Yeah, there was more to yesterday's random '80s hair band music video... There's a whole sordid story of young teen-aged love and betrayal wrapped up in that five minutes of fluff. Let's put on the Wayback Hat™ and take a voyage to
I'm working at the local supermarket over the summer break, just having fun and hanging with my friends. There's a girl in the deli who smiles when I walk by, and I ask her out one Saturday night. We go to the beach, talk a walk on the sand, that sort of thing. Nothing heavy - yet - but I definitely get the feeling she's into me.
We go out a few more times, and she tells me that her cousin's parents are going away for the weekend. She tells me to bring along a guy friend for her cousin and we can have a little party. Sounds good so far, right? Well, at some point I stepped outside for a smoke. Walk back inside the house, and my buddy and my girlfriend are nowhere to be found. See where this is heading?
I walk through the house until I find them. Together. Lip-locked.
Talk about a punch in the gut, a betrayal of the unkindest sort. My best friend and my girl, behind my back, yadda yadda yadda. Had a helluva country song there, though. Well, I go back outside. I'm hurt, pissed, angry at the world. I get in my car, and realize that I can't drive home quite yet (we'd been, err, indulging in some of the cousin's family's "extra" beer), so I turn the key to kill some time listening to the radio.
And, yes, "Every Rose Has Its Thorns" was the very first song I heard...
Ah, yes. Just what I needed. A sad hair band power ballad about love gone wrong. Kill me now. I'm feeling sorry for myself, naturally, trying to pull the knife out of my back and put my heart back in my chest after it was so unceremoniously ripped out.
And "Love Hurts" by Nazareth comes on the radio.
WTF??? Okay, this is just plain wrong. Two songs in a row? Did the DJ suffer a similar heartbreak today or what? And then song #3: "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones". Talk about YHGTBSM!
It's kind of funny. It's been almost 20 years since that incident. The girl's name has long been lost to the winds of time; a pretty face that at one time meant the world to me, now constrained to a footnote in my life. The friend, well, he and I patched things up (I nailed his girlfriend the following summer just to even things up) eventually and then slowly grew apart as life took us in different directions. I'm married, for nearly 13 years now. Two kids. House. Mortgage. All the trappings of respectable grown-up life imaginable. And yet "Every Rose" comes on the radio and I'm transported back in time to that fragile teenager with the mullet and the broken heart.
It's amazing what music can do, isn't it?
That is all.
*EDIT: I've mentioned telling time by the car I drove. It dawned on me that the car I was sitting in was my Buick, which I got in 1990...
6 comments:
Ain't that the truth man?
Timely post, I spent last night watching Motley Crue assault songs that I grew up loving by a lethal combination of poor singing, bad arranging (*not* opening "Shout at the Devil" with the guitar riff? WTF?), political commentary (derisive pictures of Bush on the video screen), and softcore porn videos accompanying their show. It brought to mind a certain young punk riding in a friend's truck and hearing "In the Beginning" followed by "Shout at the Devil" for the first time, certain of only two things: this music would piss his parents off and he had to have this tape.
Incidentally, the best concert I've ever been to was a few years ago when Poison was on tour (seen 'em every year since '99...). Their semi had burned in transit a couple of nights before, they had no outfits, and only borrowed instruments from the other acts on the tour. They played their hearts out and made it obvious that the concert was for us, the audience, not for them.
Also, Bret Michaels *always* makes a point to mention our country's troops and the debt we owe them.
Ah yes... Music is a great reminder, whether we want it to be or not!
And for the country song, how about "You better think twice" by Vince Gill?
Moody Blues' "For My Lady" just after my First Love calls to say she just got engaged.
An EZ listening station breaking into "Swinging Safari" with news of Apollo One.
Oh yes! Music really makes a lasting impression.
> "Talk about a punch in the gut, a betrayal of
> the unkindest sort. My best friend and my
> girl, behind my back, yadda yadda yadda."
^^^^^^^^^^
(harumph)
Wasn't me.
I plead creative license. A thousand pardons.
I know my true best friend would never stab me in the back like that.
(But it scans better, dontcha think?) ;)
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