 |
A
Baby is born at the end of the last summer of the sixties. His teen
parents play Carole King, Otis Redding, James Taylor, Clapton and
that Southern California AM radio hangover country-music thing as
they try to grow up and weather the storm with an infant and the
seventies looming. Young
boy hangs out in dark, air-conditioned, single-parent apartments
with the older kids in the complex: they drink screwdrivers, try
to seduce their girlfriends with Spanish Fly, and crank the age
of classic Rock through a blue haze of marijuana smoke. Zeppelin.
Stones. Who. Sly. Hendrix. Neil Young. Pink Floyd. Boy watches and
listens. He goes home and finds the Beatles in his parents’
collection and loses his goddamn mind forever. Disco and new-wave
play pretty on the periphery, but he is smitten by a homely little
band called AC/DC. His first crush. For
his twelfth birthday, boy gets nylon-string classical acoustic but
plays Crazy Train and Purple Haze anyway. MTV rearranges everything.
Image is King. The album is dead. A succession of one-hit wonders
make B-movies with weak soundtrax. He grabs a hold of War and Murmur
and holds on. He hears Marley while he’s high. He changes.
Discovers the Dead and psychedelics at the exact same moment. A
taste for the unenglishable is born. |
|
 |