), zydeco... even a little crossover country now and then.
Some of the songwriters are more poetic than others. And I always return to classic rock 'n' roll in The End.
Lately, whenever a particular lyric sticks with me, like “Suite Madame Blue” in the confused parking lot of my 7th-grade brain, I’ve been putting it into a graphic. And since we all speak in hashtags these days, there they are – #PopRockQuotes in the lower-left corner and #MyTake in the lower right. I post them to social media whenever I have a little spare time or need to give my mind a rest from client work.
You won’t see them unless you give IV Words a follow, so, c’mon – “Take a chance on me.”
Or don’t.
It is, after all, as Mr. Joel said….