I sometimes feel like my entire reputation of being cool and hip is a big fat lie.
First of all, shut up. I am so cool and hip. My mom said I was. She also said if you made fun of my new pants, it's because you were jealous and weren't my real friends. So now who's the nerd?
Here's my secret: I never went to any real music concerts when I was a kid.
Well, that's not entirely true. I went to music concerts, but not the cool ones.
In high school, my friends went to concerts like KISS, Mötley Crüe, Styx, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, etc. Not me, of course, because I didn't get to be cool back then. Not like now. So, I may have missed the cool shows growing up, but at least I've still got my hearing.
That's because I was the kid whose mom only let him watch one hour of TV per day. The kid whose mom then went and announced that at a PTA meeting.
I very nearly had a slim possibility of almost going to a KISS concert when I was 12. My friends and I were huge KISS fans in the sixth grade, and I had all their records. I even bought a couple of their solo albums.
That alone should tell you how much of a fan I was because those solo albums sucked.
(To be clear, the band's name is spelled KISS, not Kiss. I'm not just doing that to profess my love for the band or show my coolness. We've already established that I'm eminently cool and hip.)
So, you'd think one of the first concerts I ever went to would be a KISS concert, right?
Reread that part about my mom and TV.
In 1979, we heard KISS was going to play in Indianapolis, so we were going to ask our parents if we could go. Tickets were $10, and Ticketmaster wasn't around to add a million dollars in "convenience fees," which meant you could go without mortgaging the country of Luxembourg.
Except this was in the early days of the Satanic panic, which gripped America's uptight heart in the early 1980s.
Dungeons and Dragons was a few years from becoming labeled as How To Tame Your Demon, ne'er-do-wells were cramming razor blades into apples with wild abandon, and the Fun-Hating Uptight Sanctimony Squad were feverishly deciphering Satanic messages by playing rock and roll records backward.
Not rock-n-roll. "Rock. And. Roll."
The FUSSies carefully enunciated each word so parents would know exactly what evils were trying to devour their children. They sat ramrod straight and stared straight into the TV camera and America's soul as they shrieked about the hidden messages spewing out of music for the youths.
These were the ones who were scandalized when Elvis Presley gyrated his pelvis on TV and teenagers wore dungarees to school, so they weren't about to let young people enjoy themselves.
Fortunately, my parents weren't religious, so they missed all the fear-mongering, but a couple of my friends weren't allowed to listen to KISS or play D&D after that.
It was all BS, of course. Yes, even your neighbor's cousin's mom's stories about that one kid from the next town over. Nothing ever happened in your town, it happened to some kid the next town over. Except it didn't.
It was nothing more than mass hysteria breathlessly repeated by people still reeling from the negative influences of jazz. Academics who later studied Satanic panic contacted various police departments around the country, and they all reported the same thing: Nothing like that ever happened there. There were no missing virgins, no human sacrifices, and no one was ever turned evil by what the FUSSies heard.
But it still kept me from going to a KISS concert. That, and because my friend told his mom that teenagers had random sex at the concerts.
If there had been the tiniest sliver of a possibility of us going, it vanished with that helpful piece of information, and no kid in my school would ever be allowed to go to a KISS concert. At all. Forever and ever, amen.
When I got to high school, my friends were going to heavy metal concerts, but I refused. I hated, and still hate, heavy metal. I was a New Wave kid, and those bands never came to East Central Indiana. Most of them never left England.
I attended my first concert at age 12 when Chuck "Feel So Good" Mangione played at Ball State University. We saw him every year for three or four years, but I never got a t-shirt.
In fact, I never went to a real concert until ten years ago when I went to see Styx play at the Indiana State Fair, although random people didn't have sex there. I've seen plenty of live music in bars and small theaters, but never the real rock concerts in the arenas and stadiums.
Am I disappointed that I never got to go to real concerts when I was a kid? Maybe a little, but not really, because I still have a few things going for me.
I SAID, I STILL HAVE A FEW THINGS GOING FOR ME!
Photo credit: PXHere.com (Creative Commons 0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.