Upon moving into my first Tampa quarters, up in Temple Terrace at what used to be the notoriously party-friendly University Townhouse Apartments, I quickly bonded with my first Tampa next-door neighbor. His name was Troy. He was a nice guy a hazy decade or so older than me, with a mustache, a primer-colored muscle car, a landscaping job, a Doberman and a haughty three-legged feline named HandiCat.In a lot of ways, Troy was the dope-smoking, college-eschewing, classic-metal-listening older brother I never had growing up.
He liked his job OK, and he doted unsettlingly on Precious the Doberman, who had her own bedroom. But Troy's deepest, realest love was still reserved for the things he cherished most about his high-school years, back when he looked enough like Jim Morrison to have the stoner chicks lining up, and the future was all but irrelevant:
Cold beer.
Great pot.
And Judas Priest.
God, how he loved Judas Priest.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking about Heavy Metal Parking Lot, the hilarious, fan-skewering pseudo-documentary showcasing the lowbrow pre-show tailgate action outside a 1986 D.C.-area Priest concert. And you're right. I can easily imagine Troy in the video, hair a little longer, mustache a lot wispier, one arm around a radish-eyed young woman's shoulders (hand creeping inexorably down toward a breast, naturally) while the other hoists a frosty Bud. He'd probably try to say something honest and meaningful about how the music moved him, then interrupt himself to air-guitar and sing along with the chorus to "Living After Midnight."
Troy, Precious, HandiCat and the University Townhouse Apartments had long since receded into my past when then-estranged Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford publicly came out of the closet in '97. Still, one of my first reactions was to wonder how my old-school metalhead next-door neighbor was taking the news.
He was the first guy I encountered up close whose passion for music had gone into some weird sort of suspended animation, and whose passion for new music had just gone. Post-Troy, I've seen about a million of 'em. The number grows exponentially each year, and the amount of classic-rock radio stations increases accordingly.
For a long time, these people confused me. They obviously were and are rabid music fans, yet their appetite for new tunes had just as obviously dwindled and disappeared some time ago. Approximately when it happened can be ascertained by examining the music they still shit themselves over — the bands get newer as the aficionados in question get younger. With Troy, it was Priest. For those closer to my age, but still a bit older, it's more likely to be one of those worlds-apart anagrams, Cure or Crue. When you get to the folks maybe a year or two behind me in high school and college, you hit groups like Rage Against the Machine, N.W.A. and Ten-era Pearl Jam.
What made all these quitters stop looking for fresh sounds to get excited about?
I think I know.
They'll tell you that they grew up. That they don't get exposed to new music anymore. That they lack the free time to hang around the indie record store, or have a beer with a friend and find out what he or she has been listening to. That they're not some goddamn music critic who can sit on his ass and get sent more music than he can possibly hear. It all sounds reasonable enough, given that these people are all (a) edging out of the age range to which the industry markets itself most aggressively; and (b) edging into careers and families and credit debt and the clergy and whatever.
But it's bullshit, really.
The last music the quitters got all aquiver over — the music that still gets them the most psyched, years later — was the hot new soundtrack to the best times of their lives. God knows what they were doing (actually, we all know what they were doing: having sex with more than one person, experimenting with various altered states of consciousness, and working a full day on two hours' sleep without wishing they were dead), but not long after they stopped doing it, they noticed they weren't doing it anymore.
There probably wasn't any conscious decision. Over time, however, they returned to those songs more and more often in order to recapture that faded glory. And before long, any time they've got an opportunity to actually put a CD, any CD, in a player, that's the CD they choose.
Music is a powerful thing. Who knows, maybe if the quitters listened to more new tunes, they'd get excited about some of them, and that excitement would lead to an even better best time of their lives. It certainly would liven up the airwaves, at the very least — imagine what would happen if the honchos at Clear Channel wandered into a meeting to discover that the week before, more people wanted to hear Carrier's "Finally Over Water" than "Sweet Child O' Mine."
Which is not to say that amazing older music should be discarded, or that the majority of music released this year isn't going to be as overwhelmingly disappointing as the majority of music released last year. But chances are, there are songs being written right now that contain the power to move the quitters as much as "Melt With You" does. And some of their lives might be better for having sought it out.
In any case, something has to be done. We've gotta start a Mix CD Outreach Program, or at least some sort of club where we yell the names of new albums at people we went to school with when we see them in traffic.
Because no rock 'n' roll band has presided over a larger and more devoted legion of fans' final days of carefree youthful abandon than the original Van Halen lineup.
And, 20 years later, I am sick to fucking death of trying to explain why I think the first two Van Hagar albums are really just as good as the Dave stuff, only in a different way.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2004.