Music Geek-Out Moments
Goodness gracious, it’s been a heck of a long time since my last entry. The longest in fact since I started this nonsense over a decade ago. I keep mentally writing the beginnings of blogs, but for reasons that probably have something to do with the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and an election simultaneously, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger. That ends today. I’ve got a bunch of things to write about, but since it’s been a while I’ve decided to ease back in with a bit of music-nerd nostalgia.
If you’re really into music you can probably identify a few times in your life when you connected with a fellow music lover on a visceral or intellectual level. You met someone who “gets you” or “gets it.” In my museum of recollection, I could probably find dozens of worthy events to exhibit, but allow me to share just two with you today. They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they’ve stayed with me all these years and I get a kick out of them.
Alpine Valley Music Center parking lot (i.e., a big grass field), East Troy, Wisconsin, probably in 1989 or thereabouts.
I walked with my friends from the field packed with cars where people had spent the previous hour tailgating to the gate entrance to see Elvis Costello or Rush or Billy Joel. (Or maybe Jimmy Buffet? I didn’t have many Alpine Valley concerts left in me – my last time there was in 1991.) For some reason I was explaining to my friend that although I was excited to see whomever we were there to see, that I would love, just LOVE, to see Yes on stage and have them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, ’The Gates of Delirium.’” Well, you would have thought I’d just announced that Jon Anderson himself was walking behind me, because some nutjob (as in, fellow music-nerd nutjob) in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt turned toward me and shouted “Oh my God! Yes!” He ran toward me and literally – I’m not making this up – knelt down in front of me and prostrated himself in mock adulation. “I bow to the altar of Yes.” When he righted himself, his right knee was badly bloodied – he’d knelt down on broken glass! A little remnant from someone’s tailgating a little too hard with glass bottles. The bloodied fan looked down to examine his knee and said, “Ah well, Yes is worth it.” We spent the next five minutes or so avoiding going to our seats and instead exchanging our thoughts on Yes, who at the time were either on hiatus or completely defunct. I shared my opinion of the non-Jon Anderson album Drama, and we both agreed that it was good but that it shouldn’t have been called Yes. (I’ve since changed my mind about that. I believe that not only is it Yes, but it’s among the band’s best six albums). We wished each other a good evening, but I’m sure we also wished that we were seeing a different band, like being stuck on a date when the woman you really want is on the dance floor with another guy.
Fortunately, I got to see Yes five more times after this interaction, and they played “Gates of Delirium” at two of those concerts. They even brought out “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” from Drama on one of those tours. I imagine that my bloody-kneed Yes friend was at some of these shows front and center.
A gas station in western Wisconsin off of Highway 94, en route from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, probably in 1992 or 1993.
Minnesota may border Wisconsin, but going back and forth between Milwaukee, where my family lived, and the University of Minnesota, where I was in grad school, was getting mighty old. I found that I’d regularly have to pull over at a rest stop north of Wisconsin Dells and take a 20-minute snooze just to stay awake. It didn’t help that I couldn’t make it all the way on one tank of gas in my Toyota Tercel, so more time was wasted having to fill up along the journey. On one such stop, I filled up my tank and walked in to pay the cashier (automated pumps weren’t a thing yet, or at least not at this station), a young guy with dark, long curly hair and a black t-shirt. While I was waiting for the transaction to be completed, I noticed a song playing on the radio playing next to him, and the music bounced around in my brain for a bit, jump-starting old synapses in need of a good lube job. I titled my head, nonplussed, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I tentatively proceeded. “That isn’t…is that Michael Schenker?” The cashier froze, looked at me in eye with no emotion whatsoever, and then in one fluid motion, opened the till, took out a bill and slapped it down on the counter in front of me, as if he were jubilantly showing his winning straight-flush over an opponent’s full house. “That, my friend, deserves a dollar!”
I’d gotten it right. I wasn’t a fan of Michael Schenker. I wasn’t even aware of him, really, but I remembered a song that had gotten a bit of radio play on WQFM back in 1981, and since my older brother had purchased it (the vinyl record is now in my possession), the album cover and name were somehow stamped on my brain. Why I was able to remember this, and not, say, the name of a woman seconds after introducing herself to me, was a question better left to that great DJ up in the sky.
But damn, I was proud of that one.
So there you are. Two geek-out moments. I hope there are many, many more, but of course these types of interactions that make life richer aren’t possible in 2020. Here’s hoping in 2021. In the meantime, I’m going to get cracking at writing another blog entry. Stay well out there!